Listening to Prestige 600: Gildo Mahones

LISTEN TO ONE: Water Blues Fall

 Gildo Mahones would certainly vie for the dubious distinction of being the most overlooked of the great bebop pioneers, but he was there, and making his mark. In 1949, which was a little after the legendary jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse which birthed bebop, but at a time when Minton's sessions were still a vital creative force in the jazz world, Mahones became the pianist in the club's house trio, joining Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke. 

It was heady company for a 20-year-old, providing the accompaniment for whoever got up on the stand, from the veteran lords of jazz like Charlie

Parker and Coleman Hawkins to rising stars like Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. It was "fast company, and I was trying to get it together," Mahones recalled in a 2013 interview with Berkeleyside, a Bay Area alternative newspaper:

I was learning something new every day. They’d start calling songs I’d never heard of and I’d go home every night and woodshed.

That's how jazz masters are made, and Mahones absorbed the lesson well. That trio, in addition to providing the underpinning for the after hours jam sessions, also formed part of a sextet in their upstairs room with Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, and Jesse Drakes.

By the time, nearly a decade and a half later, that he became one of the Prestige regulars, he had compiled a resume that any musician would be proud of, even if he never got the name recognition to go with it. He had worked with Joe Morris's rhythm and blues ensemble. Drakes, who worked a lot with Lester Young, brought Mahones into Young's group. He recalled, in an interview for the liner notes to I'm Shooting High:

Working from 1953 to 1957 with Lester was like going to school every night. It was really wonderful. At that time the group consisted of Lester Young, Jesse Drakes, Connie Kay and John Ore.

Working with Les Jazz Modes (Julius Watkins and Charlie Rouse) followed. It was a new sounding group trying something quite different and was not publicly accepted at the time. Maybe it could stand a better chance at the present time. After a few years with the Modes, I did a short stretch with Benny Green. It was on this job that I met Ike Isaacs and it was through Ike that I met Lambert, Hendricks and Ross who I have been working with since that time.

Lester Young took some getting used to. In his Berkeleyside interview, Mahones recalled:

He’d start calling songs, but he had a different title for every song. I didn’t know what he was talking with. Connie Kay had to translate.

Mahones made his Prestige debut in December 1962 with Ted Curson, and also worked with Willis Jackson, Frank Wess, Jimmy Witherspoon and Pony Poindexter. He had made a brief debut as a leader back in February of 1963, a brief session with Larry Young, George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, all of whom had been booked for an Etta Jones date which featured a different piano player. Perhaps Mahones was in the studio that day for some other reason, and they wrapped up the Jones session early and decided to give him a shot. Who knows, at this late date? Anyway, they cut three tunes, one of which was never released. The other two ended up on the album which resulted from these next two sessions, both also short, one in August and the other in September. Two of the August songs were discarded, although one eventually made it onto a Kenny Burrell reissue on Original Classics.

The tunes are mostly standards, with two Mahones originals. "Standards" in 1963 still mostly meant the tunes that have come to be identified as the Great American Songbook, with some songs from more recent Broadway musicals thrown in. The new songwriters who were to shape popular music so significantly in the 1960s had mostly not come onto the radar of the jazz community, but Mahones includes a number by Gerry Goffin and Carole King ("Hey Girl"). His "Stormy Monday Blues" is not the familiar one written by T-Bone Walker, but a completely different song written by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, originally recorded by Hines in 1942, and later, in 1959, by Eckstine with Count Basie. The lyrics to Eckstine's version don't actually mention stormy Monday at all. 

George Tucker and Jimmie Smith, Etta Jones's rhythm section who stayed on to work with Mahones and Larry Young for the February 4 session, are back with him for both the August and September sessions. Kenny Burrell and Leo Wright were there on August 15, but since two of their tunes were not included, and they were not included on "Hey Girl," which featured a vocal, they are really only on one track, "Tales of Brooklyn," making this essentially a trio album. "Hey Girl" is sung by newcomer Ozzie Beck, for whom I can find no other recording credits.

I'm Shooting High was to be Mahones' debut album, apparently on New Jazz, but this was around the time that Bob Weinstock folded New Jazz. The album was released in 1964 on Prestige's short-lived 16000 series, and this may have been a sort of afterthought, because by then a new album, The Great Gildo, was in the works, and when it was released as a double album, five songs from I'm Shooting High were also put on The Great Gildo. So whether much of anyone actually heard I'm Shooting High seems an open question.

"Hey Girl" was released as a 45 RPM single, along with "Bali Ha'i" from a later session.

Ozzie Cadena produced all the sessions.

'

Listening to Prestige 590: Jimmy Witherspoon

LISTEN TO ONE: Lonely Boy Blues

 Ah, what says the blues like a song by Mack David ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo") and Jerry Livingston ("Mr. Ed"), written for Teresa Brewer to sing in Those Redheads from Seattle? And in fact, when Jimmy Witherspoon gets through with David and Livingston's "Baby, Baby, Baby," it would be scarcely recognizable by any redhead from Seattle, or, most likely, by the composers. Witherspoon was the real thing as a blues singer, but he was also eclectic. Even in the rhythm and blues decade of the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, he performed largely with jazz musicians, and for jazz audiences. How many other blues singers started their careers in Calcutta, India?

Witherspoon had left his home in Arkansas as a teenager, for Los Angeles and the music scene on Central Avenue, where he became a protege of Big Joe Turner, and hung out with jazzmen like Buddy Colette, who remembers that whenever Witherspoon sat in with his group, the audiences loved him. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and in 1941 he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. As a cook--this was still the pre-Harry Truman segregated armed forces. The sea led him to south Asia, where he would meet up with Teddy Weatherford.

Like many African American musicians of his era, Weatherford went the expatriate to Europe, settling first in Amsterdam. Like very few others, he didn't stop there, but continued on to Asia, where joined the band of another peripatetic expatriate, Crickett Smith, then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, where he led his own bands (Smith was now playing for him), and developed a sufficient reputation that he was tapped to make wartime broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. It was on these broadcasts that young Witherspoon got his first exposure. Weatherford, a wonderful piano player and bandleader, never got a chance to develop the reputation he deserved, dying in Calcutta in 1945 at the age of 41.

Witherspoon did return to the USA, and the West Coast, after the war, where he became a regular feature of Cavalcade of Jazz, an annual all-star jazz festival held in Los Angeles. He performed as part of the Cavalcade in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1952. 

This outing for Prestige was Witherspoon's first foray into East Coast jazz. His most recent recordings had been for Frank Sinatra's Reprise label,  where he made a record of mostly jazz standards Teddy Edwards and Gerald Wiggins, then a record of blues standards with Ben Webster; and before that with the Bihari brothers' Crown, one of the West Coast's premiere rhythm and blues labels. 

Bob Weinstock and Ozzie Cadena gave him a first-rate lineup of jazz musicians. Leo Wright had distinguished himself on two previous outings for the label, with Dave Pike and Jack McDuff. Gildo Mahones was fast becoming one of Prestige's go-to session musicians, and would record a couple of albums as leader on the label; so was Jimmie Smith. George Tucker had already established himself. And it's hard to heap more praise on Kenny Burrell.

And an eclectic lineup of tunes, tilting toward rhythm and blues. Duke Ellington wrote "Rocks in My Bed," but it's most closely associated with blues shouter Big Joe Turner, who made the original recording with boogie woogie piano player Freddie Slack. 'Bad Bad Whiskey" and "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" were both hits for Amos Milburn, the former penned by Milburn, the latter by Rudy Toombs, one of the key songwriters for Atlantic Records as the label rose to rhythm and blues supremacy. "Mean Old Frisco" came from another rhythm and blues great, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. All of them find the Prestige jazzmen playing that fine R&B behind 'Spoon's hard driving vocals.

Two other blues traditions come front and center with "Sail on, Little Girl, Sail On" and "Lonely Boy Blues." The former comes from traditional Piedmont blues singer Amos (Bumble Bee Slim) Easton, and Witherspoon gives it a heartfelt traditional treatment, with Gildo Mahones providing the appropriate backing. The latter comes from Kansas City swingmaster Jay McShann and his vocalist Walter Brown. It's a twelve bar blues, and Leo Wright's alto winds in and out and around Witherspoon's vocal. The traditional twelve bar form is also heard on 'Spoon's own "Blues and Trouble," with everyone in the band getting a piece of the action.

Prestige filled out the LP with four cuts from a later session back in Witherspoon's old West Coast stomping grounds, under the guiding hand of David Axelrod, who had just begun producing records for Capitol, where he nudged the label in the direction of more black artists, scoring hits for Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderley (he produced "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy") among others. With some excellent West Coast jazz musicians, they did two Witherspoon originals, a traditional blues, and one outlier, the rockabilly hit "Endless Sleep," a tune which Witherspoon had apparently liked enough to record a few years earlier for a smaller rhythm and blues label.

Most of the West Coasters are off Prestige's normal radar. Bobby Bryant did appear on a 1960 Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis release. Ernie Freeman was the best-known of the group. He boasted a master's degree in music composition from the University of Southern California, and a trunkful of credits as pianist, arranger and bandleader, mostly in the rhythm and blues field. Jimmy Bond was another conservatory trained musician (Juilliard), with extensive jazz credits on the East Coast, who moved to California in 1959 and built a second career there, both as a jazz musician and as a member of the Wrecking Crew, the session musicians who crafted the West Coast rock sound of the 1960s. Arthur Wright was one of the leading West Coast session musicians for blues and R&B, mostly as a guitarist. It's not clear whether Jimmy Miller is the same drummer/arranger who contributed a great deal to the Rolling Stones sound in the late 1960s.

Ozzie Cadena produced the East Coast session. The redheads from Seattle got the album's title, Baby, Baby, Baby, and that was also one of the 45 RPM singles, with "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" on the flip side. "Mean Old Frisco" / "Sail on Little Girl" also got a single release.

Listening to Prestige 578: Dave Pike

 Dave Pike continues his south of the border explorations, this time moving to the Caribbean. The calypso craze of Harry Belafonte and the Tarriers and even Robert Mitchum, who recorded a calypso album in 1957, had passed its zenith, but Latin dances were still enough of a thing that everyone was looking for a new one to follow the mambo and the conga line and the cha cha and the bossa nova, and even though Trinidadian calypso wasn't exactly Latin, it was close enough for pop culture (there had even been a "cha-lypso" -"When the records start a spinnin', do cha-lypso while you chicken at the hop"), so 1962 saw Chubby Checker, who had ridden the crest of the most popular dance craze of all, hitting the charts with "Limbo Rock."

Dave Pike had captured some attention with his Bossa Nova Carnival album, so why not go after the same lightning again--and again with fledgling producer Eliot Mazer? There was certainly some commercial consideration here. Chubby

LISTEN TO ONE: My Little Suede Shoes

Checker's "Limbo Rock" is covered, as are "Matilda" and "Jamaica Farewell," two of the most popular songs from Harry Belafonte's Calypso album, then regarded as the most popular LP record of all time, and still up among the contenders. Mexican-American Richie Valens's hit "La Bamba" is included, as is Nat "King" Cole's semi-hit "Calypso Blues." Sonny Rollins is represented by "St. Thomas," one of the calypso melodies he would make his own, and "Mambo Bounce," which had been a 78 RPM single for Rollins off an early Prestige session. And four songs from Pike's session became 45 RPM singles.

But "commercial consideration" just means choosing and playing songs that people like, and there's nothing wrong with that, if the musicians come to play, and put their full virtuosic dexterity and creative energy into the project, which is what happens here. 

"Limbo Rock" isn't the most subtle of melodies, but with Willie Bobo and Ray Barretto handling the percussion, it's lively and fun to listen to. Throughout the session, Pike alternates between vibes and marimbas -- he chose the marimbas, he explained to Juliet Lorca, who wrote the liner notes for the album, because they have a sound that's close to Trinidad's steel drums.

On the other extreme, there's Charlie Parker's "My Little Suede Shoes." Some have theorized that Parker adapted the melody from a Caribbean folk tune--Juliet Lorca suggests as much in the liner notes--but it's more likely a mashup of two French pop songs which Bird heard on a 1950 trip to Paris. One of the songs, ""Le Petit Cireur Noir," has a lyric about shoeshine man who hates suede shoes because everyone is wearing them and he's being put out of business. But then he finds a wallet stuffed with cash, buys his own shoe store, and gets rich selling suede shoes. There's no mention as to whether any of them are blue. Parker's melody--recorded with Luis Miranda on bongos and Jose Mangual on congas--is wonderfully catchy, and full of island spirit. It's a perfect choice for Dave Pike and his group, and it's a can't miss recording.

If "Limbo Rock" and "My Little Suede Shoes" are miles apart musically, they're also some distance apart in terms of orchestration. The percussionists remain, but the rest of the band -- Leo Wright on reeds and Jimmy Raney on guitar--are gone. Tommy Flanagan moves in on piano, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik replaces George Duvivier on bass.

Dave Pike was, of course, not Latin himself, and he would not remain on a Latin kick. His next album (and the last for Prestige) would go in a markedly different direction, and the rest of his career, lasting throughout the rest of the century, would take some remarkable twists and turns, through free jazz, acid jazz, funk and psychedelia. So is this cultural appropriation? That was, of course, a concept that would not be named or defined for many decades to come. Dave Pike isn't Machito or Tito Puente, but nobody is. He did turn the spotlight on a wonderful and little-known (in the States) Brazilian composer on the first album, and he has a lot of fun with some pop songs and a great Charlie Parker composition, and to quote Paul McCartney, "What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?"

"Jamaica Farewell" / "Limbo Rock" was the first single, and "La Bamba" / "My Little Suede Shoes" was the second. The album, on New Jazz (a little surprisingly--I'd thought of New Jazz as primarily a home for the less commercial fare) was called Limbo Carnival.

He would spend much of his career in Europe, not so unusual for a jazz musician, a little more unusual for a white jazz musician.

Listening to Prestige 571: Brother Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: He's a Real Gone Guy

This is the first time that Jack McDuff is identified on the record label and sleeve with the sobriquet he was to use for the rest of his career. He's Brother Jack McDuff, and he's pulling out all the stops on that powerful church organ sound to make music that is pure funkadelic--screamin' that funky music, as the album's title suggests.

This time he has Kenny Burrell as the other half of that now-popular guitar-organ sound. Joe Dukes, his regular drummer, is on board, and they are joined by Leo Wright, a Texas-born player who had begun making a name for himself in the orchestras of Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie, and who had also recorded with Burrell. Wright would do some

good work in the early 1960s, including a few more sessions with Prestige. He also made records on Impulse!, Verve and Blue Note, before decamping for Europe, where he took the expatriate route. It meant that he's now not much remembered except by the most encyclopedic jazz fans, but who's to say he was wrong? Red Garland went back home to Texas out of a feeling that rock had taken over the American consciousness, but he had already established a major reputation. Wright probably made a living in Europe that he would not have been able to equal here, unless he did what a number of musicians did, playing with Dixieland bands at Disney World, or got regular Broadway show pit work like Wendell Marshall.

There were a number of guitarists, like Thornel Schwartz, who made a specialty out of playing in organ-guitar combos, and Burrell certainly isn't one of them. He plays Kenny Burrell guitar alongside the screamin' funk of McDuff and Wright, and makes it work--jazz is probably unparalleled in its

hospitability to unlikely combinations of musicians.

McDuff plays two originals and four standards: Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump," Avery Parrish's "After Hours," and two songs most vividly associated with singers. Lots and lots of people of singers have covered "I Cover the Waterfront," but no one quite like Billie Holiday. Nellie Lutcher wrote and performed "He's a Real Gone Guy," and while hardly any singers have covered Lutcher's original, the tune has had some popularity with jazz instrumentalists.

McDuff and his group cover a lot of stylistic ground here, but they really nail it with the flat-out screamin' of the title, and the best screamin' numbers are "One O'Clock Jump" and "He's a Real Gone Guy."

Screamin' was a Prestige release, Ozzie Cadena producing. "He's a Real Gone Guy," parts 1 and 2, was the first 45 RPM single, followed by "Screamin'" b/w "Somethin' Slick," from McDuff's next session.