Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Fay Victor: Giving Voice to Herbie Nichols
Fay Victor © 2025 Deneka Peniston
The canonization of Herbie Nichols took decades. In 1963, the death of the composer and pianist was noted by few, and impacted even fewer. Eliciting only tepid approval by tastemakers like Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams, the trio recordings Nichols made from 1955 to ‘57 that are now considered classics were out of circulation and largely forgotten. The closest Nichols came to fame was a composition given lyrics and a new title by Billie Holiday – “Lady Sings the Blues” – but it brought her more fame than him. Obscurity was Nichols’ fate in life and, presumably, in death.
A.B. Spellman endeavored to reverse Nichols’s fortune in his lifetime by writing what was to be the first comprehensive article about him in a major jazz magazine. However, Metronome, who commissioned the piece, folded in December 1961, just before the article was scheduled to run. By the time Spellman found another outlet, Nichols had died. Fortunately, the material found a home in Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business.
Published in 1966, Spellman’s enduring text reflected the critical consensus decrying the manifold injustices faced by innovative African American composers and improvisers. The opening pages of his chapter on Nichols crystalize the palpable contempt Spellman and contemporaries LeRoi Jones and Frank Kofsky had for the powers that be: “There is a kind of culpability in the discovery of dead artists in that it seems almost criminal, certainly exploitative, even within the approved limits of capitalism, that the benefit of a man’s work accrue to those who ignored him during his life.” “If he is not employed ... then he does not create ... if he never has the security of a steady group ... then his musical sensitivity and sensibility cannot evolve.” These syndromes led to “the destruction” of Nichols, who because he “seldom worked where he could play his own music and who has no records in the current catalog, may be said not to have lived at all.”
Or perhaps barely. DownBeat briefly noted Nichols’ death, damning him with faint and somewhat incongruous praise as “an accomplished modernist whose capabilities and promise had yet to be fully realized.”
Spellman’s account would stand alone for almost a decade, during which Nichols’ few recordings remained virtually impossible to find. That changed practically overnight in 1975. Reissue programs had become a prominent focus of longtime jazz labels like Blue Note. The party line was that time-obscured music was being introduced to a new generation of listeners; cynics saw it as repackaged exploitation. Both were true: relatively hefty profits were enjoyed by the corporate overloads of formerly independent imprints, and a greater good was served. No reissue from that period better served the latter than The Third World, Blue Note’s 1975 reissue of the bulk of Nichols’ output. It proved Nichols not only lived, but created a singular body of work.
The Third World not only introduced Nichols’ music to a new generation of listeners; Roswell Rudd’s liner notes introduced Nichols from a unique personal vantage. Instead of musical analysis, sociological slant, or righteous indignation, Rudd simply told the story of the Nichols he knew. Rudd’s genesis story took place during a jam session at fellow trombonist Dick Rath’s loft in early 1960, when “a very tall and reserved gentleman took charge of the piano” midway through an extended workout on “Yardbird Suite,” who cast a “gentle spell” by shifting the “whole harmonic idiom” of the music. Nichols then slipped into the night, his name still unknown to Rudd. Rudd unexpectedly met Nichols again in midsummer for a weekend trio gig in Amagansett, Long Island, with cornetist Jack Fine. Rudd walking in on Nichols extemporizing in the empty club during the afternoon catalyzed exchanges between them that continued into the fall with “the lessons,” sessions where Rudd would wrestle with trombone parts Nichols wrote for compositions like “The Third World.” The lessons sputtered to a stop in 1961 as their trajectories diverged, but not before Rudd was able to introduce Nichols to Archie Shepp and Steve Swallow.
Whereas Spellman’s account had the incisiveness expected in advocacy journalism, Rudd’s – which gave equal weight to Nichols’ joy in generosity and his struggles and disappointments – conveyed an acolyte’s admiration. Rudd had already paid homage to Nichols with “Respects” on Everywhere and he was on board for Shepp’s take on “Lady Sings the Blues” on Live in San Francisco (albums recorded a few months apart in 1966); but his notes made The Third World more than the typical archival release. Whereas Spellman made the case for Nichols’ martyrdom, Rudd made the case for beatification.
Rudd was also at the center of the next step in Nichols’ posthumous rise, framing Nichols’ stature as the dawning neo-classical movement placed new emphasis on composers. This occurred in one fell swoop with presciently titled Regeneration, the 1982 album with an A side of Nichols’ compositions and a B side of compositions by the recently deceased Thelonious Monk. The date included Steve Lacy (who, despite his long association with Rudd, somehow never met Nichols), Misha Mengelberg, and Han Bennink (who notoriously swiped Nichols’ 10”s from producer Joachim-Ernest Berendt’s collection), who, along with Rudd, became a nucleus of musicians who would champion Nichols’ music for decades. The album included “Blue Chopsticks” and “2300 Skidoo,” now two of Nichols’ most frequently interpreted compositions; more importantly, Rudd brought a theretofore unknown piece to the session, “Twelve Bars,” one of Nichols’ last, a four-bar line repeated three times, suggesting Nichols was developing a more streamlined approach to structure and development.
“Twelve Bars” was the first of a slew of previously unknown Nichols compositions that subsequently came to light. Many of them that were in Rudd’s possession were included on two volumes of The Unheard Herbie Nichols in 1996. Other previously unknown works recorded by Frank Kimbrough and Ben Allison’s The Herbie Nichols Project between 1996 and 2001 were fleshed out from scores retrieved by Kimbrough from the Library of Congress, where Nichols had fastidiously registered them for copyright. Along with arrangements by Mengelberg for ICP Orchestra and by Buell Neidlinger for a quartet of violin, cello, trumpet, and tenor saxophone, Nichols’ works were being widely heard by the millennium, with better-known compositions like “House Party Starting” becoming part of the modernist repertoire.
Each of these projects expanded the interpretative possibilities of Nichols’ music (Neidlinger once quipped that The Herbie Nichols Project made it sound like it was written for Miles Davis’ second great quintet). However, each of these projects kept Nichols’ music in the realm of instrumental ensembles. Fay Victor changed that in 2023 with Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life is Funny That Way. Victor does not simply layer her lustrous voice onto Nichols’ compositions like a mahogany veneer. With lyrics transcending the pat pining and prattle of most Tin Pan Alley chestnuts, Victor connects her stories with how she hears Nichols’. Additionally, she has put together an ensemble – alto and baritone saxophonist Michaël Attias, pianist Anthony Coleman, bassist Ratzo Harris, and drummer Tom Rainey – that hears feelingly the relationship between music and text, and burnishes the connections on a bar-by-bar basis. There was something of an overnight-sensation buzz for the 2-disc debut of her Herbie Nichols SUNG project, but Victor has a decades-long engagement with Nichols’ music – a version of “House Party Starting” was a highlight of her 2000 sophomore album, Darker Than Blue.
“I was introduced to Herbie Nichols’ music when I still considered myself to be a mainstream jazz singer,” Victor recently relayed. “It was also a moment when I was reconsidering whether or not I wanted to be a mainstream jazz singer, whatever that meant. This was a complicated time. I was living in Amsterdam where I could experiment with a lot of different things. I had a completely different practice then, but his music has stayed with me since, even though I now do a lot of different things. That’s a testament to the power of his music, and its flexibility, which is something I wanted to impart through the project. I wanted to take the music in all sorts of directions, which I didn’t think had been thoroughly explored. I was being inspired by all kinds of music, including a record by Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy called School Days, which explored the improvisational possibilities of Monk’s music. That was one approach I wanted to bring to Herbie Nichols’ music. I have done a lot of different work since then, but he’s been along for the ride the entire time.”
“I didn’t grow up with jazz,” Victor said, explaining her route to Nichols. “I came to jazz in my early 20s and fell madly in love with it. I knew something about it from my parents, but I hadn’t immersed in it. It was then that I decided to make it my life’s work, to listen, to transcribe, to learn everything I could about the history to get a wider context about the vocal jazz tradition. At this point, I’m into Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln – Jeanne Lee came later. The problem I had was that the lyrics of the Tin Pan Alley songs I was singing were not saying the sort of things I wanted to say. I was already writing lyrics – poems – since I was a kid. In addition to what they were saying, I thought vocalists were confined. They were in a certain zone, allowed a certain space, but it was not ok to step out of that. I had a serious problem with that. When I started to change, when I wanted to have improvisation to be prominent in my work, one of the ideas I was dealing with was how to make it more accessible, to make it attractive. I was hearing, ‘people don’t want to hear vocalists improvise.’ I didn’t think that was true. The more understanding and confidence I gained the more I had the ability to say what I needed to say, and figure out where I could say it, and who I can say it with. And who to say it to. It was then – around 2000 – that I decided I wanted to work with Herbie Nichols’ music. When I put my first band together, ‘House Party Starting’ was part of the book. I realized that whatever direction I wanted to take, Herbie Nichols could come along.”
Victor recognizes Nichols’ unique position in the history of the music, as his music resonates with listeners oriented in mainstream jazz and those who free-range between jazz’s sub-genres, schools, and outliers. At the apex of jazz modernism, Nichols composed timeless works that balanced gravity and whimsy and can be heard as both modern and old-school. “There’s also a lot of joy in his music,” Victor hastens to add. “We are of similar heritage – his mother and my father were from Trinidad and Tobago – and that’s something I hear in the music, something I want to bring out, the joy and being intellectually rigorous without taking oneself too seriously, which I think is very much a Caribbean aesthetic and way of being. That’s very important, which is part of why his not being able to fully develop and document his music was so regrettable, which makes the joy that much more remarkable, and the commitment in sending compositions to the Library of Congress,” at a time when the $5 copyright filing fee was real money, particularly for someone who worked sporadically.
Victor began her journey with Nichols’ music in the 1990s, when she lived in Amsterdam and was mentored by Mengelberg. “We talked a lot about Herbie and he was very supportive and encouraging,” she explained. “I had a lot of conversations with him about the lyrics. A lot of musicians have a bad reputation for not caring about lyrics, but a lot of musicians really do. He was really interested in the thinking behind the lyrics and the inspirations for them. And these conversations took place over a period of years as I was developing repertoire around Herbie’s music and having small opportunities to sing it.
“I then started a small group around 2008-2009 called the Jazz Voice that performed Herbie’s compositions. I think I had four or five by then, along with some Monk and Mingus, and a little Eric Dolphy, who is one of my heroes. A good part of my style comes from Dolphy, the large intervallic leaps. I remember the first time I heard [Oliver Nelson’s] The Blues and the Abstract Truth. I was blown away by these lines that were rhythmically within the tradition, but he was hitting notes that were just – it’s strange to say this – unheard of. And the way he integrated all this was amazing. So, I started singing ‘Out to Lunch.’ I love difficult compositions. I love learning them, finding out how they are put together, what makes them come alive, and getting them to the point where I can have fun with them.
“I remember having this conversation with Misha about doing something with both Monk and Nichols. I had been writing lyrics a long time and I wanted to see what I could come up with. I was having a difficult time getting in touch with T.S. Monk to see if there were lyrics to any of the Monk compositions. But the more I talked to Misha, the more I realized that a lot of Monk projects had been done. So, Misha said, just do Nichols. That was 2013, so that’s how long I’ve been working with the music. With the exception of Tom Rainey, who joined the group in 2018, it’s been the same group that I’ve developed the music with. I was also working a lot with Achim Kaufmann to open up the music, because I didn’t want to do an archival Herbie Nichols project. I also thought that by adding lyrics it gave me a lot of space to be creative in how I approached it. I came across this recording Achim made of “2300 Skidoo” and I thought, that’s where I want to go, so we got together, played in Berlin, and experimented with how to open up the music while keeping the harmonic ideas intact. It wasn’t easy to do. How do we deconstruct the music and still have the essence – those sorts of things. I thought I could do it, because the music was strong enough, and even if we deconstruct things in an incredible way, which we do with “2300 Skidoo” on the record, it doesn’t lose its integrity.
“When I came back to the States in 2003 Nichols was in the back of my mind. I was more focused on original music, writing, and developing a band that became the Fay Victor Ensemble, and we put out a few records of all original compositions. That was the group that helped me develop my improvisational language for voice. We were also always toying with form, because one of the things about jazz that bored me was the head-solos-head form. We looked for how we could move things around, and have free improvisation come in and out of the material. I was thinking more about what I wanted to say, as opposed to what should happen in a piece, and composing and arranging from that perspective. The free songs come out of that.”
Victor began writing lyrics to Nichols’ compositions in earnest beginning in 2007. She had recently returned to Amsterdam, where she again conferred with Mengelberg, who recommended that, since she was now residing in the US, she should meet Rudd. “He said it’s time that he hears what you are doing. And I was like, really? I knew who Roswell was, I was checking out his music, but I didn’t feel like I could approach him. So, I emailed him, mentioned Herbie, and he responded, not knowing me from a hole in the wall, saying we could meet at some point – nice but non-committal. He happened to be doing a duo with Lafayette Harris the pianist at the Rubin Museum on 13th Street in 2008, I think it was. My husband and I went and it was a really beautiful concert. I went backstage and met him, and he was so beautiful, a connection moment. I then went to his place in Chelsea and brought a couple of Herbie Nichols songs, and we started playing ‘House Party Starting,’ just voice and trombone, for like an hour. His focus was amazing; he’d point to these eight bars and said, let’s do it again, and we did it again and again. It was really rigorous. So, I started going over there and we’d play all sorts of stuff.
“Then Tyshawn Sorey had a month at The Stone – remember when you got a month? – and he presented a concert with me, Roswell, and him, and we did some Nichols in that concert. In 2014 or ‘15 there was a great series at the Greenwich Music House in Brooklyn – the Sound It Out series – and we did Herbie Nichols SUNG, and Roswell and Mark Dresser and other people really connected to the music came. We had already started to experiment with the music, instead of being archival, and I was really nervous about Roswell and Verna [Gillis] being there, but he not only said that he loved it, but that Herbie would have liked what you are doing with his music, and he said keep going.
“After that, Roswell and I talked a lot about Herbie, how he was sad and shy. It made me understand his music at a deeper level, that there was this layer to pieces like ‘House Party Starting,’ which is cheerful on the surface, but darker underneath, because he had to do house parties to pay his rent. It must have been like torture for him, being shy and having to entertain people. Talking to Roswell really made me understand why the music resonates like it does.”
The performances on Life is Funny That Way distinctly resonate for two reasons: the storytelling dimension Victor’s lyrics bring to Nichols’ music; and the interplay within the ensemble. “I’m a band person,” Victor asserted. “I think bands are better for the music, the camaraderie and all that. Michaël Attias knew the records, so I asked him to come along. I loved working with Ratzo, though it took a bit for him to get comfortable with the harmonic ideas. I had been doing some things with Anthony, a little bit of Monk. I had just started a residency at the 55 Bar every last Thursday of the month, so we were doing that. He was doing a lot of deep work in stride, he knew the piano tradition that came before Herbie, like Teddy Wilson. And when I asked him to join the band, it was the beginning of summer; he had just finished the semester [teaching at New England Conservatory], and decided to immerse himself in Herbie’s music. It just worked out.
“Everything we recorded was on the album, with the exception of “117th Street.” That was so hard to sequence. It wasn’t just me. We all felt that way so we used it as a bonus. Usually, there’s already a flow to what you’ve recorded, so sequencing a record comes very quickly. This one was arduous.”
In summation, Victor stated that the Nichols we now celebrate is the result of a series of miracles. “It was a miracle that he sent those charts to the Library of Congress. It was a miracle that he was on Blue Note, even after he bugged Alfred Lion for years. It took a few miracles.”