Search - Red Norvo :: Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus: The Savoy Sessions

It took a very rare musical mind to successfully adapt the xylophone and marimba to jazz improvisation, as Norvo did in the 1930s. The same grasp of fresh possibilities was at work when he formed this trio, in 1950, with two of the finest young musicians then playing bop. With the instrumentation of Norvo's vibraphone, Tal Farlow's electric guitar, and Charles Mingus's already virtuosic bass, there's an almost absolute equivalence of parts. The three go beyond their obvious gifts as soloists to create seamlessly flowing counterpoint and richly detailed collective improvisations that live at the edges of every jazz form, from swing to bop to cool, and at the heart of the idea of jazz itself. This group represents one of the key events in the development of chamber jazz, a brilliant evolution of the Benny Goodman trio and a significant precursor of such groups as the Modern Jazz Quartet and Jimmy Giuffre's many trios. --Stuart Broomer