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.