Listening to Prestige 420: Buck Clayton - Buddy Tate

You've heard of swing-to-bop. Well, everything old is new again, and maybe this is bop-to-swing--taking some modern concepts and swinging them hard. And it's American music, right in the heart of it, drawing from blues and swing and rhythm and blues and American song to create a sound that's timeless and modern. As I've said before, these Swingville releases, with swing veterans, are not recreations of the music of the 1930s.

These guys have great swing credentials. Buck Clayton (Basie, Ellington, Goodman, Harry James) and Buddy Tate (Andy Kirk, Basie, Goodman) we've met before on Prestige, and recently.

And great credentials in general. Sir Charles Thompson (knighted by Lester Young) covered swing (Bennie Moten, Clayton, Vic Dickenson), bop (Bird, Miles), rhythm and blues (Lucky Millinder, Earl Bostic), and everything in between (Coleman Hawkins).  He co-composed the jazz standard Robbins Nest with Illinois Jacquet when he worked in the latter's band.

Gene Ramey is a long time between Prestige appearances. In the label's very early days, he played bass on a Stan Getz date. It seems odd now to think of Getz as a Prestige artist, but a lot of the label's early artists were Woody Herman alumni, and Getz filled that bill. He had a similar background to Thompson, moving from Kansas City swing (Walter Page, Jay McShann) to bebop (Bird again, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk) to those great tenor players who seemed to exist out of time (Ben Webster, Hawkins) and, like Thompson, easily moving back and forth, continuing to play with trad ensembles as well as the

moderns.

Mousie Alexander essentially worked the traditional side of the street, starting out with Jimmy McPartland (who made two 78s for Prestige--Alexander played one of them). He worked almost exclusively with traditional jazzmen (and women, an extensive stint with Marian McPartland), so I had assumed he must be the elder statesman of the bunch, but actually, born in 1922, he was a decade or more younger than the others. He did have one modern gig on his resume, with ultra-modern Lennie Tristano acolyte Lee Konitz.

Three of the tunes on the date are Clayton originals, including a tribute to the jazz Mecca where four of the five had learned their trade, "Kansas City Nights," which features inspired blowing by the two leads, and a lovely solo by Sir Charles Thompson. "When a Woman Loves a Man" is a Johnny Mercer song, and "Thou Swell" a Rodgers and Hart classic. "Can't We Be Friends," which has become a standard for jazz musicians and pop singers alike, is one of the relatively few hit tunes to be written by an investment hanker--all right, probably the only hit tune to be written by an investment banker. Lyricist "Paul James," in his banking life Paul Warburg (and a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first cabinet), was briefly married to composer Kay Swift, and collaborated with her on this tune.

The album was entitled Buck and Buddy, on Swingville. Esmond Edwards produced.