Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Jimmy Grissom is not the first name that springs to mind when one thinks of jazz vocalists, but he had an active career that spanned a good decade and a half from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and even included -- sort of -- one of the most important live performances of the era to be captured on record -- Duke Ellington's 1956 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Sort of, because of course Grissom is not on the famous Ellington at Newport LP. But, as we now know, that LP wasn't exactly Ellington at Newport. The Duke was not completely satisfied with the Festival suite, and elected to redo it in the studio. The actual live concert was pieced together from various tapes and issued as a 1999 CD release, and Grissom is on that version, singing the Rube Bloom / Johnny Mercer standard, "Day In, Day Out."
Duke Ellington was not known for working with the A-list vocalists of his day. Although he wrote some of the greatest songs in the Great American Songbook, his focus was always on his orchestra and its extraordinary soloists, and the singers were secondary. Nonetheless, you didn't get hired by Ellington without being very good.
Grissom, the nephew of Jimmie Lunceford vocalist Dan Grissom, performed and recorded around the Los Angeles area starting in the late 1940s, appearing on various independent rhythm and blues labels. He had a minor hit with "Once There Lived a Fool," written by Jessie Mae Robinson, an underappreciated (but widely recorded) songwriter. "Once There Lived a Fool" was covered by Jimmy Witherspoon, Charles Brown, Savannah Churchill, and later Tony Bennett and Dakota Staton.
He joined Ellington in 1953, and was with him through the Newport concert. He only made a few recordings after that, and his Prestige association was a brief one. It would seem that Bob Weinstock and Co. had initial high hopes for him, putting him together with Oliver Nelson, and it would also seem that they changed their minds rather quickly. They only cut four songs on this date. Two of them were released as a 45 RPM single, the other two were shelved, which seems a shame. One of the shelved songs, "Get Yourself Another Fool." is a lovely blues ballad, recorded by a number of first rate performers, including Charles Brown, Sam Cooke, and even Paul McCartney.
Nelson brought along Hank Jones, Wendell Marshall and Ed Shaughnessy, all of whom he had worked with often, and a string section, and organist Dick Hyman, an unusual choice. Hyman was a keyboard wizard who could play in nearly any style, but one that he was rarely accustomed to was the trendy soul jazz style of the moment, and in fact he stays away from that genre here, working in a more mainstream style, providing fills and swirls around the complex rhythmic patterns laid down by Marshall and Shaughnessy. All of this takes just over two minutes, backing up Grissom's rhythm and bluesy ballad vocal. It's on the short side even for a pop single, and it's hard not to wonder if there wasn't a more extended LP-intended version somewhere, edited down for 45 RPM release. Why else call in Oliver Nelson and a rhythm section as gifted as Jones, Marshall and Shaughnessy, and strings, and especially why else bring in Dick Hyman? Weinstock and Esmond Edwards (I'm guessing -- no producer credit here) must have had something different in mind, and maybe they decided it was too different (why put an organ on a record in 1962 if you're not going for the soul sound?) or not different enough. Grissom's delivery is excellent, but maybe they decided it was too 1950s, and it wasn't going to make a dent in the new market of the Kennedy era. If only they had known. Within a year, the Kennedy era was over, and a group of rock and rollers from England were going to change everything about what music was listened to, and how it was listened to.
So there's just this one single. And it's good. And worth a listen.
LISTEN TO ONE: Experiment in Terror Soft Summer Breeze
An abbreviated session for Jimmy Forrest: three tracks to be added to some leftovers from earlier sessions and released in 1962 as Soul Street. You wouldn't think they'd bring in Oliver Nelson and a nine-piece band for a few add-ons to an album by a less than A-list musician (in marquee recognition, not in quality), but they did, and we are the richer for it.
Maybe Weinstock and Edwards decided, "Hey, look what we did with Oliver Nelson and those songs from All American! Let's see what he can do with some even less promising material."
Maybe, and maybe not. There's only one really unlikely tune. Eddie Heywood's "Soft Summer Breeze" never became the jazz standard it might have, but it's a pretty tune, and quickly recognizable. Duke Ellington is always a good choice, and "Just a-Sittin' and a-Rockin'" is good solid Ellington.
Henry Mancini's "Experiment in Terror" is the odd choice, and liner notesmith Dan Morgenstern seems a little embarrassed by it:
Jimmy gives the rather slight melody more breadth and depth than this Mancini-made slickie really deserves.
"Experiment in Terror" hasn't made the cut as one of Mancini's major works, certainly, but it's an interesting tune, and it's had an interesting, if slight, history. Its 12 interpretations (per Secondhandsongs) suggest that this little ditty had something for everyone, or else that no one could quite decide what to make of it.
Experiment in Terror was a Hollywood thriller, and Mancini's orchestral version for the soundtrack came out as an album of music from the movie. Every cut on the album is jukebox-lengthed two to three minutes, though none of them took the jukeboxes by storm. The melody has a spooky quality, befitting the title, and it also also has a walking bass line, befitting Mancini. Subsequent renditions took it one
way or another, but Mancini had it both ways, a walking bass under swelling strings, at a stately, spooky pace.
It was next taken up by rock and roll instrumentalists the Champs, still looking for a followup to their big hit "Tequila," and in 1962 having added two young musicians named Seals and Crofts, who would go on to make their own name. The Champs went all out Peter Gunn, walking it hard and picking up the tempo.
And still in 1962, Oliver Nelson and Jimmy Forrest. Here the walking bass part is assigned to guitarist Mundell Lowe, and the rhythm starts to swing, and it's very easy to forget that one started out to do a survey of curious versions of this song, and simply get caught up in what these wonderful musicians do with it. The swelling strings are replaced by brass and reeds, and Jimmy Forrest's saxophone gives the rather slight slickie a reading that reminds you that this is Henry Mancini, and he did know how to write a melody. This is a very satisfying outing.
1963 saw terror move to the elevator with versions by Spanish orchestra leader Fernando Orteu and the Living Strings. Then dormant until the 1990s. when it was taken up by La Muerta, a Belgian band who specialized in music for "those abandoned by love or devoid of hope," unsurprisingly a version that emphasized the spooky elements. It was then taken up by surf rockers and pop rockers who also chose spooky over rhythmic. Most recently, contemporary jazzer Ted Nash gave it the Earl Bostic "Harlem Nocturne" treatment. Eclectic instrumentalists Reverend Organdrum returned it to the Peter Gunn sound (with organ and drum doing the walking part), and so did eclectic guitarist Al Caiola.
Maybe if more people had listened to the Jimmy Forrest version, the tune would have become more widely recorded. For one thing, it's the only collaboration I know of between the talents of Henry Mancini and Oliver Nelson.
And it has the guitar work of Mundell Lowe, in his only Prestige session. Lowe is associated more with the West Coast, but actually he was an Easterner until 1965, and recorded frequently for Riverside. Before that, interestingly for such a sophisticated stylist, he was a 16-year-old member of the Grand Ole Opry house band (not an easy gig to get in the city known as Guitar Town). A tour of duty in the army during WWII led to a friendship with John Hammond, who steered him toward jazz.
"Experiment in Terror" was the B side of a 45 RPM Prestige release, the popular "Soft Summer Breeze" on top. And all three tunes became part of Soul Street, a 1962 release on New Jazz.
Was the world really panting for a jazz version of All American? They hadn't exactly been panting for the original version of All American. The musical by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who had hit it big with Bye Bye Birdie, ran for 80 performances on Broadway, panned by critics and unloved by audiences. An account of the show's history in Wikipedia is a compendium of wrong moves.
First, the show's producers hired Mel Brooks to write the book, which doesn't sound like a bad idea, except that Brooks was then young and inexperienced. He'd had some success as a TV gag
writer, but didn't know much about writing a play. For one thing, he discovered, plays are longer than sketches for Your Show of Shows, and you had to sustain momentum all the way through them. This proved too much for Brooks to handle, and he gave up when he discovered that after you'd finished the first act, you had to write a second act. So the producers brought in Joshua Logan, who had lots of experience as a successful Broadway director and script doctor, but not so much with the kind of broad sketch comedy favored by Brooks, so the second act ended up not exactly meshing with the first act. Then the producers, sensing trouble, brought in a star--Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and a veteran Broadway star. So the script was rewritten around Bolger, which might have been a good idea except for two things: the story wasn't much of a fit for Bolger, and in 1962 no one cared about Bolger any more. Nothing good came out of all of this for the producers of All American, but something eventually did for Brooks: The Producers, inspired in part by this experience.
For all that, a musical can at least sort of succeed if it produces a few hit songs, though by 1962, that was also pretty much an idea whose time had passed. And the score of All American was not the most memorable. The website secondhandsongs.com lists cover versions of over 100,000 songs -- it's not complete by any means, but it's pretty comprehensive and a good resource. Only two of the songs from All American are listed at all on the site, so if there are any covers of the others, they are slim and scattered. "Once Upon a Time." first recorded by Tony Bennett, has had a good run of action among crooners, both pop and country, although not even the Bennett version cracked the Billboard Top 100. Instrumentally, it has mostly been picked up by orchestras like Lester Lanin's and Percy Faith's, with very little jazz interest. Charlie Byrd has recorded it, and Kenny Barron.
The only other song from the score to get any cover action at all is "I've Just Seen Her," which has ten recordings, per secondhandsongs...and all by jazz performers. Terry, followed by Gary Burton, Pepper Adams, Scott Hamilton, Bill Charlap, Scott Hamilton with Bill Charlap.
Nothing for any of the others. Perhaps they weren't very good songs. Certainly, they weren't the hippest of the hip. Nat Hentoff, in the album's liner notes, says rather charitably of Strouse and Adams:
Both are knowledgeable writers for the current state of the Broadway musical, but no one would claim that either or both has more than a peripheral acquaintance with jazz.
One wonders who thought this was a good idea in the first place. Esmond Edwards? Bob Weinstock? Did Weinstock get such a cut rate deal on the score that he couldn't refuse? In any event, a silk purse had to be made out of a sow's ear.
The history of sow's ears into silk purses, in American culture, is an interesting one, and there have been some notable successes. Louis Armstrong turned a fairly pedestrian tune, "Sweethearts on Parade," by square's square Carmen Lombardo, into one of the most sublime jazz vocals of all time. Some would argue that history repeated itself, if not quite as sublimely, with "Hello, Dolly."
There's that great story of film director Howard Hawks trying to convince Ernest Hemingway to write for the movies. Hemingway said he didn't like movies, and every time he saw a movie based on a good book he hated it. "That's because good books don't make good movies," Hawks told him. "But sometimes a bad book can make a great movie. I'll prove it to you. I'll take the worst piece of garbage you ever wrote and turn it into a great movie."
"What's the worst piece of garbage I ever wrote?" Hemingway demanded.
"No question about it. To Have and Have Not."
Hawks, like virtually everyone else, shortchanged To Have and Have Not, which is a pretty interesting novel. But he did make a great film of it.
The poet and classicist David R. Slavitt, who has been praised for his translations of Seneca and Ovid, also published a collection of a little-known Roman author, The Fables of Avianus. Because Avianus was an undiscovered gem? "Heavens, no," Slavitt told me. "Avianus was a terrible writer. This way, all the credit for quality is mine alone."
And it's been reported that Clint Eastwood wanted the challenge of making a quality film out of a perfectly awful novel. Hence, The Bridges of Madison County.
"It was clear to me," Oliver Nelson told Hentoff,
...that without the action on state, Ray Bolger's dancing, and the comedy, the music by itself needed quite special treatment to stand up on a jazz date.
In short, Nelson was nearly as accomplished a diplomat as he was an arranger.
So, did he do it? Did he make the silk purse?
Oh, my yes. It was silk, it was silk and satin and linen that shows, rings and things and buttons and bows. "I've Just Seen Her," the one tune from the show that intrigued some jazz musicians, may be the weakest track here. Nelson has crafted a pure delight, and unexpected delight. Probably no one much took this album seriously. The contemporary website AllMusic.com gave it three stars; there are no listener reviews at all on Amazon, no comments on the cuts on YouTube. So this is one of those gems of a golden age of American that's just waiting there for you to discover it. And it may not be the equivalent of David R. Slavitt and Avianus, because Strouse is certainly an adequate tunesmith, but this is Nelson's music.
Clark Terry must have been scratching his head when Prestige contacted him about this gig. Also the diplomat, he describes, not his first reaction, but his second:
I was surprised at how much Oliver had been able to do with the tunes, not only with regard to making them more interesting harmonically, but also in terms of the naturally flowing rhythm patterns he set them in. And once we all got into it, it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable date. As I think the recording shows, we all had a ball.
It does. There's no guarantee that a bunch of performers having a ball will translate into a good time for the audience--look at the Rat Pack's version of Ocean's Eleven -- but in this case, you can hear them having a ball, and you can also hear them digging into miraculous arrangements, and doing right by them.
The band was quite likely a Nelson-Terry collaboration. Les Robinson was a veteran section man with a number of big bands, and was probably known to both men--certainly to Terry, who had played with him on the West Coast. George Barrow was frequently called upon by Nelson, both on baritone, as here, and tenor. He played on Nelson's Prestige sessions, and on The Blues and the Abstract Truth.
Of Budd Johnson, Terry told Nat Hentoff:
It was a great help, of course, to have Budd Johnson along. First of all, no matter what you give him, Budd will swing it. And he has such a solid knowledge of chords that you can't lose him. He always knows what's happening and what can be done to make the proceedings more interesting. You listen to him here. He's like an old pitcher -- he's got so much "stuff" going for him, not only a fast ball, but curves and twisters and changes-of-pace. And always there's that big tone.
This comes back to Nelson again. Not to put down the excellent musicians, including some jazz greats tired of the road, who play in the pit orchestras of Broadway musicals, but the score of a show like All American isn't going to have chord changes so unexpected that they might lose a lesser musician than Budd Johnson.
Eddie Costa played on a couple of Prestige sessions in 1957. Terry singles him out for much-deserved praise as well.
The man simply can't go wrong rhythmically. Eddie also contributed a lot to the good feeling that pervaded the session.
Costa's rhythmic brilliance, especially on the vibes, and his good camaraderie were both approaching a tragic end. In July of that year, just two months later, he would die in an auto accident at age 32.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album was recorded over two sessions. It was released on Moodsville, although it was far from being a Moodsville album. The title, and I appreciate the gentle irony, is Clark Terry Plays the Jazz Version of All American.
I suspect Frank Wess is best known for his work with Count Basie, but his catalogue encompasses a lot more than that, work with a variety of other musicians and as a leader of his own ensembles. This was his 11th session for Prestige. He had previously recorded with Gene Ammons and with Lem Winchester; he had done three Prestige All Stars sessions, including one with John Coltrane; a Basie alumni session with Joe Newman; and a session with vocalist Etta Jones. He had co-led two remarkable sessions with harpist Dorothy Ashby, and had done a Moodsville session as leader in 1960.
Recording Frank Wess in 1962 is one indication of the eclectic range Prestige was pursuing in these years. The label had embraced the new soul jazz with its organ combos; the new free jazz, or "freedom music" as it was called in those days, with Eric Dolphy; modern takes on the swing era with its Swingville series; the blues with Bluesville; a softer (but still swinging) sound with Moodsville. It had embraced the rhythm and blues side of jazz with King Curtis, Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Sam "the Man" Taylor, and Latin jazz with Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet -- two genres too overlooked. And it was not overlooking the bebop/hard bop music that had come to fruition in the previous decade, and as it continued through more shifts and permutations of jazz expression would come to be known as "straight ahead jazz."
Frank Wess, with his Basie roots and his modern roots, was as straight ahead as they come, and he has a versatile straight-ahead rhythm section behind him, with Prestige veterans Tommy Flanagan, George Duvivier, Osie Johnson and Ray Barreto, and similar versatility from George Barrow, whose baritone (and occasionally tenor) sax would be featured on a number of Prestige albums, and on Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth.
New to Prestige is trumpeter Al Aarons, not Detroit-born, but Detroit-bred--a Wayne State graduate, he played with Yusef Lateef and Barry Harris, and had a regular gig at the Flame Show Bar backing up visiting talent from Billie Holiday to Jackie Wilson, before touring with Wild Bill Davis and then joining the Countasie band in 1961, and stayed with the Count for the rest of the decade, and he joined Gene Ammons for one more Prestige session near the end of the label's independent life. Later on he would play jazz fusion with Stanley Clarke and accompany both Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and record an album with B. B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland. He also started his own record label in Los Angeles.
And finally, the session had an arranger. Oliver Nelson. A septet isn't quite a big enough ensemble to require an arranger, but it can't hurt to have one, especially when it's Oliver Nelson.
Just as the Prestige Swingville records, featuring swing stars of the 1930s and 1940s, were not duplications or rehashes of those earlier decades, so the music of this session, with Nelson's arrangements, does not sound like something that might have been made seven or eight years earlier. It's straight ahead music, but music of its time. Listen to the extended duet by Johnson and Barretto on "Southern Comfort."
Wess plays both flute and tenor sax for this session. Esmond Edwards produced. There are two compositions by Wess ("Gin's Beguine" and "Summer Frost"), two by Nelson ("Southern Comfort" and "Shufflin'"). "Blues for Butterball" is by a lesser known composer, Bob Bryant (he was Vic Damone's musical director), and it's credited as having lyrics by Maine humorist Marshall Dodge, but I haven't been able to find a vocal version. "Butterball" was Oliver Nelson's nickname. "Blue Skies" (Irving Berlin) and "Dancing in the Dark (Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz) are standards.
Etta Jones probably hit her peak of popularity with Don't Go to Strangersand Something Nice. Scott Yanow, in his review on AllMusic, describes this album as "a too-long-forgotten gem," and Jones herself could easily be described that way. She doesn't make UDiscover.com's list of the 25 greatest female jazz singers, compiled by critic Charles Waring representing a younger generation (although Etta James and Norah Jones do). The voters for Ranker.com, who I suspect are mostly younger, have her at number 24 on the day I checked (this is an ongoing vote, and can change), just ahead of Norah Jones, but considerably behind Etta James. Fortunately, she continued to work, and record companies continued to want her musical stylings, right in the mainstream of vocal jazz and always rewarding. She would do four more recording sessions with Prestige, and she would continue to tour, and perform, and record, her last session (a tribute to Billie Holiday) coming just months before her death from cancer in 2007;
Oliver Nelson was back again with her, arranging two different sessions on two days, the first with strings and the second with horns.
The string section on day one is unidentified; the horn players of the second day are all Oliver Nelson veterans.
The songs are standards, and they justify the album's title. The sardonic "Makin' Whoopee" doesn't
exactly come from the heart, and it's not Jones's most effective outing, although it's still a pleasure to listen to. "You Came a Long Way From St. Louis," by John Benson Brooks and Bob Russell, also has a wry comic touch, but the wryness is mixed with warmth, and that's more in Jones's comfort zone.
Of particular interest is listening to Oliver Nelson arranging for the same singer, on successive days, with strikingly different instrumentation. Of the songs with strings, I was particularly struck by "Just Friends," a standard that's perhaps best defined by Charlie Parker, also with strings, but has been done by many vocalists. Oliver Nelson gives it a particularly arresting arrangement, starting with a sort of "Wagon Wheels" clippety clop opening, that then gets swallowed up by lush strings.
For the larger group of songs with horns, it was hard to choose, but I think I'll go with "I'm Afraid the Masquerade is Over," a song that's been done by both Ettas, Jones and James, as well as singers from Sarah to Aretha. The definitive male version is probably George Benson's, and the Cleftones gave it a doowop spin. It's a song that allows for a lot of individuality in interpretation, and Jones and Nelson put their stamp on it, for sure.
From the Heart was a Prestige release, Esmond Edwards producing. "You Came a Long Way from St. Louis" was the 45 RPM single, with "Just Friends" on the flip side.
Two items of note, here. First, Eddie Kirkland himself, one of the great blues performers of his generation. Although outgunned in reputation by Chess Records's stable of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley and all, he was outgunned by no one when it came to delivering hard driving blues. Second, a rare, probably unique, opportunity to hear King Curtis and Oliver Nelson playing together.
That second one might be a bit of a letdown. King Curtis's band was brought in to back up Kirkland, and Nelson...? Perhaps he had stopped by the studio in Englewood Cliffs for some other reason, and decided it
would be fun to sit in, and a bit of something different. This was, after all, the blues and the concrete truth. Or perhaps there was a personal connection--Nelson would sit in again with the Curtis band on Kirkland's second Prestige session, the following year.
Neither Nelson nor Curtis solos, but the ensemble gives a fullness to what is first and foremost a Kirkland session, with the blues man's forceful and commanding voice, guitar and harmonica. It's the blues man, and it's the blues, man. Love gone wrong dominates the session thematically, and there's no arguing with that as a solid basis for the blues.
This was Kirkland's first album, and the only one on which the tag "Blues Man" was added to his name. If he was to be known by a nickname, it was more often "Gypsy of the Blues," because of his nonstop touring schedule. He did release one single--his first--as "Little Eddie Kirkland," on the West Coast RPM label, and he recorded a couple of sides in 1963 as Eddie Kirk. Those were for Volt Records, one half of the legendary soul labels Stax-Volt, during the time when he was bandleader for Volt's superstar performer, Otis Redding.
Kirkland was born in Jamaica but raised in Alabama. He toured with a medicine show in his teens, then joined the army, where a fight with a racist officer brought him a dishonorable discharge. From there he made his way to Detroit, where his mother was then living, and his guitar skills brought him to the attention of John Lee Hooker, with whom he toured from 1949 to 1962. From then on, following the gig with Otis Redding, he continued as a solo act, although he did also work with other artists, including Little Richard, Ben E. King, Ruth Brown and Little Johnnie Taylor. He died in 2011 in an automobile accident.
It's the Blues Man! was released on Tru-Sound, and it has come to be regarded by many blues enthusiasts as Kirkland's best work. One track from the session "Man of Stone," was covered by the British blues band John Mayall's Bluesbreakers,. Tru-Sound also released "Train Done Gone" and "Something's Gone Wrong in My Life" on 45 RPM, while "Chill Me Baby" was matched with "Have Mercy on Me," from Kirkland's second Prestige session, in 1962. the 45 was released in 1964 on the Prestige label, Tru-Sound being no more by that time.
"Train Done Gone" had a parallel life, being also released on 45 by the tiny Detroit blues and soul label, Lu Pine, with "I Tried" on the flip side. Lu Pine did a lot of good stuff, but they're probably best remembered by music historians for "Tears of Sorrow" / "Pretty Baby," by the Primettes. The record flopped, but another Detroit music entrepreneur, Berry Gordy, liked the group's sound, signed them to his own label, and changed their name to the Supremes.
Music writer Elijah Wald once said of him, "For pure energy and emotion, he may be the greatest blues artist alive."
There's so much to say here: Oliver Nelson's first recording with a big band, all those tonal possibilities for his fertile composer's imagination--made even more interesting by the fact that he used what amounted to two different big bands for one day in the studio, and then a second day, with a different lineup. They must have needed at least a little rehearsal time, with all those musicians...and what about all those paychecks? Bob Weinstock must have really thought he had something in Oliver Nelson, and he was right.
I'm always going to wonder about musicians Prestige and I are encountering for the first time, especially names I'm not familiar with--the guys who've been flying under the radar. Did they just show up for one magical gig and then disappear into the shadows? Or have they been there all along, known by every bandleader who's ever needed a guy who can show up on time, play all the charts, and give it that little extra that makes jazz? So I'll run down the Prestige newcomers, and there are a lot of them.
Jerry Kail was a section man, and there's always room for a good section man. Among those who found room for him were Quincy Jones, Johnny Richards, Pete Rugolo, Herbie Mann, Shirley Scott, King Curtis, Bill Evans, Jack McDuff, Woody Herman, and Tito Puente. Just because you haven't heard of a guy, doesn't mean you haven't heard him.
Ernie Royal was the younger brother of Basie regular Marshall Royal, and he played a stint with Bssie too, and with a number of other big bands. Most of his work was in horn section, including the three Miles Davis/Gil Evans big band LPs, but he also worked with Charles Mingus in his octet. He was active up through the late 1970s;
Joe Wilder was a classically trained musician who turned to jazz when he realized that there would be little chance for an African American to advance in the classical world. Th concert hall's loss became jazz's gain, as Wilder's time with Hank Jones, Gil Evans, Benny Goodman and many others, his work with singers from Billie Holiday to Eileen Farrell, Tony Bennett to Harry Belafonte, led him to an NEA Jazz Masters award in 2008.
Paul Faulise is best known for his work with Kai Winding's trombone septet, but like the others on this album, he found work any time anyone needed a bass trombone. On how he broke into the recording studio, he tells a story (per interview with Jack Schatz at the Trombone Page of the World) which introduces me to a job I didn't know existed:
There were many rehearsal bands in New York, and one of them was Dan Terry's band. Dan was a music copyist and contractor for Ernie Wilkins, an arranger who had written for the bands of Count Basie, Harry James, and Tommy Dorsey and was currently the hottest arranger for jazz artists. After playing a few times in Dan's rehearsal band, he put me on one of Ernie's sessions. Ernie liked my playing, and from that time on I was Ernie's first call.
A contractor for a bandleader, contracted to supply him with musicians. Makes sense, when you think of it.
And Faulise had another story for Schatz, one that could only happen to a trombone player. This came when he was in the Tonight show orchestra:
I remember one New Year's Eve we were playing a live TV special, and all of these balloons were supposed to let go above the band at midnight. Needless to say, they didn't come down; and people started to laugh. Something got stuck in the net right over me; so Doc said to me, "Paul, get it with your slide." So I reached up with the slide to pull the net, and the slide got stuck in the net. I tried to get the darned thing loose, of course, the whole time on live TV. Johnny Carson finally shouted over, "Leave it there"; and the band pretty much lost it for the rest of the show.
Urbie Greenis better known to the average jazz fan, having been voted the New Star of 1954 on trombone in that year's DownBeat critics' poll, and regularly placing high in the trombone category of their annual readers' poll (6th in 1960). Over a long and distinguished career he recorded 28 albums as leader, several for such labels as Blue Note, Vanguard and RCA. Bill Watrous, no slouch himself on the instrument, once said, "Urbie Green is the greatest trombone player I have ever heard." And Paul Faulise, who played with him often, said, "Every time I worked with Urbie, it was like taking a lesson."
Jim Buffington, as James L. Buffington, had an outstanding career in the classical music field. He played with the Budapest String Quartet, the Juilliard String Quartet and the Lincoln Center Chamber Society. He was a soloist with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air.
As Jim Buffington, he was part of the Gil Evans/Miles Davis orchestras on their collaborations, and was one of the first called when a jazz ensemble needed a French horn. Among many others, he recorded with Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, James Brown, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Paul Desmond, Gato Barbieri and George Benson.
In the area of unclassifiable music, he recorded with Moondog.
In 1979 and 1980, he received the Most Valuable Player Award for consistently outstanding performance from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Jerry Dodgionis hailed both for his versatility ("a multi-woodwind master"--the National Jazz Museum in Harlem) and his virtuosity can always be counted on to take an inventive solo that perfectly fits the circumstances"--Scott Yanow for Blue Note Artists). Like these other in-demand session men, he's played with a plethora of artists, from Louis Armstrong to Charles Mingus. Dodgion is still with us as of this writing.
In an interview for jazzleadsheets.com, Dodgion recalls working with Oliver Nelson on this recording. He had first met Nelson in Las Vegas, when they were both playing with Red Norvo. Then later, after playing a gig in Atlantic City backing up Frank Sinatra, he and the drummer, John Markham, went out on the town looking for some music, and found themselves in a small club run by Sammy Davis Jr.'s mother, where a trio was playing: Wild Bill Davis, Grady Tate, and Oliver Nelson. They talked with Nelson during a break and he said, modestly, that he was doing some composing as well as playing, and some arranging for Quincy Jones and a few other guys:
I said to John, "We've heard him play, and he plays great. He doesn't sound like anybody else, and to hear him talking about what else he does--it's possible that's true." Then he asked me to bring my horn with me tomorrow night, so I did, and I sat in with them,and he said, "When you move to New York, call me." I ran into him one other time over the next few years--he was wearing a Count Basie band uniform. He was doing a couple of weeks with Basie.
Then a year or two later he called me to do his first big band date. And that was at Rudy Van Gelder's--my very first time at Rudy's. It was great. High ceilings, all wood, and the floor was cement with throw rugs in different places. And the drums were right in the middle of the room! No group around the drums...I mean, big band, loud music, soft music -- I didn't understand it. I said, "How is this possible?" But it turned out to be OK. You go anywhere else, the drums are off separate, so they don't bleed into the other microphones, but at Rudy's they were always right in the middle of the room, and no one else could make that work."
(Edited some for continuity.)
Dodgion takes a flute solo on "Message" and "There's a Yearnin'."
Bob Ashton was called upon again by Nelson, who did seem to like those multi-instrumentalists, and who also counted on guys he'd worked with. Many of these names -- Dodgion, Royal, etc. -- turn up again and again. Nelson and Ashton first worked together on a big band session for Prestige led by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and arranged by Nelson in 1960, released as Trane Whistle in 1961. A 1961 Prestige session led by Gene Ammons and arranged by Nelson was parceled out to various albums over the next few years. He can also be heard on Fantabulous (1964, Argo); a trio of Impulse! sessions: Happenings (1966), The Spirit of '67 (1967) and Soulful Brass (1968); Goin' Out of My Head (Verve, 1966), arranged and conducted by Nelson, and a Grammy winner for best jazz album; and Every Day I Have the Blues, with Nelson arranging music and conducting a band for blues singer Jimmy Rushing.
Ashton played a number of sessions with Gene Ammons for Prestige. He is also the author of an instruction book, You Can Teach Yourself to Compose Music.
The cello isn't called upon all that often as a jazz instrument, and when it is, it's generally played by someone like Ron Carter or Oscar Pettiford, or Ray Brown, who once made an album called Jazz Cello. The only real full time jazz cellist I can name is Fred Katz. But Nelson called on two cellists for this ensemble: Peter Makas, who would also play on albums by Johnny Griffin and Kai Winding, and Charles McCracken, who garnered very little ink as a personality (no American Wikipedia page; what biographical and discographical information I could find came from German Wikipedia), but a great deal of respect as a musician. He was used as a soloist on recordings by third stream composer Bill Russo and Charles Mingus (on Let My Children Hear Music, the album that Mingus has called "the best album I ever made"). He recorded with Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz and Jackie Paris, was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at 24, and appeared, altogether, on over 200 recordings--classical, jazz, avant-garde, unclassifiable, even mainstream pop. His son, Charles McCracken Jr., is a bassoonist with a resume almost as full and as varied as his father's. McCracken solos on "Disillusioned."
Clyde Reasinger had an interesting day job. He was the piano tuner for Johnny Carson's Tonight show orchestra. Not that he needed a day job. He was another in-demand musician for big-band work and studio recording. His first major gig was replacing Maynard Ferguson in Shorty Rogers' band, and over the years he also worked with Ferguson many times. He was in the Miles Davis/Gil Evans big band.
I was aware of Melba Liston's reputation as an arranger in the 1960s, and knew that she'd made a reputation on trombone beginning in the late 1950s, but I had no idea how much work she'd done, or how far back her career stretched. She began with Gerald Wilson's big band in 1944, when she was 18, and first recorded with high school classmate Dexter Gordon in 1947. A couple of years touring with Count Basie and Billie Holiday were enough to convince her life for a woman on the road was no life for her, and she left the music profession altogether for most of the 1950s, returning near the end of the decade to record with Art Blakey, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and a host of others (including one Prestige session, the Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis big band album arranged by Nelson). The 1960s saw the beginning of her association with Randy Weston, and her career as an arranger that would win her the most recognition, including an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 1987.
“I (Nelson) didn’t know a lot about Africa, African people and culture and most important, nothing about African music and rhythm.” Embarking on intense study of those subjects, Nelson spanned his musical portrayals from conflicts between African natives and slave traders to the contemporary civil-rights Freedom Riders of 1961. “I have at last realized the importance of my African and Negro heritage,” Nelson concluded in the liner notes, “and through this enlightenment I was able to compose 40 minutes of original music which is a true extension of my musical soul.”
Afro-American Sketches is an ambitious suite, tracing the Black experience from being snatched out of Africa and sold into slavery in America, through freedom and its attendant trials. Nelson seems to have begub with ambivalent feelings about Africa. In his liner notes to the album, he says “I didn’t know a lot about Africa, African people and culture and most important, nothing about African music and rhythm." And his initial study of recorded music of Africa given to him by Esmond Edwards was disappointing: "European influences--social, political and cultural--had somehow gotten into African music and refined it on the surface so much that I was unable to learn very much."
But he stayed with it, and began to hear that "the rhythm of the African People had remained intact...I could absorb some inspiration from that source alone."
Interestingly, as carefully as the suite was conceived and written, it was not recorded in sequence. This was because different movements of it were written for different combinations of instruments and instrumentalists, not all of whom were present on the first day of recording.
Nelson has quite a lot to say about how the suite develops. Although admitting that he generally "dislike[s] to paint word pictures about music," in this case he wants the listener "to envision what the music from a completely subjective viewpoint means to me."
This strikes me as a valuable series of insights, and I'm excerpting liberally from the album notes.
"Message"...is essentially a conversation between drummers Ed Shaughnessy and Ray Barretto. The "Message" relates that men and boats are coming up-river in great numbers.
"Jungleaire" is an account of a contest for freedom between the African Warriors and the slave traders. There is a contest in which the African loses, having been betrayed by some of his own people. He begins a new and more cruel existence in a world full of hatred and bigotry.
"Jungleaire" powerfully plays massed horns against valiant solo instruments, primarily Nelson himself.
"Emancipation Blues"...is...an attempt to depict what freedom must have meant to the American Negro when he was told, "You Are Free!" First he gives thanks, then celebrates
the acquisition of his new liberties, and then wonders, "Free to go where, to do what?"
"There's a Yearnin'," which in its entirety should be read "There's a Yearnin' Deep Inside Me," is a lament.
"Goin' Up North" is a journey by the American Negro to make a better life, to live as a human being with rights, protection under the law, and education for his children, he thinks.
"Disillusioned"...tells us that the trip North for the Negro pioneer has pro
ved little, that the Negro's position in society, politics, culture has not really changed. He realizes, however, if an individual has courage, patience, and guts, coupled with the will to overcome...hard knocks...social justice and the right to become somebody is at least within the realm of possibility.
The themes from "There's a Yearnin'," "Disillusioned," and "Freedom Dance" are all the same...they are different only in mood and musical notation..."Freedom Dance" is dedicated to the thousands of militant youths, Freedom Riders (of all races) and all people with desire and maturity to be free...In order to be really free, though, man must first learn to respect the rights of other peoples, other cultures.
I have at last realized the importance of my African and Negro Heritage and, through this enlightenment, I was able to compose 40 minutes of original music which is a true extension of my musical soul.
Nelson's liner notes go into a lot more detail about the musical structures of each piece, and they're worth reading. Buy the album. Or you can find a facsimile of the back cover at the excellent London Jazz Collector website.
Nelson says that "in order to be really free, though, man must first learn to respect the rights of other peoples, other cultures." American culture is getting more and more insular, as people in power seem to countenance, even encourage, white supremacy, while at the same time, people of all races are being galvanized in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Back in the 1960s, the civil rights movement was also galvanizing support across racial lines, and also creating a backlash, to which not even the jazz world was immune. Nelson, in an interview with John Cobley, described a conversation with someone he chose not to identify:
if I would say Charlie Parker, he would say Lee Konitz. If I would say Duke Ellington, he would say Stan Kenton. If I would say John Coltrane, he would say Stan Getz. He didn’t realize that he was trying to have a complete division, saying this was white jazz, cool jazz. Of course, what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing, that was black jazz. And I hate to think of jazz being that kind of music. As long as politics can stay out of it, I think music in this country will be very, very healthy.
In Afro-American Sketches, the key solos are by musicians covering a mixture of races. "Message" is built around a conversation between a white drummer, Ed Shaughnessy, and a Latino drummer, Ray Barretto, New York born, Puerto Rican by ancestry; it then moves into solos by white flute player Jerry Dodgion and Black bassist Art Davis.
Nelson handles the solo on "Jungleaire." Nelson, Joe Newman and Patti Bown, all African American, solo on "Emancipation Blues"; Dodgion is the soloist on "There's a Yearnin'," and Newman on "Goin' Up North." In his liner notes, Nelson calls particular attention to the "beautiful 'cello solo interpreted by Charles McCracken," another white player. Nelson also gives particular thanks to Bob Ashton for conversations before and during the composition of Afro-American Sketches, and I can find nothing on the Internet to tell me whether Ashton was Black or white. In the words of the great rhythm and blues disc jockey John R., "Why do you care?"
Nelson recognized that the greatness of the American Century in music came from Black roots, and that it flowered in its multicultural heritage, but race and music were still a source of frustration to him. He told Cobley in 1972:
Do you know what they call me, my black brothers? They call me a white musician. They call me a white composer. It’s because I’m always trying to do something. I couldn’t stay with Shaft just to prove how black I am. So I write all kinds of twelve-tone music. I write from my experiences through my education, and now I’m putting together my own thing. And if it goes outside their spectrum, they say, “You’re thinking white.”
MM: Ellington made it much, much easier to write political music. Not right away... the civil-rights movement wasn‘t quite there yet. There are very few recordings in the 1940s and early 1950s by jazz musicians that are willing to go out on the racial limb that Ellington had already gone out on repeatedly. But when the civil-rights movement really takes hold, progressively from the late 1940s down into the late 1950s, then you begin to see this influence. I often think of that Clark Terry piece, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," about the Montgomery struggle and Rosa Parks. It‘s one of the first moments where you see a jazz musician saying, "You know, I can play to this." And then certainly you have people like Oliver Nelson and Afro-American Sketches who are inspired by that. But it‘s interesting to me, the lag time… Ellington was way out in front, and you get the feeling that African-American musicians writing about civil rights by the early 1960s are reacting more than leading. Which is not a putdown of them…
DBJ: That‘s really interesting, because speaking of Oliver Nelson‘s Afro-American Sketches, that was composed and recorded in 1961, and according to his own liner notes, he entered the project reluctantly, and somewhat at the behest of Prestige‘s A and R man--because, he said, he was "put off by the lack of honesty in a lot of Afro-jazz LPs on the market" at the time...
MM: Oliver Nelson absolutely knew Black, Brown and Beige. In fact, one of his last albums, the title is a play on that--it‘s Black, Brown and Beautiful... Nelson, interestingly, was an especially politically engaged man...was known for it, was closer to politics than musicians tended to be. He did that later album in 1967, The Kennedy Dream, which is an almost surprising choice in ‘67, to be producing a tribute to a white politician. This is just, what, a year and a half away from James Brown doing "Say It Loud, I‘m Black and I‘m Proud." If I‘m remembering correctly, Oliver Nelson did orchestrations for James Brown--[Soul on Top] ...And again, it‘s too simple--we‘re talking in big building blocks here, but it‘s more musically radical musicians, innovators such as Archie Shepp, free-jazz players who seem to be the ones who tap into Black Power more readily. Think of the Attica piece that Shepp did...and there are critics who argue that there‘s a very close relationship between the radicalism of the black nationalist, black power movement on the one hand and what they saw as the revolution in jazz music, the free-jazz movement inspired by Coltrane and Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp…
DBJ: ...I can‘t think off the top of my head of any of the free-jazz musicians attempting something similar to what Nelson... had done with Afro-American Sketches and-certainly they‘re concerned with the same themes, but they don‘t seem to be prepared to address it in that kind of a scope.
MM: I think that that‘s true. Ellington and Nelson had a couple of advantages; one is musical, that they worked in forms--big-band, what would later be called mainstream music, more or less--that lent itself to longer themes, more ordered statements, to a kind of readily-heard coherence for an audience, that could make it possible to take a set of themes about black history or black activism and put them to music. Coltrane and his followers struggled with what form would be like in free jazz. When you think of that famous Coltrane record Ascension, which to some people is just two sides of cacophony on one LP record….so I think there are formal problems that the free-jazz movement had, but also I think there‘s a matter of political temperament. Ellington and the civil-rights movement were trying to locate African-American civil rights in a long sweep of black history, whereas the black power movement , for all of its emphasis on an African past, emphasized the moment and confrontation in the here and now, in a way that was different--and I don‘t think somehow lent itself to the same kind of long-term reflection that Ellington had sustained.
I'm listing the whole suite as my "Listen to One" because it should be listened to in its entirety. And if you keep Nelson's words in mind as you listen to the music, you'll hear, vividly, what he's saying.
Afro-AmericanSketches was released on the Prestige label. Nelson credits Esmond Edwards with giving him the idea of writing a long form piece drawing on African and American traditions, but no producer credit is given on the album. And although this seems very much to be album-geared material, two 45 RPM singles were drawn from it: first "Emancipation Blues," split up over two sides, and then "Goin' up North" as the B side to "Azure Te," from an earlier Nelson collaboration with Lem Winchester.
It's hard to listen to this one directly after the Joe Newman-Oliver Nelson-Shirley Scott session and not miss Shirley, but of course, that's not the way anyone would have listened, especially since the album with Scott wouldn't actually be released for another five years. And once you shake your head free and listen to this one for its own sake, it has much to offer. A great deal to offer.
It has Newman and Nelson, of course. But it also has Ray Barretto, who brings a certain something to every session he plays on. And it has Hank Jones.
This is Jones's sixth session for Prestige, but he had been on the scene since the mid-1940s, when he joined Hot Lips Page at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. Like Newman, he was of the swing-to-bop school, a style of music that may not have been cutting edge in 1961, but was, and is, timeless. Nelson could play straight-ahead jazz too, and write for a straight-ahead group. but his abilities as a composer always kept him around the cutting edge.
Nelson composed four of the six tunes on this album ("Main Stem" is Ellington; "Tangerine" is Johnny Mercer and Hollywood composer Victor Schertzinger), and they're very much tailored to this group. "Tipsy" is my favorite, tuneful and inventive, with room for solos by Oliver, Newman and Jones, with propulsive backing by George Duvivier, Charlie Persip and Barretto (with an inventive solo bt Duvivier).
I've written about Joe Newman's later work as an educator with Jazz Interactions. But here's a little about where he came from: New Orleans, where "I thought that jazz had been here ever since the world began." In an interview for the national jazz archive, he talks about his father, who he knew as a chauffeur, until he suddenly discovered he was also a musician, and the music his father brought into the house, and how he became part of it.
started playing trumpet when I was six years old, and I learned to play it within two years, by myself. At eight, I had my first formal lesson.
That came about when some musicians were having a band rehearsal at my house with my father; I was out on the back step, blowing along with them. They heard me, and they stopped, but I was still out there blowing. I didn’t see them standing there at the screen door; next thing I heard was: “Why don’t you give that kid some lessons?” That’s really how I got started.
Before that, I’d wanted to play tenor saxophone. I used to have a lead pipe plumbing fixture, and it was sort of shaped like a saxophone; I blew that and made music with it.
Another kid played a banjo, my brother had a trumpet made from some tubing and a funnel, and we used to play little parties. Then one of my playmates stole my lead pipe; so I had another one made, that looked more like a saxophone.
At eight years old, I could play some songs, and I started to do gigs with some of the same men my father had worked with. My mother would let me go if they’d come get me and bring me home. These were three and four piece bands; then after a while I started working with some bigger bands around New Orleans—about thirteen pieces, something like that. Such as Henry Hart, Bill Phillips. Richard Gray and his Society Syncopators—that was one of the first bands that operated in the Carlton area, what they called Uptown in New Orleans.
All that was just part of his life, just part of growing up in New Orleans.
It wasn’t until recently, when I started to put together lectures on Louis Armstrong, for colleges and different places, and I was reading books to gather material, that I saw these names of so many guys that I grew up around—playing with my father, friends of our family. These guys were creating it then, man, and I didn’t know it. Some of the earlier history was being made.
The album was called Main Stem, and the 45 RPM single that came from the album was the title track, split over two sides. Esmond Edwards produced for Prestige.
The jazzers are back from vacation, and back at Rudy's, and who better to start with than Shirley Scott, Prestige's reliable breadwinner in those days. And this time with some solid collaboration from two of the best in the business, Joe Newman and Oliver Nelson.
Scott continues to draw inspiration from, and give inspiration to, the players around her. And in the tune that they started the day with, they draw inspiration from another source as well. "Blue Seven" was originally recorded by Sonny Rollins for his 1956 Prestige album, Saxophone Colossus. It was one of those improvised-on-the-spot numbers that Rudy Van Gelder used to call the "five o'clock blues," but this one clicked. Scott was the first to pick it up, but it has become a minor jazz standard since then.
Rollins gave Scott and Co. a lot more than just a few variations on standard blues changes, and they were able to pick it up and run with it. At 11:17, it was the longest cut on Saxophone Colossus, giving Rollins plenty of room to demonstrate the scope of his improvisatory genius. Scott is much tighter, at seven minutes and with three soloists, so it's a very different interpretation, and a highly satisfying one. Scott had some formats that she worked well in: organ trio, quartets with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine. Familiarity can mean growth in jazz, and we're lucky to have those albums with her regulars, but we're also lucky that Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards put her in new situations from time to time. Newman and Nelson and Scott weave in and out and around each other in a gorgeous piece of music. The history of this era, session by session, is the discovery of so many brilliant pieces of music that were written or improvised for one recording session, and never played again. This is one that escaped that scrap heap of time.
These folks do pretty well with more familiar tunes, two, like Rube Bloom and Harry Ruby's "Give Me the Simple Life" and Phil Silvers/Jimmy Van Heusen's "Nancy (With the Laughing Face"). In fact, you don't have to get very far into this album before you realize that this is exceptional work, jazz the way it should be played by artists of the first rank, connecting with each other to an unusually well-attuned degree, even for jazz, which is always about that.
Shirley Scott's output was so prodigious that maybe an album or two got lost in the shuffle. And she isn't played now as often as she once was, and women have never quite gotten their due in the jazz world--Scott did better than most, but even so, she probably never really got her due. This album may have been one of those that got lost in the shuffle. It wasn't released until 1966. Today, when almost everything makes its way to YouTube, you can only find a couple of tracks from Blue Seven. But it is worth seeking out. Oh, my, yes.
Esmond Edwards produced. One track, "How Sweet," was left off the LP, but made it onto another Scott album, Now's the Time, and later onto the CD reissue of Blue Seven. "Blue Seven" was also released as a 45 RPM single, and I hope it got some jukebox play.
Esmond Edwards and Oliver Nelson put Etta Jones together with a string section over three recording sessions. The first one had been back on June 9. This one was followed by another three days later.The string sections were anonymous; the other players, except for George Duvivier on the bass, are all new from the June session. A reed section is added, and the two French horn players from June are cut down to one.
This French horn belongs to Ray Alonge, mostly a classical musician (he was first chair in the Indianapolis symphony while still in high school), but with some impressive jazz credentials too: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Hinton. And going farther afield, he played on recordings by Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Female singers with strings became a thing after Billie Holiday did it, and it generally wasn't a bad thing, if not necessarily a good thing. In this case, with Oliver Nelson arranging and conducting, the results are good. Jones veers toward the Billie Holiday side of her personality, which is probably understandable, since Holiday more or less set the template for jazz singers with strings.
One song from the July 25th session, "You Better Go Now," is associated with Holiday, and Jones would record again in 2001, on her last studio album, A Tribute to Lady Day. Interestingly, the 1961 version owes a lot more to Lady Day than the later version. She also recorded it in 1994 with Benny Green, the pianist--not to be confused with Bennie Green, the great trombonist, or Benny Green, the British saxophonist. The song had originally been performed in 1936 as part of the Broadway revue New Faces of 1936 (the only new faces of note were Imogene Coca and Van Johnson), but it had not broken out as a hit, and was never recorded again until Holiday found it in 1947.
"And This is My Beloved" is another interesting choice, perhaps dictated by the orchestral instrumentation. From the Broadway show Kismet, it never achieved quite the breakout status of "Stranger in Paradise" or "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," but it's had quite a life as a vehicle for pop singers with operatic ambitions like Jim Nabors or Jackie Wilson (granted, quite a range of styles there) or opera singers with pop ambitions like Richard Tucker, but one thing hasn't particularly beem is a vehicle for jazz singers. or jazz instrumentalists (with one odd exception--Sun Ra). Jones basically sticks to the melody, but she has some nice jazz-tinged phrasing, and it makes for a satisfactory outing,
"Unchained Melody," from the July 28 session, is another unusual choice, although not so unusual when you consider how popular a choice it was, and has become, From the soundtrack of a 1955 grade B movie, it attracted twelve different reco
Dating from 1955, it is one of the most popular songs of all time,, with over 450 versions (and if you think that the mid-1950s were so rock 'n roll dominated that a ballad didn't have a chance, think again. "Unchained Melody" isn't even the most-recorded ballad of 1955; "Cry Me a River" beats it out). It's been recorded by pop singers, rockers, country singers, almost everyone except jazz singers, although one of the biggest hit versions was by Al Hibbler. Even in the hands of an Al Hibbler or an Etta Jones it's not exactly a jazz tune, but Oliver Nelson's string arrangement is one of his most interesting, and Jones works with it in inventive and creative ways. There may not be a whole lot you can do with improvisation on "Unchained Melody" with strings, although Jones makes some interesting choices, but there's a lot you can do with dynamics, and there she comes through.
"Unchained Melody" was the 45 RPM single. On the other side was "Hurry Home," written by Buddy Bernier, Bob Emmerich and Joseph Meyer, not a well-known tune (I'd never heard it before), but a good one. It had been a hit for Kate Smith in 1938, and Ella Fitzgerald recorded it on Verve in 1957. Jones and Nelson give this one a jazz reading, and a good one--I like her version better than Ella's. The album was called So Warm.
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
Clea Bradford's obituary (2008, conflicting reports as to her age) describes her as a perfectionist and a
Renaissance woman of sorts—a world class chef (her culinary skills were documented in the Washington Star), a formidable painter, social activist, and composer, even penning blues numbers like “One Sided Love Affair” and “I’ve Found My Peace of Mind” for famed guitarist Pee Wee Crayton.
Bradford, of Choctaw-Cherokee-Ethiopian descent, was the daughter of a minister whose parish was in rural southeastern Missouri, but when she was seven, her parents separated and she moved with her mother to St. Louis. She'd been exposed to church music at home, and had loved to sing it, but St. Louis opened up a new door for her. That door was next door, and her next door neighbor in the Gateway City was Jimmy Forrest.
Forrest's house was more or less an ongoing jam session, and when Clea ventured next door, she was likely to meet other young St. Louisans like Oliver Nelson and Miles Davis. Or Clark Terry, down on a pass from Great Lakes Naval Base. And gradually, as a young teenager, she began to join in. By 17, she was a part of the St. Louis club circuit, and then, hearing that there were more musical opportunities, she moved to Detroit--a great apprenticeship for any young musician. She made her first recording, a 45 RPM rhythm and blues single, for Detroit's Hi-Q label.
Then on to New York, and a reunion with old friend Oliver Nelson, who got her a recording date with Prestige. and brought Clark Terry along to play on the gig, a collection of standards. It's a curious record, in that neither Nelson or Terry does a lot on it. It is musically interesting, because Bradford is a good singer, but mostly because of the piano work of newcomer Patti Bown.
Bown was 29 at the time of the session. She had made a record for Columbia in 1958. This was her second recording session, and her first for Prestige. She would go on to be very much in demand throughout the decade, frequently on Bob Weinstock's label. Like Clea Bradford with Oliver Nelson, Bown was able reconnect in New York with an old friend from childhood, who would hire her for his big band and connect her to others. In her case, it was Quincy Jones.
Bradford reportedly was not satisfied with her performance on the album, which I guess is one of the problems with being a perfectionist. She actually sounds quite good. There's a debt to Dinah Washington, but that's hard to avoid for a young jazz and rhythm and blues singer coming up in the 1950s. But in later interviews, she never spoke of it. But the dissatisfaction appears to have been just with herself, not with Oliver Nelson. She remained close friends with him, and they would work together years later in Los Angeles.
The album was released on Tru-Sound as These Dues, that being one of the two new songs from the session. I think a Bradford original; I'm not sure. Tru-Sound being Prestige's pop and "modern rhythm and blues" label, most of their recording sessions yielded at least one single, and "These Dues" would have been the logical choice, but no single was released, so maybe Weinstock wasn't excited enough with the results either. It would later be rereleased on New Jazz as Clea Bradford with Oliver Nelson and Clark Terry.
There would be one more jazz record for a New York label, Mainstream (Clark Terry was involved in that session too), and then at the end of the decade, a session for Cadet, a subsidiary of Chicago's Chess Records, By that time, she had become a mainstay of the various Playboy Clubs, a door opened for her by another old friend from St. Louis, comedian Dick Gregory. The Playboy Clubs, a very hot franchise in the 1960s, did not cater to a musically sophisticated audience but did feature top jazz names. Bradford had worked with, and become friendly with Kenny Burrell, who was on Cadet at the time.
Her album for Cadet was called Her Point of View. It was essentially a soul album, and its single, "My Love's a Monster," got good air play, and might have been a hit. Might have been, but it turned out that while Bradford may not have been satisfied with her performance on the Prestige album, the musical selections represented what she wanted to sing. On the strength of "My Love's a Monster," she got booked for soul reviews...where she refused to sing "My Love's a Monster," instead delivering jazz standards to a dissatisfied audience.
She continued to tour and sing through the 1970s and 1980s, then coming in off the road, she took a degree at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and became a minister. Also in these years, she grew more in touch with her Native American heritage, changing her name to Clea Bradford-Silverlight.
As with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Bob Weinstock seemed, as 1961 wound on, to be trying to get as much as possible out of Oliver Nelson before he moved on, and in as many combinations as possible. Here, four days apart, he goes from arranging strings and French horns for Etta Jones, to arranging a full jazz orchestra to support headliner Gene Ammons, Prestige's most prolific performer--this is his third session in 1961 alone. Ammons was a victim of the heroin plague, and this activity in 1961 was sandwiched between two prison sentences, one from 1958-60 and one from 1962-69.
We're hearing some musicians for the first time. Nelson was looking for a sound, not soloists, so he picked experienced section men: guys who could read music, who could follow a conductor's lead and get it right the first time, who would show up on time and ready to play.
Trumpeter Hobart Dotson had a lot of experience in big bands. He was in the dance bands of Gerald Wilson and Dan Belloc--and not all dance bands are alike. Wilson, who came up with Jimmy Lunceford (he replaced Sy Oliver), and played in the ensembles of Basie, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter, was in the tradition of black dance bands; Belloc, who owned and operated a ballroom in Chicago, and worked with some rock and roll groups (including the Buckinghams, later), catered essentially to white audiences. Dotson also worked with edgier jazz orchestras, including Charles Mingus, Slide Hampton, and (edgier still) Sun Ra.
Red Holloway would also find plenty of work for Prestige in the 1960s, particularly with Jack McDuff. Chicago was his home base for most of his career, where he worked with blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and jazz artists, recording with them and backing up touring artists.
Bob Ashton (baritone sax here; he also played tenor) made his Prestige debut in a 1960 recording of a big band led by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, which also marked Oliver Nelson's debut as an arranger. He would also find his way onto a number of Prestige sessions during the 1960s.
George Barrow is in the tenor sax section for this session, but he was better known for his work on the baritone sax, which he played on Nelson's arranging debut with Davis, and on The Blues and the Abstract Truth. With the ensemble of jazz superstars (Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Evans) that Nelson put together for that recording, he was to single out Barrow for praise: "His baritone parts were executed with such precision and devotion that I find it necessary to make special mention of his fine work." Barrow would become a fixture on a number of Prestige recordings over the next few years.
Ammons has always liked the well-loved standards, and he does his share of them here, in front of Nelson's arrangements, along with some surprises from outside of the Great American Songbook catalog, like Savannah Churchill's rhythm and blues hit, "I Want to Be Loved." It's always worthwhile to hear a good song get the Ammons treatment, and even more so in this context,
"Too Marvelous for Words" is a good example. Written by Richard A. Whiting and Johnny Mercer in the 1930s, it was always popular with both vocalists and instrumentalists, but reached a zenith in the late 1950s with Frank Sinatra's vocal and Nelson Riddle's arrangement. Ammons sings this one on his saxophone, with a lovely brief solo from Richard Wyands. Nelson's arrangement satisfies--it does all the things one wants from a big band supporting a soloist--and it also surprises.
Esmond Edwards produced. As with Coltrane, Prestige did not release all its Oliver Nelson product all at once, and this session in particular was sliced and diced, as they also had to parcel out Gene Ammons's recordings after he was sent back to prison.
"Love, I've Found You" (another rhythm and blues ballad written by Gwen and Harvey Fuqua) and "Too Marvelous for Words" were first to appear, on a 1963 compilation album, Soul Summit, Vol. 2, which also included tracks from an Etta Jones session with Ammons and two Jack McDuff sessions, one with Ammons and one without.
"Things Ain't What They Used to Be," "I Want to Be Loved," "Makin' Whoopee" and "Lullabye of the Leaves" were all on 1964's Late Hour Special.
Jerome Kern's "The Song is You" waited until later in 1964, and was released on Velvet Soul.
"I Want to Be Loved" and "Love, I've Found You" were released on 45 RPM, though it would be a stretch to think that the Ammons-Nelson versions could be aimed at the rhythm and blues market, especially since by 1964 there was no rhythm and blues market.
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
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