Cal Tjader

Tjader goes Latin....

One of my favorite movies of all time is Samuel Goldwyn’s Come And Get It, the 1936 Wisconsin lumberjack movie directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler.

I remember watching it when I was in grade school. For some reason, this movie stayed with me. Perhaps I was secretly in love with the leading lady Frances Farmer, the troubled actress who Jessica Lange portrayed in the 1982 movie Frances.

Interestingly, Frances Farmer’s movie debut was in an earlier 1936 Paramount movie Too Many Parents, which also starred a 10 year old tap dancer named Cal Tjader. On the credits of the movie (which you can watch here), he is listed as Callen Jader. In the lobby card below he is the cadet just to the right of the flag bearer.

Too Many Parents was a comedy about young boy’s experiences in a military school, in which Cal Tjader played a cadet named Alfred. The movie was a box-office success, however music would soon take center stage for young Cal Tjader.

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Both of Cal Tjader’s parent were musically gifted. They teamed up with a Swedish duo to form the Berkeley Four and joined the touring Pantages Vaudeville Company, where they performed with the famous Duncan Sisters.

In 1923, the Duncan Sisters created their signature roles in Topsy and Eva (Rosetta as the former, in blackface, Vivian as the latter), a musical comedy derived from the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. For this production they wrote and introduced the songs I Never Had a Mammy and Rememb'ring. The show was a huge hit in its day and was subsequently adapted into the 1927 MGM movie It’s A Great Life, directed by Del Lord with some additional scenes by D. W. Griffith.

Callen Radcliffe Tjader was born in St. Louis, while his parents were on the vaudeville circuit. From the beginning, Cal was groomed to be a performing artist. He got into the act as a solo tap dancer when he was 4 years old - he was “Momma’s Little Talent.” However, in 1929, vaudeville was losing out to the motion pictures or the “talkies” - as portrayed in the movie Singing In The Rain. In 1932, Tjader’s talent soon attracted the studio heads in Hollywood, and he appeared in Paramount’s The White of the Dark Cloud, tap dancing with Bill Bojangles Robinson. His appearance in MGM’s Too Many Parents followed. However, as he grew older, his interests turned to music. He recalls, “I wish now (my mother) had beaten me a little more with that ruler for piano lessons.”

Tjader quickly embraced his love for music. He played drums in the San Mateo High School band and was a member of the Hot Music Jazz Society of San Francisco. He listened to and followed the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw big bands. He also formed a Dixieland group that included on piano his boyhood friend Merv Griffin, who would go onto fame in The Merv Griffin Show. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor had a big impact on his life and music was put on hold.

At only 17, Tjader entered the United States Navy in 1943. Griffin recalls, “I remember driving him to San Francisco when he joined the Navy and he was shipped out to the South Pacific. His family did not go with him at that time in (late) 1943. I don’t know why. It was just kind of a sad day. We went to some restaurants, saw a movie and then at the appointed hour I dropped him on a big battleship and he went off to war.” He served as a medical corpsman in the Pacific Theater until March 1946 and saw action in five invasions, including the Marianas campaign and the Battle of the Philippines.

After the war, on the G. I. Bill, Tjader attended San Jose and San Francisco State Universities. While at San Francisco State, we played drums in a six-piece band with an alto sax player named Paul Breitenfeld, who later changed his name to Desmond. When Dave Brubeck organized his famous octet in the summer of 1946, he was studying with Darius Milliard at Mills College. For his octet he picked Bill Smith on clarinet and baritone sax, David Van Kriedt on tenor sax, Bob Collins on trombone, Dick Collins on trumpet, Ron Crotty on drums, Paul Desmond on alto sax, and Cal Tjader on drums.

In 1946, they recorded their groundbreaking album The Dave Brubeck Octet on the Fantasy label:

Brubeck recalls how his famous octet was formed: “The octet was born right in Milhaud’s class. When he said, ‘How many of you play jazz?’ We all started thinking, ‘Uh oh, is this going to be like all the other teachers in conservatories?’ But we raised our hands anyway, and he said, ‘All right, I’d like you to write for the jazz instrumentation,’ and that’s the way the octet was born. He got the first concert for us right there at Mills, for the girls. The guys all, well, I think quite a few romances and some marriages came out of that.” Tjader played with Brubeck on and off until 1951.

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Cal Tjader's first recording session as a sideman was on Charles Mingus's Presents His Symphonic Airs, recorded on the Fentone label in February 1949, when the bassist was still on the West Coast and known as “Barron” Mingus:

This 1951 10” LP The Cal Tjader Trio on the Fantasy label is Cal Tjader’s first recording as a leader:

Here’s my old favorite tune These Foolish Things from that album with Tjader now playing vibes:

Tjader then joined the George Shearing Quintet in 1953 for a short time and made some recordings with Shearing for the MGM label.

Cal Tjader's second 10-inch album as a leader was Vibist, a quartet date recorded in New York City for Savoy Records in the fall of 1953. Tjader played vibes, along with Hank Jones on piano, Al McKibbon on bass, and Kenny Clarke or Roy Haines on drums:

Marc Myers in his JazzWax blog put it best, “But in the beginning of the album era, when LPs were still 10 inches and held only eight tracks, Tjader played jazz the way Gene Kelly danced. Tjader's pure jazz sound would be short-lived.”

In the early 1950s at Ciro’s in San Francisco, Cal Tjader had his first performance with a Cuban musician, Armando Peraza. This event not only changed the course of Tjader’s career, but the history of Latin jazz as well.

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In early 1954 on a visit to New York City, Tjader heard the great Latin bands and was fascinated by the music. Tjader recalls, “One of the chief compensations of being with Shearing was that back east I got to hear a lot of Machito, Tito Puente, and Noro Morales. Those bands had a tremendous effect on me.” This convinced him to organize his own Latin group. So in April 1954, Tjader quit Shearing’s band after a gig at the Blackhawk in San Francisco and formed the Cal Tjader Modern Mambo Quintet, a band that featured top-notch Cuban musicians. Between 1954 and 1962, the band cut a series of over 20 albums for Fantasy.

Here’s a song I like from one of their earlier releases, Dizzy Gillespie’s song Guarachi Guaro recorded in 1954:

I think the knock on Tjader early on was the mere addition of Latin rhythm, beats and instruments to jazz standards, and I pretty much agree with that. I think Tjader really only started to hit his stride when his bands abandoned the tricked up jazz standards and started playing originals and traditional Latin songs, like this Mario Bauzá song Mambo Inn, from Tjader’s classic 1955 Ritmo Caliente!:

In 1962, after recording for Fantasy for nearly a decade, Tjader signed with better-known Verve Records. The first album Tjader recorded for Verve in the summer of 1961 was In A Latin Bag:

From that album, I really like this Tjader composition, Triste - one of my favorite songs, with the great Paul Horn on flute:

Here’s one more for the road. This is Tjader’s 1980 Grammy Award winning album La Onda Va Bien, recorded in San Francisco in July 1979 for the Concord Jazz Picante label:

I like the killer percussion by Poncho Sanchez on the Tjader original Mambo Mindoro:

At the time Tjader recorded this he was perhaps at the peak of his popularity touring in Japan with Art Pepper (April 1977) and recording with Carmen McRae (January 1982). Unfortunately, on May 5, 1982, while on tour with his band in Manila, he died of a heart attack. He was 56 year old.

Cal Tjader was a visionary, who managed to bring new attention to Latin music in America. The impact that Cal Tjader made on Jazz is deep and extended beyond jazz to fusion and Hip Hop - on their album Midnight Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest sampled Tjader’s Aquarius from Tjader’s 1968 album The Prophet. I also remember being in London in the late 1980s during the Acid Jazz craze, led by Gilles Peterson at Dingwalls. Along with Art Blakey, Tito Puente, and Chicago House music, Cal Tjader’s songs were all the rage. These days, when I want to dance or need a little giddy up, I pull out Cal Tjader first.

Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles into the music of the great alto saxophonist Art Pepper.

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Until then, keep on walking….