Herbie Nichols - The Third World
Released - 1975
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, May 6, 1955
Herbie Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
tk.1 The Third World
tk.3 Step Tempest
tk.4 Dance Line
tk.6 Blue Chopsticks
tk.9 Double Exposure
tk.10 Cro-Magnon Nights
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, May 13, 1955
Herbie Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
tk.16 Amoeba's Dance
tk.18 Brass Rings
tk.20 2300 Skidoo
tk.22 It Didn't Happen
tk.23 Crisp Day
tk.24 Shuffle Montgomery
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, August 1, 1955
Herbie Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums.
tk.4 The Gig
tk.6 Hangover Triangle
tk.8 Lady Sings The Blues
tk.10 Chit-Chatting
tk.11 House Party Starting
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, August 7, 1955
Herbie Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums.
tk.12 Terpsichore
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, April 19, 1956
Herbie Nichols, piano; Teddy Kotick, bass; Max Roach, drums.
tk.1 Wildflower
tk.4 Mine
tk.12 The Spinning Song
tk.16 Query
See Also: BLP 5068, BLP 5069, BLP 1519
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| The Third World | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Step Tempest | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Dance Line | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Blue Chopsticks | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Double Exposure | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Cro-Magnon Nights | Herbie Nichols | May 6 1955 |
| Side Two | ||
| Amoeba's Dance | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| Crisp Day | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| 2300 Skiddoo | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| It Didn't Happen | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| Shuffle Montgomery | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| Brass Rings | Herbie Nichols | May 13 1955 |
| Side Three | ||
| The Gig | Herbie Nichols | August 1 1955 |
| House Party Starting | Herbie Nichols | August 1 1955 |
| Chit Chattin' | Herbie Nichols | August 1 1955 |
| The Lady Sings The Blues | Herbie Nichols | August 1 1955 |
| Terpsichore | Herbie Nichols | August 7 1955 |
| Side Four | ||
| Spinning Song | Herbie Nichols | April 19 1956 |
| Query | Herbie Nichols | April 19 1956 |
| Wildflower | Herbie Nichols | April 19 1956 |
| Hangover Triangle | Herbie Nichols | August 1 1955 |
| Mine | George Gershwin | April 19 1956 |
Liner Notes
HERBIE NICHOLS
Herbie Nichols and I first crossed paths in the early Spring of 1960. It was at a jam session in Dick Rath's loft. Dick had known Herbie for some time, and along with Bobby Pratt and a whole gang of people, they were having one helluva party. By the time I got there the euphoria was well under way and everyone was pouring himself out into a wild collective thing that was starting to have its moments. In the middle of all this, Bobby, who had been playing piano all night, felt like playing some trombone. He vacated the piano bench, and with the music still going on (Yardbird Suite) a very tall and reserved gentleman took charge of the piano. I had no idea who he was, had never laid eyes on the man before, and I was busy trying to find a part for myself in the din. Playing along, I gradually became aware that the whole harmonic idiom of the music had shifted, and everyone including myself had changed up his style. The magic was in those chords coming from the piano, in the context of which I found myself thinking more carefully about each note I played and started reaching for ideas that had never occurred to me until then. The unknown pianist had since vanished into the night, and still the music continued to play on in the way that he had affected it. His was a gentle spell, cast almost imperceptibly by degrees, but all the music thereafter remained suspended in a new and unusual vein.
The chords of the mystery pianist lingered on in my ears and I found myself searching for hours at the keyboard trying to recapture those sounds, without much success. Then toward the middle of that summer, Jack Fine, the cornetist, hired me to play bass on a trio gig out in Amagansett, Long Island. You can imagine my surprise when the other member of the threesome turned out to be that fabulous pianist from the loft session; his name of course was Herbie Nichols. Talking with him during the long drive to the gig, he impressed me as a well informed and intelligent man who dug to converse on a variety of subjects. The rap never got around to music until we set up to play; it was then I mentioned that I was still trying to figure out those combinations he had laid on the players at the loft session. With that he seated himself at the piano, and in a very calm and unassuming kind of way he coaxed a series of dense and electrically charged chords from the battered upright. While he was doing this he told me he remembered my playing from the loft session, that he thought I had a good set of ears, not to worry, just listen closely, and motioned to me to stand where I could watch his hands. Jack's and my repertoire were mainstream and that was pretty much the music that night except for what Herbie did. He played the most graceful and luxuriant stride piano in a style all his own, quite unlike anything I'd ever heard before because all those exquisite harmonies were incorporated into it. The piano held everything together; in fact I had only to sort of color what Herbie was doing and with Jack laying down a strong pneumatic line, it soon became a very spacious-sounding trio indeed. (I had had a similar experience playing a duet with Donal "The Lamb" Lambert one time: the piano becomes a kind of orchestra in the hands of these masters. You feel like the soloist in a grand concerto with a multitude of other voices leading, supporting, and responding. With Herbie it was an even further extension of this concept.)
The following afternoon there was no one in the club and Herbie began to practice leisurely, sort of reminiscing and free-associating on the keys. Occasionally he'd throw out an idea that held some special fascination and circle back to it by a different route each time until it became transformed into a complete musical statement. Then he might interpolate something familiar into the midst of this and the whole thing would grow and grow. I think this was the first time I ever heard somebody really compose at the piano. Another characteristic was the way he sang, talked, and interjected along with his extemporizing; he'd laugh quietly upon recalling somebody's name or some related incident, and then go into the story of it, playing along all the time. It was all a conversation between Herbie and himself, Herbie with others, and Herbie with the muse, I guess. I only know that it came out as incredible music and my ears were getting the full benefit of the dialogue.
Getting to know him after that date out on Long Island. I discovered that Herbie was born, bred, and educated in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. His parents were West Indian and very proud people and raised him to be proud. He studied hard, was a brilliant student in school, and went on to study piano with a private teacher. By the time he was 35 he had mastered a mountain of European keyboard music East and West, as far back as Scarlatti and all the way up through Bartok; he could play show scores like he had written them himself, and as for the Afro-American tradition, the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, James P Johnson, Willie the Lion Smith. Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Albert Ammons, Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum...you have it, it was all second nature to him. This was the foundation of his music. He had an incredible mind, read, wrote poetry, and played chess incessantly, was an avid researcher of dancing and African cultures. I can remember that he'd start the day by reading the New York Times from back to front and often spend the rest of the day discussing it. He had an overwhelming intellectual curiosity about things, but like most intellectuals, there were only a few people he could communicate fully with. His music drew from all these sources. There are the echoes of Africa and the West Indies in his playing, but it's mainly about the places and characters in the New York City of his own home: Minton's Playhouse, 52nd Street, Harlem. The Village, his family, friends, the people in his travels. Herbie kept a diary with him at all times. called it his "goof sheet", and anything of special importance came up, out came the "goof sheet" and most likely another song. To call him an astute observer or a highly creative person doesn't seem to do justice to the man.
The Fall of that year of Long Island "the lessons" began, Herbie would phone or I'd phone and he would drop by with some elegantly scored trombone parts. I'd try to negotiate these while he played behind me like an orchestra on the piano. The experience was instantly enigmatic. The lines he'd notated were long and intricate, even the simpler ones. The breathing places rarely came at a time when I needed air. Just when I thought I was getting down on a phrase, there'd be a chromatic embellishment, the melody would change direction, and with those majestic harmonies climbing, plunging, and winding through everything, it wasn't long before I'd lose the structure and we'd have to retrack. This was before I'd even gotten to the point of trying to improvise on the material, but eventually I did, and that was a whole new ballgame too. It was early on in "the lessons" that I told Herbie in all my twenty-five years of naivete that his music was something else (!) and he really should get some heavyweight players together and record it. He replied quite modestly that he'd done a few albums for Blue Note and a session for Bethlehem, but they were trios, and what he needed now more than anything else was to hear horns playing his melodies. It seems that he had been composing since his teens, had arranged a lot of his music for the different bands he'd gigged with in his travels, but when it came to playing this music, the horn players shied away and it invariably ended up as a trio of Herbie. bass, and drums.
It took me some doing to track down these sides, and when I finally did, they came as a complete revelation, not just as a learning tool, but for the sublime statement they make about the extraordinary musical abilities and achievements of this man, Herbie Nichols, the same guy who was casually falling by every so often to run over some of his charts with a fledgling trombonist. Here he was on these records playing magnificently in company the likes of Art Blakey, Max Roach, Al McKibbon, Teddy Kotick (on the Bethlehem album no less than Danny Richmond and George Duvivier) and you can bet I at least knew who these people were. This all came as a shock to me, especially since Herbie had been laboring patiently for hours with me just to get the melodies to a couple of his songs down right. It was a true New York "lesson" that day. i e. heavy; I could only think "how the mighty have fallen," etc , etc., ad infinitum. But it made me dig in harder and one of the pieces we happened to be working on at that time was The Third World. When I played this track for myself, I damn near died, because I didn't see how anyone except maybe John Coltrane could improvise over a set of changes like that. And yet here were Nichols, Blakey, and McKibbon in 1955 doing just this and more. When Herbie came by that week and we started in on The Third World, I negotiated the head and played two choruses of Herbie's which I copied off the record, lost control when I took off on my own in the fourth chorus, at which point Herbie, rocking with laughter, got up and did a dance around the room calling out "Roz, that's great, just great! Boy, wait until Coltrane and some of these other cats hear you...they better look out..." When I began to explain that I was just imitating the record, he said, "I know, I know, but it sounds so good on trombone... I never thought I'd see the day!" It was only at times when I least expected it that Herbie got beside himself. Most of the time he was very much the composed and urbane intellectual, albeit a very warm and likeable person. Sometimes, when he gave me enough advance notice on his arrival, I'd be able to lure down some other players, like Archie Shepp or Steve Swallow, and they'd put their expertise to the test. It delighted Herbie to hear these young cats trying to get their teeth into things like The Gig or Terpsichore. He even wrote a song for Archie, The Afterbeat, I think he called it, and it was mainly an ingenious assemblage of Archie's own riffs. Archie really inspired him the few times they had the chance to play together.
The "lessons" continued on well into 1961 and then circumstances began to change for both of us. Herbie was in and out of town playing with odd bands in odd places, and I was trying out different music with different people, and these things made it tough to get together on any kind of a regular basis. How I wish I'd had enough business sense or some good connections in the music world to get us some work playing Herbie's music, all the more so because Herbie was composing new material all the time, and with some young players to really sock his melodies home to people, how could he miss? The Herbie Nichols band was still a dream when he died very tragically and suddenly in April of 1963 at the early age of 44. The medical diagnosis of his death was leukemia, but in my opinion he died mostly of a broken heart; the years of frustration, neglect, and disillusionment took their toll. I can remember him telling me toward the end "Roz, you ought to get out while there's still time, You're not enough of a savage and that's what you have to be to make it in music now." Or he'd say of himself, "I can't get work because I don't act weird, don't clown around enough. You have to be some kind of a freak to get a gig nowadays." He wasn't joking and he wasn't being cynical either. For the kind of straight person that he was and as serious as he was about the music, he was being absolutely sincere.
Herbie Nichols was painfully aware of the people and events taking place around him, and this was both a curse and an inspiration on his life as an artist. For someone who abhorred deviousness, backstabbing, and double-dealing, he was truly out of place in the world of Jazz cabarets and show biz. He wasn't equipped psychologically to cope with the insidious reality of this lifestyle, the very one to which he as a black composer was doomed, The only viable sources of employment available to him as such was that of nightclub performer or entertainer. The situation hasn't changed that much for black creators in recent times, except now, were Herbie alive, he might be eligible for some kind of a teaching fellowship, but that's about all Herbie Nichols never intended to be a martyr, that was definitely not his bag, yet we are forced by the ironies of the system to add his murder to the apalling list of geniuses, black and otherwise, who have fallen victim to the inequities of "free enterprise." Other people who knew Herbie have told me that his lack of success in terms of fame and fortune was due to his lack of enthusiasm and utter distaste for hustling and promoting himself, but this is simply not true. With Herbie it was simply a case of the man putting all of himself into his music and beyond that having neither the time nor the talent to be a heavy salesman. Besides, anyone in Herbie's league, artistically speaking, had somebody other than themselves doing their promoting and their booking for them. The truth is Herbie never got lucky with the impresarios and this was the mam stumbling block to his success.
Despite these odds, I still can't for the life of me figure out why more serious listeners including musicians didn't pick up on Herbie Nichols' music. When you listen to these recordings you'll understand what I mean when I say that Herbie designed his music with one and only one explicit end in mind: to delight people's ears. In this respect Herbie Nichols' music is nothing short of perfect; everything about it is sensuous and attractive to the ears. All you have to do is listen, purely and simply. Don't fight the magic; inhale deeply of the delectable fragrance of these sounds and let yourself be drawn into a fantastic world. Awake with your mind refreshed, your spirit renewed. You are in a multi-dimensional sound dome. There is charm and interest all What a beautiful sense of space! What incredible lyricism! What soulfullness! What grace! What an expansive palette of sonorities! Wit, taste, discretion. subtleties, nuances...and all so personal and individual.
As a composer and stylist Herbie Nichols was totally his own man and occupies his own unique place in the overall musical picture of his time. There's no doubt in my mind that he ranks as a major innovator of the fifties totally on a par with his contemporaries Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus, and John Lewis, to name a few. May these recordings. which incidentally were all done in the span of one year, light up a new corner in your musical experience; may they grow on you and enrich your ears the way they have for me. Be thankful that we at least have this little bit of Herbie Nichols to remember him by, and be outraged by the injustices that prevented him from realizing the vast remainder of his life and work.
Thank you Blue Note Records for having the good sense to record Herbie Nichols. You stand virtually alone in this respect. It's a downright crime that more people in the industry didn't get behind him the way you did. America knows the reason for the tragedy of Herbie Nichols all too well. Let's hope she does something about it before she robs herself blind of all her resources, human and otherwise.
ROSWELL RUDD
