Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Bluesville is gone, but Prestige is not quite done with the blues, so here is Lightnin' Hopkins back in the studio for two days, and two albums' worth of songs.
The details of many early blues recordings under hastily thrown-together conditions and often for obscure fly-by-night labels are shrouded in mystery, but this is hardly an early recording or a fly-by-night label, and a certain amount of confusion abides.
Wikipedia's entry for for the first-released album,
Down Home Blues, lists it as a Bluesville release, and gives a catalog number, BVLP 1086. Stefan Wirz, the German blues discographer, lists it in his Bluesville discography, with a catalog number of 1086. Jazzdisco, the Japanese jazz discographical site, lists it as a Prestige release, catalog number PR 1086.
Wirz's illustrated discography shows the album cover, and the same album cover can be found on the Wikipedia site and the Discogs site, so it would seem to be the only album cover. All of these covers bear the Prestige logo and not the Bluesville logo. Further, the Discogs site also shows the back cover, with the Prestige logo and the words Prestige 1086. Which should settle the matter...except...
Prestige has no PR 1000 line. And Prestige Bluesville did, and BVLP 1086, were it anywhere on the label or the packaging, would fit quite nicely into it, as the last Bluesville recording (save only BVLP 1089, the belated release of a 1961 session with Scrapper Blackwell protégé Shirley Griffith).
The rest of it is fairly straightforward. Well, maybe not. The sessions were recorded in New York City (Jazzdisco) or Englewood Cliffs (Wikipedia) with Ozzie Cadena producing (Discogs) or Sam Charters (Wikipedia). The sleeve of Soul Blues lists Ozzie as producer.
Chris Albertson, a frequent Prestige producer who wrote the liner notes to both albums, says that:
The rhythmic accompaniment is supplied by bassist Leonard Gaskin who has recorded with Hopkins before but whose wide range of musical associations also include Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Eddie Condon, and drummer Herbie Lovell who counts Earl Hines, Arnett Cobb, Teddy Wilson and Buck Clayton among his past associates.
Which would seem to suggest that Gaskin and Lovell are once again recording with Hopkins. But The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings posits that "Gaskin and Lovelle's parts were probably added at overdub sessions." That would not have been Prestige's normal way of doing things.
The recording took place over two days, with all of the songs that would appear on Down Hone Blues and some that were destined for Soul Blues recorded on May 4, and the rest on May 5 -- Monday and Tuesday.
Hopkins was probably the most-recorded of all the country blues singers, under his own name and a variety of others. He has appeared on seven earlier Prestige recordings -- as a solo, with other Houston bluesmen, with New York jazz musicians. One would have to be awfully dedicated to collect everything he ever recorded. But if one wanted to start listening to Hopkins, or add a little to an ongoing collection, any of these Prestige recordings would be good. These two albums, or the Double Blues reissue put out by Fantasy on LP or CD, with Rudy Van Gelder's sound engineering, would be excellent.
Two 45 RPM singles came from this session: "Let's Go Sit On The Lawn" / "I Like To Boogie" and "I'm Going To Build Me A Heaven Of My Own," Parts 1 & 2.
Sonny Stitt had recorded a soul jazz album (with Jack McDuff) for Prestige in September of 1963, and then moved over to Latin in November with an album for Verve, featuring a young Chick Corea in at the beginning of his career (he had made one earlier recording with Mongo Santamaria) and Latin percussionists. For this New Year's Eve celebration of an album, whoever decided on the the title--Primitivo Soul!--seems to have been trying to bring the two together, which is legitimate. The Latin element is once again in the ascendent here, but Stitt is always soulful. And most of the tunes here are his, and while the percussionists give them a delicious Latin rhythm, Stitt can hardly be described as a Latin composer.
Stitt comes by his soul credentials organically. Regarded by many as the quintessential bebopper and heir to the mantle of Charlie Parker, Stitt cut his blues teeth with Tiny Bradshaw, and the blues was always at the heart of his playing. And in a era marked by the startling experimentalism of the free jazz players, Stitt preferred to stay close to the source. "I don't like strange music." he told a Down Beat interviewer (quoted on the liner notes to Prmitivo Soul!):
I'm not on "Cloud Nine." Music should be a flowing melodic thing. I think you should always be around the basic melody. Improvise, but stick to the basic melody. Bird was always 85% to 90% around the melody.
Stitt had been one of Prestige's mainstay recording artists throughout the 1950s, most frequently paired with Gene Ammons, another bebopper who loved the melody, and played the blues. But outside of his long association with Ammons, he preferred to keep moving, and to play with a wide variety of musicians. Here he links up with newcomer Ronnie Mathews, fresh from his debut as leader, and the veteran rhythm tandem of Leonard Gaskin and Herbie Lovelle. To that basic group are added two percussionists, Marcelino Valdez on congas and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez on bongos.
At this point in jazz history, Latin percussionists were still pretty anonymous to the jazz listening public as a whole--Down Beat had still to recognize "percussion" as a separate category in its annual jazz polls--but these two were certainly known to the Latin community, having worked with Ray Barretto, Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria, among others. Martinez, who also appeared on Stitt's Verve album, was featured on Santamaria's classic "Watermelon Man."
The two non-Stitt compositions on the date are "Slave Maidens," by Nato Lima, writing under the pseudonym Mussapere, and "Estrellita," by Manuel Ponce.
It's hard to imagine an instrumental composition being entitled "Slave Maidens" today (just as it's hard to imagine an album of any form of world music being labeled "primitivo"), but the choice of tune is certainly a good one. Nato Lima was one of the two brothers, both guitar virtuosos, who formed the Brazilian folk/classical duo Los Indios Tabajaras, and had a huge stateside hit with their arrangement of a Brazilian folk tune, "Maria Elena." Manuel Ponce was was a composer primarily in the classical field, educated in Europe at the École Normale de Musique. Like his fellow student, Brazilian Hector Villa-Lobos, he was a pioneer in creating a composed music based on the indigenous folk traditions of his country. "Estrellita" has not become ubiquitous in the jazz repertoire, but it has won the attention of some major figures, with recordings by Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck and others. Stitt had also recorded it the previous June for Impulse!
The rest of the session is devoted to tunes written by Stitt for the date, and blending bebop, blues and Latin. Ronnie Mathews contributes some fine solos. Sonny Stitt was one of the most prolific of the major jazz soloists, and his explorations, and his collaborations, cover a wide range. We can only be grateful that these sojourns south of the border were included.
Jimmy Witherspoon was the most eclectic of blues singers. In that, he reminds me of Jerry Lee Lewis, who could and did take songs from every genre of American popular music, and -- without perverting their essence--turn them into Jerry Lee Lewis songs. 'Spoon did much the same, taking schmalzy pop, Delta blues, urban rhythm and blues, Kansas City Blues (he had four years with Jay McShann to internalize that genre), and making them into Witherspoon blues. When he joined McSha, early in his career, he replaced the hugely popular Walter Brown. McShann, Witherspoon would reminisce, told him there were three songs that had become signature songs for Brown: "Confessin' the Blues," "Hootie Blues" and "Lonely Boy." Audiences would
expect to hear them the way Brown sang them, and Witherspoon was to sing them just the Brown had. Beyond that, he was on his own, and he could find his own interpretation. Which is what he did with McShann, and what he did for the rest of his career.
This session shows the full range of Witherspoon's eclecticism. He starts out with Big Bill Broonzy's "I Had a Dream." Broonzy was from the Delta, but had built a career as a jazz guitarist in Chicago during the 1930s-40s. Then when folk music became popular in the 1950s, Broonzy reinvented himself as a "folk blues" artist. "Folk blues" was a term with wandering definitions. Sometimes it was synonymous with "country blues," which referred to the acoustic, primarily guitar-based blues of the Mississippi Delta and other rural regions, distinct from the "classic blues" of Bessie Smith and other jazz-based performers. In the 1950s it meant, more or less, the blues singers who played the folk festival and coffee house circuit, to largely white audiences. In the 1960s, as the rhythm and blues musicians from Chicago and Detroit, largely centered around Chess Records, began to decline in popularity with black audiences, while at the same time the sound they had pioneered was sweeping the globe as interpreted by young British musicians, the Chess brothers made a move to market their electric blues sound to a new audience by issuing a series of records by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others entitled The Real Folk Blues.
Big Bill Broonzy reached his peak of popularity as a folk blues performer and composer. His best-known composition, "Black, Brown and White," took on racial prejudice, but "I Had a Dream," also known as "Just a Dream," ran it a close second, with shifting lyrics in different performances, but the same song at root. Witherspoon had recorded it earlier with Ben Webster, for Frank Sinatra's Hollywood-based Reprise Records; here he gives a straight, pretty much folk blues reading, albeit with some first rate jazz musicians following his lead.
It's jazz all the way with Count Basie's "Goin' to Chicago," brought into the 1960s and organ-based soul jazz by King Curtis organist Paul Griffin.
"You Made Me Love You" is a music hall tune from 1913, written by James Monaco and Joseph McCarthy and popularized by Al Jolson, later to become a beloved classic when sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St, Louis. Witherspoon gives it his best blues crooner rendition.
"My Babe" and "Around the Clock" are from two of the leading figures of the golden age of rhythm and blues in the 1940s and 1950s, Little Walter Jacobs and Wynonie Harris. "My Babe" was a huge hit and Little Walter's signature song, "Around the Clock" lesser known but still tasty. 'Spoon knows how to sing that rhythm and blues.
"S.K. Blues" is from 1942, the beginning of that golden age, when it was a hit on the Race Records charts for Saunders King. There have been a lot of blues singers named King, and Saunders may not have been as well known as B. B., Albert or Freddie, but he deserves to be. "S. K. Blues" became a hit again in 1945, in perhaps the definitive version by Big Joe Turner, with a band including Pete Johnson, Don Byas and Frankie Newton, and it became a favorite of Witherspoon's, who first recorded in 1959, and was to record it for a third time in 1967 with Brother Jack McDuff. "S. K. Blues" is a singer's song--you can put your individual stamp on it without distorting it, and Witherspoon does just that.
"Goin' Down Slow" is from the same era. Like Saunders King, St. Louis Jimmy Oden is not remembered as well as he should be. And as with King, if he's not quite remembered, his most famous song certainly is. "Goin' Down Slow" has been recorded by nearly everyone who ever sang the blues
(including a reprise on Prestige by St. Louis Jimmy in 1960), and it's had instrumental jazz treatments by Hank Crawford and Archie Shepp. This is just a great song. Singers love to sing it, audiences love to hear it, and Witherspoon does it justice. It's another one that he has recorded a number of times: with Eric Burdon, with Ben Webster, with Robben Ford, and with Duke Robillard.
Finally, the session included three originals by Witherspoon, himself no slouch as a blues composer,
Ozzie Cadena produced the session. The Prestige LP was entitled Blues Around the Clock. It spun off two 45 RPM singles, "I Had a Dream" / "S. K. Blues" and "You Made Me Love You" / "Goin' to Chicago Blues."
Back in February of 1962, Prestige put Sonny Stitt and Jack McDuff together, that time along with Gene Ammons. Stitt was already considered one of the legends of jazz, going back to Charlie Parker and bebop's golden days in the 1940s. Ammons was probably Prestige's most consistent seller, and McDuff one of its hottest new stars. In a way, they represented three generations of jazz styles, although they were very close to the same age.
When Stitt and McDuff got together again in September, Ammons was already in prison on drug charges; but, as with the previous session, the
legend was the center, the hot new guy the support. McDuff had his own tight-knit group, with drummer Joe Dukes, considered by many to be the pulse of soul jazz, and a young George Benson, a future supernova in the jazz world. Instead, the quartet was filled out with two solid professionals--the versatile Leonard Gaskin, and the perhaps even more versatile Herbie Lovelle. Lovelle was becoming one of the drummers Prestige liked to call, with six previous sessions for the label. But calls for his sticks and brushes were far-flung, and by the time he was finished, he had played drums for everyone from Hot Lips Page to Teddy Wilson to Bob Dylan to the Monkees.
So this is essentially a Sonny Stitt album. Stitt is everything one looks for in a jazz legend--swinging, melodic, inventive, endlessly listenable. McDuff, even in his solos, is a part of that sound--tasteful, not overpowering, yet still individualistic.
And soulful. We can't forget soulful. The name of the album is Soul Shack, and the title track, composed by Stitt but certainly with McDuff in mind, is the soul highlight of the session, with the two of them getting free to get down, and never let up.
Three of the tunes chosen for the album are much-recorded standards dating back to the 1920s-30s, played by this group with fond familiarity, but given their own stamp. "Sunday" was written by Chester Conn in 1926, and has had 500-odd recordings, most often by vocalists, but with many pure jazz variations, from the original version by Jean Goldkette through Benny Carter, Gerry Mulligan and Ben Webster, Tommy Flanagan and Jaki Byard. "For You" comes from a Mack Sennett movie in 1930 and has also entered the lexicon of American song, from jazz vocalists to Ricky Nelson, as well as a few jazz interpretations. "Love Nest" also dates back to 1930, and as Dan Morgenstern comments in his liner notes, "most modernists race through this as though it were an establishment built for rabbits, but not so Sonny...he sets a calm yet springy pace...Jack McDuff waxes lyrical."
"Hairy" and "Shadows" were also written by Stitt, and "Shadows" is a blues and pure beauty, with lyrical playing by both Stitt and McDuff.
Soul Shack was a Prestige release, Ozzie Cadena producing. I can find no record of A 45 RPM single, unusual for a McDuff session of the time, but YouTube has a three minute edit of the track, so maybe there was a single.
Red Holloway first came to Prestige as part of a large ensemble put together by Oliver Nelson for a Gene Ammons session, then appeared on a session with Brother Jack McDuff, with whom he was to remain for several years. But Bob Weinstock liked his stuff, both musically and commercially, enough that he was to bring out four albums with Holloway as leader over the next few years, with an emphasis on "jazz with a beat" -- the liner notes to this album emphasize, a touch melodramatically, that this music has a good beat and you can dance to it.
Although he was born in Arkansas, Holloway was a true musical son of Chicago, where his family moved when he was still in school. He attended DeSable High School, that cradle of jazz education, where one of his classmates was Johnny Griffin. He left Chicago for the army, but returned to
spend his formative years there, playing with a wide range of musicians. He was active in Chicago's blues and rhythm and blues scene, joining Roosevelt Sykes's band, and playing with Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, Junior Parker, Lloyd Price, and Bobby Bland. He accompanied a range of visiting jazz stars, including Dexter Gordon, Yusef Lateef, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Wardell Gray, and many more. He worked with vocalists -- Billie Holiday, Dakota Staton, Joe Williams, Aretha Franklin. He toured with Sonny Stitt, Memphis Slim, and Lionel Hampton.
And all of this -- the rhythm and blues, the modern jazz, the entertainers, the soul jazz -- can be heard in Holloway's own sound, making him a good fit for Jack McDuff, and a good bet for recordings under his own name. To quote the teenage record reviewers on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, Holloway's records had a good beat. You could dance to them.
Holloway first brought a group to Rudy Van Gelder's studio on August 27. It was a quiet time (for Prestige, not for Rudy, who rarely had down time) between the two Gildo Mahones sessions, but even so, they did not spend much time with Red. He recorded two tunes, one a standard "Moonlight in Vermont") and one an original ("Miss Judie May").
Some of the musicians on this date shared a Chicago connection. Thomas "Tiaz" Palmer worked with a number of Chicago doowop and rhythm and blues groups as well as jazz groups, and in the 1980s would reunite with another ex-Chicagoan, Amina Claudine Myers, for a recording. He also toured and recorded with the Coasters frequently. Trumpeter Hobart Dotson was a music veteran, having been a member of Billy Eckstine's big band in the 1940s. He had also been a stalwart on the Chicago jazz scene, recordint with a number of groups.
Bob Durham also had his start in doowop, working with the Orioles at 16, He went on to a long and distinguished jazz career, highlighted by an an association with Norman Granz that found him playing with many of Granz's artists, including Oscar Peterson, whose regular drummer he was through much of the 1960s.
But two sides were all that this group cut, and only one of them was used. "Miss Judie May" was shelved, to be recorded again when Holloway convened a completely different group on October 10.
This one was anchored by two Prestige mainstays, Leonard Gaskin on bass and Herbie Lovelle on drums. The other players were all new--and again, relying on his Chicago connections.
Paul Serrano made his mark on the Chicago music scene not only as a trumpeter but also as a recording engineer. After playing with Woody Herman, and appearing on hundreds of recordings for Chess and other Chicago-based record labels, Serrano opened his own South Side P. S. Recording Studios in 1966. In 1992, as he began to suffer from Parkinson's disease, he closed his studio and went to work for Delmark Records as their head engineer. Ramsey Lewis, who recorded frequently with Serrano, remembered that "being a musician, he knew what the instruments were supposed to sound like." Lewis also recalled Serrano's generosity with musicians who couldn't afford to pay.
Big John Patton, like many organists, started on piano, accompanying Lloyd Price as a teenager. Switching to organ in the 1960s, he cut two records with Lou Donaldson, then served an apprenticeship of sorts with Jimmy Smith, playing tambourine on an early session by the soulmaster. By the middle of the year he was fronting his own group for Blue Note. He became one of their soul jazz stalwarts throughout the decade, then had a resurgence of his career in the 1980s with avant-gardist John Zorn.
This is a very early session for guitarist Eric Gale (he had made his Prestige debut on a King Curtis session), who wouldn't really hit his stride until the 1970s, when he became one of the most sought-after session guitarists around. His recordings with supergroup Stuff are some of the best examples of 1970s jazz-funk.
The album was released on Prestige as The Burner. "Monkey Sho' Can Talk" and "Crib Theme" were the 45 RPM single, the latter a rare composition credit for Ozzie Cadena, who produced both sessions.
Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins recorded any time, anywhere, with any musicians, for any label, and for that matter, under any name. Throw in all the nom de session recordings, and the total is anyone's guess, but he may well have been the most recorded of all blues singers. His last time out for Prestige, he was recorded in Texas with local musicians, some of them his road band at the time, and produced by folklorist Mack McCormick. This time he's in New York -- Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to be precise -- with Rudy Van Gelder manning the controls, Ozzie Cadena producing, and two first rate jazzmen, Leonard Gaskin and Herbie Lovelle, backing him up.
Both were versatile musicians, at home in a variety of styles. Closest to Gaskin's heart was probably trad jazz, and Lovelle possibly rhythm and blues, but both had played across the board (they'd played together once before, on Gaskin's Prestige All Stars outing). Hopkins's last session had featured Texas drummer Spider Kilpatrick, who was praised in the liner notes to an Arhoolie album:
Finally here was a musician who could follow Hopkins wherever he went, plus one providing a snappier beat that the guitarist could hang phrases of a bit more aggressive nature than usual on.
That was not going to be the case with Gaskin and Lovelle. The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings describes their accompaniment thus:
they are propulsive rather than responsive and never allow the music to drag.
Either way, it's still Lightnin' Hopkins: clever, wry, passionate, deep in the tradition, and an inexhaustible source of material, much of it made up on the spot, all of it deeply personal, and yet touching on universal themes.
Hopkins, of course, recorded so prolifically that listening to everything he ever recorded would be a Herculean labor. But just listening to the Bluesville recordings reveals a lot. The musical standards of jazz are exacting in the extreme. The cutting sessions in Kansas City speakeasies, at Minton's Playhouse, were designed to weed out all but the most technically adept. The story of a young Charlie Parker being forced off a Kansas City bandstand by Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at him is one of jazz's most enduring legends. So it's understandable that a jazz critic, praising the work of Gaskin and Lovelle, would comment on their ability to "follow his ramshackle, instinctual sense of rhythm quite dexterously, giving Hopkins' skeletal guitar playing some muscle." Hopkins's guitar playing had plenty of muscle, as the instrumentals on this session and the previous Houston session show. More to the point, Hopkins's professionalism is shown in his ability to adapt to the seat-of-the-pants accompaniment of his Texas cronies and the exacting standards of New York jazzmen.
Naturally, pros like Gaskin and Lovelle are going to set the tempo, "propulsive rather than responsive" in the Penguin Guide's wonderfully descriptive phrase. As Elvin Jones put it,
The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer.
But like the conductor, the drummer is there to serve the music, and the soloist. If you want Lightnin', it's wonderful to hear him in two such different settings. But essentially, if you want Lightnin', you get Lightnin'.
Goin' Away was a Bluesville release, and the two 45 RPM singles that came out of the session were also on Bluesville: "Business You're Doin'" / "Wake Up Old Lady" and "Goin' Away" / "You Better Stop Her." Jazzdisco, my main discographical source, began with its 1963 listings to include release dates, so I know that both the singles were released in 1963, and apparently quite close together: their serial numbers are Bluesville 45-823 and -824.
Rhoda Scott does not have the same name recognition as other soul jazz organists of her generation, but that's only true if you confine your attention to this side of the Atlantic. Shortly after recording two Prestige sessions, she set sail for France, where she has lived and performed ever since, and where she has become a major star.
This first date in Englewood Cliffs was a brief one, so I'll make this brief, and treat Scott at greater length later on. She recorded four songs with a quartet and vocal group. The second session was just the quartet. Two of the songs from June made
the album that was completed in October; two were released separately on a 45 RPM single. Both the LP and the 45 are credited to the Rhoda Scott Trio, never mind the number of musicians who actually played, and the album is titled Hey! Hey! Hey!, although that song is only on the 45.
The Shouters are presumably the same Buddy Lucas vocal group that recorded for Prestige in April, but augmented here with a male voice (perhaps Lucas; the individual singers are not identified here). If it's an entirely different group called the Shouters, then we have a really odd coincidence, because the combo that recorded with Lucas for Prestige in April, included trumpeter Joe Thomas, not to be confused with tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas who played on this set, although both were born in the same year (1909). had solid careers as swing era musicians, and died within a couple of years of each other in the 1980s.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!" and "If You're Lonely" were the 45, released on Tru-Sound, as was the album.
Tru-Sound, Bob Weinstock's "modern rhythm and blues" label, was not one of his more successful ventures, although it did hang on until 1963, when Weinstock folded most of his subsidiary labels (Bluesville and New Jazz hung around another year). But there weren't that many releases, and most of them--certainly the most successful--were by King Curtis. Buddy Lucas was one of the last artists to sign with the label, and if Weinstock was looking for a genuine rhythm and blues professional, he had come to the right man. Lucas had been recording R&B since joining Wynonie Harris in 1950, and had started recording with his own combo for Jubilee Records in 1951. An early two-sided hit for Jubilee set the pattern for his 78
RPM singles: a ballad on one side and an uptempo, honking blues on the other. That he was prized for both can be demonstrated by two of the biggest hits he played on: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" and Little Anthony and the Imperials' "Tears on My Pillow." He was one of the most in-demand session men for rhythm and blues and rock and roll throughout the decade, and into the 1960s. Around the same time that he recorded this album for Tru-Sound, he played one of his best-known tenor sax solos, on Dion's "The Wanderer."
The 1960s also saw him getting calls for jazz recordings, with Clark Terry, Seldon Powell, Illinois Jacquet, Jack McDuff and others, one of the most unusual being free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, on New Grass, an album Ayler made for Impulse! to show that he had a more poppish, commercial side, not entirely successfully. Unusually for a saxophone player, Lucas also doubled on the harmonica. He recorded on that instrument with King Curtis, Lou Donaldson, Thad Jones (also jaw harp), Yusef Lateef, Johnny Hodges, George Benson and many others. A number of female singers used his harmonica sound, including Laura Nyro, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, and, most notably, Nina Simone on her recording of "Since I Fell For You." He was even called in to overdub a harmonica part on a posthumous Jimi Hendrix recording.
Lucas recorded his Tru-Sound albums over two Englewood Cliffs sessions in March and April. He
surrounded himself with good players for his first dates as a leader with a jazz label that had prestige in more than just its name, and some remarkable singers. Wally Richardson, Bob Bushnell and Herbie Lovelle were Prestige veterans. Al Williams (piano for the March 31 session) had been playing professionally since the 1930s; his resume included Henry "Red" Allen, Buck Clayton and Johnny Hodges. Robert "Bobby" Banks's career stretched from 1950s to the 1980s; during the period of this recording and through much of the decade he worked with Solomon Burke. He replaced Williams on piano for the the April 22 session. Carl Lynch was one of New York's most sought-after session guitarists from the 1940s through the 1970s. one of the mainstays of Phil Spector's sound, and featured on such anthemic recordings as James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" and Nina Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black."
Both sessions were logged in as Buddy Lucas and the Shouters, but the Shouters, Lucas's vocal trio, were only there for the April 22 date. They were three girl singers better known in those days as members of Cissy Houston's vocal group, the Sweet Inspirations. One of them, Sylvia Shemwell, remained with the Inspirations as they backed up Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, among others. The other went on to solo careers. They were a pair of sisters named Warwick -- DeeDee and Dionne.
The Tru-Sound release was titled Down Home Turn Around. It was also released on Prestige's budget label, Status, as That's the Blues Man. Two 45 RPM singles came from the session, "Hocus Pokus" / "Show Down" and "Down Home Turnaround" / "April Showers."
Leonard Gaskin, New York City born and bred, found his way to Minton's and Monroe's early in the bebop era, and at age 24 followed Oscar Pettiford as bassist in Dizzy Gillespie's quintet. He played on some of Miles Davis's first recordings as a leader, recorded with Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. But as time went on he seemed to gravitate toward an earlier form of jazz, and his only two recordings as leader, both for Swingville, reflect that.
Jazz and its different forms have been known by a variety of names, not all of which caught on, not all of which are particularly endorsed by their practitioners. "Jazz" itself is rejected by many of the finest players of
this American music, while others guard the name against presumed barbarians at the gate, like Louis Armstrong castigating bebop as "Chinese music," or Eddie Condon, dismissing the beboppers with "We don't flat our fifths, we drink 'em." One well-known and well-esteemed jazz musician said of Ornette Coleman, "Whatever it is, that ain't jazz."
Or sometimes maybe it isn't used at all. In The Benny Goodman Story, the word "jazz" is never used once. Nor is the word "swing," for that matter. Steve Allen, as Benny, talks about wanting to play "hot music" and have his "hot music accepted.
Other apellations just didn't stick. For a time, the music that came to be known as bebop was called "New York music," and I've always thought it was kind of a shame that that didn't catch on. Afro-Cuban jazz was also called Cu-bop, and maybe that was too cute by half.
And then there's Dixieland, a name used by the white ensemble who cut the first jazz record, back in 1917. A number of Black musicians from New Orleans had joined the Great Migration northward to Chicago, the most famous among them being King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. A number of white musicians were to make that same trek, because there was an audience for the music. They played on their New Orleans roots by calling their ensembles Brown's Band from Dixieland, or Stein's Dixie Jass Band, or -- the group that traveled from Chicago to New York, and ended up making that first record--the Original Dixieland Jass Band, later to become the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
So it was this group that first popularized jazz beyond the nightclub audience in a few major cities, and who really brought the name into common parlance--and who also struck the first salvo in the ongoing culture war over the proposition that American music -- blues, jazz, and all their descendants -- are an African American art that has been stolen by whites.
And this is mostly true. I don't know how true it is on the musician level. Real musicians play music, and jazz musicians are consummate crafters who devote their lives to getting good enough, and remaining good enough, to be allowed into the colloquy that is jazz music. Louis Armstrong cited cornetist Nick LaRocca of the ODJB as one of his inspirations. But it is absolutely true on the business end. It's no accident that the ODJB, and not King Oliver or Fate Marable, was signed to make the first commercial jazz recording.
But if the white musicians who named their bands after a term which glorified the old South of slavery were not being consciously racist, they didn't have to be. Racism was such a part of their era that it was accepted without much conscious thought. In any event, the term, like the music it described, declined until the 1940s, and the revival of traditional jazz which began when journalist and music lover Heywood Hale Broun went down to New Orleans to record the still-active keepers of that tradition, and New Orleans musicians such as Bunk Johnson came to New York and recorded. This neo-traditional music, based on New Orleans and Chicago styles of the early decades of the 20th century, took the name of the ODJB and began to coalesce under the name Dixieland jazz. By then, there was at least somewhat more social awareness, and there were some who found the name offensive (and the music bland and uninteresting), but the most popular purveyors of this faux-nostalgic music called themselves the Dukes of Dixieland.
The Dukes were never very highly regarded in jazz circles, although Pete Fountain, Jim Hall and Herb Ellis played with them at one time or another. And they were pretty solidly white, although Louis Armstrong did sit in with them on a couple of occasions. And their musical imitators, who wore straw hats and striped blazers and conjured up images of a mythic and genteel Old South, were also all white.
But the musical tradition of New Orleans and Chicago was real, and though "Dixieland" had pretty much been relegated to football halftime shows, county fairs and Kentucky Derby festivities, there were real musicians, both black and white, who still honored those traditions, and it was just such a group of musicians that were gathered by Leonard Gaskin for this session.
It was very much Gaskin's session, and he is listed as "leader" in the session log, although that's not normally noted. Immersion in the tradition is emphasized by the selection of material, even including one tune ("At the Jazz Band Ball") from the ODJB's original sessions.
As the free jazz revolution started to take hold, it was good to be reminded of where jazz had come from--and to be reminded that jazz's evolution had been so rapid, that these still-vital, still-creative oldtimers were playing side by side with the Cecil Taylors and Albert Aylers. Sometimes literally side by side--Garvin Bushell, who had played with Bunk Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, would also play with Eric Dolphy,
Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Buster Bailey,Dick Wellstood, Herbie Lovelle and Gaskin have all appeared on Prestige sessions before, the first four on earlier Swingville releases. Lovelle backed up King Pleasure on a 1952 session. Gaskin was very active for Bluesville, working with a wide variety of blues singers, but he had also played on two of Prestige's earliest bebop sessions, one with J. J. Johnson and the other with Miles Davis.
Trumpeter Yank Lawson was one of those who continued to embrace the Dixieland moniker, and created, with bassist Bob Haggart, an ensemble that managed to achieve popularity on the Dixieland/nostalgia circuit while still playing music a jazz fan could take pleasure in. He began his career with Ben Pollack's orchestra in 1933, then worked with Bob Crosby, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. He and Haggart formed the Lawson-Haggart band in the 1950s, disbanded, and then rejoined forces in 1968 to create the modestly named World's Greatest Jazz Band, which had a solid decade's run of popularity, and included Cutshall, Dickenson and Wellstood at various times.
Trombonist Cutty Cutshall played with Benny Goodman, Billy Butterfield and Louis Armstrong, but his longest association was with Eddie Condon, with whom he was still touring when he died in 1968.
Clarinetist Edmond Hall came by the tradition naturally, being from a family of New Orleans musicians. His most important association was with Louis Armstrong, but he had a pretty strong pedigree before joining Armstrong, starting with his first recording session, in 1937, with Billie Holiday and Lester Young. He played with Claude Hopkins, Lucky Millinder, Zutty Singleton, Joe Sullivan, Henry "Red" Allen, Teddy Wilson, and Eddie Condon, among others, and was co-leader of the house band at the original Cafe Society in New York.
The recording date began with Lawson,Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall joining the rhythm section for "Tin Roof Blues," a tune that goes back to 1923 and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white group of New Orleans-to-Chicago musicians, and "Muskrat Ramble," written in 1926 and first performed by Louis Armstrong.
"At the Jazz Band Ball" is the ODJB tune, written by Nick LaRocca and other members of the group in 1917, and featuring the entire nine-piece band. The whole album is a pleasure to listen to, but on this tune in particular they really let rip, its 6:19 length giving everyone a chance to shine.
After that, Lawson, Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall pack it in, and Dickenson and Bailey take over for "Mack the Knife," the one modern tune, but it fits right in with the mood; "Hindustan," written in 1918 by Oliver Wallace, who a quarter century later would win an Academy Award for Dumbo; and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," a Fats Waller tune that's almost modern, having been first performed by Louis Armstrong in 1932. It really does sound from a different era and mind set than the other tunes on the album, even "Mack the Knife."
Swingville released the album as At the Jazz Band Ball by the Leonard Gaskin All Stars, but actually all it says on the front cover is the title and subtitle: A Dixieland Sound Spectacular, so Dixieland as a label was not dead yet. A later CD rerelease on a different label kept the title but named the group the Swingville All Stars.
Strange, but this is the session that was. You'd have thought, perhaps, that after having a hit record off of the first King Pleasure session, Weinstock would have planned a whole recording session around him, and gotten him some serious A-list musicians, led by someone better than Teacho Wiltshire. But instead, he seems to have been a sort of afterthought on a session led by someone who wasn't as good as Teacho Wiltshire--although not bad.
The Charlie Ferguson Quintet recorded eight songs that day, six of them without King Pleasure. Of those six, only two ("When Day is Done" and "Stop Talkin', Start Walkin'" were ever released, although their version of "Christmas Song," with the Mello-Moods singing pretty good backup vocals to a sort of Earl Bostic-type sax solo by Ferguson, has showed up on YouTube. Prestige had Ferguson back a few months later to record six more songs, none of which were released.
So, let's start with the band. Ferguson had some solid rhythm and blues credentials, having played with Arnett Cobb and Jimmy Liggins. Most of his work in the 50s was in the house band for Apollo Records. But he couldn't make that breakthrough, and today he's probably best known, if at all, for the two King Pleasure songs. He's also, for what it's worth, the third Ferguson to record for Prestige in 1952. I don't know if he's related to either Rudy or H-Bomb. He has an extended solo at the end of "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid," which cooks.
Ed Lewis's credentials go back to Bennie Moten in Kansas City, who played for many years with Basie, although he never soloed, and was considered by Harry "Sweets" Edison to be, along with Snooky Young, one of the two greatest first trumpets he ever played with. Ed "Schubert" Swanston actually worked extensively with the Mello-Moods, which may have been what brought him to the gig. He also had gotten around the jazz world, playing with Louis Armstrong from 1943-45, and also with such as Gene Krupa, Andy Kirk, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, Lucky Millinder, Art Blakey, Erskine Hawkins and Jimmy Rushing.
Peck Morrison would have a few turns in the Prestige studios, with Zoot Sims, J.J. and Kai, and Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson. He also recorded with Horace Silver, Gigi Gryce, and Art Farmer, and played with pretty much everyone: Gerry Mulligan, Carmen McRae, Tiny Bradshaw, Eddie Jefferson, Duke Ellington, Lou Donaldson, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston, Red Garland...I know I'm going on about these guys, when the real news about this session is King Pleasure and Betty Carter, but that's part of my pleasure in doing this blog. Jazz rode on the backs of guys like Ed Lewis and Peck Morrison...and Herbie Lovell, for many years house drummer at the Savoy Ballroom, who started with Hot Lips Page, then worked with Hal Singer, Johnny Moore's Three Blazes, Earl Hines, Lucky Thompson, Jimmy Rushing, Arnett Cobb and pianist Teddy Wilson. Which is a lot of versatility, but there's more. He also played drums on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and on albums bv John Denver, B. B. King, and...the Monkees?
King Pleasure broke through with Eddie Jefferson's magnificent treatment of "Moody's Mood," and came back this time with his own vocalese versions -- of Gene Ammons's "Red Top" (a really good start) and Lester Young's "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" (has become a classic).
Carmen MacRae once said, "There's really only one jazz singer – only one: Betty Carter." Carter's improvisational gifts are legendary, but here on her one cut ("Red Top") she's mostly singing harmony with Pleasure, although she does get to let loose on one chorus. And again, you have to wonder. "We can get Betty Carter for this date." "OK, we'll use her for one song on the Charlie Ferguson session."
And what can you say about King Pleasure? He should have recorded more. But we have what we have, and these two are right up there with his best. And maybe it wasn't so much an afterthought to the Ferguson session -- maybe these were the only two songs Pleasure had at that time. Annie Ross may have tossed off "Twisted" in one night, but this stuff really isn't easy to write.
This may have been listed as a Charlie Ferguson session, but the records came out under King Pleasure's name (with Betty Carter given credit). "Red Top" was on three different Prestige 45 RPM releases, b/w "Don't Get Scared" (from a later session), "I'm in the Mood For Love" (from an earlier session) and "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" (from this session). "Symphony Sid" also had a second 45 RPM release, b/w "Parker's Mood," Pleasure's masterpiece, about which more later, when we get to it.
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