Listening to Prestige 713: Carmell Jones

LISTEN TO ONE: Flyin' Home

 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.

Listening to Prestige part 152: James Moody

I had not known that James Moody was partially deaf--and that as a child, he was put in a school for retarded children because school administrators didn't believe he was deaf. Fortunately, his mother moved him to a different school district, and fortunately, he didn't let hearing loss stand in the way of his love for music, or his desire to play it. It also wasn't enough to keep him out of the Air Force, in which he served during World War II. The Air Force had a band, but it was whites only. Moody has spoken in a video interview of his experiences in the segregated Air Force.

He found the unauthorized "Negro Air Force Band" led by trumpeter Dave Burns, with whom he remained close, first in the postwar Dizzy Gillespie band and then in the septet he organized, which played these Prestige dates among others. Burns is heard to good effect in these two sessions.

I've written a lot about James Moody, first in relation to his Swedish sessions for Metronome/Prestige, then in these septet sessions in Hackensack at the Van Gelder studio, and I'm not sure I have much more to say, which is one of the reasons I've held off writing a blog entry for a couple of weeks--the other being that I've gotten caught up gathering my first five years' worth of entries into book form, and that's almost ready.

But I was struck by this quote from Jimmy Heath, about a somewhat older Moody:

Over the years, Moody has become so free--not in a random fashion, but a scientific freedom--that he can do anything he wants with the saxophone.... He has true knowledge. He is in complete control.

I think this is a great distinction...scientific freedom vs. random freedom. I remember hearing Steve

Allen introducing Miles Davis on his tv show, and saying that Miles was not, as your grandmother might say, "just blowin' a lot of notes." Steve's grandmother must have had a somewhat different vocabulary than mine did, but we'll pass over that. Steve went on to say that "every note has a precise musical meaning and, uh, you could prove it with mathematics if need be." Well, I suppose you could, although mathematics might not be the best proof. But for sure, there's freedom and there's freedom. The scientific freedom, the kind that you could prove with mathematics if you needed to, is the kind of freedom that allowed Shakespeare to probe every shading and subtlety of human emotion, within the confines of iambic pentameter. The geniuses of free jazz, like Coleman and Coltrane and Dolphy, found their own kind of scientific freedom, even though Allen's mother might have said they were just blowin' a lot of notes. But as for random freedom...

There's a story abut Buck Clayton playing a Jazzmobile concert in New York. A young guy hopped up on the stage next to him, said he'd like to jam with him. Clayton said OK, let's play a little blues in B-flat. He started playing, the kid started screeching and caterwauling, blowin' a bunch of notes all over the map, never mind the scale.

"What's that?" Clayton demanded.

"Man, I'm just playing what I feel."

"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

In 1955, Moody is already a master of scientific freedom, and he and his septet of Gillespie alumni feel plenty, and they feel it all in the same key. Eddie Jefferson joins them again for one number -- "Disappointed" -- and he meshes brilliantly. He doesn't make it a band backing up a vocalist, he adds one more instrument to a brilliant ensemble.