Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Showing posts with label Richard Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Williams. Show all posts
Prestige, in its twenty-odd years of existence, left us an amazing legacy, a portrait of two of the most fruitful periods in American jazz. The middle part of its second decade is rich with some of the key figures of the avant garde, and some of the key figures of soul jazz. But one of the richest and most wonderful parts of that legacy is surely found in the 12 albums Prestige put out by Jaki Byard, a musician who fit in neither of those categories, or any other, really. His music has been described as "spanning the 20th century from ragtime to no time," and it's an apt description. It was not just that he could play anything from the most traditional to free jazz. Other skilled technicians, other dedicated artists, could do that. Byard spoke each language, each dialect of jazz like a native, and he could express himself with subtlety and nuance, with intellect and emotion, in every one of them.
And perhaps all of that is the reason why he is not remembered as well as he ought to be. An article about him on the web page of the Music Museum of New England (Byard was born in Worcester, MA) says that he "won many awards for his contributions over the years," but then it's hard pressed to come up with anything more than:
In 1988 Mayor Ray Flynn awarded him the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions in Black Music and Presence in Boston. In 1995 NYC Mayor Rudolph Guliani presented him with an award for his outstanding contributions with the Apollo Stompers.
This is Byard's third album as a leader with Prestige (he'd also appeared as a supporting player on several other dates, the most recent one being with Booker Ervin, who returns the gesture on the first of these two sessions). That was the May 21 session, with Richard Williams, Williams was also well known to Prestige collectors. Williams and Ervin sit out "Lush Life," as well as all of the second session.
On bass and drums for both sessions are Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins. Cranshaw had made his first Prestige recording just a few weeks earlier, with Shirley Scott and Stanley Turrentine, but he had already begun his long association with Sonny Rollins, and had been with Rollins on his 1962 recording of The Bridge for RCA Victor, the album that heralded Rollins's return from self-imposed exile. Perkins was by this time a familiar face in Prestige sessions.
The album shows a good deal of Byard's range and versatility, and in fact a few different styles and voicings are in evidence on a single cut--"European Episode," at just over 12 minutes more a suite than a single tune. One more facet of his versatility is showcased on "When Sunny Gets Blue," a leftover take from Byard's maiden session for Prestige in 1961, with Ron Carter and Roy Haynes, and featuring Byard on alto sax.
Esmond Edwards had produced the earlier session; the two that make up the bulk of this album were produced by Ozzie Cadena. The album was titled Out Front! "I Like to Lead When I Dance" and "After the Lights Go Down Low" were not included on the album, but made the later CD release.
Ahmed Abdul-Malik had a brief recording career but an enduring legacy. Raised in New York, he entered the jazz scene in 1956, recording with enigmatic German pianist Jutta Hipp, and contributing to three albums by Randy Weston. Both Abdul-Malik and Weston would go on to develop jazz styles that drew heavily on African and Middle Eastern music, becoming, like Yusef Lateef, pioneers in what would become an increasingly important strain of jazz. He made two albums as a leader in 1958 and 1959, then in 1961 began his association with Prestige, which would last for four years and four albums, after which he essentially quit the recording business. He remained active in music, with a South American tour sponsored by the US State Department and a 1973 performance in Morocco at the first major African
jazz festival. In 1970 he began a teaching career at NYU and Brooklyn College. In 1984, he was honored with BMI's Pioneer in Jazz award for his work in bringing Middle Eastern music into the jazz lexicon.
In this session, he brought together a ten-piece group composed of musicians with solid jazz reputations (Richard Williams,Caio Scott) and others who have no other jazz recording credits (Rupert Alleyne, Edwin Steede). Bilal Aburrahman, like Abdul-Malik, was an early explorer of Middle Eastern sounds in jazz. Taft Chandler is a swing era veteran (Luis Russell), but not much recorded in a small group setting. Together, they made up the sound Abdul-Malik was looking for.
With three percussionists, each of different backgrounds, he got a rhythmic synthesis that combined traditions. If the weaving together of threads from the jazz and classical worlds is known as third stream music, then maybe this is fourth stream. A better name for it would not come until years later, but surely this is an important precursor: world music.
Rudy Collins utilized the traditional trap drum kit that has always been the backbone of jazz combos.
Entering the scene in the late 1950s, he would become a fixture on the jazz scene of the next three decades, playing with traditional (Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge), mainstream modern (Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Ammons) and avant garde (Cecil Taylor) musicians. James Hawthorne (Chief) Bey was an African folklorist as well as a jazz percussionist. Roger "Montego Joe" Sanders took a Caribbean name, but his interests were also deeply African. He had recorded with Babatunde Olatunji, and with Art Blakey's Afro-Cuban group, the Afro-Drum Ensemble.
Abdul-Malik's parents had migrated to Brooklyn from the Caribbean, although he would later invent as Sudanese heritage. and the cradle of world music, as jazz and Africa and Brazil are melded, can be heard in "African Bossa Nova," a rhythmic delight with some superb blowing and a bravura pizzicato cello from Caio.
Sounds of Africa included one track from an earlier (May 23, 1961) session. Esmond Edward produced both this session and the previous one. The album was released on New Jazz.
In 1961, Red Garland went into the studio with a quintet featuring Oliver Nelson and Richard Williams. to record a number of tunes for Prestige, including "Soft Winds," and in 1961 Prestige released the Red Garland quintet's High Pressure, which included "Soft Winds."
That makes sense, right? Only thing...the version of "Soft Winds" released in 1961 had been recorded by Garland in 1957, and featured John Coltrane and Donald Byrd.
And perhaps because of that, the new version, along with three-fifths of the session, went into the vault, not to be released until 1977 as part of a collection called Rediscovered Masters.
I listened to both versions. Conclusions:
"Soft Winds" is a beautiful tune. Written in 1939 by Benny Goodman, it's become a favorite of swingsters and boppers alike--interestingly, almost always as an instrumental, although Dinah Washington does an excellent vocal version. It's too tuneful to be called strictly a riff-based composition, but maybe too riffy to please most vocalists. But you could say the same about "Satin Doll," and vocalists love that one.
John Coltrane and Donald Byrd are jazz superstars (although in 1961, Byrd had not yet climbed onto that pedestal. It's not hard to see why Bob Weinstock decided not to release two versions of it at the same time.
That being said, is it a better version? Don't expect me to answer that one. There's no choosing between them. Coltrane and Byrd, superstars. Oliver Nelson...cult figure? Maybe. Not that widely known to the general public, but a legend to jazz cognoscenti. Richard Williams--only one album as leader in his career, so perhaps an easy name to forget, but if he wasn't that good, why did so many top jazz artists want him to work with them. And he was in demand for symphony orchestras as well. At nearly fourteen minutes, the Garland/Coltrane recording is a tour de force for all its soloists, very much including Garland. At just over six minutes, the Garland/Nelson version is tighter, less a vehicle for virtuoso performance--except, surprisingly enough, by bassist Peck Morrison. I'm glad we have both of them.
Also held off until rediscovery: "Skinny's Blues." a Garland composition featuring Nelson and Williams joining together on some blues that tell the concrete truth. "Avalon" is the Al Jolson vehicle that became a jazz standard, here kicked off by some powerful block chording from Garland, driven mercilessly by Morrison and Charlie Persip, and knocked off the table by Oliver Nelson. This one travels on way beyond Avalon.
The other two tracks didn't see daylight right away either, but in 1964 they were blended with an earlier session from July 1960. They are two tunes that are part of every jazz musician's repertoire, Bronislaw Kaper's "On Green Dolphin Street" and Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now." They're so widely played, and widely recorded, because they're beautiful tunes that have enough complexity to allow for a wide range of interpretation and improvisation. For a later CD reissue, one more tune was added from 1959.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. And Volume 4 in preparation! The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
Down Beat's review of this album says, in part, "Perhaps the most significant aspect of this set is saxophonist Nelson's debut as a big-band arranger on four tracks."
That doesn't begin to tell the story. My writeup of this session was slowed down because I had to stop everything and listen the second tune of the day, "Trane Whistle," several times, to get a full appreciation of the arrangement, the way Davis's tenor takes on a horn section with the power of Joe Louis, the versatility of Bert Campaneris and the stamina of John Havlicek, and excitement enough to make a listener go crazy trying to find
comparisons. And what Nelson has the horns doing inspires Davis to get even crazier, with results that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
The over-the-top excitement of "Trane Whistle" made me go back and listen again to the first cut of the day, "Walk Away," another Nelson composition/arrangement, and I was glad I had. The arrangement isn't as bombastic, but it is as inventive, with an intriguing piano vamp by Richard Wyands to start things off, and some wonderful call-and-response work between tenor sax and horn session.
Next up is "Whole Nelson," and if one soloist working against amazing big band horn arrangements is good, how about two? Turns out that's good too, especially when you consider that the other one is Clark Terry.
The most celebrated cut on the album is "The Stolen Moment," because Nelson used it again on his most celebrated album (and with one of the great album titles of all time), The Blues and the Abstract Truth, As "Stolen Moments," it became the most celebrated cut on that milestone album, famed for being the most notable use in jazz of the
symmetrical augmented scale, an alternative scale which I can't begin to explain but which was an important innovation in the work of early modernist composers like Bela Bartok, Milton Babbitt and Arnold Schoenberg. No augmented scale in this version, but some top-notch soloists, including a trumpet player I wasn't familiar with, Bobby Bryant, who was just passing through. He had come to New York from Chicago in 1960, and by the following year was out in Los Angeles, where he built a substantial career, including working on a number of albums with Oliver Nelson.
The arrangements on the last two tracks of the day were turned over to veteran arranger Ernie Wilkins: the Rodgers and Hart standard "You Are Too Beautiful" and the Davis original Jaws." Prime stuff. And one would be remiss not to mention the extraordinary caliber of musicians who make up this big band. But Oliver Nelson is really the story.
Ttane Whistle was a Prestige release. A later re release capitalized on the later fame of the Nelson composition and was called Stolen Moments. Esmond Edwards produced, Don Schlitten did the photography and cover design, and come to think of it, that's also how Edwards got his start at Prestige.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
Two of the tunes on this Gigi Gryce album were written by Norman Mapp, a new name to me. His Wikipedia entry mostly quotes from his obituary, and most of what people have to say about him is what a great guy he was. This is standard fare for an obituary, of course, and maybe Gryce recorded two of his tunes out of friendship (or maybe Gryce has signed him to his back-owned, musician-friendly publishing company).
Or maybe the tunes were really that good. I listened to
Mapp's original of "Blues in Bloom" (with Clark Terry, Seldon Powell, Tommy Flanagan, George Duvivier, Dave Bailey) and I was impressed. More than impressed. I've added it to my 100 Songs for Driving playlist. Mapp has a voice reminiscent of Joe Williams and King Pleasure, but his songs are the real attraction. They're so fluid, the long looping lines and sudden changes of direction reminiscent of vocalese, but "Blues in Bloom" seems to be entirely a Mapp composition. It's no wonder that Gryce decided to record it. It's a wonder that it hasn't become a jazz
standard. Or that Mapp didn't become a star in the jazz world. I guess he was working the same side of the street as Joe Williams and Jon Hendricks. But surely there was room for one more.
That being said, Gigi Gryce does a wonderful job with "Blues in Bloom." He's working again with the group he's had together for the last few albums, and if there's something to be said for throwing guys together and letting them (see my Lem Winchester entry, just before this one), there's also a lot to be said for musicians working together and developing a rapport. I love the way Gryce and Richard Williams work together. And Richard Wyands--listening to the way three of them parcel out the head to the other Mapp composition, "Monday Through Sunday," is a treat. And they keep that closeness as they head into the improv and get farther out.
The Bryce compositions are excellent, not among his best known. "The Rat Race Blues" is a tour de force. If you think Wyands is playing fast on his first solo, wait'll you hear Gryce and Williams. And this isn't bebop fast; it's something different. It's rat race fast--bursting with nervous energy. "Boxer's Blues" is a lovely blues, at back to a more normal tempo.
The final cut, "Strange Feelin'," is by Sam Finch, about whom I could find nothing at all except a mention in a 1959 Billboard that Sam Finch is starting his own record label, Finch Records, and its first release would be a recording by Sam Finch. The search was complicated not only by the fact that there's a contemporary musician named Sam Finch, but there's also another label called Finch Records, started in Cincinnati in 1957, with quite a decent catalog of gospel music, and a handful of blues, including one by a Prestige alumnus, H-Bomb Ferguson. So maybe Sam ran into copyright problems and couldn't get his label off the ground. Perhaps he was a publishing client of Gryce's. It's a decent tune, very mainstream bebop, and a satisfying listen.
This is the second of Gigi Gryce's three albums for Prestige, all with essentially the same group (Julian Euell replaces Reggie Workman on bass). Gryce clearly liked playing with these guys, and they are a classroom lesson in guys you haven't heard of, or have barely heard of, who never broke through to the top ranks.
It makes a difference if you can get your name attached to an album as leader, and Richard Williams only managed that once, on the Candid label.
Candid might have been a successful small jazz label. It was started recording exec Archie Bleyer, who had a good thing going with Cadence Records, and he got Nat Hentoff to run it. Williams brought in Gryce-mates Richard Wyands and Reggie Workman, and Hentoff himself produced the session, but in spite of being recorded at the Nola Penthouse Studio on the top floor of the Steinway building, the record never got off the ground, and Wiliams was never able to repeat it. He continued work regularly, most often with Charles Mingus and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band, and his versatility not only got him work in Broadway pit bands, but on some classical recordings. He gives a good accounting of himself here, especially on the Gryce composition, "Minority."
Richard Wyands was another who worked regularly, including a ten-year stint with Kenny Burrell, but also managed to stay under the radar of public acclaim.He was originally a Californian, born and rised in Oakland, where he got his firat musical experience, and his first major expoaure as the intermission pianist at San Francisco's Black Hawk club. He recalled, in an interview with Ted Panken in 2000, learning from the great pianists like Art Tatum who played the Black Hawk:
He told me, “You can’t compete with me anyhow, but keep it up.” He encouraged me a lot. No one can compete with him, no one in the world! But he was very nice about it. In fact, he was glad I was there, because he would talk to me while he was playing. I’d sit right up there by the piano and he knew I was sitting there, even though he couldn’t see too well at that time, and he would tell me what he was doing and what key he was going into. But when he came off the bandstand, I had to get on, so we really didn’t have much time to talk in between — not really. But just sitting there watching him was quite an experience.
Leaving California for New York, he played some gigs and got a few recordings before hooking up with Gryce, a time he remembers fondly:
Somehow I met Gigi Gryce, and he was organizing a band along with Reggie Workman, Richard Williams and Mickey Roker. We rehearsed and we worked at the old Five Spot, different places in Brooklyn... the group with Gigi was a great group. I really loved it. We had so much fun. It was a happy group. Extremely happy. I’d never been in a group like that before ever, anywhere, where everything was just so happy and musical. Happy musically and otherwise. Everybody got along with each other, there was no arguing and fighting, no egos. One of the best groups I ever worked with. Then Gigi disappeared from the scene and we were all on our own. So I just freelanced around New York.
There are only two Gryce originals on this session. The others are familiar standards, and one odd duck: the old folk song, "Frankie and Johnny." This is not usual fare for a modern jazz group, though we have seen it before, with Gil Evans and "Ella Speed." They have some fun with this one, starting out playing the melody in almost a honky tonk style, then opening up with the improvisations.
The Gryce originals are "Nica's Tempo," one of the many tributes the jazz baroness who nurtured Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, a nice tune that's still played and recorded, and "Minority," one of Gryce's most famous compositions. This session was his third recording of it, and there have been close to 200 others, including landmark versions by Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans that preceded this one.
Esmond Edwards produced. The Hap'nin's was released on New Jazz.
Of all the major jazz talents of his era, Gigi Gryce is probably one of the most under-recorded, and certainly one of the most unjustly unremembered by contemporary jazz fans, and even contemporary musicians. JazzTimes conducted a survey of 17 young alto saxophonists to find out what they considered the most important alto sax recordings: "Great performances that helped shape the jazz alto saxophone tradition." Each artist submitted a list of half a dozen or so recordings, and, eclectic as they were, Gryce did not make any of them. The website ranker.com, which gives a window into the tastes
of contemporary jazz fans, has a poll on the top saxophonists of all time. Since this is a continuing poll, there's a lot of fluctuation on the lower levels, but on the day that I checked, Gigi Gryce was number 88 on the list.
Partly this is due to a career cut short. This was the first of three recording sessions Gryce did for Prestige in 1960. Late in the year, he did one more for Mercury. Then that was it. A couple of years later, he would leave music behind completely.
But if he is largely forgotten as a saxophonist by today's jazz audience, he has never been forgotten by other musicians as a composer. "Modernity," recorded back in the 1950s by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Cal Tjader and Art Pepper, among others, continues to be a favorite to this day, with a recent recording by Cyrus Chesnutt and another by the Dutch vocalist Eva Scholten. "Social Call" has remained popular as an instrumental, but even more so as a vocal performance, with Jon Hendricks' lyrics. Earl Coleman first recorded it in 1955, and it has become a standard, most recently covered in 2016 by Heather Masse with Roswell Rudd.
His disillusionment with the music scene was principled. In addition to his considerable gifts as a player and as a composer, Gryce was ahead of his time in standing up for musicians' rights.
The 1940s and 1950s were a time of the discovery of a lot of new and exciting talents in all musical fields -- jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even country. That meant a lot of new names entering the music world, most of them young, many of them minorities, almost all of them lacking in business experience. They knew what a recording contract was, and they knew that they wanted one, but mostly they did not know what publishing rights were, or why they were important.
This meant that it was all too easy for them to sign away their publishing rights, which might often be the most lucrative part of a deal. If a young black artist had a minor hit on the rhythm and blues charts, with a song that he had written, and the song was later covered by a white artist who took it to the top of the pop charts and a gold record, that meant a very nice payday for the composer of the song--if he still owned the rights to it. All too often, he didn't.
In these days, when "cultural appropriation" has become a watchword, there's a lot of criticism of whites stealing from black culture, and a lot of it is justified, but on the level of making music, it's always been more complicated. The greatness of the American Century in music, one of history's greatest artistic flowerings, has always come from its polyglot, mongrel nature, styles and sounds and songs and influences flowing in every direction. But when it came to the business end of music, cultural appropriation was alive and well through much of that century, and the money only flowed one way, from black talent into white pockets.
This was true in jazz as well as in rhythm and blues and rock and roll. One of the biggest crooks in the business was Morris Levy, who ripped off the publishing rights from innumerable young black artists, particularly the doowop groups signed to the New York labels that he owned. But Levy also owned Birdland, and his biggest label, Roulette, also issued jazz records. One of the characters in the HBO series The Sopranos was based on him--a Jewish gangster who had gotten rich in the 1950s by screwing young black artists out of their rights. But it wasn't just Mo Levy. It was ubiquitous. Chuck Berry was surprised to discover that he had co-written "Maybellene" with Alan Freed, but that was the price he was told he had to pay to make sure that Freed played his record.
I used to read record labels as though they were sacred texts, and I noticed all these things, although I didn't know what they meant at the time.
Gigi Gryce was one of the people who knew exactly what it meant, and one of the few who tried to do something about it. He set up an independent, black-owned music publishing company, and worked at signing up black jazz artists and getting fair publishing deals for them. Nowadays most recording artists, as well as most composers and songwriters, set up their own publishing companies. Not so back then. Gryce was not able to buck the racism and the gangsterism and the other obstacles thrown in his way, and he left the music business, never to return. He converted to Islam, took on the Muslim name of Basheer Qusim, and became a highly respected educator. The school in the Bronx where he taught for many years was renamed in his honor, the Basheer Qusim Elementary School.
This is the first of three albums that Gryce, with Esmond Edwards producing, recorded for Prestige. He brought some new musicians onto the Prestige horizon, and most of them remained for all three sessions, so I'll catch up with them later. Reggie Workman would make just this first date. He was new on the scene--this was his debut on record--and fast making a name for himself, He was also moving in a more avant-garde direction. He would rejoin Gryce for the end-of-the-year recording session for Mercury, then move on to join John Coltrane's quartet.
He contributed three originals to this date: the fiery "Leila's Blues," the exotic "Blues in the Jungle," and a beautiful ballad, "Back Breaker." None of them went on to have a life beyond this album, but they all showed Gryce as a master composer, and one can't help but wonder who might have picked up "Back Breaker" if it had had a more evocative title. The other three are by Gryce's contemporaries, Curtis Fuller ("Down Home") and Hank Jones ("Let Me Know") and {Jones' Bones). One can speculate that Gryce may have had something to do with the publishing contracts for Fuller and Jones.
Sayin' Somethin' was released on New Jazz, as the subsequent sessions would be.
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