Art Farmer (1928-99) was one of a number of great trumpeters who emerged in jazz during the 1950s. By the time he switched exclusively to flugelhorn in the early sixties, he had already become known for what journalist Leonard Feather described as “a style of rare lyricism” and a player whose “solos invariably show[ed] a superb sense of construction.”
Farmer performed and recorded prolifically – on his own and with others (particularly European orchestras) – during his five-decade career. And while some of those recordings are better known than others, Farmer’s performances were always just as invariably superb.
In Farmer’s discography, Last Night When We Were Young, from 1957, barely registers as a blip or even a footnote. When it first appeared in August 1957, it stirred no attention among the music press or record buyers. Indeed, most discographies neglect to list the record among Farmer’s many other releases.
But it’s a real beauty and one that deserves some measure of recognition.
The project was supposedly Farmer’s idea. “The time arrived,” wrote the ever-disapproving Nat Hentoff, in this album’s reproachful liner notes, “when Art felt the need to communicate, if he could, to a wider audience than the jazz-oriented alone.”
Farmer proposed the project to the ambitious, yet open-minded ABC-Paramount producer Creed Taylor (1929-2022), who seemingly had no hesitation. It was one of the first times the producer – famed (and often reviled) for later setting guitarist Wes Montgomery, and others, afloat on a sea of strings – worked in the soloist-with-strings format.
Quincy Jones (1933-2024) was brought in to handle the charts. Farmer and Jones were friends and former bandmates – along with trumpeter Clifford Brown (1930-56) – in Lionel Hampton’s orchestra in the early fifties.
The two would go on to record Quincy Jones Swedish-American All Stars (1953), Farmer’s Work of Art (10” in 1953, LP in 1956), Clifford Brown-Art Farmer Swedish All Stars (1954), and Jones’ own debut LP, This is How I Feel About Jazz (1957, also produced by Creed Taylor).
Farmer had also previously factored on such Creed Taylor productions as The Oscar Pettiford Orchestra in Hi-Fi (1956) and percussionist Candido’s The Volcanic (1957), while Q had arranged such Taylor productions as Don Elliott’s A Musical Offering (1956) and Billy Taylor’s My Fair Lady Loves Jazz (1957).
The models for Last Night When We Were Young appear to have been a mad mix of the incredibly successful Jackie Gleason “mood music” records on Capitol in the mid-fifties (with Glenn Miller veteran Bobby Hackett blowing beautifully on cornet) and the venerated 1955 classic Clifford Brown with Strings (arranged by the inimitable Neal Hefti).
Quincy Jones’ strings here, however, are nothing like the lush, if not gregarious, soundscapes present on the Gleason records.
“Art,” according to Quincy Jones (whose string charts are always something this particular listener admires), “wanted to be treated as if he were a vocalist. The strings were intended to complement him, and were not to be obtrusive.”
And, indeed, they are not. Jones’ arrangements serve more, as he puts it, as “a cushion” than as sweetening, allowing Farmer to “vocalize” his part on trumpet.
Detractors of Taylor’s later “with strings” records, particularly those by Montogomery, will not appreciate that Farmer sticks primarily to the melody throughout, with only sporadic and brief interjections of improvisation. But that’s precisely Farmer’s point here: He wants to express himself through the melody rather than using the tune as a launchpad for showy blowing.
II.
The nine-song program amounts to about 31 minutes of music (two tracks from the sessions, ”Lazy Afternoon” and “Better Luck Next Time,” were left off the record and never released). It is likely that all the selections were mostly chosen by Farmer and Jones, as producer Taylor was likely not yet comfortable calling out specific tunes.
The by-then moderately familiar selections date mostly from the thirties and the forties, with “Someone to Watch Over Me” dating from 1926 (although Frank Sinatra’s slower take of the tune in 1946 set the standard for subsequent recordings) and “When I Fall in Love” from 1952, which Nat King Cole made famous in 1956. (Fellow trumpeter Miles Davis also recorded his version of “When I Fall in Love” in 1956, but his version wasn’t released until 1961.)
In addition to Jones’ strings, flutes and French horn, Farmer is accompanied here by Hank Jones on piano, Barry Galbraith or Thomas Kay on guitar, brother Addison Farmer on bass and Sol Gubin or Osie Johnson on drums. But the sterling rhythm section here is often barely perceptible. The strings are in charge throughout.
With most songs here in the three-to-four-minute range, there really isn’t a lot of room for improvisation. Farmer takes several brief solos, but just as a singer might, he hues close to the melody.
The largely laid-back set is at its best when Jones energizes the chart with a little bit of a jazz pizazz, as he does on “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “I Concentrate on You,” and “Out of This World,” the last of which Art is nicely muted (closely mirroring his more well-known flugelhorn sound).
Farmer, of course, dominates throughout, although pianist Hank Jones takes (very) brief, but pretty solos on “Ill Wind,” “Last Night,” “When I Fall in Love,” and “What’s Good About Goodbye,” while guitarist Barry Galbraith – in his only appearance in the spotlight – helps to introduce “When I Fall in Love.”
The record was clearly designed, as Quincy Jones put it, to get “a lot of people to come into jazz who wouldn’t ordinarily.” That’s likely why Creed Taylor agreed to produce it in the first place. But it didn’t connect with anyone – in jazz or out.
Nat Hentoff, for his part, had already damned the record with the faint poison of his liner notes, when he wrote, “I will not tell you I find these strings my cup of Jack Daniels. I sometimes react to them, in fact, as I might to hemlock.” To Hentoff’s point, though, the strings aren’t nearly as elevating as those Jones would later write for such leaders as Milt Jackson, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington Frank Sinatra/Count Basie, and Sarah Vaughan. But hemlock? No.
III.
In one of the album’s only notices, the music-industry trade paper Cash Box wrote in its August 31, 1957, issue, “Trumpeter Farmer solos, with the backing of a rich, stringy dominated ork conducted by Quincy Jones, and the outcome is that current trend of the jazzist adding jazz depth to the usually saccharine mood product. The artist keeps in close touch with melodic line, straying nicely while still holding on the wistful quality of the evergreens (“Someone To Watch Over Me,” “What’s Good About Goodbye?,” and “I Concentrate on You”). Solid jazz-mood item.” It wasn’t enough, unfortunately, to convince anyone to hear it out.
Right after completing work on Last Night, Quincy Jones departed for an 18-month stint serving as musical director, arranger and director for the Barclay Records label in Paris – where he would also study under the great Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). Farmer, for his part, was whisked off by Nat Hentoff to Contemporary Records to wax Portrait of Art Farmer (1958), a quartet album more to Hentoff’s liking, with drummer Roy Haynes and Last Night’s Hank Jones and Addison Farmer.
Farmer’s only other discs “with strings” include 1972’s Gentle Eyes (recorded in Vienna and arranged by Hans Salomon), Maiden Voyage and the Japan-only Ambrosia (both 1983 and arranged by Masahiko Satoh).
Quincy Jones would go on to even greater successes thereafter, reuniting with producer Creed Taylor for two monumental LPs, Walking in Space (1969) and Gula Matari (1970). While Art Farmer, who moved to Vienna in the early seventies, would come to Taylor’s CTI label in 1977 for four albums (one released only in Japan) over the next several years. None of these feature strings.
In getting whatever little due it might be deserving, Last Night When We Were Young was finally issued on CD in 2007 by the Spanish Lonehill Jazz label, with all four tracks from the previously-noted 1953 10-inch Quincy Jones Swedish-American All Stars (all with considerably more jazz content) added as “bonus tracks.”
Those tracks feature Farmer with Jimmy Cleveland and Åke Persson on trombone, Arne Domnérus on clarinet and alto sax, Lars Gullin on baritone sax, Bengt Hallberg on piano, Simon Brahm on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums.
As one of producer Creed Taylor’s earliest forays into a sort of “crossover music” – in this case easy-listening (to be fair, a sizable audience at the time) – the experiment that was Last Night When We Were Young resulted in an undeniable failure. To these ears, too much jazz was sacrificed along the way.
But the producer learned from his mistakes and continued to hone his skills, and in only five short years later, Taylor would oversee a little record auspiciously titled Jazz Samba (by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd) that not only caught the attention of easy-listening audiences, but the pop music market and the entire world at large.
And there was more – much more – to come after that.
About the Cover: Admittedly, my initial attraction to Last Night When We Were Young was the LP’s cover. The evocative photograph, paired with the elegant cursive script, suggests something lush, lovely and luxurious about the music. The artistry of the jacket – produced on laminated heavy card stock – even merited its creators’ rare front-cover credit.
Both the photographer Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) and designer Fran Scott (1929-2022), who designed many of the ABC-Paramount covers at the time, are each given front-cover credit (on the original ABC-Paramount LP) for their work here, underscoring this record’s understanding of itself – in one of producer Creed Taylor’s earliest examples of this – as a proposed “work of art.”
DeCarava, who came of age during the Harlem renaissance, used his camera to capture everyday black life in Harlem. Initially, he had only used his camera to inform his paintings. But by the mid-forties, he switched to photography exclusively.
He was best known best known for his black and white photographs of everyday life in New York City, particularly in his native Harlem. DeCarava was known especially for only working with natural lighting, eschewing models, studio photography and unnatural lighting effects (the polar opposite of the work later Creed Taylor photographer Pete Turner would be known for).
In 1956, DeCarava began work on a project he called “The Sound I Saw,” which was finally exhibited at Harlem’s Studio Museum in 1983 and published as a book in 2001. In the meantime, DeCarava also photographed such titans as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Billie Holiday at work. This led to work in the record industry, which published most of his only work in color.
DeCarava would provide the stunning photographs on the covers of Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (1957) and Ellington Indigos (1958) and the memorable image on Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess (1959).
For the gorgeous image on the cover of Last Night When We Were Young, DeCarava likely stood in an elevated interior room or shaded balcony (probably somewhere in Harlem) to take this evocative shot of a couple dancing alone in an ornate red-brick plaza.
There is a sense, though, that DeCarava did a bit of alteration work here. It appears that he deliberately underexposed the negative, as if to drain much of the color out of the image. Therefore, there is no way to acquire a copy of this disc where the color “pops.” Still, a certain warmth and sincerity remains in the cover’s intentionally romanticized image.
“I’m not a documentarian,” DeCarava, who grew up during the Harlem renaissance, famously said of his work, “I never have been. I think of myself as poetic, a maker of visions, dreams, and a few nightmares.” Regardless, it is a gorgeous image that beautifully recalls the past without promoting its superiority.
DeCarava would go on to reunite with Creed Taylor for Bill Evans’ Conversations with Myself (1963), Jimmy Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1964).