A Swedish jazz journalist once wrote that Dick Cary is "de muzikale duisenpoot" -- the musical centipede! Cary felt complimented and, soon after, composed a piece entitled "Duisenpoot," a name which may have the most excellent entomological etymology in music since "The Beatles!"

The late Dick Cary WAS a musical centipede! Without 100 hands, how could one man play so many instruments or write so much music?

He wrote over 3,200 arrangements for jazz bands. As an instrumentalist, he recorded more than 100 albums playing piano, trumpet and alto horn with the greatest names in Dixieland jazz including Louis Armstrong, Eddie Condon, Bobby Hackett, Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman and Max Kaminsky.

Here are the staggering statistics about the original manuscripts at Cary's home in Sunland, California, when he died in April, 1994.

19	Folios of arrangements, ranging in size from 25 to 800 selections.
81	Cartons of music with about 1,500 sheets of music each.
1,856	Original compositions known.
3,211	Total arrangements cataloged to date.
120,000	Estimated number of sheets of music manuscript, mostly believed to have been created since 1960. That equals 9 pages of music for every day of Dick Cary's life since 1960.
0	Number of computers used.

And that is not all the music Dick Cary wrote! Those who knew him before he moved to California in 1959 say Cary may have written just as much music in New York as he did in California.

Richard Durant Cary was born on July 10, 1916, in Hartford, Connecticut. His mother was a pianist and Dick studied violin from an early age. He performed on violin as a soloist with the Hartford Symphony at age 11. He earned a bachelor's degree in music from Wesleyan University in 1938 and immediately began to work as a full-time musician around New York and Connecticut.

In 1941, at age 25, Cary landed full-time work at Nick's in Greenwich Village, New York City, and became a fixture on the Dixieland scene despite his aversion to the word "Dixieland." (In later years, Cary spoke of a stigma which was attached to those labelled as "Dixieland musicians," saying that it usually meant an inability to read music or to play other kinds of music.) He performed with and recorded scores of albums with the genre's top artists of the 40s and 50s including Eddie Condon, Bobby Hackett, Wild Bill Davison, Billy Butterfield, Bud Freeman. Jimmy McPartland and Mugsy Spanier. In 1943, he enjoyed an assignment as a staff arranger for Benny Goodman and played with Glen Gray's Casa Loma Jazz Band.

Cary served 3 years in the Army as a musician from 1944 to 1946. He was stationed at Camp Shanks near Nyack, New York. This was not far from New York City -- about an hour hitch-hiking -- so Cary continued to perform in jazz clubs during his tour of service. During his Army stint, Cary took up the alto horn, or so-called "peckhorn," a rare instrument, especially in jazz. This instrument was to become a Cary trademark in later years.

In 1947, he gained worldwide recognition when he was selected by Louis Armstrong as the first pianist in Louis Armstrong's All Stars. This jazz band has come to be recognized as one of the greatest of all time. It included Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, Arvell Shaw, Sid Catlett and vocalist Velma Middleton. Many "live" concert recordings of this band are currently available on CD. The engagement lasted 8 months.

Afterward, Cary enjoyed steady demand for his services as an arranger and performer on piano, trumpet and alto-horn. He was, for several years, the "house pianist" at Eddie Condon's Jazz Club in New York City. While at the top of the jazz field, Cary sought musical inspiration outside of jazz. He began the study of "serious" composition with Stefan Wolpe, a composer of classical music whose works have been labelled Dadaist/Expressionist. Their association began in 1948 and lasted for 4 years.

In 1957, Cary began an extraordinarily productive collaboration with the brilliant trumpeter Bobby Hackett at New York's Henry Hudson Hotel. Their engagement at the hotel was enormously successful and the Hackett band was hailed as one of the most imaginative in jazz. Cary wrote almost all the arrangements and gained a new measure of critical acclaim.

When the Henry Hudson engagement ended in 1959, Cary moved to California. This coincided with a gradual downturn in the demand for traditional jazz. Although Cary continued to work frequently with Condon, Bob Crosby and Pee Wee Russell, he found more time to devote to his main avocation -- writing non-commercial jazz for rehearsal bands. Between engagements and overseas tours, he began to write jazz arrangements for an 18-piece rehearsal band. This library grew to about 800 selections by 1970.

Throughout the rest of Dick Cary's life, he juggled the demands of being a professional working musician with his love for writing for his rehearsal groups. Although he considered himself "retired" after the age of 65, he continued to accept engagements as a guest star at many U.S. and foreign jazz festivals. He was interviewed extensively by journalist Floyd Levin in 1991 for the Tulane University Jazz Archives.

This recording is an attempt to help the world "catch up" with the remarkable Dick Cary -- a musicians' musician, a composing genius, the musical duisenpoot.

"THE TUESDAY NIGHT FRIENDS:" THE WORLD'S GREATEST REHEARSAL BAND

The fascinating rehearsal-band phenomenon has never been properly documented. It is estimated that there were once as many as one hundred active rehearsal bands in both New York City and Los Angeles during the 1940s and '50s. In those days,many hundreds of musicians were employed in the recording studios and sound-stages of the commercial music and film industries. Today, there are fewer since synthesized music has come into wider use.

Rehearsal bands exist to serve two distinct functions. The first is to provide a place for professional "studio musicians" to practice their craft. Reading and interpreting music perfectly at first sight is the stock-in-trade of these fine musicians. If one is not consistently working-out, one's instincts and reflexes quickly diminish. Top studio musicians seek out rehearsal bands that have libraries of arrangements which exercise and challenge the skills they need to perform well in the high-pressure environment of the recording studio.

The second function of the rehearsal band is social. A rehearsal is also a meeting place where musicians can share experiences, trade tips about employment opportunities and hear each other play.

If a rehearsal band has the additional quality of possessing a music library ofexceptionally fine and enjoyable musical arrangements, it can become very popular among the best musicians. Some instrumentalists have put forth great effort to gain a regular weekly "chair" with a top rehearsal band, sometimes retaining a berth for many years.

At the time of his death, Dick Cary led arguably the best rehearsal band in LosAngeles -- and perhaps, anywhere! It was -- and still is -- an institution!

It is different from all other rehearsal bands in several respects. First, it has an amazing record of loyalty among the "regular" musicians. Some, like versatile reed-man and Les Brown stalwart Fred Cooper, have been playing in the band for over 20 years. Betty O'Hara rehearsed with Cary for over 40 years.

Secondly, each member is an exceptionally capable working studio musician. Some are also world-class artists in their own right -- such as current members Tommy Newsom, Betty O'Hara or Abe Most, all much in demand as jazz-festival headliners.

Third, this rehearsal group plays one writer's music exclusively. All others draw on the work of multiple arrangers.

Fourth, the group still plays as always despite the lamented departure of the mentor, Dick Cary. All other groups have disbanded soon after the loss of the mentor. This band, however, rehearses every week and still calls itself "Dick Cary's Tuesday Night Friends." There has been only one leader since Cary's death, the brilliant Dick Hamilton who first worked with Cary in the 1960s and who has been a regular participant in the Tuesday night rehearsals for many years.

Finally, and perhaps most important, this rehearsal band was the touch-stone for Dick Cary's creation of his amazing library of music. With the exception of Duke Ellington's Orchestra, no other ensemble in jazz history has existed long enough to afford an individual composer the opportunity to write so much music. Dick Cary had the luxury of being able to hear his new music performed almost immediately and, therefore, to develop his craft to a level far beyond that of mere mortals. The comparison with Ellington is appropriate in another way, too. Like Ellington, Cary was often writing music for specific instrumentalists, allowing him to tailor his arrangements to the artists who would be playing them.

For sheer size, there is no comparable library in all of jazz. One is reminded of the prolific output of Franz Schubert who wrote hundreds of consistently brilliant works in a tragically short life.

Recently, Arbors Records released an unusual CD of actual rehearsals of Dick Cary and His Tuesday Night Friends. That CD provides a fascinating glimpse into the rarely recorded inner-sanctum of a world-class rehearsal band. Listening to the excellence of the performances on that CD, it is hard to believe that everything was completely unrehearsed. But, the musicians were reading the music for the first time just as they are accustomed to doing on Tuesday nights at Dick Cary's home. That CD may stand as the only record ever released commercially where all the music was played "at sight!"

The CD you are now holding is considerably more polished. It was recorded in the universally accepted manner in a professional studio.

THE MUSIC ON "CATCHING UP"

How does one choose only 16 out of 3,000 arrangements by Dick Cary!

The selections on this CD were drawn from four folios for medium-sized jazz bands -- with 9, 10 or 11 instruments. The back cover of this CD lists the folio, or "book," and the number of each selection.

The "O" and "Sacramento" books are 10 piece arrangements -- generally 4 brass, 3 reeds and 3 rhythm. The "4 Reeds" book is the same except, obviously, with an extra reed, a 2nd tenor.

The "Lower" book is for 9 pieces. The alto-horn is the highest instrument, flanked by two baritone saxes, two trombones (or baritone horns) and bass trombone. Occasionally, the Lower book has an added part for clarinet and, thus, 10 pieces. One of those is used here ("Shimmy Sha Wobble").

The selections are mostly from Dick's later writing. Most were written in the 1980s. They were chosen to represent a cross-section of Dick's writing although, in retrospect, any such attempt on a single CD is doomed to inadequacy. The 16 selections on this CD represent less than 1/2 of 1% of Dick Cary's cataloged manuscripts. (There are still 16 cartons of unsorted music waiting to be catalogued.)

The personnel on this recording is made up of the current "regulars" on Tuesday Nights.

THE SELECTIONS

[1] Catching Up

A favorite of the Tuesday Night Friends. One day, Cary had a notion that he had been writing in too old fashioned a style. This piece was the next one he wrote, "catching up" with the times!

Like many other Cary compositions, this piece bridges the swing and post-bop eras. During the 1940s and '50s, Cary was active as a jazz performer in New York City, but he was not a direct participant in the "new" music of bebop. He frequently spoke about how he had wished to have greater interaction with the more progressive musicians at that time, but was not able to do so because of the necessities of being employed seven nights a week playing Dixieland in the so-called "moldy fig" clubs like Nick's and Eddie Condon's. As this piece demonstrates, Dick Cary "caught up" nicely!

In doing so, Cary left behind some of the older conventions of jazz music concerning form, harmony, rhythm and orchestration. There are musical surprises at every turn! The understated ending of this piece is marvelously unexpected; Dick Cary was a master of the anticlimax!

Order of soloists:	Tenor	Harrington
	Tenor	Newsom
	Trombone	O'Hara
	Tenors	Harrington, Newsom, both

[2] Oofy

This was the name of one of Dick Cary's dogs. Cary loved dogs and almost always owned at least one. This one was a small, white male with a sweet disposition. When Cary got him, his name was Goofy. Dick considered this too undignified a name for the dog and "Oofy" was better, he thought. The new name was close enough so that the dog still obeyed when called! Oofy was a great favorite of Cary's and its no surprise that this piece is a marvelously happy one!

Order of soloists:	Tenor	Bambridge
	Duet:	Soprano Sax:Newsom, Trombone: O'Hara

[3] September Etude

Cary wrote dozens of etudes -- each an exercise either for himself as a writer or for one or more of the musicians. The etudes are normally compositions with somewhat complex forms. These range from mono thematic etudes to long and very involved works. Each holds to a consistent stylistic language, but the idioms can vary greatly from piece to piece. Some are written with almost pure diatonic harmony while others are extremely dissonant, recalling Cary's years of study with Stefan Wolpe.

This one is impressionistic, perhaps a study relating to one of Cary's favorite composers, Ravel. The very short one-bar solos are unusually tricky challenges for the four improvisers.

Order of soloists:	Piano	Hamilton
	Short solos:	Cooper, Most, Koonse, Newsom

[4] The Albatross

One of the most-frequently played and recorded of Cary's compositions. Originally, it was published by Edward B. Marks in a folio entitled "The Jimmy McPartland Dixieland Series." Cary wrote at least 3 more arrangements of it. The composers' credit went to Jimmy McPartland as well as to Dick Cary. Dick Cary wrote the "Sacramento" book for an appearance with his band at the annual Sacramento Dixieland Jubilee in 1981. The summer jazz festival was (and still is)the world's largest festival devoted primarily to traditional jazz. Cary was a guest artist every year since the inception of the festival and, in 1987, he was honored as the festival's Grand Emperor Of Jazz.

The Sacramento book has 96 arrangements in it. It is predominantly made up of older "dixieland" standards which Cary thought would be appropriate for the festival. It is an indication of Cary's amazing ease and speed in writing that he could write 96 arrangements for a weekend festival at which only a fraction of the pieces could actually ever be played!

Order of soloists:	Trombone	O'Hara
	Dixieland Band	Trott, O'Hara, Most
	Baritone Sax	Cooper
	Tenor	Newsom
	Trumpets	Trott, Hamilton
	Bass	Mickman
	Dixieland Band	Trott, O'Hara, Most

[5] Late Sunday

A favorite with the Tuesday Night Friends, this piece features the pianist. Dick Hamilton does a great job here re-creating Cary's conception in the opening, and then branching out into wonderful new territory!

Order of soloists:	Piano	Hamilton
	Tenor duet	Harrington & Newsom
	Trumpet & Trombone	Trott & O'Hara
	Piano & Guitar	Hamilton & Koonse

[6] Gramercy Park

Presumably named for the park in New York City. Its a wonderfully appealing,but deceptively complex piece with another brilliant, understated ending!

Order of soloists:	Clarinet	Most
	Guitar	Koonse
	Piano	Hamilton

[7] Shimmy Sha Wobble

Cary wrote many arrangements of early jazz standards. They include titles such as King Oliver's "Cornet Chop Suey" or Jelly Roll Morton's "Shreveport Stomp." These arrangements are likely to be tongue-in cheek, but not disrespectful. They are almost always spectacular elaborations on early recordings.

This one is a Spencer Williams composition from 1916. It is a beautiful example of the Lower Book with an added clarinet. Here, John Bambridge plays the clarinet part superbly. Dick Hamilton's nice alto horn solo is played on Dick Cary's original instrument which he has completely restored.

Order of soloists:	Clarinet	Bambridge
	Baritone Horn	Aldcroft
	Baritone Duet	O'Hara (horn) & Cooper (sax)
	Alto Horn	Hamilton

[8] Black & Blue

Possibly the most unusual arrangement of this piece ever written. Dick Cary had played it often with Louis Armstrong's All Stars.

This arrangement might well have been played at the Sacramento Dixieland Jubilee festival. It is the antithesis of Dixieland, however, and one imagines Dick Cary might have amused himself guessing whether his listeners might recognize the melody and when. Fred Cooper's creative flute work here is perfectly suited to Cary's concept.

[9] Between Prone And Supine

Here we can enjoy the baritone sax of Fred Cooper for whom the piece was written! Dick Cary was in the hospital for two weeks straight in 1989; he was unable to move except for turning in bed. Shortly after he got home, Cary called a Tuesday night rehearsal and the musicians were amazed that he had written 10 or 12 new pieces in the hospital! This is one of them.

Order of soloists:	Baritone sax	Cooper
	Clarinet	Most
	Trombone	O'Hara
	Baritone sax	Cooper
	Trumpet	Hamilton
	Tenor	Newsom
	Bass	Mickman
	Baritone sax	Cooper

[10] December Song

This is elegant simplicity in the 32-bar song form. One cannot help but be reminded of the rich textures of Ellington and Strayhorn!

Order of soloists:	Tenor	Newsom
	Baritone Sax	Cooper
	Tenor	Newsom
	Trombone	O'Hara
	Trumpet	Hamilton

[11] Rialto

Written in the parking lot of the Rialto Theater in San Bernardino while waiting for a gig to start.

Musicians have noted that, like several famous pieces, Rialto is constructed around a chromatically descending bass line. At the end of this arrangement, the descent of the bass part encompasses a remarkable 27 consecutive half-steps, or 2 octaves plus 3 notes. It is a highly unusual ending, both emphatic and understated.

Order of soloists:	Piano	Hamilton
	Guitar	Koonse
	Tenors	Newsom & Bambridge
	Baritone sax	Cooper
	Trumpet	Trott
	Trombone	O'Hara
	Bass	Mickman

[12] Sea Of Cortez

A favorite of both musicians and festival audiences. It was written shortly afterCary's longtime collaborator Ernie Tack acquired a vacation home in Mexico on the Sea of Cortez. This arrangement features the wonderful alto-horn work of Dick Hamilton.

[13] B-e-t-t-y O'-H-a-r-a

Dick Cary created the theme for this composition using a numerical technique -- assigning a musical note to each letter of the alphabet, then musically "spelling" the name of his close musical friend. The note and-letter assignments derive from making middle-C into the first letter of the alphabet "A." Here is the resulting pattern:

So, "Betty O'Hara" is C#-E-G-G-C, D-G-C-F-C and those are exactly the notes of this piece's theme.

Dick Cary wrote several pieces using this type of system which, by the way, is not a new musical technique. It was used at least as early as several hundred years ago by J. S. Bach. It is, however, an unusual technique for a jazz composer.

Betty O'Hara, who plays beautifully on this recording, says that she considers it a distinct honor to be so recognized in Dick Cary's library.

Order of soloists:	Double-bell Euphonium	O'Hara (1st large, then small bell)
	Alto Horn	Hamilton
	Baritone horn	Aldcroft

[14] Recado

Cary loved to write arrangements of his favorite popular songs. These include Gershwin's "Fascinatin' Rhythm" which he arranged 7 times, Ellington's "Upper Manhattan Medical Group" (7 times) and Victor Young's "A Woman's Intuition" (5 times). Noticeably absent are any hackneyed popular tunes from the Swing Era like "In The Mood" or "String Of Pearls."

He arranged "Recado" by Ferreira as a swinging bossa-nova. It is a virtuoso workout for the ensemble. Dick Hamilton plays the muted alto-horn background on the first chorus. The 2nd chorus features rapid fire solo exchanges and then a wonderfully glib, improvised guitar solo by Dave Koonse. Dave's solo could not be better matched to its accompaniment if Dick Cary had written the background after hearing Dave's solo first!

[15] White April

The derivation of the title is the same as for another composition "Pale September." These two selections are not, as is often assumed, musical descriptions of beautiful, wintry landscapes. Rather, the titles refer to the paucity of pencilled-in gigs on Dick Cary's monthly calendar! In September, he had only a few jobs and his calendar was "pale!" In April, none -- white! We're sure the months got "darker and darker" as they approached!

Order of soloists:	Tenors	Newsom, Harrington, both
	Baritone sax	Cooper
	Clarinet	Most
	Guitar	Koonse
	Tenor	Harrington

[16] Sgt. Pee Wee

There are six arrangements of this exceptionally important composition in the catalog. Cary chose to perform this piece in public on numerous occasions. Tommy Newsom once observed that, if this piece had been written by Stravinsky, it mightwell have come to fame as a masterpiece!

Stories about Pee Wee Marquette were among those Cary loved to tell and to hear. For a time during the 1940s and '50s, Marquette was the doorman/bouncer/master-of-ceremonies at the famous jazz club Birdland in New York City. Members of Dick Cary's band who remember Marquette say he was a man of diminutive stature and pompous demeanor.

Pee Wee was apparently disliked by some musicians. Several tell that Pee Wee's stage announcements of musicians' names were proportional in effusiveness to the size of the tip Pee Wee received from the musician. For example, a generous tipper might be gushingly introduced by name as "an internationally renowned master of musical excellence and genuine genius of jazz artistry" while a scant tipper might go unnamed as merely "the bass player." This piece is, in part, Dick Cary's musical description of Pee Wee Marquette's self-important strutting at the historic club.


Notes by Jim Turner.