Herbie Nichols

Herbert Horatio "Herbie" Nichols (born January 3 or December 3, 1919 in New York City , † April 12, 1963 ibid) was an American jazz pianist and composer .

Live and act

Between the ages of 7 and 14, Nichols, whose parents immigrated from the Caribbean, learned classical piano. He played classical music all his life - from Scarlatti to Bartók . He only turned to jazz when he realized that his African-American origins were a hindrance to a career as a concert pianist. Before Nichols served his military service in 1941, he studied at the City College of New York and played in local bands such as the Red Baron Orchestra , although in 1938 he had been one of the jazz musicians who prepared the bebop at Clark Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem . He then continued to work for various oldtime jazz bands , including a. with Herman Autrey , Hal Singer , Rex Stewart , Illinois Jacquet and John Kirby . In the 1950s he also played with Edgar Sampson , Arnett Cobb and Wilbur De Paris and rarely led his own groups. Alfred Lion , to whom Nichols had sent his own compositions, finally gave him the chance in 1955 to record his music in a trio for Blue Note Records ; When the recordings turned out to be difficult to market, the contract was not extended, although Lion particularly appreciated Nichols as a pianist. Blue Note didn't use him as a sideman. In the early 1960s he accompanied singers like Sheila Jordan in clubs , who described him as “a very good-looking man, tall and shrouded in mystery and always elegantly dressed”. When musicians of the free jazz generation such as Roswell Rudd or Archie Shepp discovered him and performed his compositions with him between 1960 and 1962, he was already fatally ill with leukemia.

Nichols is one of those jazz musicians who only gained greater recognition posthumously; it was largely forgotten after his death in 1963. Its importance "as a link between Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor " was only increasingly recognized by the younger generation from the 1980s through the activities of Misha Mengelberg , Roswell Rudd , Duck Baker and the Herbie Nichols Project cooperative led by Frank Kimbrough and Ben Allison . Most recently, the album Spinning Songs of Herbie Nichols by Simon Nabatov was released in 2012 .

With the exception of his piece Serenade , which was provided with a text by Billie Holiday and entered the standard repertoire as Lady Sings the Blues , Nichol's compositions were for a long time only cultivated by a few musicians, besides Rudd and Steve Lacy in particular by Misha Mengelberg and Buell Neidlinger , but also Geri Allen and Dave Douglas . His own compositions, which were seldom performed during his lifetime, are in stark contrast to the traditional swing , rhythm 'n' blues and Dixieland repertoire with which Nichols earned his living. He was heavily influenced as a composer by Prokofiev and other classical modern composers, and also appreciated the approach taken by Thelonious Monk's early work (he wrote the first article about this to be published). Unlike Monk, he did not focus on structures in his 170 or so compositions (some were lost), but on idiosyncratic melodic motifs and rhythmic ideas. His compositions continue to be based on common formal schemes such as the 32-bar AABA form, which, like Gershwin's Song Mine, are alienated by the fact that the various A-sections differ. In addition, the individual parts at Nichols no longer consist of regular eight-bar periods. For some of the listeners, improvisation on such an asymmetrical form scheme has the effect of leaving out or adding parts.

Nichols also wrote poetry and articles and was also active as a painter.

plant

• Herbie Nichols: The Unpublished Works. 27 Jazz Master Pieces (edited by Roswell Rudd) Gerard and Sarzin Publishing 2000; ISBN 978-1-930080-00-3

Compositions (selection)

• S'crazy pad
• Love, Gloom, Cash, Love
• Lady Sings the Blues
• Query
• The gig
• Amoeba's Dance
• Cro-Magnon Nights
• Who's blues?
• Mary's Waltz

Discographic notes

• The Art of Herbie Nichols (with Art Blakey , Max Roach , Al McKibbon , Teddy Kotick , 1955/6), Blue Note 1992.
• The Blue Note Sessions from 1955–1956 , published in a new edition with additional material in 1988 by Mosaic Records as The Complete Recordings of Herbie Nichols (contains The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Volume 1,2 (BLP 5068, 5069), The Herbie Nichols Trio (BLP 1519 ))
• Herbie Nichols: Love, Gloom, Cash, Love (with Dannie Richmond , George Duvivier , 1957, Bethlehem), also as The Bethlehem Sessions on Affinity

As an accompanying musician

• Snub Mosley (with George Duvivier ), Penguin 1949
• Rex Stewart (with Fernando Arbello , Tommy Bedford ), Jazztone 1953
• Joe Thomas (with Buster Bailey , Buddy Tate, and others), Atlantic 1958

collection

• The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Herbie Nichols (1955/56). Mosaic , 1987 - 5 LPs with Al McKibbon , Art Blakey , Teddy Kotick , Max Roach

literature

• Ian Carr , Digby Fairweather , Brian Priestley : Rough Guide Jazz. The ultimate guide to jazz music. 1700 artists and bands from the beginning until today. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-476-01584-X .
• Francis Davis : Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers . Oxford University Press, 1992
• AB Spellman : Four Lives in the Bebop Business . Pantheon, 1966, 1985 (also as Black Music, Four Lives )
• Mark Miller: Herbie Nichols; A Jazzist's Life . Mercury Press, Toronto 2009

Web links

• Short portrait of Nichols in the jazz newspaper
• Hans-Jürgen Schaal: Herbie Nichols

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
2. ↑ Richard Cook: Blue Note . Argon Verlag, p. 107
3. ↑ quoted in Cook: Blue Note . Argon Verlag, p. 109
4. ^ Review of Phil Johnson's album in The Independent
5. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schaal : Herbie Nichols - The Unheard of (2003)
6. ↑ Bill Shoemaker : Review of Roswell Rudd Trio: The Unheard Herbie Nichols Volume 1 (1997) in JazzTimes
7. ↑ Josef Woodard: Review of the album Duck Baker - Spinning Song: Plays the Music of Herbie Nichols (1997) in JazzTimes
8. ↑ The Herbie Nichols Project ( Memento of the original from May 20, 2012 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. 
9. ↑ In the liner notes for The Herbie Nichols Trio (Blue Note) he mentions Jelly Roll Morton, Beethoven and Villa-Lobos as influences and adds that he is constantly struggling to catch up with his jazz studies in his classical music studies, which he used to do before would have been the other way around with him.
10. ↑ 1947 in "Music Dial"
11. ↑ Michael J. West: JazzTimes 10: Essential Herbie Nichols Tracks - Celebrating the centennial of a still-underappreciated pianist and composer. JazzTimes , January 31, 2019, accessed February 10, 2019 . 
12. ↑ In particular, eight additional pieces from the fourth Blue Note session in 1955, from which only one piece had previously been published