Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Shirley Scott gives us all we've come to expect from her, in a solid package. Original tunes, solid renditions of standards, Familiar cohorts. Major Holley played on her has album with Stanley Turrentine, and Roy Brooks has become her g0-to drummer, a fixture on her last three albums, and Horace Silver's regular drummer from 1959-64.
Scott, as always, gets all there is out of an organ, including some church licks on "Out of It." There's a reason why Prestige kept bringing her back to the studio--and they weren't the only ones. During 1963, she also recorded for Blue Note (with husband Stanley Turrentine) and for Impulse! She always delivered.
Ozzie Cadena produced, and the album was called Drag 'em Out. "Out of It" and "The Second Time Around" (written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen for a 1960 Bing Crosby movie) were the 45 RPM single.
Shirley Scott returns with a new soul collaborator and a new soulmate—her new husband, Stanley Turrentine. Turrentine was signed to Blue Note, but the two labels were friendly rivals—Blue Note’s Alfred Lion had given Bob Weinstock the push that moved him to start Prestige and get into the jazz recording business. So the two labels worked out a deal whereby the happy couple would record for both of them—Shirley as nominal leader for the Prestige sessions, Stanley for Blue Note. Both labels, of course, utilizing the genius of Rudy Van Gelder in the recording studio. Both continued to have separate careers, as well.
Married in 1960, they began collaborating in 1961, at a point where they had worked out their marital contracts, but not, apparently, their recording contracts to everyone's complete satisfaction. On their first session together, for Blue Note in June, she is listed as Little Miss Cott, with a knowing wink in the liner notes (Stanley and Little Miss Cott "really have something going. It is akin to a musical love affair") and even more knowing wink with the album's title and its title cut (Dearly Beloved). By November, when they made their first recording for Prestige, he was still listed in the session log with a pseudonym (Stan Turner) but by the time the album was released in 1962, an arrangement had been struck, and Turrentine is credited under his real name, with acknowledgment that he appears courtesy of Blue Note Records.
This session was recorded on January 10. Just over a week later, on January 18, the two of them were back in Englewood Cliffs to record for Blue Note (a short session, with two of the four tracks rejected), and in February they were back again for Blue Note.
Major Holley, who had been aboard for an early January Turrentine session with Kenny Burrell, for
Blue Note, played on the Prestige session, sat out the January 18 Blue Note session, and was back again for the February session. Scott liked to work with a bass player, which was not the case with all jazz organists--many of them preferred to take care of the bass line themselves. In fact, during this period, when the organ was becoming really popular as a jazz instrument, many bandleaders preferred to hire an organist as their keyboard player. With the bass part taken care of, it meant one less musician's salary to deal with. Holley was a recent addition to the Prestige stable, having recorded four albums with Coleman Hawkins.
The drummer on this and one more Scott-Turrentine session, but not on the Blue Note sessions, was Grassella Oliphant, a newcomer to Prestige and a new name to me--in fact, I thought at first that Scott had hired a woman drummer, but the first name was misleading. He was generally known by friends and associates as Grass, and that played nicely into the two albums he made for Atlantic as a leader, The Grass Roots and The Grass is Greener. Oliphant was a veteran by the time he hooked up with Scott and Turrentine. He had worked with Ahmad Jamal in 1952, and later with Sarah Vaughan. Vaughan praised him for his nice and easy touch with the brushes, and one imagines he probably was valued by Jamal for much the same reasons. One would not immediately seize on someone with those credentials as a soul jazz drummer, but Oliphant's contributions on this album, particularly his work on the ride cymbal, are exactly what's needed.
Oliphant worked through the 1960s and then basically retired from the jazz world to raise a family. The retirement stretched to nearly 40 years, but he picked up his career again in the new millennium, and was active until his death in 2017.
The most important name in this quartet, of course, is Stanley Turrentine. The Scott- Turrentine marriage lasted ten years, so it must have had some harmony to it, but their musical partnership was definitely harmonious. Scott was one of the pioneers of the soul jazz organ, and, with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, one of the pioneers of the organ-tenor sax combo, and as soul jazz became a more and more dominant sound in the early and middle 1960s, her partnership with Turrentine kept her right in the thick of it.
Stanley Turrentine began his career with Earl Bostic, and Bostic's bluesy lyricism was definitely an influence, but he was definitely a man of his time, with a full tenor sound and a soulful bent. All that can really be heard on "Secret Love," the movie ballad by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, popularized by Doris Day, a tune that Bostic might have recorded but didn't. Turrentine leads off with the head, full-toned and lyrical in the Bostic style, albeit a little more uptempo and with some kicking work by Oliphant. He then goes into an improvisation which keeps much of the same feeling, with some punctuation by Scott. When Scott enters, she brings what only Scott can.
I've always heard a different approach to the organ in Shirley Scott's work. The soul jazz organists, and the were an incredibly talented bunch, mostly played the organ as a keyboard instrument with special properties--which of course it was. But Scott seemed to me, more than the others, to be intrigued with finding out all the different things an organ could do. It made for an exciting blend with Davis's raunch, and it makes for an exciting blend with Turrentine's lyricism.
Much of this album is taken up with an unusual and interesting blend of standards, given the soul jazz treatment. You might not expect "Secret Love" to be all that soulful, but others have done it successfully, including a doo-wop version by the Moonglows, and Scott and Turrentine breathe soul into it. Going back a little further, they pluck a tune by Sy Oliver that was first recorded in 1941. Oliver had just been pirated from Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra by Tommy Dorsey, looking to add some serious swing to his ensemble, and in the 1941 version by Dorsey, with Oliver and Jo Stafford handling the vocals, you can hear the beginnings of soul, that would be developed in the 1950s by Della Reese, the Pilgrim Travelers, Ray Charles (especially!), Pat Boone, Kate Smith...what? OK, maybe not everyone who recorded it gave it soul. But Scott and Turrentine certainly do.
They go back to 1925 for an Irving Berlin favorite, "Remember," which was actually recorded by Earl Bostic in 1955, when Turrentine was in the band (he had replaced John Coltrane). Bostic's version gives him a chance to show his raunchy rhythm and blues side, and Turrentine and Scott take it from there.
They pay homage Wild Bill Davis, the pioneer of soul jazz organ and an early influence on Scott.
But they reach their soul summit on this album with two Turrentine originals, "The Soul is Willing" and "I Feel All Right." I wonder if they had originally been planning to make 45 RPM single releases out of the two recent chart hits, "Secret Love" and "Yes Indeed." Maybe they did, and maybe "The Soul is Willing" and "I Feel All Right" were just so damn soulful that nothing else would do. Anyway those were the two 45s, and each of them two-sided, Parts 1 and 2, so nothing needed to be edited down.
The Soul is Willing was the name of the album. Ozzie Cadena produced.
This is Coleman Hawkins' swan song to Prestige, and it's hard to imagine a better way to go than with Kenny Burrell. I've written extensively about both of them, and there's not much more to add, except that they mesh, and make beautiful musical together.
Hawkins comes in about halfway through the session, and is featured on"Montono Blues," "I Thought About You," "Las Palabras," and "It's Getting Dark."
The album is about evenly divided between standards and Burrell compositions, with one interesting choice--a tune that would become a standard of the jazz repertoire, but was only just being introduced. "Tres Palabras," by Cuban composer Osvaldo Farrés, had first been recorded in Cuba in 1943, but had never had a norteamericano rendition until 1962, when two things happened, probably unrelated.
First, Farrés and his wife left what had become Fidel Castro's island, never to return. They settled in New York, where they became known to the New York music community--Cuban-born Chico O'Farrill, long a part of the New York music scene, was already an admirer, having record "Las Palabras" in 1958. But also in 1962, on the West Coast, Nat "King" Cole was making his third album of Spanish-language songs. More Cole Español. Cole was already an admirer of Farrés--two of his songs had been featured on 1958's Cole Español.
Cole's vocal version (followed not long after by Johnny Mathis) and Burrell/Hawkins' jazz take brought "Las Palabras" to the attention of mainland artists, and it became a standard, recorded by many--Bill Perkins, Tete Montoliu, Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson, to name a few. Whatever Burrell's reason for recording it. the promotions depart of Prestige knew how to promote it--if not to spell it. The album cover heralds "a new BOSSA NOVA - Tres Talbras." The liner notes on the back also give the tune as "Tres Talbas," but the label on the disc itself has the name correct.
The liner notes, by Robert Levin, also give a little plug to the Prestige philosophy of recording. After recounting how, on "Montono Blues, Hawkins
padded over to his recording position in a deceptively disinclined manner after the take was already underway, seated himself next to Burrell and, after Holley's bowed solo, got a nod from Burrell to begin his own...
Levin offers this observation:
Casual jazz sessions such as this frequently produce music of greater and more durable quality than do sessions of extensive preparation and lofty design.
Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley and Eddie Locke were Hawkins' regular group in these days. Flanagan had also been a member of teenager Burrell's first group, back in Detroit. Ray Barretto, perhaps added for the Latin numbers, is always an asset in any context.
Bluesy Burrell was a Moodsville release. "Out Of This World / Montono Blues" and "I Thought About You / It's Getting Dark" were the two 45 RPM singles. The album was re-released on Prestige in 1968 Ozzie Cadena produced.
The folks at Prestige took the rest of July and half of August off, returning with this Moodsville session.
When one thinks of the Prestige subsidiary labels of the early 1960s, one is more likely to extol the virtues and the contributions to the library of recorded jazz made by Swingville and Bluesville. But let us not forget Moodsville and its contributions. Mood music? That's generally sort of a putdown, but all music has the power to affect our moods, and as producer Chris Albertson has asserted, the music that was released on Bluesville was held to the same standards as all Prestige albums.
Coleman Hawkins made recordings for both Swingville and Moodsville, and one can only be grateful for any album made by Coleman Hawkins, still at the top of his form in 1962 and still prolific. In that year he recorded two albums for Verve (both live appearances at New York's Village Gate), three albums for Impulse!, including the widely celebrated Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, and three albums for Moodsville, all of them Broadway show tunes.
No problem with that as a unifying theme. Most of the classic songs from the Great American Songbook were written for musical shows, either Broadway or Hollywood. and if by 1962 the greatest era of the Broadway musical was fast fading, it wasn't quite gone yet, and some very good composers were still creating music for the Great White Way. The title song is from a modestly successful musical of two years earlier (the full title of the album is Coleman Hawkins Plays Make Someone Happy from Do Re Mi), which featured music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Betty Comden and
Adolph Green. "Make Someone Happy" was the hit from the show; Hawkins and Co. include a second song from Do Re Mi, perhaps to justify the album title, perhaps because it really is an overlooked gem from a master tunesmith. And when I say overlooked, I mean overlooked--the Hawk's is the only jazz instrumental version of "Cry Like the Wind." June Christie recorded it, and so did Margaret Whiting and Mel Torme, but beyond that, not much of anything. Too bad--it deserves better. But at least we have this one.
A brand new musical, just opened in the spring of 1962, provided another song. The musical was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, music and lyrics by Harold Rome, and if Hawkins and Esmond Edwards were guessing at what might be the hit from the show, they guessed wrong with "Have I Told You Lately?" If anyone else has ever recorded it, I haven't been able to find it. In fact, there weren't really any breakout hits from I Can Get It for You Wholesale, but there was a breakout performer--teenaged Barbra Streisand, in her first Broadway role.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying had opened a few months earlier, in late 1961, and "I Believe in You" had established itself as the hit song from the show.
For the rest of the album, they went back to earlier mega-hits--Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music--all good stuff, all wonderfully done here, particularly "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," in which the melody is played by Major Holley on bass.
Holley, Tommy Flanagan and Eddie Locke were Hawkins's regular touring group in these days, and had backed him on the other two Broadway albums for Moodsville.
Coleman Hawkins died in 1969, and made his last recording (fittingly called The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World) in 1967, so this was pretty much the stretch run for the Hawk, but he was prodigiously productive. In 1962 alone he recorded eight albums as leader: three for Prestige, two for Verve, and three for Impulse! He also appeared on albums by Kenny Burrell and Shelly Manne. I doubt that there are many jazz musicians who can approach that level of productivity
This is the second of his Prestige outings, like the first one a Moodsville venture, and like the first focused on the Broadway musical. However, while the first (Good Old Broadway, recorded January 2)
featured familiar and beloved tunes from Broadway's storied past, this one focused on a recently opened show, No Strings, with a score by Richard Rodgers which produced no memorable songs at all.
That's a little unfair. Rodgers had not declined as a composer, but the era of Broadway show tunes becoming hit songs was over. While Broadway-to-Top-Forty had still been a common occurrence in the 1950s -- "Hernando's Hideaway," "Hey There," etc. There were crooners like Eddie Fisher and Patti Page and the Ames Brothers still regularly making the charts in those days, and even a rare Rogers and Hammerstein flop, Pipe Dream, could yield a Billboard chart hit with Fisher's version of "Everybody's Got a Home but Me."
By comparison, 1962 saw two successful musicals, No Strings and Stop the World--I Want to Get Off, and one smash hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the three of them together produced one song, Sammy Davis Jr.'s "What Kind of Fool Am I?" that even dented the charts.
No Strings not only produced no hits, but except for "The Sweetest Sounds," which got a boost from being recycled into the television musical Cinderella, there have been precious few recordings of any of the songs beyond original cast albums, and except for "Sweetest Sounds" and "Loads of Love," which were included on an Original Jazz Classics double CD called Coleman Hawkins -- On Broadway, none of these songs has had an afterlife in the reissue world.
Which doesn't make them bad songs. and doesn't make this any less of a musically satisfying outing from Hawkins and his musicians. It just means you're not likely to find it anywhere, except for YouTube, which seems to manage to find everything,
When you record ten albums in a year, and over two dozen in what is supposed to be your twilight years, a decade that you are supposed to be at best a footnote to, some of the music is going to get lost in the shuffle, even though it has every right to be heard and appreciated. So it's good to dust this one off, and the rewards are there for the listening.
The album was recorded in two sessions, on March 30 and again on April 3, and I suspect that might have been unintended. The March 30 session ends with a version of "Maine" that is marked in the session log as "Rejected by Prestige," and the April 3 session begins with "Maine," so something must have happened to make them cut the first session short.
No Strings was the first show for which Rodgers wrote both music and lyrics. Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley and Eddie Locke had appeared on Hawkins's previous Broadway album for Prestige Moodsville, and they were his regular working band during those days. The album, The Jazz Version of No Strings, was a Moodsville release. Esmond Edwards produced.
This Moodsville collection finds Coleman Hawkins bringing the Hawkins touch to Broadway, and a collection of show tunes plucked from, for the most part, not the most obvious of sources, but from some very good composers, and, given Hawkins's ear and chops. some very good results.
Sigmund Romberg. composer of old-fashioned operettas, seems an unlikely source for jazz inspiration, but he's proved surprisingly fertile, particularly from The New Moon, his final Broadway production, in 1928. "Lover, Come Back" has proved an enduring standard, and "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise" has been nearly as popular an inspiration. The other best known composition from The New Moon is "Stout Hearted Men," and it would take indeed a stout
hearted jazzman to try to make something out of that one. "Wanting You" has been pretty nearly completely passed over. Roger Williams, not exactly a jazz pianist (although he did study with Lennie Tristano and Teddy Wilson) recorded it, as did Mario Lanza, who drew much of his repertoire from operetta. And no one else.
Except Coleman Hawkins, and he makes you wonder why it hasn't found more champions. It's a very good melody, and Hawkins finds all the right ways of developing it.
Another lightly recorded song from a powerful composer is Kurt Weill's "Here I'll Stay" from a 1948 musical, Love Life, which had a not-terrible run on Broadway in 1948-49, 252 performances. It sounds as though it would have been worth seeing. Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Elia Kazan (who knew he directed musicals?), choreography by Michael Kidd. And an intriguing plot: a couple get married in 1791 and stay married through 1948, during which time they never age, but undergo marital differences that reflect different times and mores.
"Here I'll Stay" was the most successful song from the show, unless you count the number that Lerner reworked, with new music by Frederick Loewe, for the 1958 movie Gigi -- "I Remember it Well." And it's had a modest but continuing life as a vehicle for pop singers, but no jazz artist had ever taken it on between its inception in 1948 and this 1962 recording. Gerry Mulligan must have liked what he heard from the Hawk, because he recorded it in 1963, after which it mostly fell back into jazz oblivion.
Most of the rest of the tunes were recognizable standards, as befits a tribute to Broadway, although one is a ringer -- the Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin "The Man that Got Away," from the movie A Star is Born.
This was an exciting time for jazz, with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy--tremendously exciting to hear sounds that pushed the envelope, that took music to places it had never been before. But there's always a place for great old tunes, played by a master. Two masters, as Tommy Flanagan takes the piano chair for the date.
And we have two newcomers to Prestige, both seasoned veterans from the jazz cauldron of Detroit. Major Holley was an instrumental prodigy from a musical household and a graduate of Cass Technical High School, which bred so many jazz greats. Holley took up the bass in the Navy, then jumped right into the mainstream of jazz upon his return to
civilian life, playing with Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald, doing duets with Oscar Peterson, The 1950s were an expat time for him, but not Paris or Sweden like many others: he moved to London, where he worked at the BBC for a few years before returning to America. Though he developed a trademark sound of vocalizing along with a bowed bass (a style pioneered by Slam Stewart), he was also much in demand because he could work as an asset to any musicians in any situation. As he put it,
When I was in Duke Ellington’s band, I sounded like Duke’s bass players. I remained applicable to the circumstances of where I was - whether it was Coleman Hawkins or a Broadway show or Judy Collins.″
Eddie Locke came to New York in 1954, worked with a number of swing and trad musicians, became a protégé of Jo Jones, then joined Roy Eldridge in 1959. His associations with Eldridge and Hawkins are what he is best known for, as he, Flanagan and Holley became Hawkins's regular partners for the next several years, after which Locke returned to work again with Eldridge.
Esmond Edwards produced Good Old Broadway for Moodsville.
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