Review of Craig Davis’s “Tone Paintings: The Music of Dodo Marmarosa”
Craig Davis pays expert tribute to his fellow Pittsburghian, Dodo Marmarosa, with 10 covers showing a representative range of the bebop composer/pianist’s catchy and urbane compositions.
Tone Paintings: The Music of Dodo Marmarosa, Craig Davis (MCG Jazz) does two things, and does them both well: it provides an excuse to revisit some wonderful compositions by the overlooked Michael “Dodo” Marmarosa, and it delivers a warm program of first-rate piano trio jazz from an up-and-coming musician paired with two established masters.
Marmarosa was based in California rather than New York, which is how he might have missed his opportunity to become one of the formative bebop pianists on par with Bud Powell. You can hear him with Charlie Parker on some of the Dial recordings from Los Angeles that rank among Bird’s very best. Marmarosa was a big band veteran while still in his 20s, putting in long tours with the Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, and Artie Shaw orchestras. Still, Marmarosa had a difficult time as a professional musician. From being mocked for his appearance (hence the name “Dodo”), to divorce, being blocked from his children, illness, getting drafted (which didn’t stop him from being beaten into a coma by sailors who accused him of being a draft dodger), and increasingly severe mental health difficulties, Marmarosa became an elusive figure. He left the music scene in 1963, moved to Pittsburgh, became a recluse, and rarely played after the early ’70s.
Craig Davis pays tribute to his fellow Pittsburghian with 10 covers that display representative range of Marmarosa’s catchy and urbane compositions. Marmarosa brought touches of the big band era’s swing and stride elements to his bebop compositions, smoothing them out in ways that look ahead to the more conventionally graceful compositional style of Horace Silver or Vince Guaraldi. Davis is a fine match for these compositions, favoring the middle register and simpler lyrical solos over displays of knuckle-busting chops. Davis offers assured, confident playing without being the least bit intimidated by his galaxy-class rhythm section partners of John Clayton on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums. These longstanding musical partners are simply the gold standard for steady, mature jazz. Even Hamilton’s drum solos are lyrical. There are few surprises, but it’s richly recorded and enthusiastically performed, and it of course it swings flawlessly.
Davis, a graduate of Indiana University-Bloomington’s and the Manhattan School of Music’s notable jazz programs who went on to play with the Artie Shaw ghost band, has a lighter style than Marmarosa. Davis’s style is more uniform, smoothing out the rough edges but never veering into easy listening territory. He can stretch out the groove with delayed triplets like Erroll Garner on “Dodo’s Blues,” or he can gently place notes on a pillow of impressionistic chords in the classically influenced “Tone Paintings 1.” His sense of time and phrasing is flexible but always precise, and he swings at various tempos from the upbeat “Ballad of the Balcony Jive” to the melancholy “Dodo’s Lament.”
Tone Paintings makes a strong case for these compositions, and the pianist playing them, to be much more widely known.
