The Not Necessarily Happy Horns of Clark Terry
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Can a musician’s reputation be harmed by the persistent paying of a compliment? Clark Terry has a warm, plump, utterly distinctive sound on trumpet and its chubby pal the flugelhorn. He’s rhythmically assured at any tempo, and has a deep feeling for the blues. But some writers fixate on how he has “the happiest sound in jazz,” as if one trait defines his art.
To be fair, it’s not a rep he’s run away from, having once made a record called The Happy Horns of Clark Terry. His bread-and-butter song is “Mumbles,” a scatted send-up of inarticulate blues singers that can be found in different versions here and here, which in time began to include parodies of the various European languages Terry’s overheard in his travels. Not to mention the fact that he’s warm and funny off stage.
True, some of Clark Terry’s blues are jocular enough to support Albert Murray’s thesis that the music is about defying, not decrying, hard times. But there’s more to them than that. On 1994′s Shades of Blues his drumless quartet examines the form from 11 angles, some of them happy-making (“Whispering the Blues” is sort of a sotto voce “Mumbles”), a couple plumbing the depths; Terry uses plunger mute to shape his wah-wahs on the slow “Sluggo” and “Greasy Blues” (His effective foil here is plunger trombonist Al Grey). Terry’s display of deep feeling goes way further back than that: to, for example, 1958′s dark, brooding “Very Near Blue,” a chance to pull out that post-Clifford Brown robust ballad tone so many trumpeters took to back then. It’s not like every brass balladeer wants to be Miles Davis.
Terry and his younger colleague Miles did share a home town. Clark Terry was born in St. Louis in 1920; his first instrument was valve trombone, putting a big brass sound in his ear early. In 1947 he joined Count Basie‘s big band (later scaled down to an octet). Duke Ellington stole him away in 1951, even though raiding a friend’s band was a no-no.
The trumpeter fit right in among Duke’s brass specialists and eccentrics; the Ellington perennial “Perdido” became his feature. If he isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath with the band’s trumpet stars like Cootie Williams and Ray Nance, it’s probably because Duke didn’t write much for him, save “Juniflip” for flugelhorn, still an unusual instrument when the tune was introduced in 1958. Its trotting pace really sets Terry up. He left Duke the following year to take better paying studio gigs, but he was already recording outside the band, often with Ellington colleagues; on a little-known 1954 date by clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton he solos on “Chuckles,” “Blues for Clarinet” and Duke’s “What Am I Here For?”
The nine-piece band on Terry’s 1957 Duke with a Difference is mostly the master’s men, including pianist Billy Strayhorn, bassist Jimmy Woode, drummer Sam Woodyard, alto sax slitherer Johnny Hodges – and scene-stealing tenor man Paul Gonsalves who steams through “Cotton Tail” and “In a Mellow Tone.” (The “difference” is made mostly by adding Tyree Glenn on vibes, an instrument Duke didn’t warm to) Shades of Blues aside, Terry didn’t go in much for the wah-wahs and half-valved bends favored by his section mates; with his pretty tone, better to let the horn sing clear. (Terry would reprise the mid-size band, some Ellington tunes and Ducal attitude for 1989′s Squeeze Me, with Britt Woodman returning on trombone, alongside Al Grey.)
Terry and Paul Gonsalves had played together in Basie’s band as well as Duke’s, and were a good fit. The blues-loving tenor saxophonist’s deeply burnished tone complements Clark’s tart, bright one. They teamed again for a 1959 quickie in Paris (with Duke’s men Woode and Woodyard, and French pianist Raymond Fol), the quintet billed as Clark Terry and His Orchestra. There are a couple of slow, un-happy ones there too: “Lonely One” and a “Mean to Me” where Terry’s Harmon-muted playing is too full-bodied to evoke Miles.
Clark Terry made some of his best records during his Ellington years, as if Duke’s inspiration carried over. But the pianist who makes the difference on 1958′s In Orbit (where “Very Near Blue” appears) is Thelonious Monk, making a rare appearance as a sideman – his last, in fact – and contributing his oblique strategies. But Terry knocks Monk out of his comfort zone: sets a quick tempo Monk would never set himself on “In Orbit”; nudges him into three-beat waltz time on “One Foot in the Gutter”‘s bridge. The quartet (Sam Jones on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums) also play Monk’s “Let’s Cool One,” and Terry’s comfortably loping blues “Pea-Eye” and “Flugelin ‘the Blues,” right up the pianist’s alley.
On 1959′s Top ‘n ‘Bottom Brass Don Butterfield’s tuba adds more gravitas than yuks (his harrumphing melody statement on “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” aside). Midway through “Blues for Etta,” Terry does a crying baby wah-wah bit (played on the trumpet’s mouthpiece only) you might hear as a spoof of Ellingtonian plungering, though such comic mimicry goes straight back to vaudeville.
The title of 1957′s Serenade to a Bus Seat is a nod not to Rosa Parks but to a traveling musician’s life. Terry and tenor man Johnny Griffin, who loves fast tempos, take the hardbopping title track and the bop anthem “Donna Lee” at brisk clips (The oft-teamed rhythm triangle is Philly Joe, pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers.) “Serenade” itself is as good a place as any to observe Terry the soloist’s virtues: the juicy-raspberry timbre, leaps into warp speed double-time, the lingering on little figures that pounce on or tug against the beat, a bop lick or two cribbed from Dizzy Gillespie and many shapely phrases all his own.
OK I admit it: Anybody who plays that well has every reason to sound happy.
