Big Nick Nicholas, Bigger Than Ever, 2 tracks from new CD available at itunes and Amazon


1) Down Home Blues
2) Autumn In New York

Big Nick Nicholas Big and Warm Liner Notes for this CD

Big Nick Nicholas is one of the great craftsmen and showmen in the art and tradition of good time jazz. His is primarily a party music that stretches into areas of lyricism sometimes so stately that his voice and saxophone seem to have transformed themselves from frog princes of hilarity into spokesmen of incredible elegance. By party music I don’t mean something essentially trivial that is now and again given a leg up through the rendering of romantic desire or memory; I mean a ritual in which happiness is the goal. Unfortunately, ours is a culture in which the artistic pursuit and protection of joy is too often defined as somehow inferior to the expression of sorrow, disillusionment and depression. That is why artists who frequently smile are thought less serious than those with furrowed brows. But Big Nick Nicholas’s objective – like that of Louis Armstrong – is to make you feel better after hearing him than you did when you began listening. He is what Armstrong would have called “a messenger of joy”, a man in the service of happiness. Perhaps that is why this is his first album as a leader after forty years as a professional – messengers of joy, from wondrous comedians to musicians, are sometimes treated rather shabbily. But there is a heroic determination inside this musician’s spirit that refuses to condescend to his listeners, which is why this is such a splendid – even uplifting – album.

The path to his present level of authority began when Nicholas was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1922. At nine, he came home to find that his father had purchased a player piano and noticed an old, Albert system clarinet as well. Though he piddled around with the clarinet, Nicholas began studying the piano shortly afterward, a discipline that was furthered by his involvement with athletics, as a basketball player and a track and field man. He was soon playing the saxophone and left home in 1941 with Jimmy Luckey, settling in Saginaw, Michigan, where he lived with Sonny Stitt while working at the Sunshine Gardens in a band that included Thad and Hank Jones. Nicholas notes that Stitt’s mother gave him everything that he wanted and when Stitt started playing the saxophone, he then sounded much like Benny Carter. Nicholas went to Chicago not long afterwards and worked at the Rumboogie with Tiny Bradshaw for thirty-two weeks, where he was featured tenor saxophonist in a production number, his notes floating and driving through the chorus girls by whom he was surrounded. He then saw Stitt again when the alto saxophonist arrived with the Alabama State Collegians to play the Regal Theater.

“At that time, Sonny was still sounding like Benny Carter, but one night Bob Redcross, who later became Billy Eckstine’s valet, had an acetate of Bird and Dizzy playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” with Shadow Wilson using his brushes on the seat of a chair in place of drums. Sonny listened and he said – even though Bird was playing tenor – ‘Who is that?’. The next night he started playing like Bird!”

In 1943, Nicholas traveled to New York with Sabby Lewis, worked there briefly and moved on to Boston, where Lewis had a job that lasted about eighteen months. “ At that time, Boston was a fine cultural atmosphere for musicians and I got a chance to do some studying. I knew that I needed to study and Boston provided me with just the right time and place I needed.”

Nicholas had gotten married in Boston and, when he returned to New York, he began working with bandleaders like Lucky Millinder and Dizzy Gillespie. The tenor saxophonist went to Europe with Gillespie’s big band in 1948 and was featured on songs that allowed him to paint the air with his huge whooping sound, part humor, part dancing drive. “Not too long after that I started doing a solo. I realized that if I was going to pay for my house, I had to get out in the world by myself. My house was coming along, but I knew if I wanted to keep a steady job, I had to find something steady, because musicians were walking around with their horns with no place to play. I said to myself that if I ever got a place, I was going to make it home. At that time, while I was looking around, I read about Albert Schweitzer, who gave up everything to go to Africa because he was disillusioned about the way the white man had treated the black man! It had a profound influence on me because it made me think that if I was going to be a musician, I had to love everybody!”

Soon Nicholas got what was to become one of the most famous jobs in the history of New York jazz – he became featured performer and booking agent for the Paradise Club on 110th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was 1950 and the nightclub scene in Harlem had atrophied; there was no room available to the wide cross section of musicians and entertainers who had long given Harlem its legendary position in music, dance, singing and comedy. Under the influence of the tenor saxophonist, the Paradise took up the slack left I the wake of many clubs closing because of what Ebony Magazine described as “rocketing costs and the cabaret tax.” Nicholas would walk outside the club and beckon customers with his big sound. The open atmosphere quickly caught on, the audience was a democratic as imaginable – entertainers, writers, Europeans, and Harlem residents that stretched every class.

“Oh it was wonderful,” recalls Nicholas. “Billie Holiday would come in there with Louis McKay. Baby Lawrence would dance all night. I hired Betty Carter for eight months, Monk got a lot of the Monday night gigs. All kinds of people were there. You’d see actors like James Edwards and William Marshall. Langston Hughes was a regular. We had comedians, shake dancers, and every kind of music that sounded good. Like I was saying, I wanted to treat everybody with respect. If you were good, you were welcome at the Paradise.

“I remember Charlie Parker sitting outside the club one summer on his saxophone case. He was there all the time, I showed him tunes like “Just Friends”, “The Song is You”, and things like that. One time he said ‘Nick, you care if I go downtown and record those songs you showed me?’ I told him to go ahead. Yes, the Paradise was wonderful. Since then, I’ve just been out here on my own, working, trying to play the prettiest notes I can find.”

On this album, with his massive legato attack, Nicholas finds more than a few attractive notes, gliding over the beat in a manner reminiscent of a worn ocean liner floating through as mist. I find it especially effective how he can move from the satire of “Corrina” to the barnacled nobility of his “I’m All smiles”, a performance as rich in heroic affection as one is liable to hear in any form or style of contemporary music. The determination to rise above melancholy and defeat is exceptional, as are the tenderness and revelation that he brings to “ You’re My Thrill”. I doubt that there are many male singers who could achieve what Nicholas does there, a performance of such willful romance and desire that avoids sentimentality by no more than an artistic millimeter. In all, if only for those three selections, this is a recording that you will find turning on your musical spinning wheel quite often. As I said earlier, Big Nick Nicholas is one of the great craftsmen and showmen in the art and tradition of good time jazz. This album is an easy justification for that statement and, as such, is an event.

Stanley Crouch

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Liner notes for “Big Nick” An LP

The musicians who resound through time are those with presence. It’s a quality that transcends styles and dates of birth. Olu Dara has it, and so does Doc Cheatham. It doesn’t depend on the size of the player’s sound. Both Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had it. Presence does depend on the size of the musician’s spirit.

Some forty years ago, in a Boston club, I heard a tenor saxophonist whom musicians had been telling me about for some time. His name was George Nicholas, but everybody called him Big Nick. He played with a lot of authority, but what stayed in my mind was the warmth of his sound, the warmth of the man. Around that time I was spending many nights listening to Henry “Red” Allen at the Savoy in Boston; and he and Big Nick had a deep common bond. Not in terms of their styles, but rather the openness of both men to their own feelings. That’s what gave both such presence.

In the years after, Nick became a legend among musicians. Charlie Parker had learned tunes from Nick, and what to do inside those tunes. John Coltrane was another careful listener, and wrote a son, “Big Nick “, for him. But being an inside legend doesn’t always pay the rent. Nick worked, but seldom in the big leagues where he belonged. And strangest of all the curves in his career was the fact that he never had an album as a leader.

Now, if you look at any reasonably complete jazz discography, you will find a rather sizeable list of players with albums as leaders who, while assuredly are nice folks, are ephemeral musicians. Yet Big Nick, who is as durable as they come, was passed over. Until Bob Cummins, who has made India Navigation an especially valuable label, issued “Big Nick Nicholas / Big and Warm”.

The set got considerable attention. The enthusiastic consensus of the reviews can be summarized be the coda of Francis Davis’ account of the set in the Boston Phoenix: “Musicians have raved about Nicholas for so long, with so little record evidence to back up their claims, that those of us who live outside New York have had little way of determining whether he was indeed a living legend or just another of the tall tales that musicians delight in spinning to remind critics and fans that the essence of jazz is rarely captured in the grooves of records. We’ll never know what part exaggeration played in the legends of Buddy Bolden and Buddie Petit, but “Big and Warm” proclaims that Big Nick Nicholas is no myth.”

And to underscore the resonant fact that the reality of Big Nick lives up to the bardic tales of his power, here is a second Big Nick album.

The opening “Body and Soul” illustrates on of Big Nick’s presence. The tune, Lord know, has been played at least as often as “Hail To The Chief” (but in more humane surroundings). So a player who is going to record the tune yet again had better have something very much of his own to say about what therapists call relationships and what Jimmy Rushing called “the most of all music: he-she songs”. Nick, who has seen so much and heard so much and transmuted so much into his music during all these years, put all that experience into a meditative, compelling lyrical “Body and Soul” that he has indeed made his own.

“Somewhere” is from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and as played by Nick, it’s a further revelation of how passionate he is about his vocation. All of his art – the sound, the phrasing, the intimacy with time – is devoted, as Stanley Crouch said in the notes to Nick’s first album, “to make you feel better after hearing him than you did when you began listening”.

“Big Nick” was written for and about Nick by John Coltrane, and Nick plays it here in honor of Trane. “John,” Nick recalls, “was interested in my conception, and I showed him some things. As I did Bird, I showed some changes and how certain kinds of repertory can bring differences in how you sound. Actually what I taught was that the whole thing is the way you hear.”

That reminded me of what Duke Ellington told me once: “You know what I look for in a musician? Someone who knows how to listen.”

Nick heard “Down Home Blues” as sung by Denise LaSalle, a powerful singer – somewhat like Lil Green, he says- who works the South and sells a lot of records there. “She’s got a lowdown sound” Nick says. “She has that Mississippi twang. All them girls, they know. They’ve been through the whole thing.” And, as you can hear from Nick’s vocal, as well as his horn, so has Nick.

“Reverend John Gensel” is the minister of the jazz community. He’s based at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, but his availability extends ecumenically anywhere a jazz musician has need of him. He marries them, buries them, and is a friend, a close friend, of more jazz players than any non-jazz musician has ever been. Gensel is astoundingly unpretentious, not in the least self-righteous, has a gentle but perceptive wit, and all in all, is almost too good to be true. But he is true.

Big Nick wrote this song for the pastor “because he has dedicated his life to music and to musicians. And he has done several things for me. He is so honest. So up front. If only all people connected with our music were like him.”

“A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing” is Billy Strayhorn’s. Strayhorn, as every school child should know, but doesn’t, was a long-time associate of Duke Ellington as arranger, co-composer, and creative listener. When Big Nick was the leader of the band, master of ceremonies and booker of the Paradise Club in Harlem in the early 1950’s, Strayhorn lived up the street from the club. “He’s bring people from all over the world into the Paradise,” says Nick, “Swea’ Pea liked the way I played and sometimes, when he was feeling good, he’d play piano there.”

“He used to give me advice. He’d say ‘ Nick, don’t do nothing but be yourself.”

The preceding “Two For The Road” and the succeeding “I’m Pulling Through” show additional ways in which Nick “speaks” through his horn. As Eric Snider wrote, in reviewing the first album for “Music Magazine”, “Nick spends more energy finding the right notes than cramming in as many as he can.” The reason for that is that he’s not just playing notes. He’s telling stories, real-life stories.

“Reincarnation of Sonny Clarke” came to Nick’s attention when he was in New Orleans with the Marsalis family ( Ellis, Wynton, et. al). “We did a concert, and a pianist, Mike Pellera, was also on it. He’s an admirer of Sonny Clarke, and he wrote and dedicated this song to Sonny in order to remind people how great he was.”

Working with Nick in this set is a consistently resilient, attentive, and anticipatory rhythm section. John Miller is described by Nick as “a great musician and a fine human being. He was Stanley Turrentine’s musical director for twelve years, and he often works with me.”

If I were putting together a television program on the challenge and great pleasures of jazz drumming, I’d make sure he Billy Hart had a featured place in it. He is an instructive, subtle delight to watch, as well as to hear.

“I first worked with Billy Hart at a fund raiser for a jazz radio station WGBO,” Nick says. “There was no rehearsal. He walked in cold and fitted right in. He’s a natural.”

Nick met bassist Dave Jackson a couple of years ago and was struck by “his musicianship, his dedication, and the fact hat he’s a gentleman.”

In directing this album, Nick adds, “before each tune, I’d explain what it was all about. And if it was a ballad, I’d read out the lyrics.” It’s all part of making the story clear and meaningful to the musicians and thereby to the listeners. That’s Big Nick’s passion. Or, as he puts it:

“At the last count, there were 6 billion people in the world and I would like o reach as many as I can with a big, deep and warm sound.”

Nat Hentoff