Chuck Mangione - trumpet
Sal Nistico - Tenor Saxophone
Gap Mangione - Piano
Steve Davis - Bass
Roy McCurdy - Drums
Joe Romano # - Saxophones and Flute
Wynton Kelly # - Piano
Sam Jones # - Bass
Louis Hayes # - Drums
Sal Nistico - Tenor Saxophone
Gap Mangione - Piano
Steve Davis - Bass
Roy McCurdy - Drums
Joe Romano # - Saxophones and Flute
Wynton Kelly # - Piano
Sam Jones # - Bass
Louis Hayes # - Drums
- Hey Baby!
- Bags' Groove
- The Night Has A Thousand Eyes
- Givin' The Business
- Wha's Happ'nin'
- Just You, Just Me
- Old Folks
- The Bassett Sound
- Recuerdo *
- Big Foot *
- I Had The Craziest Dream *
- Solar *
- Blues For Saandar *
- If Ever I Should Lose You *
- The Little Prince *
Originally issued as Hey Baby! - The Jazz Brothers (Riverside 371)
* Originally issued as Recuerdo - Chuck Mangione (Jazzland 84)
# Appeared on the tracks with the *
This reissue is on Milestone Records M-47042
1977
* Originally issued as Recuerdo - Chuck Mangione (Jazzland 84)
# Appeared on the tracks with the *
This reissue is on Milestone Records M-47042
1977
Liner Notes
Not many people today know that Chuck Mangione—the man who wears a beard and long hair beneath a pheasant-feathered hat, and who, with his flugelhorn and electric piano, leads two of the most successful, happiest-sounding bands (one an orchestra and one a quartet) currently working—once upon a time wore a short crew cut, Conti¬nental suit, and was trumpet player and junior partner in a band known as The Jazz Brothers, led by his big brother Gaspare (Gap) Mangione.
Back in 1960, when Chuck was 19 and Gap 21, the two worked in and around their native Rochester, N.Y., as the Mangione Brothers sextet, playing the lively, demanding hard bop that had been created in the Fifties by leaders who were the Mangiones' idols: Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Clifford Brown, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, and a few others.
As the brothers acquired a big hometown reputation, Gap decided to form a little company, Manco, in order to put out an introductory single, "Struttin' with Sandra." According to Chuck, the 45 got good local support and even was played on a few Top 40 stations. Gap relates what came next: "Friends of ours laid the single on Nat Adder-ley. He' liked it, came by the club, and, still liking the music, talked to Cannon when they were playing Toronto. Then Cannon asked us to record an album for Riverside [The Jazz Brothers, a name Gap says was given them by publicist Billie Wallington], which we naturally accepted." Gap recalls that when he traveled back to New York to finalize the deal, he found both Adderley brothers at work in the studio as part of the all-star lineup of a Jimmy Heath Riverside album, Really Big. Other musicians on the date included Tootie and Percy Heath, Nat Adderley, Clark Terry, and Cedar Walton. Gap was impressed.
The first Jazz Brothers album was a full-steam-ahead excursion into bebop. "On that first record," Gap says, "I had wanted nothing more in the world than to sound like Horace Silver." In the album liner notes, Riverside executive and chief producer (and the man responsible for this reissue) Orrin Keepnews was, to say the least, enthusiastic: "One of the freshest and most vibrant young groups, [The Jazz Brothers) are an incredibly mature and richly talented unit. ... The term 'jazz brothers' can readily be taken as applying to the group as a whole, not just to the two related co-leaders."
That album was made by what was then the working Mangione sextet, which included Sal Nistico on tenor and Roy McCurdy on drums, plus Larry Combs (alto) and Bill Saunder (bass). Chuck remembers Nistico as the band's catalyst: "You can hear the fire and spark that Sal gave to the band. His playing was so energetic, very warm—one of those guys who sounded totally unique. When Sal would play the first note for a new audience, heads would turn around. All this energy was bouncing out so intensely and logically from this guy all the time, but it wasn't an intellectual thrill you got from him. It was uplifting."
By the time their second album, Hey Baby! (produced by Keepnews and reissued here), was recorded, the Jazz Brothers had become a quintet, retaining Nistico and McCurdy and with Steve Davis (best known for his work with the John Coltrane quartet) as the bassist. "On the first record I had arranged four of the tunes," Gap says, "but the second was more of a group effort. The assignments got more spread around, and the music was still organized, but looser, because we were a quintet, which gave everyone a chance to play."
Chuck's first and only Riverside album as sole leader, Recuerdo, was recorded a year later for the subsidiary Jazzland label with an entirely different supporting cast. The tenor sax player was Chuck's hometown friend Joe Romano; the two had the rare luxury of recording with a dream rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Louis Hayes. "What flattery," Chuck says. "Wynton Kelly You know, when you first meet someone you have no idea what personality is behind the music. But Wynton really beautiful. He was far ahead of me musically, I felt, but I didn't get a condescending feeling back from him. He was very warm, and was there to do it right. In fact, Wynton and Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb came up to play with Joe Romano and me one weekend in Rochester. It was fun—they didn't come on heavy, even though they were the players at the time, in the band [Miles Davis's). And that's how my record date went down. Orrin and I called Miles's piano player and Cannon's drummer and bass player, and said, 'drop on by and in six hours we'll record an album together.' There was no rehearsal. Just run the tune down, explain it, and record it."
Charles Frank Mangione was born in Rochester Novem¬ber 29, 1940, to parents who didn't play any musical instruments (Papa Frank ran a grocery store while Mama Nancy prepared the pasta at home) but who generously encouraged their children's musical proclivities. Chuck be¬gan piano lessons at the age of eight, and, two years later, after being turned on by a portrayal of Bix Beiderbecke in the film Young Man with a Horn, switched to trumpet lessons.
"I was very lucky," Chuck says, "that six months after I started playing trumpet I was also performing, with Gap playing accordion, even though it was at Italian weddings and Jewish Bar Mitzvahs. And later, with our hand, it was after-hours or any kind of thing, but it was a blowing thing a whole lot of the time. And I think it was an original band, with a lot of fire that was representative of the musicians who we idolized."
Chuck credits Gap with planting the disciplinary seeds that have aided Chuck's success as a musician, teacher, composer, and bandleader: "I always was the total lunatic and never thought twice about the fact that everybody would have to be paid sooner or later. Gap was the organic ing force, disciplined the band. He would be writing charts, calling the rehearsals. He got me into improvisation, and was writing big band charts at the age of twelve—scared the heck out of me.
"I was very slow about making a musical decision. I used to sit at the piano, arranging or orchestrating something. I'd pound out a voicing underneath one note, for hours, couldn't make up my mind. Once I had been at it for half a day, when Gap walked in from the other room, looked at me, and said, 'You've got exactly thirty seconds to make a choice.' I really needed that boot."
While Gap was playing the role of mentor, Chuck's father Frank would take both kids under his wings for regular visits to the top local jazz club, the Ridgecrest, where he would proceed to invite the musicians to the Mangione home for some good Italian cooking and maybe a little jam session. "We really had some times playing in our house," Chuck says. "Ron Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Kai Winding, Junior Cook, Junior Mance, Jimmy Cobb, every-body was there, eating and playing."
One frequent visitor was Dizzy Gillespie. "Even before Dizzy," says Chuck, "I listened to Louis Armstrong and Harry James, and later I bought every trumpet album I could. Clifford Brown was so important, and so were good players like Kenny Dorham and Lee Morgan and Bill Hard¬man. And the first time I saw Freddie Hubbard at Birdland, in 1958, I couldn't believe it—I thought it was Sonny Rollins playing the trumpet, he just devastated everybody. But you know I'm in love with Dizzy's playing and have been forever."
The second time Gillespie visited the Mangione home, he gave Chuck his second-best "up-do" trumpet (with the bell sticking up at a 45-degree angle), which Chuck played for Years, right on through the music presented here. This trumpet was revered and treasured by Chuck until the summer of 1976, when the New York Jazz Museum persuaded him to loan Dizzy's horn for an exhibit that included trumpets belonging to Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Miles Davis and Roy Eldridge. Unfortunately, a few months later the horn was stolen—the fishline supporting it was apparently burned through by a thief who was encouraged by the museum's lack of an alarm system.
Chuck calls Gillespie his "musical father," with an influence that goes beyond the music: "He was the first jazzman I ever saw who not only knocked me out musically but who could communicate with people. He invites you into the music and isn't afraid to show you he's having fun up there." Anyone who's seen Chuck perform knows how much he's taken that attitude to heart.
From 1958 through 1963, Chuck simultaneously was performing with the Mangione band and attending Rochester's famed Eastman School of Music (Gap's degree was achieved at Syracuse over an eight-year span, 1957-65, during which he went "from Jim Brown through Ernie Davis, Jim Nance, Floyd Little and Larry Csonka"). There wasn't much jazz to study at Eastman, but it was there that Chuck first picked up the flugelhorn (which he now plays exclusively) and first composed the kind of orchestral pieces that today are his trademark. Years later, he returned to teach at Eastman, greatly expanding the jazz program there and also establishing city- and countywide jazz ensembles.
In those early years Chuck's academic life was tempered by his knowledge that he "was gonna be a jazz bebop player." And, in fact, he already was. Mostly, the Jazz Brothers played around Rochester, at the Bubble Lounge, Sparky's, the El Echo, places that weren't actually jazz clubs, but where the Mangiones would bring their own following. Eventually, with Gap doing the bookings, the band ventured out of town more frequently: "When we weren't playing the Half Note or Five Spot in New York," Chuck says, "we played the Minor Key in Detroit or the Crawford Grill in Pittsburgh."
One story about driving to Pittsburgh reveals just how barely post-adolescent Chuck was at the time. Gap tells it: "We were packing up in my Peugeot, about to leave for two or three weeks. And my beloved mother was going through her litany, 'Have you brought your handkerchiefs, have you got your pencils, your music?' And we're going, 'Oh, Mom, look, we're okay.' Then she says, 'Chuck, have you got your trumpet?' And he gets out of the car, goes into the house and gets his axe. From then on we never bothered her about bothering us again."
Chuck tells another tale, about the time the band was playing four nights a week at the Gaiety in Albany (upstate New York), for $60/man each week: "The bread was so bad that in order to survive we had to live in a trailer all together, one of those places where you had to walk fifty yards to get into the shower. And it was wintertime, it was freezing, and everybody had an assignment to fill. We had to live together so close, but I was having a ball, even though the other cats were brought down—there was nothing to do but go ice skating or bowling. What it did was make you really focus in on the gig. The highlight was to get out of that trailer and onto the bandstand."
In those days, Gap says, the band had somewhere between 60 and 100 songs in their book. "We were organized, and so were the arrangements. The thing was to balance the ensemble and solo sections. We couldn't stretch out too long and still keep people's attention." Chucks adds, "We took our lead from the major bands of the day, all those great quintets, but we wouldn't duplicate an arrangement. I learned a lot back then about writing for two horns and making a big sound."
Orrin Keepnews remembers one occasion when the Mangiones played at the old Half Note in New York: "They were just about the same band as on the record and Donald Byrd said to me- 'These guys could make a fortune if they would only change their name to the Afro Sicilian Jazz Band.' Today I guess you really could do just that, but in the context of those times it was strictly a joke.
"The first Jazz Brothers record was also one of the first 'Cannonball Adderley Presents' albums--Cannon had the freedom to produce young bands that he dug, (I also used to claim that Cannon used them to restock his own band, because McCurdy of course became his drummer (for nine years) and Walter Booker was the bass player in a Washington group he produced."
In 1960, Keepnews viewed Chuck as "a kid bebop player," but also could see and feel some of the young trumpeter's potential as a big-band writer: "I had a frustrated ambition," Keepnews says. "The first time I heard the composition 'Recuerdo,' I wanted Tadd Dameron to write and record a big-band arrangement of it. Tadd liked the tune, but we just never got around to it. Not to get terribly heavy about it, but at that time I believe I heard Chuck in the way he was then or later hearing himself."
Chuck is thankful in retrospect that his earliest recording sessions were conducted by Adderley and Keepnews in such a relaxed way: "When Cannonball was with us in the studio, he would say, 'Yeah,' or 'One more'—just keep everybody loose. And Orrin would come out once in a while just to make sure everybody had their water glasses full, and say, 'Yeah,' or 'We're getting close.' The music was very unproduced—he had faith in the band and would never say 'let me hear the material first.' One thing Orrin taught me that I've always maintained is that you hang on to your artistic integrity, you control your own music. He respected us enough as musicians to give us a fair shake, let us be what we felt we should be without trying to change us or to direct the music someplace else."
The Jazz Brothers sides here contain music that is both carefully arranged and free-and-easy, reflecting the fact that this particular unit had gigged together for a long while. The material strikes a nice balance between originals and standards. The head of the first, Chuck's "Hey Baby," immediately establishes the mood, which is hard-working but insouciant. One thing Chuck says both Dizzy and Gap taught him was to always have a good time.
"Bags' Groove" was this session's blues, with Chuck's solo following another by Steve Davis (the bass and drums seem to be mixed unusually up for a recording of this period). Everyone edited his solo as he played, even the always energetic Nistico. Gap sounds especially Basie-esque; on the first record he had wanted to sound like Horace Silver, but here, he says, "My whole trip was to add more space to my playing- I didn't do that heavy comping with my left hand, but got more into a Red Garland kind of thing."
"The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" is the first extended example here of Nistico's lush but airborne style; Gap comps gently behind Sal, then steps out smartly to play a solo .bristling with ideas stated in brief breaths and bursts. "Gym' the Business," written by Frank Pullara (who later became the Jazz Brothers' bassist), is another good vehicle for the Nistico tenor; he swings terrifically with a tone that is full-bodied without being bossy, while Chuck takes a solo that is as confident as anything he plays in this package. Meantime, McCurdy loudly marks the beat on his ride cymbal while tossing off subtly booting accents with his left hand.
"Wha's Happ'nin'," written by Nistico, with its fleet, peck-filled head and simple subsequent arrangement, is delightful all the way around. Sal makes his tenor sound like an alto (as Stan Getz often has); Chuck sounds like the ebullient Dizzy; and Gap's solo is an entertaining broken-field run that ends with several of Horace Silver's explosive chords.
"Just You, Just Me" is another bright tune on which Chuck solos happily. Then comes a long ballad, "Old Folks," almost exclusively given over to Chuck's muted musings, which sound like an unlikely cross between Miles and Harry James—Chuck's tone is intimate but also a little harsh as he stretches out, his one slightly excessive indulgence on the record.
The last Jazz Brothers song here, "The Bassett Sound," is a light-hearted composition by Chuck, who playfully tacks on a few Gillespie smears to the end of his solo. This was dedicated, Chuck says, "to a disc jockey in Rochester, Bob Bassett, who would do a live music broadcast every Saturday night at 7 o'clock. For a while we played every week."
In 1962, when Chuck made his first album under his own name, Recuerdo, he had already had three Jazz Brothers LPs under his belt, so, though only 21, was no stranger to the recording studio. Still, he felt slightly hesitant about assuming leadership in the company of such accomplished musicians. As he told Gene Lees (who wrote the original liner notes): "Who was I to be calling Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Lou Hayes to play on my date? And there was Joe Romano. ... He spent two years with Woody Herman and recorded a little with him. But he'd never had a chance to record the way he wanted, to stretch out. ... Here's a cat from whom I've learned so much.... I almost felt it should have been his record date."
Chuck still agrees with that statement, but his modesty is quickly given the lie by the title track, "Recuerdo," an exotic composition and arrangement complete with Hayes's quasi-Oriental mallet playing. (This is the tune that Keep-news wanted to give to arranger Dameron, and close listening uncovers hints of Mangione's later style on flugelhorn.)
Charlie Parker's "Big Foot" was the last tune recorded on the session; annotator Lees felt that it displayed the players in their most relaxed state. Romano plays with a tone here that is a little raspy but also has a light, dancing quality; Mangione enjoys himself as usual; Jones aggressively rushes through his solo like an Olympic walker nearing the finish line; and Kelly takes a long double-time solo that still manages to lag ever-so-slightly behind the beat.
"I Had the Craziest Dream" features Mangione's muted trumpet, his precarious, breakable tone offset by mellow, legato phrasing; then Romano gets off a breathily romantic solo that suddenly shifts up to a bold I-want-you statement ... the tune shows how a masterful, mature rhythm section can bring out the best in younger soloists.
The remaining tracks offer straight-ahead, satisfying music of a generally high order. Sam Jones's big, tough melodic statement of Miles Davis's "Solar" is bracing, while Mangione's fragile chorus on "If Ever I Should Leave You" is overwhelmed by the titanic Kelly solo which follows. Chuck's two additional compositions, "Blues for Saandar" and "The Little Prince," show, respectively, his abilities at manipulating the bebop idiom and his incipient talent for writing pretty horn arrangements.
Both these discs mirror a philosophy Chuck held when they were recorded and, he says, still holds today: "I never liked tests to see how long someone could play something. The music I enjoyed most was clear, was organized, and had great improvisations balanced by great ensemble playing. But most of all, I think the Jazz Brothers was a happy band, and the musicians who made my first album were happy playing together, and that's the way they all played the music."
- Conrad Silvert
Not many people today know that Chuck Mangione—the man who wears a beard and long hair beneath a pheasant-feathered hat, and who, with his flugelhorn and electric piano, leads two of the most successful, happiest-sounding bands (one an orchestra and one a quartet) currently working—once upon a time wore a short crew cut, Conti¬nental suit, and was trumpet player and junior partner in a band known as The Jazz Brothers, led by his big brother Gaspare (Gap) Mangione.
Back in 1960, when Chuck was 19 and Gap 21, the two worked in and around their native Rochester, N.Y., as the Mangione Brothers sextet, playing the lively, demanding hard bop that had been created in the Fifties by leaders who were the Mangiones' idols: Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Clifford Brown, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, and a few others.
As the brothers acquired a big hometown reputation, Gap decided to form a little company, Manco, in order to put out an introductory single, "Struttin' with Sandra." According to Chuck, the 45 got good local support and even was played on a few Top 40 stations. Gap relates what came next: "Friends of ours laid the single on Nat Adder-ley. He' liked it, came by the club, and, still liking the music, talked to Cannon when they were playing Toronto. Then Cannon asked us to record an album for Riverside [The Jazz Brothers, a name Gap says was given them by publicist Billie Wallington], which we naturally accepted." Gap recalls that when he traveled back to New York to finalize the deal, he found both Adderley brothers at work in the studio as part of the all-star lineup of a Jimmy Heath Riverside album, Really Big. Other musicians on the date included Tootie and Percy Heath, Nat Adderley, Clark Terry, and Cedar Walton. Gap was impressed.
The first Jazz Brothers album was a full-steam-ahead excursion into bebop. "On that first record," Gap says, "I had wanted nothing more in the world than to sound like Horace Silver." In the album liner notes, Riverside executive and chief producer (and the man responsible for this reissue) Orrin Keepnews was, to say the least, enthusiastic: "One of the freshest and most vibrant young groups, [The Jazz Brothers) are an incredibly mature and richly talented unit. ... The term 'jazz brothers' can readily be taken as applying to the group as a whole, not just to the two related co-leaders."
That album was made by what was then the working Mangione sextet, which included Sal Nistico on tenor and Roy McCurdy on drums, plus Larry Combs (alto) and Bill Saunder (bass). Chuck remembers Nistico as the band's catalyst: "You can hear the fire and spark that Sal gave to the band. His playing was so energetic, very warm—one of those guys who sounded totally unique. When Sal would play the first note for a new audience, heads would turn around. All this energy was bouncing out so intensely and logically from this guy all the time, but it wasn't an intellectual thrill you got from him. It was uplifting."
By the time their second album, Hey Baby! (produced by Keepnews and reissued here), was recorded, the Jazz Brothers had become a quintet, retaining Nistico and McCurdy and with Steve Davis (best known for his work with the John Coltrane quartet) as the bassist. "On the first record I had arranged four of the tunes," Gap says, "but the second was more of a group effort. The assignments got more spread around, and the music was still organized, but looser, because we were a quintet, which gave everyone a chance to play."
Chuck's first and only Riverside album as sole leader, Recuerdo, was recorded a year later for the subsidiary Jazzland label with an entirely different supporting cast. The tenor sax player was Chuck's hometown friend Joe Romano; the two had the rare luxury of recording with a dream rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Louis Hayes. "What flattery," Chuck says. "Wynton Kelly You know, when you first meet someone you have no idea what personality is behind the music. But Wynton really beautiful. He was far ahead of me musically, I felt, but I didn't get a condescending feeling back from him. He was very warm, and was there to do it right. In fact, Wynton and Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb came up to play with Joe Romano and me one weekend in Rochester. It was fun—they didn't come on heavy, even though they were the players at the time, in the band [Miles Davis's). And that's how my record date went down. Orrin and I called Miles's piano player and Cannon's drummer and bass player, and said, 'drop on by and in six hours we'll record an album together.' There was no rehearsal. Just run the tune down, explain it, and record it."
Charles Frank Mangione was born in Rochester Novem¬ber 29, 1940, to parents who didn't play any musical instruments (Papa Frank ran a grocery store while Mama Nancy prepared the pasta at home) but who generously encouraged their children's musical proclivities. Chuck be¬gan piano lessons at the age of eight, and, two years later, after being turned on by a portrayal of Bix Beiderbecke in the film Young Man with a Horn, switched to trumpet lessons.
"I was very lucky," Chuck says, "that six months after I started playing trumpet I was also performing, with Gap playing accordion, even though it was at Italian weddings and Jewish Bar Mitzvahs. And later, with our hand, it was after-hours or any kind of thing, but it was a blowing thing a whole lot of the time. And I think it was an original band, with a lot of fire that was representative of the musicians who we idolized."
Chuck credits Gap with planting the disciplinary seeds that have aided Chuck's success as a musician, teacher, composer, and bandleader: "I always was the total lunatic and never thought twice about the fact that everybody would have to be paid sooner or later. Gap was the organic ing force, disciplined the band. He would be writing charts, calling the rehearsals. He got me into improvisation, and was writing big band charts at the age of twelve—scared the heck out of me.
"I was very slow about making a musical decision. I used to sit at the piano, arranging or orchestrating something. I'd pound out a voicing underneath one note, for hours, couldn't make up my mind. Once I had been at it for half a day, when Gap walked in from the other room, looked at me, and said, 'You've got exactly thirty seconds to make a choice.' I really needed that boot."
While Gap was playing the role of mentor, Chuck's father Frank would take both kids under his wings for regular visits to the top local jazz club, the Ridgecrest, where he would proceed to invite the musicians to the Mangione home for some good Italian cooking and maybe a little jam session. "We really had some times playing in our house," Chuck says. "Ron Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Kai Winding, Junior Cook, Junior Mance, Jimmy Cobb, every-body was there, eating and playing."
One frequent visitor was Dizzy Gillespie. "Even before Dizzy," says Chuck, "I listened to Louis Armstrong and Harry James, and later I bought every trumpet album I could. Clifford Brown was so important, and so were good players like Kenny Dorham and Lee Morgan and Bill Hard¬man. And the first time I saw Freddie Hubbard at Birdland, in 1958, I couldn't believe it—I thought it was Sonny Rollins playing the trumpet, he just devastated everybody. But you know I'm in love with Dizzy's playing and have been forever."
The second time Gillespie visited the Mangione home, he gave Chuck his second-best "up-do" trumpet (with the bell sticking up at a 45-degree angle), which Chuck played for Years, right on through the music presented here. This trumpet was revered and treasured by Chuck until the summer of 1976, when the New York Jazz Museum persuaded him to loan Dizzy's horn for an exhibit that included trumpets belonging to Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Miles Davis and Roy Eldridge. Unfortunately, a few months later the horn was stolen—the fishline supporting it was apparently burned through by a thief who was encouraged by the museum's lack of an alarm system.
Chuck calls Gillespie his "musical father," with an influence that goes beyond the music: "He was the first jazzman I ever saw who not only knocked me out musically but who could communicate with people. He invites you into the music and isn't afraid to show you he's having fun up there." Anyone who's seen Chuck perform knows how much he's taken that attitude to heart.
From 1958 through 1963, Chuck simultaneously was performing with the Mangione band and attending Rochester's famed Eastman School of Music (Gap's degree was achieved at Syracuse over an eight-year span, 1957-65, during which he went "from Jim Brown through Ernie Davis, Jim Nance, Floyd Little and Larry Csonka"). There wasn't much jazz to study at Eastman, but it was there that Chuck first picked up the flugelhorn (which he now plays exclusively) and first composed the kind of orchestral pieces that today are his trademark. Years later, he returned to teach at Eastman, greatly expanding the jazz program there and also establishing city- and countywide jazz ensembles.
In those early years Chuck's academic life was tempered by his knowledge that he "was gonna be a jazz bebop player." And, in fact, he already was. Mostly, the Jazz Brothers played around Rochester, at the Bubble Lounge, Sparky's, the El Echo, places that weren't actually jazz clubs, but where the Mangiones would bring their own following. Eventually, with Gap doing the bookings, the band ventured out of town more frequently: "When we weren't playing the Half Note or Five Spot in New York," Chuck says, "we played the Minor Key in Detroit or the Crawford Grill in Pittsburgh."
One story about driving to Pittsburgh reveals just how barely post-adolescent Chuck was at the time. Gap tells it: "We were packing up in my Peugeot, about to leave for two or three weeks. And my beloved mother was going through her litany, 'Have you brought your handkerchiefs, have you got your pencils, your music?' And we're going, 'Oh, Mom, look, we're okay.' Then she says, 'Chuck, have you got your trumpet?' And he gets out of the car, goes into the house and gets his axe. From then on we never bothered her about bothering us again."
Chuck tells another tale, about the time the band was playing four nights a week at the Gaiety in Albany (upstate New York), for $60/man each week: "The bread was so bad that in order to survive we had to live in a trailer all together, one of those places where you had to walk fifty yards to get into the shower. And it was wintertime, it was freezing, and everybody had an assignment to fill. We had to live together so close, but I was having a ball, even though the other cats were brought down—there was nothing to do but go ice skating or bowling. What it did was make you really focus in on the gig. The highlight was to get out of that trailer and onto the bandstand."
In those days, Gap says, the band had somewhere between 60 and 100 songs in their book. "We were organized, and so were the arrangements. The thing was to balance the ensemble and solo sections. We couldn't stretch out too long and still keep people's attention." Chucks adds, "We took our lead from the major bands of the day, all those great quintets, but we wouldn't duplicate an arrangement. I learned a lot back then about writing for two horns and making a big sound."
Orrin Keepnews remembers one occasion when the Mangiones played at the old Half Note in New York: "They were just about the same band as on the record and Donald Byrd said to me- 'These guys could make a fortune if they would only change their name to the Afro Sicilian Jazz Band.' Today I guess you really could do just that, but in the context of those times it was strictly a joke.
"The first Jazz Brothers record was also one of the first 'Cannonball Adderley Presents' albums--Cannon had the freedom to produce young bands that he dug, (I also used to claim that Cannon used them to restock his own band, because McCurdy of course became his drummer (for nine years) and Walter Booker was the bass player in a Washington group he produced."
In 1960, Keepnews viewed Chuck as "a kid bebop player," but also could see and feel some of the young trumpeter's potential as a big-band writer: "I had a frustrated ambition," Keepnews says. "The first time I heard the composition 'Recuerdo,' I wanted Tadd Dameron to write and record a big-band arrangement of it. Tadd liked the tune, but we just never got around to it. Not to get terribly heavy about it, but at that time I believe I heard Chuck in the way he was then or later hearing himself."
Chuck is thankful in retrospect that his earliest recording sessions were conducted by Adderley and Keepnews in such a relaxed way: "When Cannonball was with us in the studio, he would say, 'Yeah,' or 'One more'—just keep everybody loose. And Orrin would come out once in a while just to make sure everybody had their water glasses full, and say, 'Yeah,' or 'We're getting close.' The music was very unproduced—he had faith in the band and would never say 'let me hear the material first.' One thing Orrin taught me that I've always maintained is that you hang on to your artistic integrity, you control your own music. He respected us enough as musicians to give us a fair shake, let us be what we felt we should be without trying to change us or to direct the music someplace else."
The Jazz Brothers sides here contain music that is both carefully arranged and free-and-easy, reflecting the fact that this particular unit had gigged together for a long while. The material strikes a nice balance between originals and standards. The head of the first, Chuck's "Hey Baby," immediately establishes the mood, which is hard-working but insouciant. One thing Chuck says both Dizzy and Gap taught him was to always have a good time.
"Bags' Groove" was this session's blues, with Chuck's solo following another by Steve Davis (the bass and drums seem to be mixed unusually up for a recording of this period). Everyone edited his solo as he played, even the always energetic Nistico. Gap sounds especially Basie-esque; on the first record he had wanted to sound like Horace Silver, but here, he says, "My whole trip was to add more space to my playing- I didn't do that heavy comping with my left hand, but got more into a Red Garland kind of thing."
"The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" is the first extended example here of Nistico's lush but airborne style; Gap comps gently behind Sal, then steps out smartly to play a solo .bristling with ideas stated in brief breaths and bursts. "Gym' the Business," written by Frank Pullara (who later became the Jazz Brothers' bassist), is another good vehicle for the Nistico tenor; he swings terrifically with a tone that is full-bodied without being bossy, while Chuck takes a solo that is as confident as anything he plays in this package. Meantime, McCurdy loudly marks the beat on his ride cymbal while tossing off subtly booting accents with his left hand.
"Wha's Happ'nin'," written by Nistico, with its fleet, peck-filled head and simple subsequent arrangement, is delightful all the way around. Sal makes his tenor sound like an alto (as Stan Getz often has); Chuck sounds like the ebullient Dizzy; and Gap's solo is an entertaining broken-field run that ends with several of Horace Silver's explosive chords.
"Just You, Just Me" is another bright tune on which Chuck solos happily. Then comes a long ballad, "Old Folks," almost exclusively given over to Chuck's muted musings, which sound like an unlikely cross between Miles and Harry James—Chuck's tone is intimate but also a little harsh as he stretches out, his one slightly excessive indulgence on the record.
The last Jazz Brothers song here, "The Bassett Sound," is a light-hearted composition by Chuck, who playfully tacks on a few Gillespie smears to the end of his solo. This was dedicated, Chuck says, "to a disc jockey in Rochester, Bob Bassett, who would do a live music broadcast every Saturday night at 7 o'clock. For a while we played every week."
In 1962, when Chuck made his first album under his own name, Recuerdo, he had already had three Jazz Brothers LPs under his belt, so, though only 21, was no stranger to the recording studio. Still, he felt slightly hesitant about assuming leadership in the company of such accomplished musicians. As he told Gene Lees (who wrote the original liner notes): "Who was I to be calling Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Lou Hayes to play on my date? And there was Joe Romano. ... He spent two years with Woody Herman and recorded a little with him. But he'd never had a chance to record the way he wanted, to stretch out. ... Here's a cat from whom I've learned so much.... I almost felt it should have been his record date."
Chuck still agrees with that statement, but his modesty is quickly given the lie by the title track, "Recuerdo," an exotic composition and arrangement complete with Hayes's quasi-Oriental mallet playing. (This is the tune that Keep-news wanted to give to arranger Dameron, and close listening uncovers hints of Mangione's later style on flugelhorn.)
Charlie Parker's "Big Foot" was the last tune recorded on the session; annotator Lees felt that it displayed the players in their most relaxed state. Romano plays with a tone here that is a little raspy but also has a light, dancing quality; Mangione enjoys himself as usual; Jones aggressively rushes through his solo like an Olympic walker nearing the finish line; and Kelly takes a long double-time solo that still manages to lag ever-so-slightly behind the beat.
"I Had the Craziest Dream" features Mangione's muted trumpet, his precarious, breakable tone offset by mellow, legato phrasing; then Romano gets off a breathily romantic solo that suddenly shifts up to a bold I-want-you statement ... the tune shows how a masterful, mature rhythm section can bring out the best in younger soloists.
The remaining tracks offer straight-ahead, satisfying music of a generally high order. Sam Jones's big, tough melodic statement of Miles Davis's "Solar" is bracing, while Mangione's fragile chorus on "If Ever I Should Leave You" is overwhelmed by the titanic Kelly solo which follows. Chuck's two additional compositions, "Blues for Saandar" and "The Little Prince," show, respectively, his abilities at manipulating the bebop idiom and his incipient talent for writing pretty horn arrangements.
Both these discs mirror a philosophy Chuck held when they were recorded and, he says, still holds today: "I never liked tests to see how long someone could play something. The music I enjoyed most was clear, was organized, and had great improvisations balanced by great ensemble playing. But most of all, I think the Jazz Brothers was a happy band, and the musicians who made my first album were happy playing together, and that's the way they all played the music."
- Conrad Silvert
Conrad Silvert is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.