The “they” in Terry Gibbs comments above were the New York Jazz critics who, for the most part, were very dismissive of Phineas Newborn Jr. “I remember when he showed up in New York in the early 1950s. Terry Gibbs, Jazz vibraphonist and bandleader They ruined him by making it hard for him because they said he was the new Art Tatum and nobody was Art Tatum but Art Tatum. George Wein, the impresario who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, wrote these thoughts about Phineas and his music in 1956 as the liner notes to Phineas’ first album for Atlantic Records Here is Phineas. He is a moving, swinging, pianistically perfect gas.” Today, bearing in mind that Bernard Peiffer is French and Oscar Peterson Canadian, it would not be extravagant to claim that Phineas has no equal among American jazz pianists, from any standpoint, technical or esthetic. During that time, too, the technique has taken on even more astonishing means to accomplish even more incredible ends - witness one ploy that is uniquely remarkable: the ad lib use of galvanic lines played by both hands two octaves apart. Nat Hentoff, in the notes for Maggie's Back in Town, pointed out that Phineas has "harnessed his prodigious technique during the past couple of years into more emotionally meaningful directions!" True, though conservative I would lengthen the harness to four or five years. Phineas has been in similar trouble, and not because of any lack in his ability to transmit emotion but possibly, I suspect, because of the listeners' reluctance or inability to receive it. Buddy De Franco, of course, has been a consistent victim. The automatic-reflex reaction is: yes, all the notes are there and all the fingers are flying, but what is he really saying? What about the emotional communication?Īrt Tatum at the apex of his creative powers suffered this kind of treatment at the hands of a not inconsiderable proportion of the critics. “There has always been a tendency among music experts, and by no means only in jazz, to harbor misgivings about technical perfection.
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