Pete Fountain has reached that enviable stage at which the compilers of catalogues for use in record shops are uncertain whether to list him under “jazz" or in the “popular" category. In fact, Pete's success helps to underline the inherently false implication of this listing system that jazz cannot be popular music in the broadest sense.
His two years of national TV exposure with Lawrence Welk, his extraordinary success in albums under his own name and most recently the warm reaction accorded his group at such music meccas as New York's Roundtable all tend to prove that given the right blend of musician-ship, showmanship and marksmanship, jazz can be aimed at an almost unlimited audience.
The present collection is Pete's second big band album. Bud Dant, who helped to produce and write the previous venture, the Blues set (CRL 57284), was similarly associated with the new one and used basically the same personnel.
There are three main groups. On all of them the firm foundation is a superbly integrated rhythm section composed of Stan Wrightsman on piano, Morty Corb on bass, and a familiar figure common to every one of Pete's previous Coral albums (even those recorded in New Orleans), the indomitable and propulsive Jack Sperling, whose drums provide a vital and exciting spark throughout.
To these men are added, on Petite Fleur, When My Baby Smiles at Me, Begin The Beguine and Amapola, a brass section (Conrad Gozzo, lead trumpet; Art Depew, Johnny Best, and George Thow or Jackie Coons, trumpets; Moe Schneider, Bill Schaefer and Joe Howard or Marshall Cram, trombones; Pete Lofthouse, bass trombone). The rhythm section provides the foundation, on Sometimes I'm Happy, Me and My Shadow and Let's Dance, for a five piece saxophone section with Willie Schwartz, alto and tenor; Eddie Miller, Plas Johnson, Babe Russin, tenors; Chuck Gentry, baritone.
On Woodchoppers' Ball, Frenesi, March of the Bob Cats, Green Eyes and My Inspiration the same reeds, brass and rhythm are combined for some of the most potent big band sounds ever produced by these topflight West Coast musicians.
Of the album's theme, Pete says: “This is my tribute to some of the great people who have been associated with the clarinet. It's not in any way an attempt to duplicate their individual styles." It will be noted that the seven clarinetists saluted are all men who came to prominence in the 1920s and '30s. The reason, will be clear to anyone who has followed the jazz scene: Pete Fountain is the first man on his instrument to achieve complete national success and economic security since the dying days of the swing era, when for no apparent reason the thin black horn lost its vogue.
“I have to keep in mind," observes Pete with typical frankness, “that I was lucky to have an open field on my instrument. After all, when Benny Goodman came along, most of the time he had Shaw and Herman and Dorsey and others on his back; but the fellows who came up in between that period and the present—Buddy de Franco, Tony Scott and the others—are in a different field and represent a different approach to the instrument."
I would debate this last item; despite his New Orleans associations and Dixieland background, Pete essentially is a modern musician, one who has listened to jazz with ears that are as harmonically sensitive and fingers as consistently agile as those of De Franco and the other contemporary stylists. The point has never been more clearly made than in these sides on which, as he emphasizes, the tributes are to earlier figures but the style is deliberately his own.
“The orchestra," says Bud Dant, “was supposed to be built around Pete to showcase him, rather than to be integrated with him. And in the arrangements we would use a phrase or passage here and there that might be reminiscent of the original recording, but here again there was no exact carbon copying."
Woodchoppers' Ball
(I have always felt the apostrophe should come after rather than before the, because the woodchopping clearly was a concerted effort) was the first hit recording of the Woody Herman band, cut in April 1939, some 2½ years after Woody's debut as a recording bandleader. Based on a simple repeated riff in the 12-bar blues pattern, it was rearranged for this date by Don Bagley. In addition to Pete's buoyant pied- piping there is strong support from drummer Sperling and pianist Wrightsman.
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