Artist: Tal Farlow
Album: Tal
Genre: Bop, Cool
Label: Verve Records
Released: 1956/2016
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Isn't It Romantic (10:09)
- There Is No Greater Love (03:56)
- How About You (06:01)
- Anything Goes (05:08)
- Yesterdays (05:51)
- You Don't Know What Love Is (04:20)
- Chuckles (04:56)
- Broadway (06:16)
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- Personnel:
- Tal Farlow – guitar
- Eddie Costa – piano
- Vinnie Burke – bass
Shortly before the release of this album, a singular honor was placed-on Talmage Holt Farlow, guitarist extraordinaire. He was named the No. 1 guitarist in jazz today and-significantly—the No. 2 guitarist in jazz history, second only to the man who served as his inspiration years before, Charlie Christian. Following on the heels of Farlow's triumph in the Down Beat Critics Poll for 1956 this latter honor was even more pervasive since this one was a poll of more than 100 of the foremost jazz musicians taken by Leonard Feather, the critic and jazz encyclopedist. "I was floored," Farlow himself exclaimed when the results were announced. "What more of an honor can any musician ask for?"
In virtually every artist worthy of the name there exists—no matter how many honors or awards come his way—a constant process of self-analysis, leading in turn to dissatisfactions that in their turn lead to strides of improvement. The artist, in short, is never satisfied with his own work. In the case of Tal Farlow, there was a day when he found himself incapable of playing his instrument fast enough—this would be when he first joined forces with the Red Norvo trio in the waning weeks of 1949. This obstacle was a sturdy one, but Farlow managed to conquer it in time. Now in this album, Farlow will tell you, the sound he coaxes from his instrument is not quite along the same lines as on preceding records. What he is striving for now, in his own phrase, is "articulation." That is to say, he is trying to give each note he plays its due-and this without losing any speed or rhythmic flow.
"I'm working for just a little more of a staccato sound," Farlow explains, "with each note getting its own sharp attack and earning its own individuality. This is the next stage, you might say, in the progress I want to make as a musician."
With a little hard listening, the change in the Farlow approach is discernible enough although it is a very subtle difference, indeed. In any case, Farlow is heard in this album with his own trio, one which he formed at the start of 1956 to play at the Composer (at 68 W. 58th St., New York City) and which, as this is written, is there yet. Along with Farlow, there is Eddie Costa, a pianist out of Pennsylvania, formerly with Joe Venuti, and a musician with quite an attack of his own (see "Yesterdays" for an example of strong bodied, engagingly percussive piano) and Vinnie Burke, a onetime guitarist himself who, after the loss of a finger in a shop accident, turned to bass and since has worked with, among others, Tony Scott, Joe Mooney, Sauter-Finegan, and the Marian McPartland group. As for Farlow, he is—so far as memory recalls—the only jazz man to be produced by Greensboro, N. C., where he was born June 7, 1921. Tal's father had tried his hand at the guitar, banjo, violin and ukulele and soon Tal was fingering a guitar. However, he took no lessons and hasn't to this day. The guitar was a hobby for Tal Farlow, sign-painting his vocation. (Farlow was still painting signs for a living as recently as 1948 while he awaited his union card in New York). In the early 1940s the Army Air Forces set up its Basic Training Center No. 10 in Greensboro and the USO, which started a program of dances for the airmen, issued a call for musicians. It was then that Farlow turned his hobby to profit and began to spend less time in his sign shop. Later, Farlow went up to New York where he was to work with the Marge Hyams unit, the Marshall Grant society band and the Red Norvo trio where, with the exception of a six-month interval with Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five, he remained until forming his own trio.
The songs here are largely in the standard genre, excepting a jolly romp by trumpeter Clark Terry entitled "Chuckles," and on one of them—the Rodgers-Hart evergreen, "Isn't It Romantic"—Farlow pulls off something unusual in jazz. After the first chorus dedicated to the melody, in the second chorus he plays harmonics. By means of a different fingering system, the strings are divided rn half, as it were, and this results in the sound rising an octave with a more bell-like tone.