The Penguin Jazz Guide (75 page)

However, even such masterpieces were being eclipsed in the public consciousness by
Rubber Soul
,
Revolver
and
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
and a rising tide of expensively produced and fiercely promoted pop and rock albums, which replaced jazz as the audible component of the counterculture. By the Woodstock summer, jazz – with a few notable exceptions, many of them influenced in turn by rock – had started to seem the province of older listeners, not yet elderly or entirely un-hip, but no longer where it – whatever ‘it’ was – was at …

Part 1:
1961–1965

GENE AMMONS

Also known as ‘Jug’, born 14 April 1925, Chicago, Illinois; died 6 August 1974, Chicago, Illinois

Tenor saxophone

The Gene Ammons Story: Gentle Jug

Prestige PRCD-24155

Ammons; Richard Wyands, Patti Bown (p); George Duvivier, Doug Watkins (b); J. C. Heard, Ed Shaughnessy (d). January 1961–April 1962.

Saxophonist Henry Threadgill said (1981):
‘I don’t hear the younger people talking about Gene Ammons much any more. When I was coming through, he was one of the people you went to see, whenever he was playing. That was what the saxophone was all about, far as I was concerned.’

Son of the great boogie pianist Albert Ammons, ‘Jug’ worked with Billy Eckstine and Woody Herman before leading his own bands through the ’50s and ’60s. His career was interrupted by prison terms for drug offences and his life was cut short, but Ammons exerted a considerable influence while he was active, and his records – though less dramatic than his live appearances must have been – are still more than listenable and fascinating to set alongside those of today’s more celebrated saxophonists.

Sadly, even the superior Ammons albums are spotty. Great performances follow weary ones, even on the same record, and there doesn’t seem to be a particular setting that guarantees top form. One imagines he found the studio a trial. However, we wouldn’t be without his music and
Gentle Jug
is a winner, bringing together
The Soulful Mood
(where he plays with Hawkins-like authority) and
Nice ’n’ Cool
from the preceding year. The 1961 material is all ballad-based with a glorious version of ‘Till There Was You’ and the peerless ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ (which figured at a key moment in the Tom Berenger film of that name). There is also a wonderful ‘Willow, Weep For Me’. The only regret is that Wyands doesn’t get more space to stretch out, but Patti Bown on the other set is a revelation, albeit in homeopathically small doses.

JIM ROBINSON

Also known as Big Jim; born 25 December 1892 (some sources suggest 1889 or 1890), Deer Range, Louisiana; died 4 May 1976, New Orleans, Louisiana

Trombone

Jim Robinson’s New Orleans Band

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1844

Robinson; Ernest Cagnolotti (t); Louis Cottrell (cl); George Guesnon (g); Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau (b); Alfred Williams (d). January 1961.

Trombonist Turk Murphy said (1981):
‘Jim liked to get the audience up and dancing when he played. The idea of playing to a seated audience, politely clapping, just didn’t make any sense to him.’

Robinson took up the trombone while serving with the US army in France. He played in and around New Orleans for most of his long life. Much of his best work is with George Lewis or Bunk Johnson and for a time he was only a part-time player, making his living in the docks, but he did play with the Golden Leaf Band and was a significant presence on the nascent jazz scene.

The doyen of New Orleans trombonists – along with Louis Nelson – Robinson was still recording when he was past 80, despite a diffident beginning. His simple, perfectly appropriate playing wasn’t too bothered by the passing of time, and he performs throughout much as he did on all the sessions he appeared on over a space of some 35 years. ‘Ice Cream’ was his signature piece.
New Orleans Band
, along with a second disc,
Plays Spirituals And Blues
, was originally a part of Riverside’s New Orleans Living Legends series and together they were among the first occasions when Robinson had been asked to perform as a leader. Cagnolotti and Cottrell weren’t much more interested than Jim in taking a lead, and as a result the front line sounds reserved here and there; but the two discs – neatly split between NO standards on this one and gospel and blues tunes on the other – are as tough and genuine as most such sessions from this period.

EDDIE HARRIS

Born 20 October 1934, Chicago, Illinois; died 5 November 1996, Los Angeles, California

Tenor saxophone, trumpet, mouthpieces, voice

Exodus To Jazz / Mighty Like A Rose

Vee-Jay VJ-019

Harris; Willie Pickens (p); Joe Diorio (g); William Yancey (b); Harold Jones (d). January–April 1961.

Eddie Harris said (1989):
‘Almost nobody noticed that what I was trying to do was sound like a trumpet-player on the saxophone, up high. That’s what all that experimenting with mouthpieces was about. When the electric stuff started coming in, that was no longer necessary. Until then, I could work ten days a week, playing every horn I had, but when I did my own stuff, people just said it was weird.’

Harris learned several instruments in his youth and finally settled on saxophone as the main one; he experimented with electronic sax, a reed trumpet and other quirks. A great crowd-pleaser who didn’t please the critics, he none the less remained close to the AACM people round Muhal Richard Abrams, and whatever anyone wrote about the record, he was a master technician, who came back in later years to prove his enduring toughness as an improviser. Harris had one hit that everyone still remembers, the peerless ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’, which apparently his bass-player Ron Carter took with him to the Miles Davis group when the trumpeter recruited him.

Harris got off to a tremendous start with his first album,
Exodus To Jazz
, with the title-theme selling a million in single form. It rather knocked his jazz credibility, but Harris was a complex talent anyway and his range of ideas was a peculiar mix of the ingenious and the bizarre. His tenor sound was high – so high that he once received votes in a ‘Best Alto’ poll – and his tonalities suggested a kinship with the avant-garde, only true to a degree, for Eddie actually preferred soft hard-bop or boogaloo situations that drew on the gospel and blues strains of his native Chicago.

When he moved to Atlantic, Harris continued experimenting with electric saxes, trumpets played with sax mouthpieces and other gimmicks, with varying levels of success.
The In Sound
has reappeared in a useful pair with
Mean Greens.
The key tracks are ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’, still a glorious experience for jazz fans of a certain age, and a lovely version of ‘Theme From
The Sandpiper
(The Shadow Of Your Smile)’. Harris’s eccentricities aren’t too intrusive, and if one listens for the musicality of the performances rather than trying to work out what’s playing, it’s thoroughly satisfying music.

OLIVER NELSON

Born 4 June 1932, St Louis, Missouri; died 27 October 1975, Los Angeles, California

Alto and tenor saxophones, composer/arranger

Blues And The Abstract Truth

Impulse! 051154-2

Nelson; Freddie Hubbard (t); Eric Dolphy (as, f); George Barrow (bs); Bill Evans (p); Paul Chambers (b); Roy Haynes (d). February 1961.

Freddie Hubbard said (1983):
‘I sometimes think it’s the perfect record, not in the sense that there’s absolutely nothing you couldn’t improve a little, but that it was the sound of a man getting his concept together for the first time and finding that it worked.’

Nelson served an unremarkable apprenticeship with Louis Jordan and the Erskine Hawkins and Quincy Jones big bands, and he probably learned most from working with Quincy, not
least that ability to combine sophisticated intervals and expansive shapes with a raw blues feel. Sadly, Nelson was to spend his last few years in a similar direction, writing TV themes like
The Six Million Dollar Man
, lucrative but an unsatisfactory legacy for the man who wrote ‘Stolen Moments’.

Restored to its original cover artwork (a portrait of Nelson was substituted when the stereo version appeared), this is one of the classics of the period, and if there were one Nelson track to take away to a desert island it would have to be the one that starts the album, the haunting ‘Stolen Moments’ with its mournful Hubbard solo and a lovely statement from Dolphy on flute. The great man left his bass clarinet behind for this session, and it isn’t missed. Nelson tended to arrange for higher voices, and for this record he didn’t stray outside 12-bar blues and the chords of ‘I Got Rhythm’. ‘Stolen Moments’ is a minor blues, opening in C minor, with some fascinating internal divisions. ‘Hoe Down’ is a 44-bar figure based on the opening two notes. ‘Teenie’s Blues’ is dedicated to the composer’s sister, a talented singer. It rests on just three intervals, with transpositions for the two altos to maintain a level of tension and release. The rhythm section is again very fine, with Haynes relishing this setting and Chambers producing some lovely countermelodies and stop-time figures under the basic changes.

The sound is now as good as anyone could possibly want, close and sharp enough to hear Dolphy’s breath across the mouthpiece of the flute.

BILL BARRON

Born 27 March 1927, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 21 September 1989, Middletown, Connecticut

Tenor and soprano saxophones

Modern Windows Suite

Savoy 92878

Barron; Ted Curson (t); Jay Cameron (bs); Kenny Barron (p); Eddie Khan, Jimmy Garrison (b); Pete LaRoca, Frankie Dunlop (d). February–June 1961.

Brother Kenny Barron said (1992):
‘He was a very quiet and unassuming man who didn’t push himself forward or make much noise. I think that’s the only reason he isn’t better known.’

Pianist Kenny Barron’s elder brother was already in his 30s when he made his debut on Cecil Taylor’s
Love For Sale
. He stayed around Philadelphia until then, not making a move to New York until 1958. He recorded only rather sparsely and has remained something of a musician’s musician.

This Savoy disc brings together the
Suite
with
The Tenor Stylings Of Bill Barron
, although only the title-piece of the former is included. Both sessions are a striking departure from hard-bop convention. Barron’s writing, involving modal forms, blues and – in the ‘Suite’ especially – some queer Mingus-like tonalities, sounds like little else that was going on at the time. ‘Blast Off’, ‘Ode To An Earth Girl’ and ‘Nebulae’ are striking modern compositions, with altered chords and an almost avant-garde approach from Barron. One can readily imagine him working with Taylor. Both he and Curson register strongly as improvisers; listen to their contrasting approaches to the ostinato section of ‘Ode To An Earth Girl’. Cameron, absent on the second session, is rather less impressive. Both were poorly recorded by Savoy and Kenny’s piano is very receded in the mix. But for Bill’s playing alone, this is a vivid and valuable document.

BOOKER LITTLE

Born 2 April 1938, Memphis, Tennessee; died 5 October 1961, New York City

Trumpet

Out Front

Candid 9027

Little; Julian Priester (tb); Eric Dolphy (as, bcl, f); Don Friedman (p); Ron Carter, Art Davis (b); Max Roach (d, perc, vib). March & April 1961.

Trumpeter Terence Blanchard says:
‘Booker Little is one of the most underrated musicians of his generation. While being one of the most creative and technically accomplished trumpet-players of all time, his bravery in forging new paths of expression is a model by which we can still be inspired.’

Booker Little’s entire recording career occupies just 38 months, from his first studio appearance with Max Roach in June 1958 to a last appearance with the drummer’s octet in August 1961, just weeks before his death from uraemia. Along with his sometime collaborator Eric Dolphy, who makes a significant impact on this record, Little was one of the great might-have-beens of modern jazz, the first important trumpet stylist to emerge after the death of Clifford Brown, but similarly ill-fated.

By the beginning of 1961, having arrived in New York with the other Young Men from Memphis (Frank Strozier, Phineas Newborn, Louis Smith and George Coleman), Little was under the benign supervision of Nat Hentoff at Candid and was included in sessions fronted by Roach and Abbey Lincoln. Later in the year, he’d take part in John Coltrane’s
Africa/Brass
dates, for which Dolphy had done some of the arranging. In March, though, Little had an opportunity to record under his own name and he took the opportunity with both hands.

There were probably too many ‘out’ titles around at this point. What’s striking about
Out Front
is how logical, even inevitable, some of its most unconventional elements are. But how curious that few of these superbly wrought compositions – poised between hard bop and some fresh evolution – have been covered since. Indeed, the record remains surprisingly little known relative to any of Dolphy’s, though we consider it their equal or superior, and often adduced only as an item in the saxophonist’s discography.