BLP 4268

Stanley Turrentine - Easy Walker

Released - February 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 8, 1966
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Mickey Roker, drums.

1758 tk.5 Yours Is My Heart Alone
1759 tk.8 Meat Wave
1760 tk.11 What The World Needs Now Is Love
1761 tk.15 Easy Walker
1762 tk.23 They All Say I'm The Biggest Fool
1763 tk.24 Alone Together

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Meat Wave	Hank Johnson	July 8 1966
They All Say I'm the Biggest Fool	Buddy Johnson	July 8 1966
Yours Is My Heart Alone	Franz Lehár	July 8 1966
Side Two
Easy Walker	Billy Taylor	July 8 1966
What the World Needs Now	Burt Bacharach, Hal David	July 8 1966
Alone Together	Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz	July 8 1966

Liner Notes

THERE are certain moods and times for listening to jazz when nothing else will do but a horn player with a big sound and a deep, full, swinging beat. This is an album for such moods and times. As Stanley Turrentine says of these sessions, "We weren't trying to prove anything here. We just wanted to get down to basics, and enjoy ourselves." The enjoyment is so obvious and substantial that it communicates completely, I would think, to any kind of listener with roots in jazz essentials.

I told Stanley that the session sounded unusually relaxed. He laughed. "It always is when I'm working with these musicians. These are very easy guys for me to work with. We understand each other." Of McCoy Tyner, Stanley added: "He's a beautiful person, and it's that quality his music reflects. And aside from that he can fit into any situation. It doesn't matter what the groove is; he'll sound good in it. As for his comping, he's always listening, and so he always picks the right chords and doesn't get in the way. Listen to him in all the various contexts in which he plays, and you'll hear how exactly he knows what to put behind every soloist.

"Bob Cranshaw," Stanley continued, "is like McCoy in that he can play with just about anyone without losing what makes him distinctive. It's hard to put that special quality of Bob into words. I could talk about his sound, his beat, his conception; but maybe I can explain best what I mean by saying that if ten bassists were playing simultaneously, I'd have no trouble picking out Bob immediately.

That left Mickey Roker. "It's his steadiness," said Stanley. "His beat is like a rock but it can be subtle too. I tell you, with a rhythm section like this one, you don't have to worry about a thing. All that's left is for you to go about what it is you have to do.

And what Stanley feels impelled to do is, first of all, to swing. And with that swing, he insists on as full and firm a sound as he can achieve. "After all," he says, "music is sound. That's what people listen to. So the more attractive the sound, the better it is. That's one thing I'm always trying to improve on — my sound. Beyond those two necessities, I try to play the song. I mean that I try to play it as I think the person who wrote it imagined it. That's what playing is all about from my point of view—swing, sound, and the right feeling for each song."

Hank Johnson's Meat Wave gets into what Stanley calls "basics" from the start A cheerful, infectious theme is stated and then stretched by Stanley and his buoyant colleagues. Stanley's work here, and throughout the set, has the smack of authority. He knows just what it is he wants to do, and there are no problems of executing those goals. McCoy Tyner, fitting with ease, as Stanley noted, into this groove, plays with a combination of firm swing underneath and a dancing, crystalline line on top.

They All Say I'm The Biggest Fool is by Buddy Johnson, and Stanley remembers hearing the song played by the Johnson big band in the late 1940's. Because he likes "to play the song" and is also concerned with sound, Stanley is drawn to ballads. There are jazzmen for whom ballad playing is a difficult art. They tend to mistake sentimentality for sensibility. But Stanley is a natural in this vein. With clean-lined lyricism and that satisfyingly huge tone, he tells a story, a direct story of love and fulfillment. The fusion of his gentleness with the virility of his sound and beat creates a performance that is a classic illustration of the basic jazz approach to a ballad.

Rather unusual in a jazz program is Franz Lehar's Yours Is My Heart Alone but, Stanley explains, he and his wife, organist Shirley Scott, play the song often. "It's not only a pretty tune," he adds, "but its construction is very interesting." As interpreted here, the song becomes an exuberant celebration, in which Stanley settles into one of the hottest swinging grooves of his recording career. But as big as his sound is, there is also a crispness in his attack in addition to a remarkably propulsive flow of ideas. McCoy Tyner is also stimulated into a solo that, though improvised, has a sense of happy inevitability If you, as I do, keep certain records around to lift the spirit, this is a track that ought to work again and again.

Easy Walker is a Billy Taylor composition which has attracted Stanley since the first time he heard it. It has Billy's characteristic sense of lithe order, and Stanley digs into it with evident pleasure. If you play an instrument or can project yourself into a jazzman's role, listen a few times through just for the rhythm section. What a joy it must be to have that resilient a foundation behind you. Incidentally, once in a while, asked by a visitor unfamiliar to jazz to define exactly what "swinging" is. I can't do it with words. I put on one of a number of particular records, and this is one I've added to the list.

What The World Needs Now Is Love is a song out of the Dionne Warwick repertory. Again Stanley, with consummate ease and disciplined ardor, illuminates the pleasures of uncluttered, uncoy ballad playing that soars on the power of direct emotions. McCoy Tyner's solo is an affecting complement to Stanley's, and listen, by the way, to Bob Cranshaw's bass line throughout.

"We had a lot of fun with that," Stanley recalls the playing of the standard. Alone Together. "It all just fell into place. I really felt good doing that one. In fact, that's the way I'd describe the whole session—feeling good." In this last track too, Stanley and his associates get into basics—clarity, warmth, swing, and telling a story. And these qualities have resulted in an album that is not only refreshingly free of pretension and artifice but will be a source of plea- sure so long as you can react with pleasure to light, love, letting go. The whole experience is like the first morning in spring, when you realize it's a ball just being.

—NAT HENTOFF