BLP 1533

 Johnny Griffin - Introducing Johnny Griffin

Released - November 1956

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, April 17, 1956
Johnny Griffin, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Max Roach, drums.

tk.2 Chicago Calling
tk.3 Mil Dew
tk.6 The Boy Next Door
tk.8 It's All Right With Me
tk.10 Nice And Easy
tk.13 Lover Man
tk.14 These Foolish Things

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Mil Dew	Johnny Griffin	17/04/1956
Chicago Calling	Johnny Griffin	17/04/1956
These Foolish Things	Link, Marvell, Strachey	17/04/1956
The Boy Next Door	Martin, Blane	17/04/1956
Side Two
Nice and Easy	Johnny Griffin	17/04/1956
It's All Right with Me	Cole Porter	17/04/1956
Lover Man	Davis, Ram Ramirez, Sherman	17/04/1956

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	JOE SEGAL

Liner Notes

THERE is, in most every major music center, throughout the land, a relatively small handful of creators known as "musicians' musicians", one to whom, whenever they have the opportunity, the majority of better known Jazz artists go out of their way to listen to or jam with.

Chicago, in particular, has been able to produce quite a few of this rare type of musician. The late drummer, Ike Day, was one to whom all the major jazz percussionists of today, including ours for this date, Max Roach, would sit and intensively listen. Another is bassist, Wilbur Ware (featured on the new J. R. Monterose Blue Note LP BLP 1536, with another Chicagoan, trumpeter Ira Sullivan), of whom Thelonious Monk is particularly fond. Ex-Hines/Eckstine trumpeter, Gail Brockman, and the late guitarist, Ronnie Singer, are two others. Among saxophonists, JOHNNY GRIFFIN, by many, is considered to be "the man"!

Johnny credits the erstwhile leader and musical director of Chicago's DuSable High School, Capt. Walter Dye", with impounding in him the, oh, so necessary basics of music, without which, he feels, he could not have hoped to have musically survived as a top professional. Some of Capt. Dyett's other pupils, Gene Ammons, Not "King" Cole, and Bennie Green, to name but a few, are testimonies to his fine teaching.

Although Johnny, a family man, 28 years of age, prefers to "make it at home", he has spent many a formative year on the road, most notably, when only 17, with one of those wild and wooley Hampton bands. Those were the invaluable woodshedding days of playing everything, everywhere, night after night, after night. Most recently he has received a personal request from Dizzy Gillespie to join his great new band! Johnny, however, is now leading his own quartet at the Flame Show Lounge here in Chicago.

Among his personal preferences and influences, Johnny lists Byas, Bean, Bird, Bud, Pres, Fats (Navarro), Dizzy, and Dex, with especial bows to Thelonious Monk. Johnny's two week stay with Monk, at the Bee-Hive in Chicago recently, was one of the Hive's all-time musical highlights in its ten year history of presenting Jazz.

On side one, Johnny leads off with an original, Mil Dew, an up-tempo "rhythm-type" thing which tokes off like a rocket from Max's intro, and maintains itself steadily throughout Johnny's choruses, with Wynton and Curly really keeping things moving right into Max's dynamic fours with Johnny and on into the final out chorus...

The title number of the album, Chicago Calling, is a light airy little ditty composed by Johnny, which gives a feeling and mood not unlike the pretty Gigi Gryce tune, Social Call. This particular rendition points out the many fine facets of Johnny's playing; his natural buoyancy, complete freedom with the techniques of his horn, and the way his figures, no matter how far out they travel, always come back home and resolve.

The standard lovely, and favorite of Modern Jazz musicians, These Foolish Things, follows. An outstanding Wynton Kelly solo, surrounded by Johnny's really big-toned offerings, provides a perfect contrast; with a truly excellent example of the basics of control necessary for good ballad playing, with the easily discernable evidence that Johnny's seasoning years spent playing all types of dance music is experience of an irreplaceable nature. "Pretty humorous ending there, John."

Closing the side is a beautiful tune usually associated with sad voiced vocalists. To Johnny, however, the subtle changes involved in The Boy Next Door indicated that a swinging bounce treatment might better enhance the original structure of the song. Wynton's pretty intro leads Johnny right into the melody, which, with that singing quality his tone possesses, permits him to really "tell the story", and invite "the boy" right into your front yard.

Nice And Easy, by Johnny, opens side two, and is a blues with just that feeling the title describes; and not unlike that old favorite, Red Top. Johnny's raucus choruses have the inevitability of a steamroller. The Kelly chorus, followed by one of Curly's few recorded solos, and the way Max brings the whole works back into the closing theme, is a high spot of Modern Jazz making which, when years have elapsed, will still be a natural "gas"'

Johnny's rendition of It's Allright With Me, which follows, is one of the few significant versions, the others being by Jay and Kai, and Sonny Rollins. Taken at break-neck tempo, the novelty of "Latinizing" the bridge throughout, is carried along by Max behind Wynton's solo. If this particular number were the only good one in the entire album, which, of course it isn't, I suspect all of the young tenor-men in the country would cop this LP for it alone!

Ever since Sarah and Bird recorded Lover Man, it has been a favorite not only of mine, but of most every Modern Jazz fan and musician. It's one of Johnny's also, and he treats it with a strident tenderness and richness of sound that can do naught but enhance an already beautiful tune. Wynton's not unfunky solo is outstanding, and the way Max and Curly help Johnny bring the proceedings to a lovely end is one of the reasons these two are so sought after for gigs and record dates.

The release of this, the first Johnny Griffin LP, proves many things. Mainly, of course, that here is a young talented tenor saxophonist who, for too long, has been taken for granted, and who will, no doubt, soon be reaping some of his past due rewards...Also, for the sceptics of modern listening, who have been claiming otherwise, Max Roach has once again proven that his drumming is not only that of a soloist, but that of the all important pace setter of the rhythm section. All of the good taste, fire, spark, imagination, dynamics, SWING, and technique which NO other drummer possesses to his nth degree, is so readily heard that no further comment is necessary!

This, then, is "Chicago Calling", with Johnny Griffin on the other end of the wire. You'd better answer the phone!

— JOE SEGAL
(Chicago Columnist, Metronome)

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT INTRODUCING JOHNNY GRIFFIN

Joe Segal, like Johnny Griffin and Max Roach still on the scene as these notes are written, makes a couple of points in the original liner notes worth pondering. He calls this "the first Johnny Griffin LP," and from what discographies tell us he is probably correct whether you calculate from date of recording or date of issue. (Griffin also taped the Argo album J. G. at some point in 1956.) The claim that the present music introduces Griffin is subject to challenge, since a single under the saxophonist's name (recorded in 1953 or '54) had already been issued on Okeh.

Griffin had been under the jazz radar, however, in some measure due to the allegiance to his hometown. Segal's ode to Chicago reminds us of the imposing local scene that exerted a strong pull on its musical offspring, to the point that a 10-year veteran of the music wars such as Griffin remained — at least at this point — a committed resident, Many of Chicago's own did depart for New York, and the city was routinely celebrated in such sessions of the period as Blue Note's Blowing in from Chicago, taped one year after this Griffin date. The featured tenors there, Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore, were also students of DuSable's legendary Capt. Walter Dyett. (Segal's mention of Gene "Krimons" in the original liner is less likely a misprint of Gene Ammons than Blue Note's unwillingness to acknowledge competitor Prestige's star horn man.) As Segal relates, Griffin remained a Chicagoan in 1956, and the homemade Argo date was his only other microgroove recording of the year, Griffin's New York period really begins in 1957, where a two-month stretch between March and May found him recording with Art Blakey on Vik, Jubilee, and (on the classic Jazz Messengers with Monk) Atlantic, with A. K. Salim on Savoy and Clark Terry on Riverside, plus his own Blue Note sequel, A Blowing Session.

The rhythm section assembled for Griffin's 1956 visit to the East Coast was befitting of a musician who had spent much of 1945 and '46 in Lionel Hampton's big band, then the following three years in the small and always musically deep rhythm and blues unit of trumpeter Joe Morris, (At one time, Griffin and Morris blew over an Elmo Hope/Percy Heath/PhiIly Joe Jones rhythm section that was reunited for Hope's 1953 Blue Note debut as a leader.) Max Roach had been at the pinnacle of jazz percussion for a decade, was in the final months of his productive partnership with Clifford Brown, and would play a vital role in Herbie Nichols's final Blue Note date two days after this music was taped. Curly Russell, an infrequent figure on sessions of the period (though more frequently on Lion projects than elsewhere), had a thing going with Roach that stretched back to their years with Charlie Parker. Wynton Kelly, who we now think of as ubiquitous throughout his recording career, had actually made the vast majority of his studio appearances between 1951 and '55 in support of Dinah Washington. This is his first session after leaving Washington's employ, and a fine display of the skills that would be widely valued in the years to come. His statement on "Nice and Easy," to borrow one of Segal's phrases, is not unfunky indeed, and his accompaniment is stellar throughout.

While Griffin's saxophone playing is usually and justifiably celebrated on this recording, he also gives a good accounting for himself as a composer on the blues "Nice and Easy," which with minor adjustments soon became his signature "63rd Street Theme" and as such, emblematic of the real Windy City deal. And while "Chicago Calling" was never covered on disc at the time, one of my first live-jazz memories (and perhaps a too-hip-to-quickly-decipher example of jazz humor) is hearing Zoot Sims and a local rhythm section open a 1961 St. Louis concert with the number.

Above all, listening to Introducing Johnny Griffin 50 years later still drives home the magnificence of Griffin's tenor. It is not simply a matter of speed (hear the way he squeezes his phrase on the first "Mil Dew" bridge, for instance), but speed was at the heart of the man soon dubbed The Little Giant, which is why "It's Alright with Me" was correctly highlighted as the track most likely to send contemporaries to the woodshed. Bonus tracks "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Cherokee" are also guaranteed to induce shedding among saxophonists, which suggests at least the possibility that Lion omitted these titles from the original LP program as a matter of both variety and mercy.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006