A few notes while listening one track of a live piano trio record by Michel Legrand, with Shelly Manne, Ray Brown on bass. Recorded in 1968. The movie The Thomas Crowne Affair just came out, for which Legrand would win an Oscar the next year, for his song Windmills Of Your Mind. This tune is a freewheeling thing entitled Another Blues. There’s no tune, it’s just a blues, with a heavy groove, and a lot of creative interaction between Manne and Legrand. Manne is one of the more creative players just with the drums as percussion instruments, and he plays with a lot of humor.
I say there’s a heavy groove happening, between the bass and Manne’s cymbal, and bass drum— he’s playing the bass drum pretty strongly. And really digging into the cymbal. At times leaning into a shuffle feel, at one point he plays a really grooving Afro 12/8 feel, near the end he goes into double time. Tempo starts in the low 140s, in about a minute eases into a little faster tempo in the low 150s, where everyone is happy. Noting how good his cymbal beat sounds during the double time, at about 300 bpm.
There’s an unusually clear line here between what he’s playing that is supportive of the groove and blues form, and what is strictly interactive with Legrand. Increasingly leaning into the latter after about the first two and a half minutes (obviously, it’s all contained in the blues form, and is in time except when it deliberately isn’t). Normally the interaction wouldn’t be so overt. It’s a piece of club craft, in a way, making a show of creativity and interaction between the players for a club audience.
…when I say supportive of the blues form, I mean that it’s not just a 12 bar hole where we dump in the notes we want, it’s got an outline, in the chord changes and the time feel, and in how people have played it, everything that ever caught your ear on a record as a way to handle the form.
Around 4:00 they do a little improvised shout chorus, which you’ll note they don’t resolve, Legrand bails on it on the turnaround. Manne calls it back for a moment around 4:40. People want to cling to those things when they happen, and play them out to a grand down beat at the top of the next chorus, maybe it’s a more mature move to bail. It’s an actual thing in jazz, not finishing things— there are some quotes from Miles Davis about it, and Billy Hart mentions it in his book.
Following that is a funny little passage, cruising for a minute. I seem to be hearing xylophone, for some reason. Manne makes a few pointedly off grid punctuations as that’s happening. The passage concludes after 5:30 with a little avant-garde interaction, where Manne is keeping the time with his feet, and playing some deliberately eccentric stuff with his hands.
There’s a moment of rhythmic uncertainty after 6:10— Manne and Legrand are doing some dense stuff, Manne comes out of it funny. Manne recovers in two measures, it catches Legrand’s attention and he leaves a beat open to listen. Stuff happens, but it makes you notice how rarely you hear time errors on records.
Manne’s drums have a relatively low sound, including the snare drum, and sort of a dark tonality I associate with mahogany drums. His cymbal sound is interesting, too, basically a focused sound, but a little split tonality in the attack— that’s the only way I can describe it.
That’s all I have time to write, but the one other thing I’m listening for is the dynamic changes—how long do they pursue one thing, who leads the change, and how. It was a hard thing for me to do, so much of my listening was about continuity of energy— if you listen to Coltrane, they’re riding one force until it expends itself naturally. Miles in the 60s too, is about length, if someone is deliberately letting go of a string of energy, I can’t remember hearing it. Here everything mostly takes place within single choruses, then they let it go. Leading to the “shout chorus” they’ve been building energy for a few choruses, after that it’s kind of loose— you hear Manne choke his cymbal for a dynamic change, but it doesn’t happen yet, and they make it at the beginning of the next chorus.
Thank you for bringing these recordings to my attention; I wasn’t familiar with them. Almost thirty years ago, a fellow musician I’ve been playing with since my youth introduced me to Shelly Manne’s album 2-3-4 and said, “You have to listen to this — he plays just like you.” Until then, I hadn’t heard much of Shelly Manne, but after listening to him, I felt a certain kinship.
The way he swings, his sensitivity to sound and how he shapes it, and especially his approach to dynamics set him apart from his contemporaries.
I suspect his playing was deeply influenced by the swing drummers he heard as a young man on 52nd Street — particularly Jo Jones, Dave Tough and Big Sid Catlett.
He was four years older than Max Roach and found a completely different way of approaching the music. Sudden dynamic changes were not so common in bebop and the styles that followed, and the great surges of energy from Elvin Jones or Tony Williams represent a very different aesthetic. His idea how to play in a band owes more to Dave Tough and Big Sid Catlett, I think.
Shelly managed to weave the old concept into the contemporary music of his time without ever sounding old-fashioned.
Who else played with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Frank Zappa, including the Jackson Five ,and always sounded unmistakably like himself? He recorded with Ornette Coleman, Tom Waits, and Barry Manilow, and even played one of the most distinctive drum parts ever on a hit single — Peggy Lee’s Fever.
And what other drummer can you recognize after just two bars in a Hollywood blockbuster like The Pink Panther or The Thomas Crown Affair? The only other drummer who comes close might be Roy Haynes — always himself, yet always playing exactly what the music needs.
But Roy Haynes probably didn’t have the option of becoming a Hollywood studio drummer in the 1950s, as the studios were still highly segregated back then. Besides, he also made good money playing with Sarah Vaughan.
I truly think of Shelly Manne as a role model — not only as a musician but in how to live one’s life. He owned his own jazz club, essentially subsidized it with the money he made in Hollywood, provided work for hundreds of musicians, and helped Earl Palmer break into the studio scene at a time when racial segregation was still common — so much so that Earl named his daughter Shelly out of gratitude.
I could go on forever. I really love the guy.
Maybe I’ll start breeding racehorses someday too, just for the heck of it.
It’s a fun thing, I don’t know if my notes on it make any sense. It doesn’t matter, it was fun listening a bunch of times.
I remember in the memorial in MD the year he died Erskine was talking about what a great person he was.
You can definitely hear that deep 30s kind of swing in there, feels like what I hear in Shadow Wilson, maybe later on Mickey Roker? By the way, I have a Mickey Roker thing cued up you’re going to dig… absolutely killing it up in your tempo range.
I need to find Manne’s 70s records with John Gross and Gary Barone, he sounded really good playing funk grooves on that, too.
AND I didn’t know that was him on Fever. Of course it is, how could it not be?
Shelly used to tell a great story in several interviews.
This one is from the Studio Drummer Roundtable in Modern Drummer magazine (January 1984):
Shelly: “I did a date with Jimmy Bowen, “Fever.” I had never worked with Jim, but I had made the original record of “Fever,” and it said on my part, “play like Shelly Manne.” So I played it just like I played it originally. The guy came out and said I wasn’t doing it right. When I told him I was Shelly Manne, he turned around and went back in the booth.”
If you have them, please read his two lengthy interviews in MD.
They are in the October 1981 and January 1985 issues.
He discusses many important topics, and he seems like he would have been a great person to know.
When you’re here in Berlin in two weeks, I’ll show you the book about him, Sounds of a Different Drummer. It’s a great read!