Poor Butterfly - Rita Reys ft. Johnny Griffin

http://www.ritareys.eu Rita Reys performing Poor Butterfly, accompanied by The Pim Jacobs Trio ft. Johnny Griffin on tenor saxophone. Poor Butterfly was on Rita's repertoire for over half a century, and from the Seventies she always played the first chorus with only Ruud Jacobs, her brother-in-law, on bass. 

This performance is part of a TV show Rita did to promote her 1979 album That Old Feeling, which also features Johnny Griffin on sax.

Poor Butterfly is a song composed by Raymond Hubbell with lyrics by John Golden. It was published in 1916, and introduced in the Broadway show The Big Show that same year. Other well known renditions are by Julie Andrews, Sarah Vaughan, Benny Goodman and Erroll Garner.

Remembering Johnny Griffin....

John Arnold Griffin III (April 24, 1928)
Is an American bop and hard bop tenor saxophonist. Like many other successful musicians from Chicago, he studied music at DuSable High School under Walter Dyett, starting out on clarinet before moving on to oboe, alto sax and finally, shortly after joining Lionel Hampton's Orchestra, tenor sax. While still at high school, at 15 Griffin was playing alongside T-Bone Walker in a band led by Walker's brother.

We lost a true giant in 2008, the great Johnny Griffin. As Ben Ratliff wrote his NY Times obit, Johnny Griffin was "...a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation."
While we were putting together the Joe Lovano retrospective, Joe also had a few words to say about Griff.
"Bret "Jazz Video Guy" Primack"

Johnny Griffin, 80, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies

July 26, 2008
Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France.
Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization.
In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”
Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.
Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.
By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.
Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.
In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.
Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.
A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s.
Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France.
Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.
Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.

Johnny Griffin (in Memorian)

It died in this thursday (2008,Jul 25) in the interior of France, to 80 years, one of myths of the jazz, the North American saxofonista Johnny Griffin. The cause of the death was not divulged. Griffin was here in 1998, for the Free Jazz Festival. Already it was not in the height, it had 70 years at the time and some excesses had mined a little its breath, but it made a pretty concert thus exactly. Diamond ring in the right hand, Johnny was good-natured and ordered to see in caipirinhas in the River and São Paulo. In palco, it played with the fumaceira that if made in the high one of its head, in the old restaurant of the Jockey Club - where they were shows of jazz old. The J.J touched Cole Porter. Johnson and Dizzy Gillespie. Of Those Things opened the show with Just One, of Cole Porter. Sonny Rollins, that comes to the TIM Festival, in October, is considered the Colossus of the jazz. Johnny Griffin, another legend of bebop, was known as the Small Giant or " fastest of the Oeste". Griffin commemorated 50 years of the writing of its first record, in 1958. Griffin started the career to the 17 years, for the hands of Lionel Hampton.

Irreverent, Bon vivant, it lived in one cidadezinha French (she also liveed in Holland for a time). In the half of years 1990, he launched Chicago, New York, Paris, recorded to celebrate its 50 years of jazz. The heading sent to the three referenciais cities in its workmanship: Chicago, where it was born; New York, where the ascension of bebop to the people side lived as Thelonious Monk; e, finally, Paris, where it costumava to present itself frequently since years 60, when was changed for France. " I do not live in Paris because not taste of cities; I prefer campo" , it counted to the State. It touched with John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Lionel Hampton. He was friend of Betty Carter. " Lady was a candy. It always had the flame, beyond great imaginação." On its career, she said: " In the truth, same taste is to amuse me and to help the people to have noitada agradável.". It appreciated erudite music, especially Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and Bartok. It also knew Villa-Wolf, " extraordinário" , and it had admiration for João Gilbert.
Fonte: O Estado de S.Paulo Journal(26/7/2008)