"Baby Face" Willette - Face to Face
Released - May 1961
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, January 30, 1961
Fred Jackson, tenor sax; 'Baby Face' Willette, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Ben Dixon, drums.
tk.7 Face To Face
tk.11 Something Strange
tk.17 Whatever Lola Wants
tk.18 Goin' Down
tk.19 Swingin' At Sugar Ray's
tk.24 High 'N' Low
Session Photos
Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Swingin' at Sugar Ray's | Baby Face Willette | 30 January 1961 |
| Goin' Down | Baby Face Willette | 30 January 1961 |
| Whatever Lola Wants | Richard Adler, Jerry Ross | 30 January 1961 |
| Side Two | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Face to Face | Baby Face Willette | 30 January 1961 |
| Something Strange | Baby Face Willette | 30 January 1961 |
| High 'N' Low | Baby Face Willette | 30 January 1961 |
Liner Notes
The measure of a jazz musician’s success is often as much the result of his strength and endurance as it is of the size of his talent. As a facet of show business (a facet that has, until recent years, been relegated to a relatively ignoble status), jazz is subject to the many intrinsic hazards of a precarious area of life. Intermittent work, work under conditions and surroundings not always conducive to one’s most creative efforts, and a certain audience indifference until one has assumed the stature of a “star,” are only three such hazards that a man must be prepared to cope with. And, unfortunately, no matter what the capacities of his talent may be, one can rarely make use of all of them, because one must expend no small measure of one’s energy and nerve in merely surviving. Certainly such problems ore not peculiar to the jazz musician, but rarely are they foreign to him.
Of course, all this has been discussed before and everyone knows it. But probably few know it as empirically as “Baby Face” Willette, who makes his debut as a leader with this album.
Willette, who was born in New Orleans on September 11, 1933, more closely resembles an 18-year-old enthusiast of jazz than a 28-year-old creator of it — hence the nick-name. But his appearance is deceptive on several levels. If his physical stature is slight and his demeanor reserved, he belies both with the energy and power he exhibits at the organ. And on its own level, his music is as representative of his experience as say, Leadbelly’s was of his.
Willette was first, and is still, when necessary, a piano player, and began taking lessons when he was four with the encouragement of an uncle, Fred Freeman, a pianist who achieved a certain popularity in the 1920s. His mother, a missionary who also played the piano, and his father, the minister of a church in Little Rock, Arkansas, were quick to accommodate his early interest in music and he was first introduced to the organ at his father’s church. His professional career as a pianist, primarily with rhythm and blues and gospel groups, began in his late-teens and took him across the entire United States, Cuba, and eastern Canada, encompassing an itinerary that would probably make Jack Kerouac envious. But Willette’s traveling motives were less romantic than financial.
“It was always a hassle,” he says. “I would just go where I’d hear there was work.”
For close to fifteen years he was almost perpetually on the road, scuffling from town to town. From New Orleans and Little Rock he went west, with stops in Texas and New Mexico, to Los Angeles, where he worked with Johnny Otis and Big Joy McNeeley. From L.A. he went to St. Louis, then on to Detroit, Cleveland, and up into Canada, as far east as Montreal, working with various groups and for periods that lasted anywhere from several nights to several months. He covered New England for a time, then journeyed west once more, through Pittsburgh, Toledo, Chicago (where he established what was to become a home base), Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Returning to Chicago intermittently, he then spent a good deal of time in the south and southwest: Oklahoma City, Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Miami, Havana for three months, etc.
Some of the groups with which he worked and to which he frequently contributed tunes included those led by King Colax, Jump Jackson, Joe Houston, Jimmy Griffin, Roy Brown, Guitar Slim, the Caravan Gospel Singers, and a gospel group organized by his two sisters who song spirituals. For o while, in Chicago and Milwaukee, he fronted his own trio.
It was while he was in Chicago that he heard church organists Mayfield Woods and Herman Stevens whom he credits with having influenced his shift to the organ by making him aware of what he terms its more sensational qualities. He also decided at that point to devote himself primarily to jazz which, after hearing several Charlie Parker records, became what he calls his “first love.” But he voices no contempt For rhythm and blues in which he “paid his dues.” On the contrary, he believes it to have furnished him with a solid foundation.
“There’s really not much difference,” he feels, “between rhythm and blues and even church music and jazz. That’s where it all come from.”
Willette cannot read music and plays entirely by ear. He favors Jimmy Smith among jazz organists, along with Shirley Scott. Pianists who he feels have made a strong impression on him have been Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Erroll Garner, and Oscar Peterson. Willette arrived in New York just four months before this recording session and, in addition to being a frequent visitor to various jam sessions around town, has worked with Lou Donaldson.
Willette’s associates here, all of similar bent and experience, are Fred Jackson on tenor sax, Grant Green on guitar, and Ben Dixon on drums.
Jackson, a hard-toned, vociferous tenor in the Gene Ammons tradition, is from Atlanta, Georgia, and is in his early-thirties. Currently he is on tour with Lloyd Price.
Grant Green, the 30-year-old guitarist who made his first recorded appearance as a leader on Blue Note 4064 (Grant’s First Stand) in a trio that also featured Willette and Dixon, centered his playing activities in his home area until 1960, when he came to New York for the first time. In St. Louis he worked for the most part with R&B groups, among them units led by Jack Murphy, Sam Lazar, and Jimmy Forrest. He also had his own trio. Lou Donaldson, a longtime friend and admirer, brought Green to the attention of Alfred Lion. Green consistently reveals, in his single-note approach, a rhythmic resiliency and o blues-rooted energy.
Twenty-six year-old drummer Ben Dixon was born in Gaffney, South Carolina, moved to Washington D.C. when he was four, and began playing the drums when he was 15. He come to New York in 1956 to work with Wilbur Ware, Mal Waldron, Roy Draper, Leo Parker, and Lloyd Price, with whom he remained and recorded for three years. Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Philly Joe Jones are his favorites and chief influences on drums.
All the tunes but “Whatever Lola Wants” are by Willette. “Swingin’ at Sugar Ray’s” “Goin’ Down,” “Face to Face,” “Somethin’ Strange,” High ‘n low,” each of which reflecting a different shade of blue, may be variations on a familiar theme, but Willette and company, particularly on “Goin’ Down,” which seems to me to be the high point of the set, give evidence that it is a theme worthy of continued exploration. Certainly one need not have to have entirely shared the experience which created it, to respond to it.
— ROBERT LEVIN
Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT FACE TO FACE
Jazz history is filled with musicians who are recalled as intriguing footnotes to the main story. Roosevelt “Baby Face” Willette is a primary example. Until his two Blue Note albums were reissued on CD in the 1990s, Willette was best remembered for his nickname and the oh-so-literal cover image on his final recording, the Argo session Behind the 8 Ball. Yet Willette had more going for him than his youthful countenance and Don Bronstein’s photo. Like most footnotes, Willette had his moment — or, in his specific case, his week.
For all the wanderlust that Robert Levin alludes to in his original liner notes, the only documents Willette had left for posterity prior to January 1961 were two obscure R&B singles that found him singing as well as playing. On January 23, 1961, things changed (briefly) when Lou Donaldson cut Here ‘Tis, the popular alto saxophonist’s first album as a leader to feature organ in the rhythm section. Donaldson’s goal was to make a “legitimate” soul album, so he brought Willette and another new face, guitarist Grant Green, in to play with him and his regular drummer, Dave Bailey. “These guys have all played a lot of rhythm and blues and they know what it’s about,” Donaldson said of his then-unknown colleagues. Indeed they did, as producer Alfred Lion was quick to spot. Five days later, he recorded Willette, Green, and drummer Ben Dixon on what would become the guitarist’s debut as a leader, Grant’s First Stand, with Willette contributing the composition “Baby’s Minor Lope.” The present session followed two days later, and a week to the day after the Donaldson session, and together this troika of recordings account for half of Willette’s discography.
The relationship with Willette signaled both the growing popularity of the Hammond B-3 organ (which did not receive its own category in the Down Beat polls until 1964) and a change of policy at Blue Note. Jimmy Smith, the musician single-handedly responsible for popularizing the instrument, had provided all of the organ that the label needed to this point, a few Ike Quebec 45 sessions excepted; but Lion may have realized how difficult it would be to retain the services of his superstar once Smith’s current contract expired. Lion also had to be aware of what the competition was doing in this area, especially Prestige, which had already signed Brother Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott, Johnny "Hammond" Smith, and Larry Young. Willette became the first of a new wave of organists on Blue Note that would also include Freddie Roach, John Patton, and a more musically mature Young.
Fred Jackson, the featured tenor saxophonist here, was another R&B veteran who had been heard over the previous decade with Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams and Chuck Willis. Like Dixon, Jackson was employed at the time in the talented big band of pop singer Lloyd Price, where Tommy Turrentine, Julian Priester, and other jazz notables also found work in the period. Jackson would record three sessions of his own tor Blue Note in the following year, though only one (Hootin’ ‘n’ Tootin ) was released at the time, and he also appeared on two of John Patton’s early albums. His sound and extroverted style are perfect in this setting, where four of the compositions are blues and the title track also partakes of the soulful spirit. Green and Dixon went on to become the rhythm section of choice for all manner of organists over the following six years, and the guitarist (who we now know was born in 1935, making him 26 rather than 30 at the time of this session) is in the kind of form that would earn a New Star victory in the 1962 Down Beat Critics’ Poll.
The two bonus tracks here are true alternates rather than clearly inferior versions of the master takes. Given the paucity of other recordings by Willette, they are especially welcome. Here was an organist with his own sound and feeling, yet not much was heard from him after this eight-day burst of studio activity. After Stop and Listen, another excellent album with Green and Dixon, was recorded for Blue Note in May, it appears that Willette took to the road again. He then returned to Chicago, where he formed a trio and briefly held down a gig at the Moroccan Village. Argo recorded him twice in 1964, which yielded the discs Mo-Roc and the previously mentioned 8 Ball, then again a year later, though these final tracks were never issued. Willette died in 1971, cementing his footnote status. Sessions like the present one prove that it often pays to “read” the footnotes.
— Bob Blumenthal, 2007
