BLP 4105

Ike Quebec - It Might As Well Be Spring

Released - June 1964

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, December 9, 1961
Ike Quebec, tenor sax; Freddie Roach, organ; Milt Hinton, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.2 A Light Reprieve
tk.5 It Might As Well Be Spring
tk.7 Lover Man
tk.15 Ol' Man River
tk.21 Willow Weep For Me
tk.26 Easy Don't Hurt

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
It Might as Well Be Spring	Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers	09 December 1961
A Light Reprieve	Ike Quebec	09 December 1961
Easy - Don't Hurt	Ike Quebec	09 December 1961
Side Two
Lover Man	Jimmy Davis, Ram Ramirez, James Sherman	09 December 1961
Ol' Man River	Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern	09 December 1961
Willow Weep for Me	Ann Ronell	09 December 1961

Liner Notes

I FIRST heard Ike Quebec in the 1940’s when Frankie Newton would occasionally bring him to Boston. Ike would fill the room with has tone•, and not having had enough during his visits, I bought all the records he made. Blue Note was the label that gave Ike a chance to be heard then, and it is Blue Note which is now responsible for Ike’s return to a more active part in the jazz scene. As his previous two albums (Heavy Soul — 4093 and Blue and Sentimental — 4098) make clear, he has lost none of his distinctive, forceful lyricism. His tone, moreover, is even fuller and his style more expressive than it was twenty years ago.

It is that sensuous firm tone that first distinguishes Ike's playing. "From the time I started on tenor in 1942 after about seven years on piano," Ike recalls, sound became very important to me. No matter how foxy a man's ideas were, if he didn't sound good, he wasn't saying anything to me.'

Ike claims that hearing Teddy Wilson made him decide to end his career as a pianist. "'He was saying so much," says Ike, "that I turned to the tenor." But the base of Ike's horn style was shaped primarily by a pianist and a trumpeter. "Louis Armstrong," Ike remembers, "had those long, soaring melodic lines. And Earl Hines was able to break up those lines and construct them into surprising new variations. So I've been involved in combining both approaches lyricism and sometimes angularity."

Through his years with Frankie Newton, Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Cab Calloway, and others, Ike absorbed other stimuli, and he evolved into a formidable swinger who was also capable of remarkable sensitivity. During the 1950s, Ike was comparatively inactive. He had remained in contact with Blue Note, however, and during the past few years, had been listening to much of what was happening in the jazz recording studios. "I listened to this one and I listened to that one," says Ike, "and I said to myself, 'My God, I haven't lost anything. I can do as well as that, and I certainly still have something that's my own."

First came a series of Blue Note singles, and then the albums. Listeners who had heard Ike in the 1940s and wondered where he had disappeared, agreed with Ike that he indeed retained his individuality. And newer members of the jazz audience were beginning to be drawn by the warmth, inexorable logic, and controlled power of his playing. For this newest illustration of the scope of Ike Quebec, he has reassembled the rhythm section with which he recorded the Heavy Soul album. Organist Freddie Roach is from Newark, and Ike explains his high regard for Roach by pointing out that "Freddie is not the usual soggy organist. He really moves, and he's growing all the time. He's still young — in his early 20s — and he's a musician to watch."

Milt Hinton was a longtime associate of Quebec's in the Cab Calloway band. "We know each other so well musically," says Ike, "that we don't have to say anything to each other. A blink of the eye will do it. On all those days on the road during all those years, Milt and I hardly ever left the theatre between shows. We'd stay in the dressing room, just playing. So you know I always get the message from him."

Ike has a unique way of describing the effect that Al Harewood's drumming has on him. "Al," says Ike, "actually reminds me of the way a drummer would play for a show in a cabaret. When I hear him behind me, I can visualize smoke, dim lights, and broads kicking. I like that. It gives me a good, loose feeling. It makes me think it's late at night, and that's my favorite time.'

Ike had been wanting to record "It Might As Well Be Spring" for a long time. His performance demonstrates his thorough mastery of jazz ballad interpretation. There is intimacy without sentimentality, a supple use of dynamics, continual taste, and an invigorating intensification of the mood as the tempo quickens. "A light Reprieve" is an original by Ike. As he explains the basis for the title, he begins: "Sometimes you get into a groove in which you feel halfway sorry for yourself. Then you snap out of it, and you say, 'Well, hell, I ought to give myself a reprieve. Things aren't that bad.' The piece is therefore buoyantly relaxed, a release from tension. It's in a minor vein, and conveys," Ike emphasizes, "more of that late night feeling." Worth noting is the fact that, as aggressively as Ike plays in sections of the number, there is never a sense of strain. He swings with ease on any kind of material. Freddie Roach's solo is one of his most intriguing in the set — pungent, limber, and intelligently conceived.

For this listener, the most satisfying track is Ike's "Easy — Don't Hurt." The title and mood reflect again the pictorial nature of Ike's musical thinking at times. "I used to play in Canada quite a lot," he says, "and they have real shows in the clubs there. Among the acts are often adagio dancers. You know the scene where the guy goes after the girl with a whip. Well, this song is about what happens after he whips her. They've come to an understanding and things between them get groovy. Then they really get together." The song is a blues, somewhat "dressed up" harmonically, as Ike puts it. Here Once more is that firm, rounded tone, the plastic sense of time, the gradual swelling of intensity, and the strong impression of enormous, latent power in addition to the force being expended. In essence, Ike plays with a fullness of feeling that is both compelling and restorative.

"I always think of Billie Holiday when I play 'Lover Man,"' Ike notes. And his performance is like Billie's in the sense that he sustains and builds an enveloping mood while remaining entirely personal. Note, too, the irrepressible play of emotions in Ike's peroration to the tune. "Ol' Man River" bursts into a boiling stream. "This was one time," says Ike, "that I got into something emotionally and I just couldn't stop. I jumped in, and I couldn't turn around." Accordingly, the performance surges with uninhibited release of emotion, and it's one of the most explosive Ike has ever recorded.

The ballad skill of Ike is evident once more in the tender unfolding of "Willow Weep for Me," another tune Ike has always wanted to record. By changes in texture and by shaping the melodic and rhythmic lines into resilient patterns, Ike is able to create a totality, a fully-formed series of improvisations rather than a collection of bright fragments.

After the session was over, I asked Ike what the term "jazz" meant to him; what qualities, if any, were unchanging in his definition of the word. "For me," he concluded, "if you play jazz, you've got to reveal yourself. I'm also convinced that you get the best jazz from the immediate thought, the immediate emotion. From what you're thinking and feeling right now. I'm not opposed to arranging and composition, of course; but in my own case, I always create best when I'm being most spontaneous."

Ike meanwhile looks ahead to more dates with unmistakable confidence. "I've got things up my sleeve that will show people what I've been thinking all these years. I've got some time to make up, and I feel that I've only reached the beginning of a new stage for me." Here, then, is a musician who has already achieved maturity in style, but who continues to search for new ways to reveal himself more fully. And in this album, there is no diffusion or brittle attempts to conform to fashion. What you hear is full-strength Ike Quebec.

— NAT HENTOFF

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

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT IT MIGHT AS WELL BE SPRING

The urge to define jazz in terms of generations often leads us to undervalue broader trends in the music. Consider the tenor saxophone in the '50s and early-'60s. While most of the discussions focused on hard/East Coast versus cool/West Coast, or on the mainstream resurgence, there were also a number of players who favored big sounds, solid swing, and blues-based romanticism over technical display and abstract construction. This school, if you will, drew from both sides and the dead center of the swing/bop divide, and left a body of work that future generations might consider as definitive of the era as the output of Getz, Rollins, Coltrane, and Hawkins. The best of that music can be found in Ben Webster's Verve sessions, Gene Ammons's Prestige dates, and the less voluminous but equally moving music that Ike Quebec documented in his second incarnation as a Blue Note recording artist.

Like Webster and Ammons, who also scuffled while producing their eloquent oeuvres of the time, Quebec paid serious dues that no doubt fed the emotional depth of his output. Drugs were the cause, as they were with Ammons, though Quebec was more inclined to acknowledge his problems in his song titles (including "A Light Reprieve" in the present collection). This meant, among other things, that the archaic cabaret laws of the time made it impossible for Quebec to pursue his career on New York nightclub stages. That, and the cancer that ended his life a mere 13 months after these tracks were made, might have left Quebec as little more than another jazz tragedy; but his special relationship with Blue Note ensured that there would be much to celebrate from the final phase of his career. That phase was launched on July 1, 1959, with what proved to be the last Blue Note date at Rudy Van Gelder's original Hackensack, New Jersey studio. (Quebec also inaugurated Van Gelder's current Englewood Cliffs digs for Blue Note three weeks later, though the results were never released.) Over the next 40 months, the label put the tenorman in front of the RVG mics on nearly two dozen occasions, as both a featured sideman and on dates of his own, that found him taking one of the first stateside shots at bossa nova success, leading all-star acoustic rhythm sections, and in front of the organ that fellow Blue Note artist Jimmy Smith had made so popular.

Quebec's foursquare, masculine groove was made for an organ combo, as were the concepts of Ammons and even Webster (both of whom came to record in the setting at the time), and it is no surprise that over half of Quebec's '59—'62 Blue Note dates employ a Hammond B-3. In almost every instance, a string bass was also employed in the rhythm section, a strategy that allowed for a more flexible flow and gave the organist latitude to stress orchestral effects. Several excellent supporting groups were assembled for these sessions, including a blue-ribbon cast of Sir Charles Thompson, Milt Hinton, and J. C. Heard for a September 1960 session originally intended for release as 45-rpm singles only. Yet Alfred Lion realized that the band assembled for Quebec's first 12-inch LP, Heavy Soul, was truly special, which is why he brought the same cast back for It Might as Well Be Spring two weeks later.

It was an inspired choice, as each of the supporting musicians is clearly on Quebec's wavelength. Milt Hinton, a fellow alumnus of the Cab Calloway band, locks in with the understated and underrated Al Harewood throughout, with the pair at their best when strolling while organist Freddie Roach lays out. Roach, the last of many musicians who Quebec brought to the label, is in fine form here, taking advantage of his limited solo opportunities (especially on "Reprieve"), but making his greatest mark with the highly original voicings with which he supported the leader. The excellence of the entire program, warm if less demonstrative than its predecessor, puts It Might as Well Be Spring in the same relationship to Heavy Soul as another rare Blue Note sequel, Dexter Gordon's A Swingin' Affair, which followed Gordon's Go! One discographical note: A Quebec original entitled "A Light Reprieve" was also included in the saxophonist's July 1959 session for Blue Note, but that blues is not the same com position as the present " Reprieve," whose origins are hinted at when Quebec quotes a Dizzy Gillespie opus at the fade.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006