Listening to Prestige Part 169: Gene Ammons

What does a producer of jazz records do? Probably, at best, not all that much. Bob Weinstock recalls that he and Miles Davis would sit down and kick around names -- who's in town, who would you like to record with? -- and that may have been the most of it. Weinstock had his jam session philosophy -- no rehearsal, just get 'em together and let 'em play -- and even so, Miles complained later that he (and every other producer Miles worked with) interfered too much.

So what about this session? Gene Ammons was one of Prestige's stalwarts, going back to the early days, often paired with Sonny Stitt, just as often without, generally preferring the fuller sound of a larger-than-quintet group. For a while he worked with a more or less steady group. almost always including trumpeter Bill Massey. By 1955, he had begun branching out. His three 1955 sessions for Prestige saw almost a complete turnover from session to session (Art and Addison Farmer were on one of them).

Why? Ammons had trouble keeping a group together? Seems unlikely. With his warm touch on ballads, earthy touch on blues, ability to wail with the best of the R&B saxmen, Ammons was one of the most popular jazz artists of the day.

Or perhaps, as he had done with Miles, Bob Weinstock sat down with him and said, "Hey, Gene, let's start mixing it up some. Look how well it worked with Miles. We'll kick around some names, get a bunch of guys together in the studio, see what happens."

So maybe that's what a producer of jazz records does.  And how much careful thought and planning went into choosing that bunch of guys? I'd like to think very little. Art and Addison Farmer were around -- they'd just played the Bennie Green session a week or so earlier. The others were inspired choices, but none of them would have required a lot of thought.

What about Candido? Did Bob Weinstock and Ira Gitler sit up all night, saying "We've got to find something new for the next Ammons recording. How about a French horn, like the Miles Davis nonet? Bring Earl Coleman back for some vocals? Or a pianoless group like Gerry Mulligan? Wait! I've got it! We'll bring in some Latin percussion!" Or did Candido just happen to drop by the office that day, and say "Hola - I'm looking for a gig. Got anything?"

I like to think it was the latter.

And Duke Jordan? He was certainly doing a lot of session work in the 50s, not all that much of it with Prestige. He'd played with Art and Addison on a Farmer/Gryce session the previous fall. But for whatever reason they chose him, it was an inspired choice. It goes without saying that with Candido on board, you're going to have some hot rhythms, but it's Jordan whom I keep hearing driving this session. He turns out to be the real inspired choice.

Jordan had also recently written what was to become his most famous composition, "Jor-du," and one certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear it on a date where he was playing, but not so on this one.

Which raises another "what does a producer do?" question. Who chooses the tunes that will go into a recording session, and what's behind that? Obviously, there's a few extra bucks for the composer, and especially for the publishing rights, but there weren't all that many bucks in jazz overall, in those days. Jackie McLean seems almost certainly to be the composer of "Dig," for which Miles Davis took the credit, but when McLean looked into suing over it, he was told not to bother -- even if he won, there wouldn't be any money in it.

Still, you had a couple of excellent composers on this date (in addition to Jordan) and it's no surprise that they're represented--McLean with "Madhouse," Art Farmer with "The Happy Blues."

It's also not surprising that a standard was included. Ammons was great on ballads, and Weinstock liked standards, and although not much jazz was being released on single records any more by 1956, Ammons was still a jukebox favorite. Why "Can't We Be Friends" in particular? Why not? It's a beautiful song.

The one that really interests me is "The Great Lie," a swing era song by Andy Gibson -- credited to Gibson and Cab Calloway. Perhaps there were lyrics by Calloway? I could not find a version of it that included a vocal, but I did find a reference to it in a list of WWII-era songs by Calloway that had social commentary.

Andy Gibson was an underrated composer, whose best known work is probably his brilliant rhythm-and-bluesification of Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time" -- "The Hucklebuck."

It's certainly not unusual for a big band tune to be picked up and adapted by moderns, but I decided to see how this one mutated with different versions, so I listened to four: Cab Calloway (without vocal), Charlie Barnet, Gene Ammons, and Chet Baker/Art Pepper.

I liked Calloway's version, but loved Barnet's. And it brought home to me just how much big band music was an arranger's medium. I don't know who the arranger was for this version of "The Great Lie" -- it could have been Gibson, who worked a lot with Barnet. But it's wonderful, with the shifting horn patterns and solos that weave in and out of them. Charlie Barnet, like Artie Shaw, was heir to millions, and like Shaw, he got out of the music business at a fairly young age, and is probably underrated. Certainly he was by me -- I had listened to "Cherokee," maybe nothing else. This is a terrific band, and a terrific number.

Like Woody Herman, Barnet was open to the influences of bebop, and his later bands had some of the finest modern jazz musicians. But as we move seriously into the bebop-hard bop era, you can hear, listening to Barnet and then Ammons, how much the emphasis has shifted to the soloists. Both versions are hard-swinging, and they share a lot more in common than you'd think. The swing band is fresh and innovative, the bop ensemble is melodic. With all those great soloists, the Ammons band extends the tune a lot longer than Barnet's traditional song, 78 RPM length. Ammons goes nearly nine minutes, and everyone gets solo space, and makes the most of it.

With Baker and Pepper, it's pretty much all solos, and it's cool, and mellow, and all the things you expect from West Coast jazz, and also quite cerebral, but they don't forget to swing, either. And just as I found myself caught up by Duke Jordan's contribution to the Ammons group, I found myself listening to Leroy Vinnegar here, who really propels the swing of the two cool soloists with his bass.

"Madhouse" is the Jackie McLean composition, and it's also the one where Candido really shines.

It's also the one that ended up on the jukeboxes. If Weinstock had thought about using the ballad, he would have had to think again, when the boys stretched it out to over 12 minutes. Of course, "The Happy Blues," which did become the single (as Parts 1 and 2) was also over 12 minutes, but maybe it was easier to edit down. It was also the title track for the LP.

Listening to Prestige part 155: Art Farmer-Gigi Gryce

This is the second and last album by the Farmer-Gryce quintet. Like John Lewis and Miles Davis, Farmer and Gryce wanted to take jazz in new directions, and like Lewis, they wanted to establish an ensemble that would stay together and grow together.

Unlike Lewis, they weren't quite able to manage it. They were able to scuffle as jazz groups do, picking up gigs in clubs, but it wasn't enough. Gryce in particular was starting to compose a different kind of music, one that probably required a different kind of listening framework, like the one Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet were beginning to find. Between the May session for Prestige, which

produced the When Farmer Met Gryce album, and this one five months later, they had lost Freddie Redd and Art Taylor. Duke Jordan and Philly Joe Jones were great replacements, but they were also just passing through. Jones, who already had a strong connection with Miles Davis, was about to join the group that Miles was putting together to jump to Columbia with. Jordan was moving in the direction of leading his own group, and unfortunately also moving in the direction of heroin addiction, which would derail his career for a number of years. I tend to think of Jordan mostly in terms of the 40s, and his days with Charlie Parker, but actually he had a prolific later career. He moved to Denmark in the 1970s, and would record a prodigious number of albums for the Danish Steeplechase label.

By early 1956 Farmer and Gryce had to give up on their vision, though Farmer was to realize it several years later with another composer/saxophonist, Benny Golson, in the Jazztet.

Art Farmer, in a recent blog interview with Ted Panken, shared some memories of Gigi Gryce:

 Gigi was a great composer, a great arranger, and a great saxophone player, and he’s one of the people that we lost too early.  The music has lost a lot because he wasn’t around.  He was from the generation of Quincy and myself, and his contribution was lost, other than a very few things that he did for me, and, oh, yes, he had a group with Donald Byrd, but this didn’t show his full capacity as a player or a writer.  If he had just been able to hang on a bit longer, then I think he would have had a great influence on the music.  Just like Freddie Webster; I think he would have had a great influence on the music if he had been able to hang around longer.  Some people just leave too early.

Gryce didn't leave as some did, succumbing to illness and addiction and dying young. As I've written before, he withdrew from the music business, disillusioned by racism and other factors. So with a relatively small recorded output, he is remembered mostly today as a composer. And on this session, Art Farmer, no mean composer himself, turned the tunesmithing chores over to Gryce, with one

composition by Duke Jordan: "Forecast," which kicked off the session and is first on the album. Ira Gitler, in his liner notes, describes this as a tune "which got everyone loose," and that sounds about right. Jordan was a talented composer--his "Jordu" remains a jazz standard--working in a style that allowed for some spirited hard bop improvisation.

"Evening in Casablanca" is described by Gitler as having been inspired by a North African swing on the Lionel Hampton tour that became such an important springboard for so much modern jazz of the 50s, and that sounds about right, too. The music has an Arabic feel to it. And it's not likely to have been inspired by the Bogart film. As iconic as that movie has become today, back then it was just an oldie, a popular war movie from the 40s, somewhat tainted by the HUAC investigation of its screenwriter Howard Koch.  In

1957 it would begin a run at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA, which lasts to this day as an exam week tradition, and begin its ascent into legend. "Shabozz" comes from the same influence.

"Evening in Casablanca," "Satellite" and "Nica's Tempo" are all excursions into experimental, longer forms by Gryce, "Nica's Tempo," in particular, has become part of the jazz repertoire, recorded by Art Blakey, Oscar Pettiford, Tito Puente and Johnny Griffin among others.

This session was issued on a Prestige LP as Art Farmer Quintet Featuring Gigi Gryce, and later as a New Jazz LP just under Farmer's name, as Evening in Casablanca. This was a 1963 release, when the Jazztet had made Farmer's name a lot bigger, and the movie Casablanca had become a cult and late-night TV favorite. It was also released in the mid-60s on Britain's Esquire label, somewhat bizarrely, as Music for that Wild Party. The liner notes are Ira Gitler's original Prestige notes, with a little preface added urgiong you to take this record to any wild parties you're invited to, and more or less suggesting that if you do, you'll be invited to more and wilder parties.

Listening to Prestige Records, Part 31: Sonny Stitt -Gene Ammons

Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, three-piece rhythm section...a quartet? Is this one of those odd numerical quirks, like the great R&B/Doowop group the "5" Royales, who rarely had five guys in their lineup? No, as it turns out, the June 28 session was a quartet, though not always the same quartet -- Jug on two cuts, Sonny on the rest.

Stitt's tunes: "Count Every Star," "Nice Work if You Can Get It," "There Will Never Be Another You," and "Blazin'." Ammons had two: "I Wanna Be Loved" and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," but only the latter is included on Spotify.

Why? Lost to history. Maybe they couldn't both show up at the same time. Maybe they weren't talking to each other that day. Maybe Weinstock was only paying for four musicians at a time. Maybe each of them wanted the full length solo space. Not unlikely, listening to the tunes. Each of them solos all the way through. Stitt barely gives Duke Jordan a vamp at the beginning -- no vamp at all on "Count Every Star."

And he's quite sufficient to satisfy. Generally the bebop paradigm is play the melody for one or two choruses, then take off on improvisatory flights. As Ronny Graham says in his comedy routine about a commencement address to a school for progressive jazz musicians, "When you cats came here, all you could play was the melody. Now you wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." But Stitt stays around the melody in his improv, especially on "Count Every Star

I would have thought of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" as more of a 1920s vo-de-o-do kind of song, more suited for a raccoon coat and ukulele (or for Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn to sing to a leopard) than a gutbucket, blues-based bebopper like Gene Ammons. In fact, it was written in 1928, by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, for their Broadway hit musical Blackbirds of 1928. McHugh and Fields had already made their major contribution to Prestige Records history -- they wrote the original "I'm in the Mood for Love." At any rate, Ammons takes it over and does what he wants with it -- jaunty and rakish, but in the style of 52nd Street, not Broadway.

They gathered the septet again a week later for another session -- Bill Massey again on trumpet, this time Matthew Gee on trombone.

It's hard to find much about Bill Massey, who anchored all of these septet recordings. "Bill Massey Jazz" on Google mostly brings up references to the classic Jazz at Massey Hall album, but adding to the confusion, there's another jazz musician named Bill Massey,who gets the Google hits because he's more contemporary and has a website. 

Replacing Duke Jordan on piano is Charlie Bateman. There's not much on him, either, but a 2004 obituary from the Orlando Sentinel tells us that he played with Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall in 1947, moved to Orlando to play bridge, and moved there permanently after the World Trade Center bombing. More on Charlie here. He does get some solo space with the septet, and the cat can play.

Stitt is listed on baritone again for this session, but we're told that both Stitt and Ammons would double on baritone in larger ensemble settings, while the other was soloing, and I think that may be happening here.

There's another vocal -- on "Sweet Jennie Lou." On this one, there's a lead vocalist, uncredited, and I can only guess as to who it is, so I'll guess Gene Ammons. The rest of them sound not so much like drunken Irishmen as like drunken Irishmen trying to imitate the Modernaires. Actually, they sound a little like Dooley Wilson's band doing the call-and-response with him in "Knock on Wood" at Rick's Cafe Americain.

Their "Seven-Eleven" is not the same as Buddy Lucas' R&B classic "7-11," with the Gone All-Stars, but it rocks. Charlie Bateman is hot on this one, as is drummer Wes Landers (another two-generation drum family -- his son was jazz/soul drummer Wally "Gator" Watson).

They did "La Vie en Rose" on this session, and I'd love to hear it, but I can't find it on Spotify. A Google search for "Gene Ammons la Vie en Rose" says that it is on Spotify, but clicking through leads to a dead end.

Songs from all these Stitt/Ammons sessions were mixed and matched on various 78s, and on several different 10-inch LPs, Surprisingly, no 45s, though you'd have thought many of these cuts would have been naturals.

There's really no such thing as a representative track from these sessions, so I'll use "Count Every Star," because I love it.