Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Another one of those definitely worthy figures who made a brief name for himself and faded into oblivion. You won't find him on any of the various internet lists of the 50 greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Where will you find him? I dug a little deeper, starting with the forum section of organissino.com, where no one is so obscure that some coterie of fans haven't gathered to discuss him or her. I found one discussion of Jones, with all the entries dated 2003, when Mosaic released a box set of all his recordings. The reviews were there were all glowing, with several comparing him to Clifford Brown, and one mentioning that the set had been reviewed on Fresh Air. Nothing since 2003;
I found a really neat jazz blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe, which has, among other treasures, profiles of "Obscure Trumpet Masters." Jones is number four -- they're not ranked; he's number four in alphabetical order, and blogger Curtjazz (I can't find any other name for him) introduces him with:
He plays on one of the most famous straight-ahead jazz songs ever recorded, yet today people are more likely to confuse him with a film character played by Dorothy Dandridge, than they are to know the titles of any of his six albums.
The "most famous" is Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Jones had come east from Los Angeles, where he had recorded three well-received albums for Pacific Jazz, to join Silver's group. He played on two albums with Silver, and did quite a lot more sideman work with excellent musicians (incuding Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson for Prestige), and made this one Pretige album as leader, for which he received Down Beat's "New Star Trumpeter" award.
But as was the case with so many black artists of his era, the racism -- and the lack of appreciation for jazz as an art form -- in the United States weighed too heavily on him, and he moved to Germany, where he would spend the next fifteen years, and would disappear from view as far as the American jazz public was concerned.
This would be his USA swan song, at least for the time being. He would return in the 1980, and make one more album for the West Coast label Revelation. It was titled Carmell Jones Returns, although by that time the reaction would have been not so much "Wow, he's back!" and more "Who's Carmell Jones?"
His later years were spent in his almost-home town of Kansas City, Missouri. His actual home town was Kansas City, Kansas, but the Missouri side of the state line was more hospitable to music.
For those who remembered him and those who happened on him for the first time with the Mosaic box set, his work was a welcomed pleasure, as well it should have been. What this session captures is a man who loved what he did, even if he didn't love the country he was doing it in. That love comes through in every note he plays.
New to Prestige is Horace Silver veteran Roger Humphries. Don Schlitten produced, and the album was entitled Jay Hawk Talk, a tip of the hat to Jones's home state. The title cut was also released as a two-sided 45 RPM single.
I was going to say that as we move deeper into the 1960s, there's an increasing debate as to just what jazz is, but hasn't that always been true? When Nick LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first recordings in 1917, there were plenty around to say that these white boys who called themselves the creators of jazz were a pallid imitation of what Buddy Bolden had done, and what King Oliver and that Armstrong kid were doing. When critics and historians first started seriously writing defintions of jazz, in the early 1940s (no one had really done it before then), they were motivated in large part by a felt need to
create a definition that would include that new stuff by those guys who were turning chords inside out, and who, in the words of comedian Ronny Graham, "wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." In their zeal to have the new experimental sound taken seriously, the critics excluded people like Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely who were making records that people actually wanted to buy (a critical misstep which I have corrected in my new book, Jazz with a Beat, from SUNY Press, available to preorder from Amazon).
Later, as the music pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became the mainstream, those avant garde critics became the establishment, and some of them looked with dismay at the new sounds that were being made by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, with even wilder young bloods like Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler and James "Blood" Ulmer waiting in the wings. Hence, even though Prestige had its own free jazz practitioners in the mid-1960s, we could find, in the liner notes by Andrew Newcombe to this album,
The music on this record--and it is music, in the full sense of the term, and in contrast to the squamose smudges of sound that have so often been passed off as jazz in recent years--testifies to the continuing validity of "good taste" as an aesthetic canon.
Definitions of good taste come and go with the years, and it's heartwarming to see how, in the face of the onslaught of a new avant garde, those definitions can be broadened in ways that the establishment critics themselves would probably be just as happy if no one pointed them out. The soul jazz organists who were coming to prominence in the early to mid 1960s were not at all afraid to get their licks, and their rhythms, from that same rhythm and blues that had been written out of the canon--and, in fact, to use some of the same musicians who had played that music.
Smith, for his sidemen on this occasion, did not dip into the Prestige (and Blue Note, and Riverside, and EmArcy, and Roulette) repertory company. His choices were mostly more obscure, although they did include an up and coming star in Houston Person, who had made his first recording with Smith two years earlier, on Riverside. Earl Edwards, Person's opposite number on tenor sax, made a couple of records with Smith and that's about all--he does appear on a record Dinah Washington made for Roulette. I can't find any other credits for drummer John Harris.
The other Smith on the album, Floyd "Guitar" Smith, is a different story. Born in 1917, he came of age in the swing era, playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, and cut his rhythm and blues teeth with a couple of the early organ guys, Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett.
"The Stinger" is the title cut of the album, and it was the first 45 RPM single off the album, and--led by Floyd Smith's stinging but melodic guitar work, it is rhythm and blues all the way, with both "Hammond" and Person showing their R&B chops. This is the music that was at one time roundly denounced as "bad taste," and they do their swingin', backbeatin' best on it.
The other single off the session was "Brother John," so titled by Mr. "Hammond," but "Brother Ray" might have been a more apt title. I suppose if anyone moved the needle of rhythm and blues over from the bad taste to the good taste part of the dial, it was Ray Charles, but he still had enough bad taste to satisfy the most unreconstructed rhythm and blues fan, and so does Johnny "Hammond" Smith in this tribute to the great man.
All of this album is good, and it's varied. The standard, "There is No Greater Love," by Isham Jones (a standard! Good taste alert!) features some smooth playing by Houston Person (when you could still play smooth without playing "smooth jazz") and some tasty picking by Floyd Smith. "Brother John" is no holds barred. "Cleopatra and the African Knight," in addition to having a great title, does what the early rhythm and blues pioneers did so well--captures a big band feel with a small group. "Benny's Diggin'" weds rhythm and blues to bebop (as many of the early players did) and features some virtuoso work by "Hammond." Some top notch drumming by Harris, as well.
The soul jazz era, ushered in by Jimmy Smith, led to a lot of young keyboardists taking up the organ, and a lot of organ groups being signed to jazz labels. But just because it was a thing, that doesn't mean these young organists came out of a cookie cutter. They had individual styles and imaginations and creative impulses, and sitting down and listening to them for a while can only reinforce that realization.
"The Stinger" made up both sides of a 45. "Brother John" was backed with "Cleopatra." Cal Lampley produced. About the cover, I have nothing to say except to wonder why the Green Lantern is wearing red.
I talked from time to time about swing-to-bop, in writing about the early days of Prestige, and artists like Zoot Sims. It may be time to consider a new kind of transitional music -- perhaps we should call it straight-ahead-to-free. I don't know what else to call this marvelous live album by Jaki Byard, except perhaps to add that its genesis seems to blossom from Charles Mingus and Earl Hines. To explain that, I'll have to quote extensively fron the liner notes to the original album, by the incomparable Ira Gitler.
Gitler desdribes a night when Don Schlitten came to hear two groups who were sharing the stage at the Village Vanguard--Mingus and Hines. Byard was playing with Mingus then, and he approached Schltten with an idea. Lennie Sogoloff, of the small but well-regarded north-of-Boston jazz club, Lennie's on the Turnpike, had heard Jaki's work on Booker
Ervin's The Freedom Book album, annd he wanted Jaki to bring the trio he had used to back up Ervin--Richard Davis and Alan Dawson. Dawson was a Boston resident, and Sogoloff had already line him up.
Jaki, in turn, asked Schlitten if Prestige would like to record on the spot,
Don was immediately in favor of the idea and put his creative brain to work helping to shape the date. Since Davis was unable to leave New York at the time, he suggested George Tucker, then playing bass with Hines. Byard liked this and suggested multi-reed man Joe Farrell...Unwilling to trust the unknown, Schitten decided to employ a New York engineer...Dick Alderson was his man.
The group opened on a Monday. By Thursday, when Schlitten and Alderson arrived...the four men were really getting it together...Byard told [Don] they were ready. This was an understatement. Schlitten describes it as "One of the most beautiful experiencesI've ever had in listening to jazz."
I wouldn't argue with him.
It is interesting to note that the inception of this recording came at a time when Jaki was playing opposite Earl Hines. "Out of all the bands," [Byard has said], "The only one I used to dig was...Fatha Hines. That was the only band that intrigued me."
The Mingus-Hines week at the Vanguard was an inspirational one for Byard...Hines plays as if he is a big band, [and] it seemed to inspire Byard to emphasize his own leanings in this direction when he got to Lennie's. "I never heard Jaki play this way," says Schlitten. "He was like a 16-piece band. One second he would be playing the piano part, and then he would resolve and sound like a saxophone section. Behind Joe Farrell he became a punching trumpet section. Throughout the whole thing he was a bandleader. Here was a quartet that sounded like three times that many."
...For all the rough edges involved in such a mercuarial improvising process, there is nothing "haphazard." Even when they go "outside" -- and Jaki knows what he is doing when he is "out there" -- they are always under the firm control of the leader who is able to bring everything and everyone back "inside" to a logical, satisfying conclusion.
Schlitten recalls how the people at Lennie's were completely taken with Byard's ability to capture the entire history of jazz piano playing, (As he has made clear before, Jaki does not fool around in the various styles he is capable of adopting. He does not parody but instead transmits the "feeling" of the greats that he is able to embody as well.) ...Don states, "he runs the gamut from Scott Joplin, James P., Fats, Basie, Duke, to Garner, Bud, Bill Evans, Monk..." He also does the things that Brubeck and Cecil Taylor each try to do but either fall short or don't know when to stop.
Ira Gitler is, of course, one of the great jazz writers of his era, but he is of his era, and it's now a half century since he wrote this, and times change, and tastes change, and perspectives change. Gitler could be forgiven if his attitudes, and his critical perspective, had fallen somewhat out of step with today's tastes.
And maybe they have. Maybe mine have. We live in a time when some young critics reject all of Coltrane's early work as being hokey and not worth listening to...and I mean, even Giant Steps.
But I don't buy that, nor do I think it's a universally held opinion. We also live in a time when young jazz musicians study their craft in college and are denigrated for that, often unfairly, and grow up with a respect for the totality of jazz.
So I'm going to continue to do the only thing I can do, which is to consider my 21st century perspective, and my judgment of Ira Gitler in 1965, to be a valid one, and continue from there.
What's remarkable is how spot-on Gitler was, even about Jaki Byard vis-a-vis Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor. Listening to Byard today, you can still hear what Gitler heard, and even putting into the context of a lot more years and a lot more music, Gitler is still right -- he always knew what he was doing when he was "out there," and he knew when and how to bring it back "inside." And it wasn't because he chickened out, and wouldn't stay as far "out there" or as long "out there" as Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. It's because he heard it all, and wanted it all, and found a way to include it all.
And all of this leads me, in 2023, in a post-postmodern age, an age informed by the conservatorship of Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center and jazz goes to college and jazz meets rock and electronica and more jazz in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, to wonder why Jaki Byard, who encompassed all of it, and always with vision, and always with soul, is so underappreciated? If you look at the internet lists of greatest jazz pianists, lists made up by people who range in age from younger than me to ridiculously younger that me, where is he? Ranker, which is entirely based on fan voting and boasts over 8.7K voters, has Byard not included at all in a list of 70 names. The uDiscover list, compiled by" a team of respected authors and journalists who are passionate about what they do, with decades’ worth of experience in print, online, radio and TV journalism," does have him in the top 50, at number 41. But to the general public -- the general jazz-listening public, that is, the Ranker public, which knows enough to vote Art Tatum number one and Oscar Peterson number two, he doesn't exist.
Listen to what the man does. Start with my Listen to One, then check out the rest of this album, which you can find on YouTube but not on Spotify. Then listen to more.
On my last blog entry, I castigated those long-ago record company owners (visionaries all, who don't deserve my castigation except in this case) for only recording Andy and the Bey Sisters three times during their eleven years as a team. Fortunately, Jaki Byard did not suffer the same fate. Bob Weinstock stayed with him. This is his tenth appearance on Prestige, his fourth as leader of his own group. He would record six more albums as leader, and 23 more for other, mostly smaller labels up through 1998. On Prestige alone, he recorded with Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin; on other labels, with Maynard Ferguson, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, and others. And of course, most famously with Charles Mingus (13 albums).
He was with Prestige pretty much right up to the end, so I'll keep coming back to him. And there'll be more to say, since he wasn't much for repeating himself.
These were released as The Jaki Byard Quartet - Live! Vol. 1 (1965) and Vol. 2 (1967). One cut, "Spanish Tinge," was included on a 1967 studio album, On the Spot. And several previously unissued cuts -- the alternate take of "Twelve," "Dolphy" numbers 1 and 2, "St. Mark's Place Among The Sewers," plus Jaki's Ballad Medley which had been on Volume 2, were released in 2003 under the Prestige label, although by that time Prestige was a part of Fantasy and about to be bundled into the Concord group, as The Last From Lennie's, so someone still remembered Jaki in the 21st century (he died in 1999). Don Schlitten produced.
This was the third and last album that Andy and his sisters made together, and one can't fault them for deciding to go their separate ways, career-wise. They all had artistically rewarding careers, although probably not with the recognition that they all deserved. One can certainly, however, fault the record company executives who passed up the chance to pass up recording this amazing trio -- only three albums in eleven years.
Family harmony groups have made their mark in gospel, in country, in rhythm and blues and soul, but there has never been a family harmony group in jazz like Andy and the Bey Sisters. The Mills Brothers made their contribution to jazz as well as to
pop, but there were none that I can recall with the modern phrasing and sensibility of the three Beys. Add the close, supportive feeling of a family group to the dangerous edginess of the modern sound, and you have something unique.
They start out with "Tammy," from the folksy-corny movie of the same name with Debbie Reynolds. I should probably turn in my hipster credentials for saying this, but I love the melody of "Tammy." It was written by Hollywood jinglemasters Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, and I think it's one of the most beautiful melodies to come out of 1950s pop. But it is simple, it is a little naive, and while what the Beys do with it is edgy and interesting, it may be a little more than the melody can bear.
But then they get something they can sink their teeth into, Ray Charles's "Hallelujah, I Love Her So." With gospel's deep tradition of family harmony, Charles's sensual overlay, and their own contemporary arrangement, they come bursting out, riding Kenny Burrell's guitar and Andy's piano to a thrilling treatment of this rhythm and blues classic. Remarkably, they distance themselves from Ray by taking it almost completely out of the church, and they make it work.
"Everybody Loves My Baby" takes this Spencer Williams anthem of the Roaring Twenties and moves from a scatted intro by Andy into three-part harmony that notches another decade on the Beys' scorecard. "Round Midnight" reaches into a totally different world, that of Thelonious Monk, and drawe it too into the Beys' world, with the harmonies, the Burrell guitar, and some lovely solo parts by Andy.
And I could go on. Every track on this album is a new delight. Each of them gets a solo turn, as they prepare to launch into three solo careers--each of them tintroducing her or himself on the "Love Melody" that came from the second session but became the first track of the album -- Salome on "Love is Just Around the Corner," Geraldine on "I Love You," Andy on "Love You Madly."
Few swan song albums have done it better.
Cal Lampley produced. 'Round Midnight was the album title. There were no 45 RPM singles from either session, which is a bit of a surprise, given that Prestige always did well with vocals.
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