Dave Frishberg By Himself

Liner Notes

It has been a couple of decades since Dave Frishberg made a mostly piano album. A few years ago, the cornetist and author Richard Sudhalter wrote of his friend and collaborator: “David and his songs have amassed such a cult following that people often forget he’s one of the very best jazz pianists we have. I sometimes wonder whether even he has to be reminded once in a while.”

Something reminded him. Four of the 14 pieces here have vocals; you can’t expect a guy with his singing habit to go cold turkey. Two of them are brand new Frishberg songs, about which more, shortly. But in this collection, he concentrates on the keyboard.

Sure, he’s a big international singing star now, but I remember when Frishberg was the house pianist at a club so far down among the warehouses in Lower Manhattan that you could hardly find the place. The club was the Half Note, of blessed memory. We’ll never know whether the Half Note would have survived had it stayed at good old Spring and Hudson. The owners, the wonderful Canterino family, were persuaded in the 1970s to move the establishment to a piece of expensive midtown real estate. After two years, economics blew it away. For 17 years in both locations, but especially downtown, the Half Note was one of the cultural centers of New York City. It was a musicians’ club, a listeners’ club. It was also, not at all incidentally, an eaters’ club. The Canterinos broke a jazz joint rule and served good food. The spaghetti (not pasta, please; spaghetti) was divine.

There is no CD booklet big enough to list all of the major musicians who played the Half Note. Here are a few: Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Anita O’Day, Wes Montgomery, Lennie Tristano, John Coltrane, Woody Hellilall, Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Desmond, James Moody, Roy Haynes. No musicians were more indelibly associated with the Half Note than Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. In the 1960s their pianist was likely to be Dave Frishberg. In The Trouble With Me Is You and can’t Take You Nowhere this collection reflects something of the impact those nonpareil tenor saxophonists had on Dave.

A Working Pianist

Sims and Cohn were only two of the major artists for whom Frishberg was an accompanist of choice. After moving from St. Paul to New York in 1957, he played for Carmen McRae and Kai Winding when not working as a solo pianist. He performed in the 1960s, at the Half Note and elsewhere, with Bobby Hackett, Charlie Shavers, Ben Webster, Gene Krupa, Wild Bill Davison, Bud Freeman and Peanut  Hucko. I remember him in the early ’70s in trumpeter Al Porcino’s modestly named rehearsal group, the Band Of The Century, which also included Zoot and the powerful, enigmatic bassist Malcohn Cecil. During his Los Angeles period of the ’70s and ’80s, Dave played with Jack Sheldon, Joe Pass, Bill Berry and Richie Kamuca and popped up in New York now and then to make records with Dick Sudhalter, among others. He even recorded with The Tijuana Brass. Hey, if you’re going to be in California, get with the ambiance.

Frishberg’s style seemed to fit any occasion, yet it was never apparent that he changed it significantly when moving from traditional jazz into mainstream or bebop. His left hand kept great time without being tiresome by imitating a string bass, and there were lots of interesting bop things happening on top. So, whether he was with a “dixieland” (can we send that word away?) band in the Village or Al and Zoot at the Half Note, Frishberg was Frishberg, more or less unclassifiable and always swinging.

Writing, Always Writing

‘While all of that was going on, so was something else. Dave was writing songs, sometimes in collaboration with people like Bob Dorough and Blossom Dearie, other times alone. With Dorough, it was the anthem of cool, I’m Hip; with Dearie, Long Daddy Green; by himself, Peel Me a Grape. There were many Frishberg songs, and they began making their way into the repertoires of not only Dearie, who helped immortalize Peel Me A Grape, but Anita O’Day, Cleo Laine, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, and Irene Kral. Diana Krall (different spelling, no relation to Roy and Irene) is doing in the ’90s for Peel Me A Grape what Blossom Dearie did in the ‘6os. She’s making it a jazz hit, again.

In 1968, Dave recorded an album of his songs. It was called Oklahoma Toad It made a splash mostly because of Van Lingle Mungo, Dave’s haunting song with a lyric composed of the names of major league baseball players, the heroes of his youth. Looking back on Oklahoma Toad, Frishberg is touching in his assessment of his performance: “I wish I could bum every one of those IPs.” It was nearly a decade before he came out of the studio closet to perform as a singer before an audience. Following the release of his 1977 Concord album, Getting Some Fun Out Of Life, Carl Jefferson booked him into the Concord Pavilion to open for Bing Crosby.

“I was terrified,” Dave says. “When it was over, Crosby said, ‘You did a good job.’ That’s all he said, and it was plenty.”

After such an ego boost, what could he do? He could expand his career to include looking people right in the eye in public places and singing his songs. That’s what he’s been doing ever since, to acclaim for the freshness, charm, wit and just plain rightness of his lyrics and melodies. The acclaim is not only at home. At this writing, Frishberg has just returned from Sweden, where he played piano for an album by the country’s leading singers from pop, rock, show business, jazz, blues, television and theater performing a collection of his songs in Swedish.

“I didn’t know what the words were,” he says. “So it was very interesting to get to deal with those songs minus the semantic distractions. And I really liked them. I mean, they worked for me as compositions, which made me feel good. It was fun.”

So, Dave continues to get fun out of life. Much of it these days comes when he plays solo piano.

Avoiding Typecasting

“I’ve been doing it a lot lately,” he says, “ever since I moved to Portland, Oregon. I’ve become more of a solo piano player than I ever was, partly because of circumstances and partly because there’s not that much ensemble music. My earlier experiences all through my life as a piano player have been as an ensemble player, at least an accompanist. Now, ever since I moved up here, I’ve had all these solo gigs, and I’ve kind of arrived at a way of approaching it. I don’t do much singing in Portland. I hardly sing at all. Once a year, I try to put on a concert with singing and sell tickets. But Portland is the place where I’m still a piano player. That’s the way I’ve designed it. If you start singing up here in your home town, it’s not long before you’re typecast and they’re not going to call you for piano gigs any more. They’ll say, ‘Oh, don’t call him. He does an act.'”

For five years, his Portland headquarters was the Heathman, a luxury hotel on Southwest Broadway. Dave soloed and rarely sang there, but sometimes accompanied the cornetist Jim Goodwin. More often, he was in alliance with the fine singer Rebecca Kilgore. They and guitarist Dan Faehnle are on Not a Care in the World (Arbors ARCD 19169). Inexplicably, the Heathman ended Frishberg’s residency, but he and Kilgore continue their collaboration at Atwater’s in Portland on Thursday nights.

Here’s a rundown on the songs in the album at hand, with illuminations by Frishberg.

I Want To Be A Sideman is among the composer’s newest works. One of Frishberg’s inimitable collages of humor and humanity, it seems destined to join Sweet Kentucky Ham, Dear Bix and Do You Miss New York? in his nostalgia hit parade.

• “Rosemary Clooney’s been using it,” Dave says. “She sings it to introduce her sidemen. Otherwise, I’m the only one who’s ever recorded it. I get a lot of response from musicians. The audiences go for it, too. I’m really surprised. It seems a little inside to me, but apparently it’s not.”

His playing on Ain’t She Sweet raised the question of whether Frishberg was influenced by Earl Hines. It turns out that he wasn’t, at least not directly.

• “I really don’t know about Earl Hines, although many people have mentioned him to me. I’m not really that much of a Hines student, but I think there’s a lot of him in Nat Cole. Nat Cole was certainly inspirational to me. It was his articulation and his wonderful time.”

A Mysterious Song

Lately, Dave has been revisiting Harold Arlen’s Last Night When We Were Young. He first met it on a Bud Freeman record date.

• “It’s a hard song. I always thought of it as a mysterious song, harmonically. The bridge is sort of mysterious, too. The very first time I made a record with my name on it was for Bud in New York in 1960 or so. I didn’t know the song. We had to read it off the sheet music and transpose it. Bob Haggart was reading over my shoulder, and both of us said, after it was finished, ‘Wow, what an odd song. What was that?’ I thought of that when I was doing it here. Now I play it with a little more confidence than I did 37 years ago.”

You Took Advantage Of Me is Rodgers and Hart at their most uncomplicated and spritely. Generations of jazz players have enjoyed its improvisational possibilities.

• “What can I say? I chose all the songs kind of at random,” Frishberg says. “they’re songs I’ve been playing on my various gigs. It could just as well have been a collection of 14 other songs. So there’s really no reason that I chose this or chose that. It’s current repertoire. Repertoire changes slowly, like tides.”

One piece unlkely to flow out of his repertoire soon is Saratoga Hunch. He wrote it in the 1960s as an instrumental for Zoot and Al. He added the words later.

• “I’m playing it in B-flat now, and I used to play it in C all the time, but as I get older my voice deepens. I like it better in B-flat. It should have always been there.”

Groovin’ High is Dizzy Gillespie’s celebrated bebop invention on the harmonies of Whispering. Dave works a further conversion.

• “I play it with a Latin beat. I’ve never heard anyone else do that, but it seems to lie easily in that realm. I can’t count the introduction. I’ve tried a few times, but unless I get off on the right foot, I’m always surprised where I enter.”

It Shouldn’t Happen to a Dream represents Frishberg’s continuing membership in the Johnny Hodges admiration society.

• ‘Johnny Hodges makes my knees buckle, still. He’s my all-time favorite. And I think of somebody singing this song. It could be Al Hibbler” (It was, on a rare Duke Ellington Musicraft recording from 1946). “There was some Johnny Hodges in Zoot, and there was more and more of it as Zoot got older. And I hear more of Hodges in Lee Konitz now, too.”

By Frishberg, Kahn and Cohn Out Of Prez

Frishberg’s rich use of language in I Can’t Take You Nowhere produced a lyric that rolls on with such hilarity that any live performance of it is sure to elicit at least one belly laugh somewhere in the room.

I’ll Never Smile Again brought its composer, Ruth Lowe, two hit records; in 1940 Tommy Dorsey’s with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, some years later one by the Ink Spots. Frishberg took liberties with the song. He’s sorry, maybe.

• ‘I used my own set of chords. The composer would probably be upset. I would be. I’m very sensitive about people doing that. And here I make my living by screwing around with other composers. When someone does that to me, I take offense. I say to myself, ‘Don’t they think I thought of that and then rejected it?'”

Perhaps his sins are not causing him excessive loss of sleep, especially when he considers his transgression in the context of the entire album.

• “I like this album. When I listen to it, I think it might be the closest I’ve ever come to relaxing while I’m making a record. I’m slowly learning to relax.”

– Doug Ramsey, December, 1997

Doug Ramsey is the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers (University of Arkansas Press). He is a regular contributor to JazzTimes and has written for Down Beat, Jazz Journal International, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He is a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.