Introducing Johnny Griffin

Recorded and released in 1956, Introducing Johnny Griffin is the stunning debut by the great tenor saxophonist.  He is joined by Wynton Kelly on piano, Curly Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums.  It's an all-around great album and the focus is primarily on Griffin, showcasing his awesome skills on ballads, blues, uptempo, and medium swing pieces.  Along with three standards, there are three compositions by Griffin including a blues and rhythm changes.

To be fair, Johnny Griffin (1928-2008) was twenty-eight at the time of recording and had already been active for a number of years.  He was born and raised in Chicago and studied under the legendary Captain Walter Dyett (1901-1969) at DuSable High School.  Dyett was an authoritative teacher and gained the respect of his students who included Griffin, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Bo Diddley, Gene Ammons, Redd Foxx, Dorothy Donegan, and many more.  I talked about Chicago in the post on Richard Evans and Ahmad Jamal, and a major reason for all of the great jazz to come out of that town in the 1950's and 1960's is in part due to Dyett.  The local blues scene and the strong African American community were other factors. 

Griffin has solid background in blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz playing alto with T-Bone Walker at age fifteen, then joining Lionel Hampton's big band in 1945 were he switched to tenor.  He also played with Arnett Cobb, George Freeman, and  Joe Morris, a trumpet player whose jump band utilized elements of bop.  After a two-year stint in the Army, Griffin came back to Chicago and eventually made his way over to New York.  

Griffin's sound and approach is very much reflective of his background and exemplifies the hard bop approach in jazz performance.   Yet somehow his blues playing seems so much more expressive than, say, Hank Mobley.  Part of it is Griffin's vocal-like approach of hovering around the beat when playing blues licks that intensifies when he goes up into his upper register where his note wail or cry.  It's particularly effective after his rapid-fire lines.  He has incredible, jaw-dropping technique, but he also has great control and that allows him to dial in his numerous expressive techniques including slides, bends, wails, etc.  He'll also bend his note in such a way that he'll bring out those quarter tones outside of the Western tempered scale.  Altogether it's an exciting recipe for improvisation.  

Wynton Kelly (1931-1971) is a good partner for Griffin.  His comping skills are excellent and here, and demonstrates that it's not what you play but when you play.  Griffin is in complete control, so Kelly doesn't really need to play much behind, so he just stays out of the way and let's Griffin play.   Like Griffin, and other musicians of their generation, he too has a background in rhythm and blues, playing professionally since he was a teenager.  His experiences includes stints with Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Benny Carter.  I'm more familiar with Kelly's work with Miles Davis, so I notice that his blues playing is different here.  With Davis, he was a great accompanist and his blues playing was very joyful.  Here his blues-y playing reminds me of Horace Silver's funky approach to piano.  Because Griffin had a such a huge sound, he makes Kelly sound quiet and introverted, at least more so than he did with Davis.  Still, Kelly is strong.   

Bassist Curly Russell (1917-1986) played bass on many early bop recordings with Charlie Parker.  Before that, he had played in the big bands of Don Redman and Benny Carter.  In the 1940's and early 1950's, he was in demand playing on a number of recordings by Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, etc.  He has a solid tone and is a reliable timekeeper, holding everything together.  He gets a few spotlights but his solos  consist of him walking.  I don't think I've ever heard him solo with lines.  I'm sure he could, but he is that rare jazz bassist, Eugene Wright is another, who demands that his work be judged by his skills as an accompanist.  

Drummer Max Roach (1924-2007) sounds excellent as usual.  I assume that he and Russell were chosen since there are two uptempo numbers on this album.  Roach is also excellent in support and during this period is generally not that interactive with the soloists.  He does compliment the players, but overall, like Kelly, he stays out of the way of Griffin.  

On the uptempo tunes, "Mil Dew", is a rhythm changes original by Griffin, and "It's Alright With Me" by Cole Porter, Griffin plays like a man possessed.  He reminds of Sonny Stitt in his gunslinger approach to improvisation with his fiery competitiveness.  No surprise that he recorded two-tenor albums with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis,  Kelly makes the tempos but he doesn't sound terribly comfortable.  

Johnny Griffin

Sonny Rollins had recorded "It's Alright with Me" the year before, but otherwise this was one of the few standards that I learned about from a modern musician: pianist Brad Mehldau from his 1998 recording Live at the Village Vanguard Volume 2, whose version, I think, reignited interest in the tune.  Prior to that Harry Connick, Jr. had recorded a vocal version with solos by himself and Russell Mallone in 1990, but I don't think it had been played for a long time before that and Griffin's version might be one of last instrumental versions.  Especially at that tempo, it's a challenging tune with a long 72-bar form and what must have been at the time a very difficult bridge to conceive of and play with its chromatically descending diminished chords.  Griffin positively owns the tune and since there were less and less jazz musicians attempting to play such difficult tunes, I gather that this tune got lost in the shuffle, especially as more advanced forms of jazz began to appear.

On the medium tempo tunes, Griffin's original "Chicago Calling" (with a quote or fragment from Tadd Dameron's "Webb City"), "The Boy Next Door" (in 4/4 not the usual waltz), and "Nice and Easy", Griffin tends to double his lines up, but he sounds terrific.  But as he does on all tempos, he'll also let some notes ring out with some thick vibrato at the end.  He also has a nice way of playing melodies relatively close to the original.  He'll decorate some of the notes, but generally he avoids over playing on the melodies.  

This aspect is especially true on the ballads, "These Foolish Things" and "Lover Man".  He is one of the great ballad players and seems to come from the romantic school of jazz ballad playing à la Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins.  At slow tempos his vibrato almost smooth and for a moment he is a rhythm and blues player all over again.  On "These Foolish Things", he keeps things from getting too technical, but on "Lover Man" his chops spill out again.  

Throughout the album, Johnny Griffin maintains a powerful presence and mood on all tunes.  There's quite a bit of contrast on the album between the moods of the tunes (uptempo vs ballad) and the players (loud, extroverted Griffin with quiet, introverted Kelly).  It's a good formula for this prototypical hard bop album.  It makes sense, but it seems like many musicians of the hard bop era have experience with rhythm and blues bands.  It's not really talked about a lot, but it makes given how popular the genre was in the 1940's and 1950's.  After the fall of the big bands, there was probably a lot of work in rhythm and blues groups and it seems to have stuck.  Hard bop was a natural outcome of the bebop-jump/rhythm and blues schism that existed in the 1940's.  But not everyone was into it: Coltrane famouslyabandoned it when Benny Golson walked in while he was walking the bar.