Listening to Prestige 366: Modern Jazz Disciples

Interviewing Russian émigré trumpeter Valery Ponomarev, I asked him what had surprised him most about New York, and he said it was the number of incredible jazz musicians whom no one had ever heard of, who were unrecorded or only recorded on tiny obscure labels.

Ponomarev was right, and he could have found the same thing even outside of New York. Certainly Detroit and Philadelphia had more

  than their share. And you could go even farther. For many years, you could have dropped into small clubs in Wilmington, Delaware, and heard Lem Winchester playing. And for the jazz-craving local, or the salesman with his suitcase full of samples and a need to unwind, or the Kerouac-loving wayfarer out on the road, a night at Babe Baker's Jazz Corner in Cincinnati would have proved the same kind of treat. It was for Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, for whom Babe's was a stop on tour, and he was impressed enough with Babe's house band to suggest that they send a demo tape to Bob Weinstock.

Cincinnati may not have sent as many major musicians to New York as did Detroit and Philadephia (though Frank Foster was a Cincinnatian), but it was far from a backwater of jazz. A website created by local musician Pat Kelly gives an "unofficial, completely unsanctioned an iconoclastic" history of jazz in the Queen City, and it is a treasure trove of the real American experience: jazz in the heartland.

Weinstock liked what he heard on the demo, brought the group to Englewood Cliffs in September 1959 to make their first recording, which got them 4 1/2 stars in Down Beat. For their second album, they had a new drummer, Wilbur "Slim" Jackson, but the same musical fire, brilliant solos, and great writing. All the tunes from this session except "Autumn Serenade" and "My Funny Valentine" are originals.

These guys weren't just good; they were exceptional. But they disappeared before they had time to establish a reputation, and are little remembered today.

What happened? It's hard to recreate, from this point in time. Did Weinstock just drop them? It's possible, but why would he? At a time when he was looking to find new talent, they were fully formed and ready to go. Did Peagler get the urge for greener pastures? He did go on to play with Ray Charles and Count Basie, but that seems to have come later. A reminiscence on Pat Kelly's Cincinnati Jazz Hall of History has Peagler and the Disciples playing in Cincinnati in various clubs including Babe's. One musician recalls playing with Hicky Kelley and Lee Tucker in another group. So maybe they just decided to go home. That's always a struggle for a musician, espectially one with a family: the road and a shot at glory, or a stable home life.

If that was the case, the lure of the road won out for Peagler, because in 1962 he decamped for Los Angeles, where he went on to a substantial career, but not as a leader.

Home life in Cincinnati seems not to have worked out for Billy Brown, of whom Pat Kelly says:

 Billy Brown was around here when I was in my early 20s (1970s) but he was only a shell of his former self. He was bitter and angry and intoxicated when I saw him a couple 

of times. Man, was he a great player in his prime!

Ron McCurdy, the only white musician in the group, became a jazz legend in Cincinnati, with a successful local career that lasted many years. Wilbur "Slim" Jackson may have moved to Detroit: he has a songwriting credit on a couple Motown singles. It's hard to find out much about Lee Tucker or Hicky Kelley, which is a little surprising, especially in the case of Kelley, I did glean that Miles Davis wanted to buy his normaphone, but Kelley refused to sell.

So all we have as the recorded legacy of this remarkable group are two albums. It's not much, but it's enough to place them, for those who take the time to seek out slightly obscure recordings.

The New Jazz release was titled Right Down Front.

It's not too late to give Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 as a holiday gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! 

And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!

Listening to Prestige 355 - Lem Winchester

Just when I had despaired of ever seeing another bad pun in a jazz composition, Lem Winchester comes to my rescue with "Lem 'n Aide" from this session, and better than that, we have the album's title, Lem's Beat, a sly reference to Winchester's previous career as a police officer in Wilmington, Delaware.

Lem's aide on this session is Oliver Nelson, who wrote three of the tracks, played saxophone and is credited as arranger. Both Nelson and Winchester were to have lives cut short, and not attained the kind of reputation that longer lives might have afforded them. It's good they found each other for this session.

Curtis Peagler of the short-lived but interesting Modern Jazz Disciples rounds out the front line. Peagler mostly faded into obscurity with the rest of the disciples, but the little that he did put on record is worth attending to. He's joined on two tracks by a fellow Disciple, Billy Brown. The piano duties on the other tracks are handled by Roy Johnson, about whom I can find no other information. Perhaps he was someone Winchester knew from his early days in Delaware. The rest of the rhythm section is Wendell Marshall, ubiquitous, and Art Taylor, not heard from in a couple of months, both more than welcome.

Oliver Nelson, already recognized as one of the finest composers of his era, contributes three tunes, the melodic "Eddy's Dilemma," the riffy "Lem & Aide," and "Your Last Chance," which combines the best of both worlds. Nelson becomes the dominant voice on these, but Winchester is a strong partner, and Peagler proves to be an excellent choice as second saxophone, falling right in with Nelson's ideas and bringing his own voice to them.

Roy Johnson's contribution is "Lady Day," the shortest cut of the day at 2:51, haunting and moving, with Winchester and Peagler taking center stage.

"Just Friends" is back, and it's good to hear such a different take on it. And let's trust that they were all friends, and needed no persuasion to be so, since the other outside composition is the movie theme "Friendly Persuasion." My guess...Roy Johnson was a friend of Lem's from the old days? And from the compatibility of Nelson and Curtis Peagler, and the fact that piano duties were shared between Johnson and Billy Brown, maybe the disciples were old friends of Oliver's? And by this time, producer Esmond Edwards had to be pretty tight with Wendell Marshall and Art Taylor. "Friendly Persuasion" is a sentimental ballad by Dmitri Tiomkin that Winchester deals with by not trying to avoid the sentimentality, and it's a good choice. A nice number for friends to pitch in on.

Lem's Beat was a New Jazz release.

Listening to Prestige 317: The Modern Jazz Disciples

One of the joys of this project is finding wonderful musicians I had never heard of before, like Joe Holiday or Jon Eardley or just now, Bill Jennings. But here we have a whole group I’d never heard of, which arrived on the scene as a group, stayed together, and vanished together.

Groups with collective names, rather than the name of the leader on that date, are relatively rare in jazz as opposed to other musical genres. Rock and Roll has the Beatles and the Champs, rhythm and blues the Orioles and the Clovers, pop music the Ink Spots amd the Crew Cuts, country music the Oak Ridge Boys and Lady Antebellum, classical music the Amadeus String Quartet and the Kronos Quartet, and of course, all of these are just scratching the surface. In jazz, if you named two random representative groups, you’d have a hard time coming up with a third. The Modern Jazz Quartet is the gold standard, of course, but even the MJQ, for all their decades together, are four jazz musicians who had forged individual reputations.

But this is a band. You don't listen to them because hey, you've always liked Art Farmer, let's check out who he's playing with now. You've pretty much either heard of the band, or you haven't heard of any of them.

They came together in Cincinnati, all locals except for Belfast, Ireland-born drummer Ronald McCurdy. Leader and alto sax player  Curtis Peagler had played with Red Prysock, but the others were just homegrown talent that had come together. They were gigging locally around town when Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis heard them and encouraged them to make a demo tape for him to take to Bob Weinstock at Prestige.

Which piqued my curiosity. Was that common back then? Demo tapes certainly became a big deal in later days, but in 1959?

How did new acts get heard and signed? Doowop groups would go to the offices of indie record label owners and audition. A country and western hopeful like Loretta Lynn might cut a record, which was possible. Independent record labels like Sun also rented out their facilities  for anyone to come in and record a birthday gift for Mom, which is how Sam Phillips of Sun discovered Elvis Presley. The young country hopeful might then drive around to radio stations in the south, aLynn did, trying to get it played.

But jazz musicians? In the first place, they generally weren’t self-contained bands, so the idea of an unknown band trying to get a record deal is a little unusual. They were bass players, or trumpet players, or even tuba players, and my assumption was they’d come to New York or LA or even Chicago or Philadelphia, sit in on jam sessions, try to get noticed by an established jazz star who’d hire them for a club gig or a record date.


But a demo tape it was. Bob Snead, writing the liner notes for the Disciples' debut album, is a little uncomfortable withe the term, and clearly not sure his readers will know what it is. He calls it a demonstration tape, and later, a refers to a "demo." And it did the job. Perhaps its rarity was part of its charm. Certainly Weinstockk listen

Weinstock signed them to New Jazz, and brought them in to Rudy Van Gelder's studio, where they proceeded to demonstrate that they were worth the shot. They were a tight ensemble, versed in bebop, a fresh sound.

Second horn player William "Hicky" Kelley brings something a little unusual to the table in his choice of instruments: the euphonium and the normaphone. The euphonium is a brass instrument, lower-pitched than the trumpet or flugelhorn, more in the baritone range. Euphonium players are often also tuba players. It's rare enough in jazz that I can't find any example of its use on record by a well-known jazz musician.

The normaphone, Kelley's preferred instrument, is even odder, and I can't find a reference to anyone else ever having played it. Apparently, they were made in Germany in the late 1920s, and only about a hundred of them were ever made. There might have caught on, given a chance, but the jazz craze in the German Weimar Republic was snuffed out by the Third Reich as decadent, much like the Kit Kat Club immortalized in Cabaret. The normaphone has the bell of a saxophone, the three valves of a trumpet, and the sound, more or less, of a valve trombone. Kelley insisted he wasn't just playing it as a novelty, and I believe him. If someone gives you a normaphone, you might first be pleased with the novelty of it, but then you might well fall in love with its sound. The German instrument makers of the early twentieth century, inspired by their spiritual godfather Adolphe Saz, were very good.


And the proof is in the playing. Peagler, Kelley and the rest play what could be called a textbook

lesson in bebop, except there's nothing of the textbook in it. They play bebop because they love it, and it's fresh and original and winning in their hands. Cannonball Adderley's "A Little Taste" gives a little taste, and a tasty one, of what they can do. They feature originals by Kelley/Peagler and by bassist Lee Tucker, give Charlie Parker his due with "Perhaps." "Slippin' and Slidin'" (not the Little Richard song) has no composer credit on the record label itself, is credited to an Edward Baker on AllMusic's website, and to Slide Hampton on the liner notes.."After You've Gone," by Henry Creamer and Turner Layton, is a classic that goes back 1918 and vaudeville days.

I guarantee you won't regret spending some time with these guys. The album was released on New Jazz, eponymously titled, with one cut held over for their second album.