Listening to Prestige 451: The Swingville All Stars

This is the first part of a two-session, double-album extravaganza released by Prestige as The First Annual Prestige Swing Festival, Spring 1961. The festival appears to have taken place entirely in the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs--I can find no record of an actual festival. And it appears to have been the only annual Swing Festival.

Nevertheless, a cause for celebration. Prestige had put together various collections of All Stars over the past few years, including one other set of Swingville All Stars (in March of 1960, with Taft Jordan, Hilton

Jefferson, and Al Sears as the front line), and all of their all star sessions were worthy of the name, but this one has some solidly heavy hitters, and a bunch of them. The heyday of swing was also the heyday of the 78 RPM record, so your typical swing session recording was three and a half minutes or less--maybe a little more if they decided to split a song over two sides. And the typical swing recording was section players with one soloist.

But bebop changed some of that, and the long playing record changed the rest of it, and this aggregation includes a number of all stars who deserve solo space, and who get it, and the length of the selections reflects that. "Jammin' in Swingville" is nine and a half minutes, "Spring's Swing" eight minutes, "Love Me or Leave Me" a little over seven. "Cool Sunrise" nearly eleven. 

"Love Me or Leave Me" is the standard by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, first recorded by torch singer Ruth Etting in 1928, picked up by Billie Holiday in 1941, then covered a few scattered times in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was Etting's signature song, and Etting was basically a forgotten star by the 1950s, but it turned out her life, including a disastrous marriage to a brutal gangster, was more interesting than her career. It became a movie with Doris Day and James Cagney, and "Love Me or Leave Me" became the movie's title song, and jazz musicians as well as pop singers started recognizing its potential. 

"Jammin' in Swingville" and "Swing's Spring" are both credited to Vivian Hamilton, who I'm guessing was the wife of Jimmy. Her only credited compositions are on albums by Jimmy (although "Spring's Swing" was recorded in 2005 by Swiss-born, Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Sam Burckhardt), and Jimmy was the arranger for this session. "Cool Sunrise" is credited to Esmond Edwards, so important as a producer for Prestige during these years, but rarely listed as a composer. All of them provide an ample basis for joyous interpretation.

Swing, as its name suggests, is a joyful music, and extended jams like these sound like a lot of fun, like good friends getting together and producing something delightful. Let's hope this was the case, and why not? These guys were old enough, and far enough past their years of stardom, to have been able to simply enjoy getting together and making music. We continue to owe Prestige big time for recording these Swingville sessions.

Edwards produced. The title of the double album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be. When they were rereleased separately, that became the title of the record that had "Spring's Swing" and "Love Me or Leave Me" on it. The other separated LP was called Years Ago. A later rerelease as double album and CD was called Jam Session in Swingville.