LISTEN TO ONE: Honky Tonk
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.
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