Listening to Prestige 275: John Coltrane

Coltrane and Donald Byrd are a great combination, back together again after a January session, so Bob Weinstock must have really liked what he heard, and what's not to like? But it's Coltrane who really holds the interest right now. The "happy young man," in Ira Gitler's words, was on a creative tear. Just five months into the year, he was already on his sixth studio session for Prestige, and that was only part of it. He had done two dates with a group led by Wilbur Harden for Savoy, and don't forget, he still had his bread and butter gig, with Miles Davis. By May 23rd, he had recorded two studio sessions and two live sessions with Miles. And when he went out to Rudy's for his Friday Prestige date on May 23rd, he had another recording scheduled with Miles for the following Monday, in New York, at Columbia's 30th Street studio.

Turning your life around, getting off drugs, gives you energy to burn, and Coltrane was burning it. But it wasn't just energy. He was burning with musical ideas, too, which is what makes this period so exciting.

The music was exciting. What Gitler called "sheets of sound," a phrase that's become firmly implanted in the jazz lexicon. It meant Coltrane playing every note associated with every variation on a given chord, more or less at the same time. Or something. It was sort of like the rapid-fire runs through variations on chord changes that the beboppers had pioneered, except that it wasn't. But it had that same questing urgency, that sense of listening for something new, just beyond the horizon. Listening to it now in the chronological order of the music being made (this session was not released until 1964), one can really feel a part of that quest.

"Black Pearls" is a Coltrane original, "Lover Come Back" is the Sigmund Romberg melody that's

become such a favorite of jazz modernists. "Sweet Sapphire Blues" is credited to Bob Weinstock as composer, and that might raise eyebrows, since it was such common practice in those days for DJs or record company executives to put their name on songs they had not in fact written. This one was a little different. They had gone through the first two tunes, and they still had studio time, and they did not yet have enough to fill out an album. This could have been OK--Weinstock wasn't planning to release the session right away anyway, and he could always have found other ways to fill it out. Or they could have done what they so often did: what Rudy Van Gelder called the "Five O'clock Blues," an impromptu improvisation on a familiar blues riff, or a half-finished idea by one of the musicians. In this case, when Weinstock asked Trane for one more tune, Trane responded, "Why don't you write one?" As Weinstock recalled, he recoiled from the idea--one thing he was sure of, he didn't know how to write a song. But Trane kept teasing him: "How about this?" and he'd play a few notes. If Weinstock said OK, he'd play a few more: "How about this?" Before long, they had strung something together, and Trane said, "OK, you wrote it."

The result is a little like the routine Steve Allen used to do on TV. He'd call up four people from the audience, have each of them strike a note on the piano, and then do a jazz improvisation based on those four notes. A little like that, except better. The melody is jagged but interesting, and five supremely gifted musicians were able to improvise on it for 18 minutes, or one full album side.

Why "Sweet Sapphire Blues"? That's lost to history, unless they'd been watching Amos 'n Andy before the session. In any case, it wasn't likely to be the title of the album, nor was the Romberg melody. So Black Pearls it was. It was also released as a two-sided 45.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.

                                                                                                                                                --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 201: Wrapping up 1956

Here follows a blizzard of names, and I could have included more, if I'd used the entire rateyourmusic list for the year. But it gives you some idea of the richness and vitality of jazz in mid-decade.

Surely the biggest news from the Prestige label in 1956 was the wrapping up of the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon. He recorded fourteen songs in May, then twelve more in October, then Miles was off into the future, and one of the most storied careers in jazz, although Prestige would continue releasing albums from these sessions into 1961. The cuts were all first takes, and if Miles was rushing through them...well, he wasn't. The four albums that came out of the Contractual Marathon sessions, with John Coltrane and what became known as the First Great Quintet, remain some of Miles's most beloved work.

And they actually weren't all he did for Prestige that year. He led another quintet, with Sonny Rollins and Tommy Flanagan, in March.

And he left another legacy with Prestige, namely, his rhythm section. Bob Weinstock signed Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones to their own contract, and the trio, generally with Art Taylor on drums, would record nearly 30 albums for the label under Garland's name, and a bunch more backing up others.

Prestige was amassing one of the great rosters of rhythm section men in jazz history. In 1956 alone, Garland would play seven recording sessions, Paul Chambers ten, and Philly Joe Jones ten. And that was just the start of it. Mal Waldron appeared on six sessions, Doug Watkins on ten, Art Taylor on 14. So some cats were getting steady work, if they weren't exactly getting rich off it.

And others became very familiar with Hackensack. The summer of 1956 saw the Fridays with Rudy, as every weekend was preceded by one or even two Friday recording sessions. All in all, 48 sessions went down under the Prestige auspices, 41 of them in Rudy Van Gelder's studio

Jackie McLean recorded five sessions as leader, four more as sideman. Sonny Rollins did five as leader, one with Miles Davis. One of these was the only recording session to bring Rollins and John Coltrane together, on the epic "Tenor Madness." Like Miles, he moved on from Prestige after 1956. Donald Byrd was around a lot, with eight sessions as a sideman, one as a co-leader with Phil Woods, and two as a member of the Prestige All-Stars (one of these would be re-released as 2 Trumpets, leader credit shared by Byrd and Art Farmer). Hank Mobley also did two Prestige All-Stars sessions, three more as sideman and two as leader. Both Byrd and Mobley were to move over to Blue Note, where Mobley would stay for the rest of his recording career, whereas Byrd would eventually move on to new sounds with new labels. John Coltrane made the two Contractual Marathon sessions, and also played with Elmo Hope, Sonny Rollins, the Prestige All-Stars and Tadd Dameron.

Some were passing through. Jon Eardley made his fourth and last record for Prestige in January, then faded into obscurity for 20 years until he started recording again in Europe. George Wallington led a group with Donald Byrd and Phil Woods. He would make a few more records over the next year (one for New Jazz) before retiring to join the family's air conditioning business; it would be 30 years before he recorded again.

Tadd Dameron recorded far too little. His lasting reputation and legacy in jazz circles is testimony to how much we would have liked to get more of him, how lucky we were to get what we did. He went into the studio twice for Prestige in 1956, once with an octet, once with a quartet featuring John Coltrane. He would only make one more record after this, for Riverside in 1962.  Bennie Green would make his last Prestige albums during the year, as would Elmo Hope, with one album as leader and two as sideman.

Gil Melle was actually quite active, cutting four sessions for Prestige in 1956, but he was shortly to take off for Hollywood and a career as composer of electronica and film scores.

Prestige recorded a few singers in 1956. Earl Coleman actually did go on recording, off and on, into the 1980s, but his career never really took off. At his best, he was very good. Barbara Lea's sessions for Prestige won her DownBeat's Critics' Award as Best New Singer of 1956, but she left singing for acting, to return to it years later. Blind Willie McTell was recorded in Atlanta in 1956, and his songs were later released on Prestige subsidiary Bluesville.

So, a good year for Bob Weinstock's label, as he continued to be at the hot epicenter of what was happening in jazz,

Clifford Brown appeared on one Prestige album along with Max Roach and Sonny Rollins -- it was the same group that had made such great records for EmArcy, but here under Rollins's name as leader. And Brown was to die that same year in a tragic auto accident that also claimed pianist Richie Powell.

Also departing the scene in 1956 were Art Tatum, Tommy Dorsey and Frankie Trumbauer.

Variety listed the top-selling jazz albums of the year:

Ella and Louis, Verve
Stan Kenton--Cuban Fire, Capitol
Jai and Kai plus 6, Columbia
Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter Songbook, Verve
Errol Garner--Concert by the Sea, Columbia
Kenton in Hi-Fi, Capitol
Chris Connor--He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, Atlantic
Modern Jazz Quartet--Fontessa, Atlantic

Ella and Louis is undoubtedly still a jazz best-seller. So, probably, are Concert by the Sea, the MJQ album, and Ella singing Cole Porter, the first of her Songbook albums.

Other major releases for the year: Monk's Brilliant Corners, Mingus's Pithecanthropus Erectus, Rollins's Saxophone Colossus, Quincy Jones's This is How I Feel About Jazz, and of course, the obligation to Prestige having been filled, Miles's Round About Midnight for Columbia
Live releases from the Newport Jazz Festival included Dave Brubeck with Jay and Kai, and, most significantly, Duke Ellington. The classic Ellington at Newport was actually not the Duke's only live album from the festival: Check out the lesser-known Duke Ellington and the Buck Clayton All-Stars at Newport.

Metronome was DownBeat's chief competitor as a jazz magazine in the 40s and 50s, though it had actually been around since 1881, originally focusing on marching band music. Periodically, it would issue a Metronome Poll Winners LP, featuring a jam session of as many of the winners or near-winners as the staff (which included Leonard Feather) could get together. 1956 was their last dance, a 21-minute version of Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce," with solos by Thad Jones (trumpet), Lee Konitz (alto), Al Cohn and Zoot Sims (tenor), Tony Scott (clarinet),  Serge Chaloff (baritone), Eddie Bert (trombone), Teddy Charles (vibes), Tal Farlow (guitar, Billy Taylor (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). Metronome would cease publication in 1961.

A TV series hosted by Bobby Troup and called Stars of Jazz debuted on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. Its first show featured the Stan Getz Quartet and Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band

Here is my annual gripe about the crime against culture of not preserving all of DownBeat on digital archive. And as I write this, one cannot even access the readers' and critics' polls. Here's hoping that's a temporary glitch.

 But here is the wonderfully bizarre RateYourMusic poll for the year, just including the jazz selections (#1 is Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations). Don't forget these are 1956 releases, not recordings, which explains the presence of older sessions like the MJQ's Django.


2 Ellington at Newport

3 Pithecanthropus Erectus
The Charlie Mingus Jazz Workshop

4 Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book

5 Lady Sings the Blues
Billie Holiday

6 Ella and Louis

9 Songs for Swingin' Lovers!
Frank Sinatra

11 Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book

12 Clifford Brown & Max Roach At Basin Street

14 The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia, Volume 1

15 The Jazz Messengers

16 Sonny Rollins Plus 4

17 Tenor Madness
Sonny Rollins Quartet

20 Mingus at the Bohemia

21 Jazz Giant
Bud Powell

22 Concert by the Sea

23 Lennie Tristano

24 The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia, Volume 2

26 Fontessa

28 Stan Getz Plays

33  Blue Serge
Serge Chaloff

34 Django
The Modern Jazz Quartet

35 Moondog

36 Moonlight in Vermont
Johnny Smith featuring Stan Getz

37 Jazz at Oberlin
The Dave Brubeck Quartet

38 The Unique Thelonious Monk

40 Here Is Phineas: The Piano Artistry of Phineas Newborn 

42 Herbie Nichols Trio

43 Count Basie Swings - Joe Williams Sings

45 Whims of Chambers
Paul Chambers Sextet

46 The Boss of the Blues: Joe Turner Sings Kansas City Jazz

47 Ambassador Satch
Louis Armstrong

48 The Genius of Bud Powell

49 Russ Freeman / Chet Baker Quartet

50 Blossom Dearie

51 Miles
The New Miles Davis Quintet

52 Hi Fidelity Jam Session
Gene Ammons

54 Chris Connor

56 Modern Jazz Performances of Songs From My Fair Lady
Shelly Manne & His Friends

57 Jazz Workshop
George Russell

58 Jazz Immortal
Clifford Brown

59 Quintet / Sextet
Miles Davis and Milt Jackson

60 Lonely Girl
Julie London

61 Lights Out!
The Jackie McLean Quintet with Donald Byrd and Elmo Hope

62 Grand Encounter: 2° East / 3° West
John Lewis

63 Chamber Music of the New Jazz
Ahmad Jamal

64 Chet Baker Quartet Vol. 2

66 Work Time
Sonny Rollins

69 The Modern Jazz Sextet (Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Skeeter Best, Charlie Persip)

73 The Jazz Giants '56
Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones, Freddie Green & Gene Ramey

75 The Kenny Drew Trio

76 Kenton in Hi-Fi

77 Collectors' Items
Miles Davis

78 The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival

79 Calendar Girl
Julie London

80 Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi

I always get carried away with this list because it's so exhaustive. It goes on through #1200. Anyway, other jazz artists included farther down the list are Kenny Burrell, Rosemary Clooney, June Christy,  Mel Tormé With Marty Paich, Jimmy Smith, Harry Edison, Gene Krupa, Tito Puente,  Jimmy Giuffre, Tal Farlow, Teddy Charles, Elmo Hope, Chico Hamilton, the High Society soundtrack, Thad Jones, Gene Ammons, Cannonball Adderley, Hampton Hawes, Art Tatum, Curtis Counce, Sonny Criss, Warne Marsh, Gil Mellé, Dexter Gordon, Herb Ellis, Vince Guaraldi, Art Pepper, Art Farmer, Dinah Washington, George Shearing, Tadd Dameron, Phil Woods, Alain Goraguer, Jon Eardley, Betty Carter & Ray Bryant, Maxine Sullivan, Shelly Manne, Gene Quill, Al Cohn & Zoot Sims, Coleman Hawkins with Billy Byers, Kid Ory, Buddy Rich, Cal Tjader, Shorty Rogers, Tommy Dorsey, Gerry Mulligan, James Moody, Jimmy Cleveland, Betty Roché, Lee Konitz, Kenny Clarke, Jackie McLean, Bill Perkins, Carl Perkins, Randy Weston, Toni Harper, Carmen McRae, Meade Lux Lewis, Herbie Mann, Billy Bauer, Johnny Hodges, George Van Eps, Benny Goodman, Lennie Niehaus, Ernie Henry, Lee Wiley, Jack Teagarden, Doug Watkins, Cecil Payne, Annie Ross, Roy Eldridge, Mundell Lowe, Dorothy Carless, Jutta Hipp, Bud Shank, Muggsy Spanier, Allen Eager & Brew Moore, Jane Fielding, Bob Brookmeyer, Charlie Mariano, Sam Most, Chico Hamilton, Barbara Lea, Joe Wilder, Hank Jones, Billy Taylor, Candido, Bennie Green, Jimmy Raney, Eddie Costa & Vinnie Burke, Buddy Collette, George Wallington, Tony Scott...and that's just from the first 400. The list actually encompasses 1200 albums, with Teddy Wilson on the penultimate page. In other words, if you wanted to do a blog just listening to 1956, you'd have your work cut out for you.

The New Yorker continued to favor Dixieland and trad jazz spots. The Five Spot opened in 1956, with Cecil Taylor leading the house trio, but it gets no mention. Still, they're beginning to do a little better. And New York was New York, the Big Apple. It was where musicians came, and you were always going to be able to hear great music. 52nd Street was mostly gone, except for the Dixieland at Jimmy Ryan's, but there was a surprising amount of jazz in midtown. Birdland was a relatively recent arrival on the venerable street of jazz, and a powerhouse, featuring Count Basie, Chris Connor, the MJQ, and Phineas Newborn.

The Metropole, on Times Square, always had an amazing retinue of traditional players. Louis Armstrong was at Basin Street at 51st and Broadway. Also Cameo, on E. 53rd, alternated Barbara Carroll and Teddy Wilson on piano, and a block north, The Embers had a quartet of Tyree Glenn, Jo Jones, Tommy Potter and Dick Katz. Childs Paramount, which can't have lasted very long but must have been some sort of joint venture between the Childs restaurant chain and the Paramount Hotel, had a heck of a New Year's Eve show with Buck Clayton Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge and PeeWee Russell leading an all star lineup.

In Greenwich Village, the Village Vanguard was already an institution, but not always a jazz institution. To usher in the new year, however, they presented Abbey Lincoln. The Cafe Bohemia on Barrow Street, home to some classic live albums, alternated quintets led by Max Roach and Lester Young, and would have been a great place to spend New Year's Eve.

On to 1957.

Listening to Prestige 200: Moondog

In perfect symmetry, I'm finishing up 1956 with blog entry 200. In perfect asymmetry, I'm finishing up 1956 with something completely different.

Growing up in this era, even though I didn't live in New York City and visited it only sporadically, I knew about Moondog. Everyone did. The giant bearded street musician, who wore a viking helmet and carried a spear  He was a New York character, one who stood out even in a city full of eight million stories and at least a few thousand eccentrics.

As a devotee and somewhat serious student of rock and roll (I was turned down for a faculty grant in 1965 to do a study of doo-wop, surely the first such request they had ever gotten), I knew that Alan Freed had called himself Moondog when he began playing rhythm and blues music on the radio in Cleveland, but had had to change it when he arrived in New York, home of the real and original Moondog. That's when Freed began calling the music he played rock 'n roll.

But I never knew anything about Moondog's music.

Alan Freed did. He had taken the name from an early 78 RPM recording called "Moondog Symphony," one of Moondog's first.

It was a curious choice in every way. It was a symphony of percussion: Drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow log, Chinese block and cymbals. All Moondog. And there wasn't much in the way of multitracking for a self-made 78 in 1949, so he invented his own system, working back and forth between two tape recorders.

It was curious that Freed found it at all. The record only sold a few hundred copies.

It was perhaps even more curious that he liked it, and used it as the theme song for a radio show playing black rhythm and blues for white teenagers. One might have expected that a swing-era cat like Freed would have chosen a Gene Krupa recording as theme music, but Moondog's was as far from swing as could be imagined. He called it snaketime music:  "a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary ... I'm not gonna die in 4/4 time."

I knew that Freed had had to stop using Moondog's name. I didn't know that he had taken Freed to court, and that the case had gone all the way to the New York State Supreme Court. Moondog himself later said that the courts would most likely have ruled against a Viking-accoutred street person, had not Benny Goodman and Arturo Toscanini testified to his importance as a composer.

I didn't know lots of other things. That his real name was Louis Hardin, that he was related to the old Western gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, that he had gone blind at age 16, that he had married a socially prominent older woman in Arkansas but had left her to come to New York, live on the street and make music.

Mostly, I didn't know his music. I had never listened to it until encountering it as the next step in my

Prestige journey. And a surprising step it was. My general policy has been not to look ahead, preferring to take the music as it comes. So where did Moondog fit into Bob Weinstock's universe?

It's hard to say. There don't seem to exist any interviews with Weinstock where he discusses this particular choice, but actually there's more of Moondog on Prestige than anywhere else, and these recordings capture an important part of his oeuvre. He had actually recorded for a jazz label once before--Woody Herman's short-lived Mars label.

The music amazed me. I'm a fan of the avant-garde music of the mid- and late-twentieth century: Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Gavin Bryars. And Moondog is one of the finest avant-garde composers I have ever heard.

As other avant-garde composers have done, and as was certainly appropriate for a street musician, he used a lot of ambient sound. There's the Queen Elizabeth in the harbor, its "deep-throated whistle" blending with, and extended by, Moondog's bamboo pipe. There's the horn of a tugboat, as eerily melodic as the songs of the humpbacked whale that would become popular a generation or so later, blended into an almost, but not exactly orchestral blend of instruments. And the sounds move away from the street, too. Moondog was married for a second time in 1952, to a Japanese-American woman named Suzuko Whiteing, so he wasn't entirely homeless, though he still lived, by choice, mostly on the streets. "Lullabye" combines the cries of their six-week-old baby with Suzuko singing (or chanting) a lullabye in what I guess is Japanese, and music by a sextet composed in something like a pentatonic Japanese scale.

The trimba

Moondog also experimented with a wide variety of instruments, many of his own invention. He was particularly drawn to the oo, a triangular-shaped 25-string harp struck with a clava. He also created a variety of percussion instruments, and percussion played an important part in his compositions. His music was always rhythmic, but rhythmic in his own way, with the slithery snaketime rhythms. On Oo Debut," a short piece (as were most of his compositions), he simultaneously played the oo and the trimba, a triangular drum that is still used by musicians today.

The "and other" musicians that are mentioned in the session notes are also varied. Sometimes he worked alone, sometimes with a quintet or sextet. Most of the compositions are quite short, "Surf Session" being the exception at nearly seven minutes.

The first of these sessions was released by Prestige as Moondog, the second as More Moondog. More Moondog was largely recorded by Tony Schwartz, who was known as a sound archivist, and whose collections of street sounds were released by Folkways. One would have thought of Folkways as a more likely home for Moondog, but his work was much admired by modern jazz icons like Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, and PRestige is the richer for it.

The first album sold respectably--enough for Moondog to buy property upstate near Owego, which became his retreat from the city. Probably its sales were due to its novelty value, as there isn't much of a market for serious avant garde music. The second two -- there would be one more -- did not do so well.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 199: The Prestige All-Stars

This is the familiar -- and magnificent -- core of the Prestige All-Stars, with two new additions, and what a difference they make! The veterans are Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, and the rhythm section of Mal Waldron, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor. The new additions are Jerome Richardson and Kenny Burrell, and with them, Prestige takes a step forward into what will become the jazz sound of the Sixties.

A lot of this has to do with the instrumentation. Richardson was proficient on pretty much anything that could be played with a reed, and a few instruments that couldn't. On this album he doubles on flute and tenor sax, but it's the flute that really stands out.

These aren't the first instance of flute and guitar playing a major role on a Prestige recording session. Herbie Mann, Sam Most and Bobby Jaspar all recorded for Prestige. The label's most prominent guitarist was probably Jimmy Raney, who recorded with his own group, and played with Bob Brookmeyer and Teddy Charles (and who would later do an album with Kenny Burrell for Prestige). Billy Bauer also contributed some memorable sessions with Lee Konitz.

But this is different, and different all around. The instrumentation makes it different, but that's not all. It's a sound that's really looking toward the future. That future would be irrevocably ushered in the following year, with a recording made in 1949, but buried by Capitol Records until it finally got its LP release in 1957: the Miles Davis nonet's Birth of the Cool.

This session still has all the passionate heat of bop, but the flute is an instrument that lends itself to the cool sound, and jazz is forever evolving. It's interesting that this session was recorded under the Prestige All-Stars banner, but fitting. The Prestige veterans were not standing still, either. Donald Byd in particular, was still at the cusp of a career that would see him in more than one vanguard.

The opening salvo of "All Night Long" is by Art Taylor, and creates a different rhythmic pattern from any we've heard before, which leads right into a Kenny Burrell solo, followed by Richardson on flute. By this time, we're well into the LP era, and long cuts are common, but "All Night Long" is long even by 1956 standards, checking at 17:11, and giving all the All-Stars plenty of room to develop. Which they do. Every solo on it is wonderful. Burrell and Richardson stand out, but it's hard to take the record off without marveling at Mal Waldron's solo.

"All Night Long" is a Burrell original, and Burrell was hitting the scene hard. He was born and raised

in the jazz hotbed of Detroit, and went to college there, at Wayne State, where he studied music composition and theory, and founded an organization called the New World Music Society, which included fellow Detroiters Pepper Adams, Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd and Elvin Jones.

He graduated in 1955 and joined the Oscar Peterson Trio, a gig for which his early admiration for guitarist Oscar Moore of the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers had well prepared him.

He then headed for New York where his reputation preceded him. As well it might have. As a 19-year-old, he had already recorded with a group including Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane in Detroit, but had resisted the invitation to tour with Dizzy. opting for college and music theory. He hit New York right after graduation, and not only did he find work right away, he found a leader's role right away, recording three albums under his own name for Blue Note (one of his later Blue Note albums, Midnight Blue, was such a favorite of Alfred Lion's that it was one of the albums he was buried with). He also joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse (Minton's is best known as the birthplace of bebop in the 1940s, but it continued to be a jazz proving ground through the 50sand 60s), which was led at the time by Jerome Richardson.

The first Blue Note album featured all original Burrell compositions, showing that those years at Wayne State paid off.

The rest of this album is given over to two other world class composers, Mal Waldron and Hank Mobley. I particularly loved "Boo-Lu" and the irresistible riff it's built around. One (or two) more numbers were included on the session, but not on the album. One or two because on the session notes, they're listed as a medley: "Body and Soul" and "Tune Up." Which is a cool and unusual medley -- a standard from the Great American Songbook and a jazz standard by Miles Davis. But when they were included as bonus tracks on a CD release of the album, they became separate tunes. "Body and Soul" was also released as part of a compilation album of various artists doing the Eyton/Green/Heyman/Sour composition, on the Prestige subsidiary label Status, which the invaluable  London Jazz Collector describes as:

Difficult to see what was budget apart from saving on ink, providing minimal information saved nothing, but made it look budget. Working in Marketing in the Seventies, the big fear was always “cannibalisation”. You wanted all the sales you could get at the premium price, and extra sales at the budget price, without losing the one to the other. Extra effort was incurred to make things look less attractive. More marketing genius from Weinstock.

The original release was called All Night Long and credited to the Prestige All-Stars, but then, when subsequent Burrell session became All Day Long, the Night version was rereleased as a Kenny Burrell album.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 198: Red Garland

This is what happened after Jackie and his pal left to down a couple of cold ones and talk about what they could have done better (hint: not much). The rest of the afternoon was given over to Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor: once again, not a full album's worth of music, so the session would be issued piecemeal.

Garland had just recorded Frank Loesser's "If I Were a Bell" three months earlier as part of the final Miles Davis contractual marathon series. He opens his version of it with the same memorable chime-like intro, so I went back to listen to that version.

Garland actually had relatively little solo space on the Miles recording--when you have Miles and Trane, there's not a lot of space left oer--and what there was, was mostly duets with Chambers, so here he really has room to stretch out and show what he can do, which is a lot. Fascinating to listen to both versions.

"Willow Weep for Me" is a great standard both for singers and instrumentalists, and both have a debt

to Ann Ronell, who wrote words and music. You might guess that "Willow Weep for Me" is Ronell's best known song, and it sort of is, but that depends on who you talk to. She also wrote "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf." A protege of George Gershwin, Ronell was one of the first women to break into the boys' club of popular songwriting. Along with Loesser, she was one of the few composers who wrote their own lyrics.

Like the McLean session, this was broken up and mixed with a later date. "If I Were a Bell" and "I Know Why" came out on Red Garland's Piano, "Willow Weep for Me" and "What Can I Say Dear" on Groovy, another one of my purchases in my very early days of jazz collecting.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 197: Jackie McLean

Jackie McLean was by now a veteran of Prestige sessions, but not quite as much of a veteran as you'd think. Yes, he goes back to the early days--1951, and the notorious Miles Davis "Dig" session (notorious for Miles having appropriated the composition as his own). But after that, a long hiatus, not just from Prestige, but from recording altogether. There was a live recording of a couple of nights at Birdland, and session a few days later for Blue Note, all in 1952 but not, I believe, released till much later. Then nothing at all until 1955, and it's hard to say why not. He was battling addiction, but lots of musicians were fighting this fight at the time, and many of them still recorded. When Jackie did come back into the studio in 1955, with Miles again, he was only used on two tunes of a four-tune session, and Miles said later that Jackie was so high, he could barely play. Miles never used him again.

He played on a couple more sessions in '55--one with George Wallington, the other under his own leadership, Both were released on tiny labels: the Wallington live album on Progressive, the McLean Sextet album on Ad Lib. This one, according to the Rare Vinyl Jazz Collector (and aren't you glad such people exist), is "possibly the rarest of all the jazz collectibles out there." So since, like the ivory-billed woodpecker, it may never actually be seen in the wild, here's a picture of the album cover. I don't know who did the art, but it's a gem.

So, veteran or no, 1956 was really his debut year as a jazz force. He recorded for Prestige, Atlantic (with Mingus) and Columbia (with Blakey). By August, he was considered enough of a star that Bill Hardman was introduced on his first recording session as ""Jackie's Pal."

Jackie's pal is back with him for this abbreviated session, along with Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, who would take center stage as a trio for the rest of the afternoon. They do two standards and an original.

It's wonderful listening. The interplay between the two pals is intricate and yet straightforward, especially on "McLean's Scene." And this rhythm section continues to reward, every time out. Some great solos by Red Garland and Art Taylor, but it's Paul Chambers who takes your breath away. You expect a bass solo to come somewhere in the middle of a quintet piece, but on "Gone With the Wind" Chambers is the penultimate solo, right before McLean and and the restatement of the head.

You expect a piano vamp to begin a jazz quartet or quintet number--sometimes an extended vamp that becomes the head and an improvised solo. On "Mean to Me," though the first notes one hears are Garland's, Paul Chambers steps in and takes over that job. Cool.

Because this was an abbreviated session, it had to wait for LP release. It was combined with a 1957 McLean session with a different lineup, and released in 1959 on New Jazz.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 196: Sonny Rollins

Am I getting too much 1950s jazz? Is it all starting to sound alike?

No, and no.

Every album, every recording session, has been a unique and uniquely satisfying experience, and I continue to find this one of the most rewarding projects I have ever undertaken.

Obviously, I can't say that some sessions have been more uniquely satisfying than others, not if I have any respect for the English language. Each has been unique; each has given me something new and significant in my understanding and appreciation of jazz. But some have leapt out at me with particular force. Like the one before this, making me appreciate the richness of Tadd Dameron's compositions, made all the more special because he recorded so seldom.

On the other hand, I'm very familiar with Sonny Rollins's gifts as a composer and an improviser, and Lord knows his recording career has been prolific. But this one leapt out at me nonetheless. Why? Just because. Because his playing is so hot on this session: so creative, such high energy. Another reason could be that this is my farewell to Sonny on Prestige. He'll move on to a number of different labels: Blue Note and Riverside in New York, Contemporary on the West Coast. He'll record for RCA Victor for a while, and for various European labels. Then for Impulse, for Milestone, for lots of other folks. Anyway, I only found this out after I started reading background stuff, so it wasn't part of my immediate response.

The session contains three compositions by Sonny, and three songs by others. The Rollins compositions are the ones where the energy level really goes through the roof. "Ee-ah," in particular, combines the honking urgency of rhythm and blues with the creative daring of bop. I love it. 'B Quick" and "B Swift" are, if anything, taken at an even higher level of intensity, propelled by an unflagging and unforgiving Max Roach, over an incredible nine minutes for the first number. I like to imagine a spectator in the booth, drenched with sweat and exhausted just from listening to what these cats are doing, saying, "I betcha you can't do that again." "I betcha we can," Max retorts..."but maybe a little shorter this time." "B Swift is just as intense, but clocks in at five minutes."

And so to "Sonny Boy," which does what only jazz can do--it takes a familiar melody and turns into something entirely new. Screenwriter William Goldman, in his fascinating book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, discusses a screenplay he wrote for Gene Hackman, about a druggist who tries to break up an affair between his son and a married woman, but ends up having an affair with her himself. Goldman points out that the story is what it is because of a set of decisions that could as easily have gone in different directions. Instead of being a drama, it could have been a bedroom farce, which lovers hiding in closet s and under beds. If, instead of Gene Hackman, the producers had cast Faye Dunaway as the lead, it would have been story of a wife having to juggle not just one lover, but two, and then finding out that they were father and son. Or they could have cast John Travolta as a boy whose Oedipal problems take on a whole new twist. Or maybe they could cast Robert Duvall as the husband, a macho firefighter who loves his wife but has neglected her...

"Sonny Boy" was written by Tin Pan Alley stalwarts DaSylva, Brown and Henderson as a tearjerking vehicle for Al Jolson, and the emotional center of the song is the doting father. But in Sonny's version, we've changed the focus. Jolson as kindly, sentimental old father figure is no longer the star. Now it's Rollins as Sonny Boy, and he's not climbing up on anyone's knee. The song is completely transformed. It's macho, it swaggers...and it works. A number of jazz musicians, most notably Lester Young, have said that they always hear the words of a ballad when they play it. My guess is that Sonny pretty much tossed out the words when he did this one.

The two Earl Coleman cuts don't work quite as well, Coleman had cut loose from his Billy Eckstine roots in his last outing for Prestige, and was really beginning to develop as a contemporary jazz singer. Here, in spite of having Rollins, Drew and Roach to inspire him, he's back in the Mr. B. groove.

He's also working with not the best material. Every now and then, Prestige would give a contemporary hit ballad to one of its jazz acts, and they do that here with "Two Different Worlds," a 1956 chart hit for Don Rondo. The Great American Songbook had mostly closed by 1956, and a lot ballads from those years simply weren't that good. "Two Different Worlds," written by Al Frisch, known for not much besides this song (he did write "Broadway at Basin Street," an early Cannonball Adderley recording) and Sid Wayne, known for writing most of the really second rate songs that weighed down the Elvis movies, is one of those not very good ballads, and maybe a lush Mr. B-type approach is all you can do with it.

His second song is "My Ideal," written by Richard Whiting, one of the A-list tunesmiths. It's become a standard, and there have been some great jazz recordings, but for me the version that stands out is the one by Whiting's daughter Margaret, with the pure and lyrical innocence of a young girl yet to find her first love. That's not Mr. B., and it's not Earl Coleman.

Perhaps Bob Weinstock was looking for a cover record to Don Rondo's hit (Roger Williams / Jane Morgan and Nat "King" Cole also covered it), but if so, he must have changed his mind, because Coleman's numbers never were released on 45. "Ee-Ah" was, with "They Can't Take That Away from Me" from the Bird tribute album on the flip side. Let's hope that got some play on the rhythm and blues stations. It deserved to.

"Ee-Ah," the two "B" cuts, and the two Earl Coleman cuts were released in 1957 as Tour de Force. The same tracks plus "Sonny Boy" and minus Coleman came out as Sonny Boy" in 1961. Also on the latter album: "The House I Live In,"  written as a leftist anthem by Earl Robinson but co-opted as a patriotic ditty by Columbia and Frank Sinatra, and recorded earlier in 1956 by Rollins on the Bird session.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 195: Tadd Dameron

I spent some time in my just-finished entry on Art Farmer talking about the considerable composing talents of Farmer, Hank Mobley, Gigi Gryce and Kenny Drew. Then I turn around and run smack into one of the great composers of American music: Tadd Dameron.

Dameron is sufficiently highly regarded in the jazz world to have merited a tribute band (Dameronia, formed by Philly Joe Jones, which released three albums of Dameron's compositions during the 1980s), but nowhere near as well known to the general public as he should be. He has said his greatest influences were George Gershwin and Duke Ellington, both of whom are household names. And maybe Dameron isn't quite in that pantheon because maybe no one is, but certainly he deserves to be named among the elite.

 Part of the reason Dameron isn't better known is that his own output is very slim. 1956 may have been his banner year, with this and another album for Prestige. They were very close to his last recordings. There would be one more for Riverside in 1962, making his total output five albums, one of which was released postunously, plus isolated tracks on a few other albums released after his death.

Dameron wrote and arranged for a number of big bands, including those of Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan, and he liked that big sound. Most of his recordings are with eight to ten pieces, which makes this quartet album all the more unusual.

But with John Coltrane's tenor and Dameron's compositions, what more do you really need? This is a great album, one that I couldn't listen to enough.  "Mating Call" and "Soultrane" may be the ones that grab a listener first, but if I were a practitioner of vocalese, and were looking for a piece to write lyrics to, I might choose "Gnid." It is so melodic. I'd probably have to change the title, if I were looking for a catchy lyric.

Coltrane is as good a choice as you could make to round out this quintet: because he's Coltrane, and a brilliant improviser, but also because he has great respect for Dameron's melodies, and lets them shine through at all times.

Dameron contributes some great solos too, giving his own interpretation to his compositions. Philly Joe Jones contributes some brilliant solos. John Simmons was a frequent contributor to Dameron's music, and if his solos here suggest that the art of bass soloing has gone a little beyond him by the mid-1950s, he's still a strong anchor to a rhythm section.

The session was booked as the Tadd Dameron Quartet, but the initial prestige release calls it Tadd Dameron with John Coltrane, which becomes, on subsequent releases, John Coltrane with Tadd Dameron, and some cuts are included on other Coltrane repackagings.

Dameron's tunes have been widely recorded. On Chet Baker's 1964 comeback album, he included a number of Dameron compositions, including "Mating Call," "Soultrane" and "Gnid."



          

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 194: Art Farmer

This album was recorded in late November of 1956, but it appears not to have been released until 1959, not unlike some of Farmer's other early Prestige sessions, which languished on the back shelves even longer, which may have been one of the reasons why Farmer would soon leave the label.

 Farmer was very active for Prestige during this period. Like many of the young artists who had toured Europe with Lionel Hampton in 1953, he had returned with a burnished reputation and a number of closely forged musical relationships, two of the foremost being Quincy Jones and Gigi Gryce--his first session as leader, in 1953, was released as Art Farmer Plays the Arrangements and Compositions of Quincy Jones and Gigi Gryce, An early 1954 session featuring Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver wasn't actually released until 1962, and it's hard to figure out why (a quartet session from 1955 was also shelved until this release, as Early Art). Next he was reunited with Gigi Gryce for the album titled When Farmer Met Gryce, although this was scarcely a first meeting.

In 1955 he recorded with a septet, an augmented small group (or truncated big band) situation that Farmer thrived in, then with Gryce again, and with Donald Byrd (released as 2 Trumpets). He would also record as a sideman --with Gene Ammons a couple of times, backing up singer Earl Coleman (Gryce was on that session too), with Bennie Green, and with Gil Melle, and if that's not range, I don't know what is.

This session is part quintet (with Hank Mobley), and part quartet. Gigi Gryce is present again, but only as composer: the beautiful "Reminiscing," one of the quartet pieces, which affords Farmer the space for some marvelously lyrical ballad work, and does the same for Kenny Drew.

Drew is also represented with two originals on the session, which is pretty much a showcase for some of the best young composers of the era, as Farmer also weighs in with a tune--in his case, one that was already on its way to becoming a classic: "Farmer's Market." This is a very different treatment than the one Farmer gave it with Wardell Gray in his recording debut, and while it features some outstanding work by Farmer and Hank Mobley (who also contributed an original), Drew takes the first solo, and he's the one you walk away remembering most vividly.

Elvin Jones was just beginning to make his mark. He had recorded once in 1948, as part of the legendary Blue Bird Inn house band in Detroit, but his first New York recording had been in 1955, on a Miles Davis session for Charles Mingus's Debut label. He would make several contributions to Prestige and New Jazz over the next couple of years, before taking his music in a different direction and becoming one of the most important drummers of the 1960s and 70s.

In spite of the fact that one of Drew's compositions is "With Prestige," this turns out not quite to have been with Prestige. The label had come into existence, a decade earlier, as New Jazz, and in 1958, Bob Weinstock decided to revive the New Jazz label as a subsidiary (there would be a handful of other subsidiaries launched around the same time). Farmer's Market would be the third New Jazz release, following a Mal Waldron album and a Prestige All-Stars session which Farmer was not a part of. It's hard to exactly make sense of New Jazz. Maybe Weinstock was recording artists faster than he could release them? The Waldron album (Mal-3) seems to have been released fairly promptly, and may have been recorded with this new imprint in mind, but the next several were sessions that had been on the shelf for a couple of years. Anyway, the good news is, they did see the light of day, and we have this music now.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 193: Mal Waldron

Being a jazz fan in the 1950s conferred a certain mantle of hip on one, and I say that unapologetically, and without fear of contradiction, since no one ever comments on this blog.

In that decade, probably in every decade, the hip stance was to be quiet about it, because too many people weren't. Norman Mailer, in 1957, explained how to be hip in excruciating detail in his essay "The White Negro." Mailer's main point was something like this: to be hip you (you, of course, being white) had to act like a Negro, and the quickest way to think and act like a Negro was to listen to jazz.

Leaving out the colonialist racism of the essay, he was also probably wrong about the shortcut. As Nelson George points out in his classic book, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, the average African American was more likely to be listening to rhythm and blues. (I won't get into a discussion of the contemporary misappropriation of "hipster" and "R&B.")

Allen Ginsberg, in 1956, wrote of angelheaded hipsters who hung out in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats and contemplated jazz. Ginsberg used jazz more as a metaphor than anything else, and when the angelheaded hipsters gave way to acidheaded hippies he switched his allegiance to rock.

Herbert Gold, in a Playboy essay on the Beat Generation, advised me that if anyone were to come up to me at a party and say "Hey, man, you dig Bird? Zen? Proust?" the correct answer was an inscrutable "I'm hip." Alas, no one ever did, although years later, I was at a party where, I was told, I had just missed Neal Cassidy, who had split ten minutes earlier.

Someone else, or maybe it was Mailer or Gold again, wrote that if hip could be studied and learned, Robert Kennedy would study it and learn it. "But it can't."

Playboy, in those days, was setting itself up as the Bible for all those who thought that hip could be studied and learned...or learned without much studying, just by following Playboy's guide. "The magazine of sports cars and seduction," Mort Sahl labeled it. "The sports cars in front under 'science,' and the other...science fiction?"

Sports cars and Italian tailoring and...jazz. And this isn't a putdown of Playboy or its readers. They bought jazz records. And when Brubeck brought jazz to college, he opened up new audiences, and created new venues, even if those venues were't on the cutting edge of hip. When The Jazztet played SUNY New Paltz in 1965, my first year teaching there, I bought a ticket to the concert but was denied admission to it by the Greek organization that sponsored it, because I wasn't wearing a tie.

The Playboy reader knew about Miles Davis and Horace Silver and Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck, and the major label stalwarts like Stan Kenton and Errol Garner.

But he didn't know about Mal Waldron.

Mal Waldron, with the evocative, slightly sinister name, the New York vibes (born in NYC), the somewhat secretive personality (he switched from saxophone to piano because he didn't think he had the personality to be out front of a band), the attitude (the London Jazz Collector says that you won't find a Waldron album cover without a cigarette dangling from his lips (an exaggeration), and if that sounds uncool now, it didn't then).

 You'd really have to have been hip, in 1956, to bea Mal Waldron fan. And by "you," I don't mean me. I didn't even start listening to jazz until 1957.

And you would have needed to be hip enough to recognize rhythm and blues as a first cousin to bop, which I might have done. I was already a serious rhythm and blues fan by 1956, although still a country kid, and with very little access to urban record stores.

Not that any amount of access would have helped very much. Rhythm and blues records were issued on 45 (or 78), without personnel listings. And in Waldron's case, they weren't necessarily issued at all. Jazzdisco.com (how do they research these things?) has Waldron doing two songs for Atlantic in 1949, which were never released. Then in 1952 he hooked up with a band that featured Ike Quebec on tenor, backing a singer named Frank Price for Hi-Lo records, cutting two songs that were not released. Hi-Lo did release a single by Emmitt Davis with the same band, and then an instrumental single led by Quebec. Then a couple of R&B sessions for Savoy, which was a bigger label, but those were mostly unreleased too, even though one of the dates featured Varetta Dillard.

Waldron came within range of the hip jazz fan's radar in 1954, when he recorded an album with Charles Mingus, also for Savoy. He spent a couple of years with Mingus, appearing on a live album from 1955, released on Mingus's own Debut Records, and one of Mingus's best-known albums, Pithecanthropus Erectus, for Atlantic, in 1956.

Mingus put him on the jazz musicians' radar, and through 1956 the serious fan would start seeing his name: on a Teddy Charles album for Atlantic, and perhaps on a recording with Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean  for the tiny Ad Lib label. With Byrd and McLean he was knocking on the Prestige door -- or walking through the door, in a way, since the session was laid down at Rudy Van Gelder's studio. Prestige then signed him on for a Jackie McLean / Gene Ammons session in July. followed by two more with Jackie, and then in November this first session under his leadership.

The session features two Waldron originals, one of which, "Dee's Dilemma," had been his contribution to the August Jackie McLean date he had played on. Waldron would go on to become an important jazz composer.There's a Jerome Kern standard and a Benny Golson tune, "Stablemates," which had already been recorded by Paul Chambers and John Coltrane, then by Miles Davis, and was well on its way to becoming one of the most popular jazz standards of all time, with recordings by Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Tito Puente and others. Idrees Suleiman contributed a tune; and I was surprised to see that with a composer as formidable as Gigi Gryce on the session, they wouldn't have included anything by him, until I discovered that "Lee Sears," composer of "Transfiguration," was actually Gryce (Lee Sears was his wife's name).

Of particular interest to me, listening to this album, was the unfamiliar-to-Prestige rhythm section: no Paul Chambers, no Doug Watkins, no Art Taylor, no Philly Joe Jones. And I was interested to note what a difference it made.

Waldron was at the beginning of a long and distinguished career, though not one that would win him any Playboy jazz polls. Prestige titled this album Mal-1, signalling a longer commitment to this new artist, which they were to keep, through Mal-4.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.