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Scott LaFaro: Bibliography, Magazines S -- Z


This section includes articles (by authors with last names S through Z) from magazines and newspapers. In some cases I have provided extensive excerpts from these documents if not the full text. My intent is to provide greater access to available published information about LaFaro. In most cases the original journals in which these articles first appeared are now buried in library microfilm collections and not readily accessible.

Some articles are in French. I apologize for not translating them at this time (a project on my list for the near future) but anyone with a modicum of language skill will be able to decipher the gist of what is being said. Jean-Pierre Binchet's 'Le Phare LaFaro' is the best critical commentary yet on LaFaro.


Table of Contents

 Tepperman  "Scott LaFaro . . . discography" Discographical Forum (May 1971)
 Tynan  "The Monterey Festival" Down Beat  (November 10, 1960)
 Williams   “Introducing Scott LaFaroJazz Review  (August 1960)
 Wilson   “Music: A Third Stream Sound; Schuller Conducts . . . New York Times (May 17, 1960)
 Wooley   “Remembering Scott LaFaroBass World: . . . (Fall 1996)
   

 

Tepperman, Barry.  "Scott LaFaro (1936-1961):  A Discography, by Barry Tepperman" in Malcom Walker, editor, Discographical Forum -- Issue #24 (May 1971), pp. 3-6.  London, England:  Distributed by M. Walker, 98a Oakley Street, Chelsea, London SW3, UK.

This early discography with some informative, interesting notes, but without listing the published recording titles, covers the following recordings:

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Tynan, John, "The Monterey Festival" Down Beat 27:23 (November 10, 1960) 14-17.

"In a year that has seen jazz festivals take it on the chin in the public eye, the third annual Monterey event, held Sept. 23, 24, 25 in this California peninsula's oak-shaded county fair grounds, was the most financially successful thus far. In three evening and two afternoon performances, the festival grossed an impressive $85,000, an increase of $10,000 over last year's take, [which may be attributed to] enlarged seating capacity . . . of 6,800 to 7,305."

.  .  .

"The Montgomery Brothers Quartet [Wes, Buddy, and Monk plus Lawrence Marable, drums] opened the Sunday night concert at 7:25 p.m. [followed by a Lambert-Hendricks-Ross set] . . . After a four-minute second speech by general manager Jimmy Lyons, the Ornette Coleman Quartet was announced at 8:40 p.m.  The 'quartet' , however , turned out to be a trio; trumpeter Don Cherry was absent. The absence was the result of a sudden and violent backstage drama. According to many witnesses, Jimmy Witherspoon among them, who were relaxing in the Hunt Room bar in the back-of-the-stage area, this is what happened:

Cherry was warming up, playing softly on his Pakistani pocket trumpet. Suddenly, witnesses reported, Coleman lashed out at Cherry, striking him in the horn and tearing his lip. Bleeding and in pain, cherry was driven back to his hotel. Coleman went on with the show with his bassist, Scott LaFaro, and Drummer Ed Blackwell.

After his set, Coleman was asked by reporters what had happened to Cherry. He said only, 'I hit him.' Asked why, he replied, 'I don't want to talk about it,' and left the festival area.

According to those familiar with the Coleman-Cherry relationship, tension between the two had been building for some time.

Coleman's set provoked some in the audience to leave the arena. After an original, Diminished Night, the altoist chose to play an unusual, for him, choice -- the ballad You'll Never Know.  It was patently bad, disturbed and utterly unhappy, but Coleman stubbornly stuck with it, taking it at an agonizingly slow tempo and allowing for a long bass by LaFaro whose brilliant technique and ideas were remarked by all." (emphasis mine)

[The Coleman 'trio' was followed by the Modern Jazz Quartet, J. J. Johnson (with the MJQ) and the evening -- and the festival -- ended with Louis Armstrong, who "made every high note he aimed for, and many observed he hadn't sounded so good in years."] (p. 17)

See also Ralph J. Gleason's Monterey afternoons article in this Down Beat issue.

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Williams, Martin, “Introducing Scott LaFaro,” Jazz Review 3 (August 1960) pp. 16-17. Page 17 is a full-page photo of LaFaro by Gerry Schatzberg. Full text follows:

'It's quite a wonderful thing to work with the Bill Evans trio,' said bassist Scott LaFaro. 'We are really just beginning to find our way. You won't hear much of that on our first record together, except a little on “Blue and Green” where no one was playing time as such. Bill was improvising lines, I was playing musical phrases behind him, and Paul Motian played in free rhythmic drum phrases.'

LaFaro is dissatisfied with a great deal of what he hears in jazz, but what he says about it isn't mere carping. He thinks he knows what to do about it, at least in his own playing. 'My ideas are so different from what is generally acceptable nowadays that I sometimes wonder if I am a jazz musician. I remember that Bill and I used to reassure each other some nights kiddingly that we really were jazz musicians. I have such respect for so many modern classical composers, and I learn so much from them. Things are so contrived nowadays in jazz, and harmonically it has been so saccharine since Bird.'

Charlie Parker was already dead before Scott LaFaro was aware of him, even on records. In fact Scott LaFaro was not really much aware of jazz at all until 1955. He was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey, but his family moved to Geneva, New York, when he was five.

'There was always the countryside. I miss it now. I am not a city man. Maybe that is why Miles Davis touches me so deeply. I hear that in his playing anyway. I've never been through that “blues” thing either.'

LaFaro started on clarinet at fourteen and studied in high school. He took up bass on a kind of dare. 'My father played violin with a small “society” trio in town. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I had finished school, and my father said -- half-joking, I think -- that if I learned bass, I could play with them. When I did, I knew that I wanted to be a musician. It's strange: playing clarinet and sax didn't do it, but when I started on bass, I knew it was music.'

He went to Ithaca Conservatory and then to Syracuse; it was there, through fellow students, that he began to listen to jazz. He got a job in Syracuse at a place called the Embassy Club. `The leader was a drummer who played sort of like Sidney Catlett and Kenny Clarke. He formed my ideas of what jazz was about. He, and the juke box in the place -- it had Miles Davis records. And I first heard Percy Heath and Paul Chambers on that juke box. They taught me my first jazz bass lessons. There was also a Lee Konitz record with Stan Kenton called “Prologue”.

In late 1955, LaFaro joined Buddy Morrow's band. 'We toured all over the country until I left the band in Los Angeles in September 1956. I didn't hear any jazz or improve at all during that whole time.' But a few weeks after he left Morrow, he joined a Chet Baker group that included Bobby Timmons and Lawrence Marable. 'I found out so much from Lawrence, a lot of it just from playing with him. I have trouble with getting with people rhythmically and I learned a lot about it from him. I learned more about rhythm when I played with Monk last fall [1959?]; a great experience. With Monk, rhythmically, it's just there, always.

LaFaro remembers two other important experiences in California. The first was hearing Ray Brown, whose swing and perfection in his style impressed him. The other came when he lived for almost a year in the mountain-top house of Herb Geller and his late wife, Lorraine. 'I practiced and listened to records. I had -- I still have -- a feeling that if I don't practice I will never be able to play. And Herb had all the jazz records; I heard a lot of music, many people for the first time, on his records.'

In September 1958 LaFaro played with Sonny Rollins in San Francisco. and later he worked with the same rhythm section behind Harold Land. 'I think horn players and pianists have probably influenced me the most, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Sonny Rollins perhaps deepest of all. Sonny is technically good, harmonically imaginative, and really creative. He uses all he knows to make finished music when he improvises.'

'I found out playing with Bill that I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns, and form. I think a lot more imaginative work could be done within them than most people are doing, but I can't abandon them. That's why I don't think I could play with Ornette Coleman. I used to in California; we would go looking all over town for some place to play. I respect the way he overrides forms. It's all right for him, but I don't think I could do it myself.

'Bill gives the bass harmonic freedom because of the way he voices, and he is practically the only pianist who does. It's because of his classical studies. Many drummers know too little rhythmically, and many pianists know too little harmonically. In the trio we were each contributing something and really improvising together, each playing melodic and rhythmic phrases. The harmony would be improvised; we would often begin only with something thematic and not a chord sequence.

'I don't like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. (I don't even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.) There are too many things to learn and too many things you can do, to keep doing the same things over and over. My main problem now is to get that instrument under my fingers so I can play more music.'”

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Wilson, John S. “Music: A Third Stream Sound; Schuller Conducts at Circle in the Square” The New York Times CIX:37369, (May 17, 1960), p. 44.

A review of a recital of Gunther Schuller's works, the season finale to the `Jazz Profiles' concerts, presented at the Circle in the Square, 357 Bleecker Street, New York City. See another review of this concert by Whitney Balliett. LaFaro is not mentioned by name in the Wilson review, but the Bill Evans trio is noted.

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Wooley, Robert. “Remembering Scott LaFaroBass World: The Journal of the International Society of Bassists, vol. XXI, no. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 21-23. Includes three high-school era photographs of LaFaro.

A remembrance by high school friend and fellow musician.

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 Bibliography -- Miscellany  Discography -- 1990--1999
 Bibliography -- Web Sources    Discography -- 2000--  2001 ISB LaFaro Tribute

 


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