BLP 4178

Blue Mitchell - The Thing To Do

Released - November 1964

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 30, 1964
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Chick Corea, piano; Gene Taylor, bass; Aloysius Foster, drums.

1391 tk.5 Fungii Mama
1392 tk.14 Step Lightly
1393 tk.15 The Thing To Do
1394 tk.17 Chick's Tune
1395 tk.19 Mona's Mood

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Fungii Mama	Blue Mitchell	July 30 1964
Mona's Mood	Jimmy Heath	July 30 1964
The Thing to Do	Jimmy Heath	July 30 1964
Side Two
Step Lightly	Joe Henderson	July 30 1964
Chick's Tune	Chick Corea	July 30 1964

Liner Notes

WHEN Horace Silver decided to disband after two weekend engagements at Birdland in March of 1964, he was simultaneously putting a new group into action. Actually Blue Mitchell’s quintet predates the breakup of that edition of the Silver combo, for during the five years plus they were with Horace, Mitchell, Junior Cook, Gene Taylor, and Roy Brooks worked together as a separate unit when the regular Silver group did not have a booking. Usually these times consisted of o Monday night at Birdland or the Village Gate, but occasionally there would be a longer engagement at Minton’s or the Coronet. At first, Walter Bishop was their pianist, but later it became Ronnie Mathews. When Mathews began working full-time with Roy Haynes, Chick Corea was enlisted.

During the Silver quintet’s March weekends at Birdland, Brooks become ill. His substitute was Al Foster, a young drummer who had been heard around New York with trumpeter Ted Curson and vibist Vera Auer. Mitchell liked his playing so well that when he started rehearsals of his new group, Foster was invited to stay.

Except for a couple of weeks in Cincinnati with tenor saxophonist Benny Golson (the owner of the club told Benny that he would like to have Blue play with the group), Mitchell has appeared with Cook, Taylor (his old Silver buddies), Corea, and Foster at Basie’s, Minton’s, and Birdland in New York; the Coronet in Brooklyn; Crawford’s Grill in Pittsburgh; Pep’s in Philadelphia; and Connolly’s and the Jazz Workshop in Boston. Perhaps this is one explanation of why the charts in this set are so together. They are oil ones that the group had been playing. l got that from Horace,” says Blue.

As a result, not only ore the ensembles clean and crisp, but there is a relaxed feeling in the solos. No one had to worry about getting the music straightened out on the date, as so often happens. There were no panic scenes and everyone just came in and took core of business, as the saying goes.

The wise idea to record material with which the group was familiar is not all Mitchell “got from Horace.” It would be foolish to expect a group embracing Mitchell, Cook, and Taylor not to contain a Silver lining. Yet, while there are similarities — the instrumental set-up, the sound of the horns, and the hard drive to be sure — there are differences within a general area. The originals are by Mitchell, Jimmy Heath, Joe Henderson, and Corea. Chick’s piano is oriented more toward Bud Powell than the funky school that Silver mined; and Foster’s beat, as resilient as a “spaldeen” (those pink rubber balls one could buy at a candy store for a nickel years ago), is stated with subtlety and personal accents for all its heat.

Mitchell, originally from Miami, Florida, is a spiritual descendant of another Floridian, Fats Navarro. A man whom Navarro also touched, the late Clifford Brown, is another who had an influence on Blue. Although he has reached his own way of saying something through his horn, Mitchell still retains the positive characteristics that he absorbed from these titans. The gamut of emotions he runs on the first two tracks alone (the hard, joyful romping on Fungii Mamo to the reflective, pure-toned beauty of Mona’s Mood) is an immediate indicator of his great talent. And fast or slow, cooking or romantic, there is never any doubt that Blue is playing a brass instrument.

I first heard of Blue when he was playing around Miami with tenor man Johnny Burdine in about 1951. A couple of years later, while he was a member of Earl Bostic’s band, I heard him play at Thelonious Monk’s house one afternoon. Mitchell, trumpeter Freeman Lee, and Monk were the only participants. Even in this informal instruction session with master Monk, Mitchell revealed a talent that was sure to bloom. With Silver it did, and now he is ready to go on to a deserved wider recognition.

The some can be said for fellow Floridian Junior Cook, who first impressed me with his work with Dizzy Gillespie in 1958. Silver was also impressed, during an earlier meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Junior has learned from an impressive list of tenor saxophonists: Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Honk Mobley, and John Coltrane. Though he con be reminiscent of some of his models, Cook has become increasingly confident in his chosen style, and delivers his message in a most authoritative manner.

It is an understatement to soy that Mitchell and Cook fit well together. They have a thing going that comes only after long periods of working as o team. Mitchell’s Fungii Mama originally began with the two horns tossing bars back and forth at each other. Then Blue put in the West Indian beat and the rest of the melody developed from there. That is how you hear it now. First they used it as a theme but now it is just part of their book. Junior and Blue take turns at setting runs behind the other’s solo to heighten the excitement as each man reaches a peak in his center stage statement. Fungii is a West Indian dish, in case you’re wondering. I don’t know if it’s hot and spicy, but Fungii Mama is. Foster’s solo certainly shakes some pepper in the pot. Mono’s Mood and The Thing To Do are tunes by tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath, arranged specially by him for Mitchell. The first, a plaintive ballad, was previously recorded by Heath with his own band. Mitchell displays his lovely tone and acute sensitivity here with o short assist from Corea.

The title tune, The Thing To Do, is closer to the groove Mitchell and Cook had been in while with Silver. With the rhythm section digging in hard behind them, both horn men settle in for some swinging. After Corea displays his virtuosity, Taylor solos in and around the ensemble before the number is vamped out. Joe Henderson, the tenor man with Horace Silver’s group as this is written, and a Blue Note recording artist in his own right, is responsible for Step Lightly, a relaxed opus that seems to come wafting in on soft winds, but which hos a few extra zephyrs of its own. It is a 16-bar construction with the blues infused. Everyone is in a relaxed, unstrained attitude here. All solo to advantage except Foster, who backstops in a warm, restrained manner.

Corea, a young man from Boston, who has only been in New York for a few years (his other playing credits include Willie Bobo’s combo), demonstrates that his fast fingers are not his only attributes with Chick’s Tune, a skillful reworking of the changes to You Stepped Out of o Dream. Beginning with on interesting melody, the rhythmic phrasing of this material adds to the effectiveness of the surging theme. It puts everyone in the mood to stretch out. Corea has the first solo, which includes a tip of the cap to Horace Silver. Then Cook comes ripping in with exciting use of the lower reaches of his tenor. Mitchell offers a steadily burning flame, fanned constantly by Taylor and Foster. After some 8-bar exchanges among Cook, Mitchell, and Foster, Corea’s leaping line is restated as a fitting climax to an extremely satisfying session.

Now that you’ve read all about it, take the record out of its jacket, place it on the turntable, and listen. That’s The Thing To Do!

—IRA GITLER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT THE THING TO DO

In the spirit of a recent television commercial, we might call this Blue Mitchell's "not exactly" album — not exactly the first recorded appearance of his partnership with Junior Cook outside the Horace Silver Quintet, and not exactly his first Blue Note album as a leader.

As Ira Gitler points out in the original liner notes, Mitchell and Cook and the other Silver sidemen were in the habit of working together when open dates occurred in their leader's schedule. This side partnership had already led to the first album under the saxophonist's name (Junior's Cookin', Jazzland 1961, with Dolo Coker and Ronnie Mathews sharing piano duties), one of Mitchell's seven Riverside LPs (The Cup Bearers, 1962, Cedar Walton on piano), and a session on Motown's short-lived Workshop subsidiary under the leadership of drummer Roy Brooks (Beat, 1963, with Hugh Lawson on piano and trombonist George Bohanon making the band a sextet). In each of these instances, reliable Gene Taylor had been on bass, and he was the logical choice for what became the Blue Mitchell (on record) or the Blue Mitchell/Junior Cook (for many club bookings) quintet.

The remaining chairs were filled by unknowns who went on to glorious careers that now stretch into a fifth decade. Chick Corea had worked primarily in Latin bands after arriving in New York from his native Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1962, as his early discography indicates with sessions under the leadership of Mongo Santamaria and Montego Joe, plus Latin albums by Sonny Stitt and Dave Pike, plus Hubert Laws's date The Laws of Jazz where the focus was more straight-ahead. Al Foster, in contrast, had never appeared on record before The Thing to Do. He reportedly called himself Aloysius in the credits here and on Mitchell's subsequent Down With It in deference to the wishes of his father. Any rough spots that might have emerged when two such neophytes were combined with three veterans already extremely familiar with each other's work were smoothed out over the course of the gigs that Gitler catalogues.

Empathy like that displayed by Mitchell and Cook, plus strong material and the contributions of the two obviously talented newcomers, no doubt played a strong part in prompting Blue Note to release The Thing to Do ahead of what had been scheduled as Mitchell's first album for the label. That August 1963 session had been assigned a catalogue number but ultimately went unissued for 17 years, when it finally emerged as Step Lightly. Joe Henderson's composition "Step Lightly" is not to be confused with a Benny Golson opus of the same name, and reappears here. It became one of Mitchell's personal favorites, which he revisited yet again on one of his final recording sessions, Louie Bellson's Prime Time (Concord, 1977). There are two additional versions of interest featuring Bobby Hutcherson, with Henderson present on what was Hutcherson's first visit to Van Gelder Studios as a leader (The Kicker, recorded in 1963) and as part of a quartet led by drummer Grassella Oliphant on Atlantic (The Grass Roots, 1965).

"Mona's Mood," as Gitler notes, is also a tune with a history. Composer Jimmy Heath introduced it in a tentet arrangement on his 1960 Riverside album Really Big, in an arrangement that might be considered an inversion of the resent chart with reeds carrying the main melody and a brass soloist taking the bridge. It was written for Heath's wife, who we are pleased to report remains at his side in 2004. Heath also contributed "The Thing to Do," and stressed in a 1998 conversation that 'he had not been specifically requested to deliver a funky number. "That was just the time of "soul jazz', Bobby Timmons and Horace Silver, and I chose to write in that r&b style." He did it to great effect, with a bridge that raises the spirit of Silver's "Sister Sadie."

The album's hit, however, was from the pen of the leader, who was not a prolific writer and generally called upon the likes of Heath and Benny Golson to provide material for his sessions. "Fungii Mama" is easily Mitchell's most popular composition and, thanks to the present performance, one of the jazz standards of the period. Among its many delights are the ensemble affinity of the horns, one of the great trumpet/tenor teams of all time; its illustration, in his phrasing and in the way he employed the lower register for dramatic emphasis, of why Cook has been cited as an influence on Joe Henderson; and the preview it provides of the island rhythms Foster would supply in the following decade when he worked with Sonny Rollins.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003