The Penguin Jazz Guide (81 page)

Sue Mingus says:
‘In some fashion, Charles absorbed Bob Hammer’s rehearsal band for a six-week gig he had at the Village Vanguard in 1963, which provided a unique opportunity to work out, night after night, on one of his greatest compositions,
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
. During that six-week period, the piece grew and developed and changed and took on the colours and musical personalities of the musicians in the band as evidenced in the recording. Musicologist Andrew Homzy has noted how entirely different the original written score is compared to the actual recording, typical of Mingus’s incorporation of ideas and sounds of his band members as the music developed.’

Almost everything about
Black Saint
is distinctive: the long form, the use of dubbing, the liner-note by Mingus’s psychiatrist. On its release, Impulse! altered its usual slogan, ‘The new wave of jazz is on Impulse!’, to read ‘folk’, in line with Mingus’s decision to call the group the Charles Mingus New Folk Band. Ellingtonian in ambition and scope, and in the disposition of horns, the piece has a majestic, dancing presence, and Charlie Mariano’s alto solos and overdubs on ‘Mode D/E/F’ are unbelievably intense. There is evidence that Mingus’s desire to make a single continuous performance (and it should be remembered that even Ellington’s large-scale compositions were relatively brief) failed to meet favour with label executives; but there is an underlying logic even to the separate tracks which makes it difficult to separate them other than for the convenience of track listing. It remains one of the most significant jazz performances of that decade and one of the greatest jazz records of all time, a splendid artefact that doesn’t fail to reveal the circumstances of its creation, a kind of meta-text of modern improvisation.

& See also
The Complete Debut Recordings
(1951–1957; p. 131),
Pithecanthropus Erectus
(1956; p. 175),
Mingus Dynasty
(1959; p. 247),
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
(1960; p. 259)

JIMMY RUSHING

Born 26 August 1909, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; died 8 June 1972, New York City

Voice

Five Feet Of Soul

Roulette 81830-2

Rushing; Ernie Glow, Markie Markowitz, Joe Newman, Snooky Young (t); Billy Byers, Jimmy Cleveland, Willie Dennis, Urbie Green (tb); Gene Quill, Phil Woods (as); Budd Johnson, Zoot Sims (ts); Sol Schlinger (bs); Patti Bown (p); Freddie Green (g); Milt Hinton (b); Gus Johnson (d). January 1963.

Saxophonist Buddy Tate said (1991):
‘Jimmy used to say that the blues was nothing but church chords, just that two- or three-part harmony, and if you added anything, it was broke.’

Raised in Oklahoma, Rushing started as a pianist, but began around the South-West in the mid-’20s. His greatest successes were with the Basie orchestra of the ’30s and ’40s, his huge physical presence partnering the great voice. A gentle and genial man, he worked right up until his death from leukaemia. Inevitably, Rushing’s own-name records tend to pall a little compared to his work for Basie, and some of the later things were misconceived, but the voice never faltered.

Five Feet Of Soul
was the singer’s only session for Roulette (although it was actually issued on Colpix), and really isn’t much more than a studio quickie – Al Cohn arrangements for a band full of session-rats, and tunes that Jimmy must have known backwards by 1963. Al copies the Count for the feel and sound, and the likes of Snooky Young and Zoot Sims throw off the righteous obbligatos. He’s in hearty voice, though occasionally it gets away from him: he starts ‘Trouble In Mind’ mightily, but by the end the troubles seem to be getting to the tonsils. Some of them are faster than he’d like – ‘Oooh! Look-A-There’ is rattled off in a couple of minutes, and you start wondering how much better it might have sounded recast as a slow blues. He saves some of his best for his own lyrics, and ‘Please Come Back’ and ‘Did You Ever’ work out just fine.

SHIRLEY SCOTT

Born 14 March 1934, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 10 March 2002, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Organ

Soul Shoutin’

Prestige PRCD 24142-2

Scott; Stanley Turrentine (ts); Major Holley, Earl May (b); Grassella Oliphant (d). January–October 1963.

Bill Cosby said (1994):
‘Shirley is a soul sister, with a righteous groove and she plays with a smile on her face. Puts a smile on every other face, too.’

Shirley Scott was used to heavy company. In 1955, in her native Philadelphia, she was working in a trio with John Coltrane. She originally studied trumpet and piano, then began working with Lockjaw Davis and switched to organ. She formed her own trio in 1960, often working with husband Stanley Turrentine. Wider recognition led to dozens of albums for Prestige, Impulse!, Atlantic and Cadet through the ’70s. She remained visible in the ’90s on TV with Bill Cosby, when she was still playing organ and piano.

Scott wasn’t a knockabout swinger like Jimmy Smith and didn’t have the bebop attack of Don Patterson, but there’s an authority and an unusual sense of power in reserve which keep her music simmering somewhere near the boil. She is a strong blues player and a fine accompanist, and her right-hand lines have a percussive feel that utilizes space more than most organ-players ever did.

Of the albums made with her spouse,
Soul Shoutin’
is probably the best bet for anyone who doesn’t want to get into the main run of Scott albums. It brings together the contents of the original albums
The Soul Is Willing
and
Soul Shoutin’
. The title-track off
The Soul Is Willing
is the near-perfect example of what this combination could do, a fuming Turrentine solo followed by a deftly swinging one by Scott. Though Shirley was a fine player of the bass pedals, there are bass-players on the record, which perhaps dulls one of her strengths, but it’s a minor quibble.

BILL EVANS
^&

Born 16 August 1929, Plainfield, New Jersey; died 15 September 1980, New York City

Piano

Conversations With Myself

Verve 521409-2

Evans (p solo). January–February 1963.

Music promoter Jack Bradley used to know Evans when he lodged with his mother on tour:
‘I think Bill was the loneliest man I ever met.’

One might very reasonably ask why in a survey of the very best jazz from 1917 to the present, and given the overdetermining presence of Bill Evans in contemporary piano literature, he has only been accorded two entries when McCoy Tyner, say, has been given three. The answer is both simple and not so simple. For a start, Evans made such a substantial contribution to Miles Davis’s
Kind Of Blue
that he must be considered its other begetter. More argumentatively, it is our assertion that while Evans’s astonishing achievement has been widely acknowledged, Tyner’s is less securely understood.

Even at this point, though, some might question why we would choose an entire album of three-way piano overdubs, something only Lennie Tristano had previously tried.
Conversations
has aroused fierce views both for and against, but in an age where overdubbing is more or less the norm in record-making, its musicality is more important. Carefully graded, each line sifted against the others, it’s occasionally too studied, and the follow-up
Further Conversations With Myself
(also released together as
Art Of Duo
) is arguably more graciously realized. But it’s fascinating to hear Evans meditate on Monk’s structuralism here, with a fine-grained interpretation of ‘Round Midnight’ with extra melodic material, a superb and quite unexpected ‘Blue Monk’ and the bonus of ‘Bemsha Swing’, only the last of these in any way strained. Almost the highlight is a grandly cinematic ‘Theme From Spartacus’ that retains as much detail as a solo performance and on which, as throughout the set, Evans seems to gaze at his own work and find it compelling.

& See also
The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961
(1961; p. 276)

ELLIS MARSALIS

Born 14 November 1934, New Orleans, Louisiana

Piano

The Classic Ellis Marsalis

Boplicity CDBOP 016

Marsalis; Nat Perrilliat (ts); Marshall Smith (b); James Black (d). January–March 1963.

Ellis Marsalis said (1992):
‘Recording is strange because it’s different to what you’re usually doing as a jazz musician, making that music in the now. You make a record and part of the deal is going back in to edit and adjust, maybe re-record, select songs. That already changes things, and with the culture so dominated by records now, it has changed the music.’

Ellis Marsalis played and taught for decades in his native New Orleans with no recognition beyond his playing circles until he sired the most famous jazz dynasty of the day. Revered as a teacher and recognized as the father of Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason, he has only belatedly been recognized as a significant performer too. Inevitably, there has been a small flurry of releases and reissues since then, but it’s worth going back to something that was made (to put it in context) when Branford was a toddler.

One can hear where Wynton got his even-handed delineation of melody from and where Branford’s aristocratic elegance of line is rooted. The dynastic founder isn’t beyond tossing in the occasional surprise, but mostly he favours careful interpretations of standards, sparsely harmonized and delicately spelt out, with a few simple but cleverly hooked originals to lend a little extra personality. This is a rarity, a quartet dating from the early ’60s originally released as
The Monkey Puzzle
on AFO Records in which the pianist leads a group featuring the Coltrane follower Perrilliat and the jittery, post-Elvin Jones drums of Black, whose unsettling beats keep the group teetering on the brink of a chaos that the others carefully navigate. Black’s also the main writer at this stage, and his title-track is an offbeat winner, but it’s Ellis’s patient accompaniment, with all the modernist tinges one doesn’t expect to hear in ‘New Orleans jazz’, that makes the record so fresh and successful.

SATHIMA BEA BENJAMIN

Born 17 October 1936, Cape Town, South Africa

Voice

A Morning In Paris

Ekapa S.A. 004

Benjamin; Duke Ellington, Abdullah Ibrahim, Billy Strayhorn (p); Svend Asmussen (vn); Johnny Gertze (b); Makaya Ntoshko (d). February 1963.

Sathima Bea Benjamin said (1986):
‘Duke Ellington told me to be at this very grand hotel in Zurich at ten thirty the next morning. We hardly slept, Abdullah and I, but we were there the next morning. Duke sat us down in his room, told us that his accountant would give us money for fares and that we should meet him at the Barclay studios in Paris in four days’ time. Which is exactly what happened …’

Bea Benjamin buttonholed Duke Ellington after a concert in Zurich and persuaded him to come to the Club Africana and hear her boyfriend’s trio. Ever courtly, Duke insisted on hearing Bea sing as well, and was captivated. The resulting recording,
Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio
, established the South African pianist’s career, even though Frank Sinatra of Reprise Records decided the couple weren’t commercial enough for further release. That Benjamin’s half of the date survives at all is due to the habit of recording engineer Gerard Lehner of keeping a private listening copy of every session he taped.

After an impromptu rehearsal – Strayhorn had never heard ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’, Benjamin did not know his ‘Your Love Has Faded’ – the session was recorded, with Duke accompanying on ‘I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good’ and ‘Solitude’, Strayhorn on the two rehearsed songs, the solidly Duke-influenced Brand/Ibrahim on the remainder. All are standards, but Benjamin’s warm, slightly innocent delivery and sensuous (but not morbidly sensual) vibrato give familiar material like ‘Lover Man’, ‘The Man I Love’ and ‘Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year’ a quality that suggests, as we’ve noted elsewhere, that she’d
never heard these songs before, or certainly never heard iconic performances of them. The trio plays well and even the curious inclusion of Asmussen on pizzicato violin adds to the record’s charm. Later work had more of an African inflexion, but here Benjamin emerges as a remarkable interpreter of standards.

A tiny puzzle. This Ekapa release somewhat implies that this is the first appearance of these ‘lost’ tapes. Owners of our fifth (2000) edition will find it reviewed there as an Enja record. Sadly, none of Benjamin’s other discs for the German label are currently available. Probably nothing since has matched that studio debut: Duke as accompanist and producer,
and
Billy Strayhorn.

BIG JOHN PATTON

Born 12 July 1935, Kansas City, Missouri; died 19 March 2002, Montclair, New Jersey

Organ

Along Came John

Blue Note 31915

Patton; Fred Jackson, Harold Vick (ts); Grant Green (g); Ben Dixon (d). April 1963.

John Patton said (1991):
‘Playing a Hammond B3 is a bit like driving a truck. It doesn’t handle like a sports car and it needs a bit of room. You have to watch out for other road users!’