Remembering (the Right) Herbie

Around 15 years ago, a booker at a Dutch jazz club fielded a call from a New York agent representing a band that played the music of Herbie Nichols. The caller began to explain that Nichols was an unjustly neglected jazz pianist and composer who recorded in the 1950s. Yes, the booker replied dryly, I especially like his first 10-inch on Blue Note.

Dutch jazz fans know their American jazzers of course. Less noted is that many evaluate the music for themselves, regardless of US reputations. So you get a few musicians who seem more highly regarded in Holland than at home, like Bob Graettinger, Lucky Thompson and Nichols. Misha Mengelberg heard Herbie’s 1955-56 Blue Notes early, loved the way he bypassed normal chordal motion; he later touted Nichols to Eric Dolphy, and wrote the tune “Remember Herbie.” (When Mr. Hancock became popular, Misha began distinguishing between “the right Herbie” and the wrong one.) Mengelberg’s as responsible as anyone for putting him on the Dutch map. ICP, Clusone 3 and Jorrit Dijkstra (and surely others) have recorded his tunes; Michael Moore talks them up to his students at the Groningen conservatory.

Of course Nichols has had American champions too, like writer A.B. Spellman, friends Roswell Rudd and Buell Neidlinger, and Frank Kimbrough and his colleagues in the repertory-minded Herbie Nichols Project. Rudd’s highly illuminating notes to Blue Note’s and Mosaic’s ’70s and ’80s reissues were an antidote to Spellman’s gloomy portrait in Four Lives in the Be-bop Business, which lamented Herbie’s criminally infrequent record dates, his failure to make wax with horns, and his playing Dixieland to make a living. Rudd’s Nichols certainly wasn’t happy with his lot, but seemed to regard it with a certain wry detachment.

We see that side of him in Mark Miller’s Herbie Nichols: A Jazzist’s Life (from Toronto’s Mercury Press), partly drawn from Rudd’s writing and research. Nichols could shrug off a cruise ship gig so bad that passengers and crew got stranded in the Caribbean, as just one more indignity in a career full of them. But reading the great Canadian jazz writer’s surprisingly detailed yet succinct biography, it’s hard not to be depressed by the sheer volume of those indignities. Nichols apparently had to hound Alfred Lion into recording him for Blue Note, which declined to reissue his sides in the ’60s. His tunes and improvisations were too quirky for the boppers who pushed him off the piano bench at Monroe’s and Minton’s in the ’40s, and the later avant-gardists for whom melodies were merely triggers for blowing free. Mary Lou Williams was the rare pianist to play any of his tunes.

Miller, a smart critic as well as historian, pinpoints the qualities that make Herbie’s piano trio music so distinctive: the short introductory fanfares, drums integrated into the themes, odd harmonic progressions and dark keyboard voicings, and the jaunty tone of his improvisations, which stick close to the melody and a narrow dynamic range. (You can hear steel drum patterns behind them, a reflection of his West Indian parentage.) Yet even sympathetic reviewers like Nat Hentoff found his esthetic a little too hermetic: too Herbie. And even in the midst of a posthumous Nichols revival, a few writers didn’t get it. A Dutch critic once dismissed him with iron logic: all great jazz pianists play long lines; Nichols doesn’t; therefore he cannot be a great jazz pianist. (By that measure, neither can Ellington.)

There isn’t so much information about Nichols out there, but Miller combs through it well, without combing over the thin spots with weak conjecture. My quibble is that he elected not to excerpt more of Nichols’ writings about the New York scene and his fellow musicians, which appeared in several small periodicals. (He wrote an early, judiciously critical article about his friend Monk, in 1946.) This short book is the only bio we’re likely to get; why hold back? (Publisher’s restrictions, maybe.)

Miller conducted fresh interviews with some usual sources—Rudd, Neidlinger , Sheila Jordan—and some less obvious ones: Dave Frishberg, Hal Cornbread Singer, Bill Watrous, and a few white dixielanders lucky enough to have worked with him, who testify to his creative timing even in straitjacket settings. And Miller talked to Mengelberg and Kimbrough as representative revivalists.

The discography attests to how many unlikely musicians have covered his tunes like “The Gig,” House Party Starting” and “2300 Skidoo,” including Howard Alden, Duck Baker and Eugene Chadbourne among the guitarists alone. Quibble #2: the “Lady Sings the Blues” Gene Ammons covered wasn’t the Nichols tune that became Billie Holiday’s theme; Jug recorded the icky Michel Legrand theme to the awful movie of the same name. It’s unlike Miller to get even a tiny detail wrong.