Shorty Rogers and the Migration of the Cool

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The Swinging Mr. Rogers

Shorty Rogers And His Giants

2006 | Rhino Atlantic

Some good music never goes out of style: Jazz fans everywhere revere the cooking hard bop of the 1950s. So why is the other big ’50s trend, cool jazz, barely on modern radar? If you want to know how fresh and airy it still sounds, hear trumpeter/composer/arranger/cool exemplar Shorty Rogers on “Popo,” “Didi,” “Four Mothers” and “Sam and the Lady” from his first 1951 octet session: tightly arranged, swinging jazz with breezy orchestral colors, and short solos that get right to the point.

Cool as a movement is closely associated with southern California, but got started back east. Rogers came of age in the Bronx; he’d play hooky from high school in Harlem to catch Count Basie and Duke Ellington matinees at the Apollo. Cool jazz as a recognizable style was born in Manhattan in 1949, when Miles Davis fronted a nine-piece arrangers ‘band whose recordings were later collected as The Birth of the Cool. (Those sides have been reissued many times, as on Disc 4 here.) You only have to listen to Shorty’s octet classics alongside the Miles nonet’s “Move,” “Boplicity” and “Rocker” to hear the resemblance, in the pastel harmonies and colorful backgrounds for solos, and similar instrumentation including french horn and tuba among five or six mixed winds.

The odd thing is, Shorty’s band often swings harder, owing to pianist Hampton Hawes and drummer Shelly Manne – another Cali-cool kingpin from NYC – with help from whoever yelps encouragement behind. (Bop firebrand Art Pepper on alto sax is bittersweet on “Over the Rainbow.”) Miles’s arrangers like future West Coaster Gerry Mulligan drew on the sleek modernism of bandleader Claude Thornhill. That influence trickled down to Shorty too but, Rogers always claimed Basie’s fleet swing as a prime inspiration. He even cut an all-Basie big band homage, Shorty Courts the Count, where pianist Marty Paich (a Basie-inspired cool arranger himself) ably impersonates the maestro.

Shorty Rogers (1924-1994) had come up in big bands, notably Woody Herman‘s postwar outfits. Stravinsky dug Woody in general and Shorty’s lyrical, swinging solos in particular. Igor composed “Ebony Concerto” for Herman’s herd; Rogers in turn wrote “Igor” for a Herman nonet. In 1950 the trumpeter jumped to Stan Kenton’s oft overheated orchestra, an influence on Shorty’s big band shouts “Short Stop,” “Tale of an African Lobster” and “Chiquito Loco.” It wasn’t all cool.

Rogers’s big band LPs are okay, but smaller units fit him better. His best Count cover is “Moten Swing” for a two-trumpet septet featuring his Basieite idol Sweets Edison. Shorty’s midsize units kept exploring his post-Miles style, on “Powder Puff,” “The Pesky Serpent,” “Diablo’s Dance,” “Bunny,” “Pirouette,” “Morpo,” and the LP Collaboration with pianist Andre Previn, and WeCo stars and frequent Rogers allies Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank and Bob Cooper on saxes, flute and oboe.

Save for “Moten Swing” and “Igor” all the pieces mentioned so far are on The Very Best of Shorty Rogers, spanning 1950-54. It contains several complete albums, a few live items, three tunes with Kenton singer June Christy (“A Miles Down the Highway,” “Do It Again,” “He Can Come Back Anytime He Wants To”), and music from the soundtrack to Brando’s The Wild One, though the program’s marred by uneven sound quality, and a mischievously scrambled chronology. There’s also “Block Buster” and “Dynamite” by Shorty’s Bizarro-world R&B alter ego Boots Brown, with the normally ultracool Giuffre wailing on tenor like Illinois Jacquet. (More from Boots and his Blockbusters here.)

Atlantic’s 1955 The Swinging Mr. Rogers, for a quintet with Giuffre and Manne, picks up where The Very Best of leaves off. Aptly named and charming as it is, you can hear why East Coasters who dug hard-bopping Horace Silver and Clifford Brown might balk. There are a couple of uptempo raveups, but “Trickleydidlier” is frothy as a fruit smoothie, and Giuffre’s clarinet on “Oh! Play That Thing” is as laidback as SCTV‘s parody Perry Como. (Pardon the anachronisms.) Understatement was writ large on the session’s jewel “Martians, Go Home,” a skeletal riff blues that extends the elliptical nature of Basie’s piano to the whole band, till there’s barely anything left. Studded with silences, low-key solos and minimal accompaniment, it’s so cool, it evaporated. (Rogers, Giuffre and Manne also made up an experimental trio on Shelly’s “The Three” & “The Two,” discussed here.

There’s more period Atlantic stuff on this grab-bag, and on a reissue of his next album Martians, Come Back! that was so badly botched, you should approach with caution. The tunes and titles don’t always match, with some numbers wandering in from other sessions, but pick up “Chant of the Cosmos” (it’s actually track 3, mislabeled “Lotus Bud”) for Giuffre at his iciest: a solo where he blows pitchless air through clarinet, sounding rather like a drummer rustling brushes on snare.

In the 1950s, Rogers like other Los Angeles jazzmen got into Hollywood studio work. (That’s him auditioning sticks-dropping junkie drummer Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm.) He eventually retired from bandleading altogether, until a welcome but anticlimactic ’80s comeback.

A couple of early ’60s big band swansongs can be cheesy but have moments of oddball brilliance. The Fourth Dimension in Sound, an exercise in exaggerated stereo separation, is gimmicky in a good way, bright with flutes and mallet percussion. On “Stomping at the Savoy,” “Lover” and “Marie,” call-and-response figures ping-pong between instruments in opposite corners; a flutey, frilly “One O’Clock Jump” revisits Basie. “Kook-a-Ra-Cha Waltz” is jaunty borderland fun. Its companion piece is the dust-devil “Streets of Laredo” from 1962′s colorful Jazz Waltz, where the interplay between piano and Emil Richards ‘stately vibes on “Terrence’s Farewell” nods to cool East Coasters the Modern Jazz Quartet. A standout is Shorty’s arrangement of “Echoes of Harlem,” which re-orchestrates and builds on the latticework of intersecting lines in Ellington’s 1936 original. Rogers may’ve personified West Coast jazz, but he never forgot his Harlem roots.