New Jazz Son

In the Manhattan jazz den known as Birdland, the seven-man combo was swinging up a storm. Its music had a fine, contrapuntal texture, played with a neatly organized air that is not characteristic of such outfits, and was several degrees warmer than most modern jazz. The leader: Austria's excellent young (26) Concert Pianist Friedrich Gulda, making his first professional appearance as a jazzman.

He sat at the grand piano, his large head listing heavily to port, his horn rims and high forehead giving him a scholarly appearance. Before him stood four blowers on trumpet, trombone and saxophones, men whose personal styles seemed almost perfectly adapted to the Gulda idiom. During the evening's five half-hour sets they played a round dozen of Gulda's own compositions--pretty, slightly sentimental ditties with such names as Air from Other Planets, Dodo, Scruby, New Shoes--plus his arrangements of other men's tunes. Whatever the music, it had one mark of good jazz: it stimulated the performers to inventive improvisation.

Until he was 16, Pianist Gulda joined his long-haired colleagues in a general sneer for jazz. But he found himself listening to records of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and gradually his attitude changed. Last year, between concert tours (he has played four times in Carnegie Hall), he organized a group of musicians in Vienna, wrote out jazz-style counterpoint for them and made a series of broadcasts. American Jazz Buff John Hammond, who had a significant part in the careers of Basie and Benny Goodman, listened to off-the-air recordings and flipped for joy. He helped Gulda gather his combo in the U.S., got him booked into Birdland and also for Newport's American Jazz Festival next week.

Finding himself in a world he once looked at down his nose turns out to be a relief to Gulda. "Everybody agrees that something is out of order with concert music," he says. In Gulda's case, he did not like contemporary music, yet yearned to play something new, so jazz became "a way out of a misery."

Today, he practices his usual three hours daily on his concert music, then turns to jazz at night. Thus concert halls have not lost a son, but jazz halls have gained one. "At first I was afraid for my career," he says. "But this became inevitable, so I let it happen."

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