BN-LA-590-H2

Milt Jackson - All Star Bags

Released - 1976

Recording and Session Information

WOR Studios, NYC, April 7, 1952
Lou Donaldson, alto sax #1,4,7-9; Milt Jackson, vibes; John Lewis, piano; Percy Heath, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums.

BN422-0 tk.1 Tahiti
BN423-1 tk.4 Lillie
BN423-2 tk.5 Lillie (alternate take)
BN424-2 tk.8 Bags' Groove
BN425-2 tk.11 What's New (alternate take)
BN425-3 tk.12 What's New
BN426-0 tk.14 Don't Get Around Much Anymore
BN426-1 tk.15 Don't Get Around Much Anymore (alternate take)
BN427-0 tk.16 On The Scene

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, January 13, 1957
Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Milt Jackson, vibes; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.2 Reunion
tk.3 Lower Stratosphere
tk.4 Don't Walk
tk.6 Ultramarine
tk.7 Mobley's Musings

Nola Studios, NYC, December 28 & 29, 1958
Art Farmer, trumpet; Benny Golson, tenor sax; Milt Jackson, vibes; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Connie Kay, drums.

Ill Wind
Blues For Diahann
Afternoon In Paris
I Remember Clifford
Whisper Not

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tahiti	Milt Jackson	April 7 1952
Lillie	Milt Jackson	April 7 1952
Bag's Groove	Milt Jackson	April 7 1952
What's New	B. Haggart-J. Burke	April 7 1952
Don't Get Around Much Anymore	B. Russell-D. Ellington	April 7 1952
On The Scene	Lou Donaldson	April 7 1952
Lillie (Alt. Take)	Milt Jackson	April 7 1952
Don't Get Around Much Anymore (Alt. Take)	B. Russell-D. Ellington	April 7 1952
Side Two
What's New (Alt. Take)	B. Haggart-J. Burke	April 7 1952
Don't Walk	Hank Mobley	January 13 1957
Lower Stratosphere	Hank Mobley	January 13 1957
Mobley's Musings	Hank Mobley	January 13 1957
Side Three
Reunion	Hank Mobley	January 13 1957
Ultramarine	Hank Mobley	January 13 1957
Blues For Diahann	Milt Jackson	December 28/29 1958
Side Four
I Remember Clifford	Benny Golson	December 28/29 1958
Ill Wind	H. Arlen-T. Koehler	December 28/29 1958
Whisper Not	Benny Golson	December 28/29 1958
Afternoon In Paris	John Lewis	December 28/29 1958

Liner Notes

MILT JACKSON

The instrument Milt Jackson plays has no generic name — vibe, vibraphone, vibraharp are all trade names — and there is no universally accepted way of playing it. One can look on it as a sort of chromatic drum the way Lionel Hampton may, or a metal xylophone å la Red Norvo, or a mini-piano as perhaps Gary Burton does.

Those three approaches are basically percussive.

Milt Jackson's approach to the instrument is different. It is percussive in the sense that to produce a sound he must hit a metal bar with a mallet. But what comes out often gives the impression that in his mind he is playing a saxophone, the most voice-like of wind instruments.

As a child, he wanted to play saxophone or trumpet but couldn't because he had asthma. That early desire may have something to do with the way he plays vibraharp. He's also something of a singer, which helps to explain the vocal quality of his work.

Jackson achieves such non-percussive effects by implication, of course — the shape of a phrase, its shading, subtly varied accenting, and sly use of grace notes, turns and other means of thickening his musical line are some of the ways he makes his instrument sing.

But those are merely means to an end. It is Jackson's mind-heart that determines what the end will be and which means best achieve it. Sometimes end and means merge into one great rolling, often rollicking, always blues-drenched, heart-wrenching flight of musical fancy.

A soulful player indeed is Milt Jackson.

Almost everybody who knows him agrees that he is a very soulful person. Soft-spoken, slight of build (but with two of the strongest wrists in the music business), his deep-set eyes mournfully surveying the scene, he sometimes gives the impression of being a melancholy man, a brooder. That illusion is shattered by his undisguised glee when something or somebody strikes him as funny or clever. Both his sides are evident in his music, sometimes in one solo, as can be heard in Blues For Diahann, one of several superb moments among this album's performances.

Be all that as it may, "soulful" is the best description of Jackson. In fact, when the word "soul" was first used as a descriptive term in the 1950's, it was often applied to Jackson's playing. And since "soul" soon became almost a synonym for "church" in the jazz world, it was aptly applied.

"Where Bags (Jackson's nickname) gets his rhythm," Dizzy Gillespie once observed, "is that his family's sanctified." The Jackson family were members of the Church of God in Christ, in Detroit, and the services were built around music, highly rhythmic, swinging music. As a boy, Jackson was fascinated with what he heard in church, and his desire to become a musician grew quickly. "Why, that's where it all started," he recalled.

He studied guitar and piano, both formally and informally, when he was quite young. By the time he entered high school, his life's course was set: he took a full music curriculum. He majored in drums so he could be in the school's band, he was eager to learn and finished the drum instruction book before the school year was out. Looking for some way to keep a good student busy, his music teacher suggested he try his hand at the school's new xylophone. It didn't take long for the youngster to fall in love with the instrument.

Then he heard Lionel Hampton playing vibes with Benny Goodman in the late '30s. The metallic version of the xylophone fascinated him even more than the school's instrument, and his father bought him one.

The die was cast.

"I had no eyes to play Hamp's way." Jackson declared, "I just got hung on the instrument."

Every vibes player in the world knows what he means, for once under the instrument's spell, no player escapes its attraction. He may curse its awkwardness, fight it when it refuses to speak as it should, swear he'll never touch it again, despair at its mechanical eccentricities, but leave it for good? Never.

And the instrument, the particular instrument, Jackson plays is an important part of his soulfulness. his uniqueness, his musical identity. When Jackson first made his mark. as a member of Dizzy Gillespie's 1946 big band, he had a rather beat-up set of vibes. "They sounded like milk bottles." Gillespie remembered. "They used to fall apart all the time."

In 1951, Jackson acquired a used 1937 Deagan Imperial, probably the best model the Deagan company ever produced. He still uses it, for its sound is like no other vibraharp's. The tone is deeper and darker than post-war Deagan'•s; probably because of the instrument's great weight. (The company keeps insisting to Jackson and others who hear what he hears in the instrument that there is no difference in the tones of the old model and the newer ones, as shown by an electronic device that measures such things. But science is science and sound is sound, and Jackson's old vibraharp has a better tone than any produced after the war.

Part of secret in extracting the tone lies in the mallets, their degree of and their weight. Up to a point, a heavy mallet of medium hardness gets a fuller tone than a light, hard one. At least since the Hank Mobley date included in this album, Jackson has used mallets by Fred Albright, a retired studio percussionist, and they draw tone out like no others. (Over the years, Jackson has used increasingly heavy mallets, to the point that today his mallets are so heavy that probably only he can play with them.)

The 1937 Imperial was different from 1951 Deagans in another important way - Jackson could vary the speed of the instrument's "vibrato."

Every set of vibes, no matter its manufacturer, has a motor that, by means of a rubber belt, turns two shafts which run the length of the instrument under the two rows of metal bars. Discs attached to the turning shafts break the air column produced by a struck bar as the air goes into and out of the resonator below the bar. This produces the illusion of a vibrato. (It is not a true vibrato because there is no pitch variation.)

In 1931, the motors on Deagan instruments were set at a constant, rather fast speed. Jackson's Imperial, though, had a motor with a rheostat, made it possible to slow the vibrato. The slow vibrato Jackson chose fit well with thee slow vibrato favored by bop horn men, his playing companions of the time. Jackson's vibrato became the most readily identifiable element in his playing.

This perhaps too-detailed description of an instrument's mechanical aspects is meant only to point out that nonvocal music is the result of man and instrument. To hear the difference between Jackson's Imperial and a lesser instrument, compare the sound of his instrument the recordings with Lou Donaldson to that of the Hank Mobley session.

At the Donaldson date, Jackson played the Imperial. The tone, despite what sound like light hard mallets, is full. The vibrato is slow and expressive. A shallower tone or faster vibrato would have dulled the effectiveness of his improvisations on What's New? and the first and classic recording of Bag's Groove. His deft turns and grace notes on Lillie would have been in a sea of muddy sound.

At the Mobley date, a fine blowing session, the Imperial was unavailable, and he used a set of cheap vibes that were probably rented for the occasion. The lower register is clunky, the upper register brittle. The vibrato is so fast it blurs into sort of a rumble. It sounds like Milt Jackson, but then again, it doesn't. It's reminiscent of the Jackson sound of 1946. Milk bottles revisited.

Still, he turns in a remarkable performance, considering the fight he must have been waging with the instrument. In fact, he sounds to be in a state of finely controlled rage, especially on Lower Stratosphere as he rides the crest of a roaring Art Blakey roll and goes on to make a magnificent blues statement.

To hear the difference mallets make, listen to the 1952 date and then to the one with Art Farmer and Benny Golson held in 1958. True, recording techniques and equipment in 1952 for 78-rpm's were not as sophisticated as those in 1958 for stereo, but some of the improvement in the Imperial's tone on the later date is the result of Albright's mallets.

But the differences between 1952 Jackson and 1958 Jackson are attributable to more than just mallets and instrument. Musical maturity is evident in 1958. This is not to say that his playing was immature in 1952, far from it — he could not have played as he did if he had been musically naïve. And even at that early stage of development Jackson was outgrowing the bebop that nurtured him and was becoming an artist beyond category, as Duke Ellington would have put it.

In 1958, he had grown from a superb musician to a great one. Gone were the excesses of youth. He had learned the lesson all true artists learn, that less is more.

The fact that the Modern Jazz Quartet had been a working group for more than four years at the time of the Farmer-Golson recording is not incidental to Jackson's musical maturation. In the stimulating but sometimes restrictive setting of the MJQ, Jackson grew in depth. The group's pianist and music director, John Lewis, surely had some influence on Jackson's growth, if not directly, then by his writing.

Analyzing the quartet a few years ago, Farmer noted that "without John's writing, Milt wouldn't sound as good as he does. It's like John builds a wall around him, then gives Milt a two-bar break. In that two-bar break, Milt knocks the wall down, tears through it like Sampson. It's the contrast that makes them both sound good."

Analysis aside, there is no finer Jackson on record than that heard on I Remember Clifford and Ill Wind, one of the great neglected ballads. He seems drawn into his instrument, hypnotized by its sound, the notes tumbling out, there seemingly being no barrier between mind-heart and metal bars. We hear an artist as well as a craftsman at work.

Of course, probably the most important reason that there is a difference between the Jacksons of 1952 and 1958 is the passage of time, nearly seven years. Unless a person is indifferent to life around him, seven years of living changes anybody, especially somebody as sensitive to his surroundings as Jackson.

"Music comes from your everyday being," he has said. "I'll tell you exactly how my music is portrayed. It's from everyday existence. How could it be anything else?"

Here, in this album, are some extraordinary moments from four days in Milt Jackson's beautiful existence.

DON DEMICHEAL