Listening to Prestige 323: Oliver Nelson

There's a gap here. I can't find anything streaming online from Jerome Richardson's October 21 session, which produced the album Roamin' with Richardson. And I don't have it in my vinyl collection. So unless someone would like to digitize it and send it to me, it'll have to wait till I get a book contract and can afford to go back and buy the missing albums at whatever collector prices I can find.

Prestige presents the debut album of another major talent who would help to define the jazz of the 1960s, as a musician and even more as a composer--and whose life would be cut short. Not like Lem Winchester's, shorter than it should have been. He would die of a heart attack at age 43.

Nelson woke up to an awareness of music that was beyond what he had grown up with--a musical education that included an older brother who was in Cootie Williams's orchestra, and his own stint playing with Louis Jordan's Tympani Five--when he joined the Army during the Korean War, and found himself overseas in Japan and Korea. But it wasn't the music of Asia that turned his head. He had to go all the way to Japan to discover the music of the West: a Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra performance of t he music of Ravel and Hindemith. Before that, he told Ebony reporter Phyl Garland, "I hadn't even known that Negroes were allowed to go to concerts."

He was still committed to jazz, but his way to it went through a classical education. After the Army, he enrolled at Washington University in St, Louis, where jazz was a word not even mentioned in the music department, but he studied with important composers like Elliot Carter and got a grounding in composition that would stand him in good stead later--for example, when the Eastman Orchestra of Rochester, New York, premiered one of his pieces, "and the reviewers didn’t know where it belongs. You can’t tell where the jazz stops and where the classical music begins" (from an interview with John Cobley). And in 1966, he would be asked to come back to St. Louis and start a jazz program at Washington U.

He continued his postgraduate education playing in the bands of Erskine Hawkins, Wild Bill Davis, and Louie Bellson, and honed his composer/arranger chops as the house arranger at the Apollo Theater, which must have been an interesting job.

For his first album as a leader, producer Esmond Edwards has given him some of Prestige's finest for a rhythm section, plus trumpeter Kenny Dorham, not quite a regular, but here making his eighth appearance on a Prestige recording.  They've chosen four original Nelson compositions, plus one by Billy Strayhorn ("Passion Flower") and one by Bob Haggard ("What's New?") All of his own work has both immediacy and sublety, and shows a composer who will go on to become justly celebrated.  I particularly liked "Jams and Jellies," which has a catchy blues melody, and opens itself up to terrific solos by Nelson, Ray Bryant and Kenny Dorham. And in this case, I sincerely believe it must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that.

 "Ostinato" is particularly interesting. "Ostinato" is an Italian word meaning obstinate or stubborn, and in music it describes a musical phrase that keeps repeating, that won't go away. Ravel's "Bolero" is frequently used as an example, but in the world of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and even jazz, it's pretty common. Think "Tequila," or Doc Pomus's "Lonely Avenue," best known in the recording by Ray Charles. Nelson's "Ostinato" is the work of composer seriously grounded in music theory, and of a guy who knows how to have fun.

Esmond Edwards produced. The New Jazz recording was called, appropriately, Meet Oliver Nelson.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

 

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                        --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell