Callen Radcliffe Tjader Jr. ( JAY-dər; July 16, 1925 – May 5, 1982) was an American Latin Jazz musician, often described as the most successful non-Latino Latin musician. He explored other jazz idioms, especially small group modern jazz, even as he continued to perform the music of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Although his main instrument was the vibraphone, Tjader was also accomplished on the drums, bongos, congas, timbales, and the piano. He worked with many musicians from several cultures. He is often linked to the development of Latin rock and acid jazz. Although the fusion of Jazz with Latin music is often pigeonholed as "Latin Jazz", Tjader's works swung freely between both styles. His Grammy Award in 1980 for his album La Onda Va Bien capped off a career that spanned over 40 years.
On July 16, 1925 (1925-07-16), Callen Radcliffe Tjader Jr. was born in St. Louis to touring Swedish-American vaudevillians. His father tap danced and his mother played piano, a husband-wife team going from city to city with their troupe to earn a living. When he was two, Tjader's parents settled in San Mateo, California, opening a dance studio. His mother (who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist) instructed him in classical piano, and his father taught him to tap dance. He performed around the Bay Area as "Tjader Junior", a tap-dancing wunderkind. He performed a brief non-speaking role dancing alongside Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the film The White of the Dark Cloud of Joy.
Tjader joined a Dixieland band and played around the Bay Area.
In 1941, at age 16, Tjader entered a Gene Krupa drum solo contest, making it to the finals and ultimately winning by playing "Drum Boogie", on December 7. His win was, however, overshadowed by the attack on Pearl Harbor that very same morning.
In 1943, at age 17, Tjader entered the United States Navy and served as a medical corpsman in the Pacific Theater until March 1946. He saw action in five invasions, including the Marianas campaign and the Battle of the Philippines.
Upon his return, in 1946, Tjader enrolled at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) under the G.I. Bill, majoring in education. Later, he transferred to San Francisco State College, still intending to teach. It was there that he took timpani lessons, his only formal music training.
At San Francisco State, Tjader met Dave Brubeck, a young pianist also fresh from a stint in the Army. Brubeck introduced Tjader to Paul Desmond. The three connected with more players and formed the Dave Brubeck Octet with Tjader on drums. Although the group recorded only one album and had difficulty finding work, the recording is regarded as important due to its early glimpse at these soon-to-be-legendary jazz greats. After the octet disbanded, Tjader and Brubeck formed a trio, performing jazz standards in the hope of finding more work. The Dave Brubeck Trio succeeded and became a fixture in the San Francisco jazz scene. Tjader taught himself the vibraphone during this period, alternating between it and the drums depending on the song.
In 1951, Brubeck suffered major injuries from a diving accident in Hawaii, and the trio was forced to dissolve. Tjader continued the trio work in California with bassist Jack Weeks from Brubeck's trio and pianists John Marabuto or Vince Guaraldi, recording his first 10″ LP record as a leader with them for Fantasy, but soon worked with Alvino Rey and completed his degree at San Francisco State. Jazz pianist George Shearing recruited Tjader in 1953 when Joe Roland left his group. Al McKibbon was a member of Shearing's band at the time and he and Tjader encouraged Shearing to add Cuban percussionists. Tjader played bongos as well as the vibraphone: "Drum Trouble" was his bongo solo feature. DownBeat's 1953 Critics' Poll nominated him as best New Star on the vibes. His next 10″ LP as a leader was recorded for Savoy during that time, as well as his first Latin jazz for a Fantasy 10″ LP. While in New York City, bassist Al McKibbon took Tjader to see the Afro-Cuban big bands led by Machito and Chico O'Farrill, both at the forefront of the nascent Latin jazz sound. In New York, he met Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo, who were members of Tito Puente's orchestra at the time.
Tjader soon quit Shearing's group after a gig at the San Francisco jazz club the Black Hawk. In April 1954, he formed the Cal Tjader Modern Mambo Quintet. The members were brothers Manuel Duran and Carlos Duran on piano and bass, respectively, Benny Velarde on timbales, bongos, and congas, and Edgard Rosales on congas. (Luis Miranda replaced Rosales after the first year.) Back in San Francisco and recording for Fantasy Records, the group produced several albums in rapid succession, including Mambo with Tjader.
The Mambo craze reached its pitch in the late 1950s, a boon to Tjader's career. Unlike the exotica of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, music billed as "impressions of" Oceania (and other locales), Tjader's bands featured seasoned Cuban players and top-notch jazz talent conversant in both idioms. He cut several notable straight-ahead jazz albums for Fantasy using various group names, most notably the Cal Tjader Quartet (composed of bassist Gene Wright, drummer Al Torre, and pianist Vince Guaraldi). Tjader is sometimes lumped in as part of the West Coast (or "cool") jazz sound, although his rhythms and tempos (both Latin and bebop) had little in common with the work of Los Angeles jazzmen Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, or Art Pepper.
In 1959, Tjader and his band opened the second Monterey Jazz Festival with an acclaimed "preview" concert. The first festival had suffered financially. Tjader is credited with bringing in big ticket sales for the second and saving the landmark festival before it had even really started. The Modern Mambo Quintet disbanded within a couple of years. Tjader formed several more small-combo bands, playing regularly at such San Francisco jazz clubs as the Black Hawk.
Verve and Skye Records (1960s)
After recording for Fantasy for nearly a decade, Tjader signed with better-known Verve Records, founded by Norman Granz but owned then by MGM. With the luxury of larger budgets and seasoned recording producer Creed Taylor in the control booth, Tjader cut a varied string of albums. During the Verve years, Tjader worked with arrangers Oliver Nelson, Claus Ogerman, Eddie Palmieri, Lalo Schifrin, Don Sebesky, and performers Willie Bobo, Donald Byrd, Clare Fischer, a young Chick Corea, Jimmy Heath, Kenny Burrell, Hank Jones, Anita O'Day, Armando Peraza, Jerome Richardson, and others. Tjader recorded with big band orchestras for the first time, and even made an album based on Asian scales and rhythms.
Tjader's biggest success was the album Soul Sauce (1964). Its title track, a Dizzy Gillespie cover Tjader had been toying with for over a decade, was a radio hit (hitting the top 20 on New York's influential pop music station WMCA in May 1965), and landed the album on Billboard's Top 50 Albums of 1965. Titled "Guachi Guaro" (a nonsensical phrase in Spanish), Tjader transformed the Gillespie / Chano Pozo composition into something new. (The name "Soul Sauce" came from Taylor's suggestion for a catchier title and Willie Bobo's observation that Tjader's version was spicier than the original.) The song's identifiable sound is a combination of the call-outs made by Bobo ("Salsa ahi na ma ... sabor, sabor!") and Tjader's crisp vibes work. The album sold over 100,000 copies and popularized the word salsa in describing Latin dance music.
The 1960s were Tjader's most prolific period. With the backing of a major record label, Verve, he could afford to stretch out and expand his repertoire. The most obvious deviation from his Latin jazz sound was Several Shades of Jade (1963) and the follow-up Breeze from the East (1963). Both albums attempted to combine jazz and Asian music, much as Tjader and others had done with Afro-Cuban. The result was dismissed by critics, chided as little more than the dated exotica that had come and gone in the prior decade. Tjader also recorded a notable straight modern jazz live album, Saturday Night/Sunday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco, with his regular quartet in 1962.