Carmell Jones-Nathan Davis

Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972, my history of Prestige Records, can be ordered from Amazon or through your local independent bookstore.

LISTEN TO ONE: Carmell's Black Forest Waltz

 

 Carmell Jones had taken up residency in Germany when this recording was made, where he would remain until 1980. There he made the acquaintance of Nathan Davis, a Kansas City musician who had played with Jay McShann and, remarkably, with the great all-woman band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, during their later year when they would, very occasionally, hire a man to fill out a section. 

Davis came to Germany not with a touring "ambassadors of jazz" group like the Lionel Hampton big band, but by the same route as another young musician -- a guitar player named Elvis Presley. Like Elvis, Nathan was drafted, and shipped overseas to Berlin. Unlike Elvis, he stayed.

He had more reason too -- no Hollywood/Vegas superstardom awaiting him back home, plenty of racial prejudice awaiting him back home, and an international cultural life that was burgeoning in Berlin, including a jazz scene and the kind of appreciation for jazz that its practitioners would not always find in their home country. So after he mustered out in 1962, Davis stayed in Europe.

It was most likely in Berlin that he first met fellow expatriate Kenny Clarke and his musical partner, the Belgian pianist Francy Boland, with whom he struck up a musical fellowship, although he does not appear to have been a part of their big band. But when he connected in 1965 with newcomer Carmell Jones, an old schoolyard pal and early bandmate from Kansas City, it was Clarke, Boland, and their bass player, expatriate Jimmy Woode, whom he brought in for a recording session deep in the Black Forest.

That Black Forest studio, SABA-Tonstudio, had already begun to develop a reputation, one that would only grow through decade. It was most famous for the legendary solo and trio recordings by Oscar Peterson released as Exclusively for my Friends.  The studio, built by Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, a gifted engineer who was also an audiophile and jazz lover, was widely acclaimed for the excellence of its sound reproduction, and it certainly did right by this quintet.

The session is considered a high point in the careers of both. Their Kansas City background shows (and don't forget a Kansas City/Jay McShann background includes an early exposure to Charlie Parker). They are both soulful and modern, as demonstrated in the aptly titled "That Kaycee Thing." It's a Davis composition, as are most of the tunes from the session. One exception is a Jones tribute to Herr Brnner-Schwer's studio and its exotic location, "Carmell's Black Forest Waltz."

The quintet recorded seven tunes that day, all of which appear on the German release, The Hip Walk, credited to the Nathan Davis Quintet Featuring Carmell Jones. Prestige licensed four of them for its 1969 release, Carmell Jones In Europe; 1965-66. The other two tracks were recorded at a jazz festival in Frankfurt the following year with a group including Jimmy Woode and featuring Pony Poindexter and Annie Ross, singing her hit composition "Twisted." 

 Nathan Davis, who held a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. returned to the United States in 1916 to become professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was also was also founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in the United States.

Listening to Prestige 597: Pony Poindexter with Booker Ervin

LISTEN TO ONE: Gumbo Filet

 Pony Poindexter left New Orleans when he was 14. His musical career encompasses the West Coast, where he first began to make his reputation, the East Coast (although not known as a New York musician, his breakthrough as a recording artist came in the Big Apple with sessions for Epic and Prestige) and Europe (following his Prestige sessions, he moved to Spain, where he spent most of the rest of the decade). Yet, as this album clearly shows, he never left the Big Easy completely behind. Perhaps it's true that you can take the boy out of New Orleans, but...

Poindexter recorded not infrequently, and with some high-powered musicians, but he is a forgotten name today. On Ranker, a web site which features some exhaustive lists, he gets no votes at all for jazz saxophone.

I first heard his name back in the late 1950s, when I was new to jazz and a new reader of DownBeat, in connection with a minor scandal of sorts. It seems that some of Pony's West Coast admirers had attempted to stuff the ballot box for DownBeat's reader's poll, and they had somehow been caught out, and Poindexter had been stricken from the poll results altogether. This was in the days when the East Coast jazz establishment tended to view the whole West Coast scene as lightweight, anyway, and I was under that influence. So I was willing to dismiss Poindexter as a fake and a poseur, and nothing happened in the intervening years to change my view. Until this album, I had never listened to his music--and that includes his debut album for Prestige earlier in 1963, which included his take on such dubious jazz choices as "Love Me Tender," and which I was unable to find anywhere, not even a single cut.

And had I looked, I would have found that his credentials were pretty substantial. He had recorded with Wes Montgomery, with Jon Hendricks, with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (so I might have heard him without knowing it). His debut album as a leader, 1962's Pony's Express for Epic, featured Eric Dolphy, Gene Quill, Sonny Red, Phil Woods, Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath, Clifford Jordan, Sal Nistico, Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Charli Persip. Not too lightweight.

In 1963, New Orleans was many years removed from being a hub of jazz. There had been a revival of interest in the traditional New Orleans sound in the early 1940s, but that had long since been swamped by the modern jazz tsunami, and not even the revivalist producers of Prestige's Swingville label were much interested in New Orleans style. It's hard to imagine New Orleans without Preservation Hall, but that now-venerable institution had only been started in 1961, and was not yet a tourist draw. The most well-known musicians in the New Orleans tradition were the Dukes of Dixieland, a band that was scoffed at by jazz connoisseurs.

So maybe there wasn't much of a market then for an album of modern jazz built on the sounds of New Orleans, not even with a newly hot item like Booker Ervin on board. Yet coming upon it in the eclectic postmodern world of today, this is a most enjoyable album, and a real find.

Produced by Ozzie Cadena, Gumbo is a concept album, the Poindexter compositions offering heir composer's tour of the city, Uptown ("Where I come from") on side one, and the Creole Downtown in side two. The album's liner notes also provide a tune-by-tune guided tour of the city Poindexter remembered and loved:

Front o' Town is in the uptown section--right next to the levee...there was a little blues phrase that everyone there used to hum and whistle.

 Happy Strut: Grandpa played in a parade band...I'd walk along with my clarinet (sometimes it would be three hours before they played a tune I knew) and if I didn't mess up, they'd let me play...I tried to approximate that feeling with some modern changes.

Creole Girl:  She was a real pretty girl...all the men liked her and none of the women did. When I was 12 she was grown up, but I can still remember just how she looked. Creole girls...are superstitious and terrible tempered, and if they catch you with another woman, there's hell to pay. This tune is nostalgic, because you can't handle them right. But we still play it in a happy manner.

4-11-44: In New Orleans, everybody plays the policy game. This number is known as the "Washerwoman's gig" -- it's their favorite bet. It has voodoo connotations. 

And with Side Two, we move downtown, down and dirty.

Back o' Town: This is the night club section, where all the sporting girls hang out. All the church people from Front o' Town look down on Back o' Town.

Muddy Dust: Voodoo is pretty strong in New Orleans...The melody kind of laughs at it, 'cause I still don't believe in it.

French Market: The people from the swamps, the farmers, the fishermen, the voodoo dealers -- all bring their wares here. There are alligator tails, gaspigous (barking swamp fish), carnivorous plants ground up into powder, candied legs of gigantic mosquitoes...my grandfather took me there.

 Gumbo Filet: The tune is a blues--everything I like really well has to be the blues. It's arranged with two-bar breaks so I could get the name in there. You guessed it--I like Gumbo Filet.

 

The rhythm section, all Prestige veterans, are the musicians Poindexter worked with accompanying Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The album was a 1963 Prestige release. A later CD reissue combined this album with Poindexter's earlier January 31 date for Prestige, and a Larry Young session from February 28. "4-11-44" and "Happy Strut" were a 45 RPM single.

Gumbo evoked nostalgia for a time and place that no one in the jazz world was much interested in. It carried the message of a modernity that no longer seemed on the cutting edge, although maybe it should have. Booker Ervin was one of the brightest young stars of the day. Pony Poindexter was, although this is mostly forgotten, one of the pioneers of the soprano sax. Coming upon it today, this is a very easy album to fall in love with.