Listening to Prestige 282: Red Garland

Not much available from this album from any of my usual sources, and it's too bad, because from the couple of cuts I was able to listen to, Red Garland and Ray Barretto together just keep getting better and better.

Maybe the folks who select things for streaming gave this a lower priority because Paul Chambers and Art Taylor gave it a pass, but that hardly seems reason enough. George Joyner and Charlie Persip are more than up to the job of giving these guys the rhythmic support they need, and "Ralph J. Gleason Blues" shows that Persip and especially Joyner can deliver original and inventive solos.

"Ralph J. Gleason Blues" and "Mr. Wonderful" were the two cuts I was able to listen to, and I've put up "Ralph J. Gleason Blues" as my "Listen to One" selection because...because, well, everything. The Joyner and Persip contributions I mentioned above, and the ways that Garland and Barretto play off each other -- as always, perfectly balanced by Rudy Van Gelder's sound engineering.

Ralph J. Gleason, the dedicatee of Garland's blues, was one of the leading jazz critics of the 1950s, an associate editor of Down Beat. And as I've mentioned, another term for "leading jazz critic of the 1950s" was "snob."

Gleason, perhaps, less than most. While he might not have been so open as to recognize rhythm and blues as a legitimate form of jazz, because no one was, he was open to the new music that was being created by hippies and rockers of the 1960s, to the extent when in 1967, Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone, Gleason was one of its first editors.

"Mr. Wonderful" was the title song from a Broadway musical of 1956, which starred the Will Mastin Trio. In case you're not quite sure you remember the name, this was an act put together by vaudevillian Will Mastin, featuring his brother, Sammy Davis, and his nephew, who had been given the same name as his father. Yes, mega-star though he was already, Sammy Davis. Jr., continued to perform with, and feature, the vaudevillians who had nurtured them. Family acts from the Everly Brothers to Creedence Clearwater Revival have festered grievances to the point of coming to blows onstage, but Sammy stayed faithful to his two mentors until they retired, and today they are buried alongside each other. I saw Mr. Wonderful on Broadway, and yes, it wasn't much of a show, but yes, Sammy lit up the theater. The song wasn't the hit from the show, because it was sung about Sammy, not by him -- "Too Close For Comfort" got that honor. But it had a sweet melody, and Garland and his group get a lot out of it.


The session log has this as the Red Garland Quartet, but it was actually released under Red Garland Trio plus Ray Barretto (or con Ray Barretto to the Latin market). To either market, it was Rojo.

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 262: Gene Ammons

The question of jazz's popularity, or lack of it, comes up about as often in music discussions as the "death of poetry" does in literary discussions, which is to say, you can't get away from it, and no one really has anything new to add to it. Including me, but that doesn't stop me from going back to it. I finished up 1957 with a reference to an article in Billboard asking once again why jazz should be so popular abroad, and still fail to reach a mass audience at home. Billboard was always a cheerleader for the business of selling music, and their writers and editors had some very sharp insights. Music editor Paul Ackerman, one of the sharpest, suggested that people really liked jazz when they heard it, but they didn't hear it enough, and he suggested that people in the jazz world should work harder at educating America's

disk jockeys. People in other countries were hearing plenty of jazz because of the popularity of Voice of America disk jockey Willis Conover, but there was no one like Conover on the home front air waves. The Voice of America, of course, was manipulated by the CIA, and the CIA was selling its own brand of culture wars -- America was the home of abstract expressionist art and modern jazz. daring art forms that were anathema to the communists. This might have been a tougher sell at home, where artists were generally suspected of being communists.

But the idea that DJs should be educated about jazz was an interesting one. Looking at another Billboard issue, this one from 1954, radio jocks were asked about their favorite jazz artists, and they couldn't come up with many. Their lists ran to dance bands like Les Brown, pop acts like Les Paul and Mary Ford, novelty acts like Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. They didn't seem to know exactly what jazz was.

It should be pointed out that the Top Forty charts of the 1950s were reasonably hospitable to instrumental music, and all kinds of instrumental music. You had perky-poppy hits like Les Baxter's "Poor People of Paris," Latin hits like Perez Prado's "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," lush big band swing like Jimmy Dorsey's "So Rare," TV themes like Ray Anthony's "Dragnet," syrupy hits like Percy Faith's "A Summer Place," gutsy rhythm and blues like Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk," and novelty rock and roll like the Champs' "Tequila." There was even some near-jazz, like Cozy Cole's "Topsy," or Red Prysock bringing his Lester Young influence to "Hand Clappin'" and "Cloudburst," which was also given a jazz cover by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

So maybe the jazz labels should have listened to Ackerman a little more closely. If one goes back to those 1954 disc jockey lists of favorite jazz musicians and jazz albums, one can't help but notice that they are virtually all from major labels. The only independent who makes a dent is Norman Granz, so maybe he understood the game a little better than some of the other indie impresarios.

Radio was a lot different in 1954, and here's one of the big differences. From Billboard, again:

Who selects the records played on your show?

Myself                 492

Program manager    1

Music librarian        9

Assistant                 1

Today virtually no DJ does his or her own programming. But back then, they did. Country legend Loretta Lynn got her start by driving around to every little radio station in the South with a crate full of copies of her first 45, meeting the DJs, schmoozing them, giving them the record. Today, no one would let her in the door. When I wrote The New Country Music Encyclopedia, back in the early 90s, I asked a record company executive, "What if it's not a kid? What if it's a veteran like Charley Pride, with a new recording, but no major label support?" "They'd let him in, because he's Charley Pride. But they wouldn't play his record."

Back then, you didn't have to do it yourself with a dusty old station wagon and a crate full of 45s. Song pluggers were an important part of the industry, and they did it for you. And you could even pay a little under the table to get your record on the air.

When people found out that was happening, it became a major scandal. Disc jockeys were fired. Congress launched a much-publicized investigation of payola. As a young person passionately in love with music, payola never seemed much of a problem to me. The assertion that Alan Freed took money under the table for playing records didn't bother me in the slightest. I loved the records he played, and I was much more bothered by the fact of his being forced off the air.

But anyway, it was 1958, and here you were. There was the persuasive power of song pluggers, and Nelson George profiles a few of them and discusses their importance to black radio in his brilliant study, The Death of Rhythm and Blues. For a little more of an investment, there was the power of greased palms. How much of an investment? I don't know, but Alan Freed played records by some pretty small independent labels, so it had to have been somewhat negotiable.

All of which brings us back to the independent jazz labels, and their apparent invisibility to disc jockeys, be they the smooth pop purveyors like Jack Lacy and William B, Williams on WNEW, the rock and rollers like Alan Freeds on WINS, the black radio jocks like Jocko, your Ace from Outer Space, on WOV. What if the song pluggers, with a little extra scratch in their wallets, had been working for Prestige or Blue Note or Riverside, or the jazz division of Atlantic?

They could have done worse than to start with Gene Ammons, and an album like this one. It features five horns, for a full-throated big band sound. It has Ammons’s rootsy connection to the blues, and some solid rhythms. I can imagine a cut like “Ammon Joy,” with its echoes of both swing and rhythm and blues, finding a place in a number of radio formats. “Ammon Joy is 13 minutes long, so it would have to have been edited fairly severely, but that was a not uncommon practice by jazz labels when the issued a cut on 45. And, in my reimagined world of 50s music, how about that? Give the Top Forty or R&B or Make Believe Ballroom audience a taste of the swinging head, the beautiful Jerome Richardson solo, a bit of John Coltrane on alto, and your reimagined listeners put their nickel in the jukebox, like what they hear, plunk down 79 cents for a 45, listen to it a few times, get interested enough to shell out $3.98 for the LP, and wow! Didja hear this? There’s a whole lot more to this song that we got on the 45! And Paul Ackerman is right—if people are exposed to jazz, they’ll like it.

Or maybe Prestige decides to try and sell the radio jocks on a familiar tune from the Great American Songbook, like the Ammons take on Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” (quintet, with some playful work by Richardson) or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might as Well be Spring” (again a quintet, this time with Coltrane).

Or maybe not. Much as we revere the Great American Songbook today, the 50s were not its finest decade. I don’t have any sources on this, but I’m fairly certain the term had not been coined them. The songs from the 30s and 40s were known as “standards,” and they weren’t the songs that song pluggers and payola providers were pushing. So during the decade when traditional pop songs and pop singers duked it out with the rock and rollers, the popsters were not going with their heavy artillery. They were leading the charge with songs like “Ricochet Romance” and “Cross Over the Bridge” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and “Chances Are.” Some of them were pretty good songs, some of them weren’t. Frank Sinatra recorded standards on his great Capitol albums with Nelson Riddle and Billy May, but his singles, his Top Forty releases, were newly minted songs like “High Hopes” and “Young at Heart.”

The standards were left to the jazz musicians, and, interestingly, the rock and rollers. Elvis recorded Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” doowoppers recorded the Kern/Fields “The Way You Look Tonight” (the Jaguars), Louis Prima’s “Sunday Kind of Love” (the Harptones), the Benny Goodman standard “Glory of Love” (the Five Keys) and many others.

It was left to jazz musician with a pop following, Ella Fitzgerald, to call new attention to the songs of the cream of American popular composers, with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, the first of several such albums, and quite probably the inspiration for whoever coined the phrase “Great American Songbook.”

So maybe a better choice for an Ammons release for the song pluggers and payola merchants would have been a pop song of the Fifties, “That’s All,” a 1953 hit for Nat “King” Cole.

In any event, none of that happened, and jazz floated along with its niche audience. One song from the session, “Blue Hymn” (quintet with Jerome Richardson) was released on 45, but much later. It’s hard to precisely pin down, It’s hard to precisely pin down the release dates of Prestige 45s, but it probably was in conjunction with the Bluesville compilation album, Soul Jazz, Vol. 2.

“Ammon Joy,” “Jug Handle” and “It Might As Well Be Spring” were all on a 1958 release of which the title tune was “Groove Blues.” “Blue Hymn,” “The Real McCoy” (Mal Waldron composition), “Cheek to Cheek” and “That’s All” made up a second album, The Big Sound, also released in 1958, so even if they didn’t get a Top Forty single, the folks at Prestige got their money’s worth out of this session.

Listening to Prestige 259: Red Garland

Not much more to say about this amazing collection of musicians, except to wonder if this is Donald Byrd's first pairing with John Coltrane.

Well, not quite. And once again the story goes back to Detroit, and Cass Technical High School. As Byrd remembered it in a 1998 lecture at Cornell University, one of the many institutions at which he taught,

I met him in the 11th grade in Detroit. I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy’s band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You want to play?’

So he played piano, and I soloed. I never thought that six years later we would be recording together, and that we would be doing all of this stuff.

 And in fact, not even close. Byrd and Coltrane recorded together more than I would have guessed. Here's the best I can do for a complete list, relying on information from the amazing New York Public Library Research Desk, Wikipedia, jazzdisco.org, and Amazon:

Elmo Hope All Star Sextet, Informal Jazz (Prestige, May 1956) With Hank Mobley, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones

Paul Chambers Sextet, Whims of Chambers (Blue Note, September 1956). With Kenny Burrell, Horace Silver and Philly Joe Jones.

Art Blakey Big Band  (Bethlehem, December 1957). They were featured on two tracks as the Art Blakey Quintet, playihg a composition by Byrd and one by Trane.

Sonny Clark Sextet, Sonny's Crib (Blue Note, October 1957). With Curtis Fuller, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor

John Coltrane Quintet, Lush Life, Black Pearls (Prestige). These were both from the Coltrane compilations issued after Trane had left Prestige. Lush Life included one cut from a January 1958 session with Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Louis Hayes. Black Pearls was a May session with Garland, Chambers and Art Taylor.

Oscar Pettiford All-Stars, Winners Circle - Down Beat Poll Winners from 1956 (Bethlehem, October 1957). With Gene Quill, Al Cohn, Freddie Green, Eddie Costa, Philly Joe Jones and Ed Thigpen in various mix-and-match combinations.

And, since we were just talking, in the context of Mose Allison, about musicians getting duped out of publishing rights, here's another Donald Byrd story, this time with Byrd as the voice of experience, and Herbie Hancock as the callow youth. When Byrd gave Hancock his recording debut on a Blue Note session, Blue Note wanted to sign the young pianist to a recording contract, and Byrd warned him that under no account should he surrender the publishing rights to his music. So of course, that was the first condition Blue Note made.

A recording contract isn't  just a temptation to a young musician, it's the temptation. That's why so many young musicians give away so many rights. And it seemed inconceivable to Hancock that he could walk away from it, but he did. Blue Note caved. Hancock kept the publishing rights, and when Mongo Santamaria had a hit with "Watermelon Man"...well, the rest of the story comes not from a music publication, but from Road and Track (by way of Wikipedia). Hancock took the royalties from "Watermelon Man" and bought a Shelby Cobra, which is now renowned as the oldest production Cobra still in the hands of its original owner.

Of course, the real story here is the music. There's one new name, George Joyner, who would not have that name for long. He had come to New York after a stint playing the blues with B. B. King, and recorded first with Phineas Newborn. After converting to Islam, he became first Jamil Sulieman and then Jamil Nasser, and had a long association with Ahmad Jamal, and a career that went well into the 90s;

This was a long day in the studio, which would have come as no novelty to Garland and Coltrane, who were both on board for the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon. Ten songs, and one of them, "All Mornin' Long," went on pretty much all evening long, clocked in at 20 minutes, and made up a whole side of one of the LPs to come out of the session. And even after that, they weren't quite willing to call it a day, as they came back the next month to do five more.

"All Mornin' Long" was a Garland composition, and although it was the last piece recorded that day,
it was the first side of the eponymous first album released from the session. It holds attention all the way through, particularly the long piano solo by Garland that features some beautiful dialogue with Joyner/Nasser, leading into a bass solo that makes you understand why this guy was welcomed into the fold. Two other pretty fair composers took up the second half, George Gershwin ("They Can't Take That Away From Me") and Tadd Dameron ("Our Delight").

All Mornin' Long was a pretty quick release, in the spring of 1958. The others were a little longer in coming. Soul Junction saw the light of day in 1960, again with the Garland composition giving the album its title. Garland shared composing space with jazz giants: two by Dizzy Gillespie ("Woody'n You" and "Birks Works") and one by Duke Ellington (I've Got it

Bad"). The final composer honors for the album went in a different direction, to 1920s Broadway composer Vincent Youmans, but Youmans might not have recognized their bopped-out, uptempo, nonstop version of his "Hallelujah." It's a rousing enough tune, as performed by Glenn Miller and others, but not always this rousing.

The rest of the November session--"Undecided" (Charlie Shavers) and "What Is There to Say?" (Vernon Duke)--had to wait until High Pressure in 1962, along with three songs from the December session: "Soft Winds" (Benny Goodman / Fletcher Henderson), "Solitude" (Duke Ellington) and "Two Bass Hit" (Dizzy Gillespie/John Lewis).  When you're getting together to play that much music, without much rehearsal, it's probably a good idea to mostly choose tunes that everyone knows. Bird's "Billie's Bounce" and Garland's "Lazy Mae" were on a later 1962 LP called Dig It!, which put together numbers from three different sessions.