Listening to Prestige 596: Booker Ervin

LISTEN TO ONE: Mooche Mooche

 For as long as there has been small group jazz, there have been artists rebelling against its strictures--the "formula" of head-solo-solo-solo-head. Well, it's not a formula, any more than the sonnet or the ballad or the three-act play is a formula. It's a form, and forms persist because they work. They can also be broken, rebelled against, turned inside out, but in a sense that's just a tribute to their durability.

Of course, the reason why the small group, head-solo-solo-solo-head formula works is twofold. First, it works because American music is full of great melodies and great riffs that are a pleasure to play and a pleasure to listen to, and pleasure is at the

heart of all music that lasts. Second, and most important, it works because it gives wonderful musicians a chance to express themselves -- a showcase to be heard in a supportive context, and space to express themselves through tonal quality and improvisational inspiration.

One such wonderful musician who flowered in the 1960s was Booker Ervin. Ervin had burst onto the scene in 1958 in the ensemble of Charles Mingus, with whom he enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship. He had recorded with Mal Waldron and Roy Haynes for Prestige, and with Horace Parlan for Blue Note, and had made three records as leader (for Bethlehem, Savoy and Candid), so he was hardly an unknown quantity when came to Englewood Cliffs for this session, but it was the beginning of his most fertile period, with ten albums for Prestige. 

Prestige in this period was open to a wide range of music, from the free experiments of Eric Dolphy to the soul fundamentalism of Jack McDuff, and the tradition-maintaining sounds of Swingville and Bluesville, but Ervin came perhaps as close as any to the jazz heart of this label. Working with like-minded musicians, he used this premiere performance of his Prestige years to add a new sound to the library of small group masterpieces.

Frank Strozier had the admiration of his peers. Here's tuba virtuoso Howard Johnson:

No one was ever really up to the task of playing with that much technical proficiency, deep harmonic expression and all the while keeping a foot deeply in the blues. For me, Frank is joined by Harry Carney, Benny Golson, Sonny Red and Paul Gonsalves in the league of players who were never imitated because their way was too hard to figure out, much less execute. And at the same time they were as deeply inspirational as some of the widely acknowledged innovators.

He recorded with a wide variety of musicians, but never quite broke through to the level of popularity he deserved. Finally, in the late 1980s, he gave up playing the saxophone and returned to his first instrument, the piano. He never recorded on the piano, but his concerts were well reviewed and appreciated by those who heard them. Then he left music to become a math and science teacher.

Horace Parlan was also a Mingus associate. It was he who first heard Ervin when he came to New York, and recommended him to Mingus, and Ervin played on two records Parlan made as leader for Blue Note. His unique piano style, marked by heavy emphasis on the left hand, was formed by a childhood bout with polio which robbed him of the use of three fingers on his right hand.

I've written about Butch Warren on his one previous Prestige gig, with Walter Bishop Jr. He was much in demand during the early 1960s, but substance abuse and mental health issues caught up with him, and he left the rat race of big time jazz and returned to his home in Washington, DC, where he played but little. 

Walter Perkins began his career in Chicago with Ahmad Jamal, and as leader of his own ensemble MJT+3, which included Frank Strozier. He came to New York in 1962, and immediately became ubiquitous, with several sessions for Prestige alone before signing on for this gig. They included Gene Ammons, Etta Jones, fellow Chicagoan John Wright, and Dave Pike.

I said earlier that the basic small group jazz form has endured because of good musicians and good music. That's in evidence here. Broadway was still yielding up tunes with the feel of standards, such as Jule Styne's "Just in Time," from Broadway (1956) and Hollywood (1960) hit Bells Are Ringing. Fats Waller was the source for "Black and Blue." The others were originals from either Ervin ("Mooche Mooche" and "Tune In") or Perkins ("Mour," which Ervin liked enough to record again for Blue Note), or the two of them together ("No Man's Land"). All good stuff, but I've chosen "Mooche Mooche" as our "Listen to One" for sustained excitement and top notch solos from all concerned.

Exultation! was the title of the Prestige album. Short versions of "Just in Time" and "No Man's Land" were issued as a 45 RPM single, and later added to a 1971 re-release. Don Schlitten produced.

Listening to Prestige 595: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

LISTEN TO ONE: Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi

 Ahmed Abdul-Malik moved out of the mainstream and into a stream of his own. At a time when Coleman, Coltrane, Dolphy and others were redefining the mainstream, he was not following their lead, either, although he had played with Coltrane. 

Critics didn't always know what to call his music--which was, like the music of Yusef Lateef, strongly influenced by Middle Eastern music and by his Islamic belief. Even supporters like Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the liner notes for the album, refer to his "Oriental" music, while correctly noting that Abdul-Malik goes his own way:

Thus he has sometimes had to suffer the criticisms of self-styled musicologists on the one hand, and narrow-minded jazz musicians on the other. "These people would say that I was playing things out of place, and that I couldn't discipline myself."

Perhaps these criticisms are part of the reason why Abdul-Malik's recording career was so short. He had essentially stopped recording after 1964, except for a 1973 appearance on a Randy Weston session, where played the oud and took the part of "narrator."

But seen from a distance, Abdul-Malik's music is very much a part of a broader mainstream that has come to encompass world music. It now needs only to be judged as music; and as music, and as jazz, it holds up  very well. 

Morgenstern quotes Abdul-Malik on his attitude toward music:

When I'm playing with a group, my first concern is to blend with it. The objective is to have an open mind -- to try to understand how others feel about music.

Which is interesting in that in his recordings as leader, he is so clearly the leader, creating his own

sound and his own direction. His most constant collaborator is Bilal Abdurrahman, who did not have much of a recording or touring career outside of his work with Abdul-Malik, although he was to have quite a respected career as an educator. But-- again in conversation with Morgenstern, for the liner notes, he talks about wanting to record an album with stride pianist Dick Wellstood, and if that sounds totally fanciful and unlikely, it actually isn't. While they never recorded an album of their own music (whatever that would have been) together, they did play a number of club dates together, and they were part of a band that backed up Odetta on her Odetta Sings the Blues album.

This is a trio session, very much Abdul-Malik's music, and very much, and constantly interesting. The three of them take different roles on different works. Abdul-Malik, who made his mark in jazz as a bassist with enough flexibility to fit in with both Coltrane and Odetta (he's been on Prestige sessions with Walt Dickerson and Dave Pike), also became, as his fascination with Middle Eastern and world music increased, a virtuoso on the oud, an Arabic stringed instrument which is something like a lute, but can also be played as something like a stiar. Aburrahman was adept at a variety of wind instruments, both Western and Eastern; here, he also plays percussion as needed. William Henry Allen was best known for his work with Mongo Santamaria and Roy Ayers. Here he plays bass on the tracks where Abdul-Malik plays oud, and percussion on the other tracks.

The session included four Abdul-Malik compositions and one standard, George Gershwin's "Summertime." Abdul-Malik plays the bass on this one, with Abdurrahman on clarinet and reed flute, and Allen handling the percussion. Abdul-Malik switches to the oud for much of the Middle Eastern-flavored pieces, including "Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi," which really qualifies as world music long before the term was coined. "Sa-Ra-Ga" is more or less the Hindi equivalent of "Do-Re-Mi," the names for notes in sur, the Hindustani classical scale of seven notes--the syllables all corresponding to the names of Hindu deities. Abdul-Malik uses the sur scale, and uses the oud in much the way a raga uses the sitar.

I've chosen "Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi" for my "Listen to One," because it's so interesting cross-culturally as well as musically, but the whole album is worth some serious listening time. It's a shame that Abdul-Malik recorded so little, because he had so much to offer. And to me, for all its diverse influences, this is very definitely a jazz album, and every cut shows that.

The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik was a Prestige release. There appears to have been a New Jazz catalog number assigned to it as well, but it was never released on New Jazz. It doesn't appear to have ever been re-released on CD, under the Original Jazz Classics imprint or anywhere else, which is a damn shame bordering on criminal. Ozzie Cadena produced.

 

Listening to Prestige 594: Brother Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Rock Candy

 This is a big deal in the Brother Jack McDuff story and the Prestige story: the debut of a young man who will be one of the biggest jazz stars of the rest of the century, and on into the next millennium. George Benson would record several Prestige albums with McDuff, and one under his own leadership. before venturing on to stratospheric fame (there aren't many jazz players who have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame).

Benson started out as a child prodigy on the ukulele in his native Pittsburgh, taught by his father, although when he switched to guitar, his father let him go his own way--because, as Benson remembers it, his father thought the guitar began

and ended with Charlie Christian. It wasn't until years later that his father finally agreed to listen to him, and Dad had to agree that Charlie Christian had a rival.

Benson played mainly rhythm and blues in local clubs around Pittsburgh, though he did get nudged into more modern sounds when a certain musician used to come to town courting a woman. Stevie Wonder eventually married the girl, but on his trips to town, he would occasionally come and sit in with George. As Benson recalls it, his audiences refused to believe it was really Stevie Wonder, because what would he be doing in a dinky club in Pittsburgh sitting in with a kid guitarist?

It was another established musician who took him out of Pittsburgh, and brought his musicianship to another level. Benson was 19 when Jack McDuff brought him into his band, and he had a lot to learn. He recalled in an interview,

I had just started playing chord changes or jazz tunes, and I didn’t know very much about what was happening. He would have me play lines in unison or harmony with the saxophone player, and they would be at ridiculous tempos. And by the fact that the saxophone player did them, I didn’t question the fact that they could be done. I decided it was just my ability at fault; I’d go home and practise them, play them sideways, until I came up with a way to play these tunes that I didn’t even understand. And eventually I began to fit into his repertoire, and became a valuable member of the group;

It wasn't always easy. McDuff and his longtime drummer Joe Dukes were solid professionals, and very exacting. They would let him have it with both barrels if he didn't measure up, and with no shortage of obscenities.

Finally, after a particularly nasty rant, I snapped: "If y’all don’t lay off, I’m gonna take y’all outside and beat y’all old men up! I’m nineteen years old! Y’all can’t take me! We’re going out in the alley, right now!" McDuff and Dukes just stared at me for a second, then they both pulled out switchblades. But that didn’t stop me: “I don’t care! Y’all don’t scare me! Bring your switchblades into the alley! I’ll beat y’all up anyhow!” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed: nobody went into the alley, and nobody got beaten up. But it got them off my back.

By the time they got to the Front Room in Newark in June of 1963, Benson had learned a thing or two.

This is one of those rarities--a Prestige live album. In engineering it, they play up the live aspect, with spoken introductions to the tunes, ad libs and a lot of crowd noise. It was a good choice for a live album, as it turned out, though Bob Weinstock and the Prestige team couldn't have predicted just how good at the time. The recording gives you that "present at the creation" feeling when Benson launches into his solo on "Rock Candy," the first tune of the set. There's even a false ending, as McDuff appears to wrap up the tune, followed by a moment of silence, followed by Benson ripping into it, and one can

even imagine oneself at the Front Room in Newark, suddenly looking up and saying "Who is this guy?"

"Rock Candy" would become a staple of McDuff's live sets. He would record it again in 1996 with Joey DiFrancesco, and Benson would record it with his own group in 2006.

The crowd at the Front Room got their money's worth on this night, as the group pulled out all the stops. Well, McDuff didn't pull out all the stops on Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So," although he gives a bravura performance, restricting the organ to its percussive possibilities, while Benson and Holloway take care of the melodic parts.

McDuff never forgot he was a jazzman, but he also never forgot he was an entertainer--a good lesson for the young guitarist. He always included familiar songs with catchy melodies that people would like -- such as "Whistle While You Work," the dwarves' song from Walt Disney's Snow White, with drum work by Joe Dukes that makes one understand why Benson described him as "such a magnificent drummer that there were times I thought he was one of the greatest things that ever happened to mankind."

And "Undecided," a tune written by Charlie Shavers, who was torn between two poetic and evocative titles for his new composition, so he sent it off to his publishers marked "Undecided" -- title yet to come. They, however, misunderstood, thought that "Undecided" was the title, and sent it off to lyricist Sid Robin. The point of no return was reached for the song when Ella Fitzgerald recorded the lyric, and as "Undecided" it became a huge hit for the Ames Brothers in 1951.

McDuff's own compositions are always riff-based and accessible, and one of them, "Sanctified Samba," is an excellent object lesson in something else Brother Jack told the young guitarist:

I learned the blues from my former boss Brother Jack McDuff. He kept stressing, “Man, put some blues in that stuff, man.” I said, “Wait a minute, man, it’s not a blues song.” He said, “I don’t care! Put some blues in it.” I asked him why he liked the blues so much, and he told me that no matter where you are in the world – you could be in America or in China – if you play blues, they understand it.

So that’s why it’s so valuable to me. I’ve experimented with that philosophy over the years and have found that he’s correct. People like the blues no matter where you are all over the world. So it became something that I decided should be a part of everything I did. The blues is like street music. It’s like the language of the street.

This album is a riveting introduction to a budding superstar, but it's also a tight ensemble album, held together by the always masterful Dukes and featuring stellar playing by Red Holloway.

Production was handled by Lew Futterman, a recent Cornell graduate making his producing debut. He would go on to achieve success as an independent jazz producer, and greater success as a rock producer, and mega-success, ultimately, as a real estate developer, thus answering the question, "How can I make millions of dollars producing jazz?"

Brother Jack McDuff--Live! was the title of the Prestige album, with a few cuts not making it. The alternate version of "Undecided" was held off for 1967's Hallelujah Time!, and "Love Walked In" and "The Midnight Sun" appeared on The Midnight Sun, in the same year.  The session threw off its share of 45 RPM singles -- first "A Real Good 'Un" / "Rock Candy," then "Sanctified Samba" / "Whistle While You Work." A few years later, in 1967, "Rock Candy" would be the A side of a 45, with "Grease Monkey," from a different session. The singles are one indication of McDuff's huge popularity at the time; the number of times Prestige brought him back into the studio is another. But, as the song says, fame if you win it comes and goes in a minute. In recent interviews, greying superstar George Benson has had to explain that Jack McDuff was an organist who gave him his first start.

Listening to Prestige 593: Lightnin' Hopkins

LISTEN TO ONE: Stranger Here

 Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins recorded any time, anywhere, with any musicians, for any label, and for that matter, under any name. Throw in all the nom de session recordings, and the total is anyone's guess, but he may well have been the most recorded of all blues singers. His last time out for Prestige, he was recorded in Texas with local musicians, some of them his road band at the time, and produced by folklorist Mack McCormick. This time he's in New York -- Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to be precise -- with Rudy Van Gelder manning the controls, Ozzie Cadena producing, and two first rate jazzmen, Leonard Gaskin and Herbie Lovelle, backing him up.

Both were versatile musicians, at home in a variety of styles. Closest to Gaskin's heart was probably trad jazz, and Lovelle possibly rhythm and blues, but both had played across the board (they'd played together once before, on Gaskin's Prestige All Stars outing). Hopkins's last session had featured Texas drummer Spider Kilpatrick, who was praised in the liner notes to an Arhoolie album:

Finally here was a musician who could follow Hopkins wherever he went, plus one providing a snappier beat that the guitarist could hang phrases of a bit more aggressive nature than usual on.

That was not going to be the case with Gaskin and Lovelle. The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings describes their accompaniment thus:

they are propulsive rather than responsive and never allow the music to drag.

Either way, it's still Lightnin' Hopkins: clever, wry, passionate, deep in the tradition, and an inexhaustible source of material, much of it made up on the spot, all of it deeply personal, and yet touching on universal themes.

Hopkins, of course, recorded so prolifically that listening to everything he ever recorded would be a Herculean labor. But just listening to the Bluesville recordings reveals a lot. The musical standards of jazz are exacting in the extreme. The cutting sessions in Kansas City speakeasies, at Minton's Playhouse, were designed to weed out all but the most technically adept. The story of a young Charlie Parker being forced off a Kansas City bandstand by Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at him is one of jazz's most enduring legends. So it's understandable that a jazz critic, praising the work of Gaskin and Lovelle, would comment on their ability to "follow his ramshackle, instinctual sense of rhythm quite dexterously, giving Hopkins' skeletal guitar playing some muscle." Hopkins's guitar playing had plenty of muscle, as the instrumentals on this session and the previous Houston session show. More to the point, Hopkins's professionalism is shown in his ability to adapt to the seat-of-the-pants accompaniment of his Texas cronies and the exacting standards of New York jazzmen. 

Naturally, pros like Gaskin and Lovelle are going to set the tempo, "propulsive rather than responsive" in the Penguin Guide's wonderfully descriptive phrase. As Elvin Jones put it, 

The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer.

But like the conductor, the drummer is there to serve the music, and the soloist. If you want Lightnin', it's wonderful to hear him in two such different settings. But essentially, if you want Lightnin', you get Lightnin'.

Goin' Away was a Bluesville release, and the two 45 RPM singles that came out of the session were also on Bluesville: "Business You're Doin'" / "Wake Up Old Lady" and "Goin' Away" / "You Better Stop Her." Jazzdisco, my main discographical source, began with its 1963 listings to include release dates, so I know that both the singles were released in 1963, and apparently quite close together: their serial numbers are Bluesville 45-823 and -824. 

 

Listening to Prestige 592: Shirley Scott

LISTEN TO ONE: Out of It

 Shirley Scott gives us all we've come to expect from her, in a solid package. Original tunes, solid renditions of standards, Familiar cohorts. Major Holley played on her has album with Stanley Turrentine, and Roy Brooks has become her g0-to drummer, a fixture on her last three albums, and Horace Silver's regular drummer from 1959-64.

Scott, as always, gets all there is out of an organ, including some church licks on "Out of It." There's a reason why Prestige kept bringing her back to the studio--and they weren't the only ones. During 1963, she also recorded for Blue Note (with husband Stanley Turrentine) and for Impulse! She always delivered.

Ozzie Cadena produced, and the album was called Drag 'em Out. "Out of It" and "The Second Time Around" (written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen for a 1960 Bing Crosby movie) were the 45 RPM single.