The Liner Notes, by Doug Ramsey

CARL SAUNDERS: ECLECTICISM

Is there more than one Carl Saunders? Possibly, but no one has seen two, three, four or five tall, lean, bearded Carl Saunderses together. There is a Carl Saunders who has played lead trumpet in the Bill Holman Band since the early 1980s but never taken a solo. A Carl Saunders sits in the fifth trumpet chair in Bob Florence’s band and often plays solos. A Saunders shows up in Gerald Wilson’s band now and then. A trumpeter by that name gigs with the Frank Capp Juggernaut. One works in Phil Norman’s Tentet. In this album, five Saunderses team up, playing with the precision of one man.

The Carl Saunders whose existence I have been able to verify seems to be all of the above men. He also worked with Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, Harry James, Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman. He played lead behind Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Robert Goulet and Paul Anka. He grew up in a hothouse musical atmosphere, and he was a quick learner. His mother, Gail Sherwood, was a singer with her own radio show and a piano accompanist named Stan Kenton. When Kenton formed a band in the early 1940s, she was its first vocalist. She was also a singer and arranger with her brother, Bobby Sherwood, in his big band.

Saunders’ early exposure to music gives new meaning to the phrase “formative years.” He was on the road when his mom traveled with the Sherwood band from before his first birthday until he was five years old. He remembers being held backstage in his mother’s arms, seeing the lights glint off the brass instruments and hearing Sherwood’s melodic trumpet. Surrounded by music, young Carl absorbed it. He became a drummer and a pianist and taught himself to play the trumpet. His grandmother, the vaudeville veteran Gayle Sherwood, was his first accompanist. She could improvise in any key and helped him him with ear training that has served him ever since. By the time he was graduated from high school he was so accomplished a trumpet player that his mother arranged for an audition with Stan Kenton. Kenton gave him a choice; wait for the first opening in the trumpet section, or join the band immediately on mellophonium, a hybrid horn Kenton loved so much that he had an entire section of them. At 18, Carl was on the road playing mellophonium with one of the major big bands in jazz.

Saunders is in command of the trumpet and the art of improvisation to the extent that listeners’ jaws drop when they hear him. They drop farther if the listeners are musicians. At a Jazz West Coast revival meeting a few years ago, Carl played the solos in the ensemble arrangements that Jack Montrose created for Chet Baker and Clifford Brown. At the concert, I was sitting with Bill Holman, who could be expected to be familiar with Saunders’ capabilities. After all, Carl had been playing lead in his band for ten years. During one of Saunders’ solos—I think it was on “Tiny Capers”—I glanced at Bill. His jaw had dropped.

Generally, lead trumpeters and improvising soloists have different personalities, motivations and sets of skills. Lead players need strength, stamina, range and the power to pull together not just the trumpet section but the entire band. Reliability, predictability and consistency are their stocks in trade. The great ones also have perfect time. The best jazz soloists dream, take risks, let the heart lead the brain. They love to launch into open space and if there is no net, well, what the hell. A few extraordinary men have had the attributes of the lead player and the soloist, a combination so rare that trumpeters tend to speak in respectful tones of Snooky Young, Ernie Royal, Bobby Shew, Carl Saunders. In this collection, Saunders displays both talents in abundance.

He luxuriates in settings that for almost all jazz soloists happen only in their dreams. First, he has a world class rhythm section. Pianist Billy Childs is a Los Angeles native who has traveled the world as a colleague of J.J. Johnson, Nat Adderley, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Daniels, Bobby Hutcherson, Branford Marsalis and other major artists. People still talk about his work with Hubbard in the seventies. His playing today is even more impressive. Bob Magnusson is one of the great jazz bassists. At a recent festival, the first thing Percy Heath said to me after “hello” was, “I heard Magnusson is here. I’ve got to hear him.” That is typical of the respect other bassists have for Bob. Santo Savino is a drummer who can do anything, from backing the world’s best singers to driving Las Vegas spectaculars. As he makes clear here, his first love is swinging. “Santo and I have been playing together for 35 years,” Carl says. He is a special player. He makes a big band sound like a small group.” Second dream element: On all but two pieces Saunders is in the midst of strings and French horns. Third: his arrangements are by three of the best known and most admired contemporary writers in jazz and by three others Carl considers major talents.

“We have Clare Fischer, Bill Holman and Bob Florence,” he says, ”and then we have what I call my underground genius writing staff, Larry Dominello, Scott Tibbs and Jackson Stock. Those guys aren’t as famous as Fischer, Holman and Florence, but they’re heavies.”

Florence’s arrangement enhances the joyousness of George Gershwin’s “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” with a sprightly countermelody played in unison by Childs and Magnusson, ecsatic bursts from a trumpet choir made up of Carl Saunders, and strings that swirl down, lift Carl’s single trumpet and propel it into a solo. Three choruses of improvisation follow in which Saunders’ fluency, tone, inventiveness, long melodic lines and breath control may make grown men and women weep, if they are trumpet players.

“Reaching for You” is one of 124 Saunders compositions in a collection called The Cookbook (1996 Carl Saunders Music BMI). The arrangement is by Dominello, one of Carl’s underground writers. “Larry is maybe even the man,” Carl says. “Larry is awesome. He’s a piano player who lives in North Hollywood. He’s got this fusion between jazz and symphony.”

When Frédéric Chopin wrote his Opus 64 waltzes in 1846 and 1847, he could not have foreseen that he was creating frameworks for a jazz trumpeter a century and a half later. As a formidable improviser himself, if Chopin could hear what Saunders does with the changes of his celebrated C-sharp minor waltz, he would have to be impressed. In his last CD (Out of The Blue), Carl worked similar magic with the D-flat major, the Minute Waltz.

Chopin would no doubt also have approved of the harmonies Childs introduces and the orchestra expands upon in “First Gift.” In this waltz composed and orchestrated by Dominello, he melds jazz and classical idioms with even greater clarity than in “Reaching for You.” Saunders’ beautifully contoured solo rises above categories. The grace and extension of his lines here recall Don Fagerquist, one of Carl’s two major inspirations when he was developing. The other was Kenny Dorham. Fagerquist was an influence even before Carl became a trumpet player. He was a member of the popular octet headed by saxophonist Dave Pell, who was married to Saunders’ aunt. Carl heard the band frequently and remembers that Fagerquist’s sound “made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.”

Saunders asked his frequent employer Bill Holman to write an arrangement of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Surrey With the Fringe On Top.” The resulting chart for rhythm section and five trumpets is Holman at his best. He melds and interweaves simple melodic lines to achieve complexity that is received by the ear and mind as the epitome of logic and order. In some sections of the piece we have the impression of a big band, thanks not only to Holman’s writing but also to Saunders’ ability to execute this demanding material. Carl’s exhilarating solo perfectly negotiates and complements Holman’s trumpet section backgrounds. Childs solos beautifully. Savino’s accents and breaks are a big part of the success of this performance, which reveals more of itself with each hearing.

Holman on Saunders: “I know that he put in a lot of work on the overdubbing. He was very diligent, very conscientious. He can play anything. I love his jazz work, but on my band, by his choice, he plays only lead. He has really turned the band around since he’s been there. I am a Carl Saunders admirer, without reservations.”

Holman is a tough act to follow, but the next arranger is the brilliant Clare Fischer, who can handle it. He has concentrated on his Latin and vocal groups lately, and we have not heard enough of his writing for strings. When Saunders asked Fischer to write an arrangement of his favorite Harold Arlen song, “Last Night When We Were Young,” he discovered that it is also Fischer’s favorite. In the lush astringency of Fischer’s arrangement of this seldom heard classic, Saunders’ first chorus bears out that the great players can express their individuality simply by playing a beautiful melody. In his variations, there is a suggestion of Bobby Hackett and, in his cadenza, of Clifford Brown.

The dramatic “The Price of Admission” is by Scott Tibbs, who also wrote the arrangement. The piece has qualities of a show-opener and of a chart for the Count Basie band. It also has great changes for blowing, as Saunders and Childs demonstrate. Magnusson and Savino drive this one.

“I’ve known Scott Tibbs since he was 15,” Saunders says. “He was a talented writer when he was in high school in Las Vegas. After that, he went to Berkelee in Boston and did the four-year course in two years. Then he got his masters degree in composition at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. at UCLA. I was his mentor when he was a kid. Now he’s mine.”

Carl is muted for “Penticton” by Jackson Stock, another member of the Saunders composer underground. A graduate of Berkelee College of Music who also taught there for three years, Stock works in Southern California as a trombonist in traditional and swing bands, but says, “My writers’ ear leans toward bebop.” He named the piece for the small city in British Columbia’s fruit-growing belt where he was working a dixieland job when he finished the arrangement.

The mysterious atmosphere Scott Tibbs establishes in “Night Reverie” encourages reflection in Carl’s solo. Quietly, making it sound easy, with elegance Saunders moves his solo through the extremes of the trumpet and all regions in between. Don’t miss his perfect B below high C, or his final (perfect, of course) low E, as far south as the horn goes. Childs maintains the mood in his solo, nobly supported by Magnusson, a master of the sustained note, and by Savino’s subtle coloring.

Las Vegas guitarist Joe Lano provided the Latinate arrangement of “Old Folks.” The French horn passages are effective and musical, but Lano may also have been motivated to give the horns prominence by the presence in the section of his wife, Beth. Carl’s improvisations on this classic Willard Robison song flow like water over smooth stones. In the tag ending, his inflections and intervals hint at the blues character that runs through all of Robison’s pieces.

There is no mere hinting in the final “Blues For The Common Man,” one of several Saunders blues compositions in The Cookbook. This is unadulterated blues. It has plenty of trumpet section work marked by the astounding unity of tone, phrasing and attack that Carl draws from himselves. What makes this track a highlight of the album, however, is his five solo choruses of inspired blues invention. They remind us that it’s not his technique that makes Carl Saunders a magnificent jazz artist. It’s his heart.

—Doug Ramsey

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 Jazz Times and the winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing about music.