Listening to Prestige 506: Jimmy Forrest

LISTEN TO ONE: Matilda

Jimmy Forrest is back in Englewood Cliffs again after only six weeks, with mostly the same group--minus the guitar, plus Ray Barretto on congas, and with a similar mix of good tunes, not necessarily the tunes you'd hear on every modern jazz musician's set list.

The tenor saxophone is and is not a modernist instrument. It's not associated with the traditional jazz era, and not really so much with the swing era, when the clarinets of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw reigned supreme. Yet so many of the titans of the tenor - Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins -- are virtually unclassifiable. Not swing, though they can swing. Not bop, though they can bop. Not cool, though they can play it cool. 

And the same is true of the not-quite-titans, the demi-gods like Gene Ammons and Illinois Jacquet and, yes, Jimmy Forrest. The tenor sax has that human voice-like quality, and the voice is the most flexible instrument of them all. And all these cats can play the blues.

Forrest is back, as in his September session, with some familiar tunes, just not necessarily familiar in this context. And as with the tunes in the September session, he makes them work. Forrest has a great warmth to his tone, particularly in the lower registers. 

Of particular enjoyment to me in this session is "Matilda," the 1930s calypso tune brought up to date in the 1950s by Harry Belafonte. Sonny Rollins also brought calypso into modern jazz at around the same time, possibly a little later. Ray Barretto drums up a storm.

Esmond Edwards produced, and the session was released on Prestige as Most Much!, except for tunes, "I Love You" and "Sonny Boy," both of which were added to a New Jazz release, Soul Street, which gathered bits and pieces from other sessions. The traditional Scottish melody "Annie Laurie," which had been part of a brief swing era vogue for Scottish folk songs, became a two-sided 45.

Listening to Prestige 496: Jimmy Forrest

LISTEN TO ONE

One of the interesting things about this album is Forrest's choice of tunes--all of them good, all of them  open for improvisation and development, and most of them not on the set list of any other modern jazzman.

"Tuxedo Junction" was written and premiered by Erskine Hawkins in 1939; then, after a 1940 cover by the Andrews Sisters, it became a favorite of white dance bands--Glenn Miller, Harry James, Ray Anthony. From that time to this, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of modern jazz musicians who've covered it, and you'd have fingers left over if you left out the white musicians. Why? because it's strictly from

Squaresville? Glenn Miller? You might not think that if you listened to Erskine Hawkins's original, and you would certainly start doing some serious rethinking after listening to what Jimmy Forrest and his crew do to it.

And that's the key to this session--Forrest and his band having a good time and making some good music with some tunes that might well be regarded as guilty pleasures--like "Moonglow," the old Benny Goodman warhorse, which has been recorded by pretty nearly everyone, with the exception of most modern jazz artists (Dizzy Gillespie was one exception), or "Organ Grinder's Swing," composed by Will Hudson, who also wrote "Moonglow."

Detroiter Hugh Lawson worked often with Yusef Lateef, so he was used to doing unusual things with unexpected material.

Calvin Newborn never achieved the recognition that his brother Phineas did, but he had an interesting career. He and Phineas started out in a family band organized by their father, Phineas Sr., and the Newborns became B.B. King's backup band on his first recordings. They went on to become staples of the Memphis music scene, where they were the house hand for Sun Records, and Calvin gave Chester Burnett his first guitar lessons--lessons that would serve young Burnett well when he became Howlin' Wolf. They also befriended a young white kid who used to come and listen to them play in a local club, and was a frequent dinner guest at their home. He also followed their lead to Sun Records, at a time when label owner Sam Phillips was saying "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." The Newborns' protégé, Elvis Presley, was that white man.

Tommy Potter, one of the original bebop bassists, was near the end of his recording career, and his sessions with Forrest were among his last.

Clarence Johnston often worked with Forrest. His association with Prestige goes back to the mid-1950s, and two albus with James Moody, at which point I wrote about him extensively.

Esmond Edwards produced. Six of these tracks appeared on the Prestige album Sit Down And Relax With Jimmy Forrest. The seventh, "That's All," was included on a later New Jazz album,  Soul Street.

Listening to Prestige 364: Doug Watkins

Doug Watkins was one of the most prolific sidemen of the 1950s. He's been on 26 Prestige albums so far (including Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus) and countless more sessions on other labels. He was so respected as a bassist that when Charles Mingus took to the piano for 1961's Oh Yeah (Atlantic), he picked Watkins as his bassist.  But he almost never stepped out as a leader. He had done one album for a small label in 1956, and nothing more until this session.

What made him decide to put himself out in front?

A newfound passion. One of the most respected bassists in jazz, Watkins, like Mingus before him, turns the bass duties over to someone else, and takes on another instrument: his newfound passion, the cello.

How newfound was this passion? It's said that he picked it up three days before the recording date.

Which you can get away with if you're from Detroit, because that means you have a crew of homeboys who understand jazz, and who understand you, and who understand experimenting with different sounds, especially if one of them is Yusef Lateef, and the others are guys who've played with Lateef.

It's a shame that Detroit has come to be known as a blighted, crime-ridden city, because it has been a cultural capital.  It was a cauldron of jazz before jazz came to be recognized as America's seminal art form. And it produced the man who was arguably the greatest poet of his generation, Philip Levine.

Levine nurtured his art on the assembly lines of Detroit, just as Yusef Lateef did, and also in the jazz clubs of Detroit, where he heard the greats who made it their home. Poet T. R. Hummer, in an essay in the literary journal Blackbird, says that:

Some were classmates of his at Wayne University as it was called then: the guitarist Kenny Burrell was there, as were the pianists Tommy Flanagan and Bess Bonnier; they were close friends and peers of Levine’s then, as was the great and inimitable baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and the drummer Elvin Jones.

And he heard the greats who passed through, like Clifford Brown, whom he remembered as Benny Golson did:

I Remember Clifford

Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn't there
last night. Someone quietly entered, and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Bluebird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.

Shortly before he died in 2015, Levine collaborated with jazz saxophonist Benjamin Boone for a unique album of poetry and jazz. Hummer writes:

Boone said that he had suggested to Levine that it would be more efficient (as well as less taxing: it must not be forgotten that Levine was in his 80s

when this work was done) to record the music, at least the basic rhythm tracks, first and let him record his tracks after.

Levine’s response? “Why would I want to do that, Ben? I’ve sat in recording studios reading my stuff to myself plenty of times. I want to work with the musicians! That will be fun!”

And so the poet and the players convened session after session in a studio in Fresno, California, making the recordings. Another poet—especially one Levine’s age, who was also, by a certain point in the extended recording process, not in good health—might have found the lengthy, nitpicky process onerous. Levine loved it. He spent hours doing what is done in studios: sitting in a booth on a stool wearing headphones and staring at a microphone, recording take after take until everyone is satisfied, and then moving on to the next track. He stayed at it faithfully for the requisite long stretches.

The mixing of the album was not completed till after Levine died. When it came to mixing "I Remember Clifford," Boone was faced with a dilemma, according to Hummer:

For this poem, Boone composed a melody that is strongly reminiscent of, but not repetitious of, Golson’s composition. Anyone who knows Brown’s music is likely to know Golson’s composition, and so will be struck, as I was, by the extraordinarily tactful, effective work Boone did as a composer here.

But he did another excellent thing as well. Levine was always in the Fresno studio with basically the same core group of musicians. Boone is a saxophonist specializing in soprano and alto, each of which he plays wonderfully on most of these recordings (seriously, the man has deep and abiding chops; do yourself a favor and give him a listen) and he did the solo work on the original track. But as he listened to the playback of “I Remember Clifford” in the studio, and again and again at home, he found himself wondering, “Why is there a saxophone soloing in this? Clifford Brown played trumpet!”

“It was a tough decision, in terms of my own ego,” Boone told me. But in the end he contacted, through a friend of a friend, the trumpeter Tom Harrell. Harrell, now seventy-one, is a master musician who has played with just about everyone, from Stan Kenton and Woody Herman to Horace Silver on down. Who better to channel Clifford Brown?

So that's another part of Detroit. But here, for this session, the Motor City is represented by Lawson

on cello and Lateef on oboe as well as flute, so they're stepping outside of the jazz box. Detroiter Hugh Lawson is the pianist. a cat who came from Detroit with Lateef and spent many years with him before moving on to Sun Ra and others.  Detroiter Herman Wright takes the bass duties, and New Yorker Lex Humphries is the drummer, in his first session for Prestige.

They play three standards, two originals by Lateef and one ("Andre's Bag") by Watkins. The album, on New Jazz, would take its title, Soulnik, from a Lateef composition. Prestige would later rerelease it under Lateef's name as Imagination, but it's very much Watkins' session, but the creativity and versatility on display here in Watkins' pizzicato cello would get little chance to grow and blossom. This would be his second and last album as leader; in 1962 he died in an automobile accident.

Esmond Edwards produced.


It' not too late to give Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 as a Christmas gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! 

And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
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Listening to Prestige 255: Yusef Lateef

Yusef Lateef is, among his fellow Detroiters, a late arrival on the New York scene, and not because he represented a younger generation. Not at all. He was 37 when he first came to New York in the spring of 1957 to record for Savoy and Verve, and then to make this album for Prestige. And he wouldn't actually move Eest for good until 1960.

He had not been entirely homebound. He'd started playing professionally at 18, touring with swing bands and eventually with Dizzy Gillespie, but by 1950 concerns for his wife's health brought him off the road and home to Detroit, where he became an important figure, not only for his musicianship but also his cultural leadership. He was a founder and vice president of the New Music Society, an organization that reached out to younger jazz musicians and gave them a place to grow and develop. 1950 was also the year he converted to Islam.

His late arrival on the New York scene is part of the reason why, although he'd been an active musician for over 20 years by the time the decade turned, he is more associated with the jazz of the Sixties than the Fifties. The rest of that reason is his free-flying creativity, which seem like a Sixties thing, but was part of Lateef's creative personality even back in Detroit. Pianist Terry Pollard recalls that

He sometimes had me blow into a pop bottle. He'd fill it with water...to get different sounds, to make the song sound like Yusef wanted it to be. And so I ended up blowing into these pop bottles. I didn't know how, and I would get dizzy every night.*

While he was still in Detroit, Lateef began to experiment with Middle Eastern music, turned on to it by a fellow assembly line worker at the Chrysler plant. He

realized I had to widen my canvas of expression. I spent many hours in the library...studying the music of other cultures. I met a man [at Chrysler] from Syria and he asked me if I knew about the rabat.

He would bring all of this knowledge, and all the instruments he was experimenting with, to his New

York recording sessions, along with his Detroit band from their regular gig at Klein's Showbar.

We were so tight we were able to go to New York on off nights and do two albums, easily...We got off Sunday nights and jumped in the...station wagon, and we would drive all the way to Hackensack, New Jersey, and record on Monday and we'd turn right back to Detroit and open up on Tuesday.

The October session with its twelve tunes would have been an impressive feat for a group motoring over from Weehawken, let alone five guys and their instruments packed into a station wagon and barreling in from Detroit. Impressive for the sheer amount of work, impressive for how good it was, and really impressive for its range.

"Playful Flute," the first tune laid down, was composed by brass player Wilbur Harden, but it embodies Lateef's love of Middle Eastern music, learned in the library, from his fellow Chrysler worker, and certainly also from his pilgrimages to Mecca. It incorporates the flute and the argol, or arghul, a two-tubed woodwind instrument that dates back to ancient Egypt.

"Taboo" is one of those tunes that's always used when a movie soundtrack wants something Latin and exotic. Either that or Margarita Lecuona's only other hit, "Babalu." Or one of the compositions of her cousin Ernesto, like "The Breeze and I" or "Malaguena." To refresh my memory, I listened to versions by Les Baxter (boring) and Cuban bandleader Jack Costanzo (not boring). But no one brings to it quite what Lateef does. From Oliver Jackson's arresting drum intro to Lateef's flute work, he turns what's generally an ersatz exotic into a genuine exotic. Which is no small feat.

And, of course, I'm not so much interested in a critique of the Lecuona cousins' oeuvre as I am in following my reactions to Lateef's range and the courage of his choices. "Taboo" is a tune that could easily be dismissed as kitsch. Not so here. And it's interesting to consider how it might have been chosen.

This was a quintet that Lateef held together for five years, working a regular five-night-a-week gig in a very hip jazz town. Five nights a week for five years means you work out a lot of material, and sometimes you're just goofing around. Hey, let's take a tune that's straight from Squaresville, and see how we can mess around with it. And if you're Yusef Lateef, and you're playing what some have described as "world music before there was world music," even goofing around can lead to new discoveries.

"Anastasia" might have been another one of those tunes. From an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack by Alfred Newman, it had become a pop hit for Pat Boone, and you can't go much deeper into Squaresville than that. Here, Lateef does the really unexpected by staying quite faithful to the melody, but giving it a bit of a Middle Eastern twist, and a moody cast. Making it new.

Lateef's own compositions for this date are as eclectic as his covers. "Ecaps," in spite of its spacey title, is pretty much rooted on earth, with bop-influenced flute and tenor playing, and a very nice boppish piano solo by Hugh Lawson. Others range from boppish to proto-world music. And then there's "Love and Humor."

Most of the odd instruments listed in the session notes come into play here, including the balloons handed to Wilbur Harden and Hugh Lawson, for that unmistakeable sound of two balloons being rubbed together -- and Lawson is given Terry Pollard's 7-Up bottles. I couldn't help but think, as all of these unusual sounds wove their way into the mix, what kind of a challenge this session must have been for Rudy Van Gelder. The mood may be (sort of) Middle Eastern, with Lateef playing flute and argol, but the instrumentation is worthy of Spike Jones, who also knew something about love and humor. Lateef's humor is a little more subtle, and this is a very special cut, moving some distance away from jazz as we knew it, expanding our musical vocabulary. Lateef had used some of these instruments and sound effects on his earlier Savoy albums, but nothing quite like this.

I wonder if Bob Weinstock had entirely been expecting "Love and Humor." But he didn't shy away from it. It went onto his first Lateef release, The Sounds of Yusef, along with "Playful Flute," "Buckingham," "Meditation," and "Take the 'A' Train," and not only that, it was released as a 45 b/w "Meditation."

"Taboo," "All Alone," "Lambert's Joint," "Mahabs," "Minor Mood" and "Anastasia" all went onto the New Jazz album Other Sounds, released in 1959. "Ecaps" was held off until the 1960 New Jazz Cry!-Tender, the rest of which came from a later and much different session.



* This and all the other quotes -- in fact, much of the Detroit information -- from Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert's amazing book, Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit.

 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.