Listening to Prestige Part 151: Miles Davis

Does Miles already have one foot out the door? Certainly he's thinking about it. He must at least have a couple of toes out. It's just a couple of weeks since the Newport Jazz Festival jam session after which he was approached by George Avakian, wooing him for Columbia Records.

Avakian wanted Miles to put together a group that he'd work with consistently. Today, using one of the words I've grown to loathe, this would be called a brand. It was opposite from the approach Bob Weinstock had taken, having Miles record with different musicians in different combinations.

So if Miles had those couple of toes out the door, he had to have been at least to some degree auditioning young musicians. He obviously wasn't going to recruit Milt Jackson or Percy Heath, but the others were all possibilities.

Miles had kicked his heroin habit by this time, and he was understandably impatient with young musicians who had not. That meant young Jackie McLean, then 24, would not make the cut. Miles said of him later,

Jackie was so high at this session that he was always scared he could not play anymore. I don't know what's the shit was all about, but I have never hired Jackie after this session.

McLean only appears on two cuts "Dr. Jackle" and "Minor March." Miles would have the same problem with the saxophonist he did choose, John Coltrane, and they went through some rough patches, with Miles at one point firing Trane and disbanding the quintet, then putting it back together.

Art Taylor, at 26, was beginning a long association, not with Miles, but with Prestige. He may have been the drummer on a 1954 session with Art Farmer (this is up in the air), but he was definitely on this session. He would work off and on again with Miles over the years. but we would become known as the "house drummer" for Prestige, working on many sessions. Unlike Miles, he would also record again with Jackie McLean--and he had worked with him before. The two of them, and Sonny Rollins, had grown up in the same Harlem neighborhood, and had played music together as teenagers.

For 24-year-old Ray Bryant, 1955 was his breakout year, but he had actually first recorded at age 14.

This was in his native Philadelphia, in a band that included John Coltrane (on alto) and Benny Golson. And continuing my policy of never meeting a digression I didn't like, especially when it involves the twisting careers of working jazz musicians. the band was led by drummer Jimmy Johnson, who must have kept working and getting his name known in jazz circles, because 15 years later he was hired by Duke Ellington.

Trombonist Gino Murray later worked with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, but doesn't seem to have recorded with them,

Bassist Tommy Bryant didn't quite achieve the renown of his younger (by one year) brother, but he had a solid career, playing and recording with both his brother and Benny Golson from the 1944 session, and also with Dizzy Gillespie, Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, and may others.

But the really interesting career out of this aggregation belongs to trumpeter Henry Glover. In the mid-1940s, that burgeoning time for independent jazz and rhythm and blues labels, he was touring with Lucky Millinder, and met Syd Nathan, who had recently started King Records as a country label, but was discovering that there was a market for the sort of jazz that bands like Millinder's played, which was soon to be called rhythm and blues.

Nathan hired Glover to build a rhythm and blues presence on his label, and, incidentally, to build him a studio. But Glover ended up doing more than that. Originally from Arkansas, Glover had grown up listening to country music on the radio, and -- like his contemporaries Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino-- loving it. So Glover found himself producing country artists like Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins (those two would die int he plane crash that killed country legend Patsy Cline), Grandpa Jones, and the Delmore Brothers, with whom he co-wrote "Blues, Stay Away From Me," which became their signature song and a country music standard. Glover was almost certainly the first successful African American producer in the country field.

He had his first rhythm and blues hit with Bull Moose Jackson, and went on to record Lucky Millinder, Tiny Bradshaw, Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Little Willie John, and Jame Brown. Later moving to Roulette, he came back into the jazz fold, producing records for Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Sonny Stitt, as well as creating a rock 'n roll presence on Roulette with the k\likes of Ronnie Hawkins. He became close to Ronnie Hawkins' backup band, later to become The Band, and in the 1970s moved to Woodstock where he helped Levon Helm found his own independent label. As a songwriter, he wrote "Drown in My Own Tears," a hit for Ray Charles, and one of the biggest hits of the 60s, "Peppermint Twist."

The record that Glover, Bryant and the gang made was never released, and the personnel list for the session comes from the memory of Benny Golson.

Bryant would go another four years before getting a record date, this time with Tiny Grimes' Rockin' Highlanders. Grimes was another one of those cats who made music at the intersection of jazz and R&B. I know that tenor sax great Red Prysock, who was on this session, quit Grimes shortly thereafter because of the bandleader's insistence that his band members all wear kilts. So...Ray Bryant in a kilt? Or Philly Joe Jones?

Then nothing till 1955, Bryant's breakout year. Before the Davis session, he had recorded with Toots Theilemans on Columbia, with Betty Carter on Columbia subsidiary Epic (the label for which he would record most often, and then with the same trio (Wendell Marshall, Jo Jones) under his own name. He would record again for Prestige in December, with Sonny Rollins.

Miles and Milt Jackson had played together before, on the notorious Miles/Monk session, They play off each other beautifully here, and so does Jackie McLean. Although he's only on two tracks. "Dr. Jackle" and "Minor March." He gets composer credit on both, and fairly extensive solo space. "Bitty Ditty" is a Thad Jones composition that's been widely recorded; "Blues Changes," also known simply as "Changes," is Ray Bryant's. All the cuts are extended--from 6 1/2 to 9 minutes long -- giving plenty of room for improvisational experimentation.

Again, we have to grateful to Weinstock and Prestige for giving Miles this kind of exposure, in different settings and with different musicians. And, as in the case of this session, with different musicians bringing different material.

The session was planned for a 12-inch LP, with just over 15 minutes on each side, but the album wasn't released right away, for whatever reason. It came out as Prestige PRLP 7034, and is variously known as a Miles Davis or Miles Davis/Milt Jackson album (see the typefaces on the album cover.

The cover art is that muted color photo reproduction which would appear on a lot of Prestige covers; the photo is by Bob Weinstock.

Listening to Prestige Part 150: Jim Chapin

Even if you're a pretty serious jazz fan, you may never have heard of Jim Chapin. He played with the Casa Loma Orchestra, with Woody Herman and Tommy Dorsey, and with Flip Phillips at New York's Hickory House, but he only made one recording as a leader: this ten-incher on Prestige, which Prestige or its successors never reissued in any other format, although it was included, with another short session, on a 12-inch LP that was released in 1977 on the Classic Editions label. Both LPs are extremely rare, and I wasn't able to listen to them, which makes it hard to justify including this session in a blog called "Listening to Prestige."

But if you're a musician, particularly a drummer, you've heard of Jim Chapin, as perhaps the greatest of all teachers of jazz drumming. His textbook,  Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, Volume I, Coordinated Independence as Applied to Jazz and Be-Bop, published in 1948, is still considered the gold standard in its field., and he followed it three decades later with Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, Volume II, Independence–The Open End.  According to his obituary in Drum Magazine (Chapin died in 2009). "Independence," in Chapin's terminology, meant making one hand independent of the other. As he described it,

"Pianists and organists as far back as Bach had used independence to play a line with one hand and a counter-line with the other," Chapin says. "So why did drummers have to play everything hand-to-hand?"

The book's importance was recognized as soon as it was first published.

His exercises and concepts caused such a stir among drummers that he had to have a pair of drumsticks in his back pocket at all times in case he was called upon to demonstrate a particularly difficult passage and to prove that he truly could play every pattern in the book. 

Who benefitted from what came to be known as the Chapin book?  You'd best believe there were a few. Max Roach for one: "He beat a lot of drummers up with that book. We were all stumbling on it. But he made a significant contribution to conceptualizing what the drumset is all about, explaining it so clearly in his book."

Chapin, like Mike Cuozzo, moved away from the demands of the road and the jazz life to raise a family. In later years, he would play some gigs with his sons Tom and Harry, as they made their mark in the music world.

I'm hoping to find the sextet album, still. It features some wonderful musicians, including Phil Woods. Meanwhile, here's one of his instructional videos:



And here is the man, in his 80s, on the drums:

Listening to Prestige Part 149: Elmo Hope

We're on a run of piano players here, from the almost completely forgotten (Sanford Gold) to the Olympian (John Lewis) to somewhere in between.

Elmo Hope is an elusive creature in jazz lore, like the yeti, or like B. Traven. Or B. Traven in reverse -- no one knows who he was, but everyone has seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre. With Elmo Hope, the opposite. I'd certainly heard of him -- tortured soul, short life, heroin, underground reputation. WBGO, the nation's premier jazz station, remembers him on his birthday, and plays him one or two times a month, but he's not a part of their regular rotation to the degree that his contemporaries like Thelonious Monk or his lifelong friend Bud Powell are. And this is actually a good job by WBGO, keeping a flame flickering, but alive, that otherwise might be completely extinguished.

His Wikipedia entry theorizes that "he remains little known, despite, or because of, the individuality of his playing and composing, which were complex and stressed subtlety and variation rather than the virtuosity predominant in bebop." But that doesn't sound right. Hope had plenty of virtuosity, and neither Monk nor Powell was a stranger to subtlety and variation.

The jazz life is a hard one. I mentioned Mike Cuozzo in my last entry, on the MJQ, who left music to become a building contractor. Mark Myers of Jazzwax wrote glowingly of Cuozzo's abillity, and later received a letter from Michael Cuozzo, Jr., explaining that while his dad loved music, he loved his family more, and made the decision to provide for them.

John Ore, who played bass on this session, and who later spent three years as Thelonious Monk's bassist, was the subject of a 2004 profile by Reil Lazarus on the All About Jazz web page. Lazarus, reflecting on the musicians who created jazz in the 40s and 50s, noted that

today, those youngsters are aging men - gifted masters who have long since paid their dues - and many, especially those with failing health, find themselves victims of past exploitation and failure to plan....

 “I haven’t had much work,” says Ore. “In the last five or six years, I’ve had glaucoma, and that’s cut down on my ability to [find work].” This, paired with a dwindling number of venues currently catering to jazz, has made it more and more challenging for him to perform. 

“I don’t get out there to play very often,” Ore laments, “And that’s the main thing. Playing at home all by myself just isn’t the same. A musician should be playing at least two, three to four times a week with other musicians.” 

Add to this the absence of proper benefits and pensions plans for veteran musicians, and the road to a relaxed retirement appears muddier by the day. Organizations like the Jazz Foundation of America, whose monthly jam sessions Ore participates in, have worked ceaselessly to ease these unfortunate fiscal woes. Nevertheless, the lack of a substantial safety net for aging artists like Ore continues to be a major problem in jazz. 

And these are the guys who survived. Ore told Lazarus:

Not too long before Elmo Hope died, I saw him on Seventh Avenue. And he was walking in the rain with no hat on, someone else’s shoes, and he was sick. Now I don’t blame that on anyone, but there should be something, someone, somewhere we people can go.

The music remains, and this album is beautiful. I was awed by Hope's piano playing, but I was also struck by the way he uses the potential of all three instruments, bringing bass and drums to the fore in a way that not every piano session leader does. "I'm in the Mood for Love" is a little over four minutes long, and how do you do "I'm in the Mood for Love" after James Moody and King Pleasure/Eddie Jefferson have taken ownership of it? Hope does something completely unexpected. He gives the first two minutes to John Ore, who does a solo bass interpretation of "Moody's Mood." Then, with the bass still audible in the mix, and the echo of Ore's Mood still pulsing through, Hope creates his own solo, and makes the song his own.

In "Blue Mo," he brings Willie Jones to the front, with hard-edged stick work on the ride cymbal.

I was surprised to see "It's a Lovely Day Today" in the set list. It's a sprightly and hummable Irving Berlin tune, best known for a perky, optimistic rendition by Doris Day, but I wouldn't have thought of it as a bebop vehicle, and in fact I can't find any other instrumental jazz version, although Ella Fitzgerald, Astrud Gilberto and Jackie and Roy have all sung it. Hope takes it at a breakneck bebop tempo, and tears it up.

This became the fourth made-for-12-inch Prestige session, and was released as PRLP 7010 - Elmo Hope--Meditations.

PRLP 7008 and 7009 were the Wardell Gray memorial albums. Gray died on May 25, 1955, in Las Vegas. He was probably murdered, but the case was never investigated. No one cared what happened to a black man in 1950s Vegas.

Listening to Prestige Part 149: Modern Jazz Quartet

This is the first MJQ album with Connie Kay, and the last for Prestige, before they decamped for their long and fruitful association with Atlantic.

Kenny Clarke was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic within the strict confines of the MJQ. One of the pioneers, and one of the most prolific drummers of the bebop era,  He was the original house drummer at Minton's, which means he played with everyone -- and as the modern jazz decade progressed, everyone wanted him, or Max Roach or Art Blakey, to play with them.

In 1955, after severing his ties with the MJQ, Clarke made fouralbums for Savoy as leader of co-leader:a septet session with Ernie Wilkins;  The Trio, in which all three players--Clarke, Wendell Marshall and Hank Jones--go co-credit; Telefunken Blues, for which he enlisted MJQ-mates Jackson and Heath, along with a front line of Henry Coker, Frank Morgan and Frank Wess; and a third album featuring a rhythm section of Horace Silver (Hank Jones on one track) and Paul Chambers, and a front line of Donald Byrd on trumpet and Jerome Richardson on tenor sax and flute. He also gave two young brothers their first exposure on record: a trumpeter and alto sax player named Nat and Julian Adderley. It's safe to say that Cannonball made an impressive debut--impressive enough that Bohemia After Dark has often been re-released under his name.The session was successful enough that two weeks later the same two brothers and the same rhythm section recorded under Cannonball's name, and two weeks after that under Nat's name, with Jerome Richardson replacing Nat's brother.

He also recorded with Gene Ammons (Prestige), Eddie Bert (Savoy), Donald Byrd (Savoy),Milt Jackson (three albums on Savoy), Hank Jones (two more on Savoy in addition to The Trio), Duke Jordan and Gigi Gryce (Savoy),  Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh (Atlantic), Charles Mingus (Savoy), Thelonious Monk (Riverside), and Little Jimmy Scott (Savoy).

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. He also  recorded with:

• Johnny Mehegan, best remembered for his seminal books on jazz improvisation. 
• Wally Cirillo (Cirillo's album, also featuring Mingus and Teo Macero, included what is probably the first recorded jazz composition written in a 12-tone scale).
• Johnny Costa, whom Art Tatum dubbed "the white Art Tatum" and who later became musical director of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. It's nice to remember, in this day of disappearing live music, that Fred Rogers employed a live jazz trio, which played (per Wikipedia), "the show's main theme, the trolley whistle, Mr. McFeely's frenetic Speedy Delivery piano plonks, the vibraphone flute-toots as Fred fed his fish, dreamy celesta lines, and Rogers' entrance and exit tunes."
• Chuz Alfred, who made two albums as leader in 1955, then gave up jazz to play with Ralph Marterie's dance orchestra, then returned to Columbus, Ohio, where he became a charter member of the Columbus Musicians' Hall of Fame. And you thought the only musicians' hall of fame in Ohio was the one in Cleveland.
• Johnny Coates, who as Jazz King of the Poconos, employed the young Keith Jarrett as a drummer.
• Mike Cuozzo, described by Marc Myers of Jazzwax as "a gifted player... a Lester Young sound with a Lennie Tristano vibe." He gave up music to become a building contractor in New Jersey, but not before making an album with Mort Herbert, who would become deputy district attorney of Los Angeles,
• Al Caiola, who branched out from jazz to record hit versions of the themes from The Magnificent Seven and Bonanza, and who recorded with  Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Percy Faith, Buddy Holly, Mitch Miller, and Tony Bennett, among others.

Not only is that just 1955, that's just Savoy.

Clarke might have been able to keep up this prodigious schedule and still make dates with the MJQ, but he was also feeling claustrophobic about America, By 1956, he was a full-time resident of France, where he could make more money and deal with less racism. He played many sessions with visiting American musicians, and led the Clarke-Boland Big Band with Belgian pianist Francy Boland.

Connie Kay had followed Kenny Clarke before he followed him into the Modern Jazz Quartet. He became the house drummer at Minton's.

Before that, as a teenager, he had worked at a club called Ann's Red Rose in his Bronx neighborhood, getting the gig a week after he had bought his first drum kit. The house drummer for the Red Rose had quit suddenly, and someone at the bar said "Well, there's a drummer around the corner because I hear him practicing every night as I come home from work." So he played for comedians, singers, tap-dancers and chorus girls (from the NY Times obituary and a NY Times profile).

He moved from there into the jazz world, playing behind every major figure at Minton's, and also in Lester Young's band for several years. He was also putting his Ann's Red Rose experience to good use as the drummer for various rhythm and blues ensembles, including that of Frank (Floorshow) Culley, who had had a hit for Atlantic Records with "Cole Slaw." Culley brought him in to Atlantic in early 1951 to record a demo for The Clovers, who had just signed with the label. The song was "Don't You Know I Love You," and the bass player didn't show up for the session, so Kay had to double his part on the bass drum. He got paid for the gig, and thought no more about until a couple of weeks later, when "I'm driving my car and hear the tune and I say, 'Wait a minute, that sounds like the tune we made a demo of.' A week later I went to Atlantic and I went into Ahmet Ertegun's office and he said: 'Man, I'm glad to see you. We've been trying to find you. I like the beat you used on that record.' From that time on they kept calling me for record dates. When I couldn't make record dates, they'd postpone them.''

Supposedly, the "concept album" began with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which began with a vague idea by the Beatles to make an album that would represent a collection of songs by a fictitious village band, an idea which got discarded pretty quickly, but floated around the album sufficiently that "concept album" became the goal of mostly some pretty pretentious rock groups. If you wanted a real concept album, what about My Fair Lady Loves Jazz or Dave Digs Disney, or for that matter any Broadway show original cast album? Or Louis and the Angels? Or Birth of the Cool, which wasn't even made as an album but is still one of the greatest concept albums of all time?

Anyway, Concord is a concept album in that the concept was that it would be an album. It was the third recording session scheduled by Prestige to produce a full 12-inch LP's worth of music: in this case, six selections, and over 36 minutes worth of music.

It's an album that's mostly standards. Perhaps in Lewis's mind, the group already had one foot out the door, so they were saving original material for Atlantic--although in fairness, the MJQ tended to be standard-friendly until later in its career, and the first Atlantic album only had three originals. The originals are Jackson's "Ralph's New Blues" and Lewis's title track. I'd wondered if "Ralph's New Blues" was a tribute to Ralph Ellison -- I'd sort of hoped it was -- but appears to be for jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, which is pretty good too. It's built on an irresistibly bluesy riff, and is the catchiest number on the record.  "Concorde" is another Francophile nod from Lewis, and inspired the Eiffel Tower cover of the album. It has a richness of tone, a catchy melody, and an uptempo swing.

Lewis and Jackson know how to sustain a note for dramatic effect, and they know how to let loose a torrent of notes. But as always, the the MJQ is a quartet, not a leader and sidemen, and you're always aware of the contribution each member is making to the sound.

"Softly as a Morning Sunrise" was released as a two-sided 45. The album's initial release, as noted, was the 12-inch LP.

Listening to Prestige Part 148: Sanford Gold

Sanford Gold only made this one album under his own name, and it's been pretty much forgotten. Too bad. It's a nice listen--the guy definitely knew his way around a piano. Since I know so little (read nothing) about him, and since whoever wrote his Wiki entry obviously did know, and cared, and was a good writer, I'll quote it here:

Gold was one of the premier jazz piano teachers of his time. His self-published book, "A Modern Approach to Keyboard Harmony and Piano Techniques," distills the complexities of jazz and classical harmony down to a simple yet far-reaching system of pianistic and harmonic exercises, and has become an underground classic for serious students of the instrument. One of his biggest fans was Bill Evans, who often steered students his way.

His students have also remembered him on YouTube, where they've posted cuts from his album--and even the whole album. Some reminiscences:

 I was 3 yrs. old when Sanford Gold recorded this. I had my first lesson with him 12 years later in a seedy old building on 49th St and 7th Ave, full of jazz musicians like Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, Tony Aless, Ross Tompkins and the musicians from The Tonight Show band all hanging out at his studio, where there was a card game going on that never seemed to end. I thought he wasn't listening, but he would call out "3rd finger, Dummy!' from the next room.

 When I was a kid, I would sit in the waiting room while my dad was taking a lesson. By then the lessons were in a building at 58th street, and there was no room for dudes to hang out... Calling Sanford Gold a "character" is an understatement. He could be hear yelling "play that fuckin' chord" from the next room like Erik says.

 And another:

 I was a student of Sanford Gold in the mid-70s in New York.  The best piano teacher I ever had. He did once pull a machete on me, but I know he did it with love.

So we have to be grateful that Prestige brought him in for this session, although he did record with Don Byas, Stan Getz, Johnny Smith, Al Cohn, Vic Dickenson and Coleman Hawkins. And grateful to his students for keeping his memory alive.

Listening to Prestige Part 148: Bob Brookmeyer

Bob Brookmeyer, during this time period, was somewhat bicoastal. He had replaced Chet Baker in Gerry Mulligan's famous pianoless quartet, and he was still making dates in New York. This is another four song, 10-inch recording date, perhaps because Prestige already had one such session (with Teddy Charles), and needed one more to fill out a full length LP.

This New York session is also a pianoless quartet, except when it isn't. On two of the tunes, Brookmeyer plays piano. Actually, Brookmeyer had started as a pianist, with the Tex Beneke and Ray McKinley bands, before switching to valve trombone full time. This was actually true of the Mulligan-Brookmeyer quartets, as well--they were pianoless except when they weren't, since both Mulligan and Brookmeyer played piano.

To my ears, there's no falling off in technique or imagination when Brookmeyer switches to piano. He's great on both instruments, and the four tunes together, with the piano and trombone alternating, make a cohesive unit.

The quartet makes a cohesive unit, too. I believe this is Mel Lewis's debut on record. His first

important professional gig had come in just the previous year, when he had joined Stan Kenton's orchestra. Teddy Kotick had also played on the Teddy Charles session.

I continue to be impressed with Jimmy Raney, who's been on several Prestige sessions before this. His solos are beautiful, and his duet exchanges with both Brookmeyers, the trombonist and the pianist, are dazzling. He does a very cool duet with Teddy Kotick, as well, on his own composition,  "Potrezebie," the title of which tells me that in addition to his other accomplishments, Raney was an early fan of Mad comics. Mad's resident genius, Harvey Kurtzman, had run across the word in a set of Polish instructions for a bottle of aspirin (and who among us hasn't read aspirin labels in Polish?) and decided he liked thesound of it as a nonsense word (it actually means "need"). Looking on Allmusic.com to see if anyone else had recorded "Potrezebie," I discovered that although it hasn't been picked up by any other Mad-loving jazzmen, there are a number of Polish songs that use it in the title. The Polish songs spell the word correctly: Potrzebie, with no "e" between the "r" and the "z." Actually, the root word is an inflected noun, and "potrzebie" is the dative case of the noun. The various Polish songs usually use "potrzebuje" or "potrzeba," which, as near as I can make out, are verb forms. "kilkanaScie przedsiEbiorstw potrzebuje nowych dochodOw"  translates as "Over a dozen of enterprises need new incomes," which seems somehow appropriate for a discussion of jazz. I like to think that Jimmy Raney was a real Mad fan, and knew the correct spelling, but was done in by the label maker for Prestige's pressing plant.

The original 10-inch release in 1955, and the later 12-inch release, were both titled The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer, referencing two different sessions with two different Hall Overton students, or more likely Brookmeyer as trombonist and pianist. The same album was also given a New Jazz release, as Bob Brookmeyer -- Revelation!

Listening to Prestige Part 147: Gene Ammons

This is a curious session, and I'm trying to puzzle it out. It's certainly not designed to produce a 12-inch LP--they only cut two tunes that day. So...a 45, maybe? One for the jukeboxes? But this isn't exactly a rhythm and blues aggregation. It's a whole new group. None of them have recorded with Ammons before, and they're all serious modern jazz musicians, the cream of the crop.

But that's OK. All these cats can play rhythm and blues. Addison Farmer may have studied at Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music, but he also played in the house band for the Bihari brothers' Modern Records, one of the premier R&B labels on the West Coast. Lou Donaldson became famous for playing the funky side of jazz, and as he said in a recent interview with jazz blogger Larry Appelbaum , "If you can’t play the blues, you can’t play no jazz, I don’t care who it is or how much you study."

But no, that doesn't seem to be the case, either. No rhythm and blues here. These are jazz cats playing straight ahead jazz, and very tasty stuff at that. With soloists like Donaldson and Art Farmer filling out the front line with Ammons, there's a lot of jazz to play, and both selections run long - "Juggernaut" checks in at 10:31, "Woofin' and Tweetin'" at 15.06. Plenty of time for extended solos, and enough music to fill up both sides of a 10-inch LP. So who needs to worry about a 45 for the jukeboxes?

Except...they did release "Woofin' and Tweetin'" as a 45. And not an EP, apparently. How? I have no

idea. Maybe they did two versions, one for the album and one for the single. But then there'd be an indication of that on the session record. Maybe they just truncated it. I looked for playing time on the 45's label, but no such luck.

I'm pleased to see that the bebop trope of punning on the artist's name (or in this case nickname) hasn't disappeared altogether: hence, "Juggernaut." And I also like "Woofin' and Tweetin'." It has the suggestion of an old time rhythm and blues title, like "Rockin' and Rollin'" or "Rollin' and Tumblin'" or "Shuckin' and Jivin'," updated to the new jargon of the hi-fi world.

This session did eventually make it to 12-inch, but here again there's a curiosity. Prestige did often rerelease material, but in this case it doesn't seem to be so much a rerelease as a release of the same thing twice. Gene Ammons All-Star Sessions and Gene Ammons - Woofin' and Tweetin' are both PRLP 7050, same catalog number. But they have two different names and two different covers.

The 45 RPM seems to have been released more or less at the same time as the album. The label reads From the 12" LP 7050 "Woofin' and Tweetin'." So maybe it went something like this:

Hey, why don't we put out a 45 on this one. It's not exactly rhythm and blues, but it is Gene Ammons. I bet we can get it on a few jukeboxes.

Isn't it a little long?

We'll just cut it down some. On the jukeboxes, who'll care? But you know...if we're putting out the 45, maybe we should change the name of the album, so if someone hears it on a jukebox and likes it, they'll know what album to buy.

Sure, why not? In that case, let's change the album cover too. I never liked that original art much.

Actually, it wasn't unusual for Prestige to put out an album with alternate covers -- in fact, there's a whole website devoted to just that. Often the difference was just one of a different color scheme, less often a whole different design. Two different names is rarer yet, although not quite unique.

Listening to Prestige Part 146: Bennie Green

The Prestige commitment to 12-inch LPs was not yet complete. This session did eventually get included in a full-length album, but its initial release was one of the last of the 200-series 10-inchers (there'd be four more), and even more surprisingly, one of the last of their 78 RPM releases (there'd be four more of them, including another by Green from a later 1955 session).

Which means that a recording session is changing. This Bennie Green session is four songs, totalling about 20 minutes of music, or just enough for a 10-inch LP, or a couple of singles. Not exactly perfect for singles, but the two cuts that were released on 78 and 45 ("Say Jack!" and "Sometimes I'm Happy") were the shortest ones.

Compare that with the Miles Davis session of a few days earlier, which produced about 36 minutes of music, and an entire 12-inch LP. Or the MJQ's session of a few weeks later, the same. Or the first Prestige 12-inch, recorded by Billy Taylor the previous April. All of Taylor's tunes were single-length, in the three minute range, but there were 12 of them, adding up again to about 36 minutes, and none were ever released as singles.

And compare all of those to this 1949 session by Stan Getz,  which produced four songs, all of them in the 3 1/2 minute range, all of them released on 78.

And, of course, even with Bob Weinstock's famous no-rehearsal, few-alternate takes philosophy, one wasn't always going to be able to record a whole album in one day. But great jazz didn't necessarily require endless studio time. Kind of Blue was recorded in two days. Compare that with some of the 70s rockers with endless budgets and endless studio time. And...no accounting for tastes...but compare the results.

Anyway, back to Bennie Green. As I've noted earlier, Green could play anything, and he continues to demonstrate it. And he could do it on the trombone. Here he takes on three ballads, including "Body and Soul," which Coleman Hawkins pretty much owns as one of the definitive tenor sax solos. But Green manages to get the same depth of emotion on the trombone. "Laura" as a jazz standard is probably most closely associated with Charlie Parker with strings. Green gives it his own delicacy and sensivity.

"Laura" also features an unexpected and utterly entrancing solo by Cliff Smalls, hitherto unknown to

me, but a veteran of some ensembles with strong pedigrees, including Jimmie Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins. Perhaps he had a particular rapport with Green because he was also a trombonist. He had played trombone in the Earl Hines band that also featured Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and he was the backup pianist for Hines. Actually, Hines used several backups, including Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Nat "King" Cole, but Smalls was reportedly his favorite.

On "Say Jack!" Green's trombone takes on the job of a rhythm and blues tenor sax man -- and also vocalist, leading the ensemble in a ragged-but-right rhythm-and-bluesy chorus, which is not repeated anywhere else in the song, as the group gradually forgets that it's playing R&B, and moves into bebop territory -- particularly Charlie Rouse's solo.

Rouse and Smalls get a lot of solo time on "Sometimes I'm Happy," but what really kicks that number into high gear is the conga playing of  Candido, whom Rudy Van Gelder moves to the forefront, and a good move it is.
The 10-inch LP was simply titled Bennie Green Sextet. When the session found its way to 12-inch, a year or so later, it was called Bennie Green Blows His Horn in Hi-Fi; by the time it was reissued as part of a 7100-series LP a couple of years later, perhaps Hi-Fi was no longer quite such an exciting new technology, because the album became simply Bennie Green Blows His Horn.

Listening to Prestige Part 145: Miles Davis

This is an interesting period in Miles's career. This session was recorded in June of 1955, and he was still working with Bob Weinstock's philosophy:

So, our basic idea was just to make records with different people, to record with the best people around...we would sit down and talk about it. Miles would mention who was in town, who he would like to record with. I'd say who I'd like to hear him record with.

 That was about to change. Miles was healthy by this time, free from heroin addiction, working out regularly. Although he did not mix it up with Thelonious Monk during their session of the previous December, as was rumored at the time, he was working out in the gym regularly, including sessions on the light punching bag.

In July, he played the Newport Jazz Festival with an all-star group, including Thelonious Monk, although they would never record together after the December dustup. The rest of the group was Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Percy Heath and Connie Kay, who had just joined the Modern Jazz Quartet to replace expatriate-to-be Kenny Clarke. Miles doesn't appear to have been a part of the official festival lineup, but Columbia producer George Avakian heard him and his group jamming on Monk's "Round Midnight," and immediately recruited him for Columbia. Avakian had exactly the opposite to Weinstock's philosophy. He wanted Miles to put together a regular and recognizable group. Avakian's idea turned out to be the stroke of genius that put Miles over the top, but we can only be grateful, as well, for Weinstock's "jam with Miles" sessions.

It appears that, without necessarily planning it that way, Miles was already assembling that regular group. Oscar Pettiford wouldn't remain--reportedly his personality clashed with Miles's--but Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones would.

Jones had only recorded once before with Miles, but the two had spent time on the road together during Miles's self-imposed exile from New York. Garland had played on various dates with Billy Eckstine, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (John Coltrane was also in Vinson's band), but he was pretty much unknown when Miles tapped him. They had boxing in common as well as music--Garland, as a welterweight, had actually fought Sugar Ray Robinson.

Ira Gitler, in preparing the liner notes for the Prestige album from this session, talked to Miles about musicians he admired. This must have been after Newport, so Miles must already have been thinking about who he wanted in the group he'd be forming.

I asked Miles who his current favorites were. On his own instrument he quickly named Art Farmer and Clifford Brown as the new stars and Kenny Dorham as one who has come into his own. Then he spoke lovingly of Dizzy Gillespie. "Diz is it, whenever I want to learn something I go and listen to Diz." In the piano department two Philadelphia boys, Red Garland (heard to good advantage in this LP) and Ray Bryant were mentioned along with Horace Silver, Hank Jones, and Carl Perkins, "a cat on the Coast who ploys bass notes with his elbow'. The talk shifted to saxophone and to Sonny Rollins and Hank Mobley who are carrying on the tradition of Charlie Parker. This naturally started us talking about Bird. Miles credited his most wonderful experiences in jazz to his years with Bird. He stared slowly ahead *Like Max said, New York isn't New York anymore without Bird." Max's name being mentioned directed the conversation to drummers. "Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones; Max For brushes." Miles is very conscious of drummers. Many times he will sit down between the drummer and bass player and just listen to what the drummer is doing.

Miles did actually play with Kenny Dorham once, in a 1949 all-star big band in Paris, Le Festival International de Jazz All-Stars.

He recorded a few times with Dizzy Gillespie, first on a 1945 session with Charlie Parker, but Diz mostly played piano on that session. He was supposed to strictly play piano, but the youthful Miles was so nervous about playing with his idols that he broke down completely on "Ko-Ko," and Dizzy had to step in. He played in a trumpet session with Dizzy and Fats Navarro in 1949. Fats was gone, of course, by the 1955 conversation with Gitler. This was the 1949 edition of the Metronome Allstars, a group of Metronome Magazine's poll-winners that was gathered for a recording annually throughout most of the Forties and well into the 50s. Metronome would gather together as many of the poll winners as they could, and fill in the rest with runners-up. 1949's group was more than a little impressive: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro (trumpet); J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding (trombone); Buddy DeFranco (clarinet); Charlie Parker (alto saxophone); Charlie Ventura (tenor saxophone); Ernie Caceres (baritone saxophone); Lennie Tristano (piano); Billy Bauer (guitar); Eddie Safranski (bass); Shelly Manne (drums).  There was another session with Bird in 1953, and then nothing until 1989, where they appeared as the trumpet session on a very strange Quincy Jones recording that features vocals by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and rappers Big Daddy Kane and Kool Moe Dee. I'm not certain it's an entirely successful experiment, but I'm sure as hell not certain it isn't.

But he wasn't looking for another trumpet player to round out his new quintet. He was looking for a tenor sax, and actually, Sonny Rollins was his first choice. Rollins played with the new quintet in July, right after Newport, but the arrangement wasn't to last. Sonny had his own heroin habit to kick. John Coltrane was not yet on Miles's radar. Hank Mobley would play with the quintet, but not until years later.

Miles would use Ray Bryant on piano a month later, in another one of his Prestige pickup groups, but

Red Garland was to be his man. At the time of this recording, and this interview, Garland was the least-known of the piano men that Miles admired--even including Carl Perkins, who would die too young to establish much more of a reputation, and who really did play bass notes with his elbow, his left arm having been crippled by polio. But Miles clearly had his eye on Garland already.




When you think of answer songs, you're more likely going to think of country ("It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels") or rock ("Sweet Home Alabama" answering Neil Young's "Southern Man," and then Warren Zevon's "Play it All Night Long" answering Lynyrd Skynyrd), or even blues (Rufus Thomas's "You Ain't Nothin' But a Bearcat"). But here's one turning up in jazz: Miles's "I Didn't" as an answer to Monk's "Well You Needn't" (a tune that Miles also recorded). "I Didn't" is sharp, crisp and sardonic. You have to be awfully good to take on the premier composer of his generation, but Miles is up to the task.

"A Night in Tunisia" is one of the most famous of all bebop standards, and "Green Haze" a Davis original that showcases Garland, his new piano discovery. The others are all odd choices that Miles puts his indelible stamp on. "Will You Still Be Mine" was written by pop singer and swing era tunesmith Matt Dennis. The other two are by composer Arthur Schwartz, and were both songs that one would not have chosen to be present at the birth of the cool, or even at its confirmation. "I See Your Face Before Me" was best known in versions by Guy Lombardo and Glen Gray. Coltrane and Brubeck would both record it later.

"I've Got a Gal in Calico," written by Schwartz and Leo Robin for a movie musical, is one of those completely cornball, white-bread numbers, like "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," that no one could consider as the basis for a hipster jazz improvisation. But Miles worked the same magic with "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," didn't he?

Both "Green Haze" and "A Night in Tunisia" were released as two-sided 45s. The Musings of Miles became Davis's first 12-inch LP, Prestige PRLP 7007. Before it were two reissues, PRLP 7004,  Lee Konitz With Tristano, Marsh And Bauer, from four sessions (1/11/49, 6/28/49, 9/27/49, 4/7/50) in 1949-50; and PRLP 7006, Mulligan Plays Mulligan (original session 8/27/51). In between was an MJQ session recorded after Miles, but released before.

Listening to Prestige Part 144: Art Farmer/Gigi Gryce

After making his commitment to 12-inch LPs and his soon-to-be-legendary 7000 series, Bob Weinstock backtracked a bit with this session, releasing it only as a 10-inch, entitled Art Farmer Quintet. It became a 12-inch LP, along with the earlier Farmer-Gryce session for Prestige, as When Farmer Met Gryce, but that was a while later.

Actually, Farmer had met Gryce a while earlier, when they had both been part of the Lionel Hampton European tour of the summer of 1953--a tour that had kickstarted the careers of two brilliant arrangers, Gryce and Quincy Jones. Jones would go on to a legendary career as arranger and producer; Farmer would go on to a legendary career as an instrumentalist. Gryce would cut his carer short, essentially retiring from the public eye by the end of the 1950s, for a number of reasons, not the least of which may have been disillusionment with the music industry.  David Griffith, who maintains the Gigi Gryce web page, points out:

It is often overlooked that Gryce was one of the first black musicians to form his own publishing company in order to have control over his and fellow musicians' creative output - many of the prominent black jazz musicians of the day were with Gryce's Melotone publishing company. It became clear, however, that Gryce couldn't buck the deeply ingrained system of record companies controlling (at least in part) music publishing rights as part of recording deals.

The first Farmer/Gryce session had featured a familiar Prestige rhythm section of Horace Silver, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke. This one brings in some newer faces. Freddie Redd had made his Prestige debut in February, leading a trio. Farmer's brother Addison was also making his second session: he had played with Art in a quartet the previous November. Art Taylor may or may not have recorded with Art Farmer in June 1954; he definitely appeared on Thelonious Monk's last session for Prestige.

Gryce was an important composer, and his compositions take center stage here. "Social Call" probably became the best known. With lyrics by Jon Hendricks, it was a hit at least in jazz circles for Betty Carter, and has been covered by Dianne Reeves among others. It's also become a favorite with instrumentalists, including Donald Byrd, Cal Tjader, Art Blakey and the Jazz messengers, Cannonball Adderley and Wes Montgomery. If I were picking one tune from this session to write lyrics to, I'd pick "Social Call" too.  It's melodic, structured, and expressive.

But Gryce's other two tunes are nearly as good, perhaps just as good. "Capri" has been recorded by J. J. Johnson, Clifford Brown and Benny Golson. Here it moves from a brief but intriguing vamp by red to a swinging head by Farmer, to some nimble torch-passing between the two soloists. "Blue Lights" begins with a blue fanfare, and then stays bluesy and driving. It numbers Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones and Clifford Jordan among its interpreters. Art Farmer's contribution, "The Infant's Song," is a particularly beautiful melody. All in all, this is a very strong group of originals to bring to one recording session.

Listening to Prestige Part 143: Milt Jackson

Again the other MJQ, with Horace Silver instead of John Lewis, and yes, it's a very different sound. Not necessarily funkier, however, even though the session was rereleased in 1962 on album called Soul Pioneers. Silver had not yet made the fists-first commitment to funk that would bring him his greatest acclaim, and this was a session heavy on ballads, composed by some impressive balladsmiths.

"I Should Care" was co-composed by orchestra leaders Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston, with lyrics by Sammy Cahn.. Stordahl had been an arranger for Tommy Dorsey when Frank Sinatra joined the band, and he became the arranger and orchestra leader for Sinatra's Columbia recordings. The Modern Jazz Quartet would later record the same tune, so it's interesting to look at the differences. The MJQ's arrangement is, unsurprisingly, the more intricate, with some very closely worked-out duet work between John Lewis and Milt Jackson. The version by the other MJQ is much more built around Jackson, and he explores different territories, with a lot more reverb and a lot more pushing the upper register.

One significant difference between the Milt Jackson Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet is the part given to Percy Heath. Heath certainly gets solo time with Lewis's MJQ, but he seems more assertive here, particularly on Rodgers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine." "Valentine," as well as Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You," are very familiar tunes, and with good reason. There are two ways a jazz player can handle a melody like this, both with value. You can get outta the way, and give the melody a chance to express itself. Or, like Jackson and Silver, you can count on everyone knowing the melody, and just use it as a point of departure and a point of reference.

The group gets more uptempo, too, for instance in "Stonewall," with a lot of walking bass and and lot of  virtuoso vibing. I do love the ballads, but I might take "Stonewall" as a favorite from this session.

"Stonewall," in two parts, was released as a 45. Milt Jackson Quartet was Prestige PRLP 7003. Before it (PRLP 7002) came a Stan Getz reissue, featuring one session from 1949 and two sessions from 1950.

Listening to Prestige Part 142: Billy Taylor

This is a landmark in Prestige history. 1955 must have been the year that Prestige made the switch to the 12-inch LP format, and began their 7000 series of recordings, and this was the first one made for that release -- Prestige PRLP 7001. From here on, the 7000 series will be a mixture of new recordings and repackagings of recordings made for 78, for 45 RPM EP, and for 10 inch LPs.

This is the classic Billy Taylor Trio, with Percy Brice handling the drum duties.

If you were building a well-rounded jazz collection, you might not include every Billy Taylor album in it. Not that they aren't all worthwhile, but if you got all of them, you might not have time to listen to all of them, while still maintaining your status as well-rounded jazzophile. But you would certainly want to have at least one representative album--maybe at least two, so that you'd have one Latin and one straight-ahead. And whichever ones you picked, you really couldn't go wrong.

Certainly you wouldn't be going wrong with this one--and it has the added historical value of being Prestige's first 12-inch LP. Taylor's playing is technically impeccable, emotionally compelling. I'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite track, but maybe "Day Dreaming" as a ballad, and "A Grand Night For Swingin'" for a livelier tempo. "Swingin'" is a Taylor original. He's a prolific composer, and one of the best. "Day Dreaming" is Jerome Kern.

The album is entitled A Touch of Taylor, and that was a formulation that seemed to appeal -- a later album for Atlantic is called The Taylor Touch.

Listening to Prestige Part 141: Jon Eardley

Before we get to Eardley, a mention of a couple of sessions lost to the haze of time. On March 10, the Tony Luis trio cut four tunes, which were released on EP format only, and four more tunes backing up vocalist Terry Morel (also EP only). I can find nothing at all on Luis anywhere. I did find one mention of his drummer, Hank Nanni, in the autobiography of a Wall Street trader turned vagabond, who briefly went to work for Nanni, who was playing drums in a Las Vegas lounge. But not as a musician. Nanni had also opened up a business selling vacuum cleaners door to door.

Terry Morel apparently had two recording sessions in 1955, the one for Prestige which sank without a trace, and one for Bethlehem, which has survived. All I know about her I found on a German Wiki page -- there's no Wiki entry in English for her. Herbie Mann and Ralph Sharon played on the Bethlehem album, which is a live recording. She made one more live album with Gerald Wiggins in 1957, and appeared on a TV show with Bud Shank and Gary Peacock in 1962. Nothing else, although she lived until 2005. The Bethlehem sides are very good.

Jon Eardley had cut a quintet session in the Van Gelder studio a month earlier with Phil Woods, under Woods's name. This session features the same rhythm section, but with J. R. Monterose's tenor replacing Woods's alto.

Monterose is a favorite of mine, and was a good friend. He came out of that hotbed of jazz that was Detroit, but he didn't have much time to absorb that city's influences. When he was only a few months old, his family moved to Utica, New York, and upstate New York would always exert its pull on him. His first major gig was with the Buddy Rich band, but after six months he decided it wasn't the music he wanted to play, so he went back to upstate New York, where, he says, he "spent the next couple of years working in little joints but with good men."

J.R. worked with some more good men on his return to New York, including Claude Thornhill, Teddy

Charles, Kenny Dorham and Charles Mingus. But the jazz scene in New York changed in the late 60s and early 70s, with more of a racial divide than there had been previously--a situation with which he was not comfortable. He retreated to Europe, and then back to upstate New York, where he became a legend in his own time with a long-time engagement (the better part of a decade) at the Lark Tavern in Albany. He was back playing little joints with good men, including Teddy Kotick. The others in his most frequent ensemble were pianist/attorney Walter Donnaruma and drummer Eddie Robinson.

This is Jon Eardley's session, though, with Monterose as an able partner. There's one Eardley original ("Demanton") and two by Tadd Dameron, one of the finest composers in the jazz idiom. Dameron once said that he strove for beauty above all else in his composition, and he certainly achieves it here, especially in "If You Could See Me Now," which also has a haunting solo by George Syran.

The fourth piece, "Hey There," is by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and comes from the 1954 musical "The Pajama Game." It was a pop hit in 1955, for both Rosemary Clooney and Sammy Davis Jr.

The pages had pretty well been turned on the Great American Songbook by the mid-Fifties. There were still crooners like Eddie Fisher, and band singers from the Forties like Jo Stafford and Perry Como and even Bing Crosby, but the great songs had pretty much all been written, which is why pop singers like Margaret Whiting and Tony Bennett were covering Nashville songs, particularly those by Hank Williams.  But the news hadn't quite reached Broadway yet, and the Fifties were actually a pretty strong decade for Broadway musical scores. "Hey There" is a very lovely melody, and if it didn't quite become a jazz standard, it had some very good jazz interpretations by Grant Green and Phil Woods. It was recorded by a number of jazz as well as pop singers, most notably Sarah Vaughan, who was given an arrangement involving a weird and not entirely successful Danish choir, but still managed to create one the great jazz vocals.

"Hey There" was written as a moody, torchy ballad, and is generally played that way, but Eardley and Monterose take it uptempo and urgent, and it's a good change from the expected.

These tunes were released on a 10-inch from Prestige, and a 12-inch from New Jazz.

Listening to Prestige Part 140: Freddie Redd

One of the special joys of this blog is discovery. Someone I hadn't heard before...someone I didn't know enough about. And that's the case here. This is a treasure. This is music for real lovers of jazz. No pyrotechnics, no drama, just wonderful piano playing by a real artist. It's funky, it's melodic, it's inventive, it goes right into you.

Freddie Redd is probably best known for Jack Gelber's 1959 play about junkies waiting for their pusher Godot, The Connection. The play focused on a bunch of junkies sitting around a New York crash pad, waiting to get high. The cast includes four jazz musicians, most notably Redd and Jackie McLean. Gelber's original script had called for the musicians to just be sitting around noodling odd scraps of music, but Redd convinced the playwright to let him compose a real score. This was a good idea for all sorts of reasons. It was certainly stronger artistically. It was better for Freddie, because a composition meant steady...income, that is. Beyond what he was getting for acting, which in those days Off Broadway was not much. When you think about it, whatever the producers paid Freddie for the score, it was a good investment, because if the quartet had just had to sit around noodling night after night,,they would have been noodling something, and ASCAP would have been on them like a ton of bricks.

The Connection was made into a movie by Shirley Clarke, with Redd again featured, and an album of the music from the play was released on Blue Note, but none of this made Redd into a star of the jazz world. If you were to mention his name to someone from that era--like me, for instance--you'd probably get "Oh, yeah, The Connection. Did he ever do anything else?" And because in The Connection, he plays a heroin addict, the person you were talking to would probably assume he had died young.

The Connection

In fact, Redd is still with us, and as recently at 2013, according to his Facebook page, he was performing in Baltimore (his Facebook page only has 683 likes -- not enough).

But let's get back to this single session of four tunes for Prestige. His playing is simple and complex. straightforward and adventurous, bluesy and boppish. It engages the mind and goes straight to the heart. "Debut" is ornate in the manner of Bud Powell or even Art Tatum. In "Blues for Lady J" he plays the blues, elaborates on the blues, returns to the blues. "The Things We Did Last Summer" is a 1946 hit for Jo Stafford, by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, that's become a jazz standard. Redd gives it a beautiful, moody rendition that stays close to the melody but always offers something more. It comes in at just under six minutes, which gives Redd plenty of space to explore all its possibilities. "Ready Freddie" is taken at a faster tempo, and is a bravura piece for the pianist.

The trio is filled out by stellar musicians. John Ore worked with
several of the best piano players of his time, including Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, Earl Hines, and most significantly Thelonious Monk, from 1960-63. Ron Jefferson and Ore both played with Lester Young, and Jefferson also backed up Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge and Oscar Pettiford, among others. He was one of the original members of Les McCann's trio.

Ore has some solo space on both "Things We Did Last Summer" and "Blues for Lady J," and he takes full advantage of it. He also does some wonderful duet work with Redd on "Ready Freddie."

These tunes appear on a 10-inch LP, Introducing...Freddie Redd. There wasn't enough material for a 12-inch LP, so Prestige combined them with a Hampton Hawes session as Piano: East/West.

All can be heard on Spotify. I trust I don't need to tell you to listen. And if he gets booked at the Falcon, in my neck of the woods, I'm going.

Listening to Prestige Part 139: Jimmy Raney

Jimmy Raney was back in the studio twice in the winter of 1955, February 18 and March 8, with the same lineup. It included his mentor Hall Overton, who had not been part of his session from the previous August, which had featured two horns but no piano. One of the two had been Phil Woods, who went on, as we know, to have one of the most distinguished careers in jazz history, although he and Raney were not to record together again. The trumpet player for that earlier gig, John "Doc" Wilson, who is back for these next two, also went on to have a career no less admirable, if less acclaimed, as an arranger and educator.

Wilson's first recordings were on these Jimmy Raney sessions. He went on to record with Bob Brookmeyer and Gerry Mulligan, but recording with famous names was not to be his major contribution to the jazz world. And interestingly, though he played with one of jazz's great arrangers, he does not list Mulligan as one of his most important influences.

Wilson's first big time gig was with the interesting but short-lived bebop aggregation that Benny Goodman put together with Zoot Sims and Wardell Gray. He would learn a lot from Goodman, including, as he told Nate Guidry in a profile in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the way that

...when the band wasn't swinging the way he wanted, Benny would have a rehearsal early in the morning without the rhythm section so we could get our own swing thing going...I found later in my career that that's a great technique. If you've got a great rhythm section and the music isn't swinging, it's not the rhythm section's fault.

After Goodman, he played in bands led by Pete Rugolo, Neal Hefti and Claude Thornhill, all top arrangers. But he says his most rewarding experience was playing in the band led by Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan, who first made their reputation arranging in the golden years of swing, Sauter for Red Norvo, Benny Goodman and others, Finegan for Glenn Miller:

Those guys had some really novel ideas when it came to arranging. The effects of that band are still felt today. They used woodwind doubles, extra percussions that are now commonplace. But when they started doing it, it was new.

 The Sauter-Finegan orchestra  was swimming upstream against the rock and roll tide of the 1950s, and Wilson found himself swimming against the same tide in the 1960s, as the Beatles swept away everything in their path, including jazz. Wilson recalls

...things in New York were getting bad. Musicians were going from working six days a week to one or two days. I ran into Kenny Dorham working in a music store on 48th

Street. The great Kenny Dorham couldn't find work. I had my trumpet stolen, so I go into this store, and I'm in the basement trying these different horns, and here comes Kenny and he said, 'I heard some of those licks you were playing, and I had to come down and see who was playing that.'

Wilson went back to school, got a doctorate in music from NYU, and landed a teaching job at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1972. There wasn't much call for jazz in higher education then -- in 1972, only 15 colleges in the US offered degrees in jazz studies. But Wilson had his Ph.D., so he was able to  get hired as Duquesne's band director, conducting classical music and wind ensembles, and eventually to set up a jazz program.

Wilson and Raney mesh beautifully here. Raney had a wonderful sense of how to coordinate a guitar and horn, and it didn't hurt to have Rudy Van Gelder engineering the sessions. Replacing Bill Crow and Joe Morello are Teddy Kotick and Nick Stabulas.

The tunes are originals and standards on the first session, all standards on the second. Mostly Raney takes a fairly loose approach to the melodies, even on the head, and he makes it work. With the exception of "Someone to Watch Over Me," where the pure beauty of the melody engages him briefly.

I wanted to do a portrait of John "Doc" Wilson, but I can find no pictures of him anywhere on the Internet.

These sessions were combined on a 10-inch LP, and later included on the 12-inch Jimmy Raney - A.