Gerald Wilson and Me…

Nobody can say they have taught me how to write or orchestrate - I haven't studied with or under anyone - but that is not to say I haven't studied long and hard on my own. I don't feel that my lack of formal training means that I am in any way limited in my approach to the job.

Gerald Wilson

There's no way you can sit in Gerald's band and sit on the back of your chair. He handles the orchestra in a very wise and experienced craftsman sort of way. The combination of the heart and the craft is in perfect balance.

John Clayton, fellow bandleader

***Live and Swinging (1967) signed by Gerald, Charles Tolliver***

I got away from the piano when I was about ten. My mother got me a trumpet. I wanted a trumpet. I wanted to be a trumpet player because I wanted to play in the school marching bands at the schools I attended. I wanted to be there with a horn.

Gerald Wilson
I’ve been to Mexico, of course, you can’t get it all. They got a lot of music, they’re very musical people and I learned to hear the sounds. When I wrote my first numbers for them, you wonder whether they’re going to accept this music. Like I wrote a number for Carlos Arruza, who was the greatest matador in the world at one time, and you wonder if they’re going to say, “Why should you write a number for me?” But you find afterward they like it and so it makes me know that I’m on the right track...
Gerald Wilson

Gerald Wilson is one of the greatest arrangers, bandleaders and composers in jazz and pop music. While lending his considerable arranging skills to Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Julie London and Nancy Wilson, Gerald also nurtured, in his own band, the talents of future jazz stars Roy Ayers, Teddy Edwards, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Harold Land, Joe Pass, Charles Tolliver and so many others. But it didn't stop there. Even the great maestro, classical conductor Zubin Mehta, commissioned him to write a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1972. By all accounts, in his well-lived ninety-six years, Gerald Wilson was an influential musician who lived an exemplary and prolific life.

Born in Shelby, Mississippi in 1918, Gerald was surrounded by music, "My mother is a musician. She's a pianist and she's also a schoolteacher and she played piano for the school - the small school that I attended in a small town in Mississippi... She started me out around four on the piano and I learned little pieces and got to some other things pretty good, but later on I wanted to go to the trumpet." The youngest child, Gerald also benefited from his older siblings' interests in music, "My brother loved jazz. He was a piano player too, and he would tell me about all the things happening in jazz. During those years, I would get a chance to see many of the great jazz musicians coming from New Orleans..."

Unfortunately, school in Shelby ended after eighth grade so Gerald attended high school in Memphis, Tennessee, "My home was only eighty some miles from Memphis and, there, I was able to go to high school and I had a great trumpet teacher there that taught our band. I actually went to the same school where Jimmie Lunceford had been a teacher, and I had heard all about their band because they were very popular. They started in Memphis, the Jimmie Lunceford band, so it was just a good thing for me there." Hard to believe that a scant five or six years later, when he was just twenty years old, Gerald would join Lunceford's band and compose and arrange two of their biggest and enduring hits, "Hi Spook" and "Yard Dog Mazurka."

***You Better Believe It! (1961) unsigned***

But first came a move to Detroit where Gerald enrolled at Cass Technical, a key in the continuation of his music education. Gerald remembered his experiences fondly, "When I went to Detroit, I was sixteen years old. The people that I stayed with, they were friends of my mother. They had lived in my hometown where I was born, so they were not relatives but they were people who knew me, and so I stayed with them and I was able to go to Cass Tech in Detroit, which is one of the greatest schools in the world for music. It's like Juilliard, it's music all day long, just a couple of academics each year, and the rest is all music. I stayed there five years. I had to take piano again. I had to take one string instrument for a year, had to take orchestration, harmony. So they really prepared me for the time to get out into the world..."

And that call came quickly when Gerald joined the Jimmie Lunceford band and his career was off to the races. The Lunceford band had a national presence and Gerald loved the theatrics, "We threw the trumpets high in the air, we twirled them high up there. We had all kinds of moves and put on a big show, but we played great music. Listen to it. We were the avant-garde then, and we would have two or three hits going on the jukebox at the same time." In 1942, Gerald left Lunceford, went to Los Angeles and toured for a bit with Benny Carter before he was inducted into the US Navy. When he was discharged, Gerald returned to a thriving jazz scene in Los Angeles, forming his own big band in 1944. The twenty-piece band was gaining renown and traction on tour but Gerald grew disenchanted and abruptly disbanded his orchestra, "We had over $100,000 worth of contracts, but I realized I had just started and that this was not what I was looking for musically. I had to study some more... so what I did was I studied very hard and things began to develop in my mind. That was '46, '47, '48.

After studying for nearly three years on his own, Gerald finally succumbed to the entreaties of Count Basie and joined his orchestra in 1948, learning from Count and his masterful musicians. Gerald recounted, "They needed a trumpeter, and I wanted to sit in that band and play and learn. This was the All American rhythm section - Walter Page (bass), Jo Jones (drums), Freddie Green (guitar) and Count (piano). What school could have been better than to sit right there and watch them and listen?"

***Feel in’ Kinda Blues (1965) signed by Gerald***

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Gerald worked with acclaimed singers, arranging songs for Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson and Jimmy Witherspoon to name a few, as well as recording and arranging with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, most notably on Duke's Grammy winning soundtrack for Anatomy Of A Murder. In 1960, he reconstituted his orchestra and released ten acclaimed albums in the ensuing decade with some of the best talent in jazz. In this regard, Gerald was, perhaps, the West Coast answer to Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The talent that Gerald helped discover and nurture was certainly equal to Art's prodigious finds. Roy Ayers, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Bobby Hutcherson, Carmell Jones, Les McCann, Joe Pass and Charles Tolliver are a few of the Wilson Orchestra alumni who went on to very successful careers as jazz artists.

Some of Gerald's best known compositions derive from an unlikely source: his love of bullfighting. As he said in 2004, "My wife is Mexican and she's exposed me to her culture. We've been married fifty-three years and that's my other family now and I've been into that culture. I've been into... the bullfights. I've written twelve or thirteen numbers for bullfighters." Indeed, his best known song "Viva Tirado" was written as a tribute to Jose Ramon Tirado, a young and accomplished matador.

Gerald observed the art and grace of the matador while watching Tirado in the ring, "Well, he was a young matador that I saw during one of my first bullfights... He was still in his teens and I was just amazed at how he went about it. He was very brave and he did beautiful passes, which I didn't know all about the passes like I know now. I used to know the names of all of them, but he did them well, and so I wanted to write some music that would represent him. So a lot of the music represents the passes that he made. The rhythm that I will have in the notes that I'm playing is trying to catch these passes, to catch what they're doing..." With or without this context, "Viva Tirado" is a powerful song with Latin rhythms which highlights the singular talents of Carmell Jones on trumpet, Teddy Edwards, Harold Land and Bud Shank on saxophone, Jack Wilson on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, and Mel Lewis on drums. Captivating, dense and hypnotic when it was originally released in 1962, it remains a sonic tour de force which retains and reveals the drama, machismo and swagger of a bullfight. The song was later covered by El Chicano in 1970 and became a Top 40 hit.

***The Golden Sword (1966) signed by Gerald, Roy Ayers***

I saw Gerald perform with his orchestra at Birdland in New York City in 2004. Though he was eighty-five years old, he was lithe, expressive and energetic, especially when he was conducting his ferocious big band. Though he had given up the trumpet due to dental problems in the 1970s, there was no question who was in charge on the bandstand. A mesmerizing and magnetic figure, his long white hair flowing, Gerald coaxed and cajoled his orchestra to play the pieces he was feeling. He appeared to be conducting a ballet with his graceful gestures, precise instructions and disciplined movements. As he said, "Everything I do, if you are there to watch me, I choreograph it because I do the dancing up on the stage, although I'm not a dancer... but when the music comes. I choreograph it. That's just one of those things, I want to feel it."

To be sure, we were feeling it with the great trumpeter Jimmy Owens sitting in as well as pianist Rene Rosnes and Gerald's son, Anthony Wilson, an equally gifted guitarist. Before the show, I met Gerald near the bar, having a drink with some friends. He was so gracious when he signed the vinyl, "Wow, I love this record," he said when I handed him The Golden Sword, "This was done for my wife and her family. I love her culture and we had some wonderful musicians." Yes, but it was your amazing arrangements and charts which made your music, I suggested. "Well, you're very kind to say that, but, really, the musicians play the music," he replied modestly. In that way, he was like his friend and mentor Duke Ellington, the orchestra was the primary instrument and conduit for their respective genius.

Bandleader, composer, arranger extraordinaire, what a rich and robust legacy Gerald Wilson left us. His charts live on in their infinite groove and swagger.

Choice Gerald Wilson cuts (per BKs request)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMtlbJ05K74

“Viva Tirado” 1962 release, 2000 remaster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpiNzWHTSUI

“Viva Tirado” New York New Sound 2003

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o-gcqpb6Ao

“Milestones” live in Los Angeles, 1965

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgzepsWGSns

“Blues For Yna Yna” live in Los Angeles, early 1960s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9bqXmtX4mY

“Carlos” 1966 release, 2000 remaster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NhEcQntCIw&list=RD7NhEcQntCIw&start_radio=1