Blues On The Rhapsody (2)

Side-on view of the Charlie Barnet band in action, mid-'40s;
note the trombones and saxes lined up together in the front row
(luckily (?) there's no dancers threatening the trombone slides)

At one stage I was going to knuckle down and transcribe this Johnny Richards arrangement. It's one of my favorite charts. It sits right on that line between swing and bop, capturing the the essence of both, while at the same time 'updating' the source material - which is of course Gershwin's "Rhapsody" - composed in 1924. What do I mean by 'updating'? What I'm talking about is the fundamental artistic principle of absorbing the past to produce the future. With this arrangement we're talking jazz 'updating' of the highest order - or 'transmutation', as I like to call it, because it reminds me of the alchemists' attempts to extract gold from base metal. If the word 'jazz' means anything at all, it means improving something, literally 'jazzing up'. Doing whatever it takes to make that spirit come alive.

Have a listen again to the Johnny Richards arrangement, played by the Charlie Barnet Orchestra in March 1949, featuring the then 22 year-old Maynard Ferguson:



Now, I'm not the world's greatest transcriber so I knew it was going to take me quite a while to get the whole thing down. But that in itself didn't worry me especially. What did worry me was the knowledge that at the end of it all, I really couldn't be 100% sure that what I wrote down was what the guys were actually playing in that chart on that day in '49. After all it's a mono recording in a big barn of a studio with the equipment of the late '40s. I'm not saying the recording equipment wasn't up to scratch back then; some audiophiles reckon it was just as good as they use now, if not better. But for whatever reason, I had no hope of being sure that in a full band chord, I could faithfully pick out, say, the 2nd trombone's note and be sure that it was the same note that Richards wrote.

So what does any arranger do when faced with a mountain of work? Why, go to the masters for inspiration, of course! I find page 70 of Russell Garcia's "The Professional Arranger Composer Part II" particularly helpful:

"The Art of Avoiding (A Common Arranger's Malady)"
(Russell Garcia)

To that list we can now add going on the internet. Surfing the web is a procrastinator's dream. By the way, that reminds me of a great Lee Morgan tune - "The Procrastinator". If you like musical asides as I do, here it is:



Even this little aside can even show us something: notice the way Lee Morgan plays his composition twice, first 'straight', 'classically' with bowed bass, then 'hip' ('swung') as Ron Carter moves into a walking bass style. This is the kind of 'transmutation' or simply 'jazzing up' I'm trying to describe here.

Like a good student taking the master's advice, I immediately stopped working on the transcribing, and once more went on an internet search. This time, by using a different combination of search terms, I happened to stumble across a fantastic website (since disappeared) that had dozens of original scores from famous bandleaders of the '30s and '40s. Direct links to PDF files. Charts scanned by someone, somewhere, sometime (that is, not by the website host; he just put 'em up there). Separate pages for the different bandleaders with many well-known charts. Some scores - a few originals and some modern transcriptions - but mainly instrumental parts.

Then I see a section on Charlie Barnet, hit that link, and among several Johnny Richards charts, there she was! To my astonishment, right there on the page, were links to this very chart: scans of the individual parts, handwritten in what looked to me like an authentic style for the time (1949). After downloading, this is what I first laid eyes on:

It was like searching for gold - and actually finding some, for a change. I had the individual parts for almost the whole band, lacking only the first and second trumpet parts. But now I could 'reverse-engineer' the score, put it back together by copying all the separate parts into a new score. If you gotta have missing parts, the lead & second trumpet parts are probably the 'best' parts to lose, if you have to lose two. It's pretty hard to mistake a lead trumpet line, as it's the melody line of the whole band; and by having the third and fourth trumpet parts, logic should dictate what the second part should look like.

If my initial hunch was correct, and these might very well be the exact parts used by the musicians on the recording - and not just somebody else's transcription - then by putting all the parts together I'd have the closest thing possible to the original Richards score. That part of my brain that does transcribing suddenly experienced pangs of hope, joy, freedom!

Also linked on the page was a score - but not Richards' original; this one was done by someone else, in modern music software. So it seemed like somebody else had already got in there before me.

But first I had to check it all out, and start making observations. The largest file was a color scan, Barnet's part as above; but all the others were grayscale, looking like this:

Tenor 1, page 5

But they were from the same hand. And they certainly had that aged look about them, and I don't mean scan quality. For a start the copyist's handwriting is of the period, quick but accurate. Done with a proper music ink pen with the calligraphy nib, thin and fat lines possible.

To cut a long story short, when I put all the parts into a new score, there were many differences between the 'as written' version and the 'as played' (recorded) version. But they were all the same chart. This often happens in practice: charts were often amended to tweak the arrangement to suit the band. So, I decided to write two scores: one, a verbatim copy of the individual parts, exposing all the copyist's inconsistencies on the different parts, and another one - much more important to me - a score 'as played', or as close as I could get to it.

Why do I like this arrangement so much? The chart flows and builds, using the source material as a springboard; as I said, updating the 1924 Gershwin melodies, with their original rhythmic concept, to a then very modern-sounding swing/bop concept. Richards wrote the chart most probably in '48, from what I can gather; that means his version was written 24 years after the original. (2 x 24 = 48).

I don't want to tell the story of this arrangement in 'chronological order'. I want to dive straight into the 'nitty-gritty' and first pull out a couple of excerpts that will hopefully elucidate my use of the word 'transmutation' in relation to what jazz arranging is all about. Later on we'll get to the curious fate of this chart, and its ghostly presence in the jazz history books.

Here's one of the reasons I love this chart: after setting the (Gershwin) scene up, but before getting into the well-known melodies, there's a strange interlude that, as far as I can tell, bears no relationship to anything in the source material whatsoever. I can't find anything in the original that comes anywhere close to this passage. On the chart it happens at 1:35. This is what it looks like, in short score format, concert pitch:

It's a fantastic "late '40s" mood, and like I said, it's got nothing to do with the source material at all. But it really adds something extra to the chart. Remember, Richards had to fit in the six or seven definitive Gershwin themes somehow in a chat lasting just over seven minutes; which makes this interlude's existence all the more daring and unusual.

Just as interesting is the two-bar brass figure right before the interlude. Here it is, short scored with saxes at the top, brass on the bottom. The clefs are not showing, but it's the same as the above (treble and bass for both sections), chord symbol in between.

Richards had the use of six saxophones, as Barnet had a full five-piece sax section and himself played either alto, tenor or soprano - all three on this chart. On this excerpt, he's playing alto on the top note (B natural). The six saxes play an Eb7alt (Eb7#9b13, 'altered') chord, while the trumpets and bones play an almost, but not quite, retrograde-inversion figure, straight out of Stravinsky or Schoenberg. While he uses these modern classical techniques such as polytonality and his own very individual harmonization throughout - what he called his 'streams of harmony' approach - he manages to keep it organic the whole time.

More soon.