House Party Starting: Playing Herbie Nichols

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Love Is Proximity

The Herbie Nichols Project

1996 | Soul Note / CAM

Ask a jazz fan about Herbie Nichols, and the reaction is likely to be either, “He’s a genius,” or “Who?” The pianist and composer is the paradigm of a genius neglected in his own time. Nichols’s classic mid-’50s sides for Blue Note were all but forgotten when he passed at 44 in 1963. A.B. Spellman memorialized him with a chapter in 1966′s Four Lives in the Be-Bop Business, but he didn’t get much respect till Blue Note first reissued his music in the mid ’70s.

Interest has mushroomed since, and now we have Mark Miller’s admirably compact but detailed biography, Herbie Nichols: A Jazzists’s Life (Mercury Press), which contrasts his artistic triumphs with his career failures. He was too straight-laced for the boppers in the 1940s or many avant-gardists later, even if Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor were fans; he had few chances to record; for much of his career, his steadiest work was with dixieland bands – a less-than-ideal setting. Nichols had to beg to make his Blue Note sides, but they’re models of trio orchestration, with Art Blakey‘s or Max Roach‘s drums playing pivotal roles and pocket solos. The leader’s piano rarely wandered far from the melody, even as his murmuring, odd or atmospheric harmonies nibbled at the edges of the tune.

His catchy pieces are the heart of his appeal. Maybe no American composer since Charles Ives so often described socio-musical situations in his work: The first section of “The Gig” is nine bars because it simulates musicians getting together for the first time and faltering over a phrase. “Chit-Chatting” depicts the sounds of music blending with the babble of a heedless audience, a sound Nichols knew well.

His chum Mary Lou Williams was the first pianist to record any of his compositions, waxing “Opus Z,” “Mary’s Waltz” and “My First Date with You” (taken too slow, but never mind) in 1951, a year before he got to record his own blues “Nichols and Dimes,” and the superior, jaunty “Who’s Blues” where we begin to glimpse his mature style.

It’s typical of Herbie’s neglected status that his most famous tune is associated with someone else: Billie Holiday‘s theme “Lady Sings the Blues” is rare high drama from Nichols’s pen. (On a Holiday tribute album, trumpeter Terence Blanchard plays it as if it’s a theme from one of his film scores.) Almost no one played Nichols tunes until the 1980s, till two loyal admirers teamed up: his friend the trombonist Roswell Rudd and Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg. Their Regeneration with Steve Lacy on soprano sax and Han Bennink on drums was a split program of Nichols and Thelonious Monk compositions. Mengelberg gets the ingenuity of Herbie’s keyboard harmonies, with their unorthodox turns and shortcuts, and Rudd loves the sheer singability of his lines. But Mengelberg, Lacy and Bennink really hit their stride on the fleeter all-Nichols sequel Change of Season, with George Lewis subbing on trombone. (Misha recorded them with his ICP Orchestra too.)

No one’s showcased more of his compositions than the co-op Herbie Nichols Project, founded in the mid ’90s, and including Nichologists and fine players Frank Kimbrough on piano and Ron Horton on trumpet. They don’t always catch Herbie’s jauntiness, but sometimes they do, as on “Blue Chopsticks” and “Spinning Song,” “It Didn’t Happen,” “Trio,” “Karna Kangi” and “The Happenings.” They also have an easy way with the 3/4 “Love, Gloom, Cash, Love” and 5/4 “Some Wandering Bushmen,” and the swaggering “Beyond Recall” and leapfrogging “Delights” would be worth hearing no matter who wrote them.

Nichols and Monk have this is common: To play the man’s compositions right, you’ve got to enter into the spirit of his playful timing. Among modern pianists, Geri Allen (“Shuffle Montgomery” with onetime Nichols drummer Paul Motian), Ted Rosenthal (“The Gig,” “117th Street”), Mike Melillo (the first six tracks on his Nichols/Monk program Boplicity) and pre-Bad Plus Ethan Iverson (“2300 Skidoo”) have shown how closely they’ve listened to the master. And despite all of Nichols’s keyboard-specific atmospheric harmony, a few guitarists have also embraced his stuff. Duck Baker valiantly adapted them to solo guitar (for Spinning Song, not on eMusic), and Howard Alden does a very credible “House Party Starting” and “The Gig” on the wittily titled Take Your Pick with Renee Rosnes on piano and Lew Tabackin on tenor. Bop picker Eric T. Johnson really imparts the composer’s ebullient spirit to his sleeper Herbie Nichols Volume One, partly by giving drummer Nat Mugavero room to run. George Garzone on saxes doesn’t hurt either.

Jazz percussion is so central to Herbie’s music, it’s no surprise that drummers get him – drummers like Motian, Matt Wilson (“Chit-Chatting”), Owen Howard (“2300 Skidoo” enlivened by Brad Shepik‘s wah-wah guitar) and Jimmy Bennington. On Bennington’s all-Nichols Another Friend, pianist David Haney comes on like early/mid ’50s Cecil Taylor, tempering blocky dissonances with a generous amount of space, abetted by bass and drums that don’t crowd him. The trio get back to the percussive quality at the root of Nichols’s own playing, informed by steel drums out of his West Indian heritage.

For Nichols radically recast, hear the Bay Area wind quartet Clarinet Thing (Beth Custer, Ben Goldberg, Harvey Wainapel, Sheldon Brown) strut through “2300 Skidoo” – and while you’re there check out their take on Carla Bley’s “Jesus Maria.” To my ears, the best reimaginings include Nichols bud Buell Neidlinger’s arrangements for two horns and string trio (Blue Chopsticks, not on site, but essential) and saxophonist Phillip Johnston‘s passes at “12 Bars” and “Step Tempest” on his sextet/septet Big Trouble’s debut (for which I wrote the notes, long ago). Johnston’s charts continually vary the orchestration while seldom straying far from the melody, an imaginative rethink of Nichols’s ensemble method.

Given the fame of “Lady Sings the Blues” and Herbie’s hummable lines, it’s odd so few have attracted lyrics. New York singer and occasional Mengelberg ally Fay Victor‘s swaggery reading of “House Party Starting” may remind you of Carmen McRae doing Monk, a high compliment. Victor’s kick-the-bum-out-and-roll-back-the-carpets lyric, combining loss and celebration, is all too true to Herbie’s life and esthetic. His thwarted career was a bummer. His music is pure joy.