Listening to Prestige 600: Gildo Mahones

LISTEN TO ONE: Water Blues Fall

 Gildo Mahones would certainly vie for the dubious distinction of being the most overlooked of the great bebop pioneers, but he was there, and making his mark. In 1949, which was a little after the legendary jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse which birthed bebop, but at a time when Minton's sessions were still a vital creative force in the jazz world, Mahones became the pianist in the club's house trio, joining Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke. 

It was heady company for a 20-year-old, providing the accompaniment for whoever got up on the stand, from the veteran lords of jazz like Charlie

Parker and Coleman Hawkins to rising stars like Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. It was "fast company, and I was trying to get it together," Mahones recalled in a 2013 interview with Berkeleyside, a Bay Area alternative newspaper:

I was learning something new every day. They’d start calling songs I’d never heard of and I’d go home every night and woodshed.

That's how jazz masters are made, and Mahones absorbed the lesson well. That trio, in addition to providing the underpinning for the after hours jam sessions, also formed part of a sextet in their upstairs room with Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, and Jesse Drakes.

By the time, nearly a decade and a half later, that he became one of the Prestige regulars, he had compiled a resume that any musician would be proud of, even if he never got the name recognition to go with it. He had worked with Joe Morris's rhythm and blues ensemble. Drakes, who worked a lot with Lester Young, brought Mahones into Young's group. He recalled, in an interview for the liner notes to I'm Shooting High:

Working from 1953 to 1957 with Lester was like going to school every night. It was really wonderful. At that time the group consisted of Lester Young, Jesse Drakes, Connie Kay and John Ore.

Working with Les Jazz Modes (Julius Watkins and Charlie Rouse) followed. It was a new sounding group trying something quite different and was not publicly accepted at the time. Maybe it could stand a better chance at the present time. After a few years with the Modes, I did a short stretch with Benny Green. It was on this job that I met Ike Isaacs and it was through Ike that I met Lambert, Hendricks and Ross who I have been working with since that time.

Lester Young took some getting used to. In his Berkeleyside interview, Mahones recalled:

He’d start calling songs, but he had a different title for every song. I didn’t know what he was talking with. Connie Kay had to translate.

Mahones made his Prestige debut in December 1962 with Ted Curson, and also worked with Willis Jackson, Frank Wess, Jimmy Witherspoon and Pony Poindexter. He had made a brief debut as a leader back in February of 1963, a brief session with Larry Young, George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, all of whom had been booked for an Etta Jones date which featured a different piano player. Perhaps Mahones was in the studio that day for some other reason, and they wrapped up the Jones session early and decided to give him a shot. Who knows, at this late date? Anyway, they cut three tunes, one of which was never released. The other two ended up on the album which resulted from these next two sessions, both also short, one in August and the other in September. Two of the August songs were discarded, although one eventually made it onto a Kenny Burrell reissue on Original Classics.

The tunes are mostly standards, with two Mahones originals. "Standards" in 1963 still mostly meant the tunes that have come to be identified as the Great American Songbook, with some songs from more recent Broadway musicals thrown in. The new songwriters who were to shape popular music so significantly in the 1960s had mostly not come onto the radar of the jazz community, but Mahones includes a number by Gerry Goffin and Carole King ("Hey Girl"). His "Stormy Monday Blues" is not the familiar one written by T-Bone Walker, but a completely different song written by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, originally recorded by Hines in 1942, and later, in 1959, by Eckstine with Count Basie. The lyrics to Eckstine's version don't actually mention stormy Monday at all. 

George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, Etta Jones's rhythm section who stayed on to work with Mahones and Larry Young for the February 4 session, are back with him for both the August and September sessions. Kenny Burrell and Leo Wright were there on August 15, but since two of their tunes were not included, and they were not included on "Hey Girl," which featured a vocal, they are really only on one track, "Tales of Brooklyn," making this essentially a trio album. "Hey Girl" is sung by newcomer Ozzie Beck, for whom I can find no other recording credits.

I'm Shooting High was to be Mahones' debut album, apparently on New Jazz, but this was around the time that Bob Weinstock folded New Jazz. The album was released in 1964 on Prestige's short-lived 16000 series, and this may have been a sort of afterthought, because by then a new album, The Great Gildo, was in the works, and when it was released as a double album, five songs from I'm Shooting High were also put on The Great Gildo. So whether much of anyone actually heard I'm Shooting High seems an open question.

"Hey Girl" was released as a 45 RPM single, along with "Bali Ha'i" from a later session.

Ozzie Cadena produced all the sessions.

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Listening to Prestige 599: Jimmy Witherspoon

LISTEN TO ONE: Don't Let Go

Jimmy Witherspoon's first Prestige album was recorded partly in Englewood Cliffs with Ozzie Cadena producing, partly on the West Coast, which was his home base. This session, though released by Prestige. was entirely recorded on the West Coast. with an interesting collection of musicians.

Heading that list would have to be T-Bone Walker, the Texas-born, California-based musician who is credited, along with Charlie Christian, with being one of the first musicians to perform on the electric guitar. 

It's digressing a bit from music, but here's one of my favorite T-Bone Walker stories, as told by him to his biographer Helen Oakley Dance. Walker grew up in Texas, and as young boy, living in the slums of West Dallas, his best friend was a little white boy, also a slum kid. They were inseparable, according to Walker. like brothers, in and out of each other's houses. Walker eventually took his guitar, moved to California, and became famous as a blues singer, pioneer of the electric guitar, and composer of the blues classic "Stormy Monday." His friend stayed in the southwest, became proficient on another instrument, and is known for a phrase almost as famous as "They call it stormy Monday" -- "we rob banks."  

His friend was Clyde Barrow.

More to the point, Walker is one of the most influential guitarists ever, with virtually every important electric blues guitarist crediting him as their chief influence.

Clifford Scott is another Texan, who worked with a number of jazz and R&B bandleaders, including Lionel Hampton, Roy Milton and Ray Charles, but is best known for his many years with Bill Doggett. He played the saxophone solo on "Honky Tonk."

The others are less well known, although bassist Clarence Jones recorded with Hampton Hawes, but all of them combine to give Witherspoon one of his bluesiest settings.

The result is a highly satisfying outing through a bunch of Witherspoon originals and some blues and R&B standards. Among the former, although it ought to be among the latter, is "How Long Blues," credited here to Witherspoon, but it's the classic Leroy Carr song, itself a reworking of Ida Cox's "How Long, Daddy, How Long." It's a song Witherspoon had first recorded in 1949. This version of it features a powerful solo by Walker.

One of the liveliest songs from the session is Jesse Stone's "Don't Let Go." Originally recorded by Roy Hamilton, it's become a standard, with versions from the Western swing of Asleep at the Wheel to the soul of Isaac Hayes. At the other end of the emotional pendulum is the title track, written by Witherspoon.

Witherspoon, whose next Prestige albums would be recorded in the east at Rudy Van Gelder's studio with Ozzie Cadena producing, is here in the hands of David Axelrod, a man of varied accomplishments. He was the longtime producer of Cannonball Adderley and Lou Rawls for Capitol, but he also produced the soundtrack for Beach Blanket Bingo and several albums for actor David McCallum. As a composer/conductor, he produced two albums of songs based on William Blake's poetry, and a rock version of Handel's Messiah.

"Evenin'" and "Money's Getting Cheaper" were released as a 45 RPM single, and Evenin' Blues became the title of the album. Since the session was recorded out on the West Coast, there were more alternate takes kept, and four of them -- "Don't Let Go," "I've Been Treated Wrong," "Evenin'" and "Cane River" were added as bonus tracks on the Original Blues Classics CD reissue. "Money's Gettin' Cheaper" and "Evenin'" were the 45 RPM single release.

Listening to Prestige 598: Dave Van Ronk

LISTEN TO ONE: Cake Walkin' Babies 
from Home

 Dave Van Ronk was the keeper of the flame of traditional American music, playing and singing songs from the tradition even as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Ian Tyson and others made the singer-songwriter the new face of the American folk scene. Van Ronk's gravelly voice, his passion, his encyclopedic knowledge of songs. and his support for the music, the musicians that made it, and the clubs that featured it made him a mainstay of New York's folk music world, to the extent that he became familiarly known as "the Mayor of MacDougal Street."

Van Ronk's first love had been traditional jazz, and he started off playing the tenor banjo and banjola (banjo neck, mandolin body) around New York. But

there was not much call for a young jazz banjo player in the Mecca of bebop. Traditional jazz still existed in clubs like Nick's and Jimmy Ryan's, Eddie Condon's and the Metropole, but they showcased the great veterans of the jazz wars, and there wasn't much chance for a young New York kid who "wanted to play traditional jazz in the worst way...and did!" But while digging around in the bins of stores like the Record Haven on 6th Avenue for traditional jazz 78s he started finding blues records by performers like Furry Lewis, and a new world started to open up for him. New stores like Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street gave him access to a whole new world of records, and Harry Smith's six-album Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways gave him, and other young folk enthusiasts of his era, a wide open window into that world. 

Van Ronk soon found himself recording for Folkways, and becoming an important figure in the blossoming folk revival, but he never forgot his first love, and the Prestige Folklore imprint gave him a chance to pay tribute to it.

The Red Onion Jazz Band was one of those groups of scrappy revivalists that formed in the 1950s, wanting to play oldtime jazz in the worst way, and staying with it long enough that they learned how to play it in a pretty good way. The band stayed together and played together well into the new millenium.

The session was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's cathedral of jazz sound in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and it's a tribute to Van Gelder's genius that he captures the ragged-but-right, 78 RPM ambience of the Onions and Van Ronk. The band only plays on about half the cuts, the others being given over to Van Ronk's customary acoustic blues style.

The album, called In the Tradition, was released on Prestige's Folklore line rather than its Swingville line, which was probably appropriate. Two 45 RPM singles were also released. The first paired "Cake Walking Babies From Home" and "St. Louis Tickle." The former, composed by Clarence Williams, had originally been recorded by the ensemble that inspired the name of the New York band, the Red Onion Jazz Babies, out of New Orleans and featuring Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Lil Hardin (later Lil Armstrong). The latter was of even older vintage, having first been recorded by the Ossman-Dudley Trio in 1906. One other recording was made of the tune in 1924, but it's likely that it was an Ossman-Dudley 78 from which Van Ronk rescued this song from oblivion. Since then, it's been recorded by several others, including Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Van Ronk plays it as a solo acoustic guitar instrumental.

The other 45 was headed by a Bob Dylan song, "If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You." This was a bawdy, uptempo number that Dylan had sung a couple of times in club dates, and Van Ronk had liked. Dylan was regarded as an up and coming talent, but Van Ronk was doing him a favor by recording one of his songs--a favor that he would very shortly not need, as at around the same time, Peter Paul and Mary were recording "Blowin' in the Wind." Dylan's song was taken as a jazz number with the Red Onions, as was the flip side, "Ace in the Hole," a Depression-era ditty that's become a jug band and music hall standard.

Listening to Prestige 597: Pony Poindexter with Booker Ervin

LISTEN TO ONE: Gumbo Filet

 Pony Poindexter left New Orleans when he was 14. His musical career encompasses the West Coast, where he first began to make his reputation, the East Coast (although not known as a New York musician, his breakthrough as a recording artist came in the Big Apple with sessions for Epic and Prestige) and Europe (following his Prestige sessions, he moved to Spain, where he spent most of the rest of the decade). Yet, as this album clearly shows, he never left the Big Easy completely behind. Perhaps it's true that you can take the boy out of New Orleans, but...

Poindexter recorded not infrequently, and with some high-powered musicians, but he is a forgotten name today. On Ranker, a web site which features some exhaustive lists, he gets no votes at all for jazz saxophone.

I first heard his name back in the late 1950s, when I was new to jazz and a new reader of DownBeat, in connection with a minor scandal of sorts. It seems that some of Pony's West Coast admirers had attempted to stuff the ballot box for DownBeat's reader's poll, and they had somehow been caught out, and Poindexter had been stricken from the poll results altogether. This was in the days when the East Coast jazz establishment tended to view the whole West Coast scene as lightweight, anyway, and I was under that influence. So I was willing to dismiss Poindexter as a fake and a poseur, and nothing happened in the intervening years to change my view. Until this album, I had never listened to his music--and that includes his debut album for Prestige earlier in 1963, which included his take on such dubious jazz choices as "Love Me Tender," and which I was unable to find anywhere, not even a single cut.

And had I looked, I would have found that his credentials were pretty substantial. He had recorded with Wes Montgomery, with Jon Hendricks, with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (so I might have heard him without knowing it). His debut album as a leader, 1962's Pony's Express for Epic, featured Eric Dolphy, Gene Quill, Sonny Red, Phil Woods, Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath, Clifford Jordan, Sal Nistico, Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Charli Persip. Not too lightweight.

In 1963, New Orleans was many years removed from being a hub of jazz. There had been a revival of interest in the traditional New Orleans sound in the early 1940s, but that had long since been swamped by the modern jazz tsunami, and not even the revivalist producers of Prestige's Swingville label were much interested in New Orleans style. It's hard to imagine New Orleans without Preservation Hall, but that now-venerable institution had only been started in 1961, and was not yet a tourist draw. The most well-known musicians in the New Orleans tradition were the Dukes of Dixieland, a band that was scoffed at by jazz connoisseurs.

So maybe there wasn't much of a market then for an album of modern jazz built on the sounds of New Orleans, not even with a newly hot item like Booker Ervin on board. Yet coming upon it in the eclectic postmodern world of today, this is a most enjoyable album, and a real find.

Produced by Ozzie Cadena, Gumbo is a concept album, the Poindexter compositions offering heir composer's tour of the city, Uptown ("Where I come from") on side one, and the Creole Downtown in side two. The album's liner notes also provide a tune-by-tune guided tour of the city Poindexter remembered and loved:

Front o' Town is in the uptown section--right next to the levee...there was a little blues phrase that everyone there used to hum and whistle.

 Happy Strut: Grandpa played in a parade band...I'd walk along with my clarinet (sometimes it would be three hours before they played a tune I knew) and if I didn't mess up, they'd let me play...I tried to approximate that feeling with some modern changes.

Creole Girl:  She was a real pretty girl...all the men liked her and none of the women did. When I was 12 she was grown up, but I can still remember just how she looked. Creole girls...are superstitious and terrible tempered, and if they catch you with another woman, there's hell to pay. This tune is nostalgic, because you can't handle them right. But we still play it in a happy manner.

4-11-44: In New Orleans, everybody plays the policy game. This number is known as the "Washerwoman's gig" -- it's their favorite bet. It has voodoo connotations. 

And with Side Two, we move downtown, down and dirty.

Back o' Town: This is the night club section, where all the sporting girls hang out. All the church people from Front o' Town look down on Back o' Town.

Muddy Dust: Voodoo is pretty strong in New Orleans...The melody kind of laughs at it, 'cause I still don't believe in it.

French Market: The people from the swamps, the farmers, the fishermen, the voodoo dealers -- all bring their wares here. There are alligator tails, gaspigous (barking swamp fish), carnivorous plants ground up into powder, candied legs of gigantic mosquitoes...my grandfather took me there.

 Gumbo Filet: The tune is a blues--everything I like really well has to be the blues. It's arranged with two-bar breaks so I could get the name in there. You guessed it--I like Gumbo Filet.

 

The rhythm section, all Prestige veterans, are the musicians Poindexter worked with accompanying Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The album was a 1963 Prestige release. A later CD reissue combined this album with Poindexter's earlier January 31 date for Prestige, and a Larry Young session from February 28. "4-11-44" and "Happy Strut" were a 45 RPM single.

Gumbo evoked nostalgia for a time and place that no one in the jazz world was much interested in. It carried the message of a modernity that no longer seemed on the cutting edge, although maybe it should have. Booker Ervin was one of the brightest young stars of the day. Pony Poindexter was, although this is mostly forgotten, one of the pioneers of the soprano sax. Coming upon it today, this is a very easy album to fall in love with.