Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Jimmy Forrest is back in Englewood Cliffs again after only six weeks, with mostly the same group--minus the guitar, plus Ray Barretto on congas, and with a similar mix of good tunes, not necessarily the tunes you'd hear on every modern jazz musician's set list.
The tenor saxophone is and is not a modernist instrument. It's not associated with the traditional jazz era, and not really so much with the swing era, when the clarinets of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw reigned supreme. Yet so many of the titans of the tenor - Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins -- are virtually unclassifiable. Not swing, though they can swing. Not bop, though they can bop. Not cool, though they can play it cool.
And the same is true of the not-quite-titans, the demi-gods like Gene Ammons and Illinois Jacquet and, yes, Jimmy Forrest. The tenor sax has that human voice-like quality, and the voice is the most flexible instrument of them all. And all these cats can play the blues.
Forrest is back, as in his September session, with some familiar tunes, just not necessarily familiar in this context. And as with the tunes in the September session, he makes them work. Forrest has a great warmth to his tone, particularly in the lower registers.
Of particular enjoyment to me in this session is "Matilda," the 1930s calypso tune brought up to date in the 1950s by Harry Belafonte. Sonny Rollins also brought calypso into modern jazz at around the same time, possibly a little later. Ray Barretto drums up a storm.
Esmond Edwards produced, and the session was released on Prestige as Most Much!, except for tunes, "I Love You" and "Sonny Boy," both of which were added to a New Jazz release, Soul Street, which gathered bits and pieces from other sessions. The traditional Scottish melody "Annie Laurie," which had been part of a brief swing era vogue for Scottish folk songs, became a two-sided 45.
Gene Ammons played back to back sessions in October of 1961, with different lineups, for two different albums, although some tunes from each session would end up on each album.
Art Taylor and Ray Barretto supplied the percussion for both sessions, both of them familiar sounds to Prestige listeners, particularly Taylor, who had appeared on 65 earlier Prestige sessions. George Duvivier, who played on the October 18 session, was another regular, with 33 previous appearances.
Art Davis was the other bass player. He had first been heard on a Prestige recording just the week earlier,
appearing on Oliver Nelson's epic Afro-American Sketches. Ammons and producer Esmond Edwards blended youth and experience on both dates, with Davis (age 24) paired with Walter Bishop Jr. (age 34) on piano, while the veteran Duvivier (age 41) was matched with Patti Bown (30).
Both Davis and Bown had classical as well as jazz backgrounds. Bown moved early into jazz and stayed there, but Davis, regarded by many as one of the finest musicians of his generation, continued to work, and excel, in both worlds.
And he paid for it. Although he played with major symphony orchestras, those positions were hard to come by for an African American, and in 1969 he filed a discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic, which up until that time, had employed exactly one Black musician. He lost the lawsuit, but his activism led to the practice of blind auditions, where the judges could not see the race or gender of the applicant who was playing. But activism often comes with a price, and for Davis the price was a blacklist. He found it hard to get employment as a musician in the 1970s, and this was a man who was known to be John Coltrane's favorite bassist, who had been described as a "forgotten genius" by Ahmad Jamal and "beyond category" by critic Nat Hentoff.
Davis, for a while, had to find another line of work, and he did. I've talked about jazz musicians who found other things to do--George Wallingford going into the family air conditioning business, Wendell Marshall starting his own insurance agency--but Davis did them one better. He went back to school and got a doctorate in clinical psychology, and as gigs started coming his way again--both jazz and classical--he worked them around seeing patients.
Ammons, always a versatile player, covers a wide range of material in these two sessions.
There are three jazz standards, which allow Ammons and Co. to exercise their bebop chops. "The Masquerade is Over," composed by Allie Wrubel, was a hit for Jimmy Dorsey and others in 1939, then lay mostly dormant until until a doowop group, the Cleftones, picked it up in 1965, and the following year Cannonball Adderley became the first modern jazz musician to record it, after which it rapidly became a favorite of jazz, pop, and even rhythm and blues performers, "I'm Beginning to See the Light" is from the Ellington songbook, co-composed by Duke, Johnny Hodges and Harry James, it has the subtle chord changes that beboppers love. Scores of jazz singers, and singers who'd like a little jazz tinge to their repertoire, have recorded it, and it's been a favorite of instrumentalists as well. In 1961 alone, it was recorded by Ben Webster, Billy Byers, Ruby Braff, and Al Casey. And Lester Young's "Lester Leaps In" has remained a great vehicle for tenor sax players ever since Young and Count Basie introduced it in 1939, although it took a while to become the ubiquitous standard that it is. The first jazz musician to record it after Lester was James Moody in 1949 (for Prestige, on the same Swedish session that produced "Moody's Mood for Love"). Oscar Peterson recorded it in 1956, then Cannonball Adderley with Gil Evans in 1958, and after that, the floodgates opened.
"Travelin'" by Kenny Burrell isn't so much of a standard, but it's a nice tune, and this may be the first recorded version of it. Burrell doesn't seem to have recorded it until two years later, a session with Jimmy Smith.
The recent pop song catalog was mined for "The Breeze and I," "Song of the Islands," "Soft Summer Breeze," "Moonglow" and "The Five O'Clock Whistle." All of these except "Soft Summer Breeze" were older songs that had been resurrected during the 1950s.
One aspect of 1950s culture that's not often remembered was the rise of what would later come to be called "easy listening" music, but was in that era a rearguard action against rock and roll.
The playing of recorded music had become one of the predominant features of the radio airwaves by the 1950s, as live broadcasts from the big bands disappeared, and comedy and drama shows, and their stars, were lost to television. The first record was played over the air in 1911, when both radio and records were in their infancy. But the format was not to catch on right away, because a lot of restrictions were put on the way recorded music could be presented, and a lot of records simply couldn't be played over the air, because many artists wouldn't allow it, and their records were stamped "Not licensed for radio broadcast."
A real milestone in the history of recorded music on radio came
in 1935 with a program called "Make Believe Ballroom," hosted by a radio personality named Martin Block, who came to be so identified with the format that columnist Walter Winchell began calling him a "disc jockey," which was a pretty clever coinage, when you think about it. "Make Believe Ballroom" was created to fill a need--the need to fill in time between reports on the most dominant news story of the day. A carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann had gone on trial for the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. The trial lasted for over a month, and while it was going on, any regular radio programming would be broken into with bulletins. Since Block was standing by to fill in odd chunks of time, he couldn't very well have a real orchestra on hand, so make believe orchestras in a make believe ballroom were the next best thing.
Both Block and the show's title had a longer life than Bruno Hauptmann, who went to the electric chair on April 3, 1936. Recorded music on the air was growing in popularity, to the extent that musicians began to feel it was jeopardizing their livelihood, and the musicians' union called a strike against recording companies that lasted from 1942 to 1944. But recorded music on the air was a phenomenon that couldn't be stopped.
Having their records played over the air was the life's blood of the new independent record labels which had grown up like mushrooms after World War II, labels that specialized in jazz, rhythm and blues or country (although country did have its live broadcast outlets like Grand Old Opry and Louisiana Hayride). And then in the 1950s, rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll and became the new lingua franca of teenage America.
And the bête noire of another group, for whom rock and roll was the music of the devil or jungle or the terminally tone deaf, depending on which outraged voice you were listening to. For those people, recorded music on the radio followed the "Make Believe Ballroom" format, and, indeed, still included "Make Believe Ballroom" and Martin Block, who hosted the show on WNEW radio in New York until 1954. After Block finally decamped for another station, "Make Believe Ballroom" continued on WNEW with new host Jerry Marshall for three years, and then when he left, with William B. Williams, who became synonymous with the programming concept and the rearguard action against rock 'n roll through the 1980s.
So, to wind up this digression, what were the "Make Believe Ballroom" type stations playing in the 1950s? They couldn't go on being pretend ballrooms hosting make believe big bands, because those big bands mostly didn't exist any more, and the era of the big band had given way to the era of the singer--1940s era holdovers like Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, new crooners like Eddie Fisher and Connie Francis. And where did these singers get their songs? Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other recorded LPs of standards, but the real action in the 1950s--radio, jukeboxes--was on the 45 RPM record. The singers got their material from new Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and The Pajama Game and Kismet, or from movie soundtracks like Three Coins in the Fountain or A Summer Place. or new songs from Tin Pan Alley that were often not very good, or by digging out some less likely songs from the past.
Radio actually hedged a lot of bets in the 1950s. For every Make Believe Ballroom on the one hand, or Alan Freed's rock 'n roll party on the other hand, there were stations, and a format, that had it both ways. In New York, when Jerry Marshall left WNEW to go and host a similar show for competitor WMGM, that station was also adopting a new format for its afternoon, after school slot--a format that had recently been created by an Omaha, Nebraska radio station owner who noticed that the same songs kept being played over and over on the jukebox in a diner he frequented, and from that observation, Top 40 radio was born, and the top jukebox hits of any given week put Eddie Fisher and Perry Como cheek by jowl with Elvis Presley and Fats Domino.
The jazz musicians of the 1950s and early 1960s did not go much to rock 'n roll for inspiration, although that would change later in the decade, but they could still go to Your Hits of the Week for songs to catch the ear of the something less than hard core jazz fan, and a populist like Gene Ammons would always have an ear open for that.
And so with the songs on this album. "The Breeze and I" was originally a classical piece written by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona in 1928, made into a hit with English lyrics by Jimmy Dorsey in 1940. and then returned to Your Hits of the Week in 1955 by the Italian singer Caterina Valente. "Song of the Islands" was written by Hawaiian politician/songwriter Charles E. King in 1916, and brought back to radio and jukeboxes in the late 1950s by Marty Robbins, Andy Williams, and Annette Funicello. Both of these were representatives of an odd genre of faux-exotic music called "exotica," described by bandleader Martin Denny, who more or less invented the genre, as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." Which meant they were sort of novelty songs, but catchy and melodic. "The Five O'Clock Whistle" wasn't exotica, but it was a novelty, and catchy. Written by film composer Joseph Myrow in 1940, it was popularized by the orchestras of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, then brought back to life in 1955 as a pop instrumental (they had them in those days) by organist Lenny Dee. "Moonglow," written in 1933 by Will Hudson, has always been a favorite of dance orchestras, but found its way into top 40 radio in 1956, as part of a medley with the theme from Picnic, a movie vehicle for William Holden and Kim Novak, performed by George Cates, who would become Lawrence Welk's musical director.
"Soft Summer Breeze" was a minor 1955 hit for jazz/lounge pianist Eddie Heywood, who would have a much bigger hit the following year with "Canadian Sunset." "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" was a 1948 hit for Dinah Washington, and did get a cover in the 1950s by the doowop group The Silhouettes, but that never went anywhere. It would become a career-making hit a few years later for Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, but it's probably here just because Ammons liked it.
Jazz versions of top 40 hits were never likely to make a dent on Top 40 radio, but they could get played by the Martin Block/Jerry Marshall/William B. Williams types, and find their way onto certain jukeboxes. "The Breeze and I," "Moonglow," and "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" all did get released on 45, as did "Don't Go to Strangers," which had been a jazz and Make Believe Ballroom hit, even making it onto the top 40 charts for Etta Jones (on Prestige). Two Ammons originals, "Up Tight!" and "Carbow" also made it onto 45.
Both recording sessions were produced by Esmond Edwards. Up Tight! was released in 1961, Boss Soul! in 1963.
Bluesville has called upon Memphis Slim before, for a jazzier 1959 session under Willie Dixon's name, featuring Harold Ashby on tenor sax; then two sessions in 1960, one a piano-bass-drums trio and the other piano and harmonica. There was only one more simplification that could be made, and this session makes it--Slim alone with his piano.
But not quite that simple. On four tracks, he switches over to organ, two instrumental and two with vocals. Slim's rolling piano style is a huge part of his appeal, and the organ stuff is very different, but it offers pleasures of its own.
The instrumental organ tracks are his own compositions, "Celeste's Boogie" ("Cella's Boogie" on the session log) and "Mr. Freddie's Boogie." The vocals are the traditional "Soon One Morning" and "Goin' Down Slow," originally a hit for St. Louis Jimmy Odem in 1941 (and reprised by him for Bluesville in 1960). The two boogies are the more successful experiments.
"Steady Rollin' Blues" and "Three Women Blues" are both Memphis Slim compositions, and each with a debt to previous blues--as has been noted before, a good blues lyric is likely to turn up in a number of songs. Robert Johnson sang about being a steady rolling man, but the real nod here is to Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's 1946 "So Glad You're Mine," covered a decade later by Elvis Presley. Slim borrows from the chorus - "I'm so glad I'm living, and I'm so glad you're mine." "Three Women Blues" tackles the familiar theme of the guy who's only loved three women. Jimmie Rodgers did it a little more sentimentally than some. His three women are his mother, his sister, and his darling wife. Slim's persona has a tougher time: "My mother, and my sister, and the gal who wrecked my life." He borrows more strikingly from from Alberta Hunter, by way of Bessie Smith, who made "Downhearted Blues" one of her best-known songs. Slim sings it: "You know I've got the world in a jug, I hold the stopper right here in my hand / But I'm gonna hold you baby, until you come under my command."
There are lots of songs about big-legged women (a blues euphemism for big butt). Slim has chosen to credit Jimmy (Mr. Blues) Williams's version, though by the time he gets through with it, it is Slim's own. He goes to two legends of the blues for his other two selections: Leroy Carr for "Mean Mistreatin' Mama" and B. B. King for "Rock Me Baby," and he more than does justice to these two masters. "ROck Me Baby" is credited to King and Joe Josea, but it's King all the way. "Joe Josea" was the pseudonym that West Coast indie label impresario Joseph Bihari used when he wanted to claim writing and publishing credit for a song one of his artists had written and recorded for his label.
I've made "Mr. Freddie Boogie" my "Listen to One" to show a different side of Memphis Slim, although his piano blues are really his best work.
Ken Goldstein produced the session. It was engineered by Mel Kaiser, whose specialty was engineering blues and folk recording sessions, but is oddly best known, for those who know about such things, for his Folkways album of science fiction sound effects. The Bluesville release was called The Blues of Memphis Slim: Steady Rolling Blues.
This is not Joe WIlliams the smooth-voiced jazz singer who first wowed audiences with the Count Basie orchestra (and actually there was a third blues singing Joe Williams, who made at least one record in the 1950s, and a fourth, who made one record in the 1960s as Big Joe Williams, after Joseph Lee Williams started using that name. Unlike the the two Sonny Boy Williamsons, both of whom adopted that name, all of the Joe Williamses seem to have come by their name at birth). This Big Joe Williams was the real thing, from the Mississippi Delta, singing and playing in the classic style with an anything-but-classic instrument.
Williams played a nine-string guitar, a jerry-built instrument created by adding three tuning pegs to the top of his guitar, and doubling up three strings.
A lot of rural blues musicians got their start on homemade instruments, frequently made from cigar boxes and whatever wire could be scrounged up around the family home. Joe Lee Williams made his first guitar that way, with one string. It took a lot of ingenuity to make a guitar like this, and perhaps even more ingenuity to play it and musical sounds on it. To graduate from a one-string guitar to a more advanced homemade model, perhaps with three strings, perhaps even with piano wire or someone's old, discarded guitar strings, would have been heaven to a youngster in love with music. To get a real guitar--perhaps from the Sears catalog, or perhaps by making some sort of deal with a music store in the nearest big town--would involve considerable sacrifice on the part of the young musician's parents, so he/she would have to have become really good on the homemade instrument. Anyone who has started to learn on an old Stella guitar with an unforgiving high action knows how hard it is to achieve competence, let alone virtuosity--and that's a store-bought guitar that cost real money, even if not as much as a Martin or a Gibson.
This latter was important to the early blues musicians. There was not a strong proprietary sense about song lyrics, which is why the same or similar verses crop up in the recorded songs of different blues singers (and which is part of the reason why so many rhythm and blues and rock and roll performers got ripped off in music publishing deals). But guitar styles were a different matter, and they were jealously guarded. A lot of the stage tricks of early blues players (later adapted by showmen like Jimi Hendrix) were designed for that purpose--so no one could figure out exactly what they were doing with their fingers. And this practice wasn't limited to guitar players. Many of Fats Domino's recordings were slightly speeded up--partly so they would be sprightlier for dancing, but also so that he would not exactly be playing in any key, thus making his sound impossible to duplicate.
Stories vary on why Williams first built a 9-string guitar. Perhaps it was an inspiration while he was fixing a broken tuning peg on his six-string. Perhaps it was to create a sound that could not be imitated.
Big Joe Williams did succeed--partly through the uniqueness of his instrument, mostly through his talent--in creating a unique sound, one that carried him from his first (1930) recordings with the Birmingham Jug Band through to his final sessions in 1982, with recording action in each intervening decade.
A couple of things you should know about Williams.
One, he wrote one of the most enduring blues classics: "Baby, Please Don't Go." First recorded by him in 1935 by Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers on Bluebird, it has been covered close to 200 times by virtually every blues singer from Muddy Waters to T-Bone Walker to Big Mama Thornton, by rockers like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Aerosmith, by zydeco legend Clifton Chenier, and by Mose Allison on his first album for Columbia, The Transfiguration of Hiram Brown.
Second, there's his long and fruitful relationship with Bob Dylan, starting...well, that's up for debate. It may have started in Chicago in 1947, as Williams remembers it:
"I first met Bob about 1946 or 1947, in Chicago. I disremember the
exact year, but he was very very young, probably no more than six. He
looked the same that he looks now. I think he was just born with that
talent. He used to get up on his tiptoes and was cracking wise just
the way he do now.
Well, I was just working on the streets of Chicago then, the way I had
done since 1927. Somehow or other he knew songs I had made on
records, like 'Baby, Please Don't Go' and 'Highway Forty-Nine.' He
met me on the North Side, around State and Grand, and we just walked
down to State and Thirty-Fifth Street. I was working, singing, all the
way along. If we came up to some cabaret where he couldn't get in
because he was too young, I would just leave him outside on the
curbstone.
Or maybe not, although Dylan, in a 1962 interview, offered a similar story about running away to Chicago when he was ten:
I saw a Negro musician playing his guitar on the street and I went up
to him and began accompanying him on the spoons.
Dylan wasn't above making up stories about his life, especially back in 1962. Perhaps we should go with the version offered by Delmark Records founder Robert Koester, on the cover notes to a Delmark recording of Williams:
[Big Joe Williams] first session for Delmark was improptu (still
unissued), recorded at Jackovac's tavern. Erwin Helfer, on his way
from college in New Orleans, played piano. In the fall of '57, Big
Joe looked up Erwin in Chicago who booked a recording session for
Cobra Records and a night at the College of Complexes where Bob Dylan
befriended Joe.
A 16-year-old Dylan could have been in Chicago in 1957. He was a Midwesterner, and he was passionate about music (more rock and roll than blues at that point), and if you were from the Midwest and wanted to hear the blues, Chicago is where you went.
This may be more apocrypha, but hey, this is the blues. And as with Liberty Valance -- "print the legend." So why not 6-year-old Bob Dylan roaming the streets of Chicago with an old blues singer?
This we do know: Dylan credited Big Joe Williams with being an important influence. We also know that Dylan and Williams must have had some sort of a history, because in the early 1960s Dylan, already the young heir apparent to Woody Guthrie as the beacon of the folk music world, convinced Mike Porco, the owner of Gerde's Folk City, already the epicenter of the new folk revival, to book Williams as a frequent headliner, and Dylan often sat in with him. In 1964, when Victoria Spivey's new label issued Three Kings and the Queen (tracks by Spivey, Williams, Roosevelt Sykes and Lonnie Johnson), two cuts were billed as by Big Joe Williams and Bob Dylan.
Martin Williams, on the liner notes to this album, tells us that the session came about very quickly and casually. Williams called up Ken Goldstein, told him that he was in town, would like to record, and would like a harmonica player on the date. Goldstein had studio time booked for the next day, but he canceled the scheduled act to make room for Williams. When Williams showed up in the studio, Goldstein had found a harmonica player: Larry Johnson, from Georgia, who would go on to study guitar with Gary Davis and become a recognized blues performer in his own right. He had also come up with a bass player: none other than Willie Dixon, the producing and songwriting genius of Chess Records. Dixon had made a Bluesville album of his own in 1959, with Memphis Slim.
Williams dips into that familiar pool of blues themes. The gal who is a jockey, and teaching him how to ride. The coalman and iceman as lovers who deliver to your door. The hard headed woman. The fool for love, and the .38 pistol. But he makes them his own, and drives them home with that 9-string guitar.
This was an all-day session that produced 22 songs, which were released on two Bluesville albums, Blues for 9 Strings and Studio Blues. They were later rereleased as a single CD package, as Walking Blues. Ken Goldstein produced.
There's so much to say here: Oliver Nelson's first recording with a big band, all those tonal possibilities for his fertile composer's imagination--made even more interesting by the fact that he used what amounted to two different big bands for one day in the studio, and then a second day, with a different lineup. They must have needed at least a little rehearsal time, with all those musicians...and what about all those paychecks? Bob Weinstock must have really thought he had something in Oliver Nelson, and he was right.
I'm always going to wonder about musicians Prestige and I are encountering for the first time, especially names I'm not familiar with--the guys who've been flying under the radar. Did they just show up for one magical gig and then disappear into the shadows? Or have they been there all along, known by every bandleader who's ever needed a guy who can show up on time, play all the charts, and give it that little extra that makes jazz? So I'll run down the Prestige newcomers, and there are a lot of them.
Jerry Kail was a section man, and there's always room for a good section man. Among those who found room for him were Quincy Jones, Johnny Richards, Pete Rugolo, Herbie Mann, Shirley Scott, King Curtis, Bill Evans, Jack McDuff, Woody Herman, and Tito Puente. Just because you haven't heard of a guy, doesn't mean you haven't heard him.
Ernie Royal was the younger brother of Basie regular Marshall Royal, and he played a stint with Bssie too, and with a number of other big bands. Most of his work was in horn section, including the three Miles Davis/Gil Evans big band LPs, but he also worked with Charles Mingus in his octet. He was active up through the late 1970s;
Joe Wilder was a classically trained musician who turned to jazz when he realized that there would be little chance for an African American to advance in the classical world. Th concert hall's loss became jazz's gain, as Wilder's time with Hank Jones, Gil Evans, Benny Goodman and many others, his work with singers from Billie Holiday to Eileen Farrell, Tony Bennett to Harry Belafonte, led him to an NEA Jazz Masters award in 2008.
Paul Faulise is best known for his work with Kai Winding's trombone septet, but like the others on this album, he found work any time anyone needed a bass trombone. On how he broke into the recording studio, he tells a story (per interview with Jack Schatz at the Trombone Page of the World) which introduces me to a job I didn't know existed:
There were many rehearsal bands in New York, and one of them was Dan Terry's band. Dan was a music copyist and contractor for Ernie Wilkins, an arranger who had written for the bands of Count Basie, Harry James, and Tommy Dorsey and was currently the hottest arranger for jazz artists. After playing a few times in Dan's rehearsal band, he put me on one of Ernie's sessions. Ernie liked my playing, and from that time on I was Ernie's first call.
A contractor for a bandleader, contracted to supply him with musicians. Makes sense, when you think of it.
And Faulise had another story for Schatz, one that could only happen to a trombone player. This came when he was in the Tonight show orchestra:
I remember one New Year's Eve we were playing a live TV special, and all of these balloons were supposed to let go above the band at midnight. Needless to say, they didn't come down; and people started to laugh. Something got stuck in the net right over me; so Doc said to me, "Paul, get it with your slide." So I reached up with the slide to pull the net, and the slide got stuck in the net. I tried to get the darned thing loose, of course, the whole time on live TV. Johnny Carson finally shouted over, "Leave it there"; and the band pretty much lost it for the rest of the show.
Urbie Greenis better known to the average jazz fan, having been voted the New Star of 1954 on trombone in that year's DownBeat critics' poll, and regularly placing high in the trombone category of their annual readers' poll (6th in 1960). Over a long and distinguished career he recorded 28 albums as leader, several for such labels as Blue Note, Vanguard and RCA. Bill Watrous, no slouch himself on the instrument, once said, "Urbie Green is the greatest trombone player I have ever heard." And Paul Faulise, who played with him often, said, "Every time I worked with Urbie, it was like taking a lesson."
Jim Buffington, as James L. Buffington, had an outstanding career in the classical music field. He played with the Budapest String Quartet, the Juilliard String Quartet and the Lincoln Center Chamber Society. He was a soloist with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air.
As Jim Buffington, he was part of the Gil Evans/Miles Davis orchestras on their collaborations, and was one of the first called when a jazz ensemble needed a French horn. Among many others, he recorded with Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, James Brown, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Paul Desmond, Gato Barbieri and George Benson.
In the area of unclassifiable music, he recorded with Moondog.
In 1979 and 1980, he received the Most Valuable Player Award for consistently outstanding performance from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Jerry Dodgionis hailed both for his versatility ("a multi-woodwind master"--the National Jazz Museum in Harlem) and his virtuosity can always be counted on to take an inventive solo that perfectly fits the circumstances"--Scott Yanow for Blue Note Artists). Like these other in-demand session men, he's played with a plethora of artists, from Louis Armstrong to Charles Mingus. Dodgion is still with us as of this writing.
In an interview for jazzleadsheets.com, Dodgion recalls working with Oliver Nelson on this recording. He had first met Nelson in Las Vegas, when they were both playing with Red Norvo. Then later, after playing a gig in Atlantic City backing up Frank Sinatra, he and the drummer, John Markham, went out on the town looking for some music, and found themselves in a small club run by Sammy Davis Jr.'s mother, where a trio was playing: Wild Bill Davis, Grady Tate, and Oliver Nelson. They talked with Nelson during a break and he said, modestly, that he was doing some composing as well as playing, and some arranging for Quincy Jones and a few other guys:
I said to John, "We've heard him play, and he plays great. He doesn't sound like anybody else, and to hear him talking about what else he does--it's possible that's true." Then he asked me to bring my horn with me tomorrow night, so I did, and I sat in with them,and he said, "When you move to New York, call me." I ran into him one other time over the next few years--he was wearing a Count Basie band uniform. He was doing a couple of weeks with Basie.
Then a year or two later he called me to do his first big band date. And that was at Rudy Van Gelder's--my very first time at Rudy's. It was great. High ceilings, all wood, and the floor was cement with throw rugs in different places. And the drums were right in the middle of the room! No group around the drums...I mean, big band, loud music, soft music -- I didn't understand it. I said, "How is this possible?" But it turned out to be OK. You go anywhere else, the drums are off separate, so they don't bleed into the other microphones, but at Rudy's they were always right in the middle of the room, and no one else could make that work."
(Edited some for continuity.)
Dodgion takes a flute solo on "Message" and "There's a Yearnin'."
Bob Ashton was called upon again by Nelson, who did seem to like those multi-instrumentalists, and who also counted on guys he'd worked with. Many of these names -- Dodgion, Royal, etc. -- turn up again and again. Nelson and Ashton first worked together on a big band session for Prestige led by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and arranged by Nelson in 1960, released as Trane Whistle in 1961. A 1961 Prestige session led by Gene Ammons and arranged by Nelson was parceled out to various albums over the next few years. He can also be heard on Fantabulous (1964, Argo); a trio of Impulse! sessions: Happenings (1966), The Spirit of '67 (1967) and Soulful Brass (1968); Goin' Out of My Head (Verve, 1966), arranged and conducted by Nelson, and a Grammy winner for best jazz album; and Every Day I Have the Blues, with Nelson arranging music and conducting a band for blues singer Jimmy Rushing.
Ashton played a number of sessions with Gene Ammons for Prestige. He is also the author of an instruction book, You Can Teach Yourself to Compose Music.
The cello isn't called upon all that often as a jazz instrument, and when it is, it's generally played by someone like Ron Carter or Oscar Pettiford, or Ray Brown, who once made an album called Jazz Cello. The only real full time jazz cellist I can name is Fred Katz. But Nelson called on two cellists for this ensemble: Peter Makas, who would also play on albums by Johnny Griffin and Kai Winding, and Charles McCracken, who garnered very little ink as a personality (no American Wikipedia page; what biographical and discographical information I could find came from German Wikipedia), but a great deal of respect as a musician. He was used as a soloist on recordings by third stream composer Bill Russo and Charles Mingus (on Let My Children Hear Music, the album that Mingus has called "the best album I ever made"). He recorded with Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz and Jackie Paris, was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at 24, and appeared, altogether, on over 200 recordings--classical, jazz, avant-garde, unclassifiable, even mainstream pop. His son, Charles McCracken Jr., is a bassoonist with a resume almost as full and as varied as his father's. McCracken solos on "Disillusioned."
Clyde Reasinger had an interesting day job. He was the piano tuner for Johnny Carson's Tonight show orchestra. Not that he needed a day job. He was another in-demand musician for big-band work and studio recording. His first major gig was replacing Maynard Ferguson in Shorty Rogers' band, and over the years he also worked with Ferguson many times. He was in the Miles Davis/Gil Evans big band.
I was aware of Melba Liston's reputation as an arranger in the 1960s, and knew that she'd made a reputation on trombone beginning in the late 1950s, but I had no idea how much work she'd done, or how far back her career stretched. She began with Gerald Wilson's big band in 1944, when she was 18, and first recorded with high school classmate Dexter Gordon in 1947. A couple of years touring with Count Basie and Billie Holiday were enough to convince her life for a woman on the road was no life for her, and she left the music profession altogether for most of the 1950s, returning near the end of the decade to record with Art Blakey, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and a host of others (including one Prestige session, the Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis big band album arranged by Nelson). The 1960s saw the beginning of her association with Randy Weston, and her career as an arranger that would win her the most recognition, including an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 1987.
“I (Nelson) didn’t know a lot about Africa, African people and culture and most important, nothing about African music and rhythm.” Embarking on intense study of those subjects, Nelson spanned his musical portrayals from conflicts between African natives and slave traders to the contemporary civil-rights Freedom Riders of 1961. “I have at last realized the importance of my African and Negro heritage,” Nelson concluded in the liner notes, “and through this enlightenment I was able to compose 40 minutes of original music which is a true extension of my musical soul.”
Afro-American Sketches is an ambitious suite, tracing the Black experience from being snatched out of Africa and sold into slavery in America, through freedom and its attendant trials. Nelson seems to have begub with ambivalent feelings about Africa. In his liner notes to the album, he says “I didn’t know a lot about Africa, African people and culture and most important, nothing about African music and rhythm." And his initial study of recorded music of Africa given to him by Esmond Edwards was disappointing: "European influences--social, political and cultural--had somehow gotten into African music and refined it on the surface so much that I was unable to learn very much."
But he stayed with it, and began to hear that "the rhythm of the African People had remained intact...I could absorb some inspiration from that source alone."
Interestingly, as carefully as the suite was conceived and written, it was not recorded in sequence. This was because different movements of it were written for different combinations of instruments and instrumentalists, not all of whom were present on the first day of recording.
Nelson has quite a lot to say about how the suite develops. Although admitting that he generally "dislike[s] to paint word pictures about music," in this case he wants the listener "to envision what the music from a completely subjective viewpoint means to me."
This strikes me as a valuable series of insights, and I'm excerpting liberally from the album notes.
"Message"...is essentially a conversation between drummers Ed Shaughnessy and Ray Barretto. The "Message" relates that men and boats are coming up-river in great numbers.
"Jungleaire" is an account of a contest for freedom between the African Warriors and the slave traders. There is a contest in which the African loses, having been betrayed by some of his own people. He begins a new and more cruel existence in a world full of hatred and bigotry.
"Jungleaire" powerfully plays massed horns against valiant solo instruments, primarily Nelson himself.
"Emancipation Blues"...is...an attempt to depict what freedom must have meant to the American Negro when he was told, "You Are Free!" First he gives thanks, then celebrates
the acquisition of his new liberties, and then wonders, "Free to go where, to do what?"
"There's a Yearnin'," which in its entirety should be read "There's a Yearnin' Deep Inside Me," is a lament.
"Goin' Up North" is a journey by the American Negro to make a better life, to live as a human being with rights, protection under the law, and education for his children, he thinks.
"Disillusioned"...tells us that the trip North for the Negro pioneer has pro
ved little, that the Negro's position in society, politics, culture has not really changed. He realizes, however, if an individual has courage, patience, and guts, coupled with the will to overcome...hard knocks...social justice and the right to become somebody is at least within the realm of possibility.
The themes from "There's a Yearnin'," "Disillusioned," and "Freedom Dance" are all the same...they are different only in mood and musical notation..."Freedom Dance" is dedicated to the thousands of militant youths, Freedom Riders (of all races) and all people with desire and maturity to be free...In order to be really free, though, man must first learn to respect the rights of other peoples, other cultures.
I have at last realized the importance of my African and Negro Heritage and, through this enlightenment, I was able to compose 40 minutes of original music which is a true extension of my musical soul.
Nelson's liner notes go into a lot more detail about the musical structures of each piece, and they're worth reading. Buy the album. Or you can find a facsimile of the back cover at the excellent London Jazz Collector website.
Nelson says that "in order to be really free, though, man must first learn to respect the rights of other peoples, other cultures." American culture is getting more and more insular, as people in power seem to countenance, even encourage, white supremacy, while at the same time, people of all races are being galvanized in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Back in the 1960s, the civil rights movement was also galvanizing support across racial lines, and also creating a backlash, to which not even the jazz world was immune. Nelson, in an interview with John Cobley, described a conversation with someone he chose not to identify:
if I would say Charlie Parker, he would say Lee Konitz. If I would say Duke Ellington, he would say Stan Kenton. If I would say John Coltrane, he would say Stan Getz. He didn’t realize that he was trying to have a complete division, saying this was white jazz, cool jazz. Of course, what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing, that was black jazz. And I hate to think of jazz being that kind of music. As long as politics can stay out of it, I think music in this country will be very, very healthy.
In Afro-American Sketches, the key solos are by musicians covering a mixture of races. "Message" is built around a conversation between a white drummer, Ed Shaughnessy, and a Latino drummer, Ray Barretto, New York born, Puerto Rican by ancestry; it then moves into solos by white flute player Jerry Dodgion and Black bassist Art Davis.
Nelson handles the solo on "Jungleaire." Nelson, Joe Newman and Patti Bown, all African American, solo on "Emancipation Blues"; Dodgion is the soloist on "There's a Yearnin'," and Newman on "Goin' Up North." In his liner notes, Nelson calls particular attention to the "beautiful 'cello solo interpreted by Charles McCracken," another white player. Nelson also gives particular thanks to Bob Ashton for conversations before and during the composition of Afro-American Sketches, and I can find nothing on the Internet to tell me whether Ashton was Black or white. In the words of the great rhythm and blues disc jockey John R., "Why do you care?"
Nelson recognized that the greatness of the American Century in music came from Black roots, and that it flowered in its multicultural heritage, but race and music were still a source of frustration to him. He told Cobley in 1972:
Do you know what they call me, my black brothers? They call me a white musician. They call me a white composer. It’s because I’m always trying to do something. I couldn’t stay with Shaft just to prove how black I am. So I write all kinds of twelve-tone music. I write from my experiences through my education, and now I’m putting together my own thing. And if it goes outside their spectrum, they say, “You’re thinking white.”
MM: Ellington made it much, much easier to write political music. Not right away... the civil-rights movement wasn‘t quite there yet. There are very few recordings in the 1940s and early 1950s by jazz musicians that are willing to go out on the racial limb that Ellington had already gone out on repeatedly. But when the civil-rights movement really takes hold, progressively from the late 1940s down into the late 1950s, then you begin to see this influence. I often think of that Clark Terry piece, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," about the Montgomery struggle and Rosa Parks. It‘s one of the first moments where you see a jazz musician saying, "You know, I can play to this." And then certainly you have people like Oliver Nelson and Afro-American Sketches who are inspired by that. But it‘s interesting to me, the lag time… Ellington was way out in front, and you get the feeling that African-American musicians writing about civil rights by the early 1960s are reacting more than leading. Which is not a putdown of them…
DBJ: That‘s really interesting, because speaking of Oliver Nelson‘s Afro-American Sketches, that was composed and recorded in 1961, and according to his own liner notes, he entered the project reluctantly, and somewhat at the behest of Prestige‘s A and R man--because, he said, he was "put off by the lack of honesty in a lot of Afro-jazz LPs on the market" at the time...
MM: Oliver Nelson absolutely knew Black, Brown and Beige. In fact, one of his last albums, the title is a play on that--it‘s Black, Brown and Beautiful... Nelson, interestingly, was an especially politically engaged man...was known for it, was closer to politics than musicians tended to be. He did that later album in 1967, The Kennedy Dream, which is an almost surprising choice in ‘67, to be producing a tribute to a white politician. This is just, what, a year and a half away from James Brown doing "Say It Loud, I‘m Black and I‘m Proud." If I‘m remembering correctly, Oliver Nelson did orchestrations for James Brown--[Soul on Top] ...And again, it‘s too simple--we‘re talking in big building blocks here, but it‘s more musically radical musicians, innovators such as Archie Shepp, free-jazz players who seem to be the ones who tap into Black Power more readily. Think of the Attica piece that Shepp did...and there are critics who argue that there‘s a very close relationship between the radicalism of the black nationalist, black power movement on the one hand and what they saw as the revolution in jazz music, the free-jazz movement inspired by Coltrane and Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp…
DBJ: ...I can‘t think off the top of my head of any of the free-jazz musicians attempting something similar to what Nelson... had done with Afro-American Sketches and-certainly they‘re concerned with the same themes, but they don‘t seem to be prepared to address it in that kind of a scope.
MM: I think that that‘s true. Ellington and Nelson had a couple of advantages; one is musical, that they worked in forms--big-band, what would later be called mainstream music, more or less--that lent itself to longer themes, more ordered statements, to a kind of readily-heard coherence for an audience, that could make it possible to take a set of themes about black history or black activism and put them to music. Coltrane and his followers struggled with what form would be like in free jazz. When you think of that famous Coltrane record Ascension, which to some people is just two sides of cacophony on one LP record….so I think there are formal problems that the free-jazz movement had, but also I think there‘s a matter of political temperament. Ellington and the civil-rights movement were trying to locate African-American civil rights in a long sweep of black history, whereas the black power movement , for all of its emphasis on an African past, emphasized the moment and confrontation in the here and now, in a way that was different--and I don‘t think somehow lent itself to the same kind of long-term reflection that Ellington had sustained.
I'm listing the whole suite as my "Listen to One" because it should be listened to in its entirety. And if you keep Nelson's words in mind as you listen to the music, you'll hear, vividly, what he's saying.
Afro-AmericanSketches was released on the Prestige label. Nelson credits Esmond Edwards with giving him the idea of writing a long form piece drawing on African and American traditions, but no producer credit is given on the album. And although this seems very much to be album-geared material, two 45 RPM singles were drawn from it: first "Emancipation Blues," split up over two sides, and then "Goin' up North" as the B side to "Azure Te," from an earlier Nelson collaboration with Lem Winchester.
These were Victoria Spivey's last recordings for Prestige Bluesville, before starting her own record label, in partnership with her companion Len Kunstadt, a jazz and blues historian twenty years her junior. The label was to stay active for over two decades, run by Kunstadt after her death in 1976. There weren't many other blues artists, or many other female artists, or many other artists of color, who were able to assume that kind of control of the business end of a music career.
Gigi Gryce, acutely aware of how composers and songwriters, especially African-Americans, were routinely cheated out of their publishing rights, started his own publishing company and signed up a few of his fellow musicians, but he was squeezed out and became so disillusioned that he essentially quit the music business.
Charles Mingus and Max Roach started their own label, Debut Records, in 1952. They released some excellent music, including the "greatest jazz concert ever," Jazz at Massey Hall, but folded in 1957.
Mary Lou Williams, in the late 1950s, and Betty Carter, in 1969, were two other Black women who started their own record labels and ran them successfully. Carter described the experience:
People thought I was crazy when I did it. 'How are you gonna get any distribution?' I mean, 'How are you gonna take care of business and do that yourself?' 'Don't you need somebody else?' I said, 'Listen. Nobody was comin' this way and I wanted the records out there, so I found out that I could do it myself.' So, that's what I did. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Williams and Carter both released their own records. Spivey, like Mingus and Roach, actively ran a record business, signing and recording other artists: it was an important blues label. Artists included Lucille Hegamin, Buddy Tate, Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Big Joe Turner, and Lonnie Johnson.
Johnson joined Spivey for the first of these two sessions; the second one was just the lady and her piano. Both of them were stripped down to the essentials. Spivey was one of the great songwriters of the blues, in addition to her talents as a performer, and this stripped-down session is an excellent showcase for her. Johnson and Spivey went way back, and his jazz-inflected blues style fit hers perfectly.
He wasn't there for the four songs she recorded on September 26. Or at least, he wasn't there to accompany her. The Prestige session log lists two songs recorded by Johnson on the 21st, and two more on the 26th, but all went unissued.
The Bluesville album was called Woman Blues. Two tracks, "I'm a Red Hot Mama" and "That Man," were also part of a compilation album, Bawdy Blues, that came out right around the same time (Woman Blues is BVLP 1054, Bawdy Blues is BVLP 1055). This was around the time that record companies were realizing there was more to dirty songs than Oscar Brand's Barrack Room Ballads or Rusty Warren or Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and they just had to mine the old blues catalog to find it.
Here's the difference between your jazz critic (or your anything critic) and your average fan. Your critic has heard it all, and he rejects the tired, the trite, the overdone, the same old same old. An album of the most over-played, over-listened to songs in the history of jazz...spare me.
The fan isn't sophisticated enough for that. "Night Train"? "Fever"? "Honky Tonk"? Great shit, man!
Musicians aren't immune, either. Here's a story I've told before, but it's a great story, and it bears retelling. It's Phil Woods's story, and his words.
I had just graduated from Juilliard in 1952 and was playing at the Nut Club on Seventh Ave. and Sheridan Square in the Village. After all of that great education, here I was playing "Harlem Nocturne" 10 times a night...I wasn’t happy with myself. I was saying to myself, “My god, I’m a Juilliard graduate, and I can play great jazz, and here I am playing "Night Train" and "Harlem Nocturne." I didn’t like my mouthpiece. I didn’t like my reed. I didn’t like my horn. I didn’t even like the strap.
...One night somebody came into the club and said, “Hey, Charlie Parker’s playing across the street. He’s jamming.” ...I was going on my break so I rushed over. When I walked in, there was this 90-year old guy playing a piano that was only three octaves long [laughs]. His father was on drums using a tiny snare and little tiny pie plates for cymbals. And there was the great Charlie Parker—playing the baritone sax. It belonged to Larry Rivers, the painter. Parker knew me. He knew all the kids who were coming up.
...I said, “Mr. Parker, perhaps you’d like to play my alto?” He said, “Phil, that would be great. This baritone’s kicking my butt.” So I ran back across the street to the Nut Club and grabbed the alto sax that I hated. I came back and got on the bandstand, which was about as big as a coffee table. I handed my horn to Bird and he played "Long Ago and Far Away."...As I’m listening to him play my horn, I’m realizing ...nothing was wrong with the reed, nothing was wrong with the mouthpiece—even the strap sounded good. Then Parker says to me, “Now you play.” I said to myself, “My God.” So I did. I played a chorus for him... When I was done, Bird leaned over and said, “Sounds real good, Phil.” This time I levitated over Seventh Avenue to the Nut Club. And when I got back on the bandstand there, I played the shit out of Harlem Nocturne. That’s when I stopped complaining and started practicing. That was quite a lesson.
This is my 500th entry on Listening to Prestige. That's six years of listening to great jazz and writing about it. Six years of putting a theory to the test--a theory that Peter Jones and I came up with, about the recorded jazz of the 1950s, our formative years...it was all good. We were young and we were learning, and we had those aforementioned critics to go by, and we had limited resources, and we tended to buy the albums that got four and five stars in DownBeat. Can it really all have been good?
Well, I've passed through the 1950s, and I'm two years into the next decade, and I've listened to every single track recorded on a pretty representative indie label, and so far our theory is holding up.
But after 500 recording sessions, and 500 blog entries, you'd think I'd have earned my status as jaded critic, wouldn't you?
But uh-uh. I'm with the average fan on this one. I'm with the guy in the Nut Club who wanted to hear "Night Train" and "Harlem Nocturne." I'm with Phil Woods, after he got schooled by Charlie Parker. Mr. King Curtis...no "Harlem Nocturne," on the September 19th session -- how could he have forgotten it? -- but he made up for it three days later, with a return to Englewood Cliffs. Definitely "Night Train." And "Fever," and "Tuxedo Junction," and "The Hucklebuck," and..."Honky Tonk."
Billy Butler, who co-composed "Honky Tonk" and played the guitar solo on Bill Doggett's original recording, was a part of King Curtis's band at the point, and he still knew how to wail on this timeless number. He would return to Prestige leading his own group near the end of the decade.
Also on guitar for this session was a youngster, Eric Gale, who would go to become one of the most sought-after studio musicians of the 1960s-70s, playing on over 500 sessions--jazz, funk, pop. He was a member of the funk supergroup Stuff.
Bassist Bob Bushnell was new with Curtis, and new with Prestige. His career actually stretched back to the 1940s when, fresh out of high school, he played a few gigs with Jimmy Heath, but it doesn't seem really to have taken off until the 1960s, when his resume started to fill up with what became really a wide and impressive variety of the biggest names in jazz, blues and rock.
Willie Rodriguez, whose big band credits ranged from Dizzy Gillespie to Stan Kenton to Paul Whiteman, had made his recording debut as leader with a big band of his own in 1960--an album called A Bunch of Bongos.
One of Prestige's stars, Jack McDuff, rounded out the group.
Not quite so well known are "You Came a Long Way From St. Louis," from the 1940s, and "Lean, Baby," from the 1950s.
There were only four songs on the second session, but they were all classics; "Harlem Nocturne," of course. "Soft" had been a hit for Tiny Bradshaw in 1952, "Tippin' In" for Erskine Hawkins in 1945. "So Rare,"dating back to 1937, had been a huge hit for Jimmy Dorsey in 1957, hitting Number One on the charts right after Jimmy's death. Jimmy, a great talent unjustly overshadowed in reputation by his brother, played it sweet; Curtis wails it out.
The album was released on Tru-Sound as Old Gold. A later re-release on Prestige was titled Night Train.
This same group, except for Gus Johnson replacing Mousie Alexander on drums, recorded for Swingville back in December of 1960, and they sounded great then, so why not bring them back for an encore?
Why not, indeed? It turns out to be an excellent idea, and Gus Johnson turns out to be a fine addition, banging the bejeesus out of the skins, especially "Rompin' at Red Bank," which also features Gene Ramey going a little crazy, and a fine time being had by all, especially by anyone who happens to pull up a chair and listen, and even more especially to anyone who happens to roll back the rug and dance. And if after pulling out all the stops to
"Rompin'," you want to pull your sweetie in and dance close, you've got "Blue Creek," with a solo by Buck Clayton that should have her, or him, melting in your arms.
The previous album was called Buck and Buddy. This one is called Buck and Buddy Blow the Blues, and it's another reason to be grateful to Swingville. Esmond Edwards produced.
Jesse Powell recorded three sessions for Prestige's Tru-Sound rhythm and blues subsidiary in the fall and winter of 1961. These were the old-fashioned, 1949-50-era sessions, four songs, enough for two 78 RPM singles. Of course, this being 1961, they were all gathered together on one LP, and we'll consider them all together here, although he worked with two different groups of musicians.
Tru-Sound was not really a success. Bob Weinstock started it as a showcase for "contemporary rhythm and blues," but there really was no contemporary rhythm and blues in the early 1960s. It was being displaced by funk and soul. Tru-Sound's most successful artist was King Curtis. Juan Amalbert and the Latin Jazz Quintet made a couple of albums for the label. Altogether, Prestige released 14 albums on Tru-Sound
between 1961 and 1963, after which it was closed down. Although most of the label's releases fell victim to what appeared to be Weinstock's difficulty in promoting to the rhythm and blues market, they also lived up to his standards for quality, and Jesse Powell was no exception.
Born in Texas in 1924, Powell, after playing some gigs with Louis Armstrong and Luis Russell among others, joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1946, replacing another Texas tenor man, Illinois Jacquet. He also backed various blues singers, including Champion Jack Dupree and Brownie McGhee, and he played with Dizzy Gillespie. A photo of the Gillespie orchestra at the Apollo in 1949 shows both Powell and John Coltrane in the saxophone section.
In the early 1950s, Powell led his own groups for Federal and Josie, both rhythm and blues labels, and these sessions should settle once and for all whether rhythm and blues is jazz. Backing up singer Fluffy Hunter for Federal in 1951, Powell's band was composed of Buck Clayton (trumpet); J.J. Johnson (trombone); Jesse Powell (tenor sax); Cecil Payne (baritone sax); Bill Doggett (piano); Johnny Jones (guitar); James Smith (bass); Herb Lovelle (drums). And recording a couple of instrumental side for Josie in 1954, he used Sir Charles Thompson (piano / organ); Mickey Baker (guitar); Lloyd Trotman (bass); Osie Johnson (drums). He was in demand as a session man in those years, appearing on such hits as "Speedoo" by the Cadillacs for Josie, "Mr. Lee" by the Bobettes for Atlantic, and several of Bobby Darin's hits for Atlantic subsidiary Atco.
John Adriano Acea (listed on the session notes as Adiano Acea) played on the September 12 and December 15 sessions. He had started out playing trumpet and saxophone, and he was said to have been proficient on any instrument there was, but he concentrated on piano after getting out of the army in 1946. Like Powell, he got a lot of work as a session man in New York, often recording as Johnny Acea or John Acea. He was featured on albums by Grant Green, Joe Newman, Illinois Jacquet, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. Don Wilkerson and others, played with Dizzy Gillespie, and accompanied Gloria Lynne, Diana Washington, Ruth Brown and Patti Page. He worked rhythm and blues and doowop sessions for independent labels in New York and Philadelphia. Never in good health (doctors told his parents he would not survive his childhood), he died not long after these sessions, in 1963.
Albert Winston, playing organ on the September session, was primarily known as a bass player. He recorded with Archie Shepp and George Benson among others, and was active in the rhythm and blues scene, including work with pre-Specialty Little Richard and Johnny Ace.
Billy Pyles played on all three sessions. I couldn't find much about him, but he had some solid rhythm and blues sessions for Specialty artists, including Little Richard.
Bassist William Curtis only played on the September session, and I was unable to find any information on him. Equally elusive was Steve Gordon, who played piano on the November session, a particularly tricky search in that there seem to be a plethora of pianists named Steve Gordon.
Jimmy Lewis (November and December) and Belton Evans (December), are familiar names on Prestige recordings.
Wilbert Hogan (December) played on a 1956 Prestige session with Earl Coleman, as Wilbur Hogan. But that only scratches the surface of his name variations. Born Wilbert Granville Thodore Hogan Jr., he sometimes recorded as Granville Hogan, and sometimes used the initials G. T. He was active from the early 1950s (originally with Earl Bostic) through tzhe 1960s, and played with Randy Weston, Kenny Drew, Kenny Dorham, Ray Charles, Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Walter Bishop Jr.
Unusually for a rhythm and blues combo, the September session did not use a drummer. They had Ray Barretto on congas. although it wasn't a Latin session. They did one Latin tune, "Malaguena," but not with an especially Latin rendition.
All three sessions were included on a single album, It's Party Time. Three 45 RPM singles were released, all on Tru-Sound: "Jumpin' Salty/Malaguena," "When You're Smiling/Hot Stuff," and "Cool/Tonight."
Maybe between November and December the Prestige brain trust had cooled on Powell. The December session wasn't recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's, and no singles were released from it. It's also interesting that in 1962, with the twist craze in full bloom, neither of the "twist" titles were released on 45;
A lot of the information on Jesse Powell comes from an invaluable resource: A History of Tenor Saxophone Solos 1955-2015, by John Laughter.
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