Listening to Prestige 695: Sonny Stitt, Booker Ervin, Don Patterson

LISTEN TO ONE: Flyin' Home

 What happens when Prestige puts one of its greatest veteran beboppers together with two of its brightest young stars?

Jazz happens. That's all you can say, and that's the very best you can say.

But I'll say a little more. Two saxophones, and Don Patterson's organ making up two thirds of the rhythm section--no piano, no bass. None of them strangers to each other. Patterson and drummer Billy James were close associates; the two of them had worked a number of times with Ervin, and they'd done a previous Prestige recording with Stitt. Ervin and Stitt are a new combination, and why'd it take so long? They have a lot to say to each other.

This is a real collaboration between three remarkable talents, and it would be hard, and ultimately futile, to try to single out one as the dominant voice, but there is a certain nod to Stitt as the old master. Side one of the LP is devoted to two Stitt compositions, "Soul People" and "Sonny's Book," and side two is standards that one would probably associate more with Stitt's era, Duke Ellington's "C-Jam Blues" and a medley of two from the Great American Songbook, "I Can't Get Started" and "The Masquerade is Over." The medley, particulatly, starts with an extended solo by Stitt in the manner of a ballad from the bebop era, but as the idea is developed by Ervin and Patterson, and Stitt again. it becomes very much a mutual exploration, and very much in a contemporary mode.

Those four tracks make up the LP, but there was a fifth tune cut at the session, although it didn't see the
light of day until 1971, when it was tossed on to an album cobbled together from outtakes from Don Patterson sessions. That was "Flyin' Home," the Lionel Hampton tune that was a favorite of swing and rhythm and blues musicians. common ground for these collaborating generations in that it was a part of the repertory of neither, but certainly a tune to have some with. "Flyin' Home" is most famous from its renditions by 1930s-1940s players who the restriction of a 2 1/2-minute 78 RPM record. These guys stretch it out to ten minutes, give it a little bebop, a little hard bop, a little soul, a little swing, and more than a little money's worth for the listener. I love "Flyin' Home," and I'm delighted by what these guys have done with it.

Soul People was the natural choice for an album title in 1964, and Prestige didn't shrink from it. "C-Jam Blues" was released as a two-sided 45, credited to Sonny Stitt and Booker Ervin. Ozzie Cadena produced.