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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside This Issue Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee Composing Queer, review by Howard Pollack Nine Hours with Jelly Roll Morton, review by Jeff Taylor Alvin Lucier, review by David Grubbs |
George Handy's Bloos by Benjamin Bierman
George Handy Photo from Metronome magazine (May 1946) The composer George Handy (1920-1997) was an enigmatic iconoclast. His individualistic approach to jazz composition inspired many other artists, yet the self-destructive behavior that cut short an important career frustrated his friends and admirers. While his life was often filled with high drama, much of Handy’s biography is typical of the freelance musician: a peripatetic career of artistic and financial highs and lows. Handy did indeed enjoy remarkable success, though admittedly for only a short period. Handy burst onto the music scene in the 1940s, taking the big band world by surprise with a stunning brand of experimentalism. From 1945 to 1947, Handy was considered one of the top arrangers and composers in the jazz field, and was an important member of a small group of composers and arrangers that included Eddie Sauter, Pete Rugolo, Ralph Burns, Bob Graettinger, Gil Evans, and Gerry Mulligan. This cadre of innovators worked in what is generally referred to as a “modernist” or “progressive” style that emphasized advanced compositional resources and generally downplayed the role of improvisation. A number of Handy’s compositions, such as Dalvatore Sally (1945) and The Bloos (1946), are still considered seminal works in the progressive genre. George Handy was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His neighborhood friends included such high-profile musicians as vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, tenor sax players Al Cohn and Frank Socolow, and drummer Tiny Kahn. His academic career included short and unsatisfying studies at The Juilliard School and New York University, as well as private composition lessons with Aaron Copland. Handy’s feelings about his studies with Copland are summed up in his liner notes for the record set, The Jazz Scene: “Studied privately with Aaron Copland for a while, which did neither of us any good.” Handy was, however, influenced by classical composers including Stravinsky and Bartók, and drew from an unusually wide palette of sources and techniques for a jazz composer of the time. He continued to mine these sources throughout his career, and several consistent elements in his music created a recognizable style. Handy had an unusual approach to chords, with chromatic voice leading dominating many of his harmonic progressions, and minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths serving as essential components. Though the overall quality of Handy’s music is tonal, it is frequently difficult to identify a key or centric area. Some of Handy’s important early work was with bandleader Raymond Scott, trombonist Jack Teagarden, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and cornetist Muggsy Spanier. But his professional association with the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra was the most significant of his career, and produced the majority of his important compositions. Handy was with the band as pianist, primary composer and arranger, and musical director, for two one-year stints (1944-46), separated by a six-month hiatus while concentrating on songwriting in Hollywood for Capitol Records and the Paramount music division. Handy’s final period with Raeburn, from June 1945 through July or August 1946, was the apex of his career, briefly thrusting him and the Raeburn band into the forefront of the jazz scene and the progressive compositional movement. Amazingly, important works such as Dalvatore Sally, Hey Look, I’m Dancing, Key F (Keef), and Yerxa, as well as some experimental vocal arrangements, including Forgetful, I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me, and Temptation, were written in a matter of weeks. By 1946, Handy had accumulated top awards and critical acclaim, and was in demand as a composer-arranger. This reputation was further solidified by his inclusion in one of the most artistically ambitious recording projects ever undertaken in jazz, The Jazz Scene, produced by Norman Granz (1918-2001). Handy took this commission seriously enough to write The Bloos, an entirely new composition for an extended big band. This work displays Handy at the peak of his creativity, but turns out to be his last major work for a large ensemble. Coming at the end of Handy’s Raeburn period, and in the midst of his greatest commercial and artistic success, it could be seen as his crowning achievement.1 Granz was an artistically, commercially, and socio-politically ambitious music promoter. He is best known for his successful and innovative concert promoting and record producing, including the popular Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) format that brought leading jazz players to prestigious venues like Carnegie Hall. But while JATP sought wide appeal and viability, The Jazz Scene was Granz’s self-financed gift to the jazz world, and was intended for a more limited audience.2 The players and composers were to put their best foot forward without commercial considerations or artistic limitations of any kind. The objective was to create a snapshot of the most important jazz being played and written in the late 1940s. The project included works and performances by the most distinguished names in jazz, including composers Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Ralph Burns, and Neal Hefti, and instrumentalists Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Nat Cole, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. The recording sessions for The Jazz Scene, held in several studios in Los Angeles and New York, took place sporadically beginning in 1946. The final product, released in 1949 on Clef Records, is a high-quality, limited edition folio (5,000, all numbered and signed) of six twelve-inch 78 rpm discs, encased in a cloth-bound hard cover with a ring binding.3 Each record is accompanied by a profile written by Granz and a photograph of the featured artist by the well-known French photographer, Gjon Mili, who worked for Life magazine. The folio includes sixteen additional album-sized photos of other prominent jazz musicians, and artwork by David Stone Martin. The Jazz Scene sold for the premium price of twenty-five dollars (approximately $250 today). The Bloos is replete with themes, and though these are disparate and seemingly unrelated, the five-minute work has the feel of a cohesive composition. There are song-like sections contrasted with periods of episodic writing, and various instrumental sections (and combinations of sections) are highlighted; improvised and non-improvised solos are featured, and two composed cadenzas occur. Unusual for jazz recording, Handy had complete control over the instrumentation of The Bloos. As a big band composer-arranger he relied on the standard instrumentation of trumpets, trombones, reeds, and rhythm section, but created a twenty-seven piece orchestra by augmenting the big band with strings (a bottom-heavy string quartet consisting of one violin and three cellos), an expanded woodwind quintet (flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, contrabassoon, and two horns), and three percussionists. In essence, Handy created a classical chamber ensemble within the confines of a big band. The inherent problems of
such a diverse ensemble demand a careful deployment of resources. Handy handles the extremely varied timbral
qualities subtly and intelligently, with a careful, gentle orchestrational
sensibility. He often presents them in
contrast to each other, creating something similar to a concerto grosso effect. An
example of this can be seen in the opening section of The Bloos. The work begins with an
oboe theme (see example 1, page 12) that quotes an oboe solo from
Milhaud’s 1923 La Création du Monde. The
coloristic celeste chords call to mind Gershwin’s use of the instrument
in the orchestrated version of American
in Paris (1928). The next eight-measure section
brings in the entire ensemble, the brass shouting in their upper registers,
burying the strings and woodwinds.
Handy comes out of the fortissimo of this section with a sharp cutoff
of all instruments, allowing the violin and flute to pop out of the texture
as they hold through a fermata. These
held notes lead directly to a repeat of the oboe melody with a slightly
varied orchestration. The piece continues with
a series of alternating melodic flurries, and a lovely violin cadenza then
emerges. This also recalls American in Paris, which employs a
similar texture and melodic character.
A lyrical trombone solo with a cadenza follows. After a brief, rhythmically charged
ensemble, a tenor sax plays two blues choruses—the only improvisation
in this piece. The work concludes with
a final repetition of the oboe theme. The title of the composition suggests that the work be examined for its relationship to the blues, but the piece actually incorporates an idiosyncratic, abstract, and deconstructed version of that form. Much of the blues “feeling” in the blues (in major keys) comes from the juxtaposition of the major quality of the tonic chord and the key’s flatted third and fifth scale degrees, the “blue notes.” Handy’s approach to this quality, as well as to the blues in general, is expressed in this piece through his penchant for harmonic ambiguity, as well as his fascination with intervals frequently thought of as dissonant. This can be seen in the opening oboe theme, where an F and C pedal point is present throughout the first eight measures. Though the strings begin with what seems to be a clear-cut F-major7 (m. 1), the E-flat in the oboe melody confuses this, as does the colorful celeste chord. E (in the strings) and E-flat (in the oboe) both resolve to D (m. 2), which perhaps functions as the ninth of an equally confusing C9 (with no third) over an F pedal. This repeated alternation of dissonance (E and E-flat) and consonance (their resolution to D) serves as a manufactured tonal functionality. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, Handy, while not employing the blues form, uses this dissonance to create bluesy intimations with the E-flat sounding as a blue note to E. Although Handy wrote many significant jazz works, as well as intriguing pieces in a more classically oriented genre, the success of The Bloos, with its combination of elements from jazz and classical composition, makes it perhaps the finest example of Handy’s unique compositional style. The jazz/classical fusion is so unique and personal that its impact on other composers is peripheral. It lingers not as a direct influence, but rather as a tantalizing and inspirational notion that allows for the articulation of a personal musical vision and the creation of composition free from genre restrictions. Perhaps this is why Gunther Schuller cites The Bloos as one of six important examples of a style “in which attempts were made to fuse basic elements of jazz and Western art music.”4 When discussing Handy’s life, his close friends all speak of him as a fun-loving, generous, gregarious person who exuded a strong, healthy, athletic physicality. Handy, however, also had a bitter, angry, and frustrated side that was quite problematic. This may be what led him to experiment with heroin around the time that he left the Raeburn band and composed The Bloos. Consequently, his life and career went into a downward spiral. After a lengthy stay in
a substance abuse rehabilitation facility in the early 1950s, Handy managed
to continue working, but most of the music he composed from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s was
written for a very small (though impressive) group of friends and
musicians. Handy wrote for his own
band, recording two albums under his own name (Handyland, U.S.A.
[1954], and By George! (Handy Of Course) [1955]), produced three
albums for saxophonist Zoot Sims, and created works for the players involved
with the New York Saxophone Quartet whom he had known for many years. In 1968, Handy was
offered work that allowed him to extricate himself from the high-pressure
world of the New York music business.
He accepted a job as pianist in the house band at one of the
“Borscht Belt” hotels in the Catskill Mountains. Handy and his wife felt comfortable in the
area, and eventually settled there. He
went on to become a bandleader in the
hotels, and it was in this environment that Handy ended his musical career. The jazz world took note
of Handy’s eclectic and adventurous style, and found it
inspirational. Ironically, at the same
time, Handy, because of personal and professional difficulties largely
expressed through self-destructive behavior, limited his own
possibilities. Perhaps the final notes
of The Bloos,an unaccompanied and unresolved triad in the trombones,
can be seen as a metaphor for Handy’s unresolved and not fully realized
career. —Brooklyn
College, CUNY Editor’s note. On 17 October 2006, the
Manhattan School of Music sponsored a concert devoted entirely to
Handy’s works, featuring their Concert Jazz Band under the direction of
Justin DiCioccio. Ben Bierman, who played a pivotal role in the organization
of the event, served as narrator for the concert, which featured the first live
performance of The Bloos since its original recording in 1946, as well
as Dalvatore Sally and selections from 1955’s By George!
(Handy of Course). The deft execution
of Handy's difficult scores by this talented young group breathed new
life into the eccentric work of a largely-forgotten composer. Notes 1 In his article on jazz composition from this
period, Doug Ramsey states: “The Bloos for Norman Granz’s The
Jazz Scene (Verve) album of 1949 was his last masterpiece.” See
Doug Ramsey, “Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging After World
War II,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner
(Oxford University Press, 2000), 403-17. 2 Michael Levin, in his review of The Jazz
Scene, underscores Granz’s personal commitment to the project by
noting that the expenses for the record set exceeded $12,000, and that the
project could, at best, break even. See Michael Levin, “Calls
‘Jazz Scene’ Most Remarkable Album Ever,” Down Beat
(January 1950), 14. 3 As the twelve-inch format was generally
reserved for classical music, the intent of using this type of disc was to
present jazz with an equal level of artistic integrity. See Brian Priestley,
liner notes to The Jazz Scene, Verve Records (reissue), 314 521 661-2,
1994. 4 Gunther Schuller, “Third
stream,” New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., eds. Stanley
Sadie and John Tyrrell (Macmillan, 2001).
Schuller’s interest in the Bloos is also diplayed by the
fact the he published a facsimile of the score through his company, Margun
Music, BMI, 1996. The other third stream works that Schuller
cites as important examples of the genre are: Red Norvo’s Dance
of the Octopus (1933); Ralph Burns’s Summer Sequence (1946);
Graettinger’s City of Glass (1951); Alec Wilder’s Jazz
Suite (1951); and Rolf Lieberman’s Concerto for Jazz Band and
Orchestra (1956). ISAM home Who we
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