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Terry Gibbs
Steve Allen Presents Terry Gibbs at the Paino
Signature...SS 6007...Stereo...33 1/3 LP
Cover: VG our sleeve. Two inch seam split on top at opening
Record: VG+...tracks well very slight noise - plays well...$6.00
Also in the Jazz Section
SIDE 1
1) Stretchin' The Blues - 2:44
2) You Go To My Head - 2:45
3) Fickle Fingers - 2:37
4) Things Ain't What They Used to Be - 2:34
5) Cherokee - 3:35
6) Country Boy - 2:52
SIDE 2
1) For Keeps - 3:15
2) Easy Blues - 3:10
3) Shufflin's Blues - 3:18
4) Lover Man - 3:21
5) The Way you Look Tonight - 3:16
6) Airmail Special - 2:30
I first met my good friend Terry Gibbs when he did a quest shot back around 1956 on the old
Tonight Show, that long-gone TV haven for jazz musicians. I remember thinking at the time
"This guys plays so fast I can't tell why I enjoy his playing because the notes and
phrases go by too rapidly to be understood."
My opinion hasn’t changed. And if this is true of Terry it is true of all good vibraphone
players. Perhaps we ought to let them record to suit themselves, then release their stuff
only at 45 with instructions to play it at 33 1/3. At present, listening carefully to a
vibes solo of an up-tempo number is like hearing Shakespeare recited at git-gar-giddle pace
by Danny Kaye.
Another way to make it easier to meaningfully digest vibraphone ideas is to take the
musician's instrument away from him and make him play two-finger piano. Unlike the vibes,
which has so many overtones and which tends to group cluster of notes togthers in a sort
of pretty blur, the piano has a crispness and definition that the juman ear is better suited
to interpret. This fact first hit men when I was about sixteen years old and heard a wild
recording of something or other by Lionel Hampton. I hadn't been paying attention when the
radio announcer (they hadn't invented the phrase disc jockey in those days) identified
the side so I had no idea it was Hamp playing. I just thought I was hearing some fantastic
new pianist, a genius with a brittle, crackling new style of attack and a technique which
for crisp brilliance had never been equalled. The reason for my mistaken reaction is
obvious enough. No ten-fingered pianist, not even somebody as lighting fast as a Tatum or
Previn, can do with five fingers of the right hand what a man like Hamp or Terry Gibbs
can do with two fingers used like mallets.
In 1958 I took a jazz group into New York's Round Table. Star soloists of the combo
were Terry, Mundell Lowe on guitar, and Gus Bivona on clarinet. Two or three time each
evening Terry would come over to the piano and we'd play some four-handed stuff that would
knock the people out. From that moment I've thought that Terry should do an entire album
of piano solos and at last the ides has been realized.
Bass-clef pianist on most of these sides is the powerful and talented Donn Trenner who plays
with Les Brown on our TV show, although I sat in with Terry on a couple of numbers. But in
all cases Donn and I were just along for the ride. This is all Terry's show and he puts on
a great one in his traditional, hard-driving, flashy style. Gibbs has always, of course, been
a swinger. Like Hamp, he loves to play. In Hollywood he is always trying to get a
session going at a club or somebody's house and as of the moment of this writing he has been
more or less losing money for the past year because of the sheer, swinging kick he gets out
of leading his own big band, which is a powerhouse, by the way.
Whether he has been playing with Benny Goodman's sextet, the Woody Herman orchestra, or
one of his own combos, Terry is always in there giving the customers more than their money's
worth. He's one musician who, though able to play "modern", is definitely not, at heart, a
coolie. Not for Terry is the bored, superior glazed gaze over the heads of his audiences.
He has fun playing and he can't help showing it and that, all other things being equal, is
to the good, I think.
The customer certainly gets his money's worth in this package and I think he'll have just as
much fun listening as Terry and the rest of us did playing. ****** Steve Allen