Listening to Prestige 709 Lucky Thompson

LISTEN TO ONE: Cry Me a River

 This was Lucky Thompson's fourth (counting an early session with Miles Davis) and final album for Prestige. After that, in the early 1970, he made three more for the small but prestigious independent label Groove Merchant, and then apparently grew disillusioned with the music business altogether, and dropped out. It would be good to report that he had moved to Europe, where he continued to be highly regarded. He had lived in Paris from 1957-62, before returning to New York and his Prestige recording years. He did, in fact, go back from 1968-70, living in Lausanne, Switzerland, but then returned to the States again, and whatever he was looking for, he must not have found it, although he appeared to making a decent life for himself. In addition to the Groove Merchant sessions, he also taught at Dartmouth college for

two years, 1973-74. Then he dropped out.

He continued to be highly regarded in Europe -- small European labels would release forgotten or unreleased sessions by him over the next couple of decades -- but he never returned, and he seems to have grown altogether disillusioned with music. According to his obituary in the New York Times:

Fiercely intelligent, Mr. Thompson was outspoken in his feelings about what he considered the unfair control of the jazz business by record companies, music publishers and booking agents. 

Something of his later life was described by Ben Ratliff, writing the Times obituary:

Friends say he lived for a time on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and in Georgia before eventually moving west. By the early 90's he was in Seattle, mostly living in the woods or in shelter offered by friends. He did not own a saxophone. He walked long distances, and was reported to have been in excellent, muscular shape.

He was hospitalized a number of times in 1994, and finally entered the Washington Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation.

...He was rarely seen in public; at times it was hard for his old friends to find him. But the drummer Kenny Washington remembered Mr. Thompson's showing up when Mr. Washington was performing with Johnny Griffin's group at Jazz Alley in Seattle in 1993. Mr. Thompson listened, conversed with the musicians, and then departed on foot for the place where he was staying -- in a wooded spot in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, more than three miles away.

He died of complications from Alzheimer's in Seattle in 2005.

His 1965 Prestige session was called, with bitter irony as things were to turn out, Lucky Thompson Plays Happy Days are Here Again (and one wonders if that song ever really signalled happy days for anyone). Thompson is still the guy who played with Erskine Hawkins and with Charlie Parker, equally at home with swing and bebop, and so the old chestnut, the theme song of Democratic presidential hopeful Al Smith, is a fitting start point for the session. Thompson has a swingster's affimity for melody, a bebopper's comfort with complexity. There's a complexity of emotion, too, in Thompson's interpretation of this paean to untrammeled happiness, as a tinge of melancholy pervades his version.

"Happy Days are Here Again" is also closely associated with Barbra Streisand, and in fact the whole album revolves around songs associated with Streisand, even if she's not necessarily the primary association. "Cry Me a River," the next standard up, was sung by Barbra, but will forever be Julie London's. "Cry Me a River" is a song that's well-nigh irresistible for any singer with even a flicker of torch in their pipes, from Ella Fitzgerald to Joe Cocker, certainly  Streisand, most famously London. There are well over 600 covers of it. Sixty-odd instrumental versions make it a quasi-jazz standard as well, though not all that many A-listers have had a go at it: in addition to Thompson, it's been recorded by Dexter Gordon (in 1955, contemporaneous with London), Ray Bryant, Don Elliott, J. J. Johnson, Pete Candoli and a few others. Johnny "Hammond" Smith did it for Prestige.

The song was written by Arthur Hamilton, who had a long and not unsuccessful career as a songwriter and lyricist, but if he had been told he could keep all the money he made from all his other songs, but would have to return all his "Cry Me a River" royalties, he'd be pretty deeply in the red. He also had a pretty good hit with "Sing a Rainbow," from the Jack Webb movie Pete Kelly's Blues. He wrote three songs for Pete Kelly's Blues, two of which made it into the movie. The rejected one was "Cry Me a River."

Thompson makes you wonder why there aren't more jazz treatments of it. In his version, it has everything--the melodic sweetness, the uptempo bebop improvisation, room for a wonderful Tommy Flanagan solo. stickwork by Walter Perkins that embellishes as it drives.

Other standards follow: "You Don't Know What Love Is," "As Time Goes By," and of course the song most closely associated with Streisand, "People." He plays one number of his own composition, "Safari." It would have to be pretty good to keep company with these popular favorites, and it is.

In writing recently about Chuck Wayne, I discussed "that genre that's sometimes called 'mainstream' or 'straight ahead' jazz, but might best be called 'timeless jazz,' music that comes not out of any school or any era, but out of a quest for beauty, for an edge, for virtuosity, that comes from a love of playing and a mastery of the instrument and the form."

That's this album. Soul jazz and free jazz were the zeitgeist in 1965; this is neither. Barbra Streisand was the hottest thing on Broadway and in Hollywood; this isn't about her. It's timeless jazz, and thamk heavens for it.

Tommy Flanagan, George Tucker and Walter Perkins, three men at home in the world of timeless jazz, were the rhythm section. On "Safari" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" they are joined by harpist Jack Melady. Not primarily a jazz musician, Melady was known for his work in Broadway show pits, with Irish folkies the Clancy Brothers, and for a couple of albums of lounge favorites with cellist Julius Ehrenwerth, as Jack and Julie. He fits in here nicely, though.

Don Schlitten produced. "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Cry Me a River" were the single.  

Listening to Prestige 708 - Brother Jack McDuff - Benny Golson

LISTEN TO ONE: Rockabye

 This is an odd little session -- odd in so many ways. First, each cut seems to have slightly different personnel, although that may not be the case. it may been the same group of musicians, billed differently for each cut. Second, with all the painstaking care taken to separately identify the musicians for each cut in the session log, no one seems to have jotted down the date of the session -- it's just "some time in early 1965." Third, they don't seem to have had any strong reason for calling this session, unless it was just that Benny Golson had paid the big band for one more day. Each of the three cuts from the sometime in early May session ended up on a different McDuff potpourri album, one released in 1967, the other two in 1969.

Since Prestige doesn't seem to have given a lot of time and attention to the session, I won't either. Lew Futterman, McDuff's manager/producer, was at the controls. McDuff's core group is solid, and Benny Golson was doing some very interesting work with this studio band of unidentified musicians, which is another oddity of the session. Golson, at least according to Lew Futterman, jumped at the chance to record with McDuff, and a second go-round, now that McDuff has faded into history and Golson receives the honors of esteemed elder, is good to have. I've discussed their previous collaboration here.

"Rockabye" was released on the 1967 album The Midnight Sun. Two years later, "English Country Gardens" came out on I Got a Woman and "Shortnin' Bread" on Steppin' Out.

Listening to Prestige 707 Freddie McCoy

LISTEN TO ONE: Lonely Avenue

 It's 1965, and Prestige is fully committed to riding the wave of soul jazz, and no one exemplified that better than Freddie McCoy, who was tapped by Johnny "Hammond " Smith (later known as Johnny Hammond) on a couple of Prestige albums before getting this shot at an album under his own name--a position he was not to relinquish quickly. He would release seven albums on Prestige over a three year period, then one album on a tiny independent label in 1971, then nothing. He dropped out of sight, apparently left the music business. He died in 2009 in Morocco, where he was living under his adopted Muslim name of Dit Ahmed Sofi.

Larry, of the Funky16Corners blog, rates McCoy as "the finest, purely 'soul jazz' vibraphonist I’ve ever heard, and while others may lay claim to that distinction--and I would never tout any artist (well, except for Louis Armstrong) as the finest of anything, a strong case could be made for Freddie McCoy as the quintessential soul jazz vibist. His commitment to this signature jazz sound of the 1960s seems to have been total, and his ability to coax soul out of an instrument that does not allow much for the slurs or microtonalities of the blues. 

McCoy's first entry into ars poetica of soul jazz, his first tune of his first session, first cut (and the title cut) on his first album, was Doc Pomus's 'Lonely Avenue," originally recordeed by Ray Charles, inspired by the Pilgrim Travelers' gospel song "How Jesus Died." My first thought on seeing the set list was "What made Freddie McCoy think he could possibly do this?" Just as my first thought on hearing Ray's version was "How could he do it? This could so easily go wrong--how did he make it so right?" Surprisingly, it's had rather a lot of covers since Ray's masterpiece, including British Invasion soft rockers Peter and Gordon (mistake) and the Everly Brothers (big mistake -- the Everlys could sing almost anything, including several other Ray Charles covers, but they couldn't sing this. 

In short, I wasn't expecting much.

And it didn't take long to convince me otherwise.

If you loved the sound of the vibraphone, as Prestige's Bob Weinstock apparently did, and you were convinced that soul jazz was what was going to keep your label afloat in the 1960s, you had found your guy. With the vibraphone playing off the full sound of trumpet, baritone sax, trombone and organ, with a brilliant arrangement by trumpeter Gil Askey, it was pretty clear that Prestige had come up with another winner in the soul jazz sweepstakes.

Freddy McCoy, at 32, may have been a new face on the soul jazz scene, but soul jazz was not an entirely new sound (see my book, Jass with a Beat), and McCoy and producer Cal Lampley came up with some veteran talent to make this session work. Tate Houston, 40, made his first recordings with Billy Eckstine in 1946. He followed that up with stints with Sonny Stitt and Milt Jackson, and played at Detroit's Blue Bird Inn. He moved from bebop to rhythm and blues with Hal "Cornbread" Singer and Big John Greer. Napoleon "Snags" Allen's career goes back even further, being one of the first to introduce the electric guitar to the New York scene in the 1930s. Martin Rivera is probably best known for his work with Junior Mance in the 1980s, but his recording career goes back to the mid-1950s, and like Houston and Allen, was one of New York's reliable studio musicians. Like Ray Lucas, he has recorded on Prestige betore -- Rivera with Kenny Burrell, Lucas with Bobby Timmons and King Curtis. Organist James Thomas is almost certainly not the British classical organist and choir director of the same name, and I haven't been able to find out anything else about him.

The abum was recorded in two sessions, January 25 and February 16, and the second session was augmented with trombonist Dicky Harris, another veteran whose roots go back to Erskine Hawkins in the 1930s, and whose rhythm and blues credentials include work with Lucky Millinder, Ruth Brown and Sam Cooke.

t's unusual to see an arranger credit on an album by a small jazz combo, but Gil Askey certainly deserves it here. Askey, a 25-year veteran of the jazz scene (Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie) took on this gig on the way to a full time job that would keep him occupied for the next decade and more. He had just gotten a call earlier in the month from a young Detroit entrepreneur who was starting a new label.

Berry Gordy was to describe Askey as ""the glue that kept everything together" at Motown, and he is generally recognized as one of the important creators of the Motown sound. He was instrumental in developing the Jackson Five, and when the brothers were first booked on Ed Sullivan, little Michael was afraid to go until he was reassured by the sight of "Uncle Gil" in the wings.

Askey's musical roots go back to the Austin, Texas, Anderson High School Marching Band (Kenny Dorham was a bandmate), one of the first Black marching bands to gain prominence. He developed his skills in rhythm and blues as an arranger for Buddy Johnson, and touring with 1950s package shows as the backup band for Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, the Clovers, Jackie Wilson, Lloyd Price and many more.

None of these musicians played on subsequent McCoy recordings. McCoy was talented enough, and attuned enough to the zeitgeist, to build a successful career on his own talents. But these veterans, and especially the arranging genius of Gil Askey, gave him a particularly powerful debut.

Lonely Avenue became the title of the album, and also the A side of its first 45 RPM single release. The B side was "Collard Greens," continuing a rhythm and blues tradition of giving soul food titles to tunes, like Hal Singer's "Cornbread," Eddie Vinson's "Kidney Stew" and Frank Culley's "Cole Slaw" -- a tradition that had continued into the soul jazz era with Booker T's classic "Green Onions." The February 16 session yielded more soul food, and another single, with "Belly Full of Greens" (flip side the standard "Willow Weep for Me"). McCoy would continue the theme on subsequent albums Peas 'n Rice and Beans & Greens. 

Listening to Prestige 706

LISTEN TO ONE:My Baby Just Cares for Me

 For someone so highly respected as a jazz guitar innovator, with a career that spanned four decades, Chuck Wayne has a very small catalog as a leader: two albums in the 1950s, this one for Prestige in the 1960s, one each in the 1970s and '80s.

Wayne was  one of the first to apply the theories of bebop to the guitar, and his innovative techniques led him to be recognized as one of the most important technical innovators on the instrument. For the average layman (me), you may not be able to elucidate what sets his playing apart, but you're left with the feeling that yeah, that sure is different--but it sounds so natural, like it's the way everyone should be playing,

LISTEN TO ANOTHER: Sonny

Wayne's long-term credits include an early stint with Woody Herman (the First Herd) and many years as Tony Bennett's musical director and accompanist. That he could play all those years with Bennett is some indication of how listenable he could be; that Bennett would choose someone as original and innovative as Wayne to be his accompanist says a lot about the singer's chops. A YouTube search for "Chuck Wayne-Tony Bennett" brings up a version of "My Baby Just Cares For Me," which is a superb showcase for both men.

One of his his most famous compositions, and one of the great jazz standards, is his 1946 work, "Sonny." What's that? You've never heard of a jazz standard called "Sonny"? Well, perhaps you've heard it under another name, and credited to a different composer: "Solar," by Miles Davis. By now, it is generally acknowledged that Miles's "Solar" is Wayne's "Sonny." 

ONE MORE TIME: Someone to Watch Over Me

What else to say about the man? His technique and his technical innovation remain so important to this day, that a YouTube search on his name will lead you to a number of transcriptions of his solos on well-known standards.

And what about his session for Prestige? What can I say about it except that it's a wonderful album, in that genre that's sometimes called "mainstream" or "straight ahead" jazz, but might best be called "timeless jazz," music that comes not out of any school or any era, but out of a quest for beauty, for an edge, for virtuosity, that comes from a love of playing and a mastery of the instrument and the form. 

AND ONE MORE ONCE: See Saw

He takes on an eclectic mix of composers from Gershwin to Gordon Jenkins, and includes three of his own tunes. As a composer, he's best known for the tune he's officially not known at all for, "Solar," but contributions to this session, "See Saw," "I'll Get Along," and "Shalimar," show that he could write music worth listening to.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the session comes when Wayne exchanges his guitar for a banjo on Steven Sondheim's "Lovely," bringing a flexibility to that instrument that would be explored by genre-bending virtuosos like Billy Faier, George Stavis and Bela Fleck.

Wayne is joined by bassist Joe Williams--not the singer, and I could find nothing else about him except that he sounds good here. The drummer is Ronnie Bedford, who recorded sparingly but always in good company, and spent much of his life in Powell, Wyoming, where he was a professor at Northwest College, and was a recipient of the Wyoming Governor's Award for the Arts.

The session was produced by Cal Lampley, new to Prestige, but an esteemed figure in American music since his graduation from Juilliard in 1949, a time when enrollment by an African American in that prestigious institution was still a rarity, and his Carnegie Hall debut as a concert pianist in 1953. At Columbia, he had produced the Miles Davis/Gil Evans Porgy and Bess sessions. He had worked with Leonard Bernstein, Mahalia Jackson, Dave Brubeck and Victor Borge.

He came to Prestige in 1964, replacing Ozzie Cadena, whoi had left to form his own label. As Prestige producer Bob Porter, who came to the label shortly after Lampley, recalled it, "Weinstock wanted someone with a greater pop sensibility—Don Schlitten would handle the hardcore jazz." Which seems odd, given Lampley's classical background experience working across a broad range of genres. Lampley would work with a broad range of talents during his Prestige years, but he did apparently have something of a pop sensibility--he would produce the label's only charted pop hit--Richard "Groove" Holmes's version of "Misty."

The album was released as Morning Mist. It would be Wayne's only Prestige session, although a 1952 recording he made with George Wallington (on mandola) would be released, along with other early Wallington recordings, on the Prestige Historical Series in 1968, an early forerunner of the the reissue label that Prestige was to become in the 1970s.

Side note -- it's hard to believe this is a Prestige album cover.

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Listening to Prestige 705: Lightnin' Hopkins

LISTEN TO ONE:I Learn about the Blues

Lightnin' Hopkins is, by most counts. the most widely recorded of all blues singers, under his own name and a variety of others. and they're all worth listening to, but most people, indlucing most blues lovers, will not have amassed a complete collection of Lightnin's discography. You'd have to pretty committed just to own a complete set of Hopkins on Prestige--there are 11 albums, on the main label, Bluesville and Prestige Folklore.

This is the last Prestige session, produced once again by Samuel Charters, and distinguished by alternating tracks of Lightnin' singing and Lightnin' talking, creating a mini-memoir. The songs are great, in the Lightnin' style, and the interviews are fascinatng. If

you were only going to buy one Lightnin' Hopkins album, you'd probably not choose this one. You'd go for the music, and you might well choose one of the Prestige albums, because they have higher standards for recording than a lot of the other labels he turned up on. But if you're a folklorist, or just someone who wants to get to know the musicians he listens to better, this is an excellent choice. Called, appropriately, My Life in the Blues.

Listening to Prestige 704: Bobby Timmons and Don Patterson

LISTEN TO ONE: White Christmas

LISTEN TO ONE: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

 A Christmas album! From Prestige!

Yes, it's true.

It's more than true. There are two of them. Bobby Timmons, and then Don Patterson, leading their respective trios through a more or less conventional mix of traditional carols and Christmas pop songs. Fortunately, it was 1964, so most of the really awful Christmas pop songs hadn't been written yet, and Bobby and producer Ozzie Cadena know enough to stay away from "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Rockin' around the Christmas Tree," at least with Timmons. By the time Ozzie got to Patterson, on the next day, he did let "Rudolph" slip in. Both Timmons and Patterson do, however, essay "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."

There are two reasons for buying an album of Christmas songs. One, there's a choir singing the songs so you can sing along with them, a beat behind if you don't remember

the words. Two, they're all or mostly instrumental, so you can have them as background music while you're trimming the tree, wrapping presents, or trying to seduce the receptionist from the accounting department, If you're Mantovani or the Melachrino Strings, you're playing the melody pretty straight through, so that people can sing along. If you're a jazz group, you're going to be improvising, but staying close enough to the melody that people remember what it is that you're playing.

There's probably a third. You hate Christmas music, and would rather just be listening to some good jazz, but your spouse, or your boss, or somebody, insists that you pick up a Christmas album to play at the office party or the tree trimming gathering, so you get something that says "Holiday Soul" on the cover, put it on, dig it quietly until the boss says "What is this shit?" and then you show him the album cover -- "See? It says 'Holiday Soul'!" and then, if you're lucky, Bobby Timmons comes in with the melody to "Deck the Halls," and plays it pretty close to recognizably straight for the last thirty seconds of the cut. This is, of course, if you're at an office party in 1964. Today's young whippersnapper boss probably won't recognize the melody to  "Deck the Halls," and will want to know why Timmons isn't playing "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Or "White Christmas." Oh, that was "White Christmas"? Where was the melody?

It's not quite that extreme. Well, it is for "White Christmas." For the most part, both Timmons and Patterson do at least allude to the melodies of their Christmas standards, but each allows himself plenty of room to just stretch out and play jazz, and that is something each of them does very satisfactorily.

Well, probably "Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer" was a mistake if you're looking for holiday soul.

Timmons finds considerably more soul in the 16th century Welsh melody of "Deck the Halls" than Patterson does in Johnny Marks's ditty, composed during the bebop era, recorded around the time that Bob Weinstock was lining up Lennie Tristano for Prestige Records' inaugural recording session. Gene Autry didn't want to record "Rudolph," and there's a good chance Don Patterson wasn't a lot more thrilled. 

Still...hey, it's Christmas. And with some good jazz, you can make it through the season. Ozzie Cadena produced both sessions.