Horace Parlan - Speakin' My Piece
Released - November 1960
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 14, 1960
Tommy Turrentine, trumpet; Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Horace Parlan, piano; George Tucker, bass; Al Harewood, drums.
tk.4 Rastus
tk.10 Borderline
tk.16 Speakin' My Piece
tk.19 Oh, So Blue
tk.24 Up In Cynthia's Room
tk.26 Wadin'
Session Photos
Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images /
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Wadin' | Horace Parlan | 14/07/1960 |
| Up in Cynthia's Room | Horace Parlan | 14/07/1960 |
| Borderline | Stanley Turrentine | 14/07/1960 |
| Side Two | ||
| Rastus | Tommy Turrentine | 14/07/1960 |
| Oh So Blue | Leon Mitchell | 14/07/1960 |
| Speakin' My Piece | Horace Parlan | 14/07/1960 |
Liner Notes
PITTSBURGH-BORN pianist Horace Parlan, whose major experience in recent years has been gained with Charlie Mingus and Lou Donaldson, is a strikingly direct jazzman, as his previous album, Movin’ and Groovin’ (Blue Note 4028), indicated. A recurring credo in Horace’s talk about his music is: "I’m not trying to prove anything except to say what I feel and to keep growing as a pianist so that I can say all of what I feel.”
Parlan is not a one-groove pianist. He has been intrigued by the work of Bud Powell and John Lewis as well as by other diversified contemporaries such as Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Ray Bryant, and Tommy Flanagan. While a strongly emotional, vigorously swinging pianist, Parlan is also increasingly concerned with eliminating unnecessary notes from his lines and letting space work for him.
Parlan has been a professional jazzman since 1952, when he was 19. He’s had private as well as conservatory instruction in addition to many years of pragmatic training in Pittsburgh jazz rooms. For five years he worked off and on in his home town with two of the most challenging of the local hornmen, Tommy and Stanley Turrentine. They were his natural horn choices when he was asked to organize this quintet session.
Tommy is six years older than Stanley, who was born in 1934. Their father, an alumnus of the Savoy Sultans, still occasionally plays tenor in Pittsburgh. Tommy, in addition to leading combos in Pittsburgh, hos worked with the big bands of Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, and Benny Carter. Stanley became a pro at 16 with his brother’s band. The younger Turrentine also worked alongside Ray Charles in Lowell Fulson’s rhythm and blues band. Both Turrentine brothers served with Earl Bostic from 1953 to 1955, and Stanley spent two years in the 158th Army band. The Turrentines joined Max Roach in March, 1958, and hove been with him on and off since then.
George Tucker and Al Harewood form Lou Donaldson’s rhythm section along with Horace Parlan. The three, therefore, have had considerable working time together and have become fused into a mutually confident, firmly pulsating unit. Tucker’s credits include stays with Earl Bostic, John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey. Harewood has been with the combos of J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding, a Gigi Gryce-Art Farmer partnership and a Benny Golson-Curtis Fuller team. Harewood is an unpretentious, steady drummer who does not believe in soloing while someone else is supposed to. Tucker has been developing constantly as both a soloist and section player. He is a particularly conscientious, perpetual jazz student.
Horace Porjon’s Wadin’ will also soon be heard ¡n a trio version in a forthcoming Parlan Blue Note set. A blues, the title is meant to pictorialize the fact that Parlan likes to move right in when he plays the blues, rather than stay on shore. From George Tucker’s first full-bodied notes, there’s no questioning the authoritative groove of the performance. Horace states the theme which is then picked up by the horns. All present are thoroughly relaxed in what turns out to be a consistently straightforward, ungimmicked, modern blues. Stanley Turrenhine is a modernist who believes the tenor should be played with a big tone and shouting emotion. Tommy Turrentine has a bright, cutting attack and a ringingly brass tone. Horace plunges into the blues but never sounds self-consciously “earthy.” The man’s playing is as guileless as his conversation. He does play just what he feels, no more or less. I find the theme a curiously insinuating one. It has the quality of an invitation to unnamed experiences, a provocative quality underlined by the fading close.
Up in Cynthia’s Room is a band version of a Parlan original heard in trio form on Movin’ ond Groovin’. Cynthia is Parlan’s small step-daughter. The playful character of the theme is explained by Parlan in the notes to his first album: “Her room is always a swinging place - sometimes it’s in a state of confusion, but it’s always a happy place, and that’s how I conceived the tune.” Stanley Turrentine contributes another robustly warm solo. Tommy, equally hot in timbre as well as beat, again indicates his ease in roaming through the full range of the horn. I also like Tommy’s fluid, distinctly unchoppy time. Horace has a dartingly imaginative solo that connotes both a child’s grace and a child’s penchant for “putting on” adults.
Borderline is by Stanley Turrentine. “It’s a minor piece,” Parlan notes, “and although it’s in the customary a-a-b-a form, the bridge is 10 bars while the other sections are eight bars apiece. It gives an odd feeling, but it all fits.” Stanley Turrentine’s solo emphasizes Parlan’s feeling that “Stanley is the type of saxophone player who’s rapidly disappearing. He plays that instrument with so much passion; and for me, he uses the tenor for what it was intended. I mean he has that big sound and big drive. I don’t mean to put down other people with other styles; but for my own taste, Stanley is what I most like to hear in a tenor. He reminds me of “Jug” (Gene Ammons) and Illinois Jacquet as well as several of the younger ones. I hear a little bit of Sonny Rollins too, but basically, Stanley has a very individual voice.” .
Of Tommy, who follows in Borderline, Horace observes: “He’s a remarkably lyrical player and he has a fine command of his instrument. I’m also impressed because he’s much less eclectic than mast other modern trumpeters. I hear Turrentine in him, not fragments of other players.” Parlan’s own solo is characteristically vigorous and laced with his apparently perennial blues feeling.
Tommy Turrentine’s Rastus is not entirely predictable in its structure. Explains Parlan: “It has a blues flavor although it’s not actually a blues. It’s written in both major and minor. Its form is a-a-b-a, but the sections are not even. The first two sections are twelve bars. Eight are in major followed by four in minor. The third section — the bridge — is eight bars, all in major. The fourth section, like the first two, is twelve bars — eight in major and four in minor. Then there’s a four-bar tag in major that’s played on every chorus. It all falls into place naturally though. The tune has a funky, down-home feeling, and it starts off with a Charleston-type figure.”
To me, Rastus is the most infectiously engaging track on the album. The theme is an agile one and is cleverly developed. Stanley Turrentine blows with an invigorating ardor that cuts through considerations of style and age and gets to the balling core of much of the best in jazz. Tommy, with his supple time and knife-like sharpness of patterning, complements his brother well. Horace then sets off a rocking solo that leads to a restatement of the buoyant theme. There is a light-heartedness and grace to the performance as a whole that I find refreshing after so many hammeringly overstated “soul” messages.
The tender Oh So Blue is by Leon Mitchell, a Philadelphia writer. Stanley Turrentine suggested the tune for the session. It’s best described as a blues ballad. Stanley shows how fiercely he can shout even when he’s being lyrical. Horace Parlan’s solo also combines romanticism with the blues. Speakin’ My Piece is by Parlan. It’s a sequential-type tune, the sequence being in fourths in the key of F major. There’s a resiliency to the line that is common to both Horace’s writing and playing. He is not a “heavy” musician in the sense that he never sounds as if he’s pounding tent stakes. He leavens his “soul”, “funk”, or however one wants to describe the current elixirs of authenticity, with a lyrical, often playful delight in the release that jazz provides for cheerful as well as hostile feelings.
The Turrentine brothers add to the celebratory feeling of the piece and George Tucker contributes an imaginative, thoroughly personal bass solo that leads into a final exchange of ideas which establishes the conversational nature of the album as a whole. Horace not only spoke his piece, but he chose four entirely congenial associates whose viewpoints easily coalesced with his own and led to the kind of record dote that sounds as if it had been cut without the red light on.
—NAT HENTOFF, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review
Cover Design by REID MILES
Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
Tommy Turrentine performs by courtesy of Time Records.
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