BLP 4127

Kenny Dorham - Una Mas

Released - December 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 1, 1963
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Butch Warren, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

tk.6 Sao Paulo
tk.9 Straight Ahead
tk.13 Una Mas (One More Time)
tk.16 If I Would Ever Leave You

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Una Mas (One More Time)	Kenny Dorham	01 April 1961
Straight Ahead	Kenny Dorham	01 April 1961
Side Two
Sao Paolo	Kenny Dorham	01 April 1961
If Ever I Would Leave You	Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe	01 April 1961

Liner Notes

Although Kenny Dorham was not yet forty at the time this album was recorded, he has long been one of the unmistakable individualists in modern jazz. In the 1940s, when Kenny worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine and others, there were the evident signs of a young player trying to transcend his influences and only intermittently succeeding. By the next decade, however, Kenny was firmly — and flowingly — himself. He had evolved into one of the most lyrical improvisers in jazz, but that lyricism was also unusually incisive. There is a consistent clarity and definiteness in Kenny’s playing that makes his work tensile as well as sensitive.

Kenny has continued to grow, as a writer as well as a player. And, as is characteristic of jazzmen who have refused to coast on past credits, Kenny also keeps looking for and finding new colleagues among the aspiring and stimulating young. This album, for example, introduces Joe Henderson (who has become a Blue Note artist as a result of his work at these sessions). Henderson was born in Lima, Ohio, on April 24, 1937. First interested in drums, Henderson began to apply himself to the tenor saxophone when he was about thirteen, and qualified for the high school band. He also started writing for that high school unit; and while still in school, Henderson broadened his range of experience by working nights at a local strip joint. At this time, Henderson’s primary influences were Lee Konitz and Stan Getz. (“Charlie Parker,” he recalls, “was too much for me to understand. My musical capacity wasn’t up to it.”)

After a year at Kentucky State College in Frankfurt, Henderson transferred in 1956 to Wayne State University in Detroit. Among his fellow students were Yusef Lateef, Curtis Fuller and Hugh Lawson. “Detroit,’ says Henderson, “was the real awakening for me.” Barry Harris helped the young reedman, and Henderson began to double between school and night club work. He played professionally with his colleagues from school and also with Sonny Stitt, Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams. In terms of influences, before coming to Detroit, Henderson had begun to open up to Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon But now, Charlie Parker become — and has remained — the key force in his development. (“Bird did everything the way it was supposed to be done.”)

Henderson spent two years in the Army, during which period he went on a world tour with the Rolling Along Show, which played army and some air force installations. (On that tour, incidentally, Henderson did some arranging and played bass as well as tenor, having begun to study the instrument at Wayne State.) On being discharged in August 1962, Henderson spent three months in Baltimore, and then came to New York. Kenny Dorham has been a particularly valuable source of encouragement for Henderson. “We have some kind of vibration going,” Henderson feels. ‘Even when we play unison lines, it seems we breathe at the same time. That closeness comes, I suppose, from the fact that I’ve liked his playing so long. Way before I came to New York, I’d hoped Kenny would be one of those I could record with.”

In addition to Joe Henderson, this album underlines the arrival of a remarkable — and remarkably young - drummer, Anthony Williams was 17 when these recordings were made. Originally from Boston, Williams first came to Dorham’s attention through Max Roach’s interest in the young man. Tony Williams came to New York, partly through the advice of Jackie McLean, and has worked in the city with McLean and Donald Byrd.

To Butch Warren, Tony Williams’s anchor man on this date, Tony “is the best young drummer in years. New York needed a new drummer, because most of the guys seemed to be falling into the same groove. This guy, however, is fresh and he’s so together, He’s strong melodically as well as rhythmically, and he has a fine sense of dynamics. He never overpowers you. His playing is just plain beautiful.”

Butch himself has been acquiring a rising reputation, in large part for his work with Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd and Walter Bishop. Edward “Butch” Warren was born in Washington, D.C., on August 9, 1939. His father, Edward Warren, Senior, is a pianist who for years led a bond in Washington through which his son absorbed considerable experience. Butch also worked with Stuff Smith and a variety of local combos before coming to New York around 1959. He describes his major shaping forces as having been Jimmy Blanton, Paul Chambers and Ray Brown.

Herbie Hancock is the subject of laudatory analyses among more and more New York musicians. Besides his recordings with Donald Byrd, there is Herbie’s own Takin” Off (Blue Note 4109) to demonstrate why Herbie has been accepted among the jazz power elite so quickly. Born in Chicago on April 12, 1 940, Herbie is a graduate of Grinnell College with a major in music composition and has been doing graduate work in New York at the Manhattan School of Music. He had his own jazz combo in Chicago; and since coming to New York, his credits include work with Byrd, Phil Woods, Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer, and Oliver Nelson.

The first track is also the first side. "Una Mas (One More Time)” is the first occasion Kenny has ever had on records to stretch out this far. “The groove,” he explains, “was very good. And when you get that relaxing a groove, you just don’t stop. Besides, the enthusiasm of the other guys seemed to be rising as we went along so there was no danger of losing freshness.” “Una Mas” is based on a 16-bar structure, but as developed by Dorham, the piece allows for unusual flexibility of mood and approach. “You can switch to almost any kind of feeling when you’re improvising on this,” Dorham explains. “From bossa nova to the blues.”

Kenny’s solo is characteristic in its logic, alert wit and rhythmic resiliency. Henderson’s playing indicates not only emotional power but also the capacity to mold his feelings so that they don’t erupt in a multi-directional spray. His playing is thoughtful as well as intense; and as a result, he gives his ideas and emotions breathing space. Herbie Hancock improvises with his customary lithe attack and economy of means.

“Straight Ahead,” a 32-bar tune with, as Kenny explains, “a chromatic I Got Rhythm in the bridge,” is basically a riff. “It’s the kind of figure,” Kenny continues, “that you’d play under a guy when he’s soloing. But it sounded so comfortable, we just developed it, rather than constructing bop lines around it.” Note Tony Williams’s assurance and taste behind Kenny’s deftly balanced solo. Joe Henderson’s contribution was one of the reasons For Kenny Dorham’s tribute to his colleague: “Joe is full of ideas, and he avoids cliches. He has lots of drive and imagination, and I’d rate him as one of the top young tenor players on the scene, next to Wayne Shorter.” Herbie Hancock’s swift and fluid calm is an intriguing change of perspective after Henderson’s urgency. There follows a Tony Williams solo. “Listen to that kid,” said Dorham. “He always plays something different in his solos, and he always comes out exactly on time. He’s one drummer you don’t have to count for to make sure you don’t get lost.”

“Sao Paulo” is the result of Kenny’s visit to that vivid Brazilian city in 1960 when he was on a South American tour. “The tune,” says Kenny, “has a half bossa feeling and the other half is some thing else. Swing you can call it.” The shape of the song is 12 bars, 12 bars, a section that is actually nine and a half bars long and then a return to the top.

Kenny’s solo has some of the bitter-sweet wistfulness of the homegrown bossa nova but it’s essentially within Kenny’s own tradition and is not an attempt to create a hybridization of idioms. Henderson and Hancock add their distinctively personal impressions of Kenny’s evocative piece and then all close with integrated grace.

Although the young sidemen contribute importantly throughout the album, it is Dorham — as leader, performer and writer — who dominates. This is a man with a firm voice of his own, but although he is widely respected by musicians, he has yet to break through to the kind of wide public acceptance which has occasionally seemed imminent. "All I can say,” says Kenny, “is that if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen. But it’s going to have to happen within a reasonable time. After all, I’ll soon be into my twenty-fifth year on the trumpet. Anyway, however it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.”

—NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

Musicians always appreciated Kenny Dorham's brilliance. In 1955, Art Blakey introduced the trumpeter as "the uncrowned king" on the classic live session recorded for Blue Note by the original Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia. More than 16 years later, when this writer asked Freddie Hubbard to name his favorite living trumpeters, Hubbard replied "Oh, you know, the usual: MIles, Dizzy, Kenny."

Unfortunately, the jazz audience would not have found Hubbard's inclusion of Dorham in the Olympian company of Davis and Gillespie so predictable in 1972. Dorham's profile had simply been too limited in the years that followed his 1963-64 Blue Note partnership with Joe Henderson, a partnership that began with this recording. When Hubbard stated what should indeed have been obvious, Dorham was suffering from kidney disease and spending 15 hours a week on a dialysis machine. I met Dorham in December of that year, when Claudio Roditi and other Boston based trumpeters organized a tribute/benefit concert, and by that point Dorham found it difficult to walk up hills and stairways. Still, he joined the assembled musicians and blew an inspiring solo on "A Night In Tunisia, " the one tune he had strength enough to perform. It turned out to be his last public performance, as Dorham died the following evening in New York after attending the Monday night session he had been hosting at Minton's Playhouse.

Even in his last hours, I can attest that Dorham's sound remained glorious - tight but full-toned, and chipping away into hurt at the edges. Only Miles Davis had a trumpet sound that contained as much emotion, as well as ideas that matched his sound so perfectly. Both musicians could move listeners to tears just playing melody, or create fireworks as their improvisations tested the outer reaches of the chord changes; and each was an individual, with a conception unbounded by narrow concepts of style.

Dorham left a rich if relatively small discography of memorable sessions, of which none is more memorable than Una Mas. It captures the trumpeter at his most soulful and technically commanding, contains three of his most memorable compositions in three distinct moods, and finds him surrounded by an equally incredible band. It also represents the prototype Blue Note afternoon at Rudy Van Gelder’s, where new stars are discovered and the groove is so strong that producer Alfred Lion throws time constraints to the wind and lets the band stretch out.

Joe Henderson was fresh out of the military and a Dorham discovery (the trumpeter tells the story of their meeting in his notes to Henderson’s Page One). Nat Hentoff’s original liner notes indicate that the saxophonist’s work here earned him his own Blue Note contract, and it is easy to imagine the delight with which Lion and his partner Francis Wolff responded to Henderson’s solos on the title track and “Straight Ahead.” In the same vein, Dorham must have been thrilled with this rhythm section, particularly the incredibly precocious drummer who was still working under the name of Anthony Williams. Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren (who had been introduced to the New York scene in one of Dorham’s bands) and Williams had recorded together previously for Blue Note, on a February 1963 Jackie McLean session that was issued in 1980 on the LP Vertigo; and Hancock had used Williams for his own second album, My Point of View, on March 19. In May, the pianist and drummer would join Miles Davis, with whom they helped to write a new chapter in jazz history. So there already was some familiarity among the rhythm section, which was only magnified by the obvious affinity of the two horn players.

Dorham had recorded “Una Mas” at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop in 1961. At that time, the tune had a shuffle beat and a written introduction that is omitted here, and when it was initially released (on the Pacific Jazz LP Inta Somettin’) it was given the title “US.” This version is far superior, with its nasty funk/bossa foundation, a Dorham solo that lets all of the stops out, and one of the great debuts in recorded history once Henderson enters. “Straight Ahead” ranks with the handful of best variations on “I Got Rhythm,” and finds Williams redefining how to play time on a ride cymbal right before our ears. The empathy of all five players is superlative on this track — hear where Henderson takes over from Dorham for one of the most inspired collective moments. The band also gets every drop of atmosphere out of “Sao Paulo,” making the most of the harmonic and rhythmic contrasts in this typically evocative Dorham original.

The final track, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” was not heard until the first CD issue of Una Mas in 1987. Reissue producer Michael Cuscuna made an excellent point at the time when he noted that this haunting Lerner and Loewe ballad from Camelot was probably omitted from the original album because it presented a different feeling from the rest of the material. It is a touching rendition, yet it does deviate from the taut crackle of the rest of the tracks. Yet while omitting it from the initial LP release made Una Mas a relatively brief album, there were no complaints, because what was issued — note for note — comprised one of the truly magical sessions in Blue Note history.

— Bob Blumenthal, 1999