Cannonball Adderley

He had come up to New York in June 1955 to take summer graduate classes at NYU, and by his own account he walked into the Cafe Bohemia that night to see the trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, not to hear Oscar Pettiford. Pettiford's saxophonist, Jerome Richardson, was not there. Somebody put an alto in Julian Adderley's hands, the band called "I'll Remember April" at a tempo meant to hurt, and he walked through it. That much every version agrees on. Almost nothing else does. Down Beat's account four years later had Richardson merely running late and Pettiford allowing the sit-in with reservations; the archival work turned up Charlie Rouse pulling a prank on both men at once. Nat Adderley remembered standing right beside his brother with his own horn out, and Julian remembered Nat being across town that night on a gig with Paul Williams. The two of them never did agree about the most famous night of their lives.

The earliest published version of all is Leonard Feather's, printed on the back of Somethin' Else in 1958, three years after the fact and a year before Gardner. In Feather's telling nobody handed him anything and nobody tricked anybody. Julian offered to step into the spotlight, Pettiford had never heard of the plump, cheerful-faced newcomer, and to put him in his place Oscar beat the band off at an impossible tempo, which backfired when Adderley answered with a long solo that, in Feather's words, just about knocked Pettiford off the stand. But the detail that matters here is the one Feather puts first, and it is the sentence this whole piece is about.

That is how the story was told from the very beginning. Not as a schoolteacher escaping, but as a schoolteacher on his summer holidays.

What the night did is not in dispute. Within days he was working the Bohemia stand, then on a record with Kenny Clarke, then leading a date of his own. Orrin Keepnews later recorded Pettiford's first read on the stranger, which was that he was merely a high school music teacher.

That was not an insult. It was a job description. Adderley was twenty-six and had been on the Broward County payroll since he was nineteen, band director at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale from September 1, 1948. He had come to it straight from Florida A&M, which he entered at fifteen and left in August 1948 with a music degree and a minor in secondary education, having spent four years on aural skills, theory, history, piano and formal study of the clarinet, an instrument he would never make a record on.

Nobody had pushed him toward the classroom by accident. His father was a cornetist, and the warning came from him. Ginell's account has the elder Adderley talking to both sons about the unstable nature of freelance work and about what the road did to a Black musician travelling in the South, drawing on a stretch when he had been stranded in Tennessee and worked in the fields to earn his way home. A degree and a school post were the answer to that. The son took the advice, took the job, and spent the next eight years being right about it, since teaching plus a nightclub plus a car lot was a better living than most working saxophonists had.

The best documents anyone has found on him are two job applications, both sitting in that Broward County personnel file. In May 1948 the nineteen year old listed his preferred subjects in order: Music Appreciation, then Government, then History. In June 1953, home from the Army and applying to the same school again, he wrote "Band and Orchestra" as his field of specialization and listed nothing but Band, Chorus and School Music. Same school, same handwriting, five years apart, a man narrowing himself into music on paper long before he did it for a living.

The Army took the middle of it, 1950 to 1953. He served in the 36th Army Band at Fort Knox, and Feather's 1958 note says that in 1952 and 1953 he was leading a large dance band as well as a small group. The one first-hand account of that unit belongs to the pianist Junior Mance, who was two weeks from shipping out to Korea when Adderley had a company clerk type up orders that got him transferred into the band instead. Mance found out later that his original infantry outfit had been cut to pieces, and told Adderley he was alive because of him. Adderley's own version of what the Army did is stranger and better. He had not planned to go near the band at all. He was set on officer school. Then he met a couple of players from Detroit.

So the schoolteacher had already quit being a player once, and it was three years of Army bands, not New York, that talked him out of it. Which makes what happened after the Bohemia stranger still. He went home. Nat put it flatly: Julian had signed a contract to teach in Florida, and he had to go back. From September 27, 1955 he taught by day and led a band six nights a week at Porky's, a Fort Lauderdale club, and he kept both jobs going until the end of January.

Then he wrote to his principal. The letter is dated January 18, 1956, effective the first week of February, and it does not read like a man running away to join a band. It reads like an employee giving notice. He had been given the opportunity of furthering himself professionally in the field of popular music, he wrote, and felt he should no longer postpone taking that step. He had reason to hesitate. Between the school, the club and a sideline selling automobiles he was clearing about ten thousand dollars a year in Florida, which is not what a new man in New York was making in 1956.

He resigned the position. He never resigned the habit.

Before he had a band of his own, somebody had already worked out what he was for. In 1958 NBC put him on its educational series The Subject Is Jazz, introduced as a representative of bop and interviewed about what he had heard the first time he heard Charlie Parker. He was not yet thirty, two years off the school payroll, and television had him on as an explainer.

In October 1959, at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco with a new quintet and a new pianist, he stepped up to the microphone before the first tune of the night and did the whole job before the band played a note. On The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco he asks for the lights down for atmosphere, credits Bobby Timmons as the composer, calls the piece a jazz waltz, and then explains what it is. It is simultaneously a shout and a chant, he says, depending on whether you know anything about the roots of church music, and he is not talking about Bach chorales. Then the tag that follows him through the rest of his life. You know what I mean?

Orrin Keepnews left all of it on the record on purpose. Ginell's account is that Keepnews wanted to humanize the thing that happened between Adderley and a room, which is why the Jazz Workshop announcements survived the edit. The record sold somewhere between twenty five and thirty thousand copies inside six months, a figure Down Beat called phenomenal for a five dollar jazz album.

Gleason, who wrote the sleeve, had been covering San Francisco jazz for a dozen years and said he had never seen anything like the closing night, when the room stood and cheered and clapped for fifteen minutes. He also left behind the best anecdote about a Cannonball audience anybody has. Dmitri Shostakovich went to the Jazz Workshop to hear his first authentic American jazz and sat for an hour listening to this band, saying nothing, smiling now and then, applauding, leaning forward to watch a Louis Hayes drum solo. In four weeks, Gleason noted, the Russians were the only people who did not move a muscle in time to the music.

Listen across a decade of live records and the same four moves come round, and they are a teacher's moves. He names the composer and hands him the credit, explains where a tune came from or how it is built, defines any term the room might not have, and makes the joke at his own expense, as he does on Nippon Soul in Tokyo when he announces a new piece by an American musician whose name is Cannonball Adderley. Then he checks whether anybody followed him. On The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York he stops to define hipness itself, and the definition has outlived most of the music around it.

Critics noticed early and they liked it. John S. Wilson, reviewing At the Lighthouse for Down Beat in February 1961, singled out the gracefully amusing introductions and credited his unique ability to talk to an audience with intelligence, civility, and wit. Nine years later Chris Albertson quoted that sentence back and added his own, that the verbal improvisations with which Adderley introduced each number created a rare intimacy, and noted that most groups of that period avoided talking to anybody.

Here is the part that does not survive contact with the archive. The received story is that purists hated him for chattering at the customers. Go through the contemporary reviews and that charge is very hard to find. Ira Gitler's notice of In San Francisco in May 1960 is a demolition, two and a half stars for an album he calls much overrated, its title track a perfect example of over-funk so overdone that it smacks of unintentional parody, and he never mentions the announcements once. The others went after whatever else was in reach: a vocal album in 1965, the band's African tunics in 1968, a later record dismissed as a Hollywood travelogue. Nobody laid a finger on the teaching.

The closest anyone comes is Bill Quinn in November 1967, noting in passing that some feel it is better to let the music speak for itself, and naming nobody at all. The people who disliked Cannonball Adderley disliked the funk. The talking, as far as the printed record goes, they liked.

It is worth knowing that Riverside treated the talk as material. Side one, band one of the original 1959 jacket does not read "This Here." It reads "A few words by Cannonball" and then the tune. Three years later, on The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York, cut at the Village Vanguard in January 1962, side one band one is "Introduction, by Cannonball," and the label printed a running time against it: one minute fifty six seconds. A man talking, given his own band and his own printed time, on a major label jazz record.

Orrin Keepnews, who produced both, wrote the reason on the second jacket. Cannonball, he said, had long established himself as a rarety among bandleaders by invariably seeking to warm and welcome his audiences and to tell them what was going on. The producer was not tolerating the announcements. He was selling them.

Adderley would defend it in front of his peers, too. On a magazine panel in 1964 alongside Brubeck, Mulligan, Gillespie, Kenton and Mingus, he said the band played what it wanted and how it wanted, but that the music was aimed at the audience, and that jazz musicians have a tendency to keep themselves detached. He saw no harm in telling a room what was coming or in explaining why the man about to solo sounded the way he did.

His reason for it was flat and a little unsentimental. Most people who say they want to like jazz do not understand it, he told Quinn, and talking is the only thing that does anything about that. If anything he wanted to go further, and complained that jazz turned up with no lighting and no staging while Ravi Shankar arrived with a whole evening built around him.

On October 20, 1966 the quintet walked into Capitol's Studio A on Vine Street in Hollywood to play for an invited audience of family, friends and record business people, with the bar open and the parking easy. Joe Zawinul had found a Wurlitzer electric piano somewhere in the building. Adderley's spoken introduction to Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! is a small sermon with a shape: people are not prepared for adversity, he has some advice for all of us, and he got it from his pianist, who wrote this tune. Then they play it.

The sleeve said the record was made at The Club in Chicago. That was Adderley's idea. David Axelrod, who produced it, told Michael Cuscuna the story decades later when the tapes came back around: two Chicago disc jockeys, E. Rodney Jones and Pervis Spann, had bought the old Club DeLisa and reopened it, and Adderley asked Axelrod to put their room on the jacket and let Jones write a note about it. The fiction was not quite whole cloth. Capitol really had recorded the quintet at The Club that March, over the last three nights of the engagement. Apart from a handful of sides issued on Capitol singles, most of them edited down, those tapes were shelved and forgotten.

It worked completely, and the proof is in the trade paper of record. Bill Quinn opened his Down Beat review with the venue, writing that The Club, formerly Chicago's Club De Lisa, was an excellent spot to record this LP, and going on about the crowd it drew. There was no club and there was no crowd, not that night. The most famous piece of Cannonball Adderley's teaching voice is the one piece of it that is not true, and he did it as a favour to a friend with a new room to fill.

The numbers were enormous by any jazz standard. The single went to number two on Billboard's R&B chart in the weeks ending February 18 and February 25, 1967, and the album entered the jazz LP list at number one, with Capitol telling the trade press it had moved more than six hundred thousand singles and taken a hundred thousand advance orders. Cover versions were in the shops inside a month.

Leonard Feather was still watching, and in 1967, on the sleeve of 74 Miles Away, he wrote the best single sentence anybody managed about what Adderley did between tunes. Cannonball, he said, is the orator supreme among jazz combo leaders, who neither ignores his listeners nor puts them on nor condescends to them, but addresses them as if they were new-found friends. Feather was in the room for that session, and so were the brothers' parents, in from Florida to watch their sons work. Their father had been a cornetist himself, and after one of Nat's solos he said the boy sounded almost as good as I used to.

This is the point where the sellout charge is supposed to arrive, and it is worth saying plainly that in the jazz press of the day it does not, or at least not from anyone who signed their name to it. Down Beat's own review of the follow-up, Why Am I Treated So Bad!, was written by Dan Morgenstern in July 1967 and praises the combination of spontaneity and discipline, fire and control. Two passages that circulate today as attacks on Cannonball turn out on inspection to be about other musicians entirely.

What does survive is his answer, and it is a definition rather than a defence. Commercialism, he told the Denver interviewer Jack Winter in 1972, is not having a hit record. It is gearing a set to a room. He had a policy about that, announced from the stand: the band took no requests, so nobody had to ask for "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," because they were going to play it anyway. On the money he was equally blunt. He cared a great deal more about having a good band than about what it earned, and a band, he said, was a luxury, because no band can make enough to function on what it takes in.

The fuller answer is better still, because it does not pretend the problem away. He started from the ticket. If he was going to play his horn for people and they were going to pay money to hear him, he owed them something, because they came to see him for a reason. Then he turned it round: on top of that responsibility there is a responsibility to yourself and to your art, and he asked out loud where the compromise comes. His own answer put the hit to work rather than apologising for it.

Feather, signing off the 1967 sleeve, put the same thought in six words. These sides, he wrote, are exhilarating evidence of Julian Adderley practicing what he preaches.

The hit is what put him in the room, and the room is what changed the second half of his life. The band spent a week in residence at Albany State College in Georgia during Black Heritage Week, and Adderley found himself in front of students who took real and articulate pride in Black culture and knew his group as one thing only, the people who made "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." So he asked them the obvious question.

He went home and built a programme. By January 1970 Down Beat was reporting forty college concerts the previous year and better than sixty already booked for the current one, with mailings going out to schools offering the seminars free alongside a paid concert, and a syllabus, in the magazine's phrase, developed by Cannonball and his touring faculty, due in print that year. Touring faculty. The band was the department.

Roy McCurdy, who drummed for him from 1965 until the end, described how a visit actually ran. The whole band talked jazz history to the music department, then broke up so that the drummers went off with the drummer and the bass players with the bassist and the saxophonists with Cannonball, and the following evening they played a concert open to the students and the town. He is clear that this was not the leader's solo act. When they did the college master classes, he said, the whole band took part. He also thinks nobody ever recorded any of it.

UCLA got three days, or a week, depending which sentence of the same 1972 interview you read. Lectures, workshops, seminars, and, in Adderley's own phrase, rap sessions at night in the various dorms. He told Pat Wilson that students were not really turning out for the other visiting artists the university had brought in, and admitted that this made him feel good, because they turned out for his band.

The best of it has no glamour in it at all. He and Nat sat down and coached small, poor, historically Black colleges through National Endowment for the Arts grant applications, so that those schools could afford to book the quintet at all. Jackson State in Mississippi. Benedict College in South Carolina. My brother and I think these things up, he told Wilson; we have our own self-contained think tank. The fee was set at roughly what it cost to get the band there.

He had opinions about how everybody else was doing it, and they were not gentle. A poster reading Jazz Artist In Residence: Pete Fountain was, he said, criminal under the circumstances. Music faculties fighting Cecil Taylor's residencies were making their students incomplete. He also refused the gatekeeping that some of the movement wanted, telling an education panel that he was not a person who felt this music had to be developed and taught by a Black man, only that it had to be taught by someone who knows it, loves it, and is competent.

He contradicted himself in public, and the contradiction is the honest part of him. In 1967 he told Down Beat that the key to appreciation is understanding. On that same education panel he said he did not think it necessary for anyone to understand any art, any art at all. His actual method split the difference and was better than either slogan. When people told him they liked jazz but did not understand it, he asked them what music they did understand, waited for something like a Beatles song, played them Ella Fitzgerald or Count Basie doing it, and then told them how much of jazz they already knew.

The same instinct ran through everything he did with his name attached. September 1959, Indianapolis, a room called the Missile Room: he heard a guitarist whose records so far were big band work with Lionel Hampton and a few Pacific Jazz dates with his brothers, and he went at Orrin Keepnews until Riverside signed him. Keepnews remembered the pitch and, more tellingly, the pronoun. We have got to have that guy on the label, Adderley told him. Not many artists, Keepnews noted, say we about a record company. The guitarist was Wes Montgomery.

Then there are the records he produced for people who had none. Between 1960 and 1962 a run of Riverside and Jazzland albums went out stamped "A Cannonball Adderley Presentation," and the names on them are the Mangione brothers making their first record, the tenor player James Clay, Clifford Jordan, and Dexter Gordon on the way back. Keepnews described him volunteering as a sideman at union scale on other men's dates, simply because he liked them and thought his name might help.

In 1961 Riverside put out a record on which he does not play a note. A Child's Introduction to Jazz is Adderley narrating, walking a young listener from work songs and ragtime up through Dixieland and swing to bebop, explaining what the instruments are for. It is the only thing in his discography that is purely the old job, and he made it five years after he stopped drawing a teacher's salary.

The people in the band all said a version of the same thing. Yusef Lateef, himself a career academic, said being in his company was like going to school, and that Adderley elaborated on composition and on the history of music, and gave him room to write and to solo as he saw fit. Zawinul, who held the piano chair for nine years and crossed the country in a car with him more times than either could count, put it in four words: he was a professor. Nat learned the hard way. He thought reading music was a drag until his brother told their father, in front of him, that Nat could play the trumpet but refused to read. Nat learned.

The last thing he made was a story. Big Man: The Legend of John Henry is a two record set with music, lyrics and dialogue, Joe Williams as John Henry, a twenty three year old Randy Crawford on one of her first records, Robert Guillaume in the cast, a fourteen piece string section, and a score by both Adderley brothers. Nat said Cannon considered it one of the most important projects of his whole career. Man against machine, told straight through, for anybody who could follow a story. It reached the shops in November 1975.

He was not there for it. A stroke put him in St. Mary's Medical Center in Gary, Indiana on July 13, 1975, and he died there on August 8 with Olga at the bedside. He was forty six. Dan Morgenstern's obituary in Down Beat that October makes the argument of this whole piece in one line, and then does the unfashionable thing of proving it, noting that from the late sixties the band had been presenting a concise history of jazz in schools and colleges and that Adderley was an expert clinician, much in demand at school seminars.

In December the Down Beat readers put him in the Hall of Fame with 1,171 votes against 407 for the runner up, and the magazine noted in the same issue that its electorate was ninety six percent working players whose average age was about twenty three. The people who voted him in were the students.

The last of the teaching was institutional. In 1971 he and Quincy Jones helped form the Institute of Black American Music, and he served four years as its co-chairman, which put the work he had been doing college by college inside something that could outlast him.

One letter in the magazine that autumn is worth more than the tally. Bunky Green, an alto player in Chicago who would spend the rest of his life as one of the central figures in American jazz education, wrote in to describe an opening night at Milwaukee's Summerfest where he had asked Cannonball to dedicate a tune to his parents. Adderley dedicated the tune and then, Green wrote, praised him from the stand in terms elegant enough to suit royalty. He could not remember a time when Cannon was not praising somebody, new or seasoned.

Afterwards Olga sold his King Super 20 Silver Sonic alto to a man named Bill Green, a music teacher in Los Angeles. The Smithsonian curator who looks after the horn now wrote down her reason for choosing him: she sold it to Green because he was a teacher, and because she and her husband valued education and educators. Green kept it for twenty years. It sits in the National Museum of American History today, and it got there by being handed from one teacher to the next.