Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Shirley Scott gives us all we've come to expect from her, in a solid package. Original tunes, solid renditions of standards, Familiar cohorts. Major Holley played on her has album with Stanley Turrentine, and Roy Brooks has become her g0-to drummer, a fixture on her last three albums, and Horace Silver's regular drummer from 1959-64.
Scott, as always, gets all there is out of an organ, including some church licks on "Out of It." There's a reason why Prestige kept bringing her back to the studio--and they weren't the only ones. During 1963, she also recorded for Blue Note (with husband Stanley Turrentine) and for Impulse! She always delivered.
Ozzie Cadena produced, and the album was called Drag 'em Out. "Out of It" and "The Second Time Around" (written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen for a 1960 Bing Crosby movie) were the 45 RPM single.
Shirley Scott would continue to be a cornerstone of the Prestige franchise throughout the 1960s, and Prestige would continue to showcase her in various settings, so as to get as much product as possible out under her name, during this fertile period of her career. So there would be trio recordings, organ-saxophone recordings, and recordings with other combinations.
The organ-saxophone recordings, which had been so popular when she was teamed with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, would now continue with new husband Stanley Turrentine, and these too would be double-dipped. Turrentine was a Blue Note artist, so the two would record for Prestige as the Shirley Scott Quintet and for Blue Note as the Stanley Turrentine Quintet.
For her trio recordings, Scott did not stay with the same trio. Her compatriots on this session, Earl May and Roy Brooks, were working with her for the first time, and in the case of May, the only time. Brooks did join her for one more session.
Also worth mentioning is the makeup of her trios. Many organists did not work with a bass player, preferring to let the organ handle the bass line. Jimmy Smith, who is primarily responsible for making the jazz organ a prominent part of the era's jazz presence, always worked with a guitar and drums, and many others followed his example. Scott nearly always worked with a bass.
Earl May is probably most remembered for his work with Billy Taylor throughout the 1950s, including six albums for Prestige. He also did Prestige sessions with John Coltrane and Sonny Stitt, and worked widely with a broad spectrum of jazz groups, Broadway show bands, and other venues into the 21st Century.
Roy Brooks, a Detroiter who began his career with Yusef Lateef and also worked with Motor City stalwarts Barry Harris and the Four Tops, saw a career of prodigious accomplishment interrupted more than once by battles with mental illness, but out of his instability came some inventive musicianship, such as "an apparatus." described by Jason Ankeny at allmusic.com, "with tubes that vacuumed air in and out of a drum to vary its pitch."
No drum innovations here, but some solid drumming. Scott is always inventive, always looking for different organ sounds, which may be why she works with a bass player, to give her that freedom to experiment, and to keep a light, swinging touch along with her experiments. This is a good outing for Scott, with some familiar tunes, including the Fats Waller classic "Jitterbug Waltz," which is my Listen to One, but you'll have to find it yourself, as it's not up on YouTube. Also three from Richard Rodgers, one the optimistic "Happy Talk," from South Pacific and the Oscar Hammerstein collaboration, the other two from his earlier days with the wry and bittersweet Lorenz Hart.
Happy Talk was the name of the Prestige release. A rerelease a couple of years later was called Sweet Soul. There were two 45 RPM singles -- the lighthearted "Happy Talk" / "Jitterbug Waltz" and the bittersweet "My Romance" / "Where or When." Ozzie Cadena produced.
The jazzers are back from vacation, and back at Rudy's, and who better to start with than Shirley Scott, Prestige's reliable breadwinner in those days. And this time with some solid collaboration from two of the best in the business, Joe Newman and Oliver Nelson.
Scott continues to draw inspiration from, and give inspiration to, the players around her. And in the tune that they started the day with, they draw inspiration from another source as well. "Blue Seven" was originally recorded by Sonny Rollins for his 1956 Prestige album, Saxophone Colossus. It was one of those improvised-on-the-spot numbers that Rudy Van Gelder used to call the "five o'clock blues," but this one clicked. Scott was the first to pick it up, but it has become a minor jazz standard since then.
Rollins gave Scott and Co. a lot more than just a few variations on standard blues changes, and they were able to pick it up and run with it. At 11:17, it was the longest cut on Saxophone Colossus, giving Rollins plenty of room to demonstrate the scope of his improvisatory genius. Scott is much tighter, at seven minutes and with three soloists, so it's a very different interpretation, and a highly satisfying one. Scott had some formats that she worked well in: organ trio, quartets with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine. Familiarity can mean growth in jazz, and we're lucky to have those albums with her regulars, but we're also lucky that Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards put her in new situations from time to time. Newman and Nelson and Scott weave in and out and around each other in a gorgeous piece of music. The history of this era, session by session, is the discovery of so many brilliant pieces of music that were written or improvised for one recording session, and never played again. This is one that escaped that scrap heap of time.
These folks do pretty well with more familiar tunes, two, like Rube Bloom and Harry Ruby's "Give Me the Simple Life" and Phil Silvers/Jimmy Van Heusen's "Nancy (With the Laughing Face"). In fact, you don't have to get very far into this album before you realize that this is exceptional work, jazz the way it should be played by artists of the first rank, connecting with each other to an unusually well-attuned degree, even for jazz, which is always about that.
Shirley Scott's output was so prodigious that maybe an album or two got lost in the shuffle. And she isn't played now as often as she once was, and women have never quite gotten their due in the jazz world--Scott did better than most, but even so, she probably never really got her due. This album may have been one of those that got lost in the shuffle. It wasn't released until 1966. Today, when almost everything makes its way to YouTube, you can only find a couple of tracks from Blue Seven. But it is worth seeking out. Oh, my, yes.
Esmond Edwards produced. One track, "How Sweet," was left off the LP, but made it onto another Scott album, Now's the Time, and later onto the CD reissue of Blue Seven. "Blue Seven" was also released as a 45 RPM single, and I hope it got some jukebox play.
John "South Side Soul" Wright adds some uptown soul to the mix for his third Prestige album, in the person of Eddy "Cat-Eye" Williams, and some Detroit soul with drummer Roy Brooks, and they mesh to find a universal language.
I'm guessing that the new quartet was more Esmond Edwards' idea than Wright's, because according to Wright, he had never played with a horn before, and wasn't quite sure what to do. "I didn't know how to really play with horns then," he said later, "so I just started to comp behind Eddy Williams."
Wright may have been exaggerating a bit about his inexperience with horns. In an interview with Rebecca Zorach for the blog Never The Same: Conversations About Art Transforming Politics and Community in Chicago and Beyond, Wright recalled his first gig upon returning from the army after the Korean War, back when he could expect to get paid $7.50 a night:
When I came home from the military, my first job was on the West Side of Chicago at a place called, Fifth Jack, it was located at Fifth Ave. and Jackson Blvd. and it was operated by two prominent gangsters, they’re deceased now, I guess I can use their names: Butch English [this must be Charles Carmen "Chuckie English" Inglesia--TR] and Tony Accardo. I played there for one month. They told me to bring in a couple of horn players on the weekends! Well, I had met a couple of good horn players and I had invited them to play with me one weekend, they were the famous Gene Ammons, and Dexter Gordon, both tenor saxophonists.
Listening to Wright and Williams together, you'd find it hard to believe that Wright didn't know how to play with a horn player, particularly this horn player. Wright's percussive attack and Williams' hard-edged tone complement each other nicely. And they must have worked out a few ideas for the session together, because two of the best tracks on the album, "Makin' Out" and "Back in Jersey," have the two of them listed as co-composers. Two more ("Sparkle" and "Soul Search" are credited to Williams alone, and two ("Street" and "Kitty") are Wright alone.
Eddy "Cat-Eye" Williams was one of those unsung heroes, one of those guys who could play, and who could always get a job because everyone knew he could play. We know that in the 1930s and 1940s he played with Claude Williams, Tiny Bradshaw, Billy Kyle, Don Redman, Jelly Roll Morton, Lucky Millinder, Ella Fitzgerald, Wilbur De Paris, and James P. Johnson. \
Then nothing until 1958-59, when he recorded a couple of albums on Blue Note with Bennie Green. Marc Myers of the Jazzwax blog, who can track down pretty much anybody and anything, can only say
Puzzlingly, there are huge gaps of time in Williams' discography in the '50s—perhaps a result of a prolific R&B sideman career or some other reason.
The sides with Green were memorable, and were followed up by this session with John Wright. Later in the decade, a record with Pee Wee Russell and Oliver Nelson, and one with Earl Coleman.
And then? A couple of different internet bios say he "disappeared without a trace."
So this small window between 1958 and 1961, two albums with Bennie Green and one with John Wright, may be the apex of Williams's career, and if so, they give us more than a glimpse--a really good look into a really solid jazz performer, one who deserves to be remembered. We talked a lot about the swing-to-bop musicians like Zoot Sims and Coleman Hawkins, and what they gave to jazz, but the rhythm-and-blues-to-bop musicians, like Gene Ammons, King Curtis, and David "Fathead" Newman, were important too, and surely Williams was one of those.
You can hear it all on "Makin' Out," one of the Wright/Williams collaborations. Williams as a soloist, Wright as a soloist, and Wright as an inventive, intelligent and sympathetic musical collaborator with the right horn player. One of the few things we do know about Williams is that he was from Chicago, so maybe he and Wright had more of a history of playing together.
In "Makin' Out" you can also hear what a difference Roy Brooks makes. Brooks, from the jazz-intensive workshop that was Detroit, got his start with Yusef Lateef and Barry Harris. One of the more innovative drummers of his generation, he suffered from crippling bouts of mental illness that finally got the best of him. But he is certainly one of the reasons this whole session is as good as it is.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album was called Makin' Out, and it was released on Prestige. The title track, at a little less than five minutes long, could almost have made one side of a 45, but it was split and spaced over two.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
This is a new turn in the career of Shirley Scott, as her organ-tenor sax partnership shifts from Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis to Stanley Turrentine, and this one is a partnership that extended beyond the recording studio: Scott and Turrentine were married in 1960, and their marriage lasted until 1971, dissolving right around the time that Bob Weinstock dissolved his connection with Prestige, and the label wrote the last chapter in its history as a presenter of new jazz recordings.
What's the difference between the two combos? I hear more warmth in the Scott-Turrentine pairing, but perhaps that's just the romantic in me. Or maybe it's the romantic in Turrentine, stemming from his apprenticeship with Earl Bostic, with whom he served an apprenticeship (replacing John, Coltrane as the tenor sax chair in Bostic's band) in 1953.
Turrentine entered the upper echelons of jazz society in 1959, when he and his older brother Tommy joined Max Roach. Their first session with Roach, for EmArcy, was one of those oddities that could have come into being in those years when stereo was still an oddity. It was a gimmick album called Rich vs. Roach, the gimmick being that each drummer brought his quintet with him, and each quintet occupied a separate stereo channel. This is not a gimmick you'd want to see repeated a whole lot. Ornette Coleman did it on his album Free Jazz, with two quartets split over two stereo channels. but Coleman was a complex genius, and Free Jazz was an important musical experiment, not a gimmick. Still, it's fun in a weird sort of way to have this one.
Turrentine went on to record several more albums with Roach over a very short period of time. A session with Dizzy Reece brought him to Blue Note in April of 1960. He then did two Blue Note albums with Jimmy Smith, and in June, he recorded his first Blue Note album as leader. That same year, he married Shirley Scott. Like Romeo and Juliet, Scott and Turrentine came from two households. both alike in dignity, but unlike milords Montague and Capulet, Alfred Lion and Bob Weinstock did not with civil blood make their civil hands unclean. The course of true love was allowed to run smooth for the better part of a decade, and Scott and Turrentine were able to make a number of albums together--under her name as leader for Prestige, under his for Blue Note. This session, however, came before the contractual swap was ironed out, and the new Mr. Shirley Scott is billed as Stan Turner.
Scott had a new rhythm section to go with her new husband and musical partner. Bassist Herbie Lewis was a West Coaster who had broken in with Les McCann in 160, then come east to join Chico Hamilton. He was to stay in New York for a decade, then return to California, where he became director of the music program at the New College of California, in San Francisco. Roy Brooks was yet another musician to bubble out of the jazz cauldron of Detroit, playing with Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris, and Sonny Red, with whom he had his first recording session.
Stanley Turrentine provides two of the tunes for Stan Turner and Scott to play. "Hip Soul" is the more jukebox-oriented of the two, with a solid, danceable riff, and it's the one that made the jukeboxes as a two-sided 45 RPM single. "Stanley's Time" gives them more room for improvisation, but it's catchy as well.
Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer's "Out of this World" and "By Myself," by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, are the two standards, and one would think these would give them plenty of room to explore their romantic side, but not so, especially "By Myself." This is the weeper best known for Judy Garland's
rendition, which pulls out every stop of heartbreak. Here Turrentine and the rhythm section start it off a tempo a little to brisk for tormented introspection, and then Scott comes in and takes it to the wild places that only she knows. And she's not by herself, as Turrentine catches up with her. and they chase each other through the vast unknown, with Lewis and Brooks as their beaters.
Benny Golson and John Coltrane are the jazz composers called upon for the session. Golson's tune is "411 West," and if it' been recorded elsewhere, even by Golson, I can't find it. A shame. It's up to Golson's high standards as a composer, melodic enough to be instantly accessible, complex enough to bring out the best in two gifted improvisers. "Trane's Blues" is instantly recognizable in versions by Trane and by the Miles Davis Quintet with Trane. It's a good choice to take on, and they prove themselves worthy of it.
Esmond Edwards produced. Hip Soul is the title of the album, as well as the single.
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