Listening to Prestige 205: Prestige All Stars

Two groups of Prestige All Stars in two days, with only Art Farmer in common--and, curiously, Ed Thigpen. Thigpen's only previous Prestige connection was three sessions with Gil Mellé--although, like another Mellé-to-Ammons handoff, George Duvivier, he would be making funk for earth people with the Prestige funkmaster Gene Ammons in the early Sixties. Were it not for the fact that Thigpen hadn't been on Mellé's session of the previous Friday at Rudy's, one might have guessed that maybe this session had been plotted there, because both Farmer and Hal McKusick were holdovers.

Perhaps "Prestige All Stars" wasn't the best marketing strategy, since this first album is virtually nowhere to be found. Nowhere online. You can buy it from Amazon for $189, which is really weird considering that this isn't even for the vinyl--it's for the CD! And weirder yet, when you consider that you can buy the Complete Kenny Burrell 1957-62, on four CDs, including all the tunes from this session, for $11.99. It's a great lineup, and I wish I could say more about it.

Farmer is back again the next day with a different lineup, this time All Star regular Donald Byrd and All Star newcomer Idrees Sulieman, who'd done Prestige sessions with Mal Waldron and Joe Holiday: Three trumpets! Well, why not? They'd done well with two trumpets on the first All Stars session.

And they do damn well with three, here.

There's an excellent documentary by Stevenson Patti about his attempt to organize a concert featuring three New Orleans piano legends, Tuts Washington, Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint, titled after a quote from one of them, Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together. And this is mostly true, due to the unlikelihood of there being more than one piano at any given venue. There are exceptions, of course. We presented Dave and Don Grusin together at Opus 40, with two grand pianos out on the sculpture. The pianos were provided by Yamaha, who told us afterwards that it was the hardest moving and setup job they had ever done. And Daffy and Donald Duck have a memorable piano duel in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 

But it's much easier to get two or three players of a portable instrument together. J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding achieved their greatest success when they put two trombones together, and although two of the same instrument is not a rarity, it's a little rarer when both the instruments are trombones. Rarer is a group with four of the same instrument, but the World Saxophone Quartet put four saxes together. Even rarer is a group with six of the same instrument, and perhaps even rarer than that is a group composed of multiple tubas, so a rarity of rarities would be Howard Johnson's group Gravity -- six tubas and a rhythm section.

And of course, there was a time when this none of this was at all unusual--the big band era, with its horn sections. And one of those horn sections became particularly famous--Woody Herman's Four Brothers, who would go on to record in a small group setting for Prestige as Five Brothers: Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Alan Eager and Brew Moore.

More commonly, in a small group, you'll have representatives from different instrumental families, just as the balanced dinner (in those days) contained representatives of the Four Major Food Groups. Perhaps this was because the archetypal, legendary (even though it was real) bebop ensemble featured Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps it was because for the casual listener, with two or three different instruments as the front line, it was easier to tell who was playing at any given time. Scott Yanow, in his review of the Five Brothers session, admits that with five young Lester Young acolytes, it's hard to tell who's playing what.

Ira Gitler, in his liner notes to many Prestige albums, would list the order of soloists on every cut, and while this may have been a source of mild ridicule for jazz adepts, it was very useful for the casual fan striving to become more than a casual fan.

But I would think a session such as this one must have been very rewarding for the players: three guys using the same tool but finding individual approaches to improvised music, and all starting from the same melody--in this case, original compositions from each of them. And while I am one of those who really can't tell who's playing what part, I can certainly appreciate how one trumpet follows another, with a new approach, a new tonality, These three musicians are pushing and inspiring each other in a way that is perhaps unique to the situation of three or more soloing on the same instrument.

They share the composing chores too, with Sulieman contributing two tunes ("Palm Court Alley," with its opening Charlie Parker lick, and "Forty Quarters"), Farmer ("Who's Who") and Byrd ("You Gotta Dig It to Dig It") one each.

The Prestige cover, and the British Esquire label cover. From the
London Jazz Collector: "Uniquely among US overseas releases, Esquire
Records were pressed in the UK with original US supplied stampers and
not re-mastered locally, so are sonically the same as Prestige,  in most
cases showing van Gelder stamp and originating US matrix and
plant codes. What differs are the alternative covers, a mixture of quirky
native whimsy, kitsch graphics, alternative duotone colourings, and line-
drawings based on the originals: sometimes you can see the original
as inspiration, while others clearly start with different cultural reference
points, the denizens of London’s smoke-filled Soho clubs and  52nd Street
New York, two jazz-loving  communities separated by only  approximately
 the same language. Potayto, pottato. That is one of the things that
make Esquire covers so intriguiging.

The fifth number, "Diffusion of Beauty," was written by Hod O'Brien, who was a newcomer to the Prestige orbit, and did not remain in it for long--I think this is his only Prestige recording. O'Brien is one of those guys who successfully balanced dual careers. After playing with Oscar Pettiford, J. R. Monterose and others in the 50s and early 60s, he got a degree in psychology and mathematics from Columbia, and worked in statistical research in psychology at NYU. "Diffusion of Beauty" is the only composition from this session that has been recorded by others.

The album was released as Prestige All-Stars:Three Trumpets, with the names of the three--and only the three--prominently featured on both the American and British covers.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 199: The Prestige All-Stars

This is the familiar -- and magnificent -- core of the Prestige All-Stars, with two new additions, and what a difference they make! The veterans are Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, and the rhythm section of Mal Waldron, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor. The new additions are Jerome Richardson and Kenny Burrell, and with them, Prestige takes a step forward into what will become the jazz sound of the Sixties.

A lot of this has to do with the instrumentation. Richardson was proficient on pretty much anything that could be played with a reed, and a few instruments that couldn't. On this album he doubles on flute and tenor sax, but it's the flute that really stands out.

These aren't the first instance of flute and guitar playing a major role on a Prestige recording session. Herbie Mann, Sam Most and Bobby Jaspar all recorded for Prestige. The label's most prominent guitarist was probably Jimmy Raney, who recorded with his own group, and played with Bob Brookmeyer and Teddy Charles (and who would later do an album with Kenny Burrell for Prestige). Billy Bauer also contributed some memorable sessions with Lee Konitz.

But this is different, and different all around. The instrumentation makes it different, but that's not all. It's a sound that's really looking toward the future. That future would be irrevocably ushered in the following year, with a recording made in 1949, but buried by Capitol Records until it finally got its LP release in 1957: the Miles Davis nonet's Birth of the Cool.

This session still has all the passionate heat of bop, but the flute is an instrument that lends itself to the cool sound, and jazz is forever evolving. It's interesting that this session was recorded under the Prestige All-Stars banner, but fitting. The Prestige veterans were not standing still, either. Donald Byd in particular, was still at the cusp of a career that would see him in more than one vanguard.

The opening salvo of "All Night Long" is by Art Taylor, and creates a different rhythmic pattern from any we've heard before, which leads right into a Kenny Burrell solo, followed by Richardson on flute. By this time, we're well into the LP era, and long cuts are common, but "All Night Long" is long even by 1956 standards, checking at 17:11, and giving all the All-Stars plenty of room to develop. Which they do. Every solo on it is wonderful. Burrell and Richardson stand out, but it's hard to take the record off without marveling at Mal Waldron's solo.

"All Night Long" is a Burrell original, and Burrell was hitting the scene hard. He was born and raised

in the jazz hotbed of Detroit, and went to college there, at Wayne State, where he studied music composition and theory, and founded an organization called the New World Music Society, which included fellow Detroiters Pepper Adams, Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd and Elvin Jones.

He graduated in 1955 and joined the Oscar Peterson Trio, a gig for which his early admiration for guitarist Oscar Moore of the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers had well prepared him.

He then headed for New York where his reputation preceded him. As well it might have. As a 19-year-old, he had already recorded with a group including Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane in Detroit, but had resisted the invitation to tour with Dizzy. opting for college and music theory. He hit New York right after graduation, and not only did he find work right away, he found a leader's role right away, recording three albums under his own name for Blue Note (one of his later Blue Note albums, Midnight Blue, was such a favorite of Alfred Lion's that it was one of the albums he was buried with). He also joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse (Minton's is best known as the birthplace of bebop in the 1940s, but it continued to be a jazz proving ground through the 50sand 60s), which was led at the time by Jerome Richardson.

The first Blue Note album featured all original Burrell compositions, showing that those years at Wayne State paid off.

The rest of this album is given over to two other world class composers, Mal Waldron and Hank Mobley. I particularly loved "Boo-Lu" and the irresistible riff it's built around. One (or two) more numbers were included on the session, but not on the album. One or two because on the session notes, they're listed as a medley: "Body and Soul" and "Tune Up." Which is a cool and unusual medley -- a standard from the Great American Songbook and a jazz standard by Miles Davis. But when they were included as bonus tracks on a CD release of the album, they became separate tunes. "Body and Soul" was also released as part of a compilation album of various artists doing the Eyton/Green/Heyman/Sour composition, on the Prestige subsidiary label Status, which the invaluable  London Jazz Collector describes as:

Difficult to see what was budget apart from saving on ink, providing minimal information saved nothing, but made it look budget. Working in Marketing in the Seventies, the big fear was always “cannibalisation”. You wanted all the sales you could get at the premium price, and extra sales at the budget price, without losing the one to the other. Extra effort was incurred to make things look less attractive. More marketing genius from Weinstock.

The original release was called All Night Long and credited to the Prestige All-Stars, but then, when subsequent Burrell session became All Day Long, the Night version was rereleased as a Kenny Burrell album.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.