Listening to Prestige Part 176: Bennie Green

I'm guessing that not all that many jazz fans have this record in their collections, and those that do not are missing out on a treat.

Maybe Bennie Green never got his due. One website that makes lists and rankings puts him at #31 on its list of greatest jazz trombonists of all time (Bill Harris, who won several DownBeat polls in the early 50s, is #32). A site called The Trombone Forum has a discussion of the greatest jazz trombone recordings of all time, and Bennie Green is not mentioned by anyone.

This is just wrong. But even so, if you were inspired by my earlier praise, and decided to pick up a Bennie Green album. you probably wouldn't choose this one. You might go for the earlier 1956 session with Art Farmer and Philly Joe Jones. Or the one from 1955 with Charlie Rouse and Paul Chambers, or the one that added Candido to that mix. Or you might go back to 1951 and the session with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Art Blakey and Tommy Potter.

In short, faced with a blind choice of which record to take a chance on, you'd go with the chalk--the sidemen you've heard of.

Don't do it. Well, do it. Those are all terrific albums. But don't overlook this one with the sidemen you've probably never heard of.

Look at it this way. For Blakey or Farmer or even a brand new cat on the scene, 19-year-old Paul Chambers, this was another gig. For these guys, it may well have seemed the opportunity of a lifetime--a small group session on Prestige!

I don't mean that these weren't highly respected professionals. Green didn't pull them out of thin air.

Eric Dixon was 26 when this session went down, and he had a long and productive career ahead of him. He went on to appear, by some counts, on over 200 recordings, including some other small group sessions for Prestige/New Jazz in the 60s: Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Kenny Burrell, Etta Jones and Mal Waldron. But his main gig starting around the turn of the decade and going on for two more decades, including many recordings, was with the Count Basie orchestra. His one record as leader came in 1974, for the Master Jazz Recordings label, and featured both Lloyd Mayers and Bill English.

Lloyd Mayers recorded in the 60s, with Lou Donaldson, Betty Carter, Ray Barretto and others. but his big break didn't come until 1974--and no, it wasn't the Eric Dixon album. Mercer Ellington tapped him to fill the Duke's shoes in the Ellington orchestra. He was musical director for the 1981 Broadway production of Sophisticated Ladies, the musical based on Duke's music.

Sonny Wellesley and Bill English don't have the same extensive pedigrees. Wellesley played on a Blue Note session with Ike Quebec, recorded in 1959, a couple of the tunes released on 45, not released in album form till until 2000. He seems to have played in 1961 with Sir Charles Thompson, but they may not have recorded. I can't find any reference to a record.

Bill English (not be confused with Willie Nelson's drummer Billy English) made one record as leader, for Vanguard, which was primarily a folk label, and probably didn't do much to promote its occasional jazz titles. The jazz collectibles website popsike.com lists it for sale under the heading "Obscure jazz drummer Bill English." Lloyd Mayers played on this one, too. Obscure or no, you can find it on both YouTube and Spotify, and it's good stuff.

So perhaps these guys were playing together when Green tapped them, since they certainly seem to have stayed in touch afterwards. They're tight and simpatico on this session.

So if this was an audition for a big time career, they all passed with flying colors--even if, as with today's law school grads and creative writing MFA's, they didn't all get much professional advancement out of it.

The session starts with "Walkin' (Down)," which is better known without the "(Down)" as the Miles Davis classic. "Walkin'" is credited to Richard Carpenter--not the songwriter with the talented sister. This Richard Carpenter was a gonef perhaps rivaled only by Mo Levy, best known for buying songs from hard-up musicians for 25 or 50 dollars and slapping his own name on them. Sometimes he didn't even buy them. When composer-arranger Jimmy Mundy, best known for his work with the Goodman and Basie bands, died in 1983, a copyright certificate was found at the Library of Congress for a tune called "Gravey." The title, and Mundy's name, had been incompletely erased, and "Walkin'" by Richard Carpenter written over them. Junior Mance, who was with him at the time, has also confirmed that Mundy wrote the song and titled it "Gravey."

Cover design by Tom Hannan, an abstract expressionist painter
who doubled as a jazz album cover designer.

And this is a good introduction to the session. It begins with a strong drum figure by English,  then a short statement  of the head by Green, then an extended solo by Mayers. Green is generous throughout with solo space: everyone gets an opportunity to show what he can do. "Walking (Down) is also interesting in that about 3 1/2 minutes into it, the two horns seem to be about to come back to the head and wrap it up, but that doesn't happen. Instead, everything changes slightly, and the piece goes on for over 12 minutes. These shifts of tempo and mood happen a few times during the album. It keeps you on your toes.

There's one Green original on the album, the curiously named "East of the Little Big Horn," which seems never to have been picked up by anyone else. Too bad, good tune. And three standards. A favorite cut? It would be hard to choose. "Walkin' (Down) is a contender: it's always a treat to hear Bennie play the blues. But it's hard not to get caught up in the firestorm of traded licks between Green and Dixon on "It's You or No One."

The album takes away the parentheses, puts back the missing "g," and is called Walking Down.

Listening to Prestige Part 168: Bennie Green

Let's start with the music. Bennie Green and Art Farmer have an affinity for each other that keeps on giving.

I talked about sentimentality in my last post, and defended its place in art, but you can also ignore it altogether. Green and Farmer take "My Blue Heaven" at a bebopper's pace, using the melody as a springboard for great improvisation, pretty much forgetting about Molly and me and the baby, although there's a real sweetness to Farmer's restatement of the melody at the end. And although there aren't any blues in that cozy place with the fireplace, these guys find room for them in their improv.

"Cliff Dweller " is a composition by piano player Cliff Smalls, and it kicks off with some very
complex but driving interplay between Smalls, Addison Farmer and Philly Joe Jones. Smalls worked often with Bennie Green, and there may have been an extra affinity there because Smalls was also a trombonist. Further, they shared a taste for the accessibility of rhythm and blues -- Smalls would go on to be the bandleader for Clyde McPhatter, Smokey Robinson, and Brook Benton.

"Let's Stretch" seems to come with no composer credit, so we'll take it as a collectively improvised Five O'clock Blues, and stretch they do, for a well-spent ten-plus minutes.

They finish the set with a nice moody version of "Gone With the Wind."
Now, moving on to the digression. Jazz.com's online encyclopedia gives this biographical note:

Bernard Green was born on April 16, 1923 in Chicago, to a family of musicians. His older brother Elbert had played with trumpeter Roy Eldridge in the local Chicago scene, and both attended DuSable High School, a hotspot for music education at the time. It was under the direction of his music teacher at DuSable where Bennie began to study trombone. 

At a time when music education is disappearing from our test-obsessed schools, it's good to stop and remember how important it was to the American Century in music, our great contribution to world culture. People talk about musicians, particularly soul musicians, and how they learned their music in church, but there were far more who learned in school.

And what about DuSable High? Who started their music careers there?

Holy smoke.

Here's a list from Wikipedia:

• Gene Ammons — pioneering jazz tenor saxophone player.
• Ronnie Boykins — jazz bassist, most noted for his work with Sun Ra.
• Sonny Cohn — jazz trumpet player, perhaps best known for his 24 years playing with Count Basie.
• Nat King Cole — pianist and crooner, predominantly of pop and jazz works (Unforgettable).
• Jerome Cooper — jazz musician who specialized in percussion.
• Don Cornelius — television show host and producer, best known as the creator and host of Soul Train. 
• Richard Davis — bassist and professor of music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Dorothy Donegan — jazz pianist.
• Von Freeman — jazz tenor saxophonist.
• John Gilmore — clarinet and saxophone player, best known for his time with the Sun Ra Arkestra, a group he briefly led after Sun Ra's death.
• Johnny Griffin — bebop and hard bop tenor saxophone player.
• Eddie Harris — jazz musician best known for playing tenor saxophone and for introducing the electrically amplified saxophone.
• Johnny Hartman — jazz singer (Lush Life), best known for his work with John Coltrane.
• Fred Hopkins — jazz bassist.
• Joseph Jarman — jazz composer, percussionist, clarinetist, and saxophonist.
• Ella Jenkins — Grammy Award–winning musician and singer educations  best known for her work in folk music and children's music.
• LeRoy Jenkins — violinist who worked mostly in free jazz.
• Clifford Jordan — jazz saxophonist.
• Walter Perkins — jazz percussionist.
• Julian Priester — jazz trombone player.
• Wilbur Ware — hard bebop bassist.
• Dinah Washington — Grammy award–winning jazz singer.

And that's not even all. Soul singers like Joann Garrett. Doowop groups like the Esquires. Other groups like the El Dorados and the Danderliers played talent shows there.

Let's give a tribute to the men and women who taught at Dusable, and contributed so much to our culture.

This  session was released on LP as Bennie Green with Art Farmer.

Listening to Prestige part 153: Bennie Green

About the only thing I have to say about this session is how good it is, so I'll get down to it.

This is an extension of the June session, minus Candido, and it appears, along with the June session on the album variously titled Bennie Green Blows His Horn and  Bennie Green Blows His Horn in Hi-Fi.

It begins with the aptly titled "Groovin' the Blues," in which the band lays down a great groove, particularly the young Paul Chambers on bass, and Green and Charlie Rouse play the hell out of the blues. There are two different versions of this, one clocking in at 5:31 and the other at 3:13. Both of them appear on the album, and one was also released as a single, presumably the shorter one. The longer version seems to have been recorded first, so I'm guessing that it sounded so good that they decided it had to be a single, and they should cut it down to 45 RPM length. Good choice as far as I'm concerned, because I get to listen to both. Both versions are that R&B-to-bebop that I love, with the shorter leaving out a little of the extended beboppery, but still enough to be extremely pleasing.

"Travelin' Light" is the one standard, and the one ballad, in the set. It's a beautiful composition by Harry Akst, who was completely unfamiliar to me, but who began his career during World War I, writing a song with fellow doughboy Irving Berlin, and went on to write some great songs, including "Am I Blue?", "Dinah," and "Baby Face," as well as composing countless movie scores. "Travelin' Light," in 1937, was his last hit. He lived until 1973, and if I hadn't heard of him, my loss. He was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1973. Bennie Green does this lovely melody justice, and more.

Maybe Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker was right, "anyone can sing the blues." But maybe not. Bennie Green certainly makes it sound easy. But anyone who's really good can make it sound easy. As W. B. Yeats said, "A line may take us hours maybe / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." And so with Bennie Green. Just when you thought he could do everything, he turns around and makes you realize you were even more right than you knew. Green shows on "Hi-Yo Silver" that if he'd decided to drop the trombone and make a career as a rhythm and blues singer, he could have been one of the good ones.

"On the Track" is bebop, and everyone on it is good. Great work by Paul Chambers. by Cliff Smalls, by Osie Johnson, by Charlie Rouse. And by Bennie. And it works as rhythm and blues, too.

"Hi-Yo Silver" was the flip side of the short version of "Groovin' the Blues." All the tunes appeared on the album.

Listening to Prestige Part 146: Bennie Green

The Prestige commitment to 12-inch LPs was not yet complete. This session did eventually get included in a full-length album, but its initial release was one of the last of the 200-series 10-inchers (there'd be four more), and even more surprisingly, one of the last of their 78 RPM releases (there'd be four more of them, including another by Green from a later 1955 session).

Which means that a recording session is changing. This Bennie Green session is four songs, totalling about 20 minutes of music, or just enough for a 10-inch LP, or a couple of singles. Not exactly perfect for singles, but the two cuts that were released on 78 and 45 ("Say Jack!" and "Sometimes I'm Happy") were the shortest ones.

Compare that with the Miles Davis session of a few days earlier, which produced about 36 minutes of music, and an entire 12-inch LP. Or the MJQ's session of a few weeks later, the same. Or the first Prestige 12-inch, recorded by Billy Taylor the previous April. All of Taylor's tunes were single-length, in the three minute range, but there were 12 of them, adding up again to about 36 minutes, and none were ever released as singles.

And compare all of those to this 1949 session by Stan Getz,  which produced four songs, all of them in the 3 1/2 minute range, all of them released on 78.

And, of course, even with Bob Weinstock's famous no-rehearsal, few-alternate takes philosophy, one wasn't always going to be able to record a whole album in one day. But great jazz didn't necessarily require endless studio time. Kind of Blue was recorded in two days. Compare that with some of the 70s rockers with endless budgets and endless studio time. And...no accounting for tastes...but compare the results.

Anyway, back to Bennie Green. As I've noted earlier, Green could play anything, and he continues to demonstrate it. And he could do it on the trombone. Here he takes on three ballads, including "Body and Soul," which Coleman Hawkins pretty much owns as one of the definitive tenor sax solos. But Green manages to get the same depth of emotion on the trombone. "Laura" as a jazz standard is probably most closely associated with Charlie Parker with strings. Green gives it his own delicacy and sensivity.

"Laura" also features an unexpected and utterly entrancing solo by Cliff Smalls, hitherto unknown to

me, but a veteran of some ensembles with strong pedigrees, including Jimmie Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins. Perhaps he had a particular rapport with Green because he was also a trombonist. He had played trombone in the Earl Hines band that also featured Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and he was the backup pianist for Hines. Actually, Hines used several backups, including Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Nat "King" Cole, but Smalls was reportedly his favorite.

On "Say Jack!" Green's trombone takes on the job of a rhythm and blues tenor sax man -- and also vocalist, leading the ensemble in a ragged-but-right rhythm-and-bluesy chorus, which is not repeated anywhere else in the song, as the group gradually forgets that it's playing R&B, and moves into bebop territory -- particularly Charlie Rouse's solo.

Rouse and Smalls get a lot of solo time on "Sometimes I'm Happy," but what really kicks that number into high gear is the conga playing of  Candido, whom Rudy Van Gelder moves to the forefront, and a good move it is.
The 10-inch LP was simply titled Bennie Green Sextet. When the session found its way to 12-inch, a year or so later, it was called Bennie Green Blows His Horn in Hi-Fi; by the time it was reissued as part of a 7100-series LP a couple of years later, perhaps Hi-Fi was no longer quite such an exciting new technology, because the album became simply Bennie Green Blows His Horn.

Listening to Prestige Part 63a: Bennie Green

(Filling in holes - sessions I wasn't able to find and listen to before. This one goes back to 1952.)

I said in my previous Bennie Green entry that "Bennie Green could play anything, and he pretty much proves it on this set." Well, he didn't quite show everything he could do on that October 1951 session of  "big band swing ... gutbucket blues ... supercharged bebop with some R&B honking thrown in for good measure... a standard with a bebop treatment... a honk-a-thon with two classic honkers, and ... rhythm and blues if the rhythm section were a little more predictable, but it's not. What else could you possibly want?"

What else? What about a string section?

There was a mini-vogue for jazz and strings, kicked off by Charlie Parker's 1950 recordings. Green was one of the first. Chet Baker would follow in 1953 (and later, with 50 Italian strings, in 1959). Clifford Brown in 1955, Billie Holiday in 1958. But there wasn't exactly a pattern set for it, and Green wasn't much for following patterns anyway.

I was able to find and listen to two tracks from this session. Gershwin's "Embraceable You" begins with a lush string passage that could have come from a Jackie Gleason album, but doesn't stay that way. As soon as Green's trombone enters, the strings move into a dialog with him that takes some unexpected and pleasurable turns. Gershwin's songs lend themselves to almost endless possibilities of interpretation. Green's solo work is soulful, sweet, and sometimes even a little dirty. Hey. there are all kinds of embraces.

Tommy Potter never soloed much, and he doesn't exactly solo here, but on "Serenade to Love" he plays a very cool bass line against the string section.

Bill Harris won most of the trombone polls in that era, and then J. J. Johnson. J. J. and Kai were the big story on trombone, once they got together and formed an unforgettable quintet. Scott Yanow, reviewing a reissue for AllMusic.com, notes that "trombonist Bennie Green is heard on four ballads from 1952 while backed by a rhythm section and six strings. However, the more significant selections are eight songs that for the first time matched together trombonists J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding..." and he's right. They're historically more significant, and musically very important. But so was Bennie Green, although this session with strings is nearly impossible to find.

The four selections from this session were issued on a 45 RPM EP and two 78s. Prestige liked to package Bennie, JJ and Kai together, with a little confusion as a result. There are two different albums called Trombone by Three.  Prestige PRLP 7023, with a magnificent cover by Don Martin before his Mad magazine days, features selections by the Bennie Green Septet along with selections from separate Johnson and Winding quintets. PRLP 7030 has the tunes from this session, and is titled Kai and Jay - Bennie Green with Strings. But then there's a 16 2/3 album, also called Trombone by Three, with a cover by Andy Warhol before his Campbell's Soup can days, that includes selections from both Bennie Green sessions. If you have a copy of the 16 2/3 version, you probably won't be able to play it, but you'll have some neat cover art.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 50: Bennie Greene

Bennie Green could play anything, and he pretty much proves it on this set of six songs (Prestige didn't release "Jumpin' Journey").

Green got his start with traditional jazz master Earl Hines, worked with moderns like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, and avant-gardists like Randy Weston, and he could play rhythm and blues. For this session, he teamed up with sidemen who were as versatile as he was in Davis and Nicholas, and they proceeded to prove it by putting together a set in which they never played the same thing twice.

""Green Junction" is big band swing (or it's rooted there -- nothing on this session quite fits any pigeonhole). "Flowing River" sounds more like something that might have been recorded by George Winston on Windham Hill than like the gutbucket blues it is, with the dirty blues sound that only a trombone can deliver. "Whirl-a-Licks" is supercharged bebop, with some R&B honking thrown in for good measure. "Bennie's Pennies" is a standard, the only one of the day, with a bebop treatment. "Tenor Sax Shuffle"is a honk-a-thon with two classic honkers, and "Sugar Syrup" could be rhythm and blues if the rhythm section were a little more predictable, but it's not. What else could you possibly want?

Te

Teddy Brannon is the new name here for me, and his blues lick sets the tone for "Flowing River." He played up and down 52nd Street, recorded with a number of jazz greats, accompanied  Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, Billie Holiday, and his cousin Babs Gonzales,and played on a lot of doowop records. My kinda guy.

What else is happening on the jazz scene in October of 1951? We haven't checked in with the New Yorker in a while, and they've added a couple more trad jazz clubs to Condon's and Jimmy Ryan's in their "Mostly for Music" listings, while still mostly ignoring the modern clubs. Birdland, in a somewhat rare move, is featuring Bird -- Charlie Parker, trading off with Terry Gibbs. And they list The Embers, where "some of the best music on the North American continent is being turned loose by the prankish Red Norvo Trio, which has Tal Farlow on guitar." Bud Freeman is scheduled to follow Norvo, and then Erroll Garner's trio with Shadow Wilson.

I'm wondering if this session was set up with an eye toward different markets. I'm guessing not -- Weinstock doesn't seem to have been that commercially focused. But the 78s seem to be put together with a sense of what goes with what --  "Tenor Sax Shuffle" and "Sugar Syrup" on one 78, the two beboppers, "Whirl-a-Licks" and  "Bennie's Pennies" on another, the two more traditional sounds on a third. The EP leaves off  "Tenor Sax Shuffle" and "Sugar Syrup." and the same grouping goes onto the 10-inch LP Modern Jazz Trombones, Vol. 2, with cuts by Green and J. J. Johnson.