Listening to Prestige 220: Phil Woods and Gene Quill

Phil Woods is a jazz icon today, and Bobby Jaspar is pretty much forgotten, so there's a lot to be said for longevity. There are some careers that were pretty short, but they burned with such a brilliant flame that they'll never be forgotten. Charlie Parker is the obvious one. Bud Powell. There were some whose careers were very short, and they may not be remembered by the casual fan, but they are revered by the serious aficionados. Charlie Christian, Chano Pozo. There are some who had brief, blazing careers and are remembered vividly, some with much the same brief blazing careers and not so vivid: Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro.

Gene Quill had a long and productive life, but except for these recordings with Phil Woods, he mostly settled for the job security and relative anonymity of studio and section work, playing with some of the great jazz orchestras.

All of these, remembered or semi-forgotten, wrote their names in the Book of Jazz, and deserve to be remembered..deserve to be cherished.

These musings come at a time when Bob Dylan has just been awarded the Nobel Prize, and many are saying, "Aren't there other singer-songwriters who deserved it more?" And that's a foolish question. There is no "deserved it more." You either deserve it, whether it's the Nobel Prize or the respect of your peers, or you don't deserve it. Bobby Jaspar, Gene Quill, Fats Navarro, Elmo Hope, Wardell Gray, J. R. Monterose...they all deserve it.

And Phil Woods absolutely deserves it.

For this session, Woods brings back the rhythm section he used for his 1954 Prestige session with Jon Eardley (another not-so-remembered player, for a common reason: because he moved to Europe early on and spent the rest of he career there): George Syran, Teddy Kotick and Nick Stabulas. But this is 1957, and things are different. Certainly they're different for bass players. Teddy Kotick is a veteran of the birth of bebop days, one of Charlie Parker's favorite bassists. Like others of his generation, he was valued for his ability to handle the tricky tempos and improvisational leaps of the great bebop soloists, but was not expected to solo much, partly because in the pre-Rudy Van Gelder era it was hard to mike the bass in such a way as to feature it as a solo instrument. Players like Charles Mingus and Paul Chambers changed all that, and some of the standout bebop bassists like Curly Russell essentially called it a career. In this session, Kotick steps up for some serious bass solos, and he delivers.

This is very much a bebop session. You don't name a tune "Altology" unless Charlie ("Ornithology") Parker is very much on your mind.

Woods and Quill feature a couple of modern jazz standards: "Solar," attributed to Miles Davis or perhaps Chuck Wayne, and "Airegin," written by Sonny Rollins and originally recorded by Sonny with Miles. "Airegin" came from a time when it became fashionable to name tunes with words spelled backwards, a trend that I don't miss nearly as much as I miss titles with bop puns, like "A Night on Bop Mountain" or "Flight of the Bopple Bee."

Speaking of titles, two of the originals on this session are "Creme de Funk" and "Nothing but Soul," and they are fine bebop cuts, but not especially characterized by funk or soul, neither looking backward to the rhythm and blues/bop fusion of the late 40s and early 50s, or the funk/soul jazz that was trending in the late 50s and would become ubiqiitous in the 60s. This style would become linked with Blue Note, and its stars like Art Blakey (whose pianist Bobby Timmons would write the classics of the genre, "Moanin'" and "Dat Dere"), and Horace Silver (who would use Teddy Kotick on two Blue Note albums in 1957/58).

But the real progenitor of the movement was probably someone who is now revered as a jazz immortal, but was back then rejected by jazz snobs: Ray Charles. Rhythm and blues and bebop may have been soul brothers, but the exploding popularity of rock and

roll, and especially white rock and roll, had led jazz purists to build a wall even solider than the one Donald Trump plans for Mexico. But that didn't mean musicians weren't listening, and Charles' fusion of blues and gospel resulted in a whole new definition of the blues that changed both jazz and popular music irrevocably.

But I digress. Phil Woods and Gene Quill made a successful pairing because of their musical compatibility, and also because of the marketing gimmick suggested by their names. This album came out as Phil and Quill with Prestige, later released under Woods's name as his reputation continued to grow. There were only two Phil-and-Quill labeled recordings, the other for Epic, although they performed often as a quintet in clubs during this era.






 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 208: Prestige All Stars (Four Altos)

'

An interesting jazz factoid I just ran across: Ezzard Charles, heavyweight champion in the early 50s (between Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano) was also a gifted jazz bassist who frequently performed with groups at Birdland, and once sat in with Duke Ellington's orchestra. George Russell's classic composition "Ezz-thetic" is dedicated to him..

Back to Prestige. We are now in early February of 1957, and this is already the eighth recording session for Prestige. Fridays with Rudy had become a regular thing, and a few Saturdays were being added too. It's a good thing the Van Gelders weren't Orthodox Jews, Muslims or Seventh Day Adventists.

This was a busy schedule. To compare:in the first quarter of 1957, Prestige had scheduled 21 sessions, Blue Note 12, Riverside 5, Fantasy 4, Pacific Jazz 4.

Atlantic had 9 modern jazz sessions, 5 of them for the same album (Chris Connor sings Gershwin).
Only Norman Granz outdid Bob Weinstock, with 13 jazz albums on Verve (many of them covering several sessions, including 5 different sessions on consecutive day for one Billie Holiday album with Ben Webster and Harry "Sweets" Edison, so altogether it added up to a couple of dozen studio sessions). So in terms of actually turning out product, Prestige was way ahead of even Verve, but that seems to be related to Bob Weinstock's no rehearsal, very few takes philosophy.

Which means, for us, from the vantage point of the 21st Century, an incredible record of one of the most fertile and creative periods in jazz history. 1957 was Weinstock's eighth year running a jazz label and producing jazz records, and his enthusiasm hadn't flagged. If anything, he seems to have been more committed than ever to chronicling the music of his time.

He had his regulars. Gene Ammons, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd -- Kenny Burrell and Jackie McLean were new additions to that list--and the rhythm sections he called on over and over. Legends passed through and went on to other labels. But there was also all that urge to try different things, different combinations, to mix things up. I've quoted before from an interview with Weinstock, talking about working with Miles Davis:

 So, our basic idea was just to make records with different people, to record with the best people around. That's what we did until the end, when he had the quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. But everything up to that point developed from where we would sit down and talk about it. Miles would mention who was in town, who he would like to record with. I'd say who I'd like to hear him record with. We'd kick ideas around.

 And that is one important part of the greatness of jazz as a genre. The history of any art form is oten the same: folk art, popular art, high art. In jazz it happened so quickly. You didn't have to look to the past for the tradition; it was right there next to you. In 1957 Louis Armstrong was still playing. Kid Ory was still playing. And Benny Goodman and Erskine Hawkins and Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie. John Coltrane was just beginning to hit his stride. Ornette Coleman was in LA, playing music that no one could understand, but he would start putting that music on record the following year. Eric Dolphy was getting his first major gigs with Chico Hamilton. Disciples of Lester Young like Red Prysock and Sam "The Man" Taylor were revitalizing the music scene playing rhythm and blues, and turning on teenagers as part of Alan Freed's rock 'n roll stage shows. And they crossed genres: Louis Armstrong played with Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton with Stan Getz. Hampton was a one-man genre-bending army, a swing era standout whose music became a gateway to both bebop and rhythm and blues.

And on Fridays (and sometimes Saturdays) in Hackensack, New Jersey, Bob Weinstock was mixing and matching, coming up with different combinations, creating a catalog gives us such a range, such a blend, of the jazz of the 1950s.

An All Star group with three trumpets worked out well, so why not up the ante to four, and make it saxophones this time? That, of course, has been done enough to make it a fairly classic lineup, but usually with tenors. Would four alto saxes be called the Four Kid Brothers?

Phil Woods and Gene Quill would record together a number of times, partly because of a brotherhood of tonality, partly because "Phil and Quill" sounded catchy. Sahib Shihab was one of the important saxophone players of his era, playing important dates with Thelonious Monk, Benny Golson, and fellow Islam convert Art Blakey. Hal Stein did next to no recording under his own name, so he's not as well known, but he was a highly respected side man who played with a host of jazz greats, on tenor and alto.

As with the three trumpets on the earlier All Star session, or for that matter the Four Brothers, it's not necessarily going to be clear who's playing which solo, unless you're a very trained ear (and maybe not even then--the greats didn't always get their identifications right on Leonard Feather's blindfold tests), but you can tell that there are different voices, and that they're engaging in some brilliant colloquia on how to interpret a tune on the alto saxophone.

And let's talk a little about the tunes they're interpreting. Mal Waldron continues to make his mark as a composer, "Pedal Eyes" and "Staggers." A bonus in listening to a Waldron composition is that Waldron is given a little more solo space, which is always a joy, but a particular joy when he's improvising on one of his own tunes. He approaches them with a keen, searching intelligence.

"Staggers" found its way onto a number of different recordings, including one by Teddy Charles, whose fingerprints can be found imprinted on this session. Two of the tunes are his, "Kokochee" and "No More Nights."

Mal Waldron had played on (and contributed a tune to) Charles's groundbreaking tentet album for Atlantic, in which Charles experimented with modal forms even before Miles Davis. Phil Woods had a connection of longer standing : both were from Springfield, Massachusetts, and had known each other even before they hit New York. Both had trained at Juilliard. Gene Quill and Woods actually met at a jam session at Charles's loft (there's no record of whether Ezzzard Charles ever showed up there). Hal Stein also played on the Atlantic tentet album.

Tommy Potter had played on some of the Teddy Charles/Wardell Gray sessions. Potter, one of the consummate bebop jazz bassists, was by this time being eclipsed by more assertive and virtuosic bassists, and by the early 60s he had decided to give up music to stay home and raise his family. But he gives this session a solid bebop grounding, as does Louis Hayes, who was starting to make a new kind of jazz with Horace Silver, but was thoroughly grounded in Detroit bebop.

"Kokochee" and "No More Nights" are on the mainstream bebop end of Charles's compositional sspectrum, and they turned out to be a fine couple of tunes for a bunch of alto players. Hal Stein contributed "Kinda Kanonic," and the final tune is a standard by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh.

The session notes list this as a Prestige All Stars date, but actually the album cover gives the title as Four Altos, and lists the four.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige Part 174: Phil Woods

All right, it's mid-1956, which means we are smack dab in the middle of the hard bop era, and I haven't really talked about hard bop, or what makes it different from bebop, or where one leaves off and the other starts, and actually don't really intend to, because I don't know and don't care. There are two pretty standard definitions of hard bop. One is "what the Miles Davis Quintet played," and that obviously isn't much of a definition, but it more or less means the 1955-56 sessions for Prestige, which makes Prestige the quintessential hard bop label. The other definition has to do with getting funky, and mostly centers around Horace Silver and Art Blakey, which makes Blue Note the quintessential hard bop label, which is probably closer to the target.

One definition of the distinction is that bebop is more of a player-centric music, and hard bop a more listener-centric: "players like Diz, Bird, and Monk would play through a tune without playing the "head" first. They approached the music thinking that the listener had already digested the standards of the day and would recognize them by their chord structure. Hard Bop is based more around the melody in that you usually hear the melody at least one time, then the performer(s) will start in on a (usually) technically challenging solo."

And there may be something to be said for that, although musicians of the bebop era who were trying to pull away from it, like John Lewis, were specifically trying to move away from the head-solo-solo-solo-head template, and in a way the hard boppers, or neo-beboppers,were actually coming back to it. But the idea of hard bop being a more listener-friendly music makes sense.

It's a truism of jazz history that jazz went from being America's popular music, in the 30s, to being an art form that was not especially popular in the 40s. And like many truisms, it's mostly true. The musically and intellectually challenging concepts of the beboppers were not likely to go to the top of anyone's hit parade. It's even harder to imagine Snooky Lanson or Dorothy Collins singing "Scrapple from the Apple" or "Moody's Mood for Love" than it was to hear them singing "Sh-Boom" or "Heartbreak Hotel."

But it's less commented on that jazz made something of a commercial comeback in the 50s. It still wasn't challenging Elvis and Fats Domino, or even Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens, for top 40 ascendancy, but it wasn't scaring people away in droves.

Jazz was still a hipster's music, but as the Eisenhower era moved on, the hipster (not today's gourmet chocolate makers in Brooklyn, but the real hipster) became a more approachable outlaw.  Jack Kerouac became the Errol Flynn of a new generation, the buccaneer with a twinkle in his eye, living outside the mainstream, and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were the Erich Korngold and Bernard Hermann of the Beat Generation soundtrack.

Jazz came to television with Peter Gunn, to Hollywood with Anatomy of a Murder. Steve Allen featured jazz musicians on his popular network show.

Playboy played a big part in bringing modern jazz into the mainstream. Playboy in the 50s offered its readers a shortcut to sophistication, and jazz was a part of that sophistication.

And it worked, for one reason or another. George Wein opened up a new audience by bringing jazz to Newport, Dave Brubeck by bringing jazz to college. Did it make a difference that a lot of white people were playing jazz? Probably. It certainly made a difference to the popularity of what had once been called rhythm and blues. But there weren't any Fabians in jazz. It was essentially a meritocracy. Was Brubeck really better than Oscar Peterson? It's a fair question, and the answer is no, and that's an important answer. The economic story of American music is inextricably tied up with racism. But in another way, it's the wrong question. Here's another one: was Brubeck deserving of the accolades and rewards he got? Yeah, he was. I applaud every dollar that went into Dave Brubeck's pocket as opposed to Dick Cheney's, and people aren't going to forget his music in a hurry.

Brubeck, Playboy, Peter Gunn, the Beats, Steve Allen. In 1955, Billboard reported that jazz was loud at the cash register. And a 1959 album, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, is by most accountings considered to be the biggest selling album of all time, although it's also considered to be a break from all things bop, although that's a bit of an overstatement.

So, the difference between bebop and hard bop? Maybe it's a generational thing? The beboppers grew up playing big band swing, and for them modern jazz was a revolution...for a younger generation, it was just what they played. Which doesn't explain Art Blakey.,

Or how about this? If it made money, it's hard bop. If it didn't, it's bebop. Or free jazz.

Or how about this? It mox nix. It's all music.

This Phil Woods septet is made up of musicians from either side of the divide. Woods, Kenny Dorham, Gene Quill and Philly Joe Jones on the older side, Donald Byrd and Tommy Flanagan on the younger. So is their music bebop or hard bop?

Two answers. (a) I don't care, and (b) this is the last time I will ever raise that question.

I'm more interested in comparing this session to two others we've listened to recently -- the Sonny Rollins/John Coltrane duet of May 24, and the Elmo Hope Sextet session of May 7. Coltrane stayed around from that session to record with Miles and then with Sonny; Donald Byrd didn't stray far either. And Philly Joe Jones virtually never left the studio.

But it's the horns that mostly hold my interest here. Three of them on the Hope session, four of them here with Woods. You'd think that would require some serious arranging, especially here, with mini-reed and mini-brass sections, but the casualness of the Hope session seems to be the order of the day here, too. Maybe there's something about getting a bunch of musicians together that inspires a sort of collective camaraderie. There's a brotherhood in the Coltrane-Rollins collaboration, but at the same time a competitive edge. They each know what the other is doing, and neither is going to be left behind. Here, as in the Hope session, there's that fluidity. And perhaps as a result, though there's great virtuoso playing, and I mean great virtuoso playing, by all concerned, you're not really going to walk away whistling any one of the horn parts in particular. You might, instead...all right, you can't walk away whistling a drum solo, but Philly Joe Jones gets the real bravura parts.

Cover design by Harry Peck, who did some very nice work for the
British Esquire label releases of Prestige product.

Three of the tunes are Phil Woods compositions. They're vehicles for jamming: none of them has seen much recording by other artists. So it's worth noting how good some of these composed-on-the-spot vehicles for jamming in the modern jazz era were. Each of these has an arresting melody, and each provides a framework for inspired soloing by seven different guys,

'Suddenly It's Spring" is the one standard here, and if you were doing a blindfold test, and were asked to pick out the standard, you might not guess it. The guys here do all the things that give Chuck Berry his kick against modern jazz: they play it pretty darn fast, and they don't worry much about the beauty of the Jimmy Van Heusen melody. They come into it jamming, horns blazing, maybe more than on any of the spur-of-the moment compositions. There's none of the yearning romanticism that you get from the vocal versions, and it's not missed.

"Pairing Off" is the tune that gave the album its title, appropriately referencing the instrumentation.