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.