Listening to Prestige 350: Red Garland

Of the subsidiary labels that Bob Weinstock created to swing into the new decade, Moodsville is the most debatable. Swing and blues are undeniably important and arguably underserved genres, at least in this time frame, but mood music? Isn't that just watered-down jazz?

Except it isn't. Chris Albertson has asserted that every session produced for Prestige was held to the same high musical standards, and if you look at the artists in the Moodsville catalog, they're not watered-down anything.

You can raise the chicken-and-egg question. Did Weinstock say, "Hey, let's bring Red Garland in for a solo piano session, and we can release it on Moodsville"? Or did Red lobby Weinstock for solo session, and did Bob then, listening to the finished product, say, "Hey, that could work for Moodsville"?

It's questions like this that keep me up at night. And I'm entitled. In fact, as both an intellectual and a jazz fanatic, I'm doubly entitled to wakeful nights pondering pointless and unanswerable questions.

Why don't I just shut up and listen to the music? I do that too.

You can get a lot of music in when you've just got a solo piano, and Garland recorded two albums' worth on this balmy April day (I looked it up; temperatures were 15 degrees above normal). In spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, but Garland was playing alone, and his fancy turned to being alone, to songs about love lost. He was also thinking random thoughts about the blues, and apparently playing tunes as they came into his mind, so ultimately they were separated out to make two albums, and I'll take the songs album track by album track, starting with Red Alone, which became the third Moodsville release.

He begins with "When Your Lover Has Gone," written by Einar Swan for the James Cagney movie Girl Crazy. Swan was a dance band musician turned composer, and you'd think there'd be next to nothing written about him, which was true until 2006, when Scandinavian historian chanced upon a mention of him, noted his unusual first name, decided he must be Finnish (he was--the family name was Joutsen, Finnish for Swan), decided to research him and ended by writing a 90-page biography. Swan's father emigrated from Finland because he heard that American workers had an 8-hour day which meant he would have time to study music. All his children were musical, and there was a family orchestra.

"These Foolish Things" was written by British composer Jack Strachey, who also composed "A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square." It's one of my favorite ballads.

The rest are mostly the work of composer royalty--Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Young.

"Nancy with the Laughing Face" was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers, and is generally thought to have been written for Frank Sinatra's wife, but it wasn't. Silvers had originally written as "Bessie with the Laughing Face, but that was apparently considered either too ethnic or too bovine.

Man does not live by Red Alone, so the remaining titles were gathered together in a second, album, Alone with the Blues, and as one can expect from Red Garland, there's a wide-ranging selection process, delivering a veritable history of the blues. Classic blues is represented by Leroy Carr's "In the Evening (when the Sun Goes Down)." We take a trip to Kansas City for Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner's "Wee Baby Blues." Ahmet Ertegun (as A. Nugetre) and pianist Harry Van Walls wrote "Chains of Love," which was an Atlantic recording for Big Joe. Jazz is represented across the decades: "Cloudy" by Mary Lou Williams; "Sent for You Yesterday (and Here You Come Today)" by Count Basie, Eddie Durham and Jimmy Rushing; "Blues in the Closet," by Oscar Pettiford; and John Coltrane's "Trane's Blues." All of it given the Garland touch.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58, is just about ready to go to press! I'll announce shortly when I'm ready to start taking orders.

Listening to Prestige 349: Eric Dolphy

We move away from the old pros of Swingville. They were wonderful, but it's time to look to the future, and the future enters like a panzer division with Eric Dolphy. He was one of the most important musicians, along with Coleman and Coltrane, in tearing up the old rulebook and writing a new set of rules.

Or maybe not. Leonard Feather, interviewing Dolphy, tried to figure out just what those new rules were, but he didn't get very far.

LF: For one thing, I would I would like to make it clear that I don't think I understand...as a musician you know certain things I don't understand about what you are doing and I...would like to maybe get them clarified in my own mind so that I can make it clear for the average reader ... what is happening and what people like you are doing harmonically. It's very hard to explain, very hard to analyze. Can you put it into words?

ED: Well, it, you know, it always depends on the subject of what you're improvising on of course, and then, uh... Of course if you're playing freer forms and the harmony...  improvisation is much more freer and you have much more things that you can play...the lines are not held to no chord patterns, harmonically.

LF: No, but, what I don't understand is what ARE they held to? I mean what is, what is the difference between the limitations, there must be some limitations otherwise it, you would be arbitrary, you could just play any notes that you like.

ED: Well that's the idea you CAN play every note that you like. Of course, you only can play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not to your hearing, to what you're hearing. So quite naturally, I hear, uh, more notes on uh, on the same thing that's been said before.

Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Maybe Blowup, without a ball. Only you and whoever you're playing with know where the ball is going and whether you've hit it squarely. But there are spins and trajectories and lobs and smashes that only you can hear. If you get it right, you're Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard. Get it wrong, and you're that tenor saxophonist on Jazzmobile who was told by Frank Foster to "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

playing free jazz is like Michelangelo Antonioni's tennis match in

This is Dolphy's debut album as leader. He had recorded in Los Angeles with Chico Hamilton, and also with Clifford Brown, although that one has an odder history. Dolphy was a native Los Angeleno, and his dad, ever supportive of his music, built him a recording studio, and a lot of musicians--not just his friends, but serious musicians, would come by to jam with the kid. One of these sessions, with Brownie, was recorded and the recording was saved, to be released in 2005. He would pack a lot of recording into the next four years of an all-too-brief life, both as leader and sideman, including a lot of work with Charles Mingus. Much of his output would not be released until after his death in 1964.

It marks a return to the cutting edge Prestige. Esmond Edwards produced. Dolphy recorded three of his own compositions, two standards, and one tune by a contemporary, Charles "Majeed" Greenlee.

Freddie Hubbard would later become known for a more crowd-friendly style, but in these younger days he was very much in tune with the avant-garde, recording with both Coltrane and Coleman in addition to Dolphy. When there are no limitations, it puts an interesting burden on the second soloist. He has to follow in a path laid out for him by someone who adhered to no path but an inner one--what he could hear.  If he scurries back to the road more traveled, he'll seem tame by comparison. If he's faking it, or he doesn't know what he's doing, it's "feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

All this reminds me somehow of a poem I once wrote about the wilderness mapping itself, which I'll append to the end of this.

Jaki Byard, a multi-instrumentalist although the piano was his main instrument, was new to Prestige but a jazz world veteran, though mostly in Boston, where he had played and recorded with Herb Pomeroy and Charlie Mariano. This was his first New York recording gig, and the beginning of a long and important career, including a number of albums for Prestige. He also had a distinguished career as an educator, including establishing the jazz studies program at the New England Conservatory of Music.

George Tucker, like Dolphy, would not be around for long. He died in 1965 without achieving the outsized reputation of Dolphy, but being quietly respected by his peers and by younger bassists. It easy to understand why, listening to his work on this session. As the bassist, it's his job to keep the beat, and he does so, but with a full appreciation of the complexity of the music and the need of the beat to reflect that.

And it's not hard to understand why Dolphy chose Roy Haynes rather than a younger drummer more identified with the free jazz movement. All you have to do is listen.

The Dolphy compositions are freer. The standards are still grounded in melody and chord structure, although Dolphy moves further and further out as he develops his improvisation. The Charles Greenlee composition is a bit of a surprise. Although Greenlee began his career in Detroit in the 1940s, he's probably best known for his avant-garde work in the late 1960s and 1970s with Archie Shepp, so the surprise is that "Miss Toni" is really the most boppish piece of the day.

The balance is a good one, for the listener of the day to get used to the direction Dolphy was headed in, and maybe for the musicians who were playing with him, too.

Most of this session was released in 1960 as Dolphy's first Prestige album, Outward Bound. The alternate takes of "G. W." and "245" would eventually see daylight on much later compilation releases, and "April Fool" would be included in a posthumous release, 1966's Here and There. Outward Bound was first released on New Jazz, later on Prestige.

Listening to Prestige 348: Swingville All Stars

I despaired of ever finding this album on a streaming service. Nothing on Spotify by Swingville All Stars. YouTube had some cuts by Swingville All Stars with Pee Wee Russell, but nothing by this ensemble. And it looked so good. I was dying to hear it. No immediate success when I searched separately under Taft Jordan, Hilton Jefferson and Al Sears.

A streaming music hint: Sometimes something is just plain not there, but sometimes it's there if you look hard enough, and try enough different search terms. One good tactic is, if there's a song on the album you want that hasn't been recorded a whole lot, try that as a search. "New Carnegie Blues" is an Al Sears composition, and he's recorded it on his own, but not much outside of that. I found it first on YouTube, then on Spotify. Having found the tune, I selected "Go to album" and was taken to a collection called Mood Indigo by Taft Jordan which is a Prestige reissue of various Ellington-identified songs by the former Ellington trumpeter, and includes all of the tunes on the Swingville All Stars set.

It was worth the hunt. This is a totally pleasurable set by three veterans who know how to play pretty for the people. Taft Jordan, 45 when this recording was made, had made his reputation over a decade with the Chick Webb/Ella Fitzgerald Orchestra, and later played with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. He also made a stop on the modern side of the street in the orchestra that Gil Evans and Miles Davis put together for Sketches of Spain.

Hilton Jefferson, 57 when he made this date, also had stints with Webb and Ellington, but his big long-term association was with Cab Calloway. He had begun his professional career in 1929 with Claude Hopkins.

Al Sears was 50, so there was age spread between them, but they all had Chick Webb and Ellington in common, with Sears as the most prominent Ellingtonian— he took Ben Webster’s lead tenor sax chair when Webster left the Duke. The late 1950s saw him onstage with Alan Freed for his big rock ‘n roll Christmas extravaganzas, where he was known as Big Al Sears.

As a New York musician, Don Abney always got a lot of work, in jazz and as a studio musician. He recorded with many of the day's top singers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, and Pearl Bailey. But his career really prospered when he loved to LA, and became musical director for Universal Studios. His work there included an on-camera stint as Ella Fitzgerald's piano player in Jack Webb's Pete Kelly's Blues.

The session begins with the Al Sears composition, "New Carnegie Blues," and its mellow sound reminds of a reminiscence by a college professor about meeting Sears. Sears had a gentle demeanor and a bespectacled, professorial look, so the prof asked him about the meaning of the title of his most famous tune, "Castle Rock." Was it a mythological or literary reference? Sears explained, "A rock is a fuck, and a castle rock is a really humongous fuck."

"New Carnegie Blues" sets a mellow tone for a mellow album of ballads and jump numbers. "Rockin' in Rhythm," the Ellington/Harry Carney number, is the most boisterous. Neil Hefti's "Li'l Darlin'" jumps but in a more relaxed way. It features a nice piano intro by Don Abney to set up the solos and ensemble work by the three leads, which is flawless here as always. Mercer Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" is the other relaxed jumper, and features some very interesting work on the bass by Wendell Marshall.

"Willow Weep for Me" by Gershwin protege Ann Ronell, is one of the few songs to be inspired by the trees on an Ivy League campus. "Tenderly" was written by Walter Gross for Margaret Whiting as a breakup song after she had broken his heart, but I don't believe she ever recorded it. The three soloists are all particularly moving on the slow ballads.

The session was produced by Esmond Edwards. The Swingville release was entitled Rockin' in Rhythm.

Listening to Prestige 347: Pee Wee Russell

Listening to Prestige continues to be an enriching experience beyond what I even expected, as the Swingville catalog expands and showcases exemplars of a style of music I haven't always paid enough attention to. Pee Wee Russell played jazz over five decades, making a name for himself as one of the leading Dixieland and Chicago-style musicians, playing for most of his career with solid traditionalists like Eddie Condon and Henry "Red" Allen, yet always known as an odd duck in a field that did not always take kindly to odd ducks. Dixieland players, especially as, like Eddie Condon, they dug in their heels against modernism, prided themselves on hitting notes squarely, but Russell never exactly did that. His style was always punctuated by growls, swoops, yelps, and off-notes that would have felt right at home in a bebop setting. Indeed, he is certainly the only traditional jazz musician ever to play the Newport Festival as part of Thelonious Monk's group. With Condon, partly because of his unorthodox style and partly because of his hangdog looks, he was the comic relief for Condon's stage schtick, but there was nothing ridiculous about it when he stepped out front and started soloing.

Russell was on a comeback that had almost seemed impossible. In 1951, alcohol had caused a physical breakdown that sent him to the hospital, where many thought he would not recover.

Esmond Edwards, for his Prestige debut, put him together with a versatile group of musicians. Buck Clayton is perhaps best known for his work with Count Basie, and for a swing-era style, but in his time with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic he played with everyone, including Charlie Parker. The rhythm section is equally versatile, and together, they create a session that is satisfyingly mainstream and still full of surprises.

In fact, everyone in this session is capable of delivering up surprises, and they do--even Wendell Marshall, who's tasked with keeping everyone in line and is up to the job, his walking bass weaving in and out among the soloists. Osie Johnson delivers a couple of stinging solos.

And Tommy Flanagan, raised in the bebop hotbed of Detroit but capable of playing with anyone, raises some serious eyebrows here. He doesn't come close to staying within the conventions of traditional jazz, and yet everything he does works, making this a session that is absolutely located within Swingville, but rewarding for anyone of any jazz taste who takes the time to give it a listen.

The best YouTube presentation is the whole album, so that's what I've put up, but if I were able to single out a Listen to One, it would be "Lulu's Back in Town"--a Dixieland chestnut, but not the way they play it.

The Swingville album was titled Swingin' with Pee Wee.

Listening to Prestige 346: Claude Hopkins

I can't find a producer credit for this, but it has to be part two of Chris Albertson's welcome into the Prestige fold. He had brought Claude Hopkins on board with the Lonnie Johnson session, and Hopkins would stick around to do a couple of sessions as leader for Bob Weinstock's labels--something he did remarkably little of, in a long career. He did record with his orchestra in the early 1930s, but after that nothing. In fact, it would have taken a dedicated aficionado like Albertson to even remember him, though once remembered, he wouldn't have been that hard to find. Unlike Lonnie Johnson, he hadn't vanished from sight. He always found work with trad jazz or Dixieland ensembles.

A few thoughts about Bob Weinstock and his Swingville label. Looking back, it seems like a natural. All those great musicians were still around, and it would have been a shame if their later music had gone undocumented. And from a business standpoint, it had to have been a good gamble. No jazz musician made the really big bucks, but Claude Hopkins had to come a lot cheaper than John Lewis or Erroll Garner.

But remember the era. We were past the 1940s, but the jazz wars between the progressives and the moldy figs were not entirely over, and they had been fierce. Nowadays, on your mixtape if anyone still made them, on your Spotify playlist or Pandora radio station, you might perfectly easily go from Ornette Coleman to Jimmie Lunceford, and be admired for it by that discerning friend who happened to be looking over your shoulder. But back then, you really were expected to choose sides. You had to stand with Eddie Condon, who said, "We don't flat our fifths, we drink 'em!" or Louis Armstrong, who railed against bebop as "Chinese music," or Tommy Dorsey who said it had set music back twenty years. Or you could be like the Down Beat critic dismissing Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby's "Now You Has Jazz" from High Society with "Jazz? I'm still waiting to hear it."

In 1960, we stood on the brink of change. Rock and roll would turn in rock, would start becoming culturally respectable, would make a new trend out of what jazz had always done by inventing "supergroups" and jams. The blues would be rediscovered (Weinstock was again ahead of his time with the Bluesville label), and the jazz culture wars of the 1940s and 1950s would fade into oblivion, But there was some serious apostasy in a bebop/progressive label embracing the moldy fig sound the way that Weinstock did with his Swingville line. He may have played it safe out of the box with Coleman Hawkins, because no one of any age or musical taste was going to put down the Hawk, but with this group led by Claude Hopkins, the mold was seriously on the fig,

And we, in the 21st century, can only be grateful.

Hopkins is joined by Emmett "Chu" Berry on trumpet, Buddy Tate on tenor, Prestige stalwart Wendell Marshall on bass and J. C. Heard on drums. Tate is a Prestige veteran by this time, having debuted with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott and then led his own session. Berry had been with Fletcher Henderson (replacing Roy Eldridge) and Count Basie. He had also been featured on some of Billie Holiday's classic recordings. Heard, like Marshall, was equally at home with swing and bop ensembles. He had begun his career with Teddy Wilaon, had worked for the Big Three (Armstrong, Goodman, Ellington),  and had also played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

They play standards, a Bessie Smith blues, and the Sy Oliver swing composition that became the title tune, and which was having a renaissance, with recent versions by Ray Charles and Shirley Scott. They play uptempo swing and moody blues. They take great solos and work together in ensemble sections like the old pros they are. Wendell Marshall demonstrates his facility as a swing bassist.

Yes Indeed! was released on  Swingville. A later CD release saw Hopkins sharing leader credit with Tate. Nothing on 45, and there could have been. Swing was, after all, the original dance music.

Listening to Prestige 345: Oliver Nelson

I am sadly unable to find anything on the next Prestige session, a septet led by Rex Stewart and featuring kazoos, among other instruments for an album called Happy Jazz. So instead of a visit back to the happy land of trad jazz, we move into the not necessarily happy, but certainly adventurous future with the modernism of another musician who, like Gigi Gryce played the alto sax (also tenor) and who, also like Gryce, became better known as a composer.

This would be the second in a string of albums that Nelson would make for Prestige, and taken together, they make a strong case for not being taken together. Nelson uses different combinations of musicians on each, different sets of powerful individual voices. And if you could say that taken together, they show Nelson's remarkable range as a composer and arranger, you could actually say that about the compositions that make up each separate album. Certainly Taking Care of Business is adventurous enough, and certainly it's an Oliver Nelson album. He uses the skills of gifted improvisers, but the way their solos are stacked against each other adds up to an adventurous, unexpected and satisfying whole.

On his first Prestige outing, he used the archetypal bebop saxophone-trumpet quintet, but with the

unique voice of Kenny Dorham on trumpet. This time he ventures farther afield. Saxophone and Hammond organ have become a recognizable turn-of-the-decade sound thanks to Eddie Davis and Shirley Scott, but what Nelson and Johnny "Hammond" Smith do with them takes that sound in a whole new direction -- and then, he adds the vibraphone of Lem Winchester to make it a truly unique front line. Winchester had made his Prestige debut a few months earlier with Benny Golson.

At nearly ten minutes, "Trane Whistle" shows all of this: the bold composition, the juxtaposed solos, some bacchanalian duet work, dynamic range, and an overall feeling that manages to be both tight and discursive.

The two non-Nelson originals are Sonny Rollins' "Doxy" and the Cahn-Van Heusen standard "All the Way."

Esmond Edwards produced, and Taking Care of Business came out on New Jazz. "Trane Whistle" became a two-sided 45, also on New Jazz. I'm not sure it was your typical 45 RPM fare, but it must have turned a few heads when it was slipped on the record changer.

Listening to Prestige 344: Gigi Gryce

Of all the major jazz talents of his era, Gigi Gryce is probably one of the most under-recorded, and certainly one of the most unjustly unremembered by contemporary jazz fans, and even contemporary musicians. JazzTimes conducted a survey of 17 young alto saxophonists to find out what they considered the most important alto sax recordings: "Great performances that helped shape the jazz alto saxophone tradition." Each artist submitted a list of half a dozen or so recordings, and, eclectic as they were, Gryce did not make any of them. The website ranker.com, which gives a window into the tastes

of contemporary jazz fans, has a poll on the top saxophonists of all time. Since this is a continuing poll, there's a lot of fluctuation on the lower levels, but on the day that I checked, Gigi Gryce was number 88 on the list.

Partly this is due to a career cut short. This was the first of three recording sessions Gryce did for Prestige in 1960. Late in the year, he did one more for Mercury. Then that was it. A couple of years later, he would leave music behind completely.

But if he is largely forgotten as a saxophonist by today's jazz audience, he has never been forgotten by other musicians as a composer. "Modernity," recorded back in the 1950s by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Cal Tjader and Art Pepper, among others, continues to be a favorite to this day, with a recent recording by Cyrus Chesnutt and another by the Dutch vocalist Eva Scholten. "Social Call" has remained popular as an instrumental, but even more so as a vocal performance, with Jon Hendricks' lyrics. Earl Coleman first recorded it in 1955, and it has become a standard, most recently covered in 2016 by Heather Masse with Roswell Rudd.

His disillusionment with the music scene was principled. In addition to his considerable gifts as a player and as a composer, Gryce was ahead of his time in standing up for musicians' rights.

The 1940s and 1950s were a time of the discovery of a lot of new and exciting talents in all musical fields -- jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even country. That meant a lot of new names entering the music world, most of them young, many of them minorities, almost all of them lacking in business experience. They knew what a recording contract was, and they knew that they wanted one, but mostly they did not know what publishing rights were, or why they were important. 

This meant that it was all too easy for them to sign away their publishing rights, which might often be the most lucrative part of a deal. If a young black artist had a minor hit on the rhythm and blues charts, with a song that he had written, and the song was later covered by a white artist who took it to the top of the pop charts and a gold record, that meant a very nice payday for the composer of the song--if he still owned the rights to it. All too often, he didn't. 

In these days, when "cultural appropriation" has become a watchword, there's a lot of criticism of whites stealing from black culture, and a lot of it is justified, but on the level of making music, it's always been more complicated. The greatness of the American Century in music, one of history's greatest artistic flowerings, has always come from its polyglot, mongrel nature, styles and sounds and songs and influences flowing in every direction. But when it came to the business end of music, cultural appropriation was alive and well through much of that century, and the money only flowed one way, from black talent into white pockets.

This was true in jazz as well as in rhythm and blues and rock and roll. One of the biggest crooks in the business was Morris Levy, who ripped off the publishing rights from innumerable young black artists, particularly the doowop groups signed to the New York labels that he owned. But Levy also owned Birdland, and his biggest label, Roulette, also issued jazz records. One of the characters in the HBO series The Sopranos was based on him--a Jewish gangster who had gotten rich in the 1950s by screwing young black artists out of their rights. But it wasn't just Mo Levy. It was ubiquitous. Chuck Berry was surprised to discover that he had co-written "Maybellene" with Alan Freed, but that was the price he was told he had to pay to make sure that Freed played his record.

I used to read record labels as though they were sacred texts, and I noticed all these things, although I didn't know what they meant at the time.

Gigi Gryce was one of the people who knew exactly what it meant, and one of the few who tried to do something about it. He set up an independent, black-owned music publishing company, and worked at signing up black jazz artists and getting fair publishing deals for them. Nowadays most recording artists, as well as most composers and songwriters, set up their own publishing companies. Not so back then. Gryce was not able to buck the racism and the gangsterism and the other obstacles thrown in his way, and he left the music business, never to return. He converted to Islam, took on the Muslim name of Basheer Qusim, and became a highly respected educator. The school in the Bronx where he taught for many years was renamed in his honor, the Basheer Qusim Elementary School.

This is the first of three albums that Gryce, with Esmond Edwards producing, recorded for Prestige. He brought some new musicians onto the Prestige horizon, and most of them remained for all three sessions, so I'll catch up with them later. Reggie Workman would make just this first date. He was new on the scene--this was his debut on record--and fast making a name for himself, He was also moving in a more avant-garde direction. He would rejoin Gryce for the end-of-the-year recording session for Mercury, then move on to join John Coltrane's quartet.

He contributed three originals to this date: the fiery "Leila's Blues," the exotic "Blues in the Jungle," and a beautiful ballad, "Back Breaker." None of them went on to have a life beyond this album, but they all showed Gryce as a master composer, and one can't help but wonder who might have picked up "Back Breaker" if it had had a more evocative title. The other three are by Gryce's contemporaries, Curtis Fuller ("Down Home") and Hank Jones ("Let Me Know") and {Jones' Bones). One can speculate that Gryce may have had something to do with the publishing contracts for Fuller and Jones.

Sayin' Somethin' was released on New Jazz, as the subsequent sessions would be.

Listening to Prestige 343: Lonnie Johnson

I've skipped over one session, with guitarist Al Casey. I'll come back to it as soon as I find my notes.

Prestige plucked Lonnie Johnson from obscurity for this recording, and a few more that he'd make for their Bluesville line, but then he kind of fell back into it. As the blues craze of the 1960s developed, it was a rising tide that lifted two kinds of boats. The ethnic folkie crowd, energized by Columbia's release of Robert Johnson's 1936-37 recordings, started looking for and resurrecting the careers of Mississippi Delta bluesman like Son House, Furry Lewis and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The young British blues enthusiasts who came to dominate the American pop charts loved the high-octane, electrified Chicago blues. The Rolling Stones demanded that Howlin' Wolf be featured on the white teen-oriented TV show  Shindig when the made their American debut in 1965, and the careers of artists like Wolf, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were in the ascendant.

Lonnie Johnson fit neither of these categories. He was from an earlier generation than the Chicago bluesmen, and he was from a different musical aesthetic than the Delta bluesmen, closer to jazz. He was, in fact, the first and most important innovator of the single-string guitar solo, the basis of nearly all jazz guitar improvisation.

Johnson made his first mark as a blues singer, winning a recording contract with Okeh at a 1925 blues competition.

But that was 1925, right in the middle of the decade of the first blues craze. After the unexpected commercial success of Mamie Smith's recording, "Crazy Blues," had shown that there was a black audience that would buy records, all the record companies wanted a piece of it, and they all figured that the way to get it was through the blues. At first that meant the urban, jazz-oriented blues of Mamie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and especially Bessie Smith. Then it meant the rural blues of street singers and rural juke joint performers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton.

And those guys weren't necessarily bluesmen. They were songsters. They were trying to make a buck, and that meant playing anything their audiences wanted to hear. Sometimes those audiences were black, and sometimes they were white. Sometimes they wanted to listen and sometimes they wanted to dance, so the songster had to be prepared. You can hear a vestige of this in Robert Johnson's "Hot Tamales and They're Red Hot."

Then an important audience became the record company, and the record companies wanted blues, so they became bluesmen, and the best bluesmen were successful. Lonnie Johnson, later in life, would come to resent the label a little, feeling it was too restrictive and did not show the scope of what he could do. But in 1925 he was desperate to get a recording contract, and the blues was his ticket of entry, though once inside the door, he was able to expand his scope, recording with both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, among other jazzmen, including guitarist Eddie Lang, with whom he made some exciting recordings even though music was supposed to be made on a strictly segregated basis in those days.

But the blues was his meal ticket, and so it remained until that cafeteria dried up.The Depression was a time of shrinkage and retrenchment for the record companies, and the black artists were the first to be retrenched.

With the rise of independent rhythm and blues labels in the 1940s, he began to build a second career, but it ultimately dried up too, and he had settled back into obscurity for most of the 1950s.

His next comeback, and the contract with Prestige, coincided with another Prestige debut. Iceland-born Chris Albertson, who had begun making a career in radio in England, Iceland and Norway, latched onto American Armed Forces Radio as a disc jockey in Iceland, and followed his love of jazz to the United States, where found work as a disc jockey with a Philadelphia radio station. His special interest was in traditional jazz and blues, and one night he played some records by Lonnie Johnson, wondering over the air what had happened to the forgotten blues great.

He didn't have to wonder for long. A listener called the station. The hotel where he worked had a janitor named Lonnie Johnson, and though he never talked about music, he was always very careful of his hands. Could it be...?

It was. Albertson had him as a guest on his show, then brought him to Bob Weinstock's new Bluesville label, where Johnson was signed as an artist and Albertson as a producer.

Albertson put him together, for his first effort, with some first rate jazz musicians, all of them veterans with roots in traditional jazz, but nonetheless representing two different generations,

Pianist Claude Hopkins was Johnson's contemporary, born in 1903 to Johnson's 1899, and when Johnson was making his first blues recording in 1925, Hopkins was on his way to Paris as musical director of Josephine Baker's revue.

There's always work for a good piano player and bandleader, and Hopkins stayed busy throughout the following decades, including the 1950s, as there was still a demand for a pianist in the traditional style, not everyone being on board with this modern stuff. In fact, 52nd Street, once the cathedral of bebop, was by the end of the 1950s represented only by two Dixieland clubs, Eddie Condon's and Jimmy Ryan's.

When Johnson made that first recording for Okeh, his other future bandmates were barely out of diapers. Tenor saxophonist-to-be Hal Singer was six, bassist Wendell Marshall five and drummer Bobby Donaldson three.

All three of them were seasoned veterans by 1960, and all four of Albertson's musicians could play the blues, especially Singer, whose instrumental "Corn Bread" had topped the rhythm and blues charts in 1948. Together, they add jazz depth to a session that is Johnson's. and very rightly so. His single-string guitar soloing may not have been revolutionary any more, but few did it as well as he.

The album came out on Bluesville as Blues by Lonnie Johnson. The 45 RPM single was "You Don't Move Me" / "Don't Ever Love."

Listening to Prestige 342: Roosevelt Sykes

I wrote this about blues singer Al Smith's debut album for Prestige Bluesville:

Al Smith is a remarkable singer. How remarkable? Well, take his cover of a Ray Charles tune.

Ray Charles was a wonderful songwriter, and his songs have been widely covered: "I Got a Woman," "This Little Girl of Mine," "What'd I Say?" But nobody else that I've been able to find has covered "Night Time is the Right Time," and with good reason: the distinctive raw, pleading response vocals of Margie Hendrix make it virtually uncoverable. 

But Smith makes it work. His gospel-tinged blues singing is sufficiently different from Charles's to make his approach unique--and while it's equally different, it has enough of Hendrix's fervor to power his singing of both parts.

And I stand behind it 100 percent--about my praise for Smith, and about the near-impossibility of covering what Ray and Margie Hendrix did with "Night Time is the Right Time." I stand behind it, except for the part that I got 100 percent wrong.

Ray Charles didn't write "Night Time is the Right Time."

Roosevelt Sykes did.

Sykes' version, with his boogie-woogie piano, and his classic blues shouter style, was of course dramatically rethought and retooled by the time it got to Ray, but it turns out there was yet another intermediate version. Sykes' song was revamped to the point that it was considered a new song, and copyright and writing credits were given to Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records (writing as Lew Herman), Nappy Brown, and Ozzie Cadena, then a producer for Savoy, later for Prestige. Nappy Brown recorded it on Savoy, and his version is terrific, and rhythmically similar to Ray's, but Ray and the Raeletts and Ray's great orchestra still own the song.

Sykes' version is terrific too, in its own very different way, both as originally recorded in the 1930s and as recorded here in this 1960 session for Bluesville.

Bluesville in a way was the most interesting of Bob Weinstock's three subsidiary labels, because it was the most amorphous. He knew exactly what he wanted for Swingville--the older musicians who still had a lot to say, the Basie alums and Coleman Hawkins and the rhythm and blues/swing guys like Buddy Tate. And Moodville--it was like Chris Albertson said, these weren't Jackie Gleason records, they were real Prestige jazz by some of the label's finest artists, playing mostly standards and setting a mood. 

But Bluesville was more of an experiment. He'd showcased little-known but deserving blues singers like Al Smith and Mildred Anderson. He'd presented blues veterans like Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. Understandably, he leaned more toward a jazz-shaded blues format, and this was a good thing. It gave the Prestige blues releases a quality of their own. Smith and Anderson were backed by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott. Dixon, one of the chief architects of the Chicago blues sound, had been the bass player for a lounge jazz trio modeled after the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers.

Sykes was a veteran bluesman, whose recording career went back to the 1920s (he had first cut "Night Time is the Right Time" in the 1930s). A lot of his recording was piano blues and boogie-woogie in the tradition of Albert Ammons or Pete Johnson, with some of the jazz inflection of Leroy Carr. But he'd had success in the 1940s with a recording of Joe Liggins' "The Honeydripper," and adopted that title as his stage nickname. In 1944, he put together a band, and made some recordings as Roosevelt Sykes and the Honeydrippers. By the turn of the decade, his career had pretty much played out, and he had slipped into obscurity.

Weinstock wanted to develop that "Honeydrippers" aspect of his musical personality, and he put him with a five-piece combo. The musicians who worked with him on this two-day Prestige session are pretty much forgotten today, with the exception of Armand "Jump" Jackson, one of the best-known drummers on the Chicago blues scene of the 1940s, so probably these were all guys who had worked with Sykes in Chicago. But they can play, and Clarence Perry, Jr., has an arresting tone on the tenor sax.

Sykes sticks to the 12-bar blues format for the most part, with vocals that are powerful and sensitive, but each song allows plenty of room for instrumental improvisation. "Runnin' the Boogie" is a good example. It was a staple of Sykes' repertoire, and YouTube has an excellent video of him performing it as a solo piano number at a 1970 blues festival. But this recording has the piano giving way to some hot guitar licks, followed by an instrumental frenzy that features Perry worrying the blues riffs like a bulldog shaking a rat.

Sykes and company spent two days in the studio. The resulting album is called The Return of Roosevelt Sykes, and it was indeed a return. It was also a debut of sorts--the first time he had recorded a group of songs for an LP record. No 45 RPM singles were released from either session, which is interesting. Weinstock must have felt that there was no singles market for traditional blues, and he was probably right. Even with the modern sound of the group backing him, Sykes was essentially a traditional blues shouter, and the market was essentially that which had been cultivated by Moe Asch at Folkways.

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Listening to Prestige 341: Arnett Cobb

Two days in the studio with Arnett Cobb and a quintet, rhythm section augmented by congas, but with a different piano player and a different conguero each day, continuing the pattern he had established on his previous Party Time session for Prestige, with Ray Bryant and Ray Barretto.

The piano guys were two more of the best young players on the scene, 30-year-old Tommy Flanagan and 25-year-old Bobby Timmons. Flanagan had made his Prestige debut in 1956, newly arrived from Detroit, on an abbreviated Miles Davis session.

He would shortly thereafter be tabbed for one of the decade's most important albums, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, and would make his debut as leader the following year with a trio: Overseas, recorded in Sweden. By the time of this recording, he was a solid regular with the label, with 15 recording dates as leader or sideman.

Flanagan's versatility could be amply illustrated right at this moment in time: just two weeks before he went to Englewood Cliffs to record with one of the veteran masters of good-time, mainstream jazz, he had seen the release of a session with young players who would be standing jazz on its year: John Coltrane's Giant Steps.

Bobby Timmons had recorded once previously for Prestige, with Clifford Jordan and John Jenkins, but he was best known for his work with Blue Note, particularly with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

Danny Barrajanos took the conga chair for the first day. He was primarily known for his work with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba. Buck Clarke, who came in for the second day, was more of a jazz figure, with credits that would include Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock and Les McCann.

Latin percussion was still a somewhat outside-the-box idea for a modern jazz album, and one might think of Cobb as an inside-the-box kinda guy, but boy, does he know how to make it swing! Listen to the work they do on "Blue Lou," composed by Edgar Sampson, one of the few composer/arranger/ musicians of his era to move back and forth between mainstream and Latin jazz. He played with Duke Ellington, Rex Stewart, Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb (for whom he composed "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Don't Be That Way"); and worked as an arranger for Marcelino Guerra, Tito
Rodgriguez and Tito Puente. And raised a musical family--his daughter Grace co-wrote "Mambo Inn" with Mario Bauzá. "Blue Lou" is a killer, with Barrajanos pushing the beat throughout, getting some wild and crazy sax playing of Cobb and smoking solos from Flanagan, Taylor and himself.

"Blue Lou" was followed on the session by a Cobb original called "Blue Me." One can't help but wonder if the original title had been a mite dirtier.

The second day found the musicians in a mellower mood, but Buck Clarke shows how much a conguero can contribute there, too. Listen to "The Nitty Gritty," a Cobb original. It's interesting that Cobb didn't use any Bobby Timmons originals, as hot a composer as he was then. But Timmons adds his soul jazz piano to Cobb's already soulful playing, and his Illinois Jacquet-style honking.

The sessions became a little mixed on record. "Down by the Riverside" is Timmons and Clarke, but it Arnett Cobb--More Party Time, which otherwise comprised tunes from the first day. The traditional spiritual joined Stephen Foster's "Swanee River" as tunes you wouldn't necessarily bring to a modern party. "Fast Ride" was slipped back to Movin' Right Along to complete the trade. Both albums were released before 1960 was out.
was included on

"Lover Come Back to Me," from the Flanagan/Barrajanos session, was a two-sided 45 RPM single release. The Sigmund Romberg melody is from New Moon, the last operetta to be produced on Broadway. One tends to think of operetta as a form more likely to produce cornball chestnuts like "Stout Hearted Men," which is also from New Moon, but "Lover Come Back to Me" has proved a most satisfying challenge to many a modern jazz musician. So has another aria from New Moon, "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise," which Cobb recorded on the second day.

"Ghost of a Chance" was the single from the second session to be released on 45 RPM, as the flip side of "Smooth Sailing," from Cobb's first Prestige album.

Esmond Edwards produced both sessions.


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Listening to Prestige 340: Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Shirley Scott

Ballads, standards, moods for Moodsville, and a couple of novelties for a 45 RPM release and the Christmas trade.

This is mostly Eddie Davis's album. Shirley Scott plays a supporting role, and a lot of it,  session log to the contrary, is on piano. Her piano solos show that if she had chosen to stay on that instrument, she would have had a very fine jazz career.

"It Could Happen to You" was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. First recorded in 1943 by Jo Stafford, it moved into the jazz repertoire in 1951 when both Errol Garner and Bud Powell cut it, and since then, it has been beloved by jazz musicians. Burke also co-wrote "What's New" with Bob Haggard for a 1938 Bing Crosby recording, and it became a jazz standard in the early 1950s with recordings by Milt Jackson and Errol Garner before it really became a pop standard. Although both of these entered the jazz repertoire as piano pieces, Davis dominates here, and he is a fine ballad player, sensitive and atmospheric, Scott's solos are shorter, but she packs a lot into them, Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" has never wanted for performers, either vocal or instrumental, to take on its subtle loveliness. This track is Davis's throughout, with Scott providing support. The Gershwins are responsible for "The Man I Love," and it's even older, going back to the 1920s and Adele Astaire, and if anything even more popular, with over 300 recorded versions.

"The Very Thought of You" (Ray Noble), "Serenade in Blue" (Harry Warren) and "I Cover the Waterfront" (Johnny Green) can't quite match Kern and Gershwin, but they're also well-loved standards.

"Man With the Horn" was written by Bonnie Lake, one of the most successful woman songwriters of her era, and dedicated to her husband and co-composer, Jack Jenney, a trombone player who would die not long after. It became a staple for horn players, although Jenney may have been its only trombonist, and Davis recorded it more than once.

Scott goes back to the organ for the two Christmas songs. I think I prefer "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," which is sprightly and doesn't take itself too seriously, to Mel Tormé's "The Christmas Song," which has always thought of itself as a better song than it probably is. Scott does some very clever organ fills on it, though.

The Moodsville album is simply and eponymously title Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott, because at this point "Moodsville" was the prominent feature on the new label's covers. The Christmas songs were not included. They had their own niche as a seasonal 45.

VERY CLOSE TO BEING READY TO TAKE ORDERS FOR LISTENING TO PRESTIGE VOL 3!

Listening to Prestige 339: Coleman Hawkins

This is a Moodsville session, and it can legitimately be described as mood music: Coleman Hawkins and a rhythm section, a selection of well-chosen ballads, all of them familiar, none of them over-familiar. Two of them ("While We're Young" and "Trouble is a Man") were composed by Alec Wilder, who, if he didn't coin the phrase "Great American Songbook," can certainly be accorded credit for popularizing the concept with his 1972 book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950.

The cover art for the Moodsville series makes it clear what they're selling: the mood. But the musicians don't go into the studio to make mood music, and with Coleman Hawkins, you know you're getting a lot more.

And that's not to put down mood music. Music as background is sometimes unfairly derided. It's part of our lives when we don't necessarily want it to be, in elevators or supermarkets or when we're on hold. But it's the background to our lives when we choose it, to read, to work out or make love, to paint or sculpt or clean out the garage. But that background has to be foregroundable. It has to be music that you can stop sculpting for a few minutes, wipe your brow, take a breath, and shift your attention to what you're listening to. It needs to be something good, something that's every bit as challenging and absorbing as it is relaxing and soothing.

Hawkins fits all of those requirements. So does Tommy Flanagan, who is a very good match for Hawkins.

The album is called At Ease With Coleman Hawkins. Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige 338: Jack McDuff

Two weeks after Bill Jennings, Jack McDuff, Wendell Marshall and Alvin Johnson had gone to Englewood Cliffs to record as the Bill Jennings Quartet, they were back again, this time under McDuff's name. He was the third of the trio that had been signed on to Prestige as Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson's group to record as leader, though he probably ended up as the most commercially successful of the three.

McDuff and Jennings make a great combination. It turns out that if the organ-tenor sax quartet is a great new idea, and the organ-tenor sax-guitar quintet is another great idea, the organ-guitar quartet is an equally great idea, if you have two players like these.

So, about the music. The set begins with "Organ Grinder's Swing," written by Will Hudson (best known for "Moonglow"), a swing era tune from the 1930s that originally celebrated that figure of Depression-era mythology, the organ grinder and his trained monkey. In the soul jazz era, it got picked up by virtually everyone who played that more sophisticated type of organ, the Hammond B3. Shirley Scott was the first to take it on, on an album with Joe Newman, and Jimmy Smith would record it a few years later with Kenny Burrell. But McDuff and Jennings were the first to give it the guitar-organ treatment, and if there's ever a number that demonstrates how perfectly these two long-time partners work together, it's this. There are also lyrics written by Irving Mills and Mitchell Parish, probably best forgotten these days, because they include the verse "Eeny meeny miney mo, Catch a monkey by the toe."

"Drowsy" is the first Brother Jack composition on the album, and it is something different, starting with with notes sustained as only an electric organ can, to the point of eeriness,  and if you're looking for eerie, how about the next sound you here, which is Bill Jennings bending one blue note at a time, with some fairly impressive sustaining himself, and that's basically what happens throughout. If a slow tempo is enough to make something a ballad, then this is a ballad. Except it's not. Is it jazz? Well, sure it is. It's on a jazz album, and it's being played by two jazz masters, so what else do you want?

"Noon Train" is another original, uptempo, riff-based, blues-drenched, with some serious work by Wendell Marshall and especially Alvin Johnson, some flights of creativity from McDuff and a guitar solo that -- not for the first or last time -- makes you stop and ask yourself why Jennings isn't on everyone's list of greatest jazz guitarists. And he's not. Not even on Ranker's list, which has 131 guitarists on it (well, he is now). Which shows you that people can be wrong. Or perhaps that I'm wrong--but that's not possible. This is one hell of a guitarist. Am I right, Larry (the Fluff) Audette?

"Mack 'N' Duff" and "Brother Jack" are two that he named after himself, and all of these together lead one to the inescapable conclusion that if McDuff wasn't one of the great jazz composers, he surely was the greatest composer of original music for Jack McDuff, and it is every bit of that: original, and designed to show his considerable range, and with great parts for his pal Bill Jennings. Jennings is co-composer on the final original, "Light Blues," and it's a nice showcase for him, a lazy swinging blues.

"Mr. Wonderful" certainly had its heyday as a jazz piece in the late 1950s, especially with organists (Shirley Scott and Johnny "Hammond" Smith took it on too), and not much after that, which shows the clout that Sammy Davis, Jr., had in those days, but it's also not a bad tune, and it's hard to fault this version. "You're Driving Me Crazy" is a certifiable standard. Written by the prolific Walter Donaldson, it's never gone very long without provoking a new rendition, either jazz or pop (most recently Van Morrison and Joey DiFrancesco). McDuff and Jennings take it at a relaxed tempo, and do some cool things with it.

"Organ Grinder Swing" was the single, b/w "Brother Jack." Brother Jack was also the name of the album, although it would be a while before the brother would add "Brother" to his name full time. I had a tough time choosing a "Listen to One" for this session. So many different sounds competed for my attention. Listening to all would not be a bad idea at all.

Listening to Prestige 337: Mildred Anderson

Bob Weinstock continues his streak here: finding wonderful blues singers, putting them together with first rate musicians, and not really achieving the kind of success one would hope for.

Mildred Anderson had recorded a couple of sides in the 1940s and a couple more in the 1950s. This session, and a followup for Prestige, are generally considered to be her best work, but they didn't bring her much fame. She faded into obscurity--in fact, into oblivion. There appears not even to be a record of her death. Or her birth, for that matter.

Anderson had worked with first rate musicians before. She'd had a minor hit with Albert Ammons ("Doin' the Boogie Woogie"), and had recorded with Hot Lips Page and Bill Doggett. But "Doin' the Boogie Woogie" really wasn't a very good song, although it had a nice solo by Ammons. And on the Prestige session, she gets the label's stars, plus Esmond Edwards' producing talents, and, of course, Rudy Van Gelder engineering the session.

She has a full day of studio time. And she has an interesting collection of songs.

Here again, we've moved into a new era. Edwards and Anderson, or whoever picked out the songs for this session, are not looking back at the composers who compiled the Great American Songbook, now closed, gift-wrapped, and sent to Ella Fitzgerald. Those songs aren't necessarily appropriate for a contemporary blues singer, anyway. This is a different and a motley bunch, but professionals with some interesting hits to their resumes.

"I'm Gettin' 'Long Alright" and "Connections" were written by Charles Singleton (who also wrote "I'm Free" and Bobby Sharp. Sharp, who grew up in a two-room Harlem flat where his parents entertained the likes of Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington, wrote "Unchain My Heart." Singleton wrote "Strangers in the Night."

Rhythm and blues great Chuck Willis wrote "Don't Deceive Me (Please Don't Go)." Anderson herself wrote the two blues numbers, "Hello Little Boy" and "Cool Kind of Poppa," and they're both solid songs, well suited to her style. Another blues legend, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, wrote "Kidney Stew Blues," along with Leona Blackman, who wrote a number of R&B tunes for artists like Big Maybelle, but "Kidney Stew," as originally performed by Vinson, was her biggest hit.

"Person to Person," which became the title song of the album, was written by Wally Gold, who had a bunch of hits, including  "It's Now or Never" and "Good Luck Charm" for Elvis Presley, and a song he was called in on to finish up for a part time songwriter, who had been inspired by a tantrum thrown by his teenage daughter, when informed she had to invite her grandparents to her Sweet Sixteen. When he tried to calm her down, she retorted "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to."

Mildred Anderson is a terrific singer who deserved more recognition than she got. The musicians backing her up, Scott and Davis and their regular rhythm section, George Duvivier and Arthur Edgehill, are amazing. I commented before, regarding their session with Al Smith, that "Shirley Scott's understated but impassioned organ work, on every cut, really pulls the album together. It makes you wish she'd done a lot more work with singers." That's as true, and more, on this session, but if I singled out Scott that time, I might not be able to do it this time. She and Davis are equally impressive. They do wonderful work backing up the singer, accenting her and bringing out the best in her, and they move from that into solos that take on their own importance, yet never stop being part of the song. I can't say more than that, because every time I try to single out one of them, and one cut off the album, so many others jump out and demand equal time.

Maybe Davis and Scott were born out of their time. In the 1930s, the bandleaders were the stars, and the singers were just part of the show. By the 1950s, that only worked for Johnny Otis. But if Davis and Scott could have added a vocalist and put together a package like Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller...

"Person to Person," b/w "Connections," is the 45 RPM single. "Connections" was not included on the album. Nor was "Ebb Tide," and neither of them are listed on the CD reissue, either, although you can find "Connections" on YouTube, which is all to the good. It's a nice raunchy song. Unfortunately, the single didn't make much of a dent. Maybe if they could have gotten a different Wally Gold song, like It's My Party." Well, maybe not.

Listening to Prestige 336: Bill Jennings

In spite of being a prolifically recorded guitarist over a range of styles, and the musician B. B. King has called one of his biggest influences, Bill Jennings remains remarkably obscure. He played with Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan, King Curtis and Ella Fitzgerald. He played guitar on Little Willie John's "Fever."  But he's not much remembered, and all that remains in print are the early sides for the King and Gotham labels, available as an import--none of the Prestige recordings. He had come to Prestige with Willis Jackson and Jack McDuff, and the three of them recorded in various combinations. This and the earlier Enough Said were issued under his leadership, although Wikipedia's discography for Jennings lists him as a sideman to Jack McDuff for this session.

The date includes a number of tunes that Jennings had previously recorded, and one that Prestige must have hoped for some radio and jukebox action from. "Cole Slaw" was a Jesse Stone composition that had originated under a different title. It had been recorded in rhythm and blues and swing versions by "Doc" Wheeler and Jimmy Dorsey in 1942 as "Sorghum Switch." When it was resurrected in 1949 by Frank "Floorshow" Culley as "Cole Slaw/Sorghum Switch," it became a hit, and Louis Jordan covered it as simply "Cole Slaw." But you weren't going to get much nostalgia value out of a 1949 Atlantic recording. Their early rhythm and blues instrumentals had been eclipsed by their mid-1950s hitmakers like Ray Charles and LaVern Baker, and the early stuff wouldn't even be rereleased on LP till years later, with the big Atlantic box sets.

And if this had been planned as a jukebox hit, no one seems to have told the Jennings brothers and Jack McDuff, because their recording runs more than eight minutes, and probably had to be cut down considerably for the 45 RPM release. I'm guessing they cut out the intro and first solo by Al Jennings on vibes, although Al comes back much stronger later, and there's some powerful three-way interplay between Al, Bill, and McDuff. It's a fine recording, and so is the straight-ahead blues that made the flip side of the 45, "Billin' and Bluin'."

Also featured on the set is a song variously called "Miss Jones" and "Hey, Mrs. Jones," which is not to be confused with "Have You Met Miss Jones" or "Me and Mrs. Jones." "Cole Slaw"/"Billin' and Bluin'" was the only single release; the album was Glide On.

Listening to Prestige 335: Coleman Hawkins

Not much new to say about Coleman Hawkins by this time. It seems almost beside the point to write anything. Better to turn the volume to just the right level (not all the way up to eleven), sit back, and enjoy sound that is so smooth you could spread it on Wonder Bread without ripping up big hunks.

Except you would never spread it on Wonder Bread. This is the real thing, the blues, the real America, three-dimensional and full-toned and flavored like Huck Finn's stew. Unlike the Widow Douglas's white-bread cuisine where "everything was cooked by itself," you have "a barrel of odds and ends," where "things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better."

So this is music for pure enjoyment,  but isn't that what it's all for? As Hawkins and his group were in Englewood Cliffs cutting this session, Ornette Coleman was at the Five Spot making music that hurt the ears of many, but to my 19-year-old ears it was pure bliss, thrilling new, complex and simple, challenging and direct. And that's what you look for from art. The doors open where you find them, sometimes where you were looking, sometimes where you least expected, and each door that you go through broadens your range of appreciation, so that your capacity for enjoyment keeps expanding.

Hawkins has brought some old friends to this session, Osie Johnson has some swing credentials, having spent three years with Earl Hines, Tommy Flanagan and Wendell Marshall have young hands and timeless ears. But his horn players have the kind of time-tested chops that the Hawk himself brings.

Vic Dickenson kept a fairly high profile for a traditional player during the modern jazz era. A Down Beat International Critics Poll in 1963 placed him third among trombonists, tied with Lawrence Brown. And there were still plenty of great trombonists around. J. J. Johnson was still leader of the pack, Curtis Fuller and Slide Hampton were at the peak of their careers, Kai Winding was making hit records, Urbie Green and Bennie Green were still active, and Dickenson was pushing 60. But he  kept busy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, recording with Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Dicky Wells, Buster Bailey, Budd Johnson and, interestingly, Langston Hughes. He was a member of the outfit called The World's Greatest Jazz Band, which played the style of traditional jazz somewhat uncomfortably referred to as Dixieland, and which had a good enough lineup to justify the name.

Much less well-known, but regarded with reverence by those familiar with him, was trumpeter Joe Thomas. One such is Michael Steinman of the Jazz Lives blog, who has said of Thomas:

Joe knew how to structure a solo through space, to make his phrases ring by leaving breathing room between them.  Like Bix or Basie, Joe embodied restraint while everyone around him was being urgent.  His pure dark sound is as important as the notes he plays — or chooses to omit...

A simple phrase, in Thomas’s world, is a beautifully burnished object.  And one phrase flows into another, so at the end of the solo, one has embraced a new melody, resonant in three dimensions, that wasn’t there before, full of shadings, deep and logically constructed.

And more:

 Joe’s tone, dark and shining, makes the simple playing of a written line something to marvel at, and each of his notes seems a careful choice yet all is fresh, never by rote: someone speaking words that have become true because he has just discovered they are the right ones for the moment.

I've commented on this before, but it's worth repeating: What Coleman Hawkins, and other artists who recorded for Bob Weinstock's Swingville label, played was not traditional swing (as opposed, for example to The World's Greatest Jazz Band, which essentially did play traditional Dixieland). Swing was big band jazz, essentially an arranger's art form, and what followed it was a small group music with emphasis on the soloist. Of course, there had always been small groups. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five was one of the most important, and they preceded swing.

Hawkins played his own kind of music. He had virtually invented the modern improvised solo with his 1939 recording of "Body and Soul," and though his music at this stage of his career had a mellow nostalgic feeling to it, it was definitely the music of the guy who had recorded "Body and Soul" and had played on the first bebop recording.

And his traditionalist partners, Thomas and Dickenson, were right there with him. They could play traditional Dixieland when it was called for, but they could play with Hawkins, doing what Hawkins did, as well. As Dickenson once said:

I like to play the melody, and I want it still to be heard, but I like to rephrase it and bring out something fresh in it, as though I were talking or singing to someone. I don't want to play it as written, because there's usually something square in it.

Of course, the center of the Kansas City swing that Hawkins grew up with, and the center of bebop as well, is the blues, and all of these cats know how to play the blues, and it infuses even their Tin Pan Alley pop standards like "I'm Beginning to See the Light." It's part of what knits them together. The rest is a shared musical understanding that allows for solo to build on solo, in a most satisfying way.

The Swingville release was entitled Coleman Hawkins All Stars .