016. Ted Curson - The New Thing & The Blue Thing (recorded 1965)
Shining a light on the always underrated trumpeter
A good way to find hidden gem jazzmen and jazzwomen is to look at the personnel playing on the records of the jazz giants. Charles Mingus was my first jazz love. Hard-to-fathom stories of the man’s behaviour as a band leader abound, and his autobiography Beneath the Underdog (1971) is one of the more confounding, and remarkable written works that I’ve read. From reddit:
In reading the liner notes and personnel lists for Mingus’s work, I discovered trumpeter Ted Curson, who worked with Charlie on several albums, including the four-starred Mingus at Antibes (1960) and the Core Collection Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960). In listening to these albums, I found one track particularly poignant in today’s political atmosphere, the “Original Faubus Fables,” where Mingus rails against then-governor Orval Faubus, a Democrat, who in 1957 fought against the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. The track was originally recorded for the landmark album Mingus Ah Um (1959), but Columbia Records refused to include the lyrics, which were first included on Charles Mingus Present Charles Mingus. Due to contractual issues with Columbia, the song could not be released as "Fables of Faubus", so the Candid version was titled "Original Faubus Fables:"
Alright
We'd like to, um, continue this, continue this
Continue this set with a composition
Dedicated to the first, or second or third, all-American heel, Faubus
And it's titled "Fables of Faubus"[Verse 1]
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas
Yee-oh
[Verse 2]
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan
[Chorus]
Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit us in his schools!
Then he's a fool!
Oh, boo!
Curson’s personal biography written for All Tomorrow’s Parties festival states:
Ted Curson, a Philadelphian, grew up hearing and playing jazz with such greats as Percy, Jimmy, and Toodie Heath, Bobby Timmons, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Odean Pope, Henry Grimes, Lee Morgan, Reggie Workman, Ray Bryant, and Spanky Debreast. He first came to the attention of jazz lovers across the U.S. in the early sixties when he played alongside Eric Dolphy in one of the most exciting bands Charles Mingus ever put together. Curson, who describes his career as “one foot in Europe and one foot in America,” has since appeared on the stage of almost every major jazz festival in the world, from Monterey, California, and New York City to Bombay, India; Nice, Antibes, and Nancy, France; The Hague, Holland; Cork, Ireland; Kongsberg, Norway; Bled, Yugoslavia; and Pori, Finland.1
Curson was interviewed by the website All About Jazz in 2005, regarding his start with Mingus:
"I got a phone call from a friend of mine and he said 'I got a call from Mingus and I don't want to play with that crazy motherf*cker. You want to take my place?' It was in Teddy Charles' loft, and there were a 1,000 or something musicians in there jamming, and I met Mingus and we played and everybody dropped out and that was it. He said 'maybe one day I'll call you' and about two or three months later I get a call at about midnight and it's Mingus. 'Ted Curson? Charlie Mingus here. You start right now. I'm at the Showplace in the Village and as soon as you get here, you go to work.' I got there and he said 'Okay ladies and gentleman, here's your new band - Ted Curson and Eric Dolphy - and you other cats are fired!' Curson stayed with the Mingus group through 1961, including an important performance at the Antibes Jazz Festival in France in July of 1960. Curson was the group's media spokesperson, which was a good thing for the trumpeter, as his image became more firmly rooted in the European public - laying the groundwork for a warm European reception a few years later. For Curson, "the main thing I picked up from Mingus was to 'do your own shit, straight ahead no matter what.'2
After his stint with Mingus, Curson led different version of his own group, recording the four-star The New Thing & The Blue Thing in 1965, featuring Bill Barron (tenor sax), George Arvanitas (piano), Herb Bushler (bass) and Dick Berk (drums). Curson’s representation in the Penguin Guide is limited, perhaps because much of his oeuvre wasn’t re-released until after 2007, when the Guide’s seventh edition was published:
Koch’s rescue programme has had few worthier objects than Curson’s 1965 Atlantic, The New Thing & The Blue Thing, which is not two albums stuck together but a reference to the stylistic poles of Curson’s work. It teams him with the like-minded Barron, who plays brightly on two Curson originals ‘Straight ice’ and ‘Elephant Walk,’ but wanders off course a bit elsewhere. Arvanitas is a fascinating player, with a robustly lyrical touch, tracking Curson’s maverick line on ‘Starry Eyes’ with real imagination. Ted sticks to concert trumpet throughout, or so it sounds, but even here he manages to squeeze out tight, high tones that suggest a piccolo instrument. His phrasing on ‘Reava’s Waltz,’ an early appearance of what was to become a long-standing favourite, is precise and expressive.
I listened to The New Thing & The Blue Thing a fair amount this past week, and it garners my unwavering recommendation. A solid listen that stays on course, never straying from its promise of being too new or too blue. It’s an album I played in the kitchen with no complaints from the wife or the children. In fact, my wife even said it was a good album. Okay, fine, I did toot Curson’s horn before putting it on. No pun intended.
In researching Curson, I was intrigued by the fact that one of his songs, “Tears for Dolphy,” from Curson’s 1965 album of the same name, was featured in three feature films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (Theorem, in English - Curson’s work is uncredited, 1968), Vincent Gallo’s infamous The Brown Bunny (2003) and the little-known but fantastic Danish documentary on Eric Dolphy, Last Date (1991).
I had never seen any of Pasolini’s films before, so I’m glad that Curson’s music connected me to the director’s work. Teorema is featured in the extensive Criterion Collection box set of the director’s work called Pasolini 101. The film is described as “a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness:”
Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.3
We could all use a primal scream into the void during these times, eh?
You can watch Teorema here if you don’t have access to Criterion. Further, I read more about the film’s star Terence Stamp, who famously starred with Julie Andrews in the British classic Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). The pair are name-checked in the inimitable Kinks classic, and one of my all time favourites, “Waterloo Sunset:”
Terry meets Julie
Waterloo station
Every Friday night
But I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I don't feel afraid
As long as I gaze on
Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise
In a 2015 Guardian interview with Terry, the actor elaborates on his experience with Teorema:
He ended up doing Theorem, he says, because he bumped into childhood crush Silvana Mangano, who he’d seen in neo-realist classic Bitter Rice, on a Rome street (“I couldn’t believe she was there in the flesh”) and she suggested him for the role. “Pasolini told me: ‘A stranger arrives, makes love to everybody, and leaves. This is your part.’ I said: ‘I can do that!’”4
In Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, one could argue that the premise is eerily similar to Teorema: “A stranger arrives on a motorcycle, drives around in his truck, has an imagined explicit encounter, and leaves.” It’s not such a simple comparison, of course. But both involve a mysterious man and convey different ideas around desire and connection, and both films use Curson’s “Tears for Dolphy” as a melancholy affectation that enhances the mysterious vibes. I watched Teorema and The Brown Bunny in the same week... it’s quite the double bill.
(Side Note Warning: This is in no way an endorsement of the infamous The Brown Bunny. Per Grantland’s Steven Hyden, The Brown Bunny is “an impossible movie to talk about.”5 But I was curious about the use of Curson’s song in the film.)
Curson spoke on Gallo and Pasolini in an interview with Jazz Times magazine, entitled “Ted Curson: More Than a Survivor,” originally published in 2006:
I don’t know how Vincent Gallo found out I did the music [for Teorema], because my name wasn’t on it… Ennio Morricone took credit, but the music was by Ted Curson and Amadeus Mozart. Anyway, Gallo saw it and liked the music, so when he did The Brown Bunny, he used it.6
I still don’t understand why Curson’s work is not credited in Teorema. I hope that he sorted the situation out legally and earned proper royalties.
The third film featuring “Tears for Dolphy,” gets to the source of Curson’s sorrowful, beautiful tune used for affect by Gallo and Pasolini. Hans Hylkema’s 1991 Eric Dolphy documentary, Last Date, focuses on the life and music of the late jazz legend, from his LA upbringing and classical music aspirations, to his jazz evolution as an innovative composer, alto saxophone and bass clarinet player. There are illuminating interviews with European musicians who played with Dolphy, as well as interviews with American contemporaries like Curson and Jackie Byard.
Curson plays “Tears for Dolphy” as part of his interview, a somber epilogue to Dolphy’s tragic death marred in its own controversy and mystery. Apparently, Dolphy went into a diabetic coma during a concert in Berlin and and was taken to hospital, where doctors assumed that Dolphy, being a black jazz musician, was a junkie. They never checked his blood sugar, and Dolphy never emerged from his coma. He was 36 years old. Ironically, Dolphy didn’t use drugs and was in fact a teetotaler.
Ted Curson is not a household name in the United States or Canada, but he was big in Finland. The Jazz Times interview dives into his career and relationship with the Scandinavian country:
Curson’s close relationship with the annual Pori Jazz Festival in Finland has helped keep him afloat. He’s played the festival every year since its inception. This summer marked the 41st anniversary. “It started in 1965, actually. I was playing in Paris, and three guys approached me, said ‘We’re from Finland. Do you know of Finland?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ because when I was a kid I remember singing Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia.’ I don’t know why black kids in a black neighborhood in a black school in the U.S. would be singing ‘Finlandia,’ but we did, true story,” says Curson. “So anyway, the guys said they liked me and thought people in Finland would like my music and would I like to come? I said, ‘Sure, just make the arrangements.'” He played the very first Pori Festival the next year.
The association has paid off. Ted Curson is a household name in Finland, or darn close. He appears on television and even endorses products-a certain brand of shoes, for example, gets the Curson seal of approval. He’s even hosted a party for the country’s president, Tarja Halonen… [who] proposed a visit to Curson’s home in Upper Montclair, N.J., on a trip to the United States for a meeting at the United Nations in Sept. 2005.
“My wife and I put together a small party of 88 people, with special police and everything else, and it was just beautiful,” says Curson. “At first, the American government said, ‘No,’ when she told them I was a black man and it was in New Jersey. They panicked and said, ‘We can’t do this,’ but she insisted, so they sent out the Secret Service and they went over the property and saw I had a nice house. They saw everything was OK. So it was on, we had it and she was very gracious.”7
Curson never achieved widespread fame or fortune.
Making records hasn’t filled Curson’s pockets. Jazz records are typically made, released and-without proper promotion-overlooked or forgotten, usually with the musician making little or no money. Curson knows the drill. “On so many of my records, the company would tell me up front they weren’t going to promote it,” Curson says. “If people found it, fine; if they didn’t, fine. It was like a Frisbee, another Ted Curson Frisbee, and if the dog don’t catch it, too bad!”
He was talented, but never took himself too seriously.
Curson is philosophical about his career. He knows the score. Still, a lack of recognition in his home country clearly bothers him, at least a little bit. “Because you called me [about this article] I feel 100 percent better,” he says. “It makes me think, like, maybe there’s a chance for me. But I’m 71, I don’t know. If someone’s saying: ‘Ted Curson? Ted Curson, who?’ then you’re in serious trouble. Fortunately, when I work in Finland, where everybody knows me, I don’t have to worry about that. Finland and France, I’m cool. I don’t know about New York.”
Curson’s music is the truth, humble, pulling no punches. His life was his art; he travelled the world, taught the younger generations, and settled down in the comfortable, leafy New Jersey haven of Montclair. He was a witness to greatness around him, the secret sauce to so many timeless jazz recordings of the music’s heroes, from Cecil Taylor to Charles Mingus to Archie Shepp to Eric Dolphy. He endured the passing of friends and luminaries, but used his music to process loss through creativity and introspection. He led his own groups and they were damn good, too. His music lives on through recordings and through films, whose directors were taken by his personal approach to emotion.
Ted Curson died of heart failure in Montclair, New Jersey in 2012, at the age of 77. He told Jazz Times, “My life is like a barrel with no bottom. I keep putting stuff in, but it never fills up!”
https://www.atpfestival.com/artist/tedcurson
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/ted-curson-atypical-ted-ted-curson-by-clifford-allen
https://www.criterion.com/films/28660-teorema?srsltid=AfmBOor_Hn6WzEito83EN-Nlp-51HS1gCs63u-OuP9_PZMhAHN0TTzhm
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/12/terence-stamp-i-was-in-my-prime-but-when-the-60s-ended-i-ended-with-it
https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-brown-bunny-10-years-later-roger-ebert/
https://jazztimes.com/archives/ted-curson-more-than-a-survivor/
https://jazztimes.com/archives/ted-curson-more-than-a-survivor/