Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
When you think about, it's amazing how many songs make up the canon of American popular music, and are there for interpretation by jazz musicians. The Great American Songbook? Well, not all the songs were great, and not all the tunesmiths were great. The Golden Age of American Song? It was maybe one of them. Not the age that Chuck Berry and Merle Haggard and Holland, Dozier and Holland lived in, but still a pretty impressive, populated by Olympians and journeymen. And a virtually inexhaustible well of material, some of it sublime, all of it at least pretty good, all of it grist for the improviser's mill. And every one of those tunes is someone's favorite. Someone courted to it cried to it, was conceived to it.
I started thinking about this as I listened to Tommy Flanagan play a bunch of standards, and I realized that I've now listened to the better part of twelve years' worth of music from Prestige artists, most of whom included at least some standards on every session, and with the probable exception of "In a Sentimental Mood," which somebody must have played, I believe that within the confines of this project, I have never heard any one of these songs before.
With the aid of secondhandsongs.com, I did a quick survey.
"You Go to My Head" has a melody by J. Fred Coots, whose biggest hit, "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," was almost rejected by his publisher on the grounds that it was just a kids' song and no one would listen to it. "You Go to My Head" might not have bought Coots the mansion that "Santa" certainly could have, but it would have been good for a couple of nice cars and a weekend in Myrtle Beach. It became jazz standard as well as a pop standard, recorded by Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Al Haig, Lennie Tristano, Joe Bushkin, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Tete Montoliu, David
Lahm, Kenny Barron, Steve Allen, Ran Blake, Barry Harris, Eric Reed...and that just covers the pianists. But no other Prestige recordings (although Gene Ammons did record it for another label).
So there you have depth and breadth in jazz. You can go a dozen years with a prolific record label and still not begin to mine the possibilities of American song, and you can follow the same song through a plethora of artists and interpretations.
The same is true with nearly all the other ballads, although Gene Ammons would do "Born to Be Blue" on a Prestige album a couple of years hence. The only exception is a single recording of Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood," a song whose over 400 versions include three more on Prestige. Sonny Rollins and the Modern Jazz Quartet did it in 1953, for a 78 RPM release, Shirley Scott did it in 1959, and Lem Winchester and Oliver Nelson delivered their version just a month before Flanagan. And if you want a quick lesson in how differently great jazz artists can interpret a great composition, you've got it here.
This is a Moodsville release, and of course it's more than just a sentimental mood. This is three exquisite artists who are also consummate professionals. Roy Haynes brought 35 years of life and jazz experience to the session, and he was at the top of his game. Today, still playing, he brings 93 years of experience, and he's still at the top of his game.
Tommy Potter was still at the top of his, from the evidence of this album, but people were starting to DownBeat reader's poll, Potter did not get a single vote. Nor did Russell or Kotick.
forget. This was the age of the virtuoso bassist--Paul Chambers, Doug Watkins, Charles Mingus, Ray Brown, Oscar Pettiford. Leroy Vinnegar and others on the West Coast. Potter, like Curly Russell and Teddy Kotick, was in at the creation of bebop. He could keep time when the responsibility for that was shifting more and more to the bassist, and he could handle the fast tempos and tricky rhythms of the beboppers. But he wasn't a soloist. In the 1959
The Tommy Flanagan Trio came out on Moodsville. Esmond Edwards produced.
It's not too late to give Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 as a holiday gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2!
And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
Doug Watkins was one of the most prolific sidemen of the 1950s. He's been on 26 Prestige albums so far (including Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus) and countless more sessions on other labels. He was so respected as a bassist that when Charles Mingus took to the piano for 1961's Oh Yeah (Atlantic), he picked Watkins as his bassist. But he almost never stepped out as a leader. He had done one album for a small label in 1956, and nothing more until this session.
What made him decide to put himself out in front?
A newfound passion. One of the most respected bassists in jazz, Watkins, like Mingus before him, turns the bass duties over to someone else, and takes on another instrument: his newfound passion, the cello.
How newfound was this passion? It's said that he picked it up three days before the recording date.
Which you can get away with if you're from Detroit, because that means you have a crew of homeboys who understand jazz, and who understand you, and who understand experimenting with different sounds, especially if one of them is Yusef Lateef, and the others are guys who've played with Lateef.
It's a shame that Detroit has come to be known as a blighted, crime-ridden city, because it has been a cultural capital. It was a cauldron of jazz before jazz came to be recognized as America's seminal art form. And it produced the man who was arguably the greatest poet of his generation, Philip Levine.
Levine nurtured his art on the assembly lines of Detroit, just as Yusef Lateef did, and also in the jazz clubs of Detroit, where he heard the greats who made it their home. Poet T. R. Hummer, in an essay in the literary journal Blackbird, says that:
Some were classmates of his at Wayne University as it was called then: the guitarist Kenny Burrell was there, as were the pianists Tommy Flanagan and Bess Bonnier; they were close friends and peers of Levine’s then, as was the great and inimitable baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and the drummer Elvin Jones.
And he heard the greats who passed through, like Clifford Brown, whom he remembered as Benny Golson did:
I Remember Clifford
Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn't there
last night. Someone quietly entered, and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Bluebird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.
Shortly before he died in 2015, Levine collaborated with jazz saxophonist Benjamin Boone for a unique album of poetry and jazz. Hummer writes:
Boone said that he had suggested to Levine that it would be more efficient (as well as less taxing: it must not be forgotten that Levine was in his 80s
when this work was done) to record the music, at least the basic rhythm tracks, first and let him record his tracks after.
Levine’s response? “Why would I want to do that, Ben? I’ve sat in recording studios reading my stuff to myself plenty of times. I want to work with the musicians! That will be fun!”
And so the poet and the players convened session after session in a studio in Fresno, California, making the recordings. Another poet—especially one Levine’s age, who was also, by a certain point in the extended recording process, not in good health—might have found the lengthy, nitpicky process onerous. Levine loved it. He spent hours doing what is done in studios: sitting in a booth on a stool wearing headphones and staring at a microphone, recording take after take until everyone is satisfied, and then moving on to the next track. He stayed at it faithfully for the requisite long stretches.
The mixing of the album was not completed till after Levine died. When it came to mixing "I Remember Clifford," Boone was faced with a dilemma, according to Hummer:
For this poem, Boone composed a melody that is strongly reminiscent of, but not repetitious of, Golson’s composition. Anyone who knows Brown’s music is likely to know Golson’s composition, and so will be struck, as I was, by the extraordinarily tactful, effective work Boone did as a composer here.
But he did another excellent thing as well. Levine was always in the Fresno studio with basically the same core group of musicians. Boone is a saxophonist specializing in soprano and alto, each of which he plays wonderfully on most of these recordings (seriously, the man has deep and abiding chops; do yourself a favor and give him a listen) and he did the solo work on the original track. But as he listened to the playback of “I Remember Clifford” in the studio, and again and again at home, he found himself wondering, “Why is there a saxophone soloing in this? Clifford Brown played trumpet!”
“It was a tough decision, in terms of my own ego,” Boone told me. But in the end he contacted, through a friend of a friend, the trumpeter Tom Harrell. Harrell, now seventy-one, is a master musician who has played with just about everyone, from Stan Kenton and Woody Herman to Horace Silver on down. Who better to channel Clifford Brown?
So that's another part of Detroit. But here, for this session, the Motor City is represented by Lawson
on cello and Lateef on oboe as well as flute, so they're stepping outside of the jazz box. Detroiter Hugh Lawson is the pianist. a cat who came from Detroit with Lateef and spent many years with him before moving on to Sun Ra and others. Detroiter Herman Wright takes the bass duties, and New Yorker Lex Humphries is the drummer, in his first session for Prestige.
They play three standards, two originals by Lateef and one ("Andre's Bag") by Watkins. The album, on New Jazz, would take its title, Soulnik, from a Lateef composition. Prestige would later rerelease it under Lateef's name as Imagination, but it's very much Watkins' session, but the creativity and versatility on display here in Watkins' pizzicato cello would get little chance to grow and blossom. This would be his second and last album as leader; in 1962 he died in an automobile accident.
Esmond Edwards produced.
It' not too late to give Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 as a Christmas gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
i
I suppose one could look ar this period as sort of an interregnum between John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Dolphy had actually made his Prestige debut the previous month, but although it was titled Outward Bound, it wasn't as outward as Dolphy was going to go, and though his era was poised to explode, it hadn't quite done so yet.
One could look at it that way, but one would be wrong. Jazz doesn't begin and end with the superstars, and it doesn't exist only on the cutting edge. Or maybe it's always the cutting edge, because you're out there every night taking risks, which is the definition of improvisation, whether you're John Coltrane playing every note there is at the same time or Ahmad Jamal playing cocktail hour at the Pershing Hotel for salesmen who don't care that you're giving
lessons in the possibilities of jazz improvisation, or Henry "Red" Allen playing for the lunch crowd at the Metropole. And if Prestige in the 1960s is remembered more for Dolphy than for the Swingville and Bluesville and Moodsville recordings, these labels recognized the fact that jazz was living history, and the people who had made that history were still living and playing, which made it a lot more than just history.
Bud Freeman came out of the Chicago high school band that became a legend, the Austin High School Gang with Jimmy McPartland and Frank Teschemaker, and he grew to be known as the master of the swing era tenor saxophone. In
fact, he was one of the original jazz tenormen, since it was not an instrument common to that style of music, and he developed a sound all his own--Lester Young counted Freeman as one of his early influences. He never lacked for work, or for people who wanted to record him, be they major labels (Columbia), top independents (Bethlehem), labels not much given to jazz (Dot), or more obscure small labels. This would be his only recording for Prestige.
It was one of the very few small group recordings Shorty Baker would make for any label, and the only one where he got featured billing. Baker was a respected section man who played off and on with Duke Ellington's orchestra during these years, and he makes the most of his chance in the spotlight. You wouldn't be looking for this album to fill out your Shorty Baker collection, because you won't have a Shorty Baker collection, bur he plays well enough on this session to make you glad you've had a chance to hear him.
Claude Hopkins was brought to Prestige by Chris Albertson to play on Lonnie Johnson's first session, and was brought back to make an album under his own name, which featured J. C. Heard on drums. George Duvivier, of course, is an old friend.
Like most of the Swingville sessions, these are musicians who got their start in an earlier era, but didn't stay there--in fact Freeman, though he continued to play in a traditional setting, with Eddie Condon, with Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart's World's Greatest Jazzband, and with his own groups, had studied for a while in the late 1940s with Lennie Tristano. Freeman, in a 1980 conversation with radio interviewer Studs Terkel, said "My old fans would prefer that I play the way I played a hundred years ago, but I prefer to play the way I feel, and I feel that I'm improving."
The Swingville album is called The Bud Freeman All Stars Featuring Shorty Baker.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 makes a great Christmas gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
In presenting Shakey Jake (also known as Shakey Jake Harris, to distinguish him from the other Shakey Jake--yes, there was another one) continued three Prestige blues traditions. The first was to produce strikingly good records by first rate blues musicians. The second, unfortunately, was to consistently back the wrong horses. Shakey Jake would make two albums for Prestige Bluesville, then only three more, and a small handful of singles, over the next quarter century, so while he had the chops to ensure longevity, he wasn't able to break through the way his nephew Magic Sam did. A good part of his career was as a harmonica-playing sideman to Sam and other Chicago blues acts.
The third Prestige blues tradition was experimentation, mixing traditional blues artists with Prestige jazz artists, and if the results weren't a commercial breakthrough, they're artistically satisfying. The jazz voices are Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings, No drummer, which is interesting, because Jake comes out of the Chicago blues tradition, not the Delta, and he's certainly accustomed to working with some serious percussion. So here we have a most unusual conjoining of traditions: the folk blues sound of a very raw voice and harmonica with the modern but eclectic sensibilities of two jazzmen. Both McDuff and Jennings have played plenty of rhythm and blues, but that's not what they're doing here. They're finding new ways to augment a basic blues style. Especially Jennings. Every time he contributes a lick you find yourself listening to him, and yet he's not taking you away from the song as a whole. A pretty damn good trick. It's too bad that Shakey Jake didn't make it bigger. It's almost inexplicable that Bill Jennings didn't make it bigger.
The 45 RPM release from this session was "My Foolish Heart"
and "Jake's Blues," interesting choices. "My Foolish Heart" is, of course, not the syrupy Victor Young ballad from a movie of the same name, a tearjerker with Susan Hayward. And you know that comedy routine about what you can and can't do in the blues? You can't drive a Volvo or a BMW, and "persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, Auburn, and Rainbow can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis." Well, you probably can't build a blues around a phrase like "My Foolish Heart," either, and even Shakey Jake doesn't altogether succeed, although he growls it like Screamin' Jay Hawkins and manages to be pretty entertaining. The same comedy routine says you can get a good blues name out of a physical infirmity, but Shakey Jake got his name a different way: from his fondness for shaking the dice. Reportedly, when he cut his first record, he didn't get paid for the session, but made up for it by winning $700 off the record label's owner shooting craps.
"Jake's Blues" is one of three instrumentals on the record--"Just Shakey" and "Bluffin' and Puffin' (possibly "Huffin' and Puffin'") are the others. I love all of them. The three instruments are great together. Jake is a decent harmonica player, magnificently supported by McDuff and Jennings--again, especially Jennings.
The Bluesville album was titled Good Times. Esmond Edwards produced.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 makes a great Christmas gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
Frank Wess is back four days later, this time without Joe Newman, but with two thirds of the rhythm section from the previous gig, and this time the session is directed toward Moodsville, rather than Swingville.
Was Moodsville a dilution of the jazz mission of Prestige Records? Some still say yes. Chris Albertson, who produced a number of albums for Bob Weinstock during this period, has said "When I produced a session, it was a Prestige session--whether it came out on Prestige, Prestige Bluesville or Prestige Swingville, made no difference."
This album provides some evidence for the "Jackie Gleason clone" theory, if you're really looking for it, but not much. It's a good bet that the material was chosen with the awareness that this would go out on Moodsville. The songs are all dreamy ballads, even the original Wess tune.
But it provides overwhelming evidence for the "this is real jazz" theory, by being real jazz. Wess and Flanagan find the beauty in these ballads, and they never lose it, but they also find their jazz soul, their openings for improvisation.They don't need to sentimentalize the ballads, because the ballads themselves take care of that, but they are never insensitive to their beauty.
His own original, "Rainy Afternoon," needs to take a back seat to no other tune for dreamy beauty. Wess plays it on the saxophone, with all the smoky lyricism that instrument can provide.
"It's So Peaceful in the Country" was written by Alec Wilder, whose book, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, did as much as anything else you can name to create the canon we now know as the Great American Songbook, and who contributed significantly to that canon as a composer/lyricist. This particular song, introduced by Mildred Bailey in 1941, has never attracted a huge volume of jazz improvisers (Second Hand Songs has it at 51st on the list of most recorded songs from that year), but it's had its share, starting with Mundell Lowe in 1956. Tommy Flanagan opens it with a sort of bluesy vamp, which suggests a certain urban touch, but Wess's flute moves it gently but firmly, and without irony, into the realm of bucolic peace.
"But Beautiful" is a Jimmy Van Heusen melody that lives up to its title. Tommy Flanagan is given an extended solo to start this one off, and perhaps because it's a much more widely recorded tune (6th most recorded of tunes from 1947), both he and Wess allow themselves a lot more latitude to improvise, but they keep it pretty, and they keep it interesting. Wess on flute again.
"Stella by Starlight" is by movie composer Victor Young, so you'd think it would be a movie theme, and it sort of is and sort of isn't. The melody was adapted by Young from music he wrote for a film called The Uninvited. Apparently at some point when he was writing the lyrics, someone must have pointed out to lyricist Ned Washington that at one point in the movie, Ray Milland tells Gail Russell (Stella) that he's serenading her by starlight, so Washington quick had to write that into the lyric--which did not come right away. It was introduced by Young as an instrumental piece in 1944, the year of the movie's release (and it's the third most recorded of all 1944 songs*), and the lyric didn't come along till 1947, when Frank Sinatra recorded it. It's one of those unusual pieces that's had a lot more instrumental than vocal recordings, not all of them jazz by a long shot. After Young introduced it, it became an orchestral staple until both Sinatra and Harry James recorded it in 1947, and it entered the jazz book when Charlie Parker recorded it with strings. Wess switches to the tenor saxophone for this one, with all the Ben Webster-type beauty that the instrument is capable of.
“Gone With the Wind" is decidedly not a movie theme, having been composed by Allie Wrubel a good three years before the movie. Wess stays with the tenor, and gives this one a more jaunty reading.
I won't go through every tune, but they all create a mood, and if you're not in the mood for a mood, but just want to hear some fine jazz, they give you plenty of that.
Since at this juncture the stars of the "Ville" recordings on Prestige are the labels themselves, this album is just called The Frank Wess Quartet. Esmond Edwards produced. "Rainy Afternoon" was released as one side of a 45.
* The most covered song of 1944 is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," but schmaltzy "Stella By Starlight" gets beaten out for the number two slot by one of the hippest tunes ever written, Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight."
Swingville has done pretty well with recruiting Basie musicians and alumni, and why not? If there's a more swinging ensemble anywhere. I'd like to see it. Joe Newman had been with Basie on and off since 1943. Frank Wess and Eddie Jones were part of that 1950s ensemble which achieved popularity but not much critical acclaim (a shadow of its former Lester Young-dominated self, playing outdated music) but has since been recognized for the sterling aggregation that it was. Oliver Jackson never played in a Basie band, but surely this was an oversight. With credentials including the Metropole, Teddy Wilson, Charlie
Shavers, Buck Clayton, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Earl Hines, Budd Johnson, Sy Oliver, he would have been right at home with Basie.
If you're going to put together a group of Basie sidemen doing an outside gig, you're not going to have the Count at the piano, and if you're not going to get Count 1.1 Nat Pierce, as other Count's Men groups have done, then Tommy Flanagan is not a bad choice at all. Though a thoroughgoing Detroit bebopper, he's from that generation of piano players whose earliest influences were Art Tatum, Nat "King" Cole and Teddy Wilson, and he would go on to spend several years as Ella Fitzgerald.
Newman and his group are certainly not trying to escape their Basie association. The songs are all from the Basie repertoire, two of them ("Jive at Five" and "Taps Miller") composed by the Count himself, or else bluesy originals by Newman that would fit right into Basie's wheelhouse. But a quintet is going to be a lot different from the Basie big band, and although you can hear Basie in their individual voices, especially Joe Newman's, and Wess and Newman playing together can create a big sound, you hear a lot more than that. The soloists, with room to stretch out ("Taps Miller" is over eight minutes, "Wednesday's Blues" more than nine) move very naturally into that swing-to-bop territory, and especially on the Newman originals, all of them give some very interesting interpretations of the blues.
This is the second of Gigi Gryce's three albums for Prestige, all with essentially the same group (Julian Euell replaces Reggie Workman on bass). Gryce clearly liked playing with these guys, and they are a classroom lesson in guys you haven't heard of, or have barely heard of, who never broke through to the top ranks.
It makes a difference if you can get your name attached to an album as leader, and Richard Williams only managed that once, on the Candid label.
Candid might have been a successful small jazz label. It was started recording exec Archie Bleyer, who had a good thing going with Cadence Records, and he got Nat Hentoff to run it. Williams brought in Gryce-mates Richard Wyands and Reggie Workman, and Hentoff himself produced the session, but in spite of being recorded at the Nola Penthouse Studio on the top floor of the Steinway building, the record never got off the ground, and Wiliams was never able to repeat it. He continued work regularly, most often with Charles Mingus and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band, and his versatility not only got him work in Broadway pit bands, but on some classical recordings. He gives a good accounting of himself here, especially on the Gryce composition, "Minority."
Richard Wyands was another who worked regularly, including a ten-year stint with Kenny Burrell, but also managed to stay under the radar of public acclaim.He was originally a Californian, born and rised in Oakland, where he got his firat musical experience, and his first major expoaure as the intermission pianist at San Francisco's Black Hawk club. He recalled, in an interview with Ted Panken in 2000, learning from the great pianists like Art Tatum who played the Black Hawk:
He told me, “You can’t compete with me anyhow, but keep it up.” He encouraged me a lot. No one can compete with him, no one in the world! But he was very nice about it. In fact, he was glad I was there, because he would talk to me while he was playing. I’d sit right up there by the piano and he knew I was sitting there, even though he couldn’t see too well at that time, and he would tell me what he was doing and what key he was going into. But when he came off the bandstand, I had to get on, so we really didn’t have much time to talk in between — not really. But just sitting there watching him was quite an experience.
Leaving California for New York, he played some gigs and got a few recordings before hooking up with Gryce, a time he remembers fondly:
Somehow I met Gigi Gryce, and he was organizing a band along with Reggie Workman, Richard Williams and Mickey Roker. We rehearsed and we worked at the old Five Spot, different places in Brooklyn... the group with Gigi was a great group. I really loved it. We had so much fun. It was a happy group. Extremely happy. I’d never been in a group like that before ever, anywhere, where everything was just so happy and musical. Happy musically and otherwise. Everybody got along with each other, there was no arguing and fighting, no egos. One of the best groups I ever worked with. Then Gigi disappeared from the scene and we were all on our own. So I just freelanced around New York.
There are only two Gryce originals on this session. The others are familiar standards, and one odd duck: the old folk song, "Frankie and Johnny." This is not usual fare for a modern jazz group, though we have seen it before, with Gil Evans and "Ella Speed." They have some fun with this one, starting out playing the melody in almost a honky tonk style, then opening up with the improvisations.
The Gryce originals are "Nica's Tempo," one of the many tributes the jazz baroness who nurtured Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, a nice tune that's still played and recorded, and "Minority," one of Gryce's most famous compositions. This session was his third recording of it, and there have been close to 200 others, including landmark versions by Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans that preceded this one.
Esmond Edwards produced. The Hap'nin's was released on New Jazz.
Bob Weinstock has tried, not always successfully, to give a showcase to talented but unheralded blues artists (Al Smith), and he's jumpstarted careers of performers who had slipped into obscurity (Lonnie Johnson). With Memphis Slim, it's a little different, Slim, who started to find success when he moved to Chicago in the late1930s, had sustained a recording career right through the 1950s, as a jump blues player and bandleader, and then reinvented himself as a folk blues artist, having recorded several successful albums for Folkways Records, including one with Pete Seeger.
Don't forget, in 1960 the blues revival had not yet happened, and there actually was not a huge demand for a label named Bluesville. Columbia's release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers would be released in 1961, and would start a trickle of interest that would grow exponentially as the British Invasion rockers embraced American blues and brought them back home.
The late 1950s were the fields of honor for a complex series of culture wars that made the War on Christmas look like a beach party with Frankie and Annette. In literature, the battle was between tbe academics and the beats--the raw and the cooked, in Robert Lowell's phrase. And in music, the center of all the battles was rock and roll. If you were over 35, rock and roll was an offense to Western civilization, especially if you were over 35 and white and a believer in racial purity. If you were a jazz fan, rock and roll wasn't subtle or sophisticated enough. If you were an ethnic folkie, it wasn't pure enough.
So where did that leave the blues?
It seems hard to believe, as central as the blues are now perceived in the American cultural wheel, but in this era the blues were lumped into the philistine camp. Muddy Waters--philistine then, revered icon now--sang about how the blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll, but back then the cultural guardians stood at the door, banishing both mama and baby as orphans of the storm.
The old guard basically rejected the blues because they weren't white enough. Their idea of the blues was Frank Sinatra singing about how, along with cigarettes lit one after another, you could get your first lesson in learning the blues. Or Dinah Shore singing about how the Southland gave birth to the blues. Nat "King" Cole was white enough until he crossed the unwritten lines. His 15-minute network TV show was canceled when no sponsor would touch it. Sammy Davis Jr. celebrated the new racial tolerance and the death of the old Stepin Fetchit stereotypes by essentially playing Stepin Fetchit to Frank
Sinatra.
The jazz snobs rejected the blues because it wasn't sophisticated enough, but certainly not on racial grounds. Oh, no? Are we so sure about that? Modern jazz had been created, developed, brought to its peak of artistry by black musicians. But there were whites involved in that development, too, and rhythm and blues was so black. If there were any white artists playing rhythm and blues in this era, I can't name them. When Esquire magazine included black critics in its annual jazz poll and suddenly more black artists were winning, Stan Kenton became the first white racist to yell "reverse discrimination." There was no Stan Kenton in rhythm and blues--except Johnny Otis, and he identified as black. There was no Stan Getz in rhythm and blues.
Actually, there was. Elvis Presley was the Stan Getz of rhythm and blues. But no one was going to accept that idea then, and I'm willing to bet that almost mo one who reads this will accept it now. This is not meant to be a knock on Getz. We all know that he and Desmond and Evans are great jazz musicians by anyone's standards. As were Teddy Kotick and Stan Levey and George Wallington and many others. But if there hadn't been white faces on at least some of the bandstands, the audience for modern jazz would have been a lot smaller. And if the Down Beat readership of the 1940s and early 1950s had been blacker, wouldn't Roy Milton and Paul Gayten and Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely have been showing up on some of those polls?
Clint Eastwood, in Bird, echoes this. Eastwood is a true jazz lover and a great champion of jazz, and I am perhaps the only person in the jazz community who actually liked Bird, for reasons irrelevant to this discussion. But Eastwood is a bit of an old school jazz snob too, and he does have Parker react incredulously and scornfully when he hears an old rival playing at the Apollo: "What is he doing playing rhythm and blues?" I have to believe that was Bird, and not Bird.
Folkies made the divide easier. If it wasn't played on acoustic instruments, it wasn't folk, and by the 1940s most blues musicians had gone electric. The exceptions there were a small group, mostly centered around New York and mostly recorded on Folkways, including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Lead Belly.
Lead Belly was the first, and one of Folkways' biggest stars, if such a term can be applied to a populist egalitarian folkie business like Folkways. Lead Belly is an unusual figure, because he's such an important figure in the history of the blues, and yet he's not really a part of the history of the blues at all. The blues as we know them, which means recorded blues, began in 1920 with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," which sparked the blues craze that lasted through the 1920s, until the depression meant that record companies had to cut back on their output, and the black performers got cut back first.
Lead Belly spent the 1920s in prison, so the decade in which his fellow songsters reinvented themselves as bluesmen passed him by. He was discovered by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were traveling the South looking for authentic Negro folk singers. Since the blues had achieved such a high level of popularity, the Lomaxes regarded it with the disdain an aficionado of classic rhythm and blues would feel for disco. Lead Belly, who knew a thousand songs (and could make up a thousand more) represented the music of an earlier generation--the pure folk music, in the minds of the Lomaxes.
When he got to New York, they found that he had no audience in the black community, He bombed at the Apollo. He represented a time and a culture that contemporary African Americans wanted to forget. So his audience was white leftists--the Folkways crowd. And there was a problem singing the blues to this crowd, because the blues is a music of hard-headed realism. This is the way life is, and don't expect it to be anything else. This was at odds with the philosophy of the white leftists, which was give us bread and give us roses--take it easy, but take it. So Lead Belly did what any good entertainer who wants to eat should do, and gave the people what they wanted. He started writing an singing songs about being from the home of the brave and the land of the free, and not wanting to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie. Others saw that market and decided to get in on it. Big Bill Broonzy, a jazz guitarist from Chicago, reinvented himself as an ethnic folk bluesman (he had the roots credentials for it) and sang a plea to get together and break up the old Jim Crow.
The explosion of popularity of electric blues, and the invention of folk rock,was to change the face of folk music in the mid-1960s, and all but the purest of the purists had to revise their definitions. Muddy Waters gave the nod, or perhaps the finger, to the folk establishment when his 1966 LP was called The Real Folk Blues.
Which brings us to Memphis Slim, who managed not only to make a living through all those years, but to defy categorization. He was a piano player, which put him in a different category from the guitar and harmonica players who congregated in Washington Square Park on Sundays, and who were most identified with the folkie sound, but he recorded for Folkways, as a solo act and with Willie Dixon, the achitect of the Chess Records rhythm and blues sound of Chicago. He put together a jump blues band callled Memphis Slim and the House Rockers which recorded for various R&B labels: He was recording for VeeJay and Folkways at the same time. And after 1962, when he moved full time to Paris, he became a staple of European jazz festivals, including the one at Montreux in Switzerland. His song, "Nobody Loves Me," which a reworking of an earlier blues,"Every Day I Have The Blues," with the original title given back to it, became a hit for Count Basie and Joe Williams, then Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and is now considered a jazz standard.
For his first Prestige session, he formed a trio made up of electric guitarist Lafayette Thomas, whose mostly rhythm and blues background included a steady gig for several years with Jimmy McCracklin, and Prestige regular Wendell Marshall. All the songs are Slim originals, with songwriting credits given to Peter Chatman, which was not Slim's real name either, but his father's. He was actually John Len Chatman, but he used "Peter" for all his songwriting and publishing. Co-writer credit goes to Marshall on "Teasin' the Blues," which has some very nice piano-bass duet parts, and to Thomas on "Nice Stuff," which has a walking guitar solo reminiscent of Jimmy McCracklin.
This session and a later one for Prestige were both distributed across two albums, Just Blues and No Strain. Either would be an excellent introduction to Memphis Slim both as piano player and singer, or to anyone's blues library. Both were released on Bluesville. "Darling I Love You" is marked in the session notes as "Rejected," but Slim must have liked the number, because he did it again in his November session, where Thomas' guitar was replaced by a harmonica, and that one became the first cut on No Strain.
For his third Prestige album as leader, Johnny "Hammond" Smith stays with his regular bassist, George Tucker, and reunites with Oliver Nelson, on whose earlier date he contributed as a sideman. Art Taylor is back in town for a little Prestige action (he'd played the Lem Winchester session a few days previously), so he joins the session, as does Ray Barretto.
Nelson is content to play a supporting role here, not contributing any original compositions, which is
a little unusual, considering his reputation as a composer. He appears on three tracks--"Minors Allowed," "Rip Tide" and "Bennie's Diggin'." He plays a supporting role on "Minors Allowed," but he really steps out front with Walter Donaldson's "Rip Tide," an uptempo number with the energy and drive of an earlier era and the virtuoso dexterity of bebop. It really becomes his number, and Smith rides along with him, on a melody that sounds as though it were written for a soul jazz interpretation. Nelson leads off "Bennie's Diggin'." playing the head, but it becomes much more of a two-man show.
As for the works of other composers, "A Portrait of Jennie" was the title song for a 1940s movie, by an unlikely source for a sentimental movie theme composer. J. Russel Robinson began his career as a teenage ragtime composer in the first decade of the last century. He co-wrote songs with W. C. Handy, composed blues for the classic blues singers of the 1920s like Lucille Hegamin, and wrote the novelty classic "Who Is That Funny Reefer Man?" for Cab Calloway in the 1930s. He had some very big hits, like "Margie," and a lot of good songs. "Portrait of Jennie" had been recorded by Clifford Brown in 1955, but it didn't really become a jazz standard until later in the 1960s, after Smith had laid down his version. Smith keeps it short and to the point, at less than two and a half minutes it might have been a good candidate for a 45 RPM release, but such was not to be the case.
The single from this session was "The End of a Love Affair," by Edward Redding, about whom ad executive who just got lucky with one tune; his New York Times obituary lists his occupation as composer and lyricist, and they even credit him with a nickname ("Bud"), so he must have been known to someone, and they give a list of mid-level lounge singers (Julie Wilson, Jane Morgan) that he wrote for, but no other songs. Still, "End of a Love Affair" must have made him a wealthy man all by itself. It's been recorded by nearly every pop singer, lounge singer, jazz singer and cabaret singer, as well as by a host of jazz notables, not that being recorded by jazz notables ever made anyone wealthy. It's a good song, but more than that, it has a message that at least someone on any night in any cabaret is going to want to hear. Smith's version features a catchy rhythm set by Ray Barretto, and if I had been Bob Weinstock, choosing between this and "Portrait of Jennie" for my jukebox release, I too would have gone for "End of a Love Affair."
virtually nothing is known except that he wrote "The End of a Love Affair," music and lyrics both. He doesn't seem to have been a janitor or
The final standard is Erroll Garner's "Misty," and here feels no need to stay within the bounds of a melody everyone knows so well, so he opens up nicely on the improvisation. "An Affair to Remember" is not the treacly movie theme, but a Smith original, as is "Talk That Talk," a title that sends a message of nothing but soul jazz, and that's what Smith delivers. That it became the title track of the album shows that Weinstock knows the direction Snith is headed in.
Esmond Edwards produced. The release was on New Jazz.
Prestige has welcomed several of the rhythm and blues stars of the 1940a into the jazz mainstream (where they always belonged), and now the king of the rhythm and blues saxophone. If you were a rhythm and blues fan become jazz fan in the 1950s, you couldn't help but love King Curtis. His 45 RPM single of "Birth of the Blues" was one of my all time favorites, and it probably paved the way for me to fall under the spell of John Coltrane.
King Curtis is given the Prestige treatment, with Esmond Edwards producing and some major jazz figures making up an all star quintet, including Nat Adderley making his Prestige debut and Paul Chambers making and increasingly infrequent return to the label of many of his early triumphs.
But he brings the King Curtis sound with him. The other rhythm and blues veterans, like Hal Singer and Willis Jackson, bring a little nostalgia with them, remembering the R&B of the classic 1940s era. Newer players like Eddie Davis and Shirley Scott, are looking forward to the new soul era of the 1960s. Curtis, though he did begin his career with Lionel Hampton (and though he did play with Ornette Coleman in high school) is solidly right now. And why not? His sound, on countless records for Atlantic and other labels, defined the R&B saxophone of the 1950s. He explores a lot more possibilities here, but it's still the King Curtis sound.
The big difference between jazz and rhythm and blues of this era? Length. Jazz was an LP music, R&B was tailored to 45s, the jukeboxes, the radio DJs whose audiences were used to that three-minute format. That meant that an R&B instrumental number was built almost entirely around the main solo instrument, be it saxophone, guitar, piano or even harmonica. A jazz tune can easily, with extended improvisation and with solo space given to every member of the ensemble, go eight to ten minutes or longer. Obviously, this creates a whole different dynamic.
The other players here are a mixed lot. Nat Adderley pulled a stint with Lionel Hampton, but his career was almost entirely within the modern jazz idiom, In that, he finds plenty of common ground with Curtis. He turns out to have been a good choice. Wynton Kelly has a wide-ranging musical vocabulary, and he works well here. The most interesting work on the session is turned in by Chambers and Oliver Jackson, who seem to have come prepared to have a good time. Chambers does some of his signature virtuoso solos, including a very strange and haunting bowed bass at the end of "In a Funky Groove," but he also does some unusual stuff, particularly on "Da Du Dah," and Jackson just doesn't hold anything back.
I'm guessing "Little Brother Soul" is Nat Adderley composition, but it may be a Curtis original paying tribute to Cannonball's little brother. Aside from "Willow Weep For Me," the others are all Curtis originals, and he shows some nice range.
The album was called The New Scene of King Curtis. It was released on New Jazz.
Just when I had despaired of ever seeing another bad pun in a jazz composition, Lem Winchester comes to my rescue with "Lem 'n Aide" from this session, and better than that, we have the album's title, Lem's Beat, a sly reference to Winchester's previous career as a police officer in Wilmington, Delaware.
Lem's aide on this session is Oliver Nelson, who wrote three of the tracks, played saxophone and is credited as arranger. Both Nelson and Winchester were to have lives cut short, and not attained the kind of reputation that longer lives might have afforded them. It's good they found each other for this session.
Curtis Peagler of the short-lived but interesting Modern Jazz Disciples rounds out the front line. Peagler mostly faded into obscurity with the rest of the disciples, but the little that he did put on record is worth attending to. He's joined on two tracks by a fellow Disciple, Billy Brown. The piano duties on the other tracks are handled by Roy Johnson, about whom I can find no other information. Perhaps he was someone Winchester knew from his early days in Delaware. The rest of the rhythm section is Wendell Marshall, ubiquitous, and Art Taylor, not heard from in a couple of months, both more than welcome.
Oliver Nelson, already recognized as one of the finest composers of his era, contributes three tunes, the melodic "Eddy's Dilemma," the riffy "Lem & Aide," and "Your Last Chance," which combines the best of both worlds. Nelson becomes the dominant voice on these, but Winchester is a strong partner, and Peagler proves to be an excellent choice as second saxophone, falling right in with Nelson's ideas and bringing his own voice to them.
Roy Johnson's contribution is "Lady Day," the shortest cut of the day at 2:51, haunting and moving, with Winchester and Peagler taking center stage.
"Just Friends" is back, and it's good to hear such a different take on it. And let's trust that they were all friends, and needed no persuasion to be so, since the other outside composition is the movie theme "Friendly Persuasion." My guess...Roy Johnson was a friend of Lem's from the old days? And from the compatibility of Nelson and Curtis Peagler, and the fact that piano duties were shared between Johnson and Billy Brown, maybe the disciples were old friends of Oliver's? And by this time, producer Esmond Edwards had to be pretty tight with Wendell Marshall and Art Taylor. "Friendly Persuasion" is a sentimental ballad by Dmitri Tiomkin that Winchester deals with by not trying to avoid the sentimentality, and it's a good choice. A nice number for friends to pitch in on.
What a difference Ray Barretto makes to a session!
Of course, it's not just him. Davis and Scott blow the cathedral ceilings off Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs shrine, and if you ever wondered if Moodsville meant "you can sneak this record on for your Jackie Gleason fans, and maybe they won't notice it's jazz," you can forget that right now. This is a session that left me thinking two things, and two things only. One, I'm so glad I'm a jazz fan and I get to experience music like this, and two, How is it possible that I never heard this before? So pardon me if I'm speechless for a while, as I just listen to the music a few more times, all the way through.
OK, I'm back. Still amazed. Eddie Davis plays right on that sweet spot at the cusp of bebop and rhythm and blues. Ray Barretto is the musician's musician on congas, equally adept at playing Latin or bebop, but sensitive as he is to the boppish tempos of Mr. Jaws, this one has that Latin edge all the way through. And Shirley Scott is the perfect accompanist to Davis's bebop and the perfect spur to send the music into the next decade. My God, she could play! And she was so inventive.
The Moodsville album which uses the bulk of this session's material begins with two numbers from an earlier trio session. Then it starts afresh with "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss," by Lee Morse, a singer of whom I was previously unaware, but she was a big deal in the 1920s, matched only by Ruth Etting for record sales.
Curious, I listened to Lee Morse's recording of "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss." She's a very nice singer, and in those days she had her own band, which included Eddie Lang and a couple of new kids named Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. She puts a twist of yearning into the song, Davis hears it a bit differently.
It's interesting that he hears it at all. Morse kept performing through the late 1940s, but by the end or th3 1920s alcohol had pretty much destroyed her. Her jump to superstardom was supposed to come in 1927 with the starring role in a Zeigfield musical, but on opening night she was too drunk to go on, and her place was taken...by Ruth Etting. Etting's signature songs, like "Love Me or Leave Me" and "Ten Cents a Dance" (should have been Morse's; it was from that musical) have become standards, but I can find no other version of "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss."
Davis takes the first solos at a good but not breakneck tempo, abetted by some tasty work from Wendell Marshall and Ray Barretto, nicely completing each other's thoughts, and some always ingenious comping from Scott. When she comes in about two thirds of the way through for her solo, you realize that as good as Davis has been, this is what you've been waiting for. She builds up to a series of crescendos, and then Davis comes back for a final version of the head, again with Barretto and Marshall, and with a sweet, yearning quality that's reminiscent of Lee Morse.
This is the beginning of an eclectic set. They follow with Frank Loesser's "Moon of Manakoora," originally sung by Dorothy Lamour in a movie (and yes, she was wearing a sarong). It's had a number of pop recordings, and a few jazz interpretations, starting with Benny Carter and also including Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Rowles. Davis, Scott and Barretto get pretty seriously into it, eleven minutes worth, Barretto starting the game with a challenging and seductive rhythm.
"Just Friends" was composed by John Klenner, who is not known for much else, but pretty nearly
everyone has recorded "Just Friends," with the honors probably going to Charlie Parker with strings. This version would have to be right up there, though, with the three principals spurring each other to new heights. "Speak Low" has a haunting melody by Kurt Weill, sensitively handled by Davis with Barretto providing a rhythmic counterpoint. Davis gets wilder as the number progresses, and by the time Scott joins in all bets are off, although Davis comes home to the melody at the end.
"I Wished on the Moon" was written by Ralph Rainger, who had an impressive career before dying young in a plane crash. It finishes up the album, but was the first tune to be recorded that day.
The Moodsville release was entitled Misty. and hit the shelves in 1963. The odd tune out for the day was Cole Porter's "From This Moment On." It was added to a 1967 release, Stompin'.
Most of this session went on a Moodsville album, along with four songs held back from an earlier date.
She had a new bass player for the date in George Tucker. Tucker had some experience accompanying organs, having played on Johnny "Hammond" Smith's two Prestige albums. She continued with Arthur Edgehill on drums.
She is perhaps a little more subdued for Moodsville. Musically, she continues to reward the listener, but with a more limited palette of sound. Rather than
seeking out new possibilities of electronic sound, she stays close to the sound of a piano, the percussive individual notes stretched just a little by the electronic sustain of the Hammond. So it is in its own way an experiment with the different possibilities of her instrument. As one of the most popular jazz musicians of the decade, she recorded a lot, both with Prestige and Blue Note, and later Impulse and Atlantic, and she was always going to find a way to make it interesting.
For the four Moodsville songs, she picked two Rodgers and Hart standards, "Spring is Here" and "I Didn't Know What Time it Was," and you can't go wrong with Rodgers and Hart. The other two are also ballads, and equally romantic, but from composers with interesting stories. "I Thought I'd Let You Know" was composed by Scott's fellow Philadelphian Cal Massey in an uncharacteristically romantic mood; Massey was to become best known for his uncompromising political stance on civil rights, which caused him to be blacklisted by some of the large corporate record labels.
Jimmy Davis (not the Louisiana governor who wrote "You Are My Sunshine") is best known for written for Billie Holiday which has become a classic, but his story is more than that, and worth remembering. Drafted in 1942, he refused to report to a segregated army and demanded that either be exempted or seconded to the Canadian army, which was integrated. When both demands were rejected, he chose prison over a segregated armed forces. He did eventually agree to join the army, and was sent to France in 1945 with a musical unit. He fell in love with the country, and eventually, like many other African-American musicians, became an expatriate.
"Lover Man," a song
"Bye Bye Blackbird" was held for a 1961 release, Shirley's Sounds; "Autumn Leaves" and her own composition, "Bridge Blue," had wait until 1966 and Workin'..
She also cut two tunes, "Crazy Rhythm" and "The Things You Are," with Earl Coleman. They were never released. Too bad. Coleman really never got his due.
This is Al Casey's first recording as a leader, but a long way from being his first rodeo. He started his career working with Fats Waller in 1933.
It was also a long way from being his last rodeo. In 1981 he would embark on what may have been his biggest success when he joined the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band. This was the opposite end of the spectrum from Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, whose members had to retire when they reached 16. To join the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, you had to be at least 80. Founded in t973, it is still going--needless to say, with none of its original members. At various times, it has been graced with the presence of Doc
Cheatham, Eddie Durham, Eddie Chamblee, Peck Morrison, Jay McShann, Claude Hopkins, Cozy Cole, and many other working jazzmen and women who'd lived long enough and could still play strong enough.
Casey, in 1960, had a regular gig with King Curtis. For this session, he drew on the Curtis band for sidemen, but went back to his Fats Waller days for musical inspiration, and even for musical talent, with reed man Rudy Powell.
When Casey joined the Waller band as a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old, Powell was 26 and a veteran of a number of regional bands including Rex Stewart's. He would hook up with Waller and Casey in 1935. He was still in demand in the 1960s, working with Jimmy Rushing, Buddy Tate and Ray Charles. He would eventually join the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Belton Evans was no newcomer to recording, but he may have been new to recording under the name of Belton. Previously, he had recorded as Sammy "Sticks" Evans, and every possible variation of that name: Sammy Evans, Sammie Evans, Sticks Evans, Stick Evans. So it seems that he finally decided to settle in, and use his real name?
Not exactly. Samuel Evans does appear to have been his real name; Lord knows where he came up with Belton. And his range as a drummer was as varied as his choice in names, from King Curtis and Wynonie Harris through LaVern Baker and Aretha Franklin through John Lewis, Bill Evans, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.
Jimmy Lewis was a guy who knew how to change with the times, moving from double bass with Count Basie to electric bass as that instrument became popular. Like Evans, he was on call for a wide range of recording sessions, from Wilson Pickett to the Modern Jazz
Quartet (he didn't replace Percy Heath, but added an electric bass to a session that featured the MJQ with a big band). He was a first call for gigs, too, as evidenced by some of the live albums he can be heard on: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, Alberta Hunter's Downhearted Blues: Live at the Cookery, and some live recordings of Otis Redding at the Apollo. This was his first Prestige session, but he would become a familiar face during the 1960s.
Herman Foster is mostly known for his work with Lou Donaldson, but he was with Casey in King Curtis ensemble at the time of this recording.
The music is just flat-out rewarding. It's always great to hear the Fats Waller classics, and of pariculat interest is "Buck Jumpin'," a tune originally written by Casey for the Fats Waller Orchestra, and here revived by the composer..
Buck Jumpin', appropriately, is the title of the album, and it was a Swingville release.
This may have been the best known of Lonnie Johnsons albums for Prestige. It featured a second guitarist who was also a second Chris Albertson career revival: Elmer Snowden, an important bandleader in the 1920s and 30s who had recorded little, and had completely fallen off the radar. Like Johnson, he was working a menial job in Philadelphia when Albetrson found him.
Elmer Snowden has one particularly unusual credential, He was the leader of a Washington, DC-based group called the Washingtonians. He brought the band to New York, but was having trouble getting bookings, so he sent to DC for an up-and-coming piano player, fella named Duke Ellington. You know the rest of the story
.In addition to Washingtonians like Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, Snowden over a long career as bandleader had Count Basie. Jimmie Lunceford. Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge and Chick Webb, so he must have been no slouch at developing and mentoring future bandleaders. He had started out as a banjo player, but as the call for the banjo in jazz faded away, he switched to guitar (though he would make a jazz banjo album for Riverside in the 1960s).
Accompanied by Wendell Marshall on base, the two guitar players had a day of it, recording 22 songs, of which ten were chosen for the original vinyl album release, although almost all of them would eventually come out on CD. There were some vocals, more instrumentals, as Johnson got his wish to be seen as more than just a blues singer. Just a couple of old guys who know everything and can play all night.
The ten selections that made the album are pretty representative of the whole session. "Haunted House" is an original 12-bar blues by Johnson. He also sings the Eubie Blake-Andy Razaf chestnut "Memories of You" with a lighter, breezier voice: Lonnie Johnson the jazz singer.
"Blues for Chris" is their first instrumental, a tribute to their rediscoverer and producer Chris Albertson. Composer credit is given to Albertson and Elmer Snowden, and it's a fun piece, with some nice blues licks by both guitarists and some solid work by Wendell Marshall.
"I Found a Dream" is another Johnson composition, but this one a dreamy ballad. The two guitars manage some bluesy licks with a Charles Brown feel, but the vocal channels pop balladeers of a different era. Johnson doesn't seem to have listened much to contemporary balladeers like Sam Cooke or Clyde McPhatter. He draws more on the style of Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, or the Irish tenors of his generation like Morton Downey or Dennis Day. But he ramps up into full vaudeville mode with "St. Louis Blues," not paying too much attention to W. C. Handy's careful construction, just having fun. And it is fun. Then he sort of marries all these styles, including his blues style, in an old pop song, "I'll Get Along Somehow," written by Arthur Marks and Buddy Fields. Listening to this one, my first thought was, "this could be the hit single," and it appears that Bob Weinstock thought the same thing, as it became a 45 RPM release.
Johnson and Snowden put their guitars together for a jam session on a traditional jazz tune, Kid Ory's "Savoy Blues," and the results are delightful. It's only one like it on the album, but "C-Jam Blues" and "Lester Leaps In" did eventually get released.
Johnson had recorded Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues" back in the 1920s, and with Snowden's help on guitar, he gives it the full blues treatment here.
Snowden's "Elmer's Blues" has a decidedly modern rhythm and blues feel. Well, maybe not modern for 1960, but certainly modern for 1950; not bad for a couple of old guys from the 1930s. Pretty damn good, in fact. And they finish up with Johnson's "He's a Jelly Roll Baker," which also made it onto a later Bluesville anthology called Bawdy Blues. The album was called Blues & Ballads, and was a Bluesville release. "I'll Get Along Somehow" was the first 45, with "Jelly Roll Baker" on the flip side, and it was also the second 45, this time with "Memories of You."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.
Of the subsidiary labels that Bob Weinstock created to swing into the new decade, Moodsville is the most debatable. Swing and blues are undeniably important and arguably underserved genres, at least in this time frame, but mood music? Isn't that just watered-down jazz?
Except it isn't. Chris Albertson has asserted that every session produced for Prestige was held to the same high musical standards, and if you look at the artists in the Moodsville catalog, they're not watered-down anything.
You can raise the chicken-and-egg question. Did Weinstock say, "Hey, let's bring Red Garland in for a solo piano session, and we can release it on Moodsville"? Or did Red lobby Weinstock for solo session, and did Bob then, listening to the finished product, say, "Hey, that could work for Moodsville"?
It's questions like this that keep me up at night. And I'm entitled. In fact, as both an intellectual and a jazz fanatic, I'm doubly entitled to wakeful nights pondering pointless and unanswerable questions.
Why don't I just shut up and listen to the music? I do that too.
You can get a lot of music in when you've just got a solo piano, and Garland recorded two albums' worth on this balmy April day (I looked it up; temperatures were 15 degrees above normal). In spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, but Garland was playing alone, and his fancy turned to being alone, to songs about love lost. He was also thinking random thoughts about the blues, and apparently playing tunes as they came into his mind, so ultimately they were separated out to make two albums, and I'll take the songs album track by album track, starting with Red Alone, which became the third Moodsville release.
He begins with "When Your Lover Has Gone," written by Einar Swan for the James Cagney movie Girl Crazy. Swan was a dance band musician turned composer, and you'd think there'd be next to nothing written about him, which was true until 2006, when Scandinavian historian chanced upon a mention of him, noted his unusual first name, decided he must be Finnish (he was--the family name was Joutsen, Finnish for Swan), decided to research him and ended by writing a 90-page biography. Swan's father emigrated from Finland because he heard that American workers had an 8-hour day which meant he would have time to study music. All his children were musical, and there was a family orchestra.
"These Foolish Things" was written by British composer Jack Strachey, who also composed "A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square." It's one of my favorite ballads.
The rest are mostly the work of composer royalty--Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Young.
"Nancy with the Laughing Face" was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers, and is generally thought to have been written for Frank Sinatra's wife, but it wasn't. Silvers had originally written as "Bessie with the Laughing Face, but that was apparently considered either too ethnic or too bovine.
Man does not live by Red Alone, so the remaining titles were gathered together in a second, album, Alone with the Blues, and as one can expect from Red Garland, there's a wide-ranging selection process, delivering a veritable history of the blues. Classic blues is represented by Leroy Carr's "In the Evening (when the Sun Goes Down)." We take a trip to Kansas City for Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner's "Wee Baby Blues." Ahmet Ertegun (as A. Nugetre) and pianist Harry Van Walls wrote "Chains of Love," which was an Atlantic recording for Big Joe. Jazz is represented across the decades: "Cloudy" by Mary Lou Williams; "Sent for You Yesterday (and Here You Come Today)" by Count Basie, Eddie Durham and Jimmy Rushing; "Blues in the Closet," by Oscar Pettiford; and John Coltrane's "Trane's Blues." All of it given the Garland touch.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.
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