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.