© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Driving home that day, I thought about the long arc of time since I first heard Herb with The Soft Winds. There is something exceptional about him that is evasive of definition. That expression "down-home" has long since been worn to a tatter but it could have been coined for Herb Ellis. His playing has the feeling of sun on warm dark loam, which quality is the direct expression of what the man is. There is no art in which it is harder to lie than jazz, although a few men have managed it. But Herb would never even think of trying. The candor is complete. In his casual admissions of weakness, there is enormous strength. This makes him and his music profoundly human and peculiarly comforting, and time spent with Herb Ellis always lingers sweetly in the memory, long after the conversation itself is forgotten.”
- Gene Lees
When I was making my way as a Jazz drummer back when the World Was Young, I think I learned to swing by devouring all of the records of the Oscar Peterson Trio with Herb Ellis on guitar and Ray Brown on bass. That’s right, by listening to a drummer-less trio. I’m sure that if they’d heard me practicing with them, they would have hired me and instantly turned it into a quartet!
Herb worked in the Los Angeles studios for a long time and I worked with him on a few occasions for a contractor who staffed for jingles.
Many years later, we worked together in a Jazz setting when I subbed for drummer Larry Bunker on one of bassist Ray Brown's gigs in Hollywood.
During the first break Herb said to me: “I didn’t know drummers used brushes, anymore.”
I let the "praise" ride.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I hadn’t played a gig in some time and had forgotten my stick bag. [Miraculously, I had packed two sets of brushes in my trap case].
The following piece is from Gene Lees’ October, 1984 Jazzletter,
A Day with Herb Ellis:
"One afternoon a few years ago, I found myself standing behind a red-haired musician in a line of people waiting to check into a hotel at a jazz festival. At the time I knew him about well enough to say hello. I leaned close to him and sang, very softly:
It was many and many a year ago
in a kingdom by the sea
that a maiden there lived
whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee.
The words were the opening stanza of Poe's Annabel Lee.
Herb Ellis turned, startled, and looked me in the face. "Where in the world did you learn that. he said.
"In some club in Toronto that you and Lou Carter and John Frigo played when you were The Soft Winds. I can't remember the name of the room. It was probably not long after you guys set that to music."
"You must be the only guy in the world besides us who knows it," Herb said. "I don't even have a lead sheet on it."
"I do. Frigo gave me a copy in Chicago."
"Would you send me one?"
"Sure," I said. And subsequently I did.
The song is a memento of a superb trio that is now almost forgotten, as well as a phase in the career of Herb Ellis that few of his admirers even know about. I knew the song well not simply from casual hearings in a nightclub but from sitting at the piano, analyzing it, impressed by the way Ellis, pianist Lou Carter, and bassist John Frigo had turned a piece of classic metric poetry into song. The ability to lift poetry off paper and into persuasive fluent melody is far rarer than is generally realized. And they had done that to Poe's dark poem.
Nat Cole had established one of two classic trio formations, piano, bass, and guitar; the other being piano, bass, and drums. And a number of trios had been formed on the Cole pattern; including the Page Cavanaugh Trio, whose pianist leader, like Cole, sang. The Soft Winds used the Cole instrumentation, but there the resemblance ended, for the singing too was in trio, and they did adventurous things. They never became a famous recording group but some of their songs linger on, and a comparatively few people who were exposed to them retain an impression, like the image of a lightbulb after you turn it out in the night.
There are five phases to the career of Herb Ellis, whose name would turn up on almost every guitarist's list of his favorite guitarists. After he left his native Texas, there was a period of working with bands about which, until recently, I knew absolutely nothing. Then there is The Soft Winds phase, followed by the period that made him famous in the jazz world, a six-year tenure with the Oscar Peterson Trio. After that Herb worked in the studios of Los Angeles, emerging to play in clubs and at festivals. Then he walked away from the studio work and has in recent years been touring, devoting himself entirely to playing jazz.
A high percentage of the finest jazz guitarists have been from the south and southwest, including Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel, both from Oklahoma, Tal Farlow from Greensboro, North Carolina, Freddie Green from Charleston, South Carolina, Jimmy Raney from Louisville, Kentucky, Mundell Lowe from Laurel, Mississippi, and Wes Montgomery from Indianapolis, Indiana, although northeastern cities have contributed a few too — Kenny Burrell from Detroit, Gene Bertoncini and Chuck Wayne from New York City, Jim Hall from Buffalo and Cleveland, George Benson from Pittsburgh, and Bucky Pizzarelli from Paterson, New Jersey. With his Texas roots, Ellis is solidly in that south-southwestern contingent, and his playing has an incomparable earthiness and swing.
Even Herb's approach to the instrument is somehow uniquely his. He sits low in a chair, right ankle on left knee, the instrument at a slant as it rests on the raised leg. A lot of piano players sing what they are playing. Herb seems to chew every note he plays. As one bites one's tongue in threading a needle, Herb works his jaw in a way that bespeaks a total physical involvement with the music. He seems to make music with his whole body.
The instrument called the guitar in jazz should probably have another name. The true guitar is an unamplified flat-bodied instrument strung in earlier times with gut strings and later, after Segovia made them acceptable even to purists, nylon. It descends from a family of instruments developed primarily in Spain. A guitar with steel strings evolved comparatively early, and it is this instrument that is widely used in the folk music of the United States. The steel-stringed guitar has more volume than one strung with gut or nylon, but not enough to make it competitive to horns in jazz groups. Not until the development of amplification was it possible to play long-lined solos that you could hear over the surrounding din, and it was then that the instrument took its place as an important jazz voice. The credit for pioneering the instrument usually goes to Charlie Christian, although Alvino Rey played an amplified instrument before Christian. But Christian was the first great creative soloist on this instrument, as Alvino, now active as a classical guitarist, is the first to insist.
The character of the "amplified guitar" is as different from that of the historical guitar as that of an electric organ from a piano. Although they have the same tuning, E A D G B E', which forms an E minor seventh chord with an eleventh added, they are different in all other ways. The classical guitar has a strongly contrapuntal character. It is even built differently, the fingerboard being flat with the strings fairly far apart. The amplified "jazz" guitar has a slightly convex fingerboard and strings set closer together. The tones produced on a classical guitar decay rapidly; those produced on an amplified guitar have a long life, which lends to the instrument some of the nature of a wind instrument. Charlie Christian's great contribution was his perception that this was a new instrument, not simply a louder one, and his exploration of its possibilities through the exercise of a wonderful melodic imagination that made him a harbinger of bebop. This much the two instruments do have in common: as the late Hugo Friedhofer, who loved it, used to put it, "The guitar is an unforgiving instrument." There is no instrument on which it is easier to play a little, and badly, than the guitar — and no instrument on which it is harder to play a lot, and well.
It is common now for guitarists to play both instruments. Herb has remained devoted to the jazz guitar alone, although he has played other plectrum instruments in the studios. He is at the pinnacle, one of the great jazz guitarists and one of the most powerful jazz players on any instrument.
Mitchell Herbert Ellis was born August 4, 1921, four miles south of Farmersville, Texas, then a hamlet of two thousand souls, about forty miles northeast of Dallas. This makes him a Leo, like Oscar Peterson (August 15, 1925), and it also makes him sixty-four years old, which is hard to believe, not only in view of the vigor of his playing but because of the cherubic youthfulness of his appearance. The red hair has faded and thinned a little now, but Herb has an eternal boyishness about him. His coloring is that of his Scottish and Irish forebears. His skin has that clear texture of one who does not smoke or drink.
Herb has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for thirty years. "I still go to meetings," he says. "It helps me keep a focus." His lapses have been few although, as he said a few years ago, "When I fall off the wagon, the crash is heard around the world." No doubt this is because Herb seems like a pillar of sanity to those who know him, a man who has conquered a flaw, whether of heredity or habit being irrelevant. One could say of Herb what someone said recently of his late and much-missed friend Shelly Manne: I never saw him in a social or professional situation to which he did not contribute something positive. Herb is a joy to play with, a joy to be with.
His two children, now in their twenties, are gone from home, and he and his wife Patti live in a condominium in Studio City, California, one of the divisions of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. One doesn't encounter him often in California any more, because he is away so much, playing. So I availed myself of an opportunity to see him when he was home for a few days, and spent a pleasant laughing afternoon filling the gaps in my knowledge of him.
"I played the harmonica first, when I was about three," Herb said as we sat in his living room, the conversation accompanied by the slow tick of a big clock. "I have not too much recollection of that, but I can still play it. They thought I had some musical talent, so my sister bought a banjo for me. I learned to play the banjo. I got a little book, learned how to tune it, and I played the banjo. I must have been about six or seven. Then, a little later, a cousin — one of my city cousins — left a guitar at our house. My older brother wanted to play music with me. He tuned this guitar, but he tuned it incorrectly. He tuned it in a way that you could just hit all the strings at one time and it would make a major chord. He'd just bar across, and get all major chords."
"What did he do about the two top strings?"
"Well, it just sounded, parallel triads. I knew this was not right. So I got a book from Sears Roebuck and learned how to tune it and play it, and then I showed him how to play it. So then we played together, banjo and guitar. Then I learned to play the guitar, and I played the guitar more, because I liked it a lot better. I just played. I listened to the radio. We had no recordings out there except a couple of things by a singer named Gene Austin."
"I remember him. I remember him well."
"Well he had a guitar player with him who sounded terrific. I can't think of his name. And so I learned to play a little of his stuff. I don't know what I was playing. It wasn't jazz, it wasn't hillbilly. Some country tunes. Then I went to high school. I got a little amplifier from Sears Roebuck, and another guitar. And I'd play for the high school assemblies. Then I went to college, to North Texas State University."
"You must have been one of the first musicians to go to North Texas State!"
"Ever," he said.
"There was no jazz program then."
"No. I was there at the same time Jimmy Giuffre was. I'll tell you who else was there — Gene Roland and Harry Babasin. Shortly after I had been there, majoring in music, I played on the Saturday night stage show. They had a stage band, and Jimmy Giuffre was in it, and Harry Babasin. And I played Back Home Again in Indiana, and I played it pretty fast. I had a lot of technique. I could play fast, play a lot of notes ..."
"You still can."
"They heard me, and then they came to me, and asked me to move into a house where they lived together. Two-oh-four Normal Street was the address. They said, 'You've got the talent, but your music is meaningless."They told me this. They said, 'You're really headed in the wrong direction.' That hurt my feelings. And then they said, 'Listen to this guy.' And they played Charlie Christian for me. The Benny Goodman Sextet records, after I'd moved in the house with them. They said, 'Now what do you think of that?' And I remember what I said. Very childish. I said, 'Well, he sounds good. But what's the big deal? I can play a lot faster than that.' I said that."
"Oh no. You know, I once made the mistake of saying something like that to Red Norvo about Bix."
"Oh boy."
"Red is too much a gentleman to get nasty, but he quietly let me know. I said something like, he didn't play very many notes. I was about twenty at the time. And Red said, 'He didn't have to.'"
"When we're young we often have our priorities in the wrong places. Well, they said, 'You haven't got the message, yet. Listen some more.' So I listened some more to Charlie Christian. I don't know whether it was the same day or the next day, but it wasn't a long time, and it really hit me, like a spiritual awakening, what he was doing that I didn't do. How much depth he had. How great it sounded. And how scummy and shallow I sounded. His playing sounded deep and mine sounded shallow. I was very upset, very distraught. So I put the guitar underneath the bed, and said, That's it. I've just got too far to go.' It stayed there about one day. Then I got it out. Now I went from all notes to no notes. Each note had to drip with emotion and be sent from heaven. I went from one extreme ridiculously the other way. So that's how I got some of the direction. The other direction I got, which has been with me ever since, came from Count Basie. I loved Count Basie, and Lester Young was very appealing to me. They had a big influence. We had some records of Jimmie Lunceford. They were very meaningful to me. That was a great band. And Earl Hines had a great band. And I heard Dizzy Gillespie with Cab Calloway before he was playing bebop. I had some Coleman Hawkins. But the main influences were Charlie Christian and Lester Young. Then, later, when I heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy together, that was a big influence. So those are my influences, and that's the way I’ve always played. I've never tried to change it. I've just tried to get better. As you get older, you get deeper, more mature. I'm sort of suspicious of people who change styles."
"Because the music obviously is not a manifestation of their own personality."
"It's not a big commitment."
"A guitarist friend of mine says that Django Reinhardt is more honored in conversation than in actual influence."
"I believe that's true. However, during all that time, I did hear Django and I liked him, but not as well as I liked Charlie Christian."
"Christian electrified me when I was a kid. And there was a guitarist in the Billy Mills Orchestra on the Fibber McGee and Molly program."
"Oh sure, I remember that. He played a little break in the theme. I tell you who it was. Bodkin. Perry Bodkin."
"I heard a young guy a year or so ago who played like Eddie Lang."
"Eddie Lang was tremendous. But I never heard him until later. I'll tell you who else I listened to, and who was another influence on me. George Barnes. I used to hear him on the radio from Chicago. A program called The Plantation Party. He had a spot on that show, and I used to hear him every week. I was very impressed with George Barnes."
"Where did you go from North Texas State? Did you graduate?"
"No. I went a couple of years, and the money was very short. So I went on the road with a big jazz band from the University of Kansas, led by Charlie Fisk. That band lasted a few months, and then we had to give it up. Charlie Fisk, he was a trumpet player, and I both had offers to go with Russ Morgan."
"That ain't exactly your groove."
"It wasn't my groove, but the reason I was hired was to play in a quartet context — plus playing with the band — with Joe Mooney, the accordionist."
"Oh, dear dear Joe. I never knew Joe was with Russ Morgan."
"Yeah, he was there. So we played some little jobs together, Joe and myself and a clarinet player and a bass player who is now a priest. Russ Morgan just petrified me. He ruled with an iron hand. If you made a mistake, he just zeroed in on you, he just scared me to death. So we were playing a theater somewhere, and I got sick, so they had to go on to the next theater and I said I'll meet you there. I never met 'em, I just split. I went to Kansas City and stayed about a year. That was about 1941. I just got the tail end of Charlie Parker. That was right before he joined Dizzy. A friend of mine, a saxophone player I'd met earlier on the Charlie Fisk band, was in Kansas City, and he was always telling me about Charlie Parker. He called him Bird, and he was trying to explain how he played. So when I went to Kansas City, he said, 'I want you to hear this guy.' He was playing out at Tootie's Mayfair, or some little place. And he said, 'Get your guitar and I'll get my sax, and we'll go out, and we'll play, we'll sit in. They know me.' This tenor saxophonist had perfect pitch, and ears, a sensational musician. So we went out to this little dark club, and we got on the stand, and Charlie Parker was sitting 'way in the back. And the first tune that they played was Cherokee. And they played it fast. I'd never heard Cherokee. The rhythm section was just playing for two or three choruses. When they got to the bridge, it was very foreign to me, I didn't know what was happening. At that time, that type of tune was not played. So the saxophone player called out the changes. And now Charlie Parker started playing. I'd never heard anything like this. I hadn't heard Dizzy then, except with Cab Calloway's band. I heard this and it sounded beautiful, but I had no idea what this guy was doing. So he played several choruses, and when he got through, they looked at me and said, 'You got it.' Well young and dumb don't have to go together. So I said, ‘No thanks.' I mean, what am I going to do after that? So the rhythm section played three or four more choruses, Charlie Parker came back in and played another fifteen choruses. And then later on, we played something I knew at a reasonable tempo. Then I played. But what a shock that was. One of the biggest musical shocks of my whole life. It was a unique situation. I just love the memory of it. I don't know whether I dug him instantly. I knew it was different, and it sounded good, I suspected how good it was, but I was still championing Lester Young. Which you always should. Guys would say, 'Bird is the new thing,'and I'd say,'No, man, Lester Young is it forever. 'But it did have a great impact, and later on I learned not only to like it but to love it."
"What happened after Kansas City?"
"Oooh . . . From Kansas City? Oh yeah, Glenn Gray. Glenn Gray and the Casa Loma came through. I went with them and stayed a couple of years, and then I went with Jimmy Dorsey. From '45 to '47, when I went with The Soft Winds, then from '47 almost until I went with Oscar I was with The Soft Winds."
"How did that group come about?"
"We were all with Jimmy Dorsey."
"Lou Carter and John Frigo were also with Jimmy Dorsey?"
"Yes."
"Then you were three quarters of the rhythm section."
"And we left. Together. And Jimmy was very unhappy. We went to Buffalo and played at the Peter Stuyvesant, then we went to Canada a couple of times and played at the . . ."
"At the Zebra Lounge! That's what it was called! It was right across from the Globe and Mail. That's when I first knew you guys."
"The Zebra Lounge! That's right. Ray Brown heard me there."
"That was a wonderful group. How did you get the idea for that group?"
"We'd been playing together, and we'd get together when we could, and John Frigo, the bass player, got this job at the Peter Stuyvesant Hotel in Buffalo for a trio. We really liked playing together, and we had some great arrangements, if you remember. Magnificent arrangements, not just little heads, not just little-bitty first and last choruses."
"It was an orchestrated trio. Both instrumentally and vocally. Very hip."
"Orchestrated. That's exactly what it was. And Oscar heard me with that group."
"That group really was ahead of its time. Harmonically, my memory tells me it was kind of like what Gene Puerling was doing later with the Hi-Lo's."
"Sort of. That's very close. Well I stayed with them, and John left, and the group was dissipating. It lasted about five years."
"You guys wrote some marvelous things. Detour Ahead and that wonderful thing on Annabel Lee."
"I Told You I Love You, Now Get Out</sp