Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Clark Terry has been a presence in the Prestige catalog, though largely under the radar, either playing in large ensembles or backing up a vocalist. His debut was early and auspicious--in 1950, the very early days of the label, joining Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Criss for a live blowing session. This is the kind of music, from one of the most exciting periods in jazz history, that excited Bob Weinstock into forming a new label, and it's wonderful to go back and listen to it again,
Then a decade would go by before he connected with the label again--a busy time, starting out with Count Basie, then moving to Duke Ellington and spending the rest of the decade with him. A lot of recording--by the time his career was finished, Terry had appeared on more than 900 records. A lot of time on the road--much of his non-Ellington work was done in studios in LA or Chicago.
Then in 1959, he left Ellington, settled in New York, and took a job as a staff musician for NBC (he was the only African-American in the Tonight show band). This gave him a lot more time for various recording gigs, and he returned to Prestige in September of 1960 as a member of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis's big band. That was followed by a much more prominent role in a quintet led by Buddy Tate, then in a Jimmy Hamilton ensemble, an Oliver Nelson orchestra backing Gene Ammons, and a session backing vocalist Clea Bradford.
The July session, his only one as leader for Prestige, put him at the head of a quartet Prestige semi-regulars Joe Benjamin and Charlie Persip, and a musician whose history with Prestige was remarkably similar to his own. Jumior Mance had made one recording for the label in 1951, then spent the rest of the decade elsewhere, returning to join Davis's big band. He would record a few more times with Davis for the label.
The music is mellow, as befits a Moodsville session, with emphasis on ballads, and Terry is your man for the job. His approach is intelligent, technically superb, warm and emotional without ever getting cliched or sentimental. He does standards, two originals. and one unusual choice for a jazz album, Brahms's "Lullabye"--not so unusual for Terry, though. It was a particular favorite, one that he played often and recorded more than once.
This is one of those albums where you're glad it's just a quartet, because you can appreciate the intimate time spent with Terry. Junior Mance's solos are also beautiful.
The Moodsville album was titled, appropriately, Everything's Mellow.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
This was Roland Kirk's only recording for Prestige. He had been in the studio a couple of times, beginning in 1956 with a rhythm and blues session for King. Moving from Louisville to Chicago, he recorded for Argo in 1960, with Ira Sullivan.
Even in his rhythm and blues days, he was already experimenting with his exotic instruments, and with playing more than one horn at the same time. And if this was originally presented as a gimmick, it was never a gimmick. Hank Crawford first heard him playing as a 14-year-old on the rhythm and blues circuit, and remembers (quoted in Wikipedia):
He would be like this 14 year-old blind kid playing two horns at once. They would bring him out and he would tear the joint up...Now they had him doing all kinds of goofy stuff but he was playing the two horns and he was playing the shit out of them. He was an original from the beginning.
The other horns Kirk primarily used were the manzello and the stritch. The manzello is a modification of the saxello, itself a modification of the soprano saxophone. The stritch is a modified alto sax, straight like a soprano rather than curving into a bell like conventional alto (the manzello adds a bell to the conventional soprano structure). Playing all three at once, he could do something no other horn player could do: make chords. But he was also a brilliant flute player, and he made use of all sorts of sound-making devices, in the manner of Yusef Lateef (or Spike Jones), but playing all of them himself.
Kirk's musical knowledge and influences stretched from rhythm and blues to classical, from ragtime to electronic music. So it was interesting that Prestige paired him, for this outing, with a guy who essentially played one thing, though he did it very well.
But why not? I have a theory: given jazz musicians of quality and imagination, there's no such thing as a bad pairing. Here on Listening to Prestige, we've heard Eric Dolphy paired with Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet, a session often criticized as "a mismatch, with Dolphy and the quintet paying little attention to each other," but it's not true. They're listening to each other, and their playing is affected by the context, in interesting ways. The same criticism was leveled by critics at Charlie Parker playing with Machito, or by Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and it was never true in either of those cases. Just listen, and you'll hear how they're relating to each other.
One of the most delightful jazz singles ever is "Slim's Jam," featuring a dead serious avant gardist (Parker), an irreverent cutup (Slim Gaillard), and a rhythm and bluesman (Jack McVouty, in Gaillard's language, McVea in anyone else's). And how about the Birth of the Cool nonet, who made some of the tightest, most trailblazing music in jazz history, led by Miles Davis, Lee Konitz (RIP), Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis, all of whom came from very different places and went very much in separate ways? Jazz is all about reaching out of your comfort zone, so putting together great musicians from different schools is always going to be worth listening to.
And in this case, although Kirk could draw on almost any musical language you cared to name, he had a solid grounding in soul jazz. You're certainly going to get things here that you would not necessarily get on any other Jack McDuff album, but you're going to get that "jazz with a beat" and that down home sound. Kirk plays the flute in addition to his big three instrumens, and also uses a siren.
Four of the numbers here are Kirk originals. Two are standards: "Makin' Whoopee," by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, was originally a vehicle for Eddie Cantor in a 1928 Broadway musical. "Too Late Now," by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, was first sung by Jane Powell in the 1951 Powell-Fred Astaire vehicle, Royal Wedding. And one that you really wouldn't expect to find on a Jack McDuff soul jazz album, "The Skater's Waltz," by 19th century French composer Charles Emile Waldteufel. I'm not sure Waldteufel would recognize what these guys do to it, but he might also be given pause if he could visit the mid-20th century and hear his "Estudiantina Waltz" sung as "My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer."
Joe Benjamin and Art Taylor round out the quartet. Taylor is a veteran of many many Prestige sessions, and if you think of him as primarily a bop era drummer, from his work with Miles, Red Garland and others, prepare to think again. He establishes himself here as a giant of funk drumming.
The album was called Kirk's Work. It was later released as Roland Kirk--Pre-Rahsaan, which in fact it was. The name Rahsaan would come later, not out of Islamic religious leanings (he was never a Muslim), but because the name came to him in a dream. Even this early in his career, though, he had already been named by an oneirological impulse.. His birth name was Ronald, but a dream told him to switch the letters around.
"Kirk's Work" and "Doin' the 68" were the first 45 RPM release from the session, followed by "Funk Underneath," split into two parts, and then "Three for Dizzy," also a two-sider.
Esmond Edwards is listed as "Supervision" rather than as producer. I'm not sure of the difference.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle!
Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.– Terry Gibbs
This blog grew out of a few different impulses, but one, certainly, was something that Peter Jones and I had agreed on, coming out of one of our many discussions of the music of our youth: that the recorded jazz of the 1950s, on the great independent jazz labels like Prestige and Blue Note and Riverside, had all been good.
Was it really? Or were the rose-hued glasses of nostalgia coloring our vision? After all, we couldn't have listened to everything. And our limited teenage record-buying budget meant that we were mostly spending our money on albums that had gotten four or five stars from Down Beat. And the Jazztone Society's album of the month, during the time of that great but failed experiment. And the
Columbia Record Club, which wasn't necessarily on the cutting edge of jazz (they did have Miles) and certainly wasn't on the cutting edge of rhythm and blues, but hey, who could resist that initial offer of ten albums for ten cents, or whatever it was?
Listening to every single recording session from the entire decade seemed like a pretty good test/ And the conclusion was yes. It was all good.
The 50s were our decade of pure passion, and I wasn't so sure the 60s were going to measure up, but so far, so good. And more of it is new to me. Some of it is surprising, some of it amazing. Mal Waldron, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Ron Carter...an album I'd never heard, that ascends to the level of greatness. And fresh, orginal, revolutionary--even 60 years later. That shouldn't be so surprising. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk sound fresh, original, and revolutionary 80 years later. And Louis Armstrong, 100 years later. But this was music I'd never heard of before. You're not going say the same thing about Taft Jordan playing Ellington. Letting the world know that Mal Waldron was one of his era's great composers is a thrill in itself. If I tell you that Duke Ellington was one of his era's great composers, I'm not exactly going to be in the vanguard, am I? And if I tell you what a service Bob Weinstock performed for posterity by recording some of the older jazz artists on Swingville and Moodsville, this is worth saying, but I've said it before.
So I don't have anything exciting to tell you today, except that the string continues. All good. How could it not be? Ellington veteran Taft Jordan playing some of the Duke's best-loved tunes, and the reason why they're best-loved is...you can't help but love them. Kenny Burrell! After a few years' absence, he's back for two Prestige sessions in 1961: Coleman Hawkins in February, and now on board here with Jordan. Always welcome. He'll be back off and on over the decade. It tool Listening to Prestige to introduce me to Richard Wyands, and now that I know about him I smile whenever I see name on a session. I know he's going to be giving me some good piano. And what about Joe Benjamin and Charlie Persip? From the angularities and intricacies of Waldron/Dolphy to the sweet swing of Ellington/Jordan. What time is the gig and where is the studio? Thank you, ma'am, and let's play some jazz. Play it pretty for the people. Play it loud, play it clear, for the whole world to hear. Play everything cool for me and my baby. Taft and fellas. You've got me in the palm of your hand.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
Mal Waldron was recognized in his time by those who paid attention, and for more than just being Billie Holiday's pianist on the night that Frank O'Hara immortalized in "The Day Lady Died," even though he didn't get the votes in the Playboy or Down Beat reader's polls. Billboard, in reviewing this album, said, "As a composer and pianist in avant garde jazz, Mal Waldron has few peers." The Billboard reviewer put "composer" first, and that's no mistake. For whatever reason, the general public, even the Down Beat reading public, never got the message, but musicians and jazz record producers surely did. On virtually every session that Waldron was called to play on, he was asked to compose a few tunes (look at my comments for his sessions of May 2 or September 26, 1958.
"Soul Eyes," written for John Coltrane, is his best known composition, but "Fire Waltz," from this session, written for Dolphy, has attracted its share of musicians, especially in recent years. One of the many pleasures of this album is getting the chance to reconsider and re-appreciate Waldron as a composer. All the pieces recorded this day were his.
Billboard puts Waldron with the avant garde, and although his talents and interests covered the breadth of modern jazz, being asked to compose for a session with Eric Dolphy certainly gives him an opportunity to spread his avant garde wings, and he's up to the task.
There were two important jazz musicians in this era who were named after the pioneering African American educator Booker T. Washington, and both died of illness way before their time. Trumpeter Booker Little, whose collaborations with Dolphy can only leave us wondering what more the two of them might have achieved, died on October 5, 1961, at age 23.
Ervin died at age 40, in 1970...both of them of kidney failure. He had a chance to leave behind a substantial body of work, much of it on Prestige.
Originally from Texas, he got his start in the southwestern territorial band of Ernie Fields, then moved to New York in 1958, where he very quickly caught the attention of Charles Mingus. Although Dolphy and Ervin were both part of the Mingus family, they only appeared together on one recording, the Complete Town Hall Concert. This appears to be their only other joint outing.
I won't comment on each selection individually. I'd like to, but I don't have the knowledge or the vocabulary. I will say that this session made me stop and listen over and over again, and not want to go on. Charlie Persip's drumming kicks and drives and complicates the rhythm. Joe Benjamin's solid bass makes it possible for Ron Carter to move his cello up to the front line. The cello is always a touchy instrument for jazz, but Waldron finds a place for it that works. And while Waldron always adds something unique and valuable to any group that he's in, his solos on his own compositions are particularly expressive. This is a beauty of an album.
It was released on New Jazz as The Quest. Esmond Edwards produced. It would later be rereleased on Prestige under Dolphy's name as Fire Waltz. The tune, "Fire Waltz," was also played by Dolphy, Booker Little and Waldron on the Dolphy/Little Live at the Five Spot sessions, and in recent years, it has gone into the repertoire of a number of jazz musicians.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
This is the third album to be released under the Swingville All Stars banner, and the second in a little over a month. The April lineup is completely replaced, although there's a fairly close consistency as to the structure of the group. Joe Thomas replaces Joe Newman on trumpet; Vic Dickenson for J. C Higginbotham on trombone; Pee Wee Russell for Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet. The first go-round had an alto (Hilton Jefferson) and tenor sax (Coleman Hawkins); this one has two tenors (Buddy Tate and Al Sears). Both sessions had a guitar (Tiny Grimes then, Danny Barker now). Claude Hopkins, Wendell Marshall and Billy English rounded out the first
rhythm section; Cliff Jackson, Joe Benjamin and J. C. Heard were the second. In other words, heads you win, tails you can't lose.
I've commented that none of the Swingville groups are playing the music of the 1920s and 1930s. They're not playing bebop, postbop or hard bop, but they're not stuck in the past either. That's somewhat less true of this group, maybe because more of their repertoire is swing era standards. But they're still making music that sounded good in 1961, and still sounds good in the 21st century.
There are identifiable differences. The Swingville All Stars are making music in the LP era, which means that they can stretch out in ways that the cats making 78 RPM records couldn't, "Years Ago" is ten minutes long, with room for extended solos for everyone. "Phoenix" is over seven minutes. Even super-traditional swing melodies like "I May Be Wrong" go over six. And that does make a difference.
Better recording equipment and techniques make a difference. In the late 1940s, Baby Dodds made a series of videos demonstrating his phenomenal technique on a drum kit. But recording with Johnny Dodds and with King Oliver, he had to use just a block of wood, because real drums would make the needle on the primitive recording machine jump.
And as I've noted before, these are some of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen. They may not have chosen the paths blazed by Charlie Parker, but they didn't stand still, either.
Nevertheless, there's more nostalgia here than we've heard on some of the other sessions, and the only explanation I can give for that is that's how they felt like playing on this particular day. The first session is wonderful music, lifted to another level by Coleman Hawkins. This session is wonderful music, lifted to another level by Pee Wee Russell -- who, if anything, was more progressive than Hawkins. So go figure.
New to Prestige on this session were Cliff Jackson and Danny Barker. Jackson was close to 60 when this recording was made, and had built his reputation as a stride piano player. He had been well known in New York for four decades, doing some recording, but mostly known as a fixture on the
night club circuit. He did not have a lot of experience playing with the younger cats, and he may have been partly responsible for the more traditional sound on this date. But he was very good at what he did, and Prestige would use him on several more Bluesville and Swingville sessions. He died in 1970.
New Orleans-born Danny Barker lived until 1994, long enough to be revered as both a musician and a seminal figure in the revival of jazz in New Orleans. The Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band, which he founded, gave a number of young New Orleans musicians their start, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Lucien Barbarin and many others. Wynton Marsalis has credited him with being one of his most important teachers. He would continue to play, both guitar and banjo, until shortly before his death.
The Hawkins All Stars and the Russell All Stars were mixed and matched for marketing. Swingville released the material on two albums. The first, Things Ain't What They Used to Be, contained the title song, "I May Be Wrong," and "Vic's Spot," along with two numbers from the Hawkins session. The others joined the remaining two Hawkins numbers on Years Ago. Both sessions were reunited on a Prestige double album (and later CD) called Jam Session in Swingville.
The fullness and power of orchestral music, with its sections and soloists, is undeniable, as is the energy and vitality of big band music. But there's something uniquely entrancing about music made by a small ensemble, where each instrument has its own kind of clarity, and the melds are shifting and subtle. This is true of chamber music, but it's perhaps especially true of small group jazz, for all kinds of reasons, some of them obvious, some less so.
I've talked before about getting my first hi-fi, and suddenly realizing that there was more going on than just Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. I could suddenly hear Larry Bunker, and especially Chico Hamilton, and I suddenly had a whole new appreciation of the complexity of the music I was starting to love.
In a jazz ensemble, the instruments are so different from each other, and they have so many ways of interacting. Improvisation opens up the possibilities exponentially, and because the different members of the group are given space to improvise, the time it takes to play a given piece is variable, as Miles Davis found out when John Coltrane started playing his extended solos. This makes it strikingly different from a composed piece. Terry Riley's In C plays with that boundary. It is entirely composed. There are 53 separate musical phrases, and each instrument--it's written for an indeterminate number of instruments--is instructed to play each figure, in order, from beginning to end, but they don't have to start together, and each one can repeat each figure as many times as he or she chooses before going on to the next one. Still, duration is not much of a variable in most composed pieces. Even John Cage's 4'33", which involves silence, is written to last four minutes and 33 seconds.
Well, yeah, since this is the Jerome Richardson Sextet, I should have remembered that there would be a third front line instrument. So we have flute, trombone guitar. not your everyday lineup, which brings me back to what I was saying about the different permutations of sound in a small jazz ensemble. The standard Bird-and-Diz quintet lineup of trumpet and saxophone is endlessly varied enough in the hands of jazz masters, but this group is very hip, and it's an instrumental lineup you don't hear that often--and it's varied even more when Richardson switches to tenor sax.. Which brings me back to duration as a unique function of jazz's uniqueness, especially in the LP era. With room for six different soloists to stretch out and create their own take on not only the melody and chord structure, but also the solos that have come before them, this version runs close to eleven minutes. A 1950s rock and roll version by steel guitar duo Santo and Johnny basically plays the melody, and clocks in and two and a half minutes. A pop instrumental by Gordon Jenkins, strictly playing the melody, is even shorter.
The rest of the group is Hank Jones on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Charlie Persip on drums. Benjamin, never very far from the front, comes back after Kenny Burrell, and then there's an extended drum solo that captures the exotica of...well, of exotica, the complexity of bebop, and the excitement of a great drummer doing an extended drum solo.
We've heard Jimmy Cleveland before, with Art Farmer septets a couple of times, and as part of Gil Evans' tentet. Here he gets a more featured role, which is all to the good, particularly on "Way In Blues." Which reminds me to give a tip of the hat to another Prestige alumnus, Bennie Green, a great trombone bluesman, who would record through the 1960s on various labels, then settle in Las Vegas and hotel bands. Cleveland was one of those guys who could play with everyone, from blues (Ruth Brown) to soul (James Brown) to soul jazz (Cannonball Adderley) to big bands to bop.
Hank Jones accompanied vocalist Earl Coleman on a couple of Prestige albums, and played with Curtis Fuller on another. He'd be back for several more appearances on the label, but that was a tiny part of his prodigious output as leader and sideman over seven decades, with multiple honors including the National Medal of Arts two years before his death in 2010. He also has a unique credit for a jazzman: he accompanied Marilyn Monroe on her legendary performance of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President."
Joe Benjamin makes his Prestige debut, but his name is forever imprinted on my brain because he's one of the musicians Sarah Vaughan introduces in her live recording of "Shulie-a-Bop," arguably the greatest bebop vocal ever, made for Mercury Records in 1954, the same year that Mercury had her record "Make Yourself Comfortable," with a syrupy orchestra led by Hugo Peretti. This was the beginning of Mercury's project to make Vaughan into a commercial success by recording insipid pop songs with insipid arrangements. "Make Yourself Comfortable" is a clever song, and she sings it wonderfully, but come on. Is this really the best way to utilize Sarah Vaughan? It worked, for what they were trying to do. "Broken Hearted Melody," in 1959, which Vaughan regarded as the worst record she had ever made, was her biggest seller. Fortunately, they did also let her record for EmArcy, their jazz subsidiary, where she did the great Clifford Brown sessions, and the ones with Joe Benjamin. But I digress. This is actually the second member of Sarah's trio to appear on a Prestige session in the fall of 1958. Roy (drumroll) Haynes (drumroll) had been on the Dorothy Ashby date just three weeks earlier. I wonder when John Malachi will show up? But I continue to digress.
Artie Shaw's "Lyric" joins Ellington's "Caravan," and the other three tunes are Richardson originals. I've commented before that I miss the bad puns and other plays on words in the early bebop recordings, like "Ice Cream Konitz" and "Flight of the Bopple Bee." Richardson brings the word play back with rather more sophistication on "Minorally" and "Delirious Trimmings," which I hope is not a reference to anything that anyone in the band is going through.
The album was released on New Jazz as Midnight Oil.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
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