Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Kenny Burrell was certainly no stranger to Prestige's album shelf, but it had been a while since the label had given him the leader's baton -- seven years. He had recently worked with Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott, Gildo Mahones, Jimmy Witherspoon.
This a slightly unusual lineup in that it's a quintet with no horns. The basic rhythm section, and Burrell's guitar, are augmented by the always-welcome Ray Barretto. The other musicians on the date are less well-known. Bill English played on a few Prestige sessions; the other two are newcomers to Prestige, but members of Burrell's working group.
Will Davis, new to Prestige, had seniority in the jazz world. Born in 1926, he joined Howard McGhee's early West Coast bebop ensemble and recorded with McGhee in 1948. Then relocating to Detroit, he became a part of that city's high-flying jazz scene. As the house pianist at the Crystal Bar, he worked with many of bebop's royalty, including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. After his move to New York in the late 1950s, he worked often with Burrell, although this was their only recording together.
If Davis represented the Old Guard of modern jazz, Martin Rivera had something of a different background, making his first recordings with Les Jazz Modes, the experimental group organized by Julius Watkins and Charlie Rouse. He also worked frequently with Junior Mance, recording with him as a duo, and made a few albums with Burrell, although this would be the only one on Prestige.
So it's fair to say that Burrell was looking for a flexible sound--not the trendy sound of soul jazz, although the album's title, Soul Call, would seem to suggest otherwise. But any casual jazz fancier, picking up the 45 RPM single for a jolt of the popular soul jazz of the day, might have been sorely disappointed.
Any real jazz fan, not so. "Soul Call," over a rock solid (but not aggressively funky) riff from the rhythm section, is a is a wonderful rhythmic/melodic/improvisational interplay between two masters, Burrell and Barretto.
It's a Burrell composition, as is "Kenny's Theme," which is the flip side of the 45, and another opportunity for Burrell and Barretto to interweave their talents, with rhythmic delights by Bill English and Martin Rivera thrown in.
"Mark I" was written by Will Davis, and there's room for some piano-guitar interaction, but mostly it's a vehicle for some bravura work by Burrell.
Standards comprise the rest of the album, and one not-quite-standard: "Oh Henry," written by Gil Fuller and Ernie Henry. Henry was a talented saxophone player whose promising career was cut short by heroin overdose in 1957. Fuller, though his name is not quite a household word, was a gifted composer and arranger particularly known for his work with Dizzy Gillespie. He was co-composer and arranger on "Manteca," "Tin Tin Deo" and "One Bass Hit." He gives Burrell and company a spirited beboppish romp here, to cap off an album of much originality, much virtuosity, and if the group doesn't entirely answer the soul call, they provide a refreshing change of pace.
This session has a little something for everyone, with the soul jazz organ of Jack McDuff teamed up with the technical wizardry and stylistic range of Kenny Burrell, and the brilliant Latin percussion of Ray Barretto thrown into the mix for good measure.
Burrell certainly knew how to play with an organ combo, as his long association with Jimmy Smith attests to, and he jumps right in here, starting with the first number on the session, a McDuff composition called "Grease Monkey," which has the fire and energy of the finest rhythm and blues, with Burrell pushing McDuff's riffs, and McDuff creating the kind of riffs that can sustain three and a
half minutes of solid dancing or listening.
"The Breeze and I," by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, is probably more associated with lounge acts than jazz combos, but it's had its share of jazz interpreters too (both Curtis Fuller and Wes Montgomery recorded versions of it at around the same time), and why not? If you have Ray Barretto nailing the mambo beat and Joe Dukes laying down that archetypal soul jazz rhythm, you've got a great start, and then when Kenny Burrell does what he does, which is improvise stunningly while never losing sight of the melody, you come to appreciate what a good melody it it. Lecuona was one of Cuba's leading composers, and the melody which became known as "The Breeze and I" was originally a part of his well regarded Suite Andalucia.
Barretto and Dukes don't stop the carnival, as they tear into "Nica's Dream," Horace Silver's tribute to the jazz baroness and protector of Thelonious Monk. Between the two of them over these two selections, they threaten to turn this into a percussion session to rival Art Blakey at his most intense.
"Call it Stormy Monday" is one of the most recorded of blues songs, but it took a while to get there, and for Walker to start realizing any royalties on what would become his most famous composition. When Woody Herman and his Swinging Herd (then including Bill Harris, Richie Kamuca, Victor Feldman and Vince Guaraldi) released the first cover version in 1957, ten years after Walker first recorded it, there weren't many blues classics because nobody much was recording cover versions of great blues songs. When Herman recorded his Blues Groove album for Capitol, whoever wrote the blues for the back sleeve was had to find a way to sell the concept, and he came up with "Woody Herman and his Herd combine the beat of rock and roll with the dynamic sounds of swinging jazz." Jazz with a beat, as Shirley Scott and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis described it in the title to their first album together, but not many people were looking to catalog of blues originals for material. Ralph J. Gleason, in the liner notes to Blues Groove, looked forward hopefully but uncertainty: "There may come a time when the blues will be regarded as the true folk art of America."
That was 1957. The blues had already, as Muddy Waters was to point out later, "had a baby and they named it rock and roll," but jazz fans still shunned that birth as illegitimate, and to true music aficionados like Gleason, the mainstreaming of the blues into American culture was still a wistful dream.
Bizarrely enough, the next performer to take it on, in 1960, was Pat Boone. Even more surprising, his version isn't bad, with Boone adding some crooner's touches, but respecting the blues, and a nice band behind him.
But then it was the 1960s, and Ralph Gleason's dream for the blues started to become a reality. And T-Bone Walker's dream of royalty checks for a great song, as it was recorded by Nancy Wilson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bobby Bland, and Lou Rawls with Les McCann. Kenny Burrell liked the song so much he would record it again for Prestige the following year, with Shirley Scott.
And also in 1964, "Call it Stormy Monday" was recorded by Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the first British blues band, and that brought it all back home, as the showed the Yanks what the true folk art of America was.
Burrell and McDuff seize on this classic-to-be as a license to play the blues, and that's what they do. This is soul jazz, yes, but at its heart it's the blues, the whole blues, and nothing but the blues.
Most of this session went onto the LP Crash!, credited to Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet. "Moody McDuff" went on to a 1966 McDuff album, Steppin' Out, which is interesting because it pulls together tracks from five different sessions utilizing three of jazz's greatest guitarists, all of whom worked with McDuff at different stages of his career: Burrell, Grant Green, and George Benson. Apparently by the time the album was released, Burrell had already stepped out of his Prestige contract and into an exclusive contract with another label: he is credited as K. B. Groovington. "The Breeze and I" and "Nica's Dream" were released on 45 RPM. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Jack McDuff welcomed in the new year with a January 2nd session in Englewood Cliffs featuring an eight piece band, which apparently didn't go so well. Only two tunes were recorded, one of which was unissued, the other of which eventually made it onto a compilation album called The Soul Giants. It was one of Prestige's PRST releases of the late 1960s and early 1970s--tracks re-engineered for stereo release, not always successfully.
He was back again a week later, on January 8, with a different lineup, only tenorman Harold Vick and his regular drummer Joe Dukes. McDuff was by this time solidly into the soul jazz groove that would make him one of the most popular jazz artists of the decade.
It's hard to say what could have gone wrong with the January 2 octet session, with some first rate musicians aboard, but by the time the following Tuesday had rolled around, he had a tight group of players who knew just what to do. Joe Dukes was steadily building a reputation as one of the premier soul jazz drummers. He would make a career, and a good one, as Brother Jack's drummer, and pretty much fade out of sight as the the soul jazz decade of the 1960s came to an end.
Harold Vick was to make his first recording as leader later in the year with Blue Note, and would go on to make several albums with as many different labels, never quite seizing the brass ring, but making some solidly good music. He would continue to work with McDuff through 1964.
Eric Dixon only climbed aboard the McDuff cavalcade for this one session, but he knew how to swing to a solid groove, as his years with Count Basie demonstrate. And Kenny Burrell and Ray Barretto make any session better.
Sometimes it's hard to understand the vagaries of contractual obligations in the recording industry, especially the jazz end of it. Burrell is credited as K. B. Groovington on one track, "Shaky," which was buried until 1969 and finally released on a PRST compilation of McDuff sides from various Prestige sessions, Steppin' Out. . A track from a February McDuff session also ended up on Steppin' Out, so maybe by 1960 Burrell was under contract with a label that precluded the use of his name on compilations? Hard to believe. But I'm not an entertainment contract lawyer.
Five of these tunes--the title tune, "How High the Moon," It's a Wonderful World," "Smut" and "Our Miss Brooks" comprised McDuff's next LP, Somethin' Slick. "Love Walked In" was held over for a subsequent album with Burrell, "Shaky" got shaken down to the stereo compilation, and "Easy Livin' didn't make the cut at all, or at least hasn't yet. It may still end up on some streaming service.
"Somethin' Slick" was released on 45 RPM, at about half the length of the album cut (6:34 to 3:01), and I've included both versions as a sort of Listen to One and Listen to One (a), to demonstrate how a tune was edited down to fit the demands of jukeboxes. There's actually a third version available on YouTunes, a promotional copy sent to DJs, whittled down to 2:53
Dave Pike continues his south of the border explorations, this time moving to the Caribbean. The calypso craze of Harry Belafonte and the Tarriers and even Robert Mitchum, who recorded a calypso album in 1957, had passed its zenith, but Latin dances were still enough of a thing that everyone was looking for a new one to follow the mambo and the conga line and the cha cha and the bossa nova, and even though Trinidadian calypso wasn't exactly Latin, it was close enough for pop culture (there had even been a "cha-lypso" -"When the records start a spinnin', do cha-lypso while you chicken at the hop"), so 1962 saw Chubby Checker, who had ridden the crest of the most popular dance craze of all, hitting the charts with "Limbo Rock."
Dave Pike had captured some attention with his Bossa Nova Carnival album, so why not go after the same lightning again--and again with fledgling producer Eliot Mazer? There was certainly some commercial consideration here. Chubby
LISTEN TO ONE: My Little Suede Shoes
Checker's "Limbo Rock" is covered, as are "Matilda" and "Jamaica Farewell," two of the most popular songs from Harry Belafonte's Calypso album, then regarded as the most popular LP record of all time, and still up among the contenders. Mexican-American Richie Valens's hit "La Bamba" is included, as is Nat "King" Cole's semi-hit "Calypso Blues." Sonny Rollins is represented by "St. Thomas," one of the calypso melodies he would make his own, and "Mambo Bounce," which had been a 78 RPM single for Rollins off an early Prestige session. And four songs from Pike's session became 45 RPM singles.
But "commercial consideration" just means choosing and playing songs that people like, and there's nothing wrong with that, if the musicians come to play, and put their full virtuosic dexterity and creative energy into the project, which is what happens here.
"Limbo Rock" isn't the most subtle of melodies, but with Willie Bobo and Ray Barretto handling the percussion, it's lively and fun to listen to. Throughout the session, Pike alternates between vibes and marimbas -- he chose the marimbas, he explained to Juliet Lorca, who wrote the liner notes for the album, because they have a sound that's close to Trinidad's steel drums.
On the other extreme, there's Charlie Parker's "My Little Suede Shoes." Some have theorized that Parker adapted the melody from a Caribbean folk tune--Juliet Lorca suggests as much in the liner notes--but it's more likely a mashup of two French pop songs which Bird heard on a 1950 trip to Paris. One of the songs, ""Le Petit Cireur Noir," has a lyric about shoeshine man who hates suede shoes because everyone is wearing them and he's being put out of business. But then he finds a wallet stuffed with cash, buys his own shoe store, and gets rich selling suede shoes. There's no mention as to whether any of them are blue. Parker's melody--recorded with Luis Miranda on bongos and Jose Mangual on congas--is wonderfully catchy, and full of island spirit. It's a perfect choice for Dave Pike and his group, and it's a can't miss recording.
If "Limbo Rock" and "My Little Suede Shoes" are miles apart musically, they're also some distance apart in terms of orchestration. The percussionists remain, but the rest of the band -- Leo Wright on reeds and Jimmy Raney on guitar--are gone. Tommy Flanagan moves in on piano, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik replaces George Duvivier on bass.
Dave Pike was, of course, not Latin himself, and he would not remain on a Latin kick. His next album (and the last for Prestige) would go in a markedly different direction, and the rest of his career, lasting throughout the rest of the century, would take some remarkable twists and turns, through free jazz, acid jazz, funk and psychedelia. So is this cultural appropriation? That was, of course, a concept that would not be named or defined for many decades to come. Dave Pike isn't Machito or Tito Puente, but nobody is. He did turn the spotlight on a wonderful and little-known (in the States) Brazilian composer on the first album, and he has a lot of fun with some pop songs and a great Charlie Parker composition, and to quote Paul McCartney, "What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?"
"Jamaica Farewell" / "Limbo Rock" was the first single, and "La Bamba" / "My Little Suede Shoes" was the second. The album, on New Jazz (a little surprisingly--I'd thought of New Jazz as primarily a home for the less commercial fare) was called Limbo Carnival.
He would spend much of his career in Europe, not so unusual for a jazz musician, a little more unusual for a white jazz musician.
Question: What's the difference between classic rhythm and blues and soul jazz?
Answer: About three minutes.
That's the difference between the Lester Young-influenced, Illinois Jacquet-influenced, Texas roadhouse-bred, Apollo-developed, blues-based sound tenor saxophone wailing and improvising over a rock-solid groove in the 78-45 RPM era, and the LP era. Jazz With a Beat, jazz with a funky beat. And with, in the soul jazz era, a little more room to open up and try different improvisational attacks over that groove.
What about the organ, that distinctive signature sound for soul jazz? Doesn't that make it different?
Not entirely. Bill Doggett, Sil Austin, Doc Bagby and others had had rhythm and blues hits. Jack McDuff had joined the Gator to play rhythm and blues, and when the group signed with Prestige, they brought their saxophone-organ-guitar sound with them, and used it to play the longer form jams--in other words, the ones they had always played on the chitlin' circuit, but had had not been able to bring to the recording studio.
Willis Jackson had brought McDuff into his group as a bass player, and had made the inspired choice to convert him to an organist, so he knew something about nurturing organ talent. That means it's no surprise to find Freddie Roach, on the cusp of a breakout career, joining Jackson's band for this session. Roach had recorded two albums with Ike Quebec for Blue Note, and by midsummer of 1962 he was back at Blue Note to record four albums as leader. He would return to Prestige for a couple more sessions in the late 1960s, after which he stopped recording. He lived in France for a while, then California, by which time his interest had switched from jazz to the theater, where he gained something of a reputation--apparently under another name--as a playwright. He died in 1980.
Roach, along with frequent Jackson collaborators Bill Jennings, Wendell Marshall and Frank Shea, create the groove. Ray Barretto, in his second sax-organ soul jazz gig, adds the extra touch that he always does. And Jackson provided the rest. All of this comes together most emphatically on the Jackson composition "Thunderbird." When you put "Bird" in the title of a jazz composition, it's always going to suggest one thing. Bird With a Beat certainly became a rhythm and blues staple, with "Now's the Time" becoming the basis for Paul Williams's hit instrumental "The Hucklebuck." Here, there's no one Parker tune that "Thunderbird" takes off from, but Bird's improvisations on the blues are a strong inspiration.
Willis Jackson had become a mainstay of Prestige records and would remain so throughout the 1960s. This, produced once again by Esmond Edwards, was his seventh album for the label. It was released on Prestige, as was the 45 from the session, "Thunderbird," also the title of the album, "Thunderbird" was the flip side of Jackson's version of "Jambalaya."
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.
Sonny Stitt joins the organ-saxophone combo brigade. He had actually made one such record before: a live album at Chicago's Mckie's DJ Lounge, one of the last clubs standing as Chicago, by the 1960s, was losing its luster as one of the nation's jazz hot spots. That recording, for Chicago-based Argo Records, utilized a group of local musicians, including organist Eddie Buster.
This session brings Stitt together with one of the leading lights of the new organ combo soul jazz movement, and it's interesting to compare the two albums. Stitt was used to touring alone, and picking up groups of musicians in
the cities he visited, as with the Chicagoans on At the D. J. Lounge. Those musicians, whether just playing for the club audience or knowing they were to be recorded, knew that the people in the club had gotten dressed up and come out and paid money to hear Sonny Stitt. This was still a bullish era for jazz in Chicago--Mr. Kelly's was still thriving, and the Regal Theater--and there were first rate jazz musicians available. Eddie Buster's organ playing is excellent, and adds an unusual and satisfying texture to Stitt's bebop.
Playing with McDuff is a little different, but in a way not so different. In this case the city is New York, the mecca of jazz. Sonny Stitt is a stalwart veteran of Prestige's catalog (14 appearances before this one), but Jack McDuff is one of its hottest young stars. But still, it's Stitt coming to town and playing with a group of locals.
And in a way, the effect is comparable. More than is the case with a lot of the organ-saxophone combos, this is a Sonny Stitt session.
Jazz is a music of innovation, and it's easy to think of it as in an almost constant, churning state of out with the old, in with the new, but that's not exactly the way it is. Certainly change is a constant, and "in with the new" will always be the watchword, though not without resistance -- think of Charlie Parker in his day, Ornette Coleman in his. Or the commercial rejection of Miles Davis's nonet sessions that became Birth of the Cool. But that didn't necessarily mean out with the old, which is why jazz careers, health permitting, could last a long time, and Garvin Bushell could play with Bunk Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, and later with John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.
And it 's why there are not always clear dividing lines. It's why, in the 1950s, we heard swing-to-bop from players like Zoot Sims and Coleman Hawkins. And now, in 1962, are we hearing something similar, with Sonny Stitt going bop-to-funk? You can certainly hear it "Pam Ain't Blue," where Stitt's bebop rides easily along with McDuff's funk, and even more in "'Nother Fu'ther," which seems to capture the essence of bop-to-funk. All of the original compositions on this session are by Stitt, but they're geared to this blend of styles, and one of them, "Ringin' In," is really McDuff's number, and he makes the most of it. The three ballads are very much in Stitt's wheelhouse, with Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "Time after Time" getting a particularly beautiful reading.
That producer Esmond Edwards did not intend this to be strictly a jazz funk session is reflected in his choice of sidemen. McDuff regular Eddie Diehl is on guitar, but veterans Art Taylor and Ray Barretto provide the percussion, and they are the right men for the job.
I wondered if all of this added up to an album that would be more to the taste of the real jazz fan than the young crowd hopping on the funk jazz bandwagon. And I meant that to sound as snobbish as it does, when I prepared to write it, but as I got it down, I was changing my mind. Not everyone has to be totally committed to the pure soul of music. There's nothing wrong with being young, and wanting to dance, and caught up in the "what's happening now" spirit of the times. And if that zeitgeist is created at the fingertips of Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, Jack McDuff, all the better. Besides, the popular jazz of an era--funk, swing, Peter Gunn--can be a gateway drug, and of the young cats and kitties who pick this up for the organ groove, at least some of them will stay for the complexities of a Sonny Stitt improvisation. For the rest...you're only young once. God bless 'em.
The album was called Stitt Meets Brother Jack, and it was also released--presumably at the same time, with the same album number--as 'Nother Fu'ther, which was also the first single off the album, divided onto two sides of 45 RPM release. Also on 45 were "Pam Ain't Blue" / "Ringin' In," and "Thirty Three Ninety Six," parts 1 and 2.
Jimmy Forrest is back in Englewood Cliffs again after only six weeks, with mostly the same group--minus the guitar, plus Ray Barretto on congas, and with a similar mix of good tunes, not necessarily the tunes you'd hear on every modern jazz musician's set list.
The tenor saxophone is and is not a modernist instrument. It's not associated with the traditional jazz era, and not really so much with the swing era, when the clarinets of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw reigned supreme. Yet so many of the titans of the tenor - Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins -- are virtually unclassifiable. Not swing, though they can swing. Not bop, though they can bop. Not cool, though they can play it cool.
And the same is true of the not-quite-titans, the demi-gods like Gene Ammons and Illinois Jacquet and, yes, Jimmy Forrest. The tenor sax has that human voice-like quality, and the voice is the most flexible instrument of them all. And all these cats can play the blues.
Forrest is back, as in his September session, with some familiar tunes, just not necessarily familiar in this context. And as with the tunes in the September session, he makes them work. Forrest has a great warmth to his tone, particularly in the lower registers.
Of particular enjoyment to me in this session is "Matilda," the 1930s calypso tune brought up to date in the 1950s by Harry Belafonte. Sonny Rollins also brought calypso into modern jazz at around the same time, possibly a little later. Ray Barretto drums up a storm.
Esmond Edwards produced, and the session was released on Prestige as Most Much!, except for tunes, "I Love You" and "Sonny Boy," both of which were added to a New Jazz release, Soul Street, which gathered bits and pieces from other sessions. The traditional Scottish melody "Annie Laurie," which had been part of a brief swing era vogue for Scottish folk songs, became a two-sided 45.
Gene Ammons played back to back sessions in October of 1961, with different lineups, for two different albums, although some tunes from each session would end up on each album.
Art Taylor and Ray Barretto supplied the percussion for both sessions, both of them familiar sounds to Prestige listeners, particularly Taylor, who had appeared on 65 earlier Prestige sessions. George Duvivier, who played on the October 18 session, was another regular, with 33 previous appearances.
Art Davis was the other bass player. He had first been heard on a Prestige recording just the week earlier,
appearing on Oliver Nelson's epic Afro-American Sketches. Ammons and producer Esmond Edwards blended youth and experience on both dates, with Davis (age 24) paired with Walter Bishop Jr. (age 34) on piano, while the veteran Duvivier (age 41) was matched with Patti Bown (30).
Both Davis and Bown had classical as well as jazz backgrounds. Bown moved early into jazz and stayed there, but Davis, regarded by many as one of the finest musicians of his generation, continued to work, and excel, in both worlds.
And he paid for it. Although he played with major symphony orchestras, those positions were hard to come by for an African American, and in 1969 he filed a discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic, which up until that time, had employed exactly one Black musician. He lost the lawsuit, but his activism led to the practice of blind auditions, where the judges could not see the race or gender of the applicant who was playing. But activism often comes with a price, and for Davis the price was a blacklist. He found it hard to get employment as a musician in the 1970s, and this was a man who was known to be John Coltrane's favorite bassist, who had been described as a "forgotten genius" by Ahmad Jamal and "beyond category" by critic Nat Hentoff.
Davis, for a while, had to find another line of work, and he did. I've talked about jazz musicians who found other things to do--George Wallingford going into the family air conditioning business, Wendell Marshall starting his own insurance agency--but Davis did them one better. He went back to school and got a doctorate in clinical psychology, and as gigs started coming his way again--both jazz and classical--he worked them around seeing patients.
Ammons, always a versatile player, covers a wide range of material in these two sessions.
There are three jazz standards, which allow Ammons and Co. to exercise their bebop chops. "The Masquerade is Over," composed by Allie Wrubel, was a hit for Jimmy Dorsey and others in 1939, then lay mostly dormant until until a doowop group, the Cleftones, picked it up in 1965, and the following year Cannonball Adderley became the first modern jazz musician to record it, after which it rapidly became a favorite of jazz, pop, and even rhythm and blues performers, "I'm Beginning to See the Light" is from the Ellington songbook, co-composed by Duke, Johnny Hodges and Harry James, it has the subtle chord changes that beboppers love. Scores of jazz singers, and singers who'd like a little jazz tinge to their repertoire, have recorded it, and it's been a favorite of instrumentalists as well. In 1961 alone, it was recorded by Ben Webster, Billy Byers, Ruby Braff, and Al Casey. And Lester Young's "Lester Leaps In" has remained a great vehicle for tenor sax players ever since Young and Count Basie introduced it in 1939, although it took a while to become the ubiquitous standard that it is. The first jazz musician to record it after Lester was James Moody in 1949 (for Prestige, on the same Swedish session that produced "Moody's Mood for Love"). Oscar Peterson recorded it in 1956, then Cannonball Adderley with Gil Evans in 1958, and after that, the floodgates opened.
"Travelin'" by Kenny Burrell isn't so much of a standard, but it's a nice tune, and this may be the first recorded version of it. Burrell doesn't seem to have recorded it until two years later, a session with Jimmy Smith.
The recent pop song catalog was mined for "The Breeze and I," "Song of the Islands," "Soft Summer Breeze," "Moonglow" and "The Five O'Clock Whistle." All of these except "Soft Summer Breeze" were older songs that had been resurrected during the 1950s.
One aspect of 1950s culture that's not often remembered was the rise of what would later come to be called "easy listening" music, but was in that era a rearguard action against rock and roll.
The playing of recorded music had become one of the predominant features of the radio airwaves by the 1950s, as live broadcasts from the big bands disappeared, and comedy and drama shows, and their stars, were lost to television. The first record was played over the air in 1911, when both radio and records were in their infancy. But the format was not to catch on right away, because a lot of restrictions were put on the way recorded music could be presented, and a lot of records simply couldn't be played over the air, because many artists wouldn't allow it, and their records were stamped "Not licensed for radio broadcast."
A real milestone in the history of recorded music on radio came
in 1935 with a program called "Make Believe Ballroom," hosted by a radio personality named Martin Block, who came to be so identified with the format that columnist Walter Winchell began calling him a "disc jockey," which was a pretty clever coinage, when you think about it. "Make Believe Ballroom" was created to fill a need--the need to fill in time between reports on the most dominant news story of the day. A carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann had gone on trial for the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. The trial lasted for over a month, and while it was going on, any regular radio programming would be broken into with bulletins. Since Block was standing by to fill in odd chunks of time, he couldn't very well have a real orchestra on hand, so make believe orchestras in a make believe ballroom were the next best thing.
Both Block and the show's title had a longer life than Bruno Hauptmann, who went to the electric chair on April 3, 1936. Recorded music on the air was growing in popularity, to the extent that musicians began to feel it was jeopardizing their livelihood, and the musicians' union called a strike against recording companies that lasted from 1942 to 1944. But recorded music on the air was a phenomenon that couldn't be stopped.
Having their records played over the air was the life's blood of the new independent record labels which had grown up like mushrooms after World War II, labels that specialized in jazz, rhythm and blues or country (although country did have its live broadcast outlets like Grand Old Opry and Louisiana Hayride). And then in the 1950s, rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll and became the new lingua franca of teenage America.
And the bête noire of another group, for whom rock and roll was the music of the devil or jungle or the terminally tone deaf, depending on which outraged voice you were listening to. For those people, recorded music on the radio followed the "Make Believe Ballroom" format, and, indeed, still included "Make Believe Ballroom" and Martin Block, who hosted the show on WNEW radio in New York until 1954. After Block finally decamped for another station, "Make Believe Ballroom" continued on WNEW with new host Jerry Marshall for three years, and then when he left, with William B. Williams, who became synonymous with the programming concept and the rearguard action against rock 'n roll through the 1980s.
So, to wind up this digression, what were the "Make Believe Ballroom" type stations playing in the 1950s? They couldn't go on being pretend ballrooms hosting make believe big bands, because those big bands mostly didn't exist any more, and the era of the big band had given way to the era of the singer--1940s era holdovers like Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, new crooners like Eddie Fisher and Connie Francis. And where did these singers get their songs? Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other recorded LPs of standards, but the real action in the 1950s--radio, jukeboxes--was on the 45 RPM record. The singers got their material from new Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and The Pajama Game and Kismet, or from movie soundtracks like Three Coins in the Fountain or A Summer Place. or new songs from Tin Pan Alley that were often not very good, or by digging out some less likely songs from the past.
Radio actually hedged a lot of bets in the 1950s. For every Make Believe Ballroom on the one hand, or Alan Freed's rock 'n roll party on the other hand, there were stations, and a format, that had it both ways. In New York, when Jerry Marshall left WNEW to go and host a similar show for competitor WMGM, that station was also adopting a new format for its afternoon, after school slot--a format that had recently been created by an Omaha, Nebraska radio station owner who noticed that the same songs kept being played over and over on the jukebox in a diner he frequented, and from that observation, Top 40 radio was born, and the top jukebox hits of any given week put Eddie Fisher and Perry Como cheek by jowl with Elvis Presley and Fats Domino.
The jazz musicians of the 1950s and early 1960s did not go much to rock 'n roll for inspiration, although that would change later in the decade, but they could still go to Your Hits of the Week for songs to catch the ear of the something less than hard core jazz fan, and a populist like Gene Ammons would always have an ear open for that.
And so with the songs on this album. "The Breeze and I" was originally a classical piece written by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona in 1928, made into a hit with English lyrics by Jimmy Dorsey in 1940. and then returned to Your Hits of the Week in 1955 by the Italian singer Caterina Valente. "Song of the Islands" was written by Hawaiian politician/songwriter Charles E. King in 1916, and brought back to radio and jukeboxes in the late 1950s by Marty Robbins, Andy Williams, and Annette Funicello. Both of these were representatives of an odd genre of faux-exotic music called "exotica," described by bandleader Martin Denny, who more or less invented the genre, as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." Which meant they were sort of novelty songs, but catchy and melodic. "The Five O'Clock Whistle" wasn't exotica, but it was a novelty, and catchy. Written by film composer Joseph Myrow in 1940, it was popularized by the orchestras of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, then brought back to life in 1955 as a pop instrumental (they had them in those days) by organist Lenny Dee. "Moonglow," written in 1933 by Will Hudson, has always been a favorite of dance orchestras, but found its way into top 40 radio in 1956, as part of a medley with the theme from Picnic, a movie vehicle for William Holden and Kim Novak, performed by George Cates, who would become Lawrence Welk's musical director.
"Soft Summer Breeze" was a minor 1955 hit for jazz/lounge pianist Eddie Heywood, who would have a much bigger hit the following year with "Canadian Sunset." "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" was a 1948 hit for Dinah Washington, and did get a cover in the 1950s by the doowop group The Silhouettes, but that never went anywhere. It would become a career-making hit a few years later for Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, but it's probably here just because Ammons liked it.
Jazz versions of top 40 hits were never likely to make a dent on Top 40 radio, but they could get played by the Martin Block/Jerry Marshall/William B. Williams types, and find their way onto certain jukeboxes. "The Breeze and I," "Moonglow," and "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" all did get released on 45, as did "Don't Go to Strangers," which had been a jazz and Make Believe Ballroom hit, even making it onto the top 40 charts for Etta Jones (on Prestige). Two Ammons originals, "Up Tight!" and "Carbow" also made it onto 45.
Both recording sessions were produced by Esmond Edwards. Up Tight! was released in 1961, Boss Soul! in 1963.
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.
Jesse Powell recorded three sessions for Prestige's Tru-Sound rhythm and blues subsidiary in the fall and winter of 1961. These were the old-fashioned, 1949-50-era sessions, four songs, enough for two 78 RPM singles. Of course, this being 1961, they were all gathered together on one LP, and we'll consider them all together here, although he worked with two different groups of musicians.
Tru-Sound was not really a success. Bob Weinstock started it as a showcase for "contemporary rhythm and blues," but there really was no contemporary rhythm and blues in the early 1960s. It was being displaced by funk and soul. Tru-Sound's most successful artist was King Curtis. Juan Amalbert and the Latin Jazz Quintet made a couple of albums for the label. Altogether, Prestige released 14 albums on Tru-Sound
between 1961 and 1963, after which it was closed down. Although most of the label's releases fell victim to what appeared to be Weinstock's difficulty in promoting to the rhythm and blues market, they also lived up to his standards for quality, and Jesse Powell was no exception.
Born in Texas in 1924, Powell, after playing some gigs with Louis Armstrong and Luis Russell among others, joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1946, replacing another Texas tenor man, Illinois Jacquet. He also backed various blues singers, including Champion Jack Dupree and Brownie McGhee, and he played with Dizzy Gillespie. A photo of the Gillespie orchestra at the Apollo in 1949 shows both Powell and John Coltrane in the saxophone section.
In the early 1950s, Powell led his own groups for Federal and Josie, both rhythm and blues labels, and these sessions should settle once and for all whether rhythm and blues is jazz. Backing up singer Fluffy Hunter for Federal in 1951, Powell's band was composed of Buck Clayton (trumpet); J.J. Johnson (trombone); Jesse Powell (tenor sax); Cecil Payne (baritone sax); Bill Doggett (piano); Johnny Jones (guitar); James Smith (bass); Herb Lovelle (drums). And recording a couple of instrumental side for Josie in 1954, he used Sir Charles Thompson (piano / organ); Mickey Baker (guitar); Lloyd Trotman (bass); Osie Johnson (drums). He was in demand as a session man in those years, appearing on such hits as "Speedoo" by the Cadillacs for Josie, "Mr. Lee" by the Bobettes for Atlantic, and several of Bobby Darin's hits for Atlantic subsidiary Atco.
John Adriano Acea (listed on the session notes as Adiano Acea) played on the September 12 and December 15 sessions. He had started out playing trumpet and saxophone, and he was said to have been proficient on any instrument there was, but he concentrated on piano after getting out of the army in 1946. Like Powell, he got a lot of work as a session man in New York, often recording as Johnny Acea or John Acea. He was featured on albums by Grant Green, Joe Newman, Illinois Jacquet, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. Don Wilkerson and others, played with Dizzy Gillespie, and accompanied Gloria Lynne, Diana Washington, Ruth Brown and Patti Page. He worked rhythm and blues and doowop sessions for independent labels in New York and Philadelphia. Never in good health (doctors told his parents he would not survive his childhood), he died not long after these sessions, in 1963.
Albert Winston, playing organ on the September session, was primarily known as a bass player. He recorded with Archie Shepp and George Benson among others, and was active in the rhythm and blues scene, including work with pre-Specialty Little Richard and Johnny Ace.
Billy Pyles played on all three sessions. I couldn't find much about him, but he had some solid rhythm and blues sessions for Specialty artists, including Little Richard.
Bassist William Curtis only played on the September session, and I was unable to find any information on him. Equally elusive was Steve Gordon, who played piano on the November session, a particularly tricky search in that there seem to be a plethora of pianists named Steve Gordon.
Jimmy Lewis (November and December) and Belton Evans (December), are familiar names on Prestige recordings.
Wilbert Hogan (December) played on a 1956 Prestige session with Earl Coleman, as Wilbur Hogan. But that only scratches the surface of his name variations. Born Wilbert Granville Thodore Hogan Jr., he sometimes recorded as Granville Hogan, and sometimes used the initials G. T. He was active from the early 1950s (originally with Earl Bostic) through tzhe 1960s, and played with Randy Weston, Kenny Drew, Kenny Dorham, Ray Charles, Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Walter Bishop Jr.
Unusually for a rhythm and blues combo, the September session did not use a drummer. They had Ray Barretto on congas. although it wasn't a Latin session. They did one Latin tune, "Malaguena," but not with an especially Latin rendition.
All three sessions were included on a single album, It's Party Time. Three 45 RPM singles were released, all on Tru-Sound: "Jumpin' Salty/Malaguena," "When You're Smiling/Hot Stuff," and "Cool/Tonight."
Maybe between November and December the Prestige brain trust had cooled on Powell. The December session wasn't recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's, and no singles were released from it. It's also interesting that in 1962, with the twist craze in full bloom, neither of the "twist" titles were released on 45;
A lot of the information on Jesse Powell comes from an invaluable resource: A History of Tenor Saxophone Solos 1955-2015, by John Laughter.
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.
.jpg)
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4470885-1365798134-9645.jpeg.jpg)
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-3078128-1435195377-1380.jpeg.jpg)
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-1646028-1234287929.jpeg.jpg)
