Shock Treatment: Liner Notes

[liner notes are for educational use only]

Since I've enjoyed a long association with Don Ellis' music and its preservation over the years, it's a great pleasure for me to provide the following notes for what Koch Jazz and I hope is the final word on this album's very confusing history.

John Magruder's composition Zim is here twice. Track 5 is the version featuring the composer on baritone [saxophone]. The original liner notes referred to this version, which was actually not on the album. The version on track 12 features Don instead. This was the version released on the album's first pressing. Neither version made it to subsequent pressings. John utilizes a voicing technique that de-clusters cluster chords - still harmonically rich, but with a bigger, more open sound. He says the title carries no special significance and is just a casually made-up word. Dr. Suess lives!

From several people outside the band and in, came the observation that as exciting as the concerts were, it was also intense and draining for listeners. Several contributing composers, including Hank Levy, felt the audience needed some variety and a lighter tone to break up the band's largely dense material. Even though Howlett Smith did not write Seven Up specifically for this purpose, the piece comfortably assumes the role of a respite. Arranged by Joe Roccisano, the instantly whistleable tune with its flutes and muted trumpets sounds like it could be the theme to a 1960's sitcom.

Don often encouraged his musicians to contribute their own compositions and arrangements for the band. There was one caveat: tunes could not be in 4/4! Despite this directive, the common time signature sometimes sneaked its way into the band's book - sometimes even via Don himself! Terry Woodson's arrangement of I Remember Clifford and Don's own Rasty are two instances.

One of Don's avowed influences as a trumpeter was Clifford Brown. Terry's arrangement (which the band often played) allowed Don the opportunity to acknowledge and pay tribute, in a personal way, to that great musician gone too soon. It's a testament to how strongly Don felt that not only is the arrangement metrically dissimilar to what the band usually played, but it's also more traditional in every way. For a striking example of the different approaches to a standard, compare this track with Don's arrangement of Angel Eyes on the Live in 3 2/3 /4 Time recording.

Rasty is a simple up-tempo blues chart with a boogaloo feel. (The score indicates "funk". Hmmm...) It features Ron Starr's tenor sax as well as the ensemble in call-and-response and full shout modes. If the early clavinet and Fender bass (probably its first recorded use in the band) and quaint groove give the chart a dated sound - oh, let's face it, they do - an occasional dollop of kitsch is exactly what's required to remember what it was like to feel "groovy." The tune fits with the beginning of the band's transition to more youth-oriented material. Astute followers of Don's music will notice some figures and ideas that he used for later compositions. Finally, there is a notation in the score under the first occurrence of the melody: "Rasty as hog's toes." How could we leave it out?

I would like to thank personally all the musicians that I spoke with in my research. All the bonus material presented here would have remained unknown without their memories and help. Also, my thanks, as I'm sure those of many others, to Donald Elfman of Koch Jazz for investing their resources, interest and courage into helping reawaken interest in Don Ellis as a performer and composer... and for wanting to do the job right. It is my sincere hope that this reissue is the start of true acknowledgement of a great musician. Maybe Shock Treatment is just what the doctor ordered.

-Nick Di Scala
Editor, Don Ellis Critical Editions

The following are the liner notes for the original release of "Shock Treatment."

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), creator of "Theatre of Cruelty," describes in a startling passage from his memoirs the strange sensations of therapeutic electric shock treatment experiences as a person in a French insane asylum. At the moment when current surged through his body strapped upon a table, Artaud recalls his psychological release to a whole new orientation toward his existence, as though his point of view was fixed at a spot in the ceiling looking down at himself. This new way of perceiving reality became a poetic, as well as philosophical insight to Artaud, and his elaborations of this new orientation produced revolutionary echoes throughout the world of theater.

With Don Ellis, the mode is also electrical - strictly through amplifiers - and musically speaking, his sonic shock treatment is a whole new way of looking at (and listening to) things. But the rhythmic and harmonic innovations of Don's 21-piece orchestra are far from being a jazz "Theater of Cruelty." What he's got, if you can believe his enthusiastic following, is an Aural Garden of Earthly Delights.

In this album, Don has found his groove in a recording studio, and he transmits that in-person spark with assurance. The band has moved out of the happy confines of jazz clubs and into the gyrating scene of rock 'n' roll ballrooms. At the Cheetah, the Kaleidoscope, or the Carousel, kids are dancing frantically under stroboscopic lights to the big electric sounds of a jazz orchestra. Only get this: They're dancing in 7/4! It's like a sociologist's dream come true to see a big band back on the site of the Moulin Rouge (Kaleidoscope) or the Aragon (Cheetah), where the sons and daughters of Depression Era parents are reenacting those scenes from Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

While Simon and Garfunkel were listening to the recording session for SHOCK TREATMENT, Paul Simon remarked that one reason the Don Ellis band is gaining popularity is that, like the best rock groups, the Ellis band is speaking out with a musically individual voice. Nat Hentoff once said the same thing when he commented that "Don Ellis is beyond category." It seems strange to recall that just a few years ago, Don was considered some kind of a Third Stream weirdo, playing crazy tempos no one could comprehend with his Hindustani Jazz Sextet. Now the experimentalism and individualism has paid off. Not only has the orchestra succeeded under its own terms, but it has been embraced by the modern music scene. (For example, recently Don played on "rock-group" recording dates for both the United States of America and the Mothers of Invention.")

"Music, like any art, hits you on the emotional level before you dissect it analytically," says Don. "A lot of people relate to the 'sense of life' in our music. I just see it as a new way of swinging."

A new way of swinging, indeed. Take the science fiction sounds of Star Children, for example. The distant moon music murmurings of the chorus, singing in shifting tempos, provide a unique setting for Don's trumpet which breaks over the low rumple of brasses. The use of chordal elements is a page out of Penderecki and Ray Bradbury, both at the same time. The lyrics by Bill McFadden to Night City add yet another dimension to the sound of orchestra combined with chorus.

Daylight closes its eyes
a city replies,
lighting the skies.
This night-life is opening
Your senses will once again rise.
Hear subways roar,
trumpets soaring;
Glasses jingle through an all-night door
And a shadow plays
and the moment stays.
Faces sing, faces frown,
Words are washed, tastes of sound.
Listen, nigh-life, this is real!
The night is on fire,
It's capturing me;
A city's Messiah that sets me free;
And flashes of night lights crash through
the grey,
Bringing life to the day.

The saxophone section can also be heard playing in octaves with themselves by means of a special electronic device called the Conn Multivider which adds an octave below to their soli lines.

Probably the most obviously experimental composition in this album in The Tihai, inspired by Don's association with Harihar Rao, Ravi Shankar's longtime musical colleague. The title is an Indian word which describes a thrice-repeated phrase, rhythmically played in a manner completing the last note of the phrase on the first beat of a new measure. (In this case, the phrase which can be heard particularly in the trumpets behind the tenor solo is played over four bars of 7/4.) When you've figured that one out, listen closely to the finger-snapping at the opening of the tune: although the 7/4 is divided 2-3-2, the snapping accents 2, 3 1/2, 5, and 7. The chanting in the middle of the tune is Don and the band repeating the tihai, utilizing Hindu phrases known as "boles" to articulate the drum rhythms.

But fun-and-games with counting aside, The Tihai generates a terrific series of musical cross-currents which explodes most impressively in the wailing solo work on this cut. Ron Starr on tenor leaps out for the first angular flight in the midst of the rhythmic polyphony and is followed by Mike Lang on piano who plays boogie-woogie phrases against a jagged Latin line in the left hand and comes out swinging. Don complements his work on wa-wa mute throughout this tune with an open trumpet solo which climbs to a shrieking, siren-like climax.

One of Don's finest solo outings, however, is on Homecoming, a soulful blues in 3/4, which a little help from his friends on flügelhorn. Ron Starr roars in with genuine ease on the Hank Levy composition A New Kind of Country and tears up that 7/4 (divided in a fast 2-2-3) beautifully right through to his brief cadenza passage at the end. Here, too, the orchestra demonstrates its facility with ensemble work in unusual time signatures even at up-tempos.

Milo's Theme represents a real innovation for the band: a tune in 4/4. ("That's 5/4 minus one," as Don explains it.) The electronic voicing in this particular piece lends that outer space quality to the flutes being played through amplifiers with both reverb and tremolo against Mike Lang's clavinet. After what sounds like a bow in the direction of Claude Thornhill in the arranging, Don plunges into an eerie trumpet solo played first through the Conn Multivider, then with loop delay, and finally an over-dub of open trumpet softly in the background, creating a gossamer web of solo sound. John Magruder's Zim, featuring the composer on baritone sax, is written in 13 (3-3-2-2-3) and is a neat juxtaposition of melodic and rhythmic structure. The brass hit some especially effective rhythmic accent figures in this one.

Beat Me Daddy, Seven to the Bar (divided 3-2-2) opens with a cooking trumpet introduction by Don, which builds to rocking ensemble work. John Magruder on baritone, Mike Lang on piano, and Ron Starr on tenor all have some healthy solo space, but the crowning bit on this composition (and one of the best moments on the album) is the drum duet between Steve Bohannon with sticks and Chino Valdes on congas and bongos. They begin by trading fours, then twos, then half-bars.

As if to top off a perfect session, the band recorded Opus 5 in an unheard-of single take. Deciding they liked it exactly this way, as well they should, they left it without a change. The composer of Opus 5, Howlett Smith, is a blind pianist who was in Don's UCLA extension course in arranging. And, to add another first, this impressive piece, enhanced particularly by solo passages by Mike Lang and Don, is Mr. Smith's first big band arrangement.

All in all, this is a welcome step forward for the Don Ellis orchestra and a collection of music worth careful contemporary scrutiny. As mentioned on "Electric Bath", this is the best sound modern music has to offer and a welcome revitalizing of a jazz genre. Lovers of the big band sound have suffered for a long time with the Lombardo-Welk schlock treatment; it's high time we had some SHOCK TREATMENT.

-Original liner notes by Digby Diehl
(former West Coast editor of EYE
Magazine and contributor to the New York
Times, The Los Angeles Times, and
various other publications.)