This is New England Public Radio's jazz beat. I'm Tom Rini with a podcast edition of on jazz blog, which you can find at n E P R dot net. This edition of jazz beat is devoted to the Boston born trumpet or Ruby Braff. Tony Bennett included Ruby Braff in a select group of pure musicians who have what he called a sound that's as precious as a string of pearls or a rare diamond.
For the composer Alec Wilder, perhaps purity came in the form of a trumpet or who played the center of every note. New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Ballia described him as a well stirred mixture of Louis Armstrong and Bunny Berrigan and Travona's Jack T. Garden called Tim the Ivy League Louis Armstrong. Truth is Ruby hardly knew from the Ivy's.
Raised by Russian born immigrants in a Roxbury household where Yiddish remained the mother tongue. Braff said that he could write music twice as fast as he could read a newspaper and that well into middle age, he read books like Alec Wilder's American popular song with a dictionary at hand. Whitney Ballia had heard a precedent for the quartet that Braff formed with guitarist George Barnes in 1973 and what he called a treble bass blend of the Rex Stewart Django Reinhardt combo that recorded in Paris in 1939 and that we featured in a recent edition of jazz beat. Like Rex and Django, the Kansas City six were less to young and the Benny Goodman quartet.
Braff and Barnes ranks with the most exquisite chamber groups in jazz history. They were hardly out of the gate when they accompanied Tony Bennett on a concert of Rogers and Hearts songs in New York and then joined him in the studio for his album Tony Bennett, the Rogers and Hearts song book. Of Tony Bennett's many superb releases, it ranks near the top. Bennett's biographer, Will Freedwald, notes that it's more of an ensemble project than a star turn as Bennett blends neatly with Braff and Barnes.
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way you walk and whisper and look. I could write a preface on how we met so the world would never forget. And the simple secret of the plot is just to tell them that I love you a lot. Ruby Graff is an old hand at Richard Rogers' music by the mid-70s.
In 1955, he began a series of duo recordings with pianist Ellis Larkins that included the classic album, Two by Two, Ruby and Ellis played Rogers and Hart. John Hammond produced the date for Vanguard Records and touted them to Richard Rogers, who was in rehearsals with his show, Pipe Dreams. Graff ended up with a non-speaking part in the musical, but he blew on a couple of tunes and delighted in seeing Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein at work. He told me all these wild stories or lies, which I guess is a writer's right, Graff told Beliet.
It's hard to believe that I work with Richard Rogers every day and watched him work. If they needed 16 bars, it's sit at the piano and write out those 16 bars just like that. Note for note. On their own, the Ruby Graff George Barnes chords had made a few sessions for Concord and Kiro's Giro Records, but the group was short-lived.
Beneath the surface, Graff and Barnes were a royal in combination and before they played a note at their renowned new school concert in 1974, they were already squabbling. By most accounts, including my own experience with him, Graff was quarrelsome and hot-tempered. One wag referred to him as Mr. Hyde and Mr.
Hyde, though there's nothing discordant about Ruby's playing. Basis Bill Crow tells a story about playing with Graff and Toronto where musicians generally stayed at the war work, a hotel that Dizzy Gillespie called the air wick. Ruby, however, wouldn't stay in what he called a flea bag, so he could put up a high rise down the street. When Bill Crow paid him a visit, he discovered Ruby huddled in bed against the wall, opposite his balcony.
Crow remarked on what a beautiful view he had, but Graff said, I can't go near all that damn glass. I can't stand heights. Like the rest of us, Ruby was often his own worst enemy. I like to think that whatever glory's Ruby missed out on in the outside world, he made up for with music, which he idealized in a way that others do a rare five view from the 20th floor.
Graff famously said that improvisation is adoration of the melody, and he was among the most gifted players in finding new lyricism in the songs of Gershwin, Ellington, Berlin, and Richard Rogers. Ruby's style was as dramatic as any jazz man, and few can match him in the way he brought the emotional core of his song to life. In this regard, Louis Armstrong is also a model for what he called building a solo in layers. He told Whitney Beliot, when I played one of Lewis's records, I mesmerized it first with what he put on top, with the surface.
When I play it again, I hear the second layer, and then the third, a great solo surprises you every time you hear it, even though you know every note by heart. Note that Ruby never addressed Louis Armstrong as Louis or Satchmo or Pops, as he told Christopher Lydman in 2001, you don't put a nickname on God. There's a ton of great material under Ruby Graff's name, including the prolific series of recordings he made for Arbor's records during the last decade of his life. These range from reunions with Ellis Larkins in Dick Klimman, and a couple of dates with his New England song hounds, featuring Scott Hamilton and Dave McKenna, to sessions featuring up to three guitarists, and a couple of dates with strings in the mix.
Remarkably, these were made when Ruby was hobbled by Emphysema, but right till the end, he died in 2003 on Cape Cod. His playing was undiminished. As John Forum wrote in his obituary of Graff for the Guardian of London, the moment he lifted the cornet to his lips, all thoughts of frailty and mortality evaporated. In later years, Graff worked extensively with guitarist Howard Alden in various settings, including the trio album, Brevora Eloquence, which took its name from Belia's description of Ruby's bold sublimity.
Here's Graff, Alden in bassist Frank Tate in 1991, remembering one of Ruby's guiding lights, Billy Holiday. 25 years earlier, he'd included me to me on his tribute album to Lady Day, Holiday in Braff. Ruby Braff was born in Boston in 1927. Louis Armstrong picked Spiderback Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington and Lester Young for his heroes, and great songs never failed him.
He was eminently quotable. Here's how we ended an interview for the book, Jazz Spoken Here. You should never take up music, ever. No one should take up music.
If they are a person who can turn on the radio and hear something like all the things you are, and move the dial. If they find they can move the dial, if it's possible to move the dial, they shouldn't play music. That's how overwhelming melodies should be. It should grab them and drive them crazy.
If they don't feel that way, they shouldn't be playing music. It's that simple. Ruby was often featured with his fellow Bostonian George Weens Newport All-Stars. Here in France in 1969, the concert opener offered the relatively rare delight of hearing Ruby play its well-bar blues.
The tune is called Blue Boy, Barney Kessel, is the guitarist. Ruby Braff said he was honored to live in the same time space as Louis Armstrong and the other originators. You hear Armstrong's style phrasing in Ruby's playing, but he could never be mistaken for anyone other than Ruby. He was a great original, a player who defied trends and remained devoted to the legacy of love and beauty that he first experienced when he heard Armstrong on the radio.
He said, I heard this sound, even though I didn't know why it was all so good, you know. It takes a long time to know that, but immediately this sound, this bright, lovely orange sound, came over the radio. Orange was my favorite color, and it just grabbed me. You can listen to one do a Armstrong record for the rest of your life and never hear everything in it.
I'd say the same for Ruby, an extraordinarily creative player on popular songs and blues, a player who embellished and enhanced melodies far more than you might realize at first hearing. Braff was featured in a tribute to Armstrong at the Newport Casino in 1990, where he played pennies from heaven with guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, and then was joined by Doc Cheatham, John Faddison, Wynton Marsalis for Jubilee, the Hoege-Crommichael tune that Armstrong made a celebrated recording of in 1938. But he had a lot of new gellington, though he rarely played his tunes. In 1995, he told Steve Vosie, I was about 15 when I went with some friends to a dance hall in Eggleston Square in Boston to hear Duke Ellington for the first time.
As far as I know, we were the only white people in there that night. It was the band with Sonny Greer, Ben Webster, Barnaby Gard, and one of my favorite trumpet players in the world, Ray Nance. Hearing the band that time in Boston was like being in heaven. I didn't meet Duke until much later on when I happened to be in the same touring package.
We were in the hotel in Paris when he said to me, you could have breakfast? You could have breakfast with me tomorrow, but I eat about seven in the morning. What he meant was that he didn't go to bed before then. I stayed awake all night and then went and had breakfast with him.
He always wanted everybody to feel wonderful. He was the master diplomat, but if it had been in the diplomatic service, as he should have been, would have lost all that great music. That morning, I said, you don't know how much it means to me to have breakfast with you. He said, it means a lot to me too, because I've been trying to be like you for years.
Here's Ruby in 1993 with guitarist Grace Sargent playing in a sentimental mood. In addition to Barnes, Alden, and Sargent, Ruby Graf worked with several other guitar players, including the Toronto-based legend, Ed Bicard. Their 1979 album for Sackfield Records was the first session I heard by Ruby, and it remains on my desert island list of his essentials. Here they play Fats Wilders, I've got a feeling unfalling.
The song's title reminds me of the effect that Ruby has on anyone who gives him a good listen. For to borrow what Gary Giddens said of Count Basie, once Ruby's got you a year, it's only a matter of time before he's got your heart. For additional features on Ruby Graf, visit the Jaz on the Mode page at nedr.net, and for additional podcasts produced by New England Public Radio, find us at Apple Podcasts or nedr.net. Thanks to Katie Ride for a production assistance for Jaz Beats on Tomini.