Listening to Prestige Part 117: Jimmy Raney

Jimmy Raney was last seen in Hackensack with Hall Overton, his Juilliard professor who was also Teddy Charles's mentor. Charles and Overton, to me, represent a school of musical experimentation in the early '50s that falls more or less on the same side of the street as Lennie Tristano, though Raney might not agree with me. Here he is reminiscing about his early days in Chicago:

 There were a lot of talented young musicians, and they all played bebop. They didn’t get paid for it though. Nobody liked bebop. Not the jazz fans, not the older musicians, not even the Downbeat writers. We mostly played for free in a B-Girl joint on South State Street called the “Say When.” They didn’t like bebop either, but they let us play there to make the place look like a real club, instead of a clip-joint that rolled drunks who were looking for some action...There was another style going on at the time in Chicago. This was the Lenny Tristano style. We boppers didn’t think much of Lenny, and viceversa. As far as I could figure out, nobody liked Lenny’s music except Lee Konitz and his mother. (Lenny’s mother, not Lee’s.) He hated our music and we hated his, and everyone else hated all of us. Lee and Lenny left for New York City soon afterward, so we had the unpopular music scene all to ourselves.

It would be nice to think that Lee's mother liked it, too. And I suspect that Raney did, as well. In any event, his style is often compared to that of Tristano acolyte Billy Bauer, and he recorded with another Tristano student, Ted Brown.

But here, he's slipping away from those Juilliard/Tristano moorings, and recording a straight-ahead bebop session with Phil Woods, who...uh oh...graduated from Juilliard and studied with Tristano.

But his apprenticeship with Tristano was only six lessons in the summer of 1946, when he was 15, and he learned "that I didn’t know anything and that I had a lot of work to do." And by 1954, he thrown off the mantle of Juilliard, but that's another story, for another blog entry.

This quintet starts its session with a standard, probably a good idea given Weinstock's "no rehearsal" practice, to get their legs under them, and then goes off into three originals, which do get a little farther out, but I loved all of it. It's a session clearly aimed at the album market -- all the tunes are from four to six minutes.

It's the only time Raney ever recorded with Woods, Bill Crow or Joe Morello, although he did do a couple of other sessions with John Wilson. But Morello and Crow were certainly familiar with each other: they were two thirds of the Marian McPartland trio that played at the Hickory House on 52nd Street during the waning years of Swing Street, and they mesh tightly here. In fact, it's hard to say enough about any of the musicians on this gig, but Crow and Morello are always there, the central nervous system.

Something of a surprise here for me is Joe Morello, whom I had always though of as a West Coast musician, but actually, he was mostly an Easterner, born in Springfield, MA, died in Irvington, NJ, 82 years later.

His first major exposure as a musician came at age 9, when he was a featured violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but after meeting Jascha Heifetz, he threw in the towel on the violin and switched to drums. When he signed on with McPartland, he was only 25, but already a veteran of the New York scene, having played with Johnny Smith, Gil Melle and Stan Kenton, Sal Salvador. He would leave New York and McPartland in the year after this session to play a short gig on the West Coast -- a scheduled two-month series of dates with a California piano player named Dave Brubeck. Morello accepted Brubeck's offer on a sort of tentative basis. As Brubeck recalled it, Morello said “I’m interested in your group, but your drummer’s out to lunch. I want to be featured.”  The New York Times obituary writer adds that "by this, Mr. Brubeck said, Mr. Morello meant that he wanted to be allowed to play solos and experiment." It's safe to say that he got that chance over the next dozen years and some of the most famous drum solos in jazz.


In later years, back on the East Coast, Morello became a noted teacher.

There were no singles, as I've said before, but "Stella by Starlight" and "Back and Blow" were issued as an EP. All four songs were on a ten-inch issued by both New Jazz and Prestige. Later reissues gave leader credit on the session to Phil Woods.

Listening to Prestige Records project - Part 3

During the 1950s, when I started to become aware of jazz (actually late into the 50s for me, on a journey through rock and roll and rhythm and blues), there were two independent labels at the heart of that era: Blue Note and Prestige. Of the two, Blue Note has become the most famed, perhaps because it’s still around. Books have been written about it, its history chronicled.

The moment I turned from rhythm and blues to jazz (no, never turned—the moment I opened up to include jazz) came at two in the morning, in my dorm room at Bard College, twisting through the dial of my AM radio, looking for some R&B, and suddenly my hand stopping, my heart stopping, my world pausing to let in a sound that transfixed me. It was John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, and it was the first jazz record I ever bought. And it was on Prestige.

To the extent that Prestige and Blue Note were the Beatles and the Stones of the 50s to a jazz fan, I was a Prestige guy. I bought many records on both labels, of course, but when I look back at my vinyl collection, it leans heavily toward Prestige.

But there’s been no history of Prestige Records. Wikipedia doesn’t have much. There’s a photo book of Prestige album covers, but that’s all I’ve been able to find. And this blog won’t be it, either, because I don’t know enough. Not unless someone who was there on the scene, like Chris Albertson or Bill Crow, can fill in some of the gaps.

I’m using jazzdisco.org as my guide through this Prestige listening project, and I’m going chronologically by recording date, starting in 1949, the year Bob Weinstock started the label, first as New Jazz, then a year later as Prestige. I’m going by jazzdisco’s session index, because I can’t really figure out any other way to do it. The most famous Prestige album line, their 7000 series, seems to have started in 1955, so what was Prestige issuing before that? I hope someone will straighten me out.

Anyway, the third 1949 session – Serge Chaloff and the Herdsmen, March 10, 1949. The group is made up of Woody Herman veterans, as Serge was, and he’s most famous as one of Herman’s Four Brothers saxophone section, and the Jimmy Giuffre composition of that name, featuring Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, and Chaloff. Of the four, Chaloff was the only baritone sax, and he was pretty close to the only baritone sax player in jazz (Ellington’s Harry Carney his precursor) until Gerry Mulligan came along and made the instrument his own.

And Chaloff had the shortest career of the four. He succumbed to Charlie Parker’s Disease – the heroin addiction that claimed so many in the bebop era. He did kick the habit, but his life was cut short anyway, as he died in 1957 of cancer. So unlike Sims and Getz, he was not able to build very much on the Four Brothers foundation, but he did make some good music.

Here’s “Bopscotch” from that session. Personnel:  Oscar Pettiford b, Red Rodney tp, Earl Swope tb, Al Cohn ts, Serge Chaloff bs, Barbara Carroll p, Terry Gibbs vib, Denzil Best d, Shorty Rogers arr.

With not a lot of rehearsal time, there was no guarantee that a group of musicians assembled for a recording date were going to mesh, though sessions like the Minton’s and Monroe’s jam sessions gave a strong common language to the beboppers. But these were a group of musicians who’d spent some time together in the Woody Herman band, and you can hear it in the seamless blend of solos on this recording.