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.