Buddy DeFranco - Tommy Gumina Quartet

© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“This album  marks the inauguration of what may become an important alliance in modem music. Though individually known for years to wide but disparate audiences, Tommy Gumina and Buddy De Franco might have seemed, to the average observer, a most improbable pair of subjects for the kind of close musical cooperation that can be observed in these sides. Actually their teaming was the result of a lucky accident, combined with one very important factor: the decision of Decca's Sonny Burke that Gumina and De Franco ought to be heard together on an LP

"The way I met Tommy," Buddy recalls, "you would never have dreamed that we'd have wound up with a group of our own. What happened was that one day I needed a piano player for a gig. I had Frank DeVito booked on drums and he asked me whether I could use an accordion player instead. My immediate reaction was: 'Not on your life!'. But when Frank explained that this was not just another accordion player— this was something else. And it didn't take me long to find out how right he was.

"After recording my composition King Philip with Les Brown for Decca, I had talked to sonny Burke about doing a date of my own. He already had Tommy under contract, so the suggestion that we do something together was very logical from his point of view. By that time there was a real musical marriage between Tommy and me. We got a job together at Ben Pollack's on Sunset, more or less as a place to break in some of the material we wanted to work out together for the album. What you hear on these sides is largely what we were working out on that job."

- Leonard Feather, original liner notes to the Decca Album Pacific Standard (Swingin’) Time, [DL 74031 Stereo]

I met Jack Tracy, the esteemed former editor of Downbeat Magazine and long-time Jazz record producer very late in life and quite by accident.

Initially, my contact with him was through an internet chat group that focused on the West Coast Style of Jazz that predominated in California from about 1945-65.

We later met in person at a number of the biannual 4-day Jazz festivals sponsored by the Los Angeles Jazz Institute.

He was a great supporter of this blog and an earlier contributor to it as a guest writer.

Jack was from the Minneapolis St-Paul area and moved to Chicago during his tenure as Downbeat’s editor in the 1950s. He started producing Jazz records for the Chess label based in the Windy City before Mercury Records, at the urging of Quincy Jones, convinced him to relocate to Hollywood, CA in 1961 to become their resident producer of Jazz recordings on the West Coast. Artists he worked with included Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Del Close, Harry Nilsson, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Terry Gibbs

Jack always maintained that one of the greatest results from “that move West was getting to produce a number of albums by the Buddy DeFranco - Tommy Gumina Quartet. I just loved that group. The musicianship was something else.”

We recently ran across some memorabilia associated with Jack that reminded us of about the DeFranco-Gumina Quartet recordings and we thought it might be fun to develop this feature about them for the blog.

Prior to the association with Mercury, the group recorded one LP for Decca Records - Pacific Standard (Swinging’!) Time: The Buddy DeFranco Tommy Gumina Quartet [DL 740331] and Jordi Pujol provided these insert notes for its reissue as a Fresh Sound CD along with the first Mercury LP - Presenting the Buddy DeFranco Tommy Gumina Quartet [MG 20685].