From the Jazz Vault Dept.: I regret that I was unable to attend the concert described below, but I did see Nick Brignola perform on other occasions, which fully justified his reputation as a major star of the jazz scene, one who just happened to live in the Albany area. (He died in 2002.) Here’s a preview of the kind of fascinating music melding that could happen in the area in 1988.
“SOMEBODY ASKED ME the other day, ‘Are you playing the Firebird Suite?’” Baritone sax virtuoso Nick Brignola is speaking about his concert this Saturday with the Schenectady Symphony. “I said, ‘No, but I might play Yardbird Suite.’”
Although Brignola lives in the neighborhood, it’s a lucky treat to find him performing in the area. “I’ll be playing at Justin’s in Albany in February and in March. I’ll also be in Austin and in Baltimore, and I’m doing something with the US Navy Band in Washington DC. So I’m in and out.”
The Schenectady Symphony Orchestra concert takes place at 8 PM at Proctor’s Theatre; music director Charles Schneider will be on the podium.
Brignola is looking forward to working with the symphony: “It’s going to be a nice experience in the sense that we don’t get this chance very often where there’s a meeting between a jazz group and a symphony orchestra, and I’m sure the Schenectady Symphony doesn’t get this chance very often.”“We’re doing four pieces together. One is George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime,’ an eight-and-a-half minute version of it with lots of texture and tempo changes. And we’re doing Chick Corea’s ‘Times Lie,’ Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Once I Loved,’ and ‘Just Friends,’ an old Charlie Parker chestnut that a lot of jazz musicians like. Anything else I do will be played with the quartet. So there should be an interesting set of music because the orchestra is also playing Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and a Henry Cowell symphony in the first half.”
The quartet is Brignola’s most common context. “My current group has David Calarco on drums, David Santora on bass and a new-found genius on the piano, Kevin Hays, who is 19 years old. You’re going to be hearing a lot from him. Every time I play with him he just gets better and better – he’s one of these really young natural players. It’s unusual to see a kid that young who knows so much jazz history – and his head is in a whole different direction than most 19-year-olds. He brings to the group a real youthful enthusiasm, which is important because guys my age tend to get a little complacent, and develop a certain way of doing things after so many years. But Kevin forces me to things in another way in and it’s kind of stimulating.”
Brignola’s own boyhood was spent listening to jazz greats whom he acknowledges as initial inspirations. “The first was Benny Goodman, who was a strong influence on clarinet.” Brignola saluted these musicians on an album titled “New York Bound,” featuring a half-dozen tunes, each dedicated to a different player. “That record is going to be a collector’s item in the sense that it’s not being made any more, and the company is combining it with another one of mine called ‘L.A. Bound’ and we’ll be all bound up on a compact disc.”
Fats Waller was another influence. “My father had a lot of Waller’s music, and I saluted Fats with ‘Jitterbug Waltz.’ After I got into what they call modern jazz I started listening to Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond was really my first influence on saxophone.”
Ironically, the people who impressed him the most were trumpet players. “My biggest influences were Clifford Brown and Dizzy and Miles and Kenny Durham, especially after I began playing baritone sax. There just weren’t a lot of baritone players – I did listen to guys like Pepper Adams and Harry Carney, though.”
“I took up baritone reluctantly when my alto sax got broken one time and I couldn’t get an alto to replace it. Baritone is also pitched in E-flat, though it’s a little bit bigger, and I used it a few times and everyone in the band I was playing with enjoyed it. But, you see, all the hip players played alto, and so I wasn’t sure I liked it.”
“But I did play it with an attack that, say, Gerry Mulligan didn’t have. After I’d played it about seven or eight months someone gave me a copy of a Pepper Adams album, and when I heard him I said, ‘Boy, he sounds just like me!’ I was playing a certain way before I heard him, but after hearing him I felt akin to him. We became good friends and recorded together later on, but initially he was not a big influence on me until after I’d played the instrument for a while.”
“I think when somebody plays or does something similar to you, you want to study him because you have a feeling he’s on the same track. Pepper was a very brilliant guy. He was very well read, and his solos were very well thought out – I’m not saying he memorized his solos, but he did a lot of things that were intellectual, patterns, intricate things, sometimes even at the risk of not swinging.”
Brignola also counted the late Woody Herman among his closer friends, and remembers fondly the six months he spent in the Herman Herd. “When I went with Woody’s band, they had to resurrect the baritone chair. The previous player was Serge Chaloff, and after he died they delegated his solos to other instruments. When I got there, they realized they had a soloist and dug out the old charts.” A recording session with the group became doubly memorable because of its date: Nov. 22, 1963.
“Woody and I remained friends even after I left the organization. When I was in the band he was kind of distant with most people – it was a period of time when he was trying to give up drinking. He bought a ‘63 Corvette convertible and would drive to the gigs in that, with the band traveling in its bus. A guy named Bill Chase usually would drive with Woody, but sometimes Bill got tangled up with members of the opposite sex, and so I’d ride with him. That’s how I got to know him. We’d just rap and rap and I’d pick his brains about the old big band days.
“For his last eight years his baritone player was a fellow named Mike Brignola, who is no direct relation. But we suspected that our families might be able to trace some kind of connection to a town in Italy. So Woody said, ‘I know how we can find out if you guys are related. I’ll go to Nick’s house and taste his mother’s spaghetti sauce, and I’ll go to Mike’s house and taste his mother’s spaghetti sauce, and if it tastes the same, you’re cousins!’”
Tickets for the Nick Brignola-Schenectady Symphony concert are $9 and are available at CBO outlets and at Proctor’s Theatre.
– Metroland Magazine, 4 February 1988
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