Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
The most striking news from this Red Garland session is that Red gets on the organ bandwagon (if you can put an organ on a bandwagon) for one number, "Halleloo Y'All." That doesn't mean it's exactly a church organ, although all of three of the Garland originals from the first half of this session--which also means the first album from this session--have gospel-related titles. Or is "Back Slidin'" a sort of anti-gospel title? Certainly it smacks of sin more than salvation. And a fourth carries on Garland's frequent practice of reaching into the folk and blues traditions for unexpected inspiration, but in this case it's gospel: "Every Time I Feel the Spirit."
I don't know what Garland's religious leanings were, but this is hardly a sanctified album. He doesn't reach into the musical language of the church the way Ray Charles does, or the way singers like Otis Redding would. Garland is a jazzman through and through, and this is a jazz album, with Garland's signature block chords finding new voicings that almost remind one of that other great block chordist, Thelonious Monk, although Garland's voice, even when he's reaching outside what has been his comfort zone, is very much his own.
Art Taylor continues to be his go-to drummer, and Sam Jones, who first joined him for 1959's Red in Bluesville, is back on bass. As he did with Paul Chambers, Garland gives Jones plenty of room to express himself, and Jones comes through.
The gospel-tinged originals and the spiritual represent the first half of this Friday With Rudy. The second half is mostly given over to other composers: Harold Arlen for "Blues in the Night." Duke Ellington for "Rocks in my Bed," Bennie Benjamin (whose hits ranged from "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" in 1941 to "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" in 1977) for "I'll Never Be Free."
The session had two distinct themes and produced two distinct albums, with "I'll Never Be Free" the only one from the second group to join the gospel-y titles on 1960's Halleloo Y'All. One more Garland original, "Soul Burnin'," became the title tune of the second album, which included a couple of cuts from a 1961 session with Oliver Nelson, and was released in 1964, when soul music was really burnin'.
Jack McDuff's second outing as a leader for Prestige takes him out of the Willis Jackson-Bill Jennings orbit, and playing with an ad hoc group featuring veteran Jimmy Forrest and relative newcomer Lem Winchester (who has done an organ-sax-vibes session before, with Oliver Nelson and Johnny "Hammond" Smith), with a youngater, Bill Elliott, rounding out the quartet on drums. It's a good amalgam. The solosists are able to find common ground--a couple of common grounds,in fact. On the standards--"Mean to Me" and "Autumn Leaves," they're melodic. On a McDuff original like "Yeah Baby," they know how to let loose and blow.
Both "Mean to Me" and "Autumn Leaves" are taken at sprightlier tempos than one is used to hearing, and why not? The falling leaves of autumn don't always have to be an occasion for wistful sighing. You can play in them too, rake them up into a big pile and jump into them. Forrest takes the main job of the melody in this one, and does some very nice things with it, particularly at the end, where brings some wonderful smeary bluesy sounds to a melody not previously known for its affinity to the blues. "Mean to Me" is slyly playful, and again, why not? "You're so mean to me" can be a tease as well as a plaint. Winchester does some particularly strong solo work on this one.
"Yeah Baby" is nine minutes long, and gives each of them, including drummer Bill Elliott, a chance to shine. This is Elliott's recording debut, the start of a career that was always interesting, but only rarely in the field of jazz drumming. For a while he led a soul group, which is remembered chiefly as the
launching pad for one of its backup singers, Dionne Warwick. During the 1970s, she and Elliott were married, divorced, married again, and finally divorced again. Elliott also had some success as an actor, debuting on TV with a featured role in Dragnet, and then appearing as a recurring character in Bridget Loves Bernie. He also made a few movies, including Elvis Presley's Change of Habit.
The quartet is unusual in that it doesn't include a bass. The line that would normally be played by the bass is handled by McDuff himself on the Hammond,
The album, a 1960 release, was called Tough 'Duff. "Yeah Baby" was a two-sided single.
The Latin Jazz Quintet, as an ensemble (although a somewhat different ensemble each time) recorded twice for Prestige in 1960, the second time with Eric Dolphy. The Dolphy collaboration is probably better known, but this one with Shirley Scott certainly bears listening to. I've written a lot about Scott, and will be writing a lit more, so I'll focus here on the LJQ.
The leader of the quintet was conguero Juan Amalbert, who would later change his name to Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim. Information about him is hard to come by, but tantalizing. A complete list of the artists he has worked with as musician, producer, conductor or arranger is available at the website of Tomas Pena, and it is staggeringly impressive. He has appeared on record with Duke Ellington's orchestra twice, once as Amalbert and once as Abdul-Rahim. Of that latter appearance, on an album calledThe Jaywalker, critic Norman Weinstein wrote:
So what makes The Jaywalker memorable? The Ellington band is joined by a percussionist, Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim. The empathy between Abdul-Rahim on conga drums and Ellington on piano is as imaginative as anything you'll find in Ellington's output during these years. What Chano Pozo was to Dizzy Gillespie, Abdul-Rahim might have been to Ellington, had they had a longer musical relationship. Odd that Ellington didn't establish more working relationships with conga drummers, but we can be grateful for the ecstatic conversation that Abdul-Rahim and Ellington establish.
He appears to be still performing with a group called the Swing Prophets. They have an active Facebook page with the message that "we The Swing Prophets are hitting as many clubs and festivals as possible in 2018."
Gene Casey had a remarkably varied career. He would appear on a handful of Prestige albums in the 1960s, and then reappear as musical director and pianist for LaBelle on their debut album, released in 1971. The sources for career as a jazz and funk musician do not mention a second career as a composer, and the website for the Pioneer Drama Service, a theatrical resource, don't mention his jazz-funk work. There, he is primarily noted for "Hubba Hubba, a 1940s style musical that premiered in 1970 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and had a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club." Pioneer also credits him with:
co-writing "The Orphan's Revenge," which had extended runs at Ford's Theatre in Washington and the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. His children's musical, "The Magic Weave," has toured extensively nationwide.
Casey also wrote songs for two Gallagher comedy television specials and for "Trapper John, M.D.," "McCloud" and other TV series. As an accompanist, he played piano for an array of performers, including Edie Adams, Kaye Ballard and Liza Minnelli.
We know that Duke Ellington's mother called him Bill, but this is a different Bill Ellington altogether. He is primarily known for his work with Amalbert/Abdul-Rahim, but he also performed with Mal Waldron and others.
Felipe "Phil" Diaz is listed in the session notes as playing bongos, but he was primarily a vibraphone player and can be heard playing some mean vibes on this session, particularly on "Mucho Mucho." He may also being playing bongos, but if so, they're less audible.
On this date, they do a couple of standards, a couple of Scott originals, and a slam-bang version "Walkin'," best known from Miles Davis's Prestige recording, written by Jimmy Mundy but credited to this day to notorious song thief Richard Carpenter (not the one from the brother-sister duo).
"Mucho Mucho" is an extended jam that takes up the better part of one side of the album, and became the title cut. Esmond Edwards produced.
This is the second Roy Haynes trio album for Prestige. The first was the November 1958 date, We Three, with Phineas Newborn and Paul Chambers. Of that session, I said:
These are three players who mesh to make a perfectly attuned ensemble, working together seamlessly and supporting each other's solos.
That's true again here. If Haynes' new trio doesn't have the star power of the first, it certainly has the firepower. This album eschews the arty We Three for the folksier Just Us, and it's a friendly kind of album, with some powerful drum parts and some very tasty bebop, original, uptempo and ballad.
Haynes worked with Richard Wyands on the Etta Jones session, and you can see why he wanted to work with him again.
Eddie De Haas was new to Prestige, and new to me--I had not heard of him before. But if you are from Chicago, and a jazz fan, you quite likely have heard of him, for the music and civic involvement that he and his wife Geraldine gave to the City of the Big Shoulders. When they retired in 2103, because of health problems, to go and live with family in New Jersey, here's a part of the tribute columnist Howard Reich of the Chicago Tribune gave to "two artists who have been central to jazz here for nearly half a century":
It was Geraldine de Haas, after all, who led many like-minded spirits in creating the first Duke Ellington celebration concert in Grant Park, in 1974, just after the master's death. The event proved so successful that it became an annual soiree, paving the way for the emergence of the Chicago Jazz Festival in 1979 and setting the stage for all the other city-sponsored music fests that followed.
When de Haas launched her campaign to stage the aforementioned Ellington tribute in Grant Park, she faced widespread resistance, even from fellow jazz musicians.
"The South Side musicians were talking about doing (the Ellington homage) on the South Side of Chicago" in Washington Park, recalls de Haas. "My suggestion was: 'Why don't you do it in the main park (downtown)? Duke Ellington was so important to all of us.'"
"(But) the black musicians were conditioned to think one way, and the white musicians were conditioned another away. They never thought about getting everyone to participate. … I was emphatic about that.
"They said: 'If you can get it, good luck.'"
Geraldine got it, in spite of resistance from the city parks commissioners, who one has to assume were white. They told her there had been riots the last time they tried to hold a jazz concert. Riots? Jazz? It turned out they were talking about Sly and the Family Stone.
But if Gerald wanted to give jazz to the whole city, "bringing jazz to a major downtown setting – and therefore bringing black, white and others together in a dramatic way that reflected both the cross-racial appeal of the music and the unifying characteristics of Ellington's art," she didn't forget the South Side either, creating a new and successful festival, "Jazz Comes Home," in 1981. In her words, again quoted by Reich,
"It was time to expose the music to the young people" where they lived, says de Haas. "The legacy left by a lot of African-American musicians – they needed to know about it. That was one of my missions in Chicago."
Eddie De Haas was born to Dutch parents in Bandung, Java. His first instrument was the ukulele, playing Hawaiian folk songs and the music of the South Seas. He fell in love with jazz when he moved to the Netherlands as a teenager in 1946, and switched to the guitar and what would become his main instrument, the bass. He began playing with Dutch jazz groups,, and then with expatriates Don Byas and Bill Coleman, and with touring American acts like Zoot Simsm, Dave Amram and Chet Baker. He came to the USA in 1956.
This is a terrific album, high-spirited, even a little rowdy for a piano trio of very sophisticated musicians. It has lots of solo space for all three, lots of unexpected flourishes, lots of fun.
Just Us was a New Jazz release, Esmond Edwards producing. We will get to hear Geraldine too, in a while. In 1964-65, she recorded for Prestige with her brother, vocalist Andy Bey, and her sister Salome.
The De Haas children, Aisha and Darius, have also had successful musical careers, especially Darius, who has appeared on Broadway in Rent and other musicals.
A special note of appreciation. As of this writing -- February, 2019 -- all three of these great musicians, now nonegenarians, are still with us.
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