Bobby Timmons

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Robert Henry "Bobby" Timmons (born December 19, 1935 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, † March 1, 1974 in New York City , New York) was an American jazz pianist and composer . He is known for his work on Blakeys Jazz Messengers and as the composer of Moanin ' , Dat Dere and This Here , each a typical example of his gospel- processing style.

Beginnings

Timmons was the son of a pastor. The parents and several uncles and aunts played the piano. His uncle Robert Habershaw gave him early lessons and also tutored McCoy Tyner . After high school, he won a Philadelphia Musical Academy scholarship. He played the organ in the church, which influenced his later jazz playing. The first professional appearances began in the local environment and with rhythm and blues with the Trenier Twins .

Career

Timmons moved to New York City in 1954; he played with Kenny Dorham's Jazz Prophets in 1956 , with whom he made his record debut on a live recording in May. 1956/57 he played with Chet Baker ( Scott LaFaro was part of the band), 1957 with Sonny Stitt and with Maynard Ferguson from 1957-1958. Timmon's one-year collaboration with Baker from 1956–1957 is recorded on the album Chet Baker Big Band . He appeared for Stitt in 1957 on Personal Appearance and for Curtis Fuller on The Opener . In 1957 he played on Hank Mobley's album Hank . He plays with Lover Man on Lee Morgan's album The Cooker .

He moved into an apartment with Lee Morgan in the late 1950s , and they bought a piano, Timmons practiced on it and Morgan worked on compositions.

He was a member of Blakey's Jazz Messengers for the first time from July 1958 to September 1959, during which time he also toured Europe in November and December 1958. Then he joined Cannonball Adderley in 1959 . During this time, Timmons became known as a composer. The Encyclopedia of Jazz , according to his compositions were Moanin 'This Here and Dat Dere pioneered to the gospel stained soul jazz style to develop in the late 1950s and early 60s. After Billy Taylor he had Carl Perkins as a predecessor.

Moanin 'he wrote for Blakey, the other titles for Adderley. This Here was a surprise hit from The Cannonball Adderley Quintet recorded live in San Francisco , and the band found themselves playing in a large crowd at the Village Gate after returning from a tour of New York City .

Allegedly, Timmons left Adderley because he was disappointed with the little money he got after the surprise hit This Here (Dis Here) and Art Blakey offered him more.

On the Messengers album A Night In Tunisia you can hear Wayne Shorter with the Messengers and Timmons for the first time in his composition So Tired . His track Dat Dere was first recorded in 1960 by Blakey with the Messengers on the album The Big Beat . Timmons also plays it in person on Bobby Timmons Trio .

After leaving Blakey a second time, he formed his own bands, first with Ron Carter on bass and Tootie Heath on drums. In 1963 Timmons played with Lewis Powers on bass and Roy McCurdy on drums. A Washington Post reviewer described him as adventurous and agile. But by hiring less skilled musicians, he also acknowledged a lack of passion.

Although Blakey referred to him as a "gentleman" with the rest of the band, his addiction haunted and hindered him to such an extent that he was not heard on some tracks as a sideman, with Nat Adderley , for example . The album then came out with two pieces without a piano, two with Wes Montgomery as Springer and the piece Fallout .

Later recordings, usually in trio or quartet, followed; In 1967 he played with Tom McIntosh in the nonet ( Got to Get It! ). He started playing the vibraphone in the mid-1960s . Although he played the organ now and then, there is only one recording of it - a version of Moanin ' 1964 on From the Bottom . This album, which Richard Cook rated as "excellent", was only released by Prestige Records after his death.

Timmons' career quickly went downhill in the 1960s, partly because of drug abuse and partly because of supposedly frustration at being called a composer and player of simple pieces of music. In 1967 he recorded for Milestone Records and in 1969 played in a quartet by Sonny Red and in a trio that accompanied Etta Jones .

He was also involved in recordings with Art Farmer , Pepper Adams , JJ Johnson and Kenny Burrell . In March 1974, after a month in hospital, Timmons died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 38 . He was buried in Philadelphia. With his wife Estelle, also called Bobby, he had a son.

Style and composition

Timmons is known for his block chords : a style in which the right hand drafts melodies, and the left hand follows the rhythm of the right hand, but does not change the vocal lead except for chord changes. In his sometimes reduced or sometimes massive piano playing there are influences of Art Tatum and Bud Powell , which he reduced in favor of Red Garland's block chords , and which he played rhythmically harder and more concisely. A nice example is his entire chorus on the piece Come Rain or Come Shine , characterized by an F major F minor change on the album Moanin ' , here it becomes clear that these chords are composed through and are varied rather than completely newly improvised, and spontaneous combustion at Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco.

Bobby Timmons brings the diminished of his block chords when changing the chords in the left hand, while he can leave the melody in the right much simpler and improvise over bluestone scales with a diminished fifth, which also rub in the simplest form with the diminished chords that may appear. He also plays the accompaniment an octave "too low" around the small c instead of the dashed c '. In addition, Timmons octaves large seconds that obscure octave parallels and can be made even more conspicuous with chromatic nuances.

On the one hand, Scott Yanow notes that Timmons stylistically did not deviate from what he had developed up to 1960. At the same time, he highlights facets of Timmons' playing: great ballads inspired by Bud Powell , his pure, precise unsentimental long lines. Funk aspects in Timmon's playing influenced pianists like Les McCann , Ramsey Lewis , and Benny Green .

He directed his own trio, with whom he went into the studio in January 1960 and recorded for Riverside Records ; “He presented himself as a Soul Man with bubbly, sometimes classic ambitions. Timmons designed Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life and the intro to My Funny Valentine as emotional demonstrations of his harmonic competence, ”wrote Ralf Dombrowski about his debut album.

Timmons' 1963 play with Lewis Powers on bass and Roy McCurdy on drums was described by a Washington Post reviewer as "flexible, agile and adventurous ... there is a sheen of church music and spirituals over everything."

Timmons did not feel particularly like a composer: “As a composer I am a dilettante. I never really sat down and tried to write a song. ”He describes his method of writing a new song by whistling, playing around with notes, or in the club he tells one musician to play that note and the other that, and they pass it on to each other. He got the impulse to write out Moanin ' from Benny Golson, who asked him to write a bridge for the A part that he inserted between the numbers at Blakey .

Timmons developed a call-and-response principle in which the piano forms the caller and the combo forms the choir.

The quality of his recordings varies in terms of sound and instrument technology as well as inspiration and passion. Not all recordings are representative of his skills. Finally, its particularly lush ornament style is noteworthy , which sets permanently swinging impulses and confirms the time.

Discography (selection)

with Art Blakey
  • 1958: Moanin ' (Blue Note)
  • 1958: Paris Live Olympia 1958 (Fontana)
  • 1959: Just Coolin ' (Blue Note, ed. 2020); on it Quick Trick
  • 1959: At The Jazz Corner Of The World (Blue Note)
  • 1960: A Night in Tunisia ; on it So Tired
  • 1960: The Big Beat (Blue Note, 1960), then for the first time Dat Dere
as a band leader
  • This Here Is Bobby Timmons (1960), with Sam Jones (b), Jimmy Cobb (dr)
  • Soul Time (1960)
  • Easy Does It (1961)
  • The Bobby Timmons Trio in Person (OJC, 1961)
  • Street and Soulful Sounds (1962)
  • Born to be Blue! (1963)
  • Workin 'Out (Prestige, 1964-1966)
  • From the Bottom (OJC, 1964)
  • Quartets And Orchestra (Milestone, 1967–1968)
as a sideman
  • 1956: Chet Baker: Chet Baker and Crew , 1956
  • 1957: Lee Morgan: The Cooker (Blue Note)
  • 1959: Cannonball Adderley: The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco , (with This Here )
  • 1960: Nat Adderley: Work Song , with Wes Montgomery

literature

Lexical entries

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Barry Kernfeld: Timmons, Bobby. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003 ( online ; login required).
  2. ↑ a b c d e John Pagones: Timmons Shuns Composer Role. In: The Washington Post, February 16, 1964, p. G4.
  3. ↑ Taylor, Leon (June 5, 2000) "Elsie Wright Loved Kids, Fussed at Their Noisy Play" philly.com
  4. ↑ a b c d e Feather, Leonard and Gitler, Ira (1999) The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz , pp. 646-647. Oxford University Press.
  5. ^ Williams, Martin (1992) Jazz Changes , p. 108. Oxford University Press.
  6. ↑ a b c d jazz.com ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jazz.com
  7. ↑ McMillan, Jeffery S. (2008) DelightfuLee: the Life and Music of Lee Morgan , University of Michigan Press.
  8. ^ Billy Taylor, Jazz Piano
  9. ↑ a b c Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, Stephen Thomas Erlewine (eds.): The All Music Guide to Jazz. (2002) p. 1245. Backbeat Books.
  10. ↑ a b Sheridan, Chris (2000) Dis Here: a Bio-Discography of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley , pp. 81-83. Greenwood Press.
  11. ^ Walker, Jesse H. (Sep. 30, 1961) "Theatricals" New York Amsterdam News , p. 19.
  12. ↑ John Pagones: (25 January 1963) "Timmons Holds Sway at Jazz Mecca" The Washington Post , p B13.
  13. ↑ John Pagones: (March 12, 1965) "cocktail lounges Come into Their Own" The Washington Post , p B15.
  14. ↑ Interview on The Art of Jazz, In + Out, 1989
  15. ^ Mathieson, Kenny (2012) Cookin ': Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954–1965 Canongate Books.
  16. ^ R. Cook: Jazz Encyclopedia, p. 621.
  17. ^ A b Gary Giddins: (March 7, 1974) "Bobby Timmons, 1935–1974" The Village Voice. Pp. 45, 50.
  18. ^ West, Hollie I. (Nov. 5, 1967) "A Disc Company Fights the Trend" The Washington Post , p. K4.
  19. ^ West, Hollie I. (July 3, 1969) "Sparkling Jazz Group" The Washington Post , p. C6.
  20. ^ West, Hollie I. (July 21, 1969) "Great Jazz of Etta Jones" The Washington Post , p. B6.
  21. ^ A b "Bobby Timmons, 38, Jazz Pianist, Dead" (March 2, 1974) New York Times , p. 34.
  22. ^ A b Fulton, Champian (September 2011) "The Transcendent Aesthetics of the Block Chord Language" Down Beat , p. 60.
  23. ↑ Online lessons from Geoff Keezer, for a fee
  24. ^ Yanow, Scott (2003) Jazz on Record: the First Sixty Years , p. 487. Backbeat Books.
  25. ^ Yanow, Scott AllMusic and Brian Priestley Jazz Rough Guide
  26. ↑ John Pagones: Timmons Holds Sway at Jazz Mecca. In: The Washington Post. of January 25, 1963, p. B13.
  27. ↑ Martin Kunzler, Jazz-Lexikon, p. 1181 f.
  28. ↑ Cannonball Adderley Live in San Francisco
  29. ↑ The piano on Easy Does It is out of tune.
  30. ^ Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, Brian Priestley: Rough Guide Jazz. Metzler, Stuttgart 1999.
  31. ↑ observable from a comparison with the model Bud Powell
personal data
SURNAME Timmons, Bobby
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Timmons, Robert Henry (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz pianist and composer
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1974
Place of death New York City , New York