Listening to Prestige 542 - Honi Gordon

LISTEN TO ONE: My Kokomo

 This turned out to be the only solo album Honi Gordon ever made. She is categorized, if she is mentioned at all, as one of a number of "one-album wonders," female jazz singers who got that one shot, and then were forgotten, as the Beatles, and the new rock explosion in general, found jazz, and especially jazz vocalists, fading in popularity. Playboy would rename its Jazz Poll the Jazz and Pop Poll (and the Village Voice would mockingly call its music column "Pazz and Jop"). But there's more to her than that.

Her career started as part of a family singing group, The Gordons (her father, two brothers, and her), and if the Gordons never made it quite into public visibility, they were good enough to get the respect of their peers, as evidenced by the company they kept in the recording studio, starting in 1953, when Honi was 15. 

Their 1953 debut was on Debut, the Charles Mingus-Max Roach label. They appear on two tracks, and are described in the liner notes as "Max Roach discoveries," although they, and particularly Honi, would become much more closely associated with Mingus. On the Debut album, they perform with Mingus, Roach, and Hank Jones, and they recorded more than those two tracks ("Bebopper" and "Can You Blame Me"), because three more would eventually appear on record. The Original Jazz Classics CD, Debut Rarities Volume 4, released in 1993, has "You Go to My Head," "You and Me," and "Cupid." All but "You Go to My Head" are credited to George Gordon, and throughout her career, Honi would make a point of featuring her father's songs.

In 1954, the Gordons recorded one tune for Columbia with a group that included Al Cohn, but it appears never to have been released.

In 1956, they appeared on a Lionel Hampton session for Jazztone, a record-of-the-month club that was started by two chemical engineer brothers who were offered 20 tons of vinyl resin at a bargain price, and then had to figure out something to do with it. The session featured Hampton, Oscar Dennard, Oscar Pettiford and Gus Johnson, and their version of "Take the A Train" is highly prized by cognoscenti. They are featured on one cut of a 1957 Dizzy Gillespie-Stuff Smith album for Verve.

Honi then went on her own, working twice with Eddie Jefferson. In 1959 they collaborated on three

tunes, two of which were released on 45 by the Triumph label ("Sherry" and "Body and Soul"), and all three (including "Now's the Time") on a couple of Jefferson reissues. They reunited in 1961, again for Triumph, for four songs with a vocal quartet which also included Babs Gonzales. These appear never to have been released at the time (Triumph had probably already gone under), but have appeared on later Jefferson reissues.

1959 also saw her reunited with Charles Mingus for the Mingus Dynasty album for Columbia, which included a version of "Strollin'," the Mingus/George Gordon collaboration. Mingus was one of the two artists who most enthusiastically championed her career.

1962 was her Prestige year, and after that, instead of aggressively pursuing a solo career, she reunited with her family, perhaps because Mary Lou Williams, the other artist who most appreciated her talent, needed a vocal ensemble for her devotional work, Black Christ of the Andes, recorded in 1963.  She would record with Williams twice more, both times with devotional music: in 1967, for a live performance at Carnegie Hall, and 1972, on Williams's own Mary label. Mingus and Williams are two artists known for their uncompromising commitment to musical excellence, which should tell you something about Honi Gordon.

Further work with Mingus included a live Columbia recording in 1972 (Charles Mingus and Friends in Concert), and Mingus Moves in 1973, on Atlantic.

Then nothing, although she seems to have kept singing. in 2007, she performed with Andy Bey and Geri Allen at a Fordham University tribute to Mary Lou Williams, which suggests that she must have been based around New York.

Of the Prestige album. a present-day reviewer (for Allmusic.com) wrote that Gordon "had an appealing style that was influenced by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, as well as Annie Ross. There were also hints of Chris Connor..." while a contemporary of hers (Sidney Falco, who wrote the liner notes for the album) says the opposite: Gordon is "if you will, original: one cannot point to her work, as it is so easy to do in many cases, and say where such and such a phrase or stylistic trick came from." And perhaps they're both right. The one thing you can say for certain about Gordon's singing is that it sounds like jazz.

Part of the uniqueness of her style (and part of the reason why AllMusic's Alex Henderson compared her to Annie Ross) comes from her choice of material--her father's material, especially. George Gordon was a unique composer--and I use "unique" in its original sense. I don't believe anyone else did what he did. "Vocalese" was in its heyday back then, and it meant the same thing for everyone who practiced, from the innovative work of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure through the complex arrangements of Dave Lambert to the lyric inspiration of Annie Ross -- who wrote the brilliant "Farmer's Market" and the now-classic "Twisted" in one night, after Bob Weinstock had played her "Moody's Mood" and asked if she could do something like that. It meant writing a vocal line to a jazz soloist's improvisation.

But George Gordon did something a little different. You can listen to "My Kokomo" and start digging through your old wax or your new Spotify to find the "Kokomo" and the improvised solo it came from, but to no avail. Gordon wrote the whole thing, words and music. The only exception is "Strollin'," where Gordon put a lyric to Charles Mingus's "Nostalgia in Times Square." George Gordon was a remarkable composer, and Honi Gordon a fitting interpreter (and, except for "Strollin'," her father's only interpreter).

Honi does four of her father's songs on this album: "Strollin'," "My Kokomo," "Love Affair," and "Cupid." She also stretches her range in other directions. There are standards: "Ill Wind" (Harold Arlen Ted Koehler) and "Why Try to Change Me Now" (Cy Coleman, Joseph McCarthy). There's a song by Esmond Edwards, who didn't write all that many -- "Lament of the Lonely." Both of her champions are included: Mingus with "Strollin'," Mary Lou Williams with "Walkin' Out the Door." "Why" was written by Consuela Lee Moorhead, who had something in common with George Gordon. He wrote for his daughter; she contributed music, and a song, to a movie by her nephew, Spike Lee.

Honi Gordon's adventurous spirit is shown in her choice of musicians for the session, the equally adventurous Jaki Byard and Ken McIntyre (later Makanda Ken McIntyre).

Honi Gordon Sings was a Prestige release.

Listening to Prestige 375: Ken McIntyre

Ken McIntyre's early career with Prestige is an interesting tangle. This is his debut album as far as the public is concerned; it was the first one to be released, although it was recorded after his May 31 session featuring musicians from Boston with whom he had been playing regularly.

Why release this one first? Prestige's marketing department, which was essentially the same as its creative department--i.e., Bob Weinstock--must have felt that this was a stronger way to introduce a new artist creating a new and edgy kind of music.

New Jazz was becoming, more or less, Prestige's label for the edgier stuff--the new jazz, as it were. And it was happening. Ornette Coleman could no longer be ignored. Coltrane had opened a new door with Giant Steps. Eric Dolphy was on the brink of becoming Prestige's breakout star of the new jazz, and his presence on this album gives it a significance that perhaps Weinstock was afraid would not be so apparent with the other session.

Prestige is definitely telling us something with the album's title. In the wake of Ornette's Something Else!!!!, Tomorrow Is the Question!, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century, McIntyre's debut is titled Looking Ahead.

McIntyre himself might not have agreed with the decision. He saw his first session, with the guys he had developed his music with, as a truer representation of his music.  And maybe he was right, but maybe he was wrong. I don't want to judge either way. But Weinstock's classic approach--Let's put a bunch of cool cats together and see what develops--produced some exciting music, and it does so here.

All but one of the selections are McIntyre originals. The exception is the old Gershwin chestnut, "They All Laughed," and it's interesting to see how these modernists take it. They play the head remarkably straight, and they never really lose it. They go far enough out in their improvisations to be satisfying--and because they're that good, to be deeply satisfying--but they always have that ha-ha-ha, who's got the last laugh now? feeling. Who says the avant-garde can't have a sense of humor? Walter Bishop's solo brings them back into home territory, and they finish up with Gershwin again.

It's hard to top Gershwin, and of course McIntyre doesn't try. It's interesting to try and imagine what his original compositions, and the improvisatory flights of the soloists, but it's ultimately a mug's game. Which of the two sessions is better? It's close to impossible not to lean toward this one, but that may be because Eric Dolphy achieved such heights in his short career that looking back, we want to listen closely to everything he did. How difficult and experimental did this music sound to contemporary audiences? We can't hear it with their ears. Today it sounds mainstream. I can remember the excitement of being young and having discovered jazz not all that long ago, and living in New York for the first time, and going down to the Five Spot to hear Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, but I can't recover those ears. It's part of nostalgia for my youth now. I wouldn't go so far as to say that The Shape of Jazz to Come will ever exactly be comfort music, but it is now part of a tradition. And listening to Ken McIntyre and Eric Dolphy today, they sound like a couple of cats playing very good music in that tradition. I had never heard this album before, and I'm glad I'm getting the chance to hear it now. It's good jazz, real jazz. And I like his originals, especially "Lautir" and "Head Shakin'."

Looking Ahead and Stone Blues were the only two albums McIntyre would make for Prestige as leader, although he would appear on one other Prestige session backing up a vocalist.

Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige 368: Ken McIntyre

Boston is an interesting jazz hub, and if I haven't mentioned it much recently, I did back at the beginning of this blog, in the very early days of Prestige. A few musicians who claimed Boston as their home base made some very nice records for Bob Weinstock. Pianist Al Vega never left Beantown, but everyone who played a club there, from Charlie Parker to Billie Holiday to Stan Getz wanted him in their band. Charlie Mariano recorded for Prestige in Boston with a big band of Bostonians, including Dick Twardzik, a brilliant pianist lost too soon to the heroin epidemic.

Boston now, of course, is a jazz hub, with the Berklee School of Music, which has become the largest and probably the best known school of jazz and contemporary music in the world. Berklee has recently annexed the even older Boston Conservatory, which was a place for the study of classical music, and really did not have a jazz program. But it did produce Ken McIntyre (and Gigi Gryce, Slam Stewart, Don Redman and Sam Rivers), although after he graduated he set aside a lot of his classical training, looking for notes that were not in the score of any classical piece. "I was a singer before I played," he told Joe Goldberg, who  interviewed him for the liner notes on this album,

but I stopped when I took up the saxophone. There are many notes other than the ones a piano is capable of - quartertones and semi-quarter tones that the voice can sing. The ear is not accustomed to hearing them all, but that's only a matter of training. They can be played on the saxophone.

But he continued to make Boston his home, and when he came to New York and Englewood Cliffs to make his first recording, he brought with him the musicians with whom he had been playing in clubs and developing his craft.

But the business end of the recording industry is sometimes a little weird (well, so is the music end, but it's supposed to be). McIntyre was brought into the studio in May to record a session with his guys, and then four weeks later, in June, with a group of some of New York's top musicians, including fast rising star Eric Dolphy, But the June session was released first, so it ended up being McIntyre's debut album, and Joe Goldberg was left to try and make sense of the apparent order--why go back to his Boston pals after playing with New York's elite?

McIntyre answered the question just as though that were really the situation:

Ken McIntyre's... previous Prestige/New Jazz release, Looking Ahead... featured Eric Dolphy, and a top-flight New York rhythm section made up of Walter Bishop Jnr., Sam Jones, and Arthur Taylor. It is often the case on a new musician's first recording, that he will be put with such a group: professionals who are sympathetic to the newcomer's style, and whose names, it might be added, will help the record to sell. This practice can work out well, as I think it did in McIntyre's case; but sometimes the presence of old pros on a new musician's first date, plus the possibly awesome surroundings of the recording studio, can serve to inhibit whatever talent the newcomer has to the extent that is never made apparent on the record.

With this new release, McIntyre has now recorded in both situations. His associates on this record are all from Boston, as is Ken, and were, for a while, a regular working group. It is inevitable that this new record is a more complete statement of his music than was the other.

As he puts it, "The musicians on Looking Ahead were all marvelous musicians, but I was in no position to dictate to them. On this record, I was the leader."

That we are truly in a new era in jazz can be seen in the critical treatment of new alto players. For two decades, they had been described in terms of their stylistic proximity to, or distance from, Charlie Parker. Now it's Ornette Coleman. Goldberg rejects the comparison to Ornette, and I think he's right. To me, McIntyre seems closer in approach to Yusef Lateef, with his explorations of different tonalities. He doesn't share Lateef's passion for Arabic sounds, but in his later career he would come to that in his own way, becoming more and more interested in African music, and ultimately choosing a new name that would reflect that: Makanda Ken McIntyre. He described one facet of his sound this way to Goldberg:

 I like the sound of alto and trombone, and particularly of flute and trombone. But you have to have exactly the right trombone player to compliment you, and I think I found him. Take Brubeck and Desmond, for instance. Paul plays very melodic, and Dave is rhythmic and harmonic. If either one of them played like the other, they'd have nothing. In our group, John Lewis, the trombonist, plays a few notes, staccato, and my style is to play many notes, legato. That way, we compliment each other.

John Mancebo Lewis shared the same multicultural leanings, which is undoubtedly part of why they fit together so well. Lewis was shortly to embrace Islam and become Daoud Haroon, and to become an African and Middle Eastern percussionist as well as a jazz trombonist. Haroon went on to a distinguished career as a musician, but also as an author, scholar and educator--he would teach both American History and Islamic Studies at colleges in Texas. He passed away just this past year.

Pianist Dizzy Sal had more of a connection to Ornette. The previous summer, he had taken a workshop at the Lenox School of Music in the Berkshire Mountains, yet another Massachusetts

institution and fellow participants had been Ornette and Don Cherry. The three of them were part of the Max Roach-John Lewis Ensemble whose live performance was recorded as a benefit for the school. He had multicultural credentials as well. He was an ethnic Indian, born in Rangoon, Burma. His three brothers, also musicians, played in a band in Kuwait. He came to the United States on a scholarship to Berklee.

Drummer Bobby Ward is hard to find out much about. Most of the Google links, even if  you search on Bobby Ward, drummer, are to another Bobby Ward, this one a British drummer in punk bands. There are a few more to Robert Ward, blues guitarist. But no links at all to a young jazz drummer from Boston. No Wikipedia page. One comes away with the feeling that Bobby Ward never amounted to much, although he certainly sounds good here.

One might feel that way, that is, until one looked on YouTube. There, one would find two videos of the Henry Cook Band, featuring Boston jazz legend Bobby Ward on drums. And there's also a video of a "Bobby Ward Amazing Drum Solo," and in the notes that video one would find that:

Bobby has played with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea and Cat Anderson among others, and has recorded with Makanda Ken McIntyre, Wallace Roney, Bob Mover, Salim Washington and Henry Cook.

 All the compositions except for "I'll Close My Eyes" are McIntyre's. Stone Blues was a New Jazz release, Esmond Edwards producing.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 is now available!

and also:

Listening to Prestige, Vol. 2, 1954-56

Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 1949-53