Listening to Prestige 695: Sonny Stitt, Booker Ervin, Don Patterson

LISTEN TO ONE: Flyin' Home

 What happens when Prestige puts one of its greatest veteran beboppers together with two of its brightest young stars?

Jazz happens. That's all you can say, and that's the very best you can say.

But I'll say a little more. Two saxophones, and Don Patterson's organ making up two thirds of the rhythm section--no piano, no bass. None of them strangers to each other. Patterson and drummer Billy James were close associates; the two of them had worked a number of times with Ervin, and they'd done a previous Prestige recording with Stitt. Ervin and Stitt are a new combination, and why'd it take so long? They have a lot to say to each other.

This is a real collaboration between three remarkable talents, and it would be hard, and ultimately futile, to try to single out one as the dominant voice, but there is a certain nod to Stitt as the old master. Side one of the LP is devoted to two Stitt compositions, "Soul People" and "Sonny's Book," and side two is standards that one would probably associate more with Stitt's era, Duke Ellington's "C-Jam Blues" and a medley of two from the Great American Songbook, "I Can't Get Started" and "The Masquerade is Over." The medley, particulatly, starts with an extended solo by Stitt in the manner of a ballad from the bebop era, but as the idea is developed by Ervin and Patterson, and Stitt again. it becomes very much a mutual exploration, and very much in a contemporary mode.

Those four tracks make up the LP, but there was a fifth tune cut at the session, although it didn't see the
light of day until 1971, when it was tossed on to an album cobbled together from outtakes from Don Patterson sessions. That was "Flyin' Home," the Lionel Hampton tune that was a favorite of swing and rhythm and blues musicians. common ground for these collaborating generations in that it was a part of the repertory of neither, but certainly a tune to have some with. "Flyin' Home" is most famous from its renditions by 1930s-1940s players who the restriction of a 2 1/2-minute 78 RPM record. These guys stretch it out to ten minutes, give it a little bebop, a little hard bop, a little soul, a little swing, and more than a little money's worth for the listener. I love "Flyin' Home," and I'm delighted by what these guys have done with it.

Soul People was the natural choice for an album title in 1964, and Prestige didn't shrink from it. "C-Jam Blues" was released as a two-sided 45, credited to Sonny Stitt and Booker Ervin. Ozzie Cadena produced.

Listening to Prestige 621: Sonny Stitt

LISTEN TO ONE: Shangri-La

 Two 45 RPM singles were released off this session: "My New Baby" / "Misty" and "Shangri-La" / "Soul Shack," the last-named actually coming from a different Stitt-organ session, that one with Jack McDuff from 1963. I hope they got a their share of radio play and jukebox spins, because they're super-listenable, the kind of music that could have made some listeners want to hear more jazz. It's interesting that they didn't put out a 45 of "Mama Don't Allow," the ever-popular warhorse attributed to Cow Cow Davenport, which features a vocal by Stitt as well as a killer tenor sax solo and a crowd-pleasing drum solo by Billy James.

If that all adds up to something that sounds like a commercial venture, rest assured that I do not mean this in any way as a put-down. Some of America's greatest music was made for the masses, and while it's important to encourage experimentation, and give voice to the people who are ahead of the curve, there's nothing wrong with giving the people what they want, especially if it's a master like Sonny Stitt serving it up.

Prestige was getting ready to break Don Patterson out as its next big organ star. He and Billy James, along with guitarist Paul Weeden, had been working as a trio mostly in Chicago when they were hired to back up Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis on a 1973 Prestige session. Here, although Stitt got top billing, Patterson was also featured on the cover, preparing him for his next session, in two months' time, when he would be the session leader, he'd have Booker Ervin alongside him, and the album would be titled The Exciting New Organ of Don Patterson.

The marketing campaign apparently worked, because Patterson became one of Prestige's top talents for the next several years.

Good for Prestige, good for Patterson. If this album was part of the strategy, good for it. And good for the listener, too, that casual listener who might have heard a cut on Listening to Lacy and then plunked a nickel into the jukebox to hear it again, and the serious jazz fan for whom good music is always welcome.

I'm sure if you were playing--or even working as a server--in a lounge six nights a week, you could get pretty sick of "Misty" -- and a few other tunes. But as a music lover who listens to a lotta this and a lotta that, it's a familiar melody, and it's possible to appreciate that it's as familiar as it is because it's a beautiful melody, and when you have Sonny Stitt playing it, and improvising on it, it becomes a treat for the ears. The other offering from the standard catalog, not nearly as familiar, is "Shangri-La," written in 1946 by Matty Malnick and first introduced by his orchestra. It was a minor hit in 1957 for the Four Coins, one of those "safe to listen to, we're not rock and roll" groups that still hung onto the Top Forty in those days. While it's been widely recorded over the years, it's been mostly by groups whose sound is more at home in elevators than smoky basements. But it provides a good vehicle for Stitt and Patterson to blend their sound, and makes a good introduction to Patterson.

There are three Stitt originals on the album, all good listening, and two more that were recorded on the session and released later, along with some cuts from Patterson's May session with Booker Ervin, under the title Patterson's People: Don Patterson with Sonny Stitt and Booker Ervin. 

Shangri-La was the title of this Prestige release. Ozzie Cadena produced.

Listening to Prestige 611: Sonny Stitt

LISTEN TO ONE: Baion Baby

Sonny Stitt had recorded a soul jazz album (with Jack McDuff) for Prestige in September of 1963, and then moved over to Latin in November with an album for Verve, featuring a young Chick Corea in at the beginning of his career (he had made one earlier recording with Mongo Santamaria) and Latin percussionists. For this New Year's Eve celebration of an album, whoever decided on the the title--Primitivo Soul!--seems to have been trying to bring the two together, which is legitimate. The Latin element is once again in the ascendent here, but Stitt is always soulful. And most of the tunes here are his, and while the percussionists give them a delicious Latin rhythm, Stitt can hardly be described as a Latin composer.

Stitt comes by his soul credentials organically. Regarded by many as the quintessential bebopper and heir to the mantle of Charlie Parker, Stitt cut his blues teeth with Tiny Bradshaw, and the blues was always at the heart of his playing. And in a era marked by the startling experimentalism of the free jazz players, Stitt preferred to stay close to the source. "I don't like strange music." he told a Down Beat interviewer (quoted on the liner notes to Prmitivo Soul!):

I'm not on "Cloud Nine." Music should be a flowing melodic thing. I think you should always be around the basic melody. Improvise, but stick to the basic melody. Bird was always 85% to 90% around the melody.

Stitt had been one of Prestige's mainstay recording artists throughout the 1950s, most frequently paired with Gene Ammons, another bebopper who loved the melody, and played the blues. But outside of his long association with Ammons, he preferred to keep moving, and to play with a wide variety of musicians. Here he links up with newcomer Ronnie Mathews, fresh from his debut as leader, and the veteran rhythm tandem of Leonard Gaskin and Herbie Lovelle. To that basic group are added two percussionists, Marcelino Valdez on congas and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez on bongos.

At this point in jazz history, Latin percussionists were still pretty anonymous to the jazz listening public as a whole--Down Beat had still to recognize "percussion" as a separate category in its annual jazz polls--but these two were certainly known to the Latin community, having worked with Ray Barretto, Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria, among others. Martinez, who also appeared on Stitt's Verve album, was featured on Santamaria's classic "Watermelon Man."

The two non-Stitt compositions on the date are "Slave Maidens," by Nato Lima, writing under the pseudonym Mussapere, and "Estrellita," by Manuel Ponce.

It's hard to imagine an instrumental composition being entitled "Slave Maidens" today (just as it's hard to imagine an album of any form of world music being labeled "primitivo"), but the choice of tune is certainly a good one. Nato Lima was one of the two brothers, both guitar virtuosos, who formed the Brazilian folk/classical duo Los Indios Tabajaras, and had a huge stateside hit with their arrangement of a Brazilian folk tune, "Maria Elena." Manuel Ponce was was a composer primarily in the classical field, educated in Europe at the École Normale de Musique. Like his fellow student, Brazilian Hector Villa-Lobos, he was a pioneer in creating a composed music based on the indigenous folk traditions of his country. "Estrellita" has not become ubiquitous in the jazz repertoire, but it has won the attention of some major figures, with recordings by Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck and others. Stitt had also recorded it the previous June for Impulse!

The rest of the session is devoted to tunes written by Stitt for the date, and blending bebop, blues and Latin. Ronnie Mathews contributes some fine solos. Sonny Stitt was one of the most prolific of the major jazz soloists, and his explorations, and his collaborations, cover a wide range. We can only be grateful that these sojourns south of the border were included.

Listening to Prestige 603: Sonny Stitt, Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Soul Shack

 Back in February of 1962, Prestige put Sonny Stitt and Jack McDuff together, that time along with Gene Ammons. Stitt was already considered one of the legends of jazz, going back to Charlie Parker and bebop's golden days in the 1940s. Ammons was probably Prestige's most consistent seller, and McDuff one of its hottest new stars. In a way, they represented three generations of jazz styles, although they were very close to the same age.

When Stitt and McDuff got together again in September, Ammons was already in prison on drug charges; but, as with the previous session, the

legend was the center, the hot new guy the support. McDuff had his own tight-knit group, with drummer Joe Dukes, considered by many to be the pulse of soul jazz, and a young George Benson, a future supernova in the jazz world. Instead, the quartet was filled out with two solid professionals--the versatile Leonard Gaskin, and the perhaps even more versatile Herbie Lovelle. Lovelle was becoming one of the drummers Prestige liked to call, with six previous sessions for the label. But calls for his sticks and brushes were far-flung, and by the time he was finished, he had played drums for everyone from Hot Lips Page to Teddy Wilson to Bob Dylan to the Monkees.

So this is essentially a Sonny Stitt album. Stitt is everything one looks for in a jazz legend--swinging, melodic, inventive, endlessly listenable. McDuff, even in his solos, is a part of that sound--tasteful, not overpowering, yet still individualistic.

And soulful. We can't forget soulful. The name of the album is Soul Shack, and the title track, composed by Stitt but certainly with McDuff in mind, is the soul highlight of the session, with the two of them getting free to get down, and never let up.

Three of the tunes chosen for the album are much-recorded standards dating back to the 1920s-30s, played by this group with fond familiarity, but given their own stamp. "Sunday" was written by Chester Conn in 1926, and has had 500-odd recordings, most often by vocalists, but with many pure jazz variations, from the original version by Jean Goldkette through Benny Carter, Gerry Mulligan and Ben Webster, Tommy Flanagan and Jaki Byard. "For You" comes from a Mack Sennett movie in 1930 and has also entered the lexicon of American song, from jazz vocalists to Ricky Nelson, as well as a few jazz interpretations. "Love Nest" also dates back to 1930, and as Dan Morgenstern comments in his liner notes, "most modernists race through this as though it were an establishment built for rabbits, but not so Sonny...he sets a calm yet springy pace...Jack McDuff waxes lyrical."

"Hairy" and "Shadows" were also written by Stitt, and "Shadows" is a blues and pure beauty, with lyrical playing by both Stitt and McDuff.

Soul Shack was a Prestige release, Ozzie Cadena producing. I can find no record of  A 45 RPM single,  unusual for a McDuff session of the time, but YouTube has a three minute edit of the track, so maybe there was a single.

Listening to Prestige 536: Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Sleeping Susan

 It was a busy few days for Mr. Stitt, and a lot of trips out to Englewood Cliffs. On Friday, recording with Jack McDuff. On Sunday, a Verve recording session, as Norman Granz joined Sonny with Gene Ammons for a mainstream blowing session in Rudy Van Gelder's cathedral of recorded jazz. Then the two saxophonists might as well have booked a couple of rooms on the Jersey side of the river, as they were back in harness on Monday, joining "youngster" McDuff (actually all three were just about the same age, but McDuff was a new star in the jazz firmament, and the two tenormen were solidly established veterans).

These are three guys who really represent three different genres of jazz: Stitt the bebopper, Ammons the old school boppin' the blues, McDuff the soul jazz of the 1960s. So, although "Soul Summit" is a bit  of cliche, it's also an accurate description of this gathering. They are three kindred spirits who've meshed well in dyads, and mesh equally well here in a triad, with the propulsive assistance of Charlie Persip on drums. Persip and McDuff are the entire rhythm section, so Brother Jack is largely in a supporting role here, but he makes the most of it. He and Persip provide more than a cushion for the two soloists--their work is complex and provocative. 

The set is two standards, two originals by Ammons ("Tubby" and "Shuffle Twist"), one by Stitt ("Dumplin's"), and one more obscure tune from an underrated composer, Jimmy Mundy. Mundy is underrated partly because one of his most famous compositions, "Walkin'," the Miles Davis standard, is not credited to him. On the Library of Congress copyright certificate for the tune, the original title (and

the tune has been recorded under a number of different titles) is wiped out, and the name of Richard E. Carpenter is written in as composer. Carpenter was not a composer, and is best known for cheating and exploiting various jazz musicians. Mundy is credited as co-composer (with Johnny Mercer and Trummy Young) of a gold star standard, "Travlin' Light." And he is the composer, here, of "Sleeping Susan," which proves to be an excellent choice.

You might think that "Shuffle Twist" would have been earmarked as the single, just for the title alone. But instead an edited-down version of "Tubby" was the choice, on the flip side of "Love, I've Found You," from Ammons's 1961 session with Oliver Nelson. The 45 RPM single was issued under Ammons's name.

Esmond Edwards produced Soul Summit.

Listening to Prestige 534: Sonny Stitt-Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: 'Nother Fu'ther

 Sonny Stitt joins the organ-saxophone combo brigade. He had actually made one such record before: a live album at Chicago's Mckie's DJ Lounge,   one of the last clubs standing as Chicago, by the 1960s, was losing its luster as one of the nation's jazz hot spots.  That recording, for Chicago-based Argo Records, utilized a group of local musicians, including organist Eddie Buster.  

This session brings Stitt together with one of the leading lights of the new organ combo soul jazz movement, and it's interesting to compare the two albums. Stitt was used to touring alone, and picking up groups of musicians in

the cities he visited, as with the Chicagoans on At the D. J. Lounge. Those musicians, whether just playing for the club audience or knowing they were to be recorded, knew that the people in the club had gotten dressed up and come out and paid money to hear Sonny Stitt. This was still a bullish era for jazz in Chicago--Mr. Kelly's was still thriving, and the Regal Theater--and there were first rate jazz musicians available. Eddie Buster's organ playing is excellent, and adds an unusual and satisfying texture to Stitt's bebop.

Playing with McDuff is a little different, but in a way not so different. In this case the city is New York, the mecca of jazz. Sonny Stitt is a stalwart veteran of Prestige's catalog (14 appearances before this one), but Jack McDuff is one of its hottest young stars. But still, it's Stitt coming to town and playing with a group of locals.

And in a way, the effect is comparable. More than is the case with a lot of the organ-saxophone combos, this is a Sonny Stitt session. 

Jazz is a music of innovation, and it's easy to think of it as in an almost constant, churning state of out with the old, in with the new, but that's not exactly the way it is. Certainly change is a constant, and "in with the new" will always be the watchword, though not without resistance -- think of Charlie Parker in his day, Ornette Coleman in his. Or the commercial rejection of Miles Davis's nonet sessions that became Birth of the Cool. But that didn't necessarily mean out with the old, which is why jazz careers, health permitting, could last a long time, and Garvin Bushell could play with Bunk Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, and later with John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.

And it 's why there are not always clear dividing lines. It's why, in the 1950s, we heard swing-to-bop from players like Zoot Sims and Coleman Hawkins. And now, in 1962, are we hearing something similar, with Sonny Stitt going bop-to-funk? You can certainly hear it "Pam Ain't Blue," where Stitt's bebop rides easily along with McDuff's funk, and even more in "'Nother Fu'ther," which seems to capture the essence of bop-to-funk. All of the original compositions on this session are by Stitt, but they're geared to this blend of styles, and one of them, "Ringin' In," is really McDuff's number, and he makes the most of it. The three ballads are very much in Stitt's wheelhouse, with Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "Time after Time" getting a particularly beautiful reading.

That producer Esmond Edwards did not intend this to be strictly a jazz funk session is reflected in his choice of sidemen. McDuff regular Eddie Diehl is on guitar, but veterans Art Taylor and Ray Barretto provide the percussion, and they are the right men for the job.

I wondered if all of this added up to an album that would be more to the taste of the real jazz fan than the young crowd hopping on the funk jazz bandwagon. And I meant that to sound as snobbish as it does, when I prepared to write it, but as I got it down, I was changing my mind. Not everyone has to be totally committed to the pure soul of music. There's nothing wrong with being young, and wanting to dance, and caught up in the "what's happening now" spirit of the times. And if that zeitgeist is created at the fingertips of Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, Jack McDuff, all the better. Besides, the popular jazz of an era--funk, swing, Peter Gunn--can be a gateway drug, and of the young cats and kitties who pick this up for the organ groove, at least some of them will stay for the complexities of a Sonny Stitt improvisation. For the rest...you're only young once. God bless 'em.

The album was called Stitt Meets Brother Jack, and it was also released--presumably at the same time, with the same album number--as 'Nother Fu'ther, which was also the first single off the album, divided onto two sides of 45 RPM release. Also on 45 were "Pam Ain't Blue" / "Ringin' In," and "Thirty Three Ninety Six," parts 1 and 2.

Listening to Prestige 495: Gene Ammons - Sonny Stitt

LISTEN TO ONE

This was recorded in 1961 for Argo as Dig Him!, but then was rereleased in 1968 on Prestige as We'll Be Together Again. If it were just a Prestige/Fantasy or Prestige/Concord Original Jazz Classics rerelease, I wouldn't count it, but this was Prestige vinyl from the 1960s, so it counts. 

Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons are together again for this outing. They were mainstays of Prestige in the early days, with eight albums together, but there had been a ten year hiatus. The title song (at least for the Prestige release) is appropriate for their partnership, and they do right by this romantic ballad, led by Ammons, whose approach to romantic ballads was always spot on.

Who was the most romantic balladeer in jazz? That question will get  wide variety of answers. Miles Davis. Wynton Marsalis. Bill Evans. Bobby Hackett. Chet Baker. Gerry Mulligan. Erroll Garner. But most of the answers will be tenor sax players. That instrument was brought into its own by Coleman  in the 1930s. Along with the violin, it is said to be the instrument closest in emotional nuance to tie human voice. So of all the romantic ballad voices in jazz, the tenor sax is the one you're going to keep coming back to. Coleman Hawkins, who staked out the territory with "Body and Soul" n 1939. Ben Webster. Lester Young. Dexter Gordon. Earl Bostic.

And as I've written before, some of the sweetest romantic sounds to be coaxed out of the tenor sax have come from guys who are more associated with the frantic, honking, driving sounds that cone from the rhythm and blues end of jazz. David "Fathead" Newman. Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson. Hal "Corn Bread" Singer (still going at 103, and a survivor of the terrible 1921 Greenwood massacre in Tulsa, OK), Big Jay McNeely, Arnett Cobb.

And Gene Ammons.

He and Stitt, who can also handle a ballad, do some pretty ones here. "We'll Be Together Again" was written by Frankie Laine's musical director, Carl T. Fischer, with lyrics by Laine. Laine, it turns out, was quite a prolific lyricist, but this was the only one for which he had much of a hit. 

"Red Sails in the Sunset" was written by Jimmy Kennedy and Wilhelm Grosz (as Hugh Williams). Grosz was a refugee from Nazi Germany and known as an avant-gardist, but he had a number of successful collaborations in the pop field with Kennedy. Kennedy is also known for a couple of not-so-romantic songs, "Teddy Bears' Picnic" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

"But Not For Me" is by the Gershwins, who need no introduction, and "My Foolish Heart" is by Ned Washington and Victor Young, who don't need much of one, especially if you're a movie fan. "Autumn Leaves" is one of the most familiar songs in the pop music canon, even if its composer, Hungarian Joseph Kosma, isn't a household name. Jazz historian Phillippe Baudoin has labeled it the eighth-most recorded song by jazz performers, which is either some nifty research or an interesting guess. And "Time on My Hands" is by three solid pop music professionals,  Harold Adamson, Mack Gordon, and Vincent Youmans.

The rest are Stitt compositions. "New Blues Up and Down" is Ammons and Stitt, and is a followup to their popular "Blues Up and Down," from a 1950 Prestige album. And they add up to a hell of a showcase for the talents of these two saxophone wizards, from romantic to wild, with some swinging mid-tempo ("Red Sails," "But Not for Me") in the middle.

This session was recorded in Chicago, with a group that Ammons and Stitt had on the road. John Houston goes back a long way with Sonny Stitt--he was on a 78 RPM session for Prestige in 1952 that cut two songs, "Blue Mambo" and "Cool Mambo." And he has another interesting historical mention. In 1957, John Coltrane led a quartet at the House of Jazz in Philadelphia. This group must have been preparing some of the ideas that would emerge full blown a few years later, because McCoy Tyner and Reggie Workman were in it. But on the nights when Tyner couldn't make it, the pianist who filled in was Houston.

So perhaps this band was put together in Philadelphia, because that's where they also picked up Buster Williams, heard here on his first recording session. Charles "Buster" Williams is credited as "Charles Williams" here, and that's interesting, because the bassist with Ammons and Stitt was nearly another Charles Williams--Buster's father.

Charles Williams, Senior, was a bass player called on for a lot of gigs around Philadelphia and his hone town of Camden, NJ -- sometimes more than he could make, and he started recommending his son, then in high school, when he was double booked. Young Buster was a recent high school graduate when Dad recommended him to Ammons and Stitt for a Philadelphia gig, and the two jazz legends liked the kid enough to take him along on the road. It was the beginning of a successful career in jazz for Buster, which would bring him back to Prestige late in the decade.

Drummer George Brown is a little harder to trace, partly because there's another George Brown who who achieved more fame as a drummer, with the funk group Kool and the Gang. Brown the jazz drummer spent most of his career in France, but he did record with Wes Montgomery among others.

Ammons recorded a second session in Chicago a few days later for Argo, with an organ trio, but that one was only rereleased as Original Jazz Classics.

The Prestige release came in 1968, at which point the title was bittersweet, as Ammons was in prison for a second time for narcotics possession, and we can only imagine what music was lost to these terrible laws and their racist enforcement.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 62: Sonny Stitt

The mambo craze finds Sonny Stitt, and it's a match made in cielo. This is a blazing hot session, and of it, my favorite is "Cool Mambo," composed by Bill Massey. Mambo meets bebop, and my only regret is that there isn't a video of a couple of great Latin dancers, or a whole dance floor, dancing to this. Bebop is often considered the anti-dance music, but you couldn't prove it by this session. It's cool, it's hot, it's frantic, and it doesn't let up. In fact, it doesn't let up for the whole session.



Stitt is still developing that bebop big band sound that he and Gene Ammons developed, but here with different musicians, except for Ammons' right hand man, and with a sound all his own.



Providing the Latin underpinning for this session is Humberto Morales, here on congas but better known on timbales. He recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and with his own mambo orchestra, and is the author of How to Play Latin Rhythm Instruments. His percussion counterpart is Shadow Wilson, who was equally at home with swing and bebop, so he knows about dancing, and he knows about setting a rhythm for a virtuoso soloist.



The addition of Basie great Joe Newman to the ensemble adds another note to the test which says that no one told Sonny Stitt that you can't dance to bebop.

Speaking of dancing, I once saw Dave Brubeck at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival once. His set was sandwiched between a couple of rhythm and blues acts, and the audience was there to dance. Brubeck was playing "Take Five" and other undanceable rhythms, but the kids in the audience didn't know they were undanceable, and they were boogieing up a storm. I was close enough to see Brubeck's face, He was loving it. He was having the time of his life.



These were all issued on 78, and on various LPs -- a 10-inch Stitt album and a 10-inch mambo compilation. And later, on a couple of 7000-series LPs. All can be heard on Spotify.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 53 - Gene Ammons

There were two other autumn sessions for Prestige that seem to have sunk without a trace. On October 16, alto player Lem Davis, a swing specialist, led a quartet that resulted in three 78s. Also in October, pianist Al Vega made some trio recordings in Boston. Vega spent his career in Boston, where he played with many of the greats as they passed through town, and also coached Little League. The trio recorded ten songs that day, of which four were released, on two 78s.

I probably don't have a lot more to say about the Sonny Stitt - Gene Ammons Septet, except that they made a lot of really good music, and I'm always glad to come back to them. But at least one of the song selections is interesting. "Undecided" has a jazz history -- a New York jazz history, a 52nd Street history. It was co-written by Charlie Shavers, and originally recorded in 1938 by John Kirby and the Onyx Club Boys, a group that presumably coalesced at The Street's Onyx Club, and included Shavers, Buster Bailey, Billy Kyle and Russell Procope (there was also a group of Onyx Club Boys that recorded with Stuff Smith, with Buster Bailey the only member of both groups). Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald also made a record of it in 1939, and then it lay mostly dormant until 1951, when the Ames Brothers had a huge hit with it, riding the charts for 20 weeks. It was certainly not unusual back in those days for cover recordings of hit songs to crop up, but maybe not that many beboppers covering current pop hits.

We can assume it went out to the jukeboxes -- these four tunes were released on two 78s, and on a 10-inch LP. -- then not again until the Fantasy reissue days.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 46: Sonny Stitt--Gene Ammons

This time, separate quartet sessions. Maybe Bob Weinstock wanted to get twice as many songs while still only paying the rhythm section for one day in the studio.

  

Or maybe the day went something like this.

"Hey, daddy-o, whatcha got for today."

"I thought I'd blow a little 'When the Saints Go Marching in." 

"Oh,man, you are on your own,"

Certainly it's not high on the Most Requested list for hipster bebop fans, but Ammons makes it work.

And Stitt makes his session work -- three riff-built originals, and "Confessin'," another tune with deep traditionalist associations, going back to Fats Waller and early Louis Armstrong. Stitt makes it fir perfectly with this session. On the one hand, it's a familiar melody, giving a nice anchor to the session. On the other hand, while Stitt stays quite close to the melody throughout most of the number, he gives it that riffing feeling.

One thing I've noticed about all these sessions so far in our Prestige history. We have yet to hear a bass solo. Not much solo drum work. And not even all that much in the way of piano solos.

I'm guessing these sessions were all done with one mike. Certainly, they were all in mono, and

Weinstock was teaching himself how to produce and engineer a recording session -- don't forget how young he was when he started Prestige. The Rudy Van Gelder years were yet to come, but this stuff still sounds good, and we're lucky to have it. But for this session, perhaps he figured out a different mike placement, because there are some real piano solos by Clarence Anderson on both the Stitt and Ammons sessions -- some great call-and-response stuff, and a couple of very tasty extended solos.

All of these were released on 78 and on 10-inch LPs/

Listening to Prestige Records Part 41: Sonny Stitt - Gene Ammons

Prestige must have gotten a lot of jukebox play out of Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons to keep bringing them back into the studio, and why not? They had the bebop chops, and they had the popular touch. Nowadays, bebop and its offspring are mainstream jazz, the sounds we know and love. Back then, it was still new, still controversial, still associated with shades and berets and goatees and jokes about the square who walks up to a hipster and says "Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?" It was right around this time that Nancy,as she washed the dishes, was muttering to herself that Sluggo was driving her crazy listening to beep-bop. Just then, she dropped a huge armload of dishes on the floor, and Sluggo called out from the next room, "Hey! Play some more of that beep-bop!"

 So you had to be hip to love beep-bop, but maybe you needed a little help, too, and these guys were as hip as they come, and as good as they come, but also user-friendly. Stitt started out the end of January with his quartet, cutting three tunes, then joined Ammons and the septet for three more. He was back the next day with the quartet (Teddy Stewart replacing Blakey on drums). The first quarter session featured three ballads, one slow ("Can't We Be Friends?") and two medium tempo. "Liza" utilizes the upper register of the tenor sax,* "Friends" the middle, and "Can't Be Love" the lower register.

All are beautiful. "Can't We Be Friends," a 1929 song by Paul James and Kay Swift, is an especially beautiful melody. Kay Swift was the first woman ever to write the entire score for a Broadway musical. She was George Gershwin's protege and lover, and after his death she was chosen to complete and arrange some of his unpublished works. She also composed music for George Balanchine's first American ballet.. The lyrics to "Can't We Be Friends" were written by her husband, James Warburg, using a pseudonym so as not to embarrass his very proper banking family, and they contain one of my favorite unintentionally risque lyrics: "I thought I'd found a girl I could trust...what a bust..."

But the rich, deep tones of Stitt's saxophone on "This Can't Be Love" may the the best of a very good lot.

The second session that day, the septet session, adds weight to the speculation that these were jukebox favorites. You don't release "New Up and Down Blues" so soon after "Up and Down Blues" unless you've gotten some solid play on the first one.

The septet is essentially the same. The one new face is Chippy Outcalt on trombone, another guy about whom I can find out nothing except that he also did a stint in Dizzy Gillespie's big band. And again, goes to show that there have always been a hell of a lot of good musicians in New York who don't make the record dates, and aren't well known, but other musicians know them, and know they can call on them in a pinch. When I lived in Manhattan in the '70s, I would often walk home down Broadway from the upper West Side to my apartment on East 23rd Street, and when I passed through Times Square at two in the morning, there was always a guy playing saxophone under the marquee of of the movie theaters -- always the same one, though I forget now which one it was. And I would always stop and listen, because he was that good. And if one waited there long enough, musicians from the Broadway shows or the supper clubs or wherever there were paying gigs would stop on their way home to jam with him, because he was that good.

Larry Townsend is back on vocals again, so there must still have been a demand on the jukeboxes for Mr. B. acolytes. He's not bad, although it's a style that hasn't lasted, and he's singing two songs that didn't quite become standards. If "The Thrill of Your Kiss" was recorded by anyone else, I can't find it. The song was written by Richard Carpenter -- not the 60s songwriter with the sister, but, according to the jazz blog Jazz Portraits, " the OTHER Richard Carpenter, a noted jazz shyster, who according to James Gavin, ripped off Chet Baker so badly that Chet literally wanted to kill the man."

The next day's session is Stitt with quartet again, this time with Teddy Stewart on drums, redoing "This Can't Be Love," and one other tune. I only knew ".P.S. I Love You" from the syrupy Jimmy  Sacca and the Hilltoppers version from the mid-50s, and I confess I couldn't imagine it as the basis for a great jazz improvisation. Stitt proves me wrong.

Oddly, no luck with these on YouTube, although they have a lot of Stitt. You can find all these selections on Spotify. All of these were released on 78 by Prestige, some with songs from different sessions on the flip sides.As near as I can make out, there were two alternate pressings of Prestige 831, each using a different version of "This Can't Be Love." I have no idea which one I was listening to.

* Hold everything. The Jazzdisco information on this session may have been wrong. Ebay has the 78

of "Liza" for sale, and it's possible that the upper register of the tenor sax was in fact an alto sax -- that's the information on the label of the 78, which also lists Teddy Stewart as the drummer. On the other hand, the label from Prestige 739, also offered for sale on Ebay, has Stitt listed as playing alto on "Can't We Be Friends," where he's certainly playing tenor -- and it misspells Charles Bateman's name, so maybe there was some carelessness on the part of whoever designed the labels for Prestige.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 38: Gene Ammons / Sonny Stitt

Well, here's one reason why Prestige might have scheduled so many Ammons-Stitt sessions: They weren't standing still. They must have kept this septet together for a while, no easy feat in those days. 1950 was the year that both the Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie big bands were to disband for financial reasons. The Jazz Tour Database website has them playing at Birdland on March 10, 1951.

And they kept developing the septet sound. There's no arranger listed for this date -- presumably it's either Ammons or Stitt, or both -- but the arrangements are the best I've heard, and I've been listening to a lot of this band. "Wow!" is almost all ensemble work. It is tight and adventurous."Jug" does amazing call-and-response work between the soloists and the ensemble, at that breakneck pace that only the top beboppers could handle -- and the pace is just as fast, the changes just as tricky, when the ensemble is playing. And don't forget these are Prestige sessions, so Weinstock was paying for no rehearsal time, and precious few retakes.

How do you sing bebop? Well, here's one answer, from the unnamed singer on "Around About One A.M." -- with no evidence one way or another, I'll guess it's Gene Ammons. You just sing the blues. "One A.M." is a basic 12-bar blues, sung more or less straight, but with a jazzman's edge. And it's great.

In Clint Eastwood's "Bird," Forrest Whittaker, as Charlie Parker, tells white trumpeter Red Rodney (Michael Zelniker) that when they play in the segregated South, he'll be billed as Albino Red, the World's Greatest Blues Singer. "But I don't know how to sing the blues," Rodney says. "Don't worry," Parker says with a laugh, "anyone can sing the blues."

Well, not quite. But Gene Ammons -- or whoever it is -- sings the hell out of the blues on this one, and he is most likely not a professional singer, or he'd be credited, as Larry Townsend was on the last session.

Off the subject, I don't know if Red Rodney could actually sing the blues, but to play alongside Bird he surely had to play the blues. Which brings up an interesting aside, on the place of race in jazz in the 1940s -- an era in which segregation was still very much the norm. Benny Goodman was able to break the color barrier because he had such clout in the entertainment industry at that time -but a good part of the reason why he had such clout is that he was white. White musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman played jazz because they loved it, but their commercial success went way beyond the success of equally talented blacks because of their race.

For that reason -- and because blacks were often forced to clown and play the "coon show darkie"-- young African American musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and others found themselves drawn to playing a music that was so difficult that whites couldn't play it, and so intellectually and aesthetically challenging that it could not be associated with clowning. That having been done, Bird and others were then remarkably welcoming to whites who loved the music and wanted to play it -- and could keep up. Musicians like Al Haig, Stan Levey, Teddy Kotick and Red Rodney all played with Parker, and all played bebop, at the same time that musicians like Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Billie Holliday were being integrated into Benny Goodman's swing band.

The American Century in music is one of the greatest cultural flowerings the world has ever known -- right up there with Elizabethan drama, Renaissance painting, the Victorian novel. And it is different from all of those in its mongrel nature. There's nothing pure about American music. The blues had a baby, Muddy Waters tells us, and they called it rock and roll. The blues had lots of babies, and lots of mistresses, and lots of fathers and sons and daughters, a wild orgy of miscegenation and crossbreeding like no other artistic renaissance has ever seen. And we were there. We were so fortunate.

This time, no hits on YouTube or Grooveshark, but you can get all these cuts on Spotify, and you  should.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 37: Wrapping up 1950

This winds up the second year of Prestige's prestigious history. Only 20 more to go, and I'm already starting to get the feeling they're going too fast -- that's the grandparent syndrome.

 The last two albums of the year are Sonny Stitt (December 17) with Junior Mance, Gene Wright and Art Blakey, and Jimmy McPartland (December 21) with a sextet including Vic Dickenson and Marian McPartland, so they closed out the year with a rising bebop star and a tip of the hat back to an older jazz style. The McPartland sides were issued on 78 as part of Prestige's 300 series, which appears to consist entirely of four 78 RPM records, all of them by Jimmy McPartland, one session in early 1949 and the other at the end of 1950 -- apparently Bob Weinstock's entire foray into trad jazz. Neither the Stitt nor the McPartland sessions can be found on Spotify, but you can get the Stitt session on Grooveshark --"Nevertheless" and "Jeepers Creepers here  and "Cherokee" here. "Nevertheless" is not exactly a bebop staple -- this is the only recording of it by a modern jazz group that I've found -- but listening to Stitt's version, one can't help but think that maybe it should be.

Prestige was certainly starting to make its mark in 1950. The scorecard: recording sessions with Stan Getz (2), Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons (9), Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis,  Al Haig, Chubby Jackson, Lee Konitz,  Zoot Sims (4), Wardell Gray (2, one with Dexter Gordon), Leo Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody (recorded in France, released later as a 7000-series LP), and Jimmy McPartland. 

The major labels actually had the two most important jazz releases of 1950 -- one looking ahead, the other backward. Capitol put out eight songs from the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions on 78. The LP wouldn't be released until 1957, although some songs from it came out on various Capitol 10 inch LPs. Nobody realized quite how important these sessions were at the time -- Miles wasn't able to make a commercial success of his nonet, and had to disband it. However, pretty much everyone knew how important the other recording was -- the recently rediscovered originals of the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, released by Columbia as a 12-inch LP -- in fact, their first double LP set.

Charlie Parker recorded with strings.

Fats Navarro died in 1950. Thelonious Monk was arrested on drug charges, lost his cabaret card, and couldn't play again in New York for six years.

Birdland, which actually opened its doors in late December of 1949, was in its first full year of operation.

On to 1951.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 36: Sonny Stitt - Gene Ammons

1950 seems to have been the year of Sonny and Jug, and no complaints here. We're fortunate to have so much from these two guys whose different styles melded so well. Ammons is taking his turn on the baritone in the first of these two sessions. On the second, it's two tenors on "Stringin' the Jug," parts 1 and 2, then Jug alone on the last two, "A Lover is Blue" and "When I Dream of You," both of them romantic ballads in the Earl Bostic mode of R&B-tinged pop, except a lot more musically original.

The session credited to Ammons is really an Ammons session. "Stringin' the Jug," with Stitt  and Junior Mance (his first professional gig was in Ammons's band, in 1947) providing magnificent support, is pure Jug -- Ammons proving you don't have to be from Texas to blow a Texas tenor.

The septet session, with Ammons taking his turn on the baritone, has four songs: "After You've Gone," "Our Very Own," "'S Wonderful" (not on Spotify) and "To Think You've Chosen Me." The last has a vocal by Larry Townsend, about whom I can find no information. Townsend, like so many of the vocalists chosen by beboppers in the late 40s (think Kenny "Pancho" Hagood on the Birth of the Cool sessions), was from the Billy Eckstine school, and that was style that was going to prove to fade from fashion very soon. The rich, mellifluous baritone gave way, as the voice of male sex appeal, to the soulful tenor, as epitomized by Sam Cooke. That's why you can find next to nothing (well, nothing, actually) about a middle-of-the-pack Mr. B like Larry Townsend, and relatively easy to find information on a middle-of-the-pack rhythm and blues singer like Larry Darnell.

But why reach out to singers like Townsend and Hagood? There were other vocalists around in the late 40s who were more attuned to the bebop idiom. Dave Lambert was one -- he was one of the pioneers in the development of a style of singing that used bebop chord changes and inversions. Sarah Vaughan was the quintessential bebop singer -- she had a contract with Columbia in 1950, and they were trying to turn her into a pop singer, so she probably wasn't available. Jackie and Roy were already starting to make a name for themselves in the late 40s. Jackie Paris had done some major work with Charlie Parker and others, and he continued to be committed to jazz, as opposed to pop singing, which is probably why he's now considered a cult figure rather than a major singer.

The Kenton singers -- June Christy, Chris Connor, and especially Anita O'Day -- were around. Blossom Dearie had not yet moved to Paris.Dinah Washington was singing both jazz and R&B in the 40s, and in 1954 she would make one of the greatest bebop vocal albums ever, "Dinah Jams," with a band led by Clifford Brown and Clark Terry.

King Pleasure, Eddie Jefferson and Annie Ross were creating their own kind of bebop vocals, but they were all working musicians, and certainly would have stepped in to record with musicians like Stitt and Ammons if asked.

So why did beboppers choose the vocalists they chose? Or why did their producers choose them? Here's a theory -- because Mr. B, in addition to still being hugely popular, was the guy who became a kind of godfather of bebop with his mid-40s band featuring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, so although he was never really a bebop singer, he was still closely associated with the music.

A friend of mine who was there back in the day, told me why he stopped going to Amateur Night at the Apollo in the late 40's -- "All the girls were trying to sound like Sarah, and all the boys were trying to sound like Billy Eckstine."

Listening to Prestige Records, Part 31: Sonny Stitt -Gene Ammons

Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, three-piece rhythm section...a quartet? Is this one of those odd numerical quirks, like the great R&B/Doowop group the "5" Royales, who rarely had five guys in their lineup? No, as it turns out, the June 28 session was a quartet, though not always the same quartet -- Jug on two cuts, Sonny on the rest.

Stitt's tunes: "Count Every Star," "Nice Work if You Can Get It," "There Will Never Be Another You," and "Blazin'." Ammons had two: "I Wanna Be Loved" and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," but only the latter is included on Spotify.

Why? Lost to history. Maybe they couldn't both show up at the same time. Maybe they weren't talking to each other that day. Maybe Weinstock was only paying for four musicians at a time. Maybe each of them wanted the full length solo space. Not unlikely, listening to the tunes. Each of them solos all the way through. Stitt barely gives Duke Jordan a vamp at the beginning -- no vamp at all on "Count Every Star."

And he's quite sufficient to satisfy. Generally the bebop paradigm is play the melody for one or two choruses, then take off on improvisatory flights. As Ronny Graham says in his comedy routine about a commencement address to a school for progressive jazz musicians, "When you cats came here, all you could play was the melody. Now you wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." But Stitt stays around the melody in his improv, especially on "Count Every Star

I would have thought of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" as more of a 1920s vo-de-o-do kind of song, more suited for a raccoon coat and ukulele (or for Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn to sing to a leopard) than a gutbucket, blues-based bebopper like Gene Ammons. In fact, it was written in 1928, by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, for their Broadway hit musical Blackbirds of 1928. McHugh and Fields had already made their major contribution to Prestige Records history -- they wrote the original "I'm in the Mood for Love." At any rate, Ammons takes it over and does what he wants with it -- jaunty and rakish, but in the style of 52nd Street, not Broadway.

They gathered the septet again a week later for another session -- Bill Massey again on trumpet, this time Matthew Gee on trombone.

It's hard to find much about Bill Massey, who anchored all of these septet recordings. "Bill Massey Jazz" on Google mostly brings up references to the classic Jazz at Massey Hall album, but adding to the confusion, there's another jazz musician named Bill Massey,who gets the Google hits because he's more contemporary and has a website. 

Replacing Duke Jordan on piano is Charlie Bateman. There's not much on him, either, but a 2004 obituary from the Orlando Sentinel tells us that he played with Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall in 1947, moved to Orlando to play bridge, and moved there permanently after the World Trade Center bombing. More on Charlie here. He does get some solo space with the septet, and the cat can play.

Stitt is listed on baritone again for this session, but we're told that both Stitt and Ammons would double on baritone in larger ensemble settings, while the other was soloing, and I think that may be happening here.

There's another vocal -- on "Sweet Jennie Lou." On this one, there's a lead vocalist, uncredited, and I can only guess as to who it is, so I'll guess Gene Ammons. The rest of them sound not so much like drunken Irishmen as like drunken Irishmen trying to imitate the Modernaires. Actually, they sound a little like Dooley Wilson's band doing the call-and-response with him in "Knock on Wood" at Rick's Cafe Americain.

Their "Seven-Eleven" is not the same as Buddy Lucas' R&B classic "7-11," with the Gone All-Stars, but it rocks. Charlie Bateman is hot on this one, as is drummer Wes Landers (another two-generation drum family -- his son was jazz/soul drummer Wally "Gator" Watson).

They did "La Vie en Rose" on this session, and I'd love to hear it, but I can't find it on Spotify. A Google search for "Gene Ammons la Vie en Rose" says that it is on Spotify, but clicking through leads to a dead end.

Songs from all these Stitt/Ammons sessions were mixed and matched on various 78s, and on several different 10-inch LPs, Surprisingly, no 45s, though you'd have thought many of these cuts would have been naturals.

There's really no such thing as a representative track from these sessions, so I'll use "Count Every Star," because I love it.

Listening to Prestige Records, part 29: Sonny Stitt/Gene Ammons Septet

Stitt and Ammons are back in the studio with a septet, with only a few changes. Bennie Green replaces Eph Greenlea (about whom I can find no information and no more discography), and Jo Jones is replaced by the younger and more boppish Art Blakey, who makes his presence felt immediately. The biggest change, though, is Sonny Stitt switching from tenor to baritone (he'd already, in his career, switched from alto to tenor).

I've mentioned that Gerry Mulligan, in 1950, was still better known as an arranger than an instrumentalist, and he had not yet established himself as the voice on the baritone sax. You don't hear anything in Stitt's playing to suggest he'd spent much time listening to Mulligan -- rather, that he wanted to show that he could play bebop on any saxophone. The baritone also adds a richness to the ensemble parts, and according to this jazzophile:

 He had small ensemble w/ Gene Ammons during this period where they switched on baritone-- Stitt would play bari in the section when Gene played and vice-versa.

This is an odd session. The songs are "Chabootie," "Who put the sleeping pills in Rip Van Winkle's Coffee?", "Gravy (Walkin')," and "Easy Glide." The first two are the odd ones -- the long ensemble intro in "Chabootie," longer than it probably needs to be, and the vocal, if you can call it that, on "Sleeping Pills," where it sounds as though the whole band is singing along, and they're making no attempts at harmonizing or jazz styling -- they sound like a bunch of Irishmen in a pub.

If this sounds negative, it is and it isn't. My guess is that these were aimed at jukeboxes -- the Basie-style ensemble piece and the novelty vocal. Prestige probably needed some jukebox play -- I doubt that they'd had a hit since "Moody's Mood," although they'd put out some great music.

George Benson, when he was criticized by jazz purists for his pop records, maintained he was still playing jazz -- he said that if he put strong, poppish hooks at the beginning and end, he could play anything he wanted in the middle. And that's true of both of these songs.

After the ensemble choruses on "Chabootle," Stitt enters with one of Charlie Parker's signature riffs, given a new timbre on the baritone sax, and they're off from there, with some absolutely lovely solo work, and some pepper from Blakey. The same is true on "Sleeping Pills" -- the solos on that number are definitely not the work of drunken Irishmen.

What was it with beboppers and Mrs. Murphy and her overalls? Harry "the Hipster" Gibson had a huge hit (and got himself in a lot of trouble) with "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?"

OK, if these were meant for the jukebox crowd, and I'm betting they were, there was some serious bet-hedging on Bob Weinstock's part. "Chabootie" was put out on 78 and 45 on the flip side of Gene Ammons playing "Blue and Sentimental," "Sleeping Pills" on 78, on the flip side of "La Vie en Rose."

I can't find any of these cuts on YouTube or any of the other video sites, but you can get them all on Spotify.

Listening to Prestige Records, Part 23: Gene Ammons/Sonny Stitt

So I'm sitting in a club listening to a group led by J. R. Monterose, at a front table, and after a solo J. R. comes and sits with me, and we're talking a little -- quietly, respectfully, listening to the music -- as the other members of the group go through their solos. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he stands up, gets back up on the bandstand, waits a couple of beats, and comes in right on cue.

But what cue? A nod of the head or a hand signal that he was watching for and I wasn't? A prearrangement that each soloist would play a certain number of bars, and while sitting and chatting with me he's also counting them out? I couldn't even do that if I were in an isolation booth, tapping it out with my feet.  A sixth sense that tells him when the soloist is going to run out of ideas? We know that John Coltrane could solo virtually forever. When Miles Davis commented on it, Coltrane said that sometimes he just didn't know how to stop. Davis's suggestion: "Try taking the horn out of your mouth."

Which conceivably could have cued J. R. - the other guy takes the horn out of his mouth, or lifts his hands up off the keyboard -- if J. R. Is standing next to him on the bandstand, not anticipating and getting out of his chair and climbing back up on the bandstand.

All of which goes to make my oft-made point that I am not writing this as a music professor, or musicologist, or musician, or musical anything but fan. Larry Audette, or some other jazz musician who might be reading this, can certainly tell me how this works.

And all of which brings me around to Sonny Stitt once again, back in the studio for two more Prestige sessions, the first with Gene Ammons -- two classic bebop tenors, playing off a loose structure that gives plenty of room for improvisation trading lines of unequal length back and forth with casual intricacy that leaves me wondering "how do they do it?" But mostly just appreciating that they're doing it.

We know it wasn't rehearsed, because Bob Weinstock didn't allow for rehearsal, and in any case, you couldn't really rehearse that sort of improvisational give and take. I guess you could write a chart -- I'll take twelve bars and then you take four and then I'll take four and then you take eight but I'll overlap the last one...but I don't think so.

I only found two selections - "Blues Up and Down" and "You Can Depend on Me" - on a Spotify, so they were my car listening, but a third, "Bye Bye," with some propulsive drumming by Jo Jones, was on a site that was new to me --  Shelf3d. I can't embed it, but i can link to it. "Blues Up and Down" and "You Can Depend on Me"are both just the quintet, Stitt, Ammons, rhythm section.

"Blues Up and Down" Is represented in three takes. Sometimes a plethora of alternate takes can be a nuisance if you're listening to a CD, but if you're doing a close and repeated listen to just a few tunes, it's fascinating. The first take of  "Blues Up and Down" is good (though incomplete - they stop halfway through), but the second take is where it really comes together. The opening chorus is now more than just a riff, and the solos take flight. The third take may be tighter, or it may just be that they needed a third because it's the only one they actually finish, but I do love the second. I don't hear a lot of difference in the two takes of "You Can Depend on Me" (and there's only a couple of seconds difference in time) but they both sound good.

On the same day, they backed up a vocalist named Teddy Williams -- essentially the same session, but it's listed as a Teddy Williams session because the 78 was issued under his name - later rereleased on LP as both a Stitt Session and an Ammons session -- and much later, as part of a box set called "Stitt's Bits: The Bebop Recordings," although there's not much bebop in evidence on these two tracks, although lord knows they're  different enough from each other. They're both on Spotify.

On the first, "A Touch of the Blues," Williams is not particularly singing much more than a touch of the blues. It's a ballad in that Billy Eckstine style - more like Al Hibbler, really - and Stitt and Ammons play a chart that seems to have been written for a big band reed section. On the second, "Dumb Woman Blues," Williams belts out a conventional 12 bar blues in the style of Wynonie Harris or Roy Brown. And the horns play riffs that could easily be from a Wynonie Harris session, with one solo break (Ammons? I'm not good enough to be sure) that takes into that blue-gray area between bebop and rhythm and blues -- an area that's always interested me. Back in the day, the jazz tastemakers disdained rhythm and blues. Symphony Sid, if a caller requested Ray Charles, would answer scornfully, "We don't play rock and roll." But the same was not true of musicians. On Slim Gaillard's "Slim's Jam," Charlie Parker jams with "MacVoutie" - Jack McVea, best known for the R&B novelty smash "Open the Door, Richard," and another R&B bandleader, Paul Williams, had his biggest success with "The Hucklebuck," which is essentially Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time." Many jazz musicians, including such pinnacles of refinement as the MJQ's Connie Kay, played R&B dates. 

Oh, and maybe I'm not the musical dunce I think I am. Well, I am, but maybe I'm not the only one. The reviewer of the Stitt-Ammons sessions on AllMusic.com says "at times, when [Stitt] and  Gene Ammons are dueling on tenors, it's difficult to tell the difference between them," whereas the Amazon reviewer talks about "the contrast between Stitt's swift, complex phrases and Ammons's gruff passion" (how's that for bebop meets R&B?) I'm with the Amazon guy.

Listening to Prestige Records, Part 21: Sonny Stitt

A gap in the timeline. Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis recorded four sides for Prestige on February 7, 1950, but while Davis is widely represented on both Spotify and YouTube, I can't find this session anywhere. Too bad. Davis was joined by Al Casey, already an oldtimer in 1950 (I heard him play in the '90s with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band), a veteran of Fats Waller's band among others; and 19-year-old Wynton Kelly, in his first recording session. Two cuts had vocals by R&B vocalist "Chicago" Carl Davis, which makes me really sorry not to have found it -- I'm always interested in the overlap between modern jazz and rhythm and blues in this time period.

Then two European sessions, one led by French pianist Jacques Dieval, about whom even the French Wikipedia has next to nothing (but James Moody and Nat Peck played on the two-song date), and the other by a Swedish group led by vibraphonist Ulf Linde.

So the next session we have access to is Sonny Stitt again, this time with a different group of sidemen, including Art Blakey, who's most associated with Blue Note, where the Jazz Messengers recorded a lot of their albums, but who had a Prestige presence as well. Blakey, ageless and prolific, actually recorded for a lot of labels.

Without Bud Powell, most of the solo space here goes to Stitt, and the session is more ballad-oriented. Of the selections, I especially liked "Mean to Me," which is a beautiful melody, and lends itself to bluesy improvisation.

This was another of the handful of recordings originally released on the Birdland label.