Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Down Beat's review of this album says, in part, "Perhaps the most significant aspect of this set is saxophonist Nelson's debut as a big-band arranger on four tracks."
That doesn't begin to tell the story. My writeup of this session was slowed down because I had to stop everything and listen the second tune of the day, "Trane Whistle," several times, to get a full appreciation of the arrangement, the way Davis's tenor takes on a horn section with the power of Joe Louis, the versatility of Bert Campaneris and the stamina of John Havlicek, and excitement enough to make a listener go crazy trying to find
comparisons. And what Nelson has the horns doing inspires Davis to get even crazier, with results that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
The over-the-top excitement of "Trane Whistle" made me go back and listen again to the first cut of the day, "Walk Away," another Nelson composition/arrangement, and I was glad I had. The arrangement isn't as bombastic, but it is as inventive, with an intriguing piano vamp by Richard Wyands to start things off, and some wonderful call-and-response work between tenor sax and horn session.
Next up is "Whole Nelson," and if one soloist working against amazing big band horn arrangements is good, how about two? Turns out that's good too, especially when you consider that the other one is Clark Terry.
The most celebrated cut on the album is "The Stolen Moment," because Nelson used it again on his most celebrated album (and with one of the great album titles of all time), The Blues and the Abstract Truth, As "Stolen Moments," it became the most celebrated cut on that milestone album, famed for being the most notable use in jazz of the
symmetrical augmented scale, an alternative scale which I can't begin to explain but which was an important innovation in the work of early modernist composers like Bela Bartok, Milton Babbitt and Arnold Schoenberg. No augmented scale in this version, but some top-notch soloists, including a trumpet player I wasn't familiar with, Bobby Bryant, who was just passing through. He had come to New York from Chicago in 1960, and by the following year was out in Los Angeles, where he built a substantial career, including working on a number of albums with Oliver Nelson.
The arrangements on the last two tracks of the day were turned over to veteran arranger Ernie Wilkins: the Rodgers and Hart standard "You Are Too Beautiful" and the Davis original Jaws." Prime stuff. And one would be remiss not to mention the extraordinary caliber of musicians who make up this big band. But Oliver Nelson is really the story.
Ttane Whistle was a Prestige release. A later re release capitalized on the later fame of the Nelson composition and was called Stolen Moments. Esmond Edwards produced, Don Schlitten did the photography and cover design, and come to think of it, that's also how Edwards got his start at Prestige.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
I always had this fascination with jazz and with rhythm and blues. I grew up in a time and place where the adults I knew, at least the ones I was trying to emulate, were artists and intellectuals, who listened to classical music if they were old guard, jazz if they were on the cutting edge, rock and roll not at all. And if you were part of that world, or on the fringes of that world, and you loved rock and roll, you had a bit of an inferiority complex. You probably had it anyway.
I was never going to do what I really wanted to do, which was drop out of school, go to New York, find the Brill Building, camp out in front of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's office, and pester them until they took me in as an apprentice. Other teenagers like Carole King and Neil Sedaka were actually doing it, but I was so locked in to a certain world view that it not only never occurred to me to do it, it never occurred to me until much, much later that I had really wanted to do it.
So the part of me that was turning to jazz was looking for approval, the part that still loved rock and roll was still defensive. And the part that loved rhythm and blues...well, no one much noticed of cared about that part. Norman Mailer, in "The White Negro," described, in Nelson George's summary,
a new white outlaw...wandering the landscape, a "hipster," a "philosophical psychopath," whose primary inspiration was the music and sexuality of Afro-Americans...Yet in perpetuating the romance of blackness, supporting the notion that black juazzmen, for example, were in touch with some primal sexual energy, Mailer was as guilty of stereotyping blacks as the rednecks and social mainstreamers his white Negro opposed. While liberals hailed and debated Mailer's provocative rhetoric, many working class white teens were already living out the ideas Mailer articulated, infatuated as they were with black style and culture. But Mailer saw jazz as the crucial element in this new modern white personality; he had no idea of what most Negroes, or their white teenage fans, were really recording or buying.
I had a foot in both worlds. I read Norman Mailer, and I read Jack Kerouac's "Jazz of the Beat Generation" -- and I realize now, in hindsight, what Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty must have been really listening to in Oakland on that sweaty summer night in 1947. Charlie Parker's jazz revolution had not made it as far as Oakland; his 1946 gigs in Los Angeles had been pretty much of a fiasco, and had let to a six-month relaxation at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Sal and Dean were most likely listening to rhythm and blues--someone like Big Jay McNeely. And they thought it was jazz because, dammit, they were right. It was jazz.
I didn't have Nelson George and his great book, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, as a guide then. My other foot was with the white teenagers listening to Fats Domino and Little Richard (a music that in 1960, post-payola, was running very thin) and a ways deeper, with the Negroes that George describes, listening to Muddy Waters and Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Amos Milburn. And with no brilliant theoretician like George to give me intellectual support, I remember how thrilled I was to buy this album when it came out: one of my rhythm and blues heroes, King Curtis, playing real jazz along with card-carrying modern jazzmen like Nat Adderley. Playing Ellington!
Soul Meeting is the name of the album (on a re-release intensified to Soul Meeting!), and it precedes the other, somewhat better known Soul Meeting between Ray Charles and Milt Jackson by a year. And certainly, soul is the meeting ground for these diverse and considerable talents. They do take on Ellington: "Jeep's Blues." written with Johnny Hodges and originally recorded in 1938 under his name, later and most famously on the 1956 Ellington at Newport album. Ellington knew his way around the blues, and so do these guys. They also show their skill with standards and pop ballads (Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" and the Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen hit for Frank Sinatra, "All the Way"). But they really find their groove, and their bliss, in the three Curtis originals, which bring out the best in both lead instruments and in Wynton Kelly, who contributes solid accompaniment and some smashing solos.
Production credit is shared by Esmond Edwards and Ozzie Cadena, who would take over as chief of A&R for the label when Edwards left a couple of years later. The album was something of a Prestige producers' convention, as Don Schlitten, who produced two sessions for the label in 1957 and would do a bunch more later on, provided the art direction and album cover design to go with Edwards' photo of Curtis.
"Soul Meeting" and "All the Way" were released as a 45 RPM single on New Jazz.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
Prestige got behind Etta Jones, whose career had been slow in developing, putting Frank Wess and a standout group of musicians behind her for her debut recording for the label in June, and it paid off, making her an overnight success at age 32, with the better part of two decades of performing behind her. Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards wisely brought her right back for this session with two of their brightest new jazz stars, Lem Winchester (this was to be his next-to-last session) and Oliver Nelson,
This was a session of mostly familiar standards, and why not? If you're trying to advance the career of a singer who decidedly deserves it, why not give her a bunch of songs that people like to here. "The More I See You." by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, was very popular with jazz chanteuses, and even some chanteurs, in those days. A 1945 hit for Dick Haymes, it received ten other renditions in 1959-60 alone, plus four instrumental versions: interpreters included Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Julie London, Brook Benton and the Four Freshmen. Celebrities liked it too, including Tony Perkins and Maureen O'Hara. Jones is deliciously torchy on this one, with Winchester functioning as her alter ego and Nelson providing a short but moving solo near the end.
The Gershwins' wonderful "They Can't Take That Away From Me," originally recorded by Fred Astaire, is often a plaintive lament, but Jones belts it as a defiant album--nobody better try and take it away from me. This one is mostly Jones, but Winchester has an arresting, rhythmically interesting solo.
"That's All There Is to That" had been a recent hit for Nat "King" Cole, who had recorded a song called "That's All" several years earlier, and would recall another called "That's All There Is" a few years later. He sang "That's All There Is to That" for President Eisenhower at the 1956 Republican convention, but there doesn't seem to be any political message to it. It's a sensitive song of lost love and heartbreak as Cole sings it, and fatalistic in the extreme in Jones's version. No sentimentality. You love, you lose, and that's all there is to that. Richard Wyands is the instrumental star on this one. The song was written by Clyde Otis, who went on to a distinguished career as a songwriter and producer, but this was how it started for him: the Nat "King" Cole version of this song was his first hit.
"Easy Living" was written by movie composer Ralph Rainger, but it's become a jazz standard, thanks in great part to the 1937 version by Billie Holiday with Lester Young and Teddy Wilson. Jones stays close to what Lady Day did with the song--it's virtually an homage to the great singer who had died just months before.. The main solo here is Winchester, but Nelson very nearly steals the show with a much briefer one. It's interesting to compare Jones's 1960 recording with Holiday's 1937 recording, an era when the band, not the singer, was the star, and Holiday doesn't enter until more than halfway through the recording.
The Eddie Heywood "Canadian Sunset" was a big instrumental hit for Heywood in 1956, and many vocal versions followed. The lyrics by Norman Gimbel ("Killing Me Softly with His Song," English lyrics for "The Girl from Ipanema") sound a little tacked on, but not the way Jones sings them. Winchester propels her along for a snappy two and a half minutes, just the right length for a 45 RPM single, which this was.
Jones returns to Harry Warren for "I Only Have Eyes For You." a 1930s song which had been a big hit in a 1959 doowop version by the Flamingos. Jones echoes the Flamingos as she starts into the song, but soon takes it in her own direction, which is solid jazz singer. This is another 45-length cut, at just over three minutes, and I would have released it as a single. It's a great song, it's been a hit, and Jones takes it that step farther. But "That's All There Is to That" (not so short) and "Canadian Sunset" were the only singles from the album ("Canadian Sunset" would be rereleased as a single on the flip side of "Don't Go to Strangers"), and they didn't chart, so maybe Bob Weinstock decided that Jones was more an album kinda gal.
This is an interesting album in that some of 1960's finest jazz soloists (Nelson is sparingly used) are on the session, but there aren't any extended solos. And it works. Nothing wrong with tight. And when they do solo, as in Lerner and Loewe's "Almost Like Being in Love," which is about evenly divided between Jones's vocals and an instrumental break by Wyands and Winchester, the improvisation is tight, inventive, and...killer.
Much has been made of Jones's Billie Holiday influence. I didn't hear it so much in the first session--Dinah Washington came more to mind-- but it's definitely happening here, and it's all to the good.
The session would see daylight in two parcels, the 1961 release Something Nice ("That's All There Is to That," "Easy Living," "Canadian Sunset," "I Only Have Eyes for You") and 1963's Hollar.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
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