Duane Tatro has died - I've taken the liberty of bumping my own thread from January as a kind of tribute, but feel free to start your own on the other side of you want. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So there I was, a newborn baby watching the Quinn Martin TV Movie THE HOUSE ON GREENAPPLE ROAD, and I opened my left ear and my right eye for the first time, registering "good music" on my then-smooth brain.
Several centuries later it was Christmas 2019, and Santa brought me the soundtrack to THE INVADERS series! Great! Love the Dominic Frontiere scores. Oh, but there's a lot of Duane Tatro on the second CD. It's really intriguing music, so I had a look at "the computer" to see who this Duane Tatro dude was. Hey, he's still alive! 93 in May! And he's one of those REALLY interesting scientific/jazz types who started out doing jazz in the '40s!
So I absorbed all this information on him and will now vomit my rabbit on the screen for you. It's all messed up - I've been to jazz pages, listened to stuff on Spotify and YouTube... I've even formed half-baked ideas of my own.
So he was with Mel Tormé and then Stan Kenton in the '40s, then found himself as the precocious production manager at an elecronics plant, and was interested in gadgets and stuff but was deskbound. Contemporary Records somehow knew that he was fidgety wearing the wrong suit in an office, and so commissioned him to write some jazz pieces starting in 1953. It took him three years to complete it, but it was eventually released in 1956. "Duane Tatro's Jazz For Moderns", with that great William Claxton photo of General Motors' Firebird II on the cover. Tatro played on some pieces, but was mostly arranger and composer. And what a line-up! Shelly Manne, Bill Holman, Jimmy Giuffre, Lennie Niehaus... Can't recall offhand if Gerry Mulligan's on it, but it's got that Mulligan cool feel to it all. I really like how there's no piano. I mean I LOVE the piano in jazz, but I also love it when it's not there at all.
Somebody find some photos of that great sleeve and post some direct links to the music. I'm too busy - thanx!
Oh wait! Here's an intriguing one - "Jazz West Coast: From Hollywood to Los Angeles 1950 - 1958". A lot of composers on that one, Chico Hamilton, Johnny Mandel... I think Duane Tatro has only one piece represented - "Maybe Next Year", which I'd heard played by Art Pepper, but this is a different version, and it's great. I also really love the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker track "Soft Shoe" on this - it's SO like what Gil Mellé was doing around the same time. Cool west coast jazz with no piano. See? I just HAD to shoehorn in my favourite composer of all time. Both Mellé and Tatro seemed to be those scientific jazz visionaries from another planet, and that comes through clearly to me, and only me, on these recordings.
Somebody find some photos and links to all these things I've mentioned. Oh, and please add your comments, or at least wade through the rabbit spew. Thanx friends!
Thanks for that direct link, Onya - I can't do them when I'm in my spaceship - which seems to be pretty much all day every day now. "Backlash", the track that appears first on your tubular link, is the first of three by Tatro in a long "mix" (as the kids say). The other one from the Jazz For Moderns LP is "Conversation Piece", and sandwiched between those two is his "Maybe Next Year" from the Jazz West Coast album. There's another upload which (I think) mislabels one of those tracks as something else, "remastered". Anyway, it looks like the two albums were re-released in comparatively recent years - haven't checked yet to see if on LP or CD.
I think my favourite is "Backlash" - I love the "unusual" chord combinations and how it switches from minor key to major. Really interesting, and although I'm repeating myself I have to say that I LOVE that piano-less West Coast Cool. I just had to go back and listen to the Gerry Mulligan "Soft Shoe" again, the version he did with Chet Baker. It's SO Gil Mellé. Isn't it??
Message for Justin - Ah, I didn't know (or "had forgotten") that THE HOUSE ON GREENAPPLE ROAD became the DAN AUGUST series. I heard your "Mystery Clip" upload (it's now got 32 views!) and the few moments of lightly swinging jazz at the 5 and 6 minute marks were really familiar to me. I probably taped it off the telly way back.
He also contributed to two great Sixties series: Mission: Impossible: see "Ultimatum" Mannix: see "Road Trip to Nowhere" and "Broken Mirror"
And he managed many QM series and my favorite one is: The Streets of San Francisco: see "Castle of Fear" (1976) "Merchants of Death" (1975) "The Stamp of Death" (1973) "Before I Die" (1973)
I have been listening non-stop to "Jazz for Moderns." Here is my overall assessment:
I like everything on the album, and love the overall aesthetic. My issue is that the textures are not varied enough, and it has, in total, a certain sameness to it. The tunes kind of blur together.
Compare "Jazz for Moderns" to the Miles/Gil "Birth of the Cool," and you will hear more textural variety in the latter. As a result, it is easier for me to key into particular tracks on the latter.
For fun, I dropped a couple of "Jazz for Moderns" tracks into a playlist with other jazz, and the individual Tatro tracks distinguished themselves much more in this context, based on the contrast between what preceded and followed.
Would any of the legions of FSM Duane Tatro fanatics agree or disagree with my assessment?
At any rate, I do love "Jazz for Moderns" and am very happy to have found a copy at a great price.
