Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Jack McDuff did a lot of recording during this period, and a lot of it, like this session, would be held back and released a good deal later. But the soul jazz sound, and the organ-tenor sax-guitar quintet sound, of which he had been one of the pioneers with Willis Jackson and Bill Jennings.
It's the second session of his association with Harold Vick, which would last for four years. Vick would go on to a successful career across the spectrum of soul and jazz, coming back in the 1970s to the soul jazz-organ sound with Shirley Scott and Jimmy McGriff.
Grant Green had been the guitarist on the earlier McDuff/Vick session, but he had moved on, and the new guitarist was Eddie Diehl, who would do a couple more sessions with this lineup. Diehl was a highly respected guitarist, but he became even more respected in a second career as a luthier, when he had left the hurly-burly of the big city and moved up the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie.
Joe Dukes joined McDuff for this session, and remained his drummer for much of the decade. After he found Dukes, McDuff pretty much had to stop looking, because he was, by most accounts, just about the perfect soul jazz drummer. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he grew up steeped in blues and and soul. Critic François van de Linde in Flophouse Magazine, a jazz blog, describes him this way:
The chemistry between McDuff and drummer Joe Dukes was unbelievable, soul jazz drum pioneer Joe Dukes anticipated every move of McDuff and the tune changes with an assault of continuous accents and rolls, adapting big band style to the blues.
And George Benson, who joined McDuff later in the decade, simply said of him (quoted in van de Linde's blog):
Such a magnificent drummer that there were times I thought he was one of the greatest things that ever happened to mankind.
Dukes could also be a tough taskmaster, as the 19-year-old Benson was to find out when he joined McDuff:
Finally, after a particularly nasty rant, I snapped: ‘If y’all don’t lay off, I’m gonna take y’all outside and beat y’all old men up! I’m nineteen years old! Y’all can’t take me! We’re going out in the alley, right now! McDuff and Dukes just stared at me for a second, then they both pulled out switchblades. But that didn’t stop me: “I don’t care! Y’all don’t scare me! Bring your switchblades into the alley! I’ll beat y’all up anyhow!” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed: nobody went into the alley, and nobody got beaten up. But it got them off my back.
Dukes's powerful assistance is heard to full measure on this session, as were the other musicians. McDuff learned a good lesson from his mentor Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson about choosing musicians who were not only first rate, but also absolutely compatible with him. Dukes and Diehl did not go on to become celebrated names in the jazz world--Dukes because he mostly stayed in McDuff's shadow, making only one album (for Prestige) as leader, Diehl because he left the limelight for the Hudson Valley and guitar-making--but just a listen to this session will tell you how good they were, and how right for McDuff's soulful sound.
Strangely enough, as popular as the organ-sax-guitar guitar sound was at this point, and as good as this group was, and as hot as McDuff was becoming, Prestige shelved this session and didn't release it until 1971, as On With It! One cut, "Scram," a Leonard Feather composition, came out on 1963's Soul Summit Vol. 2 , made up of cuts from four different sessions, mostly featuring Gene Ammons and released shortly after Ammons went back to prison.
Leonard Gaskin, New York City born and bred, found his way to Minton's and Monroe's early in the bebop era, and at age 24 followed Oscar Pettiford as bassist in Dizzy Gillespie's quintet. He played on some of Miles Davis's first recordings as a leader, recorded with Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. But as time went on he seemed to gravitate toward an earlier form of jazz, and his only two recordings as leader, both for Swingville, reflect that.
Jazz and its different forms have been known by a variety of names, not all of which caught on, not all of which are particularly endorsed by their practitioners. "Jazz" itself is rejected by many of the finest players of
this American music, while others guard the name against presumed barbarians at the gate, like Louis Armstrong castigating bebop as "Chinese music," or Eddie Condon, dismissing the beboppers with "We don't flat our fifths, we drink 'em." One well-known and well-esteemed jazz musician said of Ornette Coleman, "Whatever it is, that ain't jazz."
Or sometimes maybe it isn't used at all. In The Benny Goodman Story, the word "jazz" is never used once. Nor is the word "swing," for that matter. Steve Allen, as Benny, talks about wanting to play "hot music" and have his "hot music accepted.
Other apellations just didn't stick. For a time, the music that came to be known as bebop was called "New York music," and I've always thought it was kind of a shame that that didn't catch on. Afro-Cuban jazz was also called Cu-bop, and maybe that was too cute by half.
And then there's Dixieland, a name used by the white ensemble who cut the first jazz record, back in 1917. A number of Black musicians from New Orleans had joined the Great Migration northward to Chicago, the most famous among them being King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. A number of white musicians were to make that same trek, because there was an audience for the music. They played on their New Orleans roots by calling their ensembles Brown's Band from Dixieland, or Stein's Dixie Jass Band, or -- the group that traveled from Chicago to New York, and ended up making that first record--the Original Dixieland Jass Band, later to become the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
So it was this group that first popularized jazz beyond the nightclub audience in a few major cities, and who really brought the name into common parlance--and who also struck the first salvo in the ongoing culture war over the proposition that American music -- blues, jazz, and all their descendants -- are an African American art that has been stolen by whites.
And this is mostly true. I don't know how true it is on the musician level. Real musicians play music, and jazz musicians are consummate crafters who devote their lives to getting good enough, and remaining good enough, to be allowed into the colloquy that is jazz music. Louis Armstrong cited cornetist Nick LaRocca of the ODJB as one of his inspirations. But it is absolutely true on the business end. It's no accident that the ODJB, and not King Oliver or Fate Marable, was signed to make the first commercial jazz recording.
But if the white musicians who named their bands after a term which glorified the old South of slavery were not being consciously racist, they didn't have to be. Racism was such a part of their era that it was accepted without much conscious thought. In any event, the term, like the music it described, declined until the 1940s, and the revival of traditional jazz which began when journalist and music lover Heywood Hale Broun went down to New Orleans to record the still-active keepers of that tradition, and New Orleans musicians such as Bunk Johnson came to New York and recorded. This neo-traditional music, based on New Orleans and Chicago styles of the early decades of the 20th century, took the name of the ODJB and began to coalesce under the name Dixieland jazz. By then, there was at least somewhat more social awareness, and there were some who found the name offensive (and the music bland and uninteresting), but the most popular purveyors of this faux-nostalgic music called themselves the Dukes of Dixieland.
The Dukes were never very highly regarded in jazz circles, although Pete Fountain, Jim Hall and Herb Ellis played with them at one time or another. And they were pretty solidly white, although Louis Armstrong did sit in with them on a couple of occasions. And their musical imitators, who wore straw hats and striped blazers and conjured up images of a mythic and genteel Old South, were also all white.
But the musical tradition of New Orleans and Chicago was real, and though "Dixieland" had pretty much been relegated to football halftime shows, county fairs and Kentucky Derby festivities, there were real musicians, both black and white, who still honored those traditions, and it was just such a group of musicians that were gathered by Leonard Gaskin for this session.
It was very much Gaskin's session, and he is listed as "leader" in the session log, although that's not normally noted. Immersion in the tradition is emphasized by the selection of material, even including one tune ("At the Jazz Band Ball") from the ODJB's original sessions.
As the free jazz revolution started to take hold, it was good to be reminded of where jazz had come from--and to be reminded that jazz's evolution had been so rapid, that these still-vital, still-creative oldtimers were playing side by side with the Cecil Taylors and Albert Aylers. Sometimes literally side by side--Garvin Bushell, who had played with Bunk Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, would also play with Eric Dolphy,
Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Buster Bailey,Dick Wellstood, Herbie Lovelle and Gaskin have all appeared on Prestige sessions before, the first four on earlier Swingville releases. Lovelle backed up King Pleasure on a 1952 session. Gaskin was very active for Bluesville, working with a wide variety of blues singers, but he had also played on two of Prestige's earliest bebop sessions, one with J. J. Johnson and the other with Miles Davis.
Trumpeter Yank Lawson was one of those who continued to embrace the Dixieland moniker, and created, with bassist Bob Haggart, an ensemble that managed to achieve popularity on the Dixieland/nostalgia circuit while still playing music a jazz fan could take pleasure in. He began his career with Ben Pollack's orchestra in 1933, then worked with Bob Crosby, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. He and Haggart formed the Lawson-Haggart band in the 1950s, disbanded, and then rejoined forces in 1968 to create the modestly named World's Greatest Jazz Band, which had a solid decade's run of popularity, and included Cutshall, Dickenson and Wellstood at various times.
Trombonist Cutty Cutshall played with Benny Goodman, Billy Butterfield and Louis Armstrong, but his longest association was with Eddie Condon, with whom he was still touring when he died in 1968.
Clarinetist Edmond Hall came by the tradition naturally, being from a family of New Orleans musicians. His most important association was with Louis Armstrong, but he had a pretty strong pedigree before joining Armstrong, starting with his first recording session, in 1937, with Billie Holiday and Lester Young. He played with Claude Hopkins, Lucky Millinder, Zutty Singleton, Joe Sullivan, Henry "Red" Allen, Teddy Wilson, and Eddie Condon, among others, and was co-leader of the house band at the original Cafe Society in New York.
The recording date began with Lawson,Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall joining the rhythm section for "Tin Roof Blues," a tune that goes back to 1923 and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white group of New Orleans-to-Chicago musicians, and "Muskrat Ramble," written in 1926 and first performed by Louis Armstrong.
"At the Jazz Band Ball" is the ODJB tune, written by Nick LaRocca and other members of the group in 1917, and featuring the entire nine-piece band. The whole album is a pleasure to listen to, but on this tune in particular they really let rip, its 6:19 length giving everyone a chance to shine.
After that, Lawson, Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall pack it in, and Dickenson and Bailey take over for "Mack the Knife," the one modern tune, but it fits right in with the mood; "Hindustan," written in 1918 by Oliver Wallace, who a quarter century later would win an Academy Award for Dumbo; and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," a Fats Waller tune that's almost modern, having been first performed by Louis Armstrong in 1932. It really does sound from a different era and mind set than the other tunes on the album, even "Mack the Knife."
Swingville released the album as At the Jazz Band Ball by the Leonard Gaskin All Stars, but actually all it says on the front cover is the title and subtitle: A Dixieland Sound Spectacular, so Dixieland as a label was not dead yet. A later CD rerelease on a different label kept the title but named the group the Swingville All Stars.
During the late 1960s, when rock started to take itself seriously, supergroups suddenly became the rage. But in jazz, they were old news. And they were done without thinking twice. Let's get Gene Ammons back into the studio. --Yeah, and let's put him with a couple of different guys. -- Who's in town? And presto, you have Joe Newman and Jack McDuff showing up to jam with Gene on some tunes. Supergroup? Oh, my, yes.
And jamming? I'd say so. They're relaxed, they're trying each other out on a variety of material, they're finding some good grooves, and they're playing jazz. What's not to like?
There's nothing not to like. Unlike the world of cartoons, or all too often the world of other collaborative arts, in jazz when you put a group of musicians like this together and say "What could possibly go wrong?" nothing does. These guys are seasoned pros, they're entertainers, and they're artists. And they've got some good tunes to work with.
I also love the variety of material here. Ellington and Strayhorn's "Satin Doll" gets covered a lot (397 versions, according to the SecondHandSongs website), but with top notch improvisers, it's always worth one more. "Stormy Monday Blues" is the Bob Crowder/Billy Eckstine/Earl Hines version, not T-Bone Walker's, though both are 12-bar blues. Bennie Moten's "Moten Swing" comes out of that Kansas City cauldron of swing. And the two Ammons compositions are up against some pretty tough competition, but they hold up.
The newcomer on this session is Chicagoan Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, who got his start playing with Ahmad Jamal, recorded with Sonny Criss for the Texas-based Peacock label, then did a few sessions as leader for the Chicago labels Argo and Vee-Jay. He would move to New York full time not long after this session, where he would do three more albums with Ammons and find plenty of other work, recording with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, George Shearing, Charles Mingus, Billy Taylor, Booker Ervin, Jaki Byard, Lucky Thompson, Pat Martino, Sonny Stitt, and Charles Earland, among others.
As you may recall, part of the reason why I started this project was the conversations Peter Jones and I had about recorded jazz in the 1950s, and our recollection that it was all good. I've been putting that to the test for 510 entries now, and I'm into the 1960s, and it's still holding up. How many different ways are there to say this is good stuff, this is a deeply satisfying listening experience? I guess we'll find out, or else I'll start showing my age, and repeating myself.
The album was called Twisting the Jug, although it was hardly a twist album (but you could dance to it). It was released on Prestige, with the title cut a two-sided 45 RPM single.
Doug Quattlebaum had a brief but well-deserved moment in the limelight, and he attained it the old-fashioned way: the modern equivalent of the old 19th and early 20th century medicine show. He had gotten a record deal in 1953, cut three songs for a Philadelphia label, and saw two of them released on a 78 RPM single. Then nothing until 1961, and his contemporary medicine show. Whereas the old timers used music to draw a crowd to whom they could sell patent medicines, Quattlebaum had taken a job driving a Mr. Softee ice cream truck. In the afternoon, he would park in a neighborhood, get out his guitar, plug into an amp he had rigged up on the truck, and start entertaining--old songs, current hits...and some blues. When he had the crowd, he could start selling ice cream. Someone told jazz and blues producer/historian Pete Welding about the Mr. Softee guy. He came, he heard, he was hooked.
Quattlebaum was from South Carolina, where as a toddler he made his first guitar out of a wire stretched between two nails on a stick of wood, then graduated to a homemade cigar box guitar. His model in those early days was fellow Carolinian Blind Boy Fuller. Later his family moved to Philadelphia, where his mother remarried. His new stepfather was Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup's brother, and he bought young Doug his first real guitar when he was 14, and taught him the only chord he knew. He taught himself the rest, and started playing accompaniment for gospel groups. After his career started and stopped in 1953, he went back to playing for gospel groups, including Clara Ward and the Ward Singers. The gospel influence can be heard in his approach to singing the blues.
For this session, he draws blues from a variety of sources, and adds a few of his own, drawing on traditional material. He pays respects to his early influences, with Blind Boy Fuller's "So Sweet" and Arthur
Crudup's "Mama Don't Allow Me to Stay out All Night Long." It's the kind of set a medicine show pitchman would put together -- something borrowed, something blue, a little something for everyone, and quite satisfying.
On the strength of this album and Welding's sponsorship, he did the blues and folk circuit for a while, then returned to Philadelphia where he continued backing gospel groups and may have become a minister.
Welding and Kenneth Goldstein produced. Softee Man Blues was released on Bluesville.
No sooner do I get done praising the uniqueness of Steve Lacy's commitment to the music of Thelonious Monk, devoting one full album and the greater part of another to Monk's compositions, when what should come along but an album by Shirley Scott devoted to the music of a different jazz composer?
And while Horace Silver, as a composer, may not have had the depth of a Monk or an Ellington, he certainly knew how to write some catchy tunes, and an album devoted to them, especially as played by Scott, is going to be great for listening, for finger snapping, for toe tapping.
And one wonders if there was a marketing consideration here. Both Prestige and Blue Note were going after the new and burgeoning soul jazz market, with Blue Note having the inside track, largely because of Horace Silver. Prestige wasn't going to get Silver, but they could get his name on an album cover.
One way or another, there can't be anything wrong with hearing tunes like "Doodlin'," "Senor Blues" and "The Preacher" played by someone as inventive as Scott, combining a popular touch with a gift for musical exploration.
Scott was joined on this day by Otis "Candy" Finch, a drummer who worked with Scott, with her husband Stanley Turrentine, with Herbie Hancock and Dizzy Gillespie and others, before leaving New York for Seattle, where would teach and play music away from the limelight.
Bassist Henry Grimes, in his only appearance on Prestige. Grimes was shortly to launch into a career as one of the favored bassists of the avant garde, working with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor and Pharaoh Saunders. But in 1961, he had already established himself a significant, figure, first in rhythm and blues (playing with Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, Arnett Cobb, “Bullmoose” Jackson, Little Willie John and others), and then with a variety of mainstream jazz artists. His reputation as one of the most versatile bassists around was cemented in one weekend--the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, the one captured in the documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day. He appeared with Benny Goodman, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, and Tony Scott.
Grimes would go on to bring a whole new level of creativity to the bass throughout the 1970s, and then suddenly disappear from the scene, so completely that he was presumed to be dead. Free jazz didn't necessarily translate into a living, even for someone as respected as Grimes, and after his bass was damaged on a West Coast trip (strapped to the roof his friend's car, it was baked by the sun through three days of driving through the desert), he had to sell the instrument.
He described what happened next in an interview with Jon Liebman of the For Bass Players Only website:
HG: I worked as a janitor and maintenance man and day laborer. I also spent many hours in the library, studying literature and writing poetry, short stories and metaphysical ideas. I have around ninety notebooks at home with my writings from those times. I still continue to write today.
He lived like this for 35 years, until a social worker and jazz enthusiast named Marshall Marotte tracked him down. A younger jazz bassist, William Parker (also a free jazz player and also a poet) donated a bass to him, and he was able to resume his career.
FBPO: Did you ever really give up on music, or did you believe, deep down, that one day you would be back?
HG: I never gave up on music, not for a minute. You could say I was absent for a long time, but I always believed I would be back one day. I just couldn’t see the way to get there, but I knew it would happen.
In the same interview, Grimes gave the best, perhaps the only reasonable answer to the question, "What would you be doing if you weren't a bass player?
This question doesn’t have any meaning to me. I am a bass player and violin player and poet. If I weren’t those things, I wouldn’t be Henry Grimes. I wouldn’t be… at all.
Grimes married, continued to create and teach and write, and lived a fulfilled life until finally felled in April of this year by the Covid virus.
Scott's second session of the day marked the start of a new association, both musical and personal. She had certainly been one of the most important figures in establishing the soul jazz organ/saxophone sound through her work with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis; now she was to continue to mine that vein with a new saxophonist, Stanley Turrentine, who was also her new husband. Turrentine was signed to Blue Note, so as the two continued to record together throughout the 1960s, they would be billed under her name for Prestige albums, under his for Blue Note sessions. I'll have more to say about him, and their partnership, in chronicling subsequent sessions.
Esmond Edwards produced. The trio album was called Shirley Scott Plays Horace Silver, the quartet album with Turrentine Hip Twist. Both were released on Prestige. There were 45 RPM singles released from both sessions: "Sister Sadie, parts 1 and 2," and "Hip Twist, parts 1 and 2."
Steve Lacy wasn't the first to notice Thelonious Monk's genius as a composer, but he was the to give Monk the kind of serious, focused attention that is given only to the greatest composers, and had never before been given to a jazz composer. His previous Prestige album was entirely devoted to Monk's compositions, and works by Monk make up the bulk of this session (two pieces are by Duke Ellington).
Lacy is a particularly interesting figure in American music. His devotion to the compositions of Thelonious Monk are a part of it, and a not insignificant part. No one before him had treated a composer in the pure jazz
idiom with this kind of seriousness. I'm hedging my bet here, categorizing Ellington as a crossover between jazz and popular song, Gershwin as crossover between jazz, Broadway and classical, thus violating all my principles about pigeonholing people into categories, but what the heck. It's still a valid point. And I don't think any progressive jazz musician had devoted a whole album to Ellington or Gershwin by 1961, either.
Lacy was also unusual in that he began by playing Dixieland, and went straight from there to the avant garde, with none of the usual stops in between. And he was unusual in that soprano sax. which is most commonly someone's "other instrument," was his only instrument. He discussed all of this in a 1980 interview in Calcutta, India, with two jazz enthusiasts, Ajoy Ray and Arthur Gracias. He began with his beginnings in music, at a later date than most, buying a soprano sax at age 16 after hearing a Sidney Bechet record. Interviewer Ray pointed out that the soprano is considered a particularly difficult instrument to play. Lacy laughed and said, "I didn't know that at the time!" Asked why he stuck with it to the exclusion of all other reed instruments, he said:
Because I found out how hard it was and therefore, I needed all my time to devote to that, do what I wanted to do, and I didn‟t have the time to do it. It's like having two wives, or 3 wives or 4 wives: couldn't do it, couldn't handle 'em.
By 19, he had progressed enough on this difficult instrument to begin playing professionally ("I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't know I didn't know"), and the love of Bechet's music led him to gravitate toward traditional jazz:
I started playing with... mostly old guys. These were people 60
years old, old pioneers who were still active in New York, like Red Allen, Hot Lips Page, Buck Clayton, Jimmy Rushing, Zutty Singleton, Pops Foster, the older cats. And I was just a kid, just 19 years old. And they were 65, but they were beautiful. They really encouraged me and showed me a lot of things.
But then...
In the middle of all that, I met Cecil Taylor and he just plucked me right out of all that and put me in the fire! Put me right into the deep waters you know! And I didn't know how deep the water was! So I swum across there for about 6 years with him. From '53 to '59.
That was where I learnt a lot of stuff, playing with him.
Ray: Wasn’t it a big switch; from the New Orleans style to C. Taylor? From one extreme to another?
Lacy: Yeah, again I didn't know how big a switch it was! Didn't seem so big to me. And it still doesn't, in a way, because Jazz is much the same really. Surface characteristics and all that, it still contains the same spirit. Not so far really.
Ray Bryant felt much the same way when he would spend afternoons at the at the Metropole Cafe sitting in with Henry "Red" Allen, and the same evening downtown at the Five Spot playing with Benny Golson and Curtis Fuller: "A C chord is a C chord no matter where you find it. I never made a conscious effort to play differently with anyone."
This album features the only Prestige appearance of one of the most significant musicians of that era: Don Cherry, who came to New York with Ornette Coleman for the two weeks that shook the world, their groundbreaking Five Spot stay. Steve Lacy, in the 198o interview, recalls that group.
Oh, that was a revelation for everybody in New York. That was like the Message, the
Writing on the Wall. Nobody could ignore that really. Either you're against it or for
it. I mean it was like a big flash. Everybody was talking about it. You either liked it
or you didn't. I liked it right away. But I had already played with Cecil (Taylor) for 6
years by the time I heard that. So it was revolutionary all right. But I had been
involved in another revolution, or maybe the same revolution. So I felt right at
home with that. We loved it.
Cherry remained in the vanguard of music for three decades, playing with avant garde musicians like Coleman, Lacy and Albert Ayler, playing with mainstream musicians like Sonny Rollins, playing world music, collaborating with classical composers.
Lacy bypassed many of the modern genres--bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, soul jazz. He told his 1980 interviewers:
I got there a little too late. Yeah very profound! I studied that music a lot. Charlie Parker was one of my masters. Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach and Thelonious Monk. I think I was too young, too late for bebop. I started in 1950, and the height of bebop was '46, '47, '48, '49. By the '50s, it had already done its thing. It was going into a kind of repetition, the cool phase and what they call hard bop. I studied it the best I could and I tried to play it, but I was in the next generation, you know what I mean? I was in the generation after that. I tried to play the best I could, but I was too late really.
It's interesting, then, that Lacy should have become such an interpreter of Monk, who is so closely identified with the bebop era. But Monk was always a special case. He was in the bebop era but not entirely of it, and his compositions are his own, a unique music portfolio. The beboppers played Monk's tunes--not as many or as often as you might think--but the staples of their repertoire were standards, and compositions based on the chord changes of the standards, like the near-ubiquitous "I Got Rhythm."
Lacy hardly ever played a standard. He liked to explore the work of other jazz composers, like Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols, and Mal Waldron, with whom he oftened collaborated in Europe when they had both gone the expatriate route.
And Duke Ellington, but you would hardly expect a disciple of Cecil Taylor and a compatriot of Ornette Coleman to play in the style of the Duke. The two Ellington compositions on this album, "The Mystery Song" and "Something to Live For" are not among the composer's best known, and I'm not sure that Duke's mother would recognize these versions of them.
The structure of these performances is not so strange. It would be recognizable to a bebop fan: head, series of solos, restatement of head. But what solos! Cherry brings his awareness that jazz has changed to this new setting, but he doesn't just bring over his Ornette Coleman Quartet style. He is very much working with Lacy here, and working with Monk. And both of them are creating something new and arresting, abetted by Coleman's drummer Billy Higgins, a presence throughout.
Bassist Carl Brown is something of a mystery. He only has two recording credits, this one and an unreleased trio session for Atlantic, with Billy Higgins. It has been speculated that this is Charlie Haden playing under an alias, but a contributor to a thread on an Organissimo.org forum (one of the best gathering spots for jazz insiders on the web) verifies that there was a real Carl Brown ("I heard him with Billy Higgins and Clarence "C" Sharpe in the Village early sixties").
This is a particularly interesting session, just for the pure enjoyment of the music, but also for the historical interest of two giants of two different avant garde schools of the mid-twentieth century, meeting and finding common ground. And for a new way of experiencing the composing genius of Thelonious Monk.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album, titled Evidence, was released on New Jazz.
