Dave Frishberg Solo and Trio

Liner Notes

I first heard Dave play sometime in the early sixties. I had dropped into the old Half Note in New York ; the band was an Al Cohn and Zoot Sims group, with Jimmy Rushing. It was joyful music, recalling Kansas City jump and swing. Gradually my attention was drawn more and more to the unfamiliar young piano player, and after a while I left the bar and went around to where I could hear him better.

He was formidable. Everything he did was based in the idiom. You could hear the ancestry of every phrase. And yet it was fresher and more original than most of the music being played by musicians attempting to be innovators. The familiar vocabularies of swing and blues piano were stretched, altered. twisted, turned upside down and inside out. The way it was done indicated a thorough knowledge of the originals. but the originals were not copied.

There’s a widespread feeling among musicians and listeners that to be creative you must abandon the methods and styles of your elders and stylistically forge ahead wherever that might be. If you can invent a new style you can be hailed as an “original voice”, and if the actual content of your music is on the thin side. people are less apt to notice (except later, from posterity’s perspective). But maybe the richest music is most often traditional or conservative in terms of stylistic underpinnings, while extravagantly inventive in terms of content. There is a double richness. The player is creating compelling ideas of his own, and at the same time these refer back to attraction or a context which provides a special depth. Dave was. and is, a case in point.

During the sixties in New York he worked in a wide variety of contexts, with (besides Al and Zoot) Roy Eldridge, Buck Clayton, Kenny Davern, Ben Webster, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Bud Freeman, Gene Krupa, Bobby Hackett. and singers Carmen McRae, Odetta, Sheila Jordan. Jimmy Rushing. Dick Haymes. and Fran Jeffries. Now in Los Angeles, he continues both studio and club work, and pursues a career as a songwriter, particularly writing music and lyrics for television. Oklahoma Toad . an album of his pop songs, is available on the CTI label.

Few jazz pianists record solo albums nowadays. This is partly an accident of style and history. From the bebop period on, jazz pianists have been ensemble, rather than solo. players; what they do is dominated by chiefly linear concerns. Earlier piano styles. however, evolved as solo styles and were, at best, multi-leveled, with different musical events happening simultaneously in both hands. In his own way, Dave harks back to the earlier tradition in some of these solos. Yet he is recognizably not a product of that era. Nor does he merely follow in great footsteps. In a sense, his art is to subtly manipulate the traditional. to throw little monkey wenches into the patterns one is led to expect by the context. His playing is full of unexpected little twists and turns. The traditional is merely the setting in which they are placed, yet this setting provides much of their meaning.

— Mait Edey

SIDE A

1. Saratoga Hunch
Originally I wrote this for two tenor saxophones-AI Cohn and Zoot Sims. The title refers to Saratoga, New York, where Al and Zoot’s band, with me on piano, was engaged for a week at an elegant old restaurant to inaugurate their new jazz policy. On our last night, when we couldn’t find the owner, we had a hunch. Our hunch was right. Subsequently we learned that he returned a few days later and stuck around just long enough to abscond with the antique Tiffany lampshades. We never got paid, of course. but we stayed at an expensive hotel and laughed a lot during the engagement.

2. Johnny Come Lately
I learned this tune while playing in Ben Webster’s quartet in 1963. The other members were Mel Lewis and Richard Davis, and I must say it was musically very heavy indeed.

3. Time On My Hands
For a year or so, whenever I sat down to play idly at a piano, at home, in a studio, in a piano store, I would begin to play this tune as if by reflex. I don’t remember playing it since I made this record. Currently in piano stores I’m playing “Count Your Blessings”

4. Where You At?
This is a very hip song by George Handy with a lyric by Jack Segal: “Where you at? Where’s your natural habitat?” I learned it from Zoot, who sometimes sings it in public. That’s why I play it in Zoot’s key-D flat. George Handy has pulled off an enormously difficult trick by employing what are essentially only three chord changes -A7, A flat 7. and D flat-in such a way as to make a unique harmonic pattern.

5. The Crave
Mv brother had this on 78 rpm. so it was among the first piano pieces to engage my interest as a youngster. It’s always been my favorite Jelly Roll Morton piece. I only recently began to play it myself. The way I do it, it’s not authentic Jelly but the mood’s there. I think.

SIDE B

I. Pent-Up House
I heard this on a Prestige LP by Sonny Rollins in the middle fifties. I was ecstatic when I first heard Sonny, and I’ve never got over him. I think he’s the best jazz improviser I’d ever heard.

2. Cuttin. Some Hogs
The title is an expression I ran across in Pops Foster’s autobiography. Where today’s musicians might use the terms “I hit a clam” or “I goofed”, in Pops Foster’s day they would say, “I cut a hog on that, better try it again.”

3. Willie the Weeper
This is part of the exotic repertoire Of Kenny Davern’s band that appeared for a brief but stormy time at Nick’s in Greenwich Village in 1961. We were billed of course as a Dixieland band. but Kenny refused to play any of the warhorses like “Tin Roof ‘ or “That’s a Plenty.” Instead, he taught us esoteric pieces like Ellington’s “Shout ‘Em Aunt Tillie”.and Armstrong’s “It’s the Last Time, Honey Babe.” The customers loved it, but the management was uneasy. One night we went too far. During “Wild Man Blues”. I reached inside the piano and strummed the strings behind Kenny’s solo. I felt one of the bosses tugging at my coat. “Are you crazy?” he was screaming with a red face, “Are you nuts?” They immediately fired the whole band. The next day they hired everybody back except me and Kenny.

4. Squeeze Me
As a child I first heard this by Milfred Bailey on a Decca 78 from my brother’s collection. Upon listening to the original again, I find that I play the turnaround on bars 7 and 8 differently from the record. Now suddenly both ways seem appropriate, but I prefer my way still.

5. Drop Me Off In Harlem
This is from one of my favorite Ellington periods-the late thirties. I wish I had played it at a more relaxed tempo. Maybe next time.

— Dave Frishberg