BLP 4023

Dizzy Reece - Star Bright

Released - January 1960

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 19, 1959
Dizzy Reece, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

tk.3 The Rebound
tk.7 A Variation On Monk
tk.11 I Wished On The Moon
tk.15 The Rake
tk.19 I'll Close My Eyes
tk.22 Groovesville

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
The Rake	Dizzy Reece	19/11/1959
I'll Close My Eyes	Buddy Kaye, Billy Reid	19/11/1959
Groovesville	Dizzy Reece	19/11/1959
Side Two
The Rebound	Dizzy Reece	19/11/1959
I Wished on the Moon	Dorothy Parker, Ralph Rainger	19/11/1959
A Variation on Monk	Dizzy Reece	19/11/1959

Liner Notes

ON October 21st, 1959, the Liberte docked in New York and deposited a valuable shipment of British goods. Alphonso Son Reece had arrived at his third home and was about to begin a significant new phase of bis career.

The life of Dizzy Reece, which began Jan. 5, 1931 in Kingston, Jamaica, was marked by no spectacular events during the first two segments, spent in Kingston and London. Because a favorable reaction on American soil is equated with success in jazz circles, and because in this country be can associate constantly with talent of his own caliber, it was logical that Alfred Lion of Blue Note should take such an immense interest in his work and give him added encouragement in coming to the States. The reception given his first Blue Note LP (Blues in Trinity, 4006, recorded in Paris with an Anglo-American personnel) had indicated that Reece’s ability, already observed by many American jazzmen visiting London or Paris, would assure him of economic security and further artistic maturation.

Within a few weeks of his arrival, Dizzy opened at Wells’ Restaurant in Manhattan with an American rhythm section to drive and inspire him. Looking back on the years that had led to this pivotal event, Dizzy spoke of the past, talking slowly and gently, a tall, bearded, quiet-mannered man with the lilting cadences of a West Indian accent still strong in his voice.

"My father was a pianist; he played in silent movie theatres, but I hardly ever got to hear him play. My inspiration came from the street parade bands in Kingston. I was only three years old when I started running out trying to follow them — 1 would disappear for hours until they had to send the police for me. Then when I was about seven I would stay out late at night just to listen to a trumpet player called Gabriel, who was working in a club. I would wait around just to be able to pack up his instrument for him, just to get hold of the trumpet.

“I wished I could explain how I felt the first time I heard the sound of the trumpet. The uncanny part about it is hearing the trumpet in a brass band. Coming from a brass band it is usually loud and brassy, but I didn’t hear it like that at all. I have been trying ever since to play it the exact way. I hear it, but it’s still a long way from perfection. The first stylist I really listened to was Buck Clayton on the old Basie records, but I always tried to get my own sound; you have to be your own man.”

It was while he was at high school, mastering first the baritone horn and then the trumpet, that Dizzy was given his nickname, which he says was not inspired by Gillespie, who was unknown at the time. As soon as his schooling was finished Dizzy decided that the motherland had to be his destination.

"It was a dismal arrival at Tilbury Docks, but I knew that there would be something for me in England. The modern movement had just begun there and things were beginning to happen. I had some trying times in Paris, but in Tottenham and various parts of London they had a lot of modern jazz clubs.

England and France provided most of Dizzy‘s living for a decade, with occasional side trips around the Continent. The third stage of his career was augured at meetings in London with Frank Wolff and Alfred Lion, and with some tapes sent to the latter by Tony Hall whom they had long respected as a tireless worker for the cause of modern jazz in England. Tony, who is a writer, critic and disc jockey, was the first to take an interest in Dizzy and to record him.

The first day in New York was almost as depressing as the first view had been at Tilbury. “I hadn’t been off the boat an hour when I almost cut off my finger trying to move a trunk. I had it bandaged and couldn’t play. Anyhow, at least I could get to hear some music right away — Gigi and Max at the Five Spot; Blakey at Smalls’; and then I went to see Dizzy Gillespie and played a set for him at the Metropole.”

For his first American recording session Dizzy chose the sidemen, all but one of whom were strangers to him. He had met and worked with Art Taylor in Paris (he was heard on the previous Reece LP), but as Dizzy says, Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers weren’t complete strangers to him, as he had already had “soul” contact with them before. "It worked out even better than I expected; I developed a very close feeling with Hank on time date.”

Dizzy was impressed by the relaxed, informal conditions in the recording studio here and especially by the invaluable experience and know-how Rudy Van Gelder puts into a recording. The session, recorded November 19, 1959, opens with a theme written by Dizzy for a British picture, Nowhere To Go.

“I wrote and played the whole score for the film — The Rake is one of four themes,” says Dizzy. The slow. minor melody uses an abrupt, Rollins-like sixteenth-note effect in the fifth measure and goes into double-time at the end of each eighth-measure passage. Reece’s solo sets the pattern for his concept throughout the album: basically he swings, hears the changes well plays with, a feeling for continuity and for dramatic and dynamic contrast. I would agree with Tony Hall and the others who have found in him no one specific influence. Mobley’s sound, on this track and throughout the album, has more assurance and warmth than ever, and Wynton cooks consistently impelled by the relentless drive of Chambers’ and A. T.’s backing.

I'll Close My Eyes, an old pop song, is given a melodic workout by Dizzy, before Hank enters abruptly to take over for two discursively eloquent choruses. After Dizzy’s two choruses and Wynton’s one, Chambers offers a solo in which the attack and melodic concept have much in common with the early and indomimitable Oscar Pettiford.

Groovesville, except for a little riffing at the end, has no theme: it is simply an uppish ad lib blues, started by piano with the bass in two and gradually cooking up, with the aid of the leader, a solid London broil. Perhaps because the blues brings out the best in any good jazzman (and the worst in any who hasn’t got it), Dizzy on this track offers his best solo of the album. His occasional explosions into a phrase that showers down from a high note, the naturally right time with an almost imperceptible delay on a note here and there, the occasional laying on a sixth or ninth — there are many elements here that, when we get to know him better, may emerge as important facets of the Reece style.

The Rebound is titled for the manner in which the outgoing choruses on the tenor, piano and bass solos are prodded by ensemble punctuations; hear it and you’ll get it. The improvisations are based on a minor-mode version of the regular 12.bar blues, but the opening and closing theme is 13 measures long.

I Wished on the Moon, a song popularized by Billie Holiday 25 years ago, follows what has become a firmly established practice: the melody is heard, more or less informally, with the bass playing in two; then the soloist moves into ad lib gear as the bass shifts to four. Hank’s time is conspicuously cool; Wynton’s solo, surprisingly, seems to be conceived in terms of the melody rather than the changes, at least for most of the first 16.

A Variation On Monk struck me as an odd title until I noticed the grace-notes-a-sixth-lower effect at the end of each eight measures, a typical Monk gambit. Dizzy conceded that this is the only essentially Monkish thing about it, but adds that “it’s the way it’s played — the phrasing can be very humorous.” Basically the melody might be classifled as early bop. On this one A.T. has his only solo workout.

The emergence of Dizzy Reece as an important new name in jazz should help to draw further attention to the fact that good jazz music can be produced by a person born to do so, regardless of latitude or longitude. Subjected to the environment he could find during the past few years in London or Paris, there was no obstacle to the development of a completely mature jazz style on the part of any musician with the soul, the technique and the desire for self-expression. Dizzy Reece has these qualities in abundance, and even in the rat-race of the New York jazz world he now faces, there isn’t a chance in the world that they will be neglected or lost.

As British critic Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker said: “It took London a long time to find someone who had moved with the times on trumpet. In Dizzy Reece we found him — and as soon as we discovered what we had amongst us, he left us. We miss him, but our loss is America’s immeasurable gain.”

—LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of the Encyclopedia of Jazz)

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