Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
It's unusual for a horn man who's used to the format of a big band to make an album in a quartet setting. Basie-ites, when stepping out (as they often did) tend to gather a few other instruments around them. often other Basie-ites. Newman had recorded a lot with his own groups, during his Basie years, always following that pattern, with an ensemble or at least a quintet. His two previous Swingville albums featured Frank Wess on one, Frank Foster on the other.
But 1961 was a year of changes for Newman, He left the Basie band to strike out on his own. And he got involved in another project that was larger than himself, albeit of a very different sort than playing in a band. He was one of the founders of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit group dedicated to jazz education and the promoting of jazz. Newman's wife Rigmor was the first president of the organization, and Newman the first vice president. As he explained in an interview for the National Jazz Archive:
We founded the organisation to promote jazz, because it was in such a serious plight at the time. Everybody talked about it, but nobody did anything to alleviate the problem...[we] formed Jazz Interactions with the idea of promoting jazz on an educational basis. We thought we could do that best by going into the schools, getting with the young people, and acquainting them with jazz.
Many of the kids carried pocket radios around, listening only to the rock’n’roll; there was a part of their heritage they knew nothing about. We did a pilot programme, and invited the New York State Council of the Arts, the Musicians’ Union and some people from the School Board. Finally we got a grant—the first jazz organisation to be funded. With our in–school programmes, we didn’t go there just to play for them; we went to give them some knowledge, but in a way that it didn’t bore them, listening to us talk all the time. We played, and we mixed it up.
...We have chosen to go and help the young people. In my day, musicians coming up got no help at all.
For much of the rest of his life he was deeply involved with Jazz Interactions.
Playing on his own with just a rhythm section, he still manages to stir up the rousing fervor that comes with striking up a band--as, for example, on the Gershwin tune, "Strike Up the Band." This near-anthemic celebration of music and of celebrations was written by George and Ira for a musical of the same name that flopped. Generally a great tune from that golden age would emerge like a phoenix from the ashes of an unsuccessful show, but "Strike up the Band" went virtually unrecorded from its debut in 1927 until Sonny Stitt and Bud Powell recorded it in 1951--once again, the dreaded beboppers keeping the Great American Songbook alive when very few else were. Chris Connor recorded it in 1957, and since then, it has taken its place among the standards.
Newman's soft and romantic side comes out with "The Very Thought of You," a tune written by British émigré and radio bandleader Ray Noble. It's a dreamy beautiful melody that's never lacked for interpreters, and with good reason. It's always nice to hear, and it's particularly nice to hear Newman and Tommy Flanagan giving it equal portions of nostalgia and innovation.
So yes, Newman can carry a quartet album, and deliver a rewarding experience. Flanagan is splendid throughout; Wendell Marshall and Billy English do fine jobs. Esmond Edwards produced for Swingville, and the album was entitled Joe's Hap'nin's.
That Walt Dickerson is largely unremembered is remarkable not only because he was so good, but also because his talent and artistry did not go unrecognized in his own time. This, his second album, got a 4 1/2 star review from Down Beat, just as his first album had.
This one finds Dickerson in a more introspective mood, but with the complexity and originality, and some of the pyrotechnics, that he displayed on his first album. Here he is playing ballads, mostly of his own composition. "Sense of Direction," the tune that leads off the album, is multi-directional, by turns stately and jaunty.
"Ode to Boy" suggests a nod to Beethoven, but there isn't much joy in it, although a lot of beauty. It really is an ode to a boy--Dickerson's brother, who drowned at sea while in the Navy. And while it doesn't summon up Beethoven, it suggests another equally classic work--it's reminiscent of John Lewis's "Django." Austin Crowe, Dickerson's longtime partner on piano, supplies a sensitive second voice.
"Togetherness" was a word invented in the mid-1950s as a slogan for the women's magazine McCall's, and it generated a lot of derision at the time. It's hard to say exactly what Walt Dickerson was thinking when he titled this piece, but it took an awful lot quick thinking and quick playing to achieve any kind of togetherness on this piece, taken at a breakneck tempo that would have left them breathless on 52nd Street. They all manage in fact -- in fact, they knock it out of the park, and drummer Edgar Bateman, new to Dickerson's team, comes through with a solo that matches the tempo and the mood of the piece...a mood that McCall's may not have exactly intended.
Bateman was a Philadelphia comrade of Dickerson's, though he was originally from St. Louis (where Oliver Nelson was a high school classmate), and made this, his recording debut, at the age of 31. He would continue to record with Dickerson off and on over the years, and with Eric Dolphy, John Handy and others. He remained a Philadelphian, and was always involved with that city's jazz scene.
"What's New?" was originally written in 1938 as an instrumental by Bob Haggart for the Bob Crosby Orchestra, and entitled "I'm Free." When Johnny Burke added lyrics to it a year later for Bob's brother Bing, he created the persona of someone who is decidedly not free. Meeting an old girl friend, who has become quite free of him, he reveals in what he tries to make a casual conversation that his heart is still bound to her. The Burke lyrics are understated and devastating, and it's impossible to hear the melody any other way. Dickerson, in his introspective mode, plays it accordingly.
"Good Earth" starts with Crowe, Dickerson and Eustis Guillemet Jr., and then becomes all Dickerson, with the vibist doing what he's best at, and strong assistance from Guillemet. "Why" starts with Guillemet, and again he's a powerful presence throughout.
Eustis Guillemet Jr. was from New Orleans, born and raised in the Tremé district, and he spent most of his life in the Crescent City, playing with Professor Longhair's group when he was young. He didn't record a lot, but he played with a lot of the great names, including Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
The albumends with two standards, both of them widely recorded ("You Go To My Head" especially popular) and both benefiting from being given the Dickerson treatment,
Esmond Edwards produced, and the album was released on New Jazz.
This is an extremely unusual addition to the King Curtis canon, and perhaps not the one you'd reach for first, in that it features Curtis as a singer. There's some saxophone playing, and it's good, but it definitely takes a back seat to the singing.
Which raises an interesting point. Curtis is a wonderful saxophone player, and it's great that he had the opportunity to show what he could do as a jazz musician on a number of recordings, many of them on Prestige. It's great that Prestige the 1950s-60s interregnum opened the door to an expansive definition
of jazz. Their Swingville label reminded people that there were plenty of great musicians around who had been passed over as the winds of innovation kept sweeping jazz forward. Producers led by Esmond Edwards made a particularly wise decision to let these people play creatively, not simply reproducing the sounds of the swing era. And as the soul jazz era began, Prestige had the insight to realize that there had been a previous soul jazz era, the one called rhythm and blues, and to record and release some of the musicians like Willis Jackson who had been overlooked by the jazz public.
In the late 1950s, as my passion for rhythm and blues developed, I bought a lot of records without ever having heard them first. You pretty much had to, if you lived in the country. I'd pick up records by Muddy Waters or Amos Milburn or Roy Brown. I'd pick up records because they were on Aladdin, or Checker. And I picked up a 45 by King Curtis on Atlantic -- "Just Smoochin'" b/w "Birth of the Blues." I think "Birth of the Blues" was the B side, but it was the side I wore out. I bought his first jazz album, Soul Meeting, when it came out.
But probably Curtis's most lasting impression came as the bandleader and saxophone soloist on a number of Atlantic rhythm and blues records. You listened to a record like "Saved" by LaVern Baker, you looked forward to every new release by the Coasters, partly for the outstanding vocal performances, partly for the innovative songwriting by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, but also--and this was very much a part of it--because you knew there was going to be a killer solo by King Curtis.
So why isn't this the same? A vocal recording with some hot instrumentals? Well, on the Atlantic recordings, the saxophone solos were always a highlight of the record -- you knew they were coming you waited for them, and they never disappointed. They had their own identity, a song within a song.
There's nothing like that here, and though Curtis is a good singer, his vocals don't strike to the gut the way his sax solos do.
But once you accept that, and listen to the album again, there's a lot to like.
For one thing, there's a fine eclecticism to Curtis's blues choices. "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out" is a depression-era classic, but actually it may have been prescient. Written in 1927, it preceded the stock market crash by two years. Bessie Smith's 1929 version captured the mood of the country, but, improbably, no one else touched until the 1950s, when it became a late-blooming standard. "Ain't Nobody's Business" is even older, dating back to 1922, and it's always been a standard for blues and torch vocalists, even though modern mores would disagree with Bessie Smith's and Billie Holiday's assertion that spousal abuse is nobody's business. "Trouble in Mind" also dates back to the 1920s, and is credited to composer Richard M. Jones, but its folk roots go back much farther. It is even more ubiquitous than "Ain't Nobody's Business."
"Bad, Bad Whiskey" was a 1950 hit for Amos Milburn, and Curtis was actually the first to cover it.
"Deep Fry" and "Jivin' Time" are the album's two instrumentals, and they were recorded at the end if the day. "Deep Fry" has the tenor sax spotlight. It's eight minutes long, with solo space for all the principals, and it does leave you wishing there were more tracks like it, but this is far from Curtis's only album, and he has a right to try something different. There's some nice tenor on "Jivin' Time" too, but even more nice work by the guitars. In general, Curtis leaves most of the instrumental turns to his bandmates, and they come through. Curtis does some guitar work, but mostly it's Al Casey, formerly with Fats Waller, is his regular guitarist, but on this session he's joined by Hugh McCracken, for contractual reasons using the pseudonym of Mac Pierce for this session, although it's hard to say why, because McCracken worked with pretty nearly everyone on every label. More likely, because this is a youthful McCracken at the outset of his career, it has to do with union status.
Trouble in Mind, recorded when he was 19, was one of his first gigs. He had dropped out of school at age 16 to make music and help support his family, His mother was working as a hat check girl in a New Jersey club where Curtis had an engagement. She convinced him to listen to her son, and he hired him for the session.
He once did sessions for Aretha Franklin and Paul McCartney in different studios for different labels on the same day, and he was McCartney's first choice as guitarist for Wings, but he elected to stay home with his young children and keep doing studio work. He had an approach to studio sessions that I suspect might not go over so well today, According to his obituary in the New York Times,
He would improvise his part once he apprehended the drift of a producer’s intention, his wife said. He arrived early the day Roberta Flack was recording “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and began fooling around on his classical guitar as he waited for the session to begin. Joel Dorn, the producer, asked him to play his riff again, and it became the song’s introduction.
Jimmy Lewis is a powerful presence on the electric bass throughout the session, and it was a relatively new instrument for him, He had played a standup bass with both Count Basie and Duke Ellington, among others, but switched to the electric bass when he joined Curtis. He would go on to make a record with a group that no one would expect to use an electric bass--the Modern Jazz Quartet. It was for a 1965 album, Jazz Dialogue, which featured the MJQ with a big band.
The King Curtis combo was pianist Paul Griffin's first major engagement, but hardly his last. He's probably best remembered for his work with Bob Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Aja; he also played piano on Don McLean's mega-hit, American Pie.
Belton Evans played with almost everyone in the blues and traditional jazz field, and with almost as many different first names, although he always stuck with Evans.
"But That's All Right" has backing vocals by the Cookies. The Cookies had a substantial career as a backup group, and had a couple of hits in their own right ("Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby"). At this time, their most important credit had been as Ray Charles's backup singers, and Charles's own group, the Raelettes, was formed around Margie Hendricks, an original Cookie. They give "But That's All Right" a real Ray Charles sound.
Trouble in Mind was released on Tru-Sound, a short-lived Prestige subsidiary. Tru-Sound had two different catalogs. One was all gospel, and the other was more varied, but albums by King Curtis made up the lion's share of their list. Two 45s came from the session, both released on Tru-Sound: "Trouble in Mind" b/w "But That's All Right" and "I Have to Worry" b/w "Jivin' Time."
I've spoken before about how the rhythm and blues tenor honkers were often also the most soulful, sensitive balladeers. We heard that just recently, with Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, and we hear it again here with Jimmy Forrest, although that's not the only note struck by this versatile tenorman. Unlike Jackson, Forrest isn't doing a Moodsville session, so the ballads are only a part of it.
Forrest's big hit, and one of the greatest rhythm and
blues records of all time, was "Night Train," his reworking of a Duke Ellington riff. He also had an instrumental hit with "Bolo Blues," back in 1953, which he reprises here. Listening to both versions, the most striking difference is in the tone. The earlier version cuts like the bolo it was named for; the Prestige version is warmer, but it also ventures into an area we've seen before with other rhythm and blues veterans, a sort of mellow honk. Forrest gives a hint of the Dionysian excitement--more than a hint, really--but keeps it within the subtler context of bebop ballad improvisation.
"Bolo Blues" is one of only two Forrest originals on the album. He comes back (going with the album order here) with "I Cried for You," a tune which has equally been recorded as a ballad or an uptempo swinger, and Forrest ratchets up the energy for it. And he does seem to have his own ideas about tempo in general. Joe Liggins's original recording of his tune, "I've Got a Right to Cry," takes it in brisk swing time (as does Mose Allison, on a recording contemporaneous to Forrest), but Forrest makes takes tongue out of cheek and makes it a romantic ballad, which certainly fits the title.
Forrest's 1961 "Bolo Blues," at just over four minutes, is about a minute longer than his original hit version, made in the days when 45 RPM was coming into its glory, and 78 RPM records were still hanging on for a last hurrah. The new version was also released on 45, and though Forrest had the benefit of LP production values, most of these album cuts are under five minutes long, with "By the River Sainte Marie" the longest at 5:13. The format for all of these is essentially the rhythm and blues juke box format, with the emphasis on the primary soloist and very little solo space for the other musicians.
"By the River Sainte Marie," with a melody by Harry Warren, does have an extended solo by Tommy Potter, which is unusual for the session, and also unusual for Potter, who rarely soloed. Potter, best known for his work with Charlie Parker, was near the end of his career, although he did continue to work with Forrest on all his Prestige albums.
Right at the beginning of his career, and getting solo space on "I Cried For You," is Joe Zawinul. Zawinul would break out as a star with Cannonball Adderley and his electric piano playing on the Zawinul-composed "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" (on a Wurlitzer, although he would soon switch to the Fender Rhodes which he helped to popularize, and on which he achieved his greatest fame). Zawinul's career trajectory was swift. He had emigrated from Austria in 1959 with a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, but left Berklee after a month to go on the road with Maynard Ferguson. After that came a gig with Dinah Washington (he played on her hit record, "What a Difference a Day Makes"). Then this album with Jimmy Forrest, and by June of 1961 he was in the studio with Adderley for the first time, for a recording session with Nancy Wilson.
Esmond Edwards produced the session. The Prestige release was called Out of the Forrest. "Bolo Blues" was the single, with "Remember," from the earlier Forrest Firealbum (Larry Young on organ) on the flip side.
At a younger age, I spent some time looking for this guy without success. The reason--Mose Allison covered his "One Room Country Shack" on his debut album, Back Country Suite. A huge Allison fan from the moment I first heard him, and always a fan of good songwriting, I wanted to hear more from the composer of this terrific blues. But the liner notes said that Mose had learned the song from a record by an old blues singer named Mercy Dee. Research tools being harder to come by in 1958, blues reference material being scarce and rhythm and blues reference material nonexistent, I ran into a dead end.
Mercy Dee Walton recorded his R&B hit version of "One Room Country Shack" for Specialty in 1953, and he did actually bill himself as Mercy Dee, although I was only able to track him down when I discovered his full name. Allison was the first to cover it, and since then, it has become a blues standard, recorded by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Paul Butterfield, Snooks Eaglin, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann, Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and many others.
Rhythm and blues records generally don't have the kind of complete session notes that jazz records do, but the Specialty recording of "One Room Country Shack" does credit Jesse Sailes on drums. Sailes has never gotten the acclaim that has gone to other studio drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, but he was an important figure, appearing on records by blues and R&B greats like B. B. King, Elmore James and Amos Milburn, but also on jazz sessions by Louis Armstrong and Jay McShann, and even on records by Doris Day and folkies Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders.
Many of the details about his Bluesville session remain nearly as elusive as did Mercy Dee himself. when I started looking for him. Some of his discographies don't acknowledge its existence at all. Some of them have K. C. Douglas credited as accompanying him on the guitar. One of them lists the session as having been produced by Kenneth L. Goldstein and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder.
In fact, the record was made in Berkeley, CA, by Chris Strachwitz, one of a series of recordings of Walton by Strachwitz in the winter and spring of 1961, some for the label he had just started, Arhoolie, and this one which was licensed to Bluesville. It did not include Douglas, although the guitarist had been in the studio with Strachwitz for the Sidney Maiden session which preceded this one. Maiden does join Walton,
most notably with some very hot playing on "Five Card Hand." Otis Cherry is credited as the drummer, with Marcellus Thomas providing backup vocals. Strachwitz had met Thomas when he drove Big Joe Williams to a recording session, and had done a couple of sides with him, but decided he wasn't distinctive enough to merit a whole album, Perhaps he had gotten here, as well, by driving one of the principals.
The precision with which Walton describes the isolation of country living in "One Room Country Shack" ("Only crickets and frogs to keep me company / And the wind howling round my door") is typical of the way he could use language to capture a moment. Often, as in the case with "Shack," those moments had to do with farm life and hard labor, to which Walton was no stranger. He had worked as a farm laborer in Texas before moving to California, and he want back to it again in California in the late 1950s, as the success of "Shack" became a dim memory and the money started to dwindle. In "Have You Ever Been Out in the Country," he shows what it's like to be working in the fields:
High noon I fall up under some shade tree, tryin' to figure what move to make
12:30 I'm right back down between two middles, tryin' to get my numbers straight
In "Pity and a Shame," he delivers the kind of wry observation on the vagaries of love that one associates with his one-time Specialty labelmate, Percy Mayfield:
Now it's a pity and a shame, the tricky actions of a woman's brain,
Soon as you find you want her and her only, right away she;'ll go and make a change.
He can put you right in the middle of the action at a poker table in "Five Card Hand":
I got a five card hand, and I don't know which way to play,
I need a queen like you, to make my hand OK
Now the Kid drew aces, and he stacked them back to back,
I looked at my hand and not a smile did I crack
And like Mayfield, he has a sense of fatalism, both about women and life in general. From "Sugar Daddy" (from this session, but issued on Arhoolie:
Sometimes I get so thrilled and excited, holding some fine chick in my arms,
Then I get sad thinkin' about all the foolish bachelors who's money'll be spent long after he's gone.
And from "Shady Lane":
You may be a wino or a gambler or have your picture in the hall of fame,
Take your pick, one is as good as the other when they lay you down in shady lane.
Since tomorrow isn't promised to no man, all your planning may be in vain,
So swing today and be merry, tomorrow you may be way down in shady lane.
And tomorrow came soon for Mercy Dee Walton. He died in 1962, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
The Bluesville album was called A Pity and a Shame.
Sidney Maiden was very lightly recorded in his lifetime, so we can thank Prestige Bluesville for this, his only LP recording. Maiden was a West Coast transplant from Louisiana who hooked up with Mississippian K. C. Douglas in Oakland, and they worked together frequently, making a few records under Douglas's name and a few under Maiden's. Their style probably reflects their adopted West Coast home more than their southern upbringing: they don't really sing or play Delta blues. With Maiden's harmonica and Douglas's guitar, their style, if anything, is more reminiscent of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, New Yorkers by way of the Piedmont country.
Douglas was reunited with Maiden for the Bluesville session, and their eclectic set includes a couple of numbers associated with Terry and McGhee, "Fox Chase" (here called "Sidney's Fox Chase") and "Sweet Little Woman."
Maiden’s song selections in general are interesting, and the credits for them are interesting too. We live in a world where any combination of notes is likely to be litigated, and any hit song will bring lawsuits out of the woodwork. This probably got started with the plagiarism suit against George Harrison for allegedly pirating the tune of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for his "My Sweet Lord," and it really kicked into high gear recently when the estate of Marvin Gaye won a $5.3 million lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Gaye's estate claimed, and a judge upheld, that Thicke/Williams's "Blurred Lines" had plagiarized Gaye's "Got to Give It Up."
There's a certain magic in the words "5.3 million dollars" that one would not find in discussions of music of a different era. Miles Davis took composer credit for a tune written by Jackie McLean, "Dig." McLean considered suing Miles, and consulted a lawyer, but the lawyer told him that even if he one, the royalties for a jazz composition would not cover the cost of the lawsuit.
So it was with the blues. Composer credit for "Sidney's Fox Chase" on the Bluesville album goes to Sidney Maiden. It's probably a tune that predates the 20th century, but it's certainly best known by Sonny Terry, and its first prominent exposure was Terry's performance of it in John Hammond's 1938 "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall. A 1944 recording gives "Arranged by Sonny Terry" in lieu of any composer credit at all. The flip side of that record is "Sweet Woman," composer credit to Sonny Terry, although it was probably composed by Terry's mentor Blind Boy Fuller, and its antecedents are likely earlier than that. Here, co-composer credit is given to Maiden and fellow Oakland resident Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller.
In those days, songs, especially in the blues and rhythm and blues worlds, were somewhat protean, coalescing, separating and re-coalescing, with no one paying too much attention, unless by chance one flew beyond its niche audience and became a hit in the pop (white) world. Such was the case with "Earth Angel," probably written by Jesse Belvin, with parts of it lifted from other sources. "Earth Angel" became a huge national hit, enough of a moneymaker for Belvin to sue for credit, and eventually receive partial credit.
Maiden's name is on all of the songs on this album, and he likely as not did write most of them, but a few co-writing credits are interesting. "My Black Name" is credited to Sonny Boy Williamson/Sidney Maiden, but Williamson first recorded it in 1941. B. B. King would later record it, in 1964, as "I Can Hear My Name," composer B. B. King. "Sidney's Worried Life Blues," credited to Sidney and Big Maceo Merriweather, was recorded by Big Maceo in 1941, with Sidney's name nowhere near Maceo's composer credit, and the same song, as "Someday Baby Blues," written by Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, was recorded in 1936. "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" (Sidney Maiden/Memphis Minnie) was recorded by Memphis Minnie, again in 1941, which was coincidentally around the time that Maiden arrived in Oakland and began to be exposed to a wide range of recorded blues.
All of this is interesting rather than shocking. There was no $5.3 million at stake, nothing to make it worth suing anyone for. "Worried Life Blues" and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" did, later on, make some money for someone. "Worried Life Blues" has become one of the most recorded blues songs of all time, with versions by nearly every big name blues artists, by rhythm and blues stars like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, even as a jazz tune by Oscar Pettiford. And then into bigger money territory when recorded by rock stars the Animals, the Blues Magoos, and Eric Clapton. Very little of which benefitted Merriweather, who died in 1953, or Maiden, whose name was only attached to his version. "Me and My Chauffeur" was recorded by Nina Simone, Big Mama Thornton, and Geoff and Maria Muldaur, among others, but its closest brush with big bucks came in a recording by an early (pre-Grace Slick) version of the Jefferson Airplane. Memphis Minnie lived to 1973, but the last 13 years of her life were confined to a nursing home after a stroke, barely getting by on social security, so it doesn't seem that she saw much from "Me and My Chauffeur."
Any blues becomes personal in the hands of a good bluesman or woman, and that's the case with all of the songs on this collection. Sidney Maiden is worth a listen.
This is the first part of a two-session, double-album extravaganza released by Prestige as The First Annual Prestige Swing Festival, Spring 1961. The festival appears to have taken place entirely in the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs--I can find no record of an actual festival. And it appears to have been the only annual Swing Festival.
Nevertheless, a cause for celebration. Prestige had put together various collections of All Stars over the past few years, including one other set of Swingville All Stars (in March of 1960, with Taft Jordan, Hilton
Jefferson, and Al Sears as the front line), and all of their all star sessions were worthy of the name, but this one has some solidly heavy hitters, and a bunch of them. The heyday of swing was also the heyday of the 78 RPM record, so your typical swing session recording was three and a half minutes or less--maybe a little more if they decided to split a song over two sides. And the typical swing recording was section players with one soloist.
But bebop changed some of that, and the long playing record changed the rest of it, and this aggregation includes a number of all stars who deserve solo space, and who get it, and the length of the selections reflects that. "Jammin' in Swingville" is nine and a half minutes, "Spring's Swing" eight minutes, "Love Me or Leave Me" a little over seven. "Cool Sunrise" nearly eleven.
"Love Me or Leave Me" is the standard by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, first recorded by torch singer Ruth Etting in 1928, picked up by Billie Holiday in 1941, then covered a few scattered times in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was Etting's signature song, and Etting was basically a forgotten star by the 1950s, but it turned out her life, including a disastrous marriage to a brutal gangster, was more interesting than her career. It became a movie with Doris Day and James Cagney, and "Love Me or Leave Me" became the movie's title song, and jazz musicians as well as pop singers started recognizing its potential.
"Jammin' in Swingville" and "Swing's Spring" are both credited to Vivian Hamilton, who I'm guessing was the wife of Jimmy. Her only credited compositions are on albums by Jimmy (although "Spring's Swing" was recorded in 2005 by Swiss-born, Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Sam Burckhardt), and Jimmy was the arranger for this session. "Cool Sunrise" is credited to Esmond Edwards, so important as a producer for Prestige during these years, but rarely listed as a composer. All of them provide an ample basis for joyous interpretation.
Swing, as its name suggests, is a joyful music, and extended jams like these sound like a lot of fun, like good friends getting together and producing something delightful. Let's hope this was the case, and why not? These guys were old enough, and far enough past their years of stardom, to have been able to simply enjoy getting together and making music. We continue to owe Prestige big time for recording these Swingville sessions.
Edwards produced. The title of the double album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be. When they were rereleased separately, that became the title of the record that had "Spring's Swing" and "Love Me or Leave Me" on it. The other separated LP was called Years Ago. A later rerelease as double album and CD was called Jam Session in Swingville.
Samuel Charters brought another field recording to Prestige Bluesville, journeying to South Carolina to record veteran bluesman Pink Anderson. Charters is listed as engineer on the this project, and Kenneth S. Goldstein as producer.
Kenny Goldstein was overall producer for the whole Bluesville series. having been brought on board when Bob Weinstock decided to start the subsidiary label. Goldstein, a folklorist, had been producing a range of
recordings for Riverside and Folkways. His interests in folklore were wide-ranging; he received the first Ph.D. in folklore offered by the University of Pennsylvania, and began teaching there in the early 1960s. He was co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. He was a special assistant to the Smithsonian and an adviser on folk arts to the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pink Anderson got his start as a young teenager in that strange American institution, the medicine show--playing music to attract a crowd so that his bosses could sell patent medicine (concoctions that weren't actually patented, were available without prescription, and were generally worthless). The patent medicine hucksters gradually went out of business as government started to enforce stricter regulations on what you could or could not claim that a medicine would do, but it was a great training ground for entertainers in the first part of the 20th century, and it's said that Anderson stayed with the medicine show circuit into mid-century.
He was first recorded by folk singer/folklorist Paul Clayton in 1950, but the recording wasn't actually released until 1956, when it became half of a Riverside album called American Street Songs. The other side of the album was given over to songs by the Reverend Gary Davis. The Davis curs were produced by Goldstein, which would have been Goldstein's first exposure to Anderson. The album was accurately titled--Davis was a street preacher, and his repertoire, mostly his own compositions, was from that world. Anderson's side was called "Carolina Street Ballads" and that's what it was. Not much blues. Mostly the familiar ballads -- "John Henry," "Wreck of the Old '97" -- that would strike a chord with passing listeners and get a few coins tossed his way. He even included a Jimmie Rodgers song, "In the Jailhouse Now."
Like Willie Nelson's Texas fans, who were so country that they didn't know they were country, the audiences--street audience or medicine show audience--for Pink Anderson were similar. They didn't care so much about whether it was the blues, or a song a song about a railroad disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, or whatever. And yet Anderson was a real bluesman, and everything he sang came out as blues.
On his Bluesville debut album, he is much more focused on the blues. With the exception of Big Joe Williams's "Baby, Please Don't Go," all the other songs listed as "uncredited traditional blues," which is a little strange. since many folk singers--certainly many white folk singers--had no problem putting their own names on, and getting the publishing right for, traditional folk songs. Some of the blues on the album are familiar, like "Mama, Where Did You Stay Last Night?" but with Anderson's own variations. Others string together the sort of "traveling lyrics" that were common to many blues in many combinations. There wasn't a strong proprietary sense about lyrics in Anderson's day. Guitar styles were much more personal and more closely guarded. It's said that Charley Patton used to do a lot of the showy tricks for which Jimi Hendrix later became famous--playing the guitar behind his back, tossing it in the air, plucking the strings with his teeth--so that other guitar players wouldn't be able to figure out exactly what he was doing.
Anderson has a powerful guitar style, a lot of single-string picking and a strong, full-toned, percussive approach. It's not hard to imagine what he would have sounded like had he joined the Great Migration to Chicago and gotten into the electric blues scene.
Anderson's first name was appropriated by the British rock group Pink Floyd, and his whole name lives on in the person of his son, the contemporary bluesman Little Pink Anderson. The Bluesville LP is titled Pink Anderson--Carolina Bluesman, Vol. 1. "Try Some of That" did not make it onto this album, but was later included in a Bluesville compilation called Bawdy Blues, as the serious blues collectors started to discover they could make a few extra bucks marketing to the party records crowd.
It's later for the Gator, as Willis Jackson finds himself in a romantic, sentimental mood for this outing, He's working in a quartet setting, giving him space to express this side of himself, and he does it expertly and with feeling.
His pensive mood apparently extended to meditation on religious matters, because he included two spirituals with the set, "Motherless Child" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." a later compilation of these and some other ballads, Gentle Gator, omits the spirituals. And gentle though the mood may have been, it was apparently lusty enough that selection, "Nancy (With the Laughing Face"), the tribute to Frank Sinatra's first wife written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers, is also include on a Prestige compilation album, Lusty Moods, the lust apparently inspired by the mention of a woman's name, since that's the common thread in all the song titles. And one of the selections, was perhaps not moody enough, because it was saved for a Prestige LP, Really Groovin'.
Mickey Roker was raised in Philadelphia, where he was mentored by Philly Joe Jones and another Philly drummer. As he related it to Ethan Iverson in a 2011 interview:
we used to have jam sessions right here in this house [the family home in Philadelphia, where he still lived in 2011]. With a piano over there. My uncle bought a piano. The drums would be set up right here and the bass would be over there. Every Sunday we would have jam sessions with cats like McCoy, Kenny Barron, Arthur Harper, Reggie Workman. An alto player named “C” Sharpe. Odean Pope used to come. Philadelphia cats, you know. The drummer that inspired me the most was Eddie Campbell. Boy, that cat could play, man. He could take an idea and just wring it out. And he would be smiling all of the time.
Roker's first New York recording was with Gigi Gryce for Prestige, three in all. He was at the
beginning of a career that would find him one of the most sought-after drummers on the scene, recording most frequently for Blue Note.
Ethan Edwards produced. The Moodsville album was called In My Solitude.
The second of two Jimmy Hamilton sessions finds the longtime Ellington sideman fronting just a quartet (the first had been a sextet with Clark Terry and Britt Woodman). Tommy Flanagan and Wendell Marshall are back with him, and there's a new drummer, Earl Williams.
Williams came from Detroit, which is almost all the pedigree you need to know. But there's more. His father was Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams, and he started touring with his dad right out of high school. The best biographical information on Williams comes from the web site of his son, Earl Williams Jr., a saxophone player like his grandfather. Earl Sr. played with Clyde McPhatter, among many others, and Earl Jr. is currently working with another next generation performer, Ronn David McPhatter.
Per young Earl, we learn that his father, while still in high school in Detroit,
began working with such artists as Lester Young, Barry Harris, Alice Coltrane, Della Reese, and Yusef Lateef. While with [Paul Williams] he played with such artists as Ruth Brown, Chuck Berry, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter and Big Joe Turner. After two years with his father’s band, My Dad left to join pianist Eddie Heywood. It was during this period that he permanently moved to New York, where he found his skills as a diversified drummer to be in great demand. He began working with many different artists, including Mary Lou Williams, The Swingle Singers, Eric Dolphy, Diahann Carroll, Jaki Byard, and The Major Holly-Tommy Flanagan trio. He also worked as house drummer at New York’s famous Apollo Theatre.
My father soon became very active as a studio musician playing on all types of recording including radio and television commercials. His television credits include a year at WNET with the Reuben Phillips Orchestra on the “Soul Show”, two and a half years at NBC with Seldon Powell on the “Someone New” show with host Leon Bibb, and a year at ABC with the Charles Randolph Grean Orchestra on the “Jack Paar Show.” My dad also has several Broadway shows to his credit, among them are “Funny Girl,” “Hair,” “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” and “A Chorus Line.”
My father's ability to handle any musical situation has afforded him the opportunity to perform with a wide variety of artists, including Teddy Wilson, Sonny Stitt, Sy Oliver, Warne Marsh, Ron Carter, Zoot Simms, Lena Horne, Shirley Verrett, Jean Pierre Rampal, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Valerie Capers, Larry Rivers, Opera Ebony, and The Alvin Ailey Dance Company.“
Young Earl takes justified pride in his father. And we can appreciate the life and career of Earl Sr., another gift of the fertile Detroit jazz scene to the music world. Jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, pop, Broadway, classical, opera. A life well lived in the music business.
And this session has to be one he could have looked back on with some pride. Hamilton mostly plays tenor sax here, with some lovely clarinet on "Dancing on the Ceiling." With Hamilton as the only front line player, the rhythm section gets time to shine, and they do, especially the always impeccable Tommy Flanagan.
The set is evenly divided between standards and Hamilton originals. One that particularly interested me was "Route 9W," because Route 9W goes through my home town, and indeed through most towns on the west side of the Hudson River. I drove on it today, and made a point to listen to this track as I was driving. Hamilton's melody is catchy, Williams does some very nice stuff rhythmically, Flanagan is Flanagan. And Hamilton swings it, even venturing into some discreet honking.
I was interested in "Lullabye of the Leaves," because although it's an oft-recorded jazz and pop standard, I had only previously heard it by Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, recorded in 1952, when Mulligan had just brought the birth of the cool out to the West Coast. Mulligan and Baker give a master class in cool with their version. Hamilton isn't afraid to let some warmth in, and some romance. The original lyric by Joe Young (melody by Bernice Petkere) is about a lonely soul remembering a lost childhood, but romance is never out of place with a good melody.
Hamilton returned to the Ellington fold for a few more years, then retired to the Virgin Islands, and didn't make another record as leader until 1985, when he was rediscovered playing at an island club called the Buccaneer, and presented by the Who's Who in Jazz label as Jimmy Hamilton: Rediscovered Live at the Buccaneer.
Esmond Edwards produced this session for Swingville.
Furry Lewis was one of the first of the forgotten folk blues singers of the 1920s to be rediscovered and recorded. Nowadays, and in fact since the late 1960s, virtually every blues performer who was put on record during the blues craze of that decade has had his or her work remastered and put on long playing vinyl, then CD, then streaming. So it's hard to imagine the impact that this would have had back in the day.
But I'm trying to. I don't remember listening to the 1959 Furry Lewis album. But what blues had I been listening to up that time?
What do I remember? I had been buying records by Lead Belly for some time, and Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, mostly on Folkways. I had a couple on Stinson, a label started by American Communists initially to distribute recordings by the Red Army Chorus, which developed an on-again, off-again relationship with Folkways. There was a record by Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Alec Stewart, who recorded a few times with Terry but is not much remembered today. I listened to Josh White, but decided he wasn't for me. Too smooth, too much of the supper club.
I had a couple of Folkways anthologies of the blues. One was called Jazz Volume 1: the South, and it didn't have a cover. I got it at Record Haven on 6th Avenue, where you could get DJ and remaindered copies, coverless, with a little hole drilled through the label, for real cheap. I still have some of them. Not that one, but I still remember it, 60 years later. It had Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, which is probably why it caught my eye, but it had lots more, leading me deeper into the blues. It opened with a field holler--"Old Hannah," by Dock Reese, and it ended with a blues called "When a Gator Hollers, Folks Say It's a Sign of Rain." I loved the title, and I loved the song. It was by Margaret Johnson. Looking it up now on Google, I see it also featured a musician whose name meant nothing to me then: King Oliver.
I had an album of work songs and field hollers by prisoners at...Angola? I think so.
I had the Harry Smith anthology, at least a couple of volumes of it. There were six, but I don't think I had them all. They were released as three two-LP sets, originally in 1952. Dave Van Ronk once said that every folk singer on MacDougal Street knew the lyrics to every song on the Harry Smith anthology, and if he was exaggerating, it wasn't by much. Harry Smith went in a different direction from Moses Asch of Folkways (although Folkways released the anthology) and the young Communists of Stinson, who were interested in the field recordings of pioneers like John and Alan Lomax, and capturing the real ethnic folk music. He was also different from Bob Weinstock, who came along a good deal later (but still early in the process), and who liked to record classic blues artists in Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with some of his great modern jazz musicians backing them up. Harry Smith was interested in what came to be called, in a felicitous phrase, the Old Weird America. He collected commercial recordings made by white country singers and black blues singers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So I would have heard Furry Lewis back then, because he was on the first Harry Smith album.
I had Blues in the Mississippi Night, Alan Lomax's 1947 recording of three blues singers swapping songs and exchanging stories of what it was like in the Deep South. The stories were too true, and too damning, for Lomax to release until ten years later, and even then it was still so incendiary that he had to withhold the singers' real names, for fear of reprisal against them. Only many years later, and after they were all dead, were the names of Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Memphis Slim attached to a CD reissue.
And by the late 1950s, I was also collecting 45 RPM records by artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, B. B. King, Wynonie Harris. It seems strange now, but to me these records were a different part of my record collection, purchased by a different part of me.
The folk blues, the country blues in Samuel Charters' phrase, were part of the grownup world of leftist intellectuals, the music of the people, authentic American folk music. This was also the world of my classmates at Bard College, the red diaper babies from Music and Art High School in New York City, kids who had read Kafka and who I knew without asking were far more worldly and sophisticated than I was.
The others were...well, they weren't really a part of any milieu that I was familiar with. Just me, and my best friends Peter and Wendell Jones. And maybe just Wendy and me, because Peter was mostly in his own world of jazz. We were exploring an addiction to which rock and roll was the gateway drug, and rock and roll, even as the decade rolled over, was still a phase you were expected to grow out of. Waters and Wolf were on Chess, the label of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley (he was on Chess subsidiary Checker) and doowop groups like the Moonglows. Wynonie Harris was on King, the label of Boyd Bennett and his Rockets, Otis Williams and the Charms, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.
Rock and roll. It wasn't until much, much later that blues which didn't have its origins in the 1920s entered the world of cultural significance.
Discovery and rediscovery was a theme of the mid-twentieth century, because so much valuable art of the early twentieth century had been overlooked and dismissed by a racist culture. Heywood Hale Broun traveled to New Orleans in 1940 to record Kid Rena and other older New Orleans musicians, sparking a revival of interest in classic New Orleans jazz. Preservation Hall, first opened in the 1950s, was an outgrowth of this revival. John Hammond, with his 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, was an important agent in this era of rediscovery.
Harry Smith, in 1952, rediscovered the Old Weird America and its music.
Samuel Charters, with his 1959 book The Country Blues and his field work for Folkways, rediscovered Lightnin' Hopkins and a number of other blues singers.
But blues was still being narrowly and often capriciously defined, as was folk music (I remember being surprised to see Hopkins, whose records I owned on 45, on rhythm and blues labels, presented as a folk blues artist.)
By the mid-1950s on, one thing that was fairly clear about the new definition of folk music was that it didn't necessarily have to be made by folk--that is, by rural musicians and singers singing the songs that had been handed down through their families or their communities. A lot of it was being made by city kids from New York, or in one particularly notorious case, from Minneapolis by way of Hibbing, Minnesota. Big Bill Broonzy, a jazz guitarist, reinvented himself as a folk singer.
And in the mid-1960s Chess Records, realizing that the market for their rhythm and blues of the 1950s had dried up, reinvented Muddy Waters and released an album called Muddy Waters, Folk Singer, followed by another called The Real Folk Blues.
Waters and the other artists whose amplified instruments had left them on the outside of the folk music boom were also to be embraced by young British musicians for whom all of it: folk music (they made it into skiffle in England), rock and roll, and especially the electrified blues coming out of Chicago and Detroit, were the new world of American music which the young Britishers were using to blast the doors off the ossified class system of their country.
As this bounced back to America, it tore the doors off this country's own ossified caste system, and now B. B. King, Eddie Kirkland, T-Bone Walker, James Cotton and the electric bluesmen of the Midwest and California were playing the same folk festivals -- now called blues festivals -- as Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis.
So was I a pioneer of the blues revival? Nah, I was just a scared kid. But I was there.
Furry Lewis had pretty much given up making music when Sam Charters found him in his home town of Memphis, working for the city. He didn't even own a guitar any more. But he hadn't lost his touch, either as a singer or a guitarist.
Lewis is a blues singer who harkens back to the songster days, the entertainers on street corners or rural parties who knew a lot of songs and sang whatever their audiences wanted to hear. Willie Nelson describes growing up with a similar audience--"so country they didn't know they were country." They just knew what they liked, and were as likely to request a song by Irving Berlin as one by Ernest Tubb. Lewis sang the ballads and story songs that people knew, and he sings several of them on these two sessions: "John Henry," "Casey Jones," "Frankie and Johnny," "St. Louis Blues." Lead Belly had presented a similar mix of material, but he was never presented as a blues singer. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry also had a wide-ranging repertoire, and they had careers that stretched far into the Blues Explosion era, but they were prolific, and their style was well established by the 1960s. Had Lewis been discovered a few years later, a young producer or record label might well have discouraged this diversity. But these songs were a part of Lewis, and in fact "Kassie Jones" had been his most popular recording back in the 1920s.
One of his own twelve bar blues, and one of the first songs recorded on April 3, is "When My Baby Left Me." The first verse of the song is also the first verse of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "My Baby Left Me," later recorded by Elvis Presley. Crudup is now venerated as one of our great blues singers, but back in those days he was still pigeonholed as a rhythm and blues singer, and rhythm and blues was considered the next cousin to rock and roll, not an authentic folk music. (Big Bill Broonzy, asked if rock and roll was folk music, famously responded, "I ain't never heard no horses singin' it.")
Crudup/Presley's "My Baby Left Me" is verse-chorus, the blues variant favored by Willie Dixon and the Midwestern blues artists who recorded for Midwestern labels like Chess.
The twelve bar blues is an introspective form by nature, whereas the verse-chorus form is more communicative. The singer of the twelve bar blues repeats the first line as a gesture of reassurance to himself, a way of making sure that it's true, and that he's really saying it--"My baby left me, never said a word." The verse-chorus singer cuts right to the chase--"Was it something I done, something that she heard?" And then drives on into the chorus, which will be repeated not just once, but after every verse, to hammer it home to the listener and also to invite the listener to sing along, aloud or silently--"She left me, you know she left me / My baby even left me, never said goodbye."
Furry Lewis is a communicator, far more than many of the early bluesmen. His choice of songs, his delivery, even his guitar style, are communicative. But he's still a bluesman, and he has a lot of the bluesman's introspection, even in his ballads. He'll linger over words, following them into some private world of emotion. The best of the blues singers make it a rare privilege to be allowed to follow them into those recesses of introspection, and Lewis is one of the best.
The Charters recordings of Lewis are an important milestone in the history of the rediscovery of the blues, and Charters has been recognized as a seminal figure in this movement. Lewis went on to have the renascent career that had been denied to him earlier. He played many blues festivals. He was profiled in Playboy. He was a guest on the Johnny Carson Tonight show, and was featured in a Burt Reynolds movie.
The sessions were released on two separate Bluesville LPs, Back on My Feet Again and Done Changed My Mind. They were rereleased together on CD as Shake 'em on Down.
Etta Jones is back, with the same rhythm section that accompanied Betty Roché on her January 24 session for Prestige, and why not? These guys had demonstrated that they knew how to work with a girl singer, and Etta, I'm guessing, must have been very easy to work with, and a very professional singer, because she got a lot accomplished in a session -- a dozen songs in this one.
And she had material left over from her last session, in September, so six of the songs from this session were bundled with five songs from that one to make her next release, Something Nice. The rest of the September session had to wait until 1963 for Hollar!, when those songs were packaged with...five more songs from this session. The titles suggest
two different concept albums, one sweet and one wild, and that does seem to have been the logic. As I've said, making the decisions about what goes on what album, and gets released when, is way above my pay grade.
You can hear a lot of other singers in Jones's voice -- there's some Billie, there's some Dinah. Those are the main two, but maybe a little Sarah, and everyone was influenced by Ella. That was the style of the day, and it was a golden era for female jazz singers. So Jones makes the right choice, I believe, when she doesn't force herself to try to be different. She accepts her influences gratefully and graciously, and she uses them to create a sound that is wonderfully listenable. whether it's familiar standards or songs that don't get recorded all that often. She is, ultimately, her own singer, and why she isn't numbered among the first ladies of jazz is beyond me.
"And Maybe You'll Be There," the first song off the session to be placed on Something Nice, falls somewhere in between, on the scale of popularity. It hasn't been covered as much as, say, "Laura," but it certainly hasn't been ignored, either. Written by Rube Bloom with lyrics by Sammy Gallop, it's a good song to sing, and some good singers have done it, including Billie Holiday, Lee Wiley, June Christy, Dakota Staton. Frank Sinatra has recorded it, and a couple of marvelous and underrated doowop singers, Lee Andrews and the Five Keys' Rudy West. Even Bob Dylan.
Here's one more interesting comparison: Betty Roché recorded the same song, just couple of months earlier, with exactly the same musicians.
The musicians approach each session differently. Jimmy Neeley takes the lead for the Roché version, Wally Richardson for Jones. Roché takes a more theatrical approach, and by that I don't mean grand gestures, I mean she does more to create a persona, the forlorn lover who can't help looking for something she knows she'll never find, and so is constantly torn. The quintet gives her space for little pauses of self-doubt, finds equivalents for the restraint which that self-doubt imposes. Jones sings the song, her engagement more with the melody and the musicality, and the musicians play to that.
I'm very glad we have both versions. I spent a lot of time on this song, a lot more than I'd expected, and when I got back to Etta Jones's version again at the end, it still sounded wonderful.
Composer Rube Bloom deserves a little mention. He had his share of hits as a songwriter, including "Fools Rush In" and "Give Me the Simple Life," and he had his moments as a piano player, working with Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, and leading a group called Rube Bloom and his Bayou Boys, which included such bayou denizens as Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. Bloom also wrote the music for "Fools Rush In," which, with Johnny Mercer lyrics, has been a staple for pop singers, jazz singers, country singers and Elvis Presley.
"My Heart Tells Me," a Harry Warren tune with lyrics by Mack Gordon, is from a Betty Grable movie, and it can fall prey to a little over-sweetness of rendition, but not the way Jones does it. With a powerful assist from Michael Mulia and Jimmy Neeley, she swings it hard. The tune has an interesting history, in that during the war, a version was made by Glenn Miller lyrics sung in German by Johnny Desmond. This was broadcast over the American Broadcasting Station in Europe, a station set up to broadcast hopeful news to Resistance fighters and demoralizing messages to German troops. Gordon also wrote the lyrics to "Through a Long and Sleepless Night," music by Alfred Newman, also from a movie. Neither of these songs have been widely recorded, but both worth a listen from Jones. "Love is the Thing" is also pretty obscure, and also written by movie composers--Ned Washington and Victor Young-- although not, apparently, for a movie.
"Till There Was You" was the hit ballad from the hit Meredith Willson musical, The Music Man, just winding up its 4-year run on Broadway as Jones took the tune to Englewood Cliffs, so that star Robert Preston could head for Hollywood to make the movie version, which was also a hit. This was the breakout romantic ballad from the show, and it became a Top Forty hit for Anita Bryant. But its biggest success was yet to come: in 1963, when the Beatles included it on their first American album. Jones keeps the sweetness of the song, but adds just enough jazzy tartness to make it interesting. "Till There Was You" was also the 45 RPM single from the session, along with "All the Way" from her first Prestige outing.
"Give Me the Simple Life" (Rube Bloom again, with Harry Ruby) led off the March 30 session, and found its way into the groove of the uptempo swingers that make up Hollar! This kind of easy but forceful swing is most associated with Ella Fitzgerald, although she wouldn't record "Simple Life" until several years later. Jones can hold her head up proudly at a comparison with Ella--she swings it, with considerable help from Michael Mulia and a "Peter Gunn"-type walking bass.
"Looking Back" is a soulful blues from the pens of two songwriters equally at home in blues and pop, and this song has found success in both genres, and in country as well. Originally a hit for Nat "King" Cole in 1958, it was covered by country crooner Ferlin Husky in 1959, and later by Marty Robbins, Conway Twitty, and rockabilly Gene Vincent. Soul versions have been recorded by Mary Wells, Roy Hamilton, Carla Thomas, the Chambers Brothers, Otis Rush, Irma Thomas, and Johnny Adams. Jazz singers Nancy Wilson, Julie London and Ruth Brown have all recorded it. The soul singers, in particular, could have learned a lot from Jones' soulful interpretation, with great assists from Neeley and Rudy Lawless.
The songwriters were Brook Benton, no slouch as a pop and soul balladeer himself, and Clyde Otis, whose entry into the music business is one of those storybook tales. As a young marine, he became friends with fellow jarhead Bobby Troup (“Route 66”)—these
were the days after President Truman had integrated the armed forces. Troup
encouraged his songwriting, so after he’d mustered out, he moved to New York,
where he spent the better part of a decade knocking on doors, piling up
rejections, and driving a cab. One evening, he caught a fare who was going to a
party given by a well-known music publisher, and he persuaded the passenger to
give the publisher a song.
Reel to reel? There were no cassettes in those days. But anyway,
the song was “That’s All There Is to That,” and it became a Top Twenty hit for
Nat “King” Cole. Within two years, Otis was the first African American A&R
executive with Mercury Records. He is credited with over 800 published songs.
His work with Brook Benton yielded several hits for Benton singly and in duets
with Dinah Washington in addition to “Looking Back.”
“And the Angels Sing,” by Ziggy Elman and Johnny Mercer, is another
song like “Give Me the Simple Life,” made to be swung. Additionally, it has a
lot of lyrics (“Suddenly the setting is strange / I can see moonlight beaming /
silver waves that break on some undiscovered shore”) which require a very good
singer to make them make sense, carry the emotion, and keep swinging. This takes
some serious musicianship combined with some serious intelligence. And she does
it all in two and a half minutes, which includes a most satisfying solo by
Wally Richardson.
“Answer Me My Love” was originally a German song by Fred
Rauch and Gerhard Winkler. A close English translation by Carl Sigman, a prolific
lyricist, began “Answer me, my Lord,” and had the singer questioning why God
had stolen his sweetie, but even when recorded by Frankie Laine, who was no
stranger to addressing God (“I Believe”), it didn’t take off. Sigman tried again,
and Laine had better success with the new secular version, although the big hit
was Nat “King” Cole’s. Love was a good fallback theme for a song in those days.
“Let Me Go, Devil,” was a song about an individual in the clutches of
alcoholism, but when it was redone as “Let Me Go, Lover,” it became a number one
hit for Joan Weber, a top ten hit for both Patti Page and Teresa Brewer, and a
charted record for several other singers.
The tempo of “Answer Me My Love” may have been more suited
to Something Nice” than Hollar!, but it’s nice to have it
wherever.
“Reverse the Charges,” by Paul Francis Webster and Clarence
Williams, seems not to have made much of a mark in spite of the pedigree of its
composers. It was the B side of a 1946 78 RPM single by the Velvetones, a vocal
harmony group in the style of the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers. A nice save
out of the remainder bin of pop history by Miss Jones, and a nice recording.
Shirley Scott, again with new musicians, this time including a second keyboardist (Ronnell Bright). This is a session that was shelved and then cut up for parts, becoming parts of two later releases, Workin' and Stompin'. The idea of naming albums with participles goes back to the series that came out of the Miles Davis Contractual Marathon, and in fact Workin' did double duty as a title for Miles and Shirley. Workin' and Stompin' both came out in the same year, 1967, which is a little odd--you'd think if they were releasing both at the same time, they'd put all the songs from the sane session on the same album, but
I don't know what goes into making decisions like this. Nor do I know why a recording sits on the shelf for six years. In the case of Shirley Scott, it can't have been concern that they wouldn't sell. And it certainly doesn't appear to have been a concern for quality -- this is prime Shirley, listenable and musically rewarding. But if there is one thing I am sure of in this life, it's that I know nothing about marketing.
This new aggregation behind Scott is a solid one. Peck Morrison and Roy Haynes are as reliable as they come. Ronnell Bright is a welcome addition, and Wally Richardson is exemplary. The guitar-organ combination is getting to be a soul jazz staple, and although Richardson hadn't done any soul jazz sessions, he was certainly conversant with the blues. On Prestige, he had recorded with Al Sears and Willie Dixon, as well as jazz vocalist Betty Roché. Also during the 1950s, he had worked with blues and R&B figures as diverse as John Lee Hooker and Frankie Lymon.
Workin' was the first of the two to be released, and it included, from this session, the Scott original "Chapped Chops" and Nat Adderley's "Work Song." It was still a new tune when Scott recorded it in 1961, having just been debuted the year before, first by Nat and then in the two most famous versions: the one by both Adderley brothers, in a group led by Cannonball, and the other the vocal rendition by Oscar Brown Jr. But by the time the album was released, it had become virtually a signature song of soul jazz. Scott's version is a worthy addition to the canon. The tune sounds great on the organ, Scott's improvisation on it is compelling, and so is Richardson's solo.
Stompin' takes its name from "Stompin' at the Savoy," off of this session, and I love what Scott does with it, especially in the upper register of the organ. The rest of the session is two standards and a spiritual, and the album is mostly standards, so maybe that's why they divided the session the way they did.
Jimmy Hamilton spent 25 years with Duke Ellington, which should tell you something about how good he was. He replaced Barney Bigard in 1943, and was an important part of the Ellington orchestra for many of its greatest recordings, as well as a bunch more with groups of Ellingtonians led by Johnny Hodges. He released a handful of albums as leader during the 1950s on extremely obscure labels, and then this and one more on Prestige, but neither of his Prestige albums were ever reissued by Fantasy or Concord as part of their Original Jazz Classics series. You can't call him a forgotten man of jazz, because 25
years with the Duke gave him a certain recognition, but on the other hand, you sorta can. Jazz fans--certainly Ellington fans--know Hamilton as a section man par excellence. Not many know him as a soloist, improviser, leader.
This would be a good introduction, with Ellingtonians Britt Woodman and Clark Terry joining a solid rhythm section, playing all originals by Hamilton. It seems that when Jimmy breaks loose from the Duke, he gravitates toward the blues, reflecting his early days with Lucky Millinder and Bill Doggett. There's nothing like hearing a bunch of disciplined Duke's men letting their hair down and jamming on the blues, and I could listen to this all day.
A sextet is enough to get a full, almost big band sound if you know what you're doing, and these guys certainly do. They're all great section men as
well as being great soloists, so they can play together when called for, improvise when it's their turn.
Not known as a composer, although he does have one co-composer credit with Ellington ("Sunswept Sunday," from the Anatomy of a Murder soundtrack), Hamilton does not make a mistake in assigning the tunemaking chores for this session to himself. He has a good feeling for blues riffs that will sustain a whole song.
This was the first of two Prestige sessions for Hamilton, and it was released on Swingville. After this, no more recording on his own for a long time. In 1968, he left Ellington and retired to the Virgin Islands, if you call teaching and playing music retirement. In the 1980s, a couple of live sessions were captured and released. He died in 1994.
Esmond Edwards produced.
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
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