Author: Francois

The Slide Hampton Octet Sister Salvation (Atlantic 1960)

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Sister Salvation is trombonist and arranger Slide Hampton’s breakthrough album as a leader. It’s another one of those typically soulful, warm-sounding, big ensemble productions of the Atlantic catalogue of the early sixties – like the albums of Hank Crawford, David Newman and Milt Jackson. Too good to miss.

Slide Hampton Octet - Sister Salvation

Personnel

Slide Hampton (trombone, arranger), Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), Ernie Royal (trumpet A2, B1-3), Richard Williams (trumpet A1, A3), Bob Zottola (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor saxophone, arranger), Jay Cameron (baritone saxophone), Kiane Zawadi (euphonium), Bill Barber (tuba), Nabil Totah (bass), Pete LaRoca (drums), Billy Frazier (arranger)

Recorded

on February 11 & 15, 1960 at Bell Sound Studio, NYC

Released

as Atlantic 1339 in 1960

Track listing

Side A:
Sister Salvation
Just Squeeze Me
Hi-Fli
Side B:
Asservation
Conversation Piece
A Little Night Music


Nowadays it’s hard to fathom the kind of incredible jazz life Slide Hampton led. Already playing trombone by the age of three, Hampton toured the US with the (XL) family band of his father, providing music at carnivals, circuses and fairs. As a young man, Hampton’s stature grew by playing with Lionel Hampton (no family relation), Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson, displaying both his fluent trombone playing and superb arrangements. By 1960, a recording as a leader by the cutting-edge Atlantic label was more than appropriate. (The release of Slide Hampton And His Horn Of Plenty a year earlier on the obscure Strand label had gone relatively unnoticed) In 1960 Hampton also played on Charles Mingus’ Mingus Revisited and Randy Weston’s Uhuru Afrika.

Asservation is a succesful blend of small combo flexibility and big band muscle. One constantly imagines a singing voice prying for attention and I think that kind of vibe is one of the tune’s and album’s greatest qualities. Sister Salvation assuredly has that ‘singing voice’ quality, you’d expect the voice of “Brother” Ray Charles to chime in any minute now. It’s churchy, r&b-type jazz at its best.

A Little Night Music, a more lithe, bouncy tune with a pronounced descending bass line, is contagious as well. Hampton also picked interesting tunes of other composers like Randy Weston’s Hi-Fli and Gigi Gryce’s Conversation Piece, that include concise, top-notch solo’s by Freddie Hubbard and George Coleman. In short, the album is a happy marriage between tunes, arranging and soloing.

The jazz life of Slide Hampton would continue, bringing many more recordings in the sixties, a job as arranger at pop soul-kingdom Motown and fruitful years as a jazz expatriate in Europe in the seventies and beyond. Hampton has been especially prolific as a recording artist in the new millenium. Twin Records released Hampton’s latest album, Inclusion, in 2014.

A View From The Stage

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Bass player Henk Haverhoek put up pictures of his gigs with classic jazz men on his website. Check it out: snapshots of Dutch jazz history.

Johnny Griffin and Henk Haverhoek
Rene Thomas, Erik Ineke, Henk Haverhoek
Henk Haverhoek portrait

(From left clockwise: Johnny Griffin and Henk Haverhoek; guitarist Rene Thomas, Eric Ineke and Henk Haverhoek; portrait of Henk Haverhoek)

American jazz musicians have traveled and lived in Europe since the thirties. The migration was at its peak in the sixties and musicians concentrated predominantly in Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam: visitors without rhythm sections, which made them dependent on local musicians. Not everyone was up to it, but talented journeymen or pros succeeded in combining a deep passion for the music of their American heroes with versatility and studiousness, maturing greatly from playing with these iron-willed jazz individuals.

Among them was bassist Henk Haverhoek, who has been active both in the Dutch jazz scene and internationally, as well as a studio/theatre/radio show musician and teacher since the mid-sixties. In 1968, Haverhoek joined pianist Rein de Graaff and saxophonist Dick Vennik’s hard bop/modal jazz quartet, which recorded and performed prolifically and succesfully in the late sixties and seventies. Haverhoek and the quartet supported, among others, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Rouse, Clifford Jordan, Freddie Hubbard, Junior Cook, Woody Shaw and Lee Konitz. Haverhoek also played with Ben Webster, Duke Jordan, Mal Waldron, Horace Parlan, Thad Jones, Slide Hampton and Joe Henderson. Could’ve done worse.

Hank Mobley The Flip (Blue Note 1969)

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In the late sixties Hank Mobley’s round tone had become a bit rougher around the edges and his style was more hard-driving. This is evident on 1969’s The Flip, which boasts hi-voltage blowing but is short on finesse. Mobley, always the prolific songwriter, wrote all five tunes on The Flip. The compositions that turn out best are the ones that resemble Mobley’s songwriting of the late fifties and early sixties.

Hank Mobley - The Flip

Personnel

Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Dizzy Reece (trumpet), Slide Hampton (trombone), Vince Benedetti (piano), Alby Cullaz (bass), Philly Joe Jones (drums)

Recorded

on July 12, 1969 at Studio Barclay, Paris, France

Released

as BST 84329 in 1969

Track listing

Side A
The Flip
Feelin’ Folksy
Side B
Snappin’ Out
18th Hole
Early Morning Stroll


Examples of the latter are Feelin’ Folksy, 18th Hole and Early Morning Stroll. Feelin’ Folksy swings suavely and is a coherent group effort. Mobley’s solo is a mix between his earlier bluesy style and new, more advanced bag. Clearly, Mobley is in fine form, in spite of the increasing alcohol abuse of that time in his life. Late 2014, I talked to Dutch pianist Rob Agerbeek, who toured in Europe with Mobley in 1968/69 and remembered that Mobley was playing very well indeed. Incidentally, Mobley wanted Agerbeek to play on the sessions of The Flip in Paris, but Blue Note boss Francis Wolff had already booked Vince Benedetti, so Agerbeek had to be cancelled.

18th Hole is an intricate, hard-swinging tune with great three-horn harmony. Philly Joe Jones keeps the guys on their toes, especially in Early Morning Stroll, a bop figure that makes good use of tension and release with an lengthy bridge.

Hank Mobley’s the quintessential musician’s musician. That isn’t front page news. Key words: killer chops, smart songwriting, unique round, warm tone, inventive storytelling, smokin’ hot to boot. Great storytelling, however, has become a minority on The Flip. More often than not, Mobley reaches an early climax in his solo’s, which doesn’t leave much room for a story to develop. Where to go when the gunpowder has faded?

To my pleasure, on Early Morning Stroll, Mobley cuts short his initial flurry of over-excited notes and instead tells an interesting, swinging tale. Trademark Mobley.

Snappin’ Out is a typical Latin hard bop tune and an easy head to blow on. Slide Hampton blows swift and assured. The tune is more satisfying than the title track and opener of the album, The Flip, which, arguably, is a conscious effort to reach the same popular status as Mobley’s earlier winner of 1965, The Turnaround. But conscious efforts, like femme fatales, rarely give you what you want.

The Flip swings hard and is sure to enliven a party. But unfortunately, it also swings wild and uncontrolled, favouring a strained, hi-octane tension over a sophisticated build-up. If Philly Joe Jones would be alive today to comment on The Flip, I’m sure he would agree that boogaloo wasn’t his long suit. I’m sure he would laugh and say, ‘Man, I better stick to modern jazz drumming, leave that boogaloo to Idris Muhammad!’ Jones possessed the humor and self-mockery. The drum legend faultlessly imitated Bela “Dracula” Lugosi on a 1958 Riverside album, remember.

Speaking of faultless jobs, considering Mobley’s abilities The Flip is quite a distance away from douze points.

Harold Ousley Tenor Sax (Bethlehem 1960)

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Tenor saxophonist Harold Ousley combined relaxed, flowing, bluesy lines with a rich, resonant sound. Tenor Sax is his only album as a leader in the sixties.

Harold Ousley - Tenor Sax

Personnel

Harold Ousley (tenor sax), Charles Davis (baritone sax), Julian Priester (trombone), Philip Wright (piano), Thomas Williams (bass), Walter Perkins (drums)

Recorded

in 1960 in NYC

Released

as Bethlehem 6059 in 1960

Track listing

Side A:
Paris Sunday
Devachan
At Last
Lush Life
Side B:
Struttin’ To Truckin’
Dell-A-Vonn
Porter’s Groove


Ousley died of unknown causes last year, on August 13, 2015. Born in Chicago, Ousley turned professional in the late fourties, working in circus bands. In the fifties and sixties, Ousley played with Gene Ammons, Billy Holiday, Howard McGhee, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Dinah Washington and organist Jack McDuff. With the reign of fusion and rock in the early seventies, work for tenor saxophonists like Ousley had become quite scarce. Ousley nevertheless held chairs in the big bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, while recording a few albums as a leader of jazzfunk ensembles. Ousley continued working in r&b and blues for the rest of his career, playing with Big Maybelle, Ruth Brown, Percy Mayfield, George Benson, Jimmy Witherspoon and organist Bill Doggett.

Ousley also teached jazz programs in schools and developed a method of ‘music as therapy’. Alledgedly, Ousley appeared in the (depending on your taste, silly or wryly funny) blaxploitation movie Cotton Comes To Harlem in 1970. But Ousley is difficult to detect. Not to say, impossible. He isn’t credited. I’m beginning to suspect that the journalists who reported Ousley’s supporting role in their eulogies of Ousley last summer have been putting on the Flophouse Floor Manager. (So if you’ve watched the movie and have found the appearance of Ousley, please report and bust this utterly important jazz myth…)

More work in showbiz followed, as Ousley hosted a cable tv show in the early nineties, Harold Ousley Presents, joining the ranks of fellow musicians Johnny Cash, Tom Jones and Ernest Tubb, who all hosted shows at one time or another in their careers.

I’m really fond of Ousley’s marshmellow sound. He’s a gentle player with sly humour, who stays in the middle register for most of the time and favors a slightly dragging beat. Ousley is comfortable with rapid, multi-note lines as well. Of his scarce work as a recording sideman, his appearance on drummer Grassella Oliphant’s The Grass Roots (Atlantic 1965) is easily his best, a successful symbiosis of sound and style. He also contributed five tunes for that album, among them Haitian Lady and One For The Masses, which Ousley would re-visit later on; the contagious, bossa-fied hard bop tune Haitian Lady would appear on Brother Jack McDuff’s Walk On By (Prestige 1966). (Ousley contributed three tunes to that album and played on a number of McDuff sessions for Prestige, probably as a sub for Red Holloway) One For The Masses returned on both Ousley’s jazzfunk albums from 1972, The Kid and Sweet Double Hipness.

Ousley’s elegant, lush playing style is already present on Tenor Sax. His tenor mixes nicely with the other two reed instruments, resulting in a warm, full-bodied group sound. The rhythm section keeps a good groove. But they are playing it pretty safe, accenting the basic formula of theme-solo’s-theme as if they’re fresh out of music college, careful not to step on anyone’s toes.

Priester, one of the most promising trombonists at that time in his career, is swift and imposing. Charles Davis speaks huskily, eloquently. Surprise lurks around the corners of Ousley’s lines, and he embellishes the mid-and uptempo tunes with patiently executed, bluesy phrases. Those attractive mid-and uptempo tunes, like Paris Sunday, are set opposite a most satisfactory, intimate, breathy version of the classic ballad Lush Life.

Nice tenor work. It’s quite incomprehensible that it took the tenor saxophonist twelve years to follow up Tenor Sax with another album under his own name.

The Jazztet The Jazztet And John Lewis (Argo 1961)

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The coupling of John Lewis, the king of chamber jazz music, as a composer and arranger with The Jazztet in 1958 wasn’t as strange as it looked on the surface. Although co-leaders Benny Golson and Art Farmer lead a cookin’ hard bop ensemble, it was acknowledged for its elegant tunes and meticulous arrangements. The smart arrangements of Lewis fit The Jazztet like a glove. Yet I’m sure that Lewis had not foreseen that the group would deliver the hardest swinging version of Django ever put on wax.

The Jazztet And John Lewis

Personnel

Benny Golson (tenor saxophone), Art Farmer (trumpet), Tom McIntosh (trombone), Cedar Walton (piano), Tommy Williams (bass), Albert Heath (drums), John Lewis (composer, arranger)

Recorded

on December 20 & 21, 1960 and January 9, 1961 at Nola’s Penthouse Studio, NYC

Released

as Argo 684 in 1961

Track listing

Side A:
Bel
Milano
Django
New York 19
Side B:
2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West
Odds Against Tomorrow


Lewis, the leader of the amazingly popular Modern Jazz Quartet, always had to tolerate a lot of vitriol. Jazz policemen condemned the group’s stiff concert hall appearances, deeming their hybrid of jazz, classical and third stream music unappropriate, often meaning decidedly ‘unblack’. They hated to see Lewis put the ball and chain on vibraphonist Milt Jackson, who was supposedly bereft of his sparkling blues playing.

If you’re as controversial as John Lewis, you’re bound to be at the right track.

Things were not that simple in the real world, outside policing dreamland. Charles Mingus worked with the ‘suite’-concept regularly. Bud Powell played and incorporated Bach. Many hard boppers had received thorough formal training. And in spite of their classical approach, the elaborate themes of Lewis and pristine solo’s of Jackson revealed their firm roots in bebop and blues.

Hank Mobley’s my main man but is that a reason to put the lid on MJQ? Of course not. My doctor advised me to take it in small doses, though. I once tried to spin MJQ albums back to back while working nine to five at home, but around 2 o’clock I started suffering from an annoying itch all over my body and a mildly disconcerting shudder of the pancreas.

All tunes except Bel were from the MJQ book. Lewis wrote Bel especially for The Jazztet And John Lewis. It’s a sweeping opening statement, consisting of a theme of staccato horn stabs that work like melodious claxons: here’s The Jazztet! The three-horn line-up sounds tremendously powerful. Its propulsive, brassy interludes coupled with the cracklin’ rolls by Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath catapult the soloists into fervent motion.

Django has the same virile, robust edge. It’s taken at a faster tempo than usual, and it’s pandemonium from there. The great asset of Django beside the glorious melody – the tension-release section – is played out by the group to full effect, inspiring Golson and Farmer to the core. It seems Farmer can’t wait as he enthousiastically announces himself at the end of Golson’s solo, weaving in and out of Golson’s sublime, understated swinging statements before his own swift, suave contribution. Another immaculate solo is by Cedar Walton, who plays very fluently in a bag that suggests the influence of both Bud Powell and Bill Evans.

Pastoral tunes like Milano and New York 19 benefit from the warm, breathy sound of Golson and the lyrical style of Farmer. They’ve got plenty of serene background harmony to work with. Odds Against Tomorrow, a composition that Lewis wrote for the movie of the same name (a Robert Wise crime flick from 1959 starring Harry Belafonte), is typical MJQ. Its slow, melancholy introduction, held together by a can’t-get-out-of-your-head four note figure, fugues into an effortlessly swinging, Ellingtonian mid-tempo movement, buoyantly introduced by Art Farmer. The tune returns to a slow outro, leaving us bucked and satiated.

Lewis’ stylish blues tune, 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West, is the right material for The Jazztet. Golson tackles the mid-tempo groove with flurries of glorious, off-centre notes. Trombonist Tom McIntosh (a fine arranger in his own right), less virtuosic and imaginative than his forerunner in the Jazztet, Curtis Fuller, contributes a more swing-type solo with an attractive, round, soothing tone.

Musically, it’s a superb album. Production-wise, it’s splendid as well. My copy is on the Dutch Funkler label, released in the same year as the Prestige original. The overall sound is sprightly and upfront. The fat, ‘together’ sound of drums and bass is a gas. Tommy Nola and Kay Norton of Nola’s Sound Studio in NYC did an outstanding job.

John Lewis and The Jazztet did an outstanding job, upping the ante as far as bringing swing to thoroughly written-out material is concerned.

Horace Parlan – At The Beeb

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A lot of American musicians migrated to Europe onwards from the fifties, looking for work, recognition and a relief from the harsh conditions of American life and the stress of racial prejudice: Bud Powell, Art Taylor, Johnny Griffin, Kenny Clarke, Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Slide Hampton, Lucky Thompson… Most of them, eventually, returned to the US. Few settled in Europe for the rest of their lives, like Don Byas, Kenny Drew and Art Farmer.

And pianist Horace Parlan. Parlan settled down in Denmark in 1972 and still lives in the village of Rude near Copenhagen. Not only that, Parlan has been a Danish citizen for years now.

Horace Parlan suffered from polio as a child. His right hand is crippled. As a consequence, Parlan’s playing style was a rare combination of sparse, rollicking left hand lines and inventive, three-fingered right hand voicings. Check out Parlan’s singular style on a 1986 concert in Köln, Germany. (with – the typically good-natured! – Dizzy Gillespie and a particularly eloquent Clifford Jordan)

horace_parlan3
Horace Parlan - Us Three
28l

Parlan is heard on a number of classic hard and post-bop recordings, notably on tunes as Charles Mingus’ Better Git It In Your Soul and Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. And everybody digs Us Three, one of the essential Blue Note rhythm sections consisting of Parlan, bassist George Tucker and drummer Al Harewood. Some of their best work is on Parlan’s Us Three and Speakin’ My Piece, Stanley Turrentine’s Up At Minton’s and Dexter Gordon’s Doin’ Alright.

BBC World Service visited the 84-years old pianist in 2015 for their radio broadcast series The Documentary. A widower in a nursing home, the blind, fragile and shaky-voiced Parlan has retired and talks us through his career. It’s a touching portrait.

At one time, Archie Shepp is on the phone. Checking on his pal. The conversation soon turns to music. “Did you hear any cool cats lately?”

Old friends, sticking together like book ends.

Clifford Jordan These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly (Atlantic 1965)

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The Mosaic label, whose policy of re-issueing and uncovering vaults has been so essential in keeping the flame of classic jazz burning, shed a welcome light last year on tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, releasing a box set of six adventurous albums Jordan produced and recorded in the late sixties and early seventies on Strata-East, among them Jordan’s career-defining 1973 album Glass Bead Games. Jordan’s career included other rewarding efforts, like These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly, Jordan’s sole album on Atlantic. It’s a surprise act, a wicked dedication to the roots of black musical culture.

Clifford Jordan - Leadbelly

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Roy Burrowes (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), Cedar Walton (piano), Chuck Wayne (banjo), Richard Davis (bass), Albert Heath (drums), Sandra Douglas (vocals A3, B3)

Recorded

on February 1 & 17, 1965 in NYC

Released

as SD 1444 in 1965

Track listing

Side A
Dick’s Holler
Silver City Bound
Take This Hammer
Black Betty
The Highest Mountain
Side B
Good Night Irene
De Gray Goose
Jolly ‘O The Ransom
Yellow Gal


Jordan hailed from Chicago, hometown of hard-driving, so-called ‘tough tenorists’ like Gene Ammons and Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis. While Jordan shared their unnerving bravado, his tone is different, an alluring tone, simultaneously rough around the edges and ephemeral. A sought-after sideman, Jordan recorded with stalwarts as Lee Morgan and Max Roach in the late fifties and early sixties, as well as a series of high standard solo albums. Much acclaimed hard bop favorites are Blowing In From Chicago (Blue Note, 1957, with John Gilmore) and Cliff Craft (Blue Note, 1957) Like age matures wine, Jordan’s style ripened in the early seventies, his lines becoming fluent like ripples of lake water. Jordan kept recording and performing steadily until his death in 1993.

Maybe this album, filled with interpretations of such classic tunes as Take This Hammer and Goodnight Irene, is not such a surprise act after all. The preceding year, Jordan had been part of Charles Mingus’ outfit (appearing on the hi-voltage live album Right Now: Live At The Jazz Workshop) Musical gobbler Mingus’ unfazed search for new vistas while retaining an all-embracing sense of the past’s relevance and blend of harmonic finesse with unbridled juke joint tumult surely rubbed off on Jordan.

Da Gray Goose is one of the cases in point. Tasteful harmony over the stop-time theme kicks it into action, strongly plucked bass and fiery drums inspire the soloists, creating an atmosphere of abandon. Lusty shout choruses stoke up the fire as the tune progresses. There are also some, yes, virtuoso banjo parts.

The gloomy folk blues music of Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter, whose life story reads like a combined effort of Shakespeare and James Baldwin, including oppression, hardship, addiction, treachery, murder and prison life, is excellently cast in a jazz frame. But not too jazzy, often the sound of Jordan’s top-notch group is as tough-as-nails as the sound of any one group that enlivened the back alley bars way back when. Jordan’s unpredictable phrasing overcomes the restrictions of the rigid folk blues form.

Craftily uncrafted, These Are My Roots is a spirited album of earnest, raw and ebullient swing.