BLP 4062

Horace Parlan - Headin' South

Released - May 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, December 6, 1960
Horace Parlan, piano; George Tucker, bass; Al Harewood, drums; Ray Barretto, congas #1-3,6,7.

tk.2 Jim Loves Sue
tk.7 Headin' South
tk.8 Congalegre
tk.9 Prelude To A Kiss
tk.10 Summertime
tk.12 The Song Is Ended
tk.16 My Mother's Eyes
tk.17 Low Down

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Headin' South	Horace Parlan	06 December 1960
The Song Is Ended	Irving Berlin	06 December 1960
Summertime	George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward	06 December 1960
Low Down	Horace Parlan	06 December 1960
Side Two
Congalegre	Ray Barretto	06 December 1960
Prelude to a Kiss	Duke Ellington, Irving Gordon, Irving Mills	06 December 1960
Jim Loves Sue	Ahmad Jamal	06 December 1960
My Mother's Eyes	Abel Baer, L. Wolfe Gilbert	06 December 1960

Liner Notes

ONE of the favorite indoor sports of jazz writers and fans is the tracing down of the origins of a musician's style, a practice that is sometimes carried on with the same grim determination another kind of specialist gives to proving he was descended from the early English kings. Since style-tracing has become such a hobby, the word "influence" has become dreadfully misused, until now it is employed mostly as a euphemism for "imitation." When Horace Parlan speaks of influence, though, he does without prompting or self-consciousness, he restores the to its original meaning. He finds, in other musicians, concepts he can use, not strings of notes.

The pianist he inevitably speaks of first is Ahmad Jamal, and the best proof of what om saying is that Jamal's Jim Loves Sue appears on this album, and the pianist sounds like no-one other than Horace Parlan. "I suspect," Horace says, "that Jamal is capable of ten times what he's doing. But he has refined his style so that he can say a great deal with a very few notes. And I'm not as technically equipped as he is, so I have to make everything I play mean something."

Parlan refers here to a childhood attack of polio which left the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand inoperable. It would not the first time that technical limitations have determined style. There is, of course, the somewhat parallel case of the great Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, but one need look no farther than another musician from whom Parlan derives musical nourishment, Miles Davis. Davis, in our time, has worked within the limitations of his technical equipment to produce the most strikingly original music of recent years.

From Jamal and Davis, Parlan has taken an idea of space. "Space," the pianist Cecil Taylor once remarked, "is the rate of at which the harmony changes." Both Jamal and Davis have been working on using as few chords as possible, so as to make their melodic improvisations freer. This idea appears on Jim Loves Sue (which could have been written by no one but Jamal) and on Summertime. The latter is somewhat in the nature of a tribute to Davis, for Parlan makes use of elements of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans arrangement of the piece. (One of the erectly pleasurable things on Summertime, by the way, is George Tucker's bowed bass work. Parlan says of it, "George is one of the few bassists who can use a bow and not sound like bees or wasps.")

Still another pianist whose economy appeals to Horace is John Lewis, who remarked on a television show recently that "if you play too many notes you may obscure What you mean." Parlan says of him, "I don't go along with all his ideas of arranging and composing, and I don't think jazz and classical music will mix, but I love the economy with which he plays, and he set a new standard for comping."

But this idea of space and economy is far from the whole musical story of Horace Parlan. Unfortunately, one of the other important facets of his style has recently become a commercial gimmick, and has been taken over by certain musicians to whom banknotes seem much more important than musical ones. I refer, of course, to Horace's urgent feeling for the blues.

Horace is as aware as anyone else of the great commercial property that has been made of gospel-funk-groove-soul-roots, and feels that, in time, the proper adjustments will be made, and the men will be separated from the bandwagon boys. "In any movement, they get sorted out," he says. "From the beginnings of bop, Bird and Dizzy and a few others are left, and from the cool school..." He stopped, in annoyance at himself... "I hate that word, school. I don't think classifications are very important except to the people who do the classifying."

"I always played this way," he says. We have all, by now, heard that statement repeated, in one way or another, by musicians fresh from the conservatory who suddenly found it expedient to announce that oh yes, they went to sanctified church every Sunday as a child, but in the case of Horace Parlan, we know it to be true. One of the greatest contributions to the authentic use of church music has been made by Charles Mingus, who has as one of his other talents the ability to spot phoniness or pretense at a distance of several miles, and it is to Horace Parlan's great credit that he was a valuable part of some of the most telling records Mingus made in that style.

And if it can be said to be true, as I think it can, that what a musician does not play is as important as what he does, then it speaks very well of Horace that When he chooses to play a ballad, as he does here with Ellington's lovely Prelude to a Kiss, then he plays that ballad with taste and respect, and does not try to sanctify it simply because that is the "hip" thing to do. Of his use of the bugle call at the beginning of that piece, Horace says, "I think jazz can use a little humor. It's gotten much too solemn."

But when he does decide to get down into the blues or gospel traditions, as he does on the title tune, Headin' South or the aptly named Low Down, he does so with force and power.

The Horace Parlan trio, as presented here, have worked together for a long time, and have recorded together a unit, notably Us Three (Blue Note 4037). With the addition of tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, they are now the Playhouse Four, a name they appropriated from Minton's. But on this set, it was decided to join them with conga drummer Ray Barretto, for a change of pace and to see what the result would be. Although Horace has not changed his style to accommodate the extra rhythm instrument — another proof of his convictions — the result has been added excitement, particularly on Barretto's showcase, his own composition Congalegre.

The two remaining pieces are both, in their own way, very special. The Song Is Ended is one of several early Irving Berlin compositions which modern jazzmen have recently begun to rediscover, perhaps because of the great interest in them evidenced by Thelonious Monk, a pianist who is a past master of economy.

The final track, My Mother's Eyes, is almost never done by jazzmen. It will remind you of either George Jessel or Nellie Lutcher, depending on where your roots are. Horace says he Was thinking of Miss Lutcher, but it comes out Parlan.

To restate Horace's own premise, someday the few people making a contribution to the current style will be sorted out and recognized. If sincerity, conviction and lack of pretense count for anything, Horace Parlan will certainly be one of them.

—JOE GOLDBERG

Cover Photo by RONNIE BRATHWAITE
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER