Listening to Prestige 709 Lucky Thompson

LISTEN TO ONE: Cry Me a River

 This was Lucky Thompson's fourth (counting an early session with Miles Davis) and final album for Prestige. After that, in the early 1970, he made three more for the small but prestigious independent label Groove Merchant, and then apparently grew disillusioned with the music business altogether, and dropped out. It would be good to report that he had moved to Europe, where he continued to be highly regarded. He had lived in Paris from 1957-62, before returning to New York and his Prestige recording years. He did, in fact, go back from 1968-70, living in Lausanne, Switzerland, but then returned to the States again, and whatever he was looking for, he must not have found it, although he appeared to making a decent life for himself. In addition to the Groove Merchant sessions, he also taught at Dartmouth college for

two years, 1973-74. Then he dropped out.

He continued to be highly regarded in Europe -- small European labels would release forgotten or unreleased sessions by him over the next couple of decades -- but he never returned, and he seems to have grown altogether disillusioned with music. According to his obituary in the New York Times:

Fiercely intelligent, Mr. Thompson was outspoken in his feelings about what he considered the unfair control of the jazz business by record companies, music publishers and booking agents. 

Something of his later life was described by Ben Ratliff, writing the Times obituary:

Friends say he lived for a time on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and in Georgia before eventually moving west. By the early 90's he was in Seattle, mostly living in the woods or in shelter offered by friends. He did not own a saxophone. He walked long distances, and was reported to have been in excellent, muscular shape.

He was hospitalized a number of times in 1994, and finally entered the Washington Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation.

...He was rarely seen in public; at times it was hard for his old friends to find him. But the drummer Kenny Washington remembered Mr. Thompson's showing up when Mr. Washington was performing with Johnny Griffin's group at Jazz Alley in Seattle in 1993. Mr. Thompson listened, conversed with the musicians, and then departed on foot for the place where he was staying -- in a wooded spot in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, more than three miles away.

He died of complications from Alzheimer's in Seattle in 2005.

His 1965 Prestige session was called, with bitter irony as things were to turn out, Lucky Thompson Plays Happy Days are Here Again (and one wonders if that song ever really signalled happy days for anyone). Thompson is still the guy who played with Erskine Hawkins and with Charlie Parker, equally at home with swing and bebop, and so the old chestnut, the theme song of Democratic presidential hopeful Al Smith, is a fitting start point for the session. Thompson has a swingster's affimity for melody, a bebopper's comfort with complexity. There's a complexity of emotion, too, in Thompson's interpretation of this paean to untrammeled happiness, as a tinge of melancholy pervades his version.

"Happy Days are Here Again" is also closely associated with Barbra Streisand, and in fact the whole album revolves around songs associated with Streisand, even if she's not necessarily the primary association. "Cry Me a River," the next standard up, was sung by Barbra, but will forever be Julie London's. "Cry Me a River" is a song that's well-nigh irresistible for any singer with even a flicker of torch in their pipes, from Ella Fitzgerald to Joe Cocker, certainly  Streisand, most famously London. There are well over 600 covers of it. Sixty-odd instrumental versions make it a quasi-jazz standard as well, though not all that many A-listers have had a go at it: in addition to Thompson, it's been recorded by Dexter Gordon (in 1955, contemporaneous with London), Ray Bryant, Don Elliott, J. J. Johnson, Pete Candoli and a few others. Johnny "Hammond" Smith did it for Prestige.

The song was written by Arthur Hamilton, who had a long and not unsuccessful career as a songwriter and lyricist, but if he had been told he could keep all the money he made from all his other songs, but would have to return all his "Cry Me a River" royalties, he'd be pretty deeply in the red. He also had a pretty good hit with "Sing a Rainbow," from the Jack Webb movie Pete Kelly's Blues. He wrote three songs for Pete Kelly's Blues, two of which made it into the movie. The rejected one was "Cry Me a River."

Thompson makes you wonder why there aren't more jazz treatments of it. In his version, it has everything--the melodic sweetness, the uptempo bebop improvisation, room for a wonderful Tommy Flanagan solo. stickwork by Walter Perkins that embellishes as it drives.

Other standards follow: "You Don't Know What Love Is," "As Time Goes By," and of course the song most closely associated with Streisand, "People." He plays one number of his own composition, "Safari." It would have to be pretty good to keep company with these popular favorites, and it is.

In writing recently about Chuck Wayne, I discussed "that genre that's sometimes called 'mainstream' or 'straight ahead' jazz, but might best be called 'timeless jazz,' music that comes not out of any school or any era, but out of a quest for beauty, for an edge, for virtuosity, that comes from a love of playing and a mastery of the instrument and the form."

That's this album. Soul jazz and free jazz were the zeitgeist in 1965; this is neither. Barbra Streisand was the hottest thing on Broadway and in Hollywood; this isn't about her. It's timeless jazz, and thamk heavens for it.

Tommy Flanagan, George Tucker and Walter Perkins, three men at home in the world of timeless jazz, were the rhythm section. On "Safari" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" they are joined by harpist Jack Melady. Not primarily a jazz musician, Melady was known for his work in Broadway show pits, with Irish folkies the Clancy Brothers, and for a couple of albums of lounge favorites with cellist Julius Ehrenwerth, as Jack and Julie. He fits in here nicely, though.

Don Schlitten produced. "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Cry Me a River" were the single.  

Listening to Prestige 704: Bobby Timmons and Don Patterson

LISTEN TO ONE: White Christmas

LISTEN TO ONE: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

 A Christmas album! From Prestige!

Yes, it's true.

It's more than true. There are two of them. Bobby Timmons, and then Don Patterson, leading their respective trios through a more or less conventional mix of traditional carols and Christmas pop songs. Fortunately, it was 1964, so most of the really awful Christmas pop songs hadn't been written yet, and Bobby and producer Ozzie Cadena know enough to stay away from "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Rockin' around the Christmas Tree," at least with Timmons. By the time Ozzie got to Patterson, on the next day, he did let "Rudolph" slip in. Both Timmons and Patterson do, however, essay "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."

There are two reasons for buying an album of Christmas songs. One, there's a choir singing the songs so you can sing along with them, a beat behind if you don't remember

the words. Two, they're all or mostly instrumental, so you can have them as background music while you're trimming the tree, wrapping presents, or trying to seduce the receptionist from the accounting department, If you're Mantovani or the Melachrino Strings, you're playing the melody pretty straight through, so that people can sing along. If you're a jazz group, you're going to be improvising, but staying close enough to the melody that people remember what it is that you're playing.

There's probably a third. You hate Christmas music, and would rather just be listening to some good jazz, but your spouse, or your boss, or somebody, insists that you pick up a Christmas album to play at the office party or the tree trimming gathering, so you get something that says "Holiday Soul" on the cover, put it on, dig it quietly until the boss says "What is this shit?" and then you show him the album cover -- "See? It says 'Holiday Soul'!" and then, if you're lucky, Bobby Timmons comes in with the melody to "Deck the Halls," and plays it pretty close to recognizably straight for the last thirty seconds of the cut. This is, of course, if you're at an office party in 1964. Today's young whippersnapper boss probably won't recognize the melody to  "Deck the Halls," and will want to know why Timmons isn't playing "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Or "White Christmas." Oh, that was "White Christmas"? Where was the melody?

It's not quite that extreme. Well, it is for "White Christmas." For the most part, both Timmons and Patterson do at least allude to the melodies of their Christmas standards, but each allows himself plenty of room to just stretch out and play jazz, and that is something each of them does very satisfactorily.

Well, probably "Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer" was a mistake if you're looking for holiday soul.

Timmons finds considerably more soul in the 16th century Welsh melody of "Deck the Halls" than Patterson does in Johnny Marks's ditty, composed during the bebop era, recorded around the time that Bob Weinstock was lining up Lennie Tristano for Prestige Records' inaugural recording session. Gene Autry didn't want to record "Rudolph," and there's a good chance Don Patterson wasn't a lot more thrilled. 

Still...hey, it's Christmas. And with some good jazz, you can make it through the season. Ozzie Cadena produced both sessions.

Listening to Prestige 632: Jaki Byard

LISTEN TO ONE: European Episode

 Prestige, in its twenty-odd years of existence, left us an amazing legacy, a portrait of two of the most fruitful periods in American jazz. The middle part of its second decade is rich with some of the key figures of the avant garde, and some of the key figures of soul jazz. But one of the richest and most wonderful parts of that legacy is surely found in the 12 albums Prestige put out by Jaki Byard, a musician who fit in neither of those categories, or any other, really. His music has been described as "spanning the 20th century from ragtime to no time," and it's an apt description. It was not just that he could play anything from the most traditional to free jazz. Other skilled technicians, other dedicated artists, could do that. Byard spoke each language, each dialect of jazz like a native, and he could express himself with subtlety and nuance, with intellect and emotion, in every one of them.

And perhaps all of that is the reason why he is not remembered as well as he ought to be. An article about him on the web page of the Music Museum of New England (Byard was born in Worcester, MA) says that he "won many awards for his contributions over the years," but then it's hard pressed to come up with anything more than:

 In 1988 Mayor Ray Flynn awarded him the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions in Black Music and Presence in Boston. In 1995 NYC Mayor Rudolph Guliani presented him with an award for his outstanding contributions with the Apollo Stompers.

 This is Byard's third album as a leader with Prestige (he'd also appeared as a supporting player on several other dates, the most recent one being with Booker Ervin, who returns the gesture on the first of these two sessions). That was the May 21 session, with Richard Williams, Williams was also well known to Prestige collectors. Williams and Ervin sit out "Lush Life," as well as all of the second session.

On bass and drums for both sessions are Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins. Cranshaw had made his first Prestige recording just a few weeks earlier, with Shirley Scott and Stanley Turrentine, but he had already begun his long association with Sonny Rollins, and had been with Rollins on his 1962 recording of The Bridge for RCA Victor, the album that heralded Rollins's return from self-imposed exile. Perkins was by this time a familiar face in Prestige sessions.

The album shows a good deal of Byard's range and versatility, and in fact a few different styles and voicings are in evidence on a single cut--"European Episode," at just over 12 minutes more a suite than a single tune. One more facet of his versatility is showcased on "When Sunny Gets Blue," a leftover take from Byard's maiden session for Prestige in 1961, with Ron Carter and Roy Haynes, and featuring Byard on alto sax.

Esmond Edwards had produced the earlier session; the two that make up the bulk of this album were produced by Ozzie Cadena. The album was titled Out Front! "I Like to Lead When I Dance" and "After the Lights Go Down Low" were not included on the album, but made the later CD release.

Listening to Prestige 620: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

LISTEN TO TWO: Spellbound
Never on Sunday

Ahmed Abdul-Malik's recording career was brief--a total of six albums as leader between 1958 and 1964, the last four on Prestige. And this was his swan song. He never led a group again, and played on only a small handful of other recordings, although he would reappear on record in 2005, more than a decade after his death and half a century after this momentous recording, when the John Coltrane/Thelonious Monk Town Hall concert of 1957 was finally releas

I don't know why this sudden halt, and I haven't been able to find out much more about it. Abdul-Malik lived into the 1990s, taught in the New York City school system, but doesn't seem to have been interviewed, and doesn't seem to have rated much in the way of obituaries. Curious neglect for such a striking talent.

Certainly this final album leaves one wishing for more, because it's so good, but also because it's so unusual. That he continued to create a fusion between Western jazz and Middle Eastern music is expected, and welcome. But to take as his source material theme music from Hollywood movies? That's not at all the choice that most of us would have made.

And what musicians would you go looking for if you were planning a session of jazz/Middle Eastern fusion? An oud player, certainly, Abdul-Malik, himself a master of the oud, had a keen ear for talent on the instrument, and he picked Hamza Aldeen, an Egyptian composer and oud master from Nubia, the upper Nile region where the oud originated. As Hamza El Din, he performed in the summer of 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival, and recorded an album for Vanguard entitled Music of Nubia, followed by a second Vanguard album in 1965. He has been cited as a major influence by avant garde composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and has recorded with the Grateful Dead and the Kronos quartet.

This was his only recording session with a jazz group, but his contribution is outstanding. He plays on two tracks, "Never on Sunday" and "Song of Delilah."

A musician with plenty of jazz credentials, but not one you'd immediately think of if you were planning an album of Middle Eastern music, is Ellington alumnus Ray Nance. Nance had joined the Ellington orchestra in 1940, and remained with them through 1963, leaving just before being tabbed to join Abdul-Malik for this session, As Ellington's first trumpet, he recorded one of the most famous trumpet solos in jazz, the Duke's original 1940 recording of "Take the A Train." He plays cornet here, on "Body and Soul" and "Cinema Blues."

Nance, of course, also became known as the only violin soloist in the Ellington orchestra, and he brings his violin to "Spellbound" and "Song of Delilah." Again, if you were putting together a cutting edge group to play an new kind of world music fusion, you might not immediately think to bring a sort of old school violin guy.

I have to assume that Abdul-Malik was completely given his head in assembling this group, because no one--not Bob Weinstock, not Don Schlitten--was going to say "World music fusion? Right. You'll need a violin, and an old school rhythm and blues guy on tenor sax."

That would be Seldon Powell. No, the choices must have been Abdul-Malik's own. And the choice of movie music? Who else would dream that up?

Anyway, assuming my assumptions are right, thank Providence they let Ahmed do it his way, because this is a wonderful album, and one is only left regretting that he didn't make any more. What would he have thought of next time?

Pianist Paul Neves was one of those local legends, in his case in two locales -- Boston and Puerto Rico. A fine player who didn't make it to New York, didn't tour with a New York or LA-based name band, didn't record -- this is his only recording date with a name group. It's good that we have him here.

I should give "Song of Delilah" as my Listen to One. It has some strong soloing by everyone. And if I didn't choose it, I'd be torn between the wonderful violin work by Ray Nance on "Spellbound," and the electrifying oud playing of Hamza Aldeen on "Never on Sunday." Well, I can't choose, and I can't reconcile. They're two such different cuts, with two such different musicians. So it's Listen to Two.

Another odd thing about this album: it was released on Prestige's lightly used and lightly distributed budget label, Status. I don't know why. Don Schlitten produced.

Listening to Prestige 596: Booker Ervin

LISTEN TO ONE: Mooche Mooche

 For as long as there has been small group jazz, there have been artists rebelling against its strictures--the "formula" of head-solo-solo-solo-head. Well, it's not a formula, any more than the sonnet or the ballad or the three-act play is a formula. It's a form, and forms persist because they work. They can also be broken, rebelled against, turned inside out, but in a sense that's just a tribute to their durability.

Of course, the reason why the small group, head-solo-solo-solo-head formula works is twofold. First, it works because American music is full of great melodies and great riffs that are a pleasure to play and a pleasure to listen to, and pleasure is at the

heart of all music that lasts. Second, and most important, it works because it gives wonderful musicians a chance to express themselves -- a showcase to be heard in a supportive context, and space to express themselves through tonal quality and improvisational inspiration.

One such wonderful musician who flowered in the 1960s was Booker Ervin. Ervin had burst onto the scene in 1958 in the ensemble of Charles Mingus, with whom he enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship. He had recorded with Mal Waldron and Roy Haynes for Prestige, and with Horace Parlan for Blue Note, and had made three records as leader (for Bethlehem, Savoy and Candid), so he was hardly an unknown quantity when came to Englewood Cliffs for this session, but it was the beginning of his most fertile period, with ten albums for Prestige. 

Prestige in this period was open to a wide range of music, from the free experiments of Eric Dolphy to the soul fundamentalism of Jack McDuff, and the tradition-maintaining sounds of Swingville and Bluesville, but Ervin came perhaps as close as any to the jazz heart of this label. Working with like-minded musicians, he used this premiere performance of his Prestige years to add a new sound to the library of small group masterpieces.

Frank Strozier had the admiration of his peers. Here's tuba virtuoso Howard Johnson:

No one was ever really up to the task of playing with that much technical proficiency, deep harmonic expression and all the while keeping a foot deeply in the blues. For me, Frank is joined by Harry Carney, Benny Golson, Sonny Red and Paul Gonsalves in the league of players who were never imitated because their way was too hard to figure out, much less execute. And at the same time they were as deeply inspirational as some of the widely acknowledged innovators.

He recorded with a wide variety of musicians, but never quite broke through to the level of popularity he deserved. Finally, in the late 1980s, he gave up playing the saxophone and returned to his first instrument, the piano. He never recorded on the piano, but his concerts were well reviewed and appreciated by those who heard them. Then he left music to become a math and science teacher.

Horace Parlan was also a Mingus associate. It was he who first heard Ervin when he came to New York, and recommended him to Mingus, and Ervin played on two records Parlan made as leader for Blue Note. His unique piano style, marked by heavy emphasis on the left hand, was formed by a childhood bout with polio which robbed him of the use of three fingers on his right hand.

I've written about Butch Warren on his one previous Prestige gig, with Walter Bishop Jr. He was much in demand during the early 1960s, but substance abuse and mental health issues caught up with him, and he left the rat race of big time jazz and returned to his home in Washington, DC, where he played but little. 

Walter Perkins began his career in Chicago with Ahmad Jamal, and as leader of his own ensemble MJT+3, which included Frank Strozier. He came to New York in 1962, and immediately became ubiquitous, with several sessions for Prestige alone before signing on for this gig. They included Gene Ammons, Etta Jones, fellow Chicagoan John Wright, and Dave Pike.

I said earlier that the basic small group jazz form has endured because of good musicians and good music. That's in evidence here. Broadway was still yielding up tunes with the feel of standards, such as Jule Styne's "Just in Time," from Broadway (1956) and Hollywood (1960) hit Bells Are Ringing. Fats Waller was the source for "Black and Blue." The others were originals from either Ervin ("Mooche Mooche" and "Tune In") or Perkins ("Mour," which Ervin liked enough to record again for Blue Note), or the two of them together ("No Man's Land"). All good stuff, but I've chosen "Mooche Mooche" as our "Listen to One" for sustained excitement and top notch solos from all concerned.

Exultation! was the title of the Prestige album. Short versions of "Just in Time" and "No Man's Land" were issued as a 45 RPM single, and later added to a 1971 re-release. Don Schlitten produced.

Listening to Prestige 580: Dave Pike

 

As promised, a new Dave Pike with this, his third and last album for Prestige. Pike would re-invent himself often, like so many jazz musicians in this swiftly moving art form, from Miles Davis on. This, however, is not so much a reinvention as a shift in emphasis, away from the Latin rhythms, on to a more mainstream sound. How much of this was the result of commercial considerations, I can't say. If commercial considerations were the whole story, nobody would be playing jazz, but sometimes a thematic approach -- less tactfully, a gimmick -- may be a way to draw a little more attention to an artist, and sell a few more records.

Nothing wrong with that if, when you get down to making the music, you're there to play and nothing else. Which certainly seems to have been the case with Dave Pike. If you sign a recording contract at height of the bossa nova craze, and management says "Hey, how about a bossa nova album," you might do it just for the contract. That was the case when Bob Weinstock asked Annie Ross if she could write some songs to jazz solos--"I was desperate, so I said 'Sure.' If he'd asked me to learn how to fly, I would have said 'Sure.'" And the rest is history. Two of the greatests jazz vocalese pieces ever -- "Twisted" and "Farmer's Market." And Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. But it seems clear that Pike didn't do it just for the contract. Had that been the case, he wouldn't have chosen to feature the works of obscure (in the United States) composer Joao Donato.

Jazz interpretations of Broadway shows had shown some commercial appeal. Oliver! had been a hit in London, had been on tour in the United States, and was about to open on Broadway, where it would be a success, but would not really spawn any hit songs. "As Long as He Needs Me" had been a British hit for Shirley Bassey, and would later become a minor hit for Sammy Davis Jr. I'm not convinced that a jazz version of Oliver! was a surefire commercial bet in 1963, and I suspect one might not find all that many people today who could hum "As Long as He Needs Me," let alone the rest of the show. So I hope it was a project that really appealed to Pike.

A confluence of reasons--not a huge Oliver! fan base among the jazz crowd, the association of Pike with more out-there genres of music--have converged to make this a not widely remembered album. Also, when one thinks of the vibes in the context of the history of jazz, there's a bit of a temptation to enumerate Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson and then stop. But there were a lot of very good players, and a lot of individual stylists, and several of them were on Prestige. Teddy Charles, back in the label's early days, who would give it all up to become a charter boat skipper. Lem Winchester, the jazz-playing cop, dead before his time. Walt Dickerson. And Dave Pike. Here, his work with Jimmy Raney and with Tommy Flanagan, two veterans who know how to challenge and support a young player, is well worth a listen.

Dave Pike Plays the Jazz Version of Oliver! is not represented on YouTube by any individual cuts, so I can't give a Listen to One, but the whole album is there, and worth checking out.

Don Schlitten, new to Prestige, produced. Schlitten had started an independent label, Signal, in 1955, then moved on to freelance producing after he and his partners sold the label to Savoy.

Dave Pike played the jazz version of "As Long as He Needs Me" for a 45 RPM single, with "Where is Love?" as the B side.  The album was released on Moodsville.

Pike's next two albums, for Decca and Atlantic, are notable for introducing Chick Corea on the first, and employing the still-new Herbie Hancock on the second.

Listening to Prestige 549: John Wright

LISTEN TO ONE: Blue Prelude

 This was John Wright's last album for Prestige, before retreating back to Chicago and the inside of a bottle, finally emerging from that trap to become a legendary figure in that neighborhood which he had apotheosized with his first album, South Side Soul, and in doing so he had created a persona that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was Mr. South Side Soul, and a beloved figure on the South Side of Chicago.

Musical Chicago is probably most associated in the public mind with the guitar and harmonica-based blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy,  But the piano had its place in Chicago blues, too, with performers

like Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, Big Maceo Meriwether, and Otis Spann. One of the chief architects of the Chicago blues sound was Willie Dixon, and he got his start playing the bass in a jazz trio led by Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston, a pianist in the Nat "King" Cole style that was so popular in the early 1940s. 

The piano jazz faces of Chicago in the modern era were Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis, and John Wright could well have made them a triumvirate, but for the alcoholism that took so many years from him. Even so, though he never broke out to national recognition like the other two, Chicago knew him, and his Wright Gatherings became a local musical tradition.

Like Jamal and Lewis and Caston, the piano trio was his favored lineup, and for this album, in addition to Prestige regular Wendell Marshall, who had worked with before, he used drummer Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, a Chicagoan who had gotten his start with Jamal.

The album features four Wright compositions and one by Esmond Edwards, whose compositional

contributions were extremely rare on the many records he produced, for Prestige and elsewhere.  The other three are by composers not close to the center of modern jazz, although "What's New?" by trad jazz stalwart Bob Haggart has become a much-loved standard for a wide range of jazz performers down to the present day. "Our Waltz" is by David Rose and "Blue Prelude" is by Gordon Jenkins, both pop music orchestra leaders. "Our Waltz" is not completely unknown to the world of jazz musicians always with open ears to a good melody with improvisational possibilities: both Gary Burton and Rahsaan Roland Kirk recorded it in the early 1960s. "Blue Prelude" has a little something for everyone. In addition to the many pop singers and

orchestras that have recorded it, it's been country (Bob Wills, David Houston), rhythm and blues (Sam "the Man" Taylor), and Latin (Candido, Jack Costanzo). Outside of Wright, the closest it's come to a modern jazz interpretation is George Shearing, who recorded it twice, once as an instrumental and once with Peggy Lee. Wright finds good things to explore in it, taking it somewhat more percussively and explosively than it's used to being taken--and, in fact, it became the 45 RPM single release from the session, along with his own composition "Strut." 

Edwards produced, and the Prestige release was entitled Mr. Soul.

Listening to Prestige 548: Etta Jones - Gene Ammons

LISTEN TO ONE: You Don't Know My Mind

LISTEN TO ONE: My Gentleman Friend

 Etta Jones's career followed a familiar arc: Apprenticeship, a breakthrough and a pinnacle of success, a period of decline. For Jones, the toiling in the fields stage was a long one--her first recording in 1944, with Barney Bigard. Her rise was meteoric when it finally came. After recording singles off and on through the 1940s and 1950s, and one little noticed album for King in 1957, she broke out with her debut album for Prestige, 1960's Don't Go to Strangers, which sold a million copies, made Billboard's top 40 with the single, and was nominated for a Grammy. She would remain on Prestige's roster for the next five years, and record eight albums, but would never have another hit like Don't Go to Strangers, would never make a significant dent in the DownBeat and Playboy polls. So...an unusually long gestation period, a brief moment of glory (sadly, not all that unusual) and then a long period of declining popularity. But that long period was super-long, as a core of devoted listeners never went away, as her career spanned six decades, until he death in 2001, just after she had recorded her last album. After leaving Prestige, she began a collaboration with saxophonist Houston Person which lasted 29 years. And while she may never have

gotten the recognition she deserved, there was always enough demand for the music she and Person made to keep her working. Nor was she completely overlooked--there were further Grammy awards in 1981 and 1998.

Jones recorded three sessions for Prestige in April and May of 1962, the middle one of which was logged as a Gene Ammons session. 

On April 6, she recorded with a quartet led by guitarist Wally Richardson and pianist Patti Bown, with George Duvivier and Ed Shaughnessy. Bown and Shaughnessy were back for the May 4 session, this time with Budd Johnson on tenor sax and Art Davis on bass.

The two sessions were mingled together on the album, Lonely and Blue. The tunes from the  April 13 Ammons session (Bown, Duvivier, Walter Perkins on drums) were included on a compilation album. Soul Summit No. 2, and later added to the CD reissue of Lonely and Blue.

It's a wonderful album. The songs are a mix of standards and little known tunes, ballads and blues, all of them good songs with intelligent lyrics that Jones understands and conveys from the inside out. The songs Ammons's and especially Johnson's tenor sax presage her work with Houston Person, warm, romantic, meticulously phrased and passionately delivered, voice and saxophone meshing and playing off each other.

Because her songs with saxophone and piano/guitar are each so distinctive, I have to give a Listen to Two for this album, and even then it's hard to choose. I went with two of the more obscure cuts. "Gentleman Friend" was written by Richard Lewine and Arnold B. Horwitt for a 1948 Broadway Revue called Make Mine Manhattan, which had a decent run and is best known for being the Broadway debut of Sid Caesar. It was pretty much the highlight of Lewine's an Horwitt's careers, though they both did respectable work in the music business. "You Don't Know My Mind" is by Clarence Williams, prolific tunesmith and one of the first successful Black music publishers.

Jones is featured on the three tracks of the Gene Ammons session, recorded shortly before he began his second prison term. The session was split over two compilation albums also featuring cuts by Jack

McDuff: Soul Summit and Soul Summit, Vol. 2. Among their other significant virtues, these albums showcase how good, and how underused, Patti Bown was. A second Ammons session, the next day, this one with Shaughnessy, was released on Moodsville.

Lonely and Blue was a Prestige release. Esmond Edwards produced both days, and the Ammons sessions. The Jones / Richardson session produced a 45 RPM single, "And I'll Be There" / "In the Dark." The 45 RPM single off the first Ammons session was "The Party's Over / "I Want to Be Loved;" off the second, "On the Street of Dreams" / "You'd be So Nice to Come Home To."

Listening to Prestige 510: Gene Ammons - Joe Newman - Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: Born to be Blue

During the late 1960s, when rock started to take itself seriously, supergroups suddenly became the rage. But in jazz, they were old news. And they were done without thinking twice. Let's get Gene Ammons back into the studio. --Yeah, and let's put him with a couple of different guys.  -- Who's in town? And presto, you have Joe Newman and Jack McDuff showing up to jam with Gene on some tunes. Supergroup? Oh, my, yes.

And jamming? I'd say so. They're relaxed, they're trying each other out on a variety of material, they're finding some good grooves, and they're playing jazz. What's not to like?

There's nothing not to like. Unlike the world of cartoons, or all too often the world of other collaborative arts, in jazz when you put a group of musicians like this together and say "What could possibly go wrong?" nothing does. These guys are seasoned pros, they're entertainers, and they're artists. And they've got some good tunes to work with.

It's hard to pick a favorite here for a Listen to One, but they do an awfully nice job on "Born to Be Blue," the ballad written by Mel Tormé and his frequent writing partner Robert Wells (they also collaborated on "The Christmas Song").  It's sensitive and lyrical, with great individual work by all the participants.

I also love the variety of material here. Ellington and Strayhorn's "Satin Doll" gets covered a lot (397 versions, according to the SecondHandSongs website), but with top notch improvisers, it's always worth one more. "Stormy Monday Blues" is the Bob Crowder/Billy Eckstine/Earl Hines version, not T-Bone Walker's, though both are 12-bar blues. Bennie Moten's "Moten Swing" comes out of that Kansas City cauldron of swing. And the two Ammons compositions are up against some pretty tough competition, but they hold up.

The newcomer on this session is Chicagoan Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, who got his start playing with Ahmad Jamal, recorded with Sonny Criss for the Texas-based Peacock label, then did a few sessions as leader for the Chicago labels Argo and Vee-Jay. He would move to New York full time not long after this session, where he would do three more albums with Ammons and find plenty of other work, recording with  Rahsaan Roland Kirk, George Shearing, Charles Mingus, Billy Taylor, Booker Ervin, Jaki Byard, Lucky Thompson, Pat Martino, Sonny Stitt, and Charles Earland, among others.

As you may recall, part of the reason why I started this project was the conversations Peter Jones and I had about recorded jazz in the 1950s, and our recollection that it was all good. I've been putting that to the test for 510 entries now, and I'm into the 1960s, and it's still holding up. How many different ways are there to say this is good stuff, this is a deeply satisfying listening experience? I guess we'll find out, or else I'll start showing my age, and repeating myself.

The album was called Twisting the Jug, although it was hardly a twist album (but you could dance to it). It was released on Prestige, with the title cut a two-sided 45 RPM single.