LT-1103

Joe Pass - Joy Spring

Released - 1981

Recording and Session Information

"Encore Theatre", Los Angeles, CA, February 6, 1964
Mike Wofford, piano; Joe Pass, guitar; Jim Hughart, bass; Colin Bailey, drums.

Joy Spring
Some Time Ago
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes
Relaxin' At Camarillo
There Is No Greater Love

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Joy Spring	Clifford Brown	February 6 1964
Some Time Ago	Sergio Mihanovich	February 6 1964
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes	B. Bernier-J. Brainin	February 6 1964
Side Two
Relaxin' At Camarillo	Charlie Parker	February 6 1964
There Is No Greater Love	I. Jones-M. Symes	February 6 1964

Liner Notes

JOE PASS

Following his discovery and first recording by Pacific Jazz' Dick Bock, Joe Pass recorded extensively over the next few years. That maiden effort, 1962's The Sounds of Synanon (Pacific Jazz 48), was succeeded by the guitarist's participation in a large number of Pacific Jazz recordings by its contracted artists as well as several well-received albums under Pass' name — Catch Me!, For Django, Simplicity and others — on all of which it was made abundantly clear that an impressive new, fully matured talent was on the scene and performing at peak creativity They revealed that Pass had not only assimilated his early influences, among whom were Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and several important early '50s jazz guitarists, but had perfected a strong, identifiable voice of his own.

His approach was characterized by great melodic fertility, harmonic sophistication and a natural, easy command of swing, and the music he made was both invigoratingly inventive and thoroughly accessible. Like Parker and other great melodists in jazz, Pass had the singular gift of improvising lines of natural, singing clarity and firm inner logic. That he rose, with superb consistency, to the opportunities afforded him through his affiliation with Pacific Jazz can be heard in every one of his numerous recordings from this period, and it is tribute to his deep, committed creativity that his work as a sideman is fully as resourceful and imaginative as that recorded under his own leadership. Too, it is tribute to Dick Bock's acumen that he provided the guitarist such plentiful opportunity to commit that creativity to record. Certainly it paid off handsomely too, for Pass contributed tellingly to every session he made with Bud Shank, Les McCann, Clifford Scott, Groove Holmes, Gerald Wilson and even blues singer Bumble Bee Slim. And his own albums, Catch Me! and For Django in particular, have taken their place with the very finest jazz guitar recordings of the last two decades.

But the Pacific Jazz chapter of Pass' career doesn't end with these albums. They represent only a portion of the recordings he made for the label during the 1960s. It was Bock's custom at the time to record his artists on a regular basis as well as, on occasion, to organize sessions literally on moments' notice when fired by what he felt to be a good idea. Not all of this material found its way onto vinyl, however, for Bock occasionally found it necessary to postpone the release of admittedly excellent jazz performances in favor of material of, presumably, wider sales potentials. Sometimes these withheld recordings never were rescheduled for release; overlooked, in time forgotten, they've lain in the Pacific Jazz vaults since the day they were first recorded.

The present set, the first to tap this rich lode of unreleased material, was recorded "live" early in 1964, some months prior to the For Django sessions in which, incidentally, bassist Jim Hughart and drummer Colin Bailey also participated (for a more authentically Django-ish quality on the latter, rhythm guitarist John Pisano was chosen to replace pianist Mike Wofford). Midway through the previous year Pass, having successfully vanquished the specter of narcotics addiction, had left Synanon's mother house and, with his bride Alison, had taken an apartment in Santa Monica. Healthy, happy, fired with newfound optimism and a growing confidence in his abilities, the 34-year-old guitarist was eager to "get out and play," to test and prove himself in the jazz arena. "I've got to get into the music, into the active music picture," he asserted at the time. "I want to get my feet wet with some good jazz musicians. That I've never done. I've never been a jazz musician." Pass was obsessed with the desire to show what he could do.

Following a brief tour of Oregon with the Sounds of Synanon group, he set about establishing himself on the Los Angeles jazz scene. In the summer of 1963 he secured one night a week at Shelly's Manne Hole, for which he organized a quartet, and within a short time had joined forces with saxophonist Bud Shank in a group they co-led at the popular Hollywood jazz spot for most of the remaining year. Simultaneous with this the guitarist also was performing on weekends with Page Cavanaugh at the pianist's club, sitting in, picking up whatever casuals came his way, and recording with various of Pacific Jazz' contractees. When the present recordings were undertaken in February of 1964, Pass had been playing steadily for more than six months and, consequently, was at the top of his game.

The performances were recorded at the Encore Theater, one of several theaters — the Adams West, Princess, Metro and Store Theaters, and the Cameo Playhouse — at which afterhours concerts and sessions were held in Los Angeles at the time. Accompanied by pianist Wofford, bassist Hughart and drummer Bailey, players junior to him by a decade and hence likely to prod and stimulate him — not that he needed it! — Pass in these informal surroundings was able to stretch out and Improvise at much greater length than in his studio recordings of the period. And for this reason alone they are welcome additions to his discography. There's an added benefit in hearing him "live," however. Pass is exactly the kind of player to profit by the opportunity, for he is one of those improvisers capable of finding and extracting more from a theme the more deeply he penetrates beyond its surface. The longer he plays, the more he discovers.

The ballad There Is No Greater Love offers a perfect illustration of the guitarist's ability to find in a piece ever more fascinating levels of meaning, greater possibilities for the elaboration and development of its melodic-harmonic character the longer he plays it. During his five-chorus improvisation he goes deeper into the piece, recasting it to his own emerging ends, pulling further and further away from its theme, into progressively more daring and audacious invention. His fifth and final chorus bears only the most elliptical relationship to the melody line that had been stated so moodily at the outset of the performance, yet Pass has arrived at that development through a steady process of musical evolution. It grows with inexorable logic from his earlier choruses. And the impression is that these five choruses scarcely begin to exhaust all that he could find in the theme. It's as though Pass in his playing reveals to us the teeming life of possibility that for the master improviser exists beneath the surface of any given melody.

Playing, for him, is a matter of taking chances, of constantly trying to approach a tune as for the first time, no matter how many times he might have played it in the past. "How many chances I take," Pass has said of his approach, "depends on how I feel, because I have nothing prepared. I don't play the same tune the same way twice. My style is my style, but I never know when I'm gonna start, or where I'm gonna end." Whenever he plays, he explained, "I'm always influenced by the place, the people, and my own emotional-mental thing. I look out there...if I play ten fast runs in a row, I say to myself, 'That's enough of that!' But maybe that 11th run might be the one that will take me off the hook and into something."

He elaborated, "Everything has to roll and flow naturally, one thing after another, in a row. If you take one thing out, you break the sequence and then it doesn't come out right. But when everything is right in your head, and you're not influenced by anything artificial, then everything is right, and it comes out that way."

A perfect illustration is Joy Spring, the delightful Clifford Brown line Pass and cohorts treat so lovingly here, with a relaxed yet propulsive rhythmic brightness and plentiful invention. Following the statement of the melody, Pass treats us to another extended solo, a striking example of thematic elaboration. Throughout his improvisation the guitarist alludes to elements of the original melody line, developing each of these motives in turn and thus exposing for our examination different facets of .Brown's distinctive melody By the end of his solo we've come to an entirely new appreciation of the melodic implications of the piece. In their turns Wofford and Hughart tellingly investigate others of those implications.

The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, on the other hand, is interesting for what it shows about the singlemindedness of Pass' commitment to the act of playing. It becomes obvious in the statement of the ballad's melody that his guitar is not quite perfectly in tune, that one of the strings is off by just a hair's breadth. At that point Pass had two options: to stop the performance while he gave his instrument the fine-tuning it needed and, this done, resume playing, or to ignore it and continue playing. He not only chose the latter course but managed to rise above this minor intonation problem so successfully that he turned in one of his most gripping, powerful solos of the session. So too are pearls produced by irritants.

"I still play everything off of tunes," Pass has observed of his penchant for ballad standards and jazz classics such as Relaxin' At Camarillo and Joy Spring, "but a lot of times after I play the tune, it's no longer the same piece. I've developed something new out of it, something of my own...That's my goal: to use everything I've learned and have lived, and bring it out at that moment through this thing called an instrument, my guitar." He comes close to its realization in these five extended performances from a period of great excitement and achievement in his continuing development as one of jazz' master guitarists.

—Pete Welding