Listening to Prestige 719: Richard "Groove" Holmes

LISTEN TO ONE: Misty (hit version)

 Richard Holmes had found his groove by the time he arrived at Prestige. Although he came from southern New Jersey and the soul organ cauldron of Philadelphia, he found his initial siccess in California, with a series of successful albums for Pacific Jazz in the early 1960s, including one with Prestige stalwart Gene Ammons, recorded at the Black Orchid, a Los Angeles jazz club where Holmes was the house organist and Ammons the visiting headliner.  

Holmes had first recorded in 1960, with West Coast jazz legend Teddy Edwards on tenor sax, backing up Jimmy Witherspoon, although the record was not released until 1964, on Chicago's Constellation label. Holmes and 'Spoon remained close friends, and Holmes's last appearance, shortly

before his death from cancer in 1991, was with Witherspoon at the Chicago Blues Festival.

His first session for Pacific Jazz featured Ben Webster and Les McCann (on piano!); a big band led by Gerald Wilson that included Buddy Colette, Harold Land, Teddy Edwards and Mel Lewis; a blues session backing Bumble Bee Slim with Joe Pass and Leroy Vinnegar; Joe Pass joining him again on sessions featuring Holmes as leader. Still on the West Coast, he backed up Lou Rawls on a session for Capitol, and played with Earl Bostic on a couple of albums for King.

But coming east, and signing with Prestige, proved to be the biggest bonanza of his career -- and one of Prestige's biggest hits.

For that first session, he used guitarist Gene Edwards, another California transplant who had been with him on many of his West Coast sessions, and who would stay with hin for most of his Prestge sessions; and drummer Jimmie Smith, a Prestige veteran whose credits include work with Larry Young.

He and producer Cal Lampley settled on a group of mostly familiar tunes, calculated to showcase Holmes's soulful, crowd-pleasing, mainstream style. There was Clifford Brown's "Daahoud," well on its way to becoming a beloved jazz standard. There was Horace Silver's soul anthem "Song for My Father." There was Jule Styne's dreamy "The Things We Did Last Summer," and two Holmes originals, "Groove's Groove" and "Soul Message."

And there was Errol Garner's "Misty." surely one of the most beloved tunes in the jazz/pop catalog. Holmes recorded a six-minute version of it with the Slide Hampton arrangement which had previously been used for a vocal version by Lloyd Price. It was was included on his debut Soul Message album. But the brain trust at Prestige must have thought they heard something more there, and how right they were. Re-edited down to 1:53, "Misty" was included as the title cut on Holmes's second Prestige album, and also released as a 45 RPM single, and that was the smash. It went to #44 on Billboard's Hot 100, #12 on its rhythm and blues chart, #7 on its Adult Contemporary chart. It became Holmes' signature, and the beginning of a fruitful relationship between artist and label.

"Soul Message" and "Song for My Father" were also released on 45. And a few years later, a four-minute edit of "Misty" was released.

Listening to Prestige 718: Don Patterson

LISTEN TO ONE: Satisfaction

 This is the first example of a jazz cover of a contemporary rock sone by a Prestige artist, and Don Patterson was the right guy to attempt it. And the liner note, by the great Bob Porter (soon to become one of the leading soul jazz producers for the label, and author of Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975) is refreshingly unapologetic about it:

"Satisfaction" was a big hit for the Rolling Stones during the summer of 1965. The Stones are closer to the authentic big city R&B feeling than any of the British groups and it is not surprising that one of their tunes fits well in a jazz context.

That's it. 'Nuff said. One cannot imagine this from a previous generation of jazz writers.

And Porter is right. "Satisfaction," in Don Patterson's hands, becomes pure soul jazz. The Stones' drummer, Charlie Watts, always thought of himself as first and foremost a jazz drummer, and I'm sure if he heard this version, he approved of how Billy James set the rhythmic pattern.

Patterson gives Miles Davis the soul jazz treatment too, and as with Mick, Miles emerges none the worse for it. Patteson is having fun with these tunes, and they're fun to listen to. "Walkin'" is from the Prestige Contractual Marathon sessions. Composer credit is given to Richard Carpenter -- not Karen Carpenter's brother, but the music publisher/thug. Secondhandsongs gives this account of the song's composer credit:

Written by Davis, the composition royalties for "Walkin'" were credited to his friend Richard Carpenter. Not a performing musician himself, Carpenter took the simple outline from the 1950 single "Gravy" by Gene Ammons, and structured a blues number around it as "Walkin'"; Miles Davis first recorded the arrangement in 1952 as "Weirdo" for Blue Note, crediting himself as composer, but decided to re-record the tune for Prestige on April 29, 1954, with Carpenter now receiving composer credit.

Which quite likely doesn't tell the whole story. Miles certainly was no stranger to claiming credit for music, the most famous example being "Dig," written by 19-year-old Jackie McLean for an early Prestige Miles Davis session, claimed by Miles as his own. Years later, when asked if McLean really wrote the song, Miles replied, "Yeah. So?" 

But Miles was the leader of the session that McLean brought "Dig" to, and it wasn't unheard of for a session leader to claim composer credit for a piece that was brought in by a sideman and developed during the session. Richard Carpenter was another story. His songwriting technique was an interesting one. He would take a tune written by someone else, apply whiteout to the composer's name, and write in his own. He was one of the real bad guys of the jazz profession in those days.

So anyway, "Walkin'" by someone, most likely Gene Ammons, is a great tume, and Patterson does it just fine.

This was Jerry Byrd's first recording on a label of any significance. As a young musician in Pittsburgh, he had made a record on a local label with Gene Ludwig, He had hooked up with Rahsaan Roland Kirk when Kirk was in Pittsburgh, and played in his ensemble. He was a protege of Wes Montgomery, and also played with Jack McDuff and Sam Rivers.

"Satisfaction" was, unsurprisingly, the first 45 RPM single off the album, with a Patterson composition, "Goin' to Meeting" (how's that for a soul title?) on the flip side.

"John Brown's Body," a nontraditional reimagining of the traditional Civil War marching tune, is divided into parts 1 and 2 on another 45, and retitled "John Brown's Soul" on the label.

Satisfaction! with an exclamation point is the album title. Cal Lampley produced.

 

Listening to Prestige 717: Bobby Timmons

LISTEN TO ONE: Chicken & Dumplin's

Bobby Timmons is remembered largely for two things: a handful of compositions, most notably "Moanin'" and "Dat Dere," which rank among the most tuneful and popular numbers in the jazz canon; and a life sadly lost to drugs and alcohol. By the mid-1960s, things weren't good for him. His Wikipedia bio states that "Timmons' career declined quickly in the 1960s, in part because of drug abuse and alcoholism, and partly as a result of being typecast as a composer and player of seemingly simple pieces of music." The same bio notes that Timmons's live performances at this time were cited by reviewers as being undermined by his hiring of sidemen of inferior quality.

None of this seemed to affect his marketability as a jazz recording artist. His Prestige years were 1964-66, during which time he recorded seven albums (this was his fifth). But the writing was already on the wall. After leaving Prestige, there were two more albums for Milestone, and that was it. His last recording was 1968; he died in 1974.

The sidemen he's working with on this recording are not the musicians he played his club dates with, the ones who were found wanting by reviewers, and although they may not have been Prestige's A-list of supporting players, they certainly aren't chopped liver. Drummer Billy Saunders has no other recording credits that I could find. But bassist Mickey Bass had an impressive resume of gigs (Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Chico Freeman, John Hicks) and his recording dates,which would mostly come in the 1970s, included Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Curtis Fuller, and Hank Mobley. He also spent many years as an educator, numbering trumpeter Wallace Roney among his students. Both of them contribute on this album, giving Timmons the support he needs. 

Tinmons calls on another composer to lead off this album--Ray Bryant, best known for "Cubano Chant," "Little Susie," and his big 1960 hit, "Madison Time." Bryant's "Chicken & Dumplin's" had first been recorded by Art Blakey in 1959, when Timmons was in the group, with boppish solos by Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley, and an excellent one by Timmons. 

"Chicken & Dumplin's" is certainly a soul food/soul jazz title, in a tradition going back to early rhythm and blues hits like Hal Singer's "Cornbread" and Frank "Floorshow" Culley's "Cole Slaw," and continuing through the kitchen classics of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott on Prestige. Timmons gives it the full soul jazz treatment here, eschewing his own melodic improvisations and those of Mobley and Morgan, in favor of a solid groove. 

In his own composition, "The Return of Genghis Khan," Tinmons appears to be setting out to prove that he was more than just simple melodies and basic soul jazz improvisation, and to these ears he succeeds. This is a nervous and nervy album, worth listening to.

Cal Lampley produced, and Chicken & Dumplin's was the name of the album. The title cut b/w "The Telephone Song" was the 45 RPM release.

Listening to Prestige 716: Benny Golson / Jimmy Witherspoon

LISTEN TO ONE: Love Me Right

 Benny Golson and a full orchestra had backed Jimmy Witherspoon in Stockholm in 1964, and now in London in 1965, Golson was ready to round up a new orchestra and do it again. In fact, he was ready to recapitulate his entire Stockholm syndrome--he had done sessions with both Witherspoon and jazz singer Carol Ventura in Sweden, and so again in London. Golson, producer Lew Futterman and Prestige Records had something of a hit-and-miss record as predictors of popularity. The jazz chanteuse sank remarkably quickly into an undeserved oblivion; the blues, pop-blues, soul-blues crooner-shouter remains one

of the most popular representatives of his genre to this day. 

Crafting hit records, and careers, is guesswork at best, as witness, on the one hand, Decca's decision to pass on the Beatles, and on the other, the mega-bucks and extravagant promotional campaigns devoted to Jobriath (who?) Making good music, on the other hand, is frequently as simple as getting some really good people together and giving them some creative freedom.

And such is the case here. Benny Golson clearly felt there was more to do with jazz singers and a full orchestra, and he was right. I spent an exhaustive amount of time and space on the previous Golson-Witherspoon collaboration, so I won't go into it all again, but this is a delighful album, the kind you'd put on again and again. 

I don't know where they got the songs from. None of them are familiar to me, and few of the songwriters are even vaguely familiar to me. All of the titles sound vaguely like something you've probably heard before. None of them became standards, even though eight of them were released on 45 RPM singles. But they're good enough songs. and they fit Spoon's voice, and Golson's arrangements.

The singles were:

Make This Heart Of Mine Smile Again / Love Me Right   

Oh How I Love You / One Last Chance   

I Never Thought I'd See The Day / If There Wasn't Any You    

Two Hearts Are Better Than One / Come On And Walk With Me

The album was titled Spoon in London. Lew Futterman produced. Baxking vocals were done by the Ladybirds, a British trio soon to become known for their work on the Benny Hill Show.

Listening to Prestige 715: Montego Joe

LISTEN TO ONE: Haitian Lady

Montego Joe's two albums for Prestige were his only two as a leader, though he continued to be in demand as a percussionist through the 1960s and '70s. This second album leans toward what appears to be an attempt to move Joe into the mainstream of 1960s pop instrumentals. The tune that was selected for 45 RPM release is "Ouch," which uses the popular device of a repeated catch phrase, in this case "You shouldn't do that!" This is the device most successfully used in "Tequila," and "Ouch" is pretty good proof that it isn't always successful.

The session log includes a credit as arranger/conductor for tenor sax man Al Gibbons. Gibbons had a solid career without ever quite breaking through to the top ranks. He played in the orchestras of Earl Hines and Woody Herman, and also in the avant garde Jazz Composer's Orchestra. He worked with Stanley Turrentine and the Manhattan Transfer. And here his job seems to have been to create a Montego Joe for the masses, although one suspects that producer Lew Futterman's may have been the heavier hand.

Prestige, especially in the soul jazz era, was not a label to shy away from popular success, but neither was it a label to court it too assiduously, and the liner notes to this album, by Francis Squibb, seem to reflect that ambiguity. Are we courting the young crowd? Well, yes and no...

The music presented here is rhythmically akin to the rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n'  blues of the discotheques and teen hops--but with a difference. The "big beat," with which almost everyone is familiar, has been seasoned generously with a variety of twists and turns from African tribal musical traditions and from African-American music of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In short, like "Tequila." Or like Perez Prado. As someone who lived through that era, I can't help but follow the twists and turns of Mr. Squibb's attempts to find a balance. The rhythm 'n' blues of discotheques? For a start, who used the 'n' of rock 'n' roll to talk about rhythm and blues? But if you were young and representing yourself as a hip aficionado of jazz, you couldn't admit to liking rock 'n' roll...but it was sort of OK to like rhythm and blues.

Sorry, I can't help myself. Squibb's discomfort in being a jazz purist writing about impure music reveals itself in his compulsive need to put words into quotation marks, that familiar device that signals "I'm really better than this, I'm not really saying this":

The music of Wet and Wild was designed to get people to "shake that thing"--and not just that thing but everything [until] you are no longer "doing" the dance...but are  a creature of the music and--perhaps--of something beyond music as we know it. [Perhaps you have seen them] "doing" the Frug, the Monkey, or the Swim.

The tunes on this LP, intended to emphasize the "commercial" aspects, have been selected with "the younger crowd of dancers" in mind.

Montego...continues to demonstrate...the ways in which supposedly "alien" melodic and rhythmical material can be combined with "native" jazz and pop material...

So Montego Joe and producer Lew Futterman set out to make a commercially successful pop album. It was certainly something that Futterman proved good at, in his work with Jack McDuff and George Benson, and his later work with rockers like Ted Nugent. He would also become even more commercially successful as a real estate developer.

Why didn't it work with Montego Joe? Who knows why things do or don't take off commercially? But also, perhaps, Joe's heart wasn't one hundred percent in it. Although he continued to work as a percussionist on a number of jazz (and a few pop) sessions, his heart was more and more with education and youth work, as described in the notes to his previous Prestige album.

Al Gibbons, trumpeter Leonard Goines, and drummer/percussionist Milford Graves all appeared on the previous album. New for this session are Arthur Jenkins, piano; Ed Thompson, bass; and Sonny Morgan, miscellaneous percussion, suggesting that the budget may have been tighter this time around, or that for a more commercial dance sound, they didn't really need Chick Corea and Eddie Gomez. Jenkins, who during this period was primarily working with pop/reggae singer Johnny Nash, would go on to become a much-sought-after accompanist, working with John Lennon, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, among others. Sonny Morgan worked with Milford Graves on his first album as leader, and later with avant-garde vocalist Leon Thomas, among others. Less is known about Ed Thompson.

"Ouch" and "Give it Up" were the two sides of the only 45 RPM single release. Wild & Warm was recorded at Futterman's preferred Regent Sound Studios in Manhattan. I've selected "Haitian Lady," composed by Harold Ousley, as the most interesting track for me. But the whole album is pretty good for "dancing."

 

Listening to Prestige 714: Morris Nanton

LISTEN TO ONE: Something We've Got

 Next up in the Prestige chronology we have the debut album by a pianist-composer who has fashioned one of the more impressive careers in American music, who has recorded over 250 albums, worked with "everyone from Ellington to Elvis, Joni Mitchell to Barbra Streisand, and Quincy Jones to Yo-Yo Ma" (from the bio on his web page), garnered a Grammy and an Oscar nomination, who has written the scores for 20 movies including the Streisand remake of A Star is Born; and a mid-career album (fourth out of a total of six) by a performer whose career is mostly bounded by the town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey,

where he and his trio were local favorites for over five decades, including a 22-year stint at one local club. The former's debut album was not long ago rereleased on CD; none of the albums by the latter seem to have been rereleased.

Unfortunately, I was only able to locate and listen to one of these albums on a streaming service--and it wasn't the guy with the truckloadfull of credentials. The Roger Kellaway Trio was actually Kellaway's second album, but the first was done for a tiny local label, so this was his debut on the national stage, produced by Jack McDuff's guiding hand Lew Futterman. I can't give you a first-hand response to the music by this "lean, bearded, intent young jazz musician" of 26 (from the liner notes; I was able to find them, but no music), but I wish I could have. It sounds fascinating, from "one of the good tunes penned by Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney" to a four-note melody written for "prepared piano," the adaptation of a traditional piano pioneered by John Cage. 

No jazz musicians were recording Lennon-McCartney tunes in 1965--in Arthur Taylor's seminal interviews with his peers a few years later, collected as Notes and Tones, the interview subjects are unanimous in dismissing the musical value of the two Beatles' compositions. And certainly none were experimenting with Cage's prepared piano, although Dave Brubeck did record one tune with a modestly prepared instrument, laying copper strips across the strings. Bizarrely, the easy listening piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher did try a number of these experiments during the course of their careers.

Kellaway prepared his piano by "fastening objects to the strings, including washers, nuts, bolts, and wooden pegs. 'The choice of which notes to prepare was purely individual,' Kellaway noted. 'Besides the melody notes I prepared mostly the lower level of the piano.'"

But for now, for me, these experiments remain tantalizingly out of reach. So I turn my attention, instead, to the May and June sessions which comprised Morris Nanton's second of three Prestige albums. and which I was able to listen to.

First, I can't resist quoting a little from Jack McKinney's album cover notes, starting with the "many forces" which shape the identity of the trio: "It is music that evolves from Art Tatum through Oscar Peterson; it has ties to the 'space movement' of Ahmad Jamal ('freedom within form'); in its more reflective moments it becomes an extension of Bill Evans' introspective analysis." But where McKinney really gets going is his of all the things the Nanton trio is not: "These are not cocktail sounds for lifeless zombies pouring more Manhattans into bored executives. They are not forays into obscurity in which erudition becomes an end and confusion a means. They are not essays on the psychotic by the introvert who is playing to magnify his egomania."

Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. The May 13 session consisted of four songs, two of which did not survive the cutting room. Of the two that did, the first is "Mood Indigo," a 6:34 treatment that doesn't exactly follow the melody line or the arrangement suggested by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard, but which, as it extends further in time and further into its own improvisational world, paradoxically starts to feel more and more Ellingtonian. 

"Mood Indigo" is one of the lovelier jazz melodies, and "Taboo" one of the cornier, but Nanton and his guys defy expectations again by giving us a good deal more of melody of "Taboo," also stretched out to six and a half minutes. To what end? It's hard to say. They're certainly not playing to its cocktail-exotica strengths, although there's some of that. They're not hipster-satirizing it either, although there's humor in their version. On one of their Perth Amboy club dates, this would have been a delight--having some fun with a tune you're perhaps a little embarrassed to admit that you recognize so readily, and at the same time giving some real musical depth of exploration to it. On an album--and it's the last tune on side B--it's still a delight.

The June 16 session begins with a blues, "Something We've Got," the only Nanton original, the longest track of the two sessions, the title cut and the leadoff cut for side A of the album. What to say about a blues? One could go with McKinney, once again, and say what it's not: "a listless and hopeless essay on futility." Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. It is a pleasure all the way through, a workout in different moods and tempi by musicians attuned to each other. 

Three shorter pieces finish out the session, and the album. "Any Number Can Win" is a moody number by French film composer Michel Magne for the Jean Gabin/Alain Delon gangster flick of the same name. Jimmy Smith had also recorded it. Two songs from the 1930s, Allie Wrubel's "The Masquerade is Over" and George Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now" (from Porgy and Bess) are also of an appropriate length for a 45 RPM single, but that honor went--and appropriately--to "Something We've Got," split into a part one and part two.

Cal Lampley produced both sessions. The rest of the trio is Norman Edge (bass), who was Nanton's musical partner for over 50 years, and Al Beldini, drummer and vocalist (not here) probably best known for his work with Don Elliott.

Listening to Prestige 713: Carmell Jones

LISTEN TO ONE: Flyin' Home

 Another one of those definitely worthy figures who made a brief name for himself and faded into oblivion. You won't find him on any of the various internet lists of the 50 greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Where will you find him? I dug a little deeper, starting with the forum section of organissino.com, where no one is so obscure that some coterie of fans haven't gathered to discuss him or her. I found one discussion of Jones, with all the entries dated 2003, when Mosaic released a box set of all his recordings. The reviews were there were all glowing, with several comparing him to Clifford Brown, and one mentioning that the set had been reviewed on Fresh Air. Nothing since 2003;

I found a really neat jazz blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe, which has, among other treasures, profiles of "Obscure Trumpet Masters." Jones is number four -- they're not ranked; he's number four in alphabetical order, and blogger Curtjazz (I can't find any other name for him) introduces him with:

He plays on one of the most famous straight-ahead jazz songs ever recorded, yet today people are more likely to confuse him with a film character played by Dorothy Dandridge, than they are to know the titles of any of his six albums.

The "most famous" is Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Jones had come east from Los Angeles, where he had recorded three well-received albums for Pacific Jazz, to join Silver's group. He played on two albums with Silver, and did quite a lot more sideman work with excellent musicians (incuding Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson for Prestige), and made this one Pretige album as leader, for which he received Down Beat's "New Star Trumpeter" award.

But as was the case with so many black artists of his era, the racism -- and the lack of appreciation for jazz as an art form -- in the United States weighed too heavily on him, and he moved to Germany, where he would spend the next fifteen years, and would disappear from view as far as the American jazz public was concerned.  

This would be his USA swan song, at least for the time being. He would return in the 1980, and make one more album for the West Coast label Revelation. It was titled Carmell Jones Returns, although by that time the reaction would have been not so much "Wow, he's back!" and more "Who's Carmell Jones?"

His later years were spent in his almost-home town of Kansas City, Missouri. His actual home town was Kansas City, Kansas, but the Missouri side of the state line was more hospitable to music.

For those who remembered him and those who happened on him for the first time with the Mosaic box set, his work was a welcomed pleasure, as well it should have been. What this session captures is a man who loved what he did, even if he didn't love the country he was doing it in. That love comes through in every note he plays.

New to Prestige is Horace Silver veteran Roger Humphries. Don Schlitten produced, and the album was entitled Jay Hawk Talk, a tip of the hat to Jones's home state. The title cut was also released as a two-sided 45 RPM single.

Listening to Prestige 712: Johnny "Hammond" Smith

LISTEN TO ONE: The Stinger

 I was going to say that as we move deeper into the 1960s, there's an increasing debate as to just what jazz is, but hasn't that always been true? When Nick LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first recordings in 1917, there were plenty around to say that these white boys who called themselves the creators of jazz were a pallid imitation of what Buddy Bolden had done, and what King Oliver and that Armstrong kid were doing. When critics and historians first started seriously writing defintions of jazz, in the early 1940s (no one had really done it before then), they were motivated in large part by a felt need to

create a definition that would include that new stuff by those guys who were turning chords inside out, and who, in the words of comedian Ronny Graham, "wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." In their zeal to have the new experimental sound taken seriously, the critics excluded people like Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely who were making records that people actually wanted to buy (a critical misstep which I have corrected in my new book, Jazz with a Beat, from SUNY Press, available to preorder from Amazon). 

Later, as the music pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became the mainstream, those avant garde critics became the establishment, and some of them looked with dismay at the new sounds that were being made by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, with even wilder young bloods like Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler and James "Blood" Ulmer waiting in the wings. Hence, even though Prestige had its own free jazz practitioners in the mid-1960s, we could find, in the liner notes by Andrew Newcombe to this album, 

The music on this record--and it is music, in the full sense of the term, and in contrast to the squamose smudges of sound that have so often been passed off as jazz in recent years--testifies to the continuing validity of "good taste" as an aesthetic canon.

Definitions of good taste come and go with the years, and it's heartwarming to see how, in the face of the onslaught of a new avant garde, those definitions can be broadened in ways that the establishment critics themselves would probably be just as happy if no one pointed them out. The soul jazz organists who were coming to prominence in the early to mid 1960s were not at all afraid to get their licks, and their rhythms, from that same rhythm and blues that had been written out of the canon--and, in fact, to use some of the same musicians who had played that music.

Smith, for his sidemen on this occasion, did not dip into the Prestige (and Blue Note, and Riverside, and EmArcy, and Roulette) repertory company. His choices were mostly more obscure, although they did include an up and coming star in Houston Person, who had made his first recording with Smith two years earlier, on Riverside. Earl Edwards, Person's opposite number on tenor sax, made a couple of records with Smith and that's about all--he does appear on a record Dinah Washington made for Roulette. I can't find any other credits for drummer John Harris.

The other Smith on the album, Floyd "Guitar" Smith, is a different story. Born in 1917, he came of age in the swing era, playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, and cut his rhythm and blues teeth with a couple of the early organ guys, Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett. 

"The Stinger" is the title cut of the album, and it was the first 45 RPM single off the album, and--led by Floyd Smith's stinging but melodic guitar work, it is rhythm and blues all the way, with both "Hammond" and Person showing their R&B chops. This is the music that was at one time roundly denounced as "bad taste," and they do their swingin', backbeatin' best on it.

The other single off the session was "Brother John," so titled by Mr. "Hammond," but "Brother Ray" might have been a more apt title. I suppose if anyone moved the needle of rhythm and blues over from the bad taste to the good taste part of the dial, it was Ray Charles, but he still had enough bad taste to satisfy the most unreconstructed rhythm and blues fan, and so does Johnny "Hammond" Smith in this tribute to the great man.

All of this album is good, and it's varied. The standard, "There is No Greater Love," by Isham Jones (a standard! Good taste alert!) features some smooth playing by Houston Person (when you could still play smooth without playing "smooth jazz") and some tasty picking by Floyd Smith. "Brother John" is no holds barred. "Cleopatra and the African Knight," in addition to having a great title, does what the early rhythm and blues pioneers did so well--captures a big band feel with a small group. "Benny's Diggin'" weds rhythm and blues to bebop (as many of the early players did) and features some virtuoso work by "Hammond." Some top notch drumming by Harris, as well.

The soul jazz era, ushered in by Jimmy Smith, led to a lot of young keyboardists taking up the organ, and a lot of organ groups being signed to jazz labels. But just because it was a thing, that doesn't mean these young organists came out of a cookie cutter. They had individual styles and imaginations and creative impulses, and sitting down and listening to them for a while can only reinforce that realization.

"The Stinger" made up both sides of a 45. "Brother John" was backed with "Cleopatra." Cal Lampley produced. About the cover, I have nothing to say except to wonder why the Green Lantern is wearing red.