My thoughts and writings on jazz and the world around it
For the 78th birthday anniversary of the late, great pianist Bobby Timmons (Dec. 19, 1935 March 1, 1974), I posting a liner note that I wrote for a Fantasy Records Of culled from his Riverside recordings, and interviews from an elite group of associates and friends: Albert Heath, Kenny Barron, Reggie Workman, Benny Golson, Cedar Walton and Ron Carter. I had fun putting this one together.
It seems apparent, given the dearth of first person testimony in the liner notes for his numerous recordings for Riverside and Prestige, that in matters of self description, pianist Bobby Timmons [1935 1974] held firmly to the dictum that music speaks louder than words.
Cherrypicked from seven Riverside albums between 1960 and 1963, The Best Of Bobby Timmons, if nothing else, highlights that Timmons was one of the seminal communicators of his generation. He was 24 when Lambert, Hendricks Ross sang Jon Hendricks' lyrics to the Timmons ditties "Moanin" and "This Here," which had debuted instrumentally on stirring albums with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Cannonball Adderley's Quintet that were released in 1959. Soon thereafter, Oscar Brown's version of "Dat Dere," originally documented by Adderley in February 1960, made it onto jukeboxes around the country. On the strength of these hits, Timmons cut his sideman affiliations in 1961, and accepted a string of national bookings with his own trio. Much to his discomfort, "soul jazz" would be the label forever be affixed to his name.
Out of South Philadelphia, a bebop hotbed in his formative years, Timmons' music was relentlessly earthy and primal. He was anything but primitive, but wholesale jerseys a soulful perspective was in his bones.
"Bobby's grandfather raised him around the corner from where our family grew up," says drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath, the baby brother of bassist Percy and tenor saxophonist Jimmy. "His grandfather was a minister, and Bobby played in his grandfather's church. Later he came into jazz. We didn't go to elementary school together, but later I saw him quite a bit. He took a lot of guidance from my brother Jimmy, who taught harmony to most of my young friends, and was an educator for a lot of people, like Lee Morgan and Jimmy Garrison. We played as a trio at dances at fraternity houses around the University of Pennsylvania, and were in a big band together with a guy named Tommy Monroe along with Lee and some other people who went on to get big names in jazz.
"We would imitate whatever we could from records Sonny Rollins, Max Roach's group and we liked Ahmad Jamal. I loved Vernell Fournier and wanted to be like him when I grew up, and I think Bobby wanted to be like Ahmad as much as he could. Ahmad came to Philadelphia with Vernell and Richard Davis, and we were too young to go in the club, so we stood outside, and heard what we could whenever the door opened. Whenever we got a chance to play as a trio, that style would be in the back of our minds."
In the trio, the aspirants completed the triangle with bassists like Garrison, Eddie Matthias, Spanky DeBrest, Jymie Merritt, and occasionally, Reggie Workman.
"Most of the time when we worked, the challenge was fulfilling whatever the engagement called for," recalls Workman. "We all had to do everything, jazz clubs as well as dances, cabarets and parties. That where the music was heard and made. I remember Bobby as a young man, his brilliance, his jovial attitude, and his depth of soul or depth of being, I should say. He was always an ardent dresser, neat in his music and in his personality. He was also very witty. It all turned up in his music. No matter what he was doing, he always had his personal voice. You'd know that it was Bobby Timmons doing it."
Timmons moved to New York in 1954, honing his craft on consequential jobs with Kenny Dorham, Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker. In the summer of 1958, Benny Golson, recently recruited by Art Blakey to bring a new sound to the Jazz Messengers, brought Timmons, Morgan and Merritt into the fold.
"He was inventive," says Golson, "He wasn't locked up in a cylinder. He could play bebop and he could play funky he could play a lot of things, and I thought it was the element that Art needed. He hadn't had anybody quite like Bobby, who could go here or go there, rather than walking in a single corridor."
As the Messengers hit the road, Golson noticed that Timmons frequently would "play this little funky lick in between the tunes." He continues: "I got used to hearing it, and after he'd play it, he would say, 'Ah, that sure is funky.' I'd say, 'Sure is.' We were in Detroit when I really started to listen to it. We got to Columbus, Ohio, and I called a rehearsal. Bobby said, 'We've got everything down; why are we going to rehearse?' I said, 'You know that little lick you play?' 'Yes.' 'You've got eight bars; all you need is another 8 bars on the bridge.' He said, 'Oh, that's nothing; that's just a little lick." I said, 'No, Bobby, I hear something else. Why don't you go up on the bandstand and compose a bridge.' In about half an hour he said, 'Come and listen,' and then he played it. I said, 'Why don't you try again, and we'll go over here and talk some more.' He did something, and called me over in about 15 minutes and asked what I thought. I could see he didn't think much of it. I said, 'That's it. Come on, Lee, let's learn it.' Then I said, 'Bobby, you've got to give it a name now.' He said, 'Well, I don't know.' 'Well, what does it sound like?' He said, '"Well, it sounds like moaning.' I said, 'Good, let's call it 'Moanin'."
In the fall of 1959, Timmons left the Messengers for Cannonball Adderley's Quintet, in which he, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes formed a slamming rhythm section on Live At The Jazz Workshop and Them Dirty Blues. He returned in the spring of 1960, in time to appear on classic Messenger dates like Night In Tunisia, The Big Beat, The Freedom Rider and The Witch Doctor .
"I had to play 'Moanin' and 'Dat Dere' when I joined the Messengers," says Cedar Walton, Timmons' successor in the piano chair. "They were arrangements that were very accessible to anybody with any kind of talent. I was hardcore when I got in the band, and couldn't imagine playing them. But once I got there, I found myself enjoying them. They were very simple, so you had to make something happen, which was a challenge."
It's a challenge that Timmons addresses with relish throughout this well wrought compilation, consisting of six Timmons originals, each with hummable hooks and tasty changes, and seven show tunes of the torchy persuasion. Powell's presence is everywhere. Note the fleet runs on "Old Devil Moon" and "Easy Does It," the stark substitutions he deploys on the brief intro to "God Bless the Child," the voicings that pop up on "Spring Can Hang You Up The Most" and "Goodbye," the Dameronian flavor on the bridge of "So Tired." As Ron Carter puts it, "Bobby wrote some interesting songs, but he was not a composer like, Benny Golson. He was a wonderful improviser. He had the ability to play the melodies and songs so that the band could tell the difference from night to night, but it would sound the same for the audience. He was very giving, very loyal, played every night like it was his last chance to get it right."
Although Timmons was a bandleader with a firm, distinctive point of view, he was never rigid. "He would accept input," Carter says. "He always remembered my basslines from the other night. He'd remember what had almost worked the night before. Can we play the same idea in a different key, or play it slower, or develop another way to make the song work? I'd say, 'Bobby, that isn't working; can we find something else to do with that?' and he'd say, 'Well, what?' If my idea worked, that would become part of the tune. Tootie would suggest something, Bobby would say, 'I don't know, man; let's see how it goes.' So he was open to any suggestion, and as a leader he would determine whether that suggestion fit the musical direction he had in mind. Good leaders do that."
The chronology ends in 1963, when Soul Jazz was no longer ascendent, the national circuit was drying up, and the tragic shadow that dogged so many of Timmons' heroes began to attach itself to him. "Bobby stayed in town more," says Carter, who recorded with Timmons as late as 1967. "We did some duo gigs before he died, working in and out of the Village, at places like the Lion's Head and the Needle's Eye."
"Bobby was a wild cat," Walton says, and indeed, Timmons did drink himself to death, eventually succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver in 1974. But the darkness never entered his music. As Carter notes, "I've never seen how someone's music can be interpreted as though it were HIM. I'm not sure how you can call 'Moanin'" indicative of Bobby's giving personality or 'Dis Here' with the fact that he would go to the mat for you."
"He had no ego about him," Golson adds. "He was always upbeat, never downbeat, and he never maligned anybody unless it was in a humorous way. Some people think he was just a funky piano player, and he could PLAY funky, but he could also get into things. Of course, now is a different time. But then he was right on the cutting edge."
Tootie Heath on Bobby Timmons:
TP: In reading the program notes from Bobby Timmons' records, only one had an interview with him, and all of them say mostly the same thing. I was talking with Reggie Workman about another subject, and Reggie told me a little. But I knew you grew up nearby and were the same age, and knew him well.
HEATH: We kind of grew up together and we grew apart together also. After the New York days, he went in his own direction. I didn't see Bobby much after Art Blakey. I think our trio was before Art Blakey.
TP: I think it was after his first time with Art. He joined in '59 with "Moanin'" that's when "Moanin'" because famous. Then he went with Cannonball.
HEATH: Right. For a short period. A year. cheap nfl jerseys
TP: Then he went back with Art for a while. That seems to be when he formed the trio.
HEATH: Right. That's when the cheap jerseys trio came in. After all of that, I guess.
TP: A number of the first records are with Sam Jones and Jimmy Cobb, so I guess he did those when he was with Cannonball, and maybe that's how he came to sign with Riverside. But you were part of the first working trio?
HEATH: Yes, I think so. With Ron Carter. We even played that around Philadelphia, before we left Philly, as a trio sometimes, with Jimmy Rowser and a couple of other local bass players. Mostly Jimmy Rowser, and sometimes Eddie Matthias, Jimmy Bond, and Reggie a few times.