(Two amazing original albums by the great Pee Wee Russell....)
Two amazing original albums by the great Pee Wee Russell. New Groove presents him fronting his own quartet accompanied by trombone, and a piano-less rhythm section of bass and drums. Our second LP, the College Concert of Pee Wee Russell and Henry Red Allen, appears here for the first time ever on CD. It features the clarinetist in a quintet format co-led by Allen, backed by an impressive modern rhythm section composed of Steve Kuhn on piano, Charlie Haden on bass, and Marty Morell on drums. As a bonus, we have added 'Mariooch', which marks the only quartet song featuring Russell from the larger group album Jazz Reunion.
(4CD digitally remastered set containing seven original al...)
4CD digitally remastered set containing seven original albums spanning 1955-1962. Includes 'Jazz At Storyville' Volume 1 & 2, 'Pee Wee Russell Plays', 'Portrait Of Pee Wee', 'Swingin' With Pee Wee', 'Jazz Reunion' & 'George Wein & The Newport All-Stars'.
Charles Ellsworth "Pee Wee" Russell was an American jazz musician. Early in his career he played clarinet and saxophones, but he eventually focused solely on clarinet.
Background
Russell was born in Maple Wood, Mo. , the son of Charles Ellsworth Russell and Ella Mary Ballard. When Russell was very young, the family moved to Muskogee, Okla. , where his father managed a department store and had oil investments. During his childhood, Russell became proficient at playing a variety of musical instruments, the violin first and then piano and drums, but after hearing the legendary New Orleans clarinetist Alcide ("Yellow") Nueez play at a local dance, he settled on the clarinet as his favored instrument.
Education
He was only twelve years old when he started playing professionally during the summer at a nearby lakeside resort. After the young Russell tried to join a riverboat orchestra, his family enrolled him at Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill. , in an attempt to discipline his rebellious proclivities. As a result, he not only prospered academically but, more important, received thorough musical training, even though he remained only a year. Later he acquired further formal instruction during a semester at the University of Missouri and from Tony Sarli of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Career
In 1922, Russell became a full-time professional musician. For the next five years, Russell worked as an itinerant player of a music that was increasingly beginning to be called "jazz. " His apprenticeship in the new music was with bands that included instrumentalists of major reputation among knowledgeable proponents of the burgeoning art form, among them the pianist Peck Kelley, the clarinetist Leon Rapollo of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (often considered the first major white jazz musician), and the trombonist Jack Teagarden, who became one of Russell's frequent collaborators in later years and a lifelong friend. Beginning in 1925, Russell often worked with Bix Beiderbecke and the groups normally associated with Beiderbecke during this period and with Frankie Trumbauer and Jean Goldkette.
During this brief period, he fell strongly under the influence of what was later to be called the Chicago style of jazz. Critics of the music often like to point out, correctly, that Russell spent little time in Chicago; but it is also true that the Chicago style indelibly marked his playing for the remainder of his life. Although the Chicago repertoire is largely the same as that of the New Orleans school, the Chicago approach is far more self-consciously excited and angular than the older form: the rhythm shuffles, the brass blares, the reeds rasp.
Russell's principal inspiration was Frank Teschemaker, a Chicago clarinetist and alto saxophonist who was killed in an auto crash in 1931. One critic has said that Teschemaker's tone, which Russell emulated, sounded "incredibly strained, and was all the better for it. " The Teschemaker influence is enormously evident on Russell's first recording, "Ida, " made in New York with Red Nichols and His Five Pennies in 1927. Very quickly, however, Russell found his individual sound, and his musical ideas started to depart dramatically from Teschemaker's, but his solos, no matter what the musical context, remained imbued with what is sometimes called "Chicago sour. " The pianist Dick Wellstood has described this quality as "a crabbed, choked, knotted tangle of squawks with which he could create an enormously roomy private universe. " It should also be pointed out that Russell's playing is pervaded by a melancholic strain but is also filled with humor, creating an emotional tone that is paradoxically exhilarating and withdrawn at the same time.
Russell free-lanced in New York for the next six years with such orchestras as those led by Paul Specht, Cass Hagen, Don Vorhees, Austin Wylie, and Ben Pollack, playing clarinet and doubling on the tenor saxophone. The recordings of "Hello, Lola" and "One Hour" by Red McKenzie's Mound City Blue Blowers feature Russell and the tenor player Coleman Hawkins as soloists, marking one of the earliest interracial phonograph collaborations. Much of Russell's best work preserved on record from this period is included in the series of discs cut in 1932, usually made under some variation of the name The Rhythmmakers. By this time his tone and the development of his musical ideas had reached full maturity. They did not alter much until the 1960's, even though the inventiveness of his improvisations remained remarkably fresh throughout his career.
After working in Massachusetts in the mid-1930's with the cornetist Bobby Hackett, Russell joined the part-jazz, part-vaudeville band of Louis Prima, with whom he remained for two years, when illness forced him to withdraw from the road.
The years 1938-1950 mark the period of his work for which Russell is best remembered. A nightclub in Greenwich Village named Nick's had become host to the music of what was called "the Condon mob. " Led by Eddie Condon (who later owned a similar club of his own), the music--and, indeed, the musicians--represented the most assertive and even aggressive since the Chicago style. Nicknamed "Nicksieland, " the band included variously such Chicago-related musicians as Bud Freeman, Muggsy Spanier, Dave Tough, and Joe Sullivan. Condon was at least three deep at every position; that is, he could draw on the talents of at least three major performers for each chair in the band. Unquestionably, Russell not only played for Condon more than anyone else but was also Condon's most popular soloist. The many titles recorded under a variety of names (but mostly under Condon's) on Milt Gabler's Commodore label during this time are among those most cherished by devotees of this style.
Russell was an alcoholic, and in 1950 he suffered a near-fatal attack of a liver ailment. At one point his death was thought to be imminent, but only seven months after his hospitalization, he was sitting in again at Condon's club. Three months after that, for the first time, he organized his own regular group, which played a particularly impressive engagement at Boston's Storyville club, owned by the jazz impresario George Wein. Russell worked for Wein many times through the rest of his career. Tiring of the routine of heading a band, Russell rejoined Condon in 1955, remaining with him until 1961, except for his annual trek to the Newport Jazz Festival. Toward the end of this period, a most surprising thing happened: the modern-jazz audience discovered Russell's work. Though he had won the Downbeat readers' poll for clarinet in the years 1942-1944, the postwar modern-jazz audience often expressed a rather parochial dislike for anything that smacked of Dixieland. Even so, he captured the Downbeat critics' poll award for each of the years from 1962 to 1968.
The roughhewn quality of his playing had become even more intense by this time, though his famous squawking had largely ceased, and his repertoire included works by such modernists as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. For one year, he and the valve trombonist Marshall Brown together led a working quartet. Russell's wife convinced him to try oil painting in 1965, and he became quite proficient, producing a number of abstract works of excellent quality. After playing for Richard Nixon's inaugural ball on January 21, 1969, he became ill again from his recurring problem of cirrhosis. He died quietly in his sleep in Alexandria, Va. , three weeks later.