SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JULIUS HEMPHILL
June 18-24
ARTHUR BLYTHE
June 25-July 1
OSCAR BROWN, JR.
July 2-July 8
DONNY HATHAWAY
July 9-July 15
EUGENE McDANIELS
July 16-July 22
ROBERTA FLACK
July 23-July 29
WOODY SHAW
July 30-August 5
FATS DOMINO
August 6-August 12
CLIFFORD BROWN
August 13-August 19
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
August 20-August 26
RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK
August 27-September 2
CHARLES BROWN
September 3-September 9
Woody Shaw
(1944-1989)
Artist Biography by Matt Collar
One of the most gifted and innovative jazz musicians of his generation, trumpeter Woody Shaw navigated the rapidly fluctuating jazz scene of the '70s and '80s to create a lasting body of work that extends his influence well beyond his tragic death at age 44. Born in Laurinburg, NC, on December 24, 1944, Shaw grew up in Newark, NJ. Interestingly, Shaw's father, Woody Shaw, Sr., sang in the gospel group the Diamond Jubilee Singers in the '30s and attended high school in Laurinburg with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie -- a connection that did not go unnoticed by a young musically inclined Shaw. Starting out on bugle, Shaw moved to trumpet at age 11 and continued his studies in music theory while attending an arts high school in Newark. By his teens, Shaw had gained a strong knowledge base in music and was already playing jazz. Early on, he evinced the influence of such artists as Louis Armstrong and Harry James, but quickly fell under the spell of such modern trumpeters as Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, and others. Later on, Shaw would also express much interest in the advancements of saxophonist John Coltrane, whose style and harmonic approach is clearly evident in his playing.
By 1963, Shaw's steady presence on the vibrant Newark jazz scene -- which included such future stars as keyboardist Larry Young and trombonist Grachan Moncur III -- had begun to catch the attention of the greater jazz world, and Shaw found work with Latin percussionist Willie Bobo as well as progressive saxophonist Eric Dolphy. Dolphy even invited Shaw on a tour of France. Sadly, however, Dolphy died from a diabetic coma before Shaw was able to join him in Paris. Undeterred, Shaw left for France and ended up performing in several European countries with a bevy of name artists including pianist Bud Powell, drummer Kenny Clarke, saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and others. Shaw even brought his Newark pals organist Young and drummer Billy Brooks overseas to perform with him and saxophonist Nathan Davis.
In 1964, Shaw returned to the States and began a series of highly formative jobs, beginning with a stint with pianist Horace Silver and continuing with a who's who of jazz artists including pianist Chick Corea, saxophonists Jackie McLean and Booker Ervin, pianists McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill, and drummer Max Roach. It was during this period that Shaw appeared on several now classic recordings including Silver's Cape Verdean Blues (1965) and The Jody Grind (1966), Larry Young's landmark Blue Note date Unity (1965), and some lesser-known but no less stellar releases like pianist Andrew Hill's Grass Roots (1968). The late '60s also found Shaw pairing with such forward-thinking and avant-garde-leaning saxophonists as Gary Bartz, Pharoah Sanders, Hank Mobley, and Archie Shepp.
The 1970s were a fruitful time both creatively and commercially for Shaw, who formed several inspired working partnerships including stints with saxophonist Joe Henderson, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, and drummer Louis Hayes. It was also during the '70s that Shaw first recorded as a leader and released several influential, forward-thinking albums featuring his by then highly individualized style that mixed harmonically complex post-bop, modal jazz, and nods toward fusion and free jazz. Included in this period are such albums as Blackstone Legacy (1970), Song of Songs (1972), Moontrane (1974), Little Red's Fantasy (1976), and The Iron Men (1977).
Capping off this decade of intense creative output, Shaw signed to Columbia Records and released several more highly acclaimed albums with Rosewood (1977), Woody III (1978) -- named after his son Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, who was born that year -- For Sure! (1980), and United (1981). Of the four releases, Rosewood achieved the most acclaim, earning a Grammy nomination and getting voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Reader's Poll -- the same poll in which Shaw was picked as Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year. Although Shaw eventually parted ways with Columbia, he continued to work and record throughout the '80s, releasing a handful of compelling albums, not the least of which included his three sessions with fellow trumpet innovator Freddie Hubbard: Time Speaks (1982), Double Take (1985), and Eternal Triangle (1988) -- most of which are collected on The Complete Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw Sessions.
By this time, Shaw
had been diagnosed with an incurable degenerative eye disease and was
losing his eyesight. While the disease did not hamper his performing
abilities, it would have obviously made the everyday functions of going
about one's life, let alone a music career, difficult. Although
specifics of the accident are somewhat vague, what is known is that on
February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, NY, which severed his left arm. Subsequently, Shaw suffered complications while in the hospital and died of kidney failure on May 10, 1989.
Although the late '80s had proven to be the most difficult period of Shaw's musical life, with the rise of the Young Lions -- most notably trumpeter Wynton Marsalis -- and the burgeoning renaissance of acoustic post-bop jazz, the seeds were sown for a renewed appreciation of Shaw's music. Like Shaw, Marsalis was not only a classically trained musician, but had spent time as a member of Blakey's Jazz Messengers and, like many of the younger jazz musicians of the '80s, drew much inspiration from Shaw's unique and harmonically progressive approach to improvisation. Shaw recorded with several of these younger musicians, including saxophonist Kenny Garrett on his stellar 1984 Criss Cross debut, Introducing Kenny Garrett. Shaw also brought younger musicians into his own group, including trombonist Steve Turre and pianist Mulgrew Miller, as well as drummers Tony Reedus and Terri Lyne Carrington. In this way, Shaw secured his reputation alongside such icons as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Horace Silver as one of the great jazz innovators, bandleaders, and mentors.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/woodyshaw
Woody Shaw, Jr. was born in Laurinburg, N.C. on December 24th, 1944 to Rosalie Pegues Shaw and Woody Shaw, Sr. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and began playing trumpet at the age of 11. Shaw attended Arts High School in Newark where he studied trumpet and music theory with Jerome Ziering. Newark has a rich Jazz history and many notable Jazz artists are originally from there, including Sarah Vaughan, Wayne Shorter, Eddie Gladden, Larry Young, and Grachan Moncur III. His first and perhaps greatest inspiration, in terms of the trumpet, came from listening to Louis Armstrong and, not long after, Clifford Brown.
Woody found out later that he had picked up the trumpet during the same month and year that Brown passed away. This was an auspicious sign for him and he felt that there was a “higher” reason for this; that it confirmed a deeper connection and purpose regarding his place within the lineage of the trumpet masters. His other primary influences were, of course, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan. Woody particularly felt a strong connection to Dizzy because of the fact that his father (Woody, Sr.) and Dizzy had gone to high school together at Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Woody Shaw, Sr. had been a Gospel singer with the Diamond Jubilee Singers in the 1930s.
In 1963, after many local professional jobs, Woody worked for Willie Bobo (with Chick Corea and Joe Farrell) and also performed and recorded as a sideman with Eric Dolphy. The following year, Dolphy invited Shaw to join him in Paris, however, Dolphy suddenly died shortly before Shaw's departure. He decided to make the trip nonetheless, and found steady work in Paris with close friend Nathan Davis and such musicians as Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Johnny Griffin, and Art Taylor.
In 1963 Woody performed frequently in Paris, Berlin, and London with a group that included Nathan Davis, Larry Young, and Billy Brooks. Young, Brooks, and Shaw were childhood friends back in Newark, and they would further develop their rapport as friends and as musicians when Shaw finally brought them to France that same year. The following year, Shaw returned to the U.S. to play in Horace Silver's quintet (1965-1966) and eventually recorded with Chick Corea (1966-1967), Jackie McLean (1967), Booker Ervin (1968), McCoy Tyner (1968), and Andrew Hill (1969). In 1968-69 he worked intermittently with Max Roach, with whom he appeared at a festival in Iran, and during the same period he began to work as a studio musician and in pit orchestras for Broadway musicals.
Thereafter, Woody continued to record with people such as Pharaoh Sanders, Hank Mobley, Gary Bartz, and Archie Shepp, and eventually formed a quintet with Joe Henderson in 1970 (also his fellow frontline-man in Horace Silver's group), which featured George Cables, Lenny White, and Ron Carter. From (1971-1973) Shaw held an important engagement with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, recording three albums for Fantasy Records (”Child's Dance,” “Buhaina,” and “Anthenagain”) before finally settling in San Fransisco, where he co-led a group with Bobby Hutcherson, soon after recording on Hutcherson's albums: “Live at Montreux” and “Cirrus” (both on Blue Note).
Shaw returned to New York in 1975 as a member of the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet, which, after Cook's departure, became the Woody Shaw-Louis Hayes Quintet. Cook was soon replaced by Rene McLean, and then by Dexter Gordon, who adopted the band for his acclaimed “homecoming” performances in 1976. By 1977, Shaw was working regularly as the sole leader of small groups whose styles were oriented towards “hard bop”, yet with a strong “modal” element which was heavily influenced by harmonic conceptions that were brought forth and developed by people like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner.
In 1978 Shaw was signed to Columbia Records and began recording a series of albums which were, and still are, considered jazz classics. Among these are albums ROSEWOOD, STEPPING STONES, WOODY III, FOR SURE, & UNITED (Rosewood was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Reader's Poll, which also voted Woody Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year and #4 Jazz Musician of the Year.)
The late 70s to early 80s would be a very prosperous period for Woody Shaw as a soloist, band leader, composer and also as a father; in 1978 his son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, was born and would become a key source of inspiration for one of Shaw's most significant recordings (WOODY III, named for the new born boy). Among Woody's regular sidemen in this period (1977-1983) were the saxophonist Carter Jefferson; pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs; bassist Stafford James; and drummer Victor Lewis, and from 1980 to 1983 his qintet included pianist Mulgrew Miller; trombonist Steve Turre; Stafford James once again; and drummer Tony Reedus. After touring and recording with a group of constantly changing personnel, in 1986 Shaw formed a new quintet with Larry Willis (also his sideman from 1979-1980), bassist David Williams, and drummer Teri Lynne Carrington.
Woody Shaw was fortunate to have had such a wide range of experiences throughout his career. This was something that had a significant impact on the development of his own personal style and musical voice. Shaw's influences ranged from Louis Armstrong to Bela Bartok and yet he was able to incorporate such varied tastes into an extremely rooted yet completely original approach to improvisation. His approach to Jazz, and more specifically to the trumpet, is based on a unique harmonic language, which in many ways reflects his deep love and natural affinity towards modern classical music, as well as the direct influence of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane on his conceptual and technical framework.
Much like Dolphy and Coltrane, Woody also felt a strong affinity to music from Asia, Africa, and various other parts of the world, and always tried to incorporate elements from many different sources into his own approach to playing, and living (Woody was dedicated to a form of martial arts called Tai Chi and possessed a natural but intense affinity with Eastern philosophy and various other spiritual practices and systems of thought. This is something which can be said to have profoundly enhanced his intellectual and creative abilities. Woody Shaw states: “Music is more than just notes to me....there is a lot of emotion and life that must go into it....you must put your experiences into it. Music is my religion”). Shaw was able to translate all of his different influences into a comepletely distinct harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic language, through a process which would inevitably lead him to expand the possibilities of his instrument, and of music in general.
The latter stages (1980s) of Woody Shaw's career included many new and interesting collaborations with such people as Kenny Garrett (Woody Shaw appears on Kenny Garrett's very first recording as leader, entitled Introducing Kenny Garrett) and Freddie Hubbard, who was not only an early influence of Woody's but a very close friend of his as well. Woody and Freddie recorded three records together during this period in dedication to Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, and Louis Armstrong (”Time Speaks,” “Double Take,” and “The Eternal Triangle”). Woody also recorded with Mal Waldron and again with Dexter Gordon, and also toured and recorded with the Paris Reunion Band, which featured musicians who had previously lived and worked there, such as Joe Henderson, Johnny Griffin, Nathan Dvais, Idris Muhammad, Jimmy Woode, Kenny Drew, and Curtis Fuller. He would continue to record and tour around the world to such places as Egypt, India, and east Asia, while still developing musicially and searching for new sources of inspiration and creativity.
Like many geniuses, however, Woody's journey would involve periods of prolonged struggle and hardship, yet through his sacrifice and dedication to the evolution of Jazz music, he added to the vocabulary of the trumpet and created a musical language which was all his own. In many ways, he is the last true innovator on his instrument and is well established as one of the major contributors in the line of great modern trumpet players that began with Louis Armstrong. Furthermore, Woody Shaw's early departure (May 10th 1989), while tragic in many ways, considering his tremendous role as one of the leaders of his generation, helps us realize how much he achieved in such a short period, and how far ahead of his time he truly was, and still is. The scale and complexity of his achievements are comparable to those of the greatest innovators of modern music, and thus his contributions live on forever as a tremendous source of learning for future generations, and as a true representation of the dignity which characterizes the profound legacy of Modern Jazz.
Source: Woody Shaw III
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/12/obituaries/woody-herman-shaw-44-jazz-trumpeter-dies.html
Woody Herman Shaw, 44, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies
by JON PARELES
May 12, 1989
Woody Herman Shaw, a leading jazz trumpeter, died of a heart attack Tuesday at Bellevue Hospital. He was 44 years old.
Mr. Shaw had been hospitalized since Feb. 27, when he fell onto subway tracks in front of a moving train. He was legally blind because of retinitis pigmentosa. The accident severed most of his left arm.
Mr. Shaw's playing was grounded in the hard-bop of Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan, the modal jazz of John Coltrane and the freer jazz of Eric Dolphy and Archie Shepp. His warm tone and his sure-footed, articulate, dramatically paced solos made him a favorite among musicians. In 1976, he placed first in Downbeat magazine's Best Trumpeter poll.
Mr. Shaw was born in Laurinburg, N.C., in 1944 and grew up in Newark. He picked up the bugle during elementary school and started playing trumpet when he was 12; by his early teens, he was sitting in at jazz clubs around Newark.
In the early 1960's, he worked with Mr. Dolphy, a groundbreaking modern saxophonist, and with the pianist Horace Silver. During the late 1960's, he moved to San Francisco and worked with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the saxophonist Joe Henderson. He also toured Europe as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and worked with the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Max Roach.
At the turn of the 1970's, Mr. Shaw began recording as a leader. From the West Coast and then in New York, he made albums for Contemporary, Muse, Columbia and Blue Note, where he made well-received collaborative albums with Mr. Hubbard.
He is survived by his parents, Woody and Rose Shaw, a sister, Toni, and a brother, Pete, all of Newark; another brother, Cedric, who lives in Connecticut, and a son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw, of Newark.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/08/14/210572029/woody-shaw-the-last-great-trumpet-innovator
Woody Shaw, who made his first recordings 50 years ago this
summer, might be the jazz trumpet's least appreciated giant. Not among
musicians, mind you; they recognize his genius whether they're horn
players or not. Yet even hardcore fans often know Shaw's name more than
his music.
Shaw, who died in 1989 at age 44, was perhaps the trumpeter of the 1970s, an icon for the "Young Lion" generation that followed. Often described as the instrument's last great innovator, Shaw was a virtuoso who restructured the way trumpet players move between long intervals, and wrote his own harmonic and melodic language using notes outside the chords (a technique known as "side-slipping").
His virtuosity and imagination made Shaw equally attractive to both bebop-rooted players and avant-garde pioneers, and he was equally conversant with both. "He was the bridge between Freddie Hubbard and the Art Ensemble of Chicago," notes trumpeter Brian Lynch, whose current project features Latin arrangements of Shaw's tunes featuring multiple trumpeters.
The man himself can be heard on numerous recordings: Shaw's sideman gigs, many of them on landmark albums, are as important in evaluating his career as his leadership roles. A substantial portion of the latter work, however, has just gotten box-set treatment, via Mosaic Records' new 7-disc collection The Complete Muse Sessions. Here are five of the worthiest examples.
This track, originally issued on the album The Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble Live at the Berliner Jazztage, is now available through Mosaic Records' new box set The Complete Muse Sessions.
This track, originally issued on the album Imagination, is now available through Mosaic Records' new box set The Complete Muse Sessions.
http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/woody.htm
WOODY SHAW
Woody Shaw is a trumpeter, cornetist, flugelhornist, composer,
arranger, bandleader, and eclectic original. "I consider
myself from the straight-ahead school of jazz," says Woody,
and if you've heard him in action, you know what he's talking
about. Avant-gardists like Eric Dolphy (with whom he worked) and
John Coltrane have made their mark on Shaw's distinctive style,
but he has not forgotten his debt to the early modern masters
like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. "I'm able to handle
any kind of music," he says, "but I think that when
jazz stops swinging, it's not jazz."
The music on Woody's latest Columbia album, Woody III - like the music on its predecessors, Rosewood and Stepping Stones - never stops swinging for an instant. And it reveals Shaw as a true triple-threat man - not only is he playing better than ever, but he wrote all but one of the LP's six selections and did all the arrangements.
The album's title has two meanings. Woody III refers not only to the fact that it's his third Columbia release, but also to the name of Woody's first child, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, who was born shortly before the album was recorded. The three selections on the first side, performed by an impressive 12-piece ensemble, are designed to tell the musical story of three generations of Woody Shaws.
James Spaulding, alto saxophone and flute, is featured as guest soloist on Woody III, but at the core of most of the tracks is Shaw's strong, tight young band of Carter Jefferson on saxophones, Onaje Allan Gumbs on piano, Buster Williams or Clint Houston on bass and Victor Lewis on drums. "I think I've found musicians who can play it all," Woody said of his quintet at the time Stepping Stones, recorded live at New York's Village Vanguard, was released, and the critics agreed. Rafi Zabor of Musician magazine, for example, praised it as "everything modern jazz should be" and called Shaw "a state-of-the-art trumpeter with a state-of-the-art band."
Similar plaudits have been coming Woody's way for some time. Down Beat's Chuck Berg, in a five-star review of Rosewood, called him "one of today's leading contenders for the world's heavyweight trumpet crown." Whitney Balliett of The New Yorker has called him "a trumpeter of startling invention and intensity." The readers of Down Beat voted Woody trumpeter of the year and Rosewood jazz album of the year in that magazine's 1978 poll. And the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated Rosewood for two Grammy awards. Shaw's legion of admirers is growing, and there's no reason to doubt that with the release of Woody III, it will continue to grow.
Woody Shaw was born on Christmas Eve in 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina, home of Dizzy Gillespie's alma mater, Laurinburg Institute. Woody's father, Woody Sr., was himself a Laurinburg alumnus and a member of the gospel group, the Diamond Jubilee Singers. When Woody was still a baby, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where Woody began studying trumpet at age 11 with Jerome Ziering.
Two years later he began his professional career, playing with Brady Hodge's Newark-based R&B orchestra. He worked with local acts like Alan Jackson and the Jive Five while in high school, where he made the All-City and All-State orchestras in 1959. Woody never finished high school, but he received valuable musical schooling through his work with local jazzmen like organist Larry Young and saxophonist Tyrone Washington. At 18, he got what he calls "the ultimate of my indoctrination" with Latin-jazz pioneer Willie Bobo at a club called the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn (among the other members of the band were Chick Corea and Joe Farrell).
Eric Dolphy heard Woody at the Blue Coronet and asked him to join his band. "Eric's music had a profound influence on me," he says of the late saxophonist. "He taught me a freer way to play and helped me find my own voice." Woody made his recording debut on Dolphy's Iron Man LP, and had been preparing to join him in Europe when Dolphy died in 1964. He went over anyway, settling in Paris, where he gained valuable experience playing with expatriate bebop greats Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell. He was also reunited with Larry Young, who played with him at Le Chat Qui Peche, a Paris nightclub, and also toured Belgium and Germany with him. The following year Horace Silver - whose trumpeter Carmell Jones, was himself moving to Europe - wrote to Shaw and asked him to come back to the U.S. and join his quintet.
After three very successful years with Silver, Woody spent the latter part of the sixties working and recording with McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill and others. The early seventies found Woody primarily on the West coast, where he worked in the bands of Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson and Art Blakey and made his recording debut as a leader with two albums on the Contemporary label. During these years Shaw wrote for almost every band with which he played. Two of his early compositions, "The Moontrane" and "Boo Ann's Grand," are considered by many to be jazz standards.
In 1973, Woody returned to the New York scene, having rejoined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The following year he left Blakey to establish himself as a leader and began recording for Muse with a band he called the Concert Ensemble. In 1975, he joined the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook quintet, assuming co-leadership with drummer Hayes when saxophonist Cook left. The Hayes-Shaw group became the band Dexter Gordon used for his triumphant U.S. tour in 1976 (the results are documented on Dexter's first Columbia LP, Homecoming - recorded, like Stepping Stones and one selection on Woody III, at the Village Vanguard. Woody's association with Gordon continued through the great saxophonist's Sophisticated Giant LP, after which he committed himself to leading a group full-time.
In the last year or so, Shaw and his quintet - occasionally expanded to a sextet with the addition of a trombonist and a saxophonist-flutist - have toured extensively both in the U.S. and abroad, and Woody himself has performed in Cuba as part of an all-star jazz band. The world, in other words, has been served notice that Woody Shaw has arrived - a fact that Woody III forcefully helps to drive home.
[1979]
http://www.dmitrimatheny.com/blog/blog/my-approach-to-jazz-by-woody-shaw
In order for me to be consistent as a trumpet player, I try to practice every day, for at least two or three hours. Oh, I’ve been in certain grooves when I said: “Well, I don’t need to practice”, and I rely on certain professional tricks, that I can get by with. But my creative mind tells me that getting by isn’t enough. So I do my chromatic scales and the little exercises. Then I have some symmetrical exercises of my own that I’ve developed. I‘m hoping to write a fundamental book on some of the exercises that I use to attain the concept that I have. A lot of trumpet players have been asking me to put out a book; so I’m working on it.
Definitely, every register is important. As for when they get hung up with the upper register—that turns me off. Because the beauty of the trumpet is in the middle and lower register, you know; I use the high register for excitement, and for effect.
For fingering, the difficulty is in middle register, from middle C on down—that’s why they play so high! I’m going to see if I can have a trumpet designed where I can go even an octave lower than the concert E that it goes to right now. I hear something else; to do what I want to do, the conventional trumpet is not enough now. I need another register—where am I going to get it from? I think it’ll have a fourth valve; I’ve seen a German flugelhorn like that—it goes down to four octaves.
I have played the flugelhorn at times, but I like the trumpet. The flugelhorn is purely incidental to me; it’s effective and pretty in certain things—but I can get just about the same sound on the trumpet. I have a very well–developed low register, with a very big, dark sound; so I don’t worry about the flugel. But—I’m going to get a flugelhorn ! Now, that instrument fits Art Farmer perfectly; you could have no better choice to play the flugel. It fits his style, his whole musical personality—he’s a very lyrical player. I heard him recently; he sounds beautiful.
Talking of trumpet players like Art Farmer—it’s so refreshing to hear him. I mean, I don’t want to hear Freddie Hubbard play rock, man, but that’s what he’s doing—he’s too good a player for that. But I heard Benny Bailey not long ago—he just knocked me out. Where are all the good improvisers that I grew up on? I look around, and it seems like I’m the only one out here. I still get an occasional chance to hear Blue Mitchell. But I don’t hear any young guys that impress me at all. I was twenty when I was with Horace, and it took me a while to get where 1 am—I’m thirty–one now. You always look for a young demon on the horizon—I haven’t heard him yet.
I think I can claim to have one of the newest approaches on the trumpet. I know some very good trumpet players out there, but they’re just not playing what I want to hear. It’s something that comes with a lot of study and practice. See, to be a good improviser, you’ve got to know about music, to know what you’re doing.
You have to know a certain amount about the keyboard harmony, and playing in all the keys. I think that’s another point, why all the free musicians shy away from learning bebop things—it goes through all the keys. And to play all the keys is very difficult——to get your technique in D flat equal to your technique in C, D equal to E flat, and so on.
By no means is jazz dead—that’s essentially why Louis Hayes and I formed this band. We really enjoy playing. Ronnie Scott’s is a nice club, but the only drag about playing there is that we only have forty–five minutes for each set. We’re used to playing an hour, or an hour–and–a–half—maybe even two hours. So we’re getting our show–time technique together.
You do a record date, you have to take shorter solos—I think of this gig like a record date. We did pretty good towards the end of our engagement last August: we were getting in three tunes per set. If it became a little more expressive, we went back to two again. Which is all right; if we can get two good tunes into a forty–five minute set, I don’t think anything’s lost.
The thing I like about New York: I can go all over town, and hear some good music. When I used to be in San Francisco, guys would say: “Ah, nothing’s happening in New York.” I said : “Nothing? I can’t believe that.” I came back, and sure enough, it was happening. Jazz went through its little down trend, but it’s better now.
For one thing, I blame the musicians for nearly killing the music. I mean, some of the rubbish that they call jazz in the States is not jazz.
George Wein puts on what he calls the Cool Jazz Festival—with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ramsey Lewis. That’s not jazz! We were thinking about suing this cat for degrading the name of jazz! And we had a whole nest of noisemakers misusing the word also. We said : “Wait a minute—we gotta change this a little bit !” It was time for us to get together. We used to watch Cedar Walton’s band, with George Coleman, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins: they seemed so happy up there when they were playing—and they work all the time. They stay busy. We said: “They’ve got a quartet. Let’s get a dynamite quintet, with trumpet and tenor.” Well, I was complaining before because I wasn’t working that much: I’m complaining because I’m working too much now.
People who’ve never even heard jazz can really enjoy it, if they’re given a chance to. The presentation of it is very important. There are a few of us; I can name Cedar’s band, McCoy Tyner. the Heath brothers. Art Blakey.
Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson—he’s still playing. I learned a lot from him when I was in school. We’re the ones out here who still believe in the music.
Mentioning McCoy reminds me: I used to play with him, and he was a very strong influence on me. He used to tell me: “Woody, you’re going to be the next great trumpet player out here. Just keep going straight ahead. Do what you have to do, and believe in the music.”
I watched him, and now the same things are happening for me. This was a few years ago when he said this; I was with him in the late ‘sixties. I talked to him again recently; he said: “Hey—I told you.” Now, I’m just starting to gain some of the rewards of playing the music, I think. That reward is to just let me play—make a decent living, and be happy. I really don’t think a creative musician belongs with a lot of money—it stunts his growth. They do deserve their full rewards for their contribution. But a musician—once he starts earning a lot of money, man, his music gets corny; I don’t see why that has to be the case, but it usually is. Some kind of line has to be drawn, that’s all.
Mind you, now—I want as much as I can get! But I really can’t complain. Specially when I remember that around two years ago I was sitting depressed in San Francisco. Nobody seemed to be paying me any attention; I couldn’t get a decent gig anywhere. I even started considering : “Man, I can’t even play this thing any more.” I felt in myself that I wasn’t playing anything. I changed my environment and now the ideas are just brimming over in my brain. I think environment has a lot to do with it. Me, I’m from the city—that stimulates me.
This group is going to stay together, keeping working and making records. We have one out on Wim Wicks’ Timeless label, which is based in Holland. And I myself have exclusively signed with Muse Records. When my record “The Moontrane,” came out in ‘75, it was pretty controversial—I think because they were surprised that somebody came out with a hard, smashing, swinging jazz record. I believe I kinda restored the faith in a few people, with that; I got a lot of very nice reviews on it. I have a more recent one that had the same effect; it’s called “Love Dance”. Now, I’m finally starting to record some personal ideas that I want to put down; I’m going to show different aspects of my playing. One of these ideas is a brass record date, with three trumpets, four trombones, one reed and a rhythm section—maybe some miscellaneous things here and there. I’m very wrapped up in writing something for brass.
I stay fresh by doing different things —now that I’m finallv getting a chance to record my own material—I made a lot of records as a sideman, and I used to ask myself: “How come I can’t get a record date?” I know now—it wasn’t time. Very simple. To my record now I have four albums out: “Blackstone Legacy” is a double record set on the Contemporary label; I have another one called “Song Of Songs”, which is out of print right now, also on Contemporary, and the two Muse records. So I hope to be recording some interesting things.
Something else I must mention is that we have very good management. Maxine Gregg is doing a very good job; she really loves the music—we need more people like her in the business. She knows what the musicians go through, what we have to do to get where we are. I think if we had some more sympathetic management out here, you would see a lot more groups.
The beautiful thing about this group is : everywhere we go, they love us. The worst gig we did was in Italy; we played on this concert that had a lot of the free music on it. Before we went on, Sam Rivers had the people in an uproar, really roused; he plays the flute for a minute, goes into his whooping and hollering sounds with his voice, sits at the piano and bangs on that for a while, then runs over and grabs the saxophone—a frenzy of activity. The people were banging chairs and everything. When we played, we had a completely calming effect on them; we turned them right back into conservatives. So that was an experience. I mean, we go out there, too, sometimes—but we know how to get back, though. I’ve got my feet on the ground—or at least I’ve got my parachute on!
Courtesy of the National Jazz Archive
http://radiofreechip.com/woody-shaw-the-complete-muse-sessions-on-mosaic/
Miles Davis, as iconic and innovative a figure as any in the history of the trumpet, dispensed compliments the way you and I might deploy manhole covers as Frisbees. Here, Fido…FETCH!
To wit, Miles once launched this zinger in the general direction of Freddie Hubbard: “I’d rather hear Thad Jones miss one note than Freddie make ten.” Presumably Zen Master cum Don Rickles was simply applying some tough love in his own sweet way, because Freddie was universally revered as the prodigal trumpeter of his generation. Still, even so beloved a mentor and employer as Art Blakey used to consul his gifted young Jazz Messenger not to blow his brains out and try to play every damn note he could inside of eight bars.
Nevertheless, when Miles spoke of Woody Shaw–who emerged on Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man in 1963, seemingly fully formed as his own man, at the tender age of 18–there was no hint of equivocation.
“Woody Shaw? Now there’s a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them”
Regrettably, out of sight often equals out of mind; and while lack of access to his recorded output and an all-too early demise may have diminished the trumpeter’s legacy, with the roll out of Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions [Mosaic], a remarkable 7-CD overview of his creative output both before and after the 1977-1981 major label showcase that was midwifed in good part by Miles Davis (and is likewise documented on another 6-CD box, Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection), seekers after truth who might’ve missed out on Shaw’s trumpet mastery the first go-round, can now revel in a comprehensive overview of his greatness as a bandleader and composer.
I mean, if you love the trumpet—LOVE THE TRUMPET—and the pure liquid cherry center of the jazz tradition as it evolved from Louis Armstrong through the works of Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clark Terry, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Don Cherry, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Booker Little, Woody Shaw, Lester Bowie and Wynton Marsalis, well then you owe it to yourself to pull out your credit cards and without a moment’s hesitation, plunk down for the Mosaic Woody Shaw box set, which represents an extraordinary body of work.
Because Woody Shaw was a remarkable jazz icon, very much his own man with his own music, who emerged as the next great enfant terrible of the trumpet hot on the heels of Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little in particular (who preceded Shaw as a key collaborator with Eric Dolphy)—all of the young titans who were inspired in large part by the musical example and vocabulary of Clifford Brown.
Blessed with a photographic memory and perfect pitch, Woody Shaw was not simply a great instrumentalist and improviser, but a brilliant composer and bandleader, who portrayed a singular vision of the hard bop tradition, with a degree of command, emotional commitment and aesthetic purity that resonates stronger than ever in 2013–some thirty plus years since he made his untimely exit from what was, for this brilliant, complex man, seemingly a veil of tears, at the tender age of 44.
Still, no matter how conflicted or unfulfilled or frustrated or sad Woody Shaw may have grown in his day to day life as a man, none of that is evident in the uniformly exceptional body of music he left behind, let alone in the achievements of those for whom he served as both mentor and inspiration, such as Wynton Marsalis, Terrence Blanchard and Wallace Roney, all of whom went on to become formidable trumpeters in their own right.
What remains amidst the recorded evidence, is a sense of striving and aspiration and struggle, a degree of consistency and excellence, that remains utterly inspiring, and which certainly inspired me these past several weeks to go on a Woody Shaw bender of epic proportions, as I reacquainted myself with the SOUND SIGNATURE of an inspirational figure in the history of American music, too often overlooked, whom I first encountered on fellow Newark-native Larry Young’s visionary Blue Note organ session Unity, with Joe Henderson and Elvin Jones, on which Shaw distinguished himself both as an instrumental voice and as a major jazz composer.
Denver native Ron Miles, one of contemporary music’s reigning trumpet masters—whether featured in jazz, classical or borderless settings—is a long-time admirer of Woody Shaw, with very personal insights into his musical breakthroughs, and he helps to frame Shaw’s contributions in their historical context.
“Woody Shaw reminds me a lot of Roy Eldridge,” Miles explains, “in that he was able to take ideas that were starting to be heard on the saxophone and make them sing on the trumpet. That’s because Roy and Woody both approached the trumpet with something akin to the velocity and vertical phrasing of a saxophone player.
“Eldridge of course came out of Coleman Hawkins while Woody Shaw was inspired by Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. Curiously enough, given their unquestioned musical mastery, they’ve both been kind of pigeonholed as secondary historical figures that haven’t gotten their due because they emerged in between more radical explorers who were viewed as being outside the prevailing millieu. By that I mean, in their time, Roy and Woody were viewed as extensions of the mainstream, while their historical bookends were seen as departures: Eldridge between Armstrong and Gillespie; Woody between Miles and Lester.
“But both are players whose approaches extend beyond their instruments. I remember hearing Woody Shaw on those Montreux Summit albums and just having my jaw hit the floor. Such a feel and great ideas. And he played the heck out the trumpet. I was a huge Maynard fan at that time and that is why I bought the LP’s. But much like hearing Dinah Jams when Maynard hooked up with Clifford Brown and Clark Terry, hearing Woody and Maynard back to back on something like “Blues March” changed my life.”
Even a cursory pass at annotating highlights from Woody’s garden of boppish delights on this lovingly mastered and annotated box set is to deny readers the opportunity to discover this wonderful body of music for themselves. Allow us a few tidbits then…
Discs 1-3 cover 1974-1976, while discs 6-7, documenting the post-Columbia years, are comprised of sessions from 1983, 1986 and 1987 respectively: reflecting Shaw’s mature, ever-deepening harmonic subtlety, dark amber tone, eye-popping articulation (“Spiderman’s Blues”) and sumptuously swinging fluidity (“The Touch Of Your Lips” and “What’s New”) from what for me is the pick of the litter sonically and musically–a 1983 session featuring tribal elders Cedar Walton on piano, Buster Williams on bass and Victor Jones on drums (all still walking among us in 2013), where Shaw is the sole horn. Anyone miss the saxophone? Don’t need a saxophone when the trumpeter can throw down like that. Masterful. Adult music by and for adults.
And disc 7 comes in a close second for return engagements, featuring as it does a beautifully balanced 1987 Van Gelder Studio recording of Shaw’s Lamborghini of a working band; trombonist Steve Turre, as always the perfect foil, with pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Carl Allen on full cruise control. “Stormy Weather?” “You And The Night And The Music?” Tell me about it. Waiter? Check, please.
Elsewhere on the Mosaix box, by way of some back story, indulge me a brief tangent to recollect how as a jazz tadpole, my initial encounters with live jazz from 1970-1973 included much of the freer repertoire then propagating on the Lower East Side at Slugs on 3rd Street between Avenues B and C, as well as the music of more traditionally centered explorers at a venue such as the Village Vanguard; I was listening to Duke and Louis and Lester and Papa Jo Jones and Dizzy and Monk and Bud and Bird in my crib, but I was attending concerts by the likes of Alice Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, McCoy Tyner, Milford Graves and Sun Ra. So, one might say that I go both ways, and we won’t even begin to discuss my love for those tributaries of American music which derive from blues and R&B and soul and funk and rock and electric jazz.
Still, as hectic an eclectic as I might be, when I returned to Manhattan from upstate NY for good back in 1976, one of my most meaningful experiences was that of the Woody Shaw Quartet at the Village Vanguard–featuring then-expatriate tenor icon Dexter Gordon in full hail-the-conquering-hero mode. Never had it so good.
Be that as it may, given this jazz tadpole’s early fascination with late Coltrane, the Miles-Wayne-Herbie-Ron-Tony Quintet, Ornette Coleman, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, it’s not surprising that I was initially drawn to some of the more dangerous sounding musical encounters on discs 4-5 of the Shaw Mosaic Box; transitional music not unlike what one might have experienced in the mid-60s on some of those edgy, one-step-beyond, Andrew Hill Blue Note sessions, or a decade-and-change down the line at a Lower East Side watering hole with a daring genre-crossing musical profile such as The Tin Palace or that experimental hub of the SOHO loft jazz scene, Sam Rivers’ Studio Rivbea–still swinging, by all means, but with a looser, more combustible conversational approach to what constitutes a collective groove, a broader harmonic pallet less beholden to Tin Pan Alley and more self-consciously post-modern, while in terms of phrasing, employing a more overtly vocalized pallet of effects.
From 1965 are the remnants of two historical unreleased Blue Note sessions which label patriarch Alfred Lion later gifted to Shaw, and like some of those more experimental Andrew Hill sessions Lion so cherished, these also feature the great drummer Joe Chambers, as well as Joe Henderson on tenor, Ron Carter on bass and Larry Young not on organ, but on piano. On the cathartic Young original “Obsequious” they walk the line (well, actually, it occurs at a brisk gallop) between hard bop and free form with riveting spirit and purpose. On the other 1965 session, Carter and Young are supplanted by Paul Chambers and Herbie Hancock, for a much sunnier, in-the-pocket landscape; on Shaw’s “Three Muses” his left-of-center approach to harmony is readily accessible yet challenging in both his voice leading and in his jagged deconstruction of the melody–hornlike and serpentine in its complexity, yet always lyrically focused.
Fleshing out the remainder of discs 4-5 are a wonderful collaboration with drummer Eddie Moore and the much neglected alto sax master from Memphis, Frank Strozier, to particular effect on magnificent Shaw originals such as the rhapsodic “Little Red’s Fantasy” and the anthemic vamp and release of my personal favorite, “Tomorrow’s Destiny,” where the trumpeter’s gorgeous melodic focus and expansive, saxophone-like phrasing bring me back time and time again.
Then like some spiritual high five, is a visionary 1977 session in which Shaw pointedly reached out to the next generation of post-Dolphy avant gardists who had just hit town; representative of a new school of explorers…to some naysayers, of “questionable” bebop command (least ways, fresh out of the gate, the old school jazz cats didn’t readily embrace them, to put it politely).
But Shaw discerned a commonality of purpose, and in the person of saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Anthony Braxton, tethered to a dynamic, state-of-the-art rhythm section of pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, bassist Cecil McBee and drummers Joe Chambers or Victor Lewis, the band proved equally accommodating to old swing chestnuts like Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” as well as the spirited psycho-drama of Eric Dolphy’s “Iron Man,” let alone on the more freely inflected performances.
And before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath, here comes another Andrew Hill metaphor bobbing to the surface. In his video interview with Shaw’s son, Woody III, Braxton explains how much it meant to him when Woody chose to represent Andrew Hill’s “Symmetry” in their session, and if the pianist’s constructs elicit a deeply felt alto solo from Braxton, Woody just kills it–out there modulating for all he’s worth without a net in Sonny Rollins country; and it’s not just about the tongue tripping complexity of Shaw’s phrasing; those vaulting intervallic leaps worthy of the Nicholas Brothers; or how he peppers his lines with the kind of spicy Tandoori chromaticism that is so challenging to execute on the trumpet.
Nope, it’s about his tone and emotional commitment. And on the Shaw original “Song Of Songs” the trumpeter inspires his ensemble to sustain the kind of chanting intensity of Coltrane/Dolphy epiphanies “Ole” and “India,” let alone his own “Tomorrow’s Destiny” or some of Booker Little’s dark sonnets–a remarkably forward thinking session.
“The last 30 years, musicians are mining the breakthroughs of [Woody Shaw],” enthuses American tribal elder Anthony Braxton about his collaborator and spirit guide on The Iron Men, by way of an Amen Chorus. “He was the one to take that step into a Lydian-based/Pentatonic reality; his music would have an intervallic component that changed the gravities of the harmony.”
So as we pause to take leave of the trumpeter…and as you commence your own journey through Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Recordings, let RADIO FREE CHIP commend you to the 1974 and 1987 sessions from discs 1 and 7 which bookend our ruminations, with reflections of his great working bands and such masterful long-time collaborators as trombonist Steve Turre, pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs and drummer Victor Lewis.
(And holy ghosts, such as Joe Henderson and Dexter Gordon and Booker Little and Freddie Hubbard and Max Roach and Clifford Brown)
Last call for the Moontrane. ALL ABOARD.
http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinfo.asp?number=255-MD-CD
If you are familiar with Mosaic, you know about our passion for jazz. Our bred-in-the-bones need to "get it right." Our devotion to perfection in every detail. And when we are able, our conviction to expose the injustice of greatness overlooked through our limited edition box sets.
We are delighted to have a second opportunity to print the name "Woody Shaw" across a Mosaic collection, this time for his Muse jazzrecordings spanning nearly his entire creative life. (Our box set #142 -- his Complete Columbia Studio recordings which chronologically came in-between the Muse dates from the seventies and eighties -- sold out long ago.)
Included in the new collection are the mid- to late-1970s recordings
that established his musical identity, and saw him break through as an
inspiring and influential musician and bandleader. Also included are
the Muse sets from his return to the label from 1983 through 1987, where
as a mature musician he displayed his range on the instrument and his
appreciation for music of many jazz disciplines. The "Complete Muse"
concept allows us also to present Woody's very first set from 1965 when
he was just 20 years old. Originally recorded for Blue Note but returned
to Woody by Alfred Lion when the record company founder experienced
remorse over selling his label, it became a Muse set years later.
He was denied fame more than once. Woody Shaw hit his prime when fusion was the rage and there was no cohesive jazz scene to support his career and recognize his innovations. A freak subway accident led to the kidney failure that claimed his life in 1989, far too early for his genius to be sufficiently appreciated by the public.
A Musicians' Musician
But if fans of jazz music do not often mention his name, the players know and remember.
Frequent collaborator and friend, the saxophonist Gary Bartz, called him "the next step that began with Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, followed by Dizzy, Roy Eldridge and Miles and then by Lee Morgan and Clifford Brown, and the next step was Woody." Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago has said, "I think of Woody as one of the great neglected talents of this century." Freddie Hubbard, the trumpeter with whom Woody is often too flippantly compared and who collaborated with him in the 1980s, simply said "Woody was bad." And no less an authority and critic than Miles Davis said, "There's a great trumpet player… He can play different from all of them."
Evidence that his intelligence and curiosity would lead to great things started early.
Many Ways To Play
There were so many ways Woody Shaw could approach a tune. He would slip in and out of a modal approach and play within the chord. Or lay other key signatures on top of what the band was playing, resolving dissonance at just the right moment to make it all coherent.
A flawless attack and roundness of tone throughout the instrument's register, top to bottom, are other hallmarks of his playing, and made his ballad work bell-like and passionate. Numbers that demanded a more hard bop interpretation got an urgent and driving propulsion from Woody's ability to push out incredibly intricate runs at blinding speeds.
Woody Shaw provides one of the best examples in jazz history of someone who ceaselessly accepted the temptation jazz presents to approach with wonder and confidence, expecting danger -- and triumphed over it. His success can be heard throughout the limited edition box set collection.
A student of great bandleaders, Woody Shaw became one himself, and these sessions provide ample evidence of that from three different eras. The earliest session, from his tenure as a Blue Note stable player, includes Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Paul Chambers and Joe Chambers. The 1970s sets include Steve Turre, Azar Lawrence, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Buster Williams, Victor Lewis, Cecil McBee, Rene McLean, Billy Harper, Joe Bonner, Frank Strozier, Ronnie Matthews, Stafford James, Eddie Moore, Frank Foster, Louis Hayes, Arthur Blythe, Anthony Braxton, and Muhal Richard Abrams, among others. In the 1980s, he played with Cedar Walton, Victor Jones, Kenny Garrett, Kenny Barron, and others.
Nine individual Muse albums are represented on our seven-CD limited edition box set. The collection includes many rare photographs from the time. The set was co-produced by Woody Shaw III, who has devoted his life to preserving the legacy of his father and that of his stepfather, Dexter Gordon. He also contributed the essay and track-by-track notes. As with all the Mosaic limited edition jazz collections whose masters we license, it will be available only for a short time and then never again in this form.
Read More About Woody Shaw:
Track Listing, Personnel & Recording Dates »
Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (#255)
Limited Edition: 5,000 copies
7 CDs - $119.00
Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy is thought to be the trumpeters answer to Miles Davis and his Jazz Rock masterpiece Bitches Brew.
That comparison has always baffled me, other than the use of some electric piano and Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet, The comparison is small in scope. Blackstone Legacy’s music is much more in the late 60’s post bop vein, with free, inside out playing.
Gary Bartz on tenor sax, Maupin on bass clarinet, as well as Ron Carter’s bass adds a lot of color and variety to the set. The music certainly doesn’t feel much like the experimental, and out of this world Bitches Brew
A great example of Jazz in the early 70’s, Modal Post bop with freer elements, that never go to far to bore the listener. Plenty of melody and exciting interplay between Woody and Gary Bartz.
The one time the album sounds a little like Bitches Brew is When Bennie Maupin sprinkles in his ghostly sounding bass clarinet, this definitely adds a Bitches Brew vibe to the music, Blackstone Legacy just doesn’t have the Funky danceable grooves to really live up to that comparison.
Blackstone Legacy is fantastic challenging music, worthy of many listens. Being as it is, the quintessential, and one of the early free bop sessions, all the tracks are very lengthy, with plenty of space being given for soloists to develop their ideas. The title track, “Boo Ann’s Grand” and “New World” are my favorites of this stellar session.
Woody Shaw was an underrated band leader and trumpeter, and he left this world much too early in 1989. Any sessions under his own name are worth acquiring, and Larry Young’s Unity is a must have.
It’s really a shame that Woody Shaw is so underrated.
If you are a serious jazz collector of any note, no doubt you have run across Woody at one time or another, whether on Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s The Jody Grind, or even Tyrone Washington’s lone Blue Note session Natural Essence, Woody pops up all over the place in the late 60’s and especially so during the 1970’s on Muse records, with albums like: Little Red’s Fantasy, The Moontrane, and Love Dance. Some of Woody’s most critically acclaimed works were laid to tape at Columbia: Rosewood, my personal favorite, and the fantastic Woody III.
I think over time Woody will get more respect, I know The vinyl copy I have of Blackstone Legacy will never leave my collection. Woody died way too young, but his music will never die to the jazz aficionado.
Photo used with permission, via Amazon.com- Blackstone Legacy
Jason Sositko
https://www.facebook.com/woodyshawlegacy
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-12/news/mn-3108_1_woody-shaw-mccoy-tyner-art-blakey-s-jazz-messengers
Woody Shaw, 44
Jazz Trumpeter
May 12, 1989
Woody Shaw, the trumpeter who lost his left arm in a freak subway accident in February and who had been plagued for years by blindness, died of kidney failure Wednesday in a New York City hospital. He was 44.
Shaw, whose 1978 recording of "Rosewood" was voted the No. 1 jazz record in the nation, had tumbled down a stairway Feb. 27 onto the tracks in a Brooklyn subway station where a train struck him, severing his arm.
He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where his condition deteriorated and he was stricken by pneumonia. Although his pneumonia abated, he continued to suffer kidney pain and died of kidney failure, said his father, Woody Shaw Sr.
In April, jazz musicians from throughout the country held a benefit concert for the trumpeter, whose deteriorating health had forced him to return last fall to his parents' home in Newark, N.J., from Europe where he was a top attraction.
Assumed Throne
Influenced by both Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard, Shaw was considered Hubbard's successor in the 1970s as the leading practitioner of his instrument.
Leonard Feather, in his "Encyclopedia of Jazz," notes that Shaw--who headed a quintet--had become more personal in his playing and had moved away from chords into "a controlled freedom."
"After two choruses I get tired of playing the changes, and I think that's the difference in today's music and, say, 10 years ago," Shaw said in 1972. "I like to superimpose harmonically. I like to play it deliberately in another key and resolve it."
Shaw played with most of the giants of modern jazz, including Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, Lionel Hampton, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley and Booker Ervin. The Shaw discography includes more than a dozen albums.
Before falling ill last year, Shaw had been living in Bern, Switzerland, and in Amsterdam, teaching at several jazz schools and touring with various jazz bands in Europe, most recently the Paris Reunion Band last summer.
Alto saxophonist Bobby Watson, who shared the bandstand with Shaw during their years as sidemen with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, said Shaw had adjusted to the loss of his eyesight.
"The blindness didn't mean nothing to him," Watson said. "He has a photographic memory. He hears a piece of music one time and memorizes it."
Jazz producer George Wein said he felt some sense of relief that Shaw's troubles were over.
"That's a blessing," Wein said after Shaw's death. "The poor man was blind, the poor man was a narcotics addict, the poor man lost his arm. He had more tough luck than any human being I've ever known."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d68a931e-f1c1-11e2-8e04-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz4FsHQTFie
July 21, 2013
Horn of plenty
Woody Shaw was a sparkling trumpeter whose clean lines and forthright attack shimmered with life and invention. Born in North Carolina in 1944, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he hit his stride in the mid-1960s, just as acoustic modern jazz was about to wane.
Largely unknown outside jazz, Shaw, who died in 1989, remains a significant figure within. His compositions incorporated new elements into established forms and he is a key link in a bravura trumpet lineage that begins with Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown and continues with the likes of Terence Blanchard today. But, perhaps most important, he was a wonderfully fluent improviser with a commanding grasp of the intricacies of modern jazz trumpet.
His small-label CDs were starting to move into collectors’ item territory but key recordings are now available on a new seven-CD box set, Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions. The set confirms just how fresh, relevant and life-affirming his music remains.
The set opens with 1974’s The Moontrane, Shaw’s first album fronting what he called his “concert ensemble”. In practice, this involved extra percussion and at least three horns in the front line. Shaw wrote the title track in 1963, a homage to the influence of John Coltrane. The CD notes recount that in the mid-1970s Shaw used to carry with him a dozen Coltrane albums and a portable record player on which to play them.
Shaw certainly pursued the same detailed study of harmonic theory and dedication to instrumental control as the celebrated saxophonist, and shared a taste for pianists with a driving attack and stark, rhythmical chords. But here the direct influence fades. Shaw’s oeuvre was the disciplined small-group modern jazz he had mastered as a sideman for both Blue Note records and the likes of drummers Max Roach and Art Blakey. The concert ensemble built on that experience, tweaking the form with funky riffs, fuller voicings and Latin beats.
The first three CDs feature various concert ensembles, including a live recording from the 1976 Berlin Jazz Festival, but the fourth and fifth present Shaw in classic quintet mode, starting with his first recording as a leader. Cassandranite was recorded for Blue Note in 1965 but label boss Alfred Lion sold his company before Shaw’s album was completed. Lion gave the tapes to Shaw, and it was only years later that they were released on Muse, revealing the 20-year-old Shaw’s sense of purpose and shape fully formed. The fifth CD ends with the looser, angular-themed The Iron Men session, recorded to celebrate Shaw’s tenure with multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, who died in 1964.
In 1977, Shaw’s single-mindedness paid off when he was signed to Columbia records but he returned to Muse in 1983 to record three more albums. These present a relaxed and mature Shaw, imaginatively unpicking the standard repertoire and introducing future star saxophonist Kenny Garrett. The material is straight-ahead but despite deteriorating health – he had a degenerative eye disease – Shaw’s playing is as vibrant as ever. In February 1989, he lost an arm when he was struck by a subway train. He died six months later.
. . .
Shaw’s Columbia recordings have been available in box set form in the US for several years but are now available in the UK. Shaw’s six-CD Columbia set opens with a rather strait-laced “concert ensemble” but the centrepiece, a terrific session at the Village Vanguard in 1978, is among his best recorded work.
Shaw also played on another classic Village Vanguard session, Dexter Gordon’s Homecoming (1976). The album marked the saxophonist’s return to the US – he had been working in Europe since 1962 – and a late career boost that led to more albums and, eventually, the lead role in the 1986 film Round Midnight. Gordon’s six-CD Columbia set captures him in languorous, magisterial and muscular form.
At this point, jazz fusion ruled the roost and Wayne Shorter led the way. Even today, the four albums the saxophonist recorded for Columbia between 1974 and 1988, with their bleak harmonies, strippedback rhythms and melodies tipped with menace, have a futuristic quality. With two bonus CDs adding all of Shorter’s compositions for Weather Report, this set comes highly recommended.
By the turn of the century, the pendulum had swung back to acoustic jazz, and Shorter was applying his pared-down aesthetic in a classic quartet. Lead figure in the change was trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whose turn of the century recordings are now packaged as Swinging Into the 21st. The 11 CDs range from grand-scale opera to classic jazz updates but among the best is another live recording from New York’s Village Vanguard. And here, the imprint of Marsalis’s mentor, Woody Shaw, is palpable.
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Woody Shaw—“Katrina Ballerina”
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw;
From the 1974 album ‘The Moontrane’ by Woody Shaw:
Woody Shaw-‘Rosewood’--
(Full album)--Columbia Records, 1977:
Woody Shaw - "Blackstone Legacy”—1970
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw); From the 1970 recording ‘Blackstone Legacy' on the Contemporary Record label:
All compositions by Woody Shaw except as indicated:
"Blackstone Legacy" - 16:08
"Think On Me" (George Cables) - 10:45
"Lost and Found" - 11:57
"New World" (Cables) - 18:30
"Boo-Ann's Grand" - 14:25
"A Deed for Dolphy" - 8:56
Personnel:
Woody Shaw - trumpet
Gary Bartz - alto saxophone, soprano saxophone
Bennie Maupin - tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
George Cables - piano, electric piano
Ron Carter - bass
Clint Houston - electric bass
Lenny White - drums
Moved by the highly charged political sensibilities among creative artists during the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s, Shaw's message for Blackstone Legacy spoke to the social and political ills of his time. In the liner notes to Blackstone Legacy, Shaw states:
The Woody Shaw Quintet in France 1979 - Complete 90 min set (Live video)
Woody Shaw - trumpet; Onaje Gumbs - piano; Carter Jefferson - saxophones; Stafford James - bass; Victor Lewis - drums.
(Some of the labeling of the tunes is wrong BTW - but the quality of the picture is excellent):
Woody Shaw—“Love Dance”
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw):
Larry Young - "The Moontrane”—1966
From the album ‘Unity’ by Larry Young on the Blue Note record label
(Composition by Woody Shaw; arrangement by Larry Young):
The Woody Shaw Quintet - Live in Rome 1983:
The Woody Shaw Quintet - Jazz Concerto - Live at The Music Inn 1983 - Rome (Italy).
CONCERTO DEL QUINTETTO DI WOODY SHAW:
Personnel:
1) Woody Shaw (trumpet)
2) Steve Turre (trombone)
3) Mulgrew Miller (piano)
4) Stafford James (bass)
5) Tony Reedus (drums)
WOODY SHAW: "To Kill A Brick" - Monterey Jazz Fest. (1979)
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw):
Anthony Braxton on Woody Shaw:
Mosaic Records:
http://MosaicRecords.com
Anthony Braxton speaks to Woody Shaw III about working with his father, trumpeter Woody Shaw, Jr.:
Woody Shaw Quintet—“Dat Dere”
A classic rendition of 'Dat Dere’ (Lyrics byOscar Brown, Jr. / Music by Bobby Timmons) by the Woody Shaw Quintet from Woody's final studio album recorded 1987.
Woody Shaw - trumpet
Steve Turre - trombone
Kirk Lightsey - piano
Ray Drummond - bass
Carl Allen - drums
Woody Shaw Interview (1982):
Elektra Musician --Master of the Art- LP Interview w/ trumpet player, Woody Shaw:
Jackie McLean & Woody Shaw—“Appointment in Ghana”—February, 1985 live performance
(Composition by Jackie McLean):
Jackie McLean—Alto saxophone
Woody Shaw—Trumpet
McCoy Tyner—Piano
Cecil McBee—Bass
Jack DeJohnette—Drums
Woody Shaw 5tet - "Time is Right"
Live at the Music Inn - Roma - 1983 - part 1:
Woody Shaw - Trumpet Stylist - "Theme for Maxine”
Woody Shaw short statement and Theme for Maxine by Woody Shaw Quintet, 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Shaw
Woody Herman Shaw, Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989) was an American virtuoso trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer and band leader, described by NPR Music as "the last great trumpet innovator".[1]
Shaw is regarded as one of the great jazz band leaders and innovators of his generation.[2] Born with a photographic memory[3] and perfect pitch,[4] he was considered to have been generations ahead of his time.[5]
Shaw began playing the bugle at age nine and performed in the Junior Elks, Junior Mason, and Washington Carver Drum and Bugle Corps in Newark. Though not his first choice of instrument, he began studying classical trumpet with Jerome Ziering at Cleveland Junior High School at the age of 11. In a 1978 interview, Shaw explained:
As a teenager, Shaw worked professionally at weddings, dances, and night clubs. He eventually left school but continued his study of the trumpet under the influence of Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard. He later discovered that he had picked up the trumpet during the same month and year that Brown died: June 1956.
In 1963, after many local professional jobs, Shaw worked for Willie Bobo (with Chick Corea and Joe Farrell) and performed and recorded as a sideman with Eric Dolphy, with whom he made his recorded debut, Iron Man.
Dolphy, who had moved to Paris around this time, unexpectedly died in
June 1964. Shaw was nonetheless invited to Paris to join Dolphy's
collaborator, Nathan Davis, and the two found steady work all over
Europe. While living in Paris, they frequented the club Le Chat Qui Peche, and Shaw crossed paths with musicians such as Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Johnny Griffin, Dexter Gordon, Art Taylor, other lesser known musicians such as John Bodwin, and notable French musicians like Jean-Louis Chautemps, Rene Utreger, Jacque Thollot and Jef Gilson. After some time, Shaw demanded that two of his contemporaries, organist Larry Young and drummer Billy Brooks,
be brought to Paris. The four young musicians – Davis, Shaw, Young, and
Brooks – continued living and performing in France, intermittently
touring other cities in Europe, including London and Berlin.
By the mid-1960s, Shaw had successfully absorbed the concepts and
influence of his mentor and friend, saxophonist Dolphy, and was
meanwhile exploring the harmonic innovations of saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner. Both saxophonists contributed greatly to the development of Shaw's style as a trumpeter and composer.
Shaw returned to the U.S. from Paris in 1965 and began his career as one of Blue Note Records' "house" trumpet players, working steadily with a roster of respected artists. He replaced Carmell Jones in the Horace Silver quintet (1965–1966), and made his Blue Note debut on Silver's The Cape Verdean Blues, followed by Larry Young's Unity album (1965), upon which three of his compositions ("Zoltan", "Moontrane", and "Beyond All Limits") appeared ("Moontrane" was dedicated to Coltrane, was written when Shaw was 18 years old, and was the first composition he wrote).
Shaw also collaborated frequently and recorded with Corea (1966–67), Jackie McLean (1967), Booker Ervin (1968), Tyner (1968), Andrew Hill (1969), Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Hutcherson. In 1968–69, he worked intermittently with Max Roach, touring with him to Iran. Shaw also worked as a studio musician, and worked in pit orchestras and on Broadway musicals.
In 1970, Shaw recorded his first featured album as a leader, Blackstone Legacy, for Contemporary Records. Blackstone Legacy featured Bennie Maupin, Ron Carter, George Cables, Gary Bartz, Clint Houston, and Lenny White. This was followed by a second release under Shaw's name, entitled Song of Songs.
During this time, Shaw moved to San Francisco to explore new
opportunities and became closely associated with musicians on the West
Coast such as Bobby Hutcherson, Eddie Moore, Eddie Marshall, and Henry Franklin.
In 1974, Shaw returned from California to New York, beginning an association with Muse Records (now High Note) that produced four of his most notable albums – The Moontrane, Love Dance, Little Red's Fantasy and Iron Men, with musicians from the mid-western creative black arts scene such as Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe and Muhal Richard Abrams.
After releasing several albums for the Muse label, Shaw signed to Columbia Records in 1977 following an endorsement from Miles Davis.[2] He then recorded the albums Rosewood, Stepping Stones: Live at the Village Vanguard, Woody III, For Sure!, and United.
Rosewood was nominated for two Grammys and was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Readers' Poll, which also voted Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year and No. 4 Jazz Musician of the Year.
He was survived by his mother, two brothers, a sister, and his son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III.[9]
In 2012, PopMarket, a division of Sony Legacy, released Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection, and in 2013, Mosaic Records released Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions, for which NPR described Shaw as "the last great trumpet innovator".[10]
Shaw III, the primary inspiration for Shaw's third Columbia album, Woody III (dedicated to Shaw's father and newborn son), is the sole heir to the Shaw family legacy. Today, Shaw III preserves the Shaw legacy through the production, management, archiving and preservation of his father's life's work. As of 2013, he is stated to be authoring the first official biography on his father's life and music. Shaw's legacy is kept active and relevant through the use of social media and the official website. The Shaw name and legacy are administered by Woody Shaw Legacy LLC.
In both his improvisations and his compositions, Shaw frequently used polytonality, the combination of two or more tonalities or keys (i.e. multiple chords or harmonic structures) at once. In his solos, he often superimposed highly complex permutations of the pentatonic scale and sequences of intervals that modulated unpredictably through numerous key centers. He was a master of modality and used a wide range of harmonic color, generating unusual contrasts, using tension and resolution, dissonance, odd rhythmic groupings, and "over the barline" phrases, yet always resolving his ideas according to the form and harmonic structure of a given composition while adhering to the conventions of jazz improvisation and simultaneously creating new ones.
His "attack" was remarkably clean and precise, regardless of tempo (Shaw often played extremely fast passages). He had a rich, dark tone that was distinctive with a near-vocal quality to it; his intonation and articulation were highly developed, and he greatly utilized the effects of the lower register, usually employing a deep, extended vibrato at the end of his phrases. Shaw also often incorporated the chromatic scale, which gave his melodic lines a subtle fluidity that seemed to allow him to weave "in and out" of chords seamlessly from all "angles".
Shaw was also born with a photographic memory[3] and perfect pitch.[4] Max Roach once stated: "He was truly one of the greatest. I first had occasion to work with Woody on a trip to Iran. One of the most amazing things was his uncanny memory. I was just flabbergasted. After one look, he knew all of the charts, no matter how complex they were."[11]
Shaw's improvisational and composing style bears the influences of his idols Dolphy, Coltrane and Tyner, as well as many European modern classical and 20th-century composers, such as Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Carlos Chavez, Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Colin McPhee.[3] Shaw also listened closely to traditional Japanese music, Indonesian Gamelan, Indian classical music, Brazilian music, and various other musics of the world.[3]
During the 1970s, he and Joe Henderson were faculty members in Jamey Aebersold's jazz camp.
NEA Grant-recipients who studied with Shaw include Wynton Marsalis (Musical Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center), and Ingrid Monson (Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University).
Other students and apprentices included Chris Botti, Wallace Roney, and Terence Blanchard.
During a 1980s tour for the United States Information Service, Shaw ventured to such countries as Egypt, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. Recently, it has been discovered that Shaw spent significant time performing and giving clinics in India, working in cities such as New Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta. When asked by film producer Chuck France in an interview whether he thought traveling was important, Shaw responded: "Most definitely. I think every great artist should share his music with the world."[14]
West, Michael. "Woody Shaw: The Last Great Trumpet Innovator". NPR. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
Collar, Matt. "Woody Shaw Biography". Allmusic. Retrieved March 5, 2010.
Shaw III, Woody. "The Official Woody Shaw Website: Biography". Retrieved March 5, 2010.
Berg, Chuck. "Woody Shaw: Trumpet In Bloom" (PDF). Retrieved March 5, 2010.
Ramsey, Doug. "Recent Listening: Woody Shaw". Retrieved August 20, 2013.
Gibert, Lois. "Interview with Woody Shaw, WRVR, 1978" (PDF). Retrieved March 5, 2010.
"A Brief History of Arts High", Arts High School. Accessed October 24, 2013.
Obituary on the L.A. Times
Peña, Tomas. "A Dialogue with Trumpet Player, producer, composer, Arranger – Tony Lujan".
West, Michael J. (August 14, 2013) "Woody Shaw: The Last Great Trumpet Innovator". npr.org. Retrieved October 24, 2013.
Parker, Jeffrey. "Woody Shaw Obituary". Retrieved March 5, 2010.
Feather, Leonard (December 1982), "Miles Davis' Miraculous Recovery From Stroke", Ebony (Johnson), p. 64, retrieved March 4, 2010
Douglas, Dave (September 19, 2008). "Woody Shaw, 1979". The Greenleaf Music Blog. Greenleaf Music. Retrieved March 17, 2012. External link in
Woody Shaw
Woody Shaw, Jr. was born in Laurinburg, N.C. on December 24th, 1944 to Rosalie Pegues Shaw and Woody Shaw, Sr. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and began playing trumpet at the age of 11. Shaw attended Arts High School in Newark where he studied trumpet and music theory with Jerome Ziering. Newark has a rich Jazz history and many notable Jazz artists are originally from there, including Sarah Vaughan, Wayne Shorter, Eddie Gladden, Larry Young, and Grachan Moncur III. His first and perhaps greatest inspiration, in terms of the trumpet, came from listening to Louis Armstrong and, not long after, Clifford Brown.
Woody found out later that he had picked up the trumpet during the same month and year that Brown passed away. This was an auspicious sign for him and he felt that there was a “higher” reason for this; that it confirmed a deeper connection and purpose regarding his place within the lineage of the trumpet masters. His other primary influences were, of course, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan. Woody particularly felt a strong connection to Dizzy because of the fact that his father (Woody, Sr.) and Dizzy had gone to high school together at Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Woody Shaw, Sr. had been a Gospel singer with the Diamond Jubilee Singers in the 1930s.
In 1963, after many local professional jobs, Woody worked for Willie Bobo (with Chick Corea and Joe Farrell) and also performed and recorded as a sideman with Eric Dolphy. The following year, Dolphy invited Shaw to join him in Paris, however, Dolphy suddenly died shortly before Shaw's departure. He decided to make the trip nonetheless, and found steady work in Paris with close friend Nathan Davis and such musicians as Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Johnny Griffin, and Art Taylor.
In 1963 Woody performed frequently in Paris, Berlin, and London with a group that included Nathan Davis, Larry Young, and Billy Brooks. Young, Brooks, and Shaw were childhood friends back in Newark, and they would further develop their rapport as friends and as musicians when Shaw finally brought them to France that same year. The following year, Shaw returned to the U.S. to play in Horace Silver's quintet (1965-1966) and eventually recorded with Chick Corea (1966-1967), Jackie McLean (1967), Booker Ervin (1968), McCoy Tyner (1968), and Andrew Hill (1969). In 1968-69 he worked intermittently with Max Roach, with whom he appeared at a festival in Iran, and during the same period he began to work as a studio musician and in pit orchestras for Broadway musicals.
Thereafter, Woody continued to record with people such as Pharaoh Sanders, Hank Mobley, Gary Bartz, and Archie Shepp, and eventually formed a quintet with Joe Henderson in 1970 (also his fellow frontline-man in Horace Silver's group), which featured George Cables, Lenny White, and Ron Carter. From (1971-1973) Shaw held an important engagement with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, recording three albums for Fantasy Records (”Child's Dance,” “Buhaina,” and “Anthenagain”) before finally settling in San Fransisco, where he co-led a group with Bobby Hutcherson, soon after recording on Hutcherson's albums: “Live at Montreux” and “Cirrus” (both on Blue Note).
Shaw returned to New York in 1975 as a member of the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet, which, after Cook's departure, became the Woody Shaw-Louis Hayes Quintet. Cook was soon replaced by Rene McLean, and then by Dexter Gordon, who adopted the band for his acclaimed “homecoming” performances in 1976. By 1977, Shaw was working regularly as the sole leader of small groups whose styles were oriented towards “hard bop”, yet with a strong “modal” element which was heavily influenced by harmonic conceptions that were brought forth and developed by people like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner.
In 1978 Shaw was signed to Columbia Records and began recording a series of albums which were, and still are, considered jazz classics. Among these are albums ROSEWOOD, STEPPING STONES, WOODY III, FOR SURE, & UNITED (Rosewood was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Reader's Poll, which also voted Woody Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year and #4 Jazz Musician of the Year.)
The late 70s to early 80s would be a very prosperous period for Woody Shaw as a soloist, band leader, composer and also as a father; in 1978 his son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, was born and would become a key source of inspiration for one of Shaw's most significant recordings (WOODY III, named for the new born boy). Among Woody's regular sidemen in this period (1977-1983) were the saxophonist Carter Jefferson; pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs; bassist Stafford James; and drummer Victor Lewis, and from 1980 to 1983 his qintet included pianist Mulgrew Miller; trombonist Steve Turre; Stafford James once again; and drummer Tony Reedus. After touring and recording with a group of constantly changing personnel, in 1986 Shaw formed a new quintet with Larry Willis (also his sideman from 1979-1980), bassist David Williams, and drummer Teri Lynne Carrington.
Woody Shaw was fortunate to have had such a wide range of experiences throughout his career. This was something that had a significant impact on the development of his own personal style and musical voice. Shaw's influences ranged from Louis Armstrong to Bela Bartok and yet he was able to incorporate such varied tastes into an extremely rooted yet completely original approach to improvisation. His approach to Jazz, and more specifically to the trumpet, is based on a unique harmonic language, which in many ways reflects his deep love and natural affinity towards modern classical music, as well as the direct influence of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane on his conceptual and technical framework.
Much like Dolphy and Coltrane, Woody also felt a strong affinity to music from Asia, Africa, and various other parts of the world, and always tried to incorporate elements from many different sources into his own approach to playing, and living (Woody was dedicated to a form of martial arts called Tai Chi and possessed a natural but intense affinity with Eastern philosophy and various other spiritual practices and systems of thought. This is something which can be said to have profoundly enhanced his intellectual and creative abilities. Woody Shaw states: “Music is more than just notes to me....there is a lot of emotion and life that must go into it....you must put your experiences into it. Music is my religion”). Shaw was able to translate all of his different influences into a comepletely distinct harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic language, through a process which would inevitably lead him to expand the possibilities of his instrument, and of music in general.
The latter stages (1980s) of Woody Shaw's career included many new and interesting collaborations with such people as Kenny Garrett (Woody Shaw appears on Kenny Garrett's very first recording as leader, entitled Introducing Kenny Garrett) and Freddie Hubbard, who was not only an early influence of Woody's but a very close friend of his as well. Woody and Freddie recorded three records together during this period in dedication to Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, and Louis Armstrong (”Time Speaks,” “Double Take,” and “The Eternal Triangle”). Woody also recorded with Mal Waldron and again with Dexter Gordon, and also toured and recorded with the Paris Reunion Band, which featured musicians who had previously lived and worked there, such as Joe Henderson, Johnny Griffin, Nathan Dvais, Idris Muhammad, Jimmy Woode, Kenny Drew, and Curtis Fuller. He would continue to record and tour around the world to such places as Egypt, India, and east Asia, while still developing musicially and searching for new sources of inspiration and creativity.
Like many geniuses, however, Woody's journey would involve periods of prolonged struggle and hardship, yet through his sacrifice and dedication to the evolution of Jazz music, he added to the vocabulary of the trumpet and created a musical language which was all his own. In many ways, he is the last true innovator on his instrument and is well established as one of the major contributors in the line of great modern trumpet players that began with Louis Armstrong. Furthermore, Woody Shaw's early departure (May 10th 1989), while tragic in many ways, considering his tremendous role as one of the leaders of his generation, helps us realize how much he achieved in such a short period, and how far ahead of his time he truly was, and still is. The scale and complexity of his achievements are comparable to those of the greatest innovators of modern music, and thus his contributions live on forever as a tremendous source of learning for future generations, and as a true representation of the dignity which characterizes the profound legacy of Modern Jazz.
Source: Woody Shaw III
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/12/obituaries/woody-herman-shaw-44-jazz-trumpeter-dies.html
Woody Herman Shaw, 44, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies
by JON PARELES
May 12, 1989
Woody Herman Shaw, a leading jazz trumpeter, died of a heart attack Tuesday at Bellevue Hospital. He was 44 years old.
Mr. Shaw had been hospitalized since Feb. 27, when he fell onto subway tracks in front of a moving train. He was legally blind because of retinitis pigmentosa. The accident severed most of his left arm.
Mr. Shaw's playing was grounded in the hard-bop of Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan, the modal jazz of John Coltrane and the freer jazz of Eric Dolphy and Archie Shepp. His warm tone and his sure-footed, articulate, dramatically paced solos made him a favorite among musicians. In 1976, he placed first in Downbeat magazine's Best Trumpeter poll.
Mr. Shaw was born in Laurinburg, N.C., in 1944 and grew up in Newark. He picked up the bugle during elementary school and started playing trumpet when he was 12; by his early teens, he was sitting in at jazz clubs around Newark.
In the early 1960's, he worked with Mr. Dolphy, a groundbreaking modern saxophonist, and with the pianist Horace Silver. During the late 1960's, he moved to San Francisco and worked with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the saxophonist Joe Henderson. He also toured Europe as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and worked with the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Max Roach.
At the turn of the 1970's, Mr. Shaw began recording as a leader. From the West Coast and then in New York, he made albums for Contemporary, Muse, Columbia and Blue Note, where he made well-received collaborative albums with Mr. Hubbard.
He is survived by his parents, Woody and Rose Shaw, a sister, Toni, and a brother, Pete, all of Newark; another brother, Cedric, who lives in Connecticut, and a son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw, of Newark.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/08/14/210572029/woody-shaw-the-last-great-trumpet-innovator
Take Five: A Jazz Sampler
Woody Shaw: The Last Great Trumpet Innovator
Woody Shaw made his first recordings 50 years ago at age 18. Tom Copi/San Francisco
Shaw, who died in 1989 at age 44, was perhaps the trumpeter of the 1970s, an icon for the "Young Lion" generation that followed. Often described as the instrument's last great innovator, Shaw was a virtuoso who restructured the way trumpet players move between long intervals, and wrote his own harmonic and melodic language using notes outside the chords (a technique known as "side-slipping").
His virtuosity and imagination made Shaw equally attractive to both bebop-rooted players and avant-garde pioneers, and he was equally conversant with both. "He was the bridge between Freddie Hubbard and the Art Ensemble of Chicago," notes trumpeter Brian Lynch, whose current project features Latin arrangements of Shaw's tunes featuring multiple trumpeters.
The man himself can be heard on numerous recordings: Shaw's sideman gigs, many of them on landmark albums, are as important in evaluating his career as his leadership roles. A substantial portion of the latter work, however, has just gotten box-set treatment, via Mosaic Records' new 7-disc collection The Complete Muse Sessions. Here are five of the worthiest examples.
1963
- Burning Spear
- from Iron Man
- by Eric Dolphy
1965
- The Moontrane
- from Unity
- by Larry Young
1976
- Obsequious
- from The Complete Muse Sessions
- by Woody Shaw
This track, originally issued on the album The Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble Live at the Berliner Jazztage, is now available through Mosaic Records' new box set The Complete Muse Sessions.
1977
- Everytime I See You
- from Rosewood
- by Woody Shaw
1987
- Stormy Weather
- from The Complete Muse Sessions
- by Woody Shaw
This track, originally issued on the album Imagination, is now available through Mosaic Records' new box set The Complete Muse Sessions.
http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/woody.htm
Biography
Columbia Records, 1979The music on Woody's latest Columbia album, Woody III - like the music on its predecessors, Rosewood and Stepping Stones - never stops swinging for an instant. And it reveals Shaw as a true triple-threat man - not only is he playing better than ever, but he wrote all but one of the LP's six selections and did all the arrangements.
The album's title has two meanings. Woody III refers not only to the fact that it's his third Columbia release, but also to the name of Woody's first child, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, who was born shortly before the album was recorded. The three selections on the first side, performed by an impressive 12-piece ensemble, are designed to tell the musical story of three generations of Woody Shaws.
James Spaulding, alto saxophone and flute, is featured as guest soloist on Woody III, but at the core of most of the tracks is Shaw's strong, tight young band of Carter Jefferson on saxophones, Onaje Allan Gumbs on piano, Buster Williams or Clint Houston on bass and Victor Lewis on drums. "I think I've found musicians who can play it all," Woody said of his quintet at the time Stepping Stones, recorded live at New York's Village Vanguard, was released, and the critics agreed. Rafi Zabor of Musician magazine, for example, praised it as "everything modern jazz should be" and called Shaw "a state-of-the-art trumpeter with a state-of-the-art band."
Similar plaudits have been coming Woody's way for some time. Down Beat's Chuck Berg, in a five-star review of Rosewood, called him "one of today's leading contenders for the world's heavyweight trumpet crown." Whitney Balliett of The New Yorker has called him "a trumpeter of startling invention and intensity." The readers of Down Beat voted Woody trumpeter of the year and Rosewood jazz album of the year in that magazine's 1978 poll. And the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated Rosewood for two Grammy awards. Shaw's legion of admirers is growing, and there's no reason to doubt that with the release of Woody III, it will continue to grow.
Woody Shaw was born on Christmas Eve in 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina, home of Dizzy Gillespie's alma mater, Laurinburg Institute. Woody's father, Woody Sr., was himself a Laurinburg alumnus and a member of the gospel group, the Diamond Jubilee Singers. When Woody was still a baby, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where Woody began studying trumpet at age 11 with Jerome Ziering.
Two years later he began his professional career, playing with Brady Hodge's Newark-based R&B orchestra. He worked with local acts like Alan Jackson and the Jive Five while in high school, where he made the All-City and All-State orchestras in 1959. Woody never finished high school, but he received valuable musical schooling through his work with local jazzmen like organist Larry Young and saxophonist Tyrone Washington. At 18, he got what he calls "the ultimate of my indoctrination" with Latin-jazz pioneer Willie Bobo at a club called the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn (among the other members of the band were Chick Corea and Joe Farrell).
Eric Dolphy heard Woody at the Blue Coronet and asked him to join his band. "Eric's music had a profound influence on me," he says of the late saxophonist. "He taught me a freer way to play and helped me find my own voice." Woody made his recording debut on Dolphy's Iron Man LP, and had been preparing to join him in Europe when Dolphy died in 1964. He went over anyway, settling in Paris, where he gained valuable experience playing with expatriate bebop greats Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell. He was also reunited with Larry Young, who played with him at Le Chat Qui Peche, a Paris nightclub, and also toured Belgium and Germany with him. The following year Horace Silver - whose trumpeter Carmell Jones, was himself moving to Europe - wrote to Shaw and asked him to come back to the U.S. and join his quintet.
After three very successful years with Silver, Woody spent the latter part of the sixties working and recording with McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill and others. The early seventies found Woody primarily on the West coast, where he worked in the bands of Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson and Art Blakey and made his recording debut as a leader with two albums on the Contemporary label. During these years Shaw wrote for almost every band with which he played. Two of his early compositions, "The Moontrane" and "Boo Ann's Grand," are considered by many to be jazz standards.
In 1973, Woody returned to the New York scene, having rejoined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The following year he left Blakey to establish himself as a leader and began recording for Muse with a band he called the Concert Ensemble. In 1975, he joined the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook quintet, assuming co-leadership with drummer Hayes when saxophonist Cook left. The Hayes-Shaw group became the band Dexter Gordon used for his triumphant U.S. tour in 1976 (the results are documented on Dexter's first Columbia LP, Homecoming - recorded, like Stepping Stones and one selection on Woody III, at the Village Vanguard. Woody's association with Gordon continued through the great saxophonist's Sophisticated Giant LP, after which he committed himself to leading a group full-time.
In the last year or so, Shaw and his quintet - occasionally expanded to a sextet with the addition of a trombonist and a saxophonist-flutist - have toured extensively both in the U.S. and abroad, and Woody himself has performed in Cuba as part of an all-star jazz band. The world, in other words, has been served notice that Woody Shaw has arrived - a fact that Woody III forcefully helps to drive home.
[1979]
Featured Artist
http://www.dmitrimatheny.com/blog/blog/my-approach-to-jazz-by-woody-shaw
MY APPROACH TO JAZZ
by Woody Shaw
In order for me to be consistent as a trumpet player, I try to practice every day, for at least two or three hours. Oh, I’ve been in certain grooves when I said: “Well, I don’t need to practice”, and I rely on certain professional tricks, that I can get by with. But my creative mind tells me that getting by isn’t enough. So I do my chromatic scales and the little exercises. Then I have some symmetrical exercises of my own that I’ve developed. I‘m hoping to write a fundamental book on some of the exercises that I use to attain the concept that I have. A lot of trumpet players have been asking me to put out a book; so I’m working on it.
Definitely, every register is important. As for when they get hung up with the upper register—that turns me off. Because the beauty of the trumpet is in the middle and lower register, you know; I use the high register for excitement, and for effect.
For fingering, the difficulty is in middle register, from middle C on down—that’s why they play so high! I’m going to see if I can have a trumpet designed where I can go even an octave lower than the concert E that it goes to right now. I hear something else; to do what I want to do, the conventional trumpet is not enough now. I need another register—where am I going to get it from? I think it’ll have a fourth valve; I’ve seen a German flugelhorn like that—it goes down to four octaves.
I have played the flugelhorn at times, but I like the trumpet. The flugelhorn is purely incidental to me; it’s effective and pretty in certain things—but I can get just about the same sound on the trumpet. I have a very well–developed low register, with a very big, dark sound; so I don’t worry about the flugel. But—I’m going to get a flugelhorn ! Now, that instrument fits Art Farmer perfectly; you could have no better choice to play the flugel. It fits his style, his whole musical personality—he’s a very lyrical player. I heard him recently; he sounds beautiful.
Talking of trumpet players like Art Farmer—it’s so refreshing to hear him. I mean, I don’t want to hear Freddie Hubbard play rock, man, but that’s what he’s doing—he’s too good a player for that. But I heard Benny Bailey not long ago—he just knocked me out. Where are all the good improvisers that I grew up on? I look around, and it seems like I’m the only one out here. I still get an occasional chance to hear Blue Mitchell. But I don’t hear any young guys that impress me at all. I was twenty when I was with Horace, and it took me a while to get where 1 am—I’m thirty–one now. You always look for a young demon on the horizon—I haven’t heard him yet.
I think I can claim to have one of the newest approaches on the trumpet. I know some very good trumpet players out there, but they’re just not playing what I want to hear. It’s something that comes with a lot of study and practice. See, to be a good improviser, you’ve got to know about music, to know what you’re doing.
You have to know a certain amount about the keyboard harmony, and playing in all the keys. I think that’s another point, why all the free musicians shy away from learning bebop things—it goes through all the keys. And to play all the keys is very difficult——to get your technique in D flat equal to your technique in C, D equal to E flat, and so on.
By no means is jazz dead—that’s essentially why Louis Hayes and I formed this band. We really enjoy playing. Ronnie Scott’s is a nice club, but the only drag about playing there is that we only have forty–five minutes for each set. We’re used to playing an hour, or an hour–and–a–half—maybe even two hours. So we’re getting our show–time technique together.
You do a record date, you have to take shorter solos—I think of this gig like a record date. We did pretty good towards the end of our engagement last August: we were getting in three tunes per set. If it became a little more expressive, we went back to two again. Which is all right; if we can get two good tunes into a forty–five minute set, I don’t think anything’s lost.
The thing I like about New York: I can go all over town, and hear some good music. When I used to be in San Francisco, guys would say: “Ah, nothing’s happening in New York.” I said : “Nothing? I can’t believe that.” I came back, and sure enough, it was happening. Jazz went through its little down trend, but it’s better now.
For one thing, I blame the musicians for nearly killing the music. I mean, some of the rubbish that they call jazz in the States is not jazz.
George Wein puts on what he calls the Cool Jazz Festival—with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ramsey Lewis. That’s not jazz! We were thinking about suing this cat for degrading the name of jazz! And we had a whole nest of noisemakers misusing the word also. We said : “Wait a minute—we gotta change this a little bit !” It was time for us to get together. We used to watch Cedar Walton’s band, with George Coleman, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins: they seemed so happy up there when they were playing—and they work all the time. They stay busy. We said: “They’ve got a quartet. Let’s get a dynamite quintet, with trumpet and tenor.” Well, I was complaining before because I wasn’t working that much: I’m complaining because I’m working too much now.
People who’ve never even heard jazz can really enjoy it, if they’re given a chance to. The presentation of it is very important. There are a few of us; I can name Cedar’s band, McCoy Tyner. the Heath brothers. Art Blakey.
Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson—he’s still playing. I learned a lot from him when I was in school. We’re the ones out here who still believe in the music.
Mentioning McCoy reminds me: I used to play with him, and he was a very strong influence on me. He used to tell me: “Woody, you’re going to be the next great trumpet player out here. Just keep going straight ahead. Do what you have to do, and believe in the music.”
I watched him, and now the same things are happening for me. This was a few years ago when he said this; I was with him in the late ‘sixties. I talked to him again recently; he said: “Hey—I told you.” Now, I’m just starting to gain some of the rewards of playing the music, I think. That reward is to just let me play—make a decent living, and be happy. I really don’t think a creative musician belongs with a lot of money—it stunts his growth. They do deserve their full rewards for their contribution. But a musician—once he starts earning a lot of money, man, his music gets corny; I don’t see why that has to be the case, but it usually is. Some kind of line has to be drawn, that’s all.
Mind you, now—I want as much as I can get! But I really can’t complain. Specially when I remember that around two years ago I was sitting depressed in San Francisco. Nobody seemed to be paying me any attention; I couldn’t get a decent gig anywhere. I even started considering : “Man, I can’t even play this thing any more.” I felt in myself that I wasn’t playing anything. I changed my environment and now the ideas are just brimming over in my brain. I think environment has a lot to do with it. Me, I’m from the city—that stimulates me.
This group is going to stay together, keeping working and making records. We have one out on Wim Wicks’ Timeless label, which is based in Holland. And I myself have exclusively signed with Muse Records. When my record “The Moontrane,” came out in ‘75, it was pretty controversial—I think because they were surprised that somebody came out with a hard, smashing, swinging jazz record. I believe I kinda restored the faith in a few people, with that; I got a lot of very nice reviews on it. I have a more recent one that had the same effect; it’s called “Love Dance”. Now, I’m finally starting to record some personal ideas that I want to put down; I’m going to show different aspects of my playing. One of these ideas is a brass record date, with three trumpets, four trombones, one reed and a rhythm section—maybe some miscellaneous things here and there. I’m very wrapped up in writing something for brass.
I stay fresh by doing different things —now that I’m finallv getting a chance to record my own material—I made a lot of records as a sideman, and I used to ask myself: “How come I can’t get a record date?” I know now—it wasn’t time. Very simple. To my record now I have four albums out: “Blackstone Legacy” is a double record set on the Contemporary label; I have another one called “Song Of Songs”, which is out of print right now, also on Contemporary, and the two Muse records. So I hope to be recording some interesting things.
Something else I must mention is that we have very good management. Maxine Gregg is doing a very good job; she really loves the music—we need more people like her in the business. She knows what the musicians go through, what we have to do to get where we are. I think if we had some more sympathetic management out here, you would see a lot more groups.
The beautiful thing about this group is : everywhere we go, they love us. The worst gig we did was in Italy; we played on this concert that had a lot of the free music on it. Before we went on, Sam Rivers had the people in an uproar, really roused; he plays the flute for a minute, goes into his whooping and hollering sounds with his voice, sits at the piano and bangs on that for a while, then runs over and grabs the saxophone—a frenzy of activity. The people were banging chairs and everything. When we played, we had a completely calming effect on them; we turned them right back into conservatives. So that was an experience. I mean, we go out there, too, sometimes—but we know how to get back, though. I’ve got my feet on the ground—or at least I’ve got my parachute on!
Courtesy of the National Jazz Archive
http://radiofreechip.com/woody-shaw-the-complete-muse-sessions-on-mosaic/
Ruminations On A Forgotten Master: Woody Shaw, The Complete Muse Sessions [Mosaic]
Miles Davis, as iconic and innovative a figure as any in the history of the trumpet, dispensed compliments the way you and I might deploy manhole covers as Frisbees. Here, Fido…FETCH!
To wit, Miles once launched this zinger in the general direction of Freddie Hubbard: “I’d rather hear Thad Jones miss one note than Freddie make ten.” Presumably Zen Master cum Don Rickles was simply applying some tough love in his own sweet way, because Freddie was universally revered as the prodigal trumpeter of his generation. Still, even so beloved a mentor and employer as Art Blakey used to consul his gifted young Jazz Messenger not to blow his brains out and try to play every damn note he could inside of eight bars.
Nevertheless, when Miles spoke of Woody Shaw–who emerged on Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man in 1963, seemingly fully formed as his own man, at the tender age of 18–there was no hint of equivocation.
“Woody Shaw? Now there’s a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them”
Regrettably, out of sight often equals out of mind; and while lack of access to his recorded output and an all-too early demise may have diminished the trumpeter’s legacy, with the roll out of Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions [Mosaic], a remarkable 7-CD overview of his creative output both before and after the 1977-1981 major label showcase that was midwifed in good part by Miles Davis (and is likewise documented on another 6-CD box, Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection), seekers after truth who might’ve missed out on Shaw’s trumpet mastery the first go-round, can now revel in a comprehensive overview of his greatness as a bandleader and composer.
I mean, if you love the trumpet—LOVE THE TRUMPET—and the pure liquid cherry center of the jazz tradition as it evolved from Louis Armstrong through the works of Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clark Terry, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Don Cherry, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Booker Little, Woody Shaw, Lester Bowie and Wynton Marsalis, well then you owe it to yourself to pull out your credit cards and without a moment’s hesitation, plunk down for the Mosaic Woody Shaw box set, which represents an extraordinary body of work.
Because Woody Shaw was a remarkable jazz icon, very much his own man with his own music, who emerged as the next great enfant terrible of the trumpet hot on the heels of Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little in particular (who preceded Shaw as a key collaborator with Eric Dolphy)—all of the young titans who were inspired in large part by the musical example and vocabulary of Clifford Brown.
Blessed with a photographic memory and perfect pitch, Woody Shaw was not simply a great instrumentalist and improviser, but a brilliant composer and bandleader, who portrayed a singular vision of the hard bop tradition, with a degree of command, emotional commitment and aesthetic purity that resonates stronger than ever in 2013–some thirty plus years since he made his untimely exit from what was, for this brilliant, complex man, seemingly a veil of tears, at the tender age of 44.
Still, no matter how conflicted or unfulfilled or frustrated or sad Woody Shaw may have grown in his day to day life as a man, none of that is evident in the uniformly exceptional body of music he left behind, let alone in the achievements of those for whom he served as both mentor and inspiration, such as Wynton Marsalis, Terrence Blanchard and Wallace Roney, all of whom went on to become formidable trumpeters in their own right.
What remains amidst the recorded evidence, is a sense of striving and aspiration and struggle, a degree of consistency and excellence, that remains utterly inspiring, and which certainly inspired me these past several weeks to go on a Woody Shaw bender of epic proportions, as I reacquainted myself with the SOUND SIGNATURE of an inspirational figure in the history of American music, too often overlooked, whom I first encountered on fellow Newark-native Larry Young’s visionary Blue Note organ session Unity, with Joe Henderson and Elvin Jones, on which Shaw distinguished himself both as an instrumental voice and as a major jazz composer.
Denver native Ron Miles, one of contemporary music’s reigning trumpet masters—whether featured in jazz, classical or borderless settings—is a long-time admirer of Woody Shaw, with very personal insights into his musical breakthroughs, and he helps to frame Shaw’s contributions in their historical context.
“Woody Shaw reminds me a lot of Roy Eldridge,” Miles explains, “in that he was able to take ideas that were starting to be heard on the saxophone and make them sing on the trumpet. That’s because Roy and Woody both approached the trumpet with something akin to the velocity and vertical phrasing of a saxophone player.
“Eldridge of course came out of Coleman Hawkins while Woody Shaw was inspired by Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. Curiously enough, given their unquestioned musical mastery, they’ve both been kind of pigeonholed as secondary historical figures that haven’t gotten their due because they emerged in between more radical explorers who were viewed as being outside the prevailing millieu. By that I mean, in their time, Roy and Woody were viewed as extensions of the mainstream, while their historical bookends were seen as departures: Eldridge between Armstrong and Gillespie; Woody between Miles and Lester.
“But both are players whose approaches extend beyond their instruments. I remember hearing Woody Shaw on those Montreux Summit albums and just having my jaw hit the floor. Such a feel and great ideas. And he played the heck out the trumpet. I was a huge Maynard fan at that time and that is why I bought the LP’s. But much like hearing Dinah Jams when Maynard hooked up with Clifford Brown and Clark Terry, hearing Woody and Maynard back to back on something like “Blues March” changed my life.”
Even a cursory pass at annotating highlights from Woody’s garden of boppish delights on this lovingly mastered and annotated box set is to deny readers the opportunity to discover this wonderful body of music for themselves. Allow us a few tidbits then…
Discs 1-3 cover 1974-1976, while discs 6-7, documenting the post-Columbia years, are comprised of sessions from 1983, 1986 and 1987 respectively: reflecting Shaw’s mature, ever-deepening harmonic subtlety, dark amber tone, eye-popping articulation (“Spiderman’s Blues”) and sumptuously swinging fluidity (“The Touch Of Your Lips” and “What’s New”) from what for me is the pick of the litter sonically and musically–a 1983 session featuring tribal elders Cedar Walton on piano, Buster Williams on bass and Victor Jones on drums (all still walking among us in 2013), where Shaw is the sole horn. Anyone miss the saxophone? Don’t need a saxophone when the trumpeter can throw down like that. Masterful. Adult music by and for adults.
And disc 7 comes in a close second for return engagements, featuring as it does a beautifully balanced 1987 Van Gelder Studio recording of Shaw’s Lamborghini of a working band; trombonist Steve Turre, as always the perfect foil, with pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Carl Allen on full cruise control. “Stormy Weather?” “You And The Night And The Music?” Tell me about it. Waiter? Check, please.
Elsewhere on the Mosaix box, by way of some back story, indulge me a brief tangent to recollect how as a jazz tadpole, my initial encounters with live jazz from 1970-1973 included much of the freer repertoire then propagating on the Lower East Side at Slugs on 3rd Street between Avenues B and C, as well as the music of more traditionally centered explorers at a venue such as the Village Vanguard; I was listening to Duke and Louis and Lester and Papa Jo Jones and Dizzy and Monk and Bud and Bird in my crib, but I was attending concerts by the likes of Alice Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, McCoy Tyner, Milford Graves and Sun Ra. So, one might say that I go both ways, and we won’t even begin to discuss my love for those tributaries of American music which derive from blues and R&B and soul and funk and rock and electric jazz.
Still, as hectic an eclectic as I might be, when I returned to Manhattan from upstate NY for good back in 1976, one of my most meaningful experiences was that of the Woody Shaw Quartet at the Village Vanguard–featuring then-expatriate tenor icon Dexter Gordon in full hail-the-conquering-hero mode. Never had it so good.
Be that as it may, given this jazz tadpole’s early fascination with late Coltrane, the Miles-Wayne-Herbie-Ron-Tony Quintet, Ornette Coleman, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, it’s not surprising that I was initially drawn to some of the more dangerous sounding musical encounters on discs 4-5 of the Shaw Mosaic Box; transitional music not unlike what one might have experienced in the mid-60s on some of those edgy, one-step-beyond, Andrew Hill Blue Note sessions, or a decade-and-change down the line at a Lower East Side watering hole with a daring genre-crossing musical profile such as The Tin Palace or that experimental hub of the SOHO loft jazz scene, Sam Rivers’ Studio Rivbea–still swinging, by all means, but with a looser, more combustible conversational approach to what constitutes a collective groove, a broader harmonic pallet less beholden to Tin Pan Alley and more self-consciously post-modern, while in terms of phrasing, employing a more overtly vocalized pallet of effects.
From 1965 are the remnants of two historical unreleased Blue Note sessions which label patriarch Alfred Lion later gifted to Shaw, and like some of those more experimental Andrew Hill sessions Lion so cherished, these also feature the great drummer Joe Chambers, as well as Joe Henderson on tenor, Ron Carter on bass and Larry Young not on organ, but on piano. On the cathartic Young original “Obsequious” they walk the line (well, actually, it occurs at a brisk gallop) between hard bop and free form with riveting spirit and purpose. On the other 1965 session, Carter and Young are supplanted by Paul Chambers and Herbie Hancock, for a much sunnier, in-the-pocket landscape; on Shaw’s “Three Muses” his left-of-center approach to harmony is readily accessible yet challenging in both his voice leading and in his jagged deconstruction of the melody–hornlike and serpentine in its complexity, yet always lyrically focused.
Fleshing out the remainder of discs 4-5 are a wonderful collaboration with drummer Eddie Moore and the much neglected alto sax master from Memphis, Frank Strozier, to particular effect on magnificent Shaw originals such as the rhapsodic “Little Red’s Fantasy” and the anthemic vamp and release of my personal favorite, “Tomorrow’s Destiny,” where the trumpeter’s gorgeous melodic focus and expansive, saxophone-like phrasing bring me back time and time again.
Then like some spiritual high five, is a visionary 1977 session in which Shaw pointedly reached out to the next generation of post-Dolphy avant gardists who had just hit town; representative of a new school of explorers…to some naysayers, of “questionable” bebop command (least ways, fresh out of the gate, the old school jazz cats didn’t readily embrace them, to put it politely).
But Shaw discerned a commonality of purpose, and in the person of saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Anthony Braxton, tethered to a dynamic, state-of-the-art rhythm section of pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, bassist Cecil McBee and drummers Joe Chambers or Victor Lewis, the band proved equally accommodating to old swing chestnuts like Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” as well as the spirited psycho-drama of Eric Dolphy’s “Iron Man,” let alone on the more freely inflected performances.
And before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath, here comes another Andrew Hill metaphor bobbing to the surface. In his video interview with Shaw’s son, Woody III, Braxton explains how much it meant to him when Woody chose to represent Andrew Hill’s “Symmetry” in their session, and if the pianist’s constructs elicit a deeply felt alto solo from Braxton, Woody just kills it–out there modulating for all he’s worth without a net in Sonny Rollins country; and it’s not just about the tongue tripping complexity of Shaw’s phrasing; those vaulting intervallic leaps worthy of the Nicholas Brothers; or how he peppers his lines with the kind of spicy Tandoori chromaticism that is so challenging to execute on the trumpet.
Nope, it’s about his tone and emotional commitment. And on the Shaw original “Song Of Songs” the trumpeter inspires his ensemble to sustain the kind of chanting intensity of Coltrane/Dolphy epiphanies “Ole” and “India,” let alone his own “Tomorrow’s Destiny” or some of Booker Little’s dark sonnets–a remarkably forward thinking session.
“The last 30 years, musicians are mining the breakthroughs of [Woody Shaw],” enthuses American tribal elder Anthony Braxton about his collaborator and spirit guide on The Iron Men, by way of an Amen Chorus. “He was the one to take that step into a Lydian-based/Pentatonic reality; his music would have an intervallic component that changed the gravities of the harmony.”
So as we pause to take leave of the trumpeter…and as you commence your own journey through Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Recordings, let RADIO FREE CHIP commend you to the 1974 and 1987 sessions from discs 1 and 7 which bookend our ruminations, with reflections of his great working bands and such masterful long-time collaborators as trombonist Steve Turre, pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs and drummer Victor Lewis.
(And holy ghosts, such as Joe Henderson and Dexter Gordon and Booker Little and Freddie Hubbard and Max Roach and Clifford Brown)
Last call for the Moontrane. ALL ABOARD.
http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinfo.asp?number=255-MD-CD
Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (#255)
Mosaic Records Limited Edition Box Set
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Lester
Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago has said, “I think of Woody as one
of the great neglected talents of this century.” Freddie Hubbard, the
trumpeter with whom Woody is often too flippantly compared and who
collaborated with him in the 1980s, simply said “Woody was bad.” And no
less an authority and critic than Miles Davis said, “There’s a great
trumpet player… He can play different from all of them.”This set is on backorder and is expected to be available late 2016
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The Set That Could Make Woody Shaw
Your Favorite Trumpeter In Jazz
Your Favorite Trumpeter In Jazz
If you are familiar with Mosaic, you know about our passion for jazz. Our bred-in-the-bones need to "get it right." Our devotion to perfection in every detail. And when we are able, our conviction to expose the injustice of greatness overlooked through our limited edition box sets.
We are delighted to have a second opportunity to print the name "Woody Shaw" across a Mosaic collection, this time for his Muse jazzrecordings spanning nearly his entire creative life. (Our box set #142 -- his Complete Columbia Studio recordings which chronologically came in-between the Muse dates from the seventies and eighties -- sold out long ago.)
He was denied fame more than once. Woody Shaw hit his prime when fusion was the rage and there was no cohesive jazz scene to support his career and recognize his innovations. A freak subway accident led to the kidney failure that claimed his life in 1989, far too early for his genius to be sufficiently appreciated by the public.
A Musicians' Musician
But if fans of jazz music do not often mention his name, the players know and remember.
Frequent collaborator and friend, the saxophonist Gary Bartz, called him "the next step that began with Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, followed by Dizzy, Roy Eldridge and Miles and then by Lee Morgan and Clifford Brown, and the next step was Woody." Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago has said, "I think of Woody as one of the great neglected talents of this century." Freddie Hubbard, the trumpeter with whom Woody is often too flippantly compared and who collaborated with him in the 1980s, simply said "Woody was bad." And no less an authority and critic than Miles Davis said, "There's a great trumpet player… He can play different from all of them."
Evidence that his intelligence and curiosity would lead to great things started early.
Many Ways To Play
There were so many ways Woody Shaw could approach a tune. He would slip in and out of a modal approach and play within the chord. Or lay other key signatures on top of what the band was playing, resolving dissonance at just the right moment to make it all coherent.
A flawless attack and roundness of tone throughout the instrument's register, top to bottom, are other hallmarks of his playing, and made his ballad work bell-like and passionate. Numbers that demanded a more hard bop interpretation got an urgent and driving propulsion from Woody's ability to push out incredibly intricate runs at blinding speeds.
Woody Shaw provides one of the best examples in jazz history of someone who ceaselessly accepted the temptation jazz presents to approach with wonder and confidence, expecting danger -- and triumphed over it. His success can be heard throughout the limited edition box set collection.
A student of great bandleaders, Woody Shaw became one himself, and these sessions provide ample evidence of that from three different eras. The earliest session, from his tenure as a Blue Note stable player, includes Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Paul Chambers and Joe Chambers. The 1970s sets include Steve Turre, Azar Lawrence, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Buster Williams, Victor Lewis, Cecil McBee, Rene McLean, Billy Harper, Joe Bonner, Frank Strozier, Ronnie Matthews, Stafford James, Eddie Moore, Frank Foster, Louis Hayes, Arthur Blythe, Anthony Braxton, and Muhal Richard Abrams, among others. In the 1980s, he played with Cedar Walton, Victor Jones, Kenny Garrett, Kenny Barron, and others.
Nine individual Muse albums are represented on our seven-CD limited edition box set. The collection includes many rare photographs from the time. The set was co-produced by Woody Shaw III, who has devoted his life to preserving the legacy of his father and that of his stepfather, Dexter Gordon. He also contributed the essay and track-by-track notes. As with all the Mosaic limited edition jazz collections whose masters we license, it will be available only for a short time and then never again in this form.
We urge you to re-examine the importance of this gentle giant by claiming a copy of a box set we expect to disappear quickly.
Read More About Woody Shaw:
Track Listing, Personnel & Recording Dates »
MOSAIC RECORDS BOOKLET
Mosaic Records has always tried to bring the great music in the
sets into focus by choosing writers with an expertise and a feel for the
spirit of the music and the era in which it was conceived. This set
marks the first time that the booklet was written by an offspring. But
Woody Shaw III, a musician with degrees in ethnomusicology, jazz
performance and arts administration, has dedicated much of his adult
life to the study and curation of his father’s work and we found the
ideal candidate to create the time and the place for us to bring the
music alive.
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Music for the ages |
| The two periods covered are bookends to Woody Shaw's Columbia period (documented in another Mosaic set many years ago). The first 5 discs are from the 1970's, and transcedent. The final two discs are from the 1980's, and highlight what a wonderful trumpet player Woody Shaw was when performing standards. Having all this music assembled in one place is a joy! | |
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Another amazing Mosaic set! |
| Woody Shaw was a rare and unique talent. His music is wonderful and demands repeated listens. I never tire of his playing and the music on this set sounds better than earlier CD versions of some of this music I have heard. So many great players are featured here as well. Steve Turre is in top form! | |
Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (#255)
Limited Edition: 5,000 copies
7 CDs - $119.00
Underrated Jazz Trumpeter Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy
Woody Shaw: One of the last great Trumpet Innovators
Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy is thought to be the trumpeters answer to Miles Davis and his Jazz Rock masterpiece Bitches Brew.
That comparison has always baffled me, other than the use of some electric piano and Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet, The comparison is small in scope. Blackstone Legacy’s music is much more in the late 60’s post bop vein, with free, inside out playing.
Gary Bartz on tenor sax, Maupin on bass clarinet, as well as Ron Carter’s bass adds a lot of color and variety to the set. The music certainly doesn’t feel much like the experimental, and out of this world Bitches Brew
A great example of Jazz in the early 70’s, Modal Post bop with freer elements, that never go to far to bore the listener. Plenty of melody and exciting interplay between Woody and Gary Bartz.
The one time the album sounds a little like Bitches Brew is When Bennie Maupin sprinkles in his ghostly sounding bass clarinet, this definitely adds a Bitches Brew vibe to the music, Blackstone Legacy just doesn’t have the Funky danceable grooves to really live up to that comparison.
Blackstone Legacy is fantastic challenging music, worthy of many listens. Being as it is, the quintessential, and one of the early free bop sessions, all the tracks are very lengthy, with plenty of space being given for soloists to develop their ideas. The title track, “Boo Ann’s Grand” and “New World” are my favorites of this stellar session.
Woody Shaw was an underrated band leader and trumpeter, and he left this world much too early in 1989. Any sessions under his own name are worth acquiring, and Larry Young’s Unity is a must have.
It’s really a shame that Woody Shaw is so underrated.
“New World” from Blackstone Legacy
Woody Shaw was only 44 years old when he died
Woody passed away at the age 44 in 1989, probably the last great trumpet innovator, maybe the last one in jazz period. Woody expanded the vocabulary for the trumpet, but because he came along after main stream jazz had lost a lot of interest in the public, he goes over looked.If you are a serious jazz collector of any note, no doubt you have run across Woody at one time or another, whether on Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s The Jody Grind, or even Tyrone Washington’s lone Blue Note session Natural Essence, Woody pops up all over the place in the late 60’s and especially so during the 1970’s on Muse records, with albums like: Little Red’s Fantasy, The Moontrane, and Love Dance. Some of Woody’s most critically acclaimed works were laid to tape at Columbia: Rosewood, my personal favorite, and the fantastic Woody III.
I think over time Woody will get more respect, I know The vinyl copy I have of Blackstone Legacy will never leave my collection. Woody died way too young, but his music will never die to the jazz aficionado.
Photo used with permission, via Amazon.com- Blackstone Legacy
Jason Sositko
https://www.facebook.com/woodyshawlegacy
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-12/news/mn-3108_1_woody-shaw-mccoy-tyner-art-blakey-s-jazz-messengers
Woody Shaw, 44
Jazz Trumpeter
May 12, 1989
Woody Shaw, the trumpeter who lost his left arm in a freak subway accident in February and who had been plagued for years by blindness, died of kidney failure Wednesday in a New York City hospital. He was 44.
Shaw, whose 1978 recording of "Rosewood" was voted the No. 1 jazz record in the nation, had tumbled down a stairway Feb. 27 onto the tracks in a Brooklyn subway station where a train struck him, severing his arm.
He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where his condition deteriorated and he was stricken by pneumonia. Although his pneumonia abated, he continued to suffer kidney pain and died of kidney failure, said his father, Woody Shaw Sr.
In April, jazz musicians from throughout the country held a benefit concert for the trumpeter, whose deteriorating health had forced him to return last fall to his parents' home in Newark, N.J., from Europe where he was a top attraction.
Assumed Throne
Influenced by both Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard, Shaw was considered Hubbard's successor in the 1970s as the leading practitioner of his instrument.
Leonard Feather, in his "Encyclopedia of Jazz," notes that Shaw--who headed a quintet--had become more personal in his playing and had moved away from chords into "a controlled freedom."
"After two choruses I get tired of playing the changes, and I think that's the difference in today's music and, say, 10 years ago," Shaw said in 1972. "I like to superimpose harmonically. I like to play it deliberately in another key and resolve it."
Shaw played with most of the giants of modern jazz, including Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, Lionel Hampton, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley and Booker Ervin. The Shaw discography includes more than a dozen albums.
Before falling ill last year, Shaw had been living in Bern, Switzerland, and in Amsterdam, teaching at several jazz schools and touring with various jazz bands in Europe, most recently the Paris Reunion Band last summer.
Alto saxophonist Bobby Watson, who shared the bandstand with Shaw during their years as sidemen with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, said Shaw had adjusted to the loss of his eyesight.
"The blindness didn't mean nothing to him," Watson said. "He has a photographic memory. He hears a piece of music one time and memorizes it."
Jazz producer George Wein said he felt some sense of relief that Shaw's troubles were over.
"That's a blessing," Wein said after Shaw's death. "The poor man was blind, the poor man was a narcotics addict, the poor man lost his arm. He had more tough luck than any human being I've ever known."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d68a931e-f1c1-11e2-8e04-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz4FsHQTFie
July 21, 2013
Horn of plenty
©Corbis Woody Shaw in 1966
Woody Shaw was a sparkling trumpeter whose clean lines and forthright attack shimmered with life and invention. Born in North Carolina in 1944, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he hit his stride in the mid-1960s, just as acoustic modern jazz was about to wane.
Largely unknown outside jazz, Shaw, who died in 1989, remains a significant figure within. His compositions incorporated new elements into established forms and he is a key link in a bravura trumpet lineage that begins with Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown and continues with the likes of Terence Blanchard today. But, perhaps most important, he was a wonderfully fluent improviser with a commanding grasp of the intricacies of modern jazz trumpet.
His small-label CDs were starting to move into collectors’ item territory but key recordings are now available on a new seven-CD box set, Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions. The set confirms just how fresh, relevant and life-affirming his music remains.
The set opens with 1974’s The Moontrane, Shaw’s first album fronting what he called his “concert ensemble”. In practice, this involved extra percussion and at least three horns in the front line. Shaw wrote the title track in 1963, a homage to the influence of John Coltrane. The CD notes recount that in the mid-1970s Shaw used to carry with him a dozen Coltrane albums and a portable record player on which to play them.
Shaw certainly pursued the same detailed study of harmonic theory and dedication to instrumental control as the celebrated saxophonist, and shared a taste for pianists with a driving attack and stark, rhythmical chords. But here the direct influence fades. Shaw’s oeuvre was the disciplined small-group modern jazz he had mastered as a sideman for both Blue Note records and the likes of drummers Max Roach and Art Blakey. The concert ensemble built on that experience, tweaking the form with funky riffs, fuller voicings and Latin beats.
The first three CDs feature various concert ensembles, including a live recording from the 1976 Berlin Jazz Festival, but the fourth and fifth present Shaw in classic quintet mode, starting with his first recording as a leader. Cassandranite was recorded for Blue Note in 1965 but label boss Alfred Lion sold his company before Shaw’s album was completed. Lion gave the tapes to Shaw, and it was only years later that they were released on Muse, revealing the 20-year-old Shaw’s sense of purpose and shape fully formed. The fifth CD ends with the looser, angular-themed The Iron Men session, recorded to celebrate Shaw’s tenure with multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, who died in 1964.
In 1977, Shaw’s single-mindedness paid off when he was signed to Columbia records but he returned to Muse in 1983 to record three more albums. These present a relaxed and mature Shaw, imaginatively unpicking the standard repertoire and introducing future star saxophonist Kenny Garrett. The material is straight-ahead but despite deteriorating health – he had a degenerative eye disease – Shaw’s playing is as vibrant as ever. In February 1989, he lost an arm when he was struck by a subway train. He died six months later.
. . .
Shaw’s Columbia recordings have been available in box set form in the US for several years but are now available in the UK. Shaw’s six-CD Columbia set opens with a rather strait-laced “concert ensemble” but the centrepiece, a terrific session at the Village Vanguard in 1978, is among his best recorded work.
Shaw also played on another classic Village Vanguard session, Dexter Gordon’s Homecoming (1976). The album marked the saxophonist’s return to the US – he had been working in Europe since 1962 – and a late career boost that led to more albums and, eventually, the lead role in the 1986 film Round Midnight. Gordon’s six-CD Columbia set captures him in languorous, magisterial and muscular form.
At this point, jazz fusion ruled the roost and Wayne Shorter led the way. Even today, the four albums the saxophonist recorded for Columbia between 1974 and 1988, with their bleak harmonies, strippedback rhythms and melodies tipped with menace, have a futuristic quality. With two bonus CDs adding all of Shorter’s compositions for Weather Report, this set comes highly recommended.
By the turn of the century, the pendulum had swung back to acoustic jazz, and Shorter was applying his pared-down aesthetic in a classic quartet. Lead figure in the change was trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whose turn of the century recordings are now packaged as Swinging Into the 21st. The 11 CDs range from grand-scale opera to classic jazz updates but among the best is another live recording from New York’s Village Vanguard. And here, the imprint of Marsalis’s mentor, Woody Shaw, is palpable.
-------------------------------------------
‘Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions’ is available at www.mosaicrecords.com; other CDs discussed here are released on Columbia, www.columbiarecords.com
Wynton Marsalis Quintet plays Ronnie Scott’s, London, from Monday to Wednesday, www.ronniescotts.co.uk
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016.
THE MUSIC OF WOODY SHAW: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. SHAW:
Woody Shaw - "The Moontrane":
Woody Herman Shaw, Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989) was an American virtuoso trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer and band leader, described by NPR Music as "the last great trumpet innovator"
Shaw is regarded as one of the great jazz band leaders and innovators of his generation. Born with a photographic memory and perfect pitch, he was considered to have been generations ahead of his time.
Woody Shaw—“Katrina Ballerina”
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw;
From the 1974 album ‘The Moontrane’ by Woody Shaw:
Woody Shaw-‘Rosewood’--
(Full album)--Columbia Records, 1977:
Woody Shaw - "Blackstone Legacy”—1970
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw); From the 1970 recording ‘Blackstone Legacy' on the Contemporary Record label:
All compositions by Woody Shaw except as indicated:
"Blackstone Legacy" - 16:08
"Think On Me" (George Cables) - 10:45
"Lost and Found" - 11:57
"New World" (Cables) - 18:30
"Boo-Ann's Grand" - 14:25
"A Deed for Dolphy" - 8:56
Personnel:
Woody Shaw - trumpet
Gary Bartz - alto saxophone, soprano saxophone
Bennie Maupin - tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
George Cables - piano, electric piano
Ron Carter - bass
Clint Houston - electric bass
Lenny White - drums
Moved by the highly charged political sensibilities among creative artists during the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s, Shaw's message for Blackstone Legacy spoke to the social and political ills of his time. In the liner notes to Blackstone Legacy, Shaw states:
“This album is dedicated to the youth who will benefit mankind. To the youth who are constantly aware of the turmoil in which the world is and who are trying to right all these wrongs – whether in music or in speech or in any other way of positive work.
This album is dedicated to the freedom of Black people all over the world. And it’s dedicated to the people in the ghettos here. The ‘stone’ in the title is the image of strength. I grew up in a ghetto – funky houses, rats and roaches, stinking hallways. I’ve seen all of that, and I’ve seen people overcome all of that. This music is meant to be a light of hope, a sound of strength and of coming through. It’s one for the ghetto.
We’re trying to express what’s happening in the world today as we – a new breed of young musicians – feel it. I mean the different tensions in the world, the ridiculous war in Vietnam, the oppression of poor people in this, a country of such wealth. The cats on this date usually discuss these things, but we’re all also trying to reach a state of spiritual enlightenment in which we’re continually aware of what’s happening but react in a positive way. The music in this album, you see, expresses strength – confidence that we’ll overcome these things.”
The Woody Shaw Quintet in France 1979 - Complete 90 min set (Live video)
Woody Shaw - trumpet; Onaje Gumbs - piano; Carter Jefferson - saxophones; Stafford James - bass; Victor Lewis - drums.
(Some of the labeling of the tunes is wrong BTW - but the quality of the picture is excellent):
Woody Shaw—“Love Dance”
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw):
Larry Young - "The Moontrane”—1966
From the album ‘Unity’ by Larry Young on the Blue Note record label
(Composition by Woody Shaw; arrangement by Larry Young):
- Larry Young – Hammond B-3 organ
- Woody Shaw – trumpet
- Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone
- Elvin Jones – drums
The Woody Shaw Quintet - Live in Rome 1983:
The Woody Shaw Quintet - Jazz Concerto - Live at The Music Inn 1983 - Rome (Italy).
CONCERTO DEL QUINTETTO DI WOODY SHAW:
Personnel:
1) Woody Shaw (trumpet)
2) Steve Turre (trombone)
3) Mulgrew Miller (piano)
4) Stafford James (bass)
5) Tony Reedus (drums)
WOODY SHAW: "To Kill A Brick" - Monterey Jazz Fest. (1979)
(Composition and arrangement by Woody Shaw):
Anthony Braxton on Woody Shaw:
Mosaic Records:
http://MosaicRecords.com
Anthony Braxton speaks to Woody Shaw III about working with his father, trumpeter Woody Shaw, Jr.:
Woody Shaw Quintet—“Dat Dere”
A classic rendition of 'Dat Dere’ (Lyrics byOscar Brown, Jr. / Music by Bobby Timmons) by the Woody Shaw Quintet from Woody's final studio album recorded 1987.
Woody Shaw - trumpet
Steve Turre - trombone
Kirk Lightsey - piano
Ray Drummond - bass
Carl Allen - drums
Woody Shaw Interview (1982):
Elektra Musician --Master of the Art- LP Interview w/ trumpet player, Woody Shaw:
Jackie McLean & Woody Shaw—“Appointment in Ghana”—February, 1985 live performance
(Composition by Jackie McLean):
Jackie McLean—Alto saxophone
Woody Shaw—Trumpet
McCoy Tyner—Piano
Cecil McBee—Bass
Jack DeJohnette—Drums
Woody Shaw 5tet - "Time is Right"
Live at the Music Inn - Roma - 1983 - part 1:
Woody Shaw - Trumpet Stylist - "Theme for Maxine”
Woody Shaw short statement and Theme for Maxine by Woody Shaw Quintet, 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Shaw
Woody Shaw
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Woody Shaw | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Woody Herman Shaw, Jr. |
| Born | December 24, 1944 Laurinburg, North Carolina, United States |
| Origin | Newark, New Jersey, United States |
| Died | May 10, 1989 (aged 44) Manhattan, New York City, United States |
| Genres | Jazz, bebop, hard bop, post-bop, modal jazz, avant-garde jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, bandleader, composer, educator |
| Instruments | Trumpet, flugelhorn, cornet |
| Years active | 1963–1989 |
| Labels | Columbia, Muse, Elektra, Blue Note, Fantasy, Contemporary, Concord Music Group |
| Associated acts | Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Horace Silver, Max Roach, Andrew Hill, Lionel Hampton, Chick Corea, Pharoah Sanders, Joe Zawinul, Jackie McLean, Dexter Gordon, Louis Hayes, Hank Mobley, Mal Waldron, Tyrone Washington, Larry Young |
| Website | woodyshaw.com |
Woody Herman Shaw, Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989) was an American virtuoso trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer and band leader, described by NPR Music as "the last great trumpet innovator".[1]
Shaw is regarded as one of the great jazz band leaders and innovators of his generation.[2] Born with a photographic memory[3] and perfect pitch,[4] he was considered to have been generations ahead of his time.[5]
Contents
Biography
Woody Shaw (1979)
Early life and background
Woody Shaw was born on December 24, 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He was taken to Newark, New Jersey by his parents, Rosalie Pegues and Woody Shaw, Sr., when he was one year old. Shaw's father was a member of the African American gospel group known as the 'Diamond Jubilee Singers' and both his parents attended the same secondary private school as Dizzy Gillespie: Laurinburg Institute. Shaw's mother was from the same town as Gillespie: Cheraw, South Carolina.
Shaw began playing the bugle at age nine and performed in the Junior Elks, Junior Mason, and Washington Carver Drum and Bugle Corps in Newark. Though not his first choice of instrument, he began studying classical trumpet with Jerome Ziering at Cleveland Junior High School at the age of 11. In a 1978 interview, Shaw explained:
The trumpet was not my first choice for an instrument. In fact, I ended up playing it by default. When we were asked what we wanted to play in the Eighteenth Avenue School Band, I chose the violin, but I was too late since all the violins were taken. My second choice was the saxophone or the trombone but they were also all spoken for. The only instrument that was left was the trumpet, and I felt why did I have to get stuck with this "tinny" sounding thing.
When I complained to my music teacher that I didn't think it was fair that all the other kids got to play the instruments they wanted, he told me to just be patient. He said he had a good feeling about me and the trumpet, and he assured me I'd grow to love it. Of course my teacher was right, and it didn't take long for me to fall in love with the trumpet. In retrospect, I believe there was some mystical force that brought us together.[6]Ziering encouraged him to continue his study of classical trumpet playing and pursue an education at the Juilliard School of music with trumpet instructor William Vacchiano, but Shaw had a deep interest in jazz. His first influences were Louis Armstrong and Harry James. After skipping two grades,[citation needed] he began attending Newark Arts High School (alma mater of Wayne Shorter, Sarah Vaughan, Melba Moore, Savion Glover and many others), from which he graduated.[7]
As a teenager, Shaw worked professionally at weddings, dances, and night clubs. He eventually left school but continued his study of the trumpet under the influence of Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard. He later discovered that he had picked up the trumpet during the same month and year that Brown died: June 1956.
Paris and Eric Dolphy (early 1960s)
Blue Note Records (mid-to-late 1960s)
Shaw returned to the U.S. from Paris in 1965 and began his career as one of Blue Note Records' "house" trumpet players, working steadily with a roster of respected artists. He replaced Carmell Jones in the Horace Silver quintet (1965–1966), and made his Blue Note debut on Silver's The Cape Verdean Blues, followed by Larry Young's Unity album (1965), upon which three of his compositions ("Zoltan", "Moontrane", and "Beyond All Limits") appeared ("Moontrane" was dedicated to Coltrane, was written when Shaw was 18 years old, and was the first composition he wrote).
Shaw also collaborated frequently and recorded with Corea (1966–67), Jackie McLean (1967), Booker Ervin (1968), Tyner (1968), Andrew Hill (1969), Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Hutcherson. In 1968–69, he worked intermittently with Max Roach, touring with him to Iran. Shaw also worked as a studio musician, and worked in pit orchestras and on Broadway musicals.
Contemporary and Muse (early-to-mid 1970s)
In 1974, Shaw returned from California to New York, beginning an association with Muse Records (now High Note) that produced four of his most notable albums – The Moontrane, Love Dance, Little Red's Fantasy and Iron Men, with musicians from the mid-western creative black arts scene such as Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe and Muhal Richard Abrams.
Columbia Records (late 1970s)
After working frequently with Hutcherson, Art Blakey, Tyner and others, Shaw emerged as a band leader during the early 1970s, which was a time when many jazz artists began to explore jazz-rock and fewer bands performed in the tradition of hard bop as a result of the popularity of and demand for more "commercial" music. A younger statesman among his elders, Shaw saw himself as an heir to the musical legacy of trumpeters such as Gillespie, Navarro, and Brown, and, being an alumnus of Blakey's Jazz Messengers, felt responsible for upholding the integrity and appreciation of the tradition of "straight-ahead" jazz.
After releasing several albums for the Muse label, Shaw signed to Columbia Records in 1977 following an endorsement from Miles Davis.[2] He then recorded the albums Rosewood, Stepping Stones: Live at the Village Vanguard, Woody III, For Sure!, and United.
Rosewood was nominated for two Grammys and was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Readers' Poll, which also voted Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year and No. 4 Jazz Musician of the Year.
Collaborations (1980s)
Throughout the 1980s, Shaw continued performing and recording as a leader with sidemen such as pianists Onaje Allan Gumbs, Mulgrew Miller, and Larry Willis, bassist David Williams, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and trombonist Steve Turre, recording a number of more "traditional" but highly lyrical albums (Solid, Setting Standards, In My Own Sweet Way) consisting predominantly of standards and tunes from the hard bop repertoire. During this time he also worked on projects with saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Dexter Gordon, as well as fellow trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on three albums (Time Speaks, Double Take, and The Eternal Triangle), later reissued on Blue Note as the Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw Sessions.
Death
By the late 1980s Shaw was suffering from an incurable degenerative eye disease and was losing his eyesight. Details of the accident are unclear, but on February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, NY, which severed his left arm. Shaw suffered complications in the hospital and died of kidney failure on May 10, 1989.[2][8] He was 44 years old.
He was survived by his mother, two brothers, a sister, and his son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III.[9]
Awards
- Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, Downbeat International Jazz Critics Poll (1977)
- Jazz Album of the Year, Downbeat Readers Poll: Rosewood (Columbia 1978)
- Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1978)
- Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist: Rosewood (1979)
- Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group: Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble, Rosewood (1979)
- Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1980)
- Downbeat Hall of Fame (1989)
Legacy revival
The years between 2003 and 2013 saw a resurgence of interest in, and recognition of, Shaw's music. In 2003, Shaw's son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, launched The Official Woody Shaw Website, which helped to reinvigorate Shaw fans and bolster appreciation for Shaw's contribution to music. Since then, many of Shaw's long-out-of-print recordings have been reissued, remastered and repackaged, under the curatorial oversight of Shaw's son and long-time producer Michael Cuscuna.
In 2012, PopMarket, a division of Sony Legacy, released Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection, and in 2013, Mosaic Records released Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions, for which NPR described Shaw as "the last great trumpet innovator".[10]
Shaw III, the primary inspiration for Shaw's third Columbia album, Woody III (dedicated to Shaw's father and newborn son), is the sole heir to the Shaw family legacy. Today, Shaw III preserves the Shaw legacy through the production, management, archiving and preservation of his father's life's work. As of 2013, he is stated to be authoring the first official biography on his father's life and music. Shaw's legacy is kept active and relevant through the use of social media and the official website. The Shaw name and legacy are administered by Woody Shaw Legacy LLC.
Innovations
Shaw was noted for his mastery and innovative use of "wide" intervals, often fourths and fifths, which are considered relatively unnatural to the trumpet and difficult to employ skillfully due to (a) the technical facility required to do so, (b) the architecture of the instrument, (c) the trumpet's inherent harmonic tendencies based on the overtone series, and (d) its traditional association with intervals based more commonly on thirds and diatonic relationships.
In both his improvisations and his compositions, Shaw frequently used polytonality, the combination of two or more tonalities or keys (i.e. multiple chords or harmonic structures) at once. In his solos, he often superimposed highly complex permutations of the pentatonic scale and sequences of intervals that modulated unpredictably through numerous key centers. He was a master of modality and used a wide range of harmonic color, generating unusual contrasts, using tension and resolution, dissonance, odd rhythmic groupings, and "over the barline" phrases, yet always resolving his ideas according to the form and harmonic structure of a given composition while adhering to the conventions of jazz improvisation and simultaneously creating new ones.
His "attack" was remarkably clean and precise, regardless of tempo (Shaw often played extremely fast passages). He had a rich, dark tone that was distinctive with a near-vocal quality to it; his intonation and articulation were highly developed, and he greatly utilized the effects of the lower register, usually employing a deep, extended vibrato at the end of his phrases. Shaw also often incorporated the chromatic scale, which gave his melodic lines a subtle fluidity that seemed to allow him to weave "in and out" of chords seamlessly from all "angles".
Shaw was also born with a photographic memory[3] and perfect pitch.[4] Max Roach once stated: "He was truly one of the greatest. I first had occasion to work with Woody on a trip to Iran. One of the most amazing things was his uncanny memory. I was just flabbergasted. After one look, he knew all of the charts, no matter how complex they were."[11]
Shaw's improvisational and composing style bears the influences of his idols Dolphy, Coltrane and Tyner, as well as many European modern classical and 20th-century composers, such as Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Carlos Chavez, Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Colin McPhee.[3] Shaw also listened closely to traditional Japanese music, Indonesian Gamelan, Indian classical music, Brazilian music, and various other musics of the world.[3]
Educator
Throughout his career, Shaw gave countless clinics, master classes and private lessons to students around the world.
During the 1970s, he and Joe Henderson were faculty members in Jamey Aebersold's jazz camp.
NEA Grant-recipients who studied with Shaw include Wynton Marsalis (Musical Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center), and Ingrid Monson (Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University).
Other students and apprentices included Chris Botti, Wallace Roney, and Terence Blanchard.
Admiration among musicians
As a musician and trumpeter, Shaw was held in high esteem by his colleagues and is today seen as one of the most technically and harmonically advanced trumpet players in the history of jazz and of the instrument itself. Miles Davis, a notoriously harsh critic of fellow musicians, once said of Shaw: "Now there's a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them."[12] Trumpeter Dave Douglas stated: "It's not only the brilliant imagination that captivates with Woody Shaw – it's how natural those fiendishly difficult lines feel... Woody Shaw is now one of the most revered figures for trumpeters today."[13] Shaw is credited with having extended the harmonic and technical vocabulary of the trumpet. Upon hearing of Shaw's death in 1989, Wynton Marsalis stated: "Woody added to the vocabulary of the trumpet. His whole approach influenced me tremendously."[6]
Spirituality
Shaw was a devout practitioner of a Chinese martial art known as T'ai chi ch'uan (Wu-style t'ai chi ch'uan). He also practiced meditation or self-hypnosis, and Sirsha-Asana – a form of Yoga.
Travels
Throughout his life, Shaw travelled all over Europe. He first moved to France at 19. As a sideman with Roach, he traveled to Iran in 1969. He also toured such places as Japan, England, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Brussels, and the Czech Republic.
During a 1980s tour for the United States Information Service, Shaw ventured to such countries as Egypt, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. Recently, it has been discovered that Shaw spent significant time performing and giving clinics in India, working in cities such as New Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta. When asked by film producer Chuck France in an interview whether he thought traveling was important, Shaw responded: "Most definitely. I think every great artist should share his music with the world."[14]
Discography
As leader
- 1965: In the Beginning (Muse) – released 1983
- 1970: Blackstone Legacy (Contemporary Records)
- 1972: Song of Songs (Contemporary)
- 1974: The Moontrane (Muse)
- 1975: San Francisco Express (Reynolds)
- 1976: Love Dance (Muse)
- 1976: Little Red's Fantasy (Muse)
- 1976: The Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble at the Berliner Jazztage (Muse)
- 1977: The Iron Men with Anthony Braxton (Muse – released 1980)
- 1977: Rosewood (Columbia)
- 1978: Stepping Stones: Live at the Village Vanguard (Columbia)
- 1979: Woody III (Columbia)
- 1980: For Sure! (Columbia)
- 1981: United (Columbia)
- 1982: Lotus Flower (Enja)
- 1982: Master of the Art (Elektra Musician)
- 1982: Night Music (Elektra Musician)
- 1983: The Time Is Right (Red)
- 1983: Setting Standards (Muse)
- 1985: Woody Shaw with the Tone Jansa Quartet (Timeless)
- 1985: Double Take with Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note)
- 1986: Bemsha Swing (Blue Note – released 1997)
- 1986: Solid (Muse)
- 1986: Dr. Chi with the Tone Jansa Quartet (Timeless)
- 1987: In My Own Sweet Way (In + Out)
- 1987: The Eternal Triangle with Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note)
- 1987: Imagination (Muse)
- 2000: Woody Shaw Live Volume One (High Note)
- 2001: Woody Shaw Live Volume Two (High Note)
- 2002: Woody Shaw Live Volume Three (High Note)
- 2005: Woody Shaw Live Volume Four (High Note)
- 2012: Stepping Stones Bonus Tracks (Columbia Legacy)
Compilations
- 1992: The Complete CBS Studio Recordings of Woody Shaw (Mosaic)
- 2011: Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection (Columbia Legacy)
- 2012: Woody Plays Woody (High Note)
- 2012: Woody Shaw – Trumpet Legacy Revisited, Field Recordings of a Jazz Master' (International Trumpet Guild)
- 2013: Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (Mosaic Records)
As sideman
With Gary Bartz
- Home! (Milestone, 1970)
- Child's Dance (Prestige, 1972)
- Buhaina (Prestige, 1973)
- Anthenagin (Prestige, 1973)
- The Free Slave (Muse, 1970 [1972])
- Duet in Detroit (Enja, 1983)
- The Almoravid (Muse, 1974)
- Tones for Joan's Bones (1966)
- The Complete "Is" Sessions (1969)
- Brilliant Circles (Freedom, 1972)
- Peace Treaty (1965)
- Happy Girl (1965)
- Conversations (1963)
- Iron Man (1963)
- Tex Book Tenor (1968 [2005]) – originally released in 1976 as part of Back from the Gig
- Serengeti Minstral (1977)
- Introducing Kenny Garrett (1984)
- Time Speaks (1982)
- Homecoming (1976–79)
- Sophisticated Giant (1977)
- Gotham City (1981)
- For Flying Out Proud (1977)
- GG-CJB (1978)
- Music of Charles Mingus (1977)
- Ichi-Ban (1976) with Junior Cook
- Lausanne 1977 (1977)
- The Real Thing (1977)
- If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem (1970)
- Joe Henderson Quintet at the Lighthouse (1970)
- Grass Roots (Blue Note, 1968 [2000])
- Lift Every Voice (Blue Note, 1969 [2001])
- Passing Ships (Blue Note, 1969 [2003])
- Bobby Hutcherson Live at Montreux (1973)
- Cirrus (1974)
- Bridge into the New Age (Prestige, 1974)
- 'Bout Soul (1967)
- Demon's Dance (Blue Note, 1967)
- Reach Out (Blue Note, 1968)
- Thinking of Home (Blue Note, 1970)
- Deaf Dumb Blind (Impulse!, 1970)
- The Cape Verdean Blues (Blue Note, 1965)
- The Jody Grind (Blue Note, 1966)
- Natural Soul (Prestige, 1968)
- Pure Dynamite (Mainstream, 1972)
- Expansions (Blue Note, 1968)
- The Git Go - Live at the Village Vanguard (Soul Note, 1986)
- The Seagulls of Kristiansund (Soul Note, 1986)
- Natural Essence (1967)
- Black Renaissance (1976)
- Pinnacle (1975)
- Unity (Blue Note, 1965)
- Zawinul (Columbia, 1970)
References:
Shaw reached a level of expressiveness, headlong linear development and freedom from post-bop conventions that was not only ahead of his time; this music from three and four decades ago is ahead of much of the rote, formulaic jazz of our time. The Mosaic box set makes it clear to what an extent Shaw was at once a liberator of the music and a preserver of tradition.
|work= (help)- France, Chuck. "Jazz in Exile". Retrieved March 5, 2010.