Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This is the second outing for the Latin Jazz Quintet and a Prestige star, following their July 8 outing with Shirley Scott. The lineup is 4/5 the same, with a bongo player dropped and vibist Carlie Simons added. I talk more about the other members of the group in the Scott entry, and I can't find any information at all on Simons, not even after plowing past all the Carly Simon links that Google starts you out with. Another source gives his name as Charlie Simmons, but I can't find anything under that name either.
The LJQ was primarily Juan Amalbert's group, with the rest of the personnel given to fluctuation. They made a second recording with Dolphy for United Artists a year later, and only Amalbert and Bill Ellington remained of the original group.
Critics have described this session as a mismatch, with Dolphy and the quintet paying little attention to each other. I've seen the same criticism leveled at Charlie Parker's collaborations with Machito (and for that matter at some of the Prestige recordings featuring Ray Barretto). I don't buy it. Bird in his day, and Dolphy in his, were far too aware, and far too appreciative of a wide range of musical styles and voices, to come into a session so contemptuous of their fellow musicians that they wouldn't listen to what was being put down, or to simply not be able to follow Latin rhythms. I don't buy it, and they sound good to me. The Quintet have a busy, agitated style of playing for the most part, and Dolphy gets with them and then takes them in directions that are his own. He's a better, more inventive musician than they are, but he's a better and more inventive musician than almost anyone, and he works with them to create something that's musically satisfying to this listener, at any rate. And it must have been sufficiently musically satisfying to all concerned that they agreed to do it again.
I particularly liked Dolphy playing flute on Gene Casey's "Sunday Go Meetin'," which also features some impressive piano work by Casey, a versatile composer who is responsible for three of the tunes on this album, the others being "Caribé" and "First Bass Line." "Blues in 6/8" and "Mambo Ricci" are co-credited to Amalbert and Jose Ricci, a sometime member of the Quintet who is not in their lineup for this session.
As always, it's good to hear the new sounds and new approaches that come out of one of Weinstock's Mis and Match sessions.
Caribé was a New Jazz release, Esmond Edwards producing.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 now includes, in its Kindle edition, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. Available from Amazon.
Willis, Jack, and Bill, back again, and proving once more that they know how to play the music folks want to hear.
And proving once again what a blessing it was that Bob Weinstock decided to sign up musicians like Jackson and Hal Singer, bringing what had been marginalized as rhythm and blues into the main stream of jazz, into the recording cathedral of Rudy Van Gelder, and onto the long playing record.
The main difference between jazz and rhythm and blues, as I've said before, is basically the difference between the jukebox and the jazz radio broadcast, between the 45 RPM record and the LP. Give musicians like Willis Jackson, Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings eight minutes instead of three to play a tune like "Cookin' Sherry," and you get the full potential of rhythm and blues--room for three great soloists to open up, stretch out, and develop their solos without sacrificing any of that rhythm and blues intensity. You can dance your ass off to "Cookin' Sherry," or you can snap your fingers and listen to what the soloists are doing, what the two other principals are doing behind the solo, what Wendell Marshall and Bill Elliott are doing--all the things that make jazz the twentieth century's answer to chamber music, only hotter. Or any combination of the above.
"Cookin' Sherry," "Blue Gator" and "Tu'gether" are the three Jackson originals from the session, with composer credit for "Mellow Blues" given to the three of them. But this trio, although they would go their separate ways, made such tight, inventive and listenable music together that you wouldn't go far wrong in thinking of them as the MJQ of gutbucket. On all of these numbers they each have solos that complement the others as though they shared one mind or set of guts, while still expressing irrepressible individualism.
They do right by other people's compositions, too. Jackson shows his ballad side on "Try a Little Tenderness," which comes in at just under six minutes and is mostly him, although Jennings contributes a sensitive and unusual guitar solo. Jimmy Dorsey's "Contrasts" brings rhythm and blues to swing, or vice versa, and why not?
Esmond Edwards produced. The session was split up and sprinkled over three albums. "Blue Gator" was on its eponymous album along with "Try a Little Tenderness." "Cookin' Sherry" was also eponymous, joined by "Contrasts" and "Mellow Blues." "Tu'gether" didn't quite manage eponymity, but close. It was on the album called Together Again. Three two-sided 45s came out of the session: "Cookin' Sherry," "Blue Gator" and "Tu'gether."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 now includes, in its Kindle edition, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. Available from Amazon.
This is the debut session for one of the most auspicious careers in jazz. Ron Carter would go on to make over 2,000 recording dates, almost certainly the most by any jazz musician. But it's an unusual debut in that the pre-eminent bass virtuoso of his era is playing the cello, rather than the bass.
The cello has a sparse history in jazz, but it does have a history, going back to W. C. Handy, who used a cellist in his ensemble. One of his cellists was William Grant Still, who went on to establish a reputation as America's first important African American classical composer. During the 1950s, probably the best known jazz cellist was Fred Katz, who worked with the Chico Hamilton Quintet--a group which included Eric Dolphy in 1958-59, just before Dolphy came to New York to move forward with his own career. Ron Carter had been trained
as a cellist before picking up the bass, but there was never going to be all that much call for a cellist in jazz.
Still, it makes a striking debut for him, and this whole session is a striking musical outing. Dolphy is really coming into his own here, making a kind of music that was so thoroughly his own that it's still hard to describe. The three great innovators of this era were Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Dolphy, and sometimes they, and the others who pursued experimentation in the same era, like Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders and Cecil Taylor, are grouped together as free jazz, but they really were doing very different things. Dolphy is also sometimes labeled as "third stream," which is probably even more difficult to define than free jazz. His collaborations with John Colrane were also panned in Down Beat as "anti-jazz," but that's just shortsighted and not worth discussing.
Free jazz, more or less, is generally defined as jazz that is not structured around chord changes. It was a polarizing musical form in the early 1960s, as bebop was in the 1940s. Miles Davis, though he was to pioneer he his own revolt against the conventions of bebop, remarked that Ornette Coleman had just fucked up everybody; Roy Eldridge thought he was jiving everyone. Arthur Taylor was compiling his remarkable book of interviews during the years that free jazz (or "freedom music," as he calls it in the book) was in its ascendancy, and he asked a lot of musicians about it.
Dexter Gordon, when Taylor asked his opinion of free jazz, said "My manager told me there would be days like this!" and continued to evade Taylor's every attempt to pin him down on the subject. Randy Weston loved Ornette Coleman but hated the concept of free jazz--"It is completely built up by white writers...My objection is that I don't see how this music is more free than another," and others felt the same way. Philly Joe Jones said that "freedom music doesn't mean anything to me because I've been playing free my whole life." He admired Coltrane and Dolphy -- "These men were geniuses. They knew exactly what they were going to do," but he had little use for those for whom "John Coltrane opened the door...I call them bag carriers. The bags that they carry their instruments in...They...don't know anything about the horn and just make a bunch of noises...I think freedom music should be limited to those who can play it."
And Ron Carter, in Taylor's interview with him, made an excellent point: "If you hear some guy play freedom who does not know bebop and is not hip to swing, he is just playing off the top of his head. He's not really as free as someone with a musical background."
Third stream is even harder to pin down. This album could be third stream, because you have one guy playing the cello and another guy playing the bass clarinet, except that Gunther Schuller, who invented the term and mostly defined it in terms of what it was not, said that "it is not jazz played on 'classical' instruments. In fact, he said that there was no such thing as third stream jazz--third stream music was a third stream, neither classical nor jazz. Not to put down Schuller, whose contribution to modern music is immense, but neither classical nor jazz is a single stream.
Which brings me back to the contribution of Eric Dolphy, who died much too young, but in the space of a very few years created a voice which was one of the most original and expressive in jazz history. Call it third stream, free jazz, freedom music, anti-jazz or advanced bebop, it is some of the most arresting, nourishing, invigorating music anyone has ever made. The collaboration of cello and whatever instrument Dolphy is playing on any given track could not be richer and more satisfying.
"Out There" is the title track to the album, and one could say it continues the journey he started with Outward Bound. Now he's there...but of course, every new outing by Dolphy was a new stop on an outward bound journey. "Out There," a Dolphy composition, is probably as close as the album comes to a more familiar form of jazz, with a sort of beboppish structure, but Dolphy is taking it to unexpected places, and so is Carter. This is the first tune of the day, and the first cut on the record, so it was the group's introduction to what they'd be doing that day, and it's the listener's introduction to where Dolphy is now.
It's hard to look back in time and try to imagine yourself hearing 1960's music through 1960's ears. Or 1944's music, for that matter. Or any era. It's hard to imagine the waltz causing a scandal, but it did when it was first introduced. The author of the Wikipedia entry on the waltz found this shocked description of it:
In the 1771 German novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim by Sophie von La Roche, a high-minded character complains about the newly introduced waltz among aristocrats thus: "But when he put his arm around her, pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding—then my silent misery turned into burning rage."
Of course, the history of jazz is so dynamic, and so compressed in time, that in 1960 there were still those who thought that bebop was just so much noise, and there were those who thought it was the soundtrack of their lives, and there were those who thought it was a straitjacket they had to burst out of. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to find the waltz scandalous, and it's hard to imagine what it would be like to find bebop cacophonous. I can't go back and try to imagine being flummoxed by Eric Dolphy, because in 1960, I was young enough and adventurous enough to embrace the avant garde with open arms. I had stood in front of Ornette Coleman's bandstand at the Five Spot, I had taken John Coltrane's Giant Steps to my heart, and I was ready for the next new thing. But even so, it's hard to recapture that feeling. Dolphy still sounds fresh and new, just as Charlie Parker still sounds fresh and new (Johann Strauss, not so much), but listening to him today, he sounds very much in the tradition. You can hear the progression of jazz history in his playing, which is what Philly Joe Jones was talking about.
"Feathers" was written by Hale Smith, and if there's a third stream, Smith was right in the middle of it. Trained in both classical and jazz piano from age seven, played in a band with Ernie Freeman and Howard Roberts as a Cleveland teenager (where he was also a protege of Duke Ellington), conservatory trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where was the winner of the first BMI Student Composer Award in 1952), composer of classical pieces for orchestra and chamber ensemble, often incorporating jazz concepts. "Feathers" was the second track recorded that day and is the last track on the album, and both placements are interesting. Dolphy let his musicians know, early on, the range they were going to be covering in this important, groundbreaking session. The jazz fan picking up the album had some time to get acclimated to all the possibilities in Dolphy's approach before getting to this.
Interestingly, and I'm sure by design, Dolphy chooses, for this most classically-influenced piece, his most jazz-acclimated instrument, the alto saxophone, and about halfway through the piece he moves into thoroughly jazz-oriented improvisation, wonderfully turning the direction of the piece while holding true to a unity. Again back to Philly Joe--Dolphy was a genius who knew exactly what he was going to do.
"The Baron," "Serene," and "17 West" are all by Dolphy. "The Baron" puts bass clarinet together with cello in some unison work, some trading and some solos. including some thrilling descents into the lower register of the bass clarinet. "Serene," which Dolphy would record again with Booker Little, is serene until it isn't, with bass clarinet and cello again. an extended pizzicato cello solo, and some wonderful drum solo work by Roy Haynes, rhythmically exciting while at the same time capturing the "out there" spirit of the date. "17 West finds him switching to flute, and giving you something you don't hear every day: one of the most distinctive, unique voices in jazz coming at you from four different instruments. The cello gets down below the flute here and is anchored by George Duvivier's bass. Duvivier and Haynes both get solid turns here.
Charles Mingus and Randy Weston are the other two composers to contribute to the session. Dolphy plays the standard B-flat clarinet on Mingus's "Eclipse," stately, melodic, atonal,and allowing Carter some very interesting choices. Weston is represented by "Sketches of Melba," with flute and cello again, first one then the other setting the improvisational direction.
Esmond Edwards produced, showing that he has some pretty serious range, too, even if it's only to know when to stand back and let Dolphy's genius take over. Out There was a New Jazz release.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 now includes, in its Kindle edition, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. Available from Amazon.
Al Smith never managed to make a name for himself, perhaps in part because "Al Smith" was a hard name to make. Too much competition. Smith was never likely to be confused with New York governor Al Smith, the "Happy Warrior" who ran for president in 1928, or Al Smith the cartoonist who drew Mutt and Jeff for 50 years, or any of the professional athletes named Al Smith, but there were also two other Al Smiths playing and singing the blues. The best known was the Midwestern blues and jazz bandleader and bass player who may have inspired the old joke about the bass player sitting on the edge of the bandstand, crying his heart out. "What's the matter?" the bandleader asks solicitously. "The guitar player untuned one of my strings!" "Well, that's very childish of him, but I don't see why it's something to cry about." "He won't tell me which one!"
That Al Smith was a successful bandleader because he could always hustle up gigs and he paid his musicians on time, but he didn't know how to tune his own bass, and always had someone in the group tune it for him.
Another Al Smith sang with Jack ("Open the Door, Richard") McVea on the West Coast.
Prestige's Al Smith was a terrific singer who never emerged from the pack. He doesn't get an entry in Wikipedia, and AllMusic has a listing for him but no bio. The listing is a bit of a mess. His genre is described as Blues, Comedy/Spoken Word, and I'm not sure who they're confusing him with. His discography is correct--the two Prestige/Bluesville albums--but his list of song credits seems to encompass songs by all three Al Smiths, and maybe even a couple by the governor. His birth stats are given as Bolivar City, MS in 1923, which is the correct information for the untuned bass player (this Al Smith was born in 1936 in Columbus, Ohio).
Anyway, what you need to know about Al Smith is that he was a terrific blues singer. He could shout the blues, old style. He could croon the blues in a manner that suggested something of both of the premiere rhythm and blues stylists of the day, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson.
He is given a different set of musicians this time around, headed by King Curtis, who had recently begun recording for Prestige. Maybe Bob Weinstock was looking to capture some of the rhythm and blues success of Atlantic Records, for which label Curtis contributed some memorable solos. But maybe not. Curtis is not really the dominant instrumental voice here. He has some terrific solos, particularly on "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" and "Ride On Midnight Special," as does guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson, but the main instrumental voice is that of organist Robert Banks. Which makes a certain amount of sense. The rhythm and blues style of King Curtis is associated with 1950s hits like those of the Coasters, and the organ sound was very much in vogue in 1960.
Banks and Robinson are both new to Prestige. Banks would do a few more sessions for Prestige/Bluesville, and go on to have his greatest success as keyboardist for Solomon Burke. He has a discography note I've never seen before: a couple of songs that were released only on 8-track cartridge.
Robinson was a well-regarded session man around Chicago in the 1950s-60s, so actually he could have played with the other Al Smith, though there's no record of it. He did play with Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, and mentored Freddie King, who called Robinson his most important influence. He had a career renaissance in the 1980s.
The musicianship and arrangements on the session are first rate, as is the singing. In addition to the album, which was titled Midnight Special, Bluesville released two singles, "You're A Sweetheart" / "Ride On Midnight Special" and "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" / "Goin' To Alabama." None of it made a dent, and Smith would not record again.
Maybe he should have changed his name to something distinctive, like Brenton Wood. It worked for Brenton Wood, who had a couple of big soul hits in the 1960s, and who had in fact changed his name. From Al Smith.
The two Newark youngsters, Larry Young (19) and Jimmie Smith (22), are teamed up here with a seasoned professional for their second record date, a week after their debut under Young's name. Hard to say why. They'd given a veteran journeyman (Joe Holiday) for two cuts in his initial outing, and very good cuts they were, but he had surely shown he didn't need guidance. But whatever the reason, it's hard to complain about the results.
Jimmy Forrest was the veteran. He had started with Fate Marable, the riverboat bandleader who discovered the young Louis Armstrong, and around the time that Larry Young was born, he was joining Jay McShann's orchestra in Kansas City.
Forrest was a midwesterner. Born in St. Louis, he spent a good deal of his professional life in the heartland, including a 1952(?) live session at a small club in St. Louis, The Barrel, with Miles Davis. This was during the period of Miles's self-imposed exile, after the nonet's non-acceptance and before the Prestige years. I wrote about the session:
A few online reviews of this session tend to give it short shrift -- recording quality not all that great, playing competent but uninspired.
They couldn't be more wrong...this session, recorded live in a St. Louis nightclub, is the real thing. This is jazz in 1952, a piece of living history, jazz as it was, and played by working musicians with (essentially the same guys with whom he would record "Night Train") in small clubs in the Midwest, music that came out of the legacy of the territorial bands of the 20s and 30s, the nighttime wail of America that John Clellon Holmes captured so vividly in The Horn, still the greatest jazz novel.
Forrest was in New York by the late 1950s, and had been working his way into the Prestige family, starting with a 1958 session with the Prestige Blues Swingers (Art Farmer, Pepper Adams, Tiny Grimes, etc.) He did two dates with Jack McDuff, one backing up vocalist Betty Roche, the other a McDuff session, while also going back to the Midwest to make a couple of albums with the Delmark label of Chicago (like Forrest, originally from St. Louis). This would be the beginning of a productive three-year, five-album association with the label, during which time he would also back up Jack McDuff (again) and Oliver Nelson.
This is a fantastic session, with the range of bebop, the guts of rhythm and blues, the soul of soul jazz. It's the kind of album you immediately want to listen to again--first just to groove with the soloists, and second to catch all the other stuff you were aware was happening but weren't focusing on: what Young is doing behind Forrest's solos, what Schwartz is doing behind Young's solos. By an odd coincidence, Forrest's perhaps-1952 session with Miles lists an unknown conga player among the personnel, and so does this session. Very odd--Prestige didn't generally forget to add names to its session notes. Ray Barretto? Maybe. Very good whoever he is.
The session starts out with Einar Aron Swan's "When Your Lover Has Gone," written in 1931 for a Jimmy Cagney musical, an unlikely source for a jazz standard, but it entered the jazz repertoire almost immediately, when Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded it in an oddly sweet arrangement, until he starts singing, and it starts to take off, and then his trumpet solo is as hot and brilliant as anything you could imagine. But Armstrong or no, the tune went back into the hands of pop singers until 1955, when there were suddenly versions by Earl Bostic, Bud Shank/Bob Brookmeyer, Urbie Green and Coleman Hawkins, and since then it seems to have gone to the front of every jazz musician's fake book. Forrest's recording starts out with the mystery conga player setting the beat, and is mostly Forrest, with a nice solo break by Young,
Then they get down to some hardcore swing-to-bop to soul, in other words some serious blowing with tunes from Dexter Gordon ("Dexter's Deck"), Milt Jackson ("Bags' Groove"), Doug Watkins ("Help," the only non-self-referential title) and Forrest ("Jim's Jam"). These are all hot, but the hottest is "Dexter's Deck," with smoking solos by both of the lead instruments, plus some continued hot work from the conga player.
The session winds up with Irving Berlin's "Remember," like "When Your Lover Has Gone" a favorite among ballad singers. Hank Mobley recorded this same tune right around the same time, for Blue Note. His album. Soul Station, is considered the pinnacle of his career, and his version of "Remember" a sort of gold standard for the tune, but Forrest, Young and Schwartz do a version that should not be forgotten. Album title notwithstanding, Mobley's version is more bop than soul, whereas Forrest's group sets the soul standard. It was the last number they cut that day, and the firsttrack on the album. It was also the track chosen for 45 RPM release, and here YouTube gives us a nice little demonstration of what happens when a jazz track is edited for single release. As I've mentioned before, in discussing King Curtis:
The big difference between jazz and rhythm and blues of this era? Length. Jazz was an LP music, R&B was tailored to 45s, the jukeboxes, the radio DJs whose audiences were used to that three-minute format. That meant that an R&B instrumental number was built almost entirely around the main solo instrument, be it saxophone, guitar, piano or even harmonica. A jazz tune can easily, with extended improvisation and with solo space given to every member of the ensemble, go eight to ten minutes or longer. Obviously, this creates a whole different dynamic.
And you can hear that perfectly illustrated here. The album version, at 5:27, has solos by not only Forrest and Young but also Schwartz (and a very tasty one); the 45 is 2:48 and all Forrest.
Forrest Fire is the name of the album. Esmond Edwards produced the New Jazz release.
Larry Young's real importance in jazz history would come later, in his Blue Note years (1964-69), when he became the first organist to follow the path blazed by John Coltrane(with whom he jammed but never recorded), into the avant garde. Teaming with Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones, he took the organ out of the soul jazz groove which had been laid out for it by Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott and others. And he never looked back. He went on to an uncredited appearance on Miles Davis's Bitches Brew album, joined Tony Williams and John McLaughlin in Lifetime, and McLaughlin and Carlos Santana for Love Devotion Surrender. He made groundbreaking albums in both free jazz and jazz-rock fusion, before succumbing to pneumonia and dying at 37.
So it would be easy to overlook Young's debut album for Prestige, at age 19, and the Prestige/New Jazz albums that followed it, and that would be a huge mistake. Artists grow, mature, and develop in different ways over the course of lifetimes, but that doesn't negate the importance of their earlier work. I've written before about how today's young Coltrane fans betray a great impatience with Trane's early work on Prestige with the Red Garland trio, and I've said how much of a mistake I think that is. And sometimes artists grow and develop in ways that not only don't eclipse their earlier work, but don't live up to it.
What's the best Miles Davis? Some would say the groundbreaking nonet sessions for Capitol in 1948-49. I've argued that Birth of the Cool, and not Kind of Blue, is the most important album of the 1950s, but many would disagree. Kind of Blue remains the most popular jazz album of all time, and its fans are legion. Others would argue for the jazz-rock fusion of Bitches Brew. Others--probably fewer--would go for the later stuff like Big Fun and Jack Johnson. But while many would not want to make the case that Miles kept getting better and better, few would argue that he should have kept doing the same thing.
Igor Stravinsky had a long and successful life as a composer, but his youthful Rite of Spring and The Firebird are what he's remembered for most. William Wordsworth lived to be 80, and wrote poetry all his life, but he's remembered for the work he did before the age of 30.
The Beatles are celebrated for Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, but for sheer enjoyment, it's hard to top "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Ticket to Ride." And so it is with Larry Young. Jazz changed a lot over the years that Young was making music, and he changed with it, but if you love soul jazz, it's hard to beat the burning, churning music that this teenager turned out on his debut album.
A contemporary review of Young's first Blue Note album talks about Young "freeing the Hammond organ from a jaded rhythm’n’blues context," just as other jazz writers have talked about Kind of Blue liberating jazz from the sweaty clichés of bop, but this is frankly bullshit. Bop wasn't a cliché and rhythm and blues is not a jaded context, certainly not the way Larry Young was playing it in 1960.
Young came from Newark, halfway between the jazz mecca of New York City and the organ hotbed of Philadelphia. He had begun to make a name for himself with rhythm and blues bands in his father's Newark clubs when he was signed by Prestige. He came into the session young, but fully formed in technique and jazz awareness.
He leads a trio for most of this session: organ, guitar and drums. The guitarist is Philadelphian Thornel Schwartz, who we've heard before on two Johnny "Hammond" Smith sessions, and who was developing a reputation as an organist's guitar player. He would eventually work with nearly all the major jazz organists.
If someone tells you they're going to play you an organ album featuring Jimmie Smith, you don't expect him to be the drummer, but in this case, that's exactly what you get. This is the other Jimmie Smith, like Larry Young a Newark native, and youthful. He was fresh out of Juilliard and making his recording debut. He would go on to have a fine if mostly unheralded career. He starts the session off with a blistering drum intro to J. J. Johnson's bebop standard "Wee Dot," taken here in a version that favors soul over bop, and gives a whole new feeling to the tune.
They are joined on the second number by an old favorite, at least an old favorite of mine: Joe Holiday, whose melding of mambo and bebop in three 1953-54 albums remains a highlight of my Prestige Odyssey. Holiday contributes an original composition, "Exercise for Chihuahuas," and comes back again later in the session to take the lead on a familiar standard, "Flamingo," best known for Earl Bostic's R&B chart-topping version in 1951.
If you think turning a bebop standard like "Wee Dot" into a soul jazz burner is a feat, how about making a soul jazz conflagration out of a Sigmund Romberg warhorse, "When I Grow Too Old to Dream"? But they do that too, and the same with Rodgers and Hart's "Falling in Love With Love."
The rest of the album is two Larry Young originals. "Some Thorny Blues" is a virtuoso piece written for Thornel Schwartz, and he comes through. "Testifying" is a remarkable piece of soul, with catchy rhythm and blues riffs morphing into the sonority of a church pipe organ.
So if you think you know Larry Young from his fusion and free jazz phases, it's worth going back and checking out where he started from. This is soul jazz and hot and fresh as sweet potato pie from a Muslim street baker in Newark. Testifying was the name of the album, and Esmond Edwards produced.
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