Listening to Prestige 427 - Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Johnny Griffin

Prestige hasn't gone in much for live albums, although with Bob Weinstock's spontaneous, recreating-a-jam-session philosophy, live recording would seem like a natural. But having made the decision to take the plunge with this one they went all in, and why not? Two wailing tenors and a cooking quintet at the jam session capital of the world, Minton's Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem. Four sets of music.

What would you leave out?

Nothing? That's how they felt, too. Four sets became four separate albums, two of them released in 1961, the others a few years later.

A live session may not have the optimal sound you'd get in a studio, especially Rudy Van Gelder's studio, and there aren't any do-overs--or weren't, back then. More sophisticated recording techniques made it possible to go into the studio, correct a wrong note, and splice it in. These days, I suppose you wouldn't even have to do that: you could just autotune out all the clinkers.   What balances that out, and makes a live set worth it, is the excitement that comes from playing off a live audience.

A lot of the time, that excitement is going to come from giving the audience what it wants. Perhaps the most famous description of the thrill of live jazz can be found in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the scene that has been anthologized as "Jazz of the Beat Generation." when Sal and Dean find themselves in a jazz club in Oakland, with a behatted tenor player who:

was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from "EE-yah!" to a crazier "EE-de-lee-yah!" and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bull neck who didn't care about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching hie head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor...

 Kerouac wonderfully describes an ecstatic moment, but what were Sal and Dean listening to in that club in Oakland? Not bebop, certainly. In the late 1940s, when Sal and Dean were on the road, bebop had yet to make a serious impact on the West Coast, not even in Los Angeles, where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had played a famous engagement in late 1945 and early 1946, to the enthusiastic support of fellow musicians and a few cognoscenti, most notably Ross Russell, who started the Dial record label to record Bird; But bebop hadn't really caught on, and when Sal and Dean were club-hopping in Oakland, and Bird was relaxing at Camarillo State Hospital, what were they listening to? From Kerouac's description, I'd say rhythm and blues. I've always wondered whether they might have happened in on a set by Big Jay McNeely.

The point of this is that a live set, in a live club, may not inspire the ecstasy that the behatted tenor man inspired in Dean Moriarty, but you are playing to an audience, and the music is only going to go by once. Proust says that if there are things that immediately grab you in a piece of music, you're going to go back to them over and over, and pretty soon you're going to start falling in love with other things about the same piece, and your love for it will deepen, but you'll gradually stop listening for the things that attracted you in the first place. This was true with Proust as he followed a popular composer around to his recitals in the salons of Paris; it's even more true in the era of recorded music.

Musicians working a live audience for a live recording are going to have to think of both: the effect on patrons of the club on that night, and the effect on buyers of the record. Of course, a sophisticated audience like the patrons of a New York City jazz club, especially Minton's, the birthplace of bebop, so they aren't going to be satisfied with the brutal hammering of butt-scarred drums, however bullnecked the drummer may be. But the guys on the bandstand are still likely to do well with material that the audience knows. The poet Billy Collins has described the poet as a sort of travel agent, starting the tour at a place his readers are familiar with, and taking them from there into new and unfamiliar realms. The modern jazz player may well want to do much the same thing, starting with a familiar melody -- a jazz standard, or a ballad from the Great American Songbook. Tuns that all the musicians on the gig are comfortable with, so that they know what they're doing and what they can expect from each other.

All of which is a roundabout way of noticing that this is what Griffin and Davis are doing--familiar jazz riffs like Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce," standards like "I'll Remember April"...and tunes by Thelonious Monk.

We're accustomed to think of Monk, today, as one of the great composers of the 20th century, but that reputation was slow in building. At this time, early 1961, only one jazz artist other than Monk had ever recorded an album of Monk's music (Steve Lacy, on Prestige, in 1956). So this much Monk on a series of live sets in a club suggests that his compositions are starting to be a common language not only of musicians (no surprise) but also audiences--and granted, this is Minton's, so even though it's not Minton's in 1946, it probably still has an audience closer to the cutting edge than most.

But I'm not exaggerating about how long it took for Monk's music to catch on. In the first set, Davis and Griffin perform "Epistrophy." One of Monk's classic tunes, written in 1948 it has been recorded 128 times, according to Secondhandsongs. But in 1961 it had been recorded exactly three times: by Milt Jackson in France, on a European label; by Bud Powell, on Verve; and by a group led by Art Taylor, on Blue Note.

"Well, You Needn't," the other Monk composition from the first set, had already achieved jazz standardhood, with 12 recordings by 1961, on its way to well over 200 to date. It also evoked an answer song -- common in rock and country, rare in jazz  -- "I Didn't," recorded by Miles Davis.

From the late evening sets: "In Walked Bud," written and recorded by Monk in 1948, now a jazz standard with at least 130 recordings, had been recorded exactly once before 1961, by Sam Most for Bethlehem in 1957.  And it's hard to believe that "Straight, No Chaser," now with 180 versions on record, was ever anything but a standard. It is now credited with being the second most widely recorded tune of 1951, trailing only "The Little Drummer Boy." But before the Davis-Griffin version, there had only been five others.

The jazz world would shortly see a second studio album of all Monk compositions, and we'll be looking at that before too long: it was Davis and Griffin (who had been closely associated with Monk), on Prestige.

Larry Gales and Ben Riley had close ties to Monk. They both played on the Davis-Griffin Monk album, played with Monk himself for several years, and then in 1990 made their Monk album,  A Message from Monk, with Riley as nominal leader of the group. Gales had made one previous Prestige session, with Buddy Tate and Clark Terry. Ben Riley had been the drummer on the first Davis/Griffin pairing for Prestige.

Junior Mance made his return to Prestige after a ten-year hiatus, and his Davis-Griffin association would last through their Monk album. His career as a recording artist had started in 1947 with Gene Ammons (for Aladdin). but his performing career had started earlier than that. When he was ten years old, the saxophone player who lived in the Chicago apartment above his had a gig in a local roadhouse, and had lost his piano player. He had heard Junior practicing, and asked his dad (Julian Mance Sr.) if Junior could fill in. Roadhouses in those days tended to be lax about asking for ID, but even so, one might have guessed that they would have noticed a ten-year-old. Nonetheless, he played the gig.

He went from Gene Ammons to Lester Young, with whom he learned a valuable lesson. As he told Marc Myers in a 2011 interview:

I once made a mistake while playing something. I said, “Damn.” The guys told me never to say that. They said, “Play right through it.”

As Miles Davis said, " It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong."

He was back with Ammons (and Sonny Stitt) for his first Prestige recording. As he told Myers:

Jazz in those days was always competitive and supportive. We didn’t rehearse. What you heard on those records is what those guys came up with on the spot. We’d do the same thing on stage.

 He also shared with Myers another great piece of advice he got from Jimmy Jones, when he first started working with Dinah Washington:

Look, when you’re working with a singer, imagine a portrait painting hanging in the museum. The singer is the subject of that portrait. What does the portrait need? A good frame. That’s you.

Prestige released an album called The Tenor Scene in 1961. It was the tunes from the second set of the evening, designated "the breakfast set": the Davis/George Duvivier composition "Light and Lovely." previously recorded with Arnett Cobb and Shirley Scott in 1959, "Straight, No Chaser," Dizzy Gillespie's "Woody 'n' You," Davis's "Bingo Domingo," and the standard "I'll Remember April."

In 1964, they began plans to roll out the entire performance, starting with the first set, and they titled the album The First Set. It featured the Charlie Parker tune and the two Thelonious Monk compositions: "Billie's Bounce," "Epistrophy," "Well, You Needn't." Added on, from the second set and first album, "I'll Remember April." This was followed by the third set, in an album entitled The Late Show, also in 1964.

1965 saw The Midnight Show, from the final set of the evening, followed by re-release of The Tenor Scene, this time titled The Breakfast Show, and maybe this explains the reason why the "breakfast" moniker was hung on this set.

Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.

Volume 4 is in preparation now!

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

Listening to Prestige 391: Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis / Johnny Griffin

The Davis/Griffin pairing, two intense, hard-blowing, hard-bop tenor saxophonists, is legendary among jazz aficionados, but it was surprisingly short-lived. This, their first pairing, was also their only studio album for Prestige, although an extended live recording was released on four different albums over the next several years, so the recorded output of their partnership lasted a good deal longer than the partnership, or than Griffin's tenure on this side of the Atlantic. They also recorded a few albums together for the Riverside subsidiary Jazzland, and Griffin on his own for Riverside, before the diminutive "Little Giant" of the tenor decamped for Europe. where years later they would reunite for one more session.
Johnny Griffin had made plenty of music before he got together with Mr. Jaws, starting as a student at that cradle of jazz, Chicago's DuSable High School,  where at age 15, in 1943, he was already playing in T-Bone Walker's band. Immediately after graduation, in 1945, he joined Lionel Hampton's band, which became a proving ground for many future beboppers.

Still primarily working out of Chicago, he made his first recording as leader in 1956, for the Chess subidiary Argo, after which he came to New York as a Blue Note artist, and his first Blue Note session became the first album to actually be released under his own name.

There were recordings for Riverside, and some memorable sessions with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and with Thelonious Monk, including one album with a group co-led by the two jazz giants, before Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards got him together with Davis.

This is a full-throttle session, starting with "Pull My Coat," a tune written by Richard Evans. Since there are several composers named Richard Evans, it took some digging to find the right one, but the digging was worth it, as it uncovered another fascinating jazz story of a young Chicagoan and contemporary of Griffin's, who also made his recording debut (and only album as leader) for Argo.

Let's digress a little and find out more about Evans, who grew up in Chicago in the 1940s, going to

...the Regal Theater. Later, I found out it was part of what they called the chitlin circuit. I remember being about nine years old and going there. You could watch two movies, and then watch Count Basie live, Duke Ellington live, and Fats Waller live. And we loved Fats Waller because at the end of the show, he’d take the curtain, wrap it around his belly, and shake it. [laughs] Cab Calloway was there too. I tell you this because, for some reason, we knew we were getting something special and that we were privileged to see these people live.

And if you turned on the radio, you had Al Benson, a Black disc jockey who’d play Black music. And when the Black programming was done, you’d hear Polish programming and their music. And I never turned the radio off. I listened to all kinds of stuff. I knew polkas, how they went, and how they sounded. Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw, so I absorbed a lot of Polish tunes and their distinct style. My stepfather was [actually] a farmer and began working the steel mill when the war started. When he’d make us breakfast, he’d listen to country music, so that’s how I heard country. So I had listened to jazz, the blues, Polish music, and country, and Minnie Pearl even.

As a kid, I didn’t know I was gonna grow up to be a musician. It just worked out that I came across diverse stuff when I was young. Plus, later I found out I could listen to a song once and arrange it without reading the sheet music.

Evans knew he wanted to be an artist, but he hadn't connected with music until his older brother, in a letter from Guam, told him he should be a musician, and since he idolized his older brother, he started playing the bass, because

 ...it was a quiet instrument. People could see me play it but could not really hear it, so they wouldn’t know that I wasn’t a real musician. 

But when his brother got out of the service and went to work in the steel mill, he saved up his money

and bought young Richard a bass, and then the boy knew that he couldn't let his hero down. He had to become a real musician. He went on to become a musician (with Sun Ra), composer and producer--for Cadet, which was Argo with a new name, and for whom he produced Marlena Shaw (he wrote her biggest hit, "Woman of the Ghetto"), Donny Hathaway, and Woody Herman, in spite of Leonard Chess's misgivings:

  Leonard Chess called me and said, “You signed that old fade Woody?” I told Leonard that I could still get a hit out of him. So we went to a hotel ballroom in North Chicago and rehearsed some songs. We only had four tracks: one track for reeds, one for rhythm, one for solos, and one for brass. We cut that whole album, Light My Fire, in two and a half hours. It turned out to become a Grammy-nominated album.

Another life in the jazz business. There eight million stories in the Naked City, three million stories in the Windy City, and Lord knows how many in the disapora of jazz, and they're all good. This has been one of them.

Does "Pull My Coat" reflect Evans's early Polish influence? Maybe  only the title -- "The Pull My

Coat Polka?" -- sounds like a hit for Jimmy Sturr, doesn't it? Certainly not the way Griffin and Davis play it. It's bebop you can dance to, driving and wailing and riff-driven and lyrical at the same time.

The rest of their set list is wonderfully eclectic. They go to Fletcher Henderson for the little-heard "What's Happening?", which includes a romping and stomping piano solo from Norman Simmons, and Simmons himself contributes the next number, "Abundance," which is a vehicle for a dialogue between the contrasting sounds of the two boss tenors.

"63rd Street Theme" is a Griffin original, down and dirty, with lots of room for great blowing, and you could dance to it. "Hey Jim" is solidly from the bebop era, by Babs Gonzalez and James Moody,.

And "If I Had You"is a chestnut from the 1920s by Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly,  composers of the drunkard's anthem "Show Me the Way to Go Home," and the romantic ballad "Try a Little Tenderness," co-written with Tin Pan Alley veteran Ted Shapiro. It was the last tune of the day for them, the only ballad, and the one song from the entire set that can be called a standard, with admirers in virtually every genre. Every genre? Well, in 1955 alone, it was covered by jazz singer Barbara Carroll, pop singer Margaret Whiting, avant-gardist Lennie Tristano, and country singer Rusty Draper. We've heard it recently on a Prestige session by Etta Jones. Davis and Griffin give it that classic bebop treatment of starting sweet and opening up to some wild and creative blowing, before cycling back to the head again.

The players in the rhythm section are all making their Prestige debuts. Pianist Norman Simmons was Johnny Griffin's homeboy from Chicago, and like Griffin, had made his debut as a leader for Argo in 1956. He would become probably best known as an accompanist to some of jazz's finest singers, including Betty Carter, Anita O'Day, Etta Jones and Dakota Staton, with long and fruitful collaborations with both Carmen MacRae and Joe Williams. He was also in demand as an arranger, working with Johnny Griffin's big band and others--most famously, arranging Ramsey Lewis's hit record "Wade in the Water."

Victo Sproles was also part of that Chicago gang. He and Simmons started out together, playing with Red Rodney and Ira Sullivan on an album called Modern Music from Chicago. He was part of Griffin's big band, and teamed up with Simmons behind Joe Williams.

Ben Riley played on all the Davis/Griffin sessions for Prestige and Riverside/Jazzland, and a lot more--over 300 albums to his credit. In an obituary, Michael J. West, for WBGO's web page, described his style:

His drumming was noted for understatement, and for a slightly skewed rhythmic conception that could keep the listener off balance. If these seem contradictory, it was perhaps Riley’s greatest gift that he reconciled them.

On this album, particularly on "Abundance," you can hear him doing exactly that.

Esmond Edwards produced the session, which was released on Prestige as Battle Royal. "Pull My Coat" also came out as a two-side 45 RPM disc, edited down for the jukeboxes and the dancers to feature the two saxophones--Norman Simmons's piano solo is cut.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three vokunes 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

Listening to Prestige part 154: Elmo Hope - Frank Foster

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There probably isn't any time in the troubled life of Elmo Hope that can really be described as good, but these couple of years in the mid-50s, when he recorded first for Blue Note and then for Prestige, were at least productive.

Hope's youth included a brush with the law that rings a sadly familiar bell in the context of today's headlines: young black man shot in the back by the cops.

He was 17. He was treated for a bullet that narrowly missed his spine, and when he was released from the hospital six weeks later, he became the scapegoat of the incident, as he was arrested for assault, attempted robbery and violation of the Sullivan Law . He was charged with having participated in a mugging of three whites. Hope claimed in court that he had not been involved in any way with the mugging, but had been nearby, and, like others at the scene, had started running when the police started shooting. All charges were dismissed.

He served in the army in World War II, then returned to New York, where he was part of an emerging generation of bebop musicians. One was Johnny Griffin. who reminisced to Peter Watrous of the New York Times (quoted in Wikipedia):

We'd go to Monk's house in Harlem or to Elmo's house in the Bronx, we just did a lot of playing. I played piano a bit, too, so I could hear what they were all doing harmonically. But if something stumped me, I'd ask and Elmo would spell out harmonies. We'd play Dizzy's tunes or Charlie Parker's.

This was the second of three sessions for Prestige, and it's a strong showcase for Hope as pianist, leader and composer. His originals here are "Wail, Frank, Wail" and "Yaho." "Zarou" gets co-composer credit for Hope and Foster.

Freeman Lee plays on the first three tunes; the last two are a quartet.

Lee (also known as Charles Freeman Lee) had some good gigs during the bebop/hard bop era, playing with Snooky Young (on piano), with Sonny Stitt, Joe Holiday, James Moody and others on trumpet, and as a member of a vocal group backing up Babs Gonzalez. After his music career ended, he returned to the Midwest and joined his two schoolteacher sisters, teaching junior high school science. I hope is career as a teacher was as rewarding as his music career. It certainly was for his students. Here's a tribute from a student, at the Find a Grave website:

Mr. Lee was my Science teacher. He was a great educator. This was in the 70's in Michigan City Indiana, where his sister, Mrs Mary White, also lived and taught. He was a great and famous trumpeter and played with Duke Ellington. He used to tell us stories about his jazz days. He passed away in Ohio where his other sister, the famous educator Jane Lee Ball lived.

- donna shindler 

I got interested in the sister, and I discovered that she was an educator of some note: she had a thirty year career as a professor and chair of the humanities division at Wilberforce University in Ohio And from her 2011 obituary:

As much as she loved education, Mrs. Ball enjoyed fiction and non-fiction writing as well. Despite the demands of career and family, she found time to turn her lively imagination and teaching gifts into words on paper. She wrote more than 100 articles for Salem Press, which publishes award-winning reference works, and also published five books: Toole, Arrigo, A Flea in the Ear, After the Split and ­Glorious to View — the latter two being carefully researched histories of her beloved Wilberforce University. At the time of her death, she had put the finishing touches on her memoir, Ebony Sweet, or Growing Up Colored Before Black Got Beautiful.

This was a family that gave much to the world.

Elmo Hope's life was short and painful. I don't begin to know the reasons why people become addicted to heroin, but I'm sure that masking pain must be one of the main ones. So I can't help but be struck by how much joy there is in this music. With Foster (and Lee) the joy is boisterous and celebratory. In Hope's playing, it's very close to pure and unalloyed. especially on "Zarou," but really throughout.