Listening to Prestige 549: John Wright

LISTEN TO ONE: Blue Prelude

 This was John Wright's last album for Prestige, before retreating back to Chicago and the inside of a bottle, finally emerging from that trap to become a legendary figure in that neighborhood which he had apotheosized with his first album, South Side Soul, and in doing so he had created a persona that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was Mr. South Side Soul, and a beloved figure on the South Side of Chicago.

Musical Chicago is probably most associated in the public mind with the guitar and harmonica-based blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy,  But the piano had its place in Chicago blues, too, with performers

like Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, Big Maceo Meriwether, and Otis Spann. One of the chief architects of the Chicago blues sound was Willie Dixon, and he got his start playing the bass in a jazz trio led by Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston, a pianist in the Nat "King" Cole style that was so popular in the early 1940s. 

The piano jazz faces of Chicago in the modern era were Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis, and John Wright could well have made them a triumvirate, but for the alcoholism that took so many years from him. Even so, though he never broke out to national recognition like the other two, Chicago knew him, and his Wright Gatherings became a local musical tradition.

Like Jamal and Lewis and Caston, the piano trio was his favored lineup, and for this album, in addition to Prestige regular Wendell Marshall, who had worked with before, he used drummer Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, a Chicagoan who had gotten his start with Jamal.

The album features four Wright compositions and one by Esmond Edwards, whose compositional

contributions were extremely rare on the many records he produced, for Prestige and elsewhere.  The other three are by composers not close to the center of modern jazz, although "What's New?" by trad jazz stalwart Bob Haggart has become a much-loved standard for a wide range of jazz performers down to the present day. "Our Waltz" is by David Rose and "Blue Prelude" is by Gordon Jenkins, both pop music orchestra leaders. "Our Waltz" is not completely unknown to the world of jazz musicians always with open ears to a good melody with improvisational possibilities: both Gary Burton and Rahsaan Roland Kirk recorded it in the early 1960s. "Blue Prelude" has a little something for everyone. In addition to the many pop singers and

orchestras that have recorded it, it's been country (Bob Wills, David Houston), rhythm and blues (Sam "the Man" Taylor), and Latin (Candido, Jack Costanzo). Outside of Wright, the closest it's come to a modern jazz interpretation is George Shearing, who recorded it twice, once as an instrumental and once with Peggy Lee. Wright finds good things to explore in it, taking it somewhat more percussively and explosively than it's used to being taken--and, in fact, it became the 45 RPM single release from the session, along with his own composition "Strut." 

Edwards produced, and the Prestige release was entitled Mr. Soul.