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 is McPherson's second Prestige album, and he hasn't lost his love for pure bebop. In fact, he never did, and although he may have seemed a little retro in 1965, both he and his mentor Barry Harris came to be recognized as national treasures for keeping alive the inventive musical style brought to life by McPherson's hero, Charlie Parker.
In a 2019 80th birthday tribute to twin octogenarians McPherson and McCoy Tyner at Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center's also saxophonist Sherman Irby paid this tribute: “The bebop master is a true alto saxophonist. He plays the instrument with fire, passion and precision. He can pull your heartstrings with one note, and dazzle you with virtuosity and
imagination. There is only one Bird, one Stitt, one Cannonball—and one Charles McPherson.”
In 2020, McPherson laid to rest the old canard that you can't dance to bebop with a striking new album. Jazz Dance Suites, which led the British jazz blog Bebop Spoken Here to enthuse:"Magnificent sounds somewhat inadequate! I doubt there will be a better album released this year. It is just so listenable, so danceable, so everything …"
And Mark Stryker, writing about his 2024 release, Reverence, said "More than six decades into a remarkable career, few command and deserve our reverence quite like Charles McPherson.”
So...in 1965, they may not have been talking about McPherson as the newest sound in town, but he was making music that people still wanted to hear, as evidenced by his six Prestige albums in four years -- and as evidenced by the fact that over six decades, he has never been far from the recording studio.
And if this session doesn't exactly bring you back to 1965, it does something much more important--it brings you into the heart of jazz. McPherson has assembled a cohesive group with Clifford Jordan joining him as his companion saxophonist, Harris on piano, George Tucker on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums.
They tip their hats to the progenitors of bebop, with compositions by Charlie Parker ("Chasin' the Bird"), Dizzy Gillespie ("Con Alma:), Thelonious Monk ("Eronel") and Dexter Gordon/Bud Powell ("Dexter Rides Again"). There's one original composition, "I Don't Know."
It's hard, from a distance of years, to imagine the reception McPherson got in 1965. Was McPherson irrelevant? Was he trying to pretend it was still 1955, or even 1945? Or was he a refreshing antidote to the dumbing down of bebop by the soul jazzers, or the incomprehensible navel-gazing of the free spirits?
It's hard to imagine from a perspective of today's listeners, for most of whom what 1945, 1955 and 1965 have in common is that they all happened before they were born. No one is likely to sit down on a rainy afternoon and play, in succession, albums by Jack McDuff, Albert Ayler and Charles McPherson. Conversely, not many contemporary listeners are going to listen to a few bars of Con Alms, rip it off the turntable (my imagined listener is a technological purist), say "What is this shit? Give me the real thing!" and put on a 78 of Bird on Dial.
Today it's just the music, and interpretations of Bird, Diz, Monk, Duke and Dexter, if they're played by someone good, are going to sound good, which is the best you can hope for from a piece of music.
I'm back! Listening to Prestige the book -- a history of Prestige Records -- is in production, and will be published this winter by SUNY Press. So I'm back to the blog again, and will continue my mission to listen to, and respond to, every Prestige session.
Another one of those definitely worthy figures who made a brief name for himself and faded into oblivion. You won't find him on any of the various internet lists of the 50 greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Where will you find him? I dug a little deeper, starting with the forum section of organissino.com, where no one is so obscure that some coterie of fans haven't gathered to discuss him or her. I found one discussion of Jones, with all the entries dated 2003, when Mosaic released a box set of all his recordings. The reviews were there were all glowing, with several comparing him to Clifford Brown, and one mentioning that the set had been reviewed on Fresh Air. Nothing since 2003;
I found a really neat jazz blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe, which has, among other treasures, profiles of "Obscure Trumpet Masters." Jones is number four -- they're not ranked; he's number four in alphabetical order, and blogger Curtjazz (I can't find any other name for him) introduces him with:
He plays on one of the most famous straight-ahead jazz songs ever recorded, yet today people are more likely to confuse him with a film character played by Dorothy Dandridge, than they are to know the titles of any of his six albums.
The "most famous" is Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Jones had come east from Los Angeles, where he had recorded three well-received albums for Pacific Jazz, to join Silver's group. He played on two albums with Silver, and did quite a lot more sideman work with excellent musicians (incuding Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson for Prestige), and made this one Pretige album as leader, for which he received Down Beat's "New Star Trumpeter" award.
But as was the case with so many black artists of his era, the racism -- and the lack of appreciation for jazz as an art form -- in the United States weighed too heavily on him, and he moved to Germany, where he would spend the next fifteen years, and would disappear from view as far as the American jazz public was concerned.
This would be his USA swan song, at least for the time being. He would return in the 1980, and make one more album for the West Coast label Revelation. It was titled Carmell Jones Returns, although by that time the reaction would have been not so much "Wow, he's back!" and more "Who's Carmell Jones?"
His later years were spent in his almost-home town of Kansas City, Missouri. His actual home town was Kansas City, Kansas, but the Missouri side of the state line was more hospitable to music.
For those who remembered him and those who happened on him for the first time with the Mosaic box set, his work was a welcomed pleasure, as well it should have been. What this session captures is a man who loved what he did, even if he didn't love the country he was doing it in. That love comes through in every note he plays.
New to Prestige is Horace Silver veteran Roger Humphries. Don Schlitten produced, and the album was entitled Jay Hawk Talk, a tip of the hat to Jones's home state. The title cut was also released as a two-sided 45 RPM single.
I talked from time to time about swing-to-bop, in writing about the early days of Prestige, and artists like Zoot Sims. It may be time to consider a new kind of transitional music -- perhaps we should call it straight-ahead-to-free. I don't know what else to call this marvelous live album by Jaki Byard, except perhaps to add that its genesis seems to blossom from Charles Mingus and Earl Hines. To explain that, I'll have to quote extensively fron the liner notes to the original album, by the incomparable Ira Gitler.
Gitler desdribes a night when Don Schlitten came to hear two groups who were sharing the stage at the Village Vanguard--Mingus and Hines. Byard was playing with Mingus then, and he approached Schltten with an idea. Lennie Sogoloff, of the small but well-regarded north-of-Boston jazz club, Lennie's on the Turnpike, had heard Jaki's work on Booker
Ervin's The Freedom Book album, annd he wanted Jaki to bring the trio he had used to back up Ervin--Richard Davis and Alan Dawson. Dawson was a Boston resident, and Sogoloff had already line him up.
Jaki, in turn, asked Schlitten if Prestige would like to record on the spot,
Don was immediately in favor of the idea and put his creative brain to work helping to shape the date. Since Davis was unable to leave New York at the time, he suggested George Tucker, then playing bass with Hines. Byard liked this and suggested multi-reed man Joe Farrell...Unwilling to trust the unknown, Schitten decided to employ a New York engineer...Dick Alderson was his man.
The group opened on a Monday. By Thursday, when Schlitten and Alderson arrived...the four men were really getting it together...Byard told [Don] they were ready. This was an understatement. Schlitten describes it as "One of the most beautiful experiencesI've ever had in listening to jazz."
I wouldn't argue with him.
It is interesting to note that the inception of this recording came at a time when Jaki was playing opposite Earl Hines. "Out of all the bands," [Byard has said], "The only one I used to dig was...Fatha Hines. That was the only band that intrigued me."
The Mingus-Hines week at the Vanguard was an inspirational one for Byard...Hines plays as if he is a big band, [and] it seemed to inspire Byard to emphasize his own leanings in this direction when he got to Lennie's. "I never heard Jaki play this way," says Schlitten. "He was like a 16-piece band. One second he would be playing the piano part, and then he would resolve and sound like a saxophone section. Behind Joe Farrell he became a punching trumpet section. Throughout the whole thing he was a bandleader. Here was a quartet that sounded like three times that many."
...For all the rough edges involved in such a mercuarial improvising process, there is nothing "haphazard." Even when they go "outside" -- and Jaki knows what he is doing when he is "out there" -- they are always under the firm control of the leader who is able to bring everything and everyone back "inside" to a logical, satisfying conclusion.
Schlitten recalls how the people at Lennie's were completely taken with Byard's ability to capture the entire history of jazz piano playing, (As he has made clear before, Jaki does not fool around in the various styles he is capable of adopting. He does not parody but instead transmits the "feeling" of the greats that he is able to embody as well.) ...Don states, "he runs the gamut from Scott Joplin, James P., Fats, Basie, Duke, to Garner, Bud, Bill Evans, Monk..." He also does the things that Brubeck and Cecil Taylor each try to do but either fall short or don't know when to stop.
Ira Gitler is, of course, one of the great jazz writers of his era, but he is of his era, and it's now a half century since he wrote this, and times change, and tastes change, and perspectives change. Gitler could be forgiven if his attitudes, and his critical perspective, had fallen somewhat out of step with today's tastes.
And maybe they have. Maybe mine have. We live in a time when some young critics reject all of Coltrane's early work as being hokey and not worth listening to...and I mean, even Giant Steps.
But I don't buy that, nor do I think it's a universally held opinion. We also live in a time when young jazz musicians study their craft in college and are denigrated for that, often unfairly, and grow up with a respect for the totality of jazz.
So I'm going to continue to do the only thing I can do, which is to consider my 21st century perspective, and my judgment of Ira Gitler in 1965, to be a valid one, and continue from there.
What's remarkable is how spot-on Gitler was, even about Jaki Byard vis-a-vis Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor. Listening to Byard today, you can still hear what Gitler heard, and even putting into the context of a lot more years and a lot more music, Gitler is still right -- he always knew what he was doing when he was "out there," and he knew when and how to bring it back "inside." And it wasn't because he chickened out, and wouldn't stay as far "out there" or as long "out there" as Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. It's because he heard it all, and wanted it all, and found a way to include it all.
And all of this leads me, in 2023, in a post-postmodern age, an age informed by the conservatorship of Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center and jazz goes to college and jazz meets rock and electronica and more jazz in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, to wonder why Jaki Byard, who encompassed all of it, and always with vision, and always with soul, is so underappreciated? If you look at the internet lists of greatest jazz pianists, lists made up by people who range in age from younger than me to ridiculously younger that me, where is he? Ranker, which is entirely based on fan voting and boasts over 8.7K voters, has Byard not included at all in a list of 70 names. The uDiscover list, compiled by" a team of respected authors and journalists who are passionate about what they do, with decades’ worth of experience in print, online, radio and TV journalism," does have him in the top 50, at number 41. But to the general public -- the general jazz-listening public, that is, the Ranker public, which knows enough to vote Art Tatum number one and Oscar Peterson number two, he doesn't exist.
Listen to what the man does. Start with my Listen to One, then check out the rest of this album, which you can find on YouTube but not on Spotify. Then listen to more.
On my last blog entry, I castigated those long-ago record company owners (visionaries all, who don't deserve my castigation except in this case) for only recording Andy and the Bey Sisters three times during their eleven years as a team. Fortunately, Jaki Byard did not suffer the same fate. Bob Weinstock stayed with him. This is his tenth appearance on Prestige, his fourth as leader of his own group. He would record six more albums as leader, and 23 more for other, mostly smaller labels up through 1998. On Prestige alone, he recorded with Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin; on other labels, with Maynard Ferguson, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, and others. And of course, most famously with Charles Mingus (13 albums).
He was with Prestige pretty much right up to the end, so I'll keep coming back to him. And there'll be more to say, since he wasn't much for repeating himself.
These were released as The Jaki Byard Quartet - Live! Vol. 1 (1965) and Vol. 2 (1967). One cut, "Spanish Tinge," was included on a 1967 studio album, On the Spot. And several previously unissued cuts -- the alternate take of "Twelve," "Dolphy" numbers 1 and 2, "St. Mark's Place Among The Sewers," plus Jaki's Ballad Medley which had been on Volume 2, were released in 2003 under the Prestige label, although by that time Prestige was a part of Fantasy and about to be bundled into the Concord group, as The Last From Lennie's, so someone still remembered Jaki in the 21st century (he died in 1999). Don Schlitten produced.
This was Lucky Thompson's fourth (counting an early session with Miles Davis) and final album for Prestige. After that, in the early 1970, he made three more for the small but prestigious independent label Groove Merchant, and then apparently grew disillusioned with the music business altogether, and dropped out. It would be good to report that he had moved to Europe, where he continued to be highly regarded. He had lived in Paris from 1957-62, before returning to New York and his Prestige recording years. He did, in fact, go back from 1968-70, living in Lausanne, Switzerland, but then returned to the States again, and whatever he was looking for, he must not have found it, although he appeared to making a decent life for himself. In addition to the Groove Merchant sessions, he also taught at Dartmouth college for
two years, 1973-74. Then he dropped out.
He continued to be highly regarded in Europe -- small European labels would release forgotten or unreleased sessions by him over the next couple of decades -- but he never returned, and he seems to have grown altogether disillusioned with music. According to his obituary in the New York Times:
Fiercely intelligent, Mr. Thompson was outspoken in his feelings about what he considered the unfair control of the jazz business by record companies, music publishers and booking agents.
Something of his later life was described by Ben Ratliff, writing the Times obituary:
Friends say he lived for a time on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and in Georgia before eventually moving west. By the early 90's he was in Seattle, mostly living in the woods or in shelter offered by friends. He did not own a saxophone. He walked long distances, and was reported to have been in excellent, muscular shape.
He was hospitalized a number of times in 1994, and finally entered the Washington Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation.
...He was rarely seen in public; at times it was hard for his old friends to find him. But the drummer Kenny Washington remembered Mr. Thompson's showing up when Mr. Washington was performing with Johnny Griffin's group at Jazz Alley in Seattle in 1993. Mr. Thompson listened, conversed with the musicians, and then departed on foot for the place where he was staying -- in a wooded spot in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, more than three miles away.
He died of complications from Alzheimer's in Seattle in 2005.
His 1965 Prestige session was called, with bitter irony as things were to turn out, Lucky Thompson Plays Happy Days are Here Again (and one wonders if that song ever really signalled happy days for anyone). Thompson is still the guy who played with Erskine Hawkins and with Charlie Parker, equally at home with swing and bebop, and so the old chestnut, the theme song of Democratic presidential hopeful Al Smith, is a fitting start point for the session. Thompson has a swingster's affimity for melody, a bebopper's comfort with complexity. There's a complexity of emotion, too, in Thompson's interpretation of this paean to untrammeled happiness, as a tinge of melancholy pervades his version.
"Happy Days are Here Again" is also closely associated with Barbra Streisand, and in fact the whole album revolves around songs associated with Streisand, even if she's not necessarily the primary association. "Cry Me a River," the next standard up, was sung by Barbra, but will forever be Julie London's. "Cry Me a River" is a song that's well-nigh irresistible for any singer with even a flicker of torch in their pipes, from Ella Fitzgerald to Joe Cocker, certainly Streisand, most famously London. There are well over 600 covers of it. Sixty-odd instrumental versions make it a quasi-jazz standard as well, though not all that many A-listers have had a go at it: in addition to Thompson, it's been recorded by Dexter Gordon (in 1955, contemporaneous with London), Ray Bryant, Don Elliott, J. J. Johnson, Pete Candoli and a few others. Johnny "Hammond" Smith did it for Prestige.
The song was written by Arthur Hamilton, who had a long and not unsuccessful career as a songwriter and lyricist, but if he had been told he could keep all the money he made from all his other songs, but would have to return all his "Cry Me a River" royalties, he'd be pretty deeply in the red. He also had a pretty good hit with "Sing a Rainbow," from the Jack Webb movie Pete Kelly's Blues. He wrote three songs for Pete Kelly's Blues, two of which made it into the movie. The rejected one was "Cry Me a River."
Thompson makes you wonder why there aren't more jazz treatments of it. In his version, it has everything--the melodic sweetness, the uptempo bebop improvisation, room for a wonderful Tommy Flanagan solo. stickwork by Walter Perkins that embellishes as it drives.
Other standards follow: "You Don't Know What Love Is," "As Time Goes By," and of course the song most closely associated with Streisand, "People." He plays one number of his own composition, "Safari." It would have to be pretty good to keep company with these popular favorites, and it is.
In writing recently about Chuck Wayne, I discussed "that genre that's sometimes called 'mainstream' or 'straight ahead' jazz, but might best be called 'timeless jazz,' music that comes not out of any school or any era, but out of a quest for beauty, for an edge, for virtuosity, that comes from a love of playing and a mastery of the instrument and the form."
That's this album. Soul jazz and free jazz were the zeitgeist in 1965; this is neither. Barbra Streisand was the hottest thing on Broadway and in Hollywood; this isn't about her. It's timeless jazz, and thamk heavens for it.
Tommy Flanagan, George Tucker and Walter Perkins, three men at home in the world of timeless jazz, were the rhythm section. On "Safari" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" they are joined by harpist Jack Melady. Not primarily a jazz musician, Melady was known for his work in Broadway show pits, with Irish folkies the Clancy Brothers, and for a couple of albums of lounge favorites with cellist Julius Ehrenwerth, as Jack and Julie. He fits in here nicely, though.
Don Schlitten produced. "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Cry Me a River" were the single.
Gildo Mahones had a near-legendary career that took him from Spanish Harlem to 125th Street, where his family moved to an apartment right behind the Apollo Theater and he got his first exposure to music. to Joe Morris's rhythm and blues band, where he played on Morris's big hit, "Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere," Then to the Army, where he became good friends with another young piano player, Berry Gordy, who had this dream of finding a few streetcorner doowop groups, rehearsing them, polishing their act...and then to Minton's Playhouse, where Kenny Clarke asked him to join a trio that would be the house band
at Minton's -- a trio that was soon augmented by Minton's manager Teddy Hill to include Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins and Percy Heath. Trumpeter Jesse Drakes, who had played with the Minton's group, was joining a new band led by Lester Young, and he brought Gildo along. That gig lasted through most of the 1950s, and then in 1959 he fell in with a newly forming vocal trio, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and stayed with them until they broke up in 1964.
Mahones got very little opportunity to record as a leader--two albums for Prestige, then one album in 1990 for a small label, Interplay, which put out some very good jazz records in the 1970s and '80s, but was pretty near the end of its run. Sessions by Mahones and Gil Coggins, another fine and little-remembered pianist, closed the door on Interplay. Of Mahones' two Prestige albums, the first one was intended to be a New Jazz release, but then Bob Weinstock folded New Jazz, and when the album was released on Prestige, it was barely distributed/ So this session, which became a double album, is probably the best-known example of his work.
It's enough to make one wish there were more, and certainly to make one wish that he would have gotten more recognition. This is a piano trio session of the sort that Red Garland was making a few years earlier, not the kind of funk-drenched organ/saxophone sound that was popular in 1964. But Mahones has his own approach to the blues, very individualistic and very much in the tradition,
He's accompanied by George Tucker, very active on Prestige in this era, and no stranger to playing with Mahones, accompanying him on his own first session, and joining him in backing up Jimmy Witherspoon and Ted Curson. Sonny Brown, on drums, is even more obscure than Mahones, but people knew who he was back then, and he worked dates with Ray Bryant and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others.
With Ozzie Cadena producing, the trio had a full day of work, recording nearly enough songs for a double alum, and -- with the addition of a few songs from his earlier sessions, a double album it was, entitled The Great Gildo: Gildo Mahones Soulful Piano, the first part being a play on the popular radio comedy of an earlier decade, The Great Gildersleeve. I believe this is the first such packaging in Prestige's catalog. Neither the novelty of the two-disc package not the excellence of the music were enough to make Mahones' name better known, and he is one of the few Prestige artists whose work has never been rereleased on CD by Original Jazz Classics. Nor can it be found on Spotify, although, curiously, a 2018 interview, done shortly before his death, is available on Spotify. So it's up to the classic vinyl hunters, searching through the bins at places like Jim Eigo's Original Vinyl Records in Warwick, NY, to keep him alive. Let's hope that keeps happening.
This is more of the same from Willis Jackson -- the same group he's been working with, which includes a young Pat Martino on guitar (interesting that he had his old bandmate Jack McDuff were both bringing along young guitarists who would become giants over the next couple of decades), the same rhythm and blues derived jazz funk sound, the same mix of funky originals and standard ballads. And why not? Good for listening, good for dancing. A lot of parties in the mid-sixties rolled back a lot of rugs and dropped a lot of needles within the grooves of a Willis Jackson record. The man was a pro, and he delivered.
Most unusual track on the oblm, and the source for half the album's title -- "Boss St. Louis Blues," which sets down a bossa nova and then blows some solid funk over it, with Jackson in top form. Once they get the beat down, they can get wild...and they do. Best for my money, the other half of the title. "Shoutin'" is what you want to hear from this band -- the good old rhythm and blues, the hot new funk, some fleetfooted guitar styling by Martino.
Boss Shoutin' is the name of the album. No 45 RPM single releases from this one, maybe because they tended to go long on the individual cuts. Or maybe they knew Prestige wasn't planning a single, so they figured they could stretch out. Either way, it works, as the playing heats up, the deeper they get into a tune. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Gildo Mahones would certainly vie for the dubious distinction of being the most overlooked of the great bebop pioneers, but he was there, and making his mark. In 1949, which was a little after the legendary jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse which birthed bebop, but at a time when Minton's sessions were still a vital creative force in the jazz world, Mahones became the pianist in the club's house trio, joining Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke.
It was heady company for a 20-year-old, providing the accompaniment for whoever got up on the stand, from the veteran lords of jazz like Charlie
Parker and Coleman Hawkins to rising stars like Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. It was "fast company, and I was trying to get it together," Mahones recalled in a 2013 interview with Berkeleyside, a Bay Area alternative newspaper:
I was learning something new every day. They’d start calling songs I’d never heard of and I’d go home every night and woodshed.
That's how jazz masters are made, and Mahones absorbed the lesson well. That trio, in addition to providing the underpinning for the after hours jam sessions, also formed part of a sextet in their upstairs room with Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, and Jesse Drakes.
By the time, nearly a decade and a half later, that he became one of the Prestige regulars, he had compiled a resume that any musician would be proud of, even if he never got the name recognition to go with it. He had worked with Joe Morris's rhythm and blues ensemble. Drakes, who worked a lot with Lester Young, brought Mahones into Young's group. He recalled, in an interview for the liner notes to I'm Shooting High:
Working from 1953 to 1957 with Lester was like going to school every night. It was really wonderful. At that time the group consisted of Lester Young, Jesse Drakes, Connie Kay and John Ore.
Working with Les Jazz Modes (Julius Watkins and Charlie Rouse) followed. It was a new sounding group trying something quite different and was not publicly accepted at the time. Maybe it could stand a better chance at the present time. After a few years with the Modes, I did a short stretch with Benny Green. It was on this job that I met Ike Isaacs and it was through Ike that I met Lambert, Hendricks and Ross who I have been working with since that time.
Lester Young took some getting used to. In his Berkeleyside interview, Mahones recalled:
He’d start calling songs, but he had a different title for every song. I didn’t know what he was talking with. Connie Kay had to translate.
Mahones made his Prestige debut in December 1962 with Ted Curson, and also worked with Willis Jackson, Frank Wess, Jimmy Witherspoon and Pony Poindexter. He had made a brief debut as a leader back in February of 1963, a brief session with Larry Young, George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, all of whom had been booked for an Etta Jones date which featured a different piano player. Perhaps Mahones was in the studio that day for some other reason, and they wrapped up the Jones session early and decided to give him a shot. Who knows, at this late date? Anyway, they cut three tunes, one of which was never released. The other two ended up on the album which resulted from these next two sessions, both also short, one in August and the other in September. Two of the August songs were discarded, although one eventually made it onto a Kenny Burrell reissue on Original Classics.
The tunes are mostly standards, with two Mahones originals. "Standards" in 1963 still mostly meant the tunes that have come to be identified as the Great American Songbook, with some songs from more recent Broadway musicals thrown in. The new songwriters who were to shape popular music so significantly in the 1960s had mostly not come onto the radar of the jazz community, but Mahones includes a number by Gerry Goffin and Carole King ("Hey Girl"). His "Stormy Monday Blues" is not the familiar one written by T-Bone Walker, but a completely different song written by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, originally recorded by Hines in 1942, and later, in 1959, by Eckstine with Count Basie. The lyrics to Eckstine's version don't actually mention stormy Monday at all.
George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, Etta Jones's rhythm section who stayed on to work with Mahones and Larry Young for the February 4 session, are back with him for both the August and September sessions. Kenny Burrell and Leo Wright were there on August 15, but since two of their tunes were not included, and they were not included on "Hey Girl," which featured a vocal, they are really only on one track, "Tales of Brooklyn," making this essentially a trio album. "Hey Girl" is sung by newcomer Ozzie Beck, for whom I can find no other recording credits.
I'm Shooting High was to be Mahones' debut album, apparently on New Jazz, but this was around the time that Bob Weinstock folded New Jazz. The album was released in 1964 on Prestige's short-lived 16000 series, and this may have been a sort of afterthought, because by then a new album, The Great Gildo, was in the works, and when it was released as a double album, five songs from I'm Shooting High were also put on The Great Gildo. So whether much of anyone actually heard I'm Shooting High seems an open question.
"Hey Girl" was released as a 45 RPM single, along with "Bali Ha'i" from a later session.
Pony Poindexter left New Orleans when he was 14. His musical career encompasses the West Coast, where he first began to make his reputation, the East Coast (although not known as a New York musician, his breakthrough as a recording artist came in the Big Apple with sessions for Epic and Prestige) and Europe (following his Prestige sessions, he moved to Spain, where he spent most of the rest of the decade). Yet, as this album clearly shows, he never left the Big Easy completely behind. Perhaps it's true that you can take the boy out of New Orleans, but...
Poindexter recorded not infrequently, and with some high-powered musicians, but he is a forgotten name today. On Ranker, a web site which features some exhaustive lists, he gets no votes at all for jazz saxophone.
I first heard his name back in the late 1950s, when I was new to jazz and a new reader of DownBeat, in connection with a minor scandal of sorts. It seems that some of Pony's West Coast admirers had attempted to stuff the ballot box for DownBeat's reader's poll, and they had somehow been caught out, and Poindexter had been stricken from the poll results altogether. This was in the days when the East Coast jazz establishment tended to view the whole West Coast scene as lightweight, anyway, and I was under that influence. So I was willing to dismiss Poindexter as a fake and a poseur, and nothing happened in the intervening years to change my view. Until this album, I had never listened to his music--and that includes his debut album for Prestige earlier in 1963, which included his take on such dubious jazz choices as "Love Me Tender," and which I was unable to find anywhere, not even a single cut.
And had I looked, I would have found that his credentials were pretty substantial. He had recorded with Wes Montgomery, with Jon Hendricks, with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (so I might have heard him without knowing it). His debut album as a leader, 1962's Pony's Express for Epic, featured Eric Dolphy, Gene Quill, Sonny Red, Phil Woods, Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath, Clifford Jordan, Sal Nistico, Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Charli Persip. Not too lightweight.
In 1963, New Orleans was many years removed from being a hub of jazz. There had been a revival of interest in the traditional New Orleans sound in the early 1940s, but that had long since been swamped by the modern jazz tsunami, and not even the revivalist producers of Prestige's Swingville label were much interested in New Orleans style. It's hard to imagine New Orleans without Preservation Hall, but that now-venerable institution had only been started in 1961, and was not yet a tourist draw. The most well-known musicians in the New Orleans tradition were the Dukes of Dixieland, a band that was scoffed at by jazz connoisseurs.
So maybe there wasn't much of a market then for an album of modern jazz built on the sounds of New Orleans, not even with a newly hot item like Booker Ervin on board. Yet coming upon it in the eclectic postmodern world of today, this is a most enjoyable album, and a real find.
Produced by Ozzie Cadena, Gumbo is a concept album, the Poindexter compositions offering heir composer's tour of the city, Uptown ("Where I come from") on side one, and the Creole Downtown in side two. The album's liner notes also provide a tune-by-tune guided tour of the city Poindexter remembered and loved:
Front o' Town is in the uptown section--right next to the levee...there was a little blues phrase that everyone there used to hum and whistle.
Happy Strut: Grandpa played in a parade band...I'd walk along with my clarinet (sometimes it would be three hours before they played a tune I knew) and if I didn't mess up, they'd let me play...I tried to approximate that feeling with some modern changes.
Creole Girl: She was a real pretty girl...all the men liked her and none of the women did. When I was 12 she was grown up, but I can still remember just how she looked. Creole girls...are superstitious and terrible tempered, and if they catch you with another woman, there's hell to pay. This tune is nostalgic, because you can't handle them right. But we still play it in a happy manner.
4-11-44: In New Orleans, everybody plays the policy game. This number is known as the "Washerwoman's gig" -- it's their favorite bet. It has voodoo connotations.
And with Side Two, we move downtown, down and dirty.
Back o' Town: This is the night club section, where all the sporting girls hang out. All the church people from Front o' Town look down on Back o' Town.
Muddy Dust: Voodoo is pretty strong in New Orleans...The melody kind of laughs at it, 'cause I still don't believe in it.
French Market: The people from the swamps, the farmers, the fishermen, the voodoo dealers -- all bring their wares here. There are alligator tails, gaspigous (barking swamp fish), carnivorous plants ground up into powder, candied legs of gigantic mosquitoes...my grandfather took me there.
Gumbo Filet: The tune is a blues--everything I like really well has to be the blues. It's arranged with two-bar breaks so I could get the name in there. You guessed it--I like Gumbo Filet.
The rhythm section, all Prestige veterans, are the musicians Poindexter worked with accompanying Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The album was a 1963 Prestige release. A later CD reissue combined this album with Poindexter's earlier January 31 date for Prestige, and a Larry Young session from February 28. "4-11-44" and "Happy Strut" were a 45 RPM single.
Gumbo evoked nostalgia for a time and place that no one in the jazz world was much interested in. It carried the message of a modernity that no longer seemed on the cutting edge, although maybe it should have. Booker Ervin was one of the brightest young stars of the day. Pony Poindexter was, although this is mostly forgotten, one of the pioneers of the soprano sax. Coming upon it today, this is a very easy album to fall in love with.
Ah, what says the blues like a song by Mack David ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo") and Jerry Livingston ("Mr. Ed"), written for Teresa Brewer to sing in Those Redheads from Seattle? And in fact, when Jimmy Witherspoon gets through with David and Livingston's "Baby, Baby, Baby," it would be scarcely recognizable by any redhead from Seattle, or, most likely, by the composers. Witherspoon was the real thing as a blues singer, but he was also eclectic. Even in the rhythm and blues decade of the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, he performed largely with jazz musicians, and for jazz audiences. How many other blues singers started their careers in Calcutta, India?
Witherspoon had left his home in Arkansas as a teenager, for Los Angeles and the music scene on Central Avenue, where he became a protege of Big Joe Turner, and hung out with jazzmen like Buddy Colette, who remembers that whenever Witherspoon sat in with his group, the audiences loved him. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and in 1941 he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. As a cook--this was still the pre-Harry Truman segregated armed forces. The sea led him to south Asia, where he would meet up with Teddy Weatherford.
Like many African American musicians of his era, Weatherford went the expatriate to Europe, settling first in Amsterdam. Like very few others, he didn't stop there, but continued on to Asia, where joined the band of another peripatetic expatriate, Crickett Smith, then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, where he led his own bands (Smith was now playing for him), and developed a sufficient reputation that he was tapped to make wartime broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. It was on these broadcasts that young Witherspoon got his first exposure. Weatherford, a wonderful piano player and bandleader, never got a chance to develop the reputation he deserved, dying in Calcutta in 1945 at the age of 41.
Witherspoon did return to the USA, and the West Coast, after the war, where he became a regular feature of Cavalcade of Jazz, an annual all-star jazz festival held in Los Angeles. He performed as part of the Cavalcade in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1952.
This outing for Prestige was Witherspoon's first foray into East Coast jazz. His most recent recordings had been for Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, where he made a record of mostly jazz standards Teddy Edwards and Gerald Wiggins, then a record of blues standards with Ben Webster; and before that with the Bihari brothers' Crown, one of the West Coast's premiere rhythm and blues labels.
Bob Weinstock and Ozzie Cadena gave him a first-rate lineup of jazz musicians. Leo Wright had distinguished himself on two previous outings for the label, with Dave Pike and Jack McDuff. Gildo Mahones was fast becoming one of Prestige's go-to session musicians, and would record a couple of albums as leader on the label; so was Jimmie Smith. George Tucker had already established himself. And it's hard to heap more praise on Kenny Burrell.
And an eclectic lineup of tunes, tilting toward rhythm and blues. Duke Ellington wrote "Rocks in My Bed," but it's most closely associated with blues shouter Big Joe Turner, who made the original recording with boogie woogie piano player Freddie Slack. 'Bad Bad Whiskey" and "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" were both hits for Amos Milburn, the former penned by Milburn, the latter by Rudy Toombs, one of the key songwriters for Atlantic Records as the label rose to rhythm and blues supremacy. "Mean Old Frisco" came from another rhythm and blues great, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. All of them find the Prestige jazzmen playing that fine R&B behind 'Spoon's hard driving vocals.
Two other blues traditions come front and center with "Sail on, Little Girl, Sail On" and "Lonely Boy Blues." The former comes from traditional Piedmont blues singer Amos (Bumble Bee Slim) Easton, and Witherspoon gives it a heartfelt traditional treatment, with Gildo Mahones providing the appropriate backing. The latter comes from Kansas City swingmaster Jay McShann and his vocalist Walter Brown. It's a twelve bar blues, and Leo Wright's alto winds in and out and around Witherspoon's vocal. The traditional twelve bar form is also heard on 'Spoon's own "Blues and Trouble," with everyone in the band getting a piece of the action.
Prestige filled out the LP with four cuts from a later session back in Witherspoon's old West Coast stomping grounds, under the guiding hand of David Axelrod, who had just begun producing records for Capitol, where he nudged the label in the direction of more black artists, scoring hits for Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderley (he produced "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy") among others. With some excellent West Coast jazz musicians, they did two Witherspoon originals, a traditional blues, and one outlier, the rockabilly hit "Endless Sleep," a tune which Witherspoon had apparently liked enough to record a few years earlier for a smaller rhythm and blues label.
Most of the West Coasters are off Prestige's normal radar. Bobby Bryant did appear on a 1960 Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis release. Ernie Freeman was the best-known of the group. He boasted a master's degree in music composition from the University of Southern California, and a trunkful of credits as pianist, arranger and bandleader, mostly in the rhythm and blues field. Jimmy Bond was another conservatory trained musician (Juilliard), with extensive jazz credits on the East Coast, who moved to California in 1959 and built a second career there, both as a jazz musician and as a member of the Wrecking Crew, the session musicians who crafted the West Coast rock sound of the 1960s. Arthur Wright was one of the leading West Coast session musicians for blues and R&B, mostly as a guitarist. It's not clear whether Jimmy Miller is the same drummer/arranger who contributed a great deal to the Rolling Stones sound in the late 1960s.
Ozzie Cadena produced the East Coast session. The redheads from Seattle got the album's title, Baby, Baby, Baby, and that was also one of the 45 RPM singles, with "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" on the flip side. "Mean Old Frisco" / "Sail on Little Girl" also got a single release.
Another artist wrapping up her career with Prestige in early 1963 was Etta Jones, with two sessions in February added to three songs recorded the previous November to put the final touch on this phase of her career, but Prestige would stay with her. After bouncing around a few other labels, she would reconnect in 1975 with Joe Fields, who had been Prestige's sales manager, but had now started a jazz label of his own, Muse. And after two decades and 14 albums, when Fields left Muse to start a new label, HighNote, she went with him, and recorded nine more albums.
Jones never quite hit the heights of popularity of the big four -- Sarah, Ella, Billie and Dinah -- but she maintained a loyal fan base--and the respect of the jazz community--in a career that lasted six decades, and into a seventh, as she made her final recordings in 2000. Her approach blended elements of all four of them, particularly Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, but her voice was her own, and she never sounded derivative.
The two sessions used talents of Larry Young, about to break loose as a new and distinctive voice in jazz organ when he signed with Blue Note in 1964, and Kenny Cox, new on the scene. Cox was a Detroiter, too young to have been part of the Detroit influx that made such a huge imprint on the jazz scene of New York, and from there the world, starting in the 1950s, but still very much a product of that scene. This was his first collaboration with Jones, but he was to stay with her until 1966 as pianist and musical director. He later made two albums for Blue Note, but his roots were always in Detroit, and by the 1980s he had returned home to male the rest of his career there.
Kenny Burrell also played on both sessions. The group was anchored by two solid rhythm sections--George Tucker and Jimmie Smith on February 4th, Peck Morrison and Oliver Jackson on the 12th. "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Old Folks" are taken without the piano and organ.
Jones takes in a nice variety of tunes over the two days, with a nod to Miles Davis, who introduced
"Someday My Prince Will Come" to the jazz lexicon, and also did a definitive version of "Old Folks," and a salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein. This last is particularly noteworthy. Jones possesses that special jazz singer's ability to take a wide range of songs and make them her own, but "Some Enchanted Evening" seems like a real stretch. From South Pacific, the song was originally written for the operatic bass voice of Ezio Pinza, and it's hard to imagine a bluesy jazz arrangement of it, with an improvisation off the melody...until you've heard Jones do it.
"Some Enchanted Evening" did not make a 45 RPM release. The two singles each featured one of the Miles borrows. "Someday My Prince Will Come" was matched with "A Gal From Joe's," from her November 28, 1962, session; "Old Folks" had "Love Walked In" on the flip.
The album was titled Love Shout. Ozzie Cadena produced.
As promised, a new Dave Pike with this, his third and last album for Prestige. Pike would re-invent himself often, like so many jazz musicians in this swiftly moving art form, from Miles Davis on. This, however, is not so much a reinvention as a shift in emphasis, away from the Latin rhythms, on to a more mainstream sound. How much of this was the result of commercial considerations, I can't say. If commercial considerations were the whole story, nobody would be playing jazz, but sometimes a thematic approach -- less tactfully, a gimmick -- may be a way to draw a little more attention to an artist, and sell a few more records.
Nothing wrong with that if, when you get down to making the music, you're there to play and nothing else. Which certainly seems to have been the case with Dave Pike. If you sign a recording contract at height of the bossa nova craze, and management says "Hey, how about a bossa nova album," you might do it just for the contract. That was the case when Bob Weinstock asked Annie Ross if she could write some songs to jazz solos--"I was desperate, so I said 'Sure.' If he'd asked me to learn how to fly, I would have said 'Sure.'" And the rest is history. Two of the greatests jazz vocalese pieces ever -- "Twisted" and "Farmer's Market." And Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. But it seems clear that Pike didn't do it just for the contract. Had that been the case, he wouldn't have chosen to feature the works of obscure (in the United States) composer Joao Donato.
Jazz interpretations of Broadway shows had shown some commercial appeal. Oliver! had been a hit in London, had been on tour in the United States, and was about to open on Broadway, where it would be a success, but would not really spawn any hit songs. "As Long as He Needs Me" had been a British hit for Shirley Bassey, and would later become a minor hit for Sammy Davis Jr. I'm not convinced that a jazz version of Oliver! was a surefire commercial bet in 1963, and I suspect one might not find all that many people today who could hum "As Long as He Needs Me," let alone the rest of the show. So I hope it was a project that really appealed to Pike.
A confluence of reasons--not a huge Oliver! fan base among the jazz crowd, the association of Pike with more out-there genres of music--have converged to make this a not widely remembered album. Also, when one thinks of the vibes in the context of the history of jazz, there's a bit of a temptation to enumerate Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson and then stop. But there were a lot of very good players, and a lot of individual stylists, and several of them were on Prestige. Teddy Charles, back in the label's early days, who would give it all up to become a charter boat skipper. Lem Winchester, the jazz-playing cop, dead before his time. Walt Dickerson. And Dave Pike. Here, his work with Jimmy Raney and with Tommy Flanagan, two veterans who know how to challenge and support a young player, is well worth a listen.
Dave Pike Plays the Jazz Version of Oliver! is not represented on YouTube by any individual cuts, so I can't give a Listen to One, but the whole album is there, and worth checking out.
Don Schlitten, new to Prestige, produced. Schlitten had started an independent label, Signal, in 1955, then moved on to freelance producing after he and his partners sold the label to Savoy.
Dave Pike played the jazz version of "As Long as He Needs Me" for a 45 RPM single, with "Where is Love?" as the B side. The album was released on Moodsville.
Pike's next two albums, for Decca and Atlantic, are notable for introducing Chick Corea on the first, and employing the still-new Herbie Hancock on the second.
During the pre-rock and roll era of American pop music, there were, very generally, two types of singers: the jazz-influenced singers like Bing Crosby and Nat "King" Cole, who were, more or less, popularizers of Louis Armstrong, and the bel canto-influenced singers like Tony Martin and Jerry Vale, who were, more or less, popularizers of Mario Lanza. And there was a deep divide between them, bridged by no one except possibly Dean Martin (Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were Italian, but they were definitely in the jazz-influenced camp).
So, could the divide be crossed by a tenor saxophone player with a jazzman's touch and rhythm and blues in his soul? Willis (Coda di Alligatore) Jackson seemed to think so, as he devoted virtually a whole album to jazz renditions of Italian pop songs.
LISTEN TO ONE: Al di La
It worked better than you might think. The rhythm and blues honkers tended to have a sweet sentimental side, perhaps modeled on Earl Bostic, and the Italian ballads fit into that. Most of this album is unavailable online, so I wasn't able to hear how Jackson handled "Volare," for example, but I did listen to his "Arrivederci Roma." That's a melody that's hard to listen to without hearing Eddie Fisher crooning it or Mario Lanza giving it the full melodramatic treatment, even though it does start out with a Latin rhythm from Montego Joe, but once Jackson begins improvising on it -- no, make that once he really gets into improvising
on it -- its jazz possibilities open up. "Arrivederci Roma" on the album is 5:43 in length; the 45 RPM single version is edited down to 2:28, and that's the version which is currently available on YouTube.
Technology had certainly advanced to the point where you could have fit 5:43 onto a 45 RPM record, so why shorten it it into what in those days would have been called the Readers' Digest condensed version? My guess...that's what the market wanted. The market in those days was radio play, which meant the pop music stations or the Black-oriented stations on your AM dial. FM radio, and songs like "Like a Rolling Stone" or "MacArthur Park" or "Alice's Restaurant" were still in the future, and your radio stations wanted manageable chunks of music between the disc jockey patter and the commercials. Jukeboxes wanted something you could dance to for three minutes or less before putting another nickel in. And presumably it was assumed that the customer putting that nickel in the slot to hear Willis Jackson wanted to hear Willis Jackson, because the 45 RPM condensed versions of jazz album cuts tended to excise everything except the featured soloist. So no Bucky Pizzarelli, authentic Italian-American though he was, no Gildo Mahomes.
The other cut I was able to listen to is "Al di là ," which had been that year's Italian entry in the
Eurovision Song Contest (it finished 5th). Eurovision was still relatively new in 1962, and its entries are, even to this day, not guaranteed much stateside audience (unless they're by Abba), but "Al di là " hd gotten some attention when Connie Francis recorded it as the B side of a minor hit, and it worked for the theme of the album, and was the occasion for some very nice guitar-saxophone interplay. Jackson, with Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings, was one of the originators of the saxophone-guitar-organ soul jazz sound, but this is an altogether different way of blending these two instruments.
Bucky Pizzarelli and Gildo Mahones had both recently made their Prestige debuts, Pizzarelli accompanying Etta Jones and Mahones with Ted Curson. Pizzarelli would have a couple more sessions over the next few years accompanying singers, but most of his acclaimed career would be elsewhere. Mahones would stay longer in the Prestige orbit, including three albums as leader.
Neapolitan Nights was released on Prestige--not Moodsville. "Arrivederci Roma" was the A side of a single which had "Y'All," from a very different session, on the B side. More thematically paired was another single, "Mama" (which had been a 1959 hit for Connie Francis) and "Neapolitan Nights."
Ozzie Cadena produced.
The one Jackson original title on the album was "Verdi's Vonce," Jackson's blues tribute (according to the liner notes) to Verdi. I would love to hear it. It was also included on a compilation album called Soul Stompin': The Best of Willis Jackson.
Ted Curson is one of that generation that made Philadelphia such a cauldron of jazz in the 1950s. The Heath family lived around the corner from and Albert "Tootie" Heath was a classmate. "On Sundays," Curson recalled (in an AllAboutJazz.com interview with Clifford Allen, "Mrs. Heath would make dinner for any musicians who were coming to Philadelphia. You could see anyone from Miles to Duke Ellington to Sonny Rollins."
But it wasn't these greats who first lured young Ted into music. It was a neighborhood guy who wandered the streets selling newspapers, and carrying a silver trumpet. When he told his father he
wanted a trumpet, the old man, a Louis Jordan fan, tried to talk him into an alto saxophone, but Ted held firm. He got his first trumpet at age ten, started playing professionally at age 16 and not long after that, met Miles Davis. In those days, Curson told Allen, he worshipped Davis:
[I was] wearing my hair like Miles, I had a tie around my waist, I even made the mistakes that he made. I liked his approach to everything and I still do. He heard me play when I was around 15 or 16 and he gave me his card and he said 'if you ever come to New York, give me a call.' There was no conversation - he said that and left - and I kept that thing in my pocket for years. After I graduated, it was about three years before I finally moved there [at age 21] and I called up Miles. Miles said 'Ted Curson, that little guy from Philadelphia? We've been waiting for you for three years! Where the hell have you been?'
This was, of course, in the Prestige days, when Miles was still allowing himself to make mistakes.
Curson drew the interest of the Levy brothers, owners of the Birdland jazz club and Roulette records. He was to make his debut at Birdland, and his audition for Roulette, on the night that Mo Levy's brother Irving was shot and killed right outside the club.
Instead, Curson served an apprenticeship in New York's avant garde. He played with Cecil Taylor, and appeared on one Taylor record for United Artists. He drew the attention of Charles Mingus, or more accurately was brought to Mingus's attention:
I got a phone call from a friend of mine and he said "I got a call from Mingus and I don't want to play with that crazy motherfucker. You want to take my place?" It was in Teddy Charles' loft, and there were a 1,000 or something musicians in there jamming, and I met Mingus and we played and everybody dropped out and that was it. He said "maybe one day I'll call you" and about two or three months later I get a call at about midnight and it's Mingus. "Ted Curson? Charlie Mingus here. You start right now. I'm at the Showplace in the Village and as soon as you get here, you go to work." I got there and he said "Okay ladies and gentleman, here's your new band - Ted Curson and Eric Dolphy - and you other cats are fired!"
He made his debut as a leader in 1961, fronting an all-star group comprised of Eric Dolphy (on two tracks), tenor saxophonist Bill Barron (who would have a long association with Curson), Kenny Drew and Jimmy Garrison. Drumming, on different tracks, were Pete La Roca, Dannie Richmond and Roy Haynes. The album came out on Old Town, a New York rhythm and blues and doowop label that had no jazz presence at all (Arthur Prysock was one of their featured artists, but he as being pitched to the rhythm and blues market in those days) and almost no LP presence, so it was heard by very few (although you can hear it now on YouTube). So for all practical purposes, this Prestige album was his real breakthrough.
The Prestige album is called Ted Curson Plays Fire Down Below, which seems to suggest that there was an audience out there just waiting to hear the latest version of "Fire Down Below," which is even less likely than the possibility than a legion of jazz fans waiting to hear the latest Old Town release. "Fire Down Below" was composed by Lester Lee, a Hollywood journeyman with a raft of movie soundtrack songs to his credit (including a bunch of polkas), but very little of interest to jazz performers.
Curson makes something eminently listenable out of the Caribbean-tinged melody, originally written for a Robert Mitchum / Jack Lemmon thriller with a Caribbean setting, and maybe part of his youthful hubris in introducing himself to the jazz public involved showing what he could do with tunes no one else had looked twice at.
If so, he did a hell of a job. Two of the tunes are recognizable standards, Lerner and Loewe's "Show Me" from My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart's "Falling in Love With Love." Well, standards. I'm not sure Henry Higgins would have recognized what Curson and Co. do with "Show Me," although Eliza Doolittle, sick to death of the genteel reserve of the society she has been elevated into, might have appreciated the propulsive drumming and all-out solos of Roy Haynes and Montego Joe.
The rest are a curious lot. Harold Little ("The Very Young") is a trumpeter and composer about whom I could find very little. Robert Allen ("Baby Has Gone Bye Bye") carved out a career as an accompanist for Perry Como, Peter Lind Hayes and Arthur Godfrey, so he can't be counted among the hippest of the hip. "Only Forever," composed by James V. Monaco, was a modest hit in 1940, from a Bing Crosby film, and Monaco does have one sublime song to his credit, "You Made Me Love You," made famous by Judy Garland. So it's not the material, it's what Curson does with it, and what he did with it announced his presence as a new major talent on the jazz scene.
Roy Haynes and Montego Joe added a lot to this session. George Tucker was a reliable bassist. Gildo Mahones would go on to do more work for Prestige in the decade, including a couple of albums as leader, so I'll save a fuller discussion of him for later. At the time of this session, he was working with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
"Fire Down Below" was the title song for the Prestige album, and it was also the 45 RPM single, with "The Very Young" on the flip side. Ozzie Cadena produced.
This is Walt Dickerson's fourth and final album for Prestige. This is the work for which he remains best known. He would take a ten-year break from jazz starting in 1965, then return in 1975 to active playing and recording, a second act to his career that would last another decade. Most of these later recordings were for the Danish label Steeplechase.
Of his four Prestige sessions, this one is in many ways the iconic achievement of his career, partly because of its musical direction and partly because of its theme. Dickerson was always considered one of the most individual stylists on the vibes (his unique sound is discussed here), but in this album, abetted by long-time collaborator Andrew Cyrille, he strays farther from his bebop-oriented roots to create a freer and more distinctive personal style.
The album, entitled To My Queen, is also a deeply personal statement. The title track, which takes up one full side of the LP, is dedicated to his wife Liz, and the emotional resonance continues to move listeners. Dickerson talked about it in a 2003 interview with Hank Shteamer:
Well, there is a way to talk about a person that you find ineffable through music, and my queen [Dickerson’s wife, Liz], being that ineffable person, music was the way that I could express those very beautiful, poignant, intellectual, brilliant, beautiful sides of her. So therefore it couldn’t fall in the realm of most songs or most compositions in the genre but had to escape those restrictions in order to exemplify her. And it doing so, it did open up a new vista of explorations, followed later by several not-to-be-mentioned musicians. It was a very, very happy experience, and I go back to that periodically. I return to that periodically, restating that which is ongoing in our relationship, which is forever.
The individuals that I chose for that outing knew my queen, and their artistic projections spoke of that. Andrew Hill: beautiful projections. George Tucker [sighs]: a rock, sensitive. And of course Andrew [Cyrille]: flourishings, nuances, bracketing the different motifs; he was awesome, and remains to this day, as does Andrew Hill. Two awesome, creative musicians. I don’t consider them musicians; I consider them artists in the highest sense. They’ve surpassed that category, “musicians.” Periodically those are the individuals I miss because now I do more, just about exclusively, solo performances.
This was Andrew Hill's only appearance on Prestige. He's best known for his work on Blue Note in the
1960s, although he continued to play and record until shortly before his death in 2007. He was equally highly regarded as a composer, which gave him the ear and the "artistic projections" that Dickerson valued.
George Tucker was an interesting choice for this session. Much of his previous work on Prestige had been funky, with organists Shirley Scott and Johnny (Hammond) Smith, but he was also on call for avant-gardists like Eric Dolphy.
To My Queen was a New Jazz release. Esmond Edwards, who was getting ready to move on after a stunning career as a producer for Prestige, produced.
Richard Brody, summing up Dickerson's career in an obituary in The New Yorker, wrote:
Dickerson is, simply, the most innovative vibes player after Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson; his rapid-fire barrage of short, metallic notes, reminiscent of John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” and Eric Dolphy’s frenetic flurries (Dickerson and Dolphy were close friends), extracted surprising harmonic riches from familiar tunes, and often did so with a puckish humor that belied the tenderness with which he could caress a melody.
Finally, here's something Dickerson was never quite able to achieve, more's the pity. From a 1995 interview with Mike Johnston:
I have asked a couple of the individuals that make the instruments to make a set of vibes in only one or two octaves, and to break it down it down into quarter tones. So you would augment the instrument so the instrument would be twice the size. But, it would only be one or two octaves. And of course they looked at me like I was a bit crazy and said we’ll get back to you. But of course they never got back to me.
No sooner do I get done praising the uniqueness of Steve Lacy's commitment to the music of Thelonious Monk, devoting one full album and the greater part of another to Monk's compositions, when what should come along but an album by Shirley Scott devoted to the music of a different jazz composer?
And while Horace Silver, as a composer, may not have had the depth of a Monk or an Ellington, he certainly knew how to write some catchy tunes, and an album devoted to them, especially as played by Scott, is going to be great for listening, for finger snapping, for toe tapping.
And one wonders if there was a marketing consideration here. Both Prestige and Blue Note were going after the new and burgeoning soul jazz market, with Blue Note having the inside track, largely because of Horace Silver. Prestige wasn't going to get Silver, but they could get his name on an album cover.
One way or another, there can't be anything wrong with hearing tunes like "Doodlin'," "Senor Blues" and "The Preacher" played by someone as inventive as Scott, combining a popular touch with a gift for musical exploration.
Scott was joined on this day by Otis "Candy" Finch, a drummer who worked with Scott, with her husband Stanley Turrentine, with Herbie Hancock and Dizzy Gillespie and others, before leaving New York for Seattle, where would teach and play music away from the limelight.
Bassist Henry Grimes, in his only appearance on Prestige. Grimes was shortly to launch into a career as one of the favored bassists of the avant garde, working with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor and Pharaoh Saunders. But in 1961, he had already established himself a significant, figure, first in rhythm and blues (playing with Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, Arnett Cobb, “Bullmoose” Jackson, Little Willie John and others), and then with a variety of mainstream jazz artists. His reputation as one of the most versatile bassists around was cemented in one weekend--the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, the one captured in the documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day. He appeared with Benny Goodman, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, and Tony Scott.
Grimes would go on to bring a whole new level of creativity to the bass throughout the 1970s, and then suddenly disappear from the scene, so completely that he was presumed to be dead. Free jazz didn't necessarily translate into a living, even for someone as respected as Grimes, and after his bass was damaged on a West Coast trip (strapped to the roof his friend's car, it was baked by the sun through three days of driving through the desert), he had to sell the instrument.
He described what happened next in an interview with Jon Liebman of the For Bass Players Only website:
HG: I worked as a janitor and maintenance man and day laborer. I also spent many hours in the library, studying literature and writing poetry, short stories and metaphysical ideas. I have around ninety notebooks at home with my writings from those times. I still continue to write today.
He lived like this for 35 years, until a social worker and jazz enthusiast named Marshall Marotte tracked him down. A younger jazz bassist, William Parker (also a free jazz player and also a poet) donated a bass to him, and he was able to resume his career.
FBPO: Did you ever really give up on music, or did you believe, deep down, that one day you would be back?
HG: I never gave up on music, not for a minute. You could say I was absent for a long time, but I always believed I would be back one day. I just couldn’t see the way to get there, but I knew it would happen.
In the same interview, Grimes gave the best, perhaps the only reasonable answer to the question, "What would you be doing if you weren't a bass player?
This question doesn’t have any meaning to me. I am a bass player and violin player and poet. If I weren’t those things, I wouldn’t be Henry Grimes. I wouldn’t be… at all.
Grimes married, continued to create and teach and write, and lived a fulfilled life until finally felled in April of this year by the Covid virus.
Scott's second session of the day marked the start of a new association, both musical and personal. She had certainly been one of the most important figures in establishing the soul jazz organ/saxophone sound through her work with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis; now she was to continue to mine that vein with a new saxophonist, Stanley Turrentine, who was also her new husband. Turrentine was signed to Blue Note, so as the two continued to record together throughout the 1960s, they would be billed under her name for Prestige albums, under his for Blue Note sessions. I'll have more to say about him, and their partnership, in chronicling subsequent sessions.
Esmond Edwards produced. The trio album was called Shirley Scott Plays Horace Silver, the quartet album with Turrentine Hip Twist. Both were released on Prestige. There were 45 RPM singles released from both sessions: "Sister Sadie, parts 1 and 2," and "Hip Twist, parts 1 and 2."
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