Some Jazz Records: Burton Greene Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Stan Kenton conducts Robert Graettinger, City of Glass, Capitol 353, 1952, multiple formats.
Talking to Cadence magazine, pianist Burton Greene recalled how some of the music that made an impression on him early on seemed to indicate an inclination toward "out" sounds. It included bandleader Stan Kenton’s City of Glass, a recording of a suite by Bob Graettinger that has been described as a "futuristic" and "ultra-modern" departure from Kenton’s usual fare. "That stuff blew me away. That was the heyday of the Kenton Orchestra," Greene told Bob Rusch. "The space, the strength, the beauty of it. It was beautiful without being evasive. It didn’t clobber you to death like some hip-hop beat."
Charlie Parker Quintet, Scrapple from the Apple/Don’t Blame Me, Dial 1021, 1948, 10" 78 rpm.
Down Beat very rarely devoted significant space to Burton Greene. In a 1980 profile that was an exception to the rule, Greene recounted how, starting college in the mid-1950s, he was put on to hipper jazz thanks to a raid on a record store’s low-priced bins orchestrated by a singer friend. One the 78s acquired that day was a 1947 Charlie Parker ballad number. "I came home and listened and listened and listened, and I said, 'Now what’s really the difference between Bird and Lee Konitz, for example? I mean, everybody’s talkin' about Charlie Parker. Now what’s the difference?,'" Greene told Down Beat. "And halfway through the 'Don’t Blame Me' solo, I heard it. I heard him flying over the chords like the chords didn’t exist. Bird was, really was, and still is free, because he wasn’t playing the form. He didn’t create a new formal concept. His freedom took him into an area where the academicians come afterward and say, 'Well, he’s doing this and so forth and so on, intellectually, with those chords.' But I don’t think Bird was thinking that way. His freedom came in that system. But he became a system for the lessers, for the imitators. To this day, I don’t hear him computing those chords. He was free in his day, and still is free."
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, Columbia CL 1355 (CS 8163), 1959, LP.
In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Musical "Pesty Mystic," Burton Greene writes of a period of deep depression in 1959. That year, he was drafted and underwent six months of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks. "One of the few positive things I remember about that boot camp was getting hold of a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue recording, which came out that year. I turned that record every night just to keep my sanity from crumbling. Miles, Trane, Cannonball, Bill Evans and Philly Joe… They just blew away all my blues, all that negativity that surrounded me, even if it was only for a few moments."
Béla Bartók, Music for Stringed Instruments, Percussion and Celesta, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik, Mercury MG 50001, 1951, LP.
Classical was a major part of Burton Greene’s musical upbringing. It remained a long-lasting interest, after his early 1960s move to New York and beyond. "I was always fascinated by Bartók’s music. The first time I heard Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, I had to pull my car off the road," Greene told Dan Warburton in a Paris Transatlantic interview. "In my pad in New York I had a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and an angel suspended from the ceiling and I used to put that record on and the angel started rocking back and forth. That was all I needed, I’d be out for hours. It was like being on LSD. I’ve still got that record of it with Rafael Kubelik conducting, scratches and all." The Bartók album in Greene’s collection likely contained an April 24, 1951 recording first issued by Mercury with Ernest Bloch material on the flip side. Another issue substituted Bloch with Schoenberg. The original LP can be heard over at the Internet Archive.
Jackie and Roy, Jackie and Roy, Storyville STLP 904, 1955, LP.
"I flew the 'slow-boat' Iceland prop-jet to Europe early May of 1969," Burton Greene wrote of his move away from the US in his Memoirs of a Musical "Pesty Mystic". "I landed in Luxembourg with $40 in my pocket, and a huge black cardboard American suitcase with a lot of socks, underwear, sweaters; some miso and tahini [ingredients used in macrobiotic cooking]; a few favorite records like Debussy, and Jackie and Roy with Barney Kessel." Jackie (Cain) and Roy (Kral) were a husband-and-wife team of "amiable" vocalists who had formerly been with Charlie Ventura. Guitarist Barney Kessel appeared on albums of theirs in 1955 and 1960. It can be surmised that Greene was referring to their first collaboration. When he left for Europe, where he would soon record for BYG, the pianist’s suitcase included more unexpected material: "a few percussion goodies like my favorite small garbage can cover with the natural warp in it, spray painted with some 1955 Mercury fire engine red hub cap paint," which he used on piano strings.