‘Classic Jazz at the Philharmonic Jam Sessions (1950-1957)’
Mosaic Records 

In the 1940s and ’50s, producer Norman Granz released highlights from his long-running concert series, “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” on an equally long-running series of record albums. There’s one volume in the series that defies recording industry norms in a very pertinent way: It lists the names of the players, as you’d expect, but does not provide a list of song titles. That tells us something about the producer’s priorities: In other words, the musicians were all-important and the songs couldn’t matter less.  

The Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts would always include a basic blues, either slow or fast, and jam on some number that was often a themeless set of chord changes (usually “I Got Rhythm”). The only time you might notice the original melody is on the slow ballads that eventually consolidated themselves into highly copacetic medleys; often enough, though, the tune was never the focus even then.

As the arranger and trumpeter Billy May once said to me, “Norman doesn’t care about anything other than a stadium with two honking tenors and 5,000 screaming fans.” It wasn’t the song that counted; it was the excitement, the thrill, the notion that the great men of jazz were creating stupendous improvisations right in front of you. 

It was the moment of spontaneous creation that was most important; the original tune that they had started with was a mere bagatelle. Granz transformed jazz into something more like a sporting event, and the tune itself was merely the rules of the game.

Just how exciting those concerts could be is made remarkably clear on the latest package from Mosaic Records, “Classic Jazz at the Philharmonic Jam Sessions (1950-1957).” Granz launched JATP in 1944 with the dual purpose of providing exposure and employment for his favorite musicians and for advancing social justice issues and using music to further the cause of integration  

Along the way, through the 15 years or so that they toured across America (plus more in Europe and some later “comeback” events), he fully achieved both ends. Granz also launched what might be the most profitable jazz-based record label (or series of labels) that ever was, and in the process, made himself quite rich.

Granz enriched more than himself; both the audience and the musicians benefited tremendously from his work. Twenty-five years ago, Universal Music, the corporate owner of the Verve catalog, issued the first half of the JATP recorded legacy on an elaborate package titled “The Complete Jazz At The Philharmonic On Verve (1944-1949).” The new set, like its predecessor, is also a very symmetrical 10 CDs.

If extroverted, larger than life, and near-ecstatic extended swing and bebop improvisations are your meat, then this package is a banquet. I picked one session at random as an example of what’s here. It’s a September 1953 concert — at Carnegie Hall no less — that takes up most of discs three and four and which is worth the price of admission all by itself.  

It starts where most contemporary jazz concerts might finish, with a big, knock-’em-down brawl of a blues. The participants stop just short of putting on boxing gloves and pummeling each other, but come close enough. Nearly all of them play solos that start small and grow gradually ever more frantic, reaching the point where they’re practically levitating.  

We hear trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers, trombonist Bill Harris, saxophonists Benny Carter, Willie Smith, Flip Phillips, and Ben Webster, with a rhythm section of pianist Oscar Peterson, guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer J.C. Heard. They each blow their way through basic blues changes, starting with an opening head of Charlie Parker’s “Cool Blues.” It’s a 23-minute track that almost seems to have justified the invention of the 12-inch LP, just to be able to release it all uninterrupted on one side of a record.

This exaggeratedly exciting opening is contrasted by the comparatively quietest moment in the JATP format, the “ballad medley,” in which each of the players glides through a single chorus of a favored love song: “September Song” (Harris), “Someone To Watch Over Me” (Webster), “Flamingo” (Carter), “I Can’t Get Started” (Eldridge), “Makin’ Whoopee” (Phillips), “Man With A Horn” (Smith), “Embraceable You” (Shavers).  These are some of my personal favorite moments in the JATP canon, the ones that make me most regret that the series ended before I was born. The saxes are particularly eloquent here; Benny Carter is so graceful and even gentlemanly, playing with such finesse that you don’t even notice that his solo is especially abstract and strays far from the written melody.

Then — all in the same evening — we get a brief mini-set by the legendary Lester Young playing with Peterson, Ellis, Brown, and Heard.  “Prez” was still near the peak of his form at this point, and he provides us with one excellent example each of everything he does perfectly: a fast blues (“Up N’ Adam”), a luxurious ballad (“I Cover the Waterfront”), and an even faster “Rhythm” variation (“Lester Leaps In”). There’s also an especially valuable trio set featuring Peterson and Carter under the leadership of superstar drummer Gene Krupa.

If that isn’t enough, this same Carnegie concert includes yet more extended jams for the entire cast of characters: “Cottontail,” “One O’Clock Jump,” “Flying Home.” I feel like I need to listen to the three hours of this particularly amazing night at least a few dozen times before moving on to the cornucopia of additional goodies contained in the other eight discs.  The booklet notes by a veteran swing scholar, John McDonough, are equally valuable; I wish he’d expand them into a full-length book on the history of JATP and its impact on jazz, American music, and even recording technology. 

As Mr. McDonough points out, the full scope of the music heard at the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts is hardly all “battles” and bloodshed.  There’s also considerable elegance here, as when Ben Webster works a quote from Vincent Youmans’s “Without a Song” into “Cool Blues.” But that amounts to kind of an extra; what listeners thronged by the thousands to hear at JATP concerts was sheer energy and exuberance, and an unrestrained lust for life.