Listening to Prestige 587: Rhoda Scott

LISTEN TO ONE: I-Yi-Yi-Yi

Newark's Key Club was a home base for Rhoda Scott, Joe Thomas and Bill Elliot, who were from Newark and had gotten their start there. Scott was destined to make her home, and her career, and her major reputation far from Newark, when she moved to France in 1969 and began a series of performances that would go on for decades and make her one of the most popular entertainers in Europe. But in 1963 she was still one of the most popular entertainers in Newark, and Newark was still a city with a jazz tradition, and her fans were packing the place, ready for that all-systems-go sound that Scott, Thomas and Elliot always delivered.

Scott and her trio were signed to Tru-Sound, Bob Weinstock's "modern rhythm and blues" label, and they delivered--raucous, jarring, uptempo, not necessarily what you'd think of a jazz and not necessarily what you'd think of as rhythm and blues, but Newark was never known for genteel manners, and this trio delivered a solid home town sound--all the more so for being live. Prestige rarely went into live recordings, but it's not hard to see why this one seemed like a good idea. 

The Tru-Sound album was called, of course, Live at the Key Club, and the single from it was "I-Yi-Yi-Yi," parts 1 and 2. Ozzie Cadena produced.

Listening to Prestige 461: The Swingville All Stars

This is the third album to be released under the Swingville All Stars banner, and the second in a little over a month. The April lineup is completely replaced, although there's a fairly close consistency as to the structure of the group. Joe Thomas replaces Joe Newman on trumpet; Vic Dickenson for J. C Higginbotham on trombone; Pee Wee Russell for Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet. The first go-round had an alto (Hilton Jefferson) and tenor sax (Coleman Hawkins); this one has two tenors (Buddy Tate and Al Sears). Both sessions had a guitar (Tiny Grimes then, Danny Barker now). Claude Hopkins, Wendell Marshall and Billy English rounded out the first

rhythm section; Cliff Jackson, Joe Benjamin and J. C. Heard were the second. In other words, heads you win, tails you can't lose.

I've commented that none of the Swingville groups are playing the music of the 1920s and 1930s. They're not playing bebop, postbop or hard bop, but they're not stuck in the past either. That's somewhat less true of this group, maybe because more of their repertoire is swing era standards. But they're still making music that sounded good in 1961, and still sounds good in the 21st century.

There are identifiable differences. The Swingville All Stars are making music in the LP era, which means that they can stretch out in ways that the cats making 78 RPM records couldn't, "Years Ago" is ten minutes long, with room for extended solos for everyone. "Phoenix" is over seven minutes. Even super-traditional swing melodies like "I May Be Wrong" go over six. And that does make a difference.

Better recording equipment and techniques make a difference. In the late 1940s, Baby Dodds made a series of videos demonstrating his phenomenal technique on a drum kit. But recording with Johnny Dodds and with King Oliver, he had to use just a block of wood, because real drums would make the needle on the primitive recording machine jump.

And as I've noted before, these are some of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen. They may not have chosen the paths blazed by Charlie Parker, but they didn't stand still, either.

Nevertheless, there's more nostalgia here than we've heard on some of the other sessions, and the only explanation I can give for that is that's how they felt like playing on this particular day. The first session is wonderful music, lifted to another level by Coleman Hawkins. This session is wonderful music, lifted to another level by Pee Wee Russell -- who, if anything, was more progressive than Hawkins. So go figure.

New to Prestige on this session were Cliff Jackson and Danny Barker. Jackson was close to 60 when this recording was made, and had built his reputation as a stride piano player. He had been well known in New York for four decades, doing some recording, but mostly known as a fixture on the

night club circuit. He did not have a lot of experience playing with the younger cats, and he may have been partly responsible for the more traditional sound on this date. But he was very good at what he did, and Prestige would use him on several more Bluesville and Swingville sessions. He died in 1970.

New Orleans-born Danny Barker lived until 1994, long enough to be revered as both a musician and a seminal figure in the revival of jazz in New Orleans. The Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band, which he founded, gave a number of young New Orleans musicians their start, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Lucien Barbarin and many others. Wynton Marsalis has credited him with being one of his most important teachers. He would continue to play, both guitar and banjo, until shortly before his death.

The Hawkins All Stars and the Russell All Stars were mixed and matched for marketing. Swingville released the material on two albums. The first, Things Ain't What They Used to Be, contained the title song, "I May Be Wrong," and "Vic's Spot," along with two numbers from the Hawkins session. The others joined the remaining two Hawkins numbers on Years Ago. Both sessions were reunited on a Prestige double album (and later CD) called Jam Session in Swingville.

Listening to Prestige 436: Claude Hopkins

I haven't been able to find the February 17 Buddy Tate session that yielded the Swingville album, Groovin' with Buddy Tate.

Claude Hopkins had a real career revival with Prestige. Since his heyday as a bandleader in the 1930s he had worked steadily but anonymously until tapped by Chris Albertson to  appear on the rediscovery session for jazzman/bluesman Lonnie Johnson in March of 1960. Just a couple of weeks later, he was called back into Rudy Van Gelder's studio to make his debut album for Swingville. 

There would be three Swingville sessions in all, and he would go on leading groups and recording for smaller labels well into the 1970s.

He was back in the studio 11 months after his first Swingville session with essentially the same group, Joe Thomas replacing Chu Berry. Thomas had done a Swingville session once before, with Coleman Hawkins. With Esmond Edwards producing, the selections here play to the strengths of Hopkins and his group, ballads and foot-stomping blues, with an emphasis on rhythm and a strong bass line. The material is familiar to Hopkins--just how familiar can be deduced from one of his originals. "I Would Do Anything For You," his mot successful composition, was co-written with pianist Alex Hill, who died in 1937.  "Safari Stomp" is, for me, the catchiest, with a solid groove and hot solos by Tate and Thomas.

The Swingville album was called, fittingly, Let's Jam. A Prestige reissue on CD was retitled  Swing Time.

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 335: Coleman Hawkins

Not much new to say about Coleman Hawkins by this time. It seems almost beside the point to write anything. Better to turn the volume to just the right level (not all the way up to eleven), sit back, and enjoy sound that is so smooth you could spread it on Wonder Bread without ripping up big hunks.

Except you would never spread it on Wonder Bread. This is the real thing, the blues, the real America, three-dimensional and full-toned and flavored like Huck Finn's stew. Unlike the Widow Douglas's white-bread cuisine where "everything was cooked by itself," you have "a barrel of odds and ends," where "things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better."

So this is music for pure enjoyment,  but isn't that what it's all for? As Hawkins and his group were in Englewood Cliffs cutting this session, Ornette Coleman was at the Five Spot making music that hurt the ears of many, but to my 19-year-old ears it was pure bliss, thrilling new, complex and simple, challenging and direct. And that's what you look for from art. The doors open where you find them, sometimes where you were looking, sometimes where you least expected, and each door that you go through broadens your range of appreciation, so that your capacity for enjoyment keeps expanding.

Hawkins has brought some old friends to this session, Osie Johnson has some swing credentials, having spent three years with Earl Hines, Tommy Flanagan and Wendell Marshall have young hands and timeless ears. But his horn players have the kind of time-tested chops that the Hawk himself brings.

Vic Dickenson kept a fairly high profile for a traditional player during the modern jazz era. A Down Beat International Critics Poll in 1963 placed him third among trombonists, tied with Lawrence Brown. And there were still plenty of great trombonists around. J. J. Johnson was still leader of the pack, Curtis Fuller and Slide Hampton were at the peak of their careers, Kai Winding was making hit records, Urbie Green and Bennie Green were still active, and Dickenson was pushing 60. But he  kept busy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, recording with Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Dicky Wells, Buster Bailey, Budd Johnson and, interestingly, Langston Hughes. He was a member of the outfit called The World's Greatest Jazz Band, which played the style of traditional jazz somewhat uncomfortably referred to as Dixieland, and which had a good enough lineup to justify the name.

Much less well-known, but regarded with reverence by those familiar with him, was trumpeter Joe Thomas. One such is Michael Steinman of the Jazz Lives blog, who has said of Thomas:

Joe knew how to structure a solo through space, to make his phrases ring by leaving breathing room between them.  Like Bix or Basie, Joe embodied restraint while everyone around him was being urgent.  His pure dark sound is as important as the notes he plays — or chooses to omit...

A simple phrase, in Thomas’s world, is a beautifully burnished object.  And one phrase flows into another, so at the end of the solo, one has embraced a new melody, resonant in three dimensions, that wasn’t there before, full of shadings, deep and logically constructed.

And more:

 Joe’s tone, dark and shining, makes the simple playing of a written line something to marvel at, and each of his notes seems a careful choice yet all is fresh, never by rote: someone speaking words that have become true because he has just discovered they are the right ones for the moment.

I've commented on this before, but it's worth repeating: What Coleman Hawkins, and other artists who recorded for Bob Weinstock's Swingville label, played was not traditional swing (as opposed, for example to The World's Greatest Jazz Band, which essentially did play traditional Dixieland). Swing was big band jazz, essentially an arranger's art form, and what followed it was a small group music with emphasis on the soloist. Of course, there had always been small groups. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five was one of the most important, and they preceded swing.

Hawkins played his own kind of music. He had virtually invented the modern improvised solo with his 1939 recording of "Body and Soul," and though his music at this stage of his career had a mellow nostalgic feeling to it, it was definitely the music of the guy who had recorded "Body and Soul" and had played on the first bebop recording.

And his traditionalist partners, Thomas and Dickenson, were right there with him. They could play traditional Dixieland when it was called for, but they could play with Hawkins, doing what Hawkins did, as well. As Dickenson once said:

I like to play the melody, and I want it still to be heard, but I like to rephrase it and bring out something fresh in it, as though I were talking or singing to someone. I don't want to play it as written, because there's usually something square in it.

Of course, the center of the Kansas City swing that Hawkins grew up with, and the center of bebop as well, is the blues, and all of these cats know how to play the blues, and it infuses even their Tin Pan Alley pop standards like "I'm Beginning to See the Light." It's part of what knits them together. The rest is a shared musical understanding that allows for solo to build on solo, in a most satisfying way.

The Swingville release was entitled Coleman Hawkins All Stars .