Listening to Prestige 516: Yusef Lateef

LISTEN TO ONE: Rasheed

 Into Something consists of three trio and four quartet tracks, the latter featuring Barry Harris on piano. On the album, these are intermingled, starting with the quartet piece “Rasheed,” and it’s a good place to start, with some of everything that made Lateef unique — the unusual lead instrument (in this case, oboe), the Middle Eastern influence, the blues roots. But actually the recording session started with the three trio pieces, so perhaps Harris was a little late for the gig, and they had to start without him. We know that Bob Weinstock didn’t believe in rehearsals, and valued spontaneity, so why not go with what have? Barry’ll be here soon enough, what works without him? Lateef had brought along three standards to go with his four originals—tunes he chose, he told Nat Hentoff who wrote the liner notes, because he particularly liked them, for various reasons. 

The one he started the session with, “When You’re Smiling,” was a favorite of his father, who used to sing it often. It was a good memory, and he liked the message of the song. Do modern jazz musicians, whose improvisatory lines wander way outside the melody, think of the yrics of a song as they play it? Some do, some don’t. Bill Evans has said that he never did. Lateef, by his account to Hentoff, was thinking of the lyrics to “When You’re Smiling,” and thinking of them in a context. 

Written in 1928, the first recording of the song (by Seger Ellis) featured a lead-in verse, almost universally ignored in later versions, about a blind man and a legless man who take care of each other, and go through life smiling. Louis Armstrong cut what is still the classic version in 1929, and his version is illuminated by the famous Armstrong style.

Jazz musicians have recorded it: Dave Brubeck, Errol Garner and Dick Hyman, Urbie Green and Sonny Stitt, all with a lilt. Lee Konitz recorded it, and even with Billy Bauer and a quartet of Tristano acolytes, he sounds positively jaunty. Who knows if they were thinking of the words? It's hard to believe that Konitz wasn't.

But Lateef apparently was thinking of the lyrics, but maybe not so much singing or reciting the lyrics in his head as he played. He may have been thinking more about his father's voice, because his version is gentle and pensive as he states the melody, then becomes fragmented and searching.

Lateef's original tunes express the range of his passions. "Koko's Tune," as the title suggests, is in the bebop vein, though gentled down somewhat from the lightning tempo of Charlie Parker's "Ko-Ko." But if the tempo is gentled, the intonation certainly isn't, going seamlessly from gutbucket blues growls to hard-edged modernity, spurred on by the driving complexity of Elvin Jones's drumming (Jones, Harris, and bassist Herman Wright make up the all-Detroit rhythm section).

"Water Pistol" is in much the same vein, with Jones demonstrating that he really is the new face of jazz drumming. He had been working steadily and had recorded widely since his 1955 arrival in New York. He had recorded as a leader on albums for Atlantic and Riverside, and he had already joined John Coltrane's great quartet, with whom he had worked on several sessions, including the ones that made up his My Favorite Things. 

"P. Bouk" shows more of the Middle Eastern influence, and also includes an effective solo by Wright. And "Rasheed," with Lateef on oboe, shows him at full fusion strength, blending blues, bop, and the Middle East. 

Also blending Middle Eastern voicing with classic Western melody is his flute-led "I'll Remember April," the Gene dePaul-composed jazz standard that made its debut in an Abbott and Costello film. It was the 45 RPM single from the session, with "Blues for the Orient" on the flip side.

It's hard to choose a "Listen to One" from this superior session, in which every song has something particular to reommend it, from Lateef's command of the blues to blistering solos by Jones, but I'll go with "Rasheed," as perhaps being the most distinctively Lateefesque.

Esmond Edwards produced. The album was released on both New Jazz and Prestige, with "I'll Remember April" / "Blues for the Orient" as a Prestige single.

Listening to Prestige 515: John Wright

LISTEN TO ONE: Les I Can't

 John Wright is back in the Big Apple (more precisely, Englewood Cliffs) from his home on the South Side of Chicago for one more session with Prestige, his fourth of five, although it would be the last released, bringing one of his South Side soul regulars with him--drummer Walter McCants--and picking up some Detroit-to-New York soul with Gene Taylor, then working regularly as Horace Silver's bassist.

Wright's recording career was almost nonexistent outside of these five Prestige albums. He made one other recording for a small independent label 30 years later. Prestige brought him in to play piano on a recording by blues singer Arbee Stidham, where he transformed Brownie McGhee's folk blues "Pawnshop Blues"

into a jazz gem, but there's nothing at all beyond those. Unfortunately, the answer is that most of those intervening years were spent inside a bottle. Prestige "had big plans for me," he told an interviewer years later. "But my choice of getting high was whiskey, and that was my downfall."

When he finally did escape from that whiskey trap, he stayed at home in Chicago, where he began what became a Chicago tradition -- the Wright Gathering. First organized in his home in suburban Chicago, it featured his music and the cooking of his third wife Evelyn, who would prepare the whole year for it, cooking and freezing food for the big day. When Evelyn died in 2007, he thought that would be the end of the Wright Gatherings, but friends and admirers took over the cooking and organizing, and the now-popular event was moved to a nearby park.

Prestige had Red Garland, whose trio and solo albums were popular, but he was winding up his time with the label, and perhaps they hoped Wright would fill that slot. He certainly could have, had it not been for the booze. He was a wonderful musician. This session is a mixture of originals and standard ballads. The standards -- "Stella by Starlight," "But Beautiful," "More Than You Know," "Be My Love," "'Deed I Do," are all particularly beautiful melodies, given just enough of a blues treatment to reincarnate them in Wright's image. Wright has a way of playing, and of getting into a number, that gives one the feeling of a man completely in that moment, and giving his all to it. 

For me, this feeling comes across most powerfully in one of his originals, "Les I Can't." I don't know what the title refers to. A tribute to Les McCann? But McCann was on the West Coast, just getting started, hardly a household name yet. Sammy Davis Jr.? But that phrase would not be associated with the singer for another few years. It doesn't matter. John Wright can, and he does.

Wright would record one more album for Prestige, but this would be the last one released, being held in the can until 1965, by which time Wright was all but forgotten, so one suspects it didn't get heard much. If not, that's a shame. Listen to this one. It'll enrich your soul and your concept of soul jazz. Esmond Edwards produced, and the 1965 release was on New Jazz.

Listening to Prestige 514: Willis Jackson

LISTEN TO ONE: Jambalaya (45 RPM)

 This is like one of those Prestige early days sessions, back in 1949-1951, when a band would come in to cut four sides for a couple of 78 RPM releases. In this case, though, the four sides are to flesh out an album which the Prestige brain trust must have suddenly realized needed fleshing out--they had more than enough material in the can for an album, not quite enough for two albums. So they got the band back together for one more session, although none of this material would actually be released for a few more years.

"Getting the band back together" mostly meant Willis Jackson, whose star maintained a steady wattage, and Jack McDuff, whose incandescence was steeply ascendant, more so that Bill Jennings, whose star was

fading, and who in fact did not solo to speak of on these four cuts, which is too bad, because he was a wonderful guitarist. But he still adds to the sound of a very tight group with three front men who have logged a whole lot of hours together.

The session features two originals by Jackson, and two songs by very different composers. "Without a Song" was written by Vincent Youmans, an early composer for musical theater, for a 1929 musical, Great Day, which was pretty much of a flop, but did produce two memorable songs, this one and "More Than You Know." A favorite of big-voiced singers, it's also had many jazz incarnations. 

The other is a little more unusual. Hank Williams is one of the great American songwriters and, like so many others in the American tradition, deeply influenced by the blues, but country songs and jazz musicians have rarely crossed paths. This was almost certainly the first cover of a Hank Williams song by a jazz musician, and I might have guessed the only one...but not quite. In 1994, Joe Pass collaborated with Roy Clark, a musician most closely associated with country (he was one of the stars of Hee Haw), but a guitar virtuoso who could and did play anything, on an album of Hank Williams songs. "Jambalaya" is Williams' reworking of an old Cajun melody, "Grand Texas." The original was a sad love song; in Williams's hands it became a celebration of Louisiana Cajun life. Jackson gives it some blues, and gives it some good times.

Frank Shea and Jimmy Lewis, from King Curtis'

s band, rounded out the quintet for this session.

The various sessions which reunited Jackson, McDuff and Jennings, from late 1959 through this one at the end of 1961, all produced by Esmond Edwards, were collected on two LPs, neither of which was released right away. The first, Together Again, came out in 1965. The second, Together Again, Again, which included all four of these cuts, was a 1966 release. Both album covers tout Jackson and McDuff, not Jennings, coming together again, and again.

"Jambalaya" was released as a 45 RPM single with "Thunderbird," from a 1962 Jackson album. "Without a Song" and "Backtrack" came out as Tru-Sound 45. Since there was no Tru-Sound in 1966, the time of the album release, I would guess that both of these singles came out much earlier.

Jon Richards Cartoon

 

Listening to Prestige 513: Eddie Kirkland

LISTEN TO ONE: Train Done Gone

Two items of note, here. First, Eddie Kirkland himself, one of the great blues performers of his generation. Although outgunned in reputation by Chess Records's stable of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley and all, he was outgunned by no one when it came to delivering hard driving blues. Second, a rare, probably unique, opportunity to hear King Curtis and Oliver Nelson playing together.

That second one might be a bit of a letdown. King Curtis's band was brought in to back up Kirkland, and Nelson...? Perhaps he had stopped by the studio in Englewood Cliffs for some other reason, and decided it

would be fun to sit in, and a bit of something different. This was, after all, the blues and the concrete truth. Or perhaps there was a personal connection--Nelson would sit in again with the Curtis band on Kirkland's second Prestige session, the following year.

Neither Nelson nor Curtis solos, but the ensemble gives a fullness to what is first and foremost a Kirkland session, with the blues man's forceful and commanding voice, guitar and harmonica. It's the blues man, and it's the blues, man. Love gone wrong dominates the session thematically, and there's no arguing with that as a solid basis for the blues.

This was Kirkland's first album, and the only one on which the tag "Blues Man" was added to his name. If he was to be known by a nickname, it was more often "Gypsy of the Blues," because of his nonstop touring schedule. He did release one single--his first--as "Little Eddie Kirkland," on the West Coast RPM label, and he recorded a couple of sides in 1963 as Eddie Kirk. Those were for Volt Records, one half of the legendary soul labels Stax-Volt, during the time when he was bandleader for Volt's superstar performer, Otis Redding.

Kirkland was born in Jamaica but raised in Alabama. He toured with a medicine show in his teens, then joined the army, where a fight with a racist officer brought him a dishonorable discharge. From there he made his way to Detroit, where his mother was then living, and his guitar skills brought him to the attention of John Lee Hooker, with whom he toured from 1949 to 1962. From then on, following the gig with Otis Redding, he continued as a solo act, although he did also work with other artists, including  Little Richard, Ben E. King, Ruth Brown and Little Johnnie Taylor. He died in 2011 in an automobile accident.

It's the Blues Man! was released on Tru-Sound, and it has come to be regarded by many blues enthusiasts as Kirkland's best work. One track from the session "Man of Stone," was covered by the British blues band John Mayall's Bluesbreakers,. Tru-Sound also released "Train Done Gone" and "Something's Gone Wrong in My Life" on 45 RPM, while "Chill Me Baby" was matched with "Have Mercy on Me," from Kirkland's second Prestige session, in 1962. the 45 was released in 1964 on the Prestige label, Tru-Sound being no more by that time.

"Train Done Gone" had a parallel life, being also released on 45 by the tiny Detroit blues and soul label, Lu Pine, with "I Tried" on the flip side. Lu Pine did a lot of good stuff, but they're probably best remembered by music historians for "Tears of Sorrow" / "Pretty Baby," by the Primettes. The record flopped, but another Detroit music entrepreneur, Berry Gordy, liked the group's sound, signed them to his own label, and changed their name to the Supremes.

Music writer Elijah Wald once said of him, "For pure energy and emotion, he may be the greatest blues artist alive."