Milt
Jackson, the man
who brought bebop to the vibraharp and the vibraharp
to a starring role in jazz and beyond, died Oct.
9 of liver cancer in Manhattan. He was 76.
A native of Detroit, Jackson was gifted with perfect
pitch and taught himself to play the guitar at the age
of 7. In high school he played drums, violin, guitar
and xylophone. He sang as a teen-ager in a gospel
choir, and after military service, formed a jazz group
called the Four Sharps.
Dizzy Gillespie heard him in 1945 and invited him to
join the historic big band he was forming. And so
Jackson became a member of the immortal rhythm section
that included Ray Brown, bass; John Lewis, piano, and
Kenny Clarke, drums. His instrument was primitive and
his sound in those days resembled a carton of falling
milk bottles, but the revolution was audible, and he
was on his way.
The
big band’s moment was decisive but short and
within a year, Gillespie had formed a small group
featuring Charlie Parker and Jackson, which recorded
the first bebop sides for Dial during an engagement at
Billy Berg’s in Los Angeles. Later, he played with
Gillespie’s sextette that included John Coltrane,
and in 1952 began recording with a group that included
Lewis, Clarke and the Philadelphian Percy Heath on
bass.
With Connie Kay replacing Clarke on drums, this became
the Modern Jazz Quartet, the tuxedo-clad campus
headliners with whom he appeared and recorded for 35
years, with a seven-year break between 1974 and 1981.
By then Jackson had acquired a more responsive
instrument, slowing down the speed of its motor-driven
vibrato to enable the ungainly device to sing in the
majestic way he will be remembered for.
A
slender, stoical figure
as he stood behind his instrument, Jackson was the
genre’s greatest master of blues phrasing,
gracefully wielding his mallets to produce long,
curving statements in which silvery, throbbing notes
were decorated with tiny filigree figures — all of
it swinging in a sanctified way that brought him the
title “Reverend.”
Indeed, one of his most renowned recordings, with
Ray Charles, was called “Soul Brothers.”
But Jackson mainly distinguished himself year after
year on the many MJQ recordings, meeting his jazz
peers on his own for a long catalog of discs with
Gillespie, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis,
Oscar Peterson, Sonny Stitt, J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones,
Lucky Thompson, Cannonball Adderley, Coleman Hawkins,
Count Basie, Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton and Clark
Terry, to name a few. His last recording, “Explosive!”
was with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra.
Jackson’s writing was as memorable as his
improvising: “Bags’ Groove,” “Bluesology,”
“D&E” and “The Cylinder” are among the
more famous tunes from his pen.
Listeners got samples of playing and
writing one evening in 1997 when played at
Catalina's in Los Angeles.
He
began with a tune called "The
Reverend," one of his nicknames. It was a perky
little blues number with a Q&A format that gave
bassist John Clayton, fresh from a triumph as leader
of the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra a couple of
days earlier, a chance to make a little
statement.
Then Clayton ably supported the vibraharpist as
Jackson took the first solo, making an entrance like a
burst of sunlight, and it quickly became evident that
Jackson was still a great deal more than a reverend or
even a prophet, the name of another tune he played in
the course of a classic evening.
For Jackson made the word flesh, and that calls for a
much grander title.
His
phrasing is one of the glories of jazz.
Each phrase was outlined in a shapely and natural way,
like a Michelangelo drawing of the limb of a saint.
And as one phrase followed another, Jackson attired
them in gracefully chosen blues licks, so that each
chorus eventually seemed to rise from the dead notes
on a page and do a dance.
If the harmony is not bluesy on its own, it becomes
bluesy under the Jackson mallets. Those tiny,
whip-like clubs have an uncanny way of exposing an
interval or a melodic phrase as though it were
backlit, frilling the edges of the main notes by
spraying them with little clouds of grace notes that
prove to be miniaturized versions of complex, freshly
imagined phrases.
Satisfaction mixed with awe and wonder as Jackson
passed through well-thought-out arrangements by Cedar
Walton, his pianist for the engagement, of "Young
and Foolish" and "Off Minor," the
ballad starkly simplified and the Monk standard
supplemented by a couple of intricate vamps, complex
and subtle little passages that Jackson rendered with
majestic aplomb.
A highlight
of the night, "Good Morning
Heartache," was treated with the distilled
bluesology of a lifetime, every phrase as personal and
profound as if it had been sung by Billie Holiday, who
made the tune famous. After a couple of matchlessly
sad and sweet choruses, the maestro looked up and out
in that way he has, as if to say, "How do you
like them apples?"
Applause from the heart was the answer.
So poor Walton kept being left with the unenviable
task of following the maestro with a chorus of his
own. A bebop master himself, he professed not to be
afraid -- and he did pretty good, eliciting Jackson's
characteristic cackle, so much like Hamp's, from time
to time.
But his stuff just got faded. Jackson can make liquid
lightning, as on the speedy "If I Were a
Bell," or become an orchestra, as on Clayton's
arrangement of "This Masquerade." You never
long for a horn when Bags is up there.
The way Jackson brings his music to life is all the
more remarkable when you consider that he uses no
breath to power the instrument, like a hornman does,
and he has only a limited power to vary the tone of
the cold metal vibraharp bars being struck with
mallets in the bony, 75-year-old fingers. So it's all
about how hard he hits and how long he lets them ring.
And of these gradations, this immortal artist has no
end.
Bags completes a number. Watch
him, now.
