Listening to Prestige 566: Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: Cae, Cae

Gene Ammons jumps on the bossa nova bandwagon, which may sound like a putdown but is not, because any wagon Ammons jumps on is a cause for celebration, especially if you're following the progression of Prestige recordings and putting yourself back into 1962, in which case, you've been listening with the dark foreboding awareness that each session is drawing him closer to cruel incarceration for drug possession, and seven years in prison for a sickness, not a crime. And we have now reached that point. This would be his final recording session for seven years.

And if you're starting to feel that Ammons' swan song was a gimmicky commercial album, don't. The bossa nova is not a bad bandwagon to be on. The Brazilian samba provides a great framework for jazz improvisation, and no one went into Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with one of Prestige's producers, to make anything less than a real jazz album.

Don't forget, also, that secret to Ammons' enduring critical and popular success was twofold: the serious jazz community loved him because he was a real musician's musician, and the public loved him because he played music that people loved to listen to. So if the public wanted the bossa nova, Ammons would have had no problem giving them--in the company of some stellar musicians--the bossa nova.

This is pretty much a new crowd. Hank Jones and Oliver Jackson, no strangers to Prestige, are matched with Ammons for the first time. Kenny Burrell, even less of a stranger, made one Ammons session back in 1957. 

Bucky Pizzarelli is new to Prestige with this session, and he would hang around for a few more during the decade. At the time of this recording he was a still relatively obscure, though respected, session guitarist, often called upon for recordings across a range of genres. When you move away from jazz, musicians on a session are frequently uncredited, so it's impossible to even come close to listing his credits. He worked with Benny Goodman, and was part of Johnny Carson's Tonight show orchestra. In 1972, when Carson left for the west coast, Pizzarelli elected to stay behind, and his reputation blossomed. Performing solo or duet in New York clubs, he started garnering rave reviews, and began to be in even more demand. Around 1980, he started playing regular duets with his son John.

The session was produced by Ozzie Cadena, who had just taken over for the departing Esmond Edwards as head of A&R for Prestige, having filled the same role at Savoy. Between Cadena and Ammons, they came up with an interesting selection of tunes for the bossa nova treatment--I'd guess mostly Cadena, because Ammons, severely heroin-addicted, overworked to pay for his habit, and headed for a lengthy prison sentence, was not likely to be reaching so far out of the jazzman's standard repertoire. 

The result is a very different route from Dave Pike's exploration of the work of one contemporary composer. There's one Ammons original ("Molto Mato Grosso"), but the rest are a curious and

fascinating collection--and with the Ammons touch, they all fit together.

"Pagan Love Song" was written in 1929 by Hollywood tunesmiths Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed for a silent film, The Pagan, starring Ramon Navarro. It later became the title song for a 1950 film with Esther Williams and Howard Keel. It became something of a staple for pop singers and exotic ethnic bands (The Hawaiian Islanders), but did not much make it over to the jazz repertoire.

Anna was a 1951 Italian film starring Silvana Mangano. Its title song, also known as "El Negro Zumbon," was written by Armando Trovajoli, a well-known composer, under the pseudonym R. Vatro. The movie was released in the US in 1953, and the song--although written by an Italian, with lyrics in Spanish by another Italian, Francisco Giordano-- is credited by some as igniting the first spark of interest in Brazilian rhythms. It was covered by Tito Puente with Abbe Lane, and by Xavier Cugat. It may have been brought to this session by Pizzarelli, as it had been recorded a year earlier by his frequent guitar partner George Barnes.

"Ca' Purange (Jungle Soul)" was composed by Natalicio Moreira Lima. He and his brother, performing as a duo, had been popular in Latin America since the early 1940s. As Los Indios Tabarajos, they would finally find success in the US and worldwide in the mid-1960s, with a gold record for 1963's "Maria Elena."

"Cae, Cae" was probably known to Cadena from Carmen Miranda's rendition of it in 1941's That Night in Rio, but the song had already been a hit in Brazil. Its composer, Roberto Martins, was (according to biographer Alvaro Neder on the Allmusic web site), "the composer of several classics of the Golden Age of the Brazilian song, recorded by many of the best interpreters of the period"--the period being the 1930s. "Cae, Cae," written for the 1940 carnival in Rio, "having been included in 12 foreign films, [became] an all-time carnival classic, even if it only achieved third place in the annual municipal contest of that year." It hasn't really caught on with recording artists, which is surprising, since it's hard to imagine a catchier tune.

"Yellow Bird" is of an earlier vintage altogether--a 19th-century poem, "Choucoune," by Haitian Oswald Durand, set to music in 18923 by Haitian composer by Michel Mauléart Monton. Katharine Dunham recorded it in 1946, and folk trio The Tarriers (featuring Alan Arkin) sang it in a 1957 movie, Calypso Heat Wave. They sang the original French lyric, but in the same year, Hollywood songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman put English lyrics to the melody. As "Yellow Bird," and rebranded as a calypso, it would have a new life, most successfully for Arthur Lyman on the newly invented Billboard Easy Listening charts in 1961. Ammons and co. make it something more than Easy Listening.

Bad! Bossa Nova was a Prestige release. It would be rereleased as Jungle Soul! and later as Jungle Soul, without the exclamation point. There were four 45 RPM singles. "Pagan Love Song" and "Anna" were on one of them. The others were all two-sided: "Ca' Purange" Parts 1 and 2, "Molto Mato Grosso" Parts 1 and 2, and "Jungle Soul" (which was, of course,  deja vu all over again on "Ca' Purange") Parts 1 and 2.

And after this, silence for seven years. That wound is still raw.

Listening to Prestige 564: Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: Blue Coolade

One of the many sessions Gene Ammons crammed into this period between incarcerations, this one is notable for having Mal Waldron on piano, which also meant the inclusion of some Waldron compositions, which are always welcome. Waldron wasn't playing much in 1962. Like Ammons, he was deep in thrall to heroin, leading to a complete breakdown in 1963. Fortunately, he recovered,and then opted for the expatriate life in Paris, where he was able to recover his health and his career.

Waldron could and did write for anyone, and here he is right up Ammons' alley, with compositions

tailored to his rhythm-and-bluesy accessibility, his ability to make the most of a groove, and his musical inventiveness. The tunes he brought to this session are "Light'n Up," "Short Stop," "Salome's Tune" and "Blue Coolade." There was good reason for Ammons' popularity. He played real jazz, and he played for the people. And Waldron caught all of that.

This session was broken up and parceled out to two albums: Velvet Soul ("Light'n Up," "Salome's Tune," "A Stranger in Town), and Sock! ("Short Stop," "They Say You're Laughing at Me," "Blue Coolade"). Both albums were released in 1964, after Ammons had begun his second prison sentence. "You Go to My Head" and "It's the Talk of the Town" were on a third album, 1965's Angel Eyes, as Bob Weinstock parceled out Ammons' releases over his incarceration period to keep his reputation alive with the jazz public. "A Stranger in Town" came out as one side of a 45 RPM single, with "Velvet Soul" on the flip side. Esmond Edwards produced the session.

Listening to Prestige 554: Gene Ammons

 These were tough times for Gene Ammons. His 1960 release from prison had thrown him back onto the mean streets unprepared to battle his addiction, and the need for money and drugs had him working at a fever pitch, in the clubs and in the studio, to support his habit, with the law dogging his heels and finally, late in 1962, arresting him again--a frameup, according to Prestige producer Bob Porter. 

Porter, in his important book Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community 1945-1975, describes the arrest:

The arrest warrant charge this time was possession with intent to sell. The case against Ammons was built with all the subtlety of an inquisition. In today's judicial climate, the case would clearly be one of entrapment, but that didn't help Ammons in the Illinois of 1962. He spent more than seven years behind bars.

Ammons, for all the desperation of his private life, was playing wonderfully in those days, and his reputation was burgeoning. Bob Porter states that "Black people began to plan their vacation schedules around his personal appearances. In 1962 alone, he had 13 recording sessions, mostly for Prestige. 

The exceptions were a February session for Verve with Sonny Stitt, and some curious recording dates in Chicago in late April and early May. There was a four-song session with Howard McGhee which yielded one 45 RPM single released on Winley, a New York doowop label, and two other songs which came out on Winley compilation albums.

Then there were a series of sessions recorded for Chess, but never released on Chess, because Ammons had an exclusive deal with Prestige, and Bob Weinstock sued and won the rights to the masters. The first of these, on April 27, featured Clarence "Sleepy" Anderson on organ, and unidentified personnel. The next, on May 3, featured Anderson, bassist Sylvester Hickman, and drummer Dorral Anderson. The next day, he recorded with Dodo Marmarosa (piano), Sam Jones (bass) and Marshall Thompson (drums). Some of these recordings were released by Prestige during the seven years of Ammons' incarceration, as Weinstock carefully spaced out releases to keep Ammons's name alive; others only came out in the early 1970s, after Prestige had been sold to Fantasy.

A 45 RPM single, with "I Can't Stop Loving You," recently featured on Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, on one side, and "My Babe," a 1955 smash for Chess artist Little Walter, on the other, did get released on Chess subsidiary Argo Records, and later again on Prestige/Fantasy compilations. Also released on Argo, and later on Prestige, was a trio album Just Jug, with Eddie Buster on organ and Gerald Donovan on drums.

Listening to Prestige 548: Etta Jones - Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: You Don't Know My Mind

LISTEN TO ONE: My Gentleman Friend

 Etta Jones's career followed a familiar arc: Apprenticeship, a breakthrough and a pinnacle of success, a period of decline. For Jones, the toiling in the fields stage was a long one--her first recording in 1944, with Barney Bigard. Her rise was meteoric when it finally came. After recording singles off and on through the 1940s and 1950s, and one little noticed album for King in 1957, she broke out with her debut album for Prestige, 1960's Don't Go to Strangers, which sold a million copies, made Billboard's top 40 with the single, and was nominated for a Grammy. She would remain on Prestige's roster for the next five years, and record eight albums, but would never have another hit like Don't Go to Strangers, would never make a significant dent in the DownBeat and Playboy polls. So...an unusually long gestation period, a brief moment of glory (sadly, not all that unusual) and then a long period of declining popularity. But that long period was super-long, as a core of devoted listeners never went away, as her career spanned six decades, until he death in 2001, just after she had recorded her last album. After leaving Prestige, she began a collaboration with saxophonist Houston Person which lasted 29 years. And while she may never have

gotten the recognition she deserved, there was always enough demand for the music she and Person made to keep her working. Nor was she completely overlooked--there were further Grammy awards in 1981 and 1998.

Jones recorded three sessions for Prestige in April and May of 1962, the middle one of which was logged as a Gene Ammons session. 

On April 6, she recorded with a quartet led by guitarist Wally Richardson and pianist Patti Bown, with George Duvivier and Ed Shaughnessy. Bown and Shaughnessy were back for the May 4 session, this time with Budd Johnson on tenor sax and Art Davis on bass.

The two sessions were mingled together on the album, Lonely and Blue. The tunes from the  April 13 Ammons session (Bown, Duvivier, Walter Perkins on drums) were included on a compilation album. Soul Summit No. 2, and later added to the CD reissue of Lonely and Blue.

It's a wonderful album. The songs are a mix of standards and little known tunes, ballads and blues, all of them good songs with intelligent lyrics that Jones understands and conveys from the inside out. The songs Ammons's and especially Johnson's tenor sax presage her work with Houston Person, warm, romantic, meticulously phrased and passionately delivered, voice and saxophone meshing and playing off each other.

Because her songs with saxophone and piano/guitar are each so distinctive, I have to give a Listen to Two for this album, and even then it's hard to choose. I went with two of the more obscure cuts. "Gentleman Friend" was written by Richard Lewine and Arnold B. Horwitt for a 1948 Broadway Revue called Make Mine Manhattan, which had a decent run and is best known for being the Broadway debut of Sid Caesar. It was pretty much the highlight of Lewine's an Horwitt's careers, though they both did respectable work in the music business. "You Don't Know My Mind" is by Clarence Williams, prolific tunesmith and one of the first successful Black music publishers.

Jones is featured on the three tracks of the Gene Ammons session, recorded shortly before he began his second prison term. The session was split over two compilation albums also featuring cuts by Jack

McDuff: Soul Summit and Soul Summit, Vol. 2. Among their other significant virtues, these albums showcase how good, and how underused, Patti Bown was. A second Ammons session, the next day, this one with Shaughnessy, was released on Moodsville.

Lonely and Blue was a Prestige release. Esmond Edwards produced both days, and the Ammons sessions. The Jones / Richardson session produced a 45 RPM single, "And I'll Be There" / "In the Dark." The 45 RPM single off the first Ammons session was "The Party's Over / "I Want to Be Loved;" off the second, "On the Street of Dreams" / "You'd be So Nice to Come Home To."

Listening to Prestige 536: Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Sleeping Susan

 It was a busy few days for Mr. Stitt, and a lot of trips out to Englewood Cliffs. On Friday, recording with Jack McDuff. On Sunday, a Verve recording session, as Norman Granz joined Sonny with Gene Ammons for a mainstream blowing session in Rudy Van Gelder's cathedral of recorded jazz. Then the two saxophonists might as well have booked a couple of rooms on the Jersey side of the river, as they were back in harness on Monday, joining "youngster" McDuff (actually all three were just about the same age, but McDuff was a new star in the jazz firmament, and the two tenormen were solidly established veterans).

These are three guys who really represent three different genres of jazz: Stitt the bebopper, Ammons the old school boppin' the blues, McDuff the soul jazz of the 1960s. So, although "Soul Summit" is a bit  of cliche, it's also an accurate description of this gathering. They are three kindred spirits who've meshed well in dyads, and mesh equally well here in a triad, with the propulsive assistance of Charlie Persip on drums. Persip and McDuff are the entire rhythm section, so Brother Jack is largely in a supporting role here, but he makes the most of it. He and Persip provide more than a cushion for the two soloists--their work is complex and provocative. 

The set is two standards, two originals by Ammons ("Tubby" and "Shuffle Twist"), one by Stitt ("Dumplin's"), and one more obscure tune from an underrated composer, Jimmy Mundy. Mundy is underrated partly because one of his most famous compositions, "Walkin'," the Miles Davis standard, is not credited to him. On the Library of Congress copyright certificate for the tune, the original title (and

the tune has been recorded under a number of different titles) is wiped out, and the name of Richard E. Carpenter is written in as composer. Carpenter was not a composer, and is best known for cheating and exploiting various jazz musicians. Mundy is credited as co-composer (with Johnny Mercer and Trummy Young) of a gold star standard, "Travlin' Light." And he is the composer, here, of "Sleeping Susan," which proves to be an excellent choice.

You might think that "Shuffle Twist" would have been earmarked as the single, just for the title alone. But instead an edited-down version of "Tubby" was the choice, on the flip side of "Love, I've Found You," from Ammons's 1961 session with Oliver Nelson. The 45 RPM single was issued under Ammons's name.

Esmond Edwards produced Soul Summit.

Listening to Prestige 529: Jack McDuff - Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: Mellow Gravy

 One day after Smith and Powell shook the cathedral rafters of Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio. another organ-sax combo took up residence, with no sign of slackening the intensity. And these were two of Prestige's top moneymakers. Jack McDuff was challenging Jimmy Smith for pre-eminence in the organ department (sexism still held Shirley Scott back, as good as she was and as popular as she was). Gene Ammons was probably the most popular artist in Prestige's history. Drugs were to catch up with Ammons before the year was out, and he was back in prison, this time for seven years. When he was finally

released in 1969, he signed again with Prestige, the most lucrative contract Bob Weinstock had ever given to an artist. And even after Weinstock sold Prestige to Saul Zaentz of Fantasy, and it became strictly a reissue label, they put out a couple of new Ammons albums.

So these guys were not going to let any other organ-sax combo steal a march on them. Smith and Powell had unleashed a killer album? Kill this, motherfuckers!

I'm making that up, of course. But it was one day later. Esmond Edwards was at the controls for both sessions. And McDuff and Ammons were smoking hot.

McDuff used the group that he had made into a super-tight ensemble. Harold Vick and Joe Dukes had been with him for a few albums, and would be sticking around for a while -- especially Dukes, regarded by many as the ideal jazz-funk drummer. Eddie Diehl would be around for a while longer, before getting  off the road and entering a new career as a guitarmaker. He had also worked before with Ammons, so they were no strangers to each other, either. 

The album. Brother Jack Meets the Boss, was a Prestige release. "Mellow Gravy" was a two-sided 45 RPM release, and the album was also released as Mellow Gravy, with a different cover but the same catalog number.

Listening to Prestige 510: Gene Ammons - Joe Newman - Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Born to be Blue

During the late 1960s, when rock started to take itself seriously, supergroups suddenly became the rage. But in jazz, they were old news. And they were done without thinking twice. Let's get Gene Ammons back into the studio. --Yeah, and let's put him with a couple of different guys.  -- Who's in town? And presto, you have Joe Newman and Jack McDuff showing up to jam with Gene on some tunes. Supergroup? Oh, my, yes.

And jamming? I'd say so. They're relaxed, they're trying each other out on a variety of material, they're finding some good grooves, and they're playing jazz. What's not to like?

There's nothing not to like. Unlike the world of cartoons, or all too often the world of other collaborative arts, in jazz when you put a group of musicians like this together and say "What could possibly go wrong?" nothing does. These guys are seasoned pros, they're entertainers, and they're artists. And they've got some good tunes to work with.

It's hard to pick a favorite here for a Listen to One, but they do an awfully nice job on "Born to Be Blue," the ballad written by Mel Tormé and his frequent writing partner Robert Wells (they also collaborated on "The Christmas Song").  It's sensitive and lyrical, with great individual work by all the participants.

I also love the variety of material here. Ellington and Strayhorn's "Satin Doll" gets covered a lot (397 versions, according to the SecondHandSongs website), but with top notch improvisers, it's always worth one more. "Stormy Monday Blues" is the Bob Crowder/Billy Eckstine/Earl Hines version, not T-Bone Walker's, though both are 12-bar blues. Bennie Moten's "Moten Swing" comes out of that Kansas City cauldron of swing. And the two Ammons compositions are up against some pretty tough competition, but they hold up.

The newcomer on this session is Chicagoan Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, who got his start playing with Ahmad Jamal, recorded with Sonny Criss for the Texas-based Peacock label, then did a few sessions as leader for the Chicago labels Argo and Vee-Jay. He would move to New York full time not long after this session, where he would do three more albums with Ammons and find plenty of other work, recording with  Rahsaan Roland Kirk, George Shearing, Charles Mingus, Billy Taylor, Booker Ervin, Jaki Byard, Lucky Thompson, Pat Martino, Sonny Stitt, and Charles Earland, among others.

As you may recall, part of the reason why I started this project was the conversations Peter Jones and I had about recorded jazz in the 1950s, and our recollection that it was all good. I've been putting that to the test for 510 entries now, and I'm into the 1960s, and it's still holding up. How many different ways are there to say this is good stuff, this is a deeply satisfying listening experience? I guess we'll find out, or else I'll start showing my age, and repeating myself.

The album was called Twisting the Jug, although it was hardly a twist album (but you could dance to it). It was released on Prestige, with the title cut a two-sided 45 RPM single.

Listening to Prestige 505: Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: I Sold My Heart
to the Junkman

Gene Ammons played back to back sessions in October of 1961, with different lineups, for two different albums, although some tunes from each session would end up on each album.

Art Taylor and Ray Barretto supplied the percussion for both sessions, both of them familiar sounds to Prestige listeners, particularly Taylor, who had appeared on 65 earlier Prestige sessions. George Duvivier, who played on the October 18 session, was another regular, with 33 previous appearances.

Art Davis was the other bass player. He had first been heard on a Prestige recording just the week earlier,

appearing on Oliver Nelson's epic Afro-American Sketches. Ammons and  producer Esmond Edwards blended youth and experience on both dates, with Davis (age 24) paired with Walter Bishop Jr. (age 34) on piano, while the veteran Duvivier (age 41) was matched with Patti Bown (30).

Both Davis and Bown had classical as well as jazz backgrounds. Bown moved early into jazz and stayed there, but Davis, regarded by many as one of the finest musicians of his generation, continued to work, and excel, in both worlds.

And he paid for it. Although he played with major symphony orchestras, those positions were hard to come by for an African American, and in 1969 he filed a discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic, which up until that time, had employed exactly one Black musician. He lost the lawsuit, but his activism led to the practice of blind auditions, where the judges could not see the race or gender of the applicant who was playing. But activism often comes with a price, and for Davis the price was a blacklist. He found it hard to get employment as a musician in the 1970s, and this was a man who was known to be John Coltrane's favorite bassist, who had been described as a "forgotten genius" by Ahmad Jamal and "beyond category" by critic Nat Hentoff.

Davis, for a while, had to find another line of work, and he did. I've talked about jazz musicians who found other things to do--George Wallingford going into the family air conditioning business, Wendell Marshall starting his own insurance agency--but Davis did them one better. He went back to school and got a doctorate in clinical psychology, and as gigs started coming his way again--both jazz and classical--he worked them around seeing patients.

Ammons, always a versatile player, covers a wide range of material in these two sessions. 

There are three jazz standards, which allow Ammons and Co. to exercise their bebop chops. "The Masquerade is Over," composed by Allie Wrubel, was a hit for Jimmy Dorsey and others in 1939, then lay mostly dormant until until a doowop group, the Cleftones, picked it up in 1965, and the following year Cannonball Adderley became the first modern jazz musician to record it, after which it rapidly became a favorite of jazz, pop, and even rhythm and blues performers,  "I'm Beginning to See the Light" is from the Ellington songbook, co-composed by Duke, Johnny Hodges and Harry James, it has the subtle chord changes that beboppers love. Scores of jazz singers, and singers who'd like a little jazz tinge to their repertoire, have recorded it, and it's been a favorite of instrumentalists as well. In 1961 alone, it was recorded by Ben Webster, Billy Byers, Ruby Braff, and Al Casey. And Lester Young's "Lester Leaps In" has remained a great vehicle for tenor sax players ever since Young and Count Basie introduced it in 1939, although it took a while to become the ubiquitous standard that it is. The first jazz musician to record it after Lester was James Moody in 1949 (for Prestige, on the same Swedish session that produced "Moody's Mood for Love").  Oscar Peterson recorded it in 1956, then Cannonball Adderley with Gil Evans in 1958, and after that, the floodgates opened.

"Travelin'" by Kenny Burrell isn't so much of a standard, but it's a nice tune, and this may be the first recorded version of it. Burrell doesn't seem to have recorded it until two years later, a session with Jimmy Smith.

The recent pop song catalog was mined for "The Breeze and I," "Song of the Islands," "Soft Summer Breeze," "Moonglow" and "The Five O'Clock Whistle."  All of these except "Soft Summer Breeze" were older songs that had been resurrected during the 1950s.

One aspect of 1950s culture that's not often remembered was the rise of what would later come to be called "easy listening" music, but was in that era a rearguard action against rock and roll. 

The playing of recorded music had become one of the predominant features of the radio airwaves by the 1950s, as live broadcasts from the big bands disappeared, and comedy and drama shows, and their stars, were lost to television. The first record was played over the air in 1911, when both radio and records were in their infancy. But the format was not to catch on right away, because a lot of restrictions were put on the way recorded music could be presented, and a lot of records simply couldn't be played over the air, because many artists wouldn't allow it, and their records were stamped "Not licensed for radio broadcast."

A real milestone in the history of recorded music on radio came

in 1935 with a program called "Make Believe Ballroom," hosted by a radio personality named Martin Block, who came to be so identified with the format that columnist Walter Winchell began calling him a "disc jockey," which was a pretty clever coinage, when you think about it. "Make Believe Ballroom" was created to fill a need--the need to fill in time between reports on the most dominant news story of the day.  A carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann had gone on trial for the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. The trial lasted for over a month, and while it was going on, any regular radio programming would be broken into with bulletins. Since Block was standing by to fill in odd chunks of time, he couldn't very well have a real orchestra on hand, so make believe orchestras in a make believe ballroom were the next best thing.

Both Block and the show's title had a longer life than Bruno Hauptmann, who went to the electric chair on April 3, 1936. Recorded music on the air was growing in popularity, to the extent that musicians began to feel it was jeopardizing their livelihood, and the musicians' union called a strike against recording companies that lasted from 1942 to 1944. But recorded music on the air was a phenomenon that couldn't be stopped. 

Having their records played over the air was the life's blood of the new independent record labels which had grown up like mushrooms after World War II, labels that specialized in jazz, rhythm and blues or country (although country did have its live broadcast outlets like Grand Old Opry and Louisiana Hayride). And then in the 1950s, rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll and became the new lingua franca of teenage America.

And the bête noire of another group, for whom rock and roll was the music of the devil or jungle or the terminally tone deaf, depending on which outraged voice you were listening to. For those people, recorded music on the radio followed the "Make Believe Ballroom" format, and, indeed, still included "Make Believe Ballroom" and Martin Block, who hosted the show on WNEW radio in New York until 1954. After Block finally decamped for another station, "Make Believe Ballroom" continued on WNEW with new host Jerry Marshall for three years, and then when he left, with William B. Williams, who became synonymous with the programming concept and the rearguard action against rock 'n roll through the 1980s.

So, to wind up this digression, what were the "Make Believe Ballroom" type stations playing in the 1950s? They couldn't go on being pretend ballrooms hosting make believe big bands, because those big bands mostly didn't exist any more, and the era of the big band had given way to the era of the singer--1940s era holdovers like Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, new crooners like Eddie Fisher and Connie Francis. And where did these singers get their songs? Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other recorded LPs of standards, but the real action in the 1950s--radio, jukeboxes--was on the 45 RPM record. The singers got their material from new Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and The Pajama Game and Kismet, or from movie soundtracks like Three Coins in the Fountain or A Summer Place. or new songs from Tin Pan Alley that were often not very good, or by digging out some less likely songs from the past.

Radio actually hedged a lot of bets in the 1950s. For every Make Believe Ballroom on the one hand, or Alan Freed's rock 'n roll party on the other hand, there were stations, and a format, that had it both ways. In New York, when Jerry Marshall left WNEW to go and host a similar show for competitor WMGM, that station was also adopting a new format for its afternoon, after school slot--a format that had recently been created by an Omaha, Nebraska radio station owner who noticed that the same songs kept being played over and over on the jukebox in a diner he frequented, and from that observation, Top 40 radio was born, and the top jukebox hits of any given week put Eddie Fisher and Perry Como cheek by jowl with Elvis Presley and Fats Domino. 

The jazz musicians of the 1950s and early 1960s did not go much to rock 'n roll for inspiration, although that would change later in the decade, but they could still go to Your Hits of the Week for songs to catch the ear of the something less than hard core jazz fan, and a populist like Gene Ammons would always have an ear open for that.

And so with the songs on this album. "The Breeze and I" was originally a classical piece written by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona in 1928, made into a hit with English lyrics by Jimmy Dorsey in 1940. and then returned to Your Hits of the Week in 1955 by the Italian singer Caterina Valente. "Song of the Islands" was written by Hawaiian politician/songwriter Charles E. King in 1916, and brought back to radio and jukeboxes in the late 1950s by Marty Robbins, Andy Williams, and Annette Funicello.  Both of these were representatives of an odd genre of faux-exotic music called "exotica," described by bandleader Martin Denny, who more or less invented the genre, as  "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." Which meant they were sort of novelty songs, but catchy and melodic. "The Five O'Clock Whistle" wasn't exotica, but it was a novelty, and catchy. Written by film composer Joseph Myrow in 1940, it was popularized by the orchestras of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, then brought back to life in 1955 as a pop instrumental (they had them in those days) by organist Lenny Dee. "Moonglow," written in 1933 by Will Hudson, has always been a favorite of dance orchestras, but found its way into top 40 radio in 1956, as part of a medley with the theme from Picnic, a movie vehicle for William Holden and Kim Novak, performed by George Cates, who would become Lawrence Welk's musical director.

"Soft Summer Breeze" was a minor 1955 hit for jazz/lounge pianist Eddie Heywood, who would have a much bigger hit the following year with "Canadian Sunset." "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" was a 1948 hit for Dinah Washington, and did get a cover in the 1950s by the doowop group The Silhouettes, but that never went anywhere. It would become a career-making hit a few years later for Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, but it's probably here just because Ammons liked it.

Jazz versions of top 40 hits were never likely to make a dent on Top 40 radio, but they could get played by the Martin Block/Jerry Marshall/William B. Williams types, and find their way onto certain jukeboxes. "The Breeze and I," "Moonglow," and "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" all did get released on 45, as did "Don't Go to Strangers," which had been a jazz and Make Believe Ballroom hit, even making it onto the top 40 charts for Etta Jones (on Prestige). Two Ammons originals, "Up Tight!" and "Carbow" also made it onto 45. 

Both recording sessions were produced by Esmond Edwards. Up Tight! was released in 1961, Boss Soul! in 1963.

Listening to Prestige 495: Gene Ammons - Sonny Stitt

LISTEN TO ONE

This was recorded in 1961 for Argo as Dig Him!, but then was rereleased in 1968 on Prestige as We'll Be Together Again. If it were just a Prestige/Fantasy or Prestige/Concord Original Jazz Classics rerelease, I wouldn't count it, but this was Prestige vinyl from the 1960s, so it counts. 

Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons are together again for this outing. They were mainstays of Prestige in the early days, with eight albums together, but there had been a ten year hiatus. The title song (at least for the Prestige release) is appropriate for their partnership, and they do right by this romantic ballad, led by Ammons, whose approach to romantic ballads was always spot on.

Who was the most romantic balladeer in jazz? That question will get  wide variety of answers. Miles Davis. Wynton Marsalis. Bill Evans. Bobby Hackett. Chet Baker. Gerry Mulligan. Erroll Garner. But most of the answers will be tenor sax players. That instrument was brought into its own by Coleman  in the 1930s. Along with the violin, it is said to be the instrument closest in emotional nuance to tie human voice. So of all the romantic ballad voices in jazz, the tenor sax is the one you're going to keep coming back to. Coleman Hawkins, who staked out the territory with "Body and Soul" n 1939. Ben Webster. Lester Young. Dexter Gordon. Earl Bostic.

And as I've written before, some of the sweetest romantic sounds to be coaxed out of the tenor sax have come from guys who are more associated with the frantic, honking, driving sounds that cone from the rhythm and blues end of jazz. David "Fathead" Newman. Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson. Hal "Corn Bread" Singer (still going at 103, and a survivor of the terrible 1921 Greenwood massacre in Tulsa, OK), Big Jay McNeely, Arnett Cobb.

And Gene Ammons.

He and Stitt, who can also handle a ballad, do some pretty ones here. "We'll Be Together Again" was written by Frankie Laine's musical director, Carl T. Fischer, with lyrics by Laine. Laine, it turns out, was quite a prolific lyricist, but this was the only one for which he had much of a hit. 

"Red Sails in the Sunset" was written by Jimmy Kennedy and Wilhelm Grosz (as Hugh Williams). Grosz was a refugee from Nazi Germany and known as an avant-gardist, but he had a number of successful collaborations in the pop field with Kennedy. Kennedy is also known for a couple of not-so-romantic songs, "Teddy Bears' Picnic" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

"But Not For Me" is by the Gershwins, who need no introduction, and "My Foolish Heart" is by Ned Washington and Victor Young, who don't need much of one, especially if you're a movie fan. "Autumn Leaves" is one of the most familiar songs in the pop music canon, even if its composer, Hungarian Joseph Kosma, isn't a household name. Jazz historian Phillippe Baudoin has labeled it the eighth-most recorded song by jazz performers, which is either some nifty research or an interesting guess. And "Time on My Hands" is by three solid pop music professionals,  Harold Adamson, Mack Gordon, and Vincent Youmans.

The rest are Stitt compositions. "New Blues Up and Down" is Ammons and Stitt, and is a followup to their popular "Blues Up and Down," from a 1950 Prestige album. And they add up to a hell of a showcase for the talents of these two saxophone wizards, from romantic to wild, with some swinging mid-tempo ("Red Sails," "But Not for Me") in the middle.

This session was recorded in Chicago, with a group that Ammons and Stitt had on the road. John Houston goes back a long way with Sonny Stitt--he was on a 78 RPM session for Prestige in 1952 that cut two songs, "Blue Mambo" and "Cool Mambo." And he has another interesting historical mention. In 1957, John Coltrane led a quartet at the House of Jazz in Philadelphia. This group must have been preparing some of the ideas that would emerge full blown a few years later, because McCoy Tyner and Reggie Workman were in it. But on the nights when Tyner couldn't make it, the pianist who filled in was Houston.

So perhaps this band was put together in Philadelphia, because that's where they also picked up Buster Williams, heard here on his first recording session. Charles "Buster" Williams is credited as "Charles Williams" here, and that's interesting, because the bassist with Ammons and Stitt was nearly another Charles Williams--Buster's father.

Charles Williams, Senior, was a bass player called on for a lot of gigs around Philadelphia and his hone town of Camden, NJ -- sometimes more than he could make, and he started recommending his son, then in high school, when he was double booked. Young Buster was a recent high school graduate when Dad recommended him to Ammons and Stitt for a Philadelphia gig, and the two jazz legends liked the kid enough to take him along on the road. It was the beginning of a successful career in jazz for Buster, which would bring him back to Prestige late in the decade.

Drummer George Brown is a little harder to trace, partly because there's another George Brown who who achieved more fame as a drummer, with the funk group Kool and the Gang. Brown the jazz drummer spent most of his career in France, but he did record with Wes Montgomery among others.

Ammons recorded a second session in Chicago a few days later for Argo, with an organ trio, but that one was only rereleased as Original Jazz Classics.

The Prestige release came in 1968, at which point the title was bittersweet, as Ammons was in prison for a second time for narcotics possession, and we can only imagine what music was lost to these terrible laws and their racist enforcement.

Listening to Prestige 467: Gene Ammons - Oliver Nelson

As with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Bob Weinstock seemed, as 1961 wound on, to be trying to get as much as possible out of Oliver Nelson before he moved on, and in as many combinations as possible. Here, four days apart, he goes from arranging strings and French horns for Etta Jones, to arranging a full jazz orchestra to support headliner Gene Ammons, Prestige's most prolific performer--this is his third session in 1961 alone. Ammons was a victim of the heroin plague, and this activity in 1961 was sandwiched between two prison sentences, one from 1958-60 and one from 1962-69.

We're hearing some musicians for the first time. Nelson was looking for a sound, not soloists, so he picked experienced section men: guys who could read music, who could follow a conductor's lead and get it right the first time, who would show up on time and ready to play.

Trumpeter Hobart Dotson had a lot of experience in big bands. He was in the dance bands of Gerald Wilson and Dan Belloc--and not all dance bands are alike. Wilson, who came up with Jimmy Lunceford (he replaced Sy Oliver), and played in the ensembles of Basie, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter, was in the tradition of black dance bands; Belloc, who owned and operated a ballroom in Chicago, and worked with some rock and roll groups (including the Buckinghams, later), catered essentially to white audiences. Dotson also worked with edgier jazz orchestras, including Charles Mingus, Slide Hampton, and (edgier still) Sun Ra.

Red Holloway would also find plenty of work for Prestige in the 1960s, particularly with Jack McDuff. Chicago was his home base for most of his career, where he worked with blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and jazz artists, recording with them and backing up touring artists.

Bob Ashton (baritone sax here; he also played tenor) made his Prestige debut in a 1960 recording of a big band led by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, which also marked Oliver Nelson's debut as an arranger. He would also find his way onto a number of Prestige sessions during the 1960s.

George Barrow is in the tenor sax section for this session, but he was better known for his work on the baritone sax, which he played on Nelson's arranging debut with Davis, and on The Blues and the Abstract Truth. With the ensemble of jazz superstars (Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Evans) that Nelson put together for that recording, he was to single out Barrow for praise: "His baritone parts were executed with such precision and devotion that I find it necessary to make special mention of his fine work." Barrow would become a fixture on a number of Prestige recordings over the next few years.

Ammons has always liked the well-loved standards, and he does his share of them here, in front of Nelson's arrangements, along with some surprises from outside of the Great American Songbook catalog, like Savannah Churchill's rhythm and blues hit, "I Want to Be Loved." It's always worthwhile to hear a good song get the Ammons treatment, and even more so in this context,

"Too Marvelous for Words" is a good example. Written by Richard A. Whiting and Johnny Mercer in the 1930s, it was always popular with both vocalists and instrumentalists, but reached a zenith in the late 1950s with Frank Sinatra's vocal and Nelson Riddle's arrangement. Ammons sings this one on his saxophone, with a lovely brief solo from Richard Wyands. Nelson's arrangement satisfies--it does all the things one wants from a big band supporting a soloist--and it also surprises.

Esmond Edwards produced. As with Coltrane, Prestige did not release all its Oliver Nelson product all at once, and this session in particular was sliced and diced, as they also had to parcel out Gene Ammons's recordings after he was sent back to prison.

"Love, I've Found You" (another rhythm and blues ballad written by Gwen and Harvey Fuqua) and "Too Marvelous for Words" were first to appear, on a 1963 compilation album, Soul Summit, Vol. 2, which also included tracks from an Etta Jones session with Ammons and two Jack McDuff sessions, one with Ammons and one without.

"Things Ain't What They Used to Be," "I Want to Be Loved," "Makin' Whoopee" and "Lullabye of the Leaves" were all on 1964's Late Hour Special.

Jerome Kern's "The Song is You" waited until later in 1964, and was released on Velvet Soul.

"I Want to Be Loved" and "Love, I've Found You" were released on 45 RPM, though it would be a stretch to think that the Ammons-Nelson versions could be aimed at the rhythm and blues market, especially since by 1964 there was no rhythm and blues market.

Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle!
Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs

Listening to Prestige 433: Gene Ammons

A busy couple of days for Gene Ammons, recording eight ballads on Thursday for Moodsville, and eight with soul jazz overtones for Prestige on Friday. He had a stellar crew of musicians with him--Richard Wyands, Doug Watkins and J. C. Heard, with organist Clarence "SLeepy" Anderson replacing Wyands for a couple of tunes on the second day.

If you wanted a musician who could cover both bases for you, give you two genres of music that have commercial appeal without letting down hard core jazz fans, Gene Ammons would be your guy. Starting with the first song on the Moodsville album, he shows why.

That's "Till There Was You." by Meredith Willson, from his hit 1957 musical, The Music Man, a celebration of middle America and its square, square, county fair musical tastes. Well, Miles Davis brought some spice to white bread with his versions of "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Surrey with the Fringe on Top." "Till There Was You" had had an interesting history by the time Ammons got hold of it. Its first jazz rendition was by Jimmy McPartland for an album called"The Music Man" Goes Dixieland. Jimmy McPartland was a fine musician, but by the late 1950s, Dixieland had long since lost its creative drive, and become a music of Rotarian luncheons and county fairs. It was next picked up Jonah Jones for his album Swinging on Broadway, more jazz for the tired businessman. But at the same time, Jimmy Giuffre and and Sonny Rollins were recording it, so serious jazzmen were liking its possibilities. But mostly, it was fodder for the likes of anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, Liberace, Mantovani, Ferrante and Teicher. And still later, it became the only show tune the Beatles ever recorded. So how did Ammons and Co. handle it?

Well, Gene Ammons bowed to none in his ability to capture the lyricism of a ballad, and he does that here. But that's just where he starts. If you're a jazz fan, you want more than sensitive lyricism. You want some creativity,, and Ammons delivers, as does the underrated but always hip Richard Wyands.

The difference between the two albums can be seen in the marketing. The Moodsville session you can sit down and listen to, appreciate the artistry of all four musicians, especially Ammons and Wyands. Or you can put it on your turntable as you serve a romantic dinner to your girl friend. You want to set a mood; this will do it. Moodsville, an LP.

The Friday session was released on LP under the Prestige banner and under the earthy title Jug (the Moodsville session had been Nice 'N Cool). But six of the eight tunes were also released on 45 RPM singles, and that should tell you something. They were aimed toward the jukeboxes, they were aimed toward the record hops.

This is the little secret of modern jazz, the one that everyone forgets: You could dance to it.  Yes, the image it left behind in the public perception was an audience of beatniks in berets sitting at tables in smoky boites, snapping their fingers instead of clapping to show appreciation. And in New York, on 52nd Street, there wasn't much dancing (except for the strippers) because New York City had begun levying an "cabaret tax" of 30 percent of revenues on establishments where food and drink was served and dancing was permitted. But elsewhere in the country, going out to a night club meant

going out dancing, and if the night club featured cats playing the modern stuff, well, you were young, you were hep, you danced to that. Charlie Parker once played a gig in Detroit at a club that featured a chorus line of dancing girls, and they danced to Parker. The trick was to listen to the bass for the beat.

Jug had tremendous cooking interplay between all four players. On two cuts. "Namely You" and "Let It Be You." Ammons joined the current trend, and an organist, Clarence "Sleepy" Anderson, replace Wyands. The organ was a nice touch. But Wyands was providing all the necessary propulsion, plus some great solos.

These would be Doug Watkins' last sessions for Prestige. He made his debut with the label in 1956 with Jackie McLean (he had recorded the previous year with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for Blue Note), and later that year joined Sonny Rollins for the Saxophone Colossus album. These two Ammons sessions were his 30th and 31st for the label. He would do a session in the spring with Donald Byrd for Blue Note. and in the fall with Bill Hardman for Savoy. He would be Charles Mingus's choice for bass player on the Oh Yeah and Tonight at Noon sessions for Atlantic, where Mingus played piano, in November. And then there would be no more. He was killed in an auto accident early in 1962. A recording career of six short years, with a lot of music poured into that time.

Esmond Edwards produced both albums.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. 

And Volume 4 in preparation!

The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs

Listening to Prestige 372: Gene Ammons

A pleasure to have Gene Ammons back, but he's never far away. One of Prestige's most prolifically recorded artists is back after a hiatus of a couple of years (sadly due to drug bust and prison term) to host back-to-back sessions on consecutive days. One might have thought putting Ammons together with an organ would be a no-brainer, and Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards seem to have thought so too, because Johnny "Hammond" Smith shows up on the second day (he would also record, later, with Richard "Groove" Holmes).  Putting anyone together with Ray Barretto

is clearly a good idea, and that happens on the first day, along with an all star rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor.

I'm always drawn to Barretto and his unique ability to bring conga rhythms to straight-ahead, and he's heard to good advantage here in every track, starting with "Close Your Eyes," the tune by "Queen of Tin Pan Alley" Bernice Petkere that's a favorite of pop singers and jazzers alike, and had an especial period of popularity after Tony Bennett's swinging 1955 hit version. We've heard in on one other remarkable Prestige album, the two guitars of Jimmy Raney and Kenny Burrell, assisted by Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean.

Ammons favors standards on this session, and he knows how to play them. Next up "Stompin' at the Savoy," another swing era classic that's had some great bebop interpretations, and this is one of them, starting out with an arresting vamp by Doug Watkins. Since Ammons is--unusually for him--the only horn on the session, he has to carry the weight of improvisation, and he does some lovely stuff, always swinging, always melodic, always interesting. Flanagan is strong with his solo, Watkins shines throughout, and both Taylor and Barretto contribute strongly.

The two Ammons originals, "Blue Ammons" and "Hittin' the Jug," deliver the down home blues that he does so well. As much as I'm drawn to Barretto, it's not at the expense of Art Taylor, who delivers throughout, and who delivers a short but wonderful solo on "Blue Ammons." Tommy Flanagan is at his bluesy best on "Hittin' the Jug," which is a particularly strong composition that's had a few other versions in spite of being so closely associated with Ammons.

"Confirmation" is the Charlie Parker tune, taking Ammons and company more to the bebop side of Jug's swing-to-bop, and all of these guys know how to do that. Watkins shines, and so does Taylor. Rodgers and Hart's "My Romance" is pure ballad, and "Canadian Sunset" a chestnut that's given new sparkle by Barretto. It's most familiar in the original version by Eddie Heywood with Hugo Winterhalter's orchestra, and Ammons turns it nicely into a saxophone piece.

The album was entitled Boss Tenor. The session produced two singles. "Hittin' the Jug" was backed with "Canadian Sunset," and a later 45 RPM release saw "Canadian Sunset" become the A side, joined by "Seed Shack" from a later session. Bob Weinstock produced this one, Esmond Edwards was in the studio the next day.

The session with Smith, also featuring Frank Wess, is definitely a meeting of like minds, despite a bit of a generation gap (Ammons was 36, Smith 28 at the time

of this session, but that was enough to put them in different eras--that's how fast jazz evolved). Ammons may not have been the first tenor man to record with an organ, but he certainly knew how to do it, and Wess's flute fits in perfectly too. They draw on a variety of
composers (including originals by Ammons and Wess) and play some first rate jazz, wild and soft, pensive and gutsy.

This session was split over two discs, both released later, when Ammons was serving a second, and longer, prison term. Velvet Soul was the title track of a 1964 release that also featured "In Sid's Thing," and the other tunes came out on Angel Eyes in 1965. "Angel Eyes" as a two-parter saw two different 45 RPM releases, some years apart, and "Velvet Soul" came out on 45 along with "A Stranger in Town" from a later session.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 is now available!

and also:

Listening to Prestige, Vol. 2, 1954-56

Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 1949-53

Listening to Prestige 274: Gene Ammons

"Mal, you're playing a gig with Gene Ammons this Friday. Come up with some tunes that'll suit him."

"On it."

By 1958, jazz and rhythm and blues had gotten a divorce, and rock 'n roll was the co-respondent. Jazz had won custody of Gene Ammons, but that gritty rhythm and blues consciousness was still a part of him, a different consciousness from that which informed the newer hard-bop, jazz-funk style that was coming to be associated with Blue Note.

So Mal Waldron did contribute all four tunes to this session, and they couldn't be righter for Ammons: funky, rhythmic, great ensemble sections, loose enough to provide plenty of space for improvisation. A lot of jazz tunes are simple riffs brought in for the session, based on the changes or even the melodic hooks of other tunes, serviceable for some great blowing but not likely to enter the jazz library.

And so it is with these, but Waldron always gave you a little more, and any of these could have blossomed into a standard. "Hip Tip," smeary and bluesy and atmospheric as a smoky alleyway, could have been another "Harlem Nocturne," and maybe would have been, if it had had a more anthemic title. It has been covered, with a very different sensibility, by a Latin-jazz-funk star of the 1980s, Bobby Rodriguez.  David "Fathead" Newman made "Blue Greens and Beans" the title cut of a 1990 album, and Newman of course came from the most prestigious of rhythm and blues pedigrees: the Ray Charles orchestra of the Atlantic years. Ammons pays tribute to the blues and bebop both on this cut, throwing in one of those little unexpected quotes from an odd source, in this case "Isle of Capri."

Idrees Suleiman, Ammons, and Pepper Adams know their way around the blues, know how to construct killer jazz solos, and know how to play together. Ammons would go to a sparer sound in later albums, but this period, with his sextets and septets, produced some richly satisfying music.

Bobby Rodriguez may have come to this album, and "Hip Tip," through admiration for Ray Barretto, but it's "Scamperin'" that really showcases the conguero. It could have been a hit too, with its Latin rhythm and the all-out wildness of the horn players. "Blue Greens and Beans" was the two-sided 45 from this session, and no complaints...it deserved it. But I might have gone with "Scamperin'."

"Blue Gene" was the title track for the album, and it has some lovely soulful playing on it, and it's the time that was also included on a compilation album later on, called Gene Ammons - Biggest Soul Hits.

So in other words, you couldn't go wrong with any one of these Mal Waldron compositions, or any one of these septet treatments of them. This album is pure pleasure.

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

Listening to Prestige 262: Gene Ammons

The question of jazz's popularity, or lack of it, comes up about as often in music discussions as the "death of poetry" does in literary discussions, which is to say, you can't get away from it, and no one really has anything new to add to it. Including me, but that doesn't stop me from going back to it. I finished up 1957 with a reference to an article in Billboard asking once again why jazz should be so popular abroad, and still fail to reach a mass audience at home. Billboard was always a cheerleader for the business of selling music, and their writers and editors had some very sharp insights. Music editor Paul Ackerman, one of the sharpest, suggested that people really liked jazz when they heard it, but they didn't hear it enough, and he suggested that people in the jazz world should work harder at educating America's

disk jockeys. People in other countries were hearing plenty of jazz because of the popularity of Voice of America disk jockey Willis Conover, but there was no one like Conover on the home front air waves. The Voice of America, of course, was manipulated by the CIA, and the CIA was selling its own brand of culture wars -- America was the home of abstract expressionist art and modern jazz. daring art forms that were anathema to the communists. This might have been a tougher sell at home, where artists were generally suspected of being communists.

But the idea that DJs should be educated about jazz was an interesting one. Looking at another Billboard issue, this one from 1954, radio jocks were asked about their favorite jazz artists, and they couldn't come up with many. Their lists ran to dance bands like Les Brown, pop acts like Les Paul and Mary Ford, novelty acts like Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. They didn't seem to know exactly what jazz was.

It should be pointed out that the Top Forty charts of the 1950s were reasonably hospitable to instrumental music, and all kinds of instrumental music. You had perky-poppy hits like Les Baxter's "Poor People of Paris," Latin hits like Perez Prado's "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," lush big band swing like Jimmy Dorsey's "So Rare," TV themes like Ray Anthony's "Dragnet," syrupy hits like Percy Faith's "A Summer Place," gutsy rhythm and blues like Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk," and novelty rock and roll like the Champs' "Tequila." There was even some near-jazz, like Cozy Cole's "Topsy," or Red Prysock bringing his Lester Young influence to "Hand Clappin'" and "Cloudburst," which was also given a jazz cover by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

So maybe the jazz labels should have listened to Ackerman a little more closely. If one goes back to those 1954 disc jockey lists of favorite jazz musicians and jazz albums, one can't help but notice that they are virtually all from major labels. The only independent who makes a dent is Norman Granz, so maybe he understood the game a little better than some of the other indie impresarios.

Radio was a lot different in 1954, and here's one of the big differences. From Billboard, again:

Who selects the records played on your show?

Myself                 492

Program manager    1

Music librarian        9

Assistant                 1

Today virtually no DJ does his or her own programming. But back then, they did. Country legend Loretta Lynn got her start by driving around to every little radio station in the South with a crate full of copies of her first 45, meeting the DJs, schmoozing them, giving them the record. Today, no one would let her in the door. When I wrote The New Country Music Encyclopedia, back in the early 90s, I asked a record company executive, "What if it's not a kid? What if it's a veteran like Charley Pride, with a new recording, but no major label support?" "They'd let him in, because he's Charley Pride. But they wouldn't play his record."

Back then, you didn't have to do it yourself with a dusty old station wagon and a crate full of 45s. Song pluggers were an important part of the industry, and they did it for you. And you could even pay a little under the table to get your record on the air.

When people found out that was happening, it became a major scandal. Disc jockeys were fired. Congress launched a much-publicized investigation of payola. As a young person passionately in love with music, payola never seemed much of a problem to me. The assertion that Alan Freed took money under the table for playing records didn't bother me in the slightest. I loved the records he played, and I was much more bothered by the fact of his being forced off the air.

But anyway, it was 1958, and here you were. There was the persuasive power of song pluggers, and Nelson George profiles a few of them and discusses their importance to black radio in his brilliant study, The Death of Rhythm and Blues. For a little more of an investment, there was the power of greased palms. How much of an investment? I don't know, but Alan Freed played records by some pretty small independent labels, so it had to have been somewhat negotiable.

All of which brings us back to the independent jazz labels, and their apparent invisibility to disc jockeys, be they the smooth pop purveyors like Jack Lacy and William B, Williams on WNEW, the rock and rollers like Alan Freeds on WINS, the black radio jocks like Jocko, your Ace from Outer Space, on WOV. What if the song pluggers, with a little extra scratch in their wallets, had been working for Prestige or Blue Note or Riverside, or the jazz division of Atlantic?

They could have done worse than to start with Gene Ammons, and an album like this one. It features five horns, for a full-throated big band sound. It has Ammons’s rootsy connection to the blues, and some solid rhythms. I can imagine a cut like “Ammon Joy,” with its echoes of both swing and rhythm and blues, finding a place in a number of radio formats. “Ammon Joy is 13 minutes long, so it would have to have been edited fairly severely, but that was a not uncommon practice by jazz labels when the issued a cut on 45. And, in my reimagined world of 50s music, how about that? Give the Top Forty or R&B or Make Believe Ballroom audience a taste of the swinging head, the beautiful Jerome Richardson solo, a bit of John Coltrane on alto, and your reimagined listeners put their nickel in the jukebox, like what they hear, plunk down 79 cents for a 45, listen to it a few times, get interested enough to shell out $3.98 for the LP, and wow! Didja hear this? There’s a whole lot more to this song that we got on the 45! And Paul Ackerman is right—if people are exposed to jazz, they’ll like it.

Or maybe Prestige decides to try and sell the radio jocks on a familiar tune from the Great American Songbook, like the Ammons take on Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” (quintet, with some playful work by Richardson) or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might as Well be Spring” (again a quintet, this time with Coltrane).

Or maybe not. Much as we revere the Great American Songbook today, the 50s were not its finest decade. I don’t have any sources on this, but I’m fairly certain the term had not been coined them. The songs from the 30s and 40s were known as “standards,” and they weren’t the songs that song pluggers and payola providers were pushing. So during the decade when traditional pop songs and pop singers duked it out with the rock and rollers, the popsters were not going with their heavy artillery. They were leading the charge with songs like “Ricochet Romance” and “Cross Over the Bridge” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and “Chances Are.” Some of them were pretty good songs, some of them weren’t. Frank Sinatra recorded standards on his great Capitol albums with Nelson Riddle and Billy May, but his singles, his Top Forty releases, were newly minted songs like “High Hopes” and “Young at Heart.”

The standards were left to the jazz musicians, and, interestingly, the rock and rollers. Elvis recorded Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” doowoppers recorded the Kern/Fields “The Way You Look Tonight” (the Jaguars), Louis Prima’s “Sunday Kind of Love” (the Harptones), the Benny Goodman standard “Glory of Love” (the Five Keys) and many others.

It was left to jazz musician with a pop following, Ella Fitzgerald, to call new attention to the songs of the cream of American popular composers, with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, the first of several such albums, and quite probably the inspiration for whoever coined the phrase “Great American Songbook.”

So maybe a better choice for an Ammons release for the song pluggers and payola merchants would have been a pop song of the Fifties, “That’s All,” a 1953 hit for Nat “King” Cole.

In any event, none of that happened, and jazz floated along with its niche audience. One song from the session, “Blue Hymn” (quintet with Jerome Richardson) was released on 45, but much later. It’s hard to precisely pin down, It’s hard to precisely pin down the release dates of Prestige 45s, but it probably was in conjunction with the Bluesville compilation album, Soul Jazz, Vol. 2.

“Ammon Joy,” “Jug Handle” and “It Might As Well Be Spring” were all on a 1958 release of which the title tune was “Groove Blues.” “Blue Hymn,” “The Real McCoy” (Mal Waldron composition), “Cheek to Cheek” and “That’s All” made up a second album, The Big Sound, also released in 1958, so even if they didn’t get a Top Forty single, the folks at Prestige got their money’s worth out of this session.