The Penguin Jazz Guide (72 page)

One of the later stalwarts (with Frank Foster) of the Basie band, Wess is also an impressive solo star, with a tenor approach that comes from Lester Young, though with intimations of Don Byas as well. Wess’s real importance, though, is in making the flute a valid solo voice. Neal Hefti found a role for flutes in the postwar Basie band, changing the character of its woodwind section entirely. He plays with a strong correct tone and is a nimble improviser. In his hands the flute is a thing of beauty, subtle and tender but without fake atmospherics. The first cut on this CD – formerly Moodsville, which suggests how it was expected to land in the market – is Alec Wilder’s ‘It’s So Peaceful In The Country’, a delightful rarity that provides the leader with a cool, sophisticated vehicle. Later, he tackles ‘Stella By Starlight’ (a switch to tenor), ‘But Beautiful’, ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Star Eyes’ and his own ‘Rainy Afternoon’. Flanagan is at his most melodious and responsive and the bassist and drummer fit the bill perfectly.

Wess had been playing flute for some time when the record was made. His tone is already mature and steady and it influenced a growing number of players coming through, from Herbie Mann to Eric Dolphy, Hubert Laws and even Bobbi Humphrey. Though by no means a stylistic innovator, he deserves his place in the scheme of things.

ANDRÉ PREVIN

Born Andreas Ludwig Priwin, 6 April 1929, Berlin, Germany

Piano

Plays Songs By Harold Arlen

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1840

Previn (p solo). May 1960.

André Previn said (1982):
‘One thing I notice about American jazz audiences, as opposed to Europe, is that they’re inclined to seem a little defensive about liking jazz, as if it’s a gesture towards something rather than a way of having fun.’

A transplanted Berliner, Previn is still better known as a conductor than as a performer. Jazz remains his first love, though. His main contribution to jazz comes in a concentrated period of activity for Contemporary, and what a gift he must have been for the label, turning up immaculately rehearsed, straight, clean, unimpeachably professional, with a series of songbook projects (Duke, Arlen,
Pal Joey
,
Gigi
,
West Side Story
) and then laying down first-take performances one after the other. One suspects there never will be a box of André Previn out-takes and alternatives, and yet there’s nothing unswinging or unspontaneous about any of these performances.

AL COHN

Born 24 November 1925, New York City; died 15 November 1988, Stroudberg, Pennsylvania

Tenor saxophone

You ’n’ Me

Verve 589318-2

Cohn; Zoot Sims (ts, cl); Mose Allison (p); Major Holley (b) Osie Johnson (d). June 1960.

Al Cohn said (1980):
‘We’re like and unlike as people, I guess. We think the same way about a lot of things, but we play quite differently. Zoot’s easy-going. I’m a bit more serious, but I enjoy working out musical problems in a way he doesn’t. So we enjoy it from different perspectives.’

The consummate jazz professional. Cohn’s arrangements were four-square and unpretentious and his saxophone-playing a model of order and accuracy. One of the Four Brothers, the legendary Woody Herman saxophone section. Later, his soloing took on a philosophical authority, unexciting but deeply satisfying.

Virtually all one needs to know about Al and Zoot’s long-standing association can be found on the sober-sounding ‘Improvisation For Two Unaccompanied Saxophones’ on
You ’n’ Me
. All the virtues (elegant interplay, silk-smooth textures) and all the vices (inconsequentiality and Sims’s tendency to follow his favourite patterns) are firmly in place. A and Z were apt to cover the whole expressive gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker once said about Miss Hepburn. The rest of this set is their all-but-patented, cheerfully swinging one-two, bodacious unisons followed by a thumping good solo out of each horn, and maybe a little cameo from Allison too. It may not dig all that deep, but you might wonder why more jazz records don’t have this feel-good factor. The remastered sound has a rather fierce edge that doesn’t seem quite appropriate for this music.

FREDDIE HUBBARD

Born 7 April 1938, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 29 December 2008, Los Angeles, California

Trumpet, flugelhorn

Open Sesame

Blue Note 95341-2

Hubbard; Tina Brooks (ts); McCoy Tyner (p); Sam Jones (b); Clifford Jarvis (d). June 1960.

Freddie Hubbard said (1983):
‘I came to New York from Indianapolis, this little quiet car-racing town where no one went anywhere. I saw shootings, stabbings. For the first couple of months, I hardly went out. After that, I was hardly ever home.’

Hubbard was one of the liveliest of the young hard-bop lions of the late ’50s and early ’60s. As a Jazz Messenger, and with his own early albums for Blue Note, he set down so many great solos that trumpeters have made studies of him to this day, the burnished tone, bravura phrasing and rhythmical subtleties still enduringly modern. He never quite had the quickfire genius of Lee Morgan, but he had a greater all-round strength, and he is an essential player in the theatre of hard bop. He first worked, back home in Indianapolis, with the Montgomery brothers and arrived in New York in 1959. He joined the Jazz Messengers in 1961 and was involved in important recordings with Ornette Coleman and Oliver Nelson, as well as leading his own dates. Uncertain of his direction in the ’70s, and unable to play at all in the later ’90s because of lip trouble.

His several Blue Note dates seem to come and go in the catalogue.
Open Sesame
and
Goin’ Up
were his first two records for the label and their youthful ebullience is still exhilarating, the trumpeter throwing off dazzling phrases almost for the sheer fun of it. The brio of the debut is paired with the sense that this was the important coming-out of a major talent, and Hubbard’s solo on the title-track is a remarkable piece of brinkmanship: in the bonus alternative take, he’s a shade cooler, but that more tempered effort is less exciting, too. ‘All Or Nothing At All’ is taken at a pace that suggests the Indianapolis 500; power, but you feel he could play like this all night. This was an early appearance for Tyner, and a valuable glimpse of Tina Brooks, who contributes two tunes and plays with his particular mix of elegance and fractious temper. A great Blue Note set.

TEDDY EDWARDS

Born Theodore Marcus Edwards, 26 April 1924, Jackson, Mississippi; died 20 April 2003, Los Angeles, California

Tenor saxophone

Teddy’s Ready

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1785

Edwards; Joe Castro (p); Leroy Vinnegar (b); Billy Higgins (d). August 1960.

Teddy Edwards said (1991):
‘Jimmy Heath told me how he and Coltrane used to practise my solos. That really hit me, because I don’t think I ever copied anyone when I was coming up. Not Lester Young, not Ben [Webster] or [Coleman] Hawkins. Good or ill, I just came by that sound my own way.’

South-western blues and West Coast cool both inform Teddy’s sound. He arrived in California working in bands originally as an altoist. In 1947, he recorded ‘The Duel’ with Dexter Gordon, a signature moment in West Coast bop. From then on, his progress was steady, but for a glitch or two, and he wrote the delightful ‘Sunset Eyes’, famously recorded by Clifford Brown. In terms of Edwards’s own quite modest body of work, given his longevity, we have
the greatest affection for
Together Again!
, recorded in 1961 with the recently rehabilitated Howard McGhee, but there is no question that but his masterpiece was set down the year before.

Teddy’s Ready
(also originally on Contemporary) has a timeless vigour that makes it endlessly replayable. It followed a period of ill-health – not drugs-related – and one can hear the relief and delight in the over-hasty attack on ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ and ‘Take The “A” Train’. In later years, Edwards was reliably to be found
behind
the beat. Not a great deal is known nowadays about Arizonan Castro; he tends to be thought of as a fine accompanist (Anita O’Day, June Christy) who never quite made it as a straight jazz player. On this showing he’s more than worthy, and the support of his colleagues goes without saying: Vinnegar’s legendary walk is sure-footed and firm and Higgins plays music on the kit, as ever.

MAX ROACH
^&

Born 10 January 1924, New Land, North Carolina; died 16 August 2007, New York City

Drums

We Insist! Freedom Now Suite

Candid CCD 79002

Roach; Booker Little (t); Julian Priester (tb); Walter Benton, Coleman Hawkins (ts); James Schenck (b); Ray Mantilla, Thomas Du Vall (perc); Abbey Lincoln (v). August–September 1960.

Abbey Lincoln said (1990):
‘Those were very exciting times for us. There was a feeling that we could change anything and everything, just by altering the rhythms and the chords, not even by “protesting”, just by making the kind of music we wanted.’

Some works of art are inseparable from the social and cultural conditions which spawned them, and
We Insist!
is certainly one of these, a record that seems rooted in its moment. Within a few short years, the civil rights movement in the USA was to acquire a more obdurate countenance. On the threshold of the Kennedy years, though, this was as ferocious as it got. The opening ‘Driva’ Man’ (one of Oscar Brown Jr’s finest moments as a lyricist) is wry and sarcastic, enunciated over Roach’s deliberately mechanical work rhythms and Coleman Hawkins’s blearily proud solo, just the kind of thing you might expect from a working stiff at the end of the longest shift in history. It’s followed by ‘Freedom Day’, which, with ‘All Africa’, was to be part of a large choral work targeted on the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation. ‘Freedom Day’ follows Roach’s typically swinging address, but is distinguished by a Booker Little solo of bursting, youthful emotion, and a contribution from the little-regarded Walter Benton that matches Hawkins’s for sheer simplicity of diction. The central ‘Triptych’ – originally a dance piece – is a duo for Roach and Lincoln. ‘Prayer’, ‘Protest’ and ‘Peace’ was not a trajectory acceptable to a later generation of militants, but there is more than enough power in Lincoln’s inchoate roars of rage in the central part, and more than enough ambiguity in the ensuing ‘Peace’, to allay thoughts that her or Roach’s politics were blandly liberal. The closing ‘Tears For Johannesburg’ has more classic Little, and also good things from Priester and Benton. It follows ‘All Africa’, which begins in a vein reminiscent of Billie Holiday, briefly degenerates into a litany of tribal names and slogans, and hinges on a ‘middle passage’ of drum music embodying the three main Black drum traditions of the West: African, African-Cuban and African-American. Its influence on subsequent jazz percussion is incalculable, and this extraordinary record remains listenable even across four decades of outwardly far more radical experimentation.

& See also
Alone Together
(1956–1960; p. 191),
Historic Concerts
(1979; p. 454)

RENÉ THOMAS

Born 25 February 1927, Liège, Belgium; died 3 January 1975, Santander, Spain

Guitar

Guitar Groove

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1725

Thomas; J. R. Monterose (ts); Hod O’Brien (p); Teddy Kotick (b); Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath (d). September 1960.

Saxophonist Stan Getz said (1983):
‘He had class and could swing. Someone asked me if it was like playing with Django Reinhardt. “Pretty much,” I said, “but minus all the shit.” ’

A fatal heart attack cut short a career that was already rather overshadowed by a more colourful and charismatic guitarist, Thomas’s Belgian compatriot Django Reinhardt. Though Django must have been the unavoidable comparison when Thomas moved to North America, there really wasn’t very much in common between them, and Thomas’s modernist credentials allowed him to fit into the American scene more comfortably than did his illustrious predecessor.
Guitar Groove
is a fine product of his American sojourn and is one of the high-points of a poorly documented career. The original, ‘Spontaneous Effort’, combines firm, boppish melody with an easy swing. It’s an interesting group of oddfellows. Monterose is too raw-throated for ‘Milestones’ but slots into ‘Ruby, My Dear’ with impressive ease. He sits out for ‘Like Someone In Love’ and O’Brien joins him on the bench for the duration of ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ The sound is better balanced on these tracks than when the horn is present, but overall it sounds very good indeed.

CHARLES MINGUS
^&

Born 22 April 1922, Nogales, Arizona; died 5 January 1979, Cuernavaca, Mexico

Double bass, piano

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus

Candid CCD 79005

Mingus; Ted Curson (t); Eric Dolphy (as, bcl); Dannie Richmond (d). October 1960.

Dannie Richmond said (1985):
‘You’d think you might be able to learn some of the lessons of being with Mingus from someone who’d gone through that experience before you. You can’t. You have to go through it yourself. It’s the process that matters, not the lessons you might learn.’