You’d think Johnny Griffin would have grown tired of references to his diminutive size by the time he played the Bern Jazz Festival in 1998, but he seems to take it all in stride when Gene Harris introduces him and asks, “How can a little guy play so much horn?” After all, Griff was 70 by then, and he’d been hailed as the Little Giant for over 40 years. The Chicago native was also, as Harris put it, “the fastest gun alive.” Ralph J. Gleason had said as much in 1958 when he wrote in Downbeat, “Unquestionably, Johnny Griffin can play the tenor saxophone faster, literally, than anyone else alive.” Babs Gonzales confirmed it from a musician’s perspective in his “real truth” memoir, Movin’ On Down De Line. “We called him ‘Chain Lightning’ and ‘The Fireman’.”
By most accounts an affable colleague, Griff’s competitive instincts were perfectly suited to the white heat intensity of post-war jazz. He began on alto after hearing the 16-year-old Gene Ammons playing with Chicago bandleader King Kolax in 1941. “Just like that,” he said, “It’s been tunnel vision ever since.” Three days after his 1945 graduation from DuSable High School, he joined the irrepressible Lionel Hampton. No one thrived on ritual more than Hamp, who insisted his new recruit take up the tenor to engage in showdowns with the band’s Texas-born star Arnett Cobb. Griff and Cobb locked horns with Hamp for a couple of years before Johnny joined the band of another Hampton colleague, trumpeter Joe Morris. Over the next few years, he worked the jump blues circuit with Morris, Cobb, and Wynonie Harris, and played on sessions at King and Atlantic Records.
Blues ran deep in Griff’s grain, and one hears it in the moving cry that lies at the heart of his sound. In a 1994 interview with Bob Bernatos, he recalled playing around Chicago with T-Bone Walker before he hit the road with Hampton. “T-Bone’s brother had a big band and T-Bone was the star of the show. We played the off-nights in the large nightclubs on the South Side of Chicago, the Rum Boogie, the DeLisa, and the El Dorado.” Griff’s influences “ran the whole gamut,” including Charlie Christian, who was T-Bone’s jazz counterpart among guitar players. But it was a pantheon of saxophonists with a strong affinity for the blues who were his primary models. “Ben Webster was my first favorite, then I went to Johnny Hodges…Then, of course, Pres, Charlie Parker, and Don Byas, a master.”
In his interview with Art Taylor for the drummer’s book of candid conversations, Notes and Tones, Griff put it more colorfully. “When I was about fourteen years old, they had a house party at my cousin’s. This put this record on by Jay McShann…I think it was the ‘Hootie Blues.’ Bird played a solo, and that stopped me in my tracks…Of course, all this influence came from the father of the swing tree, Pres [Lester Young], who influenced Bird. He was actually one of the greatest. I mean, other than Coleman Hawkins, who rescued the saxophone from the oblivion of the circus. Pres, my man, is the trunk of the swing tree…The strongest influence on me would be Charlie Parker. Bird was the greatest messenger. I wanted to be original, so I was afraid to hang out with saxophone players…I learned my lessons from Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, and Thelonious Monk…Most of my musical knowledge came from them and from [trumpeter] Fats Navarro. Fats, Brownie, and Dizzy Gillespie, cats with power. Hot jazz. Hot, fun-loving jazz. Hot colored jazz. Hot Afro jazz.”
When reading the Notes and Tones interview again this week, I was struck by the similarity in outlook of Griff and something the Miles Davis character says in the new bio pic, Miles Ahead. When Miles, played by Don Cheadle, is confronted at the front door of his Upper West Side townhouse by a Rolling Stone reporter urging him to return to the jazz scene, Miles says, “I don’t play jazz.” When asked to clarify, Miles says, “I play social music.” In Notes and Tones, Griff subscribes to a view held by numerous black musicians of his generation that jazz was continually being diverted from the black community. “They killed [jazz] with all that so-called Cool school, West Coast jive. They sold us down the line. Took the music out of Harlem and put it in Carnegie Hall and downtown in those joints where you’ve got to be quiet. The black people split and went back to Harlem, back to the rhythm and blues, so they could have a good time.”
Griff credited the two years he spent playing with an Army band during the Korean War with saving his life. He told Bernatos, “I had orders to go to Korea. Seven other young men who went in with me, Afro-American kids, all died. I had my orders to go with them, too. What happened was, when the battalion was graduating I already had my orders to go to FECOM, which was Far East Command, to go to Korea. On the bulletin board in the orderly room they asked anyone with any talent to put on a little act…for the officers. The officers were graduating and having a party. So I knew some soldiers who could play a little bit, and we got together a little group and got on the show. And a colonel there was stoned out of his mind. He said, ‘Put that boy in the band,’ [meaning] the Army band in Hawaii. Other than that, I probably would have been killed, too.”
After his discharge in 1954, Griff returned to Chicago and gigged around town. He was a seasoned 28-year-old when he made his first albums as a leader, the breathtaking Introducing Johnny Griffin for Blue Note, and a quartet date known as JG for hometown Argo Records. He then acceded to what he called “a demand” to work with Art Blakey in 1957. In Notes and Tones, he said playing with Blakey was “Fantastic…like sitting on an atom bomb…Oh man, explosions. Everything was too big for life. He’s got so much imagination.” His brief tenure with the Jazz Messengers included a standout appearance on Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk, which is one of the essentials of modern jazz. Listen here for the sassy humor of his opening solo on “Blue Monk.”
Griffin had hung out with Monk in the late forties when he was based in New York, and first played with him on the pianist’s 1955 engagement at the Bee Hive in Chicago. In Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original, Griffin told biographer, Robin D.G. Kelley, “I didn’t know Monk’s music. He just started playing and I had to figure out what he was doing.” Later that year, Monk told Nat Hentoff that he liked “the tenor I worked with in Chicago, John Griffin. He’s one of the best.”
The Bee Hive date and album by Monk and the Messengers were preludes to Griff joining Thelonious for a legendary appearance at the Five Spot in the summer of 1958. Notwithstanding their previous work together, Griffin was still unfamiliar with much of Monk’s repertoire, so the Five Spot was something of a trial by fire. “We rehearsed on the bandstand,” he told Kelley. “Monk wouldn’t pull his music out…He had it in his briefcase, but he said it would be better if I heard it. So he would play the melody and I’m supposed to retain the melody…and play the second chorus coming in with the melody! So you can imagine what happened. I’d mess up, and he’d say, ‘No, no no, let’s do it again.’ And the people loved it. You know what? I never felt embarrassed…[But] I found it difficult at times, I mean difficult.”
Griff continued with one of the most elaborate testimonies we have of what it was like playing with Monk. “I enjoyed playing with him…but when I’m playing my solos…his comping is so strong…that it’s almost like you’re in a padded cell…I mean, trying to express yourself…with him comping is so overwhelming, it’s almost like you’re trying to break out of a room made of marshmallows…Any deviation, one note off, and you sound like you’re playing another tune.”
Riverside Records, which failed to record Monk’s legendary engagement at the Five Spot the previous summer when John Coltrane was on the band, documented an entire night by the quartet with Griff, Ahmed-Abdul Malik, and Roy Haynes, on August 7, 1958. Difficulties notwithstanding, on both albums, Thelonious In Action and Misterioso: Live at the Five Spot, Griff sounds fluid and relaxed, the equal of Trane or Monk’s favorite, Sonny Rollins, in saying something uniquely compelling in this challenging music.
After the summer with Monk, Griffin formed a famous partnership with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. Billed as the “Tough Tenors,” they worked together for a couple of years at Minton’s, the fabled Harlem nightspot, and recorded several great sessions for Jazzland. Decades before the proliferation of jazz repertory groups, they were among the first combos to devote an album to Monk’s music. (Steve Lacy recorded Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays Thelonious Monk in 1958.) Griff and Jaws released Lookin’ at Monk! in 1961. In that same year, they released a live set from Minton’s called The Tenor Scene. Here they play “Straight, No Chaser.” Jaws is the first soloist.
In 1963, alienated by working conditions, under pressure from the IRS, and living like a “stoned zombie,” Griffin and Babs Gonzales sailed for France and joined the burgeoning group of jazz expatriates then taking up residence across Europe. Once settled, Griff became outspoken about the critical respect then being paid to the emerging avant-garde in jazz. “For me to take my saxophone and make squawks like chickens or elephant sounds is the worst thing I could do. I would stop playing. I’m always talking about using my horn like a machine gun, but not to kill anybody. I want to shoot them with notes of love. I want them to laugh. I want to give them something positive. I’m not playing my music for a negative purpose.”
The move to Europe proved salutary for Griff, who continued to find audiences receptive to love notes everywhere he played. Gonzales, who returned to the States, later quipped, “[Johnny] now lives like a country squire on his farm in Holland and travels the world.” In 1976, Griff’s fellow expat and occasional dueling partner Dexter Gordon made a triumphant return to the States. Griff followed suit shortly afterwards, but where Dexter ultimately lived for long periods in New York before his death in 1990, Griffin limited his stays to tours and week-long bookings in New York and Chicago. I caught him on several of his club dates in New and Cambridge over a period of 20 years, and most memorably on a summer afternoon in 1979 when his quartet (with Ronnie Mathews, Ray Drummond, and Kenny Washington) played at the dedication of 52nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues as “Swing Street.” There, as ever, he was enthralling.
In the 1994 interview, Bernatos asked him if he’d ever move back to the States. “I feel good where I am,” Griff replied. “That’s not to say I would never come back, but the way I feel now, I love it where I am. It’s heaven. I can’t think of any better place to be.” At that point, he’d been living back in France for ten years, and that’s where he remained until his death in 2008 at age 80.
Griff came to prominence when jazz was still a music of one and two-chorus solos, but by the time he began making long-playing albums of his own, the only restriction on solo length was one’s sense of form, function, and good taste. No matter the tempo, The Little Giant was a master of solos sustained by thematic cohesion, choice quotes from other sources, and vigorous swing.
Here’s a moving example of Griff riveting one’s attention over the course of a seven-minute long solo on “All the Things You Are.” This is from the Bern Festival with Gene Harris. Griff’s solo is followed by that of another tenor great, Frank Wess, but there’s nothing combative between the two in this beautiful performance.