The Story Of Madd For Tadd

by Lloyd Sachs

If the Guinness Book of World Records recognized such achievements, Kent Engelhardt would surely deserve recognition for his epic undertaking: transcribing, editing, and notating all of the legendary Tadd Dameron’s compositions. Not only well-known, frequently performed bebop anthems like “Hot House” and “Good Bait,” but also more obscure tunes like “Handy Andy (aka Gnid)” and “Super Jet.”

Not content with getting his arrangements down on paper, Engelhardt, Professor and Coordinator of Jazz Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, formed a 15-piece band, Madd for Tadd, to record them. The ensemble’s first recording, The Magic Continues (2018), offers heady remakes of the songs from Dameron’s final album, The Magic Touch (1962), plus five other compositions. In 2017, MFT got to celebrate the centennial of Tadd Dameron’s birth by performing the magical tunes at the Tri-C JazzFest in Cleveland, the city in which he was born.  

Boosted by the positive response to that performance and their luminous recording (“If you love Tadd Dameron, this album is a must,” wrote blogger Marc Myers), MFT tripled their output with the new double-disc follow-up, Central Avenue Swing & Our Delight. It includes no less than 22 more freshly conceived treatments—half taken from material Dameron wrote in the early 1940s for Kansas City mainstays Harlan Leonard and his Rockets and half from various contributions to the bop-era playbooks of Billy Eckstine, John Coltrane, and Blue Mitchell. 

What makes MFT's recordings so special is the shared vision of Engelhardt and his musical partner Stephen Enos, trumpeter and founder of the Tri-C Jazz Studies Program at Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio. One of their missions was to convert Dameron’s small group recordings to a larger band treatments—Dameron’s preferred setting, but one he never got the chance to work in for most of his career because his forward-looking concepts didn’t mesh with existing trends. The Magic Touch was recorded by such an ensemble including Clark Terry, Bill Evans, Johnny Griffin, Ron Carter, and Philly Joe Jones.

For all the recordings, alto saxophonist Engelhardt and trumpeter Enos (who also conducted) recruited a handpicked ensemble of music educators from Ohio and Pennsylvania and other parts of the country. The stalwart musicians included pianist Phil DeGreg (Cincinnati), trumpeter Brad Goode (Denver), bassist Dave Morgan (Youngstown), trombonist Michael Dease (Michigan), and DIVA pianist Jackie Warren (Cleveland). 

“I’ve always wanted to put together this kind of band,” says Engelhardt, who also contributes original compositions to the mix. “A good number of us have played together a lot over the years. I mean, the rhythm section, we’ve all known each other for decades. As music educators, we were all familiar with the process of playing fresh material. We did many of the recordings in one take.”

Says Enos, “The challenge was carrying over Dameron’s concept to a large ensemble setting without losing the integrity and spirit of the small groups, and the improvisational component. The key was to try and hear what Tadd washat hearing at the piano and basing everything on that. The more time we spent with this music, the more we appreciated what a genius he was.” 

Engelhardt didn’t take the usual path to embracing Dameron. He was initially hooked not by the Tadd tunes made famous by bebop legends including Charlie Parker (on whom Engelhardt has written two books), Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, but by what proved to be the swan songs on The Magic Touch. This was back when he was in college, listening to a lot of records and trying to figure out how to write music.

“My schoolmate Dave Rivello [who now directs the New Jazz Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music], played me this recording of some Tadd Dameron stuff. There was just something so special about it. I wasn’t exactly sure why at the time. But I picked up a few recordings at a used record store and just fell in love with The Magic Touch. I wanted to learn everything I could learn about it, so I could have it become part of me.”

Engelhardt was hardly alone in taking his time gravitating toward Dameron’s utterly distinctive blend of lyrical jazz melodies and classical-shaped harmonies. “He had a profound gift of melody, like George Gershwin and Duke Ellington,” he says. “He created melodies that instantly stuck, but it took a while to figure out how and why. And his harmonic inventions brought colors to the music that just hadn’t been heard before, foreshadowing what was to come. And he was only 23 when he first made his mark!”

Engelhardt immersed himself in Dameron’s compositions as part of a research professorship at Youngstown State. “I’m a jazz detective,” he says. “My background is in ethnomusicology, so I know how to research, and how to create something new from my discoveries.” 

“I didn’t know if I was ever going to get to perform the music anywhere outside of Youngstown with my students. But Dave Morgan, my colleague at Youngstown, said why don’t you call Steve [Enos] and see if you can use Tri-C’s new recording studio. We hadn’t played together or done anything together for a long time, but we were good friends, so I pitched the idea to him and he just went head over heels. He said, man, we’ve got to do it! We’ve got to put together a band right now! Dameron’s centennial was coming up and we just had to perform his music in Cleveland to mark the occasion! That made me even more excited about what we were doing.”

The Magic Continues includes transcriptions and arrangements of 15 Dameron compositions including the enduring classic “If You Could See Me Now,” “Fontainbleau” and “Our Delight." Among the revelations on the new collection are "Lady Bird" based on the 1948 version that Dameron recorded with trumpeter Fats Navarro, and a second version of "Our Delight," that Dameron penned for Billy Eckstine.  “If you talk to a jazz trumpet player and you go, hey, do you know those Navarro recordings, they flip out. Those are the favorite recordings of jazz trumpet players all over the place. Everybody plays ‘Lady Bird,’ but Tadd never got to have it recorded by an ensemble that would bring out its harmonic genius.” Engelhardt not only arranged it for a larger band, but also wrote lyrics that are sung by Erin Kecknan, a much-admired Cleveland artist.

“Mating Call” and “Soultrane” are based on the versions Dameron recorded with John Coltrane for their 1957 recording. “A Blue Time” and “Smooth as the Wind” are from trumpet great Blue Mitchell's 1961 album, Smooth as the Wind—“all new music,” per Engelhardt, that Dameron arranged for French brass, strings and rhythm.

Kent Engelhardt was born on May 20,1963 in Youngstown, Ohio. His mother played piano and organ when she was younger. His father didn’t play but loved music and telling stories about going to dance halls and amusement parks to see the likes of Harry James (he was there the week that Frank Sinatra joined James’s band). Kent’s father had a small record collection, but one item, the EmArcy anthology Jazz of Two Decades, captured the fancy of his son, who started taking piano lessons at age six.

Motivated by the EmArcy collection of ’40s and ’50s recordings, Kent, who switched to saxophone during middle school, attended a Jamey Aebersold jazz camp, where he got to meet and interact with saxophonist Dave Liebman and trombonist and composer/arranger Slide Hampton. He went on to study saxophone, clarinet, flute, and jazz at Youngstown State, joining a list of jazz notables who went there including pianists Harold Danko and James Weidman and saxophonist Ralph Lalama. Like many others at Youngstown State, Kent’s jazz skills were honed under the tutelage of Tony Leonardi.  After graduation, Kent toured internationally with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra conducted by Buddy Morrow. 

Back at YSU, he taught part-time, acquired a Master’s in Performance (clarinet) in 1993, and was hired as a full-time faculty member. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he acquired a Master’s and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology. His advisor was the beloved educator and saxophonist Nathan Davis, whose ties to Kansas City, his hometown, opened doors for Engelhardt’s research into the music of Charlie Parker. (Engelhardt also has transcribed the music of the Jay McShann Orchestra with Parker, Count Basie, and Mary Lou Williams.)

Engelhardt, who has performed with a wide range of artists including Clark Terry, Buddy Rich, Mel Torme, Frank Foster, Joe Lovano, Maria Schneider, and Slide Hampton, is hardly finished with Tadd Dameron. “My next project will be to create larger group arrangements of Tadd’s music that has been kind of forgotten about,” he says. “And then there’s a few things with Clifford Brown and Benny Golson which haven’t really been investigated much. There’s never any shortage of music to investigate.”

It’s easy to understand Engelhardt’s enduring love for and fascination with Dameron’s music. “Tadd once said there was too much ugliness in the world, and that he was looking for beauty,” says the jazz gumshoe. “Well, he found it again and again and we’re all the richer for it.”