Red Norvo: Hall of Fame (Veterans Committee)

By John McDonough I Jul. 27, 2023

Welcome in virtually any jazz ensemble, Norvo was a fluent and transcendent product of his own virtuosity, intelligence and integrity.
(Photo: DownBeat Archive)

This year the DownBeat Hall of Fame Veterans Committee catches up with the manifold lives of Red Norvo (1908–’99), one of the small handful of musicians in jazz history who not only brought a new style and intelligence to the music but founded a whole new class of instruments as well.

The mallet family — xylophone, marimba and ultimately vibraphone — was a clownish novelty of early 20th century vaudeville, where Norvo got his start in the ’20s, tap dancing and playing “Poet And Peasant.” Its epicene delicacy had no place in hot jazz when he joined Paul Whiteman in the early ’30s.

But Norvo saw possibilities others had overlooked. In 1932, while Lionel Hampton was still juggling drum sticks, Norvo’s xylophone accompanied Mildred Bailey (whom he married in 1930) on her first hit recording of “Rockin’ Chair.” A year later he recorded intimate chamber performances of Bix Beiderbecke’s “In A Mist” and his own “Dance Of The Octopus” on marimba. The jazz world had never met such an emotionally veiled sound. Gunther Schuller would call them “clearly the most advanced composition[s] of the early ’30s.” Three years later Hampton would join the Benny Goodman Quartet and the vibraphone would find its killer-diller niche. But even today, those pioneering Norvo pieces have a semi-atonal avant quality that looks beyond swing to a more cerebral post-war jazz future. They opened jazz’s ear to wider temperatures.

Such experimentation was not fashionable, however, on 52nd Street, where Norvo arrived in 1934–’35. DownBeat admired his virtuosity but was slow to see a future for the marimba, brushing it off as “Norvo’s woodpile” in early headlines. But he caught the ear of producer John Hammond, who recorded him often with Bailey and ambitious contemporaries like Goodman, Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan and Chu Berry. By the time swing swallowed up the country in early 1936, Norvo and Bailey each had made prominent reputations for themselves individually, which led agent Willard Alexander to see them as a unique two-for-one touring band called “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.”

The Norvo orchestra opened in New York in May and was unique from the start. “The real thrill … is its complete ease,” DownBeat’s George Frazier noted in the June 1936 edition. “The whole band is in perfect taste. It may be because of Red’s personality or something else again. But these guys have never played better.”

The something else Frazier was looking for was Eddie Sauter, a brilliant 21-year-old Norvo discovery fresh out of Juilliard who became the band’s chief designer and architect. Sauter built daring but gentle harmonic textures that cradled Norvo’s solos in a soft, swinging and wistful warmth that concealed their many surprises. “Our idea for the ensemble was rather unique,” Norvo told this writer in 1979. “Most bands would write a lead line for a section and fill in other parts harmonically. Eddie was after a more linear style, to write a line for each instrument that could make sense on its own as a well as harmonically.” (For a sense of the Norvo-Sauter sound, try YouTubing “Remember,” “Russian Lullaby” or Sauter’s abstract accompaniment to Bailey’s playing on “Smoke Dreams.”) The band won high praise from critics, but modest numbers in the DownBeat polls. “We were profitable though,” Norvo said. “You didn’t have to be in the top 10 lists to make good money.”

After a business dispute in 1939, Norvo returned to the easy small-group life of 52nd Street, where he mentored the early careers of Shorty Rogers, Flip Phillips, Ralph Burns and others, all of whom would become part of the Woody Herman First Herd during its last year with Decca. By the end of 1945, the group was packed with eager young modernists. In three years, the band had shot from 14th to 1st place in the DownBeat Readers Poll. Norvo, meanwhile, had switched from xylophone to vibraphone. He sat in on Herman’s “Father’s Mustache” session in September, felt surprisingly at home, and joined as soloist and co-leader in January, just in time for the band’s spectacular Carnegie Hall debut in March. Norvo was now in the forefront of the rush into post-war modernism.

But Norvo’s credentials were already certified. In June 1944 Comet Records had offered him an open-ended session and unique opportunity. “I had a free hand,” he said in 1979, “so I gambled. Bird and Diz were dirty words for my generation, probably because they were saying new things.” Not without a few new ideas himself, however, Norvo was intrigued and brought them together with swing stars Teddy Wilson and Slam Stewart. In helping to make a place for the vibes in the new music, Norvo caught a crackling, intergenerational rapport in his famous “Get Happy”/“Congo Blues” session — in Gunther Schuller’s words, “playing with a rhythmic freedom that anticipates the ornamental style and subtle swing of Milt Jackson.”

The most surprising of Norvo’s later working groups was the trio he formed in Los Angeles with guitarist Tal Farlow in 1950. When their bassist summarily departed, Jimmy Rowles suggested Charles Mingus, who was then between gigs and delivering mail, according to Farlow. Their rapport was immediate, intimate and groundbreaking, yet popular enough to build steady work and a nice discography. Mingus and Farlow found their natural voices in a classic Norvo format that attained a compact equilibrium between commerce and art by coaxing fresh surprises from familiar melodies. Mingus and Norvo delivered a “Prelude To A Kiss” unique among its hundreds of versions.

From the ’50s forward, Norvo lived in Santa Monica, where he settled into the West Coast jazz community and continued to record into the 1980s. The Norvo Sextet toured Australia in 1959 with Frank Sinatra, resulting in the only album the singer would ever make with a small jazz combo, Frank Sinatra With The Red Norvo Quintet Live In Australia, 1959, released on Blue Note in 1997.

Over a 60-year career that spanned Whiteman to Mingus, Red Norvo was that rare musician who was not really a product in any particular pop style or period. Welcome in virtually any jazz ensemble, he was a fluent and transcendent product of his own virtuosity, intelligence and integrity. And an essential addition to the DownBeat Hall of Fame. DB