Tom Talbert D His Life and Times

Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz

Bruce Talbot

"A jazz classicist, schooled in the past, with a yen for the future, Tom Talbert is a romantic who shuns the cliche. He is a technician who trusts the heart. Even when he's being clever his notes are warm and tender."

Budd Schulberg wrote these words in 1957. Almost 50 years later they still apply. A contemporary of Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Gil Evans, Bill Holman, and Ralph Burns, Tom Talbert is a composer, arranger, bandleader, and pianist. In the late 1940s he led his own big band in Los Angeles, featuring star artists like Art Pepper, Warne Marsh, and Claude Williamson. In New York in the 1950s he wrote for Charlie Burnet, Buddy Rich, Claude Thornhill, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, Machito, and conceived and Scored two of the most strikingly original albums in the history of jazz recording.

Tom Talbert returned to Los Angeles in 1975 and has continued to record his own innovative, impressionistic, and subtly swinging music using the finest players, even to this day. In this account of his life and career, Bruce Talbot paints a vivid portrait of Tom Talbert and his world. Utilizing first-hand accounts, the book is crammed with memories of Los Angeles in the 40s, road tours of the Mid-West, a rare glimpse of the Twin Cities jazz scene during World War II, and a portrait of New York City in the 50s when it was truly the jazz capital of the world. The book includes a complete discography of Tom Talbert's work and a CD containing fourteen of his most important and representative recordings.

Scarecrow Press

• Trim: 6 x 8¾

978-0-8108-4812-2 • Hardback /Audio disc • January 2004 • $77.00 • (£59.00)

Series: Studies in Jazz

Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / Jazz

Tom Talbert D His Life and Times

Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz

Paperback

Summary

"A jazz classicist, schooled in the past, with a yen for the future, Tom Talbert is a romantic who shuns the cliche. He is a technician who trusts the heart. Even when he's being clever his notes are warm and tender."

Budd Schulberg wrote these words in 1957. Almost 50 years later they still apply. A contemporary of Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Gil Evans, Bill Holman, and Ralph Burns, Tom Talbert is a composer, arranger, bandleader, and pianist. In the late 1940s he led his own big band in Los Angeles, featuring star artists like Art Pepper, Warne Marsh, and Claude Williamson. In New York in the 1950s he wrote for Charlie Burnet, Buddy Rich, Claude Thornhill, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, Machito, and conceived and Scored two of the most strikingly original albums in the history of jazz recording.

Tom Talbert returned to Los Angeles in 1975 and has continued to record his own innovative, impressionistic, and subtly swinging music using the finest players, even to this day. In this account of his life and career, Bruce Talbot paints a vivid portrait of Tom Talbert and his world. Utilizing first-hand accounts, the book is crammed with memories of Los Angeles in the 40s, road tours of the Mid-West, a rare glimpse of the Twin Cities jazz scene during World War II, and a portrait of New York City in the 50s when it was truly the jazz capital of the world. The book includes a complete discography of Tom Talbert's work and a CD containing fourteen of his most important and representative recordings.

Details

Scarecrow Press

• Trim: 6 x 8¾

978-0-8108-4812-2 • Hardback /Audio disc • January 2004 • $77.00 • (£59.00)

Series: Studies in Jazz

Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / Jazz

Author

Bruce Talbot was born in Wellington, New Zealand, where, as a young radio producer in the late 1950s he first heard and was moved by Tom Talbert's music. Moving to London, England in 1963 he worked for the BBC in radio, television and record production before being invited, in 1991, to come to the U.S. as Executive Producer of the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings record label.

Table of Contents

1 Some Thoughts About Tom Talbert and West Coast Jazz
2 Early Days
3 Territory Bands and Sleeper Buses
4 World War II
5 Interlude: Johnny Richards
6 Los Angeles in the 1940s
7 The Tom Talbert Orchestra
8 New York City
9 Wednesday's Child
10 Bix Dukes Fats
11 Full Shop
12 You Can Go Home Again
13 Welcome (Back) to LA
14 One, Then Seven, Then Fourteen
15 Autumn in New York, and Spring Too
16 The View From the Stand
17 Influences
18 The Enigma
19 Coda

Reviews

…not only a source of intrigue for the jazz enthusiast, but also fascinating for the average reader who may be unfamiliar with Talbert's quiet legacy.
— International Musician

Since the mid-1940s, Tom Talbert has kept to his own path and his own vision, writing extraordinary music. Judged on talent and quality alone, he would be as well known a composer and arranger as Gil Evans, Bill Holman, Thad Jones and Bob Brookmeyer. In this fascinating biography, Bruce Talbot examines the circumstances and choices that have won Talbert the admiration of music insiders and left him a secret to most of the public. Talbot's book should do much to bring Talbert recognition he has long deserved.
— Doug Ramsey, author, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers

He could have been as famous as Gil Evans or Quincy Jones. Certainly the talent was there in abundance. Instead, Tom Talbert remains one of jazz's most neglected figures, his unique arranging and composing abilities known only to the discerning few wholisten to music based on its content rather than its name value. Expatriate New Zealander Bruce Talbot, formerly head of the BBC and Smithsonian record divisions, brings his own vast jazz knowledge and experience to this fascinating biography. In dealing with Tom Talbert's life and works he depicts the man against the backdrop of an equally neglected period of American music, that of the post-war experimental years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where talent bloomed in the unlikeliest of places, flourished despite the awful conditions imposed on the traveling musicians, only to choke and die on the creeping blight known as rock 'n' roll. Truly a golden age that has been overlooked by jazz historians, here brought vividly to life again by the author.
— Michael Brooks, jazz historian; co-producer, Charlie Christian - The Genius of the Electric Guitar and The Complete Billie Holiday on Colum

This book and CD are recommended for academic libraries with music collections and public libraries with a jazz interest.
— Library Journal

In this fascinating biography, Bruce Talbot examines the circumstances and choices that have won Talbert the admiration of music insiders and left him a secret to most of the public. Talbot's book should do much to bring Talbert recognition he has long deserved.
— Doug Ramsey Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music, author

Bruce Talbot's edgy biography of an American Jazz original reads like a John dos Passos epic novel of America in the World War II and Post War years. Only it isn't a novel - it's the jazz life captured through the wide eyes of a young mid-western musician who was born to make his mark in jazz. Bruce Talbot turns in a dazzling writing performance - it's a very hip, very real, very full biography of a brilliant musician known until now as "the best kept secret in jazz'. Discover Tom Talbert and live life on the road, in the studios and in Jazz history.
— Dom Cerulli, columnist, jazz journalist. Editor of Down Beat magazine 1956-59, co-editor of 'The Jazz Word' (Da Capo Press)

He could have been as famous as Gil Evans or Quincy Jones. Certainly the talent was there in abundance. Instead, Tom Talbert remains one of jazz's most neglected figures, his unique arranging and composing abilities known only to the discerning few who listen to music based on its content rather than its name value.Expatriate New Zealander Bruce Talbot, formerly head of the BBC and Smithsonian record divisions, brings his own vast jazz knowledge and experience to this fascinating biography. In dealing with Tom Talbert's life and works he depicts the man against the backdrop of an equally neglected period of American music, that of the post-war experimental years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where talent bloomed in the unlikeliest of places, flourished despite the awful conditions imposed on the traveling musicians, only to choke and die on the creeping blight known as rock 'n' roll. Truly a golden age that has been overlooked by jazz historians, here brought vividly to life again by the author.
— Michael Brooks, Jazz historian and co-producer of "Charlie Christian - The Genius of the Electric Guitar" and "The Complete Billie Holiday on Co

This well researched book should bring belated recognition to one of the music's most neglected figures.
— Jazz Journal International

A fascinating view of this talented gentleman from the world of jazz. Beyond that, however, it also gives a perceptive insight into the various musical environments that formed Talbert's style, and the ways in which he contributed to the development of modern big band music. For those of you who just dig hearing inside stories from musicians, many of them full of humor, there is plenty of meat here for you. If you love delving more deeply into jazz history, you will also find great satisfaction in this volume.
— Jersey Jazz

Don't let the opportunity pass to learn more about [Talbert]. His is the stuff of real quality, and the Jazz world and anyone with an interest in composing and arranging should be made more aware of this fact.
— Jazz Now

There is an abundance of gorgeous writing and arranging on this disc, and combined with the book's many great stories, and its reevaluation of one of the music's great arrangers, this is truly one of the Jazz publishing events of the year.
— Cadence Magazine