Thursday, March 14, 2024

Listening to Prestige 717: Bobby Timmons


LISTEN TO ONE: Chicken & Dumplin's




Bobby Timmons is remembered largely for two things: a handful of compositions, most notably "Moanin'" and "Dat Dere," which rank among the most tuneful and popular numbers in the jazz canon; and a life sadly lost to drugs and alcohol. By the mid-1960s, things weren't good for him. His Wikipedia bio states that "Timmons' career declined quickly in the 1960s, in part because of drug abuse and alcoholism, and partly as a result of being typecast as a composer and player of seemingly simple pieces of music." The same bio notes that Timmons's live performances at this time were cited by reviewers as being undermined by his hiring of sidemen of inferior quality.


None of this seemed to affect his marketability as a jazz recording artist. His Prestige years were 1964-66, during which time he recorded seven albums (this was his fifth). But the writing was already on the wall. After leaving Prestige, there were two more albums for Milestone, and that was it. His last recording was 1968; he died in 1974.

The sidemen he's working with on this recording are not the musicians he played his club dates with, the ones who were found wanting by reviewers, and although they may not have been Prestige's A-list of supporting players, they certainly aren't chopped liver. Drummer Billy Saunders has no other recording credits that I could find. But bassist Mickey Bass had an impressive resume of gigs (Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Chico Freeman, John Hicks) and his recording dates,which would mostly come in the 1970s, included Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Curtis Fuller, and Hank Mobley. He also spent many years as an educator, numbering trumpeter Wallace Roney among his students. Both of them contribute on this album, giving Timmons the support he needs. 

Tinmons calls on another composer to lead off this album--Ray Bryant, best known for "Cubano Chant," "Little Susie," and his big 1960 hit, "Madison Time." Bryant's "Chicken & Dumplin's" had first been recorded by Art Blakey in 1959, when Timmons was in the group, with boppish solos by Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley, and an excellent one by Timmons. 


"Chicken & Dumplin's" is certainly a soul food/soul jazz title, in a tradition going back to early rhythm and blues hits like Hal Singer's "Cornbread" and Frank "Floorshow" Culley's "Cole Slaw," and continuing through the kitchen classics of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott on Prestige. Timmons gives it the full soul jazz treatment here, eschewing his own melodic improvisations and those of Mobley and Morgan, in favor of a solid groove. 

In his own composition, "The Return of Genghis Khan," Tinmons appears to be setting out to prove that he was more than just simple melodies and basic soul jazz improvisation, and to these ears he succeeds. This is a nervous and nervy album, worth listening to.

Cal Lampley produced, and Chicken & Dumplin's was the name of the album. The title cut b/w "The Telephone Song" was the 45 RPM release.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Listening to Prestige 716: Benny Golson / Jimmy Witherspoon


LISTEN TO ONE: Love Me Right

 Benny Golson and a full orchestra had backed Jimmy Witherspoon in Stockholm in 1964, and now in London in 1965, Golson was ready to round up a new orchestra and do it again. In fact, he was ready to recapitulate his entire Stockholm syndrome--he had done sessions with both Witherspoon and jazz singer Carol Ventura in Sweden, and so again in London. Golson, producer Lew Futterman and Prestige Records had something of a hit-and-miss record as predictors of popularity. The jazz chanteuse sank remarkably quickly into an undeserved oblivion; the blues, pop-blues, soul-blues crooner-shouter remains one


of the most popular representatives of his genre to this day. 

Crafting hit records, and careers, is guesswork at best, as witness, on the one hand, Decca's decision to pass on the Beatles, and on the other, the mega-bucks and extravagant promotional campaigns devoted to Jobriath (who?) Making good music, on the other hand, is frequently as simple as getting some really good people together and giving them some creative freedom.

And such is the case here. Benny Golson clearly felt there was more to do with jazz singers and a full orchestra, and he was right. I spent an exhaustive amount of time and space on the previous Golson-Witherspoon collaboration, so I won't go into it all again, but this is a delighful album, the kind you'd put on again and again. 

I don't know where they got the songs from. None of them are familiar to me, and few of the songwriters are even vaguely familiar to me. All of the titles sound vaguely like something you've probably heard before. None of them became standards, even though eight of them were released on 45 RPM singles. But they're good enough songs. and they fit Spoon's voice, and Golson's arrangements.

The singles were:

Make This Heart Of Mine Smile Again / Love Me Right   

Oh How I Love You / One Last Chance   

I Never Thought I'd See The Day / If There Wasn't Any You    

Two Hearts Are Better Than One / Come On And Walk With Me

The album was titled Spoon in London. Lew Futterman produced. Baxking vocals were done by the Ladybirds, a British trio soon to become known for their work on the Benny Hill Show.

Friday, January 19, 2024

Listening to Prestige 715: Montego Joe


LISTEN TO ONE: Haitian Lady

Montego Joe's two albums for Prestige were his only two as a leader, though he continued to be in demand as a percussionist through the 1960s and '70s. This second album leans toward what appears to be an attempt to move Joe into the mainstream of 1960s pop instrumentals. The tune that was selected for 45 RPM release is "Ouch," which uses the popular device of a repeated catch phrase, in this case "You shouldn't do that!" This is the device most successfully used in "Tequila," and "Ouch" is pretty good proof that it isn't always successful.


The session log includes a credit as arranger/conductor for tenor sax man Al Gibbons. Gibbons had a solid career without ever quite breaking through to the top ranks. He played in the orchestras of Earl Hines and Woody Herman, and also in the avant garde Jazz Composer's Orchestra. He worked with Stanley Turrentine and the Manhattan Transfer. And here his job seems to have been to create a Montego Joe for the masses, although one suspects that producer Lew Futterman's may have been the heavier hand.

Prestige, especially in the soul jazz era, was not a label to shy away from popular success, but neither was it a label to court it too assiduously, and the liner notes to this album, by Francis Squibb, seem to reflect that ambiguity. Are we courting the young crowd? Well, yes and no...
The music presented here is rhythmically akin to the rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n'  blues of the discotheques and teen hops--but with a difference. The "big beat," with which almost everyone is familiar, has been seasoned generously with a variety of twists and turns from African tribal musical traditions and from African-American music of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In short, like "Tequila." Or like Perez Prado. As someone who lived through that era, I can't help but follow the twists and turns of Mr. Squibb's attempts to find a balance. The rhythm 'n' blues of discotheques? For a start, who used the 'n' of rock 'n' roll to talk about rhythm and blues? But if you were young and representing yourself as a hip aficionado of jazz, you couldn't admit to liking rock 'n' roll...but it was sort of OK to like rhythm and blues.

Sorry, I can't help myself. Squibb's discomfort in being a jazz purist writing about impure music reveals itself in his compulsive need to put words into quotation marks, that familiar device that signals "I'm really better than this, I'm not really saying this":

The music of Wet and Wild was designed to get people to "shake that thing"--and not just that thing but everything [until] you are no longer "doing" the dance...but are  a creature of the music and--perhaps--of something beyond music as we know it. [Perhaps you have seen them] "doing" the Frug, the Monkey, or the Swim.

The tunes on this LP, intended to emphasize the "commercial" aspects, have been selected with "the younger crowd of dancers" in mind.

Montego...continues to demonstrate...the ways in which supposedly "alien" melodic and rhythmical material can be combined with "native" jazz and pop material...

So Montego Joe and producer Lew Futterman set out to make a commercially successful pop album. It was certainly something that Futterman proved good at, in his work with Jack McDuff and George Benson, and his later work with rockers like Ted Nugent. He would also become even more commercially successful as a real estate developer.

Why didn't it work with Montego Joe? Who knows why things do or don't take off commercially? But also, perhaps, Joe's heart wasn't one hundred percent in it. Although he continued to work as a percussionist on a number of jazz (and a few pop) sessions, his heart was more and more with education and youth work, as described in the notes to his previous Prestige album.


Al Gibbons, trumpeter Leonard Goines, and drummer/percussionist Milford Graves all appeared on the previous album. New for this session are Arthur Jenkins, piano; Ed Thompson, bass; and Sonny Morgan, miscellaneous percussion, suggesting that the budget may have been tighter this time around, or that for a more commercial dance sound, they didn't really need Chick Corea and Eddie Gomez. Jenkins, who during this period was primarily working with pop/reggae singer Johnny Nash, would go on to become a much-sought-after accompanist, working with John Lennon, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, among others. Sonny Morgan worked with Milford Graves on his first album as leader, and later with avant-garde vocalist Leon Thomas, among others. Less is known about Ed Thompson.

"Ouch" and "Give it Up" were the two sides of the only 45 RPM single release. Wild & Warm was recorded at Futterman's preferred Regent Sound Studios in Manhattan. I've selected "Haitian Lady," composed by Harold Ousley, as the most interesting track for me. But the whole album is pretty good for "dancing."



 

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Listening to Prestige 714: Morris Nanton


LISTEN TO ONE: Something We've Got

 Next up in the Prestige chronology we have the debut album by a pianist-composer who has fashioned one of the more impressive careers in American music, who has recorded over 250 albums, worked with "everyone from Ellington to Elvis, Joni Mitchell to Barbra Streisand, and Quincy Jones to Yo-Yo Ma" (from the bio on his web page), garnered a Grammy and an Oscar nomination, who has written the scores for 20 movies including the Streisand remake of A Star is Born; and a mid-career album (fourth out of a total of six) by a performer whose career is mostly bounded by the town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey,


where he and his trio were local favorites for over five decades, including a 22-year stint at one local club. The former's debut album was not long ago rereleased on CD; none of the albums by the latter seem to have been rereleased.

Unfortunately, I was only able to locate and listen to one of these albums on a streaming service--and it wasn't the guy with the truckloadfull of credentials. The Roger Kellaway Trio was actually Kellaway's second album, but the first was done for a tiny local label, so this was his debut on the national stage, produced by Jack McDuff's guiding hand Lew Futterman. I can't give you a first-hand response to the music by this "lean, bearded, intent young jazz musician" of 26 (from the liner notes; I was able to find them, but no music), but I wish I could have. It sounds fascinating, from "one of the good tunes penned by Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney" to a four-note melody written for "prepared piano," the adaptation of a traditional piano pioneered by John Cage. 

No jazz musicians were recording Lennon-McCartney tunes in 1965--in Arthur Taylor's seminal interviews with his peers a few years later, collected as Notes and Tones, the interview subjects are unanimous in dismissing the musical value of the two Beatles' compositions. And certainly none were experimenting with Cage's prepared piano, although Dave Brubeck did record one tune with a modestly prepared instrument, laying copper strips across the strings. Bizarrely, the easy listening piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher did try a number of these experiments during the course of their careers.

Kellaway prepared his piano by "fastening objects to the strings, including washers, nuts, bolts, and wooden pegs. 'The choice of which notes to prepare was purely individual,' Kellaway noted. 'Besides the melody notes I prepared mostly the lower level of the piano.'"

But for now, for me, these experiments remain tantalizingly out of reach. So I turn my attention, instead, to the May and June sessions which comprised Morris Nanton's second of three Prestige albums. and which I was able to listen to.

First, I can't resist quoting a little from Jack McKinney's album cover notes, starting with the "many forces" which shape the identity of the trio: "It is music that evolves from Art Tatum through Oscar Peterson; it has ties to the 'space movement' of Ahmad Jamal ('freedom within form'); in its more reflective moments it becomes an extension of Bill Evans' introspective analysis." But where McKinney really gets going is his of all the things the Nanton trio is not: "These are not cocktail sounds for lifeless zombies pouring more Manhattans into bored executives. They are not forays into obscurity in which erudition becomes an end and confusion a means. They are not essays on the psychotic by the introvert who is playing to magnify his egomania."

Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. The May 13 session consisted of four songs, two of which did not survive the cutting room. Of the two that did, the first is "Mood Indigo," a 6:34 treatment that doesn't exactly follow the melody line or the arrangement suggested by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard, but which, as it extends further in time and further into its own improvisational world, paradoxically starts to feel more and more Ellingtonian. 

"Mood Indigo" is one of the lovelier jazz melodies, and "Taboo" one of the cornier, but Nanton and his guys defy expectations again by giving us a good deal more of melody of "Taboo," also stretched out to six and a half minutes. To what end? It's hard to say. They're certainly not playing to its cocktail-exotica strengths, although there's some of that. They're not hipster-satirizing it either, although there's humor in their version. On one of their Perth Amboy club dates, this would have been a delight--having some fun with a tune you're perhaps a little embarrassed to admit that you recognize so readily, and at the same time giving some real musical depth of exploration to it. On an album--and it's the last tune on side B--it's still a delight.


The June 16 session begins with a blues, "Something We've Got," the only Nanton original, the longest track of the two sessions, the title cut and the leadoff cut for side A of the album. What to say about a blues? One could go with McKinney, once again, and say what it's not: "a listless and hopeless essay on futility." Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. It is a pleasure all the way through, a workout in different moods and tempi by musicians attuned to each other. 

Three shorter pieces finish out the session, and the album. "Any Number Can Win" is a moody number by French film composer Michel Magne for the Jean Gabin/Alain Delon gangster flick of the same name. Jimmy Smith had also recorded it. Two songs from the 1930s, Allie Wrubel's "The Masquerade is Over" and George Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now" (from Porgy and Bess) are also of an appropriate length for a 45 RPM single, but that honor went--and appropriately--to "Something We've Got," split into a part one and part two.

Cal Lampley produced both sessions. The rest of the trio is Norman Edge (bass), who was Nanton's musical partner for over 50 years, and Al Beldini, drummer and vocalist (not here) probably best known for his work with Don Elliott.







Friday, November 24, 2023

Listening to Prestige 713: Carmell Jones


LISTEN TO ONE: Flyin' Home

 Another one of those definitely worthy figures who made a brief name for himself and faded into oblivion. You won't find him on any of the various internet lists of the 50 greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Where will you find him? I dug a little deeper, starting with the forum section of organissino.com, where no one is so obscure that some coterie of fans haven't gathered to discuss him or her. I found one discussion of Jones, with all the entries dated 2003, when Mosaic released a box set of all his recordings. The reviews were there were all glowing, with several comparing him to Clifford Brown, and one mentioning that the set had been reviewed on Fresh Air. Nothing since 2003;


I found a really neat jazz blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe, which has, among other treasures, profiles of "Obscure Trumpet Masters." Jones is number four -- they're not ranked; he's number four in alphabetical order, and blogger Curtjazz (I can't find any other name for him) introduces him with:

He plays on one of the most famous straight-ahead jazz songs ever recorded, yet today people are more likely to confuse him with a film character played by Dorothy Dandridge, than they are to know the titles of any of his six albums.

The "most famous" is Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Jones had come east from Los Angeles, where he had recorded three well-received albums for Pacific Jazz, to join Silver's group. He played on two albums with Silver, and did quite a lot more sideman work with excellent musicians (incuding Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson for Prestige), and made this one Pretige album as leader, for which he received Down Beat's "New Star Trumpeter" award.


But as was the case with so many black artists of his era, the racism -- and the lack of appreciation for jazz as an art form -- in the United States weighed too heavily on him, and he moved to Germany, where he would spend the next fifteen years, and would disappear from view as far as the American jazz public was concerned.  

This would be his USA swan song, at least for the time being. He would return in the 1980, and make one more album for the West Coast label Revelation. It was titled Carmell Jones Returns, although by that time the reaction would have been not so much "Wow, he's back!" and more "Who's Carmell Jones?"

His later years were spent in his almost-home town of Kansas City, Missouri. His actual home town was Kansas City, Kansas, but the Missouri side of the state line was more hospitable to music.

For those who remembered him and those who happened on him for the first time with the Mosaic box set, his work was a welcomed pleasure, as well it should have been. What this session captures is a man who loved what he did, even if he didn't love the country he was doing it in. That love comes through in every note he plays.

New to Prestige is Horace Silver veteran Roger Humphries. Don Schlitten produced, and the album was entitled Jay Hawk Talk, a tip of the hat to Jones's home state. The title cut was also released as a two-sided 45 RPM single.

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Listening to Prestige 712: Johnny "Hammond" Smith


LISTEN TO ONE: The Stinger

 I was going to say that as we move deeper into the 1960s, there's an increasing debate as to just what jazz is, but hasn't that always been true? When Nick LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first recordings in 1917, there were plenty around to say that these white boys who called themselves the creators of jazz were a pallid imitation of what Buddy Bolden had done, and what King Oliver and that Armstrong kid were doing. When critics and historians first started seriously writing defintions of jazz, in the early 1940s (no one had really done it before then), they were motivated in large part by a felt need to


create a definition that would include that new stuff by those guys who were turning chords inside out, and who, in the words of comedian Ronny Graham, "wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." In their zeal to have the new experimental sound taken seriously, the critics excluded people like Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely who were making records that people actually wanted to buy (a critical misstep which I have corrected in my new book, Jazz with a Beat, from SUNY Press, available to preorder from Amazon). 

Later, as the music pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became the mainstream, those avant garde critics became the establishment, and some of them looked with dismay at the new sounds that were being made by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, with even wilder young bloods like Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler and James "Blood" Ulmer waiting in the wings. Hence, even though Prestige had its own free jazz practitioners in the mid-1960s, we could find, in the liner notes by Andrew Newcombe to this album, 

The music on this record--and it is music, in the full sense of the term, and in contrast to the squamose smudges of sound that have so often been passed off as jazz in recent years--testifies to the continuing validity of "good taste" as an aesthetic canon.

Definitions of good taste come and go with the years, and it's heartwarming to see how, in the face of the onslaught of a new avant garde, those definitions can be broadened in ways that the establishment critics themselves would probably be just as happy if no one pointed them out. The soul jazz organists who were coming to prominence in the early to mid 1960s were not at all afraid to get their licks, and their rhythms, from that same rhythm and blues that had been written out of the canon--and, in fact, to use some of the same musicians who had played that music.

Smith, for his sidemen on this occasion, did not dip into the Prestige (and Blue Note, and Riverside, and EmArcy, and Roulette) repertory company. His choices were mostly more obscure, although they did include an up and coming star in Houston Person, who had made his first recording with Smith two years earlier, on Riverside. Earl Edwards, Person's opposite number on tenor sax, made a couple of records with Smith and that's about all--he does appear on a record Dinah Washington made for Roulette. I can't find any other credits for drummer John Harris.

The other Smith on the album, Floyd "Guitar" Smith, is a different story. Born in 1917, he came of age in the swing era, playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, and cut his rhythm and blues teeth with a couple of the early organ guys, Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett. 

"The Stinger" is the title cut of the album, and it was the first 45 RPM single off the album, and--led by Floyd Smith's stinging but melodic guitar work, it is rhythm and blues all the way, with both "Hammond" and Person showing their R&B chops. This is the music that was at one time roundly denounced as "bad taste," and they do their swingin', backbeatin' best on it.

The other single off the session was "Brother John," so titled by Mr. "Hammond," but "Brother Ray" might have been a more apt title. I suppose if anyone moved the needle of rhythm and blues over from the bad taste to the good taste part of the dial, it was Ray Charles, but he still had enough bad taste to satisfy the most unreconstructed rhythm and blues fan, and so does Johnny "Hammond" Smith in this tribute to the great man.

All of this album is good, and it's varied. The standard, "There is No Greater Love," by Isham Jones (a standard! Good taste alert!) features some smooth playing by Houston Person (when you could still play smooth without playing "smooth jazz") and some tasty picking by Floyd Smith. "Brother John" is no holds barred. "Cleopatra and the African Knight," in addition to having a great title, does what the early rhythm and blues pioneers did so well--captures a big band feel with a small group. "Benny's Diggin'" weds rhythm and blues to bebop (as many of the early players did) and features some virtuoso work by "Hammond." Some top notch drumming by Harris, as well.


The soul jazz era, ushered in by Jimmy Smith, led to a lot of young keyboardists taking up the organ, and a lot of organ groups being signed to jazz labels. But just because it was a thing, that doesn't mean these young organists came out of a cookie cutter. They had individual styles and imaginations and creative impulses, and sitting down and listening to them for a while can only reinforce that realization.

"The Stinger" made up both sides of a 45. "Brother John" was backed with "Cleopatra." Cal Lampley produced. About the cover, I have nothing to say except to wonder why the Green Lantern is wearing red. 










 

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

Listening to Prestige 711: Jaki Byard


LISTEN TO ONE: Denise

 I talked from time to time about swing-to-bop, in writing about the early days of Prestige, and artists like Zoot Sims. It may be time to consider a new kind of transitional music -- perhaps we should call it straight-ahead-to-free. I don't know what else to call this marvelous live album by Jaki Byard, except perhaps to add that its genesis seems to blossom from Charles Mingus and Earl Hines. To explain that, I'll have to quote extensively fron the liner notes to the original album, by the incomparable Ira Gitler.

Gitler desdribes a night when Don Schlitten came to hear two groups who were sharing the stage at the Village Vanguard--Mingus and Hines. Byard was playing with Mingus then, and he approached Schltten with an idea. Lennie Sogoloff, of the small but well-regarded north-of-Boston jazz club, Lennie's on the Turnpike, had heard Jaki's work on Booker


Ervin's The Freedom Book album, annd he wanted Jaki to bring the trio he had used to back up Ervin--Richard Davis and Alan Dawson.  Dawson was a Boston resident, and Sogoloff had already line him up.

Jaki, in turn, asked Schlitten if Prestige would like to record on the spot,

Don was immediately in favor of the idea and put his creative brain to work helping to shape the date. Since Davis was unable to leave New York at the time, he suggested George Tucker, then playing bass with Hines. Byard liked this and suggested multi-reed man Joe Farrell...Unwilling to trust the unknown, Schitten decided to employ a New York engineer...Dick Alderson was his man. 

The group opened on a Monday. By Thursday, when Schlitten and Alderson arrived...the four men were really getting it together...Byard told [Don] they were ready. This was an understatement. Schlitten describes it as "One of the most beautiful experiencesI've ever had in listening to jazz." 

I wouldn't argue with him.

It is interesting to note that the inception of this recording came at a time when Jaki was playing opposite Earl Hines.  "Out of all the bands," [Byard has said], "The only one I used to dig was...Fatha Hines. That was the only band that intrigued me."

The Mingus-Hines week at the Vanguard was an inspirational one for Byard...Hines plays as if he is a big band, [and] it seemed to inspire Byard to emphasize his own leanings in this direction when he got to Lennie's. "I never heard Jaki play this way," says Schlitten. "He was like a 16-piece band. One second he would be playing the piano part, and then he would resolve and sound like a saxophone section. Behind Joe Farrell he became a punching trumpet section. Throughout the whole thing he was a bandleader. Here was a quartet that sounded like three times that many."


...For all the rough edges involved in such a mercuarial improvising process, there is nothing "haphazard." Even when they go "outside" -- and Jaki knows what he is doing when he is "out there" -- they are always under the firm control of the leader who is able to bring everything and everyone back "inside" to a logical, satisfying conclusion.

Schlitten recalls how the people at Lennie's were completely taken with Byard's ability to capture the entire history of jazz piano playing, (As he has made clear before, Jaki does not fool around in the various styles he is capable of adopting. He does not parody but instead transmits the "feeling" of the greats that he is able to embody as well.) ...Don states, "he runs the gamut from Scott Joplin, James P., Fats, Basie, Duke, to Garner, Bud, Bill Evans, Monk..." He also does the things that Brubeck and Cecil Taylor each try to do but either fall short or don't know when to stop.

 Ira Gitler is, of course, one of the great jazz writers of his era, but he  is of his era, and it's now a half century since he wrote this, and times change, and tastes change, and perspectives change. Gitler could be forgiven if his attitudes, and his critical perspective, had fallen somewhat out of step with today's tastes. 


And maybe they have. Maybe mine have. We live in a time when some young critics reject all of Coltrane's early work as being hokey and not worth listening to...and I mean, even Giant Steps.

But I don't buy that, nor do I think it's a universally held opinion. We also live in a time when young jazz musicians study their craft in college and are denigrated for that, often unfairly, and grow up with a respect for the totality of jazz.

So I'm going to continue to do the only thing I can do, which is to consider my 21st century perspective, and my judgment of Ira Gitler in 1965, to be a valid one, and continue from there.

What's remarkable is how spot-on Gitler was, even about Jaki Byard vis-a-vis Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor. Listening to Byard today, you can still hear what Gitler heard, and even putting into the context of a lot more years and a lot more music, Gitler is still right -- he always knew what he was doing when he was "out there," and he knew when and how to bring it back "inside." And it wasn't because he chickened out, and wouldn't stay as far "out there" or as long "out there" as Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. It's because he heard it all, and wanted it all, and found a way to include it all.


And all of this leads me, in 2023, in a post-postmodern age, an age informed by the conservatorship of Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center and jazz goes to college and jazz meets rock and electronica and more jazz in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, to wonder why Jaki Byard, who encompassed all of it, and always with vision, and always with soul, is so underappreciated? If you look at the internet lists of greatest jazz pianists, lists made up by people who range in age from younger than me to ridiculously younger that me, where is he? Ranker, which is entirely based on fan voting and boasts over 8.7K voters, has Byard not included at all in a list of 70 names. The uDiscover list, compiled by" a team of respected authors and journalists who are passionate about what they do, with decades’ worth of experience in print, online, radio and TV journalism," does have him in the top 50, at number 41. But to the general public -- the general jazz-listening public, that is, the Ranker public, which knows enough to vote Art Tatum number one and Oscar Peterson number two, he doesn't exist.

Listen to what the man does. Start with my Listen to One, then check out the rest of this album, which you can find on YouTube but not on Spotify. Then listen to more.

On my last blog entry, I castigated those long-ago record company owners (visionaries all, who don't deserve my castigation except in this case) for only recording Andy and the Bey Sisters three times during their eleven years as a team. Fortunately, Jaki Byard did not suffer the same fate. Bob Weinstock stayed with him. This is his tenth appearance on Prestige, his fourth as leader of his own group. He would record six more albums as leader, and 23 more for other, mostly smaller labels up through 1998. On Prestige alone, he recorded with Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin; on other labels, with Maynard Ferguson, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, and others. And of course, most famously with Charles Mingus (13 albums).

He was with Prestige pretty much right up to the end, so I'll keep coming back to him. And there'll be more to say, since he wasn't much for repeating himself.

These were released as The Jaki Byard Quartet - Live! Vol. 1 (1965) and Vol. 2 (1967). One cut, "Spanish Tinge," was included on a 1967 studio album, On the Spot. And several previously unissued cuts -- the alternate take of "Twelve," "Dolphy" numbers 1 and 2, "St. Mark's Place Among The Sewers," plus Jaki's Ballad Medley which had been on Volume 2, were released in 2003 under the Prestige label, although by that time Prestige was a part of Fantasy and about to be bundled into the Concord group, as The Last From Lennie's, so someone still remembered Jaki in the 21st century (he died in 1999). Don Schlitten produced.