Listening to Prestige 352: Al Casey

This is Al Casey's first recording as a leader, but a long way from being his first rodeo. He started his career working with Fats Waller in 1933.

It was also a long way from being his last rodeo. In 1981 he would embark on what may have been his biggest success when he joined the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band. This was the opposite end of the spectrum from Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, whose members had to retire when they reached 16. To join the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, you had to be at least 80. Founded in t973, it is still going--needless to say, with none of its original members. At various times, it has been graced with the presence of Doc

Cheatham, Eddie Durham, Eddie Chamblee, Peck Morrison, Jay McShann, Claude Hopkins, Cozy Cole,  and many other working jazzmen and women who'd lived long enough and could still play strong enough.

Casey, in 1960, had a regular gig with King Curtis. For this session, he drew on the Curtis band for sidemen, but went back to his Fats Waller days for musical inspiration, and even for musical talent, with reed man Rudy Powell.

When Casey joined the Waller band as a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old, Powell was 26 and a veteran of a number of regional bands including Rex Stewart's. He would hook up with Waller and Casey in 1935. He was still in demand in the 1960s, working with Jimmy Rushing, Buddy Tate and Ray Charles. He would eventually join the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Belton Evans was no newcomer to recording, but he may have been new to recording under the name of Belton. Previously, he had recorded as Sammy "Sticks" Evans, and every possible variation of that name: Sammy Evans, Sammie Evans, Sticks Evans, Stick Evans. So it seems that he finally decided to settle in, and use his real name?

Not exactly. Samuel Evans does appear to have been his real name; Lord knows where he came up with Belton. And his range as a drummer was as varied as his choice in names, from King Curtis and Wynonie Harris through LaVern Baker and Aretha Franklin through John Lewis, Bill Evans, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.

Jimmy Lewis was a guy who knew how to change with the times, moving from double bass with Count Basie to electric bass as that instrument became popular. Like Evans, he was on call for a wide range of recording sessions, from Wilson Pickett to the Modern Jazz

Quartet (he didn't replace Percy Heath, but added an electric bass to a session that featured the MJQ with a big band). He was a first call for gigs, too, as evidenced by some of the live albums he can be heard on: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, Alberta Hunter's Downhearted Blues: Live at the Cookery, and some live recordings of Otis Redding at the Apollo. This was his first Prestige session, but he would become a familiar face during the 1960s.

Herman Foster is mostly known for his work with Lou Donaldson, but he was with Casey in King Curtis ensemble at the time of this recording.

The music is just flat-out rewarding. It's always great to hear the Fats Waller classics, and of pariculat interest is "Buck Jumpin'," a tune originally written by Casey for the Fats Waller Orchestra, and here revived by the composer..

Buck Jumpin', appropriately, is the title of the album, and it was a Swingville release.

Listening to Prestige 351: Lonnie Johnson - Elmer Snowden

This may have been the best known of Lonnie Johnsons albums for Prestige. It featured a second guitarist who was also a second  Chris Albertson career revival: Elmer Snowden, an important bandleader in the 1920s and 30s who had recorded little, and had completely fallen off the radar. Like Johnson, he was working a menial job in Philadelphia when Albetrson found him.

Elmer Snowden has one particularly unusual credential, He was the leader of a  Washington, DC-based group called the Washingtonians. He brought the band to New York, but was having trouble getting bookings, so he sent to DC for an up-and-coming piano player, fella named Duke Ellington. You know the rest of the story

.In addition to Washingtonians like Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, Snowden over a long career as bandleader had Count Basie. Jimmie  Lunceford. Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge and Chick Webb, so he must have been no slouch at developing and mentoring future bandleaders. He had started out as a banjo player, but as the call for the banjo in jazz faded away, he switched to guitar (though he would make a jazz banjo album for Riverside in the 1960s).

Accompanied by Wendell Marshall on base, the two guitar players had a day of it, recording 22 songs, of which ten were chosen for the original vinyl album release, although almost all of them would eventually come out on CD. There were some vocals, more instrumentals, as Johnson got his wish to be seen as more than just a blues singer. Just a couple of old guys who know everything and can play all night.

The ten selections that made the album are pretty representative of the whole session. "Haunted House" is an original 12-bar blues by Johnson. He also sings the Eubie Blake-Andy Razaf chestnut "Memories of You" with a lighter, breezier voice: Lonnie Johnson the jazz singer.

"Blues for Chris" is their first instrumental, a tribute to their rediscoverer and producer Chris Albertson. Composer credit is given to Albertson and Elmer Snowden, and it's a fun piece, with some nice blues licks by both guitarists and some solid work by Wendell Marshall.

"I Found a Dream" is another Johnson composition, but this one a dreamy ballad. The two guitars manage some bluesy licks with a Charles Brown feel, but the vocal channels pop balladeers of a different era. Johnson doesn't seem to have listened much to contemporary balladeers like Sam Cooke or Clyde McPhatter. He draws more on the style of Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, or the Irish tenors of his generation like Morton Downey or Dennis Day. But he ramps up into full vaudeville mode with "St. Louis Blues," not paying too much attention to W. C. Handy's careful construction, just having fun. And it is fun. Then he sort of marries all these styles, including his blues style, in an old pop song, "I'll Get Along Somehow," written by Arthur Marks and Buddy Fields. Listening to this one, my first thought was, "this could be the hit single," and it appears that Bob Weinstock thought the same thing, as it became a 45 RPM release.

Johnson and Snowden put their guitars together for a jam session on a traditional jazz tune, Kid Ory's "Savoy Blues," and the results are delightful. It's only one like it on the album, but "C-Jam Blues" and "Lester Leaps In" did eventually get released.

Johnson had recorded Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues" back in the 1920s, and with Snowden's help on guitar, he gives it the full blues treatment here.

Snowden's "Elmer's Blues" has a decidedly modern rhythm and blues feel. Well, maybe not modern for 1960, but certainly modern for 1950; not bad for a couple of old guys from the 1930s. Pretty damn good, in fact. And they finish up with Johnson's "He's a Jelly Roll Baker," which also made it onto a later Bluesville anthology called Bawdy Blues.

The album was called Blues & Ballads, and was a Bluesville release. "I'll Get Along Somehow" was the first 45, with "Jelly Roll Baker" on the flip side, and it was also the second 45, this time with "Memories of You."

Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.

Listening to Prestige 350: Red Garland

Of the subsidiary labels that Bob Weinstock created to swing into the new decade, Moodsville is the most debatable. Swing and blues are undeniably important and arguably underserved genres, at least in this time frame, but mood music? Isn't that just watered-down jazz?

Except it isn't. Chris Albertson has asserted that every session produced for Prestige was held to the same high musical standards, and if you look at the artists in the Moodsville catalog, they're not watered-down anything.

You can raise the chicken-and-egg question. Did Weinstock say, "Hey, let's bring Red Garland in for a solo piano session, and we can release it on Moodsville"? Or did Red lobby Weinstock for solo session, and did Bob then, listening to the finished product, say, "Hey, that could work for Moodsville"?

It's questions like this that keep me up at night. And I'm entitled. In fact, as both an intellectual and a jazz fanatic, I'm doubly entitled to wakeful nights pondering pointless and unanswerable questions.

Why don't I just shut up and listen to the music? I do that too.

You can get a lot of music in when you've just got a solo piano, and Garland recorded two albums' worth on this balmy April day (I looked it up; temperatures were 15 degrees above normal). In spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, but Garland was playing alone, and his fancy turned to being alone, to songs about love lost. He was also thinking random thoughts about the blues, and apparently playing tunes as they came into his mind, so ultimately they were separated out to make two albums, and I'll take the songs album track by album track, starting with Red Alone, which became the third Moodsville release.

He begins with "When Your Lover Has Gone," written by Einar Swan for the James Cagney movie Girl Crazy. Swan was a dance band musician turned composer, and you'd think there'd be next to nothing written about him, which was true until 2006, when Scandinavian historian chanced upon a mention of him, noted his unusual first name, decided he must be Finnish (he was--the family name was Joutsen, Finnish for Swan), decided to research him and ended by writing a 90-page biography. Swan's father emigrated from Finland because he heard that American workers had an 8-hour day which meant he would have time to study music. All his children were musical, and there was a family orchestra.

"These Foolish Things" was written by British composer Jack Strachey, who also composed "A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square." It's one of my favorite ballads.

The rest are mostly the work of composer royalty--Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Young.

"Nancy with the Laughing Face" was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers, and is generally thought to have been written for Frank Sinatra's wife, but it wasn't. Silvers had originally written as "Bessie with the Laughing Face, but that was apparently considered either too ethnic or too bovine.

Man does not live by Red Alone, so the remaining titles were gathered together in a second, album, Alone with the Blues, and as one can expect from Red Garland, there's a wide-ranging selection process, delivering a veritable history of the blues. Classic blues is represented by Leroy Carr's "In the Evening (when the Sun Goes Down)." We take a trip to Kansas City for Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner's "Wee Baby Blues." Ahmet Ertegun (as A. Nugetre) and pianist Harry Van Walls wrote "Chains of Love," which was an Atlantic recording for Big Joe. Jazz is represented across the decades: "Cloudy" by Mary Lou Williams; "Sent for You Yesterday (and Here You Come Today)" by Count Basie, Eddie Durham and Jimmy Rushing; "Blues in the Closet," by Oscar Pettiford; and John Coltrane's "Trane's Blues." All of it given the Garland touch.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.

Listening to Prestige 349: Eric Dolphy

We move away from the old pros of Swingville. They were wonderful, but it's time to look to the future, and the future enters like a panzer division with Eric Dolphy. He was one of the most important musicians, along with Coleman and Coltrane, in tearing up the old rulebook and writing a new set of rules.

Or maybe not. Leonard Feather, interviewing Dolphy, tried to figure out just what those new rules were, but he didn't get very far.

LF: For one thing, I would I would like to make it clear that I don't think I understand...as a musician you know certain things I don't understand about what you are doing and I...would like to maybe get them clarified in my own mind so that I can make it clear for the average reader ... what is happening and what people like you are doing harmonically. It's very hard to explain, very hard to analyze. Can you put it into words?

ED: Well, it, you know, it always depends on the subject of what you're improvising on of course, and then, uh... Of course if you're playing freer forms and the harmony...  improvisation is much more freer and you have much more things that you can play...the lines are not held to no chord patterns, harmonically.

LF: No, but, what I don't understand is what ARE they held to? I mean what is, what is the difference between the limitations, there must be some limitations otherwise it, you would be arbitrary, you could just play any notes that you like.

ED: Well that's the idea you CAN play every note that you like. Of course, you only can play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not to your hearing, to what you're hearing. So quite naturally, I hear, uh, more notes on uh, on the same thing that's been said before.

Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Maybe Blowup, without a ball. Only you and whoever you're playing with know where the ball is going and whether you've hit it squarely. But there are spins and trajectories and lobs and smashes that only you can hear. If you get it right, you're Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard. Get it wrong, and you're that tenor saxophonist on Jazzmobile who was told by Frank Foster to "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

playing free jazz is like Michelangelo Antonioni's tennis match in

This is Dolphy's debut album as leader. He had recorded in Los Angeles with Chico Hamilton, and also with Clifford Brown, although that one has an odder history. Dolphy was a native Los Angeleno, and his dad, ever supportive of his music, built him a recording studio, and a lot of musicians--not just his friends, but serious musicians, would come by to jam with the kid. One of these sessions, with Brownie, was recorded and the recording was saved, to be released in 2005. He would pack a lot of recording into the next four years of an all-too-brief life, both as leader and sideman, including a lot of work with Charles Mingus. Much of his output would not be released until after his death in 1964.

It marks a return to the cutting edge Prestige. Esmond Edwards produced. Dolphy recorded three of his own compositions, two standards, and one tune by a contemporary, Charles "Majeed" Greenlee.

Freddie Hubbard would later become known for a more crowd-friendly style, but in these younger days he was very much in tune with the avant-garde, recording with both Coltrane and Coleman in addition to Dolphy. When there are no limitations, it puts an interesting burden on the second soloist. He has to follow in a path laid out for him by someone who adhered to no path but an inner one--what he could hear.  If he scurries back to the road more traveled, he'll seem tame by comparison. If he's faking it, or he doesn't know what he's doing, it's "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

All this reminds me somehow of a poem I once wrote about the wilderness mapping itself, which I'll append to the end of this.

Jaki Byard, a multi-instrumentalist although the piano was his main instrument, was new to Prestige but a jazz world veteran, though mostly in Boston, where he had played and recorded with Herb Pomeroy and Charlie Mariano. This was his first New York recording gig, and the beginning of a long and important career, including a number of albums for Prestige. He also had a distinguished career as an educator, including establishing the jazz studies program at the New England Conservatory of Music.

George Tucker, like Dolphy, would not be around for long. He died in 1965 without achieving the outsized reputation of Dolphy, but being quietly respected by his peers and by younger bassists. It easy to understand why, listening to his work on this session. As the bassist, it's his job to keep the beat, and he does so, but with a full appreciation of the complexity of the music and the need of the beat to reflect that.

And it's not hard to understand why Dolphy chose Roy Haynes rather than a younger drummer more identified with the free jazz movement. All you have to do is listen.

The Dolphy compositions are freer. The standards are still grounded in melody and chord structure, although Dolphy moves further and further out as he develops his improvisation. The Charles Greenlee composition is a bit of a surprise. Although Greenlee began his career in Detroit in the 1940s, he's probably best known for his avant-garde work in the late 1960s and 1970s with Archie Shepp, so the surprise is that "Miss Toni" is really the most boppish piece of the day.

The balance is a good one, for the listener of the day to get used to the direction Dolphy was headed in, and maybe for the musicians who were playing with him, too.

Most of this session was released in 1960 as Dolphy's first Prestige album, Outward Bound. The alternate takes of "G. W." and "245" would eventually see daylight on much later compilation releases, and "April Fool" would be included in a posthumous release, 1966's Here and There. Outward Bound was first released on New Jazz, later on Prestige.

Listening to Prestige 348: Swingville All Stars

I despaired of ever finding this album on a streaming service. Nothing on Spotify by Swingville All Stars. YouTube had some cuts by Swingville All Stars with Pee Wee Russell, but nothing by this ensemble. And it looked so good. I was dying to hear it. No immediate success when I searched separately under Taft Jordan, Hilton Jefferson and Al Sears.

A streaming music hint: Sometimes something is just plain not there, but sometimes it's there if you look hard enough, and try enough different search terms. One good tactic is, if there's a song on the album you want that hasn't been recorded a whole lot, try that as a search. "New Carnegie Blues" is an Al Sears composition, and he's recorded it on his own, but not much outside of that. I found it first on YouTube, then on Spotify. Having found the tune, I selected "Go to album" and was taken to a collection called Mood Indigo by Taft Jordan which is a Prestige reissue of various Ellington-identified songs by the former Ellington trumpeter, and includes all of the tunes on the Swingville All Stars set.

It was worth the hunt. This is a totally pleasurable set by three veterans who know how to play pretty for the people. Taft Jordan, 45 when this recording was made, had made his reputation over a decade with the Chick Webb/Ella Fitzgerald Orchestra, and later played with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. He also made a stop on the modern side of the street in the orchestra that Gil Evans and Miles Davis put together for Sketches of Spain.

Hilton Jefferson, 57 when he made this date, also had stints with Webb and Ellington, but his big long-term association was with Cab Calloway. He had begun his professional career in 1929 with Claude Hopkins.

Al Sears was 50, so there was age spread between them, but they all had Chick Webb and Ellington in common, with Sears as the most prominent Ellingtonian— he took Ben Webster’s lead tenor sax chair when Webster left the Duke. The late 1950s saw him onstage with Alan Freed for his big rock ‘n roll Christmas extravaganzas, where he was known as Big Al Sears.

As a New York musician, Don Abney always got a lot of work, in jazz and as a studio musician. He recorded with many of the day's top singers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, and Pearl Bailey. But his career really prospered when he loved to LA, and became musical director for Universal Studios. His work there included an on-camera stint as Ella Fitzgerald's piano player in Jack Webb's Pete Kelly's Blues.

The session begins with the Al Sears composition, "New Carnegie Blues," and its mellow sound reminds of a reminiscence by a college professor about meeting Sears. Sears had a gentle demeanor and a bespectacled, professorial look, so the prof asked him about the meaning of the title of his most famous tune, "Castle Rock." Was it a mythological or literary reference? Sears explained, "A rock is a fuck, and a castle rock is a really humongous fuck."

"New Carnegie Blues" sets a mellow tone for a mellow album of ballads and jump numbers. "Rockin' in Rhythm," the Ellington/Harry Carney number, is the most boisterous. Neil Hefti's "Li'l Darlin'" jumps but in a more relaxed way. It features a nice piano intro by Don Abney to set up the solos and ensemble work by the three leads, which is flawless here as always. Mercer Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" is the other relaxed jumper, and features some very interesting work on the bass by Wendell Marshall.

"Willow Weep for Me" by Gershwin protege Ann Ronell, is one of the few songs to be inspired by the trees on an Ivy League campus. "Tenderly" was written by Walter Gross for Margaret Whiting as a breakup song after she had broken his heart, but I don't believe she ever recorded it. The three soloists are all particularly moving on the slow ballads.

The session was produced by Esmond Edwards. The Swingville release was entitled Rockin' in Rhythm.

Listening to Prestige 347: Pee Wee Russell

Listening to Prestige continues to be an enriching experience beyond what I even expected, as the Swingville catalog expands and showcases exemplars of a style of music I haven't always paid enough attention to. Pee Wee Russell played jazz over five decades, making a name for himself as one of the leading Dixieland and Chicago-style musicians, playing for most of his career with solid traditionalists like Eddie Condon and Henry "Red" Allen, yet always known as an odd duck in a field that did not always take kindly to odd ducks. Dixieland players, especially as, like Eddie Condon, they dug in their heels against modernism, prided themselves on hitting notes squarely, but Russell never exactly did that. His style was always punctuated by growls, swoops, yelps, and off-notes that would have felt right at home in a bebop setting. Indeed, he is certainly the only traditional jazz musician ever to play the Newport Festival as part of Thelonious Monk's group. With Condon, partly because of his unorthodox style and partly because of his hangdog looks, he was the comic relief for Condon's stage schtick, but there was nothing ridiculous about it when he stepped out front and started soloing.

Russell was on a comeback that had almost seemed impossible. In 1951, alcohol had caused a physical breakdown that sent him to the hospital, where many thought he would not recover.

Esmond Edwards, for his Prestige debut, put him together with a versatile group of musicians. Buck Clayton is perhaps best known for his work with Count Basie, and for a swing-era style, but in his time with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic he played with everyone, including Charlie Parker. The rhythm section is equally versatile, and together, they create a session that is satisfyingly mainstream and still full of surprises.

In fact, everyone in this session is capable of delivering up surprises, and they do--even Wendell Marshall, who's tasked with keeping everyone in line and is up to the job, his walking bass weaving in and out among the soloists. Osie Johnson delivers a couple of stinging solos.

And Tommy Flanagan, raised in the bebop hotbed of Detroit but capable of playing with anyone, raises some serious eyebrows here. He doesn't come close to staying within the conventions of traditional jazz, and yet everything he does works, making this a session that is absolutely located within Swingville, but rewarding for anyone of any jazz taste who takes the time to give it a listen.

The best YouTube presentation is the whole album, so that's what I've put up, but if I were able to single out a Listen to One, it would be "Lulu's Back in Town"--a Dixieland chestnut, but not the way they play it.

The Swingville album was titled Swingin' with Pee Wee.