Listening to Prestige 608: Ronnie Mathews - Freddie Hubbard

LISTEN TO ONE: The Thang

Ronnie Mathews debut album as a leader might have been the start of a distinguished career -- and it was, actually, but most of that career was under the radar, and when he died (of pancreatic cancer, in 2019) most of his obituaries took note of the fact that he was not as well known as he might have been, considering the significance of his accomplishment. The New York Times gave us both sides of that picture:

Mr. Matthews spent most of his career out of the spotlight. But he was highly valued by many noted fellow musicians for his harmonic acuity, his imagination as an improviser and his sensitivity as an accompanist.

And his friend and colleague Cedar Walton said:

I like to equate Ronnie to a great character actor who may be well known in the business but not so well known outside of the business. If you go back, you could equate him to actors like Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet. They were always around but not in the forefront so much. And the time that they had on the screen made an impact. That was Ronnie. He may have been underappreciated by the general public, but I’ll certainly never forget him. 

It';s a good bet that Cedar had recently watched The Maltese Falcon. Mathews would not record again as a leader until the mid-1970s, and then his output was on tiny labels with limited distribution. But as a sideman he continued to be in demand, and not altogether unnoticed. Reviewing a 1981 appearance at the Village Vanguard by Johnny Griffin, with whom Mathews worked frequently, New York Times critic John S. Wilson commented on "the dashing flair that [Griffin] brings to his playing, and then went on to say that:

His pianist, Ronnie Matthews, reflects [that flair] so well that he is a constant and provocative challenge to Mr. Griffin.

Even more than Mr. Griffin, Mr. Matthews is the energizer of the group, developing solos that rise out of preliminary single-note noodling to become swinging, swirling juggernauts. 

At the same that Mathews was poised to embark on four decades of respected obscurity, his partner for

this session, Freddie Hubbard, was on the brink of a career in the jazz limelight, appearing on some of the most important albums of the 1960s (Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage), and then attaining jazz superstardom in the 1970s.

You can hear all of that on this session: Mathews's power as a composer, improviser, and the glue holding the session together, Hubbard's untrammeled, hair-raising virtuosity. They make for a great combination--sort of what John S. Wilson heard that night at the Vanguard with Mathews and Johnny Griffin.

The rhythm section is rounded out by Eddie Khan and Albert "Tootie" Heath, another pair whose reputations were to go in opposite directions. Heath was a member of the gifted musical family who would perform together as the Heath Brothers in the 1970s. In 2020 he was honored as an NEA Jazz Master. Jazz buffs have had a hard time tracking down any information on Khan, who stopped playing in the 1970s, and died of cancer some years later in California. He is believed to have worked as a cameraman for CBS News in Los Angeles.

And baritone saxophone player Charles Davis made his mark on an instrument that doesn't get the headlines too often, so even though he won best baritone sax player in Down Beat's 1954 International Critics Poll, his name is hardly a household word, even in jazz households. But he had a long association with both Sun Ra and Kenny Dorham, and he was noteworthy as a producer of jazz events.

The tunes are Mathews's except for Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" and one Charles Davis composition, "1239-A." Ozzie Cadena produced, and the Prestige release was entitled Doin' That Thang.

 

Listening to Prestige 488: Willie Wilson

This was Willie Wilson's only recording session. He had played in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, but had not recorded with them. He would die not long after this session was recorded. The 1961 session was originally recorded for Jazzline, but the label folded before the album could be released. It would come out in 1966, under Freddie Hubbard's name, in Europe from the Dutch Fontana label. Prestige released it under Duke Pearson's name in 1970, and Black Lion in 1988 under Hubbard's.

Yeah, there'd be no point in the subsequent releases coming out under Wilson's name. He was dead...and forgotten.

But he was respected enough by his peers to be able to call on some front line talent for his shot at the brass ring. In addition to Hubbard and Pearson, Pepper Adams is on board. So is Lex Humphries, who had been the original drummer with the Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet, and had worked with John Coltrane on the Giant Steps sessions (the tracks featuring Humphries were not included on the album, but did appear on a subsequent album called Alternate Takes). Bassist Thomas Howard is obscure, though he did record again with Pearson.

Maybe Howard was from Atlanta. That was the hometown of Pearson and Wilson. Pearson remembered him:

Willie and I grew up together from kindergarten in Atlanta. We also took piano lessons from the same teacher. We were as brothers and his death came as quite a shock to me. 

But no jazz journalist was interested enough in Wilson to probe Pearson for more stories about his friend, so this is all we have. A reputation in Atlanta of 70 years ago, a short time with Dizzy, and this album. I like to look into the lives of wonderful musicians whom fame has passed by, b

The Willie Wilson Sextet cut seven tunes on this August afternoon at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan. Because this wasn't a Bob Weinstock production, and they weren't frowning om retakes and reusing every scrap of tape, there are several takes of each cut. (We can thank Bell Sound for that, but not for the sacrilege they committed when they closed shop in 1976, and destroyed hundreds of priceless original masters.) Five of the tunes featured the sextet. The two Great American Songbook ballads on the session, "The Nearness of You" (Hoagy Carmichael, Ned Washington) and "Time After Time" (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) were a quartet, Wilson and the rhythm section. In both of them, it's just Wilson and the rhythm section, and he shows himself capable of handling the front line on his own. He's warm and sensitive and romantic, and he swings.

But I really loved the sextet numbers. How could you go wrong, with Freddie Hubbard and Pepper Adams joining you? The format is your classic bop small group, ensemble playing on the head, solo solo solo, then the ensemble again. You know, that old cliched format that John Lewis killed off, and Miles Davis killed off, and John Coltrane killed off, but no one has ever really been able to kill off, because it can be a template for such wonderful music.

Pearson ("Miss Bertha D. Blues," also known as "Number 5"). Adams ("Apothegm") and Wilson ("Blues for Alvina") all contributed tunes to the session, and they also used the composing talents of Tommy Flanagan ("Minor Mishap," which has become something of a jazz standard) and Donald Byrd ("Lex"). but for my "Listen to One" I'll give you "Blues for Alvina," and Wilson's one chance to shine as composer before an early death and undeserved obscurity.

If you want to listen to more than one, which I strongly recommend, it takes some digging. "Willie Wilson Sextet" finds nothing, either on Spotify or YouTube. A search for "Willie Wilson Quartet" will take you to the two quartet numbers. You can find everything from the Prestige album on either Spotify or YouTube by searching "Duke Pearson Dedication" or "Duke Pearson" and the individual songs. Some searching under "Freddie Hubbard" and individual titles on YouTube will get you to the Black Lion cuts, though not necessarily all of them--each tune except for "The Nearness of You" and "Time after Time" is represented by two different takes. Or, as always, buy the music. The Prestige album is still readily available, and the Black Lion album is findable.

Fred Norsworthy, who engineered the session, is listed as producer on the Prestige release, titled Dedication! Black Lion founder Alan Bates gets producer credit for the Black Lion rerelease, called Minor Mishap. The European release on Fontana was titled Groovy!, so two of the titles included exclamation points.

Listening to Prestige 349: Eric Dolphy

We move away from the old pros of Swingville. They were wonderful, but it's time to look to the future, and the future enters like a panzer division with Eric Dolphy. He was one of the most important musicians, along with Coleman and Coltrane, in tearing up the old rulebook and writing a new set of rules.

Or maybe not. Leonard Feather, interviewing Dolphy, tried to figure out just what those new rules were, but he didn't get very far.

LF: For one thing, I would I would like to make it clear that I don't think I understand...as a musician you know certain things I don't understand about what you are doing and I...would like to maybe get them clarified in my own mind so that I can make it clear for the average reader ... what is happening and what people like you are doing harmonically. It's very hard to explain, very hard to analyze. Can you put it into words?

ED: Well, it, you know, it always depends on the subject of what you're improvising on of course, and then, uh... Of course if you're playing freer forms and the harmony...  improvisation is much more freer and you have much more things that you can play...the lines are not held to no chord patterns, harmonically.

LF: No, but, what I don't understand is what ARE they held to? I mean what is, what is the difference between the limitations, there must be some limitations otherwise it, you would be arbitrary, you could just play any notes that you like.

ED: Well that's the idea you CAN play every note that you like. Of course, you only can play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not to your hearing, to what you're hearing. So quite naturally, I hear, uh, more notes on uh, on the same thing that's been said before.

Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Maybe Blowup, without a ball. Only you and whoever you're playing with know where the ball is going and whether you've hit it squarely. But there are spins and trajectories and lobs and smashes that only you can hear. If you get it right, you're Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard. Get it wrong, and you're that tenor saxophonist on Jazzmobile who was told by Frank Foster to "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

playing free jazz is like Michelangelo Antonioni's tennis match in

This is Dolphy's debut album as leader. He had recorded in Los Angeles with Chico Hamilton, and also with Clifford Brown, although that one has an odder history. Dolphy was a native Los Angeleno, and his dad, ever supportive of his music, built him a recording studio, and a lot of musicians--not just his friends, but serious musicians, would come by to jam with the kid. One of these sessions, with Brownie, was recorded and the recording was saved, to be released in 2005. He would pack a lot of recording into the next four years of an all-too-brief life, both as leader and sideman, including a lot of work with Charles Mingus. Much of his output would not be released until after his death in 1964.

It marks a return to the cutting edge Prestige. Esmond Edwards produced. Dolphy recorded three of his own compositions, two standards, and one tune by a contemporary, Charles "Majeed" Greenlee.

Freddie Hubbard would later become known for a more crowd-friendly style, but in these younger days he was very much in tune with the avant-garde, recording with both Coltrane and Coleman in addition to Dolphy. When there are no limitations, it puts an interesting burden on the second soloist. He has to follow in a path laid out for him by someone who adhered to no path but an inner one--what he could hear.  If he scurries back to the road more traveled, he'll seem tame by comparison. If he's faking it, or he doesn't know what he's doing, it's "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

All this reminds me somehow of a poem I once wrote about the wilderness mapping itself, which I'll append to the end of this.

Jaki Byard, a multi-instrumentalist although the piano was his main instrument, was new to Prestige but a jazz world veteran, though mostly in Boston, where he had played and recorded with Herb Pomeroy and Charlie Mariano. This was his first New York recording gig, and the beginning of a long and important career, including a number of albums for Prestige. He also had a distinguished career as an educator, including establishing the jazz studies program at the New England Conservatory of Music.

George Tucker, like Dolphy, would not be around for long. He died in 1965 without achieving the outsized reputation of Dolphy, but being quietly respected by his peers and by younger bassists. It easy to understand why, listening to his work on this session. As the bassist, it's his job to keep the beat, and he does so, but with a full appreciation of the complexity of the music and the need of the beat to reflect that.

And it's not hard to understand why Dolphy chose Roy Haynes rather than a younger drummer more identified with the free jazz movement. All you have to do is listen.

The Dolphy compositions are freer. The standards are still grounded in melody and chord structure, although Dolphy moves further and further out as he develops his improvisation. The Charles Greenlee composition is a bit of a surprise. Although Greenlee began his career in Detroit in the 1940s, he's probably best known for his avant-garde work in the late 1960s and 1970s with Archie Shepp, so the surprise is that "Miss Toni" is really the most boppish piece of the day.

The balance is a good one, for the listener of the day to get used to the direction Dolphy was headed in, and maybe for the musicians who were playing with him, too.

Most of this session was released in 1960 as Dolphy's first Prestige album, Outward Bound. The alternate takes of "G. W." and "245" would eventually see daylight on much later compilation releases, and "April Fool" would be included in a posthumous release, 1966's Here and There. Outward Bound was first released on New Jazz, later on Prestige.

Listening to Prestige 296: John Coltrane

I see a lot of young fans, on various internet sites, giving short shrift to John Colttrane's Prestige sessions. They're anxious for him to get on with it, to get to A Love Supreme. They want him to stop messing around with guys like Red Garland, who just hold him back, and to get to musicians who really understand him, like McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. They may even be equally impatient with Giant Steps, that groundbreaking album, with Paul Chambers and Art Taylor still anchoring the rhythm section.

Well, I'm glad that there are young jazz fans, and it's fine that they have opinions, but they're wrong. They're wrong because John Coltrane was much, more than a cultural icon. He was a jazz musician.


Some of Coltrane’s Prestige albums, like John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, are long time favorites of mine, that I keep going back to. And some, like this, his final session for the label before moving on to Atlantic, are new to me, and are a treat to be hearing for the first time. And for themselves, for the passion and inventiveness and musicality that Coltrane brought into every piece of music that he played. You don’t have to look into them for some foreshadowing of Giant Steps or My Favorite Things.

Coltrane’s parting gift to Prestige was 20-year-old Freddie Hubbard, in one of his first record dates. Prestige would soon lose him to Blue Note, for which label he made his debut as a leader in 1960, but he would return for a few sessions over the years.

Coltrane kicks off the session with “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?”, a tune that I’ve always thought of a lesser Rodgers and Hammerstein, but this rendition makes me doubt my previous judgement, especially because they stay close to the melody throughout, and make something lovely and expressive from it. Coltrane and Garland are romantic, Hubbard a little harder-edged, but all with the same melodic awareness. Coltrane, of course, would go on to show just how much truth and beauty could be found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s schmaltziest melodies with “My Favorite Things,” so maybe there is some foreshadowing. But not really.

This is an afternoon largely given over to romantic ballads, and Bob Weinstock is back in the studio. One could hardly accuse the guy who began his record label with Lennie Tristano of pandering to popular taste or eschewing the experimental, so you've got to give him credit here. He's not asking Coltrane to sell out, he's asking him to play some ballads. Which, come to think of it, is what Miles did on his last recordings for Prestige (with Coltrane). But this is different. Miles had his Harmon mute and his cool detachment, Trane had his flights of free expression. Here Trane is totally emotionally engaged, young Freddie Hubbard a little cooler--and

Hubbard is on board for the first three numbers in the set, all ballads: "Do I Love You," followed by  "Then I'll Be Tired of You" by Arthur Schwartz, and "Something I Dreamed Last Night" by Sammy Fain, two composers who may not be the kings of American song, but are certainly dauphins.

When the quintet becomes a quartet, Coltrane gets seriously eclectic, digging into the catalog of Brazilian composer Ary  Barroso, known as a composer for Carmen Miranda and for Disney cartoons. His best known composition, "Brazil," was for one such Disney production, Saludos Amigos, and "Bahia," which Coltrane chose, is from The Three Caballeros.
 
Maybe the key ingredient in this getting-ready-for-New-Years-Eve session is fun. If Coltrane seems to be enjoying the romantic ballads, he seems to be enjoying the heck out of The Three Caballeros.

The one Coltrane original is “Goldsboro Express." Goldsboro, NC, was Trane's hometown, so this must be the express out of Goldsboro--to Philadelphia, and thence to New York. Red Garland sits it out, and Paul Chambers doesn't take a solo, so the real excitement here is listening to the duet interplay between Trane and Art Taylor, which is plenty excitement enough, as Taylor provides the steam for the express engine than only a jazzman can ride.

So farewell to John Coltrane. He'll be sorely missed, but he has new worlds to conquer. Jazz fans would be able to purchase the results of this session on three different albums. "Then I'll Be Tired of You" and "Time After Time" made it onto the Stardust collection of ballads in 1963, and "Time After Time" again onto a later compilation, John Coltrane Plays for Lovers. The Believer (1964) made a place for "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful." "Bahia" was the title cut of a 1965 release, which also featured "Goldsboro Express."

Farewell to Trane does mean that I won't have to get irked each time I look up a Coltrane album on Wikipedia. Once again, gratitude to Wiki for the meticulous detail they provide in separate entries for a wide range of jazz albums, but I am tired of hearing "This is an album credited to John Coltrane," as if the credit were some sort of fake news. Of course it was credited to Coltrane; Coltrane made it. 1957 and 1958 were bumper years for Bob Weinstock and Co. They were in the studio 70 and 40 separate times respectively, some of them, like Shirley Scott's, huge sessions, and there was plenty of material to be spaced out and issued later. This was not, as Wikipedia's writer suggests, some sort of rapacious scam perpertrated on the public.

For a different and more contemporary look at these deferred Coltrane releases, here's what Billboard's reviewer had to say about Bahia. I like the Billboard reviews. Music editor Paul Ackerman was a real champion of jazz, and the editorial stance was above cliques and internecine feuds. Billboard was the music industry publication, and they highlighted things that music fans were listening to, or were likely to want. So this about Bahia, with full awareness that it's 1965 and Coltrane had moved on to other labels and other forms:

Trane” is wailin’ again...Some of the improvisations here are fierce and hard—some are more lyrical—all are typically Coltrane. His sax playing has been the subject of many a controversy, but his fans seem to stick by him regardless. There’s no question about it...he’s a commanding musician with something definite to say.

 

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2 

 

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.

                                                                                                                                                --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell