Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This album wraps up Frank Wess's run with Prestige--in fact, it was his last recording session as a leader for the rest of the 1960s, although he continued to work steadily, with Count Basie, whom he had joined in the early 1950s and would stay with until 1964, and then with Clark Terry's big band. He brings two Basie bandmates with him, Thad Jones and Buddy Catlett, and they play a brand of jazz that was not the fashionable soul jazz or the disturbing free jazz of the time, but represented a mainstream of jazz that has never failed to find adherents and listeners, drawing on the Kansas City swing of Basie and Lester Young
and Coleman Hawkins, but even more on the modern sounds that were being explored by Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. So while these Basie stalwarts bring a lot of Basie with them, they aren't just playing small group interpretations of Basie arrangements. There's a little of that in their music, but more of it is the classic jazz dynamic, head-solo-solo, that people come out to clubs to hear, to sit in close proximity to the musicians and get an intimate glimpse into their voices and personalities, to be present at the creation of improvisational ideas and the immediacy of musicians inspiring each other, as a master jazz player takes an idea, explores it, and hands it off to the next player to continue the exploration.
You get all of that throughout this session, but to particularly good advantage on "The Long Road," one of three Wess compositions (the other two are "Yo-Ho" and "Cold Miner"), where all five musicians have their chances to shine. Wess plays tenor on "The Long Road," flute on much of the rest of the album. Jones contributes one tune, "The Lizard."
The album was somewhat clunkily titled Yo-Ho! Frank Wess, Poor You, Little Me. A 45 RPM single release featured "Little Me," by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the title song from the popular Broadway musical of the time, with Wess's "Cold Miner" on the flip. Ozzie Cadena produced.
I suspect Frank Wess is best known for his work with Count Basie, but his catalogue encompasses a lot more than that, work with a variety of other musicians and as a leader of his own ensembles. This was his 11th session for Prestige. He had previously recorded with Gene Ammons and with Lem Winchester; he had done three Prestige All Stars sessions, including one with John Coltrane; a Basie alumni session with Joe Newman; and a session with vocalist Etta Jones. He had co-led two remarkable sessions with harpist Dorothy Ashby, and had done a Moodsville session as leader in 1960.
Recording Frank Wess in 1962 is one indication of the eclectic range Prestige was pursuing in these years. The label had embraced the new soul jazz with its organ combos; the new free jazz, or "freedom music" as it was called in those days, with Eric Dolphy; modern takes on the swing era with its Swingville series; the blues with Bluesville; a softer (but still swinging) sound with Moodsville. It had embraced the rhythm and blues side of jazz with King Curtis, Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Sam "the Man" Taylor, and Latin jazz with Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet -- two genres too overlooked. And it was not overlooking the bebop/hard bop music that had come to fruition in the previous decade, and as it continued through more shifts and permutations of jazz expression would come to be known as "straight ahead jazz."
Frank Wess, with his Basie roots and his modern roots, was as straight ahead as they come, and he has a versatile straight-ahead rhythm section behind him, with Prestige veterans Tommy Flanagan, George Duvivier, Osie Johnson and Ray Barreto, and similar versatility from George Barrow, whose baritone (and occasionally tenor) sax would be featured on a number of Prestige albums, and on Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth.
New to Prestige is trumpeter Al Aarons, not Detroit-born, but Detroit-bred--a Wayne State graduate, he played with Yusef Lateef and Barry Harris, and had a regular gig at the Flame Show Bar backing up visiting talent from Billie Holiday to Jackie Wilson, before touring with Wild Bill Davis and then joining the Countasie band in 1961, and stayed with the Count for the rest of the decade, and he joined Gene Ammons for one more Prestige session near the end of the label's independent life. Later on he would play jazz fusion with Stanley Clarke and accompany both Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and record an album with B. B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland. He also started his own record label in Los Angeles.
And finally, the session had an arranger. Oliver Nelson. A septet isn't quite a big enough ensemble to require an arranger, but it can't hurt to have one, especially when it's Oliver Nelson.
Just as the Prestige Swingville records, featuring swing stars of the 1930s and 1940s, were not duplications or rehashes of those earlier decades, so the music of this session, with Nelson's arrangements, does not sound like something that might have been made seven or eight years earlier. It's straight ahead music, but music of its time. Listen to the extended duet by Johnson and Barretto on "Southern Comfort."
Wess plays both flute and tenor sax for this session. Esmond Edwards produced. There are two compositions by Wess ("Gin's Beguine" and "Summer Frost"), two by Nelson ("Southern Comfort" and "Shufflin'"). "Blues for Butterball" is by a lesser known composer, Bob Bryant (he was Vic Damone's musical director), and it's credited as having lyrics by Maine humorist Marshall Dodge, but I haven't been able to find a vocal version. "Butterball" was Oliver Nelson's nickname. "Blue Skies" (Irving Berlin) and "Dancing in the Dark (Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz) are standards.
There are some songs--pop songs, art songs, theater songs--that don't necessarily benefit from a jazz treatment, and I would say "On the Street Where You Live" would be one of them. But nobody much agrees with me, and everyone wants to take a crack at a good song, so many jazz singers have covered this classic from My Fair Lady, even some soul singers like Ben E. King (I liked his version--maybe the right singer can make anything sound soulful). but Etta Jones took a shot at on this session, and acquits herself quite well. It does sound a little forced, or it would, except for one thing: Frank Wess.
This is Jones' breakthrough album at age 32, which is not exactly doddering, but it did take her the better part of two decades to become an overnight success. She began her professional career as a 15-year-old with Buddy Johnson. She had performed at amateur night at the Apollo -- "I did not win," she told interviewer Monk Rowe in 1998,"in fact, they almost booed me off the stage at first." But she finished her song, and afterwards the male vocalist with Buddy Johnson's band approached her and told her Buddy was looking for a girl singer--his sister Ella was off having a baby. She was terrified, sure she wasn't ready, but she went for the audition, which was right there, on the spot, backstage. Another singer was there to audition too, but she knew the lyrics to Johnson's songs, and the other woman did not, so she got the gig. Two days later she was on the road.
Ella came back, but Etta wasn't turning around. At 16, in 1944, she made her first recordings, with Barney Bigard and Georgie Auld--Leonard Feather on piano, Chuck Wayne guitar, Stan Levey drums. She was a blues singer back then, and could stand comparison with the best of them, but the era of classic blues was over, and that was the way producer Feather chose to present her. Feather, who wrote the songs as neo-classic blues, was a traditionalist who did not recognize the artistic potential of the new field of rhythm and blues, which is sort of too bad. Jones might have had more commercial success that way. Nevertheless, the early recordings are terrific. She also recorded "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman," with a band headed by J. C. Heard, as a haunting blues ballad. Gene Ammons recorded an instrumental version for Prestige in 1961, and it would become a huge R&B hit for Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells in 1962.
The singer she reminds me of most is Dinah Washington, and Washington did cover all bases--blues, pop, rhythm and blues, jazz. In fact, she covered three of the four Leonard Feather tunes from Jones' first session, and did well with them.
After the 1940s, Jones worked--she spent a few years with Earl Hines--but no more recording, until she re-emerged as a jazz singer, singing standards, on an album in 1957 for Cincinnati-based King Records. King was heavily into rhythm and blues and country, and did not really get behind its occasional jazz releases.
That all changed with this Prestige release. Suddenly, she was a star--an overnight success. The bestselling single from the album, "Don't Go to Strangers." went gold, something not too common for records from small jazz labels. She would record several more albums for Prestige, then for other labels with various musical accompaniments, then finally make a very successful partnership with saxophonist Houston Person, with whom she would tour and record for more than thirty years. But this would remain her best-known recording, and her greatest commercial success.
Why did it take so long for her to break through? Jones' own explanation for her late success: she wasn't ready for it earlier. Citing Billie Holiday, Thelma Carpenter and Dinah Washington as early influence, she told Billy Taylor in an interview that:
I took about twenty years to really not be afraid of what I was doing, and to know what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.
If that was the case, the results were worth waiting for. This album was deservedly praised, and Jones, working with a premier group of musicians, proves herself ready to join the top echelon of jazz singers. I can't find a producer credit for this session, but it was most likely Esmond Edwards. I've mentioned the brilliance of Frank Wess, who takes the lion's share of the solos, but Richard Wyands' contribution is also stellar, and so is a newcomer to Prestige, the veteran guitarist Skeeter Best.
Best's career goes back to 1935. He was with Earl Hines for a few years before joining the Navy in 1942, so his stay with Hines did not overlap Jones's. But he had kept busy during three decades before being tapped for this session, evolving with the times. He had played with modernists like Sonny Stitt and Sir Charles Thompson, and he'd done the guitar part on Little Willie John's R&B hit "Fever."
Along with them are George Duvivier and Roy Haynes, for whom "always reliable" doesn't begin to do them justice.
She tackles an interesting mix of songs here. She has always said, in various interviews, that what interests her most in a song is a good lyric, and she finds them in a variety of sources, from the hot-cha-cha glitz of the Roaring Twenties to a contemporary hit, and even a new song.
The Twenties are covered by "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" and "Bye, Bye Blackbird," both songs that have had many lives. "Yes Sir" has been covered by country artists (Roy Acuff) and doowoppers (the Clovers and--one of my favorite versions, the Sensations, with the relatively unusual doowop feature
of a female lead), less often by modern jazz ensembles--this may have been the first such version, and they make it work, with some inspired playing by Frank Wess. "Blackbird" has always been more conducive to a modern approach, especially after Miles Davis blew it wide open on his first Columbia album. Peggy Lee, Julie London and Carmen McRae had all contributed versions of it before Jones picked it up, but she takes a back seat to no one, not even Frank Wess, with improvisational stylings that prove you can still find surprises in an old chestnut.
She gives us the classics--Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. With "Fine and Mellow," she starts out by channeling her idol, Billie Holiday, but then moves into territory that is pure Jones (she gets some great Wyands piano on this one, and fine solo by Best). She sings a current hit, Frank Sinatra's Top Ten hit "All the Way," and introduces a new one, "Don't Go to Strangers," that would become her biggest hit.
"Don't Go to Strangers" was released twice on 45 RPM, once with "If I Had You" on the flip side, the other time with "Canadian Sunset." "All the Way" was the B side to a song from a later session, "Till There Was You." Don't Go to Strangers was also the title of the album.
generation gap (Ammons was 36, Smith 28 at the time
of this session, but that was enough to put them in different eras--that's how fast jazz evolved). Ammons may not have been the first tenor man to record with an organ, but he certainly knew how to do it, and Wess's flute fits in perfectly too. They draw on a variety of composers (including originals by Ammons and Wess) and play some first rate jazz, wild and soft, pensive and gutsy.
This session was split over two discs, both released later, when Ammons was serving a second, and longer, prison term. Velvet Soul was the title track of a 1964 release that also featured "In Sid's Thing," and the other tunes came out on Angel Eyes in 1965. "Angel Eyes" as a two-parter saw two different 45 RPM releases, some years apart, and "Velvet Soul" came out on 45 along with "A Stranger in Town" from a later session.
A pleasure to have Gene Ammons back, but he's never far away. One of Prestige's most prolifically recorded artists is back after a hiatus of a couple of years (sadly due to drug bust and prison term) to host back-to-back sessions on consecutive days. One might have thought putting Ammons together with an organ would be a no-brainer, and Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards seem to have thought so too, because Johnny "Hammond" Smith shows up on the second day (he would also record, later, with Richard "Groove" Holmes). Putting anyone together with Ray Barretto
is clearly a good idea, and that happens on the first day, along with an all star rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor.
I'm always drawn to Barretto and his unique ability to bring conga rhythms to straight-ahead, and he's heard to good advantage here in every track, starting with "Close Your Eyes," the tune by "Queen of Tin Pan Alley" Bernice Petkere that's a favorite of pop singers and jazzers alike, and had an especial period of popularity after Tony Bennett's swinging 1955 hit version. We've heard in on one other remarkable Prestige album, the two guitars of Jimmy Raney and Kenny Burrell, assisted by Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean.
Ammons favors standards on this session, and he knows how to play them. Next up "Stompin' at the Savoy," another swing era classic that's had some great bebop interpretations, and this is one of them, starting out with an arresting vamp by Doug Watkins. Since Ammons is--unusually for him--the only horn on the session, he has to carry the weight of improvisation, and he does some lovely stuff, always swinging, always melodic, always interesting. Flanagan is strong with his solo, Watkins shines throughout, and both Taylor and Barretto contribute strongly.
The two Ammons originals, "Blue Ammons" and "Hittin' the Jug," deliver the down home blues that he does so well. As much as I'm drawn to Barretto, it's not at the expense of Art Taylor, who delivers throughout, and who delivers a short but wonderful solo on "Blue Ammons." Tommy Flanagan is at his bluesy best on "Hittin' the Jug," which is a particularly strong composition that's had a few other versions in spite of being so closely associated with Ammons.
"Confirmation" is the Charlie Parker tune, taking Ammons and company more to the bebop side of Jug's swing-to-bop, and all of these guys know how to do that. Watkins shines, and so does Taylor. Rodgers and Hart's "My Romance" is pure ballad, and "Canadian Sunset" a chestnut that's given new sparkle by Barretto. It's most familiar in the original version by Eddie Heywood with Hugo Winterhalter's orchestra, and Ammons turns it nicely into a saxophone piece.
The album was entitled Boss Tenor. The session produced two singles. "Hittin' the Jug" was backed with "Canadian Sunset," and a later 45 RPM release saw "Canadian Sunset" become the A side, joined by "Seed Shack" from a later session. Bob Weinstock produced this one, Esmond Edwards was in the studio the next day.
The session with Smith, also featuring Frank Wess, is definitely a meeting of like minds, despite a bit of a generation gap (Ammons was 36, Smith 28 at the time
of this session, but that was enough to put them in different eras--that's how fast jazz evolved). Ammons may not have been the first tenor man to record with an organ, but he certainly knew how to do it, and Wess's flute fits in perfectly too. They draw on a variety of
composers (including originals by Ammons and Wess) and play some first rate jazz, wild and soft, pensive and gutsy.
This session was split over two discs, both released later, when Ammons was serving a second, and longer, prison term. Velvet Soul was the title track of a 1964 release that also featured "In Sid's Thing," and the other tunes came out on Angel Eyes in 1965. "Angel Eyes" as a two-parter saw two different 45 RPM releases, some years apart, and "Velvet Soul" came out on 45 along with "A Stranger in Town" from a later session.
Bob Weinstock's philosophy of the best jazz being from a spontaneous jam session hasn't found many adherents in recent years, with perfection being the goal. perfection achieved by multi-tracks and multi-takes, and laying in patches. But it made for some great jazz.
Part of that spontaneity came from Weinstock's commitment to fooling around with combinations of musicians. You'll recall that he deliberately did not set Miles Davis up with a regular group. That happened when Miles moved to Columbia.
It was a marketing move that brought him wealth and glory, and resulted in some great music, but he made some great music with Prestige too, and we have a legacy of Miles in different settings which is priceless.
Weinstock wouldn't mess around with an artist like Yusef Lateef, who had his familiar group that he brought in with him from Detroit. But Lem Winchester had already outgrown his Wilimington bandmates, and Weinstock set him up with a series of different partners: Benny Golson on his debut album, then Oliver Nelson and Johnny "Hammond" Smith, then Nelson again with Curtis Peagler. And for this, his third album as leader, Frank Wess came aboard, and this was another solid choice. Golson and Nelson were sax players; Wess is a tenorman, too, but here he concentrates on the flute, and to good advantage.
This album cover is a striking piece of art, and it's offered for
sale as a print at a number of sites (including Walmart!), but
nowhere is the artist credited. There's a signature running
along the lower left, and it's Esmond Edwards'. He did a lot
of photography for Prestige album covers even before he
began producing, so it's quite likely the art work is his.
Talented guy.
Winchester has a new rhythm section, too. Hank Jones had lent his piano mastery to a variety of different Prestige settings: with Jerome Richardson, Curtis Fuller and vocalist Earl Coleman. And this, of course, barely scratched the surface of the catalog of this jazz master. Eddie Jones was not one of his brothers, but a heckuva bassist anyway. He worked with Count Basie for years, and was frequently on call for sessions with Countsmen like Frank Wess. He would go on, like so many jazzmen before him, to become vice president of an insurance agency. Gus Johnson also played briefly with Basie; his previous Prestige work had been a swing session and a blues session (with Willie Dixon).
The menu on this album features three tunes by Winchester, one by Oliver Nelson, and one standard. My two favorites on the set are Winchester tunes. "Another Opus" opens with a bass vamp by Eddie Jones turns into a moody Jones-Wess duet, a mood that's picked up and carried by Winchester, who never loses it even
as his playing gets more intricate. It's easy to kid around with the title of my other favorite--Lem and Frank let you have it with both barrels--but given that Winchester was to die far too soon from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, maybe not. This one is much more experimental, and much faster. Eddie Jones, whose bass is very much on display throughout this set, whips into steeplechase speed for this one, and Wess and Winchester both step outside the comfort zone. Listening from the perspective of 1960, you'd come away wanting to hear a lot more from Lem Winchester. Listening from the perspective of the new millenium, one can only grieve that there was to be precious little more.
Another Opus came out on New Jazz, Esmond Edwards producing.
Frank Wess is back four days later, this time without Joe Newman, but with two thirds of the rhythm section from the previous gig, and this time the session is directed toward Moodsville, rather than Swingville.
Was Moodsville a dilution of the jazz mission of Prestige Records? Some still say yes. Chris Albertson, who produced a number of albums for Bob Weinstock during this period, has said "When I produced a session, it was a Prestige session--whether it came out on Prestige, Prestige Bluesville or Prestige Swingville, made no difference."
This album provides some evidence for the "Jackie Gleason clone" theory, if you're really looking for it, but not much. It's a good bet that the material was chosen with the awareness that this would go out on Moodsville. The songs are all dreamy ballads, even the original Wess tune.
But it provides overwhelming evidence for the "this is real jazz" theory, by being real jazz. Wess and Flanagan find the beauty in these ballads, and they never lose it, but they also find their jazz soul, their openings for improvisation.They don't need to sentimentalize the ballads, because the ballads themselves take care of that, but they are never insensitive to their beauty.
His own original, "Rainy Afternoon," needs to take a back seat to no other tune for dreamy beauty. Wess plays it on the saxophone, with all the smoky lyricism that instrument can provide.
"It's So Peaceful in the Country" was written by Alec Wilder, whose book, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, did as much as anything else you can name to create the canon we now know as the Great American Songbook, and who contributed significantly to that canon as a composer/lyricist. This particular song, introduced by Mildred Bailey in 1941, has never attracted a huge volume of jazz improvisers (Second Hand Songs has it at 51st on the list of most recorded songs from that year), but it's had its share, starting with Mundell Lowe in 1956. Tommy Flanagan opens it with a sort of bluesy vamp, which suggests a certain urban touch, but Wess's flute moves it gently but firmly, and without irony, into the realm of bucolic peace.
"But Beautiful" is a Jimmy Van Heusen melody that lives up to its title. Tommy Flanagan is given an extended solo to start this one off, and perhaps because it's a much more widely recorded tune (6th most recorded of tunes from 1947), both he and Wess allow themselves a lot more latitude to improvise, but they keep it pretty, and they keep it interesting. Wess on flute again.
"Stella by Starlight" is by movie composer Victor Young, so you'd think it would be a movie theme, and it sort of is and sort of isn't. The melody was adapted by Young from music he wrote for a film called The Uninvited. Apparently at some point when he was writing the lyrics, someone must have pointed out to lyricist Ned Washington that at one point in the movie, Ray Milland tells Gail Russell (Stella) that he's serenading her by starlight, so Washington quick had to write that into the lyric--which did not come right away. It was introduced by Young as an instrumental piece in 1944, the year of the movie's release (and it's the third most recorded of all 1944 songs*), and the lyric didn't come along till 1947, when Frank Sinatra recorded it. It's one of those unusual pieces that's had a lot more instrumental than vocal recordings, not all of them jazz by a long shot. After Young introduced it, it became an orchestral staple until both Sinatra and Harry James recorded it in 1947, and it entered the jazz book when Charlie Parker recorded it with strings. Wess switches to the tenor saxophone for this one, with all the Ben Webster-type beauty that the instrument is capable of.
“Gone With the Wind" is decidedly not a movie theme, having been composed by Allie Wrubel a good three years before the movie. Wess stays with the tenor, and gives this one a more jaunty reading.
I won't go through every tune, but they all create a mood, and if you're not in the mood for a mood, but just want to hear some fine jazz, they give you plenty of that.
Since at this juncture the stars of the "Ville" recordings on Prestige are the labels themselves, this album is just called The Frank Wess Quartet. Esmond Edwards produced. "Rainy Afternoon" was released as one side of a 45.
* The most covered song of 1944 is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," but schmaltzy "Stella By Starlight" gets beaten out for the number two slot by one of the hippest tunes ever written, Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight."
Swingville has done pretty well with recruiting Basie musicians and alumni, and why not? If there's a more swinging ensemble anywhere. I'd like to see it. Joe Newman had been with Basie on and off since 1943. Frank Wess and Eddie Jones were part of that 1950s ensemble which achieved popularity but not much critical acclaim (a shadow of its former Lester Young-dominated self, playing outdated music) but has since been recognized for the sterling aggregation that it was. Oliver Jackson never played in a Basie band, but surely this was an oversight. With credentials including the Metropole, Teddy Wilson, Charlie
Shavers, Buck Clayton, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Earl Hines, Budd Johnson, Sy Oliver, he would have been right at home with Basie.
If you're going to put together a group of Basie sidemen doing an outside gig, you're not going to have the Count at the piano, and if you're not going to get Count 1.1 Nat Pierce, as other Count's Men groups have done, then Tommy Flanagan is not a bad choice at all. Though a thoroughgoing Detroit bebopper, he's from that generation of piano players whose earliest influences were Art Tatum, Nat "King" Cole and Teddy Wilson, and he would go on to spend several years as Ella Fitzgerald.
Newman and his group are certainly not trying to escape their Basie association. The songs are all from the Basie repertoire, two of them ("Jive at Five" and "Taps Miller") composed by the Count himself, or else bluesy originals by Newman that would fit right into Basie's wheelhouse. But a quintet is going to be a lot different from the Basie big band, and although you can hear Basie in their individual voices, especially Joe Newman's, and Wess and Newman playing together can create a big sound, you hear a lot more than that. The soloists, with room to stretch out ("Taps Miller" is over eight minutes, "Wednesday's Blues" more than nine) move very naturally into that swing-to-bop territory, and especially on the Newman originals, all of them give some very interesting interpretations of the blues.
There's a moment during "Bohemia After Dark" when Dorothy Ashby and Herman Wright are doing a harp-bass dialog, and then it's Wright and Frank Wess doing a flute-bass dialog, and you're not quite sure when the crossover occurred. That's how well these musicians play together.
This is the second and last Ashby recording session for Prestige. She would pack a lot of music into it, and she would pack a lot of music, art, writing and performance into her short 58 years on this earth. She was from the jazz hotbed of Detroit, and she would continue to make Detroit her home, although she toured and recorded widely. For five years in the 1960s, she and her husband, John Ashby, had a jazz radio show in Detroit, where they "talked about the new jazz releases, about the problems of jazz, and about the performers" (from an interview with her and Cannonball Adderley). She reviewed jazz records for the Detroit Free Press. And she and her husband founded a theater company in Detroit, the Ashby Players. John wrote the scripts and Dorothy the songs, music and lyrics. She even performed in at least one of the plays. Unfortunately, none of this work has been released to the public, although it's said to exist on reel-to-reel tapes.
But plenty of her other work survives. She recorded eleven albums as leader of her own group, including one with Terry Pollard, another Detroit woman who broke through jazz's glass ceiling. And she wasn't just a specialty act, either--"Hey, let's build an album around this chick who plays the harp." She was in serious demand as sidewoman, recording with jazz groups (Bobbi Humphrey, Wade Marcus, Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Criss, Gene Harris, Freddie Hubbard) and vocalists (Bill Withers, Minnie Riperton, Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, Bobby Womack). She recorded with Japanese new age musician Osamu Kitajima. She's been sampled by hip-hop artists.
And if the harp wasn't enough, she brought another unusual sound into jazz: the koto, a Japanese multi-stringed instrument which she played on The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, a remarkable album released in 1970 on Cadet, a Chess Records subsidiary, an album which also featured an electric harp, and Ashby's vocals.
Ashby was active up until shortly before her death in 1986, but she had some interesting things to say about the era we're looking at now, also in the joint interview with Adderley:
I speak often of the decade of 1950-1960 as being the best for the Black jazzman. The economy of the country was in pretty fair shape. What we missed out on in the way of post-war adjustments, we "made up for" with the Korean venture. The United States was becoming aware of jazz's role in international goodwill. The jazz festivals were born, giving jazz some of its greatest and most diverse audiences. Jazz was used in the films, like Odds Against Tomorrow, No Sun in Venice, and Miles' The Elevator to the Hangman.
Another nail in the coffin of the myth of the 1930s being the golden era of jazz's popularity.
This album features standards, and two compositions by Ashby, "It's a Minor Thing" and "Rascality." One sort of expects a minor thing to be moody and subdued, but this one is rowdy, rambunctious and bursting at the seams. "Rascality" is a hell of a piece of music. It's hard to say what makes one jazz tune into a widely recorded standard, while another doesn't make it beyond its first recording session. Oscar Pettiford's "Bohemia After Dark," which Ashby and Co. start off the day with, is one such standard. "Rascality" is not, perhaps because nobody thinks a melody written by a harpist can translate into other instrumentations. Ashby discussed that in an interview with jazz historian Sally Placksin:
Even arrangers admit that often they don’t know how to write what they’d like to write. What they would be willing to write for harp often doesn’t work, because they’re writing from a pianistic point of view, or maybe another instrumental point of view, and that doesn’t work on a harp, because you can only change two pedals at a time, and various other technicalities…. The harp has complexities that a person has to be able to work out in their head while they’re spontaneously creating jazz on it.
The only other version I've been able to find is one by contemporary jazz harpist Destiny Muhammad, in a concert tribute to Dorothy Ashby. But a great tune is a great tune, and jazz musicians have made a mistake by not picking up on this one.
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.
Dorothy Ashby, harpist. Can a harpist swing? Can a harpist play bebop?
Before you answer, consider one other fact.
Dorothy Ashby came from Detroit.
Detroit, like most of the jazz world of this era, was male dominated, but there was enough of a meritocracy that it was possible for a woman to make it, if she was really good. Those doors didn't open easily. But then, to play in Detroit at all, you had to be ready to challenge and prove yourself with some of the finest musicians in the country. Three who
did were Terry Pollard, Alice McLeod (later Alice Coltrane) and Dorothy Ashby.
All three were pianists. There was a certain amount of gender discrimination in the instruments women were presumed able to play, just as there was racial discrimination in the positions football players were presumed able to play. There were all-girl orchestras in the 30s and 40s, so there were at least some musicians playing a variety of instruments. A couple of my favorites: drummer Viola Smith, the Hep Girl, who announced in Down Beat that women could hold their on any male bandstand, and proved it by sharing a stage with Chick Webb. And trombonist Lillian Briggs, who later became an entrepreneur and rented the pleasure yacht Monkey Business to presidential hopeful Gary Hart, who became an unhopeful when he was caught on the yacht doing
monkey business with a woman not his wife. And Terry Pollard put together a group of musicians good enough to challenge a group led by Clark Terry in the Leonard Feather-produced LP, Cats vs. Chicks.
But if you were good enough to play with the big boys in Detroit, you were good enough to challenge the ideas of who could play what. Terry Pollard moved over from piano to vibes, and it was said that when she and Alice McLeod shared the bandstand, not many musicians were man enough to sit in with them and keep up with their rapid tempi.
Dorothy Ashby made, arguably, an even gutsier move, to an instrument that may have been traditionally associated with women, but was definitely not associated with jazz. Terry Pollard had to convince the boys that she could play with them. Dorothy Ashby not only had to convince the boys that she could play with them, she had to convince the boys that a harp could play with them. The harp was associated with classical music and with polite parlors, and it was also associated with the white musicians who were granted access to classical orchestras and polite parlors.
Ashby proved all of that (and so did McLeod/Coltrane, who would later take up the harp). Critic Tom Moon, in an essay for National Public Radio, describes her achievement:
Ashby operates in an unassuming way, leaping through intricate arpeggios that no other jazz instrumentalist could attempt. Her single lines may not be terribly fancy, but she selects her notes carefully, and plays each one with a classical guitarist's stinging articulation...sometimes snapping off chords as if the harp were just a bigger guitar, and at other times using its immense range to conjure an enveloping wash of sound in the background.
You get all of that and more on this collaboration with Frank Wess: the "more" being her considerable gifts as a composer. The four standards on the album are augmented by three Ashby originals, "Pawky," "Back Talk" and "Jollity." "Pawky" means "having or showing a sly sense of humor," and she does that. She also takes the harp out of the parlor and into...well, actually into Rudy Van Gelder's parents' parlor, but this is a parlor in which nearly every jazz great has sipped tea. She and Frank Wess complement each other on strings and woodwind as ingeniously as Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane had done a fortnight earlier in the same parlor. She also does a wonderful bass-harp duet with Herman Wright on "Back Talk" which does everything Tom Moone describes: the biting single-string notes and the enveloping sound of the harp. And Art Taylor gives the session all the propulsion it needs.
The album was released as Hip Harp, which was sort of a hard sell--in case you hadn't realized that a harp could be hip. It's had various re-releases over the years, and "Charmaine" was included on a Moodsville collection called Lusty Moods Played by America's Greatest Jazzmen. A jazzwoman, it turned out, could be just as lusty and just as great.
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.
What to say about this session? I've already talked about the pleasures of a Coltrane-Quinichette collaboration, and they're here again in abundance, all the more pleasurable when Frank Wess is added to the mix. Wess, like Quinichette, was a Basie guy and a Lester Young guy on tenor. He also played the flute, an instrument that is finding its way more and more into Prestige sessions. The tenor saxophone is never going to go away. It's the beating heart of jazz and its rambunctious cousin rhythm and blues. But new colorations are finding their way into the music, and both the solid groove and the newer sound are featured here, as Wess plays both flute and tenor. The Basie swing of Quinichette and Wess is a part of the jazz vocabulary that Coltrane is internalizing, ready to burst forth.
And I've talked more than once about the brilliance of Mal Waldron as a composer, and as an interpreter of his own compositions. Very often, when a group is playing a Waldron tune, he'll take a late solo, or the last solo, and he'll add something that the other brilliant musicians on the take have missed -- something that goes to the heart of the song.
So what to talk about here? Well, one thing that you very rarely find on a Bob Weinstock recording, the existence of alternate takes. Weinstock, as we know, valued spontaneity and didn't encourage a lot of second and third tries on a tune. Also, as we know, he valued recording tape and didn't like to waste it, so most unused takes were taped over.
Alternate takes are often a treasure to the jazz scholar, just as often a pain in the neck to the jazz lover who just wants to hear music, not study it, and whose enjoyment of the CD version of an album he once loved is marred by having to listen to five different takes of some group's version of "Ornithology." But because they are so infrequent on Prestige, and because I am sort of pretending to be a jazz scholar in this project, they're a rare treat.
I listened to the final take of "Wheelin'" first, the alternate take second, wondering if I'd hear the difference, or get why they were dissatisfied with the first. And maybe I did. This is a very swinging group, with two Lester Young acolyte Basie-ites, and a piano player who would be tapped by Pres's soulmate Billie Holiday as her accompanist, and as great as the first version is, maybe they thought that they could swing harder.
Especially Mal Waldron. On the final take, I was blown away by his piano solo, hard as nails, played almost entirely on the topmost end of the piano. The earlier version is mellower, and it seems as though Waldron decided to trade sonority for percussiveness, not unlike what Illinois Jacquet did in his classic recording of "Flying Home" with the Lionel Hampton band, when he created the honking tenor sound, with all its emotional immediacy. Waldron is doing something a lot more complex, but no less immediate.
Other thoughts about this session: I was drawn in by the inescapable beat of the rhythm section on Mercer Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," one of the numbers that features Wess on flute. And speaking of Illinois Jacquet, his "Robbins Nest" is one of the great jazz standards, with an irresistible melody and ample room for improvisation, done proud by this ensemble. Jacquet's collaborators on "Robbins Nest" were Sir Charles Thompson and Bob Russell, a fine lyricist (Songwriters Hall of Fame) who seemed to have a penchant for writing lyrics that were rarely used, although there is a version of "Robbins Nest" by Ella Fitzgerald.
All of the final takes m this session were on the Prestige album Wheelin' and Dealin', credited to the All Stars. The two alternate takes made it to a budget Status album, The Dealers, credited to Waldron and also featuring two cuts from his April 19 session. The alternate takes inevitably made their way onto the CD reissue of Wheelin' and Dealin'. Weinstock must have been moved as I was by the irresistible beat of "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," because it was released as a two-sided 45, under Coltrane's name.
This is the kind of album that if you're listening to it while doing something else, you keep getting pulled back to it. You keep hearing riffs that have you saying. "Oh, my, yes," or you realize that you're in the middle of a solo that started out good and keeps getting better, and pretty soon whatever else it was that you were doing, you're not doing it any more. You're just listening to jazz.
All the tunes are by Mal Waldron, and each one is different, and each is remarkable in its own way.
"Count One" with some rollicking, stomping Waldron piano, and then allows Frank Wess and Thad Jones to show some of their Basie chops. Wess opens it up with his solo, then Jones tears it up with his, taking Basie to a whole new dimension. His solo is probably the highlight of the number, except that everyone else is pretty near as good. A tight solo by Kenny Burrell, then Waldron again, and maybe he's the highlight. Paul Chambers contributes a lengthy solo, and by this time we've left Basie far behind for some vintage Prestige-style jamming bebop, but then Basie veterans Jones and Wess come back for a swinging solid jazz ensemble that could work in any era.
"Steamin'" lives up to its name, and where'd the name come from? It's the title of one of the albums drawn from the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon, so is this Waldron's tribute to Miles, following his tribute to the Count? Not in a million years. For one thing, the Marathon sessions may have preceded this one, but the Steamin' album would not be titled, or released, for a few years yet, so it's more likely the other way around. Weinstock was looking for another gerund with a dropped "g," and remembered this one. That's a reasonable theory, because how could you forget it? Chambers and Taylor lay down a groove that would turn Lawrence Welk into a bebopper. The head is a maniacally repeated riff, and as with the previous cut, each solo leaves you thinking no one can possibly top it, until the next one comes along. Kenny Burrell picks up Thad
Jones so seamlessly that you almost can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins, which is no mean trick if you're dealing with a trumpet and a guitar. Frank Wess, on flute this time, manages the same feat, and if you had to pick one solo on this cut to give the blue ribbon to, it might be Wess. Mal Waldron had just started working as Billie Holiday's accompanist, and accompanying a singer takes a certain kind of focus, especially a singer as unique as Holiday, especially a singer as unstable as Holiday was by this time in her life. So I guess he had that urge to let loose, and play some of the blindingly fast and endlessly inventive stuff he plays here.
"Empty Street" is a ballad as haunting as its title, and gives Burrell his best solo space. "Blue Jelly" is more than just a late afternoon five o'clock blues. It's another superb Waldron composition, with some extended ensemble play along with the great solos.
The album came out as an All Stars session--that is, no name above the title, which was After Hours. Thad Jones's name came first, and it's often thought of as a Jones album. Later -- after the Miles Davis release -- it became Steamin', by Frank Wess and Kenny Burrell.
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