Listening to Prestige Part 111: Jimmy Raney

Jimmy Raney double-tracks his guitar on these tracks, using a technique that Les Paul had started to experiment with in the 30s, but had not been able to convince a record label to release a record using the technique until 1949. Interestingly, that meant that Paul was not the first artist to put out a record with multi-tracked instruments--Sidney Bechet did it in 1941.

Outside of the studio pyrotechnics, there doesn't seem to be much to connect the progressive ideas of Jimmy Raney with the more trad-focused licks of Les Paul, but it's not hard to think of them together, if one puts one's mind to it. There's a joy and a brightness in the playing of both guitarists. And, of course, wizard-like technique combined with technical wizardry.

Here again, Raney is joined by Hall Overton, and as with the Teddy Charles sessions, it's a case of the student overtaking the professor (Raney and Charles had both studied with Overton and Juilliard). But not really. Overton was an enigmatic and adventurous musician, and he prods Raney into some very cool things here.

Art Mardigan may be best known as a mainstay of the red hot Detroit jazz scene, working as the
house drummer at the Blue Bird Inn, but he did a lot of work in New York, too, with some major musicians.

I knew Teddy Kotick at the end of his career, when he was working a day job as a mailman in his native Massachusetts, and playing some great jazz with J. R. Monterose in Albany. He had been one

of Charlie Parker's favorite bassists, and was always reliable. He didn't solo much, but he has some moments here, on "Some Other Spring" and "On the Square," and he shines.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 84: Jimmy Raney / Stan Getz

Just as with Charlie Parker, an alias doesn't do much to hide the sound of Stan Getz. The aliases were necessary because the artists had exclusive deals with other record companies. This can't have fooled anyone. If it happened today, there'd be lawsuits, injunctions, records pulled from the shelves.

Hall Overton is back, with his other protege, Jimmy Raney, but a session with Stan Getz on it is going to be a Stan Getz session. Still, not quite like any other Stan Getz session. Do the avant-garde leanings of Raney and Overton pull Getz a little farther out into left field? I think so. He's lyrical as only he can be, but he's edgier, too.


This is an incredibly interesting session. It has the structure of a bebop blowing session, but a different dynamic. Or maybe that's not so. Maybe bebop had a lot more flexibility, a lot more nuance, a lot more room for growth than a lot of people gave it credit for. Maybe this wasn't the death throes of bebop that so many back then were predicting, and that so many since then have taken as an article of faith. Maybe this was bebop. Listen to Hall Overton's solo in "Lee." He's soloing in the bebop tradition, taking it to some strange but logical places, trading some great stuff with bassist Red Mitchell, then setting up Getz to take it out.

I've listened to this one a lot, and every time I listen, I appreciate more and more how these musicians worked with each other. Only in jazz, and maybe especially in the jazz of this era, do you find this kind of collective experimentation, and at this high level, and with this expectation of success. Putting Stan Getz together with Jimmy Raney and Hall Overton is more than just throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. It's an inspiration.

The songs are "Round Midnight" and three Raney compositions. I had thought that "Lee" might have been a tribute to Konitz, but it's named after Raney's wife.

It's damned hard, even in the age of Google, to track down composer credits for jazz tunes, unless you happen to have the record in front of you. My ability to give credit has been, and will be, spotty at best.

New to Prestige, and perhaps new to recording -- I haven't found anything earlier -- are Red Mitchell and Frank Isola, although they had been playing and making significant names for themselves since the late forties.

Mitchell came to New York in 1948, just out of the army, and was to leave for the West Coast not long after this recording, where he made most of his career, and where he became an important innovator, tuning his bass in fifths -- the tuning used on a violin or cello -- instead of the conventional fourths. He would later join the expatriate jazz community in Stockholm.

There's a great chapter on Frank Isola, who came to New York around the same time as Mitchell, but didn't stay in the jazz world for long, in a book called Fifties Jazz Talk by Gordon Jack (Scarecrow Press). I would love to have a copy of it, but it costs 50 bucks, so it's on my gift list. Meanwhile, it is excerpted at Google Books, so we can get part of the story. We know Isola walked away from the jazz scene in 1957, after having established an important reputation as a modern jazz drummer. He worked a lot with Stan Getz, which may explain his presence on this session, and was involved in some important Prestige recordings, so we'll see him again.

In 1942, at age 17, he won the Detroit division of a national Gene Krupa drumming contest, and would have gone on to the finals in New York, if he hadn't been disqualified as an amateur for having joined the union. Had he gone, he would have given stiff competition to the eventual winner of the contest -- Louis Bellson.

He seems to have made a number of recordings that didn't quite happen, before the Prestige date. He was with a group including Don Lanphere and Teddy Kotick that backed up Babs Gonzalez on a demo for Capitol. Babs got the contract, but they didn't use the group. He made some sides with Lanphere and Herb Geller for a nascent label that never got off the ground. And in 1950, he acompanied Charlie Parker on a private session that was recorded, but I can't find a record of its having been released.

Just as he was getting ready to leave the music biz behind in the late 50s, he got a call from the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, wanting to hire him. His response: "No, thanks. Tell Tommy I'm not in a sentimental mood."

These sessions -- Raney's first as leader -- seem not to have been released as singles. Strange if true, given Stan Getz's popularity, but then his name wasn't on them. They came out on an album called Jimmy Raney Plays, with cover art by David X. Young of the Hall Overton / W. Eugene Smith jazz loft fame, one of the first Prestige albums to take cover art seriously.

Today, they're most available because of Getz, appearing on a reissue package called Early Stan.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 78: Teddy Charles / Hall Overton

 I finished up 1952 with a curious but oddly satisfying "Best of" list from rateyourmusic.com. The rateyourmusic raters had a lot of jazz for their best of the year in music, a lot of classical, some ethnic folk, some spoken word. No rhythm and blues. Their list of best singles of 1952, on the other hand, was full of rhythm and blues, full of country. And eventually it struck me: of course. Who was putting out rhythm and blues LPs in 1952?

My own 1952 on Prestige was full of wonderful surprises. I had never really listened to George Wallington or Teddy Charles. Or Hampton Hawes, who blew me away. I had never heard of Joe Holiday, and I loved his mambo jazz. I revisited King Pleasure and Annie Ross, two all-time favorites. I got reacquainted with the great Wardell Gray (and with his daughter, on Facebook), with Zoot Sims. I got to hear more of Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, and they continued to give pleasure. I heard the first recordings by the Modern Jazz Quartet (I'd played this one many times on vinyl), the first recordings of some of Thelonious Monk's greatest compositions, the first really extensive recording sessions by Billy Taylor.

I finished up my first four years of listening to Prestige Records, session by session, and came into 1953 ready to revisit old favorites and encounter new surprises. And my first 1953 session was very new, and very much a surprise.


My first thought in listening to this remarkable session of four original compositions was to wonder if Teddy Charles had been influenced by electronic minimalist composers like LaMonte Young. My chronology was a little vague, so I looked up Young, and discovered that if anything, it was just the reverse. Young, and Steve Reich and Philip Glass and Terry Riley, all came later, so if there was an influence--and I think there must have been -- it was in the other direction. My guess is that every avant-garde musician coming along in the 1950s listened to Teddy Charles's New Directions album.

 I wasn't familiar at all with Hall Overton, so I did some research there, and found that he is most famous for orchestrating Thelonious Monk's piano compositions (Monk chose him for the job) for a groundbreaking Town Hall concert. But in the early 1950s, Overton was an incredibly influential figure, though virtually as little known then as he is now.

 Did he influence electronic music? Well, as it turns out, yes. Steve Reich was a student of Overton's at Juilliard.

 And so were Teddy Charles and Jimmy Raney. It must have been a thrill for Charles to make this album with his mentor, and he must have known he was about to go in even newer directions.

 Almost all of what anyone knows about Hall Overton, beyond the Monk concert, can be found in a Internet article by Art Lange, written in 2009, because Lange was frustrated by the fact that basically, no one knew anything about Overton. So here, thanks to Art Lange, is what I know about Hall Overton (I do recommend reading his piece). He shared the weird and notorious 6th Avenue loft with David X. Wilson, which I've written about briefly before. Photographer W. Eugene Smith also lived at the loft, and (this and all subsequent quotes are from the Lange article, and you should really read the whole article):

Between 1957 and ’65 he made approximately 4,000 hours of surreptitious tape recordings at the loft, everything from hours of cats meowing and random street sounds to historically invaluable jam sessions, rehearsals, and conversations – most importantly, those in preparation for the Town Hall concert...the tapes of Monk and arranger/orchestrator Overton discussing the music and sounding out details at two pianos reveal just how much of a collaboration it was, and the intimate and thorough working relationship the two shared.

Lange also gives a detailed description of the New Directions session, which is so much better than anything I could write that I'll quote from it at length here.

remarkable because they’re not really jazz, but constructions that explore new methods

of organization from an improvisational perspective, equally informed by classical procedures. (You can’t call them Third Stream, Gunther Schuller wouldn’t coin the term for several years.) Though all four pieces are attributed to Overton, liner note annotator Ira Gitler said that one, “Metalizing,” was devised by Charles. None of the pieces “swing” in a conventional way; the rhythms are sometimes regulated by a snare drum pattern or predetermined melodic material, but for the most part jostle through freely phrased development of motifs, which provides momentum. Typically, the piano (Overton) and vibes (Charles) engage in complimentary linear counterpoint; in “Antiphony” their lines take on a modal cast, with the kind of large intervals favored by Webern and Eric Dolphy, and in “Decibels” the three-part interaction never resolves into a single-minded composition, but maintains its jazz identity as a trio conception. “Metalizing” includes timbral juxtapositions – the piano is pedaled so chords resonate, Shaughnessy focuses on cymbal washes, Charles switches from vibes to xylophone and glockenspiel to alter colors. Nothing in jazz was comparable at the time.

I don't know that anything in jazz has ever been comparable. This music is mesmerizing, difficult, intellectual, and somehow straight to the gut. This from Prestige, the label that gave us hard bop, the early Miles, Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, King Pleasure and Annie Ross (and which started out with Lennie Tristano). This from Ed Shaughnessy, who spent 30 years providing rimshots for Johnny Carson and Doc Severinsen (and engaging in titanic drum battles with Buddy Rich). This is the vast richness of American music.

On Hall Overton's Wikipedia page, there's this quote from Overton about his music.

Since I am both a composer and active jazz musician, my work reflects both of these sources of musical experience. As a composer, my main interest has been in the exploration of non-systematic, intuitive harmony, both tonal and dissonant from which other elements—melody, counterpoint and form—can be derived. I am not particularly concerned whether this places me in the middle of the road, left or right. Or even if there is such a thing as a road to be on or off. There are only individual expressions for which we must find the right language. Some are good, some are bad. My attitude towards jazz is one of deep respect. Having attempted to master this difficult and exacting art for several years, with some small degree of success, I feel that I have come to know it in a way that is possible only through actually performing and creating in this idiom. Jazz has had a strong influence on my compositional style, but purely on a subconscious level. For I am opposed to the practice of trying to make jazz respectable through the unnatural imposition of classical forms or materials.

These were released on a 10-inch LP, New Directions, Vol 2, and then not again until a much later reissue with volume 1 as simply New Directions.

All these selections are on Spotify, and deserve to be listened to. They represent an important and influential direction in modern music. None are on YouTube.