Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
LISTEN TO ONE: Get out of Town / I've Got Your Number
Pat Bowie is primarily a stage actress, having appeared in several productions of August Wilson's plays, among numerous other credits. She has recently had recurring roles in Orange is the New Black and And Just Like That..., the reboot of Sex and the City. This, and one later album for Prestige, were her only ventures into recorded jazz singing, and from the evidence here, she certainly could have had a career as a jazz singer, although it's entirely possible that recurring roles on hit TV series pay better than singing in jazz clubs.
Certainly the Prestige brain trust must have thought highly of Bowie's singing abilities. They brought her back into the studio for three different sessions, and surrounded her with a dream team of musicians.
Bowie takes a brisk, hard-edged, no-nonsense approach to a song, cutting off Seldon Powell when she's had enough of his solo and getting through "Get Out of Town" in under two minutes, which is pretty close to unheard of for a jazz recording, Ray Bryant returns the favor by breaking right in when she threatens to hold a note on "I've Got Your Number," and taking an authoritative piano solo. It all works, and perhaps this conservation of energy is what has enabled her to have a fine career going 60 years after the making of this record.
Cal Lampley produced--a new name on the Prestige label, Lampley was starting to spread his wings and freelance in a few different places, after having spent nine years with Columbia, starting as a tape editor and working his way up to Recording Director of the Popular Albums Department, although his producing range extended farther than that: he worked with Leonard Bernstein, Victor Borge, Mahalia Jackson and Dave Brubeck, just to name a few.
There's a gap here. I can't find anything streaming online from Jerome Richardson's October 21 session, which produced the album Roamin' with Richardson. And I don't have it in my vinyl collection. So unless someone would like to digitize it and send it to me, it'll have to wait till I get a book contract and can afford to go back and buy the missing albums at whatever collector prices I can find.
Prestige presents the debut album of another major talent who would help to define the jazz of the 1960s, as a musician and even more as a composer--and whose life would be cut short. Not like Lem Winchester's, shorter than it should have been. He would die of a heart attack at age 43.
Nelson woke up to an awareness of music that was beyond what he had grown up with--a musical education that included an older brother who was in Cootie Williams's orchestra, and his own stint playing with Louis Jordan's Tympani Five--when he joined the Army during the Korean War, and found himself overseas in Japan and Korea. But it wasn't the music of Asia that turned his head. He had to go all the way to Japan to discover the music of the West: a Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra performance of t he music of Ravel and Hindemith. Before that, he told Ebony reporter Phyl Garland, "I hadn't even known that Negroes were allowed to go to concerts."
He was still committed to jazz, but his way to it went through a classical education. After the Army, he enrolled at Washington University in St, Louis, where jazz was a word not even mentioned in the music department, but he studied with important composers like Elliot Carter and got a grounding in composition that would stand him in good stead later--for example, when the Eastman Orchestra of Rochester, New York, premiered one of his pieces, "and the reviewers didn’t know where it belongs. You can’t tell where the jazz stops and where the classical music begins" (from an interview with John Cobley). And in 1966, he would be asked to come back to St. Louis and start a jazz program at Washington U.
He continued his postgraduate education playing in the bands of Erskine Hawkins, Wild Bill Davis, and Louie Bellson, and honed his composer/arranger chops as the house arranger at the Apollo Theater, which must have been an interesting job.
For his first album as a leader, producer Esmond Edwards has given him some of Prestige's finest for a rhythm section, plus trumpeter Kenny Dorham, not quite a regular, but here making his eighth appearance on a Prestige recording. They've chosen four original Nelson compositions, plus one by Billy Strayhorn ("Passion Flower") and one by Bob Haggard ("What's New?") All of his own work has both immediacy and sublety, and shows a composer who will go on to become justly celebrated. I particularly liked "Jams and Jellies," which has a catchy blues melody, and opens itself up to terrific solos by Nelson, Ray Bryant and Kenny Dorham. And in this case, I sincerely believe it must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that.
"Ostinato" is particularly interesting. "Ostinato" is an Italian word meaning obstinate or stubborn, and in music it describes a musical phrase that keeps repeating, that won't go away. Ravel's "Bolero" is frequently used as an example, but in the world of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and even jazz, it's pretty common. Think "Tequila," or Doc Pomus's "Lonely Avenue," best known in the recording by Ray Charles. Nelson's "Ostinato" is the work of composer seriously grounded in music theory, and of a guy who knows how to have fun.
Esmond Edwards produced. The New Jazz recording was called, appropriately, Meet Oliver Nelson.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
This is the second of three albums Benny Golson and Curtis Fuller made for Prestige, before they linked up with Art Farmer and went off to form the Jazztet. A tightly planned sextet had been on Golson’s mind for a while, and when he approached Farmer with it, Farmer shot back a note saying he’d been thinking along the same lines, and been on the point of contacting Golson.
This one features Golson playing more standards than originals. Which is actually the balance on Meet the Jazztet, too, though that album is mostly remembered for the great Golson original compositions, “I Remember Clifford,” “Blues March,” and especially “Killer Joe,” which was the new one. The originals for this album didn’t become classics, although “The Stroller” was originally written for Lou Donaldson, and has been recorded by Italian bandleader Giorgio Azzolini.
If "The Stroller" and "My Blues House" haven't become standards, hey certainly could have. They're in competition with some pretty high-level work in the Golson catalog, but as "lines... meant to be vehicles for blowing," in Golson's words, they fill the bill quite nicely.
"The Stroller" does anything but stroll, although its name doesn't come from its tempo, but from the practice of "strolling," playing a solo without piano backing. It's a high-octane thrill ride in bebop tempo, powered by Art Blakey, with exciting solo space for everyone, leading off with three minutes of nonstop strolling by Golson, an including Paul Chambers on his signature bowed bass. "My Blues House," same good stuff, more relaxed tempo.
It's a little unusual to see one of Blue Note's marquee performers moonlighting on a Prestige session, but Blakey is here in support of one of the mainstays of his great late 1950s version of the Jazz Messengers. In addition to playing and composing, Golson also mentored the Messengers' Bobby Timmons through writing "Moanin'."
"Drum Boogie" is the Roy Eldridge/Gene Krupa classic vehicle for Krupa, generally including a vocal, most famously Anita O'Day. It's so closely associated with Krupa that it's not all that often taken on by other artists, but we have heard it before on Prestige, from a Kenny Burrell-led group featuring Cecil Payne and Elvin Jones. Interestingly, even with the presence of Blakey on the one cut and Jones on the other, two of the most expressive and individual drum soloists in jazz, both groups treat it more as an ensemble piece, with a relatively short drum solo.
Golson's gone to two of the masters, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern, for the rest of the session.
Golson, in Ira Gitler's liner notes, discusses the musicians he chose for this session, starting with Curtis Fuller:
If I couldn't work with Curtis...I'd probably use another instrument for a two-horn grpup. We blend together so well, and he's always listening.
Fuller does a fair amount of listening here, as this is more of a Golson showcase than the later Jazztet albums will be, but when he does solo, you can absolutely hear what Golson means about how well they blend.
Of Ray Bryant: "His harmonics are great and he is so melodic too." Of Paul Chambers:
For his age, Paul seems to have attained maturity on his instrument that usually takes years to acquire. His melodic conception is uncanny. When you're strolling ... you can
lean on him without ever having to worry.
And about his old boss:
I consider it an asset having Art Blakey on any record date I make. He has made it very hard for me to play with most drummers because he swings so hard and so constant. He's a dynamo. And such a feeling for the drums--he can express himself like a horn player.
A note in passing. It's been often remarked that jazz became mainstreamed into American culture during this era with jazz themes for TV shows like Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn" and Count Basie's "M Squad, jazz soundtracks for movies like John Lewis's Odds Against Tomorrow, Duke Ellington's Anatomy of a Murder, and Elmer Bernstein's Man with the Golden Arm. Perhaps even more indicative of the mainstreaming of jazz was the way that TV and movie producers, even when they weren't looking for a marquee name for a highly promotable soundtrack or theme, still looked to jazz musicians. Benny Golson composed and arranged soundtrack music for any number of movies and TV shows, including Mannix and Mission Impossible(main themes by Dizzy Gillespie alumnus Lalo Schifrin), Ironside, M*A*S*H, and even The Partridge Family.
Groovin' with Golson was released on New Jazz. Esmond Edwards produced.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
Prestige follows up its Swingville debut with another Swingville set, this one led by Tiny Grimes, another traditional player, for an album that's steeped in the blues--and as Grimes comments in the liner notes, "If a man can't play the blues he won't last very long."
Everyone here could play the blues. Jerome Richardson, who played with Lionel Hampton and Earl Hines, certainly could. He was fast becoming Prestige's go-to guy in 1958-59. He appeared with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Gene Ammons, the Prestige Blues Swingers led by Art Farmer, the Prestige All Stars with Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley and Kenny Burrell, and his own group with Kenny Burrell and Jimmy Cleveland.
The songs are a mixture of familiar folk songs, not always a first stop market for jazz musicians, "Ain't Misbehavin'," so familiar and beloved a melody that it could almost be a folk song and originals by Grimes and Doretta Crawley, about whom I can find no biographical information and no other writing credits, so I'm guessing a romantic liaison of some sort. Whether Crawley helped a lot, I don't know, but she certainly didn't hurt. These are tunes that roll up the blues and lay them flat out. “Down With It” and “Home Sick” are slow blues, redolent of the juke joint, vehicles for Grimes’s bent notes and unreconstructed feeling. Grimes is really the center here, but Richardson weighs in with a flute solo on “Down With It” that makes as good a case for the flute as a blues instrument as you’re likely to here, then comes back with the tenor sax for the final statement of the theme. “Home Sick” gives Ray Bryant some great solo space and duet space with Grimes. “Durn Tootin’” kicks up the tempo and puts Richardson in the driver’s seat, which changes a lot of things. It gives Tiny a different direction, so that without giving away any blues cred, he stretches out his jazz chops a lot. They're one-shot tunes, just for this album, so limited royalties for Ms. Crawley, but they sound good.
Tiny in Swingville was the second Swingville release. "Annle Laurie" and "Durn Tootin'" were put out as a 45, and got a nice heads up from Billboard:
Annie Laurie: Tiny Grimes is featured on guitar on this swinging version of the familiar folk tune. Good side for jazz boxes. Durn Tootin: Jerome Richardson and Ray Bryant join Grimes on this happy riff effort that should appeal to modern jazz buffs.
And that hits it pretty well. Swingville's marketing, and the presence of Tiny Grimes, was a signal to the swing fans and the classic rhythm and blues fans that there was something here for them, and yet Prestige was not losing sight of its modern jazz soul.
Benny Golson is a jazz legend for all sorts of excellent reasons: saxophone great, composer, and co-leader of a legendary if short-lived 1960s group, the Jazztet.
As a composer, he can lay as legitimate a claim as any to the title of Third Most Important Modern Jazz Composer--Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington will always be one-two, although their order can be debated. Then there are Dave Brubeck and Dave Grusin, Tadd Dameron...and others, but Golson is in that group. Few can match him for the number of compositions that have become jazz standards-- the
tunes that every jazz musician can be expected to know if they're called at a jam session, and that virtually every jazz ensemble has recorded at one time or another. "Killer Joe" has been recorded over 50 times; "Stablemates," the tune that first drew attention to Golson as a composer, has over 70 versions, as does "Whisper Not;" musicians have gone into the studio with "I Remember Clifford" well over 100 times. And these are all jazz standards, not popular songs with lyrics which have also become favorites with instrumentalists.
"Stablemates" was first recorded by Miles Davis in 1955, when Golson was 26, but the story of how it got to Miles goes back to Golson's childhood in Philadelphia, a city that spawned a lot of young jazzmen (and women: don't forget Shirley Scott). Young Benny had studied piano until, at 15, he went to hear Lionel Hampton in concert, and when Arnett Cobb stepped out in front to play his solo, he knew that there was nothing else to do but play the saxophone. If he only had one. And if he knew which saxophone he wanted to play. He told his mother of his longing, and she asked which saxophone he wanted. "Oh...the one with the curve in the neck."
The Golsons were about as poor as you could get. Mrs. Golson took in washing, and one day young Benny found her crying because she didn't have five cents to buy soap to do her loads of wash. But she somehow put together the money to buy her son a saxophone with a curved neck.
He and his friends began practicing and playing together by the open window of his mother's apartment, to the bemusement of their long-suffering neighbors, but as Golson recalls it, they knew they were starting to get good when their neighbors started calling requests in through the window.
Benny went to Howard University and studied music theory, then started playing professionally with rhythm and blues bands: Tiny Grimes, Bull Moose Jackson, Earl Bostic. Jackson's band included Tadd Dameron on piano, and Dameron became his mentor and strongest influence as a composer. He was more and more drawn to writing music, and he began handing out lead sheets to every bandleader and musician he met. He didn't know if anyone actually looked at them until he gave one to his best friend from the open window days. John Coltrane had just been summoned from Philadephia, on the recommendation of fellow Philly cat Philly Joe Jones, to join Miles Davis' band, and he brought the lead sheet for "Stablemates" with him. When that record came out, musicians all over began digging through their piles of lead sheets and saying "Golson? Wasn't that the name of the kid who...?"
Tadd Dameron once said that the most important element to him in a composition was beauty, and that's a lesson that Golson learned. His work is simple, direct, melodic and beautiful. If a tune like "I Remember Clifford" weren't complex and capable of great musical exploration, it wouldn't have been recorded so many times, even by young musicians who don't remember Clifford. But the simplicity and beauty come first.
And although there aren't any greatest hits from Golson's pen on this album, those qualities are very much in evidence -- beauty, simplicity, melody.
"Stacatto Swing" is a play on one of his big ones, "Blues March," recorded the year before by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. "Blues March" was an unlikely combination. When Golson told Blakey he was writing it, Blakey advised him to forget it. No one wanted to hear a march, and nothing could be a march and the blues at the same time. But when they debuted it at Smalls Paradise, a club known for a listening, not a dancing audience, chairs were kicked back right and left as couples couldn't keep to their seats. "Stacatto Swing" is not as insistently stacatto as "Blues March" is with its smoky march beat, but it's a melody as lovely as any in Golson's better known songs.
Curtis Fuller is the other horn on the session, and he would stay with Golson in 1960 as they joined forces with Art Farmer to make the Jazztet. Ray Bryant is a continuing supportive presence, and here he brings his brother Tommy to take over the bass duties. Al Harewood makes his Prestige debut here. but he was an in-demand drummer, and had worked with Curtis Fuller on two other recent sessions, one of which--for Savoy--had also included Golson.
The session was produced by Esmond Edwards. The album appeared on New Jazz as Gone With Golson. Curtis Fuller's one contribution as composer, "A Bit of Heaven," was left off the album but included in a later CD rerelease.
Benny Golson continues to perform as of this writing.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
Pointing out that Prestige is celebrating its tenth anniversary by putting out a string of audience-pleasing records is not the same as suggesting that Prestige is not doing all it could be doing to further the cause and development of jazz, although there certainly were some back then who would have felt that way. There has always been an avant-garde that equates commercial success with selling out, and that was so true in 1959. I’ve said it before: we were such snobs back then. I remember Down Beat’’s dismissal of High Society and the Crosby-Armstrong number, “Now You Has Jazz”: “Jazz? I’m still waiting to hear it.” Or the critics who generally liked Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day but criticized the movie—and the festival—for including Chuck Berry.
I remember the comics who jabbed little pinpricks into this snobbery, like Ronny Graham and his commencement address at the School for Progressive Jazz Musicians: “When you cats came here, all you could play was the melody. Now you wouldn’t know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece!” Or a comedy record that I had once but no longer do, and no longer remember who the comic was, but he played the persona of a super-hip jazz critic, way too hip to like anyone. Miles? Too much mute, MJQ? Too tinkly. Who did he like? There was a quintet of Eskimoes, with axes. “That’s it? Just five saxophones?” “No, man, five axes.”
The albums that Esmond Edwards was producing and Bob Weinstock was releasing were not not going to be top sellers. They weren’t going to rival Kind of Blue or Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College or Errol Garner’s Concert by the Sea. But they were pitched to be consistent sellers. And they were pitched to be consistent sellers to a largely black community, which meant they might well be flying under the radar of the mostly white jazz critical establishment.
Which also means, today, that to a younger generation of jazz critics, who know all about Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, Coltrane and Dolphy and Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders, and who aren’t afflicted by our generation’s snobbery (well, we outgrew it too), and are looking for more music from this rich era, these recordings are something of a treasure trove to be rediscovered, so that Scott Yanow, reviewing for AllMusic.com can give this album four stars and a “highly recommended.”
The album is called Party Time, which should give a clue as to its marketing strategy. Cobb’s trio of Ray Bryant, Wendell Marshall, Art Taylor, augmented by Ray Barretto. Barretto, the conguero equally at home with swing and Latin rhythms, gives us both here, turning “Cocktails for Two” into a hot Latin number that every dance party needs. Barretto also gives a new and exciting underpinning to the always-welcome “Flying Home,” which checks in here at just over five minutes, enough time to give the classic reading and then take it farther.
I was particularly struck by “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.” This is a syrupy ballad from the 1930s which was originally recorded by Guy Lombardo and mostly forgotten since then. But for a listener in 1959, the song only had one antecedent: the great 1956 version by Fats Domino.
Domino's version swings, it rocks and rolls, and it has the services of one of the warmest, most life-affirming voices in the history of American popular music.
Paradoxically but effectively, that warmth and positive energy was often used in the service of the blues and songs of loss, despair and even suicide--"Ain't That a Shame," "Poor Me," "Goin' to the River"--there was even the fear of being bitten by the beloved's dog. The other great chroniclers of the lure of the river were Hank Williams and Percy Mayfield, and with them, you always felt that accepting the river's invitation was a real possibility. With Domino, the tug-of-war between life and death was always going to be decided on the side of life.
All of which gave Domino an emotional richness which he used to powerful effect when singing the treacly optimism of songs from a different era and from an escapist white middle class culture--"My Blue Heaven," "When My Dreamboat Comes Home." Domino's voice comes from a world where no one is sweethearts, yes forever, but that has never gotten him down before, and his unquenchable warmth carries the day.
Party Time was the first of a successful series of recordings. "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" and "Lonesome Road" were released as a 45.
His recording also has the benefit of Dave Bartholomew's New Orleans studio musicians, and a fiery tenor sax solo by Herbert Hardesty.
Arnett Cobb brings the tempo back down to slow dance time, but they slow-dance differently at the party time Cobb is playing for than they did to Guy Lombardo at the Rainbow Room, and his quintet, especially Ray Barretto, give this dance a unique and flexible rhythm.
Cobb's "Dreamboat" has Fats Domino at its core, but it also has a lot more. This is a jazz ballad, and Ray Bryant's solo, which has nothing to do with Fats Domino, emphasizes that.
Cobb reprises his most popular number, "Flying Home" (he
replaced Illinois Jacquet in Lionel Hampton's band). He does a couple of
originals (including "Slow Poke," not the more familiar tune
popularized by PeeWee King), and "Lonesome Road," which I would have
thought of as a folk melody, but is credited to Gene Austin and
Nathaniel Shilkret.
"Blues in the Closet" is by bass
great Oscar Pettiford, and is driven by Wendell Marshall, Ray Barretto
and Art Taylor laying down a great groove for Cobb to swing over.
Party Time was successful enough for Prestige to warrant a sequel. "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" and "Lonesome Road" were the single.
So what's the real thing? What are the greatest jazz records ever made? All I can tell you is that if I were driving home from New York City to Saugerties, and I found a radio station that played Fats Domino, Arnett Cobb and Giant Steps, and someone were to ask me "What was the best part of your trip?" I'd have to answer, "All of it."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
As Prestige roars into its tenth anniversary year, new ideas are taking shape, and everything old is new again. The 19-year-old who as a youngster had gone out with his father collecting traditional jazz 78s by the bushel, who had experienced the epiphany of Thelonious Monk and begun a new label to become an apostle of bebop, was 29 now, and looking around at the music scene on the cusp of a new decade.
Ten years as president of a record label will also give you new ideas about marketing, and as 1959 rolled on, Bob Weinstock was preparing to unleash three new subsidiary labels, Moodsville, Swingville and Bluesville.
These were not the "budget" labels that a lot of record labels put out in those days: LPs that were repackagings of earlier recordings, or masters that had been bought up from defunct labels. The budget labels were cheaply pressed and cheaply packaged, and were a way that companies tried to squeeze a few last nickels out of music that they probably weren't going to see a payday any other way. It's not widely known, but in 1977 RCA Victor was planning a massive budget rerelease of the music of one of its declining stars, Elvis Presley. That, of course, was the year that Elvis achieved true immortality by dying, and RCA changed its plans in a hurry.
New Jazz was sort of a budget label for Prestige, although its catalog feature some of Prestige's best artist doing some of their best work. The London Jazz Collector notes that some New Jazz titles:
are sometimes marred by “hissy vinyl”, due to the raw vinylite being bulked up with recycled vinyl (containing minute detritus and fragments of paper label, which the stylus picks up as a continuous hiss) . Some pressings are ok, others have the dreaded hiss throughout, sometimes minor, on other copies quite prominent. There is no consistency – even the same title can be found with hissy copies and not hissy copies. Perhaps it all depended on whether the vinylite stock delivered to the XYZ pressing plant that week had been bulked up with recycled vinyl or not. I have not encountered the problem with any other labels than Prestige, and does not occur with pre-Bergenfield [Prestige moved from New York City to Bergenfield, NJ, in the mid-1960s] label pressings or those from Abbey Manufacturing, so the finger points to reckless cost-cutting or dubious quality at some plants.
But for the most part, New Jazz records had pretty good quality control. Status was the real budget label, and even there, according to the London Jazz Collector, it's
difficult to see what was budget apart from saving on ink, providing minimal information saved nothing, but made it look budget. Working in Marketing in the Seventies, the big fear was always “cannibalisation”. You wanted all the sales you could get at the premium price, and extra sales at the budget price, without losing the one to the other. Extra effort was incurred to make things look less attractive. More marketing genius from Weinstock.
Swingville, Bluesville and Moodsville do not appear to have been budget labels at all. There's a lengthy discussion of this question online at the Organissimo jazz forum, and Chris Albertson, jazz historian and producer of many a Prestige session, weighs in with this:
I really don't think there was any serious marketing decision involved in the creation of the Bluesville, Swingville, Moodsville, etc. series. Remember, these were not stand-alone subsidiary labels--it was always Prestige Moodsville, Prestige Swingville, etc. I don't recall if the pricing was different--if so, that may have been a factor. As a dj when these first came out, and later as a Prestige employee, I never thought of them as anything but Prestige albums with a series name.
Sometimes I think that consumers/collectors make more out of such details than the facts call for. When I produced a session, it was a Prestige session--whether it came out on Prestige, Prestige Bluesville or Prestige Swingville, made no difference.
If Bob Weinstock was, as the London Jazz Collector suggests, a marketing genius, perhaps he was also by this time pretty savvy about accounting, and maybe there was a tax advantage to these subsidiary labels.
Or maybe it was just about the music. I'll deal with Bluesville and Moodsville later, but Weinstock, who had grown up on swing, and whose Times Square offices were still within hailing distance of the Metropole, was already assembling quite a collection swing era veterans, to the extent that he could have created a whole new line of Prestige All Stars or Prestige Blues Swingers. Because All Stars these gents certainly were, starting with one of the all stars of all of jazz history, Coleman Hawkins, who is gracing the ten-year-anniversary halls of Prestige and the Van Gelder Studio with his larger than life presence. And here, joined by:
Charlie Shavers, 42 years old, first recruited by Prestige for the February 20 Hal Singer session. Swing credentials include Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Count Basie, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, Budd Johnson, and his own band with Terry Gibbs and Louis Bellson. He is the composer of "Undecided," which had its origin in a tune that Shavers liked enough to send off to his publishers. They liked it too, and asked for a title. Shavers was trying to decide between a couple of catchy titles, but hadn't made up his mind yet, so he wrote "Undecided." The publishers immediately sent it off to lyricist Leo Robin, and the rest is history--and some 200 recordings.
Ray Bryant, the kid of the group at 28, but a kid who felt perfectly at home sitting in with the old guys at the Metropole in the afternoon, then heading downtown to play with the moderns in the evening.
George Duvivier, 39, made his mark with the Shirley Scott and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis sessions, but his first Prestige gig had been two years earlier, with Gil Melle, of all people. He played with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Louis Bellson, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Anita O’Day, and lots of moderns too. Pretty nearly everyone.
Osie Johnson, 36, played with Earl Hines, Zoot Sims, Dinah Washington, Paul Gonsalves. He first hit Prestige in 1955 with Bennie Green, and stuck around over the next four years to back up Barbara Lea, Tiny Grimes and J. C. Higginbotham,
Coleman Hawkins was 55 when he stepped the studio with this aggregation and in the middle of yet another career renaissance.
So what are these Swingville all stars playing? It’s nothing that you would have heard from a Benny Goodman radio broadcast on a Saturday night high atop the Rainbow Room. It’s nothing like the jump, jive and wail you would have heard from an old Louis Prima record or from a contemporary group like the Stray Cats when swing music and swing dancing had a renaissance among the kids in the 1990s. This is small group jazz from New York musicians in the 1950s, guys who have been around long enough to remember when jazz was dance music, but who know that today’s listeners want to hear inventive solos that’ll take them someplace new. You’d go to a Swingville album, as the label established itself, to hear music that would give you a certain traditional feel, but would also give you the modern jazz you’d come to expect from Prestige.
Coleman Hawkins, the architect of the saxophone sound in jazz, the guy who played with Fletcher Henderson, who gave new meaning to the improvised jazz solo with “Body and Soul,” who played with Dizzy on 52nd Street, who was still playing, the amalgam of everything he ever knew, was the perfect choice to build a new label around. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that signing the Hawk to Prestige was what gave Weinstock the idea for Swingville.
Hawk Eyes' first release was on Prestige, but it soon became one of Swingville's early releases.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.
--Dave Grusin
An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
Hal Singer had his moment in the sun in 1948 when his 78 RPM single, "Corn Bread," went to Number One on the rhythm and blues charts, or rather the Race Records chart, because Billboard didn't start using the appellation "Rhythm and Blues" until 1949. "Corn Bread" has a solid blues riff, builds on it with energy and humor and some clever interplay between Singer's saxophone and a trombone. The two work closer and closer together on an improvisation that gets wilder and more intense. It would have been great to dance to. It still is. And of course, it was ignored by the jazz critical establishment, hiosters and moldy figs alike. It wasn't abstract like Lee Konitz. It didn't swing like Harry James. And it didn't have real jazz musicians playing.
No identification of individual musicians on the Savoy record label, as was common with R&B, because no one was reviewing them or writing think pieces about them. But we know who they were. The trombone was Milt Larkin. Wynton Kelly was on piano, Franklin Skeete bass, Heywood Jackson, drums. Jazz enough for you?
"Corn Bread" wasn't all that Singer wanted to do. He said in an interview years later that the thing he was most proud of about the recording was giving Wynton Kelly his first chance on record. That, and that it led to his joining the Duke Ellington band a few years later, so the Duke knew jazz where he heard it.
Singer's followup, "Beef Stew," went nowhere, and so did his career, for a while. He still had work (a beloved Number One hit will do that for you), but he couldn't recapture the magic on a few more singles for Savoy and some smaller labels.
By the time of the Prestige session he had joined the Ellington Orchestra and left it to work with his own small groups again--a tough decision, but maybe the right one.
This was his first ever booking to make a whole LP record. He was teamed with another jazz veteran, Charlie Shavers. The two were about the same age, Shavers 42 and Singer 40. They had similar backgrounds, although Shavers had always managed to stay on the respectable side of the swing/rhythm and blues divide, playing with Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Jazz at the Philharmonic.
He was always in demand. His 1950s had been marked by recordings with Louis Bellson, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Woody Herman, and Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich (together).
This session includes one standard ("With a Song in My Heart") and a bunch of originals. You can hear stylistic difference between Singer and Shavers--rhythm and blues and swing are not exactly the same--but the mesh together to create an exciting and organic music.
The difference between record like "Corn Bread" and a record like "Blue Stomping" -- "Corn Bread" is three minutes long. That's a little long for a 78 RPM record, but it's within the limits, which is how you made a record in 1948. And as a result, it's essentially an extended saxophone solo. There's nothing in it that would confuse or slow down a dancer.
"Blue Stomping" is Hal Singer stretching out to LP length, at six and a half minutes, so the full-out excitement of "Corn Bread" is there, but now it's part of a larger picture, with solos traded off between Shavers and Singer, not so much ensemble work, and a piano solo by Ray Bryant, including some give and take with Wendell Marshall and Osie Johnson, which you would not hear in a rhythm and blues recording, or a swing record either, for that matter.
Shavers died in 1971, within days of his friend Louis Armstrong; his last request was that his mouthpiece be buried atop Armstrong's coffin.
Singer's career was revived with this session. He would make one more record with Prestige. Then not long after, on a European tour, he would become yet another jazzman to fall under the spell of Paris skies. He stayed there, becoming an important part of the European jazz scene. He was awarded the title of Chevalier and later Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, along with T. S. Eliot, Audrey Hepburn and Marcel Marceau, and of course, this being France, Jerry Lewis.
This album was released as Blue Stompin' on Prestige, and was a later Swingville rerelease. The title track became a two-sided 45.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve
with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of
bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this
American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely
take its place in the history of this music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of
all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each
song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the
listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each
track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the
artists at work.
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