Listening to Prestige 427 - Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Johnny Griffin

Prestige hasn't gone in much for live albums, although with Bob Weinstock's spontaneous, recreating-a-jam-session philosophy, live recording would seem like a natural. But having made the decision to take the plunge with this one they went all in, and why not? Two wailing tenors and a cooking quintet at the jam session capital of the world, Minton's Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem. Four sets of music.

What would you leave out?

Nothing? That's how they felt, too. Four sets became four separate albums, two of them released in 1961, the others a few years later.

A live session may not have the optimal sound you'd get in a studio, especially Rudy Van Gelder's studio, and there aren't any do-overs--or weren't, back then. More sophisticated recording techniques made it possible to go into the studio, correct a wrong note, and splice it in. These days, I suppose you wouldn't even have to do that: you could just autotune out all the clinkers.   What balances that out, and makes a live set worth it, is the excitement that comes from playing off a live audience.

A lot of the time, that excitement is going to come from giving the audience what it wants. Perhaps the most famous description of the thrill of live jazz can be found in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the scene that has been anthologized as "Jazz of the Beat Generation." when Sal and Dean find themselves in a jazz club in Oakland, with a behatted tenor player who:

was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from "EE-yah!" to a crazier "EE-de-lee-yah!" and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bull neck who didn't care about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching hie head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor...

 Kerouac wonderfully describes an ecstatic moment, but what were Sal and Dean listening to in that club in Oakland? Not bebop, certainly. In the late 1940s, when Sal and Dean were on the road, bebop had yet to make a serious impact on the West Coast, not even in Los Angeles, where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had played a famous engagement in late 1945 and early 1946, to the enthusiastic support of fellow musicians and a few cognoscenti, most notably Ross Russell, who started the Dial record label to record Bird; But bebop hadn't really caught on, and when Sal and Dean were club-hopping in Oakland, and Bird was relaxing at Camarillo State Hospital, what were they listening to? From Kerouac's description, I'd say rhythm and blues. I've always wondered whether they might have happened in on a set by Big Jay McNeely.

The point of this is that a live set, in a live club, may not inspire the ecstasy that the behatted tenor man inspired in Dean Moriarty, but you are playing to an audience, and the music is only going to go by once. Proust says that if there are things that immediately grab you in a piece of music, you're going to go back to them over and over, and pretty soon you're going to start falling in love with other things about the same piece, and your love for it will deepen, but you'll gradually stop listening for the things that attracted you in the first place. This was true with Proust as he followed a popular composer around to his recitals in the salons of Paris; it's even more true in the era of recorded music.

Musicians working a live audience for a live recording are going to have to think of both: the effect on patrons of the club on that night, and the effect on buyers of the record. Of course, a sophisticated audience like the patrons of a New York City jazz club, especially Minton's, the birthplace of bebop, so they aren't going to be satisfied with the brutal hammering of butt-scarred drums, however bullnecked the drummer may be. But the guys on the bandstand are still likely to do well with material that the audience knows. The poet Billy Collins has described the poet as a sort of travel agent, starting the tour at a place his readers are familiar with, and taking them from there into new and unfamiliar realms. The modern jazz player may well want to do much the same thing, starting with a familiar melody -- a jazz standard, or a ballad from the Great American Songbook. Tuns that all the musicians on the gig are comfortable with, so that they know what they're doing and what they can expect from each other.

All of which is a roundabout way of noticing that this is what Griffin and Davis are doing--familiar jazz riffs like Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce," standards like "I'll Remember April"...and tunes by Thelonious Monk.

We're accustomed to think of Monk, today, as one of the great composers of the 20th century, but that reputation was slow in building. At this time, early 1961, only one jazz artist other than Monk had ever recorded an album of Monk's music (Steve Lacy, on Prestige, in 1956). So this much Monk on a series of live sets in a club suggests that his compositions are starting to be a common language not only of musicians (no surprise) but also audiences--and granted, this is Minton's, so even though it's not Minton's in 1946, it probably still has an audience closer to the cutting edge than most.

But I'm not exaggerating about how long it took for Monk's music to catch on. In the first set, Davis and Griffin perform "Epistrophy." One of Monk's classic tunes, written in 1948 it has been recorded 128 times, according to Secondhandsongs. But in 1961 it had been recorded exactly three times: by Milt Jackson in France, on a European label; by Bud Powell, on Verve; and by a group led by Art Taylor, on Blue Note.

"Well, You Needn't," the other Monk composition from the first set, had already achieved jazz standardhood, with 12 recordings by 1961, on its way to well over 200 to date. It also evoked an answer song -- common in rock and country, rare in jazz  -- "I Didn't," recorded by Miles Davis.

From the late evening sets: "In Walked Bud," written and recorded by Monk in 1948, now a jazz standard with at least 130 recordings, had been recorded exactly once before 1961, by Sam Most for Bethlehem in 1957.  And it's hard to believe that "Straight, No Chaser," now with 180 versions on record, was ever anything but a standard. It is now credited with being the second most widely recorded tune of 1951, trailing only "The Little Drummer Boy." But before the Davis-Griffin version, there had only been five others.

The jazz world would shortly see a second studio album of all Monk compositions, and we'll be looking at that before too long: it was Davis and Griffin (who had been closely associated with Monk), on Prestige.

Larry Gales and Ben Riley had close ties to Monk. They both played on the Davis-Griffin Monk album, played with Monk himself for several years, and then in 1990 made their Monk album,  A Message from Monk, with Riley as nominal leader of the group. Gales had made one previous Prestige session, with Buddy Tate and Clark Terry. Ben Riley had been the drummer on the first Davis/Griffin pairing for Prestige.

Junior Mance made his return to Prestige after a ten-year hiatus, and his Davis-Griffin association would last through their Monk album. His career as a recording artist had started in 1947 with Gene Ammons (for Aladdin). but his performing career had started earlier than that. When he was ten years old, the saxophone player who lived in the Chicago apartment above his had a gig in a local roadhouse, and had lost his piano player. He had heard Junior practicing, and asked his dad (Julian Mance Sr.) if Junior could fill in. Roadhouses in those days tended to be lax about asking for ID, but even so, one might have guessed that they would have noticed a ten-year-old. Nonetheless, he played the gig.

He went from Gene Ammons to Lester Young, with whom he learned a valuable lesson. As he told Marc Myers in a 2011 interview:

I once made a mistake while playing something. I said, “Damn.” The guys told me never to say that. They said, “Play right through it.”

As Miles Davis said, " It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong."

He was back with Ammons (and Sonny Stitt) for his first Prestige recording. As he told Myers:

Jazz in those days was always competitive and supportive. We didn’t rehearse. What you heard on those records is what those guys came up with on the spot. We’d do the same thing on stage.

 He also shared with Myers another great piece of advice he got from Jimmy Jones, when he first started working with Dinah Washington:

Look, when you’re working with a singer, imagine a portrait painting hanging in the museum. The singer is the subject of that portrait. What does the portrait need? A good frame. That’s you.

Prestige released an album called The Tenor Scene in 1961. It was the tunes from the second set of the evening, designated "the breakfast set": the Davis/George Duvivier composition "Light and Lovely." previously recorded with Arnett Cobb and Shirley Scott in 1959, "Straight, No Chaser," Dizzy Gillespie's "Woody 'n' You," Davis's "Bingo Domingo," and the standard "I'll Remember April."

In 1964, they began plans to roll out the entire performance, starting with the first set, and they titled the album The First Set. It featured the Charlie Parker tune and the two Thelonious Monk compositions: "Billie's Bounce," "Epistrophy," "Well, You Needn't." Added on, from the second set and first album, "I'll Remember April." This was followed by the third set, in an album entitled The Late Show, also in 1964.

1965 saw The Midnight Show, from the final set of the evening, followed by re-release of The Tenor Scene, this time titled The Breakfast Show, and maybe this explains the reason why the "breakfast" moniker was hung on this set.

Esmond Edwards produced.

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.

Volume 4 is in preparation now!

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