Listening to Prestige 691 - Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: 'Sokay

 July, 1964. was a busy time in dear old Stockholm. Jack McDuff, now solidly Brother Jack McDuff, was there too, recorded live in Stockholm's Golden Circle  with his group, and then in the studio with a Swedish big band. I do wonder if Benny Golson was tempted, after his previous success with McDuff and a big band, to bring the organist and is group into his Stockholm project, but probably not. Golson was looking in a quite different direction. More likely, perhaps, McDuff got the idea of using a Swedish big band from dropping in on his old friend Benny's recording session. More likely yet is the theory that Lew Futterman, McDuff's manager/producer, who had also produced Golson's Stockholm session, was the organizing force behind all of this, and the one who, as before, brought Golson in to arrange the big band session.

LISTEN TO ONE: Au Privave

Soul jazz and the organ combo was still a relatively new sound to Scandinavia--indeed to most of Europe. Jimmy Smith had toured, but European audiences, having graduated from le jazz hot to bebop, were sufficiently skeptical that Futterman had a tough time booking McDuff's tour. As Futterman observes in his liner notes to The Concert McDuff:

Whether or not European jazz audiences, noted for their attraction to the cerebral, would take to McDuff was highly dubious.

But as Futterman goes on to note, at their first stop, the Jazz Festival on the Riviera,

McDuff and his group stole the show. According to Nice Matin, "McDuff a vaincu tout le monde." And in Sweden, the amazed proprietors of Stockholm's famous jazz club, the Golden Circle, saw their audiences dancing in the aisles.

There was enough musical depth in McDuff's music to satisfy the most cerebral of Europeans. And it seemes as though those intellectuals hadn't forgotten how to respond to le jazz hot.

From a historical perspective, it's tempting to focus on the development of young George Benson in McDuff's group, and certainly by the time of this live show at Gyllene Cirkeln (the Golden Circle), he could no longer be considered an apprentice. But while Benson went on to become an international superstar, still regarded to this day as a living legend, and Red Holloway is remembered, if at all, as one of a number of very good tenor saxophonists of the era, it would be a mistake to underestimate Holloway's contribution. His solo on "'Sokay," from the live album, may well be the highlight of that number.

The band that Golson put together for the McDuff/Stockholm studio session is labeled The Big Soul Band, which seems an odd choice for a bunch of Swedes, but it's not out of place. If anyone knew how to arrange a big band to back up Jack McDuff, it was Benny Golson, and the soul is provided by McDuff, Dukes, Benson and Holloway. It's an album very much worth listening to, if you can find it. It doesn't appear to be on Spotify or Amazon Music, and "'Sokay" is the only track I've found on YouTube, which is becoming more and more my source for hard-to-find jazz. 

The live album is titled The Brother Jack McDuff Quartet Recorded Live! In Concert Around The World - The Concert McDuff, or more familiarly The Concert McDuff. The Big Soul Band numbers became part of an album called Silk and Soul, which incorporated tunes from two other sessions and was released in 1965. Lew Futterman produced all of the sessions.

July, 1964, was a busy time for Jack McDuff, in and out of Stockholm. During the same month (presumably on his return from Europe, though there are no precise dates for any of these sessions) he was back in New York for a hardworking session during which he recorded nine songs with his basic quartet. all of them in that groove that you can call soul jazz, or funk, or hard bop, or rhythm and blues. Or you can call it by a name that hadn't been invented yet, but which McDuff, Holloway, Benson and Dukes may have pioneered, as several of these cuts would later be collected in an anthology collection called Legends of Acid Jazz. 

At the time of their recording, they weren't collected anywhere, exactly. McDuff would make a couple more albums for Prestige before moving over to Atlantic in 1966, so Bob Weinstock's label mixed and matched for a few more releases. "Scufflin'," the first tune off the session, had been added to Silk and Soul. "East of the Sun," "Au Privave" and "Hallelujah Time" made it to Hallelujah Time!, a 1967 album that threw it together with one cut from a 1963 session and a few from a later date. Another bits and pieces album, Midnight Sun, also issued in 1963, contained "Misconstrued," and yet another, 1968's Soul Circle, found room for "Lew's Piece" and Horace Silver's "Opus de Funk." Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman" is the title cut to a 1969 release, and again in 1969, Steppin' Out included "Our Miss Brooks."

 

 

Listening to Prestige 640 - Carol Ventura

LISTEN TO ONE: When the World Was Young

 Carol Ventura didn't just fade into obscurity, she disappeared into oblivion. She made two albums for Prestige. and nothing else. But two albums for Prestige is not chopped liver, and you'd think she could have had some kind of a career after that--enough that there is very close to nothing about her on the Internet. She gets a brief mention on a web page called Obscure & Neglected Female Singers Of Jazz & Standards (1930s to 1960s), part of a site called Steve Hoffman Music Forums, and how Hoffman came up with even this much information is a bit of a miracle, although she lived long enough for someone to have found her. Much of her life, though, seems to have been terribly sad.  According to Hoffman (my only biographical source)

If word of mouth is true, this New Jersey native wounded up living in the streets, due to mental illness. She allegedly needed to be medicated, and would take to a homeless life on those occasions in which she stopped using medication. She is said to have passed away at a senior home in 2010.

 She came from a show business family, her father a vaudeville performer, her mother a singer, her brother a drummer. She sang with Charlie Spivak, and replaced Keely Smith in Louis Prima's Las Vegas act. Smith left Prima in 1961, so this would have been before her Prestige debut. 

Probably as a result of her work with Capitol artist Prima, she got a record deal with that label, and this being 1962, the girl group era, that was the direction Capitol pushed her in, with a single called "Mr. Muscles." Jazz critic Gene Lees, who wrote the liner notes for her first Prestige album, was suitably horrified by this career choice:

This attempt to make a sow's ear out of a silk purse is comparable to the attempt of Russian commissars to turn the gypsies into hard-working dawn-to-dark farmers. Forget it, Charlie, nobody turned up. It would be impossible to infuse into Carol's singing the hostility, maladjustment, latent delinquency, bad tone, and general musical incompetence that it takes to be a successful rock and roller.

Lees's mock horror at the hobgoblin of rock and roll would perhaps have been more appropriate in 1958 than at the dawn of the Beatles era, but he's not entirely wrong. "Mr. Muscles" is not much of a record, and yes, it is on YouTube, so you can judge for yourself.

He's also not wrong about Ventura's genuine talent as a jazz singer, with a considerable vocal range, and an approach the encompasses humor, drama, and musicality, including a delightful interpolation of scatting into the traditional folk sone "Lonesome Road."

Hoffman, whose research into Ventura's life is extraordinary, seems to have looked less closely into her music. The one thing he doesn't know about her is her music.  writing that this album was recorded "supposedly in Sweden (according to a YouTube poster; I don't know if it is true)."

It was recorded in Sweden. How Ventura arrived in Stockholm is lost to history, as is how she connected with Benny Golson. We can safely assume he didn't decided to work with her on the strength of "Mr. Muscles." Lew Futterman, who produced the other Golson sessions in Sweden at this time, apparently was aware of her strengths as a vocalist. Lees, in his liner notes, quotes Futterman as having first heard her in West Orange, NJ. Futterman had heard that there was a singer worth hearing in a local lounge, but:

When we arrived, the place turned out to be a bowling alley...We stood around in the roar of ten pins, trying to figure out what was going on. Then we heard what sounded like Barbra Streisand. As the song ended, the voice cracked ludicrously and we realized we'd been listening to a marvelous satire...The girl went into a hilarous impression of Ethel Merman...[and then] the most sensitive interpretation of "When the World Was Young" I'd ever heard.

Futterman's idea of putting her together with Golson's Swedish orchestra after Jimny Witherspoon (or before -- there's no precise date for this session) was an inspired one, as was what must have been his suggestion that they do "When the World Was Young," with its Johnny Mercer lyric to a melody by French composer Philippe-Gérard.

This is a wonderful album. The song selection is varied and unexpected. Another highlight is Bill Evans's beautiful "Waltz for Debbie," with lyrics by Lees. She does "Meditation" by Antonio Carlos Jobim, just starting to become well known in North America. She does Futterman's lyric to "Frere Jacques" (this may have been a mistake. She does a bravura version of "If Ever I Should Leave You" from Camelot, and a song by Stephen Sondheim. and lots more. This album is a forgotten masterpiece. And yes, it's all on YouTube. 

Someone shoud have taken better care of Carol. But listen to this album. You won't regret it.

Ventura and Golson got together again in London, the following year, for a second Prestige session. The first album is titled Carol!, the second I Love to Sing. Prestige released on 45 RPM single from each session, "Night Song" / "Say No More" from the first, and "Please Somebody Help Me" / "No Man" from the second.

Nothing from I Love to Sing has been uploaded anywhere that I can find. although it is sometines possible to find copies of both albums on Amazon and eBay. As of this writing, eBay vendors are also offering a couple of 45s for sale, one on Roulette and the other no label listed. And even more obscure, a web page for a company called Heritage Auctions was offering, as of this writing, an acetate recording of eleven songs by Ventura, with the following information:

This double-sided acetate was recorded at Regent Sound Studios - by comparing the label to similar acetates from the studio, it appears that it was made in the mid-late 60s. The eleven-track disc was likely a demo made by Ventura to attract the interest of other record companies. Carol Ventura Sings (printed on the label) may have been the working title. The type-written track listings seem to be a collection of standards, which might have been easier to acquire/record than the more modern selections on her first two albums. 

Heritage had a floor of $500 for the item.