Listening to Prestige 707 Freddie McCoy

LISTEN TO ONE: Lonely Avenue

 It's 1965, and Prestige is fully committed to riding the wave of soul jazz, and no one exemplified that better than Freddie McCoy, who was tapped by Johnny "Hammond " Smith (later known as Johnny Hammond) on a couple of Prestige albums before getting this shot at an album under his own name--a position he was not to relinquish quickly. He would release seven albums on Prestige over a three year period, then one album on a tiny independent label in 1971, then nothing. He dropped out of sight, apparently left the music business. He died in 2009 in Morocco, where he was living under his adopted Muslim name of Dit Ahmed Sofi.

Larry, of the Funky16Corners blog, rates McCoy as "the finest, purely 'soul jazz' vibraphonist I’ve ever heard, and while others may lay claim to that distinction--and I would never tout any artist (well, except for Louis Armstrong) as the finest of anything, a strong case could be made for Freddie McCoy as the quintessential soul jazz vibist. His commitment to this signature jazz sound of the 1960s seems to have been total, and his ability to coax soul out of an instrument that does not allow much for the slurs or microtonalities of the blues. 

McCoy's first entry into ars poetica of soul jazz, his first tune of his first session, first cut (and the title cut) on his first album, was Doc Pomus's 'Lonely Avenue," originally recordeed by Ray Charles, inspired by the Pilgrim Travelers' gospel song "How Jesus Died." My first thought on seeing the set list was "What made Freddie McCoy think he could possibly do this?" Just as my first thought on hearing Ray's version was "How could he do it? This could so easily go wrong--how did he make it so right?" Surprisingly, it's had rather a lot of covers since Ray's masterpiece, including British Invasion soft rockers Peter and Gordon (mistake) and the Everly Brothers (big mistake -- the Everlys could sing almost anything, including several other Ray Charles covers, but they couldn't sing this. 

In short, I wasn't expecting much.

And it didn't take long to convince me otherwise.

If you loved the sound of the vibraphone, as Prestige's Bob Weinstock apparently did, and you were convinced that soul jazz was what was going to keep your label afloat in the 1960s, you had found your guy. With the vibraphone playing off the full sound of trumpet, baritone sax, trombone and organ, with a brilliant arrangement by trumpeter Gil Askey, it was pretty clear that Prestige had come up with another winner in the soul jazz sweepstakes.

Freddy McCoy, at 32, may have been a new face on the soul jazz scene, but soul jazz was not an entirely new sound (see my book, Jass with a Beat), and McCoy and producer Cal Lampley came up with some veteran talent to make this session work. Tate Houston, 40, made his first recordings with Billy Eckstine in 1946. He followed that up with stints with Sonny Stitt and Milt Jackson, and played at Detroit's Blue Bird Inn. He moved from bebop to rhythm and blues with Hal "Cornbread" Singer and Big John Greer. Napoleon "Snags" Allen's career goes back even further, being one of the first to introduce the electric guitar to the New York scene in the 1930s. Martin Rivera is probably best known for his work with Junior Mance in the 1980s, but his recording career goes back to the mid-1950s, and like Houston and Allen, was one of New York's reliable studio musicians. Like Ray Lucas, he has recorded on Prestige betore -- Rivera with Kenny Burrell, Lucas with Bobby Timmons and King Curtis. Organist James Thomas is almost certainly not the British classical organist and choir director of the same name, and I haven't been able to find out anything else about him.

The abum was recorded in two sessions, January 25 and February 16, and the second session was augmented with trombonist Dicky Harris, another veteran whose roots go back to Erskine Hawkins in the 1930s, and whose rhythm and blues credentials include work with Lucky Millinder, Ruth Brown and Sam Cooke.

t's unusual to see an arranger credit on an album by a small jazz combo, but Gil Askey certainly deserves it here. Askey, a 25-year veteran of the jazz scene (Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie) took on this gig on the way to a full time job that would keep him occupied for the next decade and more. He had just gotten a call earlier in the month from a young Detroit entrepreneur who was starting a new label.

Berry Gordy was to describe Askey as ""the glue that kept everything together" at Motown, and he is generally recognized as one of the important creators of the Motown sound. He was instrumental in developing the Jackson Five, and when the brothers were first booked on Ed Sullivan, little Michael was afraid to go until he was reassured by the sight of "Uncle Gil" in the wings.

Askey's musical roots go back to the Austin, Texas, Anderson High School Marching Band (Kenny Dorham was a bandmate), one of the first Black marching bands to gain prominence. He developed his skills in rhythm and blues as an arranger for Buddy Johnson, and touring with 1950s package shows as the backup band for Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, the Clovers, Jackie Wilson, Lloyd Price and many more.

None of these musicians played on subsequent McCoy recordings. McCoy was talented enough, and attuned enough to the zeitgeist, to build a successful career on his own talents. But these veterans, and especially the arranging genius of Gil Askey, gave him a particularly powerful debut.

Lonely Avenue became the title of the album, and also the A side of its first 45 RPM single release. The B side was "Collard Greens," continuing a rhythm and blues tradition of giving soul food titles to tunes, like Hal Singer's "Cornbread," Eddie Vinson's "Kidney Stew" and Frank Culley's "Cole Slaw" -- a tradition that had continued into the soul jazz era with Booker T's classic "Green Onions." The February 16 session yielded more soul food, and another single, with "Belly Full of Greens" (flip side the standard "Willow Weep for Me"). McCoy would continue the theme on subsequent albums Peas 'n Rice and Beans & Greens. 

Listening to Prestige 459: Johnny "Hammond" Smith

If Don Ellis gave us an album in which virtually everything was unexpected, Prestige brings us back to familiar ground with Johnny "Hammond" Smith. In those days, it seemed that people couldn't get enough of that soul jazz organ sound, and Smith was one of the most reliable of the bunch, solid for listening or dancing. He used the same Philadelphia cohorts he'd been using, came up once again with a nicely chosen mixture of originals and standards--and, in point of fact, distributed the results of this session over the same two albums as the last session, Stimulation, which was released right away, and Opus de Funk, which waited until 1966.

So I don't have a lot to add to my commentary on the February 14th session. This is an extension of that one, and it's still good music.

Esmond Edwards produced both dates. "Sticks and Stones" became the flip side of "The End of a Love Affair." from the February session, as the first 45 RPM single off the album. "Sad Eyes" was the A side of a 45 with "Opus de Funk," released in tandem with the 1966 release of the second album.

There comes a time in every long book, novel or nonfiction, when you're trapped in the middle. You can barely remember starting it, you can't imagine ever finishing it, you can no longer imagine why anyone would want to read it. I guess I'm pretty much at that stage now. It's been five years of my life, twelve years in the history of Prestige. And yet my enthusiasm hasn't flagged. I can thank the music for that, and the incredible musicians who made it.  I still look forward to every session, and I still find myself spurred to write about it by the freshness of the music, the stories of the unique individuals who made the music, my own memories of who I was when I first heard it or the excitement of hearing it and discovering it for the first time.

The 1960s, which we are just nosing into here, were a time of great social change, and a time when a number of musicians chafed at calling the music they were playing "jazz." It was a name that grew out of a music that was disrespected, a name associated with back-alley sexual encounters, a name that does not reflect on the importance of what many have called "America's classical music." But to me, whatever its origins, the name has been hallowed by Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, consecrated by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, immortalized by Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz...and Don Ellis and Johnny "Hammond" Smith and Shirley Scott and Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson and Walt Dickerson and people like Al Francis or Eddie McFadden who made brief contributions and disappeared, and the name of "jazz" is ennobled by their presence.

Listen to Prestige 435: Johnny "Hammond" Smith

Organ, vibes, guitar. This time the organist is Johnny "Hammond" Smith, and except for bassist Wendell Marshall, all the other musicians are new to Prestige.

And pretty new all around. Freddie McCoy, 28 years old at the time of this session, was making his recording debut. Were the vibes a good fit for the soul jazz sound? Prestige had begun to explore the possibility with Lem Winchester, but his untimely death brought an end to that. Was organ-vibes the way

to go, and was McCoy the answer? Bob Weinstock had always had a thing for vibes, according to Bob Porter, Prestige soul jazz producer and author of Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975. And McCoy? Perhaps the answer, but not right away. He was used on this and one other Smith session, then did no further recording until 1965, when he became one of the label's hot acts for remainder of the decade, after which he left the music scene.

Eddie McFadden, like Thornel Schwartz (with whom Smith also recorded), was a Philadelphia soul jazz guitarist who mainly worked with organ combos. He was actually one of the pioneers of the sound, having worked with Jimmy Smith and recorded 12 albums with him between 1957-58. As with McCoy, his career rose and set with the soul jazz organ combo. After his work with Johnny Smith ended in 1966, he would work some more with Jimmy Smith but not record again with him. He returned to Philadelphia, where he lived with his mother, a former jazz singer, played local clubs, and was a fixture on the Philadepphia scene. He made two small label albums in 1977 and 1978 with two other organists.

Leo Stevens came up with Johnny Smith and worked as his drummer on nearly all of his albums, and those albums are the full extent of his discography.

This was the first of two sessions that Smith and this same group recorded for Prestige in early 1961 (the second would come on on May 12), and the two sessions were combined and released on two different albums, Stimulation, which came out in 1961, and Opus de Funk, which was held back unti 1966.

During this turn-of-the-decade period, Prestige seems to not have been entirely sure what they had with Smith, in terms of packaging and marketing. Bob Porter recalls that he was considered the best ballad player among jazz organists. If the organ wasn't taken seriously as a jazz instrument until Jimmy Smith shined a spotlight on it, it had certainly developed a niche in the pop world of the 1950s, with balladeers like Lenny Dee, but that wasn't the way Weinstock and Esmond Edwards saw Johnny Smith, either. If they had, his records would have been released on Moodsville.

Instead, they were released on New Jazz, which had a very different cachet in these years: described as specializing in emerging artists, they tended toward the more experimental. less commercial. And putting him with the likes of Oliver Nelson certainly suggested that direction.

Gettin' the Message, the album pairing Smith and Lem Winchester, was the first of Smith's recording sessions to get the Prestige label, but Stimulation was actually the first to be released on Prestige, so it can be said to be the beginning of Smith's soul jazz career.

Of the four songs on this session that made it to Stimulation, three of them are ballads not normally associated with soul jazz. "Cry Me a River" is the torchiest of torch songs. "Spring is Here," by Rodgers and Hart, and "Invitation," by Bronislaw Kaper (best known in jazz circles for "On Green Dolphin Street") both became jazz standards when recorded by John Coltrane in a 1958 session for Prestige. The one Smith original is "Ribs an' Chips," and it's interesting how often food, especially soul food,  gets into the titles of funky music, from early rhythm and blues instrumentals like "Cornbread" to Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis's forays into the kitchen, and "Ribs an' Chips" has all the ingredients that went into those earlier recipes, the catchy riff, the rhythmic propulsion, the funky blues notes. It's mostly Mr. Hammond on the Hammond, as is the whole session, but Freddie McCoy really starts to get into the possibilities of soul jazz vibes.

"Autumn Leaves" and "Almost Like Being in Love," which were held back for the second album, are also ballads, so it definitely would appear that Johnny "Hammond" Smith as funkster was an idea that was slow developing.

The other funky track from this session, which became the title track of the later-released album and also a 45 RPM single, is Horace Silver's "Opus de Funk," first recorded by Silver in 1953, then by Milt Jackson for Prestige in 1954. It was widely recorded throughout the 1950s, though mostly not by groups that you'd immediately associate with funk: several Swedish combos, and a group of Nashville session musicians.

Esmond Edwards produced this and the May session. The album was released on Prestige. Later, both sessions would be conjoined in a CD reissue.