Listening to Prestige 260: Ray Draper - John Coltrane

Bob Weinstock must have had a lot of confidence in his barely 17-year-old prodigy Ray Draper, giving him John Coltrane as a bandmate. It's tough enough playing bebop on a tuba, without being asked to play it off against one of the most advanced improvisers of the era. And to up the stakes a little more, either Weinstock or Draper decided not to go with their tried and true reliables in the rhythm section. Each of them had played on only one other Prestige session. Gil Coggins had played on a Jackie McLean session in August.  Spanky DeBrest had appeared on Draper's debut as leader, though he was already an established figure with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Larry Ritchie had also worked with Draper, on the July 12 Jackie McLean session.

All of this works. Coggins is a jagged, percussive piano player, and sets the tone that this is going to be a different kind of session. Draper and Coltrane work well together in the ensemble passages. Draper proves that he's a first rate composer on his originals, particularly "Clifford's Kappa," and he shines as a soloist.

And that's saying a lot, considering what he was up against. Everything from this session is good, better than good. But Coltrane was on fire. When he solos, everything else melts away. I've been following Coltrane's progression here, from the Miles sessions through the wide-ranging array of sideman gigs that Weinstock used him for, through his sessions as leader, looking for clues as to what he would burst forth into come the 1960s, and not really finding them. In each of his Prestige sessions, including this one, he is right there in the present moment, making the music he's brought in to make. And making all the right choices. And listening to his recording sessions in chronological order, all I can say is that he keeps getting better and better.

His solos here virtually stop time and space, and exist in their own dimension. But that doesn't mean he's ignoring what's around him. He's working with Draper and Coggins, building on what they're doing, and they're doing some very, very good stuff.

In spite of all that, it's hard to know what to do with a tuba player, and Weinstock was not going to do more. This is Draper's last session for Prestige, and it was released on New Jazz, which generally meant it was not going to get the promotional push that went behind a Prestige release. Draper would record only sporadically after that, succumbing to heroin addiction and drug-related prison time. He died in 1982, meeting an ironically grisly end for a musical prodigy: he was shot and killed by a hold-up gang led by a 13-year-old.

The original New Jazz release was called The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane. A much later Prestige reissue was title The John Coltrane/Ray Draper Quintet.



Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 252: Jackie McLean

"Jazzy" is a slang term that's fairly commonplace in our national discourse, and as it's generally used, it has nothing to do with jazz. If jazz musicians don't care for the word "jazz," as many of them don't (perhaps not so many as at one time), maybe it's not just because of its origin as a slang term for sexual intercourse. After all, there are a lot worse things than having your art form compared to sexual intercourse. Maybe it's the ancillary meanings that have grown up around it. The Jazz Age -- drinking bathtub gin and shallow partying. Don't give me any of that jazz - don't give me any of your insincere bullshit. He's studying Greek literature and all that jazz -- and a lot of other stuff that's not really important enough to talk about.

Let's jazz it up -- let's add some bells and whistles.

And "jazzy" means showy, glitzy, with lots of surface flash. If it's used in connection with music--well, it almost never is--it's not related to jazz. Will Smith's hip hop partner, when he was starting out, was Jazzy Jeff. If you watch movies on TV with closed captioning, which some of us older folks have to do, sometimes a caption will inform you that a "jazzy theme" is being played, and if your hearing ain't all that bad, you can tell that the background music for the scene has about as much relationship to jazz as...well, as the "noirish jazz" that also pops up on closed captions.

That being said, Jackie McLean's version of "Chasin' the Bird" is jazzy. It starts out with an odd dirgelike intro from Curtis Fuller, and the whole ensemble bursts into a lively, glitzy, spirited rendition of the head. Proving that something can be jazzy and real jazz at the same time. "Chasin' the Bird" is one of the many jazz compositions based on Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," which is one of the products of the Jazz Age.  And it's a joyous melody. We've heard it recently by Herbie Mann and Bobby Jaspar, and the joy comes through loud and clear in their version: chasin' a bird is a sunny, open pastime.

And "A Long Drink of the Blues" is bluesy. And long, And deeply satisfying: 20 minutes of jamming on the blues with a bunch of cats who know how to play the blues.

Gil Coggins is the newcomer on this session. He was raised in Harlem and Barbados by a mother

who played piano in church and encouraged him to play until he joined the army. Stationed in St. Louis, he received some encouragement from his tap-dancing sergeant, Honi Coles, but his real inspiration came when he met a jazz-loving 16-year-old kid who was playing trumpet with a local band in a bowling alley. Ten years later, he would reunite with that teenager in New York to record an album for Blue Note, the one called Miles Davis Volume 2.


Coggins was another one of those jazzmen, like Wendell Marshall, George Wallington and Teddy Charles, who gave himself a day job to fall back on. In 1954, he began selling real estate, and eventually he phased out of the music business and into real life, and realtor life. Like Wallington, he made a return to music later in life, recording his only two albums as a leader in 1990 and 2003. At the time of his death from an auto accident in 2004, he was playing regularly at an East Village club. His last album, Better Late Than Never, was released posthumously.

This is another one of those mix-and-match sessions. "What's New" was released first, on the Strange Blues" album. "Chasin' the Bird" and "Jackie's Ghost" both came out on a 1960 New Jazz release, Makin' the Changes, resulting in two dropped g's from the same session."A Long Drink of the Blues" waited until 1961 and the eponymous album, also on New Jazz. All three of these albums also included cuts from the earlier February 15 session.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.