Listening to Prestige 510: Gene Ammons - Joe Newman - Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Born to be Blue

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.

It's hard to pick a favorite here for a Listen to One, but they do an awfully nice job on "Born to Be Blue," the ballad written by Mel Tormé and his frequent writing partner Robert Wells (they also collaborated on "The Christmas Song").  It's sensitive and lyrical, with great individual work by all the participants.

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.