Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This is the last round of the Contractual Marathon: twelve tunes, one afternoon, and Miles is out the door. And what more is there to say about what was...well, one can't say one of the most fruitful periods of Miles's career, because they were all fruitful, but probably one of the most beloved?
What's not to love? Miles with one of jazz's storied quintets, playing timeless tunes. "I'll play it and tell you what is after," Miles says at the beginning of the session, but there's scarcely any need. We always know what it is. Classic tunes from the Great American Songbook. Jazz standards from Monk and Rollins and Miles himself.
So rather than think a lot about it, I just listened to them. A lot. In the car, in the house. In a box, with a fox. And I did like them, Sam-I-Am.
Music that has been orchestrated into the sound track of your life, that you first heard when jazz was becoming as necessary to you as a pulse, can become one with that pulse over time and resolve itself into background music, but not in a bad way. It's never going to be elevator music. But it has the warm familiarity of a thirty year marriage. And then, suddenly, it will surprise you in a new, unexpected and challenging way, like...well, like a thirty year marriage.
So goodbye, Prince of Darkness. Like Tristano, and Getz, and Monk, and the MJQ, you're moving on from Prestige, although your bandmates will still be here for a while, Kind of Blue lies ahead of you, and Sketches of Spain, and In a Silent Way, and Bitches Brew, and Big Fun, and Jack Johnson, and the Fillmore. Thanks for the memories and the music.
After the last of the Contractual Marathon sessions had been recorded, Miles was free to pursue his career with Columbia. Her didn't have to wait for the records to be released, and in fact, their release dates were spread out.
"My Funny Valentine," "Blues by Five" (by Red Garland), "Airegin" (by Sonny Rollins, first
recorded by Miles in 1954 and already on its way to becoming a jazz standard), "Tune Up/When Lights Are Low" (presented as a medley, the first a Miles original and the second by Benny Carter and Spencer Williams) made up Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, released in July 1957 as the first album in this series. The cover art was by Phil Hays, who, like Miles, would move on to Columbia, where he became noted for his album cover portraits of Bessie Smith and others.
Standards "If I Were a Bell," "You're My Everything" and "I Could Write a Book," along with Rollins's "Oleo," were on the second album, Relaxin', released in February, 1958. "Half Nelson" saw daylight two years later, on Workin', February, 1960. "Well, You Needn't" was on Steamin', not released until August, 1961.
Prestige also got several 45 RPM releases from this session: "If I Were A Bell," Part 1&2, "Airegin / 'Round Midnight," "Tune Up / Oleo," and "My Funny Valentine / Smooch," the last one perhaps a Valentine's Day special.
I was sitting with Margaret Whiting one day when she got a call from the organizers of the Kool Jazz Festival, asking her if she'd perform.
"But I'm not a jazz singer," she said. "I only sing the melody."
"We know," the festival guy said, "and do you know how hard it is to find someone who can really do that?"
What is a jazz singer, exactly? Someone who improvises around the melody? What about Frank Sinatra? Some would call him one of the greatest of all jazz singers, and he pretty much sang the melody, although he did improvise around the beat.
It doesn't get any easier if move into the contemporary postmodern world, where you can probably be everything if you set your mind to it, like Amy Winehouse or Cassandra Wilson or Esperanza Spalding.
Google "what makes a jazz singer a jazz singer," and you get not much of any definitions at all, but you do get advice to aspiring jazz singers, and that advice boils down to: listen to a lotta jazz.
So is a jazz singer someone who sings and listens to a lotta jazz? That's hard to quantify.
So I'll offer this as a definition: a jazz singer is a singer who sings with jazz musicians.
And even that isn't enough. Connie Kay played drums on most of Atlantic's rock and roll sessions, but that didn't make those performers jazz singers. Margaret Whiting is a self-described non-jazz singer (although she did play that Kool Jazz Festival, and knocked 'em dead), but her greatest hit and signature song, "Moonlight in Vermont," was recorded with Billy Butterfield.
So I'll revise my definition. Taking off from the "listen to a lotta jazz" advice, I'll say that a jazz singer is someone who sings with a lotta jazz musicians.
I suppose even that is dodgy. Margaret Whiting recorded "Moonlight in Vermont" with Billy Butterfield and his orchestra, but not really. It was Les Brown's dance band, but for contractual reasons they couldn't use Brown's name.
Which brings us to Barbara Lea, who came into Rudy Van Gelder's studio for two consecutive days
to record a group of songs with a jazz group led by Johnny Windhurst, although the supporting personnel changed between one day and the next. And what makes her a jazz singer, and a very good one, is that she sings with jazz musicians, and connects with them. You can feel the chemistry. This comes through on every song, but if you really want to hear her interacting with jazz musicians, listen to "My Honey's Loving Arms" or "I'm Coming Virginia."
The session is a little unusual for Prestige, especially in the mid-50s, in that the musicians are essentially old school, which was generally Lea's choice. And if it wasn't to Bob Weinstock's mainstream taste, it was an inspired detour. The album was critically acclaimed, and Lea was named Best New Vocalist of the year by Down Beat, which tended to be more than a little snobbish about what was jazz and what wasn't.
Her first New York recording session was two songs released on the Cadillac label (not the Chicago label that later became Chess) in 1954, with a band led by Eddie Barefield, Pee Wee Erwin, and Cutty Cutshall. In 1955 he recorded for Riverside, with a band that included Billy Taylor regulars Earl May and Percy Brice. The songs were included on an album that threw together a hodgepodge of groups,
and came out under Mundell Lowe's name.
Then the Prestige sessions, and she would record for them through 1957, after which her recording career would come to a standstill until the late 1970s, when she made a number of records for Audiophile over the next decade, and Whitney Baillett declared in The New Yorker that "Barbara Lea has no superior among popular singers."
The groups on both of the October sessions are led by trumpeter Johnny Windhurst, with whom Lea worked frequently. Windhurst's career went back to 1944, when Sidney Bechet tapped him to replace Bunk Johnson in his group. Trad jazz giant Ruby Braff has listed him as his major influence. He's little remembered today, partly because he was a trad jazzer after trad jazz had mostly faded into critical irrelevance, partly because he seemed not to have wanted the spotlight. He left New York and moved upstate to Poughkeepsie, in my native Hudson Valley, where he lived with his mother and played in the house band at Frivolous Sal's Last Chance Saloon. Frivolous Sal's, which later became The Chance, one of the Hudson Valley's major music venues, was a place where they played Dixieland jazz and the waiters wore ersatz Gay Nineties outfits. In short, the kind of place that I would not have been caught dead at, which means I missed hearing a great trumpet player. The moral
of this story -- don't turn up your nose at any place that plays live music, especially with musicians who are a little older.
The October 18th session featured Richard Lowman on piano. "Richard Lowman" was a pseudonym -- if you think about it for a minute, you can probably figure out for whom. Ready? Thinking?
.......
Dick Hyman.
Only four songs were recorded the first day: "Baltimore Oriole," "I Had Myself A True Love," "Nobody Else But Me" and "Thursday's Child."`Perhaps Van Gelder had to spend some adjusting for the presence of a vocalist, because the next day they came back and did eight more.
On the 19th, Lowman/Hyman had bowed out, and Dick Cary, who had played alto horn (not to be confused with alto sax) the first day, doubled on horn and piano. He was equally adept at both instruments. He had made his first mark as a pianist in 1947, when a promoter wanted to present Louis Armstrong, who had been leading a big orchestra for years, in a small group setting, including Jack Teagarden and Bobby Hackett. Cary was the rehearsal pianist. Armstrong didn't actually show up for any of the rehearsals, and on the night of the first performance at Town Hall, there was no one else, and Cary stayed on piano. That turned out to be the beginning of the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and when they began booking regular gigs, Armstrong remembered "the kid who did the concert," and Cary became the All-Stars' first piano player. His first recordings on alto horn were with Billy Butterfield, and he also played trumpet at Eddie Condon's. According to his obituary,
Unlike the Dixielanders, he was a progressive musician and his apartment became the centre for jam sessions with players like Zoot Sims, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Evans and Jimmy Raney. From 1956 he worked in the progressive band led by Bobby Hackett.
Al Hall and Osie Johnson were the rhythm section on both sessions, and both were respected music veterans who could play bebop as well as older styles. Hall is best known for his work with Errol Garner, but he also played bebop with Bud Powell, swing with Teddy Wilson, and rock and roll with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Johnson also moved deftly between swing and bebop, no mean feat for a drummer since the demands were so different, and he was a favorite of jazz singers (whatever that means) like Carmen McRae and Dinah Washington.
The second session adds Al Casamenti on guitar, and he had, if anything, an even wider range, from easy listening (Enoch Light) to rhythm and blues (King Curtis) to rock and roll (Screamin' Jay Hawkins) to jazz (Billy Taylor, Wes Montgomery) to Latin (Tito Puente) to pop (Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine -- including "Rawhide") to jazz singers (Ella Fitzgerald). His lead-in to "My Honey's Loving Arms" is particularly tasty.
The Prestige album is self-titled.
I've had to skip over an album recorded by Herbie Mann in Sweden because I can't find it anywhere.
Everything that every jazz musician plays is, at root, a tribute to Bird. Today, those tributes are most often paid by musicians who were not yet born when Bird died, but they're nonetheless sincere, and those younger musicians still feel that closeness to Bird. But this session was recorded in 1956, when Bird was only one year and a few months dead, and he was still very much a living presence to every jazz musician, and much more profoundly than the ubiquitous "Bird Lives" graffiti of those days (my favorite legend is the one that said at the moment of Bird's death, a single feather fell from the rafters of Carnegie Hall.
Sonny Rollins had played with Charlie Parker on the 1953 Miles Davis session which would ultimately be part of the Collector's Items album, not to be released until December of 1956. He remembered Parker's powerful personal influence when interviewed by Art Taylor, for Taylor's powerful book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews:
Bird was not only great to me as far as music goes; he also befriended me at a very important time in my life. You know that Bird helped me get off drugs when I was younger. When I made Collector's Items...Bird found out that I had been indulging. He really didn't like it. I saw for the first time that he didn't dig my doing that. I realized I must be doing the wrong thing. Up until that time I had thought it was all fun and games and that it was okay to use drugs. I subsequently got myself off drugs, when he showed me that wasn't the way to go. Unfortunately, when I did get myself straight, I was anxious to let him see I had dug his message, but as life would have it, he passed away before I was able to meet him again,
Rollins entered the federal drug treatment center in Lexington, Kentucky in 1955. Charlie Parker died in March of 1955, probably while Rollins was still at Lexington, so one can only imagine the extent that Parker was still on his mind.
Max Roach played on a number of Parker sessions, including his first Savoy recordings in 1945, and the legendary Massey Hall concert. He would record his own Parker tribute album a year later, for EmArcy.
Kenny Dorham must have had Parker very much on his mind. He had played with Bird on the great altoist's last gig, on March 5, 1955, at Birdland. Bird would be dead only a week later.
George Morrow never recorded with Bird, but he did play with him, on a number of gigs during Bird's 1946 California sojourn. Morrow, who was 30 at the time of this session, had played with the Roach-Clifford Brown quintet on all their recordings.
Wade Legge, at 22, was the youngest musician to be tabbed for this session, and though he had never
played with Bird, he had gotten his start in Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra. Dizzy, recognizing his talent, originally hired him as a bassist, but then heard him suggesting some innovative changes to the piano player. The bebop great liked what he heard, and immediately installed Legge on piano, the instrument he would play for the rest of his short career. He was highly sought after in the late 1950s, appearing on more than 50 recording sessions, and making one album under his own name (for French Vogue, reissued on Blue Note). By 1959 he had retired back to his native Buffalo, probably for reasons of health. He died at 29 of a bleeding ulcer.
The Bird medley begins with the classic "Parker's Mood" opening riff, then goes into standards closely associated with Parker, and original Parker compositions. "I Remember You" (written by Victor Scherzinger as a vehicle for Dorothy Lamour) is from a 1948 Savoy recording (with Max Roach on drums) and features Rollins as chief soloist. The musicians take turns as leader in each part of the medley. Kenny Dorham is up next on "My Melancholy Baby," recorded in 1950 for the Clef album Bird and Diz, the last studio Parker/Gillespie collaboration, a recording which rescued the 1912 melody from the provenance of weepy drunks in late night piano bars.
"Melancholy Baby" has an odd story, which I'll digress to share. From Wikipedia:
Ernie Burnett, who composed the music, was wounded fighting in the First World War, and he lost his memory together with his identity dog-tags. While recuperating in hospital, a pianist entertained the patients with popular tunes including "Melancholy Baby". Burnett rose from his sickbed and exclaimed: "That's my song!" He had regained his memory.
"Old Folks" is sweetly sentimental, and it comes from the ill-fated Charlie Parker with Voices collaboration with Dave Lambert. The criticism of this session is not unfair, but Bird's solo has a lot of feeling, and it's not hard to see why the guys picked it to be part of this tribute. The medley is not so much an attempt to play like Bird as it is an expression of how musicians felt about Bird, and this one goes to Wade Legge, both horns sitting out. "They Can't Take That Away From Me" is the gorgeous Gershwin melody, recorded by Bird on the Charlie Parker with Strings album, controversial at the time, now pretty universally beloved. Rollins takes the lead. Dorham comes back for "Just Friends."
"My Little Suede Shoes" is one of the catchiest of Bird's original compositions, originally recorded with a Latin percussion, which would seem to make it a natural for Rollins, but Legge takes the lead, and listen to this if you want to appreciated just how good this largely forgotten pianist was. The whole ensemble comes in for the finale. "Star Eyes."
The rest of the album is less Bird-oriented. "Kids Know" is a Rollins original, and one might wonder if a title like "Kids Know" in 1956 was a suggestion that Sonny was going to try rock and roll, but no. Sonny did try rock and roll years later, with the Rolling Stones. When he played a concert at SUNY New Paltz one time, it was promoted as "Sonny Rollins (from the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You album)," so maybe kids don't know everything. My Fair Lady opened on Broadway in 1956, so Bird would never have heard "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." "The House I Live In" was written as a leftist anthem by Earl Robinson, became a patriotic anthem when recorded by Frank Sinatra, and here serves as a reminder of Rollins's far-ranging ears. It's one of those tunes you can't hear without having the lyrics run through your head, so you can take it as leftist or patriotic, or both.
"They Can't Take That Away From Me" was plucked out of the medley for release as one side of a 45.
Prestige is generally considered to lag behind Blue Note in the artistry of its album covers, but this is often unfair. The cover for Rollins Plays for Bird, by Reid Miles. is stunning. It's only fair to note, however, that Miles was a Blue Note artist.
In 1956, Blind Willie McTell was singing on the streets of Atlanta. He was recorded by a local record store owner, but before the recordings could ever find a label or be released, McTell was dead.
He died in 1959. Bob Weinstock founded his Bluesville subsidiary in 1960, which was actually a little ahead of the curve. King of the Delta Blues Singers, the rerelease of Robert Johnson's Vocalion recordings of 1936 and 1937, didn't come until 1961. Charley Patton, one of the earliest pioneers of Delta Blues, had his reissue in 1962, 28 years after his death.
The Blues Hall of Fame started recognizing the titans of the Blues in 1980, did not get an actual building until 2015.
In 1940, John Lomax had recorded McTell for the Library of Congress Archives. He would do very little recording in the intervening years.
Recorded blues had an odd and spotty history. The first blues recording came out in 1920. An African American songwriter, Perry Bradford, one of the very few composers working on Tin Pan Alley, the tight cluster of New York music publishing firms that produced most of America's popular music in the first quarter of the 19th Century. had written a song called "Crazy Blues." He first offered it to Sophie Tucker, one of the most popular singers of her day, but she wasn't looking at any new material just then. A couple of other singers passed on it, so Bradford suggested recording it with a colored singer. The response: Bradford was crazier than his blues. No one would ever by a record by a colored singer. But they did take a chance and record "Crazy Blues" with Mamie Smith, and it was a smash, and it started the blues craze of the 1920s. But the Depression forced cutbacks in the recording industry, and the black performers were the first to be cut.
The real return of recorded blues was post-World War II, and it was part of the developing interest in
folk music (the vital electric blues being recorded in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles was considered commercial and inauthentic by the folkies). And this made for an interesting development, since the blues was essentially a music of realism, with the underlying message that things were never going to get better, and the white leftists who were a great part of the folkie audience believed that we could get together and make a better world.
The blues that were to become the center of the new blues explosion were from the Mississippi Delta. Delta musicians like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson made their way north to Chicago, where they created an electric blues style that folk purists wanted nothing to do with. Musicians from Oklahoma and Texas went to Los Angeles, where they created their own electric style (T-Bone Walker was one of the pioneers of the electric guitar). There was much less of a blues scene in New York, always more of a jazz town, hospitable to jazz-based blues singers like Bessie Smith. The blues musicians who came to New York were mostly from the East Coast, and played in a style that came to be known as Piedmont blues, which was characterized by many things, but one of them was that many of its exponents, like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, sang in accents that were easier for the mostly white folkie audience in New York than the heavier accents of Delta bluesmen like Charley Patton. The Delta bluesmen would soon be championed by a new group, the blues purists, who were different in many respects from the folk purists. Brownie McGhee had been recorded by Bob Weinstock early in his career, when he was trying to make a name as a rhythm and blues singer.
All of this would change with the nascence of the blues purists, who were a different breed altogether from the folk purists, and the British blues imitators, who were not purists at all.
Blind Willie McTell was a Piedmont bluesman, and although Bob Weinstock was a jazzer rather than a folkie, this seems to have been one of the styles he gravitated toward. But I actually probably shouldn't be spending anywhere near this much time on McTell, since he wasn't one of Weinstock's recordees, or one of his first Bluesville releases, for that matter.
But he was a good pickup for Bluesville, and it's good that these late recordings are available. Bob Dylan sang that no one could sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell, but it may have been more true that no one's name fit the rhythm and rhyme scheme of his song like Blind Willie McTell's. McTell in many ways hearkened back to an earlier age. The black street singers in the South were "songsters," and they sang a bit of everything, including the blues. When the blues craze of the 1920s hit, the songsters became bluesmen. By 1956, McTell was still singing on the street, and he had some of the repertoire of the old songsters, like "Wabash Cannonball," a 19th century ballad popularized by country and western pioneer Roy Acuff. It was cool to hear it done with a blues twist.
Also on the session, "Beedle Um Bum," which had been recorded by Tampa Red and McKinney's Cotton Pickers.
The Bluesville album was released in 1962 as Last Session. The following year, "Beedle Um Bum" made a reappearance on a compilation album called Bawdy Blues.
Anyway, more about Bluesville and Bob Weinstock's blues when we get to 1960.
John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims together as the sax section for one recording session. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing, as it turns out. Talk about four brothers! These are four of the all-time greats on the instrument that became the heart and soul of jazz and rhythm and blues of the 40s and 50s.
No one is listed as the leader on the session, although it may have sort of been Hank Mobley, who contributed two original compositions (the other two tunes are standards). Eventually, as John Coltrane's star continued to rise, the album was reissued under his name. Interestingly, although that star continued until Trane had risen to the firmament populated by Miles, Bird and Armstrong, it's the leaderless Tenor Conclave cover that adorned the CD reissue.
And no one takes over as leader, or tries to. in her liner notes to the reissue, Ann Giudici* says
As opposed to the popular "cutting session" of years gone by, this date merely offers four different players a chance to display their ideas. No one was out to blow the other off the stand. The atmosphere is one of forceful but relaxed blowing."
Maybe this is a characteristic of jazz of the Fifties. Certainly we've heard competitive sessions, like the Coltrane/Sonny Rollins Tenor Madness. But as often as not, the leitmotif is camaraderie. We heard it in the earlier Prestige All-Stars session, with Art Farmer, Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean. Or the Phil Woods session from back in June, with Woods and Gene Quill paired on altos, Donald Byrd and Kenny Dorham on trumpets.
How good an album is this?
Very, very good.
Is it four times as good as an album with one of them?
The answer is yes and no.
No, because if you compare it with albums featuring any one of them -- say, John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, one of my all time favorites, and also on Prestige, you wouldn't want to even consider the question of which one is better. It would be like choosing between your children.
But yes, because it's mythic. Like knowing that "Tenor Madness" is the only recorded collaboration between Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Like the discovery, five decades after the fact, of a live recording of Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Town Hall.
The myth is important. One of the wonders of art is that it stays with you, and gestates inside your mind and your soul until it becomes a new entity, the offspring of you and the artist(s). And that new enitycomes out into the world and plays with new friends, half-sisters and brothers, the offspring of the artist(s) and your friends, or people you meet in online forums, or people you meet by reading their books and articles and liner notes and poems (like Michael S. Harper's paeans to Dear John, Dear Coltrane). Imagine making love to someone after listening, together, to Stan Getz or Louis Armstrong or Ornette Coleman. You're imagining (or better yet) remembering three very different experiences, aren't you? And each one with a special richness that would not be there without Stan or Louis or Ornette. **
Part of that gestation is the art itself, and part is the history, the personalities, the stories--especially in jazz, which is such a collaborative art, and such an endless melding and blending and separating of personalities and sensibilities, the Miles Davis nonet or J.J. and Kai or James Moody and Tito Puente or the musicians Norman Granz brought together for Jazz at the Philharmonic or Ella Fitzgerald and George Gershwin.
In a review of the album on allmusic.com, Lindsay Planer says that " It takes a couple of passes and somewhat of a trained ear to be able to link the players with their contributions," and this is certainly true to my not very trained ear, but the sense of those different voices and sensibilities coming together is palpable and intoxicating. The London Jazz Collector, in his blog, characterizes the four voices as "Mobley’s tone is pure chocolate, Coltrane is spiced lime, Sims is a good Claret, Cohn is mocha garnacha." Which is beautiful and allusive and mysterious, especially since I had no idea what mocha garnacha is.
Ira Gitler, always helpful, runs down the solos in his liner notes to the original album:
* Always interested in new names that crop up on the periphery of the music and the scene, I looked up Ann Giudici and found not very much. In the early 60s, she was apparently producing plays off-Broadway, and Hackensack station WJRZ, which was having success with old time radio dramas, hired Ann Giudici to produce original dramas and adaptations of short stories with a local repertory company. JRZ had a varied format including jazz (Les Davis was a DJ), but shortly afterwards they switched to an all-country format.
** Here's an imagined look at jazz and lovemaking. This will be included in my forthcoming collaboration between me (poems) and Nancy Ostrovsky (drawings), She Took Off Her Dress.
SHE SAID
She said jazz
is how life should be
flexible rhythm but
you count it off
beyond that
improvisation
melody left behind
now it’s your call
you know where
the roots are you don’t
know where it’s taking you
she herself was
Chet Baker
Gerry Mulligan
touching where you didn’t
know you tingled
or she was
Thelonious Monk
threading her way along
narrow pathways
with broad steps
on either side are
Arizona cactus
long spined blooming
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