BLP 1534

 Paul Chambers - Whims Of Chambers

Released - November 1956

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, September 21, 1956
Donald Byrd, trumpet #1,2,5-7; John Coltrane, tenor sax #1,2,5,6; Horace Silver, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar #1,2,4-7; Paul Chambers, bass; "Philly" Joe Jones, drums.

tk.3 We Six
tk.5 Omicron
tk.6 Tale Of The Fingers
tk.8 Whims Of Chambers
tk.9 Nita
tk.11 Just For The Love
tk.13 Dear Ann

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Omicron	Donald Byrd	21/09/1956
Whims of Chambers	Paul Chambers	21/09/1956
Nita	John Coltrane	21/09/1956
Side Two
We Six	Donald Byrd	21/09/1956
Dear Ann	Paul Chambers	21/09/1956
Tale of the Fingers	Paul Chambers	21/09/1956
Just for the Love	John Coltrane	21/09/1956

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

WHO shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers?

—John Milton

Unless Milton was uncannily prescient when he quilled the above line it is unlikely that he was referring specifically to Paul Chambers. Nor were the airs and madrigals he had in mind as complex or as stimulating as Whims of Chambers or Tale of the Fingers. But Milton’s question seems apposite, for on these sides we find not only softness and subtlety in Chambers but also a strong, virile instrumental voice that cannot and shall not be silenced; a sound that must and will command attention during the coming years wherever jazz is heard.

The role of the jazz bass player was largely a metronomic assignment until, in 1939, Jimmy Blanton’s flight through time and space, when he alighted in the Duke Ellington airport, transformed the entire scene. Since that time scores of talented men have put hundreds of fingers to work proving that Blanton was right; that the bass is capable of melodic invention and rhythmic variety unknown before his day.

Oscar Pettiford is the man generally assumed to have inherited the Blanton mantle, though Ray Brown, Red Mitchell, Percy Heath and a few more have exhibited formidable prowess and extraordinary heights of inspiration. And now, to join the handful of giants of whom one con speak in the same breath as these few, the inner jazz circle has welcomed Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr.

Among other achievements Chambers can claim to be the first jazzman to earn dual renown as on arco and pizzicato bass soloist. Born in Pittsburgh April 22, 1935, he entered music through a windy side entrance when he and several schoolmates were fingered to take up music and the baritone horn became his assignment. Later he took up the tuba. “I got along pretty well, but it’s quite a job to carry it around in those long parades, and I didn’t like the instrument that much.” (Besides, you can’t bow a tuba.) So Paul became a string bassist, around 1949 in Detroit, where he hod been living for a while since the death of his mother.

Playing his first gig at one of the little bars in the Hastings Street area, he was soon doing club jobs with Thad Jones, Barry Harris and others who have since effected the Detroit-New York junction. His formal bass training got going in earnest in 1952, when he began taking lessons with a bassist in the Detroit Symphony. Paul did some “classical” work himself, with a group called the Detroit String Band that was, in effect, a rehearsal symphony orchestra. Studying at Cass Tech. off and on from 1952 to ‘55 he played in Cass’ own symphony, and in various other student groups, one of which had him blowing baritone sax. By the time he left for New York at the invitation of Paul Quinichette, he had absorbed a working knowledge of several armfuls of instruments.

The Quinichette job was Paul’s first time on the road. Since then he has worked with Benny Green’s combo; at the Bohemia in New York with George Wallington’s quintet; at the Embers and Birdland with Joe Roland; and on several jobs with the since-split trombone twins, Johnson and Winding. For the past 18 months most of his working hours have been devoted to the furnishing of a solid understructure for Miles Davis, and it was with the help of two colleagues from Miles’ combo (John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones) that the present LP gained much of its power and conviction.

Paul was about 15 when he started to listen to Bird and Bud, his first jazz influences. Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown, the first bassists he admired, were followed in his book by Percy Heath, Milton Hinton and Wendell Marshall for their rhythm section work, Mingus and Charles Duvivier for their technical powers and for their efforts in broadening the scope of jazz bass. Blanton, of course, is his all-time favorite, the perennial poll winner in his ballot.

Speaking of polls, a review of the last Down Beat critics’ referendum shows that Paul won in the New Star bassist category by a comfortable margin with 85 points. (This means that 8 1/2 critics voted for him — one critic, initials L.F., betrayed a split personality.) And now, with that honor in the bag, Paul has something new to crow about: his first Blue Note LP as a leader.

Donald Byrd, whose horn plays a meaty role in the sextet, is o 24-year-old Detroiter who, like Paul, studied at Cass Tech. and worked in the Wallington Quintet; for a while he was a Messenger in Art Blakey’s service. John Coltrane, a native of Hamlet, N. C., is 30, was raised in Philadelphia and has a background of assignments in rhythm and blues groups (Earl Bostic, Eddie Vinson) as well as with jazz outfits (Johnny Hodges, Gillespie, Miles).

Paul’s partners in the rhythm team include Horace Silver, Blue Note’s adopted son; Kenny Burrell, another Detroiter and recent addition to the Blue Note family (his own LP is BLP 1523), and the indomitable Philadelphia Joseph Jones, Blue Note alumnus of dates with Elmo Hope, Lou Donaldson et al.

Omicron, named by Donald Byrd for a Greek letter but framed along modern American lines with a Woodyn You chassis, has a fascinating introduction and coda written in 6/8 as well as solo expenses by Silver, Burrell and the horns, and some estimable Chambers pizzicato. Whims of Chambers is a charming blues played by Paul and Kenny in octave unison, dedicated to the rhythm section, of which all four members acquit themselves superbly on the solo passages. Coltrane’s Nita has an interesting pattern; at the 23rd measure of each chorus it goes into six bars of suspended rhythm followed by a two-bar break. When the unison horns take over after the drum solo you may, on first hearing, wonder how they knew when to come in; which only proves that Philly Joe cannot be fully dug at one hearing.

We Six has Coltrane showing his big, bulging tone on a minor Byrd theme. Coltrane is the living reminder of the existence of more than one way to get a big sound on tenor, for at no time, in tone or in style, could he be mistaken for a disciple of the Coleman Hawkins school. Paul has one of his amazingly fluent bowed solos here, after which Kenny and Horace both get in a good smooth groove.

Dear Ann, after a pretty chord-style guitar intro, shows Byrd in the medium-slow theme, named for Mrs. Chambers (Paul, married four years, has produced Eric, 3, and Renee, 2 and expects the former to start climbing up the bass any day now for his first solo chorus.) Dear Ann shows the Chambers pizzicato at its most agile and fertile.

Tale of the Fingers is our favorite track, if we may be personal. Based on the Strike Up the Bond chord sequence, it opens with four choruses of bowed bass, and never before have there been 128 measures even remotely like this. Horace is in there wailing too, and later Philly Joe trades some fours with “The Bow” before Paul takes over solo for the finale, but frankly, it is difficult to recall anything that happens after those first choruses, because anything that followed them would necessarily have been anticlimactic. I would call Chambers a gas, except that it is depressing to think about gas chambers; so perhaps o bolder word may be permitted. Chambers, as his fellow-musicians have been saying ever since they heard his very first solo, is a bitch.

Just for the Love, a Coltrane line, is built in 12-bar sequences but uses changes somewhat removed from the conventional blues routine. Tenor, piano, trumpet, guitar, pizzicato bass and drums (i.e. the entire sextet) can be heard individually in that order.

It may not be long before Pittsburgh and Detroit start a fight about which city can claim Paul Chambers as a hometown boy. He’s a valuable enough man on anyone’s team to generate just such a squabble, and these sides, I’m sure you’ll agree, offer the most eloquent evidence to date.

—LEONARD FEATHER

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER