Herbie Nichols

It didn't happen....and then it did.

Jun 12, 2021

I’m a guy who’s been broke all my life and music is a release for me.

It’s the way I can keep on living.

- Herbie Nichols on liner notes of Bethlehem Records: Love, Gloom, Cash, Love

While digging around in a record store somewhere in either London or The Hague, 2300 Skidoo came on and knocked me off my feet. Only after I bought the album, Regeneration, did I read that it was written by Herbie Nichols in 1952, but recorded by ICP veterans Misha Mengelburg and Han Bennink over 30 years later. Amazingly, all Herbie Nichols’ Blue Note and Bethlehem sessions were recorded in a piano trio format. Unfortunately, he never got to realize his dream - to hear his compositions played with horns. It took a Dutchman to complete Herbie Nichols’ dream.

The Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg discovered Nichols’ Blue Note recordings as soon as they reached Amsterdam in the 1950s. He was awe-struck. Mengelberg said some twenty years later, “Herbie has a very open harmonic mind that is of the quality, I would say, of Stravinsky’s early things, the things Stravinsky did in 1917, 1918.”

Like Nichols, Mengelberg grew up with classical music. His father, Karel, was a conductor of note; however, his uncle, Willem, is more well-known. At 24 years old, Willem Mengelberg was appointed principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

He held that position until 1945. Here he is conducting in 1919.

He also went on to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1928.

Misha Mengelberg studied classical music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. However, around 1960, as a student, he surprisingly chose to analyze the compositions of Herbie Nichols and Thelonious Monk rather than Beethoven, Brahms, or any other classical music composer. Interestingly, his decision was supported by his mentor, the Dutch composer Kees van Baaren, a fan of serialism in the manner of Arnold Schoenberg and, informally, the pianist Fats Waller.

From 1981 to 1984, with Han Bennink on drums for all but the first session, Mengelberg recorded four albums featuring one or more Nichols compositions. These sessions sparked a new interest in the genius of Herbie Nichols.

I think it’s fitting that Mengelberg’s second album, the recording session of Regeneration in 1982, included the co-leadership of American trombonist Roswell Rudd, who introduced a composition that Nichols never recorded, Twelve Bars.

Regeneration was a seminal recording session. With these four compositions, Herbie Nichols was finally liberated from the piano trio!

Roswell Rudd had this to say about Herbie Nichols:

Here are two incredible Nichols compositions. House Party Starting recorded on August 1, 1955:

…and 117th Street recorded on August 7, 1955:

Herbie Nichols’ legacy parallels that of Thelonious Monk. Perhaps foremost because at the time their music sounded odd. It was different and therefore kept on the outside by the New York music scene. However, Monk had a stroke of good fortune. Riverside Record’s Orrin Keepnews took an interest in Monk and thought his music should be “properly recorded and promoted”. In 1956, Monk's first recording for the Riverside label was produced by Keepnews. Interestingly, he "thought that Monk's first LPs would reach a wider audience if he did not record his original music." They accordingly proposed to do an "all-Ellington album."

Sadly, in his lifetime, Herbie Nichols never found fame. By 1958, work had become increasingly scarce. His affiliation with Blue Note had not brought him new opportunities. In the end, he traveled in New York’s Dixieland circles and later even worked on a Turkish cruise ship.

Buell Neidlinger, who played with Nichols and later in 2013 recorded a jazz trio album called The Happenings: The Music of Herbie Nichols, had a loft during the mid-1950s at 21 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the center of avant-garde culture in New York. At the time, he was working with Cecil Taylor, the most modern of the modern jazz pianists. He tells this story of an infamous late 1950s meeting:

“I lived on the top floor. Below me was a furrier. The place was filled with fur; everyone was always sneezing. It was an awful place… The way to get upstairs was to bang on the gate downstairs with this big pipe that we’d hung on a chain for the purpose. So we were rehearsing up there and we heard this banging downstairs. I looked down. It wasn’t the police this time. It was Herbie. I went down, let him in, said, ‘Herbie, we’re rehearsing with Cecil upstairs, I hope you don’t mind?’ Obviously, he was hoping to play the piano himself.
So Herbie, the master of 1945, 1950, 1955 music, was sitting there listening to Cecil, the much-touted one, whom you’d read about in the Village Voice every week…. Two masters in the same room. Cecil had no idea who Herbie was. Not at that moment.
The look that came across Herbie’s face! You know the look of a kid who has just gone in the water at the beach and all of a sudden a 10-foot wave hits him? That was the look: not only of surprise, but of physical dismay. He realized that once again he had been passed by.”

Perhaps that story reveals best how for Herbie Nichols, it just didn’t happen….

In closing, on the liner notes of Mengelberg’s 1985 dedication album Change of Season, A. B. Spellman does a great job summing up Herbie’s jazz journey:

“Herbie Nichols’ was a career that was maddeningly frustrating even for those who admired his music, for him it was a treadmill through a gauntlet, a ceaseless battle in which his only weapon, a talent that was too subtle for the casual listener and too demanding for the lazy improviser, worked against him.”

I gain much satisfaction in knowing now that although he did not find fame in his lifetime, through the work of Mengelberg and Rudd and recently Neidlinger and with The Herbie Nichols Project, the wonderful work of this prolific and versatile composer/pianist survives for posterity. This makes my heart soar like a hawk.

Here is a terrific 1962 interview hosted by Mait Edey from WBAI radio’s The Scope of Jazz. This is a great chance to listen to Herbie Nichols tell a little about his own story.

And, one more for the road. I’m a big George Gershwin fan, and I think this is my favorite rendition of his song, Mine. Herbie said about the song, “Mine is a wonderful George Gershwin tune from the musical revue Of Thee I Sing. It is the sort of tune that I wish I had written.”

By influencing their peers and working through others, so many underexposed creative forces have shaped the history of jazz. Over the past three weeks, our journey has focused on three of these forces: Jimmy Blanton, Mary Lou Williams, and Herbie Nichols. Although their stories are so completely different, they all had one thing in common: they were musician’s musicians, who garnered complete respect from their peers. In the end, they may not have found great fame, but they found something far more important and elusive: glory.

Next week, that Big River called Jazz takes another side tributary as we go back in time and revisit how those old black & white movies influenced my Jazz journey. This time, we’ll focus on a comedy team of brothers born in New York City, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and France - the Marx Brothers.

If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.

Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.

Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….

Until then, keep on walking….