Listening to Prestige 298: The Prestige Blues-Swingers

This is mostly a new edition of the Prestige Blues-Swingers from the previous August. Jerome Richardson, Pepper Adams and Ray Bryant are back, and perhaps most importantly arranger Jerry Valentine, the central figure behind both dates. This time, Valentine is given Coleman Hawkins to work with, which has to be a good thing.

One would think Hawkins would be most closely associated with the 1920s, when he changed jazz irrevocably by making the tenor saxophone a jazz instrument, or the 1930s when he changed improvisation irrevocably with his 1939 recording of “Body and Soul.”

But then you’d have to take into account the 1940s, when a new revolution swept jazz, leaving earlier innovators like Hawkins in its wake, except that it didn’t. Hawk led a group on 52nd Street with Monk, Miles Davis, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach, and led a group with Dizzy Gillespie in what many consider to be the first bebop recording, in 1944.

But Hawk never slowed down, and the 1950s were probably his most prolific recording decade. It’s hard to keep track, but in 1958 and 1959 alone he appeared on close to twenty albums as leader, and several more as sideman. Everyone wanted to play with Hawkins. And a couple of lesser known names are getting their chance here.

The LA Times obituary for Walter Bolden, who died in 2002, was entitled “Drummer Played With Jazz Greats,” and there are certainly worse ways to be remembered.

Here’s how that started. Sometimes a touring musician will go it on his own, generally for economic reasons, and work a date with local musicians. That was the case in 1950 when Stan Getz played a club date in Hartford, which was home to the Hartt School of Music, so Getz could count on getting some competent guys. But if Getz was planning on saving money by not hiring a band, economy gave way to the chance to snatch up some very good players. He left town with a drummer, Walter Bolden, and a piano player, Horace Silver. When he got back to New York, he used them on a couple of recording sessions for Roost.

Bolden may not have gone on to have the impact that Horace Silver did, but he stayed in New York and became a solid go-to drummer, recording with Gerry Mulligan, J. J. Johnson, Junior Mande, Howard McGhee and others. He toured with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and ultimately returned home, where he took a place on the faculty of the University of Hartford.

23-year-old Roy Gaines’s is strangely omitted from the session log as posted on the always-reliable jazzdisco web page. But there's definitely a guitar on the session, and it's definitely Gaines. He's listed on a couple of other sources. And a German reissue of the album gives leader credit to Hawkins-Bryant-Gaines.

Gaines had been playing professionally since his mid-teens, When admiration for T-Bone Walker had led him to leave Texas for the West Coast, where he found work in the touring bands of Roy Milton and Chuck Willis, and some gigs with his idol, Walker. He probably played on Willis's 1952 recording of "Loud Mouth Lucy," because he would cover the song on his own in 1956.

The thirty years between the early 1950s and the early 1980s are the history of the unsung working musician, which is to say no history at all, but he apparently did spend some time up and down the East Coast. "Loud Mouth Lucy" was recorded for Miami-based Chart Records, and 1958 seems to have found him in New York recording for "Skippy is a Sissy" for RCA Victor, which had some minor success. His later blues albums are terrific, but so are the 50s R&B records, and must have played a gig somewhere to catch the ear of Jerry Valentine, who was certainly looking for a blues sound for this session. In 1982 the one-nighters and smoky rooms finally paid off for him, as he got a recording contract for a traditional blues album, and he went on to record several more through the end of the millennium and into the next, winning a W. C. Handy Award and the Living Blues Comeback of the Year Award. One of his albums, fittingly, was a tribute to T-Bone Walker.

Valentine has chosen an interesting group of tunes for the session. There are two of his own, “Stasch” and “Skrouk.”

There are three blues tunes, each generally associated a vocalist, and three very different sorts of vocalists. Well, “Since I Fell For You,” with its sweet, bluesy, romantic melody, has proved a natural for almost every kind of vocalist. Originally written by bandleader Buddy Johnson for his sister Ella, it’s been recorded by jazz singers (Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Morgana King, Arthur Prysock, Shirley Horn), pop singers (Doris Day, Jack Jones, Eydie Gorme), doowoppers (the Harptones, the Spaniels, the Dells), rhythm and blues singers (Lloyd Price, Wilbert Harrison), soul singers (the Righteous Brothers, Fontella Bass, Barbara Lewis, Barbara George, Aaron Neville), country singers (Ketty Lester, Con Hunley, Willie Nelson). It’s been recorded over 200 times.

“Roll ‘em Pete” and “My Babe” are each associated with only one version: The former with Big Joe Turner’s vocal over Pete Johnson's boogie woogie piano, and the latter Little Walter's harmonica-and-vocal treatment of a song by Willie Dixon, one of the great blues songwriters, for Chess Records.

Hawkins gives the crooner treatment to “Since I Fell For You,” and it’s beautiful. Valentine gives a little more bite to the ensemble sections, and there are brief solos by all concerned. They’re all good, and all can’t help but remind one that in a really important sense, all modern improvisation comes from Coleman Hawkins and “Body and Soul.” This is still true in 1959, and will be until the free boys take over, which they're starting to.

Nobody is going to do what Big Joe Turner did with “Roll ‘em Pete,” but Jerry Valentine takes it back to Kansas City. Hawkins knows how to do that: he was there. And Valentine was close: his first important arranging gig was with Earl Hines. The Hawk shows everything he learned back then, and everything he’s learned since. And we can stop to appreciate what a perfect choice Ray Bryant is for this session. He can play anything, including an updated but pulsing take on Pete Johnson’s riffs.

Roy Gaines’s web page concentrates on his post-1980s work, and this session isn’t mentioned. You’d think he’d be prouder of it, but probably his web page was built by young guys. At any rate, he delivers a solo on “Roll ‘em Pete” that should, yet again one more once, clinch the argument as to whether rhythm and blues is jazz.

And Gaines’s solo on “Roll ‘em Pete” is his strongest and most personal, although you’d think that “My Babe,” from the guitar-dominated Chess Records library, might have been the one. But Valentine writes a real big band arrangement for “My Babe,” and Gaines plays a Charlie Christian-influenced solo.

 Valentine’s own two tunes are big band swing, as well. If you name your compositions “Stasch” and “Skrouk,”you’re probably not expecting them to have a long shelf life, but they’re good tunes.

"Trust  in Me," the one tune from the standards repertoire, was written by Jean Schwartz, already a veteran ("Trust in Me" would be one of his last) and Ned Wever. It was originally recorded in 1937 by Wayne King, the Waltz King (although a fox trot), and almost immediately covered by Mildred Bailey, setting up a schmaltz-hip dichotomy that would endure, with the likes of Eddie Fisher in one camp, and Louis Jordan, Clyde McPhatter and Thelonious Monk in the other, not to mention Beyoncé and Rolling Stone Bill Wyman.

Wever was better known as an actor than a composer, starring on radio as Dick Tracy and Bulldog Drummond. Jerome Richardson walks right down that street like Bulldog Drummond in thie recording, and so does Ray Bryant.

Bob Weinstock was gearing up to start his Moodsville and Swingville subsidiary labels by the end of the year, and Stasch, credited to the Prestige Blues Swingers featuring Coleman Hawkins, was one of their first Swingville releases, in 1960. It would later be released as part of a Prestige CD package (Prestige as a subsidiary of Concord) called Coleman Hawkins--Bean and the Boys.



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