GXF-3073

Bobby Hutcherson - Inner Glow

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

United Artists Studios, Los Angeles, CA, March 24, 1975
Oscar Brashear, trumpet #1,2; Thurman Green, trombone #1,2; Harold Land, tenor sax #1,2; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Dwight Dickenson, piano; Kent Brinkley, bass; Larry Hancock, drums.

(tk.7) Boodaa
(tk.4) Roses Poses
(tk.2) Searchin' The Trane

United Artists Studios, Los Angeles, CA, March 25, 1975
Oscar Brashear, trumpet; Thurman Green, trombone; Harold Land, tenor sax; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Dwight Dickenson, piano; Kent Brinkley, bass; Larry Hancock, drums.

(tk.3) Inner Glow
(tk.2) Cowboy Bob

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Boodaa	Bobby Hutcherson	March 24 1975
Cowboy Bob	Bobby Hutcherson	March 25 1975
Side Two
Searchin' the Trane	Bobby Hutcherson	March 24 1975
Inner Glow	George Cables	March 25 1975
Roses Poses	Bobby Hutcherson	March 24 1975

Liner Notes

Last year, a down beat interviewer, suggesting a certain critical neglect of Bobby Hutcherson in the mid-to-late Seventies, asked the vibist, "Why weren't you talked about more? " "Well," answered Hutcherson, "I was covered up by a lot of new groups and new names and electronics." True enough. But then, Hutch got to the heart of the matter: "I was trying to continue my dedication to a new way of playing bebop — with new harmonies and melodic concepts." Or, as down beat did note three years earlier, to "tunes that open with richly melodic heads...subsequent, spirited improvisations that remain close to the initial changes and are more like rhythmic/dynamic explorations than new melodies ...conceptions routinely explored by McCoy Tyner."

Actually, though, Hutcherson was going back further than Tyner. He was going back to John Coltrane, and his original notion of exhaustive, dynamic improvisation within a mode, rather than atop changes. He really was working out "a new way of playing bebop," by integrating the saxophonist's innovation into subtly structured lyricism — with an ease Tyner, frankly, has yet to achieve. And, he was doing it on the vibes and marimba, two instruments whose sonic lightness — even in a relentless, percussive solo — seemed to make the whole idea a lot more accessible (especially when compared to Tyner's violent, though extraordinary, piano technique).

But, for whatever reason, more jazz critics and record buyers spent the Seventies talking about Tyner — or almost anyone else — than Bobby Hutcherson.

So, it's especially fitting that we enter the Eighties with another look at the vibist in the 70s: INNER GLOW. Recorded in 1975, its five tunes are prime examples of Hutcherson's "new way of playing bebop", a style begun on his 1972 album SAN FRANCISCO (BST-84362), already in place on 1974's CIRRUS (BN-LA 25G) and climaxing on 1976's WAITING (BN-LA-615-G). Throughout, Hutcherson involved a number of key musicians in its growth, including tenor saxophonist Harold Land(present on SAN FRANCISCO, CIRRUS and these dates, and co-leader of a group with Hutcherson from 1968-71), pianist George Cables(featured on WAITING, and the arranger-composer of the title tune here), drummer Larry Hancock (heard on CIRRUS and these sessions), and his late Seventies bandmates Emanuel Boyd (reeds), Eddie Marshall (drums), James Leary (bass) and Kenneth Nash (percussion), all of whom are featured on WAITING. Along with the players here (pianist Dwight Dickerson, a veteran of duty with Leroy Vinnegar and Sonny Criss, and then working with Hutcherson; West Coast studio trumpeter Oscar Brashear; bassist Kent Brinkley, featured with Charles Tyler and Freddie Hubbard earlier in the Seventies; and trombonist Thurman Green, who'd previously recorded with Doug Carn, Gerald Wilson and Donald Byrd), they executed Hutcherson's demanding concept exactly and sympathetically.

Which, quite honestly, was often a task tailor-made for the egoless. Take "Boodaa" here, for example. Once the rhythm section gets past its quirky bit of opening sturcture (and the comical pauses that separate Hutcherson and Green's runs) they simply vamp, in a start-stop-crash fabric. It's engagingly hypnotic, and a great foil for Bobby's dazzling solo technique — you need plenty of chops to make such a steady setting interesting — but the sidemen here are really sidemen. (And then, if a sideman does solo in this context, he tackles a particular spatial test; here, Green makes the mistake of laying back when he should attack, and so his solo only comes to life when Hancock picks up the tempo. On "Cowboy Bob," though, while the endlessly loping line suggests a horse at canter, Brashear does play a strong, broad ride, and Green follows suit; Dickerson then gets in a brief but solid run. And, on "Inner Glow," Cables' faintly bossa line reminiscent of his better- known "Think On Me — " and highlighted on the pianist's forthcoming Contemporary LP, also featuring Hutcherson — Land snaps off a trademarked half-mellow/half-hewn solo, much in the manner of Dexter Gordon.)

The point is, Bobby Hutcherson was also the rightful star of his progressive conception, as the one who understood it best. You can hear that here, in his commanding solos on all the tracks — and especially on "Searchin' The 'Trane" and "Roses Poses," two of his compositions later done very similarly on WAITING. Both have melodies highly lyrical and original; "Searchin' The 'Trane" is a pure quartet performance, with Bobby as the only soloist. (On the WAITING album, group members also solo on both tracks.) And on both, Hutcherson uses his depth of musical knowledge to create a remarkable tension: by writing structures(e.g. the constant, one-two-three vamp, played by Dickerson, on "Searchin'", the static bridge of "Roses") that support his playing reflexively, and then using every tool in his soloist's arsenal — speed, spacing, time, dynamics, and lots of fresh ideas — to make them come alive. As he described (to db) the process himself: "When I was comin' up, back in L.A., around 1956-1960...you had to count. You had to know. You didn't just...play because you wanted to. You had to know all the chord changes, all the structure, everything...You got to get that together so well that you don't even have to think about it — and then you get the soul out there, and you think spiritually about what you're gonna play and what you're playing." Today, his music (as reflected on two recent LPs for CBS) is often less structurally rigorous, but Bobby Hutcherson is no less a musician. In fact, these sessions, heard for the first time, may prove he's always been much, much more.

— Michael Rozek

 

GXF-3072

Tina Brooks - Minor Move

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, March 16, 1958
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Tina Brooks, tenor sax; Sonny Clark, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.7 The Way You Look Tonight
tk.9 Nutville
tk.10 Star Eyes
tk.11 Everything Happens To Me
tk.15 Minor Move

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Nutville	Tina Brooks	March 16 1958
The Way You Look Tonight	D. Fields-J. Kern	March 16 1958
Side Two
Star Eyes	Don Raye-Gene De Paul	March 16 1958
Minor Move	Tina Brooks	March 16 1958
Everything Happens To Me	M. Dennis-T. Adair	March 16 1958

Liner Notes

It is an eerie, uncomfortable fact that only one of the men who appear on this recording is still alive. But among the many musicians whose careers have been cut short by one aspect or another of the so-called "jazz life," there are some special cases — artists whose acutely sensitive, often melancholic music seems to have predicted their time with us would be brief.

Tenor saxophonists Harold Floyd "Tina" Brooks was such a man. And fortunately, we have recordings to prove that his skills have not been exaggerated by retrospective romanticism.

Most of those recordings were made for the Blue Note label. Brooks' own album "True Blue," Freddie Hubbard's "Open Sesame," a Jimmy and a Kenny Burrell jam session date, half of Jackie McLean's "Jackie's Bag," Freddie Redd's "Shades of Redd," and a version Redd's score issued on the Felsted label under Howard McGhee's name.

Collectors have been aware that at least one other Brooks-led album exists — "Back to the Tracks," with Blue Mitchell, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor. But some reason "Bock to the Tracks" was never released, even though the cover of the album appeared on some Blue Note inner sleeves. Now, however, thanks to Michael Cuscuna's exploration of the Blue Note archives, have the album entitled "Minor Move." And Cuscuna reports that yet another Brooks album was recorded — with Johnny Coles, Wilbur Ware, and Philly Joe Jones.

The pre-1960 details of Brooks' career were outlined by Ira Gitler in his liner notes for "True Blue." Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on June 7, 1932, Brooks move to New York with his family at the age of 13. He played C-melody saxophone in high school, and then switched to alto and tenor under the tutelage of his elder brother, David "Bubba" Brooks, an Arnett Cobb-Don Byas disciple who can often be heard now with Bill Doggett's combo. But as Brooks told Gitler: "Prez was the first one to really get my attention."

Professionally, Brooks' early days were spent in R&B bands (Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, Joe Morris, etc.), and he toured briefly with Lionel Hampton in the mid-1950s. He studied theory and harmony with Herbert Bourne and received less formal but apparently quite valuable guidance from trumpeter Benny Harris, with whom Brooks worked at a club in the Bronx called the Blue Morocco.

It was Harris who recommended him to Blue Note's Alfred Lion, and on Feb. 25, 1958 Brooks entered Rudy Van Gelder's studio for the first time, participating on the Jimmy Smith date that would be spread over "House Party," "The Sermon" and that recently issued "Confirmation." Obviously impressed by what he had heard, Lion brought Brooks back as a leader on March 16, 1958 to record the session now issued as "Minor Move."

Further recording dates followed, most notably "True Blue" and "Shades of Redd," but gradually Brooks faded from the scene. According to trumpeter Oliver Beener, who was both a friend and a close musical associate of Brooks, his playing days had pretty much come to an end by the early 1970s. And on August 13, 1974, Brooks died - a victim, Beener says, "of general dissipation."

That Brooks was a man of unusual sensitivity is obvious from his music. He was, says Beener, "a sentimentalist — his favorite tune was 'My Devotion' — and especially on blues Tina's tone sounded like a prayer." (Brooks' first name, incidentally, is pronounced "Tee-na," not "Ty-na" — a variation Gitler explains, on Brooks' childhood moniker, "Teeny." )

Lester Young clearly was his primary inspiration, and in that it is interesting that Brooks began on the C-melody sax, the obsolete horn played by Young's idol, Frankie Trumbauer. One can also detect traces of Hank Mobley, Sonny Stitt, and Sonny Rollins in Brooks' music; and there are signs that, for a time, he and his contemporary Wayne Shorter were developing along parallel lines.

But as effective as he was in orthodox hard-bop contexts, Brooks was essentially an individualist. His sound, first of all, set him apart — the prayer-like tone that Beener speaks of. It was an airy, keening, often speech-like approach to the horn that instantly identified Brooks as one of those musicians for whom feeling and sound were one.

Equally important were the ways in which he created a feeling of resolution within restlessness. Phrase by phrase, his lines are formed so naturally and perfectly that the melodic shapes seem almost tangible — three dimensional objects that one can contemplate at will. But these purely lyrical resolutions are placed within a harmonic context that denies the possibility of rest.

The sonata-like patterns explored by Sonny Rollins — in which melodic and harmonic elements suddenly coalesce, releasing their accumulated tensions in cadential outbursts — are alien to Brooks' music. Instead, he hears both melody and harmony as linear forces that exist in a perpetual equilibrium, a universe in which the forming process never ceases and tensions are not resolved but transformed into the new terms of an endless lyricism.

This is the world that Lester Young built; and allowing for Brooks' more hard-edged approach to rhythm, there are times when his music recalls Young's clarinet solos with the Kansas City Five. A similar comparison — more far-fetched but equally genuine - can be made between Brooks' music and that of Gabriel Faure, in which the lyrical line, buoyed by wavelike shifts in harmony and rhythm, flows calmly and gracefully toward an ever-receding horizon.

While Brooks' solo on the title track of "True Blue' is the one example of his work I would preserve at all costs, "Minor Move" may be his most satisfying album — although the as-yet-unheard music on "Back to the Tracks" and the date with Coles, Ware, and Jones may change that estimate. "Minor Move" does have some rough edges, but except for Duke Jordan and perhaps Paul Chambers, the sidemen "True Blue" (Freddie Hubbard and Art Tayler) are clearly outclassed by Brooks' partners on this earlier date.

Lee Morgan, in 1958, was in his "bull ring" period, a time when everything he played seemed about to burst into a fanfare. He is in top form here, creating technically remarkable lines that fully express the exuberance of a man who was, at the age of 19, already a young master.

Watkins, according to his one-time boss Red Garland, "was a very true bass player. The note was right on, never a quarter tone sharp or flat. And his walking rhythm, his feeling, was perfect." To which I would add that the sheer lilt of Watkins' lines, the way everything he played seemed to "sing," reminds me of Oscar Pettiford.

As for Art Blakey, it goes without saying that he is modern jazz premier ensemble drummer. And Sonny Clark's stature as an accompanist and a soloist steadily increases with the passage of time.

"Nutville" is a groovy, medium-tempo blues that finds everyone in a good form — Clark displaying his superb sense of swing, Morgan heating up from the first chorus on and eventually leaping into implied double-time, and Brooks soaring ahead with remarkable confidence for a man who is making his debut as a leader in very fast company. Toward the end of his solo, though, a convoluted Mobley-like passage leaves everyone unsure as to where "one" is. Presumably, that is the reason Lion and Van Gelder removed Watkins' second walking chorus which accounts for the abrupt jump into the final statement of the theme.

Next comes "The Way You Look Tonight," a piece that Beener says was one of Brooks' favorite vehicles. It's easy to hear why, as the tenorman glides through the graceful changes of Jerome Kern's standard in a kind of lyrical overdrive. The emotional climate of his solo is almost jolly, and at one point he quotes another very romantic tune, Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon."

- LAWRENCE KART

Original Session Produced by ALFRED LION
Recorded on March 16, 1958 at Van Gelder Studios, Hackensack, New Jersey
Recording Engineer RUDY VAN GELDER

GXF-3071

Grant Green - Remembering

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 29, 1961
Grant Green, guitar; Wilbur Ware, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.5 I'll Remember April
tk.6 You And The Night And The Music
tk.9 All The Things You Are
tk.14 If Had You
tk.15 I Remember You
tk.18 Love Walked In

See Also: 8-21284-2

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
All the Things You Are	Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern	August 29 1961
If I Had You	Irving King	August 29 1961
Love Walked In	George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin	August 29 1961
Side Two
I'll Remember April	de Paul-Johnston-Raye	August 29 1961
You and the Night and the Music	Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz	August 29 1961
I Remember You	Johnny Mercer, Victor Schertzinger	August 29 1961

Liner Notes

For all its beauty and fresh sounding vitality, the music in this album ultimately proves a sobering listening experience. Sobering because it reminds us anew of the great, thrilling promise that was implicit in Grant Green's earliest work, a promise that for a number of reasons, most of them having little to do with music, failed to develop beyond the levels achieved in his first few years of performing and recording. As this group of performances reasserts, the early to middle 1960s, following the guitarist's move to New York City, can be seen as having comprised the most productive, consistently creative period of Green's two-decade career in jazz' major leagues.

A mature, seasoned veteran with more than 15 years' performing experience in both jazz and rhythm-and-blues groups, Green was nearly 30 when he made the move to the East Coast. Born June 6, 1931, in St. Louis, Mo., he had begun guitar studies while still in elementary school, and by age 13 had graduated to full professionalism. "The first thing I played was boogie woogie," he noted of these early experiences. "Then I had to do a lot of rock and roll. It's all the blues, anyhow. Everything comes in handy in music," he added pragmatically. "A musician should be able to play anything when the situation calls for it."

It was in late 1959 that Green, having moved to Chicago, had made his first recording — for the small Delmark label — a date under the leadership of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest in whose combo Green had performed when both were St. Louis residents. Following this he worked for a brief time in mid-1960 with organist Sam Lazar with whose quartet he recorded an album for the Chess jazz subsidiary Argo Records. Then at summer's end it was off to New York City where, thanks to his experience and versatility, he found ready employment, most often with the small organ-led combos then in vogue, the best known of which was Jack McDuff's.

During this time alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson introduced the guitarist to Blue Note's Alfred Lion and before the year was out Green found himself under contract to the label. Green's first Blue Note recording session, a Donaldson-led quartet date that also included organist Baby Face Willette and drummer Ben Dixon, took place early in 1961, and was followed within a week by his own first session as a leader, with Willette and Dixon on board, and appearing on the organist's debut recording for the label. The next few months saw the guitarist participating in a dizzying succession of record dates, performing on sessions led by Jack McDuff (on which he was reunited with Jimmy Forrest) for Prestige Records; tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, a "live" recording made at Minton's Playhouse that resulted in two LPs; tenorist Hank Mobley, leading a quintet that included Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones; Green's second album as leader, with bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Dave Bailey, as well as Willette's second LP; a Horace Parlan quintet date; a second album with McDuff, again for Prestige; Green's third LP session, with Yusef Lateef, McDuff and Al Harewood and, finally, the present recording which, admitted excellence not-withstanding, is here released for the first time.

What is perhaps most interesting about the six performances, taped in late August of 1961, just about a year after his arrival on the New York scene, is their conventionalism — what they reveal about Green's easy mastery of mainstream modern jazz guitar as it had been practiced over the preceding decade or so. The most widely held view of Green was that fostered by the majority of recordings on which he had appeared; that he was fundamentally a swinging blues-based player, master of funk and like earthy musics.

Which, of course, he was; his effortless, creative command of these forms is documented on album after album from every stage of his recording career. But that's not all Green was or aspired to. As is so well attested by these (and other) performances, the guitarist was an eloquent, thoughtful, imaginatively resourceful player of standard ballads, his handling of which evidenced both melodic fertility and a thoroughgoing mastery of harmony.

Green was, in fact, a complete guitarist and had developed his approach to the instrument through conventional music studies. As for most electric guitarists, Charlie Christian had been his earliest inspiration — "You can't get around him," Green emphasized — and, through recordings, chief stylistic model as well. While Christian's singing, single-note approach was the fundamental source of Green's, it is instructive to note that of modern, post-Christian players of the instrument Green cited Jimmy Raney as a major influence on the shaping of his own mature style. Raney, it will be recalled, has been highly regarded for the uncommon lucidity and intelligence of his musical thought, the breadth of his knowledge of harmony and the elegant, thoughtful melodism of his approach to improvisation, all qualities Green sought to emulate in his own handling of the more sophisticated ballad form. Kenny Burrell, with a style that also fused elements of Christian and Raney, was another guitarist Green admired.

Few guitarists, Christian and Raney included, develop mastery of the instrument without reference to at least some earlier approaches; however, once this is achieved, the guitarist may look beyond the instrument for further inspiration. Green, for example, observed in the early 1960s, "I don't listen to guitar players much. I dig horn players. I was very much influenced by Charlie Parker — very much."

This set of well-chosen ballads combines all of these elements. Christian's crisp, swinging attack and impeccable time sense find contemporary echoes in Green's — "If I Had You" is a particularly good example which even on legato statements possess an incisive staccato quality. Also, like Parker, there is always an underlying blues tonality to the strong clearly focused command of melodic invention and its anchoring knowledge of harmony that characterize his approach to improvising. The influence of Raney and other modern guitarists is to be seen in the choice of material, its harmonic reordering and the emphasis on lucidity and intelligence in organizing solos. What these performances most clearly indicate, however, is how fully Green had become his own man, with a sound, attack and approach to improvisation uniquely his own as well as a maturity of conception that placed him among the foremost, fluently creative guitarists of the day.

Commenting on his first guitar-bass-drums trio recording [Green Street, Blue Note 4071], John S. Wilson described Green's approach to the instrument: "His notes are clean, deliberate and full-bodied, avoiding both the clangor of some post-Christian guitarists and the muddiness of recent soul-influenced guitar men. He plays with a strong, swinging quality on both ballads and up-tempo swingers. His ideas are fresh without stretching for effect. He is working time-worn and time-proved jazz territory in a manner that shows how lastingly useful the basic elements of jazz can be in firmly creative hands." The description can stand for these selections as well, taped only five months later.

For one thing, the group heard here was an exemplary version of the guitarist's favored instrumentation. "Guitar and organ go well together," he has said of the setting in which he was most frequently obliged to perform and record in the early 1960s. "But my favorite trio is guitar, bass and drums. You can really stretch out and nothing gets cluttered up." In stating this preference, Green might have been talking about this specific trio, for in nonpareil bassist Wilbur Ware and brisk, tasteful drummer Al Harewood he had found virtually the ideal playing partners. Thoughtful, sensitive, empathetic and, above all, venturesome musicians, Ware and Harewood were truly the guitarist's peers not only in their command of their respective instruments but on the conceptual level as well. As a result, this particular unit, despite its ad hoc nature, achieved phenomenal levels of ensemble integration and artistic success. Theirs was not simply the standard soloist-with-accompaniment format but, rather, represented a genuinely collective approach to improvisation among three perfectly matched, like-thinking and responsive musicians united in common cause.

These performances strike and maintain unusually high levels of interactive artistry, and in fact the most notable feature of the trio's work is the consistency of its rapport. It's hard to single out individual performances for special mention, although "Love Walked In" and "I'll Remember April" might serve to typify a number of the elements that make the trio's work so special. Taken at bright medium-up tempos, the pieces crackle with barely suppressed excitement right from the outset, as though Green and company couldn't wait to get started on their recasting of the songs' melodic-harmonic potentials.

Once past the theme statement, the guitarist usually builds his solos slowly, his opening chorus invariably fairly conservative in character, with each succeeding one building in greater melodic-rhythmic complexity, ever richer imaginative resourcefulness and mounting, spark-producing intensity. It's as though the very act of playing enlivens and sets free his imagination, triggering a cascading flow of invention. Green's second chorus on Love Walked In," for example, consists of a gracefully shaped, virtually seamless improvised line that runs uninterrupted for almost the entire length of the chorus. The final bars of this solo, leading directly to Ware's perfect one-chorus statement, make use of a device Green often favoured: that of repeating a phrase several times, with only slight variations, building an effective charge of tension he then defuses. On his unrelenting inventive "I'll Remember April" solo is to be found a fine example of call-and-response phrasing, another device he used in constructing his improvisations.

Following him on the piece, Ware contributes a buoyant solo that, possibly taking a page from Green's book, gets under way with a telling use of repetition and then strides into a dancing, surprise-filled set of inventions demonstrating both breathtaking technical mastery and unerring musical intelligence, and employing a number of the characteristic devices for which he was noted among his peers -double-stops, complex rhythmic displacements, rests and in general an uncommonly effective use of space.

Then too, there's Green's beautifully conceived solo on "You and the Night and the Music," variations organized three distinct ways: those conceived primarily as permutations of the song's melodic contour, those stemming directly from its harmonic armature and, third, those with a predominantly rhythmic basis, taking their impetus from the cadential character of the theme materials. While all three modes are present simultaneously in every improvisation, Green has so ordered his solo on this selection that we are able to discern his reliance on each as it assumes primacy in his mind, making for an instructive as well as immensely pleasurable listening experience. We literally can hear him think his way through the piece. But then, each of his, Ware's and Harewood's contributions —individually and collectively — to these six performances reveal to us men engaged by and responding to their art and its materials with fervent, spirited creativity, keen intelligence and utter rapport.

Although not released during their lifetimes, these selections add richly to the discographies of Green and Ware both of whom, it will be recalled, died in 1979. Considering the vastness of his talent, the bassist left behind a pitifully meagre body of recordings, which is swelled considerably by his work on this session, for his contributions were pivotally important to the artistic success this trio achieved in its short existence. Green, too, is well served by these performances, far better in fact than by most of the recordings he made during the last decade-and-a-half of his life when the exigencies of keeping a group working, no less than self-imposed, external and often conflicting pressures towards the production of music of a more commercially-oriented nature, resulted in a large number of insipid performances of unworthy material. Even more sadly for Green, the popular success he and his producers sought so determinedly failed to materialize, so the guitarist had trivialized his music for nothing. Fortunately for us, however, the true nature of his artistry has been well documented on his Blue Note recordings from the early to middle 1960s, to the best of which can now be added this splendid, recently discovered trio session. Like his finest work from this period, this music will endure.

Pete Welding

GXF-3070

Kenny Burrell - Swingin'

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Audio-Video Studios, NYC, March 12, 1956
Frank Foster, tenor sax; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Shadow Wilson, drums.

tk.42 My Heart Stood Still

Manhattan Towers, NYC, May 14, 1958
Louis Smith, trumpet; Tina Brooks, Junior Cook, tenor sax; Duke Jordan, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Sam Jones, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.1 I Never Knew

"Five Spot Cafe", NYC, 1st set, August 25, 1959
Roland Hanna, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Ben Tucker, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.3 If You Could See Me Now

"Five Spot Cafe", NYC, 2nd set, August 25, 1959
Tina Brooks, tenor sax; Bobby Timmons, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Ben Tucker, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.8 Swingin'

"Five Spot Cafe", NYC, 3rd set, August 25, 1959
Roland Hanna, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Ben Tucker, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.14 Beef Stew Blues

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
I Never Knew	Gus Kahn, Ted Fio Rito	May 14 1958
My Heart Stood Still	Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers	March 12 1956
Side Two
Beef Stew Blues	Randy Weston	August 25 1959
If You Could See Me Now	Tadd Dameron, Carl Sigman	August 25 1959
Swingin'	Clifford Brown	August 25 1959

Liner Notes

First, a few points about Kenny Burrell. A few years ago, Cadet Records collected some of Burrell's Argo recordings in a double album reissue entitled Cool Cookin'. It was an especially appropriate title. Burrell, like his contemporaries Grant Green and Wes Montgomery, never lets things get out of control. Even at rapid tempos, such as "I Never Knew" and '"Swingin"' in this collection, his is a quiet fire. His recordings in recent years may make some wonder whether the fire is now merely hot coals, but all through the 1950s Burrell was playing the best guitar out there.

Another interesting feature of Burrell's work is something we are beginning to understand with the discovery of the previously unissued music in this and other collections. He would record certain tunes, for different labels, in different situations, until he felt they had been done properly. I first became aware of this when researching Kenny Clarke's Savoy session with the Detroit jazzmen, and I discovered a still-unissued treatment of '*But Not For Me" which was essentially a guitar solo with discreet brushes from Clarke. The performance was not fully formed, but just about a month later he recorded his solo version for Blue Note (1543). We know now that he recorded his own "Loie" for the first time on the March 27, 1963, Blue Note session (Freedom, GXF 3057), rather than the version with Gil Evans on Verve. With this album we discover two more instances where this has happened.

It is hard to think of Burrell playing "I Never Knew" with- out thinking of his classic version on New Jazz which also featured John Coltrane. Yet here we are listening to a treatment of "I Never Knew" recorded two months after the version with Coltrane. Unlike the similar treatments of '*But Not For Me", the versions of "I Never Knew" are very different. The New Jazz was taken at medium tempo, but the presentation here is hard driving. The tune comes from the May 14, 1958, date that produced Kenny's Blue Lights albums (Blue Note 1596 and 1597). Kenny opens up with three smoking choruses followed by an absolutely fantastic Tina Brooks solo with Blakey really opening up behind him. Louis Smith follows with a hard-swinging solo out of Clifford Brown as Kenny sets a riff behind him. Junior Cook was a brand new member of the Horace Silver Quintet when this was recorded, and he cooks in the Silver tradition. The elegant Duke Jordan is next followed by "Mister Thunder" — Art Blakey — before a return to the theme and a brief tag. Twelve and a half minutes of dynamic jazz!

"My Heart Stood Still" is from the sessions that produced Kenny's first album. The March 12 date is correct and published discographies are all wrong. They list the date as December 3, and that probably resulted from the different ways that people abbreviate dates since European custom is to list the day before the month. At any rate, there is additional music unissued from Kenny Dorham's Café Bohemia session (1524) with Burrell and that also features another treatment of this fine standard. Frank Foster who provides the warm mellow tenor here was a frequent partner of Kenny's in the 50s (They did albums together for Prestige and Savoy). This is the only tune in mono on the album. Blue Note did not begin stereo recording until 1957.

The contributions of Tommy Flanagan and Oscar Pettiford should not be overlooked. Any music made by those two is worth hearing.

All three tunes from the second side are from the session recorded by Kenny at The Five Spot August 25, 1959. The rhythm sections here are an especially interesting blend. Ben Tucker had recently come to New York from Los Angeles where he had recorded with Art Pepper and gigged with Joe Albany. The effervescent Roland Hanna led a trio at The Five Spot a bit later in the year and recorded his second Atco album (with Ben Tucker) just about a month after this. I can remember hearing Art Blakey's Messengers at Birdland no more than two weeks after this session was made. Timmons was still his pianist at the time, but he would soon leave to join the reconstructed Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Blakey, himself, was probably rehearsing prior to the Birdland opening. He had just returned from Europe where he used the excellent Barney Wilen on tenor (Hank Mobley left in the spring), and his new man, Wayne Shorter, was getting ready for his first major exposure.

The music here is an interesting mixture. Randy Weston was known as the "Waltz King of Jazz" in the late 50s since so many of his tunes were written in 3/4 time. His "Beef Blues Stew" is in waltz time which doesn't seem to hinder any of the players. It is quite interesting to hear Blakey playing in 3/4 because it rarely happened in his own groups.

Kenny Burrell has always favored ballads with interesting changes, and Tadd Dameron never wrote anything without beautiful harmonic structure, so the Burrell treatment of "If You Could See Me Now" seems especially apt. Roland Hanna's style, which would become quite distinctive in time, tended to reflect Erroll Garner in his solos here.

With "Swingin'", we come to the final performance and Clifford Brown country. By this time it should not surprise any reader to discover that "'Swingin"' is based on the chord changes of "I Never Knew." The late Tina Brooks joins the group (with Timmons now at the piano), so we have a chance to compare Burrell, Brooks and Blakey on the same changes on the same album! Brooks, who had some of Wardell Gray's flowing swing in his playing, opens up with a splendid effort (not quite as good as his earlier solo however) followed by Kenny, Timmons (a very nice solo) and some Burrell-Blakey-Brooks exchanges and a return to the swingin' "Swingin"' theme.

A final note...because of the fact that so many discoveries have been forthcoming from the golden days of Blue Note, it is inevitable that some people may bring up a point that perhaps these are rejected performances. One listen to the music should dispel any attitudes along those lines, but the relationship between Alfred Lion and Rudy Van Gelder, a special one, brings out more information as to why there was so much Blue Note music unissued.

Van Gelder, then and now, likes to limit the amount of playing time on an LP side feeling that once the time gets past nineteen minutes, he cannot obtain optimum mastering quality. That would account for a number of individual titles not issued and finally when Lion found Blue Note with a hit LP (as he frequently did with Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson and others), he would slow down his release schedule while maintaining his recording schedule. Alfred Lion, according to Van Gelder, never missed a week without recording a new Blue Note album.

Thus it is the special relationship between artist, label and engineer that allows us to hear remarkable music such as this, more than twenty years after it was recorded. Aren't we lucky?!

- BOB PORTER

Original sessions produced by ALFRED LION
Produced for release by MICHAEL CUSCUNA
Recording engineer : RUDY VAN GELDER
Photo: K.ABÉ

GXF-3069

Sonny Clark - The Art Of The Trio

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, October 13, 1957
Sonny Clark, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.2 I Didn't Know What Time It Was (alternate take)
tk.5 Two Bass Hit (alternate take)
tk.9 Tadd's Delight (alternate take)

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, November 16, 1958
Sonny Clark, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; Wesley Landers, drums.

tk.3 Black Velvet
tk.4 I'm Just A Lucky So And So
tk.5 Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You
tk.8 Ain't No Use
tk.9 The Breeze And I
tk.13 I Can't Give You Anything But Love

See Also: BNJ-61017

Session Photos

Sonny Clark

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tadd's Delight [Alternate Take]	Tadd Dameron	October 13 1957
Two Bass Hit [Alternate Take]	J. Lewis-D. Gillespie	October 13 1957
I Didn't Know What Time It Was [Alternate Take]	R. Rodgers-L. Hart	October 13 1957
Ain't No Use	Rudy Stevenson	November 16 1958
Side Two
Black Velvet	Illinois Jacquet-Jimmy Mundy	November 16 1958
I'm Just a Lucky So-and-So	Mack David, Duke Ellington	November 16 1958
Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You	Andy Razaf, Don Redman	November 16 1958
The Breeze and I	Camarata-Lecuona-Stillman	November 16 1958
I Can't Give You Anything But Love	Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh	November 16 1958

Liner Notes

When the definitive history of the modern jazz era is written, there will be a chapter on heroin. No doubt there were heroin addicts before Charlie Parker, and there are probably some among the jazz musicians of today, but thankfully, the pervasive influence of the drug is pretty much a thing of the past. But in the 40s and 50s, the image of the junkie musician was everywhere. One critic went so far as to suggest that one couldn't assemble a good big band without at least one addict. It is hard to determine just how many record dates were made or list because of heroin, or whether certain musicians played with or did not play with certain other musicians because of the drug. We do know that heroin kills. It killed Sonny Clark.

Heroin was responsible for any number of other deaths among the post World War II generation of jazz musicians., but in some ways the loss of Sonny Clark hurts more than any of them. By 1946, Bud Powell had demonstrated the best way to play bebop piano. It was not the only way to play, but surely the best way. Yet by 1949, the personal demons of Bud Powell had begun to dominate him and his brilliance after that time was an occasional thing. To be sure, there were performances that showed flashes of the early genius, but there was little in the way of consistency. Of the players who followed Powell - chronologically and musically - Sonny Clark was the best. Not the only one, but the best.

It is possible to compare Sonny Clark with Wardell Gray in many ways. Gray, like Clark, captured the essence of a model (Lester Young) and brought enough of his personality to the basic style to forge a personal mode of expression which, while not innovative, could improve, in some ways, on the original. Each man was under-recorded and had an active recording career of roughly ten years. Heroin also helped kill Wardell Gray.

We are fortunate that Alfred Lion of Blue Note heard Sonny Clark better than anyone while he was alive. He was not the only one to hear Clark's brilliance, but he was the only one who recorded him. On fact, between 1957 and 1962, Sonny Clark was the pianist on more Blue Note sessions than anyone else. In retrospect, it is easy to see why. Sonny Clark rarely put anything uninspired on record whether the session was his own or that of some other leader.

Two of the three trios sessions which Clark recorded for Blue Note are represented here. The earliest is with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, as fine a bass and drums combination as anyone has ever heard. The three tunes are all alternate masters from the versions issued on Blue Note 1579. "Tadd's Delight" kicks things off and immediately we notice one difference: Philly is playing brushes! The arrangement is identical to the original master and as a demonstration of this trio's ability to keep consistent time, it should be noted that the playing time of this performance and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" are virtually identical to that of the original master. If the melody sounds familiar, you should know that the composer's original title for this piece was "Sid's Delight," and it acquired this title after Miles Davis' 1956 recording of the tune.

The arrangement of both "Two Bass Hit" and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" are unchanged from the originals. Indeed it is a rare Blue Note alternate take that differs substantially in arrangement from its original because it was Alfred Lion's practice to rehearse prior to recording and to come to his sessions prepared with the knowledge of how long each piece was laid out and to have a reasonable knowledge of how long each piece would run. This is in market contrast to the way other labels made records in the 50s.

The remaining sides have been issued previously (LNJ 70079), but there are some significant differences. On that LP, a wrong master was used for "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You" and mono dubs were used for the source. Here we get the session in its original stereo from along with the original master of "Gee, Baby." The alternate master of "Gee, Baby" now appears on Blues In The Nigh (GXF 3051). These performances were originally issued in America only on 45 rpm singles. The American juke box industry was very likely the reason for the material chosen here. Red Garland's trio records were quite popular juke box items (as were Ahmad Jamal's) and it seems likely that Blue Note wanted to explore this direction with Clark. "Ain't No Use" was a popular tune of the days in Dakota Staton's version. Illinois Jacquet and Jimmy Mundy's "Black Velvet" (also known as "Don't Cha Go Away Mad"), Duke Ellington's "Just A Lucky So And So,* and Don Redman's "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You" were strong, bluesy, melodies that lent themselves to Sonny's melodic interpretations. "The Breeze And I" is one of those adaptable melodies which seem to in favor with jazzmen year in and year out. Sonny's graceful singing lines really come alive here, yet one can't help feeling that if he were playing with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe, he would approach the tune differently. The blockchorded melody statement of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" is quite reminiscent of Red Garland.

But, too soon, we come to the close. Unless by some miracle the extremely rare (less than 1,000 pressed!) Jazz West date with James Clay and Lawrence Marable appears, we have come to the end of Sonny Clark's Blue Note records and quite possibly, the end of all his records. Perhaps some poorly recorded private tapes will surface but that is not the same thing. Sonny Clark made nine albums for Blue Note and four have been issued only in Japan. There is on better tribute to the musical taste of the Japanese people that the fact that seventeen years after his death, the name and the music of Conrad Yeatis "Sonny" Clark (July 21, 1931 - January 13, 1963) has not been allowed to die.

-BOB PORTER