BLP 4129

Stanley Turrentine - Never Let Me Go

Released - November 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, January 18, 1963
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Shirley Scott, organ; Sam Jones, bass; Clarence Johnston, drums.

tk.12 Never Let Me Go

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 13, 1963
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Shirley Scott, organ; Major Holley, bass; Al Harewood, drums; Ray Barretto, congas, tambourine #1-3,5,6.

tk.6 Trouble
tk.16 Major's Minor
tk.19 Without A Song
tk.22 God Bless The Child
tk.24 You'll Never Get Away From Me
tk.28 Sera's Dance

Session Photos

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

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Trouble	Harold Logan, Lloyd Price	13 February 1963
God Bless the Child	Arthur Herzog, Billie Holiday	13 February 1963
Sara's Dance	Stanley Turrentine	13 February 1963
Without a Song	Edward Eliscu, Billy Rose, Vincent Youmans	13 February 1963
Side Two
Major's Minor	Shirley Scott, Stanley Turrentine	13 February 1963
Never Let Me Go	Shirley Scott	18 January 1963
You'll Never Get Away from Me	Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne	13 February 1963

Liner Notes

"WHEN Stanley plays," Shirley Scott was trying to verbalize her husband's most distinctive musical quality, "it's like he's singing. All I can tell you is," she smiled with the doubled satisfaction of a consonant musical and personal partnership, "he sounds good to me."

Stanley Turrentine was more specific in detailing those stylistic elements which have made Shirley Scott a particularly refreshing and resilient organist. I had told Stanley of my aversion to those organists — and they are legion — who use the instrument is if they were working overtime on the construction of a subway. Shirley's playing, by contrast, is lithe, graceful, and witty.

"It's her knowledge of dynamics," Stanley explained. "She knows that, like any other organist, she has the power to snuff out anybody, including the drummer. But she doesn't abuse that power. She plays with other people. Also, Shirley uses the complete organ. By knowing more about pedaling than most jazz organists, she gets a fuller sound and a more pulsating beat. Furthermore, she's an exceptionally melodic improviser, and she has a unique approach to voicing her chords."

Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott have been musically allied since August, 1960, and they were married soon after. Turrentine, a 29-year-old member of a musical family from Pittsburgh, had worked with Earl Bostic, Ray Charles, and Max Roach, among other groups. Shirley Scott was born in Philadelphia on March 14, 1934, less than a month before Stanley's arrival. Originally a pianist and then a trumpeter, Shirley switched to organ in 1954. After working around Philadelphia, she was featured with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis for five years before going out on her own.

For Shirley, having Stanley as a musical colleague not only provided her with the added strength that comes from sharing a common goal, but his lyricism stimulatingly complemented her own. I asked Stanley what the effect of their union had been on his playing. After all, since Shirley is an organist, their unit does not include a bassist — except on some recording dates. Had he missed the bass? "Well," he said, "I've had to listen more. You hear a lot of overtones in the organ, and you have to be consistently alert to follow the chord structure. The result, therefore, is that working with Shirley has sharpened my harmonic sense considerably."

For this session, Stanley and Shirley did utilize a bassist, the durable and ebullient Major Holley. "He was the man for us," Stanley emphasizes, "because he has a big, beautiful sound and a very melodic conception." "I was a little apprehensive," Shirley adds, "because I'm so used to making my own bass lines, and no two people think alike. But Major was just right. He not only didn't hold me back. He helped me."

Al Harewood is a favorite of both Stanley and Shirley. With characteristic economy, Stanley points out, "Al is so basic; he's tasty; and he never gets in the way." As for Ray Barretto, Stanley and Shirley agreed that, unlike some hypertensive conga players, Ray was expert at controlling his instrument. "I've heard congas run away with the man playing them," says Shirley, "but Ray knows where to place them, and when to leave them out."

The opening Trouble, a tune written and often performed by Lloyd Price, was suggested to Stanley by his trumpet-playing brother, Tommy Turrentine. "It's an oddly appealing song," Stanley emphasizes. "for me, it says what its title promises. It reminds me of trouble." On this track, and throughout the album, I would like to cite again the bracing absence of churning, lumpish heaviness in Shirley's playing. "Yes," Shirley answered my question, "I do consciously try to play light. I think everybody in a group should be heard, and I'm conscious of how easily I could play over the other musicians. Also, when you plan the organ too loud, everything gets distorted. I can't even hear myself."

In his solo on Trouble, Turrentine manages to express urgency with speech-like, exclamatory phrasing and yet he also remains able to shape his intensity into balanced, flowing form. Shirley Scott does more than provide the harmonic background; she punctuates, adds to and otherwise illuminates the story in her own singularly and equally disciplined way. Then, when she takes center stage, she indicates how buoyant the organ can be, even in this context of surging passion.

Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child, a statement of Emersonian self-reliance tinged with bitter experience, provides a further illustration of Shirley Scott's spontaneity. "She used stops in that version," says Stanley Turrentine, "I'd never heard her work with before. As long as we've been together, she can still surprise me. Shirley is always improvising. Many of the other organists stay in one straight, little groove. There's no limiting Shirley though." Turrentine's playing on the tune is appropriately introspective and poignant. Shirley supplies an intriguing contrast of both color and mood, emphasizing the pungent resistance to despair that is also implicit in Billie's tune.

Tommy Turrentine wrote Sara's Dance. It's partly modal in harmonic structure in the sense that the first sixteen bars and the final eight are based on just one chord, f minor. The more conventional bridge is formed on c minor and F7. "With that kind of harmonic base," Stanley points out, "we had more melodic freedom." Shirley adds that this was the first time she had ever recorded a tune with this degree of challenge to her melodic imagination, and she obviously enjoyed the experience.

During an engagement at Minton's in Harlem shortly before this recording session, one of Stanley's friends kept asking for Without A Song. Turrentine finally yielded to the request, and he and his wife soon discovered they'd become fond of the tune. Because it is a romantic piece, it fits the temperaments of both. And yet, they do not play it in a saccharine, excessively brooding manner. Without distorting the song's lyrical character, they've brightened it into a celebratory rather than a ceremonial experience.

Although Stanley Turrentine composed the melody for Major's Minor, he gives most of the credit for the piece to his wife. It's a minor blues with inversions. In Shirley's solo, note again the highly individualistic textures Shirley draws from her instrument, the incisiveness of her phrasing, and her quick, darting wit. Stanley, as is his commendable custom, avoids rhetoric. He tells his story directly, with a firm_and large tone, and with a compelling sense of swing.

Never Let Me Go, on which Sam Jones and Clarence Johnston replace Major Holley and Al Harewood, gratifies Stanley's and Shirley's affection for ballads. Stanley exemplifies his wife's description of the vocal nature of his playing. He sustains a delicacy of mood without copping out by falling into bathos or by doubling the tempo.

You'll Never Get Away from Me is from Gypsy, and is seldom performed by jazz combos. The treatment here is light-hearted, easily swinging, and as reflective as the rest of the program of the thoroughly relaxed aura for this gate. Stanley and Shirley have found their own styles, and they have discovered further that those conceptions fuse with each other to provide both musicians with the added pleasure of functioning as a unit which liberates rather than constricts its members. Add to this combination a discreet and attentive rhythm section, and the result is, as Stanley summarized the proceedings, "a ball."

—NAT HENTOFF

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

Shirley Scott performs by courtesy Of Prestige Records.

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT NEVER LET ME GO

Jazz fans in some future, post-corporate world will no doubt scratch their heads over the subterfuge labels often employed when a musician's obligations to a rival company prohibited straightforward identification. There were several attempts at what might actually pass for disguise, for how would one know without listening that Lester Young's pianist A Guy was actually Nat Cole, or that Cannonball Adderley had once appeared on a Milt Jackson session as Ronnie Peters? Often, though, the trick was to disguise without really disguising. The presence of Charlie Parker with Miles Davis as Charlie Chan and Cannonball with Louis Smith as Buckshot LeFunke is a bit easier to decipher, as was Stanley Turrentine's true identity when he appeared with his wife Shirley Scott on Prestige as Stan Turner. Scott, for her part, retumed the favor on a Blue Note Turrentine session under the nom de disque Little Miss Cott.

Turrentine and Scott were not only professional partners but a married couple when these half-hearted aliases were assumed in 1961; but since each had their own record deal with rival jazz labels, their collaboration — for contractual reasons — dare not speak its name on album covers. For the sake of clarity if nothing else, this foolishness was abandoned by the time Never Let Me Go was taped in 1963. It was the first of four occasions on which Scott was credited on one of her husband's Blue Note albums.

As was often the case at Blue Note, this disc is the product of two contiguous visits to the Van Gelder studios. In both instances, the assembled band represents an organ combo uncommon for its lack of guitar and inclusion of bass. The choice represented a norm for Scott, who first came to prominence in Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' guitarless trio in 1956, and who began recording with an added bassist both under Davis' name and on her own two years later. What resulted was a greater sense of space that fed into Scott'S lighter touch and inventive voicings and settings, and that threw Turrentine's brawny sound into even greater relief.

Ray Barretto's congas were added for the second session where the bulk of the music was made, and fit snugly with the tasteful drums of Al Harewood into the seamless Turrentine/Scott groove. Barretto had worked with Scott previously on Davis sessions as well as her own dates, but the conga drummer's presence here, as well as that of bassist Major Holley, Jr., can probably be traced to the success that they and Turrentine enjoyed under the leadership of Kenny Burrell on the guitarist's Blue Note classic Midnight Blue, which had been recorded a month earlier. With Barretto, Holley and Harwood completing the quintet, six titles were recorded, including remakes of "Without a Song" and "Major's Minor," titles that had been attempted at the earlier session with Sam Jones, Clarence Johnston and no added percussion. The title track here is the choice item of that initial date, and of this album, and remains one of Turrentine's most gripping ballad performances.

The saxophonist assembled one of the best of his many fine musical programs on this album, which reflects comfort in a variety of musical areas including black pop music ("Never Let Me Go" and "Trouble"), mainstream standards ("Without a Song" and the bonus track "They Can't Take That Away from Me"), show tunes of more recent vintage ("You'll Never Get Away from Me"), jazz classics ("God Bless the Child") and original material ("Major's Minor" and "Sara's Dance," the latter by Stanley's trumpet-playing brother Tommy Turrentine). That a listener at a Harlem nightclub had requested the Vincent Youmans chestnut "Without a Song," and that Turrentine had been able to respond and play it, speaks volumes about the knowledge base that the better jazz musicians drew upon at the cusp of the pop music explosion that the Beatles would soon trigger. Turrentine proved to be among the few who could move comfortably and with integrity intact within the commercial flow, and cut one of the first jazz versions of a Beatles tune, "Can't Buy Me Love," in 1964 (though it was not released until 1980).

For some comparative listening, and another great Turrentine collection with Scott, seek out Hustlin', also available in an RVG Edition, wherein saxophonist and spouse revisit "Trouble" a year later with Kenny Burrell aboard.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003