Today is the 100th anniversary of Clark Terry's birth. In celebration of the day, here is an article I wrote in 2015 while Editor of Duke Ellington Society UK journal Blue Light.
In 1999 when Columbia Legacy released Such Sweet Thunder in stereo for the first time, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued when it came to light that the alternative stereo version of Up and Down, Up and Down the producers had selected for inclusion did not include the famous coda played by Clark Terry quoting Puck’s line ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’.
Those few bars seem to capture the very spirit of the musician. Of the brass players in the studio that day, 24 April 1957, one can imagine the phrase being played by no other soloist than Clark. In its measure are all the candour, warmth and humour of not just Clark Terry’s approach to playing the trumpet or flugelhorn but his approach to life.
Approaching his thirty-first birthday when he joined Ellington, he was, of course, a different musical generation to Stewart and his playing spoke - like his contemporary Paul Gonsalves who had joined the orchestra a year before - rather, the language of be- bop. The Ellington orchestra was more than ready to absorb and reflect this musical development, however. Earlier that year The Coronets had recorded Hoppin’ John – a bop-flavoured variation on the chords of Perdidio which was incorporated subsequently into later performances of the Tizol standard itself, including the version on the album Ellington Uptown. This version was Clark’s first major solo excursion on record with the Ellington aggregation. His two solo statements in the piece, separated by a trombone choir à la Cosmic Scene and the aforementioned Hoppin’ John, demonstrate the fecundity of ideas, the technical facility and the predilection for quotation (amongst others, here, a reference to the obscure pop standard Cynthia’s In Love) characteristic of the bop school. They herald the arrival of a brilliant new star within the Ellington firmament more than capable of holding his own against the rest of the brass team as the stand off which occurs towards the climax of the arrangement proves.
The sound was instantly recognizable: buoyant and confident, as modern and sleek as the lines on a Cadillac convertible or perhaps one should say, rather, the ‘longest automobile you’ve ever seen, eighty-eight cylinders’ driven through town one night at 440 miles per hour by Madam Zajj. It is Clark’s inventive, cupped, pungent boppish brass figures one hears behind Ellington’s narration during this number from A Drum Is A Woman.
Typically for this rich, allegorical fantasy – parallel to the history of jazz – Ellington cast against type: whilst Clark brought a modish new contemporary sound to the Orchestra – a breath of fresh air - it was a solo in the most traditional fashion Ellington sought from his new star turn. The responsibility with which he was tasked prompted Terry to aspire to heights beyond his stature and depths beyond his sounding. So adept a musician with such a range, Clark was not found wanting in the challenge. It was a story he told many times himself, in that chuckling, intimate tone – brandy warming in a glass – which in many ways was characteristic of the way he played the horn:
“I told him, ‘Maestro, I don’t know anything about Buddy Bolden. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Duke said, ‘Oh, sure, you’re Buddy Bolden. He was just like you. He was suave. He had a good tone, he bent notes, he was big with diminishes, he loved the ladies, and when he blew a note in New Orleans, he’d break glass across the river in Algiers. Come on, you can do it.’ I told him I’d try, and I blew some phrases, and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s Buddy Bolden, that’s it, Sweetie.’ That’s how Maestro was. He could get out of you anything he wanted. And he made you believe you could do it. I suppose that’s why they used to say the band was his instrument. The Buddy Bolden thing is on the record, and Duke was satisfied. So as far as I’m concerned, it was Buddy Bolden.”
Participation in sessions for Ellington’s next album, Such Sweet Thunder, were sandwiched between studio time for Clark’s own first full album as leader, Serenade to a Bus Seat on the Riverside label. As early as 1954, Ellington seems to have been quite relaxed about sidemen such as Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves and Clark Terry participating in numerous sessions under their own name. No sideman’s efforts in this area were more conspicuous than Clark’s, however. He had led several sessions for Emarcy Records, which were compiled in various configurations as albums. It was a session as last- minute sideman for Thelonious Monk’s album Brilliant Corners which brought his potential to the attention of producer Orrin Keepnews (who passed away a little over a week after Clark Terry on 1 March, 2015). As Keepnews himself related the story in the original album’s liner notes:
“A jazz-magazine editor had suggested that we do a Clark Terry album. At precisely that time we were in the midst of cutting a Thelonious Monk LP. One sideman unexpectedly left town on a long road trip, Terry happened to be in town, and Monk unhesitatingly picked him to fill the gap. That meant a lot all by itself: Monk’s approval, never loosely given, has always counted for a great deal around this label. The clincher came in hearing Clark at the session.”
The album’s title was an allusion to ‘the story of my life’ as Clark called it: a life on the road, travelling with the big bands.
In his liner notes, Keepnews asserted that “...while his work with Duke has brought him to the attention of many, it has also had to mean fairly limited solo opportunities and a general subordination of his personal style and ideas to the quite specific requirements of the Ellington sound.”
The album found Clark in a much more contemporary setting: two thirds of the rhythm section on the date – Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums were making waves as two thirds of the rhythm section on what became known as the ‘First Great Quintet’ of Miles Davis (the group’s first album for Columbia, ’Round About Midnight had been released in March, 1957, just a month before this session with Terry) and the third member of the rhythm section – Wynton Kelly – would join Davis for one track (Freddie Freeloader) on the seminal album Kind of Blue before taking up a place permanently with the Davis group for the next four years.
The title track finds Clark doubling with tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin in the freewheeling, durable, long lines characteristic of the school of hard bop. ‘Jaunty’ perhaps describes Clark’s solo work here; not an adjective one would apply to his sometime pupil and fellow denizen of St Louis, to whom Clark always referred as ‘Dewey’. Six years his junior, the career of Miles Davis described a very different arc. Davis’s clinical, probing solos, the very sound of isolation, couched in those dark, spare, linear arrangements could hardly stand in more stark contrast to Clark Terry’s music and approach.
Serenade to a Bus Seat was later often mistaken as a reference to Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks. Whatever iniquities Clark Terry suffered in that way (and he did), this was not an aspect of his life he ever chose to bring to an understanding of his work. This makes a larger and very important point about the man and his music. It was no coincidence that as a graduate of ‘the University of Ellingtonia’, his commitment to his history or heritage expressed itself professionally in a very similar way to ‘Maestro’.
In his essay Duke Ellington’s legacy and influence (in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington) Benjamin Bierman argues that one of the most important influences Ellington had over the young brass player was as ‘showman’. He says:
“What makes it all work, of course, is the extremely high level of musicality that even the casual listener can appreciate. That, in conjunction with his sense of humour and his obvious desire to embrace and entertain his audience, has made him a consummate musician and entertainer. Artists like Terry continue to show us that entertainment and high art can work together in an extremely effective and appealing manner – another important element of the Ellington legacy.”
All of this is certainly true. Equally, if not even more important, however, is the figure that Clark Terry cut within the entertainment business and his achievements within that industry because his achievements were at such a high and uncompromised level, despite the inherent social disadvantage of the times and the not inconsiderable difficulties of negotiating the politics of Civil Rights. At a time when the stereotype of black musicians as feckless, dissolute, unreliable players was an effective bar to the lucrative and secure world of studio session work, Clark Terry held down a lengthy tenure as a member of the NBC Tonight Show band. Whilst many of his contemporaries were constrained financially to leave the States for careers on the European continent, Clark forged ahead with a successful career in the most unforgiving of artistic environments, conducting himself with absolute professionalism, grace and good humour.
Not that Clark Terry’s art was all sunshine. True, it is difficult to imagine an album entitled The Happy Horns of Miles Davis, but there was darkness, too, in Clark’s work. I am reminded of Ian Carr’s memorable description that Terry’s ‘trumpet sound became full and non-brassy, with often a cry in the note or phrase, rather like a disembodied human voice’.
By and large, however, if Clark Terry chose, rather, to dwell in the sunlit uplands of his prodigious talent, his classical discipline, his consummate professionalism, well – in the end, such a choice, such values – a life lived well – proved themselves to be enduring when the light grew dim through the debilitating illness of his final years. His passion for teaching burned ever more brightly, however, documented movingly in Alan Hicks’s film Keep On Keepin’ On and Clark’s mentoring of the young pianist Justin Kauflin.
And always, there will be the sound of that horn, “the effortless rhythmic buoyancy, the bluesy phrases and the quicksilver surprises of articulated thought,” (Carr again); the sound that puts to flight our mortal folly.
Thank you for Clark Terry.
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