Classic Recordings, Herbie Nichols

Herbie Nichols is one of the many artists throughout jazz’s history who never really caught a break and died too young and in relative obscurity before having their genius discovered. Save for a few out-takes and an early session for Savoy, this Avid set collects together the entirety of Nichols’s output, all recorded in the mid-fifties: The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Vol. 1 and 2 and The Herbie Nichols Trio for Blue Note, and Love, Gloom, Cash, Love for the Bethlehem label. What subsequent generations of listeners and artists have discovered is music of immense charm and ingenuity, the work of an artist who could have contributed so much more to jazz had he not passed away from leukaemia in 1963, aged just 44.

Born in New York in 1919 to immigrant parents from St. Kitts and Trinidad, Nichols grew up in Harlem during the height of the big band and swing era, and was on the ground for the birth of bebop in the forties. By all accounts an unassuming and rather old-fashioned fellow, after serving in World War II the majority of his career was spent working in Dixieland bands, giving him a meagre but steady income. He was on the periphery of the New York jazz scene, but despite gaining the respect of many of his peers the public at large was oblivious to the brilliance of his talents as a composer and pianist. In fact the only real impact he made in his lifetime was when Billie Holiday added lyrics to his tune Serenade and retitled it Lady Sings The Blues, to become her signature song and also the title of her autobiography, and later be covered by Diana Ross. So we have Alfred Lion, owner of Blue Note Records, to thank for the recordings on this collection. Believing Nichols was as talented as Thelonious Monk he offered to record him, and in 1955 and 1956 Nichols cut three sessions with the two finest bop drummers of the era, Art Blakey (The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Vol. 1 & 2) and Max Roach (Herbie Nichols Trio), clearly inspiring Nichols to deliver these knockout performances.

You really need to spend some time listening to Nichols’s quirky music in order to even try to pin down what makes it so special. There’s a certain innocence to it certainly: many of the tunes open with a dialogue between piano and drums, as on The Third World, Blue Chopsticks and Cro-Magnon nights, before Nichols goes on to state the full theme. The Third World is a good example of how most of his tunes progress; a deceptively simple melody gets stretched out and elaborated, whilst adding liberal yet tasteful amounts of dissonance in the left hand, which imbues everything with its own Nicols-esque taste.

It’s hard to identify many other contemporary influences in his sound: he certainly possesses some of Monk’s erratic approach to rhythm and harmony, with plenty of unresolved chords left hanging, but there’s no confusing the music of either. There also a similarity to some of the music which the young Cecil Taylor was playing around the same time (especially Taylor’s album Love for Sale, also for Blue Note) in the way he generates kinetic energy through chromaticism, but with a superior melodic sense. Ultimately Nichols stood outside the music of that period, with a style that harked back to the pre-bop pianism of Art Tatum, Duke Ellington and Teddy Wilson, shot through with genuine modernism that predicted some of the innovations to come in the sixties.

Nichols liked to add programmatic titles to his music, possibly as a way of making his often complex structures more comprehensible to the listener. House Party Starting is a sonic description of a social gathering, depicting the ravers getting ever more rowdy and inebriated, the delivery sloppier as the night wears on. Elsewhere tracks like Chit-Chatting and Argumentative portray robust discussion between friends. Throughout this set fresh delights abound; a series of memorable tunes, brilliant performances and accompaniment from Blue Note stalwarts and a tantalising glimpse of what should have been merely the opening salvo in a brilliant career.

Every time I listen to Nichols I end up imagining how incredible it would have been to hear a Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown or Roswell Rudd step in and take a solo, further twisting with these fertile pieces into new shapes. Trombonist Rudd did in fact carry the torch forward for Nichols, who along with Steve Lacy and Misha Mengelberg in the seventies interpreted the music within an expanded context, adding their own modernist spin. But ultimately it is Herbie Nichols’s original recordings that deserve a place in any discerning jazz collection.