Listening to Prestige 420: Buck Clayton - Buddy Tate

You've heard of swing-to-bop. Well, everything old is new again, and maybe this is bop-to-swing--taking some modern concepts and swinging them hard. And it's American music, right in the heart of it, drawing from blues and swing and rhythm and blues and American song to create a sound that's timeless and modern. As I've said before, these Swingville releases, with swing veterans, are not recreations of the music of the 1930s.

These guys have great swing credentials. Buck Clayton (Basie, Ellington, Goodman, Harry James) and Buddy Tate (Andy Kirk, Basie, Goodman) we've met before on Prestige, and recently.

And great credentials in general. Sir Charles Thompson (knighted by Lester Young) covered swing (Bennie Moten, Clayton, Vic Dickenson), bop (Bird, Miles), rhythm and blues (Lucky Millinder, Earl Bostic), and everything in between (Coleman Hawkins).  He co-composed the jazz standard Robbins Nest with Illinois Jacquet when he worked in the latter's band.

Gene Ramey is a long time between Prestige appearances. In the label's very early days, he played bass on a Stan Getz date. It seems odd now to think of Getz as a Prestige artist, but a lot of the label's early artists were Woody Herman alumni, and Getz filled that bill. He had a similar background to Thompson, moving from Kansas City swing (Walter Page, Jay McShann) to bebop (Bird again, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk) to those great tenor players who seemed to exist out of time (Ben Webster, Hawkins) and, like Thompson, easily moving back and forth, continuing to play with trad ensembles as well as the

moderns.

Mousie Alexander essentially worked the traditional side of the street, starting out with Jimmy McPartland (who made two 78s for Prestige--Alexander played one of them). He worked almost exclusively with traditional jazzmen (and women, an extensive stint with Marian McPartland), so I had assumed he must be the elder statesman of the bunch, but actually, born in 1922, he was a decade or more younger than the others. He did have one modern gig on his resume, with ultra-modern Lennie Tristano acolyte Lee Konitz.

Three of the tunes on the date are Clayton originals, including a tribute to the jazz Mecca where four of the five had learned their trade, "Kansas City Nights," which features inspired blowing by the two leads, and a lovely solo by Sir Charles Thompson. "When a Woman Loves a Man" is a Johnny Mercer song, and "Thou Swell" a Rodgers and Hart classic. "Can't We Be Friends," which has become a standard for jazz musicians and pop singers alike, is one of the relatively few hit tunes to be written by an investment hanker--all right, probably the only hit tune to be written by an investment banker. Lyricist "Paul James," in his banking life Paul Warburg (and a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first cabinet), was briefly married to composer Kay Swift, and collaborated with her on this tune.

The album was entitled Buck and Buddy, on Swingville. Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige Records Project - Part 5

Didn’t know Prestige had a Dixieland line? They did. Their entire 300 series of 78 RPM records was devoted to Dixieland. Of course, their entire 300 series was Prestige 301-304, and it consisted of four records by Jimmy McPartland, this session from March, 1949, and a second session September 21,1950. Both of them, appropriately, in Chicago, where Jimmy had cut his teeth as a musician, one of the

Austin High Gang of young white cats who got together to play in high school, discovered New Orleans jazz and Bix Beiderbecke, and never looked back.

Spotify doesn't have any of these sessions; YouTube has the first one, with Jmmy McPartland (cornet) Harry Lepp (trombone) Jack O'Connel (clarinet, alto saxophone) Marian Page (piano) Ben Carlton (bass) Mousie Alexander (drums). By the 1950 session, young Marian Turner, who had used the name Marian Page when she played jazz in Europe, so as not to disgrace her classical music-loving family, had taken the name of the dashing young hero of Normandy whom she had met and married in Europe when they were both playing USO shows.



"Royal Garden Blues" is a New Orleans standard written by Spencer Williams, and if traditional Dixieland was getting a little tired in 1949 (certainly Bob Weinstock must have thought so, as fast as he shut down this Dixieland line, you can't tell it from these cats. "In a Mist" is a Bix Beiderbecke composition, so one would think a natural to feature Jimmy, but Bix composed it for piano and played it on piano, so it becomes a very early showcase for Marian, and a lovely one.










Prestige 303 and 304 has an entirely different lineup, including Vic Dickenson. Well, entirely different if you count replacing Marian Page with Marian McPartland, the name she would use for the rest of her life, and make famous and beloved.