Listening to Prestige 550 -- Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Barney Bigard

LISTEN TO ONE: Lula

 One of the wonderful things about jazz is its capacity, more than in almost any other music, to surprise you. Sometimes it surprises you with how unexpected it is, and it doesn't have to be on today's cutting edge to do that. You can listen to Charlie Parker and still be seized by a phrase that sounds as if it had been recorded this morning.  You can listen to Louis Armstrong for the hundredth time and suddenly understand all over again what Miles Davis meant when he said that there's nothing you can play on the trumpet that Armstrong hasn't played already, including the modern stuff.

And sometimes it just surprises you with how right it is. 

That's the case with this Swingville album by three guys who come to play, and who know how to play. And for many of them, with not much chance to record any more, which is why we're so grateful for this Swingville series. Verve was another label that kept classic jazz alive, but it tended to concentrate more on a few major stars.

That last was not so true of Ben Webster. He,  Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young formed the legendary triumvirate of classic tenor sax, and although Young lost the battle to illness and addiction, Hawkins and Webster went on recording prolifically throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Surprisingly, though Webster's career as a leading jazz artist goes back as far as the 1930s, he doesn't seem to have recorded as a leader until the mid-1950s. But he made up for lost time, first with a number of albums for Verve/Norgran, then with a variety of labels right up until his death in 1973 (his last is one of my personal all-time favorites, recorded in Spain three months before his death with the Belgian pianist Tete Montoliu, released as Gentle Ben on the Spanish Ensayo label and as Did You Call? in the US on Nessa). 

Ben Webster

Benny Carter lived to be a national treasure and also sustained an active recording career, making his last recording in 1995 at age 87. Like Hawkins, he made a number of recordings for Norman Granz, for Verve and Norgran in the 1950s, and later, in 1970s-80s, for Granz's Pablo Records. For both Carter and Hawkins, this was their only Prestige session.

Webster and Carter developed reputations that were not bound by an era or a genre. Barney Bigard, best known for his stints in the Ellington (1927-42) and Armstrong (1947-55 and 1960-61) orchestras--so closely associated with these two giants that is autobiography was entitled With Louis and the Duke--was much more associated with jazz nostalgia. In this session, he's able to join the other two B's in what I've come to think of as the Swingville style -- music played by swing era veterans with a modern touch, although Bigard, on clarinet, edges them a little more toward nostalgia.

The session was recorded in Los Angeles, so it features some West Coast musicians not customarily heard on Prestige recordings. One such is trumpeter Shorty Sherock, who did a lot of West Coast studio work, particularly with Nelson Riddle, with whose orchestra he can be heard backing up Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald and others. He also played with Jimmy Dorsey and Gene Krupa, and was a charter member of Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic in 1944.  Another full-time denizen of the West Coast was bassist Leroy Vinnegar, best known as one of the trio, with Andre Previn and Shelley Manne, who created the mega-selling hit record My Fair Lady Loves Jazz. 

Jimmy Rowles was more West Coast than not, although as one of the most sought-after accompanists of female jazz singers (Carmen McRae described him as  "the guy every girl singer in her right mind would like to work with") he traveled a lot. His reputation as an accompanist almost overshadows his work in instrumental settings, but a healthy cross section of major jazz instrumentalists, and he recorded prolifically as a leader, in trio settings or with larger groups, even singing on at least one album.

Dave Barbour was the one girl singer in particular wanted to work with. After a busy career in the 1930s, he married Peggy Lee and was her arranger/bandleader/co-writer ("Mañana," "It's a Good Day") until their 1951 divorce. After that he more or less dropped out of music--this session was one of his rare appearances.

Mel Lewis was more bicoastal, and is probably best known for the big band he co-led with Thad Jones for many years at the Village Vanguard in New York. He had played a couple of earlier Prestige gigs.

Leonard Feather produced, and wrote two of the numbers on the album ("Opening Blues" and "You Can't Tell the Difference When the Sun Goes Down Blues." Carter wrote the other two. The album was entitled BBB and Co., and was released on Swingville.