BLP 4091

Sonny Clark - Leapin' And Lopin'

Released - April 1962

Recording and Session Information

Tommy Turrentine, trumpet; Charlie Rouse, tenor sax; Sonny Clark, piano; Butch Warren, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 13, 1961

tk.7 Voodoo
tk.12 Somethin' Special
tk.17 Midnight Mambo
tk.18 Melody For C
tk.21 Eric Walks

Ike Quebec, tenor sax; Sonny Clark, piano; Butch Warren, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

tk.24 Deep In A Dream

Session Photos

Sonny Clark

Sonny Clark and Ike Quebec

Tommy Turrentine and Charlie Rouse

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Somethin' Special	Sonny Clark	13 November 1961
Deep in a Dream	Jimmy Van Heusen, Eddie DeLange	13 November 1961
Melody for C	Sonny Clark	13 November 1961
Side Two
Eric Walks	Butch Warren	13 November 1961
Voodoo	Sonny Clark	13 November 1961
Midnight Mambo	Tommy Turrentine	13 November 1961

Liner Notes

JAZZ now has several traditions within its grand tradition, and these have a way of enduring through the efforts of the originators and the musicians whose imaginations they subsequently capture. Today there is much talk about a fresh movement, encompassing a variety of related and unrelated groups and called, for lack of a better title, “the new thing.” In recognizing “the new thing” we should not lose sight of “the not-so-old thing,” the direct line from Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, especially when it is not bastardized as it has been so often in the Funky Fifties and the Soulful Sixties. This is not to say that if it is not being played exactly the way Dizzy Gillespie played in the 1940s it is not correct. Change is natural and individual interpretation is one of the rewarding characteristics of jazz but when the spirit of the music is abused then it is bound to suffer.

The musicians who make up the quintet in Leapin’ and Lopin’ have respect for the tradition in which they grew up. Although they are expressing their own feelings, which, in turn, reflect the decade in which they are now playing, there is a spirit and substance present that show a direct link to their particular roots.

Sonny Clark is fortunately far from the fashionably funky, and is more personal a pianist than ever before. Bud Powell was his main influence and, if general area of keyboard approach is to be considered, still is. However, Clark, whose past Blue Note recordings show that he was never as close to Powell as, or, say, Walter Bishop or Kenny Drew once were, is now more solidly his own man when it comes down to specifics. Furthermore, he has not lost that quality which Art Farmer referred to on the back liner of Cool Struttin’: “Some people sound like they’re trying to swing. Sonny just flows naturally along.”

Since this is not Clark’s first Blue Note LP, there are many of you who are aware of his background. On the other hand, as it has been a while since his last outing, I’m sure there are some who do not know that he was born in Herminie, Pennsylvania, sixteen miles from Pittsburgh, in July of 1931 — or that he lived in Pittsburgh from age twelve to age nineteen, and played piano from the time he was four. His older brother, also a pianist, took him out to California as he was turning twenty, and Sonny soon was playing with Wardell Gray and other important jazz men around Los Angeles.

Next he joined Oscar Pettiford’s group and moved on to San Francisco. From there it was 2 years with Buddy De Franco, including a European tour, before settling in California again, this time in 1956 as one of Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars at Hermosa Beach. The urge to go east was accomplished by traveling to New York as Dinah Washington’s accompanist in 1957.

In New York he gigged with Sonny Rollins, Charlie Mingus, J. R. Monterose, and led his own trio which included Sam Jones and Art Taylor. Then came the series of Blue Note albums, starting with Dial S for Sonny (1570), followed by Sonny’s Crib (1576), Sonny Clark Trio (1579), and Cool Struttin’ (1588). The first two feature sextets while Struttin’ is by a quintet. Men like Art Former, Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, and Jackie McLean have graced the front lines while Sam Jones, Paul Chambers, Wilbur Ware, Art Taylor, Philly Joe Jones, and Louis Hayes hove helped comprise the rhythm sections. A formidable list to be sure. Perhaps the names of the musicians in this supporting cast are not quite as lustrous in reputation, but the final result is the best album Sonny Clark has presented to-date.

In 1961, Sonny has been playing at some of the East Village clubs, particularly at an East 10th Street coffee house called The White Whale (Herman Melville, please copy). Other habitues have been Tommy Turrentine and Billy Higgins. Since Sonny digs their playing, it was natural to have them in his recording group.

Turrentine, the older brother of tenor man Stanley Turrentine, hardly needs an introduction to Blue Note’s regular listeners who have heard him with Horace Parlan. Tommy, who played with Billy Eckstine’s band in the Forties, Max Roach in he Fifties, and Lou Donaldson in the Sixties, is an expressive descendant of the attitude created by Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro and fostered by Kenny Dorham and Art Farmer. There is a lot of heart in his playing and a melodic head to go with it, Above all, there is much Turrentine.

Higgins is the inventive Californian who, on the basis of his work with Ornette Coleman in 1959-60, won the Down Beat International Critics’ Poll New Star award in 1960. He does more than keep time, but he does that requisite task expertly.

Another New Star winner, this time in the 1961 poll, was, ironically, the veteran Charlie Rouse, who received this belated recognition after becoming part of the Thelonious Monk Quartet in 1959. Rouse, who recorded with Todd Dameron for Blue Note as far back as the late-Forties (The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Volume 1, 1531), has paid his musical dues with Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Bennie Green, and Buddy Rich. In addition, he and French Hornist Julius Watkins co-led The Jazz Modes from 1956—58. An individualist who has heard and learned from Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins. Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins but has his own distinct sound and attack, Rouse, in this album, equals the high standard he has set for himself in recent years.

Butch Warren, the young bassist from Washington who was heard with Kenny Dorham’s quintet in 1960, is a steady performer. He is well represented in this set as writer (“Eric Walks”), bower (behind Clark on “Deep in a Dream”) and picker (solos on “Melody for C” and “Eric Walks”).

The library for the date is composed of five originals and one unearthed standard. Leader Clark is the main contributor with three lines. “Somethin’ Special” is an infectious minor-key blues with the three main soloists echoing the cooking mood of the theme. “Melody for C” is in the increasingly popular (among modern jazzmen) modal groove and is, in fact, extremely melodious. There is vigorous, vibrant Rouse, tender Turrentine, and thoughtful Clark in a succinct demonstration of what a mature soloist Sonny has become. “Voodoo” walks on padded feet through its eerily beautiful 32-bar theme, building o tension for the soloists to release.

Warren’s “Eric Walks” is a swinger with its own story, but in places, it seems a cousin to Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n You,” harmonically-speaking. The rhythm section is tightly-knit and inspiring to the soloists, all of whom sparkle brightly.

“Midnight Mambo” by Turrentine has an appropriate dancing quality. Both horns and Clark exhibit rhythmic freeness in their stints with Sonny weaving in some mambo motifs among his longer-lined phrases.

Turrentine and Rouse drop out on the only ballad, Eddie DeLange’s warmly caressing “Deep in a Dream”. Warren’s bow underlines the opening part of Clark’s sensitive melody statement. After Sonny’s solo, a surprise guest demonstrates that he has lost none of the skill which made him one of the important tenor saxophone voices of the mid-’40s. Whether or not you remember Ike Quebec, there is no escaping the marvelous warmth and depth of his solo here. He respects the beauty inherent in the song, at the same time investing it with his own personality. This perfect balance really brings the message across.

Sonny Clark once was quoted as saying that “soul” was "your conception” and “your growing up to the capacities of the instrument.” Sonny Clark has come of age.

— IRA GITLER

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT LEAPIN’ AND LOPIN’

If discretion and compassion for Sonny Clark’s ongoing struggles led original annotator Ira Gitler to note only that “it had been a while since (Clark’s] last outing” for Blue Note, the pianist’s earlier ubiquity on the label made some notice of the absence obligatory. Clark had participated in an astonishing 20 sessions (roughly a quarter of his entire recorded output) in the 10 months between his label debut on Hank Mobley in June 1957 and Benny Green’s Soul Stirrin’ the following April, but only five more in the next year. After the March 1959 session that produced My Conception, 30 months would pass before Clark and Alfred Lion were reunited in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, months in which the pianist only made five recordings elsewhere.

As the world learned fairly quickly after his death on January 13, 1963, heroin addiction explained the erratic nature of Clark’s career. Several friends and colleagues have testified in subsequent years about the depths of Clark’s problem, none more memorably than Hampton Hawes in the autobiography he wrote with Don Asher’s assistance, Raise Up Off Me. Hawes describes an east coast trip in which he and Clark formed a hustle-and-score partnership that earned them the moniker the Gold Dust Twins. Interventions by their peers including one in Thelonious Monk’s apartment involving Monk and Sonny Rollins) produced no results. Hawes retreated to his Los Angeles home and survived another two decades, while Clark remained in Manhattan and succumbed more quickly. Another fellow pianist and fellow sufferer, Bill Evans, put it aptly in the anagram he chose for a requiem, “N.Y.C.’s No Lark.”

Yet the recordings that comprise the second phase of Clark’s Blue Note career, beginning with Jackie McLean’s A Fickle Sonance in October ‘61 and running through Stanley Turrentine’s Jubilee Shout session a year later, hardly reveal an artist in decline. These final recordings are suffused with the soul and lithe grace of his earlier work, filtered through a richer harmonic prism and an even more assertive rhythmic concept. This was no radical rethinking of his approach, but rather a shift in emphasis, as if Monk’s influence in Clark’s personal stylistic mix had increased vis-à-vis the equally compelling examples of Bud Powell and Horace Silver.

The Monk connection was never clearer than on this, Clark’s final date as a leader, where the personnel includes Monk associates present, past, and future. Charlie Rouse was well into the third year of what would become a decade-long tenure with Monk, Billy Higgins had drummed briefly in Monk’s quartet during a 1960 west coast tour, and Butch Warren would spend a year with the pianist during 1963—64. With Tommy Turrentine’s trumpet adding a slightly exotic richness to the ensembles and Higgins’s wide-bottomed cymbal work, the band here sounds like a first cousin to the one Monk led on his 1959 classic Five x Monk x Five.

Some comparative listening will underscore these developments. An obvious place to start is Smithville, the 1958 date by trumpeter Louis Smith that was recently reissued in the Blue Note Connoisseur Series and includes the only other recorded meeting of Clark and Rouse. While both men play well on Smith’s date, there is an added snap and gravitas here, befitting musicians who had attentively listened to (and, in Rouse’s case, worked with) Monk in the interim. An even clearer indication of the effect Monk had on Clark can be heard when “Voodoo” on the present session is contrasted with the Lighthouse All-Stars version of “Topsy” featuring Clark on the 1956 Contemporary album Music For Lighthousekeeping. “Voodoo” is similar to “Topsy” harmonically, and both performances are taken at similar tempos with active piano commentary during the theme choruses. Clark is sly and bubbly on the earlier performance, but more dark and brooding here, as if he had spent a portion of the ensuing years staring into the abyss.

This is not to suggest that the affirmative momentum Clark generated so effortlessly throughout his career is absent here. His improvisations continued to induce smiles, his writing never sounded better than when articulated by the present ensemble, and the overall result is as memorable as any in Clark’s oeuvre. Among the highlights are the playing throughout of Tommy Turrentine, in one of his best outings; the Clark/Warren/Higgins rhythm section that briefly became a house rhythm section for producer Lion; and the presence of guest star Ike Quebec on "Deep in a Dream,” a classic ballad reading that led to other recorded encounters with Clark. Note the bonus tracks, a “ Melody for C” alternate originally slated to be the master take, and an otherwise undocumented Clark original.

-Bob 8lumenthal, 2008