Listening to Prestige 346: Claude Hopkins

I can't find a producer credit for this, but it has to be part two of Chris Albertson's welcome into the Prestige fold. He had brought Claude Hopkins on board with the Lonnie Johnson session, and Hopkins would stick around to do a couple of sessions as leader for Bob Weinstock's labels--something he did remarkably little of, in a long career. He did record with his orchestra in the early 1930s, but after that nothing. In fact, it would have taken a dedicated aficionado like Albertson to even remember him, though once remembered, he wouldn't have been that hard to find. Unlike Lonnie Johnson, he hadn't vanished from sight. He always found work with trad jazz or Dixieland ensembles.

A few thoughts about Bob Weinstock and his Swingville label. Looking back, it seems like a natural. All those great musicians were still around, and it would have been a shame if their later music had gone undocumented. And from a business standpoint, it had to have been a good gamble. No jazz musician made the really big bucks, but Claude Hopkins had to come a lot cheaper than John Lewis or Erroll Garner.

But remember the era. We were past the 1940s, but the jazz wars between the progressives and the moldy figs were not entirely over, and they had been fierce. Nowadays, on your mixtape if anyone still made them, on your Spotify playlist or Pandora radio station, you might perfectly easily go from Ornette Coleman to Jimmie Lunceford, and be admired for it by that discerning friend who happened to be looking over your shoulder. But back then, you really were expected to choose sides. You had to stand with Eddie Condon, who said, "We don't flat our fifths, we drink 'em!" or Louis Armstrong, who railed against bebop as "Chinese music," or Tommy Dorsey who said it had set music back twenty years. Or you could be like the Down Beat critic dismissing Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby's "Now You Has Jazz" from High Society with "Jazz? I'm still waiting to hear it."

In 1960, we stood on the brink of change. Rock and roll would turn in rock, would start becoming culturally respectable, would make a new trend out of what jazz had always done by inventing "supergroups" and jams. The blues would be rediscovered (Weinstock was again ahead of his time with the Bluesville label), and the jazz culture wars of the 1940s and 1950s would fade into oblivion, But there was some serious apostasy in a bebop/progressive label embracing the moldy fig sound the way that Weinstock did with his Swingville line. He may have played it safe out of the box with Coleman Hawkins, because no one of any age or musical taste was going to put down the Hawk, but with this group led by Claude Hopkins, the mold was seriously on the fig,

And we, in the 21st century, can only be grateful.

Hopkins is joined by Emmett "Chu" Berry on trumpet, Buddy Tate on tenor, Prestige stalwart Wendell Marshall on bass and J. C. Heard on drums. Tate is a Prestige veteran by this time, having debuted with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott and then led his own session. Berry had been with Fletcher Henderson (replacing Roy Eldridge) and Count Basie. He had also been featured on some of Billie Holiday's classic recordings. Heard, like Marshall, was equally at home with swing and bop ensembles. He had begun his career with Teddy Wilaon, had worked for the Big Three (Armstrong, Goodman, Ellington),  and had also played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

They play standards, a Bessie Smith blues, and the Sy Oliver swing composition that became the title tune, and which was having a renaissance, with recent versions by Ray Charles and Shirley Scott. They play uptempo swing and moody blues. They take great solos and work together in ensemble sections like the old pros they are. Wendell Marshall demonstrates his facility as a swing bassist.

Yes Indeed! was released on  Swingville. A later CD release saw Hopkins sharing leader credit with Tate. Nothing on 45, and there could have been. Swing was, after all, the original dance music.

Listening to Prestige 345: Oliver Nelson

I am sadly unable to find anything on the next Prestige session, a septet led by Rex Stewart and featuring kazoos, among other instruments for an album called Happy Jazz. So instead of a visit back to the happy land of trad jazz, we move into the not necessarily happy, but certainly adventurous future with the modernism of another musician who, like Gigi Gryce played the alto sax (also tenor) and who, also like Gryce, became better known as a composer.

This would be the second in a string of albums that Nelson would make for Prestige, and taken together, they make a strong case for not being taken together. Nelson uses different combinations of musicians on each, different sets of powerful individual voices. And if you could say that taken together, they show Nelson's remarkable range as a composer and arranger, you could actually say that about the compositions that make up each separate album. Certainly Taking Care of Business is adventurous enough, and certainly it's an Oliver Nelson album. He uses the skills of gifted improvisers, but the way their solos are stacked against each other adds up to an adventurous, unexpected and satisfying whole.

On his first Prestige outing, he used the archetypal bebop saxophone-trumpet quintet, but with the

unique voice of Kenny Dorham on trumpet. This time he ventures farther afield. Saxophone and Hammond organ have become a recognizable turn-of-the-decade sound thanks to Eddie Davis and Shirley Scott, but what Nelson and Johnny "Hammond" Smith do with them takes that sound in a whole new direction -- and then, he adds the vibraphone of Lem Winchester to make it a truly unique front line. Winchester had made his Prestige debut a few months earlier with Benny Golson.

At nearly ten minutes, "Trane Whistle" shows all of this: the bold composition, the juxtaposed solos, some bacchanalian duet work, dynamic range, and an overall feeling that manages to be both tight and discursive.

The two non-Nelson originals are Sonny Rollins' "Doxy" and the Cahn-Van Heusen standard "All the Way."

Esmond Edwards produced, and Taking Care of Business came out on New Jazz. "Trane Whistle" became a two-sided 45, also on New Jazz. I'm not sure it was your typical 45 RPM fare, but it must have turned a few heads when it was slipped on the record changer.

Listening to Prestige 344: Gigi Gryce

Of all the major jazz talents of his era, Gigi Gryce is probably one of the most under-recorded, and certainly one of the most unjustly unremembered by contemporary jazz fans, and even contemporary musicians. JazzTimes conducted a survey of 17 young alto saxophonists to find out what they considered the most important alto sax recordings: "Great performances that helped shape the jazz alto saxophone tradition." Each artist submitted a list of half a dozen or so recordings, and, eclectic as they were, Gryce did not make any of them. The website ranker.com, which gives a window into the tastes

of contemporary jazz fans, has a poll on the top saxophonists of all time. Since this is a continuing poll, there's a lot of fluctuation on the lower levels, but on the day that I checked, Gigi Gryce was number 88 on the list.

Partly this is due to a career cut short. This was the first of three recording sessions Gryce did for Prestige in 1960. Late in the year, he did one more for Mercury. Then that was it. A couple of years later, he would leave music behind completely.

But if he is largely forgotten as a saxophonist by today's jazz audience, he has never been forgotten by other musicians as a composer. "Modernity," recorded back in the 1950s by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Cal Tjader and Art Pepper, among others, continues to be a favorite to this day, with a recent recording by Cyrus Chesnutt and another by the Dutch vocalist Eva Scholten. "Social Call" has remained popular as an instrumental, but even more so as a vocal performance, with Jon Hendricks' lyrics. Earl Coleman first recorded it in 1955, and it has become a standard, most recently covered in 2016 by Heather Masse with Roswell Rudd.

His disillusionment with the music scene was principled. In addition to his considerable gifts as a player and as a composer, Gryce was ahead of his time in standing up for musicians' rights.

The 1940s and 1950s were a time of the discovery of a lot of new and exciting talents in all musical fields -- jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even country. That meant a lot of new names entering the music world, most of them young, many of them minorities, almost all of them lacking in business experience. They knew what a recording contract was, and they knew that they wanted one, but mostly they did not know what publishing rights were, or why they were important. 

This meant that it was all too easy for them to sign away their publishing rights, which might often be the most lucrative part of a deal. If a young black artist had a minor hit on the rhythm and blues charts, with a song that he had written, and the song was later covered by a white artist who took it to the top of the pop charts and a gold record, that meant a very nice payday for the composer of the song--if he still owned the rights to it. All too often, he didn't. 

In these days, when "cultural appropriation" has become a watchword, there's a lot of criticism of whites stealing from black culture, and a lot of it is justified, but on the level of making music, it's always been more complicated. The greatness of the American Century in music, one of history's greatest artistic flowerings, has always come from its polyglot, mongrel nature, styles and sounds and songs and influences flowing in every direction. But when it came to the business end of music, cultural appropriation was alive and well through much of that century, and the money only flowed one way, from black talent into white pockets.

This was true in jazz as well as in rhythm and blues and rock and roll. One of the biggest crooks in the business was Morris Levy, who ripped off the publishing rights from innumerable young black artists, particularly the doowop groups signed to the New York labels that he owned. But Levy also owned Birdland, and his biggest label, Roulette, also issued jazz records. One of the characters in the HBO series The Sopranos was based on him--a Jewish gangster who had gotten rich in the 1950s by screwing young black artists out of their rights. But it wasn't just Mo Levy. It was ubiquitous. Chuck Berry was surprised to discover that he had co-written "Maybellene" with Alan Freed, but that was the price he was told he had to pay to make sure that Freed played his record.

I used to read record labels as though they were sacred texts, and I noticed all these things, although I didn't know what they meant at the time.

Gigi Gryce was one of the people who knew exactly what it meant, and one of the few who tried to do something about it. He set up an independent, black-owned music publishing company, and worked at signing up black jazz artists and getting fair publishing deals for them. Nowadays most recording artists, as well as most composers and songwriters, set up their own publishing companies. Not so back then. Gryce was not able to buck the racism and the gangsterism and the other obstacles thrown in his way, and he left the music business, never to return. He converted to Islam, took on the Muslim name of Basheer Qusim, and became a highly respected educator. The school in the Bronx where he taught for many years was renamed in his honor, the Basheer Qusim Elementary School.

This is the first of three albums that Gryce, with Esmond Edwards producing, recorded for Prestige. He brought some new musicians onto the Prestige horizon, and most of them remained for all three sessions, so I'll catch up with them later. Reggie Workman would make just this first date. He was new on the scene--this was his debut on record--and fast making a name for himself, He was also moving in a more avant-garde direction. He would rejoin Gryce for the end-of-the-year recording session for Mercury, then move on to join John Coltrane's quartet.

He contributed three originals to this date: the fiery "Leila's Blues," the exotic "Blues in the Jungle," and a beautiful ballad, "Back Breaker." None of them went on to have a life beyond this album, but they all showed Gryce as a master composer, and one can't help but wonder who might have picked up "Back Breaker" if it had had a more evocative title. The other three are by Gryce's contemporaries, Curtis Fuller ("Down Home") and Hank Jones ("Let Me Know") and {Jones' Bones). One can speculate that Gryce may have had something to do with the publishing contracts for Fuller and Jones.

Sayin' Somethin' was released on New Jazz, as the subsequent sessions would be.

Listening to Prestige 343: Lonnie Johnson

I've skipped over one session, with guitarist Al Casey. I'll come back to it as soon as I find my notes.

Prestige plucked Lonnie Johnson from obscurity for this recording, and a few more that he'd make for their Bluesville line, but then he kind of fell back into it. As the blues craze of the 1960s developed, it was a rising tide that lifted two kinds of boats. The ethnic folkie crowd, energized by Columbia's release of Robert Johnson's 1936-37 recordings, started looking for and resurrecting the careers of Mississippi Delta bluesman like Son House, Furry Lewis and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The young British blues enthusiasts who came to dominate the American pop charts loved the high-octane, electrified Chicago blues. The Rolling Stones demanded that Howlin' Wolf be featured on the white teen-oriented TV show  Shindig when the made their American debut in 1965, and the careers of artists like Wolf, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were in the ascendant.

Lonnie Johnson fit neither of these categories. He was from an earlier generation than the Chicago bluesmen, and he was from a different musical aesthetic than the Delta bluesmen, closer to jazz. He was, in fact, the first and most important innovator of the single-string guitar solo, the basis of nearly all jazz guitar improvisation.

Johnson made his first mark as a blues singer, winning a recording contract with Okeh at a 1925 blues competition.

But that was 1925, right in the middle of the decade of the first blues craze. After the unexpected commercial success of Mamie Smith's recording, "Crazy Blues," had shown that there was a black audience that would buy records, all the record companies wanted a piece of it, and they all figured that the way to get it was through the blues. At first that meant the urban, jazz-oriented blues of Mamie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and especially Bessie Smith. Then it meant the rural blues of street singers and rural juke joint performers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton.

And those guys weren't necessarily bluesmen. They were songsters. They were trying to make a buck, and that meant playing anything their audiences wanted to hear. Sometimes those audiences were black, and sometimes they were white. Sometimes they wanted to listen and sometimes they wanted to dance, so the songster had to be prepared. You can hear a vestige of this in Robert Johnson's "Hot Tamales and They're Red Hot."

Then an important audience became the record company, and the record companies wanted blues, so they became bluesmen, and the best bluesmen were successful. Lonnie Johnson, later in life, would come to resent the label a little, feeling it was too restrictive and did not show the scope of what he could do. But in 1925 he was desperate to get a recording contract, and the blues was his ticket of entry, though once inside the door, he was able to expand his scope, recording with both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, among other jazzmen, including guitarist Eddie Lang, with whom he made some exciting recordings even though music was supposed to be made on a strictly segregated basis in those days.

But the blues was his meal ticket, and so it remained until that cafeteria dried up.The Depression was a time of shrinkage and retrenchment for the record companies, and the black artists were the first to be retrenched.

With the rise of independent rhythm and blues labels in the 1940s, he began to build a second career, but it ultimately dried up too, and he had settled back into obscurity for most of the 1950s.

His next comeback, and the contract with Prestige, coincided with another Prestige debut. Iceland-born Chris Albertson, who had begun making a career in radio in England, Iceland and Norway, latched onto American Armed Forces Radio as a disc jockey in Iceland, and followed his love of jazz to the United States, where found work as a disc jockey with a Philadelphia radio station. His special interest was in traditional jazz and blues, and one night he played some records by Lonnie Johnson, wondering over the air what had happened to the forgotten blues great.

He didn't have to wonder for long. A listener called the station. The hotel where he worked had a janitor named Lonnie Johnson, and though he never talked about music, he was always very careful of his hands. Could it be...?

It was. Albertson had him as a guest on his show, then brought him to Bob Weinstock's new Bluesville label, where Johnson was signed as an artist and Albertson as a producer.

Albertson put him together, for his first effort, with some first rate jazz musicians, all of them veterans with roots in traditional jazz, but nonetheless representing two different generations,

Pianist Claude Hopkins was Johnson's contemporary, born in 1903 to Johnson's 1899, and when Johnson was making his first blues recording in 1925, Hopkins was on his way to Paris as musical director of Josephine Baker's revue.

There's always work for a good piano player and bandleader, and Hopkins stayed busy throughout the following decades, including the 1950s, as there was still a demand for a pianist in the traditional style, not everyone being on board with this modern stuff. In fact, 52nd Street, once the cathedral of bebop, was by the end of the 1950s represented only by two Dixieland clubs, Eddie Condon's and Jimmy Ryan's.

When Johnson made that first recording for Okeh, his other future bandmates were barely out of diapers. Tenor saxophonist-to-be Hal Singer was six, bassist Wendell Marshall five and drummer Bobby Donaldson three.

All three of them were seasoned veterans by 1960, and all four of Albertson's musicians could play the blues, especially Singer, whose instrumental "Corn Bread" had topped the rhythm and blues charts in 1948. Together, they add jazz depth to a session that is Johnson's. and very rightly so. His single-string guitar soloing may not have been revolutionary any more, but few did it as well as he.

The album came out on Bluesville as Blues by Lonnie Johnson. The 45 RPM single was "You Don't Move Me" / "Don't Ever Love."