[Dixielandjazz] A More complete Jimmy Giuffre Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

This is a more complete Jimmy Giuffre Obit. From the UK Telegraph.  
Note how Woody Herman "discovered" the 4 brothers sound in Gene  
Roland's Band. Note also the Stan Getz quote about dumb jobs. Ah well,  
I guess everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Cheers,

Steve Barbone
www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Jimmy Giuffre

Versatile jazz musician who loomed large in the West Coast genre  
before turning to minimalism.

Jimmy Giuffre, who died on April 24 aged 86, was a jazz composer and  
instrumentalist of great originality and stylistic breadth; during a  
long career he produced some music which met with wide public acclaim,  
including the acknowledged masterpiece Four Brothers, and some so  
baffling and inward-looking that it found virtually no audience at all.

James Peter Giuffre was born in Dallas, Texas, on April 26 1921 and  
began learning the clarinet aged nine. Initially he played the tiny E- 
flat instrument, graduating to the standard B-flat model when his  
hands had grown sufficiently. He added the saxophone a few years later.

While studying at North Texas State Teachers' College, Giuffre played  
tenor saxophone in local dance bands and clarinet in classical  
ensembles. After receiving his BMus in 1942 he served for four years  
in a US Army Air Force band before settling in southern California,  
where he studied composition and worked as a freelance arranger. He  
wrote mainly for the forward-looking Boyd Raeburn Orchestra and for  
the popular dance band led by the saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey.

The immediate post-war years saw the emergence of a radically new  
approach to the tenor saxophone in jazz – producing a sound that was  
light, airy and smooth. It had been introduced by Lester Young and  
adopted by a younger generation of players as the new voice of the  
instrument. Giuffre joined three other young players – Stan Getz, Zoot  
Sims and Herbie Steward – in a band led by the trumpeter Gene Roland.  
The four light-toned tenor saxophones playing in close harmony made a  
sound quite unlike any other combination, a sound that seemed to  
epitomise modernity and glamour.

Roland's unusual saxophone team was soon spotted by Woody Herman, then  
in the process of creating his new band. The only one of the four not  
hired by Herman was Giuffre, who played the lowest of the four parts.  
Herman already had a baritone saxophonist, Serge Chaloff, for that role.

As a kind of consolation prize, Herman invited Giuffre to write for  
the band. The first piece he came up with, entitled Four Brothers,  
amounted to a miniature concerto grosso, with the saxophones,  
separately and together, playing the concertino role. Today, after  
more than 60 years, this three-and-a-quarter-minute recording, with  
its immaculate tonal blend, grace and momentum, continues to exert a  
spirit-lifting effect. Outside the work of Duke Ellington, it is  
difficult to think of a finer piece for the jazz orchestra.

Giuffre continued to follow the combined careers of composer-arranger  
and jobbing saxophonist, not always in the choicest company. As Stan  
Getz recalled of those days: "We played some dumb jobs – Mickey Mouse  
bands, rhumba bands, Dixieland bands." Giuffre himself worked briefly  
with a Mexican group and with Spade Cooley's "Western Swing" band. But  
he also acted as musical director for Buddy Rich's big band in 1948,  
and finally got to be one of the Four Brothers the following year,  
when he joined Herman for a few months.

The early 1950s saw the rise of a specific "West Coast" style of jazz,  
with Giuffre as one of its central figures. He played with, and wrote  
for, all the leading bands, including those of Shelly Manne, Howard  
Rumsey and Shorty Rogers. Giuffre also recorded some more experimental  
work under his own name, including Tangents In Jazz (1955) and The  
Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet (1956), the latter employing various  
combinations of orchestral woodwind, except in one piece where the  
only accompaniment to his clarinet is the sound of his own tapping foot.

A move to New York in 1956 brought a sudden change in Giuffre's music.  
He embraced minimalism, in the form of a simple trio with Jim Hall on  
guitar and a succession of bassists. After a while the bass was  
replaced by valve trombone, played by Bob Brookmeyer. The effect was  
aptly described by one critic as "a homespun, back-porch feeling", and  
it was particularly marked when Giuffre played the clarinet. He  
usually confined himself to the instrument's woody lower register,  
imparting an innocent, folky flavour to improvisations that could  
actually be quite complex.

It was with this trio that Giuffre enjoyed his second burst of  
popularity. It came with a jaunty little piece entitled The Train and  
the River, which caused a small stir when the trio played it on a  
television show in 1957, and a considerably larger stir when it was  
featured in the opening sequence of the film Jazz On A Summer's Day,  
shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and released worldwide in 1960.

In 1957 Giuffre was invited to teach at the annual summer music school  
at Lennox, Massachusetts. There he encountered exponents of the  
emerging "free-form" movement and the "third stream", which sought to  
combine the techniques of jazz and classical music. These had a marked  
effect on his own music, which now took a more abstract turn. Although  
he gained some success with his later trios in Europe, he was now  
applauded more for his courage than for the appeal of his music.

"I don't play to win a mass audience," he explained in 1964. "If I  
wanted that, I'd play with Guy Lombardo or Lawrence Welk."

 From 1970 Giuffre combined performance with teaching, at Rutgers  
University, the New England Conservatory and New York University. His  
final years were affected by Parkinson's disease.

Jimmy Giuffre is survived by his wife, Juanita.



Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband