Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
This is McPherson's second Prestige album, and he hasn't lost his love for pure bebop. In fact, he never did, and although he may have seemed a little retro in 1965, both he and his mentor Barry Harris came to be recognized as national treasures for keeping alive the inventive musical style brought to life by McPherson's hero, Charlie Parker.
In a 2019 80th birthday tribute to twin octogenarians McPherson and McCoy Tyner at Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center's also saxophonist Sherman Irby paid this tribute: “The bebop master is a true alto saxophonist. He plays the instrument with fire, passion and precision. He can pull your heartstrings with one note, and dazzle you with virtuosity and
imagination. There is only one Bird, one Stitt, one Cannonball—and one Charles McPherson.”
In 2020, McPherson laid to rest the old canard that you can't dance to bebop with a striking new album. Jazz Dance Suites, which led the British jazz blog Bebop Spoken Here to enthuse:"Magnificent sounds somewhat inadequate! I doubt there will be a better album released this year. It is just so listenable, so danceable, so everything …"
And Mark Stryker, writing about his 2024 release, Reverence, said "More than six decades into a remarkable career, few command and deserve our reverence quite like Charles McPherson.”
So...in 1965, they may not have been talking about McPherson as the newest sound in town, but he was making music that people still wanted to hear, as evidenced by his six Prestige albums in four years -- and as evidenced by the fact that over six decades, he has never been far from the recording studio.
And if this session doesn't exactly bring you back to 1965, it does something much more important--it brings you into the heart of jazz. McPherson has assembled a cohesive group with Clifford Jordan joining him as his companion saxophonist, Harris on piano, George Tucker on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums.
They tip their hats to the progenitors of bebop, with compositions by Charlie Parker ("Chasin' the Bird"), Dizzy Gillespie ("Con Alma:), Thelonious Monk ("Eronel") and Dexter Gordon/Bud Powell ("Dexter Rides Again"). There's one original composition, "I Don't Know."
It's hard, from a distance of years, to imagine the reception McPherson got in 1965. Was McPherson irrelevant? Was he trying to pretend it was still 1955, or even 1945? Or was he a refreshing antidote to the dumbing down of bebop by the soul jazzers, or the incomprehensible navel-gazing of the free spirits?
It's hard to imagine from a perspective of today's listeners, for most of whom what 1945, 1955 and 1965 have in common is that they all happened before they were born. No one is likely to sit down on a rainy afternoon and play, in succession, albums by Jack McDuff, Albert Ayler and Charles McPherson. Conversely, not many contemporary listeners are going to listen to a few bars of Con Alms, rip it off the turntable (my imagined listener is a technological purist), say "What is this shit? Give me the real thing!" and put on a 78 of Bird on Dial.
Today it's just the music, and interpretations of Bird, Diz, Monk, Duke and Dexter, if they're played by someone good, are going to sound good, which is the best you can hope for from a piece of music.
I'm back! Listening to Prestige the book -- a history of Prestige Records -- is in production, and will be published this winter by SUNY Press. So I'm back to the blog again, and will continue my mission to listen to, and respond to, every Prestige session.
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.
You look at an album, and you see that the tunes on it are by Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, and you start to get the feeling that this guy is serious about his bebop. That the two remaning tunes are by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein will do nothing to dissuade you from that opinion. And then if you notice that the album is titled Bebop Revisited, even if you've never heard of the guy, you've got reason enough to pick up the album.
Of course, this is 2023, so you already know that Charles McPherson is one of the revered elder statesmen of jazz, with a career that few can match. But if it were 1964, and you were standing in Sam Goody's looking over the new jazz releases, you might not be so familiar with the name.
You might. McPherson had been playing and recording with Charles Mingus for three years by then. But this was his first recording as a leader. So you look at the names of the composers, and the names of the tunes: "Hot House," "Variations on a Blues by Bird," and if you're an old timer of, say 27 or 28, and you're already regretting the passing of the bebop era, you're definitely starting to be intrigued.
And if you start reading the liner notes by Ira Gitler, a real old timer in his thirties, you discover that Ira, too, misses the bebop era, and is saddened by the fact that younger musicians who play "hard bop" are not really challenging themselves -- they play the "simpler [bebop] tunes like 'Now's the Time' rather than 'Billie's Bounce,' 'Relaxin' at Camarillo' or 'Shaw 'Nuff.'"
And you'll certainly, as you plunk down your $3.98 for the album, be intrigued by the presence of Barry Harris, an uncompromising bebopper still playing in the new era and still making great music.
And in fact, McPherson had been a protégé of Harris's for quite some time, going back to when he was 14, newly moved to Detroit from Joplin, Missouri, and living on the same block as Harris and Lonnie Hillyer, another young teenager in love with music. McPherson and Hillyer used to sit outside the local club--also on the same street--where Harris played, and talk to the musicians when they stepped outside to take a break and grab a smoke or some fresh air.
McPherson started taking music lessons from Harris, but he soon found out that the pianist had a lot more to teach him than that. In a videotaped interview, he remembered showing Harris his report card, which was all C's,
And I thought that was fine...I was focused on other things than homework. As long as I'm not the dumbest guy in the room...he said, "I see you got a bunch of C's. You're quite ordinary, aren't you?" And I said -- I was proud of it -- "Yes, I am." And he said, "Well, I'm going to tell you. The kind of guys you like -- your musical heroes -- are anything but ordinary. If you want to learn to play this music, you can't be a C anything." And the moment he said that, it changed my whole way of thinking. He said, "Do you ever read?" I said no. "Do you ever do puzzles?" No. He said, "OK, let's start by doing the puzzles," and he brought out a newspaper -- the New York Times -- and I noticed that he could read the whole New York Times, the editorials, so he knew about...and I had not a clue. So I started reading, and I started doing the puzzles.
And Barry Harris had friends, people like Pepper Adams, who would come to his house, and I would listen to these guys talk, and quite often they would talk about things that had nothing to do with music. They would be talking about de Maupassant, Nietszche, Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, they'd talk about Henry Miller and this book, Tropic of Capricorn, and I had not a clue that this was what jazz people...and I learned that, at least in Detroit, in order to be considered hip, not only did you have to know about Bird, and this kind of music, you had to know about painting, you had to know about philosophy, and if you could talk, and you had something to say, then you were considered hip.
Well, I've talked about Detroit before, and how it was one of the greatest schools of music in those days, but clearly with guys like Barry Harris and Pepper Adams around, it was a lot more than that,
And they would say, "Hey man, do you know that Charlie Parker can go to a museum and identify Marc Chagall, or Matisse, or Miro -- he could just look at a painting and say 'Oh, this is cubism' -- these people are great thinkers, as well as wonderful musicians, and if you want to be like that, you have to read.
Barry Harris gave young Charles a lesson that stayed with him for life. Harris, and Pepper Adams -- he doesn't mention Wardell Gray, but Gray was around Detroit in those days too, and he was another who valued learning. And Charlie Parker -- in another interview, given just this year, he recalled, “Bird could sit down and talk about quantum mechanics. Our notion of hip was a broad thing, and Bird’s the guy who started to make it that way.”
And McPherson paid it forward. The interviewer, Andrew Gilbert, mentions Rob Schneiderman, a fine young pianist who worked with McPherson, listened to McPherson, and went on to get a Ph. D. in mathematics at the University of California:
He credits his early conversations with McPherson about Einstein’s theory of spacetime with setting him on the path that led to his love of math (and his current position as a professor of mathematics at City University of New York’s Lehman College).
“Charles McPherson loves talking about Einstein’s theories,” Schneiderman said. “You look at all these books for the lay person on Einstein and you realize you’ve got to learn calculus in order to understand physics and why time stands still at the speed of light.”
All of this is completely irrelevant to a discussion of the music.
All of this is crucial to a discussion of the music.
Both of the above statements are true. But at any rate, we're back in 1964, and Charles McPherson, with Barry Harris, is in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, making an album of bebop, the music to which Charlie Parker brought his love of Marc Chagall, and Igor Stravinsky, and the blues. As did Barry Harris. As did young Charles McPherson.
It is ridiculous to suggest that in just a few years, bebop had exhausted everything it was possible to say within its framework, any more than it makes sense to say that the English language sonnet had run its course as a viable form after a couple of hot decades in the 16th century. Charles McPherson finds plenty to discover and build on in its complex use of chording, rapid tempi, and deconstruction of melody. His tone has a sweet lyricism to it, and it can reach to intellectually challenging improvisational passages or emotional immediacy in the Illinois Jacquet mode.
He is joined by Barry Harris, with whom he had of course had a long association, and Carmell Jones, with whom he had never worked before. Jones had spent time in California, where he had worked in movie studio orchestras and recorded with Bud Shank, Harold Land and Teddy Edwards. Coming east, he had been on Horace Silver's Song for My Father. He did not record again with McPherson, which is too bad, because they meshed well together; but he basically didn't stick around New York for too long. He did a couple of Prestige sessions with Booker Ervin, but then headed to Europe, where he spent the rest of his career as an expatriate, gaining less name recognition but more respect.
Barry Harris leads an outstanding rhythm section of Albert "Tootie" Heath and Nelson Boyd. Boyd came from Philadelphia, perhaps second only to Detroit for gestation of jazz talent, and he came by his bebop credentials honestly, having played with Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro. This session seems to have marked the end of his recording career, although he lived until 1985.
And of course, Harris's solos are invaluable.
Charles McPherson With Carmell Jones And Barry Harris - Bebop Revisited! was produced by Don Schlitten.
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.
By 1961, Yusef Lateef had completed his move from Detroit to New York. In 1960, he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music. He would continue his studies off and on, eventually getting a BA (1969) and and MA (1970), then going on to get his Ed.D. And he was, although still playing in a jazz context, using jazz musicians and recording for a jazz label, already moving counter to a lot of what jazz was expected to do, perhaps more toward what he would come to call autophysiopsychic music --“music from one's physical, mental and spiritual self.” He was continuing to work a lot with musicians who had come with him from Detroit--in this case, Barry Harris and Ernie Farrow,
half-brother of Alice McLeod, who became Alice Coltrane--and who had become accustomed to his middle eastern influence and his often unusual instruments. But he had begun working with a New Yorker on drums--Lex Humphries, who had been with him on two previous albums for Riverside.
Lateef called this one Eastern Sounds, and that's a fitting title. Most of the compositions are his, and they reflect his love for Arabic music, but not just that. The sounds are truly eclectic. "Blues for the Orient" is a good example of this, starting with the two-worlds yoking in the title. Lateef plays the flute, and to my ear it's more Near Eastern than what we used to call "the Orient" - China, Japan, Korea, etc. But it's haunting and multicultural. And at the same time, Barry Harris, accompanying him, is playing the blues.When Harris takes an extended solo, he starts off on his own world music tangent, but then brings it around to the blues--and not the soul jazz, funk-drenched blues that were becoming so popular in the early 1960s, but very boppish, very Detroit-ish blues, earthy and cerebral at the same time. He and Lateef complement each other in unconventional but undeniable ways.
"Plum Blossom" is in a way more western, in other ways not. Harris is definitely in a boppish mood, and Lateef is not far away, but he's working with a most unusual instrument. The session notes call it a bamboo flute, but that it is not. It's sometimes called a xun, sometimes a Chinese globular flute. It looks a little like an ocarina, with it's globular shape, but it's played more like a jug from a rural jug band, by blowing into the top, but with finger holes around the ovoid shape.
It's not hard to tell why Lateef reached out of his Detroit orbit to pull in Lex Humphries. Probably best known in 1961 as the drummer on Art Farmer and Benny Golson's immensely popular and solidly hard bop Meet the Jazztet album, but he was capable of reaching outside what were usually thought of as jazz time signatures, which is what made him so valuable to Lateef and later to Sun Ra. His drumming on this session is a revelation, outside the box but always on point.
So you have three musicians, two from Detroit and one from New York, two searching outside the normal traditions of jazz and one working creatively within those traditions. Redefining jazz, yes, but jazz is always about redefinition, so it's not so far-fetched to say that Lateef, Harris, Humphries and Farrow are working in the tradition, playing jazz, finding new ways, and the old ways, to play jazz.
Ernie Farrow contributes importantly as well, playing bass and also an instrument called, in the session log and liner notes, a rabat, but Rabat is the capital of Morocco, not a musical instrument. He seems to have been playing a rabab, an Arabic stringed instrument played with a bow. Both the xun and the rababare ancient instruments.
But the biggest splash was not made by one of Lateef's compositions, but by an unlikely selection. One of the three non-Lateef numbers was Jimmy McHugh's "Don't Blame Me," from an obscure 1932 Broadway revue called Clowns in Clover, but that's not the unlikely one. Obscure Broadway revues or obscure grade B films often produced memorable tunes (like the melody from the forgotten
prison break movie Unchained), and "Don't Blame Me" had already entered the jazz repertoire, with recordings by Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins and J. J. Johnson. No, much more unlikely for an against-the-grain jazzman with a taste for the Near East were two lush orchestral themes from big-budget movies, "Love Theme from The Robe" and "Love Theme from Spartacus."
And even more unlikely, not only did "Love Theme from Spartacus" become the breakout hit from the album, it remained one of Lateef's most popular numbers, and a lot of other jazz musicians subsequently had a go at it, including Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis, Gabor Szabo and Ahmad Jamal. And it's not hard to see why. It has a good groove from Harris, very full and very beautiful, and exotic flute solos from Lateef. It gets to you.
Eastern Sounds came out on Moodsville, and it certainly sets a mood. It generated three 45 RPM singles, although two of them were "Love Theme from Spartacus," once with "Snafu" from this session, and once with "Sea Breeze" from the earlier Cry! -- Tender. The other 45 was "Blues for the Orient," which was coupled with the standard "I'll Remember April," from Into Something, recorded in December of 1961. Esmond Edwards produced.
On the session index, this is listed as the Prestige All Stars, the first but not the last time this designation would be used. Presumably, a bunch of contract players were rounded up for the Fridays at Rudy's session, but none of them were specifically signed on as leader, so they let the producer (can't find out who produced this session) select the tunes and organize the session.
Not sure how this differs from other sessions. Did they tell Hank Mobley, "Hey, we want you to put together a combo for a recording session this week -- oh, but you'll be using Watkins and Taylor"? Or maybe these were all basically Prestige All Stars sessions, but only now did they decide to call it that. Presumably the leader would bring in the tunes, or most of them. In this nominally leaderless session, they included a tune that was composed by a contemporary jazzer who's not on the session: Kenny Drew's "Contour." Probably Jackie McLean brought it in--he had an affinity for the tune, had played it just recently on one of his 4, 5 and 6 dates (Donald Byrd was on that session, too). In any event, it's a fine tune, and more people should record it, and actually, several have.
Certainly, McLean must have brought "Dig" to the session, given that it's his composition, even though Miles grabbed the composer credit for it, and whatever royalties it accrued, but this is jazz, so there probably weren't many, as McLean was told when he looked into suing Miles -- it wouldn't be worth it.
"The Third" is a Donald Byrd composition, so one figures he brought it in. He probably also brought "'Round Midnight," since he's the only horn on that track. Art Farmer takes "When Your Lover Has Gone" on his own, so it's likely his choice.
"Dig" is the centerpiece of the album, at nearly 15 minutes. I was interested to see how it compared to the version that was laid down the day Jackie first brought it into the studio to record with Miles and Sonny Rollins. The Davis-Rollins-McLean version is more melodic, the Prestige All Stars more intense--and at this length, that intensity has to be sustained, and it is. All the soloists are powerful. I started to try to name a favorite, but I can't.
However far afield an improvisation goes, if there's going to be enough meat to sustain it for 15 minutes, it's got to be a very good tune to start with, and "Dig" is. I'm surprised it hasn't been covered more often.
When the album was actually pressed and given a cover and released, it was called 2 Trumpets and credited to Farmer and Byrd. A rerelease was again Farmer and Byrd, and called Trumpets All Out, and a much much later rerelease just had Byrd's name above the title, which was House of Byrd.
Hank Mobley is mostly associated with Blue Note, but he did show up for a handful of Prestige sessions in 1956, starting with Elmo Hope in May, and continuing on into the summer, including two sessions as leader, this being the first.
He shows a healthy respect for the classics here, from pop and particularly from bebop, choosing tunes by Rodgers and Hart, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker--and two of his own compositions, which shows a healthy ego. Neither "Minor Disturbance" nor "Alternating Current" have become jazz standards, but Mobley did go on to become a composer of some note.
Monk composed "52nd Street Theme" in 1944, when 52nd Street was the nerve center of bebop, and Mobley was 14 years old. Powell composed "Bouncing With Bud" in 1946, the year that Mobley took up the tenor saxophone--late, for a guy who mastered it as fully as he did, and almost by accident. He had played the piano before that, as had his mother and grandmother before him, but when he was 16 he was housebound for several months with an illness, and an uncle gave him a saxophone to occupy his time.
He picked it up very quickly -- by 19 he was working with Paul Gayten's rhythm and blues band, and as yet another demonstration of how good those R&B bands of the late 40s and early 50s were, this one included Cecil Payne, Clark Terry, Aaron Bell, Sam Woodyard and Walter Davis, Jr. And young Mobley stood out even in that all-star aggregation. Recalling those days, Gayten said, "Hank was beautiful, he played alto, tenor and baritone and did a lot of the writing. He took care of business and I could leave things up to him." The tenor sax solo on Gayten's recording "Each Time" may or may not be Mobley--opinions differ.
By 1951, when Bird wrote and recorded "Au Privave," Mobley was a full-fledged member of the elite jazz community--not bad for a late starter. He and Davis were backing jazz stars like Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon and Lester Young as the house band in a Newark jazz club, and one of those visitors, Max Roach, hired the two of them and brought them to New York, where Mobley's gigs included bebop heaven -- Minton's, as part of a Horace Silver-led house band which also included Doug Watkins.
So with tunes by Monk, Bud, and Bird, Mobley embraces bebop in this session, though he was later to become known as the pre-eminent hard bop tenor player--a distinction which I don't particularly care to recognize, as I've made clear before. But that's OK, I don't particularly care to recognize a firm distinction between bebop and rhythm and blues, either.
It's great to hear these classic tunes brought into the framework of a straight-ahead Prestige jam session, particularly "Au Privave." It's always good to be reminded of what an amazing artist Bird was, as composer as well as soloist.
Mal Waldron may have had other plans, because Barry Harris is in as the piano player for this second
July 20th session. Harris would eventually settle in New York, but in 1956 he was on loan from Detroit's jazz hotbed, and among the places I'd go to if I could time travel, Detroit's Blue Bird Inn in the 40s and 50s would be high on the list. Harris is solid throughout, and contributes some hot solos.
Prestige released this session as Mobley's Message,and it's billed as the Hank Mobley Sextet, though it's only a sextet for "Au Privave," when Jackie McLean joins the group. And Donald Byrd drops out on "Little Girl Blue," making that a quartet number. It was later rereleased as Hank Mobley's Message, perhaps so no one would confuse the tenor player with Miss America Mary Ann Mobley.
