Listening to Prestige 543 - Coleman Hawkins

LISTEN TO ONE: The Sweetest Sounds

Coleman Hawkins died in 1969, and made his last recording (fittingly called The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World) in 1967, so this was pretty much the stretch run for the Hawk, but he was prodigiously productive. In 1962 alone he recorded eight albums as leader: three for Prestige, two for Verve, and three for Impulse! He also appeared on albums by Kenny Burrell and Shelly Manne. I doubt that there are many jazz musicians who can approach that level of productivity

This is the second of his Prestige outings, like the first one a Moodsville venture, and like the first focused on the Broadway musical. However, while the first (Good Old Broadway, recorded January 2)

featured familiar and beloved tunes from Broadway's storied past, this one focused on a recently opened show, No Strings, with a score by Richard Rodgers which produced no memorable songs at all.

That's a little unfair. Rodgers had not declined as a composer, but the era of Broadway show tunes becoming hit songs was over. While Broadway-to-Top-Forty had still been a common occurrence in the 1950s -- "Hernando's Hideaway," "Hey There," etc. There were crooners like Eddie Fisher and Patti Page and the Ames Brothers still regularly making the charts in those days, and even a rare Rogers and Hammerstein flop, Pipe Dream, could yield a Billboard chart hit with Fisher's version of "Everybody's Got a Home but Me." 

By comparison, 1962 saw two successful musicals, No Strings and Stop the World--I Want to Get Off, and one smash hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the three of them together produced one song, Sammy Davis Jr.'s "What Kind of Fool Am I?" that even dented the charts.

No Strings not only produced no hits, but except for "The Sweetest Sounds," which got a boost from being recycled into the television musical Cinderella, there have been precious few recordings of any of the songs beyond original cast albums, and except for "Sweetest Sounds" and "Loads of Love," which were included on an Original Jazz Classics double CD called Coleman Hawkins -- On Broadway, none of these songs has had an afterlife in the reissue world.

Which doesn't make them bad songs. and doesn't make this any less of a musically satisfying outing from Hawkins and his musicians. It just means you're not likely to find it anywhere, except for YouTube, which seems to manage to find everything,

When you record ten albums in a year, and over two dozen in what is supposed to be your twilight years, a decade that you are supposed to be at best a footnote to, some of the music is going to get lost in the shuffle, even though it has every right to be heard and appreciated. So it's good to dust this one off, and the rewards are there for the listening.

The album was recorded in two sessions, on March 30 and again on April 3, and I suspect that might have been unintended. The March 30 session ends with a version of  "Maine" that is marked in the session log as "Rejected by Prestige," and the April 3 session begins with "Maine," so something must have happened to make them cut the first session short.

No Strings was the first show for which Rodgers wrote both music and lyrics. Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley and Eddie Locke had appeared on Hawkins's previous Broadway album for Prestige Moodsville, and they were his regular working band during those days. The album, The Jazz Version of No Strings, was a Moodsville release. Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige 542 - Honi Gordon

LISTEN TO ONE: My Kokomo

 This turned out to be the only solo album Honi Gordon ever made. She is categorized, if she is mentioned at all, as one of a number of "one-album wonders," female jazz singers who got that one shot, and then were forgotten, as the Beatles, and the new rock explosion in general, found jazz, and especially jazz vocalists, fading in popularity. Playboy would rename its Jazz Poll the Jazz and Pop Poll (and the Village Voice would mockingly call its music column "Pazz and Jop"). But there's more to her than that.

Her career started as part of a family singing group, The Gordons (her father, two brothers, and her), and if the Gordons never made it quite into public visibility, they were good enough to get the respect of their peers, as evidenced by the company they kept in the recording studio, starting in 1953, when Honi was 15. 

Their 1953 debut was on Debut, the Charles Mingus-Max Roach label. They appear on two tracks, and are described in the liner notes as "Max Roach discoveries," although they, and particularly Honi, would become much more closely associated with Mingus. On the Debut album, they perform with Mingus, Roach, and Hank Jones, and they recorded more than those two tracks ("Bebopper" and "Can You Blame Me"), because three more would eventually appear on record. The Original Jazz Classics CD, Debut Rarities Volume 4, released in 1993, has "You Go to My Head," "You and Me," and "Cupid." All but "You Go to My Head" are credited to George Gordon, and throughout her career, Honi would make a point of featuring her father's songs.

In 1954, the Gordons recorded one tune for Columbia with a group that included Al Cohn, but it appears never to have been released.

In 1956, they appeared on a Lionel Hampton session for Jazztone, a record-of-the-month club that was started by two chemical engineer brothers who were offered 20 tons of vinyl resin at a bargain price, and then had to figure out something to do with it. The session featured Hampton, Oscar Dennard, Oscar Pettiford and Gus Johnson, and their version of "Take the A Train" is highly prized by cognoscenti. They are featured on one cut of a 1957 Dizzy Gillespie-Stuff Smith album for Verve.

Honi then went on her own, working twice with Eddie Jefferson. In 1959 they collaborated on three

tunes, two of which were released on 45 by the Triumph label ("Sherry" and "Body and Soul"), and all three (including "Now's the Time") on a couple of Jefferson reissues. They reunited in 1961, again for Triumph, for four songs with a vocal quartet which also included Babs Gonzales. These appear never to have been released at the time (Triumph had probably already gone under), but have appeared on later Jefferson reissues.

1959 also saw her reunited with Charles Mingus for the Mingus Dynasty album for Columbia, which included a version of "Strollin'," the Mingus/George Gordon collaboration. Mingus was one of the two artists who most enthusiastically championed her career.

1962 was her Prestige year, and after that, instead of aggressively pursuing a solo career, she reunited with her family, perhaps because Mary Lou Williams, the other artist who most appreciated her talent, needed a vocal ensemble for her devotional work, Black Christ of the Andes, recorded in 1963.  She would record with Williams twice more, both times with devotional music: in 1967, for a live performance at Carnegie Hall, and 1972, on Williams's own Mary label. Mingus and Williams are two artists known for their uncompromising commitment to musical excellence, which should tell you something about Honi Gordon.

Further work with Mingus included a live Columbia recording in 1972 (Charles Mingus and Friends in Concert), and Mingus Moves in 1973, on Atlantic.

Then nothing, although she seems to have kept singing. in 2007, she performed with Andy Bey and Geri Allen at a Fordham University tribute to Mary Lou Williams, which suggests that she must have been based around New York.

Of the Prestige album. a present-day reviewer (for Allmusic.com) wrote that Gordon "had an appealing style that was influenced by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, as well as Annie Ross. There were also hints of Chris Connor..." while a contemporary of hers (Sidney Falco, who wrote the liner notes for the album) says the opposite: Gordon is "if you will, original: one cannot point to her work, as it is so easy to do in many cases, and say where such and such a phrase or stylistic trick came from." And perhaps they're both right. The one thing you can say for certain about Gordon's singing is that it sounds like jazz.

Part of the uniqueness of her style (and part of the reason why AllMusic's Alex Henderson compared her to Annie Ross) comes from her choice of material--her father's material, especially. George Gordon was a unique composer--and I use "unique" in its original sense. I don't believe anyone else did what he did. "Vocalese" was in its heyday back then, and it meant the same thing for everyone who practiced, from the innovative work of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure through the complex arrangements of Dave Lambert to the lyric inspiration of Annie Ross -- who wrote the brilliant "Farmer's Market" and the now-classic "Twisted" in one night, after Bob Weinstock had played her "Moody's Mood" and asked if she could do something like that. It meant writing a vocal line to a jazz soloist's improvisation.

But George Gordon did something a little different. You can listen to "My Kokomo" and start digging through your old wax or your new Spotify to find the "Kokomo" and the improvised solo it came from, but to no avail. Gordon wrote the whole thing, words and music. The only exception is "Strollin'," where Gordon put a lyric to Charles Mingus's "Nostalgia in Times Square." George Gordon was a remarkable composer, and Honi Gordon a fitting interpreter (and, except for "Strollin'," her father's only interpreter).

Honi does four of her father's songs on this album: "Strollin'," "My Kokomo," "Love Affair," and "Cupid." She also stretches her range in other directions. There are standards: "Ill Wind" (Harold Arlen Ted Koehler) and "Why Try to Change Me Now" (Cy Coleman, Joseph McCarthy). There's a song by Esmond Edwards, who didn't write all that many -- "Lament of the Lonely." Both of her champions are included: Mingus with "Strollin'," Mary Lou Williams with "Walkin' Out the Door." "Why" was written by Consuela Lee Moorhead, who had something in common with George Gordon. He wrote for his daughter; she contributed music, and a song, to a movie by her nephew, Spike Lee.

Honi Gordon's adventurous spirit is shown in her choice of musicians for the session, the equally adventurous Jaki Byard and Ken McIntyre (later Makanda Ken McIntyre).

Honi Gordon Sings was a Prestige release.

Listening to Prestige 541 - Frank Wess

LISTEN TO ONE: Southern Comfort

 I suspect Frank Wess is best known for his work with Count Basie, but his catalogue encompasses a lot more than that, work with a variety of other musicians and as a leader of his own ensembles. This was his 11th session for Prestige. He had previously recorded with Gene Ammons and with Lem Winchester; he had done three Prestige All Stars sessions, including one with John Coltrane; a Basie alumni session with Joe Newman; and a session with vocalist Etta Jones. He had co-led two remarkable sessions with harpist Dorothy Ashby, and had done a Moodsville session as leader in 1960.

Recording Frank Wess in 1962 is one indication of the eclectic range Prestige was pursuing in these years. The label had embraced the new soul jazz with its organ combos; the new free jazz, or "freedom music" as it was called in those days, with Eric Dolphy; modern takes on the swing era with its Swingville series; the blues with Bluesville; a softer (but still swinging) sound with Moodsville. It had embraced the rhythm and blues side of jazz with King Curtis, Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Sam "the Man" Taylor, and Latin jazz with Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet -- two genres too overlooked. And it was not overlooking the bebop/hard bop music that had come to fruition in the previous decade, and as it continued through more shifts and permutations of jazz expression would come to be known as "straight ahead jazz."

Frank Wess, with his Basie roots and his modern roots, was as straight ahead as they come, and he has a versatile straight-ahead rhythm section behind him, with Prestige veterans Tommy Flanagan, George Duvivier, Osie Johnson and Ray Barreto, and similar versatility from George Barrow, whose baritone (and occasionally tenor) sax would be featured on a number of Prestige albums, and on Oliver Nelson's  The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

New to Prestige is trumpeter Al Aarons, not Detroit-born, but Detroit-bred--a Wayne State graduate, he played with Yusef Lateef and Barry Harris, and had a regular gig at the Flame Show Bar backing up visiting talent from Billie Holiday to Jackie Wilson, before touring with Wild Bill Davis and then joining the Countasie band in 1961, and stayed with the Count for the rest of the decade, and he joined Gene Ammons for one more Prestige session near the end of the label's independent life. Later on he would play jazz fusion with Stanley Clarke and accompany both Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and record an album with B. B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland. He also started his own record label in Los Angeles.

And finally, the session had an arranger. Oliver Nelson. A septet isn't quite a big enough ensemble to require an arranger, but it can't hurt to have one, especially when it's Oliver Nelson.

Just as the Prestige Swingville records, featuring swing stars of the 1930s and 1940s, were not  duplications or rehashes of those earlier decades, so the music of this session, with Nelson's arrangements, does not sound like something that might have been made seven or eight years earlier. It's straight ahead music, but music of its time. Listen to the extended duet by Johnson and Barretto on "Southern Comfort."

Wess plays both flute and tenor sax for this session. Esmond Edwards produced. There are two compositions by Wess ("Gin's Beguine" and "Summer Frost"), two by Nelson ("Southern Comfort" and "Shufflin'"). "Blues for Butterball" is by a lesser known composer, Bob Bryant (he was Vic Damone's musical director), and it's credited as having lyrics by Maine humorist Marshall Dodge, but I haven't been able to find a vocal version. "Butterball" was Oliver Nelson's nickname. "Blue Skies" (Irving Berlin) and "Dancing in the Dark (Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz) are standards.

Listening to Prestige 540: Dizzy Reece

LISTEN TO ONE: Spiritus Parkus

 Dizzy Reece took a long way around to New York and Rudy Van Gelder's studio and the jazz kitchens of Blue Note and Prestige, and the music once known as New York music, later to be given to an unsuspecting and at first unwelcoming world as bebop. By the time that Reece recorded this session for Prestige, other strains of jazz were mixed into his broth, but bebop was always at the center of it.

And it was not exactly his birthrigh at, as it was for his New York and Detroit-born contemporaries. Reece was born and raised in Jamaica. His father was a musician who played piano accompaniment for silent movies. His biographies point out that he took up the trumpet at age 14, switching over from

the baritone saxophone, which is remarkable in itself--a 12 or 13-year old boy would not have been much bigger than than that unwieldy instrument. But the trumpet was where he found himself, and by age 16 he was playing professionally in  a swing band. At 17, in 1948, he was ready to expand his musical horizons. and he set sail -- not for New York, but for London.

His first bookings did not take that far from home musically. On his passage across the Atlantic, he made the acquaintance of a calypso band, also England bound, and since they had gigs lined up in Liverpool, he joined up with them. He did not make it to London until the following year, where he first discovered bebop, and was completely won over by the new music on a trip to Paris and the first International Jazz Festival, where he heard Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

He made his first recordings in London in 1955, and, while still in England in 1958, recorded an album for Blue Note (Donald Byrd played on the session). The following year, with the encouragement of Miles Davis, whom he had met in Paris, he came to New York. He made three more albums for Blue Note before being dropped from the label. He did this one session for Prestige, then pretty much disappeared from the recording scene. He joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1968, and made a few records for small labels in Europe and New York in the 1970s. He remained active, if mostly unacclaimed, into the 21st century, and not only as a musician. He's had exhibitions of his paintings, he's made documentary films. and he told an interviewer in 2019 that he was just putting the finishing touches on a 750-page autobiography.

Asia Minor is solidly grounded in bebop, but it incorporates some of the newer ideas of the jazz

experimentalists of the era, and--as the title suggests--some of the sounds of the Near East and North Africa which were being explored most prominently by Yusef Lateef. All of these influences can be heard on "Spiritus Parkus (Parker's Spirit)," a Cecil Payne composition.

Baritone saxophonist Payne was no stranger to Prestige, having played on a John Coltrane-led Prestige All Stars session, and with Kenny Burrell, Tadd Dameron, Gene Ammons, and mambo jazzer Joe Holiday, in sessions going back to 1953.

Joe Farrell, just 24 when these recordings were made, had recorded with Maynard Ferguson, but was really just embarking on a career that would blossom in subsequent decades, most notably with Chick Corea's Return to Forever. He died young, of myelodysplastic syndrome, in 1986. One his compositions, "Upon This Rock," has been the subject of a series of lawsuits by his daughter against a number of hip-hop artists for unauthorized sampling.

Perhaps Reece's Jamaican background made him particularly conscious of rhythms, a subject that he frequently came back to in interviews -- "Charlie Parker played drums on the saxophone." he told one interviewer, and he prided himself on always working with great rhythm sections, which he certainly has here, with Hank Jones, Ron Carter, and especially Charlie Persip, whose rhythmic inventions go way beyond bebop here. Persip, who worked with swing, bop, and free jazz groups over his long career, was really coming into his own as a distinctive and innovative drummer in these years, as he became one of the most sought-after jazz drummers.

New York proved to be not all that hospitable to Reece. He never quite broke through to major recognition, and his marriage suffered from a resistance to an interracial couple that he had not experienced in England. His wife ultimately left him and took their daughters back home to England. Reece, too, would return to England and Europe for many years, though New York ultimately beckoned him home, mostly to anonymity. When an interviewer found him in 2019, he was greated with, "I'm surprised you didn't think I was dead!"

Asia Minor was a New Jazz release. Jules Colomby produced.

Listening to Prestige 539; Larry Young

LISTEN TO ONE: Groove Street

This was Larry Young's third and last album for Prestige, and his last album in the Jimmy Smith soul jazz genre. There would be a couple of years' hiatus, and then when he resumed recording in late 1964 for Blue Note, he had moved in a different direction for himself, and for jazz organ--a much more Coltrane-influenced sound. 

As such, it's a somewhat overlooked album, and undeservedly. Young may be better known today for his later work. Only 22 when he recorded it, Young had the chops, and he had the soul, and he had the love of making music that comes through loud and clear. He worked on this session with two familiar musicians, guitarist Thornel Schwartz and drummer Jimmie Smith, his cousin, who usually spelled his name with an "ie" to differentiate himself

from the organist. Schwartz, 13 years Young's senior, had begun his recording career with the organist Jimmy Smith on the latter's debut album in 1956, and had made a name for himself as the go-to guitarist for the organ-guitar sound.

New to the Young orbit, and to Prestige, is tenor saxophonist Bill Leslie, who brings an old school rhythm and blues sound to 1960s soul. Yoked with Young and Schwartz, he adds a third distinctive solo sound, making it the kind of record that elicits an "Oh yeah!" with the start of each new solo. 

This session is a stop on the road for Young, similar in style to his earlier Prestige albums. He was about to leave all of that behind--Prestige and soul jazz--so I'll take a little time here to look at Leslie, who doesn't get much attention elsewhere.

Leslie did very little recording. There's this album, and two for Argo (produced by Esmond Edwards). On one he shares co-leader billing with Schwartz, who was his contemporary (Leslie was born in 1925) from Philadelphia--it's likely that Schwartz recommended him for the session with Young. That one is generally billed as a Thornel Schwartz album, and was in fact Schwartz's only album as leader.

The other is Bill Leslie's only album as leader, and his last credited appearance on wax. He was abetted by Schwartz, Tommy Flanagan, Ben Tucker and Art Taylor. The album was called Diggin' the Chicks, and it featured tunes about women, including the Lead Belly classic "Goodnight Irene," and -- surprising and ambitions for a swing-rhythm and blues-soul jazz guy, Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman."

He did a creditable job tackling a challenging tune, but it was not to be a harbinger of things to come.

Unlike Larry Young, Leslie does not seem to have followed the trail blazed by Coleman / Colttane / Dolphy. Reports have him staying home and continuing to play soul jazz in the Newark / Philadelphia axis. He died in 2003.

"Groove Street" was the title tune from Young's album, and also a two-sided 45 RPM single. Another original, "Talkin' About J. C.," showed his growing interest in Coltrane. He would record it again for Blue Note with Grant Green, and Green would also put it on an album. Esmond Edwards produced the session.