Saxophonist, composer, and arranger Jack Montrose, pictured here in 1954. His arrangements would be recorded that year by ensembles led by Chet Baker and Clifford Brown. Photo by William Claxton.
A man with talent wants the world. Even if he’s too modest or mannered to announce it aloud, or to himself, there’s a part of him that sees one possible future where everything breaks his way. But what does such a man deserve? Maybe it’s fair, if harsh, to say that he doesn’t deserve anything. That no one deserves anything. But if you’ve some combination of natural talent, acquired skill, and the nerve to open yourself to the world’s judgment, all you can really ask for is a window of a few years to show what you’re capable of, come what may.
Growing up poor in Detroit and Chattanooga, Tenn., before moving to Los Angeles with his family as a teenager, Jack Montrose (1928-2006) would become a very capable tenor saxophonist and an exceptional arranger. With a penchant for counterpoint and non-standard harmonies, Montrose established himself as an innovative arranger, especially for horns. Even the critics couldn’t help but notice.
“Montrose’s writing again clearly shines forth as one of the major lights of modern jazz,” read Billboard’s review of 1955’s Jack Montrose Sextet (Pacific Jazz), an album mixing Montrose originals with and his own arrangements of standards. “Montrose has achieved a real ‘chamber music’ feel in these tightly written, neatly balanced creations."
Downstream of innovations like “Birth of the Cool,” 1955’s “Jack Montrose Sextet” is a masterclass in what some have taken to calling “chamber jazz.”
While he contributed arrangements to albums recorded on the Contemporary and Atlantic labels, Montrose proved most influential on Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label, where he helped shape the house aesthetic in the 1950s, a decade during which the most prominent instrumentalists associated with the West Coast style — Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Conte Candoli, Herb Geller, Bud Shank, Zoot Sims, Bob Gordon — played his charts.
It was Bock who gave a 25-year-old Montrose his first major recording opportunity in late 1953.
Gerry Mulligan’s pioneering piano-less quartet, featuring a rapidly ascending Chet Baker on trumpet, had been a boon for Bock’s upstart Pacific label in 1952 and 1953, producing some of the era’s foundational cool jazz recordings while maintaining a residency at The Haig in Hollywood that, by all accounts, was transformational — especially for musicians like Montrose.
“Gerry was a genius,” Montrose told Gordon Jack, author of 2004’s Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective (Scarecrow Press), “and when he and Chet were at The Haig, I used to visit two or three nights a week. It was an unbelievably stimulating experience, hearing them play together. And the rest is history because that is one of the best jazz groups ever.”
By the middle of 1953, though, that transformational group had effectively disbanded, the result of Mulligan’s drug arrest and subsequent six-month incarceration. Eager to find a new musical home for his label’s rising star — Baker, by this point, was being hailed as the next great one — Pacific’s Bock plugged Baker into Montrose’s working band, a septet that’d been playing The Haig on the Mulligan Quartet’s off nights.
The “Chet Baker Ensemble” was born when Pacific Jazz's Dick Bock paired Chet Baker with the Jack Montrose-led band that had been playing at The Haig on the Gerry Mulligan Quartet's off nights.
In December 1953, Bock recorded them at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. Though it was effectively Montrose’s band, consisting mostly of tunes Montrose had either composed himself or arranged for the occasion, Baker, given his star power, was, naturally, billed as the leader. Released in 1954, The Chet Baker Ensemble comprised Montrose and Herb Geller on tenor saxophones, Montrose’s best buddy Bob Gordon on bari sax, Baker on trumpet, and a rhythm section of Shelly Manne, Russ Freeman, and Joe Mondragon on drums, piano, and bass, respectively.
Montrose first met Baker in the late 1940s, when the Sunday jam sessions run by trombonist and Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton alum Herbie Harper at the Showtime club were, as Montrose told Jack for his 2004 book, “like a postgraduate study in jazz” for the area’s young, up-and-coming musicians. Montrose and Baker, along with Shelly Manne, Cal Tjader, Bill Perkins, Shorty Rogers, and Art Pepper, were regulars.
Like so many others, Montrose was enamored of Baker’s sound and God-given musicality.
“[Chet’s playing] immediately grabbed your attention,” Montrose told Jack, “and, just like a comet blazing through the sky, he wouldn’t be denied. Gerry Mulligan in his wisdom really nailed it when he said that Chet knew everything about chords except their names… because he had the best ears of anyone I have ever encountered.”
Still, though Baker was often saddled with the backhanded compliment of being “naturally gifted” (code for uneducated, undisciplined, and untrained), Montrose insisted that the reports of Baker being unable to read music were “quite untrue,” telling Jack, “He played my charts, which were far from easy, as well as anyone.”
As someone who’s seen those original Montrose charts that Gilbert Castellanos and company will be charged with playing this Tuesday night (July 2, 2025) at the Handlery, I can assure you that Montrose wasn’t kidding; they are, indeed, far from easy.
It was true, though, that Baker did lack the formal theoretical training, discipline and regimented work habits of peers like Mulligan and Clifford Brown, the other major trumpeter with whom Montrose’s name will always share an association.
Which makes Montrose’s recording dates with Baker and then, just months later, with Brown an interesting contrast in styles and personalities.
In the summer of 1954, Montrose found himself playing and arranging for Art Pepper’s Quintet. The band had a regular gig that summer at the Tiffany Club in L.A., where they just so happened to be splitting a bill with the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet, who, notably, were in town to record what would become that legendary group’s eponymously titled debut, with San Diego’s Harold Land on tenor sax, George Morrow on bass, and Bud Powell’s younger brother Richie on piano.
Meanwhile, Pacific Jazz’s Dick Bock was keen to record Brown and Roach with some of Pacific’s roster of West Coast-based musicians. Bock, a hands on producer, was involved in all logistical facets of the recording, including selecting the instrumentation, the personnel, and much of the repertoire, which is how a date ostensibly led by Brown comes to include not just Brown originals like “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud” but also seeming outliers like “Blueberry Hill” and “Gone with the Wind.” As for Montrose, Bock tapped him to arrange the five tunes that would go on to constitute Brown’s Clifford Brown Ensemble, a 10-inch LP released early the following year.
Most immediately remarkable for any Clifford Brown fanatic are Montrose’s arrangements of “Daahoud” and “Joy Spring,” which endure as two of Brown’s most beloved original compositions. Interestingly, Montrose’s arrangements, though much less well known, end up becoming the first recorded arrangements of these two tunes. The takes recorded for Brown and Roach’s EmArcy debut — and these are the versions that would end up becoming much more famous — ended up being released earlier but were actually recorded about a month later.
Notwithstanding this interesting though ultimately trivial tidbit, Montrose’s arrangements of these soon-to-become standards remain remarkable, if for no other reason than the extent to which they differ from the versions Brown recorded with Roach, who ended up being replaced on the Pacific date at the last minute by Shelly Manne after Roach and Bock, in Montrose’s words, “got into a money hassle.”
While the more celebrated versions frame Brown’s trumpet with just one other horn, Land’s tenor, which shares a lot of unison lines with Brown’s lead part, Montrose’s arrangement uses a trio of horns — Stu Williamson on valve trombone, Bob Gordon on bari sax, and Zoot Sims on tenor sax — that are lower in pitch but more diaphanous in tone, which serves both to nest Brown’s signature sound within highly textured harmonic framing but also to set it apart as a nimble yet forceful lead voice, epitomizing the West Coast’s cool conviction.
For as much as Montrose was enamored of Baker, that’s how much he seems to have admired Brown.
“Clifford Brown,” he told Jack, “had Chet’s ears, but he was also a thoroughly schooled musician who would have practiced all day if he could. He was…very advanced in theory and totally immersed in music.”
By all accounts, the same can’t be said of Baker, whose interests [and habits] away from the bandstand tended to be more adventurous at best — and reckless at worst. Still, both will always be linked, at least loosely. By the era in which they both came of age, by the instrument that made them both famous, by the music that made them both immortal, and by a West Coast writer and arranger named Jack Montrose, a man with some knowledge and some talent who once got an opportunity to put two of the most talented musicians to ever live in positions to be their best.
