Trudy Pitts The Excitement Of Trudy Pitts (Prestige 1968)

Cliché but the veritable truth. Ms. Pitts is nothing short of exciting, especially in a live setting.

Personnel

Trudy Pitts (organ), Wilbert Longmire (guitar), Bill Carney (drums)

Recorded

on May 24, 1968 at Club Baron, New York City

Released

as PRST-7583 in 1968

Track listing

Side A:
Trudy ‘N’ Blue
Never My Love
Side B:
Autumn Leaves
W.T. Blues

Husbands and wives. There’s Shirley Scott and Mr. T, but let’s not forget Trudy Pitts and Mr. C. Wife and husband. Only difference is, Stanley Turrentine was a tenor saxophonist, whereas Bill Carney was a drummer. Equally soulful, Carney had previously worked with Shirley Scott and encouraged Trudy to pursue a career on the Hammond organ. Mr. C subsequently assisted her on four Prestige records. Pitts, formerly a pianist and music educator that had studied at Juillard, also cooperated with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt. Why there hasn’t in the wordplay world of jazz been a record by the name of Stitt’s Pitts is beyond me. Missed opportunity.

At any rate, Pitts furthermore recorded with Pat Martino (El Hombre) and Willis Jackson (Star Bag) and came to be part of the increasingly quirky career of Roland Kirk in the ‘70s, appearing on, among others, Other Folks’ Music, as dryly comical a title as they come.

The title of The Excitement Of Trudy Pitts is a dime a dozen. A matter of insignificance, because it’s the subtitle that counts: Recorded Live At Club Baron. Among the Prestige records of Trudy Pitts, who hailed from the stronghold of organ jazz Philadelphia and was acclaimed for her blues-drenched style, dynamic settings of the organ and foot pedal work and mentored ‘another Scott’, namely the young Rhoda Scott, The Excitement Of Trudy Pitts stands out. Whereas her other records focused on diverse and concise standards and popular tunes, her fourth and final album on Prestige is a full-blown affair of groove and grease.

What’s so alluring about records like The Excitement Of Trudy Pitts is that they give you a feeling of how things went at the tail end of the chitlin’ circuit era, during which clubs offered accessible, soulful musical entertainment to the predominantly black community, which was lining up in clubs in cities like Newark, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Syracuse, Chicago, Atlantic City. Hammond organ combos were very popular. Foot pedal style or bass lines on the keyboard obviated the need for a bass player, which was cheaper for club owners. Most of all, crowds were taken in by the multi-dimensional sounds of the organ, which sounded familiarly like church and related to the vocalizing of blues singers.

This time the place is Club Baron in New York City and the aural snapshot is provided by Ms. Pitts, who rocks the joint with the help of guitarist Wilbert Longmire and her other half, Bill Carney. Four tunes, two on each side. Pitts rips and roars through the up-tempo 12-bar blues progression of Trudy ‘N’ Blue. The feeling that she coaxes out of the organ during Never My Love equals the bittersweet yearning of the soul singer and is underlined by a subtle, perky beat.

The other beats that Carney provides are jubilant, groovy, raucous and bring Club Baron to boiling point in combination with Wilbert Longmire’s dirty but nimble-fingered playing style. Autumn Leaves gets a hard-cookin’ treatment and W.T. Blues is the kind of backbeat-heavy blues that induces a couple of slightly inebriated gents and dames to start to point their fingers at what lingers in the middle of their bodies.

Miss Pitts was exciting, remember? To be sure, she is not a cheap sensationalist but gets the message across with plenty of ideas and plenty of skills. Plenty is the word here. As T-Bone Walker once sang, “let your hair down baby, let’s have a natural ball.” Baron had a ball. Wouldn’t you? After five decades, this stuff is definitely still fresh enough to arouse your spirits.

Listen to W.T.’s Blues on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCLV9y3tsj0

Nat Adderley In The Bag (Jazzland 1962)

The Adderley Brothers get down to the nitty gritty in the cradle of jazz with Ellis Marsalis and friends.

Nat Adderley - In The Bag

Personnel

Nat Adderley (cornet), Nat Perrilliat (tenor saxophone), Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone), Ellis Marsalis (piano), Sam Jones (bass), James Black (drums)

Recorded

on May 19, 1962 in New Orleans

Released

as Jazzland 75 in 1962

Track listing

Side A:
In The Bag
Sister Wilson
R.S.V.P
Low Brown
Side B:
Mozart-in
New Arrival
Chatterbox

Finding themselves in New Orleans in early 1962, Nat and Cannonball Adderley noticed that there were quite a few excellent, blues and swing-drenched jazz players. Leave it to Cannonball to act upon his intuition, just like he did when he called Riverside label boss Orrin Keepnews in 1959 when the quintet was firing on all cylinders at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, which led to smash hit and perennial favorite Live In San Francisco. From New Orleans, Cannonball called in on Keepnews again and requested that they record with a couple of good but relatively unknown NO musicians. And so Nat Adderley’s In The Bag came to pass. That was the advantage of being part of the independent music business.

The cats that the Adderleys met were tenor saxophonist Nat Perrilliat, drummer James Black and pianist Ellis Marsalis, supposedly the first time that the beloved educator and head of the Marsalis dynasty was recorded on wax. Many recordings would follow, if only decades later, after two of his six sons, Wynton and Branford, broke through in the early 1980’s. Marsalis sadly passed away from Covid-19-related pneumonia in 2020.

It was a good idea to represent modern jazz from New Orleans, since it was rather underrepresented in The Big Easy, town of traditional jazz and rhythm and blues. In The Bag was certainly not the ‘first modern jazz session in New Orleans’, as Keepnews claims in the liner notes, though it is evident that practically all modernists worked in rhythm and blues and traditional settings to earn a living and were into their own thing exclusively at after-hours spots, notably artists like clarinettist Alvin Batiste and Ed Blackwell, the unique drummer who would join the groundbreaking free jazz group of one-time New Orleans-resident Ornette Coleman in Los Angeles in the late 1950’s.

Contrary to Keepnews’s statement, there had been modern jazz recordings in New Orleans, even if they were very few, among those Golf Coast Jazz Volume 1, recorded by the American Jazz Quintet featuring Marsalis, Blackwell, Batiste, saxophonist Harold Batiste and bassist Richard Payne in 1959. Modernists as saxophonist Mouse Bonati and pianists Ed Frank and Frank Strazzeri were represented on various New Sounds From New Orleans albums, though they, to be sure, were not New Orleans-born. But to the credit of Keepnews, these recordings were very obscure and only reissued decades later. His remark raises the question how many modern jazz recordings there approximately have been in New Orleans in the bop and hard bop period of the 1950s-60’s and which releases and artists are we actually talking about?

In The Bag, on the strength of the high-profile presence of the Adderley Brothers, has been reissued over the years. It’s a fine, blues-drenched session. Nat Adderley’s catchy line In The Bag ends with a coda full of naughty odd notes. It becomes immediately clear that the hard tone and sassy playing of Nat Perrilliat is a great asset. James Black’s Sister Wilson is a first-class hard bop burner. Adderley’s ballad playing on cornet on Marsalis’s R.S.V.P. has the right touch of control and emotion. Marsalis, a saucy accompanist throughout, takes vivid center stage during Yusef Salim’s mid-tempo Low Down, spurred on by Black’s gritty accents.

Mozart-in refers to its composer Alvin Batiste, who was nicknamed “Mozart” because of his prolific composing career. It features another jubilant solo by Nat Adderley, who isn’t afraid to engage in buoyant high whoops, appropriately Satchmo-like as vivaciousness is concerned. The band also took Chatterbox from the Alvin Batiste book, familiar terrain for the New Orleans clan, having been recorded earlier on the beforementioned Golf Coast session by the American Jazz Quintet.

The Adderleys made every effort necessary to limelight unsung cats. Cool guys with a big heart.

Ricardo Me

Portuguese guitarist Ricardo Pinheiro is all about melody and tone and meanwhile making up musical stories with a who’s who from Europe, USA and Brazil. “I’m working with my idols, so I’m very happy.”

Pinheiro shows the view from his house with his camera. A big garden, rows of trees of multiple heights at the edge. A crystal-clear blue sky. It’s Sintra, a short drive from Lisbon. The gorgeous Sintra Woods and Mountains were a retreat for Portuguese nobility, full of opulent castles and villas. The forests are dense like giant wombs, the hills are jagged like gigantic rock elbows and various locations offer a breathtaking view of the ocean nearby. To say the least, living in Sintra is not a punishment. “It’s beautiful. I grew up in Lisbon, but I came to Sintra when I was 17. My parents built a house. I lived here for three years before I went to study at Berklee in Boston. When I got married, me and my wife were wondering where to live. Prices in Lisbon were high. Not as crazy high as nowadays, but higher than Sintra. We got an apartment and then, after the birth of our second child, moved into this house.”

The beauty and splendid serenity of Sintra inspired Caruma, Pinheiro’s refined and moving piece of guitar and voices featuring singers Theo Bleckmann and Monica Salmasso from 2020. Clearly, Pinheiro can’t be confined to a small space. He got plenty heads turning as a sidekick to Dave Liebman and never looked back, releasing various, singular albums of standards, straight-ahead and prog jazz, acoustic and Brazilian-Portuguese flavored songs, free improv, jazz and poetry and cinematic scores. A kid in the candy store of guitar music. “There wasn’t an instrument in the house until I asked for a guitar at age 14. I was soon playing heavy metal. Metallica and Iron Maiden. I was in a band that even recorded in the UK. But when I was about 17, I felt the need to study theory. That meant playing jazz at the Hot Club Jazz. My grandfather listened to Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Broadway tunes, Brazilian music. It was old people’s music to me then. It was okay, but old! Still, I started to get into standards, learning harmony. Then I got into John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson. Charlie Parker. Slowly but surely I started understanding it and loving it.”

You could do worse than, a couple decades later, assembling a line-up of saxophonist Chris Cheek, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Jorge Rossy. They are part of Pinheiro’s newest Fresh Sound Records release, Tone Stories. A set of standards that includes well-known warhorses as When You Wish Upon A Star and Blame It On My Youth and seldom-played hard bop classics as Elmo Hope’s De-Dah and Dexter Gordon’s Fried Bananas, marked by the angular yet lyrical playing of Pinheiro, embedded in the colorful sounds of the all-star cast. It’s a warm and smoothly flowing album, apple pie fresh out of the oven. And nothing tastes quite as good as his version of Jimmy Rowles’s seminal ballad The Peacocks, achingly beautiful from start to finish. “Tone is the quality of sound. I like to think of the album as a set of stories that are told with the tones of each player, which together make the sound of the band. And we’re telling a story with each song. Chris and Michael have incredible tones. Jorge as well. He had definite ideas of how he wanted his drums to sound, especially during the ballads. He said to the engineers, ‘I’m not playing like a typical drummer, behind everything, chink chink… Please put me up forward in the mix. I’m painting sounds.’ Jorge is one of my favorite drummers of all-time, period. So, this album is a dream come true.”

From heavy metal, the tradition of Wes Montgomery to the invigorating input of the school of the 90’s. Pinheiro enthusiastically reflects on the influence of his postmodernist elders. “I belong to the first generation that was inspired by people like Jorge Rossy, Brad Meldhau, Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Chris Cheek. They incorporated a lot of tradition but with a new flavor, used the same tools in a different way. It’s not Wes but also isn’t fusion. When Meldhau did those pop songs, it really connected with me. Jazz can be like this, wow. It wasn’t playing pop as pop, but pop like jazz. Brad, Jorge and Chris redefined things, formed new musical proposals. Nobody played even eights like Jorge. Nobody had the timbre of Kurt or the two-handed independence and the classical vibe of Brad. Or played the upper part of the horn like Mark. Their groups joined two worlds, tradition and fusion, together in a peaceful way. They deserve all the credit.”

He sometimes starts solos where you least expect it. Paves the way to a resolution with quirkily melodious twists and turns. Pinheiro’s style is a refreshing mixture of asymmetry and lyricism. He doesn’t restrict himself to the vintage 1950’s aesthetic. On the contrary. He allows himself the odd display of effects and volume and tone control, with extraordinary results. During The Peacocks, his handling of volume control mingles like a human voice with Cheek’s suave soprano. Back in 2017, he made When You Wish Upon A Star into a psychedelic tour de force, almost as if he was playing in The Grateful Dead or Iron Butterfly or Pink Floyd or was playing along with the thirteenth take of The Beatles’s Tomorrow Never Knows, with Massimo Cavalli and Eric Ineke on Triplicity. The same trio repeated the uncanny feat on their 2022 version of Bill Evans’s Time Remembered. And effects and tone control are all over Caruma or 2013’s Tone Of A Pitch. Pinheiro stresses an important fact: “Melody is all-important. I’m not thinking about hip runs or large intervals. If music has no melody, there’s no point in my opinion. But I like different things. I’m like a chameleon. Tone aesthetic comes with the history of jazz, in a way. The classic guitarists were thinking about their tone. Way back, I started listening to John Scofield and Bill Frisell and started experimenting with delay, overdrive and reverb to color the music. But I avoid exaggerating at all costs, I don’t want to obscure the message and the melody. I envision sounds and try to go for it, either with thinking about strings, how to use my hands or with effects. The incredible Ben Monder has been very important to me. He taught me how to use effects and tone control without confusing things up. It took a few years of experimenting.”

Pinheiro hooked up with various class acts through the years. He met Dave Liebman and Dutch drummer Eric Ineke through the International Association of Schools of Jazz, which was founded by Liebman. His albums were released on Greg Osby’s Inner Circle label and Jordi Pujol’s acclaimed Fresh Sound Records, among others. A well-connected gent. “Fresh Sound was one of my favorite labels. I fell in love with those records from Meldhau and Rosenwinkel. I kept in touch with Jordi ever since the release of my debut album Open Letter in 2010. It’s kind of my nature to take matters in my own hands. I’m a little… how shall I say this, not ashamed.” Pinheiro laughs. “I harass people! That’s how I got in touch with Chris Cheek. Back then, I knew Chris was coming to play here. He had done four albums on Fresh Sound and I thought they were absolutely fantastic. I sent him an email and asked if he wanted to record and he agreed. I asked if he could talk with Jordi. He happily obliged and that is how my first album Open Letter came about. Now we’ve got Tone Stories and another one in the can already with the same quartet.”

Neatly trimmed coupe, healthy tan, bright eyes, rapid, enthusiastic flow of speech. One easily understands why colleagues, apart from his original musicianship of course, like to work with the resident of Sintra and jazz teacher. He’s eager to continue his striking partnership with Massimo Cavalli and Eric Ineke. “We’ve got another album coming up, we’ve finished recording just last month. Massimo and I have a great understanding. And I love to play with Eric. He’s one of the most swinging drummers out there, so easy to play with. Energetic, yet sensitive. There’s no effort, strain, doubt, he always is totally aware of the structure of the music. He carries with him this big history of playing with loads of giants of jazz.”

Among other endeavors, notably working with Grammy-winning Brazilian singer Luciana Souza and having the exceptional improvisational skills of Portuguese Maria João on a soon-to-released solo album, Pinheiro is currently striking up a cooperation with none other than famous Brazilian composer and singer Ivan Lins. “I contacted him and sent some songs. He said that they were beautiful and suggested that he write lyrics. I couldn’t believe it. I’m over the moon.”

Ricardo Pinheiro

Check out Ricardo and his discography here.
And find Tone Stories on Fresh Sound here.

The real thing

GRANT GREEN AND JACK KINSELLA –

We heard from guitarist Jack Kinsella, a fine straightforward jazz guitarist from The Hague, The Netherlands, who also plays in the positively charming country band The Good, The Bad & The English. Kinsella uploaded a couple of rare tunes from The Real Thing session from tenor saxophonist Houston Person featuring guitarist Grant Green and organist Brother Jack McDuff.

Of course, all participants are the grooviest, but as a guitarist, of course Kinsella is specifically interested in ‘hero’ Grant Green, also a Flophouse Favorite as everybody who trespasses the premises frank and free is well aware of. In the early 1970’s, Grant Green had moved from New York City to Detroit. The most prolific artist of Blue Note in the early 1960’s, even eclipsing chart magnet Jimmy Smith as far as number of sessions is concerned, he gradually vanished from the scene in the mid-1960’s, largely due to his addiction to narcotics.

Green returned at the end of the decade, inspired by his feature on organist Reuben Wilson’s Love Bug and, with strong support of Francis Wolff, set up a new career as jazz funk guitarist. Green made a series of great albums, revered nowadays as jazz funk classics by aficionados (though there always has been a strong segment that considered him a sell-out to real jazz at this point) and good sellers. Although Green remained quite frustrated at not having reached the kind of fame like Kenny Burrell, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, who had passed away in 1968 after a run of extremely successful commercial albums.

Green was recently divorced and bought a house in Detroit. Motor City had always been a place where black people, secured of regular jobs in the automobile factories, owned more homes in general than elsewhere in the USA. Motown had left to Los Angeles but people still appreciated good ‘n’ groovy black music. One of the centerpieces of action was Watt’s Club Mozambique. How great the atmosphere and music was at this club can be heard on organist Lonnie Smith’s Live At Club Mozambique (recorded in 1970) and Green’s Live At Club Mozambique, (recorded in 1971 and also featuring Person and Muhammad) both ‘previously unreleased’ Blue Note albums from, respectively, 1995 and 2006.

Green was a regular musician on the stand of Club Mozambique. Another album, The Real Thing, by the great tenor saxophonist Houston Person, a double LP, was recorded in March 1973 and released the same year on Eastbound. It featured, in different line-ups, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, organists Brother Jack McDuff and Sonny Phillips, bassist (and Motown ‘Funk Brother’ legend) James Jamerson, drummers Idris Muhammad and Hank Brown and singers Etta Jones and Spanky Wilson. A solid album of pop, funk, blues and ballads. Listen to The Ohio Players’s Pain here.

Green appeared on five tracks on the official release. Kinsella found a bonus track on a compilation CD, Lester Leaps In, listen here. Great to hear Green, McDuff and Person in a straight-ahead mode. Next, Kinsella uploaded the funky Grazy Legs from the CD version, better quality than the vinyl rip, listen here.

Kinsella also mentions an upload from Big John Patton’s Blue John album featuring Grant Green from 1963, only released on CD in Japan in 2004, five bonus tracks including Green’s Jean de Fleur, five months before Green’s recording on his seminal Idle Moments, listen here.

Green is beautiful.

Clifford Jordan Beyond Paradiso (NJA 2024)

Clifford found his Jordanaires in Holland.

Clifford Jordan - Beyond Paradiso

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Cees Slinger (piano), Ruud Jacobs (bass), Han Bennink (drums), Steve Boston (percussion); Jacques Schols (bass), Martin van Duynhoven (drums)

Recorded

on September 10, 1969 at VARA studio, Hilversum; on June 3, 1970 at Paradiso, Amsterdam

Released

as NJA 2401 in 2024

Track listing

Vienna
Impressions Of Scandinavia
Doug’s Prelude
Quagadougou
Girl, You’ve Got A Home
I Can’t Get Started
The Girl From Ipanema


Unmistakable tone defines the greats, whether it’s icons like Lester Young or John Coltrane or acquired tastes like Lucky Thompson or Clifford Jordan. You’ll spot Jordan in a cacophony of thousands. Lovely tone. Clear as a blue sky, pure as goat’s milk. His tone is a precious satin cloth that traveled westward through the Silk Road. A touch of the blues. A dog’s wail from the back porch.

Chicago-born. Middle name: Laconia. This is also the title of an exciting Latin-tinged tune from his fourth Blue Note debut album Cliff Craft from 1957. Jordan was a promising, Rollins-inspired tenor saxophonist who found himself a spot in the vanguard of hard bop, recording with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver and Max Roach.

As the years went by, Jordan followed a progressive route, playing with Charles Mingus in the 1960’s alongside Eric Dolphy. He was interested in the movement of black rights and consciousness. Typically, Jordan wanted to take matters in his own hands and produced recordings of favorite artists and himself under the heading of The Dolphy Series. Though his efforts of releasing those tapes by himself stranded, his recordings eventually found a home on the groundbreaking Strata-East label from Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver. Jordan’s participation in Strata-East and influence on the avant garde is a feat that is too often neglected.

Glass Bead Games, often cited as a perennial favorite by jazz fans and a major inspiration to following generations of players, was released by Strata-East in 1973. Part of that album represented the start of a stellar quartet that would come to be known as The Magic Triangle: Jordan, Cedar Walton, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins.

A year before, Strata-East released In This World, a set of original tunes by Jordan from 1969, featuring Don Cherry, Kenny Dorham, Julian Priester, Wynton Kelly, Richard Davis and drummers Ed Blackwell, Roy Haynes and Albert Heath.

It is the repertoire of In This World that, among others, is played by Jordan on a top-notch new release by the Dutch Jazz Archive: Beyond Paradiso. Jordan was booked to play in Paradiso, Amsterdam’s hub of the counterculture movement in 1969, but the club was closed for a month due to circumstances and Jordan and his band of Dutch stalwarts – pianist Cees Slinger, bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink – were transferred to the VARA studio in Hilversum. A year later, Jordan was offered a second chance and played in Paradiso with Slinger, bassist Jacques Schols and drummer Martin van Duynhoven.

The Hilversum date is positively explosive. Jordan presents a ballad, Doug’s Prelude, a hip blues line, Quagadougou, and Vienna and Impressions Of Scandinavia, both enticing modal canvases, open for a lot of suggestions, and everybody rises to the occasion, Slinger in a McCoy/Herbie-inspired role and the tandem of Jacobs/Bennink notably propulsive. At times, Jordan wails like a gladiator to the gods, but, typically, he always remains in balance, flowing with long graceful lines. There never is any strain, a great feat. As liner note writer Tom Beek says – he did a great job by the way – Jordan is quite the king of understatement.

At Paradiso, though the sound, not surprisingly, is a bit dry and muffled, Jordan kept up his charged but balanced playing and, this time, plays the standards I Can’t Get Started, The Girl From Ipanema and Jordan’s Girl, You’ve Got A Home, the latter, which applies to the whole program of Beyond Paradiso, making abundantly clear that the Dutch cats convincingly stood their ground.

In this world, better said, flood, of archival releases, this applies to the Dutch Jazz Archive as well.

Clifford Jordan

Buy Beyond Paradiso at Nederlands Jazz Archief here.

The Vara show is also available on vinyl.

Louis Smith Prancin’ (Steeplechase 1979)

Mr. Smith goes to Copenhagen. As a matter of speaking.

Louis Smith - Prancin

Personnel

Louis Smith (trumpet, flugelhorn), Junior Cook (tenor saxophone), Roland Hanna (piano), Sam Jones (bass), Billy Hart (drums)

Recorded

on April 13, 1979 in New York

Released

as SCS 1121 in 1979

Track listing

Side A:
One For Nils
Chanson de Louise
Ryan’s Groove
Side B:
Prancin’
I Can’t Get Started
Fats

Short but sweet. That is what you would call the career of trumpeter Louis Smith in the late 1950’s. There’s one session from Transition that was purchased by Blue Note: Here Comes Louis Smith featuring Cannonball Adderley credited as ‘Buckshot La Funke’. A month later, Smith walked into the studio of Rudy van Gelder in Hackensack, New Jersey, meeting up with Charlie Rouse, Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor: Smithville. Treasured Blue Note goodies for the jazz geek, excellent stuff, the latter, as yours truly is concerned, having the upper hard bop hand.

Memphis, Tennessee-born Smith was the nephew of Booker Little. Now there’s a hip trumpet blood lineage. While attending University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, young lion Smith shed wood with the likes of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt. Smith quit the scene after his Blue Note releases and focused on band directing at Booker T. Washington and University of Michigan and teaching at Ann Arbor public schools. After long radio silence, Smith reappeared on the Danish Steeplechase label of Nils Winther in the late 1970’s. Steeplechase was a safe haven for many stalwarts of mainstream jazz during the fusion and disco-infested years of torture. We’re talking Duke Jordan, Kenny Drew, Horace Parlan, Jimmy Knepper, Chet Baker, Walt Dickerson, Tete Montoliu, Hilton Ruiz and many more. It is still going strong as one of the to-go-to independent jazz labels. Quite a feat.

Smith recorded no less than twelve albums for Steeplechase from 1978 to 2004, though he remarkably succeeded to stay under the radar of the jazz universe until the end of his life in 2016. Dutch pianist and concert organizer Rein de Graaff, always on the hunt for unsung heroes, invited Smith to perform during De Graaff’s famed Stoomcursus Bebop lectures and concerts in The Netherlands. As he recounted recently, De Graaff also played with Smith in Detroit in the famed Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, “before an all-black audience.” De Graaff: “He was a very sweet man. The Steeplechase albums are good in general, but his Blue Note period is the real deal. Back then he was in his mid-twenties and on top of his game.”

Louis Smith didn’t have to travel to Denmark to record for the Danish-based label. It was Greenwich Grooving Time in NYC and the trumpeter was in the good company of tenor saxophonist Junior Cook (a Steeplechase recording artist in his own right), pianist Roland Hanna, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Hart. They play a solid set of hard bop, mid-and up-tempo swingers that feature the flexible style and bright sounds of Smith and the typically half-lazy phrasing of the great Junior Cook, who found a nice spot in the jazz realm between the legendary stylings of Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon.

The thing that hooked me though is Smith’s balladry on flugelhorn. He added a ballad or two on every one of his twelve Steeplechase records. Smith’s lovely buttery soft lyricism is all over his Chanson de Louise. Furthermore, Smith builds a beautiful seven-minute solo during I Can’t Get Started, the Gershwin/Duke standard that suffers from silly lyrics (“I’ve flown around the world in a plane/I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/The North Pole I have charted/But I can’t get started with you…”) but boast a beautiful melody and attractive chord changes. It has always been a perennial favorite of jazz musicians and singers.

The importance of the American Songbook for jazz – and how well jazz musicians recreated Tin Pan Alley in their own image – cannot be overestimated. Smith runs away with I Can’t Get Started here, a man of sorrow and resilience and more than a couple of emotional nuances in between. A gem, no less. Pleasurable result of browsing through the Steeplechase catalogue of records by what back then were acclaimed or unsung middle-aged jazz men.

Listen on YouTube to Prancin’, Chanson de Louise and I Can’t Get Started.