[Dixielandjazz] Ruby Braff Bio

[Richard Broadie]

Steve Voce recently sent me this.  Another view of the great Mr. Braff.
Dick Broadie

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This piece appears in to-day's The Independent in London.

Steve Voce



RUBY BRAFF

When Ruby Braff played the cornet it was, to paraphrase Eddie Condon, like a
girl saying 'yes'.

  Braff came in a direct line from Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and
Bobby Hackett and his playing had all the beauty and eloquence that goes
with such a hallmark. His fat sound on the instrument and delicate showers
of notes were instantly recognisable and he was one of the most melodic
improvisers in the history of jazz. Unlike the other three he spawned no
imitators, for his sound and the method of creating it were unique and
largely uncopyable. Unimpressed by high notes for their own sake, he opened
up new depths in the bottom registers of the instrument that others could
not reach.

  The beauty ended abruptly when he took the horn from his mouth. He was
usually abrasive, insensitive, cruel, insulting and he was one of my best
friends. Over the years he drove most of his friends and other musicians
away from him as they gave him up in exasperation. At the end of his life
the remaining handful included Dave Bennett, his English manager and Mat
Domber, president of Arbors, the recording company that released all of
Braff's elegant albums of the Nineties. The final album just issued, 'Watch
What Happens', was recorded when the musicians who could get there struggled
through the centre of New York on the day after the September 11 2001
catastrophe. Typically it has a version of "Over The Rainbow" looked at from
a new perspective and, in the Braff manner, filled with improvised melodies
that improve on the composer's original.

  Like most cornet players he was physically small. The elfin frame was
often driven by one of the most surreal senses of humour one could imagine
and his spontaneous introductions from the stage invariably had his
audiences contorted with helpless laughter. He loved audiences and his
happiest moments over the last decade were when he appeared, as he did four
or five times a year, on the radio programme that I present for BBC local
radio in the north.

  Here he revealed that he was romantically pursued by the Queen Mother.
"Every time I see her on the television at the races or somewhere she is
looking directly into my eyes and I can see that she is singing 'If I Could
Be With You One Hour Tonight'." He mulled over his potential as a member of
the royal family. He kept us up to date with the affair over the years, as
he did with the frequent occasions when Scotland Yard called him in to
advise on how to solve the most impenetrable crimes. Would they ask him to
be Chief of Police? He claimed also to have secret underwater rendezvous in
their nuclear submarines with another friend, Humphrey Lyttelton, where the
two discussed the best actions they should take in directing world affairs.

  Braff was one of the last people alive who had rubbed shoulders with the
jazz masters in the classic era. As a young boy he had played informally
with Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington had taken him under his wing at a dance
when Braff was eleven.

  The mellow sound of his cornet came from the fact that he had always
wanted a saxophone. When his father finally bought a cornet for him, he
tried to play it as though it was a reed instrument and this accounted for
the softness of his tone.

  Self-taught, he began playing at jam sessions and clubs in Boston during
the Forties. His friends at the time were the pianists George Wein, who
became an entrepreneur and founded and ran the Newport Jazz Festival, and
Nat Pierce, later to be the backbone for many years of the Woody Herman
band.

  The cosmopolitan issue of a 1949 recording Braff made in a club with
clarinettist Edmond Hall's band first alerted Americans and Europeans to the
presence of a new stylist on the horn. Much younger than those he worked
with, he brought a freshness to the music that immediately made him stand
out.

  In 1953 he and Pierce took an apartment in New York expecting great
things. Braff was irritated by his parents' habit of sending him tins of
sardines and threw them down the building's airshaft when they arrived.
Weeks later, as they starved, he and Pierce were desperately salvaging the
tins that hadn't been eaten by their also ravenous neighbours. In December
that year he made the classic and still selling recordings of "Russian
Lullaby" and "Jeepers Creepers" with the Vic Dickenson Septet. But one
record date, no matter how successful, didn't constitute a living and he and
Pierce were trying to stay alive on a diet of tinned plum tomatoes, the
cheapest food to be found.

  But Braff's talent was as a pillar of fire in the night, and within months
he was recording with giants like Buck Clayton, Benny Goodman and Bud
Freeman, and his career took off.

   He toured Europe first in 1961 and then came back regularly each year in
his own right.

  He became a jazz master himself and had his own jazz chamber music salon.
With a particular affinity for cornet and piano duets, over the years he
created wonderful partnerships on albums with the cream of the jazz
pianists - Mel Powell, Ralph Sutton, Dick Hyman, Ellis Larkins and Roger
Kellaway.

  The quartet that he formed with the guitarist George Barnes in 1973 played
sublime music. It had years of life left in it when Braff had a corrosive
falling out with Barnes in 1975.

  "Why don't you make another album with George Barnes?" an English fan
asked plaintively.

  "Why don't you make a fucking album with George Barnes?" Braff snarled
with typical venom.

  From 1974 onwards he became a regular attraction at the Nice Jazz Festival
and in subsequent years led bands for seasons at Eddie Condon's Club in New
York. He came regularly to Britain to appear at the Pizza Express and to
make ever-successful tours with the Alex Welsh band.

  As the older musicians succumbed, Braff became the leading light of
Mainstream jazz. He embarked on a series of albums during the Seventies for
the Concord label and these supercharged his career as they spread across
the world.

  He fostered young jazz musicians like guitarist Howard Alden and Scott
Hamilton as they too grew to be stars in the jazz firmament. He worked with
both of them over a number of years.

  But success was tempered by his ill health. Troubled with emphysema,
glaucoma and a heart condition, he had difficulties in aircraft and had to
be pushed in a wheelchair across air terminals.

  He could not play where people smoked, and he had to have lighting
lowered. On one occasion last year, when Dave Bennett was up a ladder
adjusting the lighting under Braff's scornful direction, Bennett asked
"Would you like me to paint the ceiling while I'm up here?"

  Paradoxically as Braff's health fell away his playing continued to
improve. It was the rigor of his British tour last autumn that led to his
death, but the music that he played as he travelled around got better and
better until it concluded with what was to be his last and best performance
at the Nairn Festival in northernmost Scotland.

  After it he returned to his lonely life in Cape Cod and to his final bout
of illness.

  Louis Armstrong's remark at the death of Bunny Berigan could apply equally
well to Braff.

   "He ain't got no business dyin'."

Steve Voce

Reuben "Ruby" Braff, cornettist; born Boston, 16 March 1927; died North
Chatham, Massachusetts 9 February 2003.