Richard Twardzik
Sad walk...
“The idea for A Crutch for the Crab came from watching the hands of the Polish pianist, Jan Smeterlin, as they scurried crab-like into the keys.”
- Richard Twardzik on liner notes of Pacific Jazz record, Trio
Looking back now, one of the things I regret most is not going to see Chet Baker play in northern Holland when I was stationed in Germany. It would have been a long drive, and I didn’t have a weekend pass - so it wasn’t in the cards. It would have been possible, but it would have been brutal the next day. As it turned out, he died a few months later in Amsterdam.
By that time, in the late 1980s, I had become a big Chet Baker fan. The year before Baker’s death, Mosaic Records had released their box set: The Chet Baker Quartet With Russ Freeman – The Complete Pacific Jazz Studio Recordings Of The Chet Baker Quartet With Russ Freeman.
When I later returned to California after my time in the service, I went on the hunt in used record stores for Chet Baker albums. One album I ran across was this: Trio Russ Freeman/Richard Twardzik, recorded in October 1954 for Pacific Jazz Records at “Rudy Gelder’s” studio in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Although it wasn’t a Chet Baker album, I picked it out because it featured his piano player Russ Freeman - but who was this Richard Twardzik?
When I played the album, I played the Russ Freeman side first, of course. Then I flipped it over to check out the Twardzik trio with his friend and fellow Bostonian Peter Littman on drums and Baker’s bass player Carson Smith. I immediately noticed Twardzik, like Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols, sounded different. The song I liked best was A Crutch for a Crab, an original composition. I must have played it over three times before I finally heard it. I had not really heard a piano trio play like that, so uniquely beautiful.
On the back liner notes of the album, Russ Freeman wrote: “Dick Twardzik was one of those rare musicians, one with an original concept….The first time I heard him was in late 1954 at Storyville in Boston. His playing struck me as fresh and very uninhibited, especially harmonically.”
Another great song from that album is Bess You Is My Woman from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
Ever since I saw An American In Paris as a kid, I have been a big Gershwin fan.
In June of 1959, the movie version of Porgy and Bess was released, directed by Otto Preminger, and starred Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and the movie's soundtrack album won the Grammy Award for Best Sound Track Album or Recording of Original Cast From a Motion Picture or Television.
You may remember a younger Dorothy Dandridge from last week’s journey performing with Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers.
That movie started a Porgy and Bess boom that brought with it jazz versions of its score by Miles Davis and Gil Evans,
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald,
…and many other jazz musicians.
In his book, Bouncin’ With Bartok, Jack Chambers explains how Twardzik’s recording of Bess You Is My Woman pre-dates by four full years this boom:
Gershwin’s opera had been revived in 1952 for an international tour starring soprano Leontyre Price, but that was a more operatic version than the film would be, and it hardly caught the attention of jazz musicians, except for Twardzik. Although several George Gershwin songs ranked high in the standard jazz repertoire, the ones from Porgy and Bess were not common among them except for Summertime, and that by virtue not of the opera but of a seminal 1939 jazz recording by Sidney Bechet. When Twardzik recorded Bess You Is My Woman in 1954, it was completely unknown as a jazz vehicle.
Here’s the Twardzik trio’s version of Bess You Is My Woman from 1954:
In 1959, Oscar Peterson’s trio recorded Porgy and Bess (notice the David Stone Martin cover art) on the Verve label.
On this album, Peterson recorded the same tune. Even though he recorded it five years after Twardzik, I like to compare each artist’s interpretation of this Gershwin classic.
Madame Chaloff
Margaret Stedman Chaloff was a legendary piano teacher. English by birth she emigrated to America to pursue musical opportunities and entered the New England Conservatory of Music.
In 1919, she married one of her teachers, Julius Chaloff. Julius was also a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and later would go on to become the pianist for the Boston Symphony and proprietor of the Chaloff School of Music on Newbury Street in Boston.
She taught mainly the classical regimen, and Leonard Bernstein was one of her most celebrated students; however, she was also a prized jazz piano teacher. Incredibly, the jazz pianists who studied with her include George Shearing, Ralph Burns, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Steve Kuhn, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Mulgrew Miller. Perhaps her most obscure, but not insignificant, student was Richard Twardzik.
Margaret and Julius raised two sons. One was Serge, the renowned jazz musician and member of Woody Herman’s “Four Brothers” featuring, along with Chaloff, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Herbie Steward.
Here’s Serge Chaloff with the cool Pabst Blue Ribbon sign in the background.
In 1951, Chaloff invited Twardzik to join him for a summer-long gig at a club in Cape Cod’s West Yarmouth. The pianist wrote home to his parents from a cottage they were renting: “Serge is reading Kafka and we listen to Bird, Ernest Bloch, Alban Berg, and Bela Bartok.” This idyllic booking was followed by a tour of the New England circuit taking in Detroit, Chicago, and East St. Louis along the way which lasted until early 1952. From there, things moved quickly for him. That same year, at just 21 years old, he played with Charlie Parker at the High Hat in Boston. More recordings followed in 1953 with the Charlie Mariano band and in 1954 with Chaloff.
Here’s a 1953 recording with Charlie Mariano, and you can hear how his playing is already further out than most bebop pianists:
I can imagine all the other musicians stopping and looking at Twardzik on that piano solo and just saying, “Wow. What was that?” It was during this time that Twardzik came to the attention of Russ Freeman.
Russ Freeman would play a key role in Twardzik’s musical career in two ways. First, recognizing Twardzik’s fresh and uninhibited piano playing, he phoned Richard Bock, owner and producer of Pacific Jazz Records in LA, to tell him about this amazing new piano player in Boston. Bock permitted Freeman to record him for the label. The result was the now legendary Trio sides recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. Second, Freeman was by now tired of playing on the road with Baker. When news came to him that Baker had suddenly proposed an extended European tour, Freeman was out. He recommended Twardzik and Baker hired him. As it turns out, the reason Baker wanted to go to Paris was to follow his new love, Lillian Cukier.
Lillian Cukier
Liliane Rovère is currently starring as Arlette on the Netflix hit program, Call My Agent. She was 82 when the show began, and she’s 88 now. Born in Paris, Liliane Cukier was a fixture for several years in the Paris jazz scene. However, at 21, she found herself in the legendary Birdland jazz club in Manhattan and in love with Chet Baker. Here she is with Baker in William Claxton’s iconic photo.
In an interview, Rovère said, “I didn’t have any doubts – I yielded very easily! I wasn’t in love like he was, but he charmed me – he was handsome, he was young, he was bold, he was famous.” The pair clicked, much to the chagrin of Baker’s wife, who pulled a gun on her rival. “I didn’t think things through much,” Rovère admits about her youth. “I wasn’t what you’d call sensible. Things happened to me, and I’d go along with them.”
When her visa ran out, she had to leave New York. She would return to Paris and Baker decided to follow her and take his band along. In September of 1955, the band left for Europe, and Twardzik took with him several Bob Zieff tunes, which they recorded in Paris the following month for Barclay Records. It was released in the U.S. as Chet Baker in Europe for Pacific Jazz Records. Here’s one of my favorites from that album: Pomp, composed by Bob Zieff:
Here's an excerpt from a 1985 interview with Baker that touches on Bob Zieff.
“You can tell from the record with all those Bob Zieff tunes. That album was way ahead of its time, it didn't go anywhere. He wrote one tune on that album, I think it was The Girl from Greenland; it's such a nice tune (hums).
Those Bob Zieff tunes were a real challenge to me, because they were so different from what I'd been doing up till that time. I was always sad because that album never received the recognition it should have.
Bob Zieff was, is, because he's still alive and lives in Hollywood, a wonderful composer. All those tunes were completely different from one other. They had a different mood and a different feel to them, and so original. Sad Walk, Rondette, Mid-Forte, Piece Caprice – a really wonderful album and I enjoyed it so much."
Here’s another Bob Zieff tune, Rondette:
On this album, besides Twardzik’s piano and the Zieff compositions, I also was taken by Jimmy Bond’s hard-driving bass. Surprisingly, Bond was just 22 years old and recently out of the Juilliard School. Just as a side note, Jimmy Bond went on to become one of the legendary Wrecking Crew out of LA. Here he is at a session with his bass.
Tragically, only ten days after Chet Baker in Europe was recorded, Richard Twardzik died of a heroin overdose in his Paris hotel room. He was 24 years old.
Serge Chaloff wrote this eulogy:
Dick had an unquenchable desire for learning. He was never without books covering all forms of art and Philosophy and spent every available moment at Symphony concerts and art museums and of course practicing. Even after some very late gigs, he would still be at his piano the next morning at nine o’clock practicing so that his afternoon would be free to study the other forms of art that he loved.
Although his recording legacy amounts to just over an hour of beautiful music, it stands as a huge testament to his artistic genius. Next week, that Big River called Jazz takes us on a journey back to Chicago and the great pianist and composer, Andrew Hill.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Another tour de force: did not know Twardzik at all