Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This album wraps up Frank Wess's run with Prestige--in fact, it was his last recording session as a leader for the rest of the 1960s, although he continued to work steadily, with Count Basie, whom he had joined in the early 1950s and would stay with until 1964, and then with Clark Terry's big band. He brings two Basie bandmates with him, Thad Jones and Buddy Catlett, and they play a brand of jazz that was not the fashionable soul jazz or the disturbing free jazz of the time, but represented a mainstream of jazz that has never failed to find adherents and listeners, drawing on the Kansas City swing of Basie and Lester Young
and Coleman Hawkins, but even more on the modern sounds that were being explored by Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. So while these Basie stalwarts bring a lot of Basie with them, they aren't just playing small group interpretations of Basie arrangements. There's a little of that in their music, but more of it is the classic jazz dynamic, head-solo-solo, that people come out to clubs to hear, to sit in close proximity to the musicians and get an intimate glimpse into their voices and personalities, to be present at the creation of improvisational ideas and the immediacy of musicians inspiring each other, as a master jazz player takes an idea, explores it, and hands it off to the next player to continue the exploration.
You get all of that throughout this session, but to particularly good advantage on "The Long Road," one of three Wess compositions (the other two are "Yo-Ho" and "Cold Miner"), where all five musicians have their chances to shine. Wess plays tenor on "The Long Road," flute on much of the rest of the album. Jones contributes one tune, "The Lizard."
The album was somewhat clunkily titled Yo-Ho! Frank Wess, Poor You, Little Me. A 45 RPM single release featured "Little Me," by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the title song from the popular Broadway musical of the time, with Wess's "Cold Miner" on the flip. Ozzie Cadena produced.
This is the kind of album that if you're listening to it while doing something else, you keep getting pulled back to it. You keep hearing riffs that have you saying. "Oh, my, yes," or you realize that you're in the middle of a solo that started out good and keeps getting better, and pretty soon whatever else it was that you were doing, you're not doing it any more. You're just listening to jazz.
All the tunes are by Mal Waldron, and each one is different, and each is remarkable in its own way.
"Count One" with some rollicking, stomping Waldron piano, and then allows Frank Wess and Thad Jones to show some of their Basie chops. Wess opens it up with his solo, then Jones tears it up with his, taking Basie to a whole new dimension. His solo is probably the highlight of the number, except that everyone else is pretty near as good. A tight solo by Kenny Burrell, then Waldron again, and maybe he's the highlight. Paul Chambers contributes a lengthy solo, and by this time we've left Basie far behind for some vintage Prestige-style jamming bebop, but then Basie veterans Jones and Wess come back for a swinging solid jazz ensemble that could work in any era.
"Steamin'" lives up to its name, and where'd the name come from? It's the title of one of the albums drawn from the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon, so is this Waldron's tribute to Miles, following his tribute to the Count? Not in a million years. For one thing, the Marathon sessions may have preceded this one, but the Steamin' album would not be titled, or released, for a few years yet, so it's more likely the other way around. Weinstock was looking for another gerund with a dropped "g," and remembered this one. That's a reasonable theory, because how could you forget it? Chambers and Taylor lay down a groove that would turn Lawrence Welk into a bebopper. The head is a maniacally repeated riff, and as with the previous cut, each solo leaves you thinking no one can possibly top it, until the next one comes along. Kenny Burrell picks up Thad
Jones so seamlessly that you almost can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins, which is no mean trick if you're dealing with a trumpet and a guitar. Frank Wess, on flute this time, manages the same feat, and if you had to pick one solo on this cut to give the blue ribbon to, it might be Wess. Mal Waldron had just started working as Billie Holiday's accompanist, and accompanying a singer takes a certain kind of focus, especially a singer as unique as Holiday, especially a singer as unstable as Holiday was by this time in her life. So I guess he had that urge to let loose, and play some of the blindingly fast and endlessly inventive stuff he plays here.
"Empty Street" is a ballad as haunting as its title, and gives Burrell his best solo space. "Blue Jelly" is more than just a late afternoon five o'clock blues. It's another superb Waldron composition, with some extended ensemble play along with the great solos.
The album came out as an All Stars session--that is, no name above the title, which was After Hours. Thad Jones's name came first, and it's often thought of as a Jones album. Later -- after the Miles Davis release -- it became Steamin', by Frank Wess and Kenny Burrell.
Some new additions to the All Star roster, and some new combinations of familiar faces, and I'll start with them, because one of the highlight of this session is a showcase of two of the best composers of this era. "Touche" and "Potpourri" were written by Mal Waldron. "Blues Without Woe," "Dakar" and "Hello Frisco" are all by Teddy Charles, who also produced the session.
I wondered if Thad Jones and Frank Wess were brought in by Charles because of past association, but such was not the case. Neither had ever recorded with Charles before, and it's unlikely that they'd ever done much, if any, playing with him. Both were regulars, all through this period, of the Count Basie orchestra. Jones did have a connection to this ensemble, but it wasn't Teddy Charles -- it was his own younger brother Elvin, making his third appearance on the label.
Charles was never a man to stand still, but for him, movement in a new direction could mean almost anything. When he moved to the West Coast to produce the new evolving West Coast sound for Bob Weinstock in 1953, his first move was to decide not to produce the new evolving West Coast sound. As he put it,
When I got out on the West Coast, I didn’t want to do the West Coast cool jazz thing that was so popular then. Frankly I didn’t care for the West Coast style of playing. The music was too laid back and didn’t have the sound.
Instead, he put together a solid mainstream group featuring one of the finest swing-to-boppers, Wardell Gray, and a young Charlie Parker acolyte, Frank Morgan. After that, he made a second recording with Shorty Rogers, who would become identified with the West Coast sound, but was, at this point in his career, a dedicated avant-gardist.
Charles would continue move farther out, recording with experimentalists like Hall Overton and Gil Melle, And he'd hit the mainstream hard, with gritty soloists like J. R. Monterose.
And here, he goes even closer to the bone of mainstream jazz, bringing in two stalwarts from the Basie band. Avant garde music in general, and avant garde jazz in particular, is noted for all kinds of experimental approaches: experiments with tonality, with stretching the limits of harmony, with unusual or shifting time signatures, with textures of sound. But not necessarily with the rollicking swing of an ensemble like the Count Basie Orchestra.
So what would this session be? Avant garde, or Basie-esque swing?
Well, it's a Teddy Charles sesssion, which means none of the above. Or all of the above. It swings, but the ensemble sections have a tonality that nods to the avant garde, and the solos by Jones and Wess are not solos that they would have been likely to play in a Basie arrangement.
What they are, is amazing. If you were asked to pick the top ten Prestige albums, you'd likely start with something from the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon, or the MJQ's Django album, or Sonny and Trane's tenor duet, or King Pleasure / Annie Ross, or any one of a number of great albums we haven't gotten to yet. Probably not this one. Because unless you're really steeped in jazz lore, you might never have heard it. I'm moderately steeped in jazz lore, and I never had. Thad Jones is best known for his legendary Thad Jones - Mel Lewis big band; Frank Wess made a number of albums as leader, and won several Down Beat polls in the flute category, but is still probably most associated with Basie. Teddy Charles is a special talent who's probably known to a niche audience today, as well as to aficionados of charter sailing boats in the Caribbean. You won't find it in anyone's 100 essential jazz albums list, because the folks who make them gravitate, not unreasonably, to the top names. But I'd nominate it right now.
The flute was just beginning to come to the forefront as a jazz instrument, and Wess's solos,
particularly on the Mal Waldron compositions, are a powerful argument for the instrument. But if I were to pick one cut from this session, it would be the Charles tune "Blues Without Woe," on which Wess moves to tenor.
Without woe these blues may be, but they're certainly without "Whoa!" This track never lets up; it's one burning solo after another. In my entry on Kenny Burrell's "Drum Boogie," I commented that Elvin Jones seemed to have held back from the blistering solo one might have expected in a modern version of Gene Krupa's classic. Any such reticence is gone here, and he comes through with that powerhouse drumming that we've come to expect, but which must have been something of a revelation to a 1957 listener.
The album was released as a Prestige All Stars session, titled Olio. You'd expect the album title to be drawn from one of the cuts, but such is not the case here. Still, it's apt. What do get when you mix together a 50s avant-gardist, a soon-to-be 60s avant-gardist of the Coltrane school, two Basie-ites and two solid boppers. You get an admixture of heterogenous elements. An olio. Or a potpourri. Maybe it is drawn from one of the cuts after all. On the British Esquire release, Olio plays a tiny second fiddle to the musicians' names, and the cover is a very nice piece of work in the David Stone Martin tradition, though I don't think it is Martin, and it doesn't quite have room for Doug Watkins.
You'd have to call this a Teddy Charles session, but Charles, always generous, gives Jones and Wess room to shine, so the album is often credited to Thad Jones as leader.A later re-release credits Jones and Wess as co-leaders, and another, part of a double album (Olio / After Hours) is listed as by Thad Jones and the Prestige All Stars.
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