Listening to Prestige 583: Frank Wess

LISTEN TO ONE: The Long Road

 This album wraps up Frank Wess's run with Prestige--in fact, it was his last recording session as a leader for the rest of the 1960s, although he continued to work steadily, with Count Basie, whom he had joined in the early 1950s and would stay with until 1964, and then with Clark Terry's big band. He brings two Basie bandmates with him, Thad Jones and Buddy Catlett, and they play a brand of jazz that was not the fashionable soul jazz or the disturbing free jazz of the time, but represented a mainstream of jazz that has never failed to find adherents and listeners, drawing on the Kansas City swing of Basie and Lester Young

and Coleman Hawkins, but even more on the modern sounds that were being explored by Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. So while these Basie stalwarts bring a lot of Basie with them, they aren't just playing small group interpretations of Basie arrangements. There's a little of that in their music, but more of it is the classic jazz dynamic, head-solo-solo, that people come out to clubs to hear, to sit in close proximity to the musicians and get an intimate glimpse into their voices and personalities, to be present at the creation of improvisational ideas and the immediacy of musicians inspiring each other, as a master jazz player takes an idea, explores it, and hands it off to the next player to continue the exploration.

You get all of that throughout this session, but to particularly good advantage on "The Long Road," one of three Wess compositions (the other two are "Yo-Ho" and "Cold Miner"), where all five musicians have their chances to shine. Wess plays tenor on "The Long Road," flute on much of the rest of the album. Jones contributes one tune, "The Lizard."

The album was somewhat clunkily titled Yo-Ho! Frank Wess, Poor You, Little Me. A 45 RPM single release featured "Little Me," by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the title song from the popular Broadway musical of the time, with Wess's "Cold Miner" on the flip. Ozzie Cadena produced.