Listing to Prestige 225: Mal Waldron

We're really getting into the Coltrane era at Prestige now. As with Miles, Bob Weinstock seems to have wanted to present Trane in a variety of settings, which is good. Unlike the Miles recordings, however, the Trane sessions did not necessarily present him as the heavy hitter of whatever group had been gathered.

Here's a quick rundown of his post-Miles oeuvre with Prestige, up to this current session.

• Elmo Hope All Star Sextet, May 7, 1956. This was actually issued two different ways, at the same time and with the same catalog number, but with two different covers and two different billings: as Elmo Hope - Informal Jazz and as Hank Mobley/John Coltrane - Two Tenors. He would finally get top billing in a 1969 re-release: John Coltrane - 2 Tenors With Hank Mobley. Wikipedia's entry on the 1969 release comments: "As Coltrane's fame grew during the 1960s long after he had stopped recording for the label, Prestige assembled varied recordings, often those where Coltrane had been merely a sideman, and reissued them as a new album with Coltrane's name prominently displayed." But "merely a sideman" only describes the billing on the album cover. In a quintet or sextet album of jazz masters, there's no merely. Everyone contributes.
• Sonny Rollins Quartet With John Coltrane, May 24, 1956. Trane gets featured billing on the session notes, not on the album cover. There it's Sonny Rollins - Tenor Madness, and on the reissue, Sonny Rollins - Taking Care of Business. But there's a reason for this. The title cut, "Tenor Madness," is an epic duet -- the only one between these two tenor legends. But it's also Coltrane's only cut on the session.
• The Prestige All Stars, September 7, 1956. I don't think any of the Prestige All Stars sessions were actually packaged as "Prestige All Stars." Generally, the album cover had the whole cast, sometimes omitting the rhythm section, with each musician getting equal billing. Such was the case here. This was two of the original Four Brothers, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, with two new brothers, Coltrane and Hank Mobley. The album was titled Tenor Conclave, and listed the brothers (Mobley - Cohn - Coltrane - Sims) on the cover. The order isn't alphabetical, and it isn't by seniority. Maybe they just flipped a coin. Two later reissues were under Coltrane's name, the first keeping Tenor Conclave and the second including a Tadd Dameron session and titled On a Misty Night.
• Tadd Dameron Quartet, November 30, 1956. Booked as a Dameron session. there was co-billing on the album cover: Tadd Dameron/John Coltrane - Mating Call. It would be rereleased as On a Misty Night, under Trane's name alone, and the "On a Misty Night" track would also be put on another Trane repackage, John Coltrane Plays For Lovers --misnamed, if you ask Tom Cruise. In Jerry Maguire, Cruise's friend gives him a Miles Davis and John Coltrane tape to play during lovemaking, but when the moment comes, Cruise listens to a few bars, says "What is this shit?" and throws it out.
• The Prestige All Stars, March 22, 1957. Released as Interplay For 2 Trumpets And 2 Tenors, with the usual equal billing for all musicians. The two trumpets were Idrees Sulieman and Webster Young, the two tenors were Trane and Bobby Jaspar. This was reissued as Jazz Interplay, but never got a reisssue under Coltrane's name. 
• Art Taylor's All Stars. March 22, 1957. One cut, from the same date, this one a quartet with Taylor, Coltrane, Red Garland and Paul Chambers, for inclusion on a different Taylor session that didn't quite fill out an album.
• The Prestige All Stars, April, 1957. Just the day before the current session, and released as Tommy Flanagan / John Coltrane / Kenny Burrell.

Up to this point, no sessions with Coltrane as leader, although that will come, and a marvelous potpourri of musicians.

I basically approve of the democratic approach to billing on the All Stars sessions, and as stated above, I take issue with the Wiki writer's "merely a sideman." None of the were merely anything. And I suspect this is an echo of the condescension contemporary writers show toward Prestige -- in a addition to sloppy and unrehearsed, Weinstock's label is also put down for the frequency of its repackagings. You know how I feel about all of these criticisms. The hell with them.

And speaking of marvelous potpourris, the tune that Mal Waldron wrote for an earlier session with Thad Jones, Frank Wess and Teddy Charles makes its reappearance here.

"Potpourri" is pure bebop, and surely one of the reasons why bebop retains its vitality well into the 1950s is the emergence of composers like Waldron,

The other Waldron originals: "J. M.'s Dream Doll," and that must have been some dream, or some doll. Some great solos here, but Waldron's is really outstanding. And "Blue Calypso." Remember the

mambo bebop craze of a couple of years back, with Joe Holiday and Billy Taylor as its champions, but also contributions from James Moody, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Kenny Graham (mambo bebop from England!). Well, it turns out you can do it with calypso, too. Sonnny Rollins, from island-born parents, would make calypso his own, but here in 1957, with Harry Belafonte topping the charts with one of the most popular albums of all time, Waldron, Coltrane et al. show how its rhythms can be assimilated into the language of bop.

"Don't Explain" was written by Billie Holiday and her frequent collaborator Arthur Herzog, Jr., and covering a song associated with Billie inevitably means finding a correlative to the intensity of feeling that she put into everything. "Falling in Love with Love" is by Rodgers and Hart, and nothing Lorenz Hart wrote was entirely sentimental, but this song is often given a sentimental treatment by crooners. Not here.

"Potpourri," "J. M.'s Dream Doll" and "Don't Explain became part of Waldron's Mal-2 album, Mal-2, released in 1957. "Blue Calypso" and "Falling in Love With Love" had something of an odder fate. In spite of whatever sales potential a calypso may have had in 1957, both were left off and not released until 1964--and then only on the short-lived Prestige subsidiary Status, which was definitely a budget label, pressed on cheaper quality vinyl and marketed straight to the budget bins. That album, which put together outtakes from two Waldron sessions, was called The Dealers. The session was ultimately released under Coltrane's name in a much later CD box called Side Steps, a title which suggests "like Giant Steps but less important." Well, maybe so. Very few things touch Giant Steps. But great stuff nonetheless.


 



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Listing to Prestige 224: Prestige All Stars

It's four days later, and the Prestige All Stars are back in the studio, although the only thing this group has in common with the recent All Stars is Idrees Sulieman.

Well, there was one other commonality. Both of these sessions were stuck on the shelf and not released till 1959, and then on the New Jazz label.




What was New Jazz, exactly? It had been Bob Weinstock's original name for his label, but that was very soon changed to Prestige, perhaps because Weinstock was not one hundred percent sure he'd be devoting his label to new jazz. And he did record a few blues and R&B musicians like Brownie McGhee and H-Bomb Ferguson--even King Pleasure was first recorded with a rhythm and blues band and marketed as R&B. And old jazz, like Jimmy McPartland. Later, Weinstock would create subsidiary labels like Bluesville and the short-lived Par Presentation for non-modern jazz recordings. But he also revived New Jazz, and it's not clear why.

Partly, it may have been his version of a budget label. Budget labels were an interesting business back then. An LP record sold for $4.98, but you could also buy, mostly at places like Woolworth's, LP's for $1.98. Some of these were knockoffs of popular groups--Meet the Beetles! And some were labels like Pickwick, that leased music that had gone out of print from major labels. Some were subsidiaries of the majors themselves, like RCA's Camden. Elvis Presley, his sales declining and his star waning, had a lot of his material repackaged on Camden, and even leased to Pickwick, when Elvis repackaged himself by dying, and thus reattaining superstardom. A lot of the budget labels had inferior pressing and labeling.

But if New Jazz was a budget label, it wouldn't have done much for your budget. Contemporary catalogs have the list price at $3.98, which meant you wouldn't even save enough to buy a budget reissue of old Red Callender swing, repackaged as Rock and Roll, or Tom Lehrer's Songs Recorded by Jack Eljan.

And it wasn't entirely a repackaging enterprise, either. Some albums
were released on both Prestige and New Jazz, with the same cover art and liner notes. And some recordings, like these two All Star sessions, were New Jazz originals. The straight-to-New Jazz sessions seem to have been ones that Weinstock didn't see much commercial potential in: less distribution, less marketing.

But this doesn't make a lot of sense, either. There's no reason to think that a session with Teddy Charles, Idrees Sulieman and Mal Waldron would be a loser, or that Weinstock would want to bury it, especially since he and Charles were pals. But there is absolutely no reason to think that a session with John Coltrane would be an underperformer. By 1957, Coltrane was already a star. And it gets worse, which is to say, more unlikely. The session wasn't actually released until 1959, when Trane was becoming a huge star. He had already decamped for Atlantic, and had recorded Giant Steps.

Regardless, this was a terrific album, with Tommy Flanagan taking over the piano and composing reins from Mal Waldron, and bringing, among others, a tune he had recorded a month earlier.

The March version of "Solacium" featured Bobby Jaspar and Eddie Costa. Here flute and vibes are replaced by trumpet, tenor sax and guitar, and yet the tune is instantly familiar, even to me, who has a tough time remembering any tune he didn't first hear when he was under 21. Coltrane et. al. work it out for nearly twice the length of Jaspar and Costa, beginning with Burrell, leading up to a particularly powerful solo by Sulieman that's then taken to even greater heights by Coltrane,, then Burrell again, building on what's come before.

The other Flanagan originals are "Tommy's Time," "Minor Mishap" and "Eclypso." If you tuned into the last named expecting to hear a calypso, swallow your disappointment. Coltrane will be back tomorrow (literally; he recorded on both March 18 and 19) with a different cast and a real calypso. In the meantime, no need for disappointment. This Eclypso is eclipsed by nothing.

Logged in as a Prestige All Stars session, it was released (on New Jazz, in 1959} as The Cats, by Tommy Flanagan/John Coltrane/Kenny Burrell, and it managed to stay sufficiently obscure that a later Coltrane/Burrell album is often credited as the only time Trane recorded with a guitarist.

 



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Listing to Prestige 223: Prestige All Stars

This is one of the more obscure All Stars sessions. I couldn't find it at all on Spotify, and had no luck on YouTube searching under Prestige All Stars. Finally, I decided to search under the names of individual band members and struck gold on the first try: Teddy Charles. YouTube has the tracks under Charles' name. AllMusic credits the session to the leadership of Charles and Mal Waldron, who was certainly a strong organizing force at Prestige in those days. Wikipedia gives producer credit to Charles, rateyourmusic gives it to Bob Weinstock. The Teddy Charles discography website, maintained by Noal Cohen, describes it as a session by the Prestige Jazz Quartet with guests. In any event, you can find the tunes on YouTube under Charles's name.

Waldron contributed two tunes to the session; Charles, Idrees Suleiman and John Jenkins one each. A Charles session could go one of two ways: very avant garde or very mainstream. This is definitely in the latter category, as was only appropriate. Teddy Charles as producer or no, this was still a Prestige All Stars session, which meant a Bob Weinstock session: loose, mostly unrehearsed jamming. Jazz like it should be, with all really good players meshing well.

Charles, Waldron, Addison Farmer and Jerry Segal were playing together for the first time here, and were not yet known as the Prestige Jazz Quartet, but they would work a few more sessions together under that name.

Drummer Jerry Segal had done an earlier Teddy Charles recording for New Jazz, and had recorded with Terry Gibbs, so he knew something about playing behind vibraphonists. He would join Mose Allison for a few albums after Allison's move to Columbia.

This was John Jenkins's recording debut. 1957 would be his busiest year, touching the heart of New York indie jazz, as he recorded with Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy and Riverside. Like Teddy Charles, he would leave jazz a few years later to take up other pursuits, but unlike Charles, he doesn't seem to have found a more secure profession, For most of his non-jazz years, he was a street pedlar, and when he returned to music in the mid-1980s, it was as a street musician. This is no reflection on his ability--the world of street music in New York is highly competitive, and of a very high level. He did record once more, with Clifford Jordan, before his death in 1993.

The album was entitled Coolin'. The 1949 Miles Davis nonet sessions were finally released on LP by Capitol right around the time of this session, and were receiving the acclaim from the jazz public that they had always had among musicians,  so that may have influenced the choice of title. And of course gerunds with dropped g's had been, and would continue to be featured in Prestige's releases of the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon sessions. All this seems to have had more to do with marketing than with the music.But whatever marketing strategy went into the naming of this album, there seems to have been not much followup. It was not released until 1959, and then only on New Jazz, and there were no repackagings of it under Teddy Charles's name. In fact, no repackagings at all, until finally a release on Concord's Original Jazz Classics series.

 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here. It makes a great Christmas gift for the jazz lovers on your list. And you can tell them that Volume 2 should be ready for next Christmas!

Listening to Prestige 222: Gene Ammons

This could very easily be another Prestige All Stars session. It has pretty much the right lineup. But it was released as a Gene Ammons album, which says something about Ammons's popularity with the record buying public.

It is a typical Ammons session He liked to work slightly larger than the typical quartet-quintet lienup. He had certainly worked with Jackie McLean before. This was his first session with Idrees Suleiman, but he he had included other outstanding trumpeters in his groups, most recently Art Farmer in January. And that January session had also introduced Kenny Burrell to the mix. Burrell was one of Prestige's new stars, and the bite of his guitar solos played well with the powerful horn sections that Ammons fronted.

Ammons is known as a godfather of soul jazz, and for a style that stayed close to the roots of R&B.

But he had an equal fondness for the dreamy romantic ballad, and why not? The funky style of a Muddy Waters or an Amos Milburn was certainly a part of R&B, but not the whole part  Honkers like Big Jay McNeely and Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson played dreamy ballads too, and Earl Bostic specialized in them. And don't forget the doowop harmony groups of New York and LA, Philadelphia and Chicago. They were an important part of the music we call rhythm and blues, and they loved those dreamy pop ballads.

We get that side of Ammons in the opening section of "Pennies Fom Heaven," a tune written by Arthur Johnston for a 1936 Bing Crosby movie It became a standard beloved by pop singers, traditional jazzers and beboppers alike, and Ammons's dreamy head soon morphs into some solid bebop jamming.

If you were listing the significant jazz composers of this era, who would you come up with? Ellington, of course, in any era he chose to alight in. Monk, first of all. Bird, of course. Tadd Dameron. Bobby Timmons is maybe even better known for funk classics like "Moanin'" than for his piano playing. John Lewis and Horace Silver were two of the top pianists and composers of the era. There were Benny Golson ("I Remember Clifford,," "Killer Joe") and Sonny Rollins ("Airegin"), and Miles Davis, even though he probably didn't write "Dig"  But he did write "Four," which Ammons covers here.

I don't think that -- at least before I started writing this blog -- I would have thought of Mal Waldron right away, but his contemporaries surely did. In virtually every session he's called up on to play, you'll find at least one Waldron tune -- frequently two or more.

There are two here, "The Twister" and "Cattin'." In "Cattin'," the heavy cat is Paul Chambers He starts it off with an intricate bass figure, and remains a presence throughout. Well, come to think of it throughout the whole session, with a lovely bowed bass solo on "The Twister."

The album was released as Jammin' in Hi-Fi with Gene Ammons. It would later be rereleased as Gene Ammons - The Twister. I'm not quite sure why. The release would probably have predated the twist craze, and even if it had't, it would have been difficult to convince anyone that they could do the twist to this bebop jam session.

Nothing on 45, which is a little surprising, since Ammons' work for Prestige did yield a number of 45 RPM releases.


 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here. It makes a great Christmas gift for the jazz lovers on your list. And you can tell them that Volume 2 should be ready for next Christmas!

Listening to Prestige 221: Ray Bryant

(New format. At the request of a reader--all right, my brother--I'm putting the YouTube link up near the top, to make it easier for those who want to listen while reading.)

This was a hot time for Ray Bryant. And actually, come to think of it, he never cooled off over a long and productive career: over 60 albums as leader, including a few solo piano albums, and a Music Minus One, which is something I'd quite forgotten about. Music Minus One was a series of albums of classic jazz tunes with the part for the main soloist left out, as a practice tool for musicians. So I remembered. It turns out that (a) Music Minus One was really started for classical musicians, although they did jazz too, and (b) they're still around, with close to 900 titles in print, and with the kid who founded it, now nearly 90, still running the company. Good for Irv Kratka, and good for Music Minus One. Good for anything that encourages people to play music, and helps them to play music.

But I digress. Ray Bryant gave us over 60 albums as leader, gigs as sideman numbering in the hundreds. He had a huge pop hit in 1959 with "Madison Time," which became even huger in 1988 when it was used for a key scene in John Waters' Hairspray. He composed several other tunes that have become jazz standards.

 He had burst onto the New York recording scene in 1954, with an album for Columbia entitled Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant. It was the debut album for both of them, but when a vocalist is one of the people you're meeting on vinyl, it's really the vocalist's session.

He was still living in Philadelphia until well into the 1950s, playing regularly at a club there, and commuting to New York for recording sessions with various artists, including three on Prestige. He cut his first album as a leader (also a trio session) for Epic in 1956, and this was his second. He would shortly make the move that a serious jazz musician had to make, to the Big Apple.

Backing him up this session were Ike Isaacs on bass and Charles "Specs" Wright on drums, both new to Prestige but not new to Bryant. Earlier in the year he had worked with Wright on an Art Blakey date, and then with both of them on two sessions with Carmen McRae (Isaacs was then Mr. Carmen McRae), so they had a good groove going.

As talented a composer as Bryant came to be, for this early session he relied mostly on tunes from an eclectic assortment of composers.

The session leads off with John Lewis's almost painfully beautiful "Django," and the song leads off with a slow, stately reading of the melody, with a lot of sustain, that leaves you holding your breath, wanting to hold onto the moment, and waiting to see what will come next. When he picks up the tempo and loses the sustain, the haunting quality of the head stays with you.

As is often the case, the order of the session is changed on the album, which leads off with "Golden Earrings," by Victor Young one of those enduring tunes from a forgotten movie (like "Unchained Melody"). He also covers Tin Pan Alley journeymen Ray Henderson and Matt Dennis, and jazz greats Clifford Brown ("Daahoud") and Kenny Clarke/Gerald Wiggins ("Sonar"). The two originals are "Blues Changes" -- and there's some blues in everything Bryant plays -- and "Splittn'," in which the tempo burns and the lead is split between Bryant's piano and Wright's drums

The album was released on both Prestige and New Jazz, same cover art for each release, and although it's called Piano Piano Piano Piano in some catalogs, on the record the title is just Ray Bryant Trio,

 



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Listening to Prestige 220: Phil Woods and Gene Quill

Phil Woods is a jazz icon today, and Bobby Jaspar is pretty much forgotten, so there's a lot to be said for longevity. There are some careers that were pretty short, but they burned with such a brilliant flame that they'll never be forgotten. Charlie Parker is the obvious one. Bud Powell. There were some whose careers were very short, and they may not be remembered by the casual fan, but they are revered by the serious aficionados. Charlie Christian, Chano Pozo. There are some who had brief, blazing careers and are remembered vividly, some with much the same brief blazing careers and not so vivid: Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro.

Gene Quill had a long and productive life, but except for these recordings with Phil Woods, he mostly settled for the job security and relative anonymity of studio and section work, playing with some of the great jazz orchestras.

All of these, remembered or semi-forgotten, wrote their names in the Book of Jazz, and deserve to be remembered..deserve to be cherished.

These musings come at a time when Bob Dylan has just been awarded the Nobel Prize, and many are saying, "Aren't there other singer-songwriters who deserved it more?" And that's a foolish question. There is no "deserved it more." You either deserve it, whether it's the Nobel Prize or the respect of your peers, or you don't deserve it. Bobby Jaspar, Gene Quill, Fats Navarro, Elmo Hope, Wardell Gray, J. R. Monterose...they all deserve it.

And Phil Woods absolutely deserves it.

For this session, Woods brings back the rhythm section he used for his 1954 Prestige session with Jon Eardley (another not-so-remembered player, for a common reason: because he moved to Europe early on and spent the rest of he career there): George Syran, Teddy Kotick and Nick Stabulas. But this is 1957, and things are different. Certainly they're different for bass players. Teddy Kotick is a veteran of the birth of bebop days, one of Charlie Parker's favorite bassists. Like others of his generation, he was valued for his ability to handle the tricky tempos and improvisational leaps of the great bebop soloists, but was not expected to solo much, partly because in the pre-Rudy Van Gelder era it was hard to mike the bass in such a way as to feature it as a solo instrument. Players like Charles Mingus and Paul Chambers changed all that, and some of the standout bebop bassists like Curly Russell essentially called it a career. In this session, Kotick steps up for some serious bass solos, and he delivers.

This is very much a bebop session. You don't name a tune "Altology" unless Charlie ("Ornithology") Parker is very much on your mind.

Woods and Quill feature a couple of modern jazz standards: "Solar," attributed to Miles Davis or perhaps Chuck Wayne, and "Airegin," written by Sonny Rollins and originally recorded by Sonny with Miles. "Airegin" came from a time when it became fashionable to name tunes with words spelled backwards, a trend that I don't miss nearly as much as I miss titles with bop puns, like "A Night on Bop Mountain" or "Flight of the Bopple Bee."

Speaking of titles, two of the originals on this session are "Creme de Funk" and "Nothing but Soul," and they are fine bebop cuts, but not especially characterized by funk or soul, neither looking backward to the rhythm and blues/bop fusion of the late 40s and early 50s, or the funk/soul jazz that was trending in the late 50s and would become ubiqiitous in the 60s. This style would become linked with Blue Note, and its stars like Art Blakey (whose pianist Bobby Timmons would write the classics of the genre, "Moanin'" and "Dat Dere"), and Horace Silver (who would use Teddy Kotick on two Blue Note albums in 1957/58).

But the real progenitor of the movement was probably someone who is now revered as a jazz immortal, but was back then rejected by jazz snobs: Ray Charles. Rhythm and blues and bebop may have been soul brothers, but the exploding popularity of rock and

roll, and especially white rock and roll, had led jazz purists to build a wall even solider than the one Donald Trump plans for Mexico. But that didn't mean musicians weren't listening, and Charles' fusion of blues and gospel resulted in a whole new definition of the blues that changed both jazz and popular music irrevocably.

But I digress. Phil Woods and Gene Quill made a successful pairing because of their musical compatibility, and also because of the marketing gimmick suggested by their names. This album came out as Phil and Quill with Prestige, later released under Woods's name as his reputation continued to grow. There were only two Phil-and-Quill labeled recordings, the other for Epic, although they performed often as a quintet in clubs during this era.






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Listening to Prestige 219: Art Taylor's All Stars

March 22 was a busy day out at the Van Gelder residence. Webster Young recalls that John Coltrane had already cut a session by the time he and Idrees Suleiman and Bobby Jaspar arrived, but this may not be quite accurate. There were three different sessions that day, and if you were guessing, you'd put this one-tune session in the middle slot: first the Red Garland Trio, then the same rhythm section with Coltrane, and then Coltrane sticking around to be part of the Prestige All Stars octet. But judging by the numbers in the session as recreated by jazzdisco.org, the Red Garland session was first, and although Coltrane may have arrived earlier to hang out, he did not sit in.

Next, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor remained on bill, but the All Stars session was Mal Waldron's, so Garland wasn't needed, but he stuck around. Then after the Waldron crew had finished, there was, amazingly enough, time for one more, so Garland's trio stepped up again (Chambers and Taylor still on the job), this time billed as Art Taylor's All Stars, and this time with Coltrane added to the mix.

Why Art Taylor's All Stars? The simplest explanation is as good as any. Weinstock had a previous Art Taylor session in the can, but it was just a little too short to make a full album. In any event, Taylor does some fierce and fancy drumming.

Coltrane would be back before long for a return engagement with Garland, Chambers and Taylor. I can't tell you exactly when because I don't look ahead. But I'll save my thoughts on the quartet for that album, one of my all time favorites.

"C.T.A." was included on the Taylor's Wailers album, and later on a Red Garland album. When Interplay for 2 Trumpets and 2 Tenors was rereleased on CD, it was included there too, as a "bonus track," a marketing gimmick that was a big deal back when CDs were a big deal, if anyone can remember that far back.

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Listening to Prestige 218: Prestige All Stars

All of the Prestige All Stars sessions lived up to their all star billling, but this one really does, and not just because it has John Coltrane on it. Coltrane was to become a jazz deity, but he was already jazz royalty. But the rest of the group is extraordinary, and their playing on this date lives up to their name recognition.  Webster Young, the new kid on the block, was invited to play on this date shortly after his debut album with Ray Draper. He talks about it in Benjamin Franklin V's Jazz and Blues Musicians of South Carolina:

About two weeks later, Mal Waldron called me and said, "I have a record date. I asked him who was on it and he said himself, John Coltrane--my knees began to sink--Idrees Sulieman, Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers and Arthur Taylor. These were heavyweights. Bobby Jaspar was there on tenor. I said, "OK."

On the morning of the date, I went over to see Miles, and he convinced me that I could do it...He showed me a few licks. He was living on Tenth Avenue, and I had to get to Prestige on 50th Street...

Me, Bobby Jaspar and Idrees Suleiman went out together. The other cats were already there...a Coltrane date had [already] been held there. Red Garland was there with his

John and Naima Coltrane

wife. Trane was there with his wife, Naima. It was Mal's date. He had written four tunes: "Interplay," which was "I Got Rhythm;" "Anatomy," which was "All the Things That You Are;" "Light Blue," which was a blues, and the tune that made the album, "Soul Eyes." I was nervous as hell, but I was determined. Everything that we did was one take. Between Coltrane and Bobby Jaspar, that was something. Bobby Jaspar was a good player, very good. He was tight with Idrees; he was a nice cat. I liked him and Trane. It was a hell of a date.

A hell of a date is right.  Young was focused on the horn players, and so left out Kenny Burrell, but he was another one of Prestige's rising all stars, and he contributes mightily as well. "Anatomy" goes straight from the head (which is a lot more than a riff: Waldron was a talented composer, and even if this is based on the ubiquitous chord changes, in this case "All the Things That You Are") to a guitar solo, to a bowed bass solo by Chambers, to a piano solo by Waldron, and they're all a lot more than interludes between the two trumpets and two saxophones.

The centerpiece here, Webster Young's "tune that made the album," is Waldron's classic "Soul Eyes." It's best known for the 1962 recording by Coltrane on Impulse, but it's become a standard, recorded by Stan Getz among others (and check out the recent vocal version by Kandace Springs). Coltrane's 1962 recording features his great quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, and distills the beauty of the composition into 5:27. This version lasts 17:29, one whole side of the LP, and gives ample opportunity for interplay between two trumpets, two tenors, a guitar and a rhythm section. If you know and love the Coltrane quartet version, listen to this one, too.

This is an amazing feat, when you think about it. Bob Weinstock, as we know, liked the impromptu feeling of a jam session. He's talked about the way he worked with Miles Davis--no regular group, just sit down and kick around ideas for a session. Who was in town, who Miles would like to play with. That resulted in some perspectives on Miles that we would not have had otherwise, and it's the same thing here with Coltrane, as you can tell if you listen to "Soul Eyes" with Coltrane's regular group, and with this pickup group, probably put together by Weinstock and Mal Waldron. Coltrane and Sulieman were veterans and most likely knew each other, but they had never recorded together. Nor had Coltrane and Waldron, although Waldron and Sulieman had done one previous session. Kenny Burrell was new in town. He'd worked with Paul Chambers, but that was about it. Bobby Jaspar was not only new in town, he was new to the country. Webster Young was still a kid whose knees started shaking when he heard he was to record with John Coltrane.

So you have these guys new to each other, playing charts they had almost certainly just received that day. Two of the melodies were based on chord changes they were familiar with, one was a blues. But the last one, the big one, was a new and subtle melody, and as they started playing the head, they must have known it was not going to be a three minute number for jukebox release (which it is, in the Kandace Springs recording), but they didn't necessarily know that it was going to go on for the better part of 20 minutes, and they'd have to keep improvising and keep on keeping it fresh. And, as we know from Webster Young's reminiscence, you were going to have to do it in one take.

And I don't know, but I'd guess if you were getting together with strangers on a 17 minute jam, it would be easier to sustain if you were playing something bouncy than a dreamy, subtle ballad. But that's what they do, and they do sustain it. I wouldn't subtract a minute.

If you're going to pull something like this off, it helps to have a musician of the caliber of John Coltrane at the center of it. And it helps to have the composer anchoring it, if that composer is Mal Waldron. It's always a special experience to hear Waldron soloing on one of this own compositions.

Listen to the way the musicians come in as the head gets restated at the end of the piece. It's unusual, maybe even haphazard. It wouldn't be that way if it had been rehearsed. And it's just about perfect. It's Prestige jazz.

The title of the album is Interplay for 2 Trumpets and 2 Tenors.


 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 217: Red Garland

I remember buying this album way back when, and I remember loving it. Keep in mind that I came to jazz from rhythm and blues, and while I was learning to love everything about jazz with an elemental passion, rhythm and blues was still in the deepest part of my heart, and I was enthralled that Red Garland would include, along with the jazz standards that made up the preponderance of this album, a rhythm and blues classic: Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone To Love."

Now, five decades later, my tastes have grown and matured, and...well, no, they haven't. I still love classic rhythm and blues in the deepest core of my heart, and I still get the same thrill listening to Red Garland's rendition of "Please Send Me Someone to Love."

I knew the song first from the doowop version by the Moonglows, with Harvey Fuqua singing the lead. I fell in love with it then, and fell deeper in love with it when I heard Percy Mayfield's heart-rending version. Mayfield was called "the poet of the blues," and his brooding imagery was widely admired. Art Rupe, who recorded him for Specialty Records, was later to say that with the right kind of encouragement, Percy could have become another Langston Hughes.

No one was looking at the Los Angeles-based label, drawing on New Orleans talent, the label of gospel singers and Little Richard, for the next Langston Hughes, any more than they were looking to the Chicago-based R&B label started by the Chess brothers. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had a hard time being taken seriously as music in those days, and no one was looking at Percy Mayfield or Chuck Berry as candidates a Nobel Prize, or for Poet Laureateship. They should have been.

As good as Harvey Fuqua's vocal was, over the insistent piano triplets that underpinned the doowop sound, Red Garland's piano actually comes closer to capturing the lament in Mayfield's voice, and his lyric: a lament for the suffering of the world and one soul's loneliness.

And yes, jazz does give you more. The rhythmic complexity of Art Taylor, and especially the richness of Paul Chambers, add depth without sacrificing any of the immediacy. Garland and the trio give ten minutes to Mayfield, and they really explore its possibilities.

Garland goes a little outside the bebop canon for the Benn Goodman swing era classic, "Stompin' at the Savoy," which turns out to adapt itself seamlessly to a modern treatment.

Standards make up the rest of the session, beautiful ones from Ray Noble, Lerner and Loewe, Fields and McHugh, and the Gershwins.

Miles Davis may not have particularly liked anyone a whole lot, and probably no one likes their record label. Musicians hate their labels, artists hate their galleries, writers hate their publishers. And for the same good reasons: not enough money, not enough marketing support. But Miles may not have hated Bob Weinstock, as these things go. He bequeathed to Prestige's owner his rhythm section -- and as we shall see, his tenor player. This was one heck of a bequest.

The album from this session (plus a couple of tunes from a previous session) was called Red Garland's Piano, and Prestige also released a couple of 45s. Appropriately, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" was one of them, split onto two sides. Later, they'd release the swinging "Stompin' at the Savoy," b/w "He's a Real Gone Guy," from a subsequent session.


 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 216: Herbie Mann - Bobby Jaspar

The two March Bobby Jaspar sessions, the first a quintet with Eddie Costa on vibes, the second a partnership, the second a partnership with Herbie Mann (guitarist Joe Puma making it a sextet), were mixed and matched and released on two albums, Flute Flight and Flute Soufflé.

Of the two, Flute Flight is the one I remember as an iconic album of the era, Flute Soufflé less well known. The cover art from Flight triggers a memory, but I'm fairly certain I'm seeing the cover art from Soufflé for the first time.

And that recollection gets support from the accounting of the modern world. Amazon lists Flight as number 9000-something on its sales chart, Soufflé down in the mid-13000s.

Herbie Mann was the marquee performer. He would go on to have one of the most commercially successful careers in modern jazz (his Memphis Underground is one of the top selling jazz albums of all time, and a single, "Hijack," spent three weeks at Number One on the Billboard dance chart in 1975), while retaining his artistic cred (a website devoted to the 100 greatest jazz flutists rates him at #2 behind Eric Dolphy (Bobby Jaspar is #36, which is probably a little low. If he'd lived longer, and recorded more, this would be a different story).

So Flute Flight is the album on which Bobby Jaspar's American reputation mostly rests, and it is actually mostly his album, with all of the quintet numbers plus two from this session.

This may partly reflect the fact that the quintet session was a little short for a full album (20 miinutes of music, and they weren't doing 10-inchers then), but I'm guessing it was mostly a marketing decision. Move a couple of tracks from the Herbie Mann session over, and you can put his name on both albums. Not really a bait and switch. Jazz fans are notoriously well-informed consumers, and they'd rarely buy an album without checking all the players on every cut. And in any case, no need to feel shortchanged by the music. It's all good.

It's also all flute, at least from the two leaders, which further cemented Jaspar's reputation as a flutist, although in Europe he was known more for his work on the tenor sax. Soufflé, on the other hand, mixes up the instruments more. Which I'll get to, as we actually start to focus on this session.

They say that Chuck Berry never had to tour with a band, because there was no city he could go to,

anywhere in the world, where he couldn't find musicians who knew all his songs. For two jazz musicians in the Fifties, the same could be said for Charlie Parker tunes, so what better way for a Belgian and a Brooklyn hipster (a real Brooklyn hipster, not the kind who make fake gourmet chocolate) to get to know each other? The first cut on this session is Parker's "Chasin' the Bird," and it's a great ice-breaker. They make their mutual introductions on the flute, and Bird provides a rich source for interpretation, so the two flute voices are distinctive and complementary. And so are the other voices on the session.

"Bo-Do" is two flutes again, but perhaps the star turn on this Joe Puma composition is Puma himself, on guitar--and as a composer. The tune is riff-driven but very substantial, and there are great solos by Tommy Flanagan and Wendell Marshall. Puma only did one other session for Prestige, but he had a long and distinguished career in jazz, still active until shortly before his death in 2000. During the mid-50s, he and Herbie Mann worked together often.

"Somewhere Else" is a Puma composition again, another good one, this time a showcase for four solo instruments, played by two guys. First Mann on tenor, then Jaspar on flute, and after an interval in the middle by Puma, back to Mann on flute and finally a strong Jaspar on tenor.

Back to the flutes for "Let's March," a Mann composition that starts out with Bobby Donaldson demonstrating that the march has come a long way since Sousa, followed by Mann showing that it's come even farther than you might think, when it's overlaid with the intricate runs and rhythms of bebop. This is a cool piece for both flutes, but maybe even better for Puma, who burns through his solo, and then we close with the two flutes and the drummer marching out.

"Tel Aviv" is the centerpiece of the session, a beautiful pensive melody by Herbie Mann showcasing Jaspar on tenor sax. It's 15 minutes long, and gives everyone a place in the limelight, but it's Jaspar you really carry away.

They finish up the session with another Mann composition, "Tutti Flutie," which may well have been thrown together on the spot, one of Rudy Van Gelder's "five o'clock blues." It stretches out for ten minutes, which makes enough music to fill out two albums, it's fun and tuneful and bluesy and gives everyone room for some great solos. I was especially taken by Tommy Flanagan and Wendell Marshall. And the fluties are tutti -- no saxes here.

This meant it could go on the all-flute album, Flute Flight, along with "Bo-Do." The others are all on Flute Soufflé. 

"Let's March" was also released on a two-sided 45, which suggests that Weinstock may have sensed Mann's hitmaking potential early. "Tutti Flutie" also became a 45 later on -- much later on, I would guess. "Let's March" is in the 100 series, "Tutti Flutie" in the 400 series. I can't exactly figure out Prestige's 400 series of 45s. They're not in any chronological sequence -- the MJQ's "Django" and "Moody's Mood for Love" come next. So these maybe come late in the game, when Prestige was moving toward mosty repackaging and reissuing, or even after the sale to Fantasy.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 216: Ray Draper

Don't ask me why Webster Young gets the special "introducing" credit in the session notes. New performers were introduced all the time, especially with Jackie McLean. Ray Draper had just made his debut a month earlier on a session with McLean and Bill Hardman, himself a McLean introducee. But that's what it says.

Draper's debut as a leader is noteworthy for a couple of reasons: (a) there aren't all that many jazz combos led by a tuba player, and (b) Draper was still only 16. But he had leadership qualities, and if he hadn't lost so many years to heroin addiction (it must have been tough to handle being 16 and being thrust into the cauldron of the New York jazz life), he could have done a lot more. As it is, he is credited with being the first musician (even before Miles) to form a jazz-rock fusion group

There are a bunch of faces new to Prestige here. Except for McLean and Mal Waldron, this is a new mix, which once again leads to the speculation on how a group is put together for a session. Sometimes musicians who grew up together will coalesce to make a record, like the various Detroiters, or Harlem high school pals Sonny Rollins, Kenny Drew, Jackie McLean and Art Taylor. But Ray Draper certainly wasn't calling on guys his age from the old neighborhood, because there weren't any other guys his age playing jazz on this level. Webster Young, Spanky DeBrest and Ben Dixon were all in their early twenties, but there's a big gap between that and 16.

But we know a certain amount about this session, from a reminiscence by Webster Young in Jazz and Blues Musicians of South Carolina, by Benjamin Franklin V. Young was living in Brooklyn and mostly playing with a bunch of guys in Brooklyn, although he would come in to Manhattan to informally apprentice with Miles Davis, and occasionally sit in with him on gigs. Miles, he said, would encourage him but keep him in check:

If you wanted to show off, Miles would say, "You got a Cadillac outside?" In other words, "What's wrong with you?" I dug it, I needed that.

Ray Draper would occasionally show up at the Brooklyn jam sessions.

He'd been playing at some sessions in New York and some competitions at Birdland...He was a nice cat [but] full of himself. I was a little bit older, and I helped him to be serious...Ray came up with a proposal. If he could play with us, he'd get us to the New York competitions. I said "No." And I didn't want a tuba player. But the other cats said if we did it, we'd be doing something. So I thought if we didn't do it, I'd lose the band. We let Ray play with us, and we had the competitions. Nat Hentoff...was one of the judges. We played three competitions. We won them all.

Young was invited to meet Jackie McLean and hang out during Draper's first recording session with McLean, and

...during intermission, Bob Weinstock came over to Ray and said he was going to record him and Webster. He didn't even know me.

So that's how Young got on the session. He was also the one who recommended drummer Ben Dixon, a fellow South Carolinian. The two had moved to Washington and then Brooklyn together, and Young had told Draper that "I'd make the date as long as we had Ben Dixon on drums."

Dixon would go on to a substantial career in New York, becoming a sought-after drummer especially for Blue Note's soul jazz recordings, working a lot with Lou Donaldson and Grant Green. Young played on several Prestige dates in 1957, and that was pretty much the end of his recording career, although he continued to be in demand as a working musician. He told Franklin that he had reservations about doing a lot of recording because he didn't want to be tied down to a day job, although he eventually did take a day job, becoming a respected educator.

Jackie McLean is the veteran here. Although only 25 himself, he was already considered a major jazz star, and one of the most recorded jazz musicians of his time. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, that he was really good and really versatile. Second, that his situation was almost exactly the opposite of Webster Young's: he was largely limited to day jobs. He battled heroin addiction throughout the '50s, and his arrest and conviction for heroin possession meant that he could not get a cabaret card to work in New York City clubs. As Young recalls in his taped reminiscence, Jackie "was the cat," but because of his ubiquitous exposure and his innate generosity, he gave much of the solo space to the younger musicians.

Draper and Young each contributed two songs to the set, each of them paying tribute to a mentor, Young with "House of Davis," and Draper with "Jackie's Dolly," dedicated to McLean's young daughter. And Webster paid tribute to another idol with his suggestion of "You're My Thrill," one of his favorite Billie Holiday recordings.

Mal Waldron's "Pivot" had previously been done on the Jimmy Raney / Kenny Burrell version of the Prestige All Stars, and here it shows Waldron's piano chops as well as his compositional skills.

Jazz instrumentalists were doing amazing things with unlikely instruments during this era. J. J Johnson and Kai Winding had shown that fast, complex bebop figures could be played on the trombone. The bass had become a flexible solo instrument in the hands of players like Paul Chambers and Oscar Pettiford, and Ray Draper was ready, at 16, to step out front and make the tuba a significant solo instrument. And to show just how much can be done in those lower registers, he played some exciting bass-tuba duets with Spanky DeBrest (best known for his work with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers).

The session was released as Tuba Sounds, with "introducing Webster Young" as part of the front cover text.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 215: Bobby Jaspar

A star-crossed session, with two wonderful players destined to die far too young. Vibraphonist Eddie Costa would die in an auto accident in 1962, leader Bobby Jaspar of a heart attack in 1963.

This was Jaspar's recording debut, and the American debut for the Belgian-born musician. He was probably better known as a saxophonist in Europe, but most of his American recording, and therefore most of his reputation, was on the flute.

Jaspar came to the US in 1956. The Swedes like Lars Gullin and Bengt Hallberg had paved the way for acceptance of European jazz musicians, and Jaspar arrived with a reputation as a cat who could play.

He also arrived with an American wife. He had married semi-expatriate Blosssom Dearie in Paris in 1955 (they would divorce in 1957, around the time he was making these Prestige sides).

Eddie Costa, also making his Prestige debut with this session, was really hitting his stride in 1957, the year that he was named the Down Beat new star of the year on both piano and vibes, the first time a musician had ever won two categories in the same year. He first hit New York in 1949, with his older brother Bill. It wasn't a long drive from his home town in central Pennsylvania--only 150 miles--but culturally, it might as well have been a moon shot. Atlas, PA, was a coal mining town, and not much modern jazz made it there. But brother Bill played piano, and had a taste for swing, which he passed on to Eddie. The two of them hit the big city together, where Eddie first heard Bud Powell, and found his true musical love. He recorded with Sal Salvador in 1954, and made his first recording as a leader in 1956, a trio session with Vinnie Burke and Nick Stabulas that was released by two primarily rhythm and blues labels, Jubilee and its subsidiary Josie.

Bobby Donaldson was also new to Prestige, but hardly new to the music business. He went back to the swing and jump blues days in the 1940s, but by this time he was a sought-after session drummer in virtually any genre you'd care to name.

If you were going to assign signs of the zodiac to musical instruments, flute would be an air sign, vibes and piano water signs. Bass and drums, of course, would be earth signs. So minus the fire sign of a saxophone, this session is earth, wind and water, and a very cool combination it is. I was particularly struck by the compositions, which I guessed might be all Bobby Jaspar tunes, but I was wrong. "Flute Bob" is Jaspar's, but "Flute Bass Blues" is by Doug Watkins and "Solacium" by Tommy Flanagan. Which says something about how many talented composers there were in the jazz world of the 1950s, even though many of these compositions were caught in flight at the one session they were brought to, and then soared on into the jazz ionosphere. "Flute Bass Blues" was recorded in a very different era as a duet for Jeremy Steig and Eddie Gomez, where it becomes much more a vehicle for bass virtuosity, although Watkins does have a short and effective solo on this cut; and "Solacium" became best known as a vehicle for John Coltrane, on album that showcased Tommy Flanagan's compositions.

Interestingly, "Solacium" is the cut that has the least of Flanagan for this session. It's very much a flute-vibes duet. It's the first cut of the session (although the last of the subsequent album) and establishes the chemistry between the two soloists.

These three tunes became part of an album called Flute Flight, with a second session that featured Herbie Mann and Joe Puma taking Costa's place, and Mann and Jaspar sharing leader billing.