WHISTLE STOP : KENNY DORHAM, JAZZ, AND THE JOURNEY OF A TEXAS FAMILY

By Robert M. Pallitto and John A. Melendez

University Press of Mississippi. 242 pages. £22.99. ISBN 978-1-4968-6196-2

Reviewed by Jim Burns

In 1950 I was a fourteen year old who had just discovered bebop. At that time there were four trumpeters I associated with the music – Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, Howard McGhee. Those were the names I came across in Jazz Journal  and the Melody Maker, and on the few records that were available in Britain, or that I heard on the radio as I fiddled with it to pick up programmes from stations in Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. There was little jazz on the BBC in those days, and not too many records featuring bop musicians.

It was perhaps not surprising that I hadn’t heard of Kenny Dorham, though I was later to discover that he had been a member of the bop coterie in New York in the mid-1940s. He had worked in the Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie big-bands, and recorded with small groups in the company of Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, and others. I did slowly begin to recognise his name and his work. He was the trumpet soloist on Lionel Hampton’s 1947 recording of “Three Minutes on 52nd Street”, and someone gave me a 78 record of Mercer Ellington’s “Metronome All-Out”, which featured Dorham. The person who gave it to me had a brother who was a merchant seaman and he’d brought it back from New York. It had been a rough crossing and the record was slightly damaged, but I could hear the trumpet solo.

By 1967, when I wrote an article about Dorham for Jazz Journal, there was much more of his work to be found on LPs. Recordings from the 1940s that had never previously been issued in Britain enabled me to place him alongside Fats Navarro, though I did rate the latter higher as a soloist while acknowledging Dorham’s grasp of the bebop style. But this was dealing with material from the early days, when a kind of rough urgency marked the music, and it was better to consider what he did in the 1950s when his playing had matured. It’s significant that the authors of Whistle Stop spend a fair amount of time in looking at what Dorham produced during that decade.

So, who was Kenny Dorham? He was born in 1924 in the small community of Post Oak, “a few miles south east of Fairfield, Texas”.   He recalled that he had a happy childhood in a family that valued education. Racism in Texas could be restrictive and violent but there doesn’t seem to be a record of Dorham’s family experiencing it in its extreme forms. I have a copy of the DownBeat Yearbook for 1970, to which Dorham  contributed some “Fragments of an Autobiography”, and he makes it sound almost idyllic: “On a brisk spring morning around the middle to the end of March, while my father groomed the fields, the young plants could be seen breaking through the soil. The chirping of the mocking birds, jaybirds, woodpeckers, and flocks of blackbirds could be heard in contrast to the whippoorwills, the hawks, coyotes, crickets, frogs, rattlesnakes, and all the familiar sounds of the big Southwest. And sometimes the lonesome train whistle of the Sunshine Special that travelled across east Texas would join in. A rare combination of musical sounds”.

I’ve quoted that passage because it is the contention of Robert M. Pallitto and John A. Melendez that the sounds were hinted at in Dorham’s soloing, and in his compositions, along with the music he heard while growing up. There are references to country blues, folk songs, church music, jazz and work songs. There is also a mention of Dorham learning to play “Shuffle off to Buffalo” on the piano. If memory serves me right, it was a song performed by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in the 1933  Hollywood musical 42nd Street. It’s instructive to look at all the musical sounds that may have influenced Dorham. He pointed to Roy Eldridge and Erskine Hawkins, when questioned, but also white trumpeters like Bix Beiderbecke, Ziggy Elman, and Bunny Berigan. And if he was aware of “Shuffle off to Buffalo” (had he seen the film?), he also had heard Larry Clinton’s “Dipsy Doodle”, a popular hit in the 1930s.  It was a fact that, for black people living outside cities and large towns, it was often easier to hear white bands and singers than it was to listen to black performers. Radio stations were mostly controlled by whites and mainly featured recordings by white artists.

Dorham attended Anderson High School, where he played in the school band, and, on leaving there, enrolled at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, a black institution with a good musical reputation. He was there only a short time before being conscripted into the army. He doesn’t appear to have been in uniform for very long and by 1943 was on his way to California to look for employment as a musician. He joined Russell Jacquet’s band. Pallitto and Melendez seem a little shaky when it comes to jazz history and refer to Jacquet as “Texas saxophonist Russell Jacquet”, and on another occasion, as “Russell ‘Illinois’ Jacquet”. He was actually a trumpet player and the older brother of tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet who became well-known in jazz circles for his solo on Lionel Hampton’s 1942 recording of “Flying Home”.  Russell Jacquet made some interesting records in the 1940s, though Dorham wasn’t on any of them, and often led small groups that played a mixture of jazz and rhythm-and-blues.

The obvious place for an ambitious young trumpeter, especially one who was keen to play the new music, bebop, that was spreading its message, was New York. Dorham arrived there in 1945, and by 1946 was sufficiently accepted by the clique that formed around bop to record with alto-player Sonny Stitt, pianist Bud Powell, trumpeter Fats Navarro, and others like them. I referred earlier to what I thought was a “kind of rough urgency” that seemed typical of the music, sometimes even to the point of shrillness, and it made me wonder whether the lives they were leading was shaping how they played. I don’t want to focus too much on the subject, but heroin use was prevalent among bop musicians, and the authors do refer to the “lingering addiction to heroin, something Dorham struggled with, on and off, until the end of his life”.  Did he pick up his addiction in those early days in New York?  It would have been easy to do so, given the circles he was mixing in. Pallitto and Melendez suggest that it was more likely that he started using narcotics during the period in late-1948 and through 1949 when he was a member of Charlie Parker’s group.

Dorham was in Paris in 1949 with Parker, and while he was there recorded a session with tenor-saxophonist James Moody. I remember hearing at least one track, “Prince Albert” (a Dorham composition based on the chords of “All the Things You Are”), one night when listening to a jazz programme from Paris, and being impressed by its intriguing melodic line and the trumpeter’s solo. It was some years before I obtained a recording of this, and the other numbers from the date, but despite the poor recording quality, and the occasionally shifting sound from the radio, something very real in terms of the quality of Dorham’s playing left a lasting impression in my mind. Dorham a few years later performed this number with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers during a 1955 engagement at the Café Bohemia in New York, again impressing with the way he weaves his improvisations over the steady but relaxed rhythm.

I haven’t mentioned all the recordings on which Dorham appeared, some of them with Parker, J.J.Johnson. Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and his own groups. And there are the live recordings with Parker from the Royal Roost. If one looks at a Dorham discography it might appear that recording, coupled with the appearances in clubs, dance-halls, and other locations, indicated that he was making a decent living as a musician. But the fact was that, as a married man with two young daughters, he had to take additional employment to top up his earnings from music. He worked for Republic Aviation, the Post Office, and other employers. It occurs to me that, as the 1950s progressed, he should have been eligible for work in the recording studios, even if not necessarily playing jazz. And yet he rarely, if ever, cropped up in the ranks of the groups, of varying sizes, backing singers or recording albums of well-known standards or recreations of the music of bands from earlier years. It is true to say that a lot of studio work was allocated to white musicians, so colour could have been a factor in his being overlooked.

Pallitto and Melendez pay a great deal of attention to the music that Dorham created in the 1950s and early-1960s. My own feelings are that he was at his best in the former years, with some of his finest performances being with the Jazz Messengers and his own group, The Jazz Prophets. I’ve already mentioned “Prince Albert” with the Messengers, and there is a long solo on “Soft Winds” which, as I said in my 1967 article, was “little short of brilliant, with its double-time passages, stuttering Parker-like phrases, and relaxed, but perfectly executed improvisations”. With the Prophets he comes up with a fine muted solo on “Blues Elegante” which again uses Parker-like phrases, and even some “growl” effects.

I should add that the analytical surveys of Dorham’s solos in this book are far more complex than anything I’ve said, and require an understanding of musical notation, and the technical aspects of playing the trumpet, that will probably leave layman readers struggling to know what is meant. I’m not condemning this aspect of Whistle Talk, simply wondering if it doesn’t limit its possible readership and in consequence fails in its intention to draw attention to what Dorham achieved. Not everyone who listens to music wants to be a musician or even know how something is constructed. They might just want to enjoy some good sounds, which doesn’t stop them recognising a well-shaped solo, even if their response is intuitive rather than technical. But I’m being contentious, so I’ll leave the subject alone.

There are a variety of reasons why Dorham was, as the authors claim, neglected in his lifetime. Many of the people who knew him referred to his being “too nice” a person, and not being pushy or mean-spirited. He could be assertive, as for example when he functioned as a record reviewer for DownBeat, and was less than positive in his rejection of the new sounds being created by the likes of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Other people who encountered him thought he lacked business sense, for example by not properly registering his compositions with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers).  And it’s always debatable about how his addiction affected his actions.

The heroin eventually caught up with him: “Heroin use wears down the body and its  systems. Over time it can collapse or clog blood vessels, which can damage the kidneys or other organs. Dorham suffered from chronic kidney disease and required regular dialysis treatment….Dorham struggled with the dialysis regimen – both the monetary cost and the toll it took on his body and spirit”.  His body eventually gave up and he died on the 5th December, 1973.

Whistle Stop is a fine tribute to an excellent musician who, at his best, created music of lasting value. It is informative and has extensive notes, a basic but useful discography, and relevant illustrations. I’m conscious of not having paid attention to the back-story of Dorham’s life, referred to in the book’s sub-title, The Journey of a Texas Family. This relates to the lives of his parents and his brother and sister. It’s of interest but I decided to concentrate, as much as I could within the space available, on Dorham and his music.    

      

 

 

    

 

 

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