BLP 4069

Stanley Turrentine - Up at Minton's - Volume 1

Released - August 1961

Recording and Session Information

"Minton's Playhouse", NYC, 2nd set, February 23, 1961
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Horace Parlan, piano; Grant Green, guitar; George Tucker, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.7 But Not For Me

"Minton's Playhouse", NYC, 3rd set, February 23, 1961
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Horace Parlan, piano; Grant Green, guitar; George Tucker, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.8 Stanley's Time
tk.9 Broadway
tk.11 Yesterdays

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
But Not for Me	George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin	23 February 1961
Stanley's Time	Stanley Turrentine	23 February 1961
Side Two
Broadway	Billy Bird, Teddy McRae, Henri Woode	23 February 1961
Yesterdays	Otto Harbach, Jerome Kern	23 February 1961

Liner Notes

THE IDEA behind this session was a logical one. Alfred Lion, having become thoroughly familiar with Stanley Turrentine’s style as a result of several highly successful studio recordings, decided that the time had come to present him informally in a session to be taped at a small, intimate night spot. It was natural that his choice for the locale should be the Play House.

Although the Play House is its official name and the one you’ll have to look for when you want to pay it a visit, everyone who he cuts the room still thinks of it as Minton’s. Actually there was a Mr. Minton, a former saxophonist and Local 802 official, who at one point had run the celebrated Rhythm Club, which Duke Ellington once called the greatest musicians’ hangout of them all.

Kenny Clarke, reminiscing in Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, recalled that originally Minton’s was a rather drab resort frequented by cronies of Mr. Minton, and that Happy Cauldwell had a combo in the back room for a while. But the character of the place changed late in 1940 when Teddy Hill, who had just broken up the big band in which Kenny and Dizzy Gillespie had played, was installed as manager. From the beginning of 1941, when Teddy brought in a quartet composed of Kenny, Joe Guy on trumpet, Thelonious Monk and bassist Nick Fenton, Minton’s began to earn a reputation as the place to go. “It was nice and intimate,” said Mary Lou Williams. "The bar was at the front, and the cabaret was in the back. The bandstand was situated at the rear of the back room, where the wall was covered with strange paintings... during the daytime, people played the jukebox and danced. I used to call in often and got many laughs. That’s how we were — one big family on West 118th Street. Minton’s was a room next door to the Cecil Hotel."

Today Henry Minton is long gone, but the Play House looks almost the way it did 20 years ago, though the wall between the bar and the back room has been taken down. But the memory of the happenings at Minton’s is what gives the room an intangible aura of glamour. Knowing that Gillespie and Monk, Klook and Charlie Christian, Lester Young and Charlie Parker all were among the guests on the bandstand, you are conscious that this room as much as any other was responsible for the development of many of the revolutionary musical concepts that changed the face of jazz in the 1940's.

It is the reputation of the Play House as the original crucible of bebop, rather than any physical aspect or acoustical merit, that has given the room an importance it retains today. The genial Teddy Hill, looking very little older than the day he took charge, is still on the scene, and the music policy is still one of encouraging the younger and more adventurous talents.

One night in February of 1961 a trio composed of Horace Parlan, George Tucker and Al Harewood (known as Us Three) was working in the room. Tucker has become virtually a house leader in recent years and has led several groups there. It was natural to fit Stanley Turrentine into this set-up, this being the rhythm section with which he has gigged and recorded. The occasion also provided Alfred Lion with a perfect opportunity to incorporate into the proceedings a new and remarkable soloist, Grant Green from St. Louis.

Stanley Turrentine and this same rhythm section (with the addition of Stan’s brother Tommy on trumpet) were heard in Speakin’ My Piece under the name of the Horace Parlan Quintet on Blue Note 4043. Biographical details of the Pittsburgh tenor saxophonist will be found in his first LP as a leader, Look Out! on Blue Note 4039, and in his session backed by the Three Sounds, Blue Hour on 4057.

Grant Green arrived in New York only a few months before the present session took place, but no time was lost in corralling him for record dates well suited to his talents. Featured in his own Grant’s First Stand on Blue Note 4064, he has also taken part in numerous other jobs for the label, some already released, others due for issue shortly. Kenny Dorham, Lou Donaldson and organist Baby Face Willette are among those who have used Green on their dates and have been gassed by his fluency.

It was singularly appropriate that this great new guitarist was included in a session recorded at the Play House, for in the old days Charlie Christian was a frequent after-hours visitor. Relaxing in the less formalized setting of the club after a long evening with Benny Goodman’s Sextet, Christian established himself as the bellwether of the experimentalists on electric guitar, an instrument almost unknown to jazz until his advent. One of Teddy Hill’s proudest possessions, which he still keeps in his office at the Play House even though it is battered and useless, is the amplifier of the original guitar on which Christian used to play some of the inspiring choruses that made Minton’s a mecca of the jazz modernists two decades ago.

Stanley Turrentine and Grant Green and the rhythm section, all well acquainted with the background facts about the room, naturally came to this session aware that its associations lent the occasion a special meaning. Moreover, since the Christian days, when a young fan named Jerry Newman used to sit at the side of the room trying to catch the sounds with a crude disc-recorder, there had been practically no on-the-spot recording at the club.

"The whole session was a pleasure," says Alfred Lion. "Everyone was in the best of spirits, Teddy Hill was very cooperative, and it was a Thursday night and the room was packed."

Given all these ingredients - a room filled with memories and crowded with customers, a compatible group of first-rate musicians, and the best of equipment in modern tape-recording facilities - it is hardly surprising that Up At Minton’s turned out to be a hall for all.

Volume 1

The opening track is a suitable groove-setter for the occasion. The Gershwin standard But Not For Me (introduced, incidentally, by Ginger Rogers in a 1930 Broadway show called Girl Crazy) is played straight, with minor rhythmic variations, by Stanley, at a bright tempo, before he embarks on a long and consistent improvisation. It is interesting to note - and I’ve observed this often to be the case among the less spectacular and more tasteful of modern soloists - that Stanley doesn’t always think in terms of building. A good solo doesn’t invariably have to be climactic, each chorus louder and more intense than the last, though there has been a tendency among some observers to look for this quality. What Stanley does is remain consistently interesting for about five minutes of well-constructed, emotionally mature choruses, which is enough in itself. Grant Green follows with an indication of the many great things to be expected of him - notice particularly how he gets to a tremolo effect that he likes, on the tonic, and stays with it for about 11 bars, reminding one that movement isn’t everything. Parlan’s solo, as so often happens with him, invests the tune with a few unexpected funky blues touches.

Stanley’s Time: Ah, yes, the blues! The tempo, moderato; the mode minor, the basic theme a simple use of the tonic, minor third and fourth. Grant Green’s solo is noteworthy: observe how, in his third chorus, he spends several bars investigating a G Minor 7th (or a C Minor 11th) with results that are melodically simple but harmonically most effective. Stan, George and Horace all have solos on this track.

Broadway: A tune on the changes of Crazy Rhythm, introduced by Count Basie’s band in 1940. Note the perfect fusion of Green’s solo into Turrentine’s, almost as if the tenor were an extension of his own ax, reminding us of Green’s comment: “I don’t listen to guitar players much - just horn players... I used to sit up all night copying Charlie Parker solos note by note.” Note also Harewood’s observant and complementary work during the Parlan solo.

Yesterdays: A Jerome Kern song of 1933, which most jazzmen dig for its harmonic structure even more than for its melody. Taken at a moderate pace, it offers a good example of Turrentine’s tasteful blend of qualities - the Rollins-and-Coltrane-like sense of time and articulation blended with a tonal warmth often reminiscent of Lucky Thompson. Notice, too, his subtle sense of when to use flat tones and when to employ a more perceptible vibrato. Green, Parlan and Tucker are heard from, the last-named showing a flair for melodic bass solo work that may surprise those who have thought of him chiefly as a reliable section man.

Volume 2

Later at Minton's is a big-game hunt into the hinterlands of the blues. Without even a theme as ammunition, unarmed by anything but the chord changes and their horns and souls, they begin their explorations with George and Al, treading slowly and cautiously, followed by Horace, then by an unusually aggressive Stanley (looking for Livingstone?). This is magnificent blues and superlative Turrentine. One point to watch for particularly occurs about five minutes along the route, when you’ll notice his passionate and technically wondrous use of syncopation in a passage of short, stabbing notes that have tremendous impact. Green’s solo, during which Al doubles the beat, has a climactic moment when he moves from a long series of triplets into the simpler final guitar chorus, when Al goes back to the original slow meter. The drums’ effective backing becomes evident again during Parlan's solo, when Al surprisingly bursts into a 12/8 pattern.

Come Rain or Come Shine, a Harold Arlen melody from the 1946 Broadway musical St. Louis Woman, basically is a pleasant melody without any direct relationship to the blues, but in this treatment everybody concerned helps to lend it a blues-like quality. Parlan’s darting, impulsive phrasing in his solo here, mostly during the first half of his chorus, is a fine sample of his work. I was also much impressed by Stan’s treatment of the melody itself, and by George Tucker’s added touches during the closing chorus.

Love for Sale, after a bass vamp, goes into a cymbal figure by Al that is maintained throughout the first chorus (except for the release). It’s a hypnotizing use of 12/8 meter that goes like this: 

Stan is at his most endlessly fluent on this track and Parlan, never content with the bare bones of a song’s changes, is constantly feeding him creative and inspiring ideas. The longest performance in the album (just under a quarter of an hour), this is also the most original and exciting.

Summertime, the Porgy and Bess standard, moves slowly and gracefully as a vehicle for Stanley in his most reflective ballad mood, with time out for contributions by Green and Parlan, the former demonstrating his tasteful and relatively uncluttered slow-melody mood. Parlan’s chording is rich and mood-sustaining.

This is one session I was regretful to hear coming to an end. In fact, there was an added regret that I hadn’t been there in person. Yet these albums are more than merely the next best thing; after all, the session only occurred once, but the records are available indefinitely. And in any case, I’m sure it won’t be the last' time that Blue Note comes to Minton's.

- LEONARD FEATHER
Author of The New Encyclopedia of Jazz

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