John Entwistle: The Quiet One

The Who's 1975 album The Who By Numbers, the cover drawn by bassist John Entwistle

Remembering The Who’s bassist John Entwistle, who died on this day in 2002.

Entwistle was known as The Quiet One (and the Ox) in the group, but like the youngest voice in a family struggling to be heard, it was just as much that all the other personalities of the group in its early days — Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon — were louder. Which is what Entwistle himself suggested in his song “The Quiet One.” Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman famously described Entwistle as “the quietest man in private but the loudest man on stage.”

In the Who, that wasn’t easy. But Entwistle made his voice heard when there was a lull. He was the first to produce a solo album, and eventually did five in all. He drew the caricatures and cover for The Who By Numbers; how many Who fans never noticed Entwistle’s signature in the lower left?

And he consistently wrote songs to the group’s albums (except for Quadrophenia), his production increasing as the years went on. Boris The Spider (A Quick One), My Wife (Who’s Next), Success Story (Who By Numbers), Trick of the Light, 905 and Had Enough (Who Are You), The Quiet One (Face Dances) and Dangerous and One At A Time (It’s Hard) were all authored by Entwistle.

The circumstances of his death mixed rock and roll and Las Vegas. He had retired for the evening with a Vegas stripper, and the coroner’s report said he died of a heart attacked induced by cocaine use (Entwistle had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease; he smoked, he drank  . . .).

The band was there to open a concert tour the next day, in part to help Entwistle pay off some debts. The tour went on, Townshend noting the tragic irony. Entwistle was the second member of the band to die a drug-related death, Moon preceding him by 24 years. Entwistle was 57 years old when he died.

Rock critic Dave Marsh on Entwistle, from counterpunch.org: “John Entwistle was the first musician to figure out how to use the bass for carrying forward melody and weaving additional themes through a song, while still stabilizing the beat — that is, he figured a way to balance the extreme playing of Pete Townshend and Keith Moon simultaneously, a stupendous feat . . . There wasn’t any precedent for what Entwistle did, and all bassists since — from Jaco Pastorious to Doug Wimbish and beyond owe him their sense of freedom.”

Part of the lyrics to Entwistle’s The Quiet One:

Everybody calls me the quiet one
But you just don’t understand
You can’t listen you won’t hear me
With your head stuck in the sand
I ain’t never had time for words that don’t rhyme
My head is in a cloud
I ain’t quiet – everybody else is too loud

A link to a live version of the song below:

 sources: Thewho.com, the independent.co.uk, counterpunch.org

Clifford Brown: Joy Spring

Remembering Clifford Brown and Richie Powell and Nancy Powell on the day of their death in 1956.

Today is the day the music died 55 years ago in jazz, in a car crash on a rainy night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Brown and Powell had played in a session in Philadelphia, and were on their way to Chicago for a date the next day.

Trumpeter Brown was just 25 when he died, Richie Powell — the pianist in his group, and brother of the great pianist Bud Powell – just 24. Brown’s loss to jazz musicians was every bit as devastating as Buddy Holly’s would be to the young genre of rock and roll three years hence. Said Brown’s drummer Max Roach, according to Ben Sidran’s book Talking Jazz: “I was really in never-never land for quite a while.” (Brown’s groups were an impressive array of talent; they included Roach, Powell and saxophonist Sonny Rollins, among others.)

There were several bitter ironies to the tragedy:

• Brown had survived a horrific car crash six years earlier in June of 1950. He was already a rising talent in the jazz world, but he suffered severe injuries — including two broken legs — that required skin grafts and a full body cast.
• It was while hospitalized for the 1950 crash that Brown learned of the death of fellow player trumpet player Fats Navarro, Brown’s closest confidante in the jazz world, at 26. According to Howard Gillis in a jazztimes.com piece, Brown named only Navarro when asked to name his favorite trumpet players. According to Gillis, Brown’s widow Laura Brown Watson told jazz historian Leonard Feather: “(Clifford) idolized Fats Navarro. That was his heart.”
• Navarro’s death was hastened by drug addiction and tuberculosis. Brown was widely reported to be free of the addictions that killed so many jazz players so young.
• The accident happened on Brown’s second wedding anniversary, and his wife’s 22nd birthday.

Saturday a group of jazz players went to Brown’s grave site in his hometown of Wilmington, Del., and played in his honor. They finished with the song Benny Golson wrote in Brown’s honor, I Remember Clifford, which seems only appropriate on the 55th anniversary of his death.

A link to Brown’s composition Joy Spring, played by the Max Roach-Clifford Brown quartet, above:

sources: wikipedia.org, Members.tripod.com, shout.net, jazztimes.com, delawareonline.com

Around the World: Hungary’s Laszlo Gardony

Laszlo Gardony's 1994 album Breakout

Pianist Laszlo Gardony was born in Hungary in 1956 — the year the Soviet tanks crushed an uprising there – and he trained at the Bela Bartok Conservatory in Budapest. Like Bartok, he emigrated to the United States seeking freedom – Bartok from the Nazis in World War II, Gardony from a Communist regime that he felt stifled his musical expression.

But after that the similarities fail. Bartok was older and lived barely past the end of the war, composing in trickles. Gardony thrived in his move to the States, receiving a scholarship to Berklee and joining the faculty there after graduation. As an artist, he expanded his audience and earned critical acclaim. It might be wider if he had produced more than nine albums in the last quarter century, but if you’re a jazz fan not familiar with his work, you should be.

“My circumstances in Hungary weren’t allowing me to take the music as far as I wanted it to go,” Gardony told Downbeat’s Bill Milkowski on the liner notes to the 1989 album The Legends of Tsumi. “I had become a professional but I really wasn’t able to play the music I wanted to play. It was mostly just sessions and gigs.  I really had no connection to the spiritual side of music with this type of playing. It got very predictable, so I decided to make a break.”

Moving to the U.S. was his big break, but he didn’t let go of his homeland entirely.   “. . . in some sense Hungary is a musical melting pot, because it has been the center of so much commotion over the centuries – lots of wars and migrations,” Gardony told Berkshireweb.com’s Seth Rogovoy in a 1996 interview. “The whole Hungarian philosophy was that whoever lives here is considered Hungarian, and therefore there were lots of influences mixed in to the culture.”

You can hear them in Gardony’s music, which he plays with a seeming ease that belies his talent. And you can see Gardony with that full head of hair — more often if you’re in his adopted New England, where he performs more frequently.

Allaboutjazz.com’s Tom Greenland: “Who said, ‘those who can’t do teach?’ It’s not necessarily true, as some of the best jazz musicians can be found hiding out in institutions of higher learning. Laszlo Gardony is a case in point.”

A link to Gardony’s solo rendition of Mahalia below:

sources: lgjazz.com, wikipedia.org, berkshireweb.com