BLP 4148

George Braith -  Two Souls in One

Released - November 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 4, 1963
George Braith, soprano sax, stritch; Billy Gardner, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Donald Bailey, drums.

tk.8 Mary Had A Little Lamb
tk.17 Poinciana
tk.26 Mary Ann
tk.27 Home Street
tk.33 Braith-A-Way

Session Photos

Donald Bailey

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Mary Ann		04 September 1963
Home Street	George Braithwaite	04 September 1963
Poinciana	Bernier, Simon	04 September 1963
Side Two
Mary Had A Little Lamb		04 September 1963
Braith-A-Way	George Braithwaite	04 September 1963

Liner Notes

ABOUT seven years ago, I was asked to be one of the judges in a jazz tourney at a now defunct Greenwich Village club called The Pad. The room was singularly depressing, shaped like a box, painted in black, as I recall, and resembling as a whole the kind of place in which claustrophobics might be assigned in Hell. Some of the music fitted the sure surroundings all too well, but there was one band which communicated such fire that it even succeeded in lighting up The Pad. Pete LaRoca was on drums; a young, mocking elf named John Maher was on piano; and the leader was George Braith. The leader couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen, but he already wore the air of command as if he had been to the manner born. He was playing baritone and alto, and he swung with both skill and passion.

Since then, George Braith has continued to lead a variety of units, and to broaden his musical knowledge (both academically and through long nights in clubs), and he has also explored several other instruments. As of now, moreover, he has found that there are occasions when one instrument at a time cannot contain his emotions. Therefore, on this, his first aibum under his own name, Mr. Braith can be heard simultaneously on the soprano saxophone and the stritch (a straight alto). Hence the title — Two Souls In One.

Music as the direct expression of emotion is endemic to George Braith's background. He was born in New York on June 27, 1939, the youngest of nine children. His late father was the minister of a Pentecostal church on Madison Avenue and 127th Street. Himself a pianist and organist, Braith's father taught his children the basics of piano playing. Their mother sang in church; and adding to the musical environment of the home was the fact that the father always had a trumpet, trombone and violin around the house for any of the children to experiment with. (George Braith is the only one of the children to have concentrated on reeds).

In the Pentecostal churches, music is a vital and pervasive part of the services. And in the church of George's father, instrumental as well as vocal music was used. Members of the congregation played; George himself improvised on baritone in church; and there were brothers with trumpet and trombone. George's own capacity for leadership began to be evident when he was no more than ten or eleven. At the time, he played a pocket flute and he organized a calypso band. (That musical heritage was also part of the family's history since his parents came from the West Indies). The calypso band played in neighborhood theatres and on a children's television show. While in junior high school, Braith started studying clarinet and then added baritone and alto saxophones. Throughout his school years, incidentally, Braith always had an extracurricular combo of his own going; and when he was fifteen, he brought a quintet of his to a summer job in the Catskills. It was in the fall of that year that I heard him at The Pad. His band, by the way, won the contest.

Braith went on to Music and Art High School. There he studied bassoon and flute and also took courses in theory. He still played clubs at night despite his age ("I had a beard," he explains, "and so I was able to get away with it.") By this point, among the influences on Braith's music were Gerry Mulligan, Ernie Henry, and particularly Charlie Parker and Art Tatum. (Later, he was also especially impressed by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Gil Evans).

Soon after graduation in 1957, Braith took another unit of his, the American Jazz Quintet, to Europe for three months. They scored a particular success in an Amsterdam concert headed by J. J. Johnson, and as a result of their quick acceptance, the band didn't have a day off while in Europe. During the trip, George Braith met Lucky Thompson and that experience spurred him to start on tenor. In September, 1957, Braith entered the Manhattan School of Music where he studied during the day and played tenor at night. He was at Manhattan, where he concentrated on theory and arranging, for a year and a half. He left because his night-time activity was leading to more and more traveling and also because he had gotten married. In the years since, Braith has worked extensively in the East, as well as in Bermuda. Always, he has been the leader.

Braith's absorption in multiple horn playing started about 1961. He came across a straight alto (the stritch) It is different, incidentally, from the stritch which Roland Kirk uses in that the bell of Kirk's horn is considerably larger and also, Braith's stritch is custom-made. "I brought a few notes up from the bottom of the stritch," Braith explains, "and added them to the top. In that way, I can finger almost the whole range of the instrument with one hand. I did the same thing with the soprano saxophone, and now I can cover practically the whole range of any two-part harmony system when I play them together. I play the stritch with my left hand and the soprano with my right. Putting it another way, I can harmonize any song in any series of intervals I desire."

As Braith perfected his '"Two Souls in One," he also worked on developing the organ trio he started two years ago. He couldn't afford a guitar and so he tried to utilize the two horns simultaneously to fill in for the guitar. "It got so," Braith observes, "that I was able to both comp effectively with the two horns as well as use them in solos. There's a lot more, however, I want to do with simultaneous playing, and eventually, I intend to use the tenor along with the stritch and soprano."

George's first album as a leader came as a result of his work as a sideman on a John Patton album, Blue John (4143) for Blue Note. Alfred Lion was sufficiently impressed to sign Braith. For this album, Grant Green was added on guitar. Green requires no introduction to Blue Note listeners. He is a musician of uncommonly consistent clarity, swing, and a blues orientation which heightens the expressivity of his playing. Billy Gardner went to high school with Braith. He started as a pianist, but Braith convinced him to try the organ in 1961, and they have worked together ever since. Braith is impressed with Gardner's inventiveness and also with his sense of color and his attentiveness to everything happening around in any given musical situation. Donald Bailey, long the drummer with organist Jimmy Smith, is now a member of George Braith's regular trio. "Donald," Braith notes, "is especially skilful at knowing how to play with an organ. He knows which spaces to fill and when not to play too much. Also he continually stimulates the soloists."

Mary Ann is a vintage calypso, arranged — as are all the numbers in the album — by Braith. The contrast in textures is immediately intriguing — the acridly steaming organ, the pungent fusion of stritch and soprano, and the strong, clear guitar of Grant Green. Annealing all these colors, moreover, is a swirling beat. Although generally no admirer of the electronic organ, I find Gardner appealing, partly because of the calliope-sound he gets from the instrument and also because of his ebullient musical temperament. Most organists either chug remorselessly ahead or become mired in sentimental syrup. Mr. Gardner, however, has made that usually refractory instrument into a playful adjunct to a rhythm Section as Well as a high-spirited solo medium. Mr. Braith, as is evident throughout the album, does not hold back his emotions. He is of the full-feeling school of jazz.

Home Street is indeed a street by that name. It's in the Bronx, and Braith lived there for some eighteen Years. Braith also based his piece on the "down home" connotations of the title so that the street is paved in blues. The number is described by Braith as "basically a twelve-bar 'church' type of blues — with a channel." Again, the penetrating sound of the combined stritch and soprano makes for increased intensity. Also, the act of playing both instruments simultaneously somehow accentuates the speech-like nature Of Braith's phrasing so that he almost literally "tells a story." Interestingly, Gardner can also make his organ "talk" so that the occasional exchanges between him and Braith are very much in the nature of an idiomatic dialogue. Poinciana has proved one of the most popular arrangements in Braith's repertory on night club dates. His interpretation retains the exotic aura usually associated with the tune, but he also infuses a strong admixture of blues colorations and is considerably aided in that area by the forceful presence of Grant Green. Further individualizing this version of Poinciana is the flavorful solo by Billy Gardner.

The concept of transmuting a nursery rhyme into jazz is not unprecedented. Art Blakey, for one, used to feature a fierce version of Three Blind Mice. George Braith's reanimation of Mary Had A Little Lamb also is unalloyed jazz. There is nothing coy in the approach which is hard-swinging and, in fact, rises through a series Of explosive climaxes. Once more, the contrast between Grant Green's sinewy sound and the blistering colors of Braith's solo on combined stritch and soprano is unusually beguiling. Following the intense solos by Braith and Green, Gardner demonstrates brilliantly that excitement can be created on the organ without building up a sheer storm of sound. In Gardner's work, the voicings and lines are cuttingly clear.

Braith-A-Way was written during a road trip (while Braith was away). "I was a little homesick," Braith explains, "and that explains the mood of the song." The piece is a twelve-bar structure with a vamp at the beginning, a vamp at the end, and no channel. "The chords," Braith explains, "are misleading because they seem to be going round and round. They should settle some place but actually they don't, and that gives the number a coloring which musicians seem to find challenging." Braith's own solo is both expansively lyrical and yet simultaneously virile. Grant Green is heard in a rather wistful solo, but Green too always buttresses the most gentle of his reflections with a spine of blues. Billy Gardner's solo is a demonstration of Braith's answer when I told him that I find Gardner's playing refreshing by comparison with those other organists who seem only able to swing but have little musical imagination. "Well," said Braith, "I'm all for swinging, but I'm not for a lot of pulsation and no music. They can be combined, and that's what Billy does."

This first album by George Braith is stimulating in many ways — the leader's own resourceful and musical approach to soloing on two horns in one; the leader's strongly propulsive arrangements for his group; and the particularized stylistic contributions of his colleagues. Considering his youth and the scope of imagination and disciplined passion he has already displayed, George Braith is clearly going to be an increasingly audible factor on the modern jazz scene.

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