This Week on Jazz Spectrum – September 30, 2023

By Fritz Byers

Saturday is the birthday (September 30, 1922) of the pathbreaking bassist, Oscar Pettiford, son of a half-Cherokee-half-African-American father and a mother of Choctaw descent. Oscar was not exactly a prodigy, but by his teens he’d shown both his proclivity for music and his desire to innovate.  His timing was excellent. As Oscar’s reputation and exposure expanded, the great bassist Jimmy Blanton was redefining the role of the instrument, not only as a prominent source of harmonic foundations in a big band setting but also as a solo instrument, engaging on its own terms.

By the time Oscar was 20, he was well along in developing his own distinctive style and voicing on the bass, building on not only Jimmy’s bravura but also the novel harmonic challenges of the be-bop revolution. He worked with established jazz legends, such as Coleman Hawkins (Oscar’s solo on the 1939 recording of “The Man I Love” is among the premiere bass solos of the era), and also with insurgents, such as the guitarist Charlie Christian (1916-1942), who, like Jimmy Blanton (1918-1942), died just as he was beginning to soar. Oscar plays a central role in a series of private recordings from the early 1940s of the uber-lord of bebop, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. More publicly, he was a fixture at Minton’s Playhouse, the venue where Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and others brought into being an entirely new way of thinking about music and improvisation.

Oscar’s prominence, and the breadth and depth of his appeal, are perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that from the late 1940s until his death, aged 37, in September 1960, he worked primarily as a leader of his own bands. In time the bassist Ray Brown would achieve a similar stature, but during Oscar’s time jazz was distinctly a pianists’ and hornmen’s world. Oscar challenged that in the same way he challenged the conception of his instrument.
    
All the while, of course, he remained a first-call first bassist across nearly the entire range of the music. A single, and singular, example: Thelonious Monk chose Oscar to play on the notoriously difficult composition, “Brilliant Corners.” Famously, nearly everyone in the studio, including the unrivaled saxophonist Sonny Rollins, struggled with the angular structure and intervallic leaps of Thelonious’s tune, but you never hear any strain in Oscar’s precise playing.
    
This week on Jazz Spectrum, we mark Oscar’s birthday with two sets – the first and third – featuring Oscar. In the first set, we’ll hear three tracks from June 1956 – a stand-out big band that Oscar helmed performing two Gigi Gryce tunes and a lovely version of Lucky Thompson’s “Deep Passion.” Any chance to hear Lucky is a treat, and he’s in particularly affecting form here. The entire band, replete with all-stars, is in excellent voice. The trumpet work of Art Farmer and Ernie Royal is characteristically sharp, and you’ll like Julius Watkins’s touches on French Horn. Oscar switches to cello for the third tune, Gigi’s “Smoke Signal.” 

The third set, along about 9 p.m. Eastern, takes three tracks from the New Oscar Pettiford Sextet, a marvelous 1953 date on which Oscar plays cello alongside Charlie Mingus’s redoubtable bass. Julius Watkins is here again on French Horn, and Phil Urso, an under-recorded tenorist, shows drive and taste. Two of tunes – “The Pendulum at Falcon’s Lair” and “Low and Behold” – are both Oscar’s compositions. They’ll give you a taste of how he thought about music.

Oscar’s birthday is a day worth celebrating.