Listening to Prestige 562: Coleman Hawkins

LISTEN TO ONE: Cry Like the Wind

The folks at Prestige took the rest of July and half of August off, returning with this Moodsville session.

 When one thinks of the Prestige subsidiary labels of the early 1960s, one is more likely to extol the virtues and the contributions to the library of recorded jazz made by Swingville and Bluesville. But let us not forget Moodsville and its contributions. Mood music? That's generally sort of a putdown, but all music has the power to affect our moods, and as producer Chris Albertson has asserted, the music that was released on Bluesville was held to the same standards as all Prestige albums. 

Coleman Hawkins made recordings for both Swingville and Moodsville, and one can only be grateful for any album made by Coleman Hawkins, still at the top of his form in 1962 and still prolific. In that year he recorded two albums for Verve (both live appearances at New York's Village Gate),  three albums for Impulse!, including the widely celebrated Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, and three albums for Moodsville, all of them Broadway show tunes. 

No problem with that as a unifying theme. Most of the classic songs from the Great American Songbook were written for musical shows, either Broadway or Hollywood. and if by 1962 the greatest era of the Broadway musical was fast fading, it wasn't quite gone yet, and some very good composers were still creating music for the Great White Way. The title song is from a modestly successful musical of two years earlier (the full title of the album is Coleman Hawkins Plays Make Someone Happy from Do Re Mi), which featured music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Betty Comden and

Adolph Green. "Make Someone Happy" was the hit from the show; Hawkins and Co. include a second song from Do Re Mi, perhaps to justify the album title, perhaps because it really is an overlooked gem from a master tunesmith. And when I say overlooked, I mean overlooked--the Hawk's is the only jazz instrumental version of "Cry Like the Wind." June Christie recorded it, and so did Margaret Whiting and Mel Torme, but beyond that, not much of anything. Too bad--it deserves better. But at least we have this one.

A brand new musical, just opened in the spring of 1962, provided another song. The musical was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, music and lyrics by Harold Rome, and if Hawkins and Esmond Edwards were guessing at what might be the hit from the show, they guessed wrong with "Have I Told You Lately?" If anyone else has ever recorded it, I haven't been able to find it. In fact, there weren't really any breakout hits from I Can Get It for You Wholesale, but there was a breakout performer--teenaged Barbra Streisand, in her first Broadway role. 

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying had opened a few months earlier, in late 1961, and "I Believe in You" had established itself as the hit song from the show.

For the rest of the album, they went back to earlier mega-hits--Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music--all good stuff, all wonderfully done here, particularly "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," in which the melody is played by Major Holley on bass.

Holley, Tommy Flanagan and Eddie Locke were Hawkins's regular touring group in these days, and had backed him on the other two Broadway albums for Moodsville.