Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Claude Hopkins had a long and distinguished career as pianist and bandleader, but live music is evanescent, and so are the reputations based on it. Lasting reputations are built on recorded music, so it'sm thanks to Prestige and Swingville that Hopkins is chiefly remembered today -- with the Swingville All Stars, backing up Bud Freeman and Lonnie Johnson, and most indelibly for the three albums he recorded as leader: Yes Indeed!, Let's Jam, and this final one, Swing Time! Esmond Edwards gave him great support for the first two (Buddy Tate, augmented by Chu Berry on Yes Indeed! and Joe Thomas on Let's Jam), and Don
Schlitten, not to be undone, gives him a masterful group here, led by Vic Dickenson and Budd Johnson.
Hopkins had the kind of career that jazz fans and jazz historians can dream about, and conjure up a mythos around -- musical director of Josephine Baker's ensemble in Paris (which included Sidney Bechet), leader of a 1930s band which included Vic Dickenson and which had long residencies at the Cotton Club and Roseland. But to actually hear him, these recordings are the place to go. Swing Time! includes two Hopkins originals plus the kind of old chestnuts that, when they're in the hands of masters, you never get tired of hearing.
New to Prestige are trumpeter Bobby Johnson and drummer
Ferdinand Everett. Johnson was a much-in-demand section man who played with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Erskine Hawkins, among others. Everett's only record date appears to have been this one, but he carries his weight.
Ah, what says the blues like a song by Mack David ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo") and Jerry Livingston ("Mr. Ed"), written for Teresa Brewer to sing in Those Redheads from Seattle? And in fact, when Jimmy Witherspoon gets through with David and Livingston's "Baby, Baby, Baby," it would be scarcely recognizable by any redhead from Seattle, or, most likely, by the composers. Witherspoon was the real thing as a blues singer, but he was also eclectic. Even in the rhythm and blues decade of the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, he performed largely with jazz musicians, and for jazz audiences. How many other blues singers started their careers in Calcutta, India?
Witherspoon had left his home in Arkansas as a teenager, for Los Angeles and the music scene on Central Avenue, where he became a protege of Big Joe Turner, and hung out with jazzmen like Buddy Colette, who remembers that whenever Witherspoon sat in with his group, the audiences loved him. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and in 1941 he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. As a cook--this was still the pre-Harry Truman segregated armed forces. The sea led him to south Asia, where he would meet up with Teddy Weatherford.
Like many African American musicians of his era, Weatherford went the expatriate to Europe, settling first in Amsterdam. Like very few others, he didn't stop there, but continued on to Asia, where joined the band of another peripatetic expatriate, Crickett Smith, then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, where he led his own bands (Smith was now playing for him), and developed a sufficient reputation that he was tapped to make wartime broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio. It was on these broadcasts that young Witherspoon got his first exposure. Weatherford, a wonderful piano player and bandleader, never got a chance to develop the reputation he deserved, dying in Calcutta in 1945 at the age of 41.
Witherspoon did return to the USA, and the West Coast, after the war, where he became a regular feature of Cavalcade of Jazz, an annual all-star jazz festival held in Los Angeles. He performed as part of the Cavalcade in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1952.
This outing for Prestige was Witherspoon's first foray into East Coast jazz. His most recent recordings had been for Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, where he made a record of mostly jazz standards Teddy Edwards and Gerald Wiggins, then a record of blues standards with Ben Webster; and before that with the Bihari brothers' Crown, one of the West Coast's premiere rhythm and blues labels.
Bob Weinstock and Ozzie Cadena gave him a first-rate lineup of jazz musicians. Leo Wright had distinguished himself on two previous outings for the label, with Dave Pike and Jack McDuff. Gildo Mahones was fast becoming one of Prestige's go-to session musicians, and would record a couple of albums as leader on the label; so was Jimmie Smith. George Tucker had already established himself. And it's hard to heap more praise on Kenny Burrell.
And an eclectic lineup of tunes, tilting toward rhythm and blues. Duke Ellington wrote "Rocks in My Bed," but it's most closely associated with blues shouter Big Joe Turner, who made the original recording with boogie woogie piano player Freddie Slack. 'Bad Bad Whiskey" and "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" were both hits for Amos Milburn, the former penned by Milburn, the latter by Rudy Toombs, one of the key songwriters for Atlantic Records as the label rose to rhythm and blues supremacy. "Mean Old Frisco" came from another rhythm and blues great, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. All of them find the Prestige jazzmen playing that fine R&B behind 'Spoon's hard driving vocals.
Two other blues traditions come front and center with "Sail on, Little Girl, Sail On" and "Lonely Boy Blues." The former comes from traditional Piedmont blues singer Amos (Bumble Bee Slim) Easton, and Witherspoon gives it a heartfelt traditional treatment, with Gildo Mahones providing the appropriate backing. The latter comes from Kansas City swingmaster Jay McShann and his vocalist Walter Brown. It's a twelve bar blues, and Leo Wright's alto winds in and out and around Witherspoon's vocal. The traditional twelve bar form is also heard on 'Spoon's own "Blues and Trouble," with everyone in the band getting a piece of the action.
Prestige filled out the LP with four cuts from a later session back in Witherspoon's old West Coast stomping grounds, under the guiding hand of David Axelrod, who had just begun producing records for Capitol, where he nudged the label in the direction of more black artists, scoring hits for Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderley (he produced "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy") among others. With some excellent West Coast jazz musicians, they did two Witherspoon originals, a traditional blues, and one outlier, the rockabilly hit "Endless Sleep," a tune which Witherspoon had apparently liked enough to record a few years earlier for a smaller rhythm and blues label.
Most of the West Coasters are off Prestige's normal radar. Bobby Bryant did appear on a 1960 Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis release. Ernie Freeman was the best-known of the group. He boasted a master's degree in music composition from the University of Southern California, and a trunkful of credits as pianist, arranger and bandleader, mostly in the rhythm and blues field. Jimmy Bond was another conservatory trained musician (Juilliard), with extensive jazz credits on the East Coast, who moved to California in 1959 and built a second career there, both as a jazz musician and as a member of the Wrecking Crew, the session musicians who crafted the West Coast rock sound of the 1960s. Arthur Wright was one of the leading West Coast session musicians for blues and R&B, mostly as a guitarist. It's not clear whether Jimmy Miller is the same drummer/arranger who contributed a great deal to the Rolling Stones sound in the late 1960s.
Ozzie Cadena produced the East Coast session. The redheads from Seattle got the album's title, Baby, Baby, Baby, and that was also one of the 45 RPM singles, with "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" on the flip side. "Mean Old Frisco" / "Sail on Little Girl" also got a single release.
Booker Ervin had been in the studio for Prestige earlier in 1963, for a session with Larry Young, that was inexplicably shelved, not to see the light of day until many years later, in the CD reissue era, when it was coupled with an Ervin-Pony Poindexter recording which was made later in the year. He had appeared on one previous New Jazz recording, with Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron. He was to become a mainstay of Prestige over the next few years.
Roy Haynes was already a Prestige mainstay, appearing with musicians covering the spectrum
from Willis Jackson to Phil Woods to Eric Dolphy. He'd played soul jazz with Shirley Scott, harp jazz with Dorothy Ashby, blues with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and a little bit of everything with master of eclecticism Jaki Byard.
He had led his own trio (Phineas Newborn, Paul Chambers) in 1958, for a particularly beautiful album, We Three, and followed it in 1969 with another trio album (Richard Wyands, Eddie de Haas), Just Us. He had put together a couple of earlier sessions as leader with Mercury/EmArcy, and one with a smaller independent label. He told Ira Gitler that wanted to do more work as leader, because he could "set more of a pace," or as Gitler put it, he could "[pick] the tunes, the order they should be programmed in, and the tempo they should follow. The last, of course, is closest to the drummer's domain. Before he can do any of these things, a leader has to make his most important decisions--choosing the men who will play with him. Haynes has chosen well in the past, and his current quartet again reflects his good taste."
For his first Prestige album, Haynes had chosen two of the finest--and most talked about--of the younger musicians on the scene. For his second, he chose musicians who would never have the honors or name recognition of Phineas Newborn and Paul Chambers, but who were bold and sensitive, and delivered the music that Haynes was looking for. A 1962 session for Impulse! featured the rising star Roland Kirk.
Here, in Booker Ervin, he has another rising star, that would blaze forth through the rest of the 1960s on albums for Prestige and Blue Note, before Ervin's untimely death from kidney disease in 1970.
At 28, Ronnie Mathews was another young talent, and one who apparently appealed to the era's finest drummers--he had been discovered by Max Roach, and also worked extensively with Art Blakey. He had made his recording debut for Prestige in 1961 with Roland Alexander, and would lead a session of his own for the label later in 1963.
Larry Ridley was 26 when this record was made, and he had a fine career as a bassist ahead of, playing with Chet Baker, Kenny Burrell, Dexter Gordon and Stephane Grappelli among others, but perhaps an even more important contribution to the music was his work as an educator and administrator. He served as (and I'll just quote his Wikipedia entry here):
chairman of the Jazz Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and was the
organization's National Coordinator of the "Jazz Artists in Schools" Program for five years (1978–1982). Ridley is a recipient of the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation's "Living Legacy Jazz Award", a 1998 inductee the International Association for Jazz Education Hall of Fame (IAJE), an inductee of the Downbeat Magazine Jazz Education Hall of Fame, a recipient of the Benny Golson Jazz Award from Howard University, and was honored by a Juneteenth 2006 Proclamation Award from the New York City Council. Ridley is currently the Executive Director of the African American Jazz Caucus, Inc., an affiliate of IAJE. He is also the IAJE Northeast Regional Coordinator. He continues to actively teach as Professor of Jazz Bass at the Manhattan School of Music. Ridley is currently serving as Jazz Artist in Residence at the Harlem based New York Public Library/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He established an annual series there dedicated to presenting the compositions of jazz masters that are performed by Ridley and his Jazz Legacy Ensemble.
Haynes also utilized the composing talents of the musicians he brought in. Ronnie Mathews composed "Dorian" and "Honeydew." Booker Ervin contributed "Scoochie," and Haynes finished the session with his own "Bad News Blues." Randy Weston is represented by his tribute to Melba Liston, "Sketch of Melba."
They play one semi-standard, "Under Paris Skies," originally composed by Hubert Giraud for the French film Sous le Ciel de Paris, later recorded by Edith Piaf. With English lyrics, it became a favorite of vocalists and mostly of sweet-music dance bands, although it has had some jazz adherents, most prominently Duke Ellington. Art Van Damme and Quincy Jones both also recorded it. Haynes liked the tune, and featured it in his club performances, often with Frank Strozier soloing on flute. Haynes's virtuoso lead-ins are a strong feature of all the tracks on this album, but on this one he really goes to town, driving all thoughts of sweet strings out of your head. Larry Ridley joins him on bass before--over thirty seconds in--Ervin enters, playing the familiar melody, and sticking mostly close to the melody for a full three minutes, as Haynes continues to kick it hard. The real improvisation starts with Mathews, and continues with Ervin, until the head is briefly restated at the end, this time by Mathews, perhaps somewhat sardonically.
"Bad News Blues" is a first rate example of what sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder used to call a "five-o-clock blues" -- it's the end of a session, we've played all the tunes we came in with, let's just play some blues. Prestige founder and president Bob Weinstock loved a good jam session, and a lot of good ones came out of this approach, with "Bad News Blues" being a prime example, Haynes setting the pace and everyone getting some room to blow.
Mathews's "Dorian" is in the Dorian mode, the minor-key modal structure made most famous by Miles Davis's "So What" and here turned into a moody, emotionally stirring piece, particularly in Mathews's own solo. All of this is taken at a quick tempo, not what you'd think of as the first choice for moody introspection, but it works. "Honeydew" is altogether different, with Ridley playing the blues right out of the gate, with Mathews and Ervin joining to create a full-bore, major scale excursion into rhythm and blues with Haynes providing a complex but driving alternative to the back beat.
"Scoochie" is Ervin's, and it is not only scoochie, it is downright scorchy. Ervin had introduced the tune a few years earlier in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, in a group led by Teddy Charles and also featuring Booker Little. If that rendition scooched the statues into life, this one would have scorched and singed them, with Haynes providing the beat, Ervin flying high, and Mathews turning in a piano solo that echoes and extends what Teddy Charles did in the Garden.
Haynes had entered a phase of his career where he wanted to work more as a leader, with his own groups, but he was only to make one more record for Prestige, and then one for Pacific Jazz, and nothing else in the 1960s, though the 1970s were a much more fruitful decade for him in the leader role, and he was to continue as a jazz stalwart, and a jazz legend, into his 90s.
Cracklin' was the title of the New Jazz album release,and the title credit was Roy Haynes with Booker Ervin. The two Mathews compositions, "Dorian" and "Honeydew," were a 45 RPM single. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Willis Jackson worked a series of recording sessions for Prestige in 1963 and 1964 with his working band at the time: Carl Wilson on organ, Frank Robinson on trumpet, Bill Jones on guitar, Joe Hadrick on drums. They weren't musicians who had recording careers outside of these sessions with Jackson, and I could find no biographical material on any of them, but they knew how to play Jackson's kind of music, or they wouldn't have stayed with him, because Jackson's was an ensemble that always found work.
Jackson's best-known ensemble, the one he brought to Prestige in 1959, featured Jack McDuff as organist, and he was a tough act to follow, but Jackson didn't put his side men into a cookie cutter. Wilson is his own man on organ, and his own man is a wild man.
For the second of these Prestige sessions--and thereafter--Bill Jones was replaced by a guitar player named Pat Azzara, who would go on to make a name for himself, only the name wasn't Azzara. He was to change it to Pat Martino.
The ensemble, with different bass players, would record five studio sessions and one live, a date that makes Miles Davis's contractual marathon look like the Minute Waltz. This was four sets at the club Allegro in New York City, and Prestige recorded them all, and released them all on four albums. And why not? This was a working band, that toured hard and played hard, and audiences loved them. They could play all night, and it could have been, and should have been, and was saved for posterity.
The LP from the March session was entitled Loose. It followed Jackson's template, and set the pattern for all the sessions to follow--some standards, some recent hits ("When My Dreamboat Comes Home" was both--an old song refurbished for the young crowd by Fats Domino), some riff-based rhythm and blues, or as we now called it, soul jazz. Jazz with a beat. "Secret Love" became a two-sided 45 RPM single, and "Y'All" was the flip side of "Arrivederci Roma" from an earlier session.
The two May sessions were parceled out to two LPs, Grease 'n' Gravy and The Good Life. The 45s were "Gra-a-avy" / "Brother Elijah" and "Troubled Times" / "As Long as He Needs Me." The October session became More Gravy, with the title tune and "Pool Shark" broken out on 45. January of 1964 became Boss Shoutin'. The teenaged Mr. Azzara, making his recording debut, is described in H. G. MacGill's liner notes as "a combination of early Kenny Burrell, Tiny Grimes, a little Jimmy Raney and the beginnings of a highly original style of his own."
Each of the Allegro sets went onto its own album--Jackson's Action! Recorded Live; Live!Action; Soul Night Live!; and Tell It.... "Jive Samba" from the first set, two-sided, was the only 45 RPM release. All of the live sessions, when re-released on CD, were credited to Willis Jackson with Pat Martino.
Ozzie Cadena produced all, including the live sessions.
Newark's Key Club was a home base for Rhoda Scott, Joe Thomas and Bill Elliot, who were from Newark and had gotten their start there. Scott was destined to make her home, and her career, and her major reputation far from Newark, when she moved to France in 1969 and began a series of performances that would go on for decades and make her one of the most popular entertainers in Europe. But in 1963 she was still one of the most popular entertainers in Newark, and Newark was still a city with a jazz tradition, and her fans were packing the place, ready for that all-systems-go sound that Scott, Thomas and Elliot always delivered.
Scott and her trio were signed to Tru-Sound, Bob Weinstock's "modern rhythm and blues" label, and they delivered--raucous, jarring, uptempo, not necessarily what you'd think of a jazz and not necessarily what you'd think of as rhythm and blues, but Newark was never known for genteel manners, and this trio delivered a solid home town sound--all the more so for being live. Prestige rarely went into live recordings, but it's not hard to see why this one seemed like a good idea.
The Tru-Sound album was called, of course, Live at the Key Club, and the single from it was "I-Yi-Yi-Yi," parts 1 and 2. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Lucky Thompson was associated with an earlier era of jazz (although he was only 39 at the time of this recording): he'd played with Lionel Hampton, Don Redman, Billy Eckstine, Lucky Millinder and Count Basie. His time with Eckstine coincided with that of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and like so many of that era and that influence, he moved into bebop. He had recorded once for Prestige, a 1954 session with Miles Davis.
Also like many of that era, who grew increasingly frustrated with the racism of American society and the avarice of the music industry, and moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. His debut with Prestige (he would record three albums altogether) came shortly after his return to the States.
His association with the jazz of earlier times (just a few years earlier was already being thought of as earlier times) may have been what prompted Prestige to suggest an album of Jerome Kern, and to release it on Moodsville.
There's nothing wrong with devoting an album to Jerome Kern, one of our greatest and most subtle composers. And nothing wrong with a Moodsville release, either--the subsidiary label was home to some great albums by major artists. But I'm not sure that this really a Moodsville album. Thompson was a true bebopper, and this album is in the tradition--fast tempi, bravura solos. Somewhat outside of the bebop mainstream was his choice of the soprano saxophone as a lead instrument -- perhaps the Paris influence of Sidney Bechet.
Anyway, Moodsville or no, it's great that Thompson is back in the States (he would leave again in a few years), playing with some wonderful musicians.These years of Moodsville and Swingville led to the recording of musicians who might not otherwise have been recorded in this era, by an important independent label with good distribution. Dave Bailey is the new face here, and this was to be his only Prestige session. Best known for his work with Gerry Mulligan, Bailey is another of those jazzers with an interesting day job. In 1969 he retired from music to become a flight instructor.
The album is called Lucky Thompson Plays Jerome Kern and No More because, in fact, there was one more -- a Thompson original entitled "No More." "Who?" and "Lovely to Look At" became a 45 RPM single on Prestige. Don Schlitten produced.
This session has a little something for everyone, with the soul jazz organ of Jack McDuff teamed up with the technical wizardry and stylistic range of Kenny Burrell, and the brilliant Latin percussion of Ray Barretto thrown into the mix for good measure.
Burrell certainly knew how to play with an organ combo, as his long association with Jimmy Smith attests to, and he jumps right in here, starting with the first number on the session, a McDuff composition called "Grease Monkey," which has the fire and energy of the finest rhythm and blues, with Burrell pushing McDuff's riffs, and McDuff creating the kind of riffs that can sustain three and a
half minutes of solid dancing or listening.
"The Breeze and I," by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, is probably more associated with lounge acts than jazz combos, but it's had its share of jazz interpreters too (both Curtis Fuller and Wes Montgomery recorded versions of it at around the same time), and why not? If you have Ray Barretto nailing the mambo beat and Joe Dukes laying down that archetypal soul jazz rhythm, you've got a great start, and then when Kenny Burrell does what he does, which is improvise stunningly while never losing sight of the melody, you come to appreciate what a good melody it it. Lecuona was one of Cuba's leading composers, and the melody which became known as "The Breeze and I" was originally a part of his well regarded Suite Andalucia.
Barretto and Dukes don't stop the carnival, as they tear into "Nica's Dream," Horace Silver's tribute to the jazz baroness and protector of Thelonious Monk. Between the two of them over these two selections, they threaten to turn this into a percussion session to rival Art Blakey at his most intense.
"Call it Stormy Monday" is one of the most recorded of blues songs, but it took a while to get there, and for Walker to start realizing any royalties on what would become his most famous composition. When Woody Herman and his Swinging Herd (then including Bill Harris, Richie Kamuca, Victor Feldman and Vince Guaraldi) released the first cover version in 1957, ten years after Walker first recorded it, there weren't many blues classics because nobody much was recording cover versions of great blues songs. When Herman recorded his Blues Groove album for Capitol, whoever wrote the blues for the back sleeve was had to find a way to sell the concept, and he came up with "Woody Herman and his Herd combine the beat of rock and roll with the dynamic sounds of swinging jazz." Jazz with a beat, as Shirley Scott and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis described it in the title to their first album together, but not many people were looking to catalog of blues originals for material. Ralph J. Gleason, in the liner notes to Blues Groove, looked forward hopefully but uncertainty: "There may come a time when the blues will be regarded as the true folk art of America."
That was 1957. The blues had already, as Muddy Waters was to point out later, "had a baby and they named it rock and roll," but jazz fans still shunned that birth as illegitimate, and to true music aficionados like Gleason, the mainstreaming of the blues into American culture was still a wistful dream.
Bizarrely enough, the next performer to take it on, in 1960, was Pat Boone. Even more surprising, his version isn't bad, with Boone adding some crooner's touches, but respecting the blues, and a nice band behind him.
But then it was the 1960s, and Ralph Gleason's dream for the blues started to become a reality. And T-Bone Walker's dream of royalty checks for a great song, as it was recorded by Nancy Wilson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bobby Bland, and Lou Rawls with Les McCann. Kenny Burrell liked the song so much he would record it again for Prestige the following year, with Shirley Scott.
And also in 1964, "Call it Stormy Monday" was recorded by Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the first British blues band, and that brought it all back home, as the showed the Yanks what the true folk art of America was.
Burrell and McDuff seize on this classic-to-be as a license to play the blues, and that's what they do. This is soul jazz, yes, but at its heart it's the blues, the whole blues, and nothing but the blues.
Most of this session went onto the LP Crash!, credited to Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet. "Moody McDuff" went on to a 1966 McDuff album, Steppin' Out, which is interesting because it pulls together tracks from five different sessions utilizing three of jazz's greatest guitarists, all of whom worked with McDuff at different stages of his career: Burrell, Grant Green, and George Benson. Apparently by the time the album was released, Burrell had already stepped out of his Prestige contract and into an exclusive contract with another label: he is credited as K. B. Groovington. "The Breeze and I" and "Nica's Dream" were released on 45 RPM. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Another artist wrapping up her career with Prestige in early 1963 was Etta Jones, with two sessions in February added to three songs recorded the previous November to put the final touch on this phase of her career, but Prestige would stay with her. After bouncing around a few other labels, she would reconnect in 1975 with Joe Fields, who had been Prestige's sales manager, but had now started a jazz label of his own, Muse. And after two decades and 14 albums, when Fields left Muse to start a new label, HighNote, she went with him, and recorded nine more albums.
Jones never quite hit the heights of popularity of the big four -- Sarah, Ella, Billie and Dinah -- but she maintained a loyal fan base--and the respect of the jazz community--in a career that lasted six decades, and into a seventh, as she made her final recordings in 2000. Her approach blended elements of all four of them, particularly Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, but her voice was her own, and she never sounded derivative.
The two sessions used talents of Larry Young, about to break loose as a new and distinctive voice in jazz organ when he signed with Blue Note in 1964, and Kenny Cox, new on the scene. Cox was a Detroiter, too young to have been part of the Detroit influx that made such a huge imprint on the jazz scene of New York, and from there the world, starting in the 1950s, but still very much a product of that scene. This was his first collaboration with Jones, but he was to stay with her until 1966 as pianist and musical director. He later made two albums for Blue Note, but his roots were always in Detroit, and by the 1980s he had returned home to male the rest of his career there.
Kenny Burrell also played on both sessions. The group was anchored by two solid rhythm sections--George Tucker and Jimmie Smith on February 4th, Peck Morrison and Oliver Jackson on the 12th. "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Old Folks" are taken without the piano and organ.
Jones takes in a nice variety of tunes over the two days, with a nod to Miles Davis, who introduced
"Someday My Prince Will Come" to the jazz lexicon, and also did a definitive version of "Old Folks," and a salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein. This last is particularly noteworthy. Jones possesses that special jazz singer's ability to take a wide range of songs and make them her own, but "Some Enchanted Evening" seems like a real stretch. From South Pacific, the song was originally written for the operatic bass voice of Ezio Pinza, and it's hard to imagine a bluesy jazz arrangement of it, with an improvisation off the melody...until you've heard Jones do it.
"Some Enchanted Evening" did not make a 45 RPM release. The two singles each featured one of the Miles borrows. "Someday My Prince Will Come" was matched with "A Gal From Joe's," from her November 28, 1962, session; "Old Folks" had "Love Walked In" on the flip.
The album was titled Love Shout. Ozzie Cadena produced.
This album wraps up Frank Wess's run with Prestige--in fact, it was his last recording session as a leader for the rest of the 1960s, although he continued to work steadily, with Count Basie, whom he had joined in the early 1950s and would stay with until 1964, and then with Clark Terry's big band. He brings two Basie bandmates with him, Thad Jones and Buddy Catlett, and they play a brand of jazz that was not the fashionable soul jazz or the disturbing free jazz of the time, but represented a mainstream of jazz that has never failed to find adherents and listeners, drawing on the Kansas City swing of Basie and Lester Young
and Coleman Hawkins, but even more on the modern sounds that were being explored by Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. So while these Basie stalwarts bring a lot of Basie with them, they aren't just playing small group interpretations of Basie arrangements. There's a little of that in their music, but more of it is the classic jazz dynamic, head-solo-solo, that people come out to clubs to hear, to sit in close proximity to the musicians and get an intimate glimpse into their voices and personalities, to be present at the creation of improvisational ideas and the immediacy of musicians inspiring each other, as a master jazz player takes an idea, explores it, and hands it off to the next player to continue the exploration.
You get all of that throughout this session, but to particularly good advantage on "The Long Road," one of three Wess compositions (the other two are "Yo-Ho" and "Cold Miner"), where all five musicians have their chances to shine. Wess plays tenor on "The Long Road," flute on much of the rest of the album. Jones contributes one tune, "The Lizard."
The album was somewhat clunkily titled Yo-Ho! Frank Wess, Poor You, Little Me. A 45 RPM single release featured "Little Me," by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the title song from the popular Broadway musical of the time, with Wess's "Cold Miner" on the flip. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Shirley Scott returns with a new soul collaborator and a new soulmate—her new husband, Stanley Turrentine. Turrentine was signed to Blue Note, but the two labels were friendly rivals—Blue Note’s Alfred Lion had given Bob Weinstock the push that moved him to start Prestige and get into the jazz recording business. So the two labels worked out a deal whereby the happy couple would record for both of them—Shirley as nominal leader for the Prestige sessions, Stanley for Blue Note. Both labels, of course, utilizing the genius of Rudy Van Gelder in the recording studio. Both continued to have separate careers, as well.
Married in 1960, they began collaborating in 1961, at a point where they had worked out their marital contracts, but not, apparently, their recording contracts to everyone's complete satisfaction. On their first session together, for Blue Note in June, she is listed as Little Miss Cott, with a knowing wink in the liner notes (Stanley and Little Miss Cott "really have something going. It is akin to a musical love affair") and even more knowing wink with the album's title and its title cut (Dearly Beloved). By November, when they made their first recording for Prestige, he was still listed in the session log with a pseudonym (Stan Turner) but by the time the album was released in 1962, an arrangement had been struck, and Turrentine is credited under his real name, with acknowledgment that he appears courtesy of Blue Note Records.
This session was recorded on January 10. Just over a week later, on January 18, the two of them were back in Englewood Cliffs to record for Blue Note (a short session, with two of the four tracks rejected), and in February they were back again for Blue Note.
Major Holley, who had been aboard for an early January Turrentine session with Kenny Burrell, for
Blue Note, played on the Prestige session, sat out the January 18 Blue Note session, and was back again for the February session. Scott liked to work with a bass player, which was not the case with all jazz organists--many of them preferred to take care of the bass line themselves. In fact, during this period, when the organ was becoming really popular as a jazz instrument, many bandleaders preferred to hire an organist as their keyboard player. With the bass part taken care of, it meant one less musician's salary to deal with. Holley was a recent addition to the Prestige stable, having recorded four albums with Coleman Hawkins.
The drummer on this and one more Scott-Turrentine session, but not on the Blue Note sessions, was Grassella Oliphant, a newcomer to Prestige and a new name to me--in fact, I thought at first that Scott had hired a woman drummer, but the first name was misleading. He was generally known by friends and associates as Grass, and that played nicely into the two albums he made for Atlantic as a leader, The Grass Roots and The Grass is Greener. Oliphant was a veteran by the time he hooked up with Scott and Turrentine. He had worked with Ahmad Jamal in 1952, and later with Sarah Vaughan. Vaughan praised him for his nice and easy touch with the brushes, and one imagines he probably was valued by Jamal for much the same reasons. One would not immediately seize on someone with those credentials as a soul jazz drummer, but Oliphant's contributions on this album, particularly his work on the ride cymbal, are exactly what's needed.
Oliphant worked through the 1960s and then basically retired from the jazz world to raise a family. The retirement stretched to nearly 40 years, but he picked up his career again in the new millennium, and was active until his death in 2017.
The most important name in this quartet, of course, is Stanley Turrentine. The Scott- Turrentine marriage lasted ten years, so it must have had some harmony to it, but their musical partnership was definitely harmonious. Scott was one of the pioneers of the soul jazz organ, and, with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, one of the pioneers of the organ-tenor sax combo, and as soul jazz became a more and more dominant sound in the early and middle 1960s, her partnership with Turrentine kept her right in the thick of it.
Stanley Turrentine began his career with Earl Bostic, and Bostic's bluesy lyricism was definitely an influence, but he was definitely a man of his time, with a full tenor sound and a soulful bent. All that can really be heard on "Secret Love," the movie ballad by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, popularized by Doris Day, a tune that Bostic might have recorded but didn't. Turrentine leads off with the head, full-toned and lyrical in the Bostic style, albeit a little more uptempo and with some kicking work by Oliphant. He then goes into an improvisation which keeps much of the same feeling, with some punctuation by Scott. When Scott enters, she brings what only Scott can.
I've always heard a different approach to the organ in Shirley Scott's work. The soul jazz organists, and the were an incredibly talented bunch, mostly played the organ as a keyboard instrument with special properties--which of course it was. But Scott seemed to me, more than the others, to be intrigued with finding out all the different things an organ could do. It made for an exciting blend with Davis's raunch, and it makes for an exciting blend with Turrentine's lyricism.
Much of this album is taken up with an unusual and interesting blend of standards, given the soul jazz treatment. You might not expect "Secret Love" to be all that soulful, but others have done it successfully, including a doo-wop version by the Moonglows, and Scott and Turrentine breathe soul into it. Going back a little further, they pluck a tune by Sy Oliver that was first recorded in 1941. Oliver had just been pirated from Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra by Tommy Dorsey, looking to add some serious swing to his ensemble, and in the 1941 version by Dorsey, with Oliver and Jo Stafford handling the vocals, you can hear the beginnings of soul, that would be developed in the 1950s by Della Reese, the Pilgrim Travelers, Ray Charles (especially!), Pat Boone, Kate Smith...what? OK, maybe not everyone who recorded it gave it soul. But Scott and Turrentine certainly do.
They go back to 1925 for an Irving Berlin favorite, "Remember," which was actually recorded by Earl Bostic in 1955, when Turrentine was in the band (he had replaced John Coltrane). Bostic's version gives him a chance to show his raunchy rhythm and blues side, and Turrentine and Scott take it from there.
They pay homage Wild Bill Davis, the pioneer of soul jazz organ and an early influence on Scott.
But they reach their soul summit on this album with two Turrentine originals, "The Soul is Willing" and "I Feel All Right." I wonder if they had originally been planning to make 45 RPM single releases out of the two recent chart hits, "Secret Love" and "Yes Indeed." Maybe they did, and maybe "The Soul is Willing" and "I Feel All Right" were just so damn soulful that nothing else would do. Anyway those were the two 45s, and each of them two-sided, Parts 1 and 2, so nothing needed to be edited down.
The Soul is Willing was the name of the album. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Jack McDuff welcomed in the new year with a January 2nd session in Englewood Cliffs featuring an eight piece band, which apparently didn't go so well. Only two tunes were recorded, one of which was unissued, the other of which eventually made it onto a compilation album called The Soul Giants. It was one of Prestige's PRST releases of the late 1960s and early 1970s--tracks re-engineered for stereo release, not always successfully.
He was back again a week later, on January 8, with a different lineup, only tenorman Harold Vick and his regular drummer Joe Dukes. McDuff was by this time solidly into the soul jazz groove that would make him one of the most popular jazz artists of the decade.
It's hard to say what could have gone wrong with the January 2 octet session, with some first rate musicians aboard, but by the time the following Tuesday had rolled around, he had a tight group of players who knew just what to do. Joe Dukes was steadily building a reputation as one of the premier soul jazz drummers. He would make a career, and a good one, as Brother Jack's drummer, and pretty much fade out of sight as the the soul jazz decade of the 1960s came to an end.
Harold Vick was to make his first recording as leader later in the year with Blue Note, and would go on to make several albums with as many different labels, never quite seizing the brass ring, but making some solidly good music. He would continue to work with McDuff through 1964.
Eric Dixon only climbed aboard the McDuff cavalcade for this one session, but he knew how to swing to a solid groove, as his years with Count Basie demonstrate. And Kenny Burrell and Ray Barretto make any session better.
Sometimes it's hard to understand the vagaries of contractual obligations in the recording industry, especially the jazz end of it. Burrell is credited as K. B. Groovington on one track, "Shaky," which was buried until 1969 and finally released on a PRST compilation of McDuff sides from various Prestige sessions, Steppin' Out. . A track from a February McDuff session also ended up on Steppin' Out, so maybe by 1960 Burrell was under contract with a label that precluded the use of his name on compilations? Hard to believe. But I'm not an entertainment contract lawyer.
Five of these tunes--the title tune, "How High the Moon," It's a Wonderful World," "Smut" and "Our Miss Brooks" comprised McDuff's next LP, Somethin' Slick. "Love Walked In" was held over for a subsequent album with Burrell, "Shaky" got shaken down to the stereo compilation, and "Easy Livin' didn't make the cut at all, or at least hasn't yet. It may still end up on some streaming service.
"Somethin' Slick" was released on 45 RPM, at about half the length of the album cut (6:34 to 3:01), and I've included both versions as a sort of Listen to One and Listen to One (a), to demonstrate how a tune was edited down to fit the demands of jukeboxes. There's actually a third version available on YouTunes, a promotional copy sent to DJs, whittled down to 2:53
As promised, a new Dave Pike with this, his third and last album for Prestige. Pike would re-invent himself often, like so many jazz musicians in this swiftly moving art form, from Miles Davis on. This, however, is not so much a reinvention as a shift in emphasis, away from the Latin rhythms, on to a more mainstream sound. How much of this was the result of commercial considerations, I can't say. If commercial considerations were the whole story, nobody would be playing jazz, but sometimes a thematic approach -- less tactfully, a gimmick -- may be a way to draw a little more attention to an artist, and sell a few more records.
Nothing wrong with that if, when you get down to making the music, you're there to play and nothing else. Which certainly seems to have been the case with Dave Pike. If you sign a recording contract at height of the bossa nova craze, and management says "Hey, how about a bossa nova album," you might do it just for the contract. That was the case when Bob Weinstock asked Annie Ross if she could write some songs to jazz solos--"I was desperate, so I said 'Sure.' If he'd asked me to learn how to fly, I would have said 'Sure.'" And the rest is history. Two of the greatests jazz vocalese pieces ever -- "Twisted" and "Farmer's Market." And Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. But it seems clear that Pike didn't do it just for the contract. Had that been the case, he wouldn't have chosen to feature the works of obscure (in the United States) composer Joao Donato.
Jazz interpretations of Broadway shows had shown some commercial appeal. Oliver! had been a hit in London, had been on tour in the United States, and was about to open on Broadway, where it would be a success, but would not really spawn any hit songs. "As Long as He Needs Me" had been a British hit for Shirley Bassey, and would later become a minor hit for Sammy Davis Jr. I'm not convinced that a jazz version of Oliver! was a surefire commercial bet in 1963, and I suspect one might not find all that many people today who could hum "As Long as He Needs Me," let alone the rest of the show. So I hope it was a project that really appealed to Pike.
A confluence of reasons--not a huge Oliver! fan base among the jazz crowd, the association of Pike with more out-there genres of music--have converged to make this a not widely remembered album. Also, when one thinks of the vibes in the context of the history of jazz, there's a bit of a temptation to enumerate Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson and then stop. But there were a lot of very good players, and a lot of individual stylists, and several of them were on Prestige. Teddy Charles, back in the label's early days, who would give it all up to become a charter boat skipper. Lem Winchester, the jazz-playing cop, dead before his time. Walt Dickerson. And Dave Pike. Here, his work with Jimmy Raney and with Tommy Flanagan, two veterans who know how to challenge and support a young player, is well worth a listen.
Dave Pike Plays the Jazz Version of Oliver! is not represented on YouTube by any individual cuts, so I can't give a Listen to One, but the whole album is there, and worth checking out.
Don Schlitten, new to Prestige, produced. Schlitten had started an independent label, Signal, in 1955, then moved on to freelance producing after he and his partners sold the label to Savoy.
Dave Pike played the jazz version of "As Long as He Needs Me" for a 45 RPM single, with "Where is Love?" as the B side. The album was released on Moodsville.
Pike's next two albums, for Decca and Atlantic, are notable for introducing Chick Corea on the first, and employing the still-new Herbie Hancock on the second.
During the pre-rock and roll era of American pop music, there were, very generally, two types of singers: the jazz-influenced singers like Bing Crosby and Nat "King" Cole, who were, more or less, popularizers of Louis Armstrong, and the bel canto-influenced singers like Tony Martin and Jerry Vale, who were, more or less, popularizers of Mario Lanza. And there was a deep divide between them, bridged by no one except possibly Dean Martin (Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were Italian, but they were definitely in the jazz-influenced camp).
So, could the divide be crossed by a tenor saxophone player with a jazzman's touch and rhythm and blues in his soul? Willis (Coda di Alligatore) Jackson seemed to think so, as he devoted virtually a whole album to jazz renditions of Italian pop songs.
LISTEN TO ONE: Al di La
It worked better than you might think. The rhythm and blues honkers tended to have a sweet sentimental side, perhaps modeled on Earl Bostic, and the Italian ballads fit into that. Most of this album is unavailable online, so I wasn't able to hear how Jackson handled "Volare," for example, but I did listen to his "Arrivederci Roma." That's a melody that's hard to listen to without hearing Eddie Fisher crooning it or Mario Lanza giving it the full melodramatic treatment, even though it does start out with a Latin rhythm from Montego Joe, but once Jackson begins improvising on it -- no, make that once he really gets into improvising
on it -- its jazz possibilities open up. "Arrivederci Roma" on the album is 5:43 in length; the 45 RPM single version is edited down to 2:28, and that's the version which is currently available on YouTube.
Technology had certainly advanced to the point where you could have fit 5:43 onto a 45 RPM record, so why shorten it it into what in those days would have been called the Readers' Digest condensed version? My guess...that's what the market wanted. The market in those days was radio play, which meant the pop music stations or the Black-oriented stations on your AM dial. FM radio, and songs like "Like a Rolling Stone" or "MacArthur Park" or "Alice's Restaurant" were still in the future, and your radio stations wanted manageable chunks of music between the disc jockey patter and the commercials. Jukeboxes wanted something you could dance to for three minutes or less before putting another nickel in. And presumably it was assumed that the customer putting that nickel in the slot to hear Willis Jackson wanted to hear Willis Jackson, because the 45 RPM condensed versions of jazz album cuts tended to excise everything except the featured soloist. So no Bucky Pizzarelli, authentic Italian-American though he was, no Gildo Mahomes.
The other cut I was able to listen to is "Al di là ," which had been that year's Italian entry in the
Eurovision Song Contest (it finished 5th). Eurovision was still relatively new in 1962, and its entries are, even to this day, not guaranteed much stateside audience (unless they're by Abba), but "Al di là " hd gotten some attention when Connie Francis recorded it as the B side of a minor hit, and it worked for the theme of the album, and was the occasion for some very nice guitar-saxophone interplay. Jackson, with Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings, was one of the originators of the saxophone-guitar-organ soul jazz sound, but this is an altogether different way of blending these two instruments.
Bucky Pizzarelli and Gildo Mahones had both recently made their Prestige debuts, Pizzarelli accompanying Etta Jones and Mahones with Ted Curson. Pizzarelli would have a couple more sessions over the next few years accompanying singers, but most of his acclaimed career would be elsewhere. Mahones would stay longer in the Prestige orbit, including three albums as leader.
Neapolitan Nights was released on Prestige--not Moodsville. "Arrivederci Roma" was the A side of a single which had "Y'All," from a very different session, on the B side. More thematically paired was another single, "Mama" (which had been a 1959 hit for Connie Francis) and "Neapolitan Nights."
Ozzie Cadena produced.
The one Jackson original title on the album was "Verdi's Vonce," Jackson's blues tribute (according to the liner notes) to Verdi. I would love to hear it. It was also included on a compilation album called Soul Stompin': The Best of Willis Jackson.
Dave Pike continues his south of the border explorations, this time moving to the Caribbean. The calypso craze of Harry Belafonte and the Tarriers and even Robert Mitchum, who recorded a calypso album in 1957, had passed its zenith, but Latin dances were still enough of a thing that everyone was looking for a new one to follow the mambo and the conga line and the cha cha and the bossa nova, and even though Trinidadian calypso wasn't exactly Latin, it was close enough for pop culture (there had even been a "cha-lypso" -"When the records start a spinnin', do cha-lypso while you chicken at the hop"), so 1962 saw Chubby Checker, who had ridden the crest of the most popular dance craze of all, hitting the charts with "Limbo Rock."
Dave Pike had captured some attention with his Bossa Nova Carnival album, so why not go after the same lightning again--and again with fledgling producer Eliot Mazer? There was certainly some commercial consideration here. Chubby
LISTEN TO ONE: My Little Suede Shoes
Checker's "Limbo Rock" is covered, as are "Matilda" and "Jamaica Farewell," two of the most popular songs from Harry Belafonte's Calypso album, then regarded as the most popular LP record of all time, and still up among the contenders. Mexican-American Richie Valens's hit "La Bamba" is included, as is Nat "King" Cole's semi-hit "Calypso Blues." Sonny Rollins is represented by "St. Thomas," one of the calypso melodies he would make his own, and "Mambo Bounce," which had been a 78 RPM single for Rollins off an early Prestige session. And four songs from Pike's session became 45 RPM singles.
But "commercial consideration" just means choosing and playing songs that people like, and there's nothing wrong with that, if the musicians come to play, and put their full virtuosic dexterity and creative energy into the project, which is what happens here.
"Limbo Rock" isn't the most subtle of melodies, but with Willie Bobo and Ray Barretto handling the percussion, it's lively and fun to listen to. Throughout the session, Pike alternates between vibes and marimbas -- he chose the marimbas, he explained to Juliet Lorca, who wrote the liner notes for the album, because they have a sound that's close to Trinidad's steel drums.
On the other extreme, there's Charlie Parker's "My Little Suede Shoes." Some have theorized that Parker adapted the melody from a Caribbean folk tune--Juliet Lorca suggests as much in the liner notes--but it's more likely a mashup of two French pop songs which Bird heard on a 1950 trip to Paris. One of the songs, ""Le Petit Cireur Noir," has a lyric about shoeshine man who hates suede shoes because everyone is wearing them and he's being put out of business. But then he finds a wallet stuffed with cash, buys his own shoe store, and gets rich selling suede shoes. There's no mention as to whether any of them are blue. Parker's melody--recorded with Luis Miranda on bongos and Jose Mangual on congas--is wonderfully catchy, and full of island spirit. It's a perfect choice for Dave Pike and his group, and it's a can't miss recording.
If "Limbo Rock" and "My Little Suede Shoes" are miles apart musically, they're also some distance apart in terms of orchestration. The percussionists remain, but the rest of the band -- Leo Wright on reeds and Jimmy Raney on guitar--are gone. Tommy Flanagan moves in on piano, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik replaces George Duvivier on bass.
Dave Pike was, of course, not Latin himself, and he would not remain on a Latin kick. His next album (and the last for Prestige) would go in a markedly different direction, and the rest of his career, lasting throughout the rest of the century, would take some remarkable twists and turns, through free jazz, acid jazz, funk and psychedelia. So is this cultural appropriation? That was, of course, a concept that would not be named or defined for many decades to come. Dave Pike isn't Machito or Tito Puente, but nobody is. He did turn the spotlight on a wonderful and little-known (in the States) Brazilian composer on the first album, and he has a lot of fun with some pop songs and a great Charlie Parker composition, and to quote Paul McCartney, "What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?"
"Jamaica Farewell" / "Limbo Rock" was the first single, and "La Bamba" / "My Little Suede Shoes" was the second. The album, on New Jazz (a little surprisingly--I'd thought of New Jazz as primarily a home for the less commercial fare) was called Limbo Carnival.
He would spend much of his career in Europe, not so unusual for a jazz musician, a little more unusual for a white jazz musician.
Ted Curson is one of that generation that made Philadelphia such a cauldron of jazz in the 1950s. The Heath family lived around the corner from and Albert "Tootie" Heath was a classmate. "On Sundays," Curson recalled (in an AllAboutJazz.com interview with Clifford Allen, "Mrs. Heath would make dinner for any musicians who were coming to Philadelphia. You could see anyone from Miles to Duke Ellington to Sonny Rollins."
But it wasn't these greats who first lured young Ted into music. It was a neighborhood guy who wandered the streets selling newspapers, and carrying a silver trumpet. When he told his father he
wanted a trumpet, the old man, a Louis Jordan fan, tried to talk him into an alto saxophone, but Ted held firm. He got his first trumpet at age ten, started playing professionally at age 16 and not long after that, met Miles Davis. In those days, Curson told Allen, he worshipped Davis:
[I was] wearing my hair like Miles, I had a tie around my waist, I even made the mistakes that he made. I liked his approach to everything and I still do. He heard me play when I was around 15 or 16 and he gave me his card and he said 'if you ever come to New York, give me a call.' There was no conversation - he said that and left - and I kept that thing in my pocket for years. After I graduated, it was about three years before I finally moved there [at age 21] and I called up Miles. Miles said 'Ted Curson, that little guy from Philadelphia? We've been waiting for you for three years! Where the hell have you been?'
This was, of course, in the Prestige days, when Miles was still allowing himself to make mistakes.
Curson drew the interest of the Levy brothers, owners of the Birdland jazz club and Roulette records. He was to make his debut at Birdland, and his audition for Roulette, on the night that Mo Levy's brother Irving was shot and killed right outside the club.
Instead, Curson served an apprenticeship in New York's avant garde. He played with Cecil Taylor, and appeared on one Taylor record for United Artists. He drew the attention of Charles Mingus, or more accurately was brought to Mingus's attention:
I got a phone call from a friend of mine and he said "I got a call from Mingus and I don't want to play with that crazy motherfucker. You want to take my place?" It was in Teddy Charles' loft, and there were a 1,000 or something musicians in there jamming, and I met Mingus and we played and everybody dropped out and that was it. He said "maybe one day I'll call you" and about two or three months later I get a call at about midnight and it's Mingus. "Ted Curson? Charlie Mingus here. You start right now. I'm at the Showplace in the Village and as soon as you get here, you go to work." I got there and he said "Okay ladies and gentleman, here's your new band - Ted Curson and Eric Dolphy - and you other cats are fired!"
He made his debut as a leader in 1961, fronting an all-star group comprised of Eric Dolphy (on two tracks), tenor saxophonist Bill Barron (who would have a long association with Curson), Kenny Drew and Jimmy Garrison. Drumming, on different tracks, were Pete La Roca, Dannie Richmond and Roy Haynes. The album came out on Old Town, a New York rhythm and blues and doowop label that had no jazz presence at all (Arthur Prysock was one of their featured artists, but he as being pitched to the rhythm and blues market in those days) and almost no LP presence, so it was heard by very few (although you can hear it now on YouTube). So for all practical purposes, this Prestige album was his real breakthrough.
The Prestige album is called Ted Curson Plays Fire Down Below, which seems to suggest that there was an audience out there just waiting to hear the latest version of "Fire Down Below," which is even less likely than the possibility than a legion of jazz fans waiting to hear the latest Old Town release. "Fire Down Below" was composed by Lester Lee, a Hollywood journeyman with a raft of movie soundtrack songs to his credit (including a bunch of polkas), but very little of interest to jazz performers.
Curson makes something eminently listenable out of the Caribbean-tinged melody, originally written for a Robert Mitchum / Jack Lemmon thriller with a Caribbean setting, and maybe part of his youthful hubris in introducing himself to the jazz public involved showing what he could do with tunes no one else had looked twice at.
If so, he did a hell of a job. Two of the tunes are recognizable standards, Lerner and Loewe's "Show Me" from My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart's "Falling in Love With Love." Well, standards. I'm not sure Henry Higgins would have recognized what Curson and Co. do with "Show Me," although Eliza Doolittle, sick to death of the genteel reserve of the society she has been elevated into, might have appreciated the propulsive drumming and all-out solos of Roy Haynes and Montego Joe.
The rest are a curious lot. Harold Little ("The Very Young") is a trumpeter and composer about whom I could find very little. Robert Allen ("Baby Has Gone Bye Bye") carved out a career as an accompanist for Perry Como, Peter Lind Hayes and Arthur Godfrey, so he can't be counted among the hippest of the hip. "Only Forever," composed by James V. Monaco, was a modest hit in 1940, from a Bing Crosby film, and Monaco does have one sublime song to his credit, "You Made Me Love You," made famous by Judy Garland. So it's not the material, it's what Curson does with it, and what he did with it announced his presence as a new major talent on the jazz scene.
Roy Haynes and Montego Joe added a lot to this session. George Tucker was a reliable bassist. Gildo Mahones would go on to do more work for Prestige in the decade, including a couple of albums as leader, so I'll save a fuller discussion of him for later. At the time of this session, he was working with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
"Fire Down Below" was the title song for the Prestige album, and it was also the 45 RPM single, with "The Very Young" on the flip side. Ozzie Cadena produced.
Shirley Scott would continue to be a cornerstone of the Prestige franchise throughout the 1960s, and Prestige would continue to showcase her in various settings, so as to get as much product as possible out under her name, during this fertile period of her career. So there would be trio recordings, organ-saxophone recordings, and recordings with other combinations.
The organ-saxophone recordings, which had been so popular when she was teamed with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, would now continue with new husband Stanley Turrentine, and these too would be double-dipped. Turrentine was a Blue Note artist, so the two would record for Prestige as the Shirley Scott Quintet and for Blue Note as the Stanley Turrentine Quintet.
For her trio recordings, Scott did not stay with the same trio. Her compatriots on this session, Earl May and Roy Brooks, were working with her for the first time, and in the case of May, the only time. Brooks did join her for one more session.
Also worth mentioning is the makeup of her trios. Many organists did not work with a bass player, preferring to let the organ handle the bass line. Jimmy Smith, who is primarily responsible for making the jazz organ a prominent part of the era's jazz presence, always worked with a guitar and drums, and many others followed his example. Scott nearly always worked with a bass.
Earl May is probably most remembered for his work with Billy Taylor throughout the 1950s, including six albums for Prestige. He also did Prestige sessions with John Coltrane and Sonny Stitt, and worked widely with a broad spectrum of jazz groups, Broadway show bands, and other venues into the 21st Century.
Roy Brooks, a Detroiter who began his career with Yusef Lateef and also worked with Motor City stalwarts Barry Harris and the Four Tops, saw a career of prodigious accomplishment interrupted more than once by battles with mental illness, but out of his instability came some inventive musicianship, such as "an apparatus." described by Jason Ankeny at allmusic.com, "with tubes that vacuumed air in and out of a drum to vary its pitch."
No drum innovations here, but some solid drumming. Scott is always inventive, always looking for different organ sounds, which may be why she works with a bass player, to give her that freedom to experiment, and to keep a light, swinging touch along with her experiments. This is a good outing for Scott, with some familiar tunes, including the Fats Waller classic "Jitterbug Waltz," which is my Listen to One, but you'll have to find it yourself, as it's not up on YouTube. Also three from Richard Rodgers, one the optimistic "Happy Talk," from South Pacific and the Oscar Hammerstein collaboration, the other two from his earlier days with the wry and bittersweet Lorenz Hart.
Happy Talk was the name of the Prestige release. A rerelease a couple of years later was called Sweet Soul. There were two 45 RPM singles -- the lighthearted "Happy Talk" / "Jitterbug Waltz" and the bittersweet "My Romance" / "Where or When." Ozzie Cadena produced.
A short session for Miss Jones--one song to fill out Hollar!, being readied for release, and three for a future project. She would be back in the studio in early 1963, and the three sessions together would make her last recording sessions for Prestige, to be issued as Love Shout, which was actually released before Hollar! Why these titles for these two albums is anyone's guess, as Jones was a singer, not a shouter. But then, a lot of the marketing decisions over the course of her long career may not have been the best ones, as her reputation has always seemed to lag behind her talent.
This is an interesting session in terms of song selection, leaning toward songs on the sweet end of the spectrum, not necessarily the first choices for most jazz singers--although other songs from not exactly hipster sources, like Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, have become jazz standards.
The session begins with Rodgers and Hammerstein's "If I Loved You," from Carousel, a much-loved standard for pop singers, bel canto and even operatic voices, not so many jazz singers. Doo wop singers of the 1950s breathed new life into a lot of standards and show tunes, but not this one--perhaps it was too resistant to a rhythm and blues spin. Dinah Washington recorded it twice, and Sarah Vaughan once. Dinah's first in 1950 with an orchestra led by drummer Teddy Stewart, and some melodramatic, almost coloratura, belting. the second a decade later with Quincy Jones. Both featured lush strings and an orchestral mood, as did Sarah's--I don't know the arranger or orchestra leader.
It goes without saying that both Dinah and Sarah can do no wrong with a song. Etta may not quite have the vocal chops of those two ladies, because no one has (except Ella, of course), but I do believe that Etta has the definitive jazz interpretation. She swings it, with a killer assist from Jerome Richardson on flute. Etta has always had the unique ability to channel other jazz singers without sacrificing her own individuality, and she does that here, starting out the way Dinah might have if she'd had Richardson, Kenny Burrell and Bucky Pizzarelli swinging her along, but then taking it to places that are pure Jones. For jazz, she owns this tune.
"Hi Lili, Hi Lo" was written for the Leslie Caron / Mel Ferrer movie Lili by composer Bronislau Kaper and Helen Deutsch, the film's screenwriter and not otherwise a lyricist. It was a 1952 hit for Dinah Shore before the movie came out, then everlastingly associated with the character of the sweet, innocent orphan who talked to puppets. It became a standard, mostly for girl singers with sweet, innocent voices, like the Lennon Sisters, the Chordettes, or Teresa Brewer--although Jimmy Durante also sang it (a weird masterpiece), as did the Everly Brothers (mistake), Manfred Mann (mistake), and Gene Vincent (oddly enough, not so bad). But jazz singing is mostly not about sweetness and innocence, although one of the great jazz vocals of all time is pure sweetness and innocence--Ella's "A-Tisket, a-Tasket," which works so well because there's no knowing wink behind it.
Jones respects the sweetness of "Hi Lili, Hi Lo." There's no knowing wink behind her rendition. But there's musical sophistication in the guitar parts especially, and if she doesn't swing it the way she does "If I Loved You," she gives it a nice bluesy touch.
Nat "King" Cole was never an innocent orphan who talked to puppets, for all his silky voice, and his
"Nature Boy" was a song about an innocent, not a song of innocence. It's a prodigiously recorded song -- nearly 600 versions, with lyrics translated into a bunch of languages including French, Italian, Portuguese, and three different Finnish translations, and yet it remains always Nat "King" Cole's. Etta Jones won't change your mind about that, but her knowing, smoky version, shorter than any of the other songs on this session, has its own very real words, not the least of them being Jerome Richardson's sax solo.
There's no question about the jazz credentials of "A Gal From Joe's" -- it was written by Duke Ellington, and his original 1938 recording features a memorable Johnny Hodges solo. And it's a good tune, but one that never caught on the way so many Ellington songs have -- in fact, Jones's 1962 recording was the first to feature a vocal. Nina Simone would record it a couple of years later, and her version is the best known. Contemporary singer Deborah J. Carter has recorded it, and that's about it. The lyric, credited to Ellington's manager Irving Mills, is odd -- is the gal leaving Joe's because she's dying? Because she's been arrested for murder? Or just because she's tired of Joe? Anyway, Jones does a fine version of a tune that deserves more attention than it's gotten, with wonderful solo and ensemble work from the musicians.
Also on this gig -- Sam Bruno, playing both organ and piano, although he's probably better known as a bassist; Ernest Hayes on bass (can't find any other credits for him, unless he's Ernie Hayes the piano player--he's certainly not Ernest Hayes the bass fisherman); and Bobby Donaldson, who's made several Prestige sessions, including a few backing up vocalists, and who brings a lot to this date.
Three of the four songs made it onto 45 RPM releases. "Nature Boy" and "Hi Lili, Hi Lo" were one entry. "A Gal from Joe's" was paired with "Some Day My Prince Will Come," from one of the later sessions. Esmond Edwards had brought Jones to Prestige, but Ozzie Cadena produced this and the later Love Shout sessions.
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