Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Willis Jackson, Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings are still together, bringing a world of experience to their partnership before ever arriving at Prestige. This means two things, both of them good. First, they're comfortable and relaxed and intuitive with each other. Second, they know each other well enough to feel good about taking chances and trying something new.
Three things, actually, all of them good. They've been playing for the people for a long time. So to Jackson, McDuff and Jennings, trying something new doesn't mean what it means to Coleman or Coltrane. It means finding new little surprises to wake up an audience. It means you'll be booed for a week if the audience knows what to expect from you, and you'll be held over for another week if you give them a little of the unexpected, too.
How about if you're at a dance hall, and the Gator announces that "Now we're gonna play an old favorite -- 'Sunny Side of the Street,' and your feet start tapping in anticipation, because you can feel the tempo already? And you're getting set to sing along: "Grab your coat and get your hat...Leave your worries on the doorstep..."
And then Jack McDuff starts that odd organ riff, teasing the melody and bumpety bumping away from it, and you're scratching your head for about 20 seconds before the Gator comes in with the melody, and now you're tapping your toes and saying, "Hey, that was some cool shit brother Jack put down."
This isn't music appreciation postgraduate level, it's Music Appreciation 101, and that's what makes a lot of folks happy.
This session was broken up and sold for parts. "Sunny Side of the Street" "Blue Strollin'" went to Cool "Gator," released in 1960, and rereleased as Keep on a-Blowin'. "East Breeze" was on Blue Gator, a later 1960 release. "When I Fall in Love" was held off for Cookin' Sherry, a 1961 release. "Glad a See Ya" came out in 1965, after McDuff had moved on to lead his own group, on an album entitled Willis Jackson and Jack McDuff--Together Again! and the medley saw daylight the following year on Together Again, Again! Esmond Edwards produced this session and the others that were mixed and matched on all those albums.
"On the Sunny Side of the Street" was the flip side of a 45 that featured "Come Back to Sorrento."
Johnny "Hammond" Smith and his Philadelphia cohorts go after some familiar standards here, and I do mean familiar. That gives him a more difficult task than you might imagine. These are super-familiar standards because people love them, so he's got to not alienate the multitudes who love them, while at the same time appealing to the esoterica-loving jazz hipsters who would rather run naked through Sam Goody's than listen to another rendition of "My Funny Valentine."
Or, especially, of "Autumn Leaves." This is 1959, and although there have already been several jazz interpretations (Jimmy Smith, Ahmad Jamal, Errol Garner), the one that's been inescapable since
1955 has been the recording by Roger Williams, with its arpeggios run amok through jukeboxes, radio stations both top forty and traditional, and your aunt's living room, where her 9-year-old won't stop sliding his fist from top to bottom of the keyboard, yelling out "Hey, I'm playin' 'Autumn Leaves!'"
So, does Mr. Smith, otherwise known as Mister Hammond, succeed in keeping it recognizable, while at the same time making it hip, at least a little sardonic, different, and ultimately musical? To these ears, yes.
I'm not saying that every listener to Lacy, or to Martin Block's Make Believe Ballroom, would have pricked up his ears, tapped his feet, and said "It's not Roger Williams...but I like it." But they should have. And I'm not saying that every jaded jazzer would offer a knowing smile and say "Hey, that's hip." But I did.
I like standards. I always cringe a little when a young jazz musician, especially a vocalist, announces that this set will be all originals, because not everyone is that good a composer. They call them standards because they set a standard, and it's a good standard to measure yourself against. Even the Beatles on their early albums, even Thelonious Monk -- and we're talking about composers on a level that you and I and the young jazz trumpet player in the next apartment can only dream about -- recorded their versions of standards (they're called "covers" in pop and rock; in jazz we call it playing music). The challenge Smith sets for himself--and he lays it right out there with "Autumn Leaves"--is not the
usual jazz player's challenge to seek out and reclaim neglected standards, but to go toe to toe with the Great American Songbook's Greatest Hits: "My Funny Valentine," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "I'll Remember April."
Well, now. "I'll Remember April." I was tempted to choose that as my "Listen to One," except it's not exactly reminiscent of anything except itself. This is an April that seems to have been remembered in a barnyard, with pigs and ducks and other farm animals doing the remembering, I love it. It's worth a trip to YouTube to check it out.
Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce" is a little different, Your task in playing a composition by Bird is not to find a new and hip way of interpreting it, but just to do it justice, and Smith comes through here, too.
Finally, balancing out the set, we have two Smith originals. The whole set has been about delivering that good feeling, and his own composition, "That Good Feelin'," is all about that--jaunty, bluesy and tuneful, and a good stretch on the Hammond. The other original, "Puddin'," also has a dropped "g," and also delivers in much the same way.
That Good Feelin' was the title of the New Jazz album. The 45 RPM single was "I'll Remember April," an interesting choice. Maybe not the one I would have picked if I were looking for maximum air and jukebox play, but refreshing. The flip side is "That Good Feelin'," which you can't argue with.
And...OK, I can't resist. Here's "I'll Remember April."
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.
There's a gap here. I can't find anything streaming online from Jerome Richardson's October 21 session, which produced the album Roamin' with Richardson. And I don't have it in my vinyl collection. So unless someone would like to digitize it and send it to me, it'll have to wait till I get a book contract and can afford to go back and buy the missing albums at whatever collector prices I can find.
Prestige presents the debut album of another major talent who would help to define the jazz of the 1960s, as a musician and even more as a composer--and whose life would be cut short. Not like Lem Winchester's, shorter than it should have been. He would die of a heart attack at age 43.
Nelson woke up to an awareness of music that was beyond what he had grown up with--a musical education that included an older brother who was in Cootie Williams's orchestra, and his own stint playing with Louis Jordan's Tympani Five--when he joined the Army during the Korean War, and found himself overseas in Japan and Korea. But it wasn't the music of Asia that turned his head. He had to go all the way to Japan to discover the music of the West: a Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra performance of t he music of Ravel and Hindemith. Before that, he told Ebony reporter Phyl Garland, "I hadn't even known that Negroes were allowed to go to concerts."
He was still committed to jazz, but his way to it went through a classical education. After the Army, he enrolled at Washington University in St, Louis, where jazz was a word not even mentioned in the music department, but he studied with important composers like Elliot Carter and got a grounding in composition that would stand him in good stead later--for example, when the Eastman Orchestra of Rochester, New York, premiered one of his pieces, "and the reviewers didn’t know where it belongs. You can’t tell where the jazz stops and where the classical music begins" (from an interview with John Cobley). And in 1966, he would be asked to come back to St. Louis and start a jazz program at Washington U.
He continued his postgraduate education playing in the bands of Erskine Hawkins, Wild Bill Davis, and Louie Bellson, and honed his composer/arranger chops as the house arranger at the Apollo Theater, which must have been an interesting job.
For his first album as a leader, producer Esmond Edwards has given him some of Prestige's finest for a rhythm section, plus trumpeter Kenny Dorham, not quite a regular, but here making his eighth appearance on a Prestige recording. They've chosen four original Nelson compositions, plus one by Billy Strayhorn ("Passion Flower") and one by Bob Haggard ("What's New?") All of his own work has both immediacy and sublety, and shows a composer who will go on to become justly celebrated. I particularly liked "Jams and Jellies," which has a catchy blues melody, and opens itself up to terrific solos by Nelson, Ray Bryant and Kenny Dorham. And in this case, I sincerely believe it must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that.
"Ostinato" is particularly interesting. "Ostinato" is an Italian word meaning obstinate or stubborn, and in music it describes a musical phrase that keeps repeating, that won't go away. Ravel's "Bolero" is frequently used as an example, but in the world of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and even jazz, it's pretty common. Think "Tequila," or Doc Pomus's "Lonely Avenue," best known in the recording by Ray Charles. Nelson's "Ostinato" is the work of composer seriously grounded in music theory, and of a guy who knows how to have fun.
Esmond Edwards produced. The New Jazz recording was called, appropriately, Meet Oliver Nelson.
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.
Yusef Lateef, like many musicians who worked in this contemporary American musical form, created by African American artists, hailed as America's signal cultural achievement, did not like the word jazz. It's understandable, and I've written about it before--the lowlife origins of the word, the not always attractive associations that have grown up around it. As Lateef told Marc Myers of Jazzwax,
I feel the word is a misnomer. It has meanings and connotations that debase the art and belittle those who play it. Performing music that inspires listeners and puts them in touch with themselves is a beautiful and challenging and difficult expression. There’s communication between the artist and the listener, and hopefully both are better people and more enriched as a result.
...If you look it up, you’ll see that its synonyms include “nonsense,” “blather,” “claptrap” and other definitions that reduce the music to poppycock and skulduggery. I find that the word “jazz” is a meaningless term that too narrowly defines the music I play, and it adds a connotation that’s disrespectful to the art and those who perform it.
I do like the word. I feel that it has been ennobled by the people who have played it. It has been elevated from the profane to the sacred, without losing a touch of the profane, by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, Ben Webster and Eric Dolphy, Erskine Hawkins and Bug Jay McNeely. It has gone to college with Dave Brubeck, to the Philharmonic with Norman Granz, to high society with Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. It has gone into concert halls with the Modern Jazz Quartet. And if America's greatest art form had its roots in the bawdy houses of Storyville in New Orleans, the mob-controlled speakeasies of Chicago, the urban corruption of Boss Pendergast in Kansas City, then it has something in common with Hamlet, which was written by an actor, about as lowlife and raffish a profession as you could find in Elizabethan England. Great art comes from folk roots, and the folk are where you find them.
It's also difficult to find a word to replace it. Lateef, in the same interview, suggested:
autophysiopsychic music. This means music from the physical, mental and spiritual. I think it’s an adequate term.
It's hard to dispute its adequacy, and it's certainly better than the "social music" that Miles Davis put forth, but it's not likely to catch on.
The 1960s were a time during which a lot of musicians were chafing at the name "jazz" (in Art Taylor's book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, he asks a lot of his subject what they think of the term, and they mostly don't like it), but they were also a time during which musicians were questioning what the music was, and what its boundaries were. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were the most famous of these, but Lateef was one of the important figures in this jazz revolution.
Lateef, in discussing his bending of barriers, credited the spiritual element that he brought to the music, but that's hard to quantify, although there's a direct correlation to something that is quantifiable. He was one of the earliest convert to Islam among American jazz musicians, embracing the religion in Detroit in 1948, and this brought him into contact with Detroit's Islamic community. These days greater Detroit, particularly Dearborn, is home to one of America's largest Islamic communities, but even then the influence was there if one was open to it, and Lateef was. From a Syrian fellow assembly line worker at the Chrysler plant he began to learn about Middle Eastern music, and it was to have a profound effect on the music he would make.
Lateef was not the only jazz musician to turn to the Middle East for inspiration (we've heard Herbie Mann's "Tel Aviv" in a 1957 Prestige recording), but he may well have been the most profoundly influenced. So his spiritual quest became a musical quest, and it didn't stop with the tonality and instrumentation of the Middle East. As he told Marc Myers:
When I was beginning to explore spiritual music in the mid-1950s, there was some resentment. My early albums as a leader for Savoy—Jazz for the Thinker and Prayer to the East—were different than anything else that had been recorded. I realized then that if I was going to continue, I had to change the format. I started studying [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, a classical composer who was changing music with his embrace of electronics and new theories. After listening to composers like him, I knew I had to go beyond what I already knew.
When he signed a recording contract with Prestige, Lateef was still living in Detroit. He had recorded one earlier Prestige album, and the two game-changers for Savoy, but for all of these, he would pile his musicians and instruments into a station wagon, drive all night to New York, make the record, then back to Detroit. The Motor City had one of the most vibrant and active jazz scenes in the Midwest, and had sent an all star cast of musicians to New York, but Lateef was one of the last holdouts. He would not move east until 1960, and when he made this recording for Prestige, it was sill under those conditions, so all of the musicians on this date were Detroiters.
One of them, Lonnie Hillyer, who become known in the 1960s for his long association with Charles Mingus, was the stuff of legend in Detroit for an episode he wasn't even directly involved with. When Miles Davis lived there in the early 1950s, he was deep into heroin addiction, and his trumpet was generally in a pawnshop, so when he got a gig he'd have to borrow one, and the trumpet's owner had to hope it wouldn't end up in a pawnshop at the end of the evening. On this particular night, Miles had touched up young teenage trumpet student Lonnie Hillyer. When Lonnie's mother found out, she was furious. She went straight to the club, marched up onto the stage, and snatched the horn away from Miles in mid-solo.
Hillyer was all grown up in 1959, and like the rest of his bandmates, used to playing with Lateef every night. This was a tight group of Detroiters that Lateef brought to Englewood Cliffs, and they were able to hang tight with the leader as he pushed boundaries. These were all musicians who had grown up in the jazz cauldron of Detroit, and who were fully equipped to understand and abet the fusion between jazz and autophysiopsychic music.
Lateef brings us both: what we already knew of as jazz and what we were to discover by listening to his music, in this album, in the earlier Prestige and Savoy albums, and in recordings to come.
He has not brought any of the exotic Midde Eastern instruments that he has mastered to this session, like the arghul, which he played on his 1957 recordings for Prestige, but he does play both the flute (at this point not unusual on a jazz recording) and the oboe (still unusual) in addition to the tenor sax, and these allow him to find a range of sounds and feelings beyond the usual. He plays four of his own compositions and three standards: Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays," Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now," and "Seabreeze," a swing-era tune credited to Larry Douglas, Fred Norman, and Rommie Bearden, the last named more commonly known as Romare Bearden, one of the great painters of his generation.
Cry!-Tender was released on New Jazz. Weinstock was creating quite a renaissance for New Jazz in his tenth anniversary year -- and that in addition to the new labels he was starting. Quite a lot of diversification, presumably for tax reasons. Cry!-Tender wasn't actually released until mid-1960, but a lot of New Jazz product was shipping as 1959 wound down, some of it cut in the waning months of the year, some of if off the shelf.
Here's a quick rundown of the last quarter of the year:
NJLP 8224 Meet Oliver Nelson, recorded 10/30/1959
NJLP 8225 Kenny Dorham - Quiet Kenny, recorded 11/13/1959
NJLP 8226 Jerome Richardson, Roamin' with Richardson, recorded 10/21/1959
NJLP 8227 Ray Bryant Trio, delayed release of a 1957 recording
NJLP 8228 The Ray Draper Quintet Featuring John Coltrane, delayed release of a 1957 recording
NJLP 8229 - Johnny "Hammond" Smith - That Good Feelin', recorded 11/4/1959
Two 45 RPM singles came from the session. "Dopolous" / "Yesterdays" was released on New Jazz, "Seabreeze" came out on Prestige, paired with "Love Theme From Spartacus" from a later session, which was to become Lateef's biggest hit.
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.
This
was the first occasion of Prestige venturing out of the friendly
confines of Rudy Van Gelder's studio to record a live album, and it
proved to be an adventure worth daring. The sound is fine, and Red
Garland and his club band -- Paul Chambers and Art Taylor had their own
things going on -- put on a fine evening of entertainment.
Garland,
Jimmy Rowser and "Specs" Wright gave Prestige enough material for three
albums of Garland at his best, which were not exactly hurried into
distribution or given enough fanfare, but are as good as it gets when it
comes to piano jazz from this master, but even better yet would have
been to have been at the Prelude that night and to have experienced the
real thing.
And
I could have been. 1959 was a year of living in New York, and
discovering jazz in clubs, discovering that these were real people, on a
bandstand so close you could almost reach out and touch them, listening
to the music, and the music was jazz, it was improvised music, being
created right in front of you. You held your breath at that moment when
the soloist finished playing the head, the melody to "The Way You Look
Tonight" or "There's a Small Hotel" or "Satin Doll" and started off into
the unknown, with notes suggested by the original tune -- based on the
chord changes, they said, but recognizing the chord changes was too
sophisiticated for me, and it still is too sophisticated for me. The
places they went were melodic and anti-melodic, insistent and
suggestive, playing for each other, playing for the audience, making
little inside musical jokes that you weren't going to get but you didn't
have to, it was enough to feel that it was happening, right then and
there.
My first time was Small's Paradise, 135th Street
and 7th Avenue, Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams. No minimum and no cover.
You could sit at the bar, order a bottle of beer for 75 cents, and nurse
it for a long time. Drinking age was 18, so I was legal. Bandstand was
over my right shoulder. Some of America's greatest musicians were up on
it, playing the music I'd dreamed of hearing.
Later
that night I walked down 7th Avenue and went into Count Basie's. A house
band was playing -- not the Count, obviously. They were good. I wish I
knew now what their names were. I didn't stay long. A white country boy
in Harlem can only handle so much sensory input in one night.
I
did hear the Count Basie band, though, at Birdland, Broadway and 52nd
St. This was the summer that Miles Davis was beaten by the cops just
outside Birdland when he was on break from playing a set. If I remember
right it had happened just a couple of weeks earlier, and the jazz
community was scandalized and outraged. Was I part of the jazz
community. Well, not hardly. But I was scandalized and outraged.
And,
that night, I was hearing one of the world's legendary bands, in one of
its legendary clubs. I remember white tablecloths. Whether or not
that's an imagined memory I don't know, but the place seemed opulent to
me, a palace of jazz. And the full-bodied music of the Basie band.
I
seemed always to have been alone in my jazz forays that year, except
for the Half Note, way downtown on Hudson Street, with my best friend
Lenny (now Leonardo) Rosen. Al Cohn and Zoot Sims led a quintet, and we
were particularly excited to discover that Mose Allison, the
composer-singer-songwriter we loved from Back Country Suite and Local Color,
was Al and Zoot's piano player.. The paths that cross in jazz have
always been a part of the music's fascination, and the scene't
fascination, and here it was happening as Lenny and I sat at a table and
let the music thrill us.
Sometime in the 1990s, I was
in the city, downtown around NYU, and I ran into an old friend who was
getting his PhD, just coming from a seminar. We decided to go get a
beer, and he said he knew of a place on Cooper Square. It was a thrash
punk club, but it was way too early for the music, and it would be
quiet.
The decor was thrashy and punky, with black
painted cobwebs everywhere, but the layout was as familiar as if forty
years had not passed. "I've been here before," I said. "The last time I
was here, Ornette Coleman was on that bandstand."
The
Five Spot was the last of my 1959 jazz clubs, and certainly not the
least. I was under Ornette's spell, and I went back again and again to
hear the music the New Yorker described as "the buzzing of angry bees."
But
I didn't know about the Prelude, and I have to conjure up that evening
from the music as captured and converted to vinyl by Prestige.
Well,
the music is the thing, and this is Garland at his best, playing mostly
standards with some originals--one of them. "Prelude Blues," probably
composed on the spot. He starts out with a nod to Basie, the theme from M Squad,
and salutes Basie again with "Li'l Darlin,'" Let Me See" and "One
O'Clock Jump." A late (1971) release from the Prelude tapes also
includes a studio cut from the previous August, a Garland composition
called "Little Bit of Basie." Garland tips a hat to Duke Ellington,
too, with "Satin Doll," "Just Squeeze Me" and Ellingtonian Juan Tizol's
"Perdido."
Rowser and Wright know how to work with Garland, and know how to solo when called to step up. Wish I'd been there.
Red Garland Live!,
on New Jazz, was the first release from this session, and that not
until 1965. Edmond Edwards produced the recording, and he chose Irving
Berlin's "Marie," Garland's "Bohemian Blues," "One O'Clock Jump,"
Gershwin's "A Foggy Day" and "Mr..Wonderful."
A budget release on Status was called Li'l Darlin' and had the title cut, "We Kiss in a Shadow" and "Blues in the Closet." It's hard to find release dates for Status product.
Red Garland at the Prelude
was released on Prestige in 1971, with "Satin Doll," "Perdido," "There
Will Never Be Another You," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Let Me See,"
"Prelude Blues," "Just Squeeze Me" and "One O'Clock Jump.""_Perdido" and
"Just Squeeze Me" were also released on 45, with a catalog number low
enough to suggest a release well before 1971, though that seems odd.
Also in 1971 and also on the Prestige label, Satin Doll, with the
alternate take of the title cut, the aforementioned Basie tribute, "The
Man I Love," "It's a Blue World" and "M-Squad Theme." Orrin Keepnews
produced this one.
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.
The year 1959 was to yield Prestige one more major modern jazz talent, and his career was to be horribly short. That would be Lem Winchester, the vibes-playing cop from Wilmington, Delaware, who was introduced as a Leonard Feather discovery at Newport in 1958, made an album with Ramsey Lewis for Argo Records, and then settle with Prestige, for whom he would cut four sessions over the next two years, and then die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1961--apparently an accident, although some rumors suggest Russian Roulette.
In 1957, Winchester was a young veteran police officer. He had a wife and family, and at his mother's insistence he had opted for job security and a steady salary rather than falling prey to the temptation to join his teenage friend Clifford Brown in decamping Wilimington for Philadelphia and the uncertain life of a jazz musician. But he had been gigging around his home town, and a local trio called John Chowning's Collegiates had dreams of glory, and of the Newport Jazz Festival. They decided to make a recording and sent it to Leonard Feather, and they figured they would have a better chance of being listened to if they added Winchester to their group.
They were partly right. Winchester made Feather sit up and take notice--but only of him, not the Collegiates. Feather put Winchester together with a somewhat more professional trio and presented him at Newport in 1958. This would also be Winchester's recording debut, as one side of a Feather-produced disk called New Faces at Newport (Randy Weston was the other new face). Winchester was backed by three fine musicians from Boston, Ray Santisi, John Neves and Jimmy Zitano. All three were stars of the vibrant Boston club scene, and had worked with major jazz stars like Charlie Parker and Stan Getz.
Winchester's group was billed on the album as the Patrolman Lem Winchester Quartet (he's in uniform on the album cover), and in fact he had not given up his day job. He still walked a beat in Wilimington, but now his moonlighting gigs ranged a little farther afield, including Chicago, where he made a record in 1958 with the Ramsey Lewis Trio. After that he signed with Prestige.
Pairing Benny Golson with Winchester was an excellent idea, although they don't avail themselves of Golson's compositional skills. The album is two Winchester originals (including "Down Fuzz," which has to be an allusion to his other profession), three standards, and one tune, the first recorded, by Len Foster, who seems to have no other credits as composer, musician or anything else. But it must have been a song both Golson and Winchester knew, leading me to guess that Foster must have been a part of the Philadelphia scene, because it's the tune they open their set with. Which means it's where we first hear Golson shape the sound of his tenor so that it becomes the perfect pairing with Winchester's vibes.
For the last tune of the day, Frank Loesser's "If I Were a Bell," Golson sits it out and lets Winchester show what he can do, which is a lot.
Signing up Lem Winchester must have been one of the highlights of what was already a banner tenth anniversary for Bob Weinstock. I bet he'd thought he'd be making records with him for years to come.
Bob Weinstock's early experiments with blues and R&B singers were marked by two near-constants. Joe "Bebop" Carroll,They were (a) very good, and (b) commercially unsuccessful. As with jazz, Bob Weinstock had the ear. But he didn't seem to have the marketing touch that he had with jazz.
Remember The Cabineers, Ralph Willis, John Bennings, H-Bomb Ferguson, Bobby Harris, Paula Grimes, Rudy Ferguson, The Mello-Moods, Joe "Bebop" Carroll, Bob Kent,Piney Brown, Billy Valentine, James "Deacon" Ware? If you're a pretty serious blues collector, you might remember H-Bomb Ferguson, Joe "Bebop" Carroll or Piney Brown. You might actually remember the wrong Piney Brown--the more famous one was the Kansas City saloonkeeper who inspired Big Joe Turner's "Piney Brown Blues." Anyway, those three had decent recording careers, if not comparable to Big Joe Turner or Sonny Boy Williamson or Wynonie Harris or Larry Darnell or Varetta Dillard, to name a few contemporaries.
Prestige did record a couple of well-known blues singers like Brownie McGhee, but they weren't known for their work on Prestige. And if you want to count King Pleasure as a blues singer, there's one unqualified success.
But most of the other Prestige blues singers have disappeared into almost total obscurity, for mostly no good reason. You can find a couple of cuts by Paula Grimes on YouTube, maybe, and she's wonderful, but she never quite made it.
Weinstock briefly had a blues subsidiary, Par Presentation Records, in the early 1950s, but it only put out a few unsuccessful titles and was quickly shuttered.
But this was 1959, the tenth anniversary year of what was by now a very successful independent record label, run by a guy who had learned more than a few tricks about successful marketing. Weinstock had staked his claim to the jazz nostalgia niche with Swingville, and he was about to do the same for the blues market with Bluesville.
And still, at least with his first attempt, he couldn't bring it off. Al Smith is almost totally forgotten today, his two albums for Prestige/Bluesville the only record of his ever having existed. He's easier to find and listen to, in today's streaming wonderland, than Paula Grimes, but I'd guess that very few still have a copy of the vinyl record, although you can actually buy it from collectors' sites.
And if there's ever a record that deserves to have been heard, and to become a classic, it's this one. Smith is a remarkable singer. How remarkable? Well, take his cover of a Ray Charles tune.
Ray Charles was a wonderful songwriter, and his songs have been widely covered: "I Got a Woman," "This Little Girl of Mine," "What'd I Say?" But nobody else that I've been able to find has covered "Night Time is the Right Time," and with good reason: the distinctive raw, pleading response vocals of Margie Hendrix make it virtually uncoverable.
But Smith makes it work. His gospel-tinged blues singing is sufficiently different from Charles's to make his approach unique--and while it's equally different, it has enough of Hendrix's fervor to power his singing of both parts.
He also Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis's tenor sax solo adding yet another gospel-tinged declamation to the mix.
Davis stands out on "Night Time," but Shirley Scott's understated but impassioned organ work, on every cut, really pulls the album together. It makes you wish she'd done a lot more work with singers (she and Davis did back up Mildred Anderson on another Bluesville release).
Smith does two other covers, both associated with Johnny Ace: "Never Let Me Go," written by prolific tunesmith Joe Scott, and Ace's mega-hit, "Pledging My Love," credited to Ferdinand Washington and Don Robey, although the flamboyant label-owner Robey was better at putting his name on songs than actually writing them. His version of "Pledging my Love," with Scott's sensitive organ, is one of the best covers of this song.
His originals are all good songs. I'm not sure any of them has "hit" emblazoned on it the way "Pledging My Love" does, but they're good. Two of them, "Tears in My Eyes" and "Come On Pretty Baby" became the first 45 RPM single off the album. The two covers, "Night Time is the Right Time" and "Pledging My Love" were a second single."Tears in My Eyes"/"Come on Pretty Baby" was the first 45 RPM release on Bluesville, and Hear My Blues was the first Bluesville album. While it may have made only a faint dent at most, Bluesville would go on to achieve some success.
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.
I've ignored an important milestone in jazz of the 1950s. In midsummer of 1959, Rudy Van Gelder moved out of his parents' living room and into his new studio at 445 Sylvan Avenie, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. This studio, designed by architect David Henken in consultation with Van Gelder and inspired, as so much architecture of the era was, by Frank Lloyd Wright, had 39-foot cathedral ceilings, and reminded many of a cathedral: Ira Gitler said that it could give you "a feeling of religion." It is a shrine to modern jazz, but even more than that, it was a great working studio, and Van Gelder kept developing it and improving it and recording music in it until shortly before his death in 2016.
Ike Quebec was the first artist to record in the new space, on July 20, and Coleman Hawkins and Red Garland were the first Prestige artists, on August 12. My apologies for carelessness, and when this gets assembled in book form, it will be back to its correct chronology.
Johnny "Hammond" Smith's nickname was not to distinguish him from other organists, because they all played the Hammond, but to distinguish him from other Johnny Smiths, particularly the acclaimed jazz guitarist. Like many organists, he began on the piano, and like many before him, the sound of a pioneering organ virtuoso inspired him. Since he didn't come from Philadelphia, it wasn't Jimmy Smith. Born in Louisville, KY, Smith moved to Cleveland, where he first heard Wild Bill Davis. He was working at the time (1958) as Nancy Wilson's piano accompanist, but the organ won him over, to the point that when he made his 1959 debut as a leader, he had already folded "Hammond" into his name.
Smith had a real feeling for the funky qualities of the organ, and he would become known as the instrument's funkmeister as his career developed, and he was plenty funky as he began with Prestige, but he also showed his dexterity with standards, as was expected of an organ group in those days: "The Masquerade is Over," "Pennies from Heaven" and "Secret Love,," not quite a standard yet, although it certainly became one. Smith's was one of the first jazz renditions.
All of the musicians with Smith are also new to Prestige. Guitarist Thornel Schwartz understands and contributes to the guitar-organ dynamic which is developing as an important new thing in jazz, and he's a new phenomenon: a guitar-organ specialist. Schwartz was from Philadelphia, and he began his career with Jimmy Smith. He would go on to play with Larry Young, Charles Earland, Jimmy McGriff and Richard "Groove" Holmes.
George Tucker flew under the radar of publicity during his short life (he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1965, at age 38) but he left a powerful impression as a musician. On an Internet forum devoted to the discussion of jazz bass, a young fan writes about hearing him on a session with Earl Hines and Coleman Hawkins, and laments that he can't find anything about him: "Is George Tucker a highly regarded player? If so, why is there so little about him on the net?"
No one on the forum knows anything about him, but everyone, it seems, has a favorite recording:
Mr. Tucker plays on one of my all-time favorite "sleeper" discs, Jaki Byard's Live!! at Lennie's On the Turnpike.
Not to mention an Illinois Jacquet date with Alan Dawson and Barry Harris also live from Lennie's called Bottoms Up.
Check out a Zoot side w.Dave McKenna and Dannie Richman on drums playing more trad type tunes...the album is called Down Home.
I came across George Tucker's playing on the Stanley Turrentine record, Look Out! I particularly appreciate the amount of space and bluesy-ness Tucker applies to his solo on 'Yesterdays'.
And there are more. Young bassists love his work with Walt Dickerson, Andrew Cyrille, Freddie Redd, Horace Parlan, Booker Ervin.
Tucker had already built an impressive resume by the time he made his Prestige debut with Smith: Curtis Fuller, Bennie Green, John Handy, Slide Hampton, Melba Liston. He would become a mainstay of Prestige recording during the early 1960s before his death.
Leo Stevens had been with Smith from the beginning, and remained with him for many years. He doesn't appear to have moonighted beyond his work with Smith, but he was an important part of Smith's jazz-funk sound.
Maybe the best word for Smith's debut recording is "ingratiating." His general attitude seems to be "there's no way you're not gonna like this, and unless you're an unreconstructed organ combo-hater, that's going to be pretty much true. "Sweet Cookies" is a pretty good place to start hearing how that works. It's a Smith original, and it opens with a groove nearly as irresistible as "Honky Tonk," to draw you in, and then without ever losing that, it develops textures, does those things with tonality than only an organ can do, and includes terrific guitar solo from Schwartz.
The album was released from New Jazz as All Soul, and the title cut, b/w "The Masquerade is Over," was released on 45 RPM two different ways: under the Prestige label, with "Masquerade" as the A side, and on New Jazz, with "All Soul" on top. The significance of an A side was basically that when the record was advertised in the trade publications or promotional cards were sent to record stores, the A side got the major ink. On jukeboxes, the A side was the top listed. When the record was sent to disc jockeys, it was sent with instructions (perhaps along with payola) to play the A side, and generally those instructions were followed, although there are famous stories of B sides that eclipsed their leaders, including one funky organ classic. "Behave Yourself" by Booker T. and the MG's was going nowhere until a few enterprising DJs flipped it over and started playing the B side, "Green Onions."
"Sweet Cookies" was also a New Jazz 45, with "Secret Love" on the flip side.
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.
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