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LITTLE NILES
Blue Note
Randy Weston by Robert
Palmer
Pianist / composer Randy Weston has been associated throughout his career
with beautiful landscapes. He is no stranger to urban decay, having been
born and raised in Brooklyn, but the rolling hill country of the
Berkshires, in Massachusetts, and the Jebel or "little hills" just beyond
Tangier, Morocco have fascinated him, and drawn him irresistibly, over the
past twenty-five years. It was during summers in Lenox, 1950's summers
full of pastel sunsets, concerts by the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood,
and conversations with visitors such as poet Langston Hughes, dancer
Geoffrey Holder, and Riverside records president Bill Grauer, that Weston
decided to devote himself full-time to music. It was in Tangier, where he
lived for several years in a spacious apartment with a balcony facing the
hills, that he consolidated the most recent phase of his development by
becoming a connoisseur of the rhythms of Mother Africa.
Weston had yet to visit Africa when he recorded for United Artists, but
the Berkshires had left their mark. The cover of the Little Niles album
showed Randy on a leafy hillside with his son Niles and daughter Pamela.
The pastoral liner notes were by Langston Hughes. The titles "Earth
Birth," "Nice Ice," "Lets Climb A Hill" reflected the Berkshires
ambience. But above all, the music itself suggested air, sunlight, a
breeze blowing the clouds away. With its skipping piano improvisations -
beautifully recorded, by the way - and its brittle horn textures. Little
Niles is for me one of the two or three finest of Weston's dozen albums,
I've been listening to it regularly for fifteen years, ever since I bought
it, for $1.29, in a Little Rock, Arkansas Woolworth's. And it still sounds
fresh.
Weston's music wears well, but it has yet to make his name a household
word. More than one of his albums has been remaindered to Woolworth's like
Little Niles and seldom heard of again. In fact, the Live at the Five Spot
- LP which is also reissued in this package, and which features Randy's
early idol Coleman Hawkins, came as a complete, delightful surprise to me.
So rather than jump into effusive praise of the music, I'd like to begin
by sketching Randy Weston's life and career, including as I go along some
observations of the Weston household as I've encountered it in New York
and Tangier.
Randy was born April 6, 1926. His father, F.E. Weston. is a culinary
magician as well as a music lover, and although he called on Randy to help
out around his luncheonette, he also made sure the youngster had piano
lessons. "All I wanted to do was go out in the street and play ball,"
Randy later told Ira Gitler. "After three years of classical study, my
teacher gave up." But jazz began infiltrating Weston's consciousness when
he was twelve, and when he was fourteen a friend, drummer Al Harewood,
taught him a familiar song on the piano. Once Randy could relate something
he was playing to a melody he heard, there was no stopping him. He
practiced on his own and developed firm favorites, among them Basie,
Ellington. and Coleman Hawkins. Later in his teens he began gigging around
Brooklyn with the Sudanese bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, trumpeter Ray
Copeland, and baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne. He worked in Greenwich
Village with guitarist Huey Long before being drafted.
He was a supply sergeant in Okinawa and the Philippines, but spent most of
his Army years near New York. where he constantly visited 52nd Street.
Thelonious Monk was playing there with Coleman Hawkins, and Randy "didn't
think Monk was playing at all at the time, but I had such a respect for
Hawk that I said. 'This guy must be saying something or Hawk wouldn't have
him.' and I found myself going back." After he was discharged, in 1947,
Weston hung out with Monk, "studying," listening. "I felt." he told Gitler,
"that he was so heavily steeped in the basic blues, and yet he was able to
create modern ideas. A unique and ideal combination."
The styles of Weston's earlier pianistic influences, particularly Waller
and Ellington, were refined by Monk into a compacted essence. As a
beneficiary of this stylistic progression, Weston was able to find his own
balance. He was able to combine Monk's acerbic, ringing inversions with
Waller's effulgent fluency, to partake of the legacy of Harlem stride
which passed from Ellington to Monk almost unaltered without neglecting
Waller's more rococo variations, to become, in other words, a further link
in a strong, supple chain.
At the same time, other more exotic influences appeared very early. There
were the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Weston's partially West Indian heritage
and of the transplanted West Indians of the Brooklyn ghetto. There was the
explosion of New York Afro-Cuban music which so profoundly colored the
area's rhythmic atmosphere during the forties. As a teenager, Weston was
already hearing things "another way," His partner in crime was
Abdul-Malik; the two were often castigated by other musicians for their
harmonic and rhythmic innovations. Hearing Monk completed Randy's cycle of
influences in more ways than one. The experience reminded him of these
earlier experiments in Brooklyn and gave him an "ethnic connection with
self-expression ... without saying a word. Monk taught me, 'Play what you
feel although it may not be the way it's supposed to be.'"
The late forties should have been years when these inspirations flowered.
Instead, Randy worked in his father's luncheonette, unsure of what he
wanted to do. Max Roach and most of the other major figures of the bop
movement were regular customers, and Randy installed their records on the
jukebox, but somehow he wasn't quite aware that the music had become his
calling. New York can do that to you. Days can succeed one another, with
sights, sounds, and nagging notions of things to do assaulting your senses
from the moment you open your eyes. If you're not careful, you can spend
several years treading water, living from one sensory impression to the
next. When that happens, you need to get away and clear your head out, and
thus Randy took a job as a cook in Lenox during the early fifties. It was
there, at a camp for elderly refugees from Central Europe, that he
appeared in an informal concert, struck a chord in his listeners, and let
their reaction tell him what had eluded him in New York, that he was a
musician. During the next few years he met Marshall Steams, who was to
become an important force in his life and thought, and Bill Grauer. It was
Steams who started him thinking on the rich history and pre-history of
Jazz, as far back as West African roots. It was Grauer who arranged for
him to make his first recordings, for Riverside. In 1955 he won the new
star on piano award in Downbeat's critics' poll and formed the first of
many groups of his own.
There were plenty of ups and downs during the late fifties and early
sixties, but plenty of musical rewards. Weston was developing rapidly as a
composer, writing "Little Niles," "Hi-Fly," and "Where?." the
much-played waltz-time tunes which are perhaps his most enduring
contributions to jazz. He was working with the finest musicians, as the
presence of Hawkins. Kenny Dorham, Johnny Griffin, and Elvin Jones on
these sides indicates. And in 1961 he was able to make an all-important
direct connection with his heritage by visiting Africa for the first time.
F.E. Weston had first fired his son's interest in things African. "He
talked to me about Africa from the time I was three years old," Randy told
me years later. "He let me know that I had a heritage that was very rich
and that one day I should go back to Africa," Marshall Steams added fuel
to the fire: "In 1957 we began doing a history of jazz together in various
universities. Marshall did the lecturing and my band did African folklore,
calypso, dixieland, bop. We were showing the whole heritage of this music,
which is really what African peoples contributed to America. Marshall was
very interested in the West African beginnings of the music; he got
involved in finding out what groups of people came on the slave ships,
what happened when they arrived in America, how they acquired musical
instruments, and so on. Then he had a heart attack, and since he couldn't
continue to travel he suggested that I develop my own narration, which I
did."
Randy's 1961 trip was sponsored by the American Society of African
Culture. He was part of a black American delegation to Lagos, Nigeria
which included Langston Hughes, Geoffrey Holder, Lionel Hampton, and Nina
Simone. The visit was "a tremendous lesson and emotional experience. As a
child I grew up listening to Negro spirituals on Mom's side. I listened to
a lot of West Indian calypso on Pop's side. So when I went over there, I
heard both in their raw form. I heard the basic rhythms that I recognized
from the calypso music, and I heard some of the singing and hand-clapping
that I heard in the churches on Mom's side." In 1963, Weston returned to
Lagos for a 12-day visit. Then, in 1966, "my band was chosen by the State
Department to do a fourteen-country tour of Africa, Marshall was on the
board that selected us. Ironically, the article came out that we were
chosen to go and right next to it was a picture of Marshall, who had died.
I never had a chance to thank him."
Randy settled in Tangier following the tour and opened his own African
Rhythms Club. I met him there in 1971 and described the club in an
article in Rolling Stone, as "an opulent upstairs den, above the
Mauritania Cinema and across the Avenue du Prince Heritier from another
notable Tangier nightspot, the Parade bar. Each serves an overlapping
community of international expatriates and affluent, upwardly mobile
Moroccans. The Parade's garden exudes the scent of honeysuckle and the
aural elegance of records by Marlene Dietrich and Billie Holiday. Weston's
club is dark and smokey. To reach it, one climbs a winding orange
staircase, decorated with indistinct black faces fading into tribal
designs. The bar at the top may be crowded or empty but the center of
attention is invariably a central area that includes a dance floor and
bandstand. The club operates between 11 p.m. and the hours before dawn and
depending on the time of night the floor will be filled with couples
dancing to James Brown or cleared while Weston, an almost seven feet tall
apparition in a dashiki, plays his brand of jazz, which owes as much to
the rhythms of Moroccan folklore as to the bristling angularity of
Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington."
By this time, Randy's son Niles had grown into a young man who'd changed
his name to Azzedin and was a ferociously powerful conga drummer. F.E.
Weston was around when he wasn't in Panama or New York, and the evenings
my wife and I spent with the three of them are some of the most pleasant I
can remember. Weston Sr.'s cooking was one of the principal attractions,
to be sure. He would walk down into the souks or open-air markets of the
old, pre-European part of the city in the morning and haggle over produce
like the most experienced Berber barterer, returning with treasures for
which he paid mere pennies. He would then apply the sort of creativity
many musicians think is their own exclusive preserve, putting soul-food
and traditional Moroccan culinary ideas together with élan. Randy would
keep putting the mellowest jazz records on his turntable and Azzedin would
regale us with tales concerning his latest adventures around town. Once, I
remember, he told how he'd taken his conga to sit in with devotees of one
of the mystical brotherhoods. "They started going into trance after
awhile," he said. "cutting themselves with knives and things. One of them
stuck his whole head into the flame of a torch and his beard wasn't even
singed. I began to get the idea that I wasn't wanted, so I packed up my
drum and split."
There was no such thing as a generation gap around this Weston household.
Dad would cook, gab, and go to bed early, Randy would go to the club and
perform with his son, friends would be in and out, and never did I see
signs of any misunderstandings due to age or relative experience and
inexperience. Several years later Randy gave a party in Queens and again,
the generations were at peace. Ed Blackwell, who'd toured Africa with
Randy, and a few younger players of post-modernist persuasion were there. J.J,
Johnson stopped by. R.E. Weston forced his visitors to down quantities
of liquor in the interest of conviviality and then allowed that he never
drank himself. Azzedin and his buddies were in and out, along with French
visitors, jazz critics, and God knows who else. The scene had been
transported from the Arabian nights to the most prosaic urban setting with
its soul
and humor intact.
And that's just the way I feel about the music in this album. It has that
mixture of modernity and blues roots which Weston admired in Monk's work,
and its soul and good humor have survived more than a decade with style
and grace. The three sessions are diverse. The Little Niles date features
a sextet playing colorful, relatively tightly-knit arrangements. The six
tunes from the Five Spot are performed by a much more loosely organized
ensemble: the wonderfully authoritative work of Coleman Hawkins and the
poignant lyricism of Kenny Dorham are the music's most immediately
attractive attributes. In addition to the entire contents of these two
LP's, four tunes from Destry Rides Again, featuring a Weston quartet plus
four trombones, have been added. The jazzman-plays- show-tunes era may be
one many jazzmen would rather forget, but these four selections find Randy
in a relaxed, playful mood and afford a rare glimpse of his abilities as
an interpreter of other composers material. In addition, the rhythm
section features Afro-Cuban percussionist Willie Rodriguez and an
exuberant Elvin Jones and in its multi-textured layering and polyrhythmic
complexity foreshadows Weston's later use of African Rhythms.
Melba Liston's charts provided an underlying unity for all three dates.
She was closely associated with Randy's music at the time, having already
worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Gerald Wilson as trombonist and arranger
and toured Europe with Quincy Jones. Just as Hall Overton translated
Monk's peculiar sonorities into orchestral terms with a fidelity nobody
else has been able to match, Melba is the one arranger and orchestrator
who has been able to turn horns into an extension of Weston's piano. The
arrangements included herein abound with touches that make you want to cry
out with pleasure. Some of my favorites include the crystalline intro to
"Nice Ice," the way the close voicings and parade drumming interact in a
glorious epiphany on "Little Susan," the entwined, hocket-like trombone
choir under the piano on "Once Knew A Fella." Another of Melba's
trademarks is her fondness for breaking solos down into exchanges a few
bars in length, a practice which builds incredible excitement on "Little
Niles" and "Hi-Fly." But why don't I stop and let you discover these
things for yourself?
1978 Robert Palmer
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