Art
Farmer looked every inch the
Euro-gentleman as he took the bandstand at Catalina's
one night in 1991. His gray, single-breasted suit
jacket hung flawlessly, caught in front by a single
button, and his French cuffs showed a carefully
measured band of white as he lifted his instrument to
his lips.
''I'm
Old Fashioned,'' a vintage Jerome Kern song from a
1942 Fred Astaire picture, was his opening number. As
he grasped his horn, you could see that he wore a gold
signet ring with a dark stone. The antique bagatelle,
like his music, like his presence, brought a touch of
Old World elegance to the sleazy environs of Cahuenga
and Hollywood boulevards.
The manicured fingers moved lightly
and sound emerged from the brass bell, sound like that
of a cello, not brassy and martial but dark and
daintily melancholy. The instrument was not shiny but
had a dull, antique finish, and the tubing was curved
like a shepherd's crook.
As Farmer deftly assembled his
phrases, they took shape like a drawing by Degas,
pastoral in tone but cosmopolitan in substance. A
forward motion was felt, swift and sure yet precise,
like the trotting of a race horse.
The
set was thoughtfully gaited. Coltrane's
''Moment's Notice'' next offered serenely furious
moments of modernism. ''Sad to Say,'' by Farmer's old
partner Benny Golson, was about mourning and grief.
''Isfahan,'' a late Billy Strayhorn work, met harmonic
complexity and made it sing. ''Cherokee Sketches'' was
a bebop barnburner.
In its gemlike perfection it all
seemed a far cry from the days when Farmer was
breaking into the big time on Central Avenue, jobbing
with the raunchy crews of Johnny Otis, Gerald Wilson
and Roy Porter. He recorded the sardonic “Farmer’s
Market” with Wardell Gray, another Central Avenue
denizen.
The kid went out with Lionel
Hampton, then settled in New York to work with Horace
Silver, Gigi Gryce, Art Blakey, Charlie Mingus and
Gerry Mulligan, before joining Golson for the
immortal Jazztet that made their names in the late
1950s with tunes like "Killer Joe" and
"I Remember Clifford."
Later he worked with a fondly
remembered group co-led by the guitarist Jim Hall,
with whom he recorded an unforgettable and deeply
swinging version of "Stompin' at the Savoy."
Farmer
lived in Vienna, Austria, where he'd
been a member of the Austrian Radio Orchestra since
1968.
His horn, however, was not an
antique from the ancient musical capital but a newly
designed device called the flumpet, handmade by the
instrument maker David Monette of Portland, Ore., who
makes Wynton Marsalis's axes.
A cross between a trumpet and a
flugelhorn, it suited Farmer admirably on the set's
best number, ''Like Someone in Love,'' a hit for Bing
Crosby when Farmer was playing screech for bluesman
Otis.
As Mike
Wofford, Bob Magnusson and Roy McCurdy backed him
expertly on piano, bass and drums, Farmer turned its
harmonies this way and that, now witty, now wistful,
here exultant, there the very portrait of a man whose
heart is breaking in a gentlemanly way. Obediently,
the flumpet rang or brooded as the occasion demanded,
serving the muse of harmony as faithfully and well as
the highly civilized artist who was playing it.
A native
of Council Bluffs, Iowa,
Farmer and his twin brother Addison, the bassist, came
to Los Angeles at the height of the Central Avenue
jazz boom. After studying with Samuel Browne at
Jefferson High School, Art Farmer worked with Johnny
Otis, Gerald Wilson and Benny Carter.
Wilson remembers him
with precision.
"He had fine range, good execution, a good
concept of playing," said Wilson, a trumpet
player himself. "Nothing was too difficult for
him; the changes weren't too hard for him no matter
what kind of number it was."
