The Jazz Messengers at the Café Bohemia - Volume 2
Released - May 1956
Recording and Session Information
"Cafe Bohemia", NYC, 1st set, November 23, 1955
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
tk.2 Like Someone In Love
tk.4 I Waited For You
"Cafe Bohemia", NYC, 2nd set, November 23, 1955
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax #1; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
1. tk.7 Avila & Tequila
2. tk.8 Yesterdays
"Cafe Bohemia", NYC, 4th set, November 23, 1955
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
tk.15 Sportin' Crowd
The Theme (incomplete)
Session Photos
Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images /
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/
Track Listing
| Side One | |||
| Title | Author | Recording Date | |
| Annoucement by Art Blakey | 23-Nov-55 | ||
| Sportin' Crowd | Hank Mobley | 23-Nov-55 | 4th Set |
| Like Someone In Love | Burke-Van Heusen | 23-Nov-55 | 1st Set |
| Yesterdays | Kern, Harbach | 23-Nov-55 | 2nd Set |
| Side Two | |||
| Avila and Tequila | Hank Mobley | 23-Nov-55 | 2nd Set |
| I Waited For You | Fuller | 23-Nov-55 | 1st Set |
Credits
|
Liner Notes
THIS CHEERFUL, animated album starts out with two important precedents to guide it. First, it revives the Messengers name that was originated (many of us may hove overlooked this fact or never have known it) on the Blue Note label when Art Blakey led a somewhat larger band for a session as far back as 1947. Second, it repeats the night club locus operandi idea initiated so fruitfully when the Art Blakey-A Night At Birdiand series was offered on Blue Note BLP5037, BLP5038 and BLP5039.
The present Messengers unit came into being as a result of the record sessions under Horace’s name that produced Blue Note BLP5058 and BLP5062. A cooperative unit from the start, they hove shared the belief that jazzmen must retain firm roots in the jazz tradition, and that advancement must never lose touch with this principle As Art Blakey told Nat Hentoff in a Down Beat interview, "In jazz you get the message when you hear the music. And when we’re on the stand and we see that there ore people in the audience who aren't patting their feet and who aren’t nodding their heads to our music, we know we’re doing something wrong. As Horace Silver added, We don’t want to go too far out. We want people to understand what we’re doing “
The Messengers played their first official date together in February 1955 at the Blue Note in Philadelphia. They are still playing clubs around the east and middle west.
At the time of the Birdland recording, Cafe Bohemia was just an obscure Greenwich Village club dedicated apparently forever to the education of the visiting fire-eaters who sought the girliest of girlie shows. In the spring of 1955 a big change came over the club and over the thinking of Jimmy Garofolo, its owner. Jimmy had no previous knowledge of jazz, but when a couple of musicians wandered in off the street (possibly mistaking the place for Café Society, or maybe just hungry for cheesecake) and sat in for a stimulating jam session, Jimmy was impressed. He was better than impressed when Charlie Parker fell by one night. Even to the point of deciding on a jazz policy, and on Bird himself for the opening attraction. Alas, the sign advertising Charlie Parker’s initiation of Jazz at the Bohemia still lies unused n Jimmy’s cellar.
The Bohemia, a somewhat long and narrow room with a bar at one end and a small bandstand at the other, is on street level, just a few doors from Café Society on Sheridan Square. Musicians have embraced it as one of New York’s Three B’s of the jazz club circuit, along with Birdland and Basin Street. The members of the Messengers, singly and collectively, hove enjoyed many pleasant weeks among the hip crowd the club now attracts.
On these records you will hear Art Blakey introducing the other members of the cooperative team. None of them will be strangers to you: Kenny Dorham, the trumpet man from Fairfield, Texos, has his own Afro-Cuban LP on Blue Note BLP5065. On tenor Hank Mobley who has been heard in the Gillespie, Roach and Silver combos and who was also featured on the Dorham set as well as on sessions with Jay Jay Johnson and Julius Watkins. Horace Ward Morton Tavares Silver (you will note that he is a quintet in himself) has become virtually one of the Blue Note Family; his own LPs include BLP5018 and BLP5034 with his trio, BLP5021 with Lou Donaldson, BLP5024 with Howard McGhee, BLP5040 with Miles Davis, BLP5058 and BLP5062 with ihe Jazz Messengers, BLP5070 with Jay Jay Johnson, and the three Night at Birdland discs on BLP5037, BLP5038, BLP5039. Doug Watkins, from Detroit, is one of the youngest and most promising of this year’s bass crop. Art, as you know, is all through the Blue Note catalogue with Horace, Miles, Monk and others.
On the first record you will hear the old Goodman Sextet’s Soft Winds, delightfully stretched into an easy going, rocking affair with intermittent doubling of the tempo, which basically is a slow and insinuating one. Then comes the bond’s swinging theme, affording excellent solo opportunities to all. Next in line are Minor’s Holiday, faster and longer and, it seems to me, even more exciting than the version on Kenny’s own LP, Alone Together, announced by Art one of his favorite ballads, and showing Honk Mobley off effectively; and Prince Albert, which Kenny and Max Roach devised and recorded way back around 1947, but which, if we may say so, is for better recorded and played in this new version.
BLP 1508
On the second record Hank Mobley’s fast blues riff Sportin’ Crowd launches a series of leaping solos by Kenny, Hank, Horace and Art; the Burke-van Heusen Like Someone In Love provides, for these ears, the most relaxed and charming moments of the whole session; the steady beat and fine recording of the rhythm section are no less important here than the consistently integrated quality of the solos.
Kenny Dorham announces his own solo on Yesterdays, a very beautifully pinpointed interpretation that somehow contrives to make a legato-sounding performance out of the use of many staccato notes. This is again a personal judgment, but Kenny sounds far maturer and for better engineered here than he did on a previous version.
Everybody seems to grab the nearest clove, maracas, jawbone or teaspoon to lend his hand for a fine overall Latin effect on Avila and Tequila, which has a long percussive preamble before introducing the theme. (Four Messengers, minus Kenny. cut this also on BLP5066 under Hank’s leadership.) Art and Doug Watkins deserve special commendation on this one. Finally the old Gillespie closing theme, Gil Fuller’s I Waited For You, is brilliantly handled by Kenny in the opening chorus, after which Hank and Horace maintain the mood consistently.
So, as Art Blakey says, take off your shoes and have a ball. The Messengers missive comes special delivery through the courtesy of Alfred Lion, and we’re sure you will dig their handwriting, as it bounces off the Bohemia’s wailing walls.
— LEONARD FEATHER
Cover Design by JOHN HERMANSADER
Photos by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
During 1955 and 1956, the Café Bohemia was at the center of jazz creativity in New York City. The Greenwich Village club was located at 15 Barrow Street, on the same premises where James P. Johnson, Max Kaminsky, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Wilbur De Paris had led groups a decade earlier when the Space was called the Pied Piper. Owner Jimmy Garofolo had operated the Bohemia as a strip club until i musicians, including Charlie Parker, began coming in to jam in early 1955. Parker, scheduled to be the opening jazz attraction, died in March; but the Bohemia did present several other leading modernists. Oscar Pettiford, who wrote “Bohemia After Dark” while at the club, was the original musical director and led his own big band. Cannonball Adderley became an overnight sensation by sitting in with Pettiford at the Bohemia in June 1955. When Miles Davis was getting his first classic quintet together a few months later, the Bohemia was its base of operations.
Pettiford, Adderley and Davis never recorded live at the Bohemia, though several other important musicians did. George Wallington, who succeeded Pettiford as musical director, documented the quintet that provided early exposure to Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean and Paul Chambers (with Arthur Taylor on drums) on Progressive. An early edition of the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, with special guest Max Roach, taped the first versions of ‘Jump Monk” and Haitian Fight Song” for the Debut label. Six months after the present music was cut, trumpeter Kenny Dorham returned with his new ensemble, the Jazz Prophets, producer Alfred Lion and engineer Rudy Van Gelder to record his “Round About Midnight” at the Café Bohemia LP for Blue Note.
Jazz history identifies no band more closely with the Bohemia, however, than the Jazz Messengers, thanks to the pair of long-playing albums the seminal quintet made at the club on November 23, 1955. Six additional titles comprised a third volume that first appeared on vinyl in Japan. The present reissue includes three of these later discoveries on each volume, after the original LP program. Note also that all of the music was recorded at a single performance, contrary to earlier sources that listed separate dates for Volumes One and Two.
The five musicians heard here comprise the “original” Jazz Messengers — i.e., the cooperative that began working under that name in February 1955 after recording two 10” albums as the Horace Silver Quintet for Blue Note, and that continued to function as a co-op (with Donald Byrd replacing Dorham shortly after the Bohemia recordings) until mid-1956. The assertive Jazz Messenger style, however, really began taking shape on Silver’s first recordings with Blakey in 1952, and continued to manifest itself in various studio encounters involving the pianist and drummer for nearly a year after their working partnership had dissolved. Certainly the February 1954 live albums Blakey cut at Birdland with Silver, Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson and Curly Russell (also available in the RVG Series) anticipate the Messengers sound; and such landmark 1955 sessions as Mobley’s debut as a leader (the Messengers minus Dorham), the Dorham dates heard on his Afro-Cuban LP (Messengers minus Watkins plus added starters) and Donald Byrd’s sextet date on Transition (the post-Dorham Messengers plus Joe Gordon), as well as the material cut for Columbia in the Spring of 1956 are part of the story. But the original five are heard together only on the two studio sessions by Silver, which focus on his compositions, and the live Bohemia material.
Blakey was the band’s elder statesman, the front man, and clearly first among equals (after all, he kept the Jazz Messenger trademark when the co-op was dissolved), and his introductory Volume One make his pride in the music and his fellow-musicians crystal clear. Silver had been central to the band’s success, with his intense piano soloing and comping and such immediately popular compositions from the studio sessions as “The Preacher” and “Doodlin’.” He was already one of the most widely imitated pianists. Bassist Doug Watkins was part of a new generation of Detroit musicians that were in the process of invigorating the New York scene. Tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley was a new star at the time, as Blakey comments, known initially for his work with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie and rapidly becoming a recording session favorite. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham, like Blakey, was a veteran of the Billy Eckstine band, Charlie Parker’s quintet, and the drummer’s own 1947 Messengers octet that suggested the name of the cooperative. Dorham had already earned a reputation for being perennially underrated that would follow him through his career; but the inner circle knew his worth as both soloist and composer. Note that Blakey calls Dorham the band’s “arranger,” suggesting that (even with Silver present) the trumpeter served as the Messengers’ musical director.
Blakey also calls Dorham “the uncrowned king.” Amen to that, and Hank Mobley makes two. The beauty of their conceptions is finally coming to be recognized and together they were truly special. "That horn section was so hip, you know, they were super hip," Silver remarked about Dorham and Mobley in 1990.“The way they phrased and the lines they played, their harmonic knowledge was so beautiful.” Superlatives are due the rhythm section as well. Thank goodness Lion and Van Gelder caught them at work, where they were able to stretch out and deliver a bit of history.
The first track on this volume ¡s called “Sportin’ Crowd” and credited to Mobley, though it gained its widest currency as “Tenor Madness” when Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane recorded it together for Prestige six months later. The true origin of the blues line was a 1946 session recorded in New York under Kenny Clarke’S leadership for the French Swing label, which credited Clarke as the composer and alternately used the titles “Royal Roost” and “Rue Chaptal” on various issues. Dorham was heard on that version, along with Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt and Bud Powell. Everyone blows well here, though the intense work of Silver and Blakey dominate the performance and make it an ideal work-up-a-sweat opener. Blakey is reluctant to give it up when the horns initially return.
“At this point ladies and gentlemen we’d like to play for you. . . anything groovy,” Blakey says in what proves to be a major understatement. “Like Someone In Love” is heard here at an ideal medium tempo, in an ingenious arrangement with a rhythmic suspension at bars three through six of the melody that is retained for the solo choruses. Dorham plays the theme most soulfully, then turns to his “running” double-time style, pulling back just as Blakey shifts into higher gear; while Mobley tumbles through the rich chord changes juggling accents brilliantly. Silver employs the unusual and effective gambit of starting his solo without block chords. Subtlety was not supposed to be a Jazz Messenger strength, but catch the quiet touches Mobley adds when Dorham plays the theme.
"Yesterdays" had served as a Dorham ballad feature before, on the 1949 Max Roach session that also introduced "Prince Albert," heard on Volume One. On that occasion, the Jerome Kern standard was called "Tomorrow." Common ideas appear in both versions, though this is the superior one, thanks to the greater depth and emotional content Dorham's sound had acquired in the intervening six years.
"Avila and Tequila" is an Afro-Latin Mobley gem first heard on the saxophonists's debut as a leader eight months earlier. This reading finds everyone soloing, and all the non-drummers augmenting Blakey's long introduction with miscellaneous percussion - a practice that later editions of the Jazz Messengers would apply to "A Night in Tunisia." The composer is particularly eloquent in the opening solo.
The original LP concluded with "I Waited For You," a surprising yet most effective ballad closer. Mobley introduces his former boss Dizzy Gillespie's them song, then harmonizes under Dorham's lead. Double time is an effective touch during the trumpet and piano solos, raising the swing quotient without breaking the mood. This was not one of the Jazz Messengers funk numbers, but nothing in the group’s book elicíted more soulful playing.
Bands of the period loved to work out on Cole Porter’s “Just One Of Those Things,” íncluding 1956 edition of Max Roach + 4 that Dorham joined after Clifford Brown’s death. Blakey, who does not set the whirlwind pace that Roach favored, is nonetheless supercharged in a performance that features limber work by the three primary soloists.
“Hank’s Symphony” was written by Mobley as a Blakey feature, and appeared as the closing trackon the Columbia album The Jazz Messengers. This earlier version is more carefully shaped, and hence a better performance, while remaining a percussive tour de force.
Finally, we hear “Gone With The Wind,” another superlative set of changes at a swing-inducing medium tempo. Dorham and Mobley take three choruses each, the portion that Silver appears ready to claim when Dorham recapitulates the theme at the start of what would have been the third piano chorus. The most memorable moment for me, and an example of pure Mobley, is the declarative phrase the saxophonist plays at bar 25 of his final chorus after heated double timing.
—Bob Blumenthal, 2001
No comments:
Post a Comment