BLP 1588

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin'

Released - August 1958

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, January 5, 1958
Art Farmer, trumpet; Jackie McLean, alto sax; Sonny Clark, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.1 Blue Minor
tk.2 Cool Struttin'
tk.5 Sippin' At Bells
tk.6 Deep Night

Session Photos

Jackie McLean

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Cool Struttin'	Sonny Clark	05/01/1958
Blue Minor	Sonny Clark	05/01/1958
Side Two
Sippin' At Bells	Miles Davis	05/01/1958
Deep Night	Charles Henderson, Rudy Vallée	05/01/1958

Credits

Cover Photo:
Cover Design:
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	NAT HENTOFF

Liner Notes

“A primary quality in Sonny Clark’s playing,” notes Art Farmer, who is an astute jazz critic avocationally, “is that there’s no strain in it. Some people sound like they’re trying to swing. Sonny just flows naturally along. Also central to his work is that he has a good, powerful feeling for the blues.”

Sonny’s capacity and present strength as a stimulating, functional jazz pianist has finally been clearly outlined in his recent series of Blue Note LPs, particularly his first three as a leader — Dial S For Sonny (BLP 1570). Sonny’s Crib (BLP 1576) and Sonny Clark Trio (BLP 1579). There have also been several forceful appearances as a sideman, among them with Curtis Fuller (BLP 1572), John Jenkins (BLP 1573), Johnny Griffin (BLP 1580) and Cliff Jordan (BLP 1582).

Sonny’s biographical dues have been detailed on both of his previous LPs as a leader. Briefly, he was born July 21, 1931 in Pittsburgh, and started on piano at four. In high school, he was piano soloist with the band and also played bass and vibes. He first gigged professionally around Pittsburgh while still in school. In 1951, he worked with Vido Musso and Oscar Pettiford and had his own trio in Son Francisco. A Los Angeles period followed during which he played with a large number of jazz figures, among them Art Farmer, Wardell Gray, Anita O’Day, Stan Getz, Shelly Manne, etc. Starting in 1954, Sonny was with Buddy DeFranco for two and a half years. He then joined the Lighthouse All Stars in Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles. He came to New York in April 1957, after working across the country with Dinah Washington.

His principal activity since being in New York has been his Blue Note sessions. He’s also worked with Sonny Rollins, Charlie Mingus, J.R. Monterose and headed his own trio with Art Taylor and Sam Jones at Birdland — a trio he hopes to reactivate soon and keep together. Sonny’s earliest influences on his instrument, starting when he was 11 or 12, were Pete Johnson, Art Tatum and Fats Wailer. There followed Erroll Garner and then Bud Powell. He also admires Lennie Tristano (“his technical ability and conception”), George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonious Monk whom he began to absorb after Powell, Shearing and Peterson. Sonny likes to perform Monk’s tunes and admires Monk as a pianist also (“he has technical ability for what he wants to do”). Younger pianists who impress Sonny include Horace Silver, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Ray Bryant and Red Garland.

Sonny selected the men for this date — Farmer had been on his Dial S For Sonny album and Paul Chambers had participated in Sonny’s Crib. “I met Paul,” notes Sonny, “in Detroit in 1954. He was very young and nobody outside the city knew much about him, but I dug him right then. He’s very consistent and has superior conception, choice of notes and ability to construct lines. He plays with intelligence and he always keeps it interesting.” Of Paul’s colleague in the Miles Davis rhythm section, “Philly” Joe Jones, Sonny says: “I never heard him until he was with Miles and came out to the coast in 1956.

“Joe,” Sonny continues, “has a different way of swinging . He plays all the drums. Usually, when a drummer tries to do that, he gets in the way and doesn’t make much sense. But Joe’s different. He has every musical conception — and he listens to what you and the other players are doing. Very few drummers really listen. He gets involved in the group effort, and he winds up inspiring you by the different little things he does besides keeping time. Joe really makes it happen. He’s always inventing something. I can listen to him develop a rhythmic pattern and it turns into a melodic pattern that I in turn con build on. And always, underneath everything, he’s genuinely swinging.”

Sonny met Art Former in California as early as 1952. “I was living in Pasadena, and Art used to come over with Wardell Gray. We’d session all the time. Art, although he was influenced a lot by Miles Davis, had a style of his own even then. In the years since, he’s matured a lot and has a more masculine style of playing. Now he’s more consistent too and his conception is very impressive.”

Sonny had heard one of Jackie McLean’s first recordings — with Miles Davis around 1953 — and had liked his fresh, different” sound from the beginning, “He was influenced by Bird certainly,” adds Sonny, “but he’s one of the very few who has his own style of playing modern alto, To which appraisal Art Farmer contributes a perceptive analysis: Most of the altoists took one primary aspect from Bird — there were so many to the man — and developed that one for their own purposes. With Jackie, he took that real agonized tone — sometimes it’s like a squawk — that Bird would use at times. It’s like someone sticks a knife in you; you holler and scream and your voice changes in the pain. It’s a real hurt thing. So Jackie developed on that and paid little attention to the more delicate elements of Bird’s playing. Jackie has a feeling in his playing that you know immediately is him. He doesn’t just copy.”

The title tune, "Cool Struttin’,’ was inspired by Sonny’s wife. “I sort of got the name for it from the way the melody goes. It’s a feeling of somebody struttin’ I mean the old conception of the word. I guess you could say the tune itself is a funky-modern version of on old step. It's a 24-bar blues, 12 and then 12.”

“Blue Minor,” another Clark original, is thus titled because it’s in minor and “blue” connotes the “relaxed, moody’ feeling Sonny was trying to project. “Actually, I wrote this tune a few years back. I’ve played it often since then, but not until this date did I feel it would be played on records the way I wanted it. I’d been saving it for the right group of guys. It’s 16, 8, and 8.”

“Sippin’ At Bells, a Charlie Porker tune, “was one of the first in my jazz record collection. I never had the opportunity to play with Bird, I did meet him once in Chicago in 1954 during my first trip there with Buddy DeFranco. Bird encouraged me to continue playing. I admire those early Bird tunes. This one for its melody as well as its changes. It’s a 12-bar blues with sort of advanced changes.”

“Deep Night” I like for its changes, but until I heard Bud Powell play it in Birdland one night, I’d never heard it played except in a semi-pop way. When I heard Bud do it, I knew I’d have to play it too in my way.”

Sonny feels this is about the best date he’s done yet. The music was played the way I wanted it and I got the fellows I’d been wanting to record with for some time.”

The session as a whole seems to me — in the musical personalities of its participants — to embody Sonny’s definition of what "soul" in jazz is: “I take it to mean you’re growing up to capacities of the instrument. Your soul is your conception and you begin to have it in your playing when the way you strike a note, the sound you get and your phrasing come out of you yourself and no one else. That’s what jazz is, after all, self-expression.”

- NAT HENTOFF

Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

Jackie McLean plays courtesy of Bethlehem Records

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT COOL STRUTTIN’

Many consider Cool Struttin’ the definitive example of the hard bop style that Blue Note documented so assiduously during the late 1950s. It is a blowing session where the associations among most of the musicians were forged in the recording studio rather than on nightclub bandstands (the Chambers/Jones rhythm section being the obvious exception), and the material is straightforward and devoid of elaborate arrangements. Still, the results are so invigorating that weeks of rehearsing or gigging together might produce little improvement. Like-minded players, all specifically requested by Clark according to the wonderful interview in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes, simply came together and created a masterpiece.

The title track in particular has come to symbolize the Platonic ideal of a groovy medium blues. It might be considered a sibling to another Blue Note study in perambulation, Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” also recorded in 1958; but “Cool Struttin” gained particular favor among listeners in Japan’s jazz kissa (coffee shops) during the 1970s. Back then, few American fans remembered who Sonny Clark was, so this album is also emblematic of the reconsideration of hard bop generally and Clark in particular that Japanese fans provoked in those years.

Cool Struttin’ should hardly have come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to Sonny Clark’s work in 1958. Alfred Lion, who was clearly paying attention, first recorded the pianist as a sideman with Hank Mobley in June 1957, two months after Clark arrived in New York following six years based on the West Coast. A month later, Clark made his debut as a leader, and for the following year he was a ubiquitous presence on both his own and others’ Blue Note dates. This was his fourth album and fifth session as a leader in less than six months, and might have provided significant momentum to Clark’s career had drug problems not intervened and thrust the pianist into temporary limbo. While Clark would go on to record ten more sessions for the label (including three as a leader) in the next 14 months, he would wait until late 1961 to see his career on Blue Note get back into gear. One reason Clark sounds so spectacular here is his rhythm section. He recorded with Chambers and Jones on the previous Sonny Clark Trio, where they created one of the era’s greatest piano/bass/drum sets. Miles Davis’s longstanding team was ideal for the melodic lucidity and subtle rhythmic shifts at the heart of Clark’s style, and the responsiveness and propulsive support the unit offers horn soloists here reveals an added dimension of its brilliance.

Art Farmer and Jackie McLean, each still alive and still playing magnificently at Blue Note’s 60th anniversary, were at critical stages in their careers at the time of this session. Farmer was still with Horace Silver (he recorded Further Explorations By The Horace Silver Quintet six days later) and would finish 1958 with the Gerry Mulligan quartet. In 1959 Farmer launched the Jazztet with Benny Golson and Curtis Fuller, thus effectively ending his years as a sideman. Most of his Blue Note appearances took place around the time of this album, and found Farmer displaying his trademark lyricism in a more charged rhythmic context than his later work enjoyed.

Jackie McLean was returning to the label where he made his second recorded appearance (with Miles Davis in 1952), and where he would soon scale new heights as a leader. McLean’s visceral sound, which Clark described so accurately to Hentoff, was made for Blue Note; and McLean and Clark were also ideal partners who teamed up on four subsequent occasions under the saxophonist’s leadership. Their work on Jackie’s Bag (January ‘59, with Chambers and Jones once again present) and A Fickle Sonance (October ‘61, Clark’s return to Blue Note after a 31-month absence) are on the same rarefied level as the resent performances.

The original Cool Struttin’ contained only the first four tracks. “Royal Flush” and “Lover” were originally intended to serve as one side of what was scheduled to be Clark’s subsequent Blue Note album, and may have been recorded with the specific intention of being released with the three tracks produced at Clark’s quintet session with Clifford Jordan, Kenny Burrell, Chambers and Pete LaRoca from the previous month. The album in question appeared as BLP 1592 in the label’s catalogue listings, yet was not actually released until it first saw the light of day in Japan 20 years later.

The three Clark originals here were each recorded by the pianist on at least one later occasion, though title changes confuse the chronology. Trombonist Bennie Green’s 1960 Time album features Clark’s piano and three of his tunes, including a version of “Blue Minor” mistitled “Cool Struttin” and one of “Cool Struttin” under the title “It’s Time.” Clark did “Royal Flush” twice more under his own name — on a March ‘59 Blue Note quintet date with Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Chambers and Art Blakey first released in Japan as My Conception in 1980; and as “Nica” on the 1960 Time album Sonny Clark Trio with George Duvivier and Max Roach.

— Bob Blumenthal, 1999