Listening to Prestige 622: Willis Jackson

LISTEN TO ONE: Gator Tail

 This would seem to be some indication of how well Prestige was doing with Willis Jackson in the mid-1960s. A night at a New York club, four sets captured live, released on four different albums over the next three years. Jackson's popularity didn't endure--you won't find his name on any contemporary list of best jazz saxophone players, perhaps because he's too closely identified with rhythm and blues, and jazz snobbery still exists. This is wrong, of course. Rhythm and blues is jazz. for one thing, and for another, Jackson's many Prestige albums were squarely in the mainstream hard bop tradition. A quick glance at the set lists

for this live date makes the point: He plays a couple of his rhythm and blues favorites, like "Gator Tail" and "Blue Gator," but a lot more jazz standards: "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," "Jumpin' with Symphony Sid," "Perdido."

And of these four albums, only a handful of tracks have been posted by jazz aficionados on YouTube. So Jackson is still collected, but assiduously.

And probably, Jackson's recordings from this era are mostly remembered for the presence of a very young Pat Martino, at the beginning of his career, still calling himself Pat Azzara, on guitar. The CD reissues of these and other recordings are all billed as Willis Jackson with Pat Martino. That's understandable -- Martino was already a standout guitarist, at the threshold of a great career. But the fervent Martino collector who finds these albums will be treated to a fine band, led by a very fine sax man.

Even at the time, Jackson's defenders faced something of an uphill battle. In the liner notes for Live! Action, Kansas City radio personality Tom Reed quoted Michael Gold's liner notes to an earlier Jackson album:

This music from a jazz critic's standpoint has been unjustly rated on many occasions. Many critics have confused the initial intent and purpose of the music which they evaluate with their own ideals and standards of merit. It is often startling to read that a record which is obviously aimed at the amusement and entertainment of the listener is mistaken and evaluated by the standards which should be used for work which projects itself with a different and contradictory intent.

Today many musicians have only contempt for critics. It is very difficult for an artist to have respect for a man who makes such obvious errors out of a profound ignorance or through a mistaken belief in the purpose of the music."

It's the old artists vs. critics battle. NBA star George "Iceman" Gervin said it well, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, when he explained why he didn't have much use for sportswriters: He said that he goes out every night and tests himself against some of the greatest athletes who ever lived, and who are these writers testing themselves against? Shakespeare? Hemingway? Not likely,

And there's something to be said for critics being in the vanguard, calling attention to new artists like Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy before the listening public at large is ready to give something so new a chance. And something to be said for pointing out that sometimes mass taste is just wrong, wrong, wrong, and saxophone players with one initial for a last name aren't really offering anything musically rewarding.

But there's very often something to be said for music that people like to listen to. Especially when it's being played by a pro's pro who knows how to give the people what they want in a hard-driving, sweet sounding, musically fulfilling way. Especially when the old pro has taken under his wing a 19-year-old guitarist who's already making people prick their ears up and take notice. The two hot young guitarists who were starting to play around town and make people sit up and take notice were Martino and George Benson, and Benson has talked about going to hear Martino and being turned on by him.

A live album, or series of albums, covering four sets on the same night, is a good place to put this theory to the test, as the band is going to be playing a lot of familiar material, the tunes that a live club audience is going to want to hear. Jackson, Martino and company pass that test with flying colors.

The four Prestige albums to issue from this night of live music (with "Blue Gator" on two of them) are Jackson's Action! Recorded Live, Live! Action (with Pat Martino pinning a new tail on the Gator with his solo on Jackson's signature song), Soul Night/Live!, and Tell It... Ozzie Cadena produced, and Prestige got good value out of an evening at the Allegro.

 

Listening to Prestige 621: Sonny Stitt

LISTEN TO ONE: Shangri-La

 Two 45 RPM singles were released off this session: "My New Baby" / "Misty" and "Shangri-La" / "Soul Shack," the last-named actually coming from a different Stitt-organ session, that one with Jack McDuff from 1963. I hope they got a their share of radio play and jukebox spins, because they're super-listenable, the kind of music that could have made some listeners want to hear more jazz. It's interesting that they didn't put out a 45 of "Mama Don't Allow," the ever-popular warhorse attributed to Cow Cow Davenport, which features a vocal by Stitt as well as a killer tenor sax solo and a crowd-pleasing drum solo by Billy James.

If that all adds up to something that sounds like a commercial venture, rest assured that I do not mean this in any way as a put-down. Some of America's greatest music was made for the masses, and while it's important to encourage experimentation, and give voice to the people who are ahead of the curve, there's nothing wrong with giving the people what they want, especially if it's a master like Sonny Stitt serving it up.

Prestige was getting ready to break Don Patterson out as its next big organ star. He and Billy James, along with guitarist Paul Weeden, had been working as a trio mostly in Chicago when they were hired to back up Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis on a 1973 Prestige session. Here, although Stitt got top billing, Patterson was also featured on the cover, preparing him for his next session, in two months' time, when he would be the session leader, he'd have Booker Ervin alongside him, and the album would be titled The Exciting New Organ of Don Patterson.

The marketing campaign apparently worked, because Patterson became one of Prestige's top talents for the next several years.

Good for Prestige, good for Patterson. If this album was part of the strategy, good for it. And good for the listener, too, that casual listener who might have heard a cut on Listening to Lacy and then plunked a nickel into the jukebox to hear it again, and the serious jazz fan for whom good music is always welcome.

I'm sure if you were playing--or even working as a server--in a lounge six nights a week, you could get pretty sick of "Misty" -- and a few other tunes. But as a music lover who listens to a lotta this and a lotta that, it's a familiar melody, and it's possible to appreciate that it's as familiar as it is because it's a beautiful melody, and when you have Sonny Stitt playing it, and improvising on it, it becomes a treat for the ears. The other offering from the standard catalog, not nearly as familiar, is "Shangri-La," written in 1946 by Matty Malnick and first introduced by his orchestra. It was a minor hit in 1957 for the Four Coins, one of those "safe to listen to, we're not rock and roll" groups that still hung onto the Top Forty in those days. While it's been widely recorded over the years, it's been mostly by groups whose sound is more at home in elevators than smoky basements. But it provides a good vehicle for Stitt and Patterson to blend their sound, and makes a good introduction to Patterson.

There are three Stitt originals on the album, all good listening, and two more that were recorded on the session and released later, along with some cuts from Patterson's May session with Booker Ervin, under the title Patterson's People: Don Patterson with Sonny Stitt and Booker Ervin. 

Shangri-La was the title of this Prestige release. Ozzie Cadena produced.

Listening to Prestige 620: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

LISTEN TO TWO: Spellbound
Never on Sunday

Ahmed Abdul-Malik's recording career was brief--a total of six albums as leader between 1958 and 1964, the last four on Prestige. And this was his swan song. He never led a group again, and played on only a small handful of other recordings, although he would reappear on record in 2005, more than a decade after his death and half a century after this momentous recording, when the John Coltrane/Thelonious Monk Town Hall concert of 1957 was finally releas

I don't know why this sudden halt, and I haven't been able to find out much more about it. Abdul-Malik lived into the 1990s, taught in the New York City school system, but doesn't seem to have been interviewed, and doesn't seem to have rated much in the way of obituaries. Curious neglect for such a striking talent.

Certainly this final album leaves one wishing for more, because it's so good, but also because it's so unusual. That he continued to create a fusion between Western jazz and Middle Eastern music is expected, and welcome. But to take as his source material theme music from Hollywood movies? That's not at all the choice that most of us would have made.

And what musicians would you go looking for if you were planning a session of jazz/Middle Eastern fusion? An oud player, certainly, Abdul-Malik, himself a master of the oud, had a keen ear for talent on the instrument, and he picked Hamza Aldeen, an Egyptian composer and oud master from Nubia, the upper Nile region where the oud originated. As Hamza El Din, he performed in the summer of 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival, and recorded an album for Vanguard entitled Music of Nubia, followed by a second Vanguard album in 1965. He has been cited as a major influence by avant garde composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and has recorded with the Grateful Dead and the Kronos quartet.

This was his only recording session with a jazz group, but his contribution is outstanding. He plays on two tracks, "Never on Sunday" and "Song of Delilah."

A musician with plenty of jazz credentials, but not one you'd immediately think of if you were planning an album of Middle Eastern music, is Ellington alumnus Ray Nance. Nance had joined the Ellington orchestra in 1940, and remained with them through 1963, leaving just before being tabbed to join Abdul-Malik for this session, As Ellington's first trumpet, he recorded one of the most famous trumpet solos in jazz, the Duke's original 1940 recording of "Take the A Train." He plays cornet here, on "Body and Soul" and "Cinema Blues."

Nance, of course, also became known as the only violin soloist in the Ellington orchestra, and he brings his violin to "Spellbound" and "Song of Delilah." Again, if you were putting together a cutting edge group to play an new kind of world music fusion, you might not immediately think to bring a sort of old school violin guy.

I have to assume that Abdul-Malik was completely given his head in assembling this group, because no one--not Bob Weinstock, not Don Schlitten--was going to say "World music fusion? Right. You'll need a violin, and an old school rhythm and blues guy on tenor sax."

That would be Seldon Powell. No, the choices must have been Abdul-Malik's own. And the choice of movie music? Who else would dream that up?

Anyway, assuming my assumptions are right, thank Providence they let Ahmed do it his way, because this is a wonderful album, and one is only left regretting that he didn't make any more. What would he have thought of next time?

Pianist Paul Neves was one of those local legends, in his case in two locales -- Boston and Puerto Rico. A fine player who didn't make it to New York, didn't tour with a New York or LA-based name band, didn't record -- this is his only recording date with a name group. It's good that we have him here.

I should give "Song of Delilah" as my Listen to One. It has some strong soloing by everyone. And if I didn't choose it, I'd be torn between the wonderful violin work by Ray Nance on "Spellbound," and the electrifying oud playing of Hamza Aldeen on "Never on Sunday." Well, I can't choose, and I can't reconcile. They're two such different cuts, with two such different musicians. So it's Listen to Two.

Another odd thing about this album: it was released on Prestige's lightly used and lightly distributed budget label, Status. I don't know why. Don Schlitten produced.

Listening to Prestige 619 - Reverend Gary Davis

LISTEN TO ONE: Maple Leaf Rag

This is the fourth and final album (not counting repackagings) by the Reverend Gary Davis, Harlem street singer and preacher. and mentor to nearly every young guitar player in New York. The first three were released on Bluesville, but Bluesville was no more, shelved along with Prestige's other jazz subsidiaries, New Jazz, Swingville and Moodsville. 

There were still some smaller subsidiary labels: Prestige International, Prestige Lively Arts and Prestige Folklore, more in competition with smaller independents like Folkways and Caedmon than with the other jazz independents. I haven't included them in my history/reminiscence of Prestige Records.

But since I have been following Gary Davis on Prestige, I'm including this Folklore release, which is an interesting addition to the Davis catalog, in that it's all instrumental. Davis was one of the great blues guitar stylists as well as one of the great teachers, and here plays some ragtime and some folk styles as well as blues, and also plays banjo and harmonica on this unaccompanied field recording by Sam Charters.

His harmonica (on "Coon Hunt") is reminiscent of Sonny Terry's, on "Fox Chase." He's really adept on banjo, which he plays on "Devil's Dream" and "Please Baby." His finger picking banjo style is reminiscent of nothing so much as his guitar style. And his guitar mastery is sufficient to make one glad that he put out an all-instrumental album. He has tempos from "Slow Drag" to "Fast Fox Trot," and from ragtime ("Maple Leaf Rag") to march ("United States March"), and a tribute to multitasking with "The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (And Playing the Guitar at the Same Time)."

This would be Davis's last recording for Prestige, but he continued performing, and recording, right up to his death in 1972. A performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 brought him to the attention of new audiences, and his last years were some of his most successful ones.

Listening to Prestige 618 - Eddie Chamblee with Dayton Selby

LISTEN TO ONE: The Honeydripper

 The second track of Eddie Chamblee's album is Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone," and if you had gotten up and tried to dance your way through the first track, "The Honeydripper," you might well be thinking of it as "You'll Never Walk Again." There's an urgency that's seldom matched on record to kickstart "The Honeydripper," and that urgency never lets up, as Chamblee, organist Dayton Selby and drummer Al Griffin keep kicking it down the road. Truth be told, although "You'll Never Walk Alone" is a breather, that's only in comparison with "The Honeydripper." This may not have been the sensitive approach that Rodgers and Hammerstein intended for their inspirational lyric and quasi-operatic melody, but who asked them?

They actually do slow down and take "Softly, as I Leave You" as a sweet ballad, Chamblee was a tenor player of the old school, and the old rhythm and blues school called for a tenor man to slow the tempo down and play sweet for make-out time for the dancers.

Chamblee was definitely one of those old school guys. Born in Atlanta, raised in Chicago, his pre-law studies at the historically Black Chicago State College were interrupted by service in World War II, and after the war he went back to the weekend gig he had held down during his college days--playing the tenor saxophone in clubs. His breakthrough came when he recorded the tenor sax solo on pianist Sonny Thompson's R&B hit "Long Gone." The song became his signature and his nickname, like Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson or Frank "Floorshow" Culley. Or Joe "The Honeydripper" Liggins, but that tune outgrew its composer to become a rhythm and blues and soul jazz standard, Chamblee's ass-kicking version being just one of many.

He led his own groups in the Chicago area before joining Lionel Hampton's band for its celebrated European tour in the mid-1950s, and he had an association with Dinah Washington that lasted musically for eight years and five albums (including some vocal duets in the style she would later perfect with Brook Benton), romantically a good deal shorter (he was briefly her fifth husband).

Dayton Selby was another veteran of the rhythm and blues era--his style is more suggestive of Bill Doggett than Jimmy Smith. He did record a couple of albums for for small labels, but this session with Chamblee is what he's best known for.

Al Griffin's obituary gives a sterling resume for a life in the music business: 

He trained in NYC with the world famous Cozy Cole & Gene Krupa at their music studio just before he started his career on the road touring and playing with Dinah Washington, Clark Terry, Eddie Chamblee, Henry "Red" Allen, Bob Crosby, Paul Anka, Dayton Selby, Milt Buckner, Billy Eckstine, Illinois Jacquet, Timmy Rogers, Redd Foxx, The Nat King Cole Show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, just to name a few, he was also part of the house band (drummer) for then Heavyweight Champion Sugar Ray Robinson at his club in Harlem "Sugar Ray's."

 And the Asbury Park African American Music Project quotes Griffin, who returned to Asbury Park as his music career wound down, to take over his father's dry cleaning business, on how he got his start in his home town:

I was sitting outside, and this fellow came by, a friend of mine, with some drumsticks. I said, “Where are you going with those drumsticks?” He said, “Just messing around.” I said, “Where’d you get them?” He said, “I got them at the West Side Community Center” – which was right around the corner from me. He said, “They’re starting up a drum and bugle corp,” so I’m going to try to get over there. And that’s what I did.

Bob Weinstock's record of commercial success with the rhythm and blues veterans he signed to capitalize on the soul jazz craze was hit or miss: a lot of success with Willis Jackson, not so much with some of the others, including Eddie Chamblee. But his record of recording damn good music continues triumphant. The Rocking Tenor Sax Of Eddie Chamblee With Dayton Selby At The Organ is a rocking good time for listening, and would make a super album for dancing, with its driving uptempo numbers, slowed down in the middle with "Softly as I Leave You." and winding up the evening with a "goodnight sweetheart" special: the 1950s ballad hit "Little Things Mean a Lot." Ozzie Cadena produced.

Listening to Prestige 617: Booker Ervin

LISTEN TO ONE: The Lamp is Low

 This is the second of the "Books" compiled by "the Book," Booker Ervin, for Prestige, the first being The Freedom Book of the previous December. That one had Jaki Byard on piano, with Richard Davis (bass) and Alan Dawson (drums) rounding out the quartet. Davis and Dawson would remain on board for the whole series of books, but other instrumentation would vary, and here it's Tommy Flanagan on the keyboard. Flanagan makes an excellent consort, as Ervin continues to cement his place as the hottest new sound on the tenor sax.

He starts off the session by putting his imprint on "The Lamp is Low," a old tune that may never have had quite the wakeup call Ervin gives to it. The melody was taken from a piece by Maurice Ravel, "Pavane pour une Infante Défunte" (Pavane for a Dead Child). A part of Ravel's longer work was adapted by Peter DeRose and Bert Shefter,with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. Originally recorded by Mildred Bailey in 1939, covered a week later and turned into a big hit. the song takes Ravel's solemn dirge and turns it into a dreamy torch song, with lyrics about melting into the lover's arms and dreaming while the lamp is low. It's generally done to match that dreamy mood, but not always--Sarah Vaughan made it swing, and raised a few goose bumps with a thrilling interpretation. Ervin picks up where Vaughan left off, kicking into high gear almost immediately, with soaring, daring solos that are taken up and kicked again and again by Flanagan, Davis and Dawson.

The moody, introspective tone which Ervin might have adopted in "The Lamp is Low" gets its due in 
"Come Sunday," the churchy section from Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige suite. "Come Sunday" is also the newest song in Ervin's Song Book, dating from 1943. All the others go back to the 1930s, although "Just Friends," written in 1931, is indelibly, in every jazz fan's mind, the song newly created from the bones of the of the original by Charlie Parker in 1949. There's no nostalgia in Ervin's treatment of any of these old chestnuts -- there's no danger of this album being released on Swingville, even if that fine series had not recently been closed down by Prestige. This was a solid Booker Ervin session, a musician very much aware of tradition, very much aware of his time, and in the full maturity of his own sound.

Ervin was at the midpoint of his tenure with Prestige, which is the same as saying the midpoint of his career, since the 1960s were the summit of his achievement and his reputation, and by 1970 he would be dead of a kidney disease. He had clearly marked himself by this time as one of the most distinctive stylists of his generation--critic Gary Giddins has remarked that 

you know it’s him after two notes...he is completely himself...It is not avant-garde jazz — he’s playing changes — yet it has the kind of freedom and velocity you might associate with Coltrane...though Booker didn’t sound anything like Trane. He was one of the few tenors of his generation who didn’t. 

But his reputation remained mostly within the jazz community. Music producer and historian Michael Cuscuna has pointed out that his Prestige recordings

had caused a lot of excitement in New York, but New York isn't America...which meant that his triumphs were mixed with incomprehensible dry spells.

His basic quartet for the "Book" sessions was Richard Davis and Alan Dawson on all of them, Jaki Byard on two of them, and yet this tight-knit and sympathetic group was not Ervin's regular touring band--they may never have played together outside of the studio. The economics of jazz in the 1960s, at least the sort of jazz that Ervin played, didn't allow for the maintaining of a regular group.

And what was that? It wasn't free jazz (although the commercial outlets for that were limited too). It wasn't soul jazz. Hard bop may have become old hat to the critics, but it certainly still had its followers. But that wasn't what Ervin played either. As a result, it was easy for Ervin to get lost in the pack. As Giddins puts it:

Everybody was talking about Coltrane and Shorter and Rollins and the big guns, and Ervin was really something of a cult figure. Those Prestige records were hardly best sellers.

 Ervin's early death meant that he didn't stay around to become an elder statesman of jazz, lionized by Jazz at Lincoln Center or the NEA Jazz Masters. To modern listmakers, he generally doesn't crack anyone's list of the 50 greatest jazz saxophonists. But he should. 

This second "Book" album was called The Song Book. Don Schlitten produced.

 

Listening to Prestige 616: Jimmy Witherspoon

LISTEN TO ONE: I Wonder

 I love it that Jimmy Witherspoon starts off this set with "I Wonder." This song, written and originally performed by Cecil Gant, is frequently credited with being the first rhythm and blues hit. Gant recorded it in 1944, first for the tiny Black-owned Bronze label, and then, as it started to catch with another small but not quite so small label, the whine-owned Gilt Edge, with better chances at distribution. Appealing to WWII patriotism, Gant is "Pvt. Cecil Gant" on the label, and that underscored the poignancy of the song, with its lyric that suggested a lonely GI wondering if his girl friend back home was with another man. But "I Wonder" didn't need anything but itself. It was a winner, a beautiful blues ballad with Gant accompanying himself on the piano.

Nothing's ever entirely new, and Gant's soft, sensitive approach to the blues had been pioneered in the 1920s by Leroy Carr. But "I Wonder" ushered in a new era and a new sound--a sound that was so new it didn't have name in 1944, so when the record went to the top of the Billboard charts, the chart was the Harlem Hit Parade. It did not become rhythm and blues till 1949.

Gant's record was a hit, but "I Wonder," the song, was huge. Roosevelt Sykes recorded it for Bluebird, and with Sykes's popularity and RCA Victor's distribution, he had a Number One hit. And in an unusual moment in chart history, the record it replaced at Number One was Pvt. Cecil Gant's version of "I Wonder." Louis Armstrong recorded a gorgeous version of it in 1945, with the song giving Armstrong a vehicle for one of his most poignant and sensitive vocals. His recording went to number three on the charts, and "I Wonder" has been a staple ever since, right down to a recent duet by Tony Bennett and k. d. lang. We've heard an earlier version of the song on Prestige, by Etta Jones.

"I Wonder" represented a new era in music in more ways than one. The post-WWII manufacturing boom extended to record pressing plants, and small independent labels--the labels that pioneered rhythm and blues and modern jazz--had the ability, for the first time, to get records made on a large scale. And Gant's smooth, blues-inflected crooning style caught on. Rhythm and blues was a big umbrella, encompassing the raucous jump blues of Louis Jordan, the Delta-goes-electric of Muddy Waters, the New Orleans horns behind Fats Domino, Lloyd Price and Little Richard, but the crooning ballad style of Cecil Gant gave birth to a whole generation who came to be known as the "sepia Sinatras." Billy Eckstine and Nat "King" Cole were the mega-stars of this new style, but there were so many others, Sonny Til and Clyde McPhatter and Tony Williams and all the other wonderful voices who created the street corner harmonies known as doowop, on to Johnny Mathis and Sam Cooke.

To make a great record of "I Wonder," all you have to do is sing it, and let its magic come through you. That's exactly what Jimmy Witherspoon does, Ozzie Cadena has given him some extraordinary musicians to back him on this session, and they do their job too.

And, of course, 'Spoon doesn't stop there. Ever the aggregator of wonderful material, he does it again here. "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" was written in 1923 by Jimmie Cox, made unforgettable in 1929 by Bessie Smith, and became an anthem for the Depression. But its lyrics have resonated beyond its time. Again, as with "I Wonder," as is his approach, Witherspoon respects the song, and lets it express itself as only he can.

I won't go through the whole album, but the selections are eclectic and rewarding. One, "Blues in the Morning," is credited to Kenny Burrell, and features some wonderful playing by Burrell, Gildo Mahomes and Roy Haynes.

The Prestige release is entitled Blue Spoon. 

Listening to Prestige 615: Shirley Scott and Kenny Burrell

LISTEN TO ONE: Call it Stormy Monday

Prestige puts two of its most creative talents of the 1960s together, and the results are as beautiful, as creative, and as unique as you might have predicted. The two of them challenge each other, complement each other. They put together a good selection of tunes, and they make music that's a joy to listen to. They're joined by bassist Eddie Khan, heard once before on Prestige with Ronnie Mathews and Freddie Hubbard, and drummer Otis "Candy" Finch, borrowed by Scott from husband Stanley Turrentine's group. Finch, from Detroit, was the son of Otis Finch Sr., tenor saxophone player with John Lee Hooker.

"Trav'lin Light" was written by Jimmy Mundy and Trummy Young, and brought by Young to a 1942 session Paul Whiteman was doing for the newly formed Capitol Records. Young had also brought along his then girlfriend, Billie Holiday, and not wanting to miss an opportunity, Capitol's co-founder Johnny Mercer took Young's tune, wrote a lyric to it, and put Holiday in front of a microphone with the new song. She was under contract to Columbia, so she was "Lady Day" for the recording. 

"Solar" is the famous Miles Davis composition, now a jazz standard, over 200 versions of it recorded, the first few bars of the melody engraved on Miles' tombstone...and almost certainly written by Chuck Wayne, not Miles. Be that as it may, it's a great romp for jazz musicians, Burrell playing it mainstream and wholly satisfying, Scott using the tune for one of her excursions to test the possibilities of the Hammond. They bring it off together, with some nice soloing by Eddie Khan.

"Nice 'n Easy" was a recent hit, written by Hollywood songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman for Frank Sinatra, and an instant standard, equally popular with crooners, swingsters, and jazz groups (Willis Jackson had brought the tune out to Englewood Cliffs just a month before Scott and Burrell). It's a catchy tune, and they catch hold of something, and swing it to life.

T-Bone Walker's "They Call it Stormy Monday" is a blues you can sink your teeth into. Blues singers love it, but jazz musicians have largely left it alone. Before Scott and Burrell, only Woody Herman had recorded it. Burrell actually had done it on record before, with Junior Mance, but that was backing up a blues singer, Billie Poole. Very few instrumental jazz renditions of it have been done since, and if Scott and Burrell (and Eddie Khan) are any guide, this is a mistake. This is the highlight of the album, a terrific blues--not soul jazz, the real blues.

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" has become a controversial song in recent years, with many decrying its lyric, but it's hard to find anything wrong with the sassy, tuneful Frank Loesser melody, and whatever you may think of the various male-female vocal duets, there's nothing at all wrong with the Scott-Burrell duet. It's delicious.

And speaking of songs that aren't normally done by jazz groups. this is probably the only jazz rendition you'll ever hear of the traditional Irish "Kerry Dance." It, too, is a delight, with some fancy stick work by "Candy" Finch.

What would you have released as your 45 RPM single? I think I would have gone with "Stormy Monday" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside," but Bob Weinstock and the marketing boys at Prestige chose "Travelin' Light" and "Kerry Dance." I can't complain. Anything from this album that I ever saw on a jukebox would get my nickel. Travelin' Light also became the album's title. Ozzie Cadena produced.