An Overworked Orchestrator

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The New York Sun

Among short-lived jazz performers, the main causes of early death are the road (Clifford Brown), substance abuse (Charlie Parker), and jilted lovers with guns (Lee Morgan). For arrangers and composers, however, overwork is a more formidable foe. Particularly in the 1950s and early ’60s, when a large portion of recorded pop songs, television music, and movie scores still had a jazz sensibility, there was an almost unlimited amount of work available for workaholic orchestrators.

Oliver Nelson, who died of pancreatitis at the age of 43, was especially masochistic. Not only did he pursue a full-time career as a commercial arranger working on assignments from Hollywood studios, but he simultaneously composed, arranged, and recorded a stunning number of his own albums as well. Compounding the problem, Nelson wrote every note himself, unlike other prolific arrangers such as Quincy Jones (who employed a battery of copyists and also subcontracted to other arrangers).

Still, a major benefit of doing something so obsessively is that you get better at it, and Oliver Nelson was perhaps the greatest jazz orchestrator and composer of the postwar era. A new six-CD box set, “Oliver Nelson: The Argo, Verve and Impulse Big Band Studio Sessions” (Mosaic Records, MD6-233), which contains 15 albums and 100 tracks recorded between 1962 and 1967, is a testament to Nelson’s frenetic activity and to the quality of his music.

Nelson was born in St. Louis, MO in 1932, and began his career by playing alto saxophone in several Midwestern bands. He played briefly in Louis Jordan’s big band, then served in the Army for two years. He formally studied composition in the mid-1950s under the G.I. Bill, then moved to New York in 1959. Upon arrival, he worked regularly with Louis Bellson and Wild Bill Davis, and he subbed with both Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He made an auspicious debut as a leader that same year with “Meet Oliver Nelson,” in which he shared the front line with the marvelous trumpeter Kenny Dorham.

Between 1959 and 1961, Nelson appeared on 11 albums for Prestige as both a leader and sideman. Early in 1961, Nelson began working with the young producer Creed Taylor. Their collaboration began with one of the great albums of the 1960s, “Blues and the Abstract Truth,” in which Nelson combined elements of bop and postmodern jazz in a fresh and original way – in the company of an all-star cast of Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans and Roy Haynes.

In 1962, Mr. Taylor produced the aptly titled “Full Nelson,” the composer’s first album as a big-band leader, and the earliest album on the Mosaic set. He also began orchestrating for a growing roster of star singers and instrumentalists, most notably the organist Jimmy Smith. Nelson and Smith did 10 albums together between 1962 and 1968, most of which are included in the Mosaic box, including a team-up between Smith and the dynamic guitarist Wes Montgomery. There are also collaborations with organist Shirley Scott, the team of vibraharpist Milt Jackson and bassist Ray Brown, and one of jazz’s great individualists, the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell.

As an orchestrator, Nelson had a distinct palette of tonal colors and a firm command of his tools. At times it’s hard to tell the difference between a Nelson original and an arrangement. He seems to have approached the task of arranging a piece of music composed by someone else as if it were a de facto collaboration. He had a unique talent for doing everything his own way: When he had the hankering to write in waltz time, he satisfied that urge by putting a melody in 9/8 or some unusual rhythm designed to test the mettle of his players; if he wrote a blues, it usually wasn’t exactly a blues, but an original composition that used blues ingredients and alluded to the form.

Interestingly, the only time he plays a traditional blues straight-up is when he’s arranging someone else’s work. Even then, the results are strikingly original, as when he uses dream-like suspended chords in his recasting of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” for trumpeter Joe Newman. That same 1966 session includes a blues in the classic 12-bar format, but as the saxophonist and scholar Kenny Berger points out in the invaluable annotation that accompanies the box set, Nelson superimposes it over a 12-tone row, calling it “Twelve Tone Blues.” Nelson’s ability to do something new with the blues was frequently called into play during his work with Jimmy Smith, as on his funky recasting of “Walk Right In,” a folk-blues introduced by Cannon’s Jug Stompers in 1929 and successfully revived in the hootenanny boom of the early 1960s.

The albums released under Nelson’s name veer off in all sorts of unexpected directions. One of the quirkiest songs is a short treatment of the Zimbabwean import “Skokiaan” that is equal parts Dixieland, swing band, and African high life.

Nelson’s most serious and least jazzy work is “The Kennedy Dream,” a suite composed in 1967 for a large orchestra of strings and woodwinds. This is jazz-classical fusion of the highest order, and Nelson’s idea to begin most of the eight sections with the recorded voice of the martyred president only increases its freshness. His 1966 suite “Peter and the Wolf” succeeds as a hybrid of American and European music: It doesn’t merely put Prokofiev into jazz time, but reconstructs the Soviet children’s classic as a jazz orchestral work, with Smith’s organ filling the familiar function of narrator.

The most successful extended work in Nelson’s canon is “Jazzhattan Suite” (1967), a 32-minute tonal portrait of New York. It’s divided into six movements, each of which seems completely different from the others, although they somehow form a unified whole. The opening section switches time signatures frequently to convey the confusion of “A Typical Day in New York,” while “The East Side/The West Side” is a 12-bar blues in a 9/8 meter. “Penthouse Dawn” is a beautiful, sonorous ballad featuring Nelson’s favorite soloist, the alto saxophonist Phil Woods. “One for Duke” recalls Ellington’s many musical depictions of his favorite city, and begins with Ducal chromatics from pianist Patti Bown.

Although “Jazzhattan Suite” was recorded in New York – and performed in Central Park and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one memorable day in 1967 – Nelson had already relocated to Los Angeles, where he was working around the clock scoring TV dramas like “Ironsides,” “Columbo,” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.” In addition, Nelson may have contracted malaria in a 1969 trip to Africa, according to his son. Whatever the case, his system was severely weakened by stress and overwork, and he died from liver disease in 1975.

Though Nelson left us 30 years ago, his music continues to be performed: Count Basie and Quincy Jones both recorded “Hobo Flats”; Joe Lovano and Hank Jones continue to play “Six and Four” in his memory; “Blues and the Abstract Truth” and “Stolen Moments” have been performed by big bands and vocalists all over the world, and there have been well over 100 recordings of “Moments.” The ongoing presence of Oliver Nelson’s music offers some compensation for all the moments with him that were stolen from us.


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