LISTEN TO ONE: Just Friends
This is not your father's organ-saxophone trio album, and anyone looking for Jimmy Smith or Brother Jack McDuff or Shirley Scott and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis is going to go away scratching their heads. And I say this with all due respect, and appreciation that every one of the above named is an individual with a unique sound.
But these two are going there own way. Booker Ervin already had forged a reputation as one of the most original and important new voices on the jazz scene--not as defiantly anti-establishment as Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler, but definitely a new sound. Don Patterson was starting to make a name for himself, and the idea that his approach to the
organ would mesh well with Booker Ervin's fresh approach resonated with the Prestige brain trust from the start. After putting putting him on sessions with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Sonny Stitt, they gave him Ervin as a partner for his first session as leader, and it worked well enough to reunite them here.
Perhaps the most interesting result of this pairing comes on "Just Friends." The tune is a sentimantal ballad from the 1930s that served as a vehicle for the likes of Kate Smith, Russ Colombo and Morton Downey, but it became a jazz standard after Charlie Parker included it on his Charlie Parker with Strings album. After that, a number of artists picked it up--it even had a soul jazz organ treatment by Jimmy Smith--but Bird with strings is still the version most jazz fans will think of when they hear the title.
So it's hard to resist comparing the two, especially because Ervin (like every jazz man who came of age in or after the 1940s) is very aware of Bird's version, and his "Just Friends" is very much of a dialog with the master.
Bird enjoyed the lush romanticism of his string section, though he certainly was not linited by it. And
just as Bird both honored and subverted the genre, so Ervin and Patterson both honor and subvert the organ-saxophone soul jazz genre. If there is such a thing as soul jazz-free jazz fusion, they find it here.
"Sister Ruth," "Donald Duck," "Rosetta" and "Under the Boardwalk" were put together with an 18-minute jam from Patterson and Ervin's previous session, "Hip Cake Walk," and issued as an LP under that name. "Sister Ruth" and "Donald Duck" were issued as a 45 RPM single, as was "Under the Boardwalk," paired with another tune from the earlier session, "Up in Betty's Room." The cover of the newly released smash hit by the Drifters is a natural for the jukeboxes. Patterson and Billy James have a good time with it, and it shows.
"Just Friends" was saved for a later album, Tune Up!, incorporating tunes from a bunch of different sessions, and released in 1971, after Ervin's death.
Ozzie Cadena produced the session.
