BLP 4082

Horace Parlan - Up and Down

Released - March 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 18, 1961
Booker Ervin, tenor sax; Horace Parlan, piano; Grant Green, guitar; George Tucker, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.4 Light Blue
tk.8 Up And Down
tk.10 The Book's Beat
tk.15 Fugee
tk.16 Lonely One
tk.18 The Other Part Of Town

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
The Book's Beat	Booker Ervin	18 June 1961
Up and Down	Horace Parlan	18 June 1961
Fugee	George Tucker	18 June 1961
Side Two
The Other Part of Town	Grant Green	18 June 1961
Lonely One	Babs Gonzales	18 June 1961
Light Blue	Tommy Turrentine	18 June 1961

Liner Notes

NOT much more than two years have passed since the first album released under Horace Parlan's name was reviewed in Down Beat. The LP was Movin' and Groovin' (Blue Note 4028). The critic who dealt with it, Barbara Gardner, observed that "Parlan is a technically competent pianist, which is saying a lot in view of the crop of sloppy, inadequate pianists who flounder under the guise of 'soulful brothers'. " Adding that Parlan possesses the ability to communicate sincereåy and effectively, she concluded: 'The album is well-conceived, the material is varied, and level of performance is consistently high. Parlan should become a prominent figure in jazz."

I have quoted from this review not in order to sell anybody on Horace (after all, it is safe to assume that most people who read liner notes have already bought the album and need no Further persuasion), but rather to point up retrospectively that Miss Gardner and other critics who reacted similarly were right. Barely four years after his arrival in New York, and less than two years since his first album was taped, Horace already is a prominent figure in jazz.

Since Movin' and Groovin' came out, there has been abundant evidence of Horace's progress. Heard in a stimulating variety of contexts, he has settled down to membership in a cooperative rhythm section, with George Tucker and Al Harewood. They were with him on Us Three (4037), as well as on Stanley Turrentine's Look Out' (4039) and in Horace's own quintet session, Speakin' My Piece (4043). What has impressed me more and more in following Parlan's progress is his deep, passionate sense of commitment, an emotional dedication to the nature and development of each performance that is never marred by eclecticism or technical display. When Horace speaks his piece you know that it is his alone, and that he speaks from the heart.

The instrumentation on the present set is different from that of any previous Parlan album. Though he has been heard in a tenor-and-rhythm setting before (notably the Turrentine item listed above), the addition of Grant Green lends the group a distinctive sound, important both as a rhythmic component and as an additional melodic voice.

Booker Ervin, like Horace, is a graduate of the challenging Charles Mingus group of the late-1950s; also like Horace, he was 30 years old at the time of this session and is a comparative newcomer on the New York scene, having arrived in May of 1958. Born Booker Telleferro Ervin II in Denison, Texas, he spent five years as a child studying trombone with his father, a professional musician, but had not played for seven years when, in 1950, he entered the Air Force. He then began playing tenor, leading his own combo in Okinawa, and after his discharge in 1953, studied at Schillinger House (now known as the Berklee School). He worked in Denver for a year or two and spent six months in Pittsburgh before finally making it to the Apple.

Grant Green, also 30 years old, is of course a major Blue Note discovery, already heard to advantage in his own albums (Grant's First Stand, 4064; Green Street, 4071 Grantstand, 4086). George Tucker and Al Harewood need no introduction to each other, to Horace, or to the conscientious Blue Note camp-follower.

As Horace points out, "The four of us — Booker, George, Al, and I — had been working as a unit at the Playhouse, so we managed to get a real group feeling going during that time. And Grant Green was my suggestion. I wanted to include him on this date because I heard him in St. Louis and I was tremendously impressed with him. I feel that his musical roots and mine are similar, and I hope the results show it. Actually this was one of the most relaxed and enjoyable sessions I can ever remember taking part in." Of the opening track, "The Book's Beat," he observes: "This is a number we'd been playing for quite a long while with the quartet before we got around to it. Booker, it seems to me, has a very special penchant for writing good basic blues lines; and he plays with such fervor and honesty that each performance becomes a part of him."

After Booker's intense and compelling offering on this moderato blues track, Grant takes over for an extended solo. Though his technical agility enables him to express himself in long, sweeping, and sometimes intricate phrases, he demonstrates again his sense of contrast; note particularly the shattering intensity with which he launches into a whole chorus built on a repeated triplet phrase. Horace, in his solo, shows a similar feeling for light and shade, notably just before his chorded chorus, in a passage that repeats a phrase with intriguingly varied accents. George Tucker's solo reminds us of Horace's assessment of his virtues ("One of the purest bass sounds; and his style is different. "The attractive theme, with tenor-and-guitar figures answered by the rhythm section's Charleston beats, returns to seal off this consistently rewording performance.

"Up and Down," Horace's title number for the album, is so named because of the melodic vacillation of the theme between G and A-flat. At this demanding up tempo Horace demonstrates brilliantly his ability to feed the soloists with an aggressively swinging style of comping. Booker reminds us, in his solos, that basically he comes out of two major traditions: Bird and Prez. The melodic continuity of his work is as important as his keen rhythmic sense. You always know where he stands in relation to the beat; this is a characteristic some times lacking in new saxophonists who reach so far for complex harmonic effects that the end result fails to swing.

"Fugae" is a blues in 6/4 time. "George Tucker has been dabbling in composition for the past few months," says Horace, "and as you can tell from this one, he has some original ideas. This was one of the highlights of the session for me." Horace's solo here is a craftsman-like example of his capacity For building and extending a mood. Note particularly the passage in which he uses a B-flat pedal point against a colorful series oF chords. Grant and Booker both sustain the hard-swinging blues-waltz feel. The bass-and-piano riffing against Al Harewood's supple inserts leads to an excitingly percussive passage as Horace fades away before the theme returns.

Grant Green's "The Other Part of Town" is, according to Horace, "a showcase for Grant — and he really stole this one!" The medium-paced blues, actually, is a lengthy and absorbing excursion that reflects credit on all five participants. Horace starts out rather simply, with a touch of humor in the repeated phrase during his second chorus, but there is a cumulative tension later in his series of tonic-to-fifth rising phrases. This is very characteristic of Parlan. Booker then cooks persuasively, with Tucker walking firmly underneath before coming up for solo air. Despite all these virtues, it must be admitted Horace has a point when he extols the virtues of Grant Green here. The sudden explosion into a riot of B-flat-E-flat-D-flat patterns is only one stunning factor in a solo rich with new concepts and warmly moving melodic execution.

"Lonely One" was composed by Babs Gonzales, better known as a bop singer and as a writer of mainly up-tempo originals "I'd been promising for quite a while to record something for Babs," says Horace. "I particularly liked this one. He wrote it for Lady Day — yes, it does have lyrics — and think she made a record of it that was never released." The construction is such that the performance here consists of just one long chorus. Booker states the first portion of the minor melody in long notes; Horace articulates gently in the next passage, and Grant takes the bridge, against double-time brushwork from Al; then Booker takes it out. It's Babs's most impressive piece of writing to date and a touchingly nostalgic interpretation.

"Light Blue" is from the pen of Tommy Turrentine_ "Tommy always comes up with something different — never a conventional blues says Horace. Booker swings wildly on this moderato tune in F minor- I hear little if any Coltrane influence (you may recall the statement by Mingus that he heard Booker playing in his present style before Coltrane came to prominence). Horace's solo builds from mainly single note lines to a chorded conclusion. Green and Tucker also have effective workouts.

One concluding thought; it is interesting to note that each of the six tracks here was written by a different composer. The themes and lines furnished by Messrs Parlan, Ervin, Tucker, Gonzales, Green, and Turrentine have been woven into an integrated whole in which the dominant factors are the personalities and solo styles of the men who bring these works to life. Up & Down is a typical Parlan album; by which I mean it reminds us again that Horace is headed no place but up.

— LEONARD FEATHER

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

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT UP & DOWN

While hardly the end of his career, Up & Down marks the end of Horace Parlan's most productive period as a recording artist and presence on the US jazz scene. This rich though brief era began in 1957, when Charles Mingus brought the pianist into his Jazz Workshop for a two-year stay that led to several of Mingus's finest recordings, and received a major boost in 1959, when Parlan began an equally valuable relationship with Lou Donaldson. It was through Donaldson that Parlan entered the Blue Note family (on the saxophonist's October 1959 album The Time Is Right), and it was in Donaldson's band that Parlan, George Tucker, and Al Harewood first joined forces in the rhythm section so memorably dubbed Us Three for one of the pianist's own sessions.

The substantial Blue Note discography of this unit in support of Donaldson, Stanley Turrentine, and Dexter Gordon, as well as on several Parlan albums, has earned it a place in history as a notable gang of three. After leaving Donaldson's employ in November 1960, the trio gained an important fourth partner in tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin. Parlan and Ervin had initially crossed paths in the pianist's hometown of Pittsburgh, and it was Parlan who brought Ervin into the Mingus band in 1958. Reunited in what became the cooperative Playhouse Four (named for Minton's Playhouse, where bassist Tucker frequently served as house bandleader), the Mingus alums managed to fuse the emotional tensions of the bassist's music with the funkier inclinations of Parlan's blues-centered style. Yet the Playhouse Four's importance in Parlan's career has tended to be by the rhythm section's more frequent appearances on Blue Note in support of another great tenor, Stanley Turrentine, and by Parlan's use of the pseudonym Felix Krull on the Four's only recording as a quartet, Ervin's Candid album That's It!

Adding Grant Green to the mix here was an excellent idea with a precedent. Four months earlier, with Stanley Turrentine in Ervin's chair and serving as leader, the guitarist had participated in the gig that produced two exceptional volumes titled Up at Minton's. Like Ervin, Green provided a different kind of edge to the present tracks, one that reinforces the more traditional blues bent of the rhythm section and lends a conversational, after-hours aura to the music. What results is a memorable session suffused with eloquence and empathy.

Still, Up & Down suggests why Parlan never caught on with the public, and why he suffered a subsequent decline in recording opportunities. As a pianist who could function equally well at the head of a trio or in support of horns, he lacked the fleetness and romantic bent of someone like Red Garland, though given Parlan's physical limitations (childhood polio had paralyzed the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand), the versatility in his playing is quite amazing. And he clearly lacked the compositional chops of another, more celebrated Blue Note artist named Horace, to the point where both this and his previous quintet date, On the Spur of the Moment, had been designed to feature the writing of others. While most of the material on Spur was from outside the recording unit, including two titles by Ervin, the material here is drawn primarily from among the participants plus two longstanding associates. Trumpeter Tommy Turrentine, Stanley's older brother, was another one of Parlan's first employers, and has been credited by the pianist frequently as a source of instruction and inspiration. The album Tommy Turrentine (Time) had been the occasion of the pianist's first recorded composition, "Blues for J.P." Babs Gonzales was another acquaintance who employed Parlan on his self-produced recordings both before and after this date, including a 1968 album on which "Lonely One" was reprised. (A stunning tenor/bass/drums version of the tune can also be heard on Johnny Griffin's 1959 Riverside album The Little Giant.) On the subject of comparative listening, note how Parlan quickly moves into the hypnotic gospel zone that informed his most famous work with Mingus on the master take of "Fugee, " but turns in a solo with fewer licks on the alternate, where Green's solo is less potent; but these are matters of degree, as no one on this album ever had a problem playing the blues.

Parlan would visit Rudy Van Gelder's studio as a Blue Note leader one more time, in February 1963, with Ervin back aboard. That session was announced as up BLP 4134, Happy Frame of Mind, but went unreleased until it emerged 13 years later as part of the two-record set under Ervin's name titled Back from the Gig. It was not until 1974 and his expatriation to Denmark that Parlan's career as a leader would begin again.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2008