Listening to Prestige 557: Jimmy Forrest

LISTEN TO ONE: Experiment in Terror
Soft Summer Breeze

 An abbreviated session for Jimmy Forrest: three tracks to be added to some leftovers from earlier sessions and released in 1962 as Soul Street. You wouldn't think they'd bring in Oliver Nelson and a nine-piece band for a few add-ons to an album by a less than A-list musician (in marquee recognition, not in quality), but they did, and we are the richer for it.

Maybe Weinstock and Edwards decided, "Hey, look what we did with Oliver Nelson and those songs from All American! Let's see what he can do with some even less promising material."

Maybe, and maybe not. There's only one really unlikely tune. Eddie Heywood's "Soft Summer Breeze" never became the jazz standard it might have, but it's a pretty tune, and quickly recognizable. Duke Ellington is always a good choice, and "Just a-Sittin' and a-Rockin'" is good solid Ellington.

Henry Mancini's "Experiment in Terror" is the odd choice, and liner notesmith Dan Morgenstern seems a little embarrassed by it:

Jimmy gives the rather slight melody more breadth and depth than this Mancini-made slickie really deserves.

"Experiment in Terror" hasn't made the cut as one of Mancini's major works, certainly, but it's an interesting tune, and it's had an interesting, if slight, history. Its 12 interpretations (per Secondhandsongs) suggest that this little ditty had something for everyone, or else that no one could quite decide what to make of it.

Experiment in Terror was a Hollywood thriller, and Mancini's orchestral version for the soundtrack came out as an album of music from the movie. Every cut on the album is jukebox-lengthed two to three minutes, though none of them took the jukeboxes by storm. The melody has a spooky quality, befitting the title, and it also also has a walking bass line, befitting Mancini. Subsequent renditions took it one

way or another, but Mancini had it both ways, a walking bass under swelling strings, at a stately, spooky pace.

It was next taken up by rock and roll instrumentalists the Champs, still looking for a followup to their big hit "Tequila," and in 1962 having added two young musicians named Seals and Crofts, who would go on to make their own name. The Champs went all out Peter Gunn, walking it hard and picking up the tempo.

And still in 1962, Oliver Nelson and Jimmy Forrest. Here the walking bass part is assigned to guitarist Mundell Lowe, and the rhythm starts to swing, and it's very easy to forget that one started out to do a survey of curious versions of this song, and simply get caught up in what these wonderful musicians do with it. The swelling strings are replaced by brass and reeds, and Jimmy Forrest's saxophone gives the rather slight slickie a reading that reminds you that this is Henry Mancini, and he did know how to write a melody. This is a very satisfying outing.

1963 saw terror move to the elevator with versions by Spanish orchestra leader Fernando Orteu and the Living Strings. Then dormant until the 1990s. when it was taken up by La Muerta, a Belgian band who specialized in music for "those abandoned by love or devoid of hope," unsurprisingly a version that emphasized the spooky elements. It was then taken up by surf rockers and pop rockers who also chose spooky over rhythmic. Most recently, contemporary jazzer Ted Nash gave it the Earl Bostic "Harlem Nocturne" treatment. Eclectic instrumentalists Reverend Organdrum returned it to the Peter Gunn sound (with organ and drum doing the walking part), and so did eclectic guitarist Al Caiola.

Maybe if more people had listened to the Jimmy Forrest version, the tune would have become more widely recorded. For one thing, it's the only collaboration I know of between the talents of Henry Mancini and Oliver Nelson. 

And it has the guitar work of Mundell Lowe, in his only Prestige session. Lowe is associated more with the West Coast, but actually he was an Easterner until 1965, and recorded frequently for Riverside. Before that, interestingly for such a sophisticated stylist, he was a 16-year-old member of the Grand Ole Opry house band (not an easy gig to get in the city known as Guitar Town). A tour of duty in the army during WWII led to a friendship with John Hammond, who steered him toward jazz.

"Experiment in Terror" was the B side of a 45 RPM Prestige release, the popular "Soft Summer Breeze" on top. And all three tunes became part of Soul Street, a 1962 release on New Jazz.

 

Listening to Prestige 288: Jerome Richardson

The fullness and power of orchestral music, with its sections and soloists, is undeniable, as is the energy and vitality of big band music. But there's something uniquely entrancing about music made by a small ensemble, where each instrument has its own kind of clarity, and the melds are shifting and subtle. This is true of chamber music, but it's perhaps especially true of small group jazz, for all kinds of reasons, some of them obvious, some less so.

I've talked before about getting my first hi-fi, and suddenly realizing that there was more going on than just Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. I could suddenly hear Larry Bunker, and especially Chico Hamilton, and I suddenly had a whole new appreciation of the complexity of the music I was starting to love.

In a jazz ensemble, the instruments are so different from each other, and they have so many ways of interacting. Improvisation opens up the possibilities exponentially, and because the different members of the group are given space to improvise, the time it takes to play a given piece is variable, as Miles Davis found out when John Coltrane started playing his extended solos. This makes it strikingly different from a composed piece. Terry Riley's In C plays with that boundary. It is entirely composed. There are 53 separate musical phrases, and each instrument--it's written for an indeterminate number of instruments--is instructed to play each figure, in order, from beginning to end, but they don't have to start together, and each one can repeat each figure as many times as he or she chooses before going on to the next one. Still, duration is not much of a variable in most composed pieces. Even John Cage's 4'33", which involves silence, is written to last four minutes and 33 seconds.

So I'm in the car alone, my favorite way of listening to Prestige, and I've lined up the Jerome Richardson session, and "Caravan" comes on, the Duke Ellington-Juan Tizol warhorse, which has been recorded over 350 times, not always by jazz groups--sometimes just for its exotic melody. That makes it, like "Taboo" which we've recently heard recorded by both Yusef Lateef and Dorothy Ashby, just a little bit suspect: will it fall into the clichés of exotica? Which makes me particularly interested in listening to it. And this being the car, with me driving, I can't refer to the session notes, and I haven't really looked at them. I know that Richardson has Jimmy Cleveland on trombone, since brass always comes first in the personnel listing, but that's all.

It starts with a faint, exotic but not at all clichéd rhythm on the ride cymbal, but then the bass enters with the first strong voice, and it's a repeated but unnerving figure, no less unnerving when the piano joins in. Richardson enters, playing the melody, but he's distant, behind the bass and piano. So the first all-out solo goes to Jimmy Cleveland, improvising, and then it's Richardson again, out front this time, playing the melody again, sort of haunting, sort of mocking, sort of appreciative, and then they're off into uncharted territory, with Richardson beginning an extended solo, and now we're about three minutes into the piece, and we're just getting started, so this will be, yes, of indeterminate length, and the melody will be left in the desert dust. A lengthy Cleveland solo is next, followed by...what's this? Kenny Burrell? He's on this session too?

Well, yeah, since this is the Jerome Richardson Sextet, I should have remembered that there would be a third front line instrument. So we have flute, trombone guitar. not your everyday lineup, which brings me back to what I was saying about the different permutations of sound in a small jazz ensemble. The standard Bird-and-Diz quintet lineup of trumpet and saxophone is endlessly varied enough in the hands of jazz masters, but this group is very hip, and it's an instrumental lineup you don't hear that often--and it's varied even more when Richardson switches to tenor sax.. Which brings me back to duration as a unique function of jazz's uniqueness, especially in the LP era. With room for six different soloists to stretch out and create their own take on not only the melody and chord structure, but also the solos that have come before them, this version runs close to eleven minutes. A 1950s rock and roll version by steel guitar duo Santo and Johnny basically plays the melody, and clocks in and two and a half minutes. A pop instrumental by Gordon Jenkins, strictly playing the melody, is even shorter.

The rest of the group is Hank Jones on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Charlie Persip on drums. Benjamin, never very far from the front, comes back after Kenny Burrell, and then there's an extended drum solo that captures the exotica of...well, of exotica, the complexity of bebop, and the excitement of a great drummer doing an extended drum solo.

We've heard Jimmy Cleveland before, with  Art Farmer septets a couple of times, and as part of Gil Evans' tentet. Here he gets a more featured role, which is all to the good, particularly on "Way In Blues." Which reminds me to give a tip of the hat to another Prestige alumnus, Bennie Green, a great trombone bluesman, who would record through the 1960s on various labels, then settle in Las Vegas and hotel bands. Cleveland was one of those guys who could play with everyone, from blues (Ruth Brown) to soul (James Brown) to soul jazz (Cannonball Adderley) to big bands to bop.

Hank Jones accompanied vocalist Earl Coleman on a couple of Prestige albums, and played with Curtis Fuller on another. He'd be back for several more appearances on the label, but that was a tiny part of his prodigious output as leader and sideman over seven decades, with multiple honors including the National Medal of Arts two years before his death in 2010. He also has a unique credit for a jazzman: he accompanied Marilyn Monroe on her legendary performance of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President."

Joe Benjamin makes his Prestige debut, but his name is forever imprinted on my brain because he's one of the musicians Sarah Vaughan introduces in her live recording of "Shulie-a-Bop," arguably the greatest bebop vocal ever, made for Mercury Records in 1954, the same year that Mercury had her record "Make Yourself Comfortable," with a syrupy orchestra led by Hugo Peretti. This was the beginning of Mercury's project to make Vaughan into a commercial success by recording insipid pop songs with insipid arrangements. "Make Yourself Comfortable" is a clever song, and she sings it wonderfully, but come on. Is this really the best way to utilize Sarah Vaughan? It worked, for what they were trying to do. "Broken Hearted Melody," in 1959, which Vaughan regarded as the worst record she had ever made, was her biggest seller.

Fortunately, they did also let her record for EmArcy, their jazz subsidiary, where she did the great Clifford Brown sessions, and the ones with Joe Benjamin. But I digress.

This is actually the second member of Sarah's trio to appear on a Prestige session in the fall  of 1958. Roy (drumroll) Haynes (drumroll) had been on the Dorothy Ashby date just three weeks earlier. I wonder when John Malachi will show up? But I continue to digress.

Artie Shaw's "Lyric" joins Ellington's "Caravan," and the other three tunes are Richardson originals. I've commented before that I miss the bad puns and other plays on words in the early bebop recordings, like "Ice Cream Konitz" and "Flight of the Bopple Bee." Richardson brings the word play back with rather more sophistication on "Minorally" and "Delirious Trimmings," which I hope is not a reference to anything that anyone in the band is going through.

The album was released on New Jazz as Midnight Oil.



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 253: Gil Evans

Gil Evans is best known for his early work with Claude Thornhill, where he began to sow the seeds for modern jazz big band arranging; for his seminal work with Miles Davis on the Birth of the Cool sessions, thought by many to be the most important jazz album of the 50s (although recorded in the 40s); and the great orchestral albums he made with Miles for Columbia: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain. He had already recorded Miles Ahead at the time he went into Rudy Van Gelder's studio on three dates in September and October to record his first album as leader. He used 21 pieces on Miles Ahead.

According to the excellent Evans biography Castles Made of Sound, by Larry Hicock, Evans's work with Miles was far more extensive than the album credits would suggest. He had input into virtually every recording Miles made, and during his angriest, most anti-white periods, Miles still spoke to Gil nearly every day.

This is Evans's first album under his own name as leader, and if it doesn't register with the same historical force as the Miles Davis sides, it surely registers musically. Evans works with eleven instruments, including some of the Miles Ahead crew (John Carisi, Louis Mucci, Willie Ruff, Jimmy Cleveland, Lee Konitz and Paul Chambers), and including himself on piano (Wynton Kelly had done the Miles sessions). I hadn't realized what a good piano player he was.

But his greatest strength was as an arranger, and a group this size gives him all the room he needs to work with textures, dynamics, the shifting and balancing of parts.

The first day's work was two songs, Irving Berlin's "Remember," and "Ella Speed," a blues ballad best known in its 1944 recording by Lead Belly, and a continuing favorite of folk singers.

"Ella Speed" was rejected. Not "unissued," meaning put on the shelf, but sooner or later it might turn up on a later album or compilation. Rejected. One imagines Bob Weinstock's response: "Hey, Gil, what is this shit? We're a progressive jazz label. If you want to do folk songs, go over and see Moe Asch at Folkways."

But if such was the case, Evans was not dissuaded. He came back a week later for his second session, and this time led off with "Ella Speed." And this time, it was accepted, and it became a part of the Gil Evans canon.

And rightly so. There's something about a simple folk melody that lends itself to being a showcase for brilliant arrangements. Around the same time that Evans was recording "Ella Speed," British jazzman Johnny Dankworth made a record called "Experiments With Mice," in which he played "Three Blind Mice" in the styles of the great bandleaders and arrangers of the day: Billy May, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gerry Mulligan, Sauter-Finnegan, Stan Kenton. And Victor Borge, on Broadway, was doing baroque and romantic variations on "Happy Birthday to You." And so "Ella Speed" really shows off Evans at his best.


Miles Davis and Gil Evans

Leonard Bernstein's "Big Stuff" isn't quite a jazz standard, but it could be. It was written for Bernstein's first theatrical venture, the score for Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free. "Big Stuff" is the ballet's prologue, and was written with Billie Holliday in mind, but at the time Bernstein thought Lady Day was out of his league, and didn't show it to her. As it turned out, Bernstein was right. Holiday loved the song, and later recorded it. The Evans version is the only other jazz recording of it that I've found.

Some of Evans' musicians: Willie Ruff was already starting to make a name for himself as half of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, a name he was to continue to inhabit for the next 50 years. He and Dwike Mitchell became international ambassadors for jazz, the first jazz group to play in China and the Soviet Union.

Steve Lacy was at the beginning of a career that would make him one of the most versatile and widely recorded jazz stars of all time, and he was already showing his versatility, having recorded with Dixieland groups and with avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. He may have been the first significant musician to bring the soprano sax into modern jazz, well before John  Coltrane.

Of the lesser known players, Lou Mucci was revered as a teacher. I particularly loved this story from one of his students:

I went to see Louis Prima at the Paramount Theater. The trumpet players had very shiny trumpets and I wanted one. I asked Mr. Mucci if he would give me a note for my parents so that they would buy me a shiny trumpet. He tried my horn and said that I did not need a new horn and that he was doing the Patti Page TV show and he would use my horn.

That is a good man.

Gil Evans and Ten was released on Prestige, and later rereleased on New Jazz as Big Stuff.

 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige Part 112: Art Farmer

Art Farmer seemed to do very well with the mid-sized group, six to eight pieces. He was perhaps best known for the six-man Jazztet with Benny Golson in the late 50s - early 60s, and his work in the early 50s also tended toward that format. His early Wardell Gray session for Prestige in 1952 was a sextet, although only two of the group were front line players (the sixth was a percussionist). He led a septet in 1953 before joining the Lionel Hampton tour, and played with various mid-sized ensembles during the Hampton tour in Europe. His first two 1954 sessions were quintets - Sonny Rollins and Gigi Gryce -- but he returned to the studio again with seven pieces for this one. The group included   Horace Silver and Percy Heath, and maybe Kenny Clarke, according to the jazzdisco.com website, which has the set lists for every Prestige session. But they may be wrong. The label on the 45 says the drummer was Art Taylor, and the Art Taylor Wikipedia page credits him with both this and the quintet session with Gigi Gryce (Art Blakey was the drummer on the Rollins session). Scott Yanow's bio on Allmusic.com puts Taylor in the Prestige studios for the second half of the decade, so 1954 would be on the cusp. Taylor's obituary in the New York Times gives a list of musicians he played with, and does not include Farmer. Your guess is as good as mine. My ear isn't good enough to choose between the drumming techniques of two modern masters (and two eventual expatriates).

Jimmy Cleveland, who had played in the earlier septet, returned for this one. The other two were

Danny Bank and Charlie Rouse, and all of these guys were veterans, with extensive experience in swing and bebop...and rhythm and blues. Jimmy Cleveland's resume would include soul jazz with Gene Ammons and funk with James Brown. Charlie Rouse, whose chief fame would come later as Thelonious Monk's right hand man, began his career with the classic Billy Eckstine band that included Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, but he also played with Bull Moose Jackson. He played big band swing with Basie and Ellington, bebop with Dizzy and Tadd Dameron. Danny Bank had a similarly varied career, playing with virtually every major swing band, with Charlie Parker, with Clifford Brown, with Ray Charles. He's probably best known, though, for his work with Miles Davis and Gil Evans on their classic collaborative albums.

And this versatility is put to use here. On "Evening in Paris," a Quincy Jones ballad, they lend support to a piece that mostly features Farmer and Silver, who also dominate "Elephant Walk," a piece which demonstrates that even elephants get the blues. "Wildwood" is a Gigi Gryce composition, as Farmer continued his close association with the two young composer/arranger stars of the Hampton tour, and it gives a wild, full romp to the whole ensemble. They give the same treatment to "Tiajuana," again a Gryce composition, which is complex and straight-ahead at the same time.

I don't want to lose the real thrust of this blog, which is the experience of listening to this music. Secondarily, it's exploring the history of jazz in this period. Finding out who Charlie Rouse was and what he did before his years with Monk. Learning about the work done by professionals like Danny Bank who didn't make a mark as leader, but contributed so much. Thinking about what an ear Art Farmer had for the great jazz composers of his era: Quincy Jones and Gigi Gryce here, Benny Golson later.

But listening to this session, it's the bluesy chording and rhythmic virtuosity of Horace Silver, and the warm, pure tone of Art Farmer. It's the ensemble work of a septet, and how if Art Farmer worked in the shadow of arrangers like Jones, Gryce and Golson, he was one hell of an arranger himself. It's the

music I love.

These were released on 45 and 78, and on a 12-inch, 7000-series LP, The Art Farmer Septet. It's the first Prestige session I've seen that didn't come out on a 10-inch LP first.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 96: Quincy Jones

The Lionel Hampton gang still in Sweden, still breaking away from Hamp to play some bebop with the Swedes, still giving Gigi Gryce and Quincy Jones to work out the arrangements they want to hear. This time it's Jones, and these are archetypal Quincy Jones arrangements -- full, melodic, adventurous, great ensemble voicings, plenty of room for improvisation.These Swedish sessions are the first recordings of Jones as an arranger, and they really show him already at a peak of form.

Jones doesn't play any trumpet on this set -- I guess if you've got Art Farmer handling that aspect, you don't really need to. Farmer has plenty of room to stretch out here, and he sounds great.

Jones doesn't play any piano, either, but it turns out that's covered very nicely too. Bengt Hallberg never ventured far beyond his native Sweden, but he made a name for himself that stretched far beyond the Scandinavian borders. Miles Davis, in a 1955 Leonard Feather blindfold test for Billboard, was

played one of these tunes, and said,

The piano player gasses me – I don’t know his name. I’ve been trying to find out his name. He’s from Sweden. . . . I think he made those records with Stan, like “Dear Old Stockholm.” I never heard anybody play in a high register like that. So clean, and he swings and plays his own things…

Hallberg died in 2013, at age 80.