Listening to Prestige 310: Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson

Even before On the Road came out, excerpts from it had the literary world talking, particularly the one called “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” It’s the part where Sal and Dean find themselves in a jazz club in Oakland:

The behatted tenor man was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from “EE-yah!” to a crazier “EE-de-lee-yah!” and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn’t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenor man had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor...

What were Sal and Dean listening to? This was 1947, around the time that Charlie Parker and his new music had failed to conquer the hearts and minds of LA audiences, and there wasn’t going to be much of a modern jazz scene in Oakland. They had most likely wandered into a club featuring a tenor man who taken the ideas and tonality of Lester Young, plus the new honking sound of Illinois Jacquet, and added a few helpings of Dionysian excess to create a kind of jazz that a club audience on Saturday night could respond to primally: a tenor man like Big Jay McNeely or Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson.

By the time Jackson signed on with Prestige in 1959, at age 27, he had already packed a lot of playing into his life. As a teenager, he turned down offers from Lionel Hampton and Andy Kirk to finish college, which is something to add to your stereotype of what a tenor sax wild man is like. After graduating from Florida A&M, he joined Cootie Williams in time to play the tenor solo on Williams’s jukebox hit “Gator Tail,” which functioned in his career in much the same way “Flying Home” had done for Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb, plus it gave him the nickname he would carry with him for the rest of his life.

After Williams, he led his own popular groups, and worked with Ruth Brown at Atlantic. He had played on her mega-hit “5-10-15 Hours,” and they would spend part of the decade as husband and wife. But as the 1950s wound down, the honking dynamic tenor sax that been a staple of the rhythm and blues of the 1940s and 50s was waning in popularity, just as the new sound of soul jazz was waking up. Fortunately, someone at Prestige, perhaps Esmond Edwards, figured out that if you were looking for a guy who who could play down and dirty and could also play modern, there was a treasure trove of guys who could do it and had been doing it for a while, including at least one who had heard the siren song of the tenor sax/organ combo. Fortunately for the Gator, whose career was rejuvenated, and fortunately for Prestige, which got not one but three of its stars of the coming decade; Jackson himself, guitarist Bill Jennings, and organist Jack McDuff.

McDuff had joined Jackson’s band as a bassist, and it was the Gator who convinced him to switch to organ, an instrument he took to the way the Smith Brothers took to cough drops. So when Prestige came calling, Jackson already had just the group they were looking for.

Bill Jennings never amassed the kind of discography that Jack McDuff did. He was one of those “musicians’ musicians,” largely overlooked during his career, reclaimed—and claimed—by guitarists who followed him. B. B. King called him:

A daring player, both rhythmically and technically... because he would start a groove to going, and then whatever it takes to keep that groove going, he would do it.

Tommy Potter, one of mainstays of the bass during the early bebop era, was pretty close to the end of his career--his work on this Jackson session may be his last on record. Alvin Johnson was part of the group Jackson brought with him to Prestige, and isn't know for much beyond his work with Jackson, McDuff and Jennings, but he knew how to keep things going.

This is an immense session. Maybe Edwards wasn't sure he was going to be able to keep Jackson, McDuff and Jennings around (he needn't have worried), or maybe everyone was just having a good time. In any event, the fourteen tunes cut on this date showed up on three immediate releases, and many more over time.

Jackson and co. mix standards and originals, honkers and ballads, something for everyone.

I don’t think I was much of a fan of organ combos back when. I may have bought a Jimmy Smith album sometime in the 60s, but like many, I was a little put off by organ music, the sound of church and roller rink and radio soap operas. I don't really know of another instrument that arouses such negativity in so many listeners. Maybe bagpipes, except for Philadelphia's Rufus Harley, there isn't much of a bagpipe presence in jazz. So I can add one more to the delights of listening carefully and closely to everything recorded for Prestige Records: really coming to understand and appreciate the range and tonality of the Hammond B3 organ in the hands of some jazz virtuosos, and to appreciate how the B3 and the tenor saxophone were, in fact, made for each other.

Please Mr. Jackson, released in 1959, was the first from this session. It was followed  by Cool "Gator" in 1960. "Gator's Tail" and "She's Funny That Way" were held back for a second 1960 release, Blue Gator. The three 45 RPM records to come from this session were "Please Mr. Jackson" / "Dinky's Mood," "Come Back To Sorrento" / "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and "Cool Grits, Part 1 & 2."

Listening to Prestige 309: Arnett Cobb

Pointing out that Prestige is celebrating its tenth anniversary by putting out a string of audience-pleasing records is not the same as suggesting that Prestige is not doing all it could be doing to further the cause and development of jazz, although there certainly were some back then who would have felt that way. There has always been an avant-garde that equates commercial success with selling out, and that was so true in 1959. I’ve said it before: we were such snobs back then. I remember Down Beat’’s dismissal of High Society and the Crosby-Armstrong number, “Now You Has Jazz”: “Jazz? I’m still waiting to hear it.” Or the critics who generally liked Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day but criticized the movie—and the festival—for including Chuck Berry.

I remember the comics who jabbed little pinpricks into this snobbery, like Ronny Graham and his commencement address at the School for Progressive Jazz Musicians: “When you cats came here, all you could play was the melody. Now you wouldn’t know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece!” Or a comedy record that I had once but no longer do, and no longer remember who the comic was, but he played the persona of a super-hip jazz critic, way too hip to like anyone. Miles? Too much mute, MJQ? Too tinkly. Who did he like? There was a quintet of Eskimoes, with axes. “That’s it? Just five saxophones?” “No, man, five axes.”

The albums that Esmond Edwards was producing and Bob Weinstock was releasing were not not going to be top sellers. They weren’t going to rival Kind of Blue or Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College or Errol Garner’s Concert by the Sea. But they were pitched to be consistent sellers. And they were pitched to be consistent sellers to a largely black community, which meant they might well be flying under the radar of the mostly white jazz critical establishment.

Which also means, today, that to a younger generation of jazz critics, who know all about Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, Coltrane and Dolphy and Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders, and who aren’t afflicted by our generation’s snobbery (well, we outgrew it too), and are looking for more music from this rich era, these recordings are something of a treasure trove to be rediscovered, so that Scott Yanow, reviewing for AllMusic.com can give this album four stars and a “highly recommended.”

The album is called Party Time, which should give a clue as to its marketing strategy. Cobb’s trio of Ray Bryant, Wendell Marshall, Art Taylor, augmented by Ray Barretto. Barretto, the conguero equally at home with swing and Latin rhythms, gives us both here, turning “Cocktails for Two” into a hot Latin number that every dance party needs. Barretto also gives a new and exciting underpinning to the always-welcome “Flying Home,” which checks in here at just over five minutes, enough time to give the classic reading and then take it farther.

I was particularly struck by “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.” This is a syrupy ballad from the 1930s which was originally recorded by Guy Lombardo and mostly forgotten since then. But for a listener in 1959, the song only had one antecedent: the great 1956 version by Fats Domino.

Domino's version swings, it rocks and rolls, and it has the services of one of the warmest, most life-affirming voices in the history of American popular music.

Paradoxically but effectively, that warmth and positive energy was often used in the service of the blues and songs of loss, despair and even suicide--"Ain't That a Shame," "Poor Me," "Goin' to the River"--there was even the fear of being bitten by the beloved's dog. The other great chroniclers of the lure of the river were Hank Williams and Percy Mayfield, and with them, you always felt that accepting the river's invitation was a real possibility. With Domino, the tug-of-war between life and death was always going to be decided on the side of life.

All of which gave Domino an emotional richness which he used to powerful effect when singing the treacly optimism of songs from a different era and from an escapist white middle class culture--"My Blue Heaven," "When My Dreamboat Comes Home." Domino's voice comes from a world where no one is sweethearts, yes forever, but that has never gotten him down before, and his unquenchable warmth carries the day.

Party Time was the first of a successful series  of recordings. "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" and "Lonesome Road" were released as a 45.

His recording also has the benefit of Dave Bartholomew's New Orleans studio musicians, and a fiery tenor sax solo by Herbert Hardesty.

 Arnett Cobb brings the tempo back down to slow dance time, but they slow-dance differently at the party time Cobb is playing for than they did to Guy Lombardo at the Rainbow Room, and his quintet, especially Ray Barretto, give this dance a unique and flexible rhythm.

Cobb's "Dreamboat" has Fats Domino at its core, but it also has a lot more. This is a jazz ballad, and Ray Bryant's solo, which has nothing to do with Fats Domino, emphasizes that.


Cobb reprises his most popular number, "Flying Home" (he replaced Illinois Jacquet in Lionel Hampton's band). He does a couple of originals (including "Slow Poke," not the more familiar tune popularized by PeeWee King), and "Lonesome Road," which I would have thought of as a folk melody, but is credited to Gene Austin and Nathaniel Shilkret.

"Blues in the Closet" is by bass great Oscar Pettiford, and is driven by Wendell Marshall, Ray Barretto and Art Taylor laying down a great groove for Cobb to swing over.

Party Time was successful enough for Prestige to warrant a sequel. "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" and "Lonesome Road" were the single.

So what's the real thing? What are the greatest jazz records ever made? All I can tell you is that if I were driving home from New York City to Saugerties, and I found a radio station that played Fats Domino, Arnett Cobb and Giant Steps, and someone were to ask me "What was the best part of your trip?" I'd have to answer, "All of it."

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                    
--Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 308: Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis - Shirley Scott

This must have been a good year for Prestige’s bottom line. Look at who they’ve recorded so far. Davis and Scott. Scott with a trio. Arnett Cobb. Coleman Hawkins. Hal Singer. Due in a couple of weeks, Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson.

Davis and Scott are new stars, and very hot, and young and raring to go, and they’ll come back into the studio and make exciting music over and over again. Coleman Hawkins is a legend riding the cusp of a new popularity, Cobb and Singer and Jackson are rhythm and blues hitmakers.

So can we say that 1959 was, in general, a year of place-holding, of playing it safe while the music percolates, and new directions take time to sort themselves out?

No. Not hardly. The AllAboutJazz web site calls this “the most creative year in all of jazz history, and they make a persuasive case. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue. John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps. Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come. Dave Brubeck recorded Time Out.

You really don’t need any more evidence, but AllAboutJazz rounds out its list of ten albums with:

• Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz (Riverside): “A defining piano trio set: Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums. The empathy within this album is outrageous, like all three musicians are connected by the same brain...A major influence onpiano trios to come such as the Keith Jarrett Trio and the Brad Mehldau Trio, and the epitome of a great jazz piano trio. 
• Mingus Ah Um (Columbia). “Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficianados everywhere.”
• Duke Ellington, Anatomy of a Murder (Columbia). “This Ellington / Strayhorn collaboration is one of the hippest soundtracks of all time. Ellington and Strayhorn were writing original compositions for use in a major motion picture, a wonderful development for jazz."
• Horace Silver, Blowin' the Blues Away (Blue Note). "Another side of things: The hard bop side with bluesy, soulful overtones...it's not modal jazz, its not free jazz, it's even in 4/4 time, but it's essential." 

I'd raise my hand and put in a quiet vote here for Eddie Davis and Shirley Scott, but the AllAboutJazz guy;s assessment is fair. Horace Silver is recognized as the godfather of soul jazz. And Jimmy Smith (who made Home Cookin' in 1959) is the titan of the Hammond B-3.
Somebody is always going to be the poll winner, and the name associated with a new movement. But in the world of music, as opposed to music journalism, those hierarchies don’t matter.

• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book (Verve).
• Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain (Columbia). "The combination of two genius minds at work: Miles Davis and Gil Evans in probably the most celebrated meeting of the two ...Integral to the history of jazz for combining classical music styles with jazz improvisation, thus pushing the 'third stream' movement...another gargantuan contribution to the evolution and diversity in jazz."

So Prestige wasn't exactly out in front in terms of creative innovation. They had been, from their first Tristano release through their introduction of the Modern Jazz Quartet to the world, through the Coltrane albums that immediately led up to Giant Steps. And they would continue to introduce new and exciting jazz innovators. So what are we to make of this chill-out period of soul jazz and post-swing and rhythm and blues?

As I said,  a good cash flow situation. The sales figures for these albums aren’t going to match Kind of Blue or Time Out, but on the other hand, it didn't cost anywhere near as much to make a Hal Singer album as it did to make Kind of Blue. And the folks who'll plunk down $4.98 for an LP record just because they like to listen to it, and play it at parties, and dance to it, can sometimes outnumber the ones who want to be the first to own the album that Down Beat and The Jazz Review are raving about.

Esmond Edwards produced this string of albums. He was that rarity in the 1950s, an African American producer of the music that was African America’s gift to world culture, and he knew what they were dancing to at a Harlem house party on Saturday night.

And a half century later, what does this mean?

It means the discovery of some wonderful music. Our generation (and the two or three following us) own Giant Steps and Kind of Blue and Time Out and Sketches of Spain. We bought them on vinyl when they came out, and we paid the ripoff prices to buy them again as we began our CD collections. Now the vinyls are still lovingly in a rack in our music rooms, the CDs are somewhere or other, or we gave them to the church for their annual flea market, and we listen to music over a streaming service, or Sirius-XM in our cars, which plays the music you want to hear: Davis and Brubeck, Coltrane and Coleman.

Or you go a little off the beaten track, and you listen to music that was old when they made it, but is new again now. Music that offers nothing except you'll love it, and isn't that kind of what music is for? And if it made a few bucks for Bob Weinstock back in 1959, good for him.

And as for any of these Davis-Scott albums, they’re not even close to getting overexposed. The perspective of fifty years in the future isn’t all that different from the perspective of listening to each of these sessions as they were released. Either way, you’re hearing two artists learn more and more about working together, finding new and exciting ways to blend that tenor saxophone and Hammond organ sound, especially when they add a Latin beat to soul jazz, as in Ary Barosso’s “Bahia” (previously heard by John Coltrane in one of his last Prestige sessions).

Although Davis and Scott are always the main event, they like working in the quintet format, and on this album, they are augmented by trombonist Steve Pulliam, a veteran of the Buddy Johnson orchestra, who adds substance and a few very tasty solos. An article in Jet, about Pulliam being hit with a paternity suit, describes him as a prominent Harlem bandleader.

The album was Jaws in Orbit. No singles came off this session.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                      
--Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 307: The Prestige All Stars

There are a lot of fields of entertainment and the arts in which one can speak of “an embarrassment of riches,” where too much of a good thing starts to weigh it down or actually diffuse it. An NBA All Star Game is never going to be as good as a game between two closely matched teams. You probably wouldn’t really want to have Leonardo and Raphael working on the same canvas, although it might be fun for a minute.

Fortunately, this is rarely the case in jazz. In jazz, the more great players you pull together on one bandstand, the more excitement, the more richness you’re going to have. That’s why there isn’t a jazz fan alive who wouldn’t give his left arm to have been at that speakeasy in Kansas City where Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young dueled it out, toe to toe. That’s why Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic jams with, say, Charlie Parker and Lester Young, are so prized today.

That’s why if you take Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Shirley Scott, already a dynamic aggregation, and tell a jazz fan you’re adding Coleman Hawkins to the group, he or she is going to whoop for joy. Then if you announce that you’re not stopping there, you’re going throw in Arnett Cobb (Yeah, yeah!) and Buddy Tate (Yeah, yeah, yeah!)

So what happens when you get four tenor sax greats together for a session? Well, first of all, you have some great section playing. Then, you have four guys loving what their peers are doing, and encouraging each other to one hot solo after another. And then...wait a second. It’s not just four great tenormen, is it?

It’s not just tenors.

And it’s not just men.

I’ve talked before about how the small group Shirley Scott is different from the organ trio Shirley, but maybe not so different. In the trio she is constantly exploring the different ways that an organ can sound. With a small group, she is constantly finding new ways to be a part of that group, to push and cajole the sax guys into new places. I’ve talked before about how good she is, but I have to come back to it because I think I’m just realizing, in this set, just how good she is. Maybe it’s working with those different voices.

In “Light and Lovely,” she and George Duvivier have an extended duet that leaves one wondering, if they are the title, which is which?

What is this kind of music? Davis and Clark are certainly in the vanguard of the soul jazz movement, but these other guys aren’t. In recent years, we hear a lot about “mainstream jazz” and “straight-ahead jazz,” and both terms have very precise, if not always clear, definitions which one is not to stray from (or to confuse the two) by musicians who were not really a part of bebop, but who did live on this planet and were aware of its power and importance. So these are guys who are not living in the past, or particularly looking toward the future, but are playing the kind of music they like, and playing it sweetly and completely.

This is listed as an All Stars date, which means it was released with no leader given for the session, but the names of all the participants (in this case, all four tenormen) on the cover. It would be rereleased later as a Davis/Scott session.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                      
--Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 306: Shirley Scott

It seems that Shirley Scott saved her more mainstream work for the small group sessions with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis (and later Stanley Turrentine), and her more adventurous work for trio recordings. Which is interesting, because organ trios were at such a peak of popularity in jazz clubs and supper clubs at this time, generally speaking a surge in popularity means a lot of people who know they expect, and expect to hear what they know.

It’s not clear that this Ellington album was one of Scott’s big sellers. It seems never to have been re-released, not even years later on the Original Jazz Classics line from Concord, and none of the tunes from it were culled for later anthology albums. On the other hand, Billboard  gave it an enthusiastic mini-review, liking it for all the right reasons:

Shirley Scott’s distinctive style on the organ is shown off to good advantage on this collection of Ellingtonia. She is more successful than most organists in getting a full range of color from her instrument and she shows a warm and fluid style at the piano in a few tunes.

So there you have it. Somebody who came to this album, in 1959, thinking “that Shirley. She’s always got something new up her sleeve. Wonder what it’ll be here?” was going to love this. The fans who bought it thinking “Oh, boy—an album of Ellington tunes. A hot organ trio. What could possibly go wrong?” might be scratching their heads as they listened to “Caravan.” But...don’t forget that Billboard also praised her warm and fluid style, and Lord knows it’s there. There’s much on this album to just dig, and just dance to. Maybe that’s why Shirley Scott stayed so popular for so long: she provided the comfort food and she provided the challenges.

Maybe on another label, things would have been different. Maybe when they rehearsed it, Esmond Edwards would have said “Hey Shirley, let’s just touch on the melody to ‘Caravan’ before you take it out there.” Or maybe he would have said, “That’s great. Let’s do one more take, and Shirley...”
Or maybe not. Maybe even with a little more license to go for perfection, Edwards would have dug Scott’s spontaneity, and decided to stick with what she wanted. And it’s really hard to argue with any of her choices. Half a century later, you can still feel the pulsing energy as well as the experimental courage.

I know I talk every time about how perfectly suited George Duvivier and Arthur Edgehill were to Scott and her sound, but I’ll say it again.

The album was.titled Scottie Plays the Duke. It may not have vaulted up the charts, but it did well enough that Prestige brought her back with Eddie Davis a week later, and with a trio before the year was out. And don’t forget, Billboard didn’t review all that many jazz albums. They knew this was an artist to follow.

Prestige also released two 45s off the session. The A side of the first is “In a Mellow Tone,” and this could certainly have lit up some jukeboxes, with a rhythm and bluesy drive that gives a whole new meaning to mellow. And you could dance as well to the flip side, “Just Squeeze Me.”

The second 45 continues the dance groove with “Just a-Sittin’ and a-Rockin’,” and “Prelude to a Kiss” for slow dancing, and what better prelude to a kiss could there be?

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                         
--Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 305: Red Garland

One of the joys of any Red Garland album is always the material—seeing how Red has gone beyond the conventional standards/originals bag to find some worthwhile tunes that others have overlooked, often drawn from the rhythm and blues catalog. Here, with a whole album devoted to the blues, he goes in and out of styles and decades, presenting a portrait of the blues that’s also a self-portrait in blue.

“Trouble in Mind” goes back to the 1920s and the first explosion of recorded blues. It’s credited to songwriter Richard M. Jones. Although it’s been recorded over time by some of our finest jazz singers, including Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin, it has, at heart, that lonely introspection of a man or woman alone with a piano or guitar, singing to him or herself of a deeply personal blues.

Mose Allison caught that feeling on the other Prestige recording of the song, as the trumpet piece for his album Local Color. And Garland catches it here, leaning over the piano, lost in his private blues, the rest of us fortunate enough to get a chance to listen.

“He’s a Real Gone Guy” is from the classic rhythm and blues era of 1940s, and was a hit for Nellie Lutcher. Garland gives it that rhythm and blues vitality, with some powerful solo work by Art Taylor and the new guy in this trio, Sam Jones, temporarily replacing Paul Chambers. Jones was fast

becoming one of the important bass players on the New York scene, though he would be best known for his extensive work with Cannonball Adderley.

“See See Rider” is another one that’s been around since the birth of the blues, at least the birth of recorded blues, in a version by Ma Rainey, and it probably does go back to the birth of the blues. It is a classic traditional 12-bar blues, celebrating one of the most celebrated themes of the blues, the badness of a bad woman. Unlike his approach to “Trouble in Mind,” Garland doesn’t spend a lot of time with the melody, in fact, basically none. He gets right into the improv, a modernist approach to this most classic of blues.

"M-Squad Theme” was written by Count Basie for the hard boiled police procedural that starred Lee Marvin as a Chicago cop. The music mixes a little “Peter Gunn” with a little “Hucklebuck/Now’s the Time” with some Basie swagger to make for a piece which, if it never quite got the ubiquity that Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” achieved, still is a satisfying example of its genre and a good choice for a big, modern blues. As in “Peter Gunn,” the bass gets prominently featured, so it’s a good showcase for Sam Jones.

If you asked the average American to name a blues song, nine times out of ten you’d get “St. Louis Blues.” This W. C. Handy composition, part blues and part tango, has woofed its way into warp of American culture so completely that it is now the name of an NHL hockey team. And “Your Red Wagon” is scarcely a blues at all. It’s Tin Pan Alley, although one of its co-composers is Richard M. Jones of “Trouble in Mind.” Both of them give Garland, Jones and Taylor space for a lot of imaginative trio work.

Red in Bluesville was recorded in April, released in September of 1959, presumably before Weinstock got the idea of a label subsidiary with the same name. Three 45 RPM singles were released from the session: "That's Your Red Wagon" / "Trouble in Mind" and two others that drew one side from this date: "Stompin' at the Savoy" / "He's a Real Gone Guy" and "M-Squad" / "Makin' Whoopee."

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad
Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                          
--Dave Grusin

An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 303: Mal Waldron

Left Alone (Bethehem) and Impressions were the two albums that Mal Waldron made in 1959 to commemorate his two-year association with Billie Holiday, who would enter the hospital for her final illness on May 31, and die on July 17. Left Alone was recorded on February 24, Impressions on March 20.

Holiday's death was famously chronicled in Frank O'Hara's poem, "The Day Lady Died," in which O'Hara recalls a moment at the Five Spot when:

She whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The memory of the song, and the moment that took O'Hara's breath away comes back to him the news of Holiday's literal last breath. But in the poem, that transcendent moment reaches Mal Waldron first, before it spreads to everyone else in the club and finally to O'Hara, leaning on the door to the john. An perhaps more than that. To Waldron, her closest collaborator in art at that moment, and through him to Lester Young, her soulmate in art, dead just a handful of weeks earlier, and to all artists touched by art as perhaps no one else can be, and then to everyone in the club, and then to everyone, touched and moved and changed by art being in the world whether they know it or not, whether they care or not, whether they've heard of Billie Holiday or not, and finally to Frank O'Hara, who can only record that she stopped breathing on an ordinary day, and stopped breathing because for a moment her artistry made the universe stand still.

In O'Hara's poem, Mal Waldron is the conduit, and as his two-year-association with Billie Holiday drew to a close, Waldron was thinking, musically, about that that meant.

Both Left Alone and Impressions are unique as tribute albums in that they don't, on the surface, have very much to with the artist they're paying tribute to. Left Alone has one song, "You Don;t Know What Love Is," associated with Holiday. Impressions has three songs that were written for vocalists, but only one of them, "All the Way," was recorded by her, on her strings album with Ry Ellis, but surely that song would fit more comfortably onto a Frank Sinatra tribute album.

Trumpeter Webster Young recorded a Holiday tribute album that was all songs she had made famous,  but Waldron's approach really makes as much sense. Jazz is jazz. Once Young has played the melody of "Don't Explain," he's off into his own improvisation, and the version quickly becomes his.

Waldron is thinking about what he's learned from his two years with Holiday, and in fact one track of Left Alone is Teddy Charles interviewing Waldron about precisely that.

One thing, Waldron stresses in the interview, is that he learned from Holiday to listen to the words. This is advice passed down to the younger musician from an older one, with Holiday as the conduit: Lester Young said that he always had the words to a song in his mind when he played. I've always wondered if this could also be retrofitted--did Lester think of King Pleasure's lyrics to "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid," written to his solo, when he played it?

A bit of transient whimsy, but interesting to consider in that Waldron was one of the best composers of his era, and as such played a lot of original material that had no words. But I have to believe that Holiday's influence was strong here, too: the way that she listened to, and sang, and created musical patterns for words.

Three of the pieces on Impressions are a suite: "Les Champs Elysées," "C'est Formidable," and "Ciao," inspired by a European tour that he and Holiday took together. You can actually hear the spectre of lyrics in "Ciao," the frenzied conversations, trying to get everything in before departing for America. Waldron would return to Europe to live, after losing a few years to a heroin overdose triggering a near-total mental breakdown, and he would often say in interviews that if Holiday had been able to make the break to expatriate living, it could have added years to her life.

The other non-original songs that Waldron includes on Impressions are "With a Song in Heart" by Rodgers and Hart, and "You Stepped Out of a Dream" by Nacio Herb Brown and Gus Kahn. "All About Us" is credited to Elaine Waldron, Mal's wife. She's received composer credit on his work before, and it may be some sort of publishing thing.

When John Coltrane came back to New York from Philadelphia, clean and sober and ready to record again, one of the players he brought with him was drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath, who stayed in the Big Apple and returns to Prestige here.

As of this blog entry, "Tootie" is still with us, and he talked about jazz then and now in a recent interview:

 I come from an era where...“jazz” was not considered a music that was sophisticated. It was always happening in some place where everybody was drunk, the room was full of smoke, and it wasn’t on the concert stage.

Once jazz was presented on the concert stage and introduced to festivals all over the world, the people that play it don’t necessarily represent people from my era anymore because we’ve died out.

I consider myself one of those people who came from the area where the blues was important and the RnB was important, and church gospel music was important. It’s not a part of what people call “jazz” anymore. People ignore that, they are not intellectual forms of music. That is not taught at the universities, they don’t teach you nothing about no blues. How to play an 8 bar or 12 bar blues, they don’t teach you that at the universities.

They teach you about sequences and how to go from this kind of change to that kind of change. We didn’t even know what that was, most of us.

Duke Ellington said, “one foot in the future, and one foot in blues would make the music unique.”

I started this project partly on a whim, partly out of the realization that this was an important era in American culture, and the idea that I could maybe get a sense of the totality of it through looking at one record label. Prestige because I thought it had been a little overlooked in jazz history, and because it was such an important part of my early jazz record collecting.

Bob Weinstock said that he sold the label in 1971 in part because the jazz he loved was no longer the jazz that was being made. Choosing Prestige meant starting to look at jazz in 1949, which is good because there's no right date, and this way the choice was made for me.

The music of these two decades was made by musicians born in the teens, in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s--musicians who matured and made their mark in the heart of the American Century in Music, that unparalleled artistic flourishing that came from the blues and developed in so many astounding ways. Maybe jazz, building from " the area where the blues was important and the RnB was important, and church gospel music was important," is the fullest expression of that music. Not the best, because there is no best, but the fullest, and the music that so many who started in more basic forms aspired to.

There are lots of reasons why the American Century wound down, or maybe just one reason. Because things do. No one is composing baroque music any more, or writing Elizabethan drama. That doesn't make the interpretive art of a Yo-Yo Ma or an Ian McKellen any less wonderful. But maybe "Tootie" has his finger on it.

There's another explanation, and that is that I'm wrong. That the Duke is right, and we still have one foot in the blues, and the other in the future. That "Tootie" got old, and I got old, and it's natural for us to live in the past.

Impressions was released on New Jazz. In spite of being hailed at the time as Waldron's best work to date, it seems to have never made it over, in whole or part, to a Prestige release.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad
Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                             
--Dave Grusin

An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 304: Coleman Hawkins

As Prestige roars into its tenth anniversary year, new ideas are taking shape, and everything old is new again. The 19-year-old who as a youngster had gone out with his father collecting traditional jazz 78s by the bushel, who had experienced the epiphany of Thelonious Monk and begun a new label to become an apostle of bebop, was 29 now, and looking around at the music scene on the cusp of a new decade.

Ten years as president of a record label will also give you new ideas about marketing, and as 1959 rolled on, Bob Weinstock was preparing to unleash three new subsidiary labels, Moodsville, Swingville and Bluesville.

These were not the "budget" labels that a lot of record labels put out in those days: LPs that were repackagings of earlier recordings, or masters that had been bought up from defunct labels. The budget labels were cheaply pressed and cheaply packaged, and were a way that companies tried to squeeze a few last nickels out of music that they probably weren't going to see a payday any other way. It's not widely known, but in 1977 RCA Victor was planning a massive budget rerelease of the music of one of its declining stars, Elvis Presley. That, of course, was the year that Elvis achieved true immortality by dying, and RCA changed its plans in a hurry.

New Jazz was sort of a budget label for Prestige, although its catalog feature some of Prestige's best artist doing some of their best work. The London Jazz Collector notes that some New Jazz titles:

 are sometimes marred by “hissy vinyl”, due to the raw vinylite being bulked up with recycled vinyl (containing minute detritus and fragments of paper label, which the stylus picks up as a continuous hiss) . Some pressings are ok, others have the dreaded hiss throughout, sometimes minor, on  other copies quite prominent. There is no consistency – even the same title can be found with hissy copies and not hissy copies. Perhaps it all depended on whether the vinylite stock delivered to the XYZ pressing plant that week had been bulked up with recycled vinyl or not. I have not encountered the problem with any other labels than Prestige, and does not occur with pre-Bergenfield [Prestige moved from New York City to Bergenfield, NJ, in the mid-1960s] label pressings or those from Abbey Manufacturing, so the finger points to reckless cost-cutting or dubious quality at some plants.

But for the most part, New Jazz records had pretty good quality control. Status was the real budget label, and even there, according to the London Jazz Collector, it's

difficult to see what was budget apart from saving on ink, providing minimal information saved nothing, but made it look budget. Working in Marketing in the Seventies, the big fear was always “cannibalisation”. You wanted all the sales you could get at the premium price, and extra sales at the budget price, without losing the one to the other. Extra effort was incurred to make things look less attractive. More marketing genius from Weinstock.

Swingville, Bluesville and Moodsville do not appear to have been budget labels at all. There's a lengthy discussion of this question online at the Organissimo jazz forum, and Chris Albertson, jazz historian and producer of many a Prestige session, weighs in with this:

I really don't think there was any serious marketing decision involved in the creation of the Bluesville, Swingville, Moodsville, etc. series. Remember, these were not stand-alone subsidiary labels--it was always Prestige Moodsville, Prestige Swingville, etc. I don't recall if the pricing was different--if so, that may have been a factor. As a dj when these first came out, and later as a Prestige employee, I never thought of them as anything but Prestige albums with a series name.
Sometimes I think that consumers/collectors make more out of such details than the facts call for. When I produced a session, it was a Prestige session--whether it came out on Prestige, Prestige Bluesville or Prestige Swingville, made no difference.

If Bob Weinstock was, as the London Jazz Collector suggests, a marketing genius, perhaps he was also by this time pretty savvy about accounting, and maybe there was a tax advantage to these subsidiary labels.

Or maybe it was just about the music. I'll deal with Bluesville and Moodsville later, but Weinstock, who had grown up on swing, and whose Times Square offices were still within hailing distance of the Metropole, was already assembling quite a collection swing era veterans, to the extent that he could have created a whole new line of Prestige All Stars or Prestige Blues Swingers. Because All Stars these gents certainly were, starting with one of the all stars of all of jazz history, Coleman Hawkins, who is gracing the ten-year-anniversary halls of Prestige and the Van Gelder Studio with his larger than life presence. And here, joined by:

• Charlie Shavers, 42 years old, first recruited by Prestige for the February 20 Hal Singer session. Swing credentials include Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Count Basie, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, Budd Johnson, and his own band with Terry Gibbs and Louis Bellson. He is the composer of  "Undecided," which had its origin in a tune that Shavers liked enough to send off to his publishers. They liked it too, and asked for a title. Shavers was trying to decide between  a couple of catchy titles, but hadn't made up his mind yet, so he wrote "Undecided." The publishers immediately sent it off to lyricist Leo Robin, and the rest is history--and some 200 recordings.
• Ray Bryant, the kid of the group at 28, but a kid who felt perfectly at home sitting in with the old guys at the Metropole in the afternoon, then heading downtown to play with the moderns in the evening.
• Tiny Grimes, 43, veteran of three earlier Prestige sessions, including a swinging soirée with J. C. Higginbotham, would be a Swingville staple. Played with Slam Stewart, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday. He had a hit with a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond." On the strength of that, he organized  Tiny Grimes and his Rocking Highlanders, which featured Red Prysock until Red quit because he refused to wear a kilt.
• George Duvivier, 39, made his mark with the Shirley Scott and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis sessions, but his first Prestige gig had been two years earlier, with Gil Melle, of all people. He played with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Louis Bellson, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Anita O’Day, and lots of moderns too. Pretty nearly everyone.
• Osie Johnson, 36, played with Earl Hines, Zoot Sims, Dinah Washington, Paul Gonsalves. He first hit Prestige in 1955 with Bennie Green, and stuck around over the next four years to back up Barbara Lea, Tiny Grimes and J. C. Higginbotham, 

Coleman Hawkins was 55 when he stepped the studio with this aggregation and in the middle of yet another career renaissance.

So what are these Swingville all stars playing? It’s nothing that you would have heard from a Benny Goodman radio broadcast on a Saturday night high atop the Rainbow Room. It’s nothing like the jump, jive and wail you would have heard from an old Louis Prima record or from a contemporary group like the Stray Cats when swing music and swing dancing had a renaissance among the kids in the 1990s. This is small group jazz from New York musicians in the 1950s, guys who have been around long enough to remember when jazz was dance music, but who know that today’s listeners want to hear inventive solos that’ll take them someplace new. You’d go to a Swingville album, as the label established itself, to hear music that would give you a certain traditional feel, but would also give you the modern jazz you’d come to expect from Prestige.

Coleman Hawkins, the architect of the saxophone sound in jazz, the guy who played with Fletcher Henderson, who gave new meaning to the improvised jazz solo with “Body and Soul,” who played with Dizzy on 52nd Street, who was still playing, the amalgam of everything he ever knew, was the perfect choice to build a new label around. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that signing the Hawk to Prestige was what gave Weinstock the idea for Swingville.

Hawk Eyes' first release was on Prestige, but it soon became one of Swingville's early releases.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                             
--Dave Grusin

An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell