Charles Fambrough - R.I.P.

After a long bout battling liver disease and many years of suffering, the great jazz bassist Charles Fambrough passed away on Saturday, January 1, 2011. Fambrough had apparently been awaiting a transplant match. Several musical tributes were held in Philadelphia over the last several years to help Fambrough and his family pay the bassist's outrageous medical expenses.

Philadelphia resident Charles Fambrough was born on August 25, 1950. Fambrough studied classical piano throughout his elementary and high-school years. He gravitated to bass at the age of 13, attempting to imitate Paul Chambers, the first jazz bassist he ever heard. He began studying classical bass in the seventh grade but gave it up in 1968 to begin working in the pit bands for such theatrical productions as You Can't Take it With You and By e-Bye Birdie and, by day, playing on The Mike Douglas Show.

In 1969, Charles began working with a cover band called Andy Aaron's Mean Machine that also featured a young saxophonist by the name of Grover Washington, Jr. A year later, Charles joined Grover Washington's road band, staying with the saxophonist during his popular CTI years. In 1975, Fambrough joined Airto Moreira's band, where he stayed for two years until joining legendary pianist McCoy Tyner's group, playing on Tyner's Focal Point (1977), The Greeting (1978) and Horizon (1979), as well as Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Boogie Woogie String Along For Real (1977)—his earliest known recordings.

Upon leaving Tyner's group, Fambrough hooked up with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at about the same time Wynton Marsalis was part of the group, recording with the great jazz drummer from 1980 until 1982 and featuring on the pivotal Album of the Year (1981). Fambrough once said “McCoy showed me how to play with endurance. Art gave me refinement.”

He continued, “With McCoy, the gig is about speed and strength. He plays so much stuff that you're lucky if you're heard, so you struggle to keep up with him. But with Art it was a lot different. He heard every note you played and if there was anything raggedy, he immediately let you know about it. He really taught you how to play behind a horn player, how to develop in a rhythm section.”

Surprisingly, Charles Fambrough made his own solo recording debut on Creed Taylor's famed CTI Records in 1991 with The Proper Angle, an excellent, star-studded affair featuring Wynton Marsalis (who featured Fambrough in his first band in 1982) and Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Branford Marsalis and Joe Ford (who first met Fambrough on a McCoy Tyner gig 13 years earlier) on sax, the late, lamented Kenny Kirkland on piano, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums (both Kirkland and Watts featured with Fambrough in a trio at the time dubbed “Jazz From Keystone”) and Steve Barrios, Mino Cinelu and Jerry Gonzalez on percussion. The record is the first bassist-led date on CTI Records since the legendary Ron Carter in 1976 and it's clear that Fambrough, like Carter, was a bassist who could lead an interesting jazz record of his own. It also ranks among the very best the label issued during its 1989-98 resurgence.

The Proper Angle was not only one of CTI's only straight-ahead albums of the time, it also showcased some of jazz's best young lions at the top of their game. It surely proved that Fambrough was a tremendously capable leader adept at helming a band of great improvisers who worked beautifully well together and it introduced the bassist's amazing facility for interesting composition (”The Dreamer,” “Sand Jewels,” “Broski,” the bassist's nickname from his Jazz Messenger days, “Dolores Carla Maria,” named for Fambrough's wife and widow, a singer of great renown in her own right, “Earthlings,” “The Proper Angle,” “One for Honor,” originally written for McCoy Tyner's Horizon, and the beautifully titled “Our Father Who Art Blakey,” named for the drummer who had passed away the year before).

Fambrough issued two more records on CTI, The Charmer (1992), featuring Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Kenny Garrett on alto sax, pianists Bill O'Connell, Kenny Kirkland and Abdullah Ibrahim (!), drummers Jeff “Tain” Watts, Billy Drummond and Yoron Israel (!) on drums and a reunion on three tracks with Grover Washington, Jr., and the splendiferously excellent live album Blues at Bradley's (1993) featuring Donald Harrison, Steve Turre, Joe Ford, Bill O'Connell, Bobby Broom, Ricky Sebastian and Steve Berrios. These records remain the undisputed highpoint of CTI in the nineties.

Several other discs under Charles Fambrough's name also appeared, including Keep of the Spirit (AudioQuest, 1995), City Tribes (Evidence, 1995), Upright Citizen (NuGroove, 1997) and Charles Fambrough Live @ Zanzibar Blue (Random Chance, 2002). The bassist also continued to appear on a wide array of discs by others, including Pharoah Sanders (Crescent with Love), Bill O'Connell (including the pianist's great CTI album Lost Voices), Ernie Watts (Reaching Up), Kevin Mahogany (My Romance) and the jazz-rock cover bands Beatlejazz and Stonejazz.

In recent years, health problems prevented Charles Fambrough from participating as much as he once had on the recording scene. But he continued playing around his hometown as much as possible and was one of the bassists featured on drummer/composer Lenny White's 2010 album Anomoly (Abstract Logix).

A fellow musician and Fambrough friend, pianist, composer and educator George Colligan, said on his jazztruth blog today that “Charles had health issues for many of his last years, but it never seemed to deter him from his passion for music. He talked about his condition like it was a minor nuisance. He seemed determined to press on despite his health.”

There was something undeniably special about the sound Charles Fambrough made. While you never got the sense that his bass was leading the music's charge, you often stopped to wonder exactly what drove the music he was port of to be as magnificently magnetic as it was. Simple consideration reveals just how emphatic and empathic his role in the music was.

Fellow bassist Ron Carter has stated that he doesn't like his playing to be considered an anchor, something that holds a vessel from moving. Bassists hear that kind of thing all the time, and it's no wonder Carter resents it.

When listening to Charles Fambrough, it's clear that a good bassist propels the music where it needs to go. It's a shame that the music will no longer be propelled by Charles Fambrough, an inventive and imaginative bassist and one of the finest of “the young lions” who emerged in jazz's new traditionalism of the early 1980s.

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• Charles Fambrough, 1950-2011 (therestandstheglass.blogspot.com)

Jazz Articles: Trudy Pitts Dies at 78 — By Evan Haga — Jazz Articles

Cover of Trudy PittsJazz Articles: Trudy Pitts Dies at 78 — By Evan Haga — Jazz Articles

Trudy Pitts, a classically trained pianist who became a prominent jazz organist and an important music educator in Philadelphia, died there on Dec. 19. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Pitts was 78.

Pitts was something of an anomaly in the organ-jazz tradition that found a natural home in Philadelphia in the middle of the 20th century. One of jazz’s most populist and accessible schools, organ jazz had much to do with machismo and intuition: Drenched in the blues and gospel, organ trios became the jazz equivalent of rock ’n’ roll bar bands with their danceable swing and rousing displays of chops. On paper, Pitts probably shouldn’t have excelled in the idiom like she did. As Chris Kelsey reported in his 2007 Overdue Ovation, Pitts started on piano at age 6, eventually studying to become a concert pianist at Juilliard. She hadn’t played much jazz or, for that matter, B3 organ when she was considered to replace Shirley Scott in a group led by drummer Bill “Mr. C” Carney, whom Pitts would marry in 1958, three years after they met. But by the time she signed with the Prestige label and issued a string of LPs in 1967 and ’68, her mastery of the Hammond B3 was indisputable, and her sound was a thing apart from other Philly-born or -based organ greats, among them Scott, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland.

Dust off Introducing the Fabulous Trudy Pitts and bear witness. With guitarist Pat Martino and Carney in tow, she cooks on Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” and a version of “It Was a Very Good Year” whose swing snowballs in urgency and intensity. On “Steppin’ in Minor,” also released as a 45, she simmers through one lyrically soulful chorus after another. Pitts’ flowing touch belied her classical training but didn’t impede the requisite blues sensibility in her playing, and, unlike so many of her peers, she didn’t overplay. For jazz-piano fans who think they don’t dig organ, she might be an excellent introduction. She tended not to overindulge in the Hammond’s idiomatic elements; in other words, static-chord squalling is thankfully less prevalent.

Introducing’s follow-up, These Blues of Mine, showcased Pitts as a player as well as a competent singer, taking her colorful vibrato to period pop like “Eleanor Rigby” and “The House of the Rising Sun.” But those covers aren’t the record’s highlight: An instrumental take on another pop staple, Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” flaunts a groove so buoyant and fun you can only imagine how many packed bars it brought alive. As a sideperson Pitts played on Martino’s 1967 debut as a leader, El Hombre (Prestige), now part of the jazz-guitar canon, and recorded with Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Pitts appeared on the saxophonist’s ambitiously arranged Other Folks’ Music, contributing a composition, “Anysha,” and playing acoustic and electric piano. And on his Warner Bros. debut, Return of the 5000 Lb. Man, Pitts (on organ) and Mr. C bolstered Kirk through Sammy Fain’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Extra material from Return was used on Kirk’s next release, Kirkatron, and Pitts played organ on an arrangement of Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song.”

Nick Ruechel

Trudy Pitts

Despite not recording for name labels after those Kirk dates in the mid-’70s, Pitts stayed active on organ and piano, and became a mentor figure in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate professor at the city’s University of the Arts, where she began teaching in 1991. She also performed regularly with her long-standing personal and musical partner, Mr. C, releasing a live trio recording from an SFJAZZ gig on the Doodlin’ label in 2007.

For the 2006 compilation Pianadelphia (Turtle), Pitts recorded a version of “Naima” on the 88s that is stunning in its rhapsodic, classically tinged gentility; laying it side-by-side with fellow Philadelphian McCoy Tyner’s typically clangorous version from 2009’s Solo (Half Note) makes for a stunning comparison.

Speaking on the phone earlier today from his home in Philadelphia, Pat Martino remembered Pitts as both player and person. When asked how Pitts’ conservatory training was evident in her technique, he recalled “her facility regarding time signatures, to be able to play in 7/4 or 9/4 or 11/8, or any of these odd time signatures, at a very early date.

“This was in the ’60s,” he continued, “[and] she was writing compositions of that nature.” (Pitts composed “Count Nine,” in 9/4, for 1967’s These Blues of Mine.)

The guitarist also commented on the profundity of the relationship Pitts and Carney shared, in their personal as well as musical lives. “When you ask a question like, ‘How was Trudy as a person?’” he said, “you’re asking, ‘How were both of them together?’ whether you know it or you don’t. Because they were always together, and I’m sure they still are, in many ways.”

And, referring to their enduring trio: “When they brought in a new member, that new member had to learn them.” Martino reflected that joining their group in the ’60s, when he was a competitive, ambitious young player, taught him an important lesson in selflessness and accommodation.

In 2006, Pitts became the first jazz artist to play the Dobson pipe organ at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. To read more about that and Pitts’ life and work, check out Chris Kelsey’s Overdue Ovation. Also be sure and check out the recent tribute piece by JT contributor David R. Adler in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

According to the Inquirer, Pitts is survived by Carney and their son and daughter. In a digital biography produced by Slife Productions, Pitts recalled the difficulties of being a parent and a working musician simultaneously. “I was an old-fashioned mother and an artist, and that presented me with quite a few problems,” she said.

“But it was good because it helped me to be able to be multi-faceted. … I think I’ve been an extraordinary mother.”