Listening to Prestige 566: Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: Cae, Cae

Gene Ammons jumps on the bossa nova bandwagon, which may sound like a putdown but is not, because any wagon Ammons jumps on is a cause for celebration, especially if you're following the progression of Prestige recordings and putting yourself back into 1962, in which case, you've been listening with the dark foreboding awareness that each session is drawing him closer to cruel incarceration for drug possession, and seven years in prison for a sickness, not a crime. And we have now reached that point. This would be his final recording session for seven years.

And if you're starting to feel that Ammons' swan song was a gimmicky commercial album, don't. The bossa nova is not a bad bandwagon to be on. The Brazilian samba provides a great framework for jazz improvisation, and no one went into Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with one of Prestige's producers, to make anything less than a real jazz album.

Don't forget, also, that secret to Ammons' enduring critical and popular success was twofold: the serious jazz community loved him because he was a real musician's musician, and the public loved him because he played music that people loved to listen to. So if the public wanted the bossa nova, Ammons would have had no problem giving them--in the company of some stellar musicians--the bossa nova.

This is pretty much a new crowd. Hank Jones and Oliver Jackson, no strangers to Prestige, are matched with Ammons for the first time. Kenny Burrell, even less of a stranger, made one Ammons session back in 1957. 

Bucky Pizzarelli is new to Prestige with this session, and he would hang around for a few more during the decade. At the time of this recording he was a still relatively obscure, though respected, session guitarist, often called upon for recordings across a range of genres. When you move away from jazz, musicians on a session are frequently uncredited, so it's impossible to even come close to listing his credits. He worked with Benny Goodman, and was part of Johnny Carson's Tonight show orchestra. In 1972, when Carson left for the west coast, Pizzarelli elected to stay behind, and his reputation blossomed. Performing solo or duet in New York clubs, he started garnering rave reviews, and began to be in even more demand. Around 1980, he started playing regular duets with his son John.

The session was produced by Ozzie Cadena, who had just taken over for the departing Esmond Edwards as head of A&R for Prestige, having filled the same role at Savoy. Between Cadena and Ammons, they came up with an interesting selection of tunes for the bossa nova treatment--I'd guess mostly Cadena, because Ammons, severely heroin-addicted, overworked to pay for his habit, and headed for a lengthy prison sentence, was not likely to be reaching so far out of the jazzman's standard repertoire. 

The result is a very different route from Dave Pike's exploration of the work of one contemporary composer. There's one Ammons original ("Molto Mato Grosso"), but the rest are a curious and

fascinating collection--and with the Ammons touch, they all fit together.

"Pagan Love Song" was written in 1929 by Hollywood tunesmiths Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed for a silent film, The Pagan, starring Ramon Navarro. It later became the title song for a 1950 film with Esther Williams and Howard Keel. It became something of a staple for pop singers and exotic ethnic bands (The Hawaiian Islanders), but did not much make it over to the jazz repertoire.

Anna was a 1951 Italian film starring Silvana Mangano. Its title song, also known as "El Negro Zumbon," was written by Armando Trovajoli, a well-known composer, under the pseudonym R. Vatro. The movie was released in the US in 1953, and the song--although written by an Italian, with lyrics in Spanish by another Italian, Francisco Giordano-- is credited by some as igniting the first spark of interest in Brazilian rhythms. It was covered by Tito Puente with Abbe Lane, and by Xavier Cugat. It may have been brought to this session by Pizzarelli, as it had been recorded a year earlier by his frequent guitar partner George Barnes.

"Ca' Purange (Jungle Soul)" was composed by Natalicio Moreira Lima. He and his brother, performing as a duo, had been popular in Latin America since the early 1940s. As Los Indios Tabarajos, they would finally find success in the US and worldwide in the mid-1960s, with a gold record for 1963's "Maria Elena."

"Cae, Cae" was probably known to Cadena from Carmen Miranda's rendition of it in 1941's That Night in Rio, but the song had already been a hit in Brazil. Its composer, Roberto Martins, was (according to biographer Alvaro Neder on the Allmusic web site), "the composer of several classics of the Golden Age of the Brazilian song, recorded by many of the best interpreters of the period"--the period being the 1930s. "Cae, Cae," written for the 1940 carnival in Rio, "having been included in 12 foreign films, [became] an all-time carnival classic, even if it only achieved third place in the annual municipal contest of that year." It hasn't really caught on with recording artists, which is surprising, since it's hard to imagine a catchier tune.

"Yellow Bird" is of an earlier vintage altogether--a 19th-century poem, "Choucoune," by Haitian Oswald Durand, set to music in 18923 by Haitian composer by Michel Mauléart Monton. Katharine Dunham recorded it in 1946, and folk trio The Tarriers (featuring Alan Arkin) sang it in a 1957 movie, Calypso Heat Wave. They sang the original French lyric, but in the same year, Hollywood songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman put English lyrics to the melody. As "Yellow Bird," and rebranded as a calypso, it would have a new life, most successfully for Arthur Lyman on the newly invented Billboard Easy Listening charts in 1961. Ammons and co. make it something more than Easy Listening.

Bad! Bossa Nova was a Prestige release. It would be rereleased as Jungle Soul! and later as Jungle Soul, without the exclamation point. There were four 45 RPM singles. "Pagan Love Song" and "Anna" were on one of them. The others were all two-sided: "Ca' Purange" Parts 1 and 2, "Molto Mato Grosso" Parts 1 and 2, and "Jungle Soul" (which was, of course,  deja vu all over again on "Ca' Purange") Parts 1 and 2.

And after this, silence for seven years. That wound is still raw.