Listening to Prestige 382: Jimmy Forrest

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.