These are the first batch of jazz records I wrote up for this site.
Most of the choices below belong on a list of the Greatest LP’s Ever, in any genre, and not just as jazz albums. If you are new to jazz or an old fan there should be much to love — and debate — here. There will be many more jazz records to come, from a wider range of artists, and a deeper set of releases from some of the same artists. Do you really think you only need one Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk record in your life??? But if you are building up your record collection these are amongst the first records you should reach for.
Most of the selections won’t be shockers — the usual suspects are accounted for — Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Lady Day. But, I like melody and harmony and am not afraid of pretty music. I also have a fondness for the Cool 1950s, the alternately cerebral and earthy 1960s, and the funky 1970s. So, there is one acoustic Herbie Hancock “jazz is art” choice represented while one electric Herbie “jazz can be fun” selection makes the list. There are two Bill Evans masterpieces on here, an entire box set from Chet Baker, and I decided to write up Miles with Gil Evans before I went with Fusion Cocaine Miles (come back over time and some Fusion Miles will be on here).
But, there are also a couple of left field choices to keep things interesting. My initial Cal Tjader choices to write about are far from his greatest albums but I picked two of his sets that have never earned a compact disc reissue and are not on streaming services. This missing music is in itself a great reason to buy, and play, vinyl. Likewise, Sun Ra is bigger today than he was during his lifetime but I went with a mainstream Sun Ra record that was put out by Herb Alpert (!!!) on his A&M label. Sun Ra deserved to be lovingly recorded, and promoted, by a major label just like his peers and not just celebrated as a leftfield oddball.
Considering that both the introduction of the 12′ vinyl LP and jazz itself were stalwarts of the post WWII 20th Century that is when almost all of these records come from. I have one set from 2009 and it brilliantly updates 1950s and ’60s Miles Davis Cool for our current post-apocalyptic hell-scape with (lyrical) avant-garde explorations. There will be more 21st Century jazz coming and I often feature more recent jazz albums in my Put This On Vinyl section.
One of the joys of record collecting, and collecting jazz records in particular, is the brilliance, and feel, of the live-in-the-studio sound captured in the record grooves and the beauty of the sleeve designs. These are art objects worth having in your home even when they aren’t on your turntable.
Finally — want me to cover something I have missed so far? Send in a photo of the LP with your pet and I will review it. Find out more here.
I sold a huge part of my record collection when my son was born. Big mistake. When I started collecting again, I was thinking about only getting the greatest albums ever made. Maybe that meant 10 Miles Davis records and 1 Helen Merrill album. For, Helen Merrill, I went straight to her debut, a 1955 stunner with Clifford Brown and Quincy Jones.. I think its an example of a debut being the single greatest album in an artist’s career.
Here’s the thing — collecting is like an addiction and I have always been a collector. So, I now have dozens of Miles Davis albums and I have restocked my Helen Merrill collection with all of her records I sold. Who just wants to have only the Single Greatest Album in an artist’s career, especially when that artist had an interesting, rewarding, and even downright eccentric career. You could say it for the cult artist Helen Merrill almost as easily as you could for the iconic Miles Davis.
That brings us to Helen Merrill‘s Dream of You, what she initially saw as the follow-up album to her debut. It is a brilliantly eccentric collaboration with genius arranger Gil Evans. Its not a perfect album but it is a great one and well worth owning and diving into.
It is also an album that connects back to Miles Davis, his newly minted best-seller status at Columbia Records, and the rebirth of the career of Gil Evans. Helen Merrill really helped give the world more Gil Evans and (unknowingly) launched him into the next phase of his career while giving Miles Davis the idea for the next phase of his career.
Dream of You is an eerie, emotional experience so buckle up and prepare for a ride into a melodramatic dreamscape that often threatens to turn into a nightmare.
Art
An elegant, perfectly balanced 1950s record sleeve.
I don’t know why most everything is getting more advanced while photography and graphic design seem to be getting worse. In 1956 they knew what they were doing — this is a lovely image effortlessly matched with typography.
During the 1950s, the line between jazz and pop singing was so opaque that Helen Merrill may have been thought of as another “girl singer.” In the modern era Merrill slots nicely into The Cool School of vocalists, especially her fellow New Yorker, Chris Connor, and June Christy from Los Angeles. Visually, all three were presented as pretty but approachable, blonde girls. If anything, Helen Merrill was often pictured on her album sleeves as more alluring and glamourous then Christy or Connor. The latter two were most often photographed in casual clothes instead of vamping evening wear a la Julie London. They were presented as the realistically nice (if often depressive) girls the listener should be with and not the femme fatale that was tempting them into dangerous waters.
Helen Merrill, June Christy, and Chris Connor: 3 Cool Blondes Who Hung Out With The Jazz Guys.
The thing is, if these were the girls next door their neighbors weren’t Eisenhower Era conformists but thoroughly hip, modernist jazz musicians and counter-cultural beatniks. These were artists who sometimes put out daring, off-kilter recordings, especially Christy and Merrill. They weren’t go along to get along Girl Singers but artists who took chances. Chris Connor was steeped in the same NYC jazz scene Helen Merrill grew up in and June Christy came up in Stan Kenton’s challenging big band and was married to an underrated, well-respected saxophonist. Though Christy worked with small group jazz bands every few recordings she collaborated primarily with modernist West Coast arranger Pete Rugolo. This last gent, Rugolo, brings in another connection to Miles Davis, as he produced the Birth of the Cool sessions. That said, Chris Connor and June Christy had more commercially succesful careers in the U.S. than Helen Merrill did. If anything, MMerrill’s often otherworldly voice just made it harder for her to play “normal” the way June Christy and Chris Connor could.
You could look at the Dream of You album cover like a bait and switch for the off-kilter music within it. But, I think it helps to look at it like a David Lynch meditation on American normalcy leading to dark and twisted corners rather than a fake-out that you are going to be getting cheery, Doris Day or Rosemary Clooney style romantic optimism on the album.
Music
EmArcy was launched in 1954 as the jazz subsidiary of Mercury Records. EmArcy almost played like a mini mirror version of Verve — quality mainstream jazz aimed at a mainstream city dwelling audience. EmArcy didn’t flood the market with jazz releases but the records they did put out were Grade A choice. Legendary producer Bob Shad was given EmArcy to run. Shad had recorded much of the first wave of modern blues artists, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, and was on the ground floor of Be-Bop.
Born Jelena Ana Milcetic to Croatia immigrants, Helen Merrill had been a professional jazz singer since the age of 15. She sang with a number of artists and big bands, even recording a weird single with Earl Hines called “A Cigarette For Company” which makes it plain that her unique singing style was always locked into place. Merrill gravitated to modern jazz and was friends with many of the vanguard artists in the NYC community she grew up in, including the Birth of the Cool gang. At Emarcy she joined a small roster of elite jazzers that included vocalists Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine as well as musicians Erroll Garner, Maynard Ferguson, and trumpeter Clifford Brown.
EmArcy knew they had a once in a lifetime genius in Clifford Brown. They first paired him with fellow trumpeters Clark Terry and Maynard Ferguson and they used him as the featured soloist on an album each with Sarah Vaughn and Helen Merrill. Both of these vocal records have become classics of the genre and are often held up as the greatest albums for each artist. Then, Bob Shad had Brown record a lush ballad LP to introduce him to a wider audience that you can read about here.
Producer’s Bob Shad’s approach for Helen Merrill worked. In an age when all jazz vocalists were basically pop singers, he pulled Merrill over to appeal to a jazz audience on her self-titled debut with Clifford Brown, arranged by Quincy Jones, and featuring a host of other talents. The LP earned great reviews and sold quite well for the mid 1950s, when success was measured in the allotments of tens of thousands of albums sold and not in multi millions.
I always place Helen Merrill in little bit of a corner as her vocal style is an acquired taste. Here’s the strange thing — she is true to herself on her debut album and she wouldn’t be changing her style on her subsequent releases. Merrill sings and sounds exactly like she would on more challenging works but for her first LP it just comes off as more approachable and charming. I am not sure why. I am not alone in thinking this. After Verve acquired the EmArcy catalog it is always the songs from this debut that ended up on a host of Verve compilations and songbook albums. When her work for this era is compiled it often has featured cuts from most of her debut album and a few tracks selected from all of her other releases. I really like Helen Merrill but she does earn the Velvet Fog nickname that Mel Torme somehow got stuck with early in his career.
Helen Merrill had a little pull after her first record beat sales expectations. Tragically, she wouldn’t go on to record with her friend Clifford Brown again. The trumpeter, already a legend with jazz musicians, was killed in a car accident, along with Richie Powell and his wife, in June of 1956.
Helen Merrill came in hard with a plan to work with arranger and friend Gil Evans, who was struggling professionally at this time. Producer Bob Shad, who seems like a sympathetic guy, said “No.” In 1956, Evans was respected by jazz musicians but almost completely unknown by the wider jazz listening public. Shad didn’t care about the arranger’s lack of name recognition. It was the fact that Gil Evans worked very slowly and his arrangements were so complex and hard for the musicians to learn that it ate up a lot of studio time. Shad didn’t like that Evans often went into overtime in the studio because of this. It was a financial decision. But, Merrill wouldn’t let Gil Evans go and she finally prevailed, with Shad balancing out her request by having her record a string ballad set first, which was viewed as the more commercial proposition.
Helen Merrill With Strings is a very good album but it didn’t sell like Merrill’s debut. I don’t think anything her or Shad could have done really would have placed her at the same level of popularity as a Dinah Washington, or even a Chris Connor. Helen Merrill is a great singer but her voice is also just innately kind of unsettling. I am not sure if she sounds haunted or like a spirit doing the haunting. June Christy could sound the same way, especially on her accurately titled album Off Beat, but she could also sound fun and carefree. Thankfully, Shad still believed in Helen Merrill and was a man of his word so recording with Gil Evans came next.
It turned out to be a great pairing because if anything Gil Evans’ work often sounds either haunting or haunted, making him a great match for Helen Merrill.
Like all arrangers on vocal dates Gil Evans couldn’t afford to have a working band learn his charts before the recording session. Thankfully, Bob Shad put together superior studio bands for EmArcy dates and didn’t disappoint here. Some standouts talents in the Gil Evans orchestra for this album include Hank Jones on piano, Art Farmer on trumpet, Barry Galbraith on guitar, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Joe Morello on drums. Morello would soon have all of his time taken up when he became the star drummer with The Dave Brubeck Quartet so its nice to see him on a session date.
Bob Shad was no slouch and was correct about the relative expense of the arranger’s work. Gil Evans did take a long time to craft the arrangements for Dream of You and he did go over time in the recording studio to get the music right, which gets expensive when you have to have an orchestra’s worth of musicians in the studio at the same time. During this era albums were usually recorded live-in-the-studio in 1 to 4 days max. I can’t find how many separate dates Dream of You was recorded in but the first session was in July 26 of 1956 and the last went into the end of February, 1957. This was very rare for the era — I don’t think I have seen an album from this era have that expansive of a recording length. I have no idea what sessions the finished songs come from but my guess is that it may have taken the band multiple attempts to get Evans’s charts right and that the final recordings come from Feb of 1957.
It wasn’t exactly that his arrangements were difficult for individual musicians to learn, it was that it was hard for the entire band to be able to play the music together in the same way. Gil Evans was supposed to be a great guy and very easy to work with — he just had his own sound and it wasn’t part of the jazz vocabulary yet. Helen Merrill has nothing but good things to say about the recording process and her time in the studio with Evans.
The final album contains a solid mix of standards from stage and screen plus numbers from the jazz world, including a handful of obscurities. Richard Rodgers is represented by both his work with Lorenz Hart (the lesser recorded “He Was Too Good To Me) and with Oscar Hammerstein (the extremely au courant “People Will Say We’re In Love.”) Frank Sinatra only wrote a handful of songs himself but Merrill does my favorite version of his “I’m A Fool To Want You” after Sinatra’s own Capitol reading — both are total noir wrist-slashers and detail his psycho-sexual relationship with Ava Gardner (it had to have been worth it).
The title track, “Dream of You,” was co-written by Sy Oliver from his time in the Jimmie Lunceford band. Bringing Sinatra back, Sy Oliver was his greatest arranger during his bow-tie Aw Shucks Big Band era. Oliver is now a sadly under-recognized artist but he is a giant in the story of jazz (I believe it was Sy Oliver who blue-printed letting a smaller ensemble inside a big band emerge before everybody comes roaring back in again; he also brought Gospel into jazz in ways that Sy Oliver fan Ray Charles now exclusively gets credited for).
while Eubie Blake’s “You’re Lucky To Me” is one of four tunes on the album I was not otherwise familiar with. The other more obscure tunes are “I’ve Never Seen,” by somebody named Don Marcotte, a dark night of the soul dazzler titled “Troubled Waters” that ends the album and “Where Flamingoes Fly.” The title of this last song may sound like an upbeat, tropical tune but this reading of it plays like the theme song to a Nicholas Ray film noir.
Gil Evans and Helen Merrill got to do their weird thing together:
Probably the most successful upbeat number on the record is Duke Ellington’s “Just A Lucky So & So,” which also highlights a completely different, more mainstream, swinging sound from Gil Evans and allows him to be himself while he gets to tip his hat to one of his heroes, Ellington, who had no trouble smuggling avant-garde influences into his work and creating a few of his own for the rest of the jazz field to follow. What a brilliant arranger Gil Evans is, and what a fine band is playing his charts. And, if you don’t think Helen Merrill can sound like she is having a good time, check her out on this number.
Combine the distinct worlds, and sonic approaches, of “Where Flamingoes Fly” and “Lucky So & So” together and you get Merrill and Evans’s reading of “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” Its both swinging and lugibrious; sexy and upbeat yet somehow unsettling (“somehow unsettling” might be a great description for Helen Merrill’s overall singing style). Harold Arlen may be the most under-recognized master composer of the Great Broadway & Classic Hollywood era. He was definitely the most blues/jazz based. Lyricist Johnny Mercer may have been his greatest songwriting partner.
Dream of You is always a compelling work but its also a solitary listen. Blast it around party company and you are liable to find yourself sitting alone with the balloons. Playing it for a romantic partner might result in an empty bed. Maybe only Nina Simone gets as off-kilter as Helen Merrill though Simone’s backing accompaniment usually grounds her in normalcy whereas Gil Evans is traveling in waters as troubled as his vocalist.
Helen Merrill and Gil Evans tried to go on tour together but it was a disaster. Gil Evans had yet to make a name for himself and they couldn’t afford the orchestra he had in the studio that had taken the time to learn the arrangements and gel as an ensemble. Pick-up bands couldn’t sight read Gil Evans’ very challenging charts nor get the special collective Gil Evans feel of his music down instantly. Merrill likened the resulting music as the sound of musicians crashing into each other and the tour was aborted.
Helen Merrill recorded only two more albums for EmArcy. The last one, The Nearness of You is almost up there with her brilliant debut. Five cuts on it feature pianist Bill Evans on piano and it houses fantastic versions of “Softly As a Morning Sunrise” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” (my mum’s favorite song).
Merrill would never really click in the States beyond jazz clubs and cabarets but she had very successful periods in Italy and France — she even recorded a great record in Italian during an extended stay in Europe. Her most enduring career success has been in Japan, where she lived for a number of years and where she retains a large cult following. Japanese fans refer to Merrill as the “Sigh Of New York” (as great as that nickname is listen to enough Helen Merrill and maybe Siren of New York Harbor is more accurate). There is a nice interview with her on the Jazz Wax site, where she comes across as a grounded, sensible artist as well as a beatnik free-thinker. She took a fair amount of time out of singing and touring to raise a family but her final marriage was to Torrie Zito (a solid jazz arranger himself) and her career has lasted decades. She is still with us well into her 90s — a true rarity for those living the jazz life. Or, any kind of life really.
If working with Gil Evans had very little positive impact on Helen Merrill’s immediate commercial prospects it certainly showed her a path forward. Merrill has taken on a few projects that seemed like they were stabs at a more mainstream career (like recording Country songs) but overall she has kept tight with the jazz free-thinkers, often in stripped down duet formats of one voice and one instrument. Other key recording collaborators have included Gary Peacock, John Lewis, Steve Lacy, and Ron Carter to name just a few.
And, in 1987, she revisited Dream of You on a new recording with her old friend Gil Evans. The initial plan was for them to record new material together but Evans was dying of cancer at the time. So, they ended up rerecording his charts from their original collaboration and added in “Summertime” at the top. It was a major label release on the reborn EmArcy label and, if anything, it received a lot more press and sold better than their first set together 30 years earlier ever did. The Penguin Guide to Jazz described Collaboration, the resulting release as “One of the strangest singer-and-orchestra records ever made.” They obviously had never heard Dream of You.
Helen Merrill took a big career swing with Dream of You and it ended up cementing in her place as a cherished cult singer. But, the album had a major impact on Gil Evans career. One of the friends Helen Merrill kept talking about the project to, throughout the process, was Miles Davis, who loved the resulting recordings and said he should start working with Gil again.
Gil Evans actually wrote a number of charts for Johnny Mathis’s debut LP around the same time (not realizing they had a major crossover pop star on their hands, Columbia initially surrounded Mathis with serious jazz backing). Gil’s earlier work with Miles or his charts with Mathis don’t sound like the music on Dream of You. But, Evans’s subsequent recordings with Davis, starting with Miles Ahead, are very much in the vein of his work on this Helen Merrill album. In a nice change of pace, instead of being leftfield weirdo music Gil Evans’ collaborations with Miles Davis became amongst the very best-selling jazz albums of the 1950s and early ’60s. Their most commercially successful collaboration, Sketches of Spain, is ironically the least commercial sounding. Its always nice when overestimating your audience’s taste works out.
Dream of You was the sound of Gil Evans becoming the Gil Evans who would become much listened to for the rest of his life. I have read a couple biographies of Gil Evans. Helen Merrill gets a couple sentences in each one but she, and Dream of You, deserve at least a few pages, if not a complete chapter, in a book on Gil Evans’s career.
I’d been holding off on putting up an Ahmad Jamal album cover featuring him with his pup for my Canine Covers feature and now he is gone. I’d saw him play a couple of times over the years at Yoshi’s in Oakland and his later style could sometimes be very different from his early sound that brought him such deserved success.
Ahmad Jamal was that rarest of things — a brilliant jazz musician who was a true avant-garde artist, changed the musical landscape, AND did so while experiencing massive mainstream success.
It helps when the cutting edge music you are making is easy on the ears.
The Ahmad Jamal album that become a 1955 smash hit is pictured in the second row from the bottom at the far right. Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not for Me was a monster seller in the late 1950s, staying on the Billboard charts for over 100 weeks. This wasn’t just impressive for jazz but for all of pop music — it was one of the biggest selling albums of the entire 1950s, beating out most releases by Sinatra, Nat Cole, Elvis, etc.
And, Pershing is a lowkey live album pulled from a Jamal club date. Ironically, the album itself is very short (especially for a 1950s 12′ record which tend to run long) but the hit single from it, “Poinciana” is an epic 8 minute track that was itself a big hit and night time radio staple. The song can be seen like a forerunner of Downtempo and a classier relative of the Exotica EZ listening of the time.
Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans were contemporaries of each other in the way that they made beautiful experimental music but their playing styles, and approaches were very different, with Evans experimenting with having his rhythm section improvise at the same time as him. The early Jamal trios were much more controlled, and his melodic playing often stays stripped down.
Of the above LPs, I most often listen to the two Impulse dates (highly recommended), Pershing, and the Penthouse set with strings. For whatever reason, most of Jamal’s back catalog is out of print. Extra strange is the fact that his electric Fusion and birth-of-Smooth-Jazz albums have been wiped off the official record and are ALL out of print. These records actually sold pretty well and were often on the jazz charts of the era.
Like many later albums by jazz and R&B artists there is a cut-off date to this kind of stuff a couple of years into the 1980s but it’s fun and saw Jamal keeping the lights on.
At a certain point, Jamal just went back to acoustic jazz full time but his style transformed. He started hitting the keys harder and had a more percussive style. The couple times I saw him in concert were very fun and exciting events. Jamal would be having a ball playing and would play a few bars that delighted him and he’d laugh and loop a few bars in his playing before taking off somewhere new. It was like watching an acoustic pianist be a sampler and remixer of his own playing.
He must of been in his late 70s or early 80s at the time.
Here is Ahmad Jamal knocking them dead when he was just a couple years shy of age 90. The playing here combines the style that made him famous with some of the more muscular force of his later playing.
What a massive talent. That sense of joy he played with must have been some life force.
Like a lot of idiots with a music blog, I don’t have any trouble recommending records to people. That said, things can get tricky for some jazz artists, a number of them on the Blue Note label. The default setting for ne plus ultra Blue Note artists such as Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey is EXCELLENT. The weird thing about putting out so many excellent albums, often multiple ones in a single year, is that it can end up nullifying any one of them. One truly great record (Television’s Marquee Moon or Andy Bey’s American Song) is like a monolith on a mountain. Dozens of great albums by the same artist can hurt the reputation of any one of them.
And here’s the thing with Art Blakey — it’s not just his Blue Note records that are fantastic. Some of the above records are on Impulse!, Colpix, Limelight, and Riverside. Jesus, even the Blakey LP on Timeless from 1981 is tops.
It’s hard to go wrong with a Blue Note record. But, that most probably is because of the talent they signed. You see a record under Art Blakey name just snatch it up and buy it no matter what label its on.
It’s gonna be great.
People have asked me why I bring up sales and chart placements when talking about records. Well, I think Art Blakey humorously sums up it best in his opening remarks in the below video — “I sincerely hope you all buy these records. God knows we need the money.” Artists deserve to make a living from their work just like you and I do.
A big part of what a bandleader does is recognize and foster talent even if that means you are setting those people up to learn how to be bandleaders themselves and leave you.
Here’s Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers on what is probably their most famous tune, “Moanin,” written and arranged by pianist Bobby Timmons (who I write about here). This has to be Blakey’s most famous band — joining pianist Timmons is Lee Morgan on trumpet and Benny Golson on saxophone. All three have composed much covered jazz standards and all went on to have stellar careers as bandleaders themselves. I am going to raise a glass to clean-living in the arts because the great Benny Golson is, blessedly, still with us at age 94, and put out his last album in 2015.
When Ramsey Lewis passed away back in September I pulled his records off my shelf and got reacquainted with an old friend. I also discovered there are some sweet Ramsey Lewis platters I should add to my collection.
Lewis came to fame in Chicago in the 1950s with a lean, mainstream, and above all propulsive piano sound. Raised in a household that honored Classical music, jazz, and Gospel, Lewis earned an advanced degree in Classical music which he matched with a “Get The People Moving” foundation that he gleaned from his tenure as a church pianist.
There are four phases of Ramsey Lewis.
Phase One was the 1950s to early ’60s when the Chicago pianist married the tasty trio sounds of Dr. Billy Taylor and Gene Harris with some of Bill Evans’s more ethereal chords on ballads. Lewis had a jazz career during this time and he’d be remembered in jazz even if we ended there. Then, Ramsey broke through with the most crossover thing possible — two sweet instrumental Xmas sets. The first one saw him hitting the lower reaches of the pop charts for the first time in 1961. The second one, in 1964 went straight up to the Top 10. Even in the 1960s this didn’t happen very often.
I actually have the RL Xmas sets but they are quarantined in a separate section until after Thanksgiving with the rest of my Holiday LPs. There is one Ramsey Lewis set from this period, that also hit the pop charts but it is now out-of-print. The sweet Bach To The Blues seamlessly combines tunes based on Bach compositions with the dirtier blues. Listen to the entire thing and you can hear just about every side of Ramsey Lewis — the classical training, the roadhouse smoker, the kinetic master of Gospel soul-jazz, and the lush romantic balladry. Plus, what a great LP cover! I did to get this one.
Ramsely Lewis followed that up with the hit that would launch his second phase and define him for the rest of his career.
It is springtime in San Francisco, with blue skies and sunshine followed by flashes of surprise rain followed by a heatwave that turns into artic winds whipping out of nowhere.
With just a little bit of light in the sky, I reach for Desmond Blue, an orchestral jazz set featuring the bittersweet, lyrical saxophone of Paul Desmond. Its a timeless release but it reminds me that the early 1960s were still part of the 1950s.
Dexter Gordon was one of the tenor sax titans, and a key jazz figure in a line that goes Gordon-Rollins-Coltrane. I love the music of all three of those great men but if we are just talking about the way they laid out on ballads my pick would be the series of ballads on Blue Note that Dexter Gordon cut in the early 1960s. Blue Note usually looked for new talent to develop so it was a very nice surprise that Dexter Gordon ended up recording for them. Serious jail time for drugs in the 1950s had hurt his career trajectory.
The thing is, Dexter Gordon never cut a ballad set for that storied label. Gordon would fly into NYC from his homes in Los Angeles, and then Paris, and record a mess of material that the label would turn into albums, putting one or two of Dex’s ballads on each set. Towards the end of his label contract, Blue Note let the single coolest human ever stay in Paris and cut his records there (its a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it).
Jazz reissues really turned into an art during the CD Era and the reconstituted Blue Note put out this compilation of Gordon’s ocean-deep ballad readings in 1991. It became one of my most listened to late night album during the 1990s — a time when I actually spent my life listening to jazz late into the night. Ah, sweet bird of youth.
On another Dexter Gordon post I used a Blue Note reading of a song Sinatra made famous. Here, Dexter Gordon does the single greatest instrumental reading of a tune Sinatra actually wrote, the tortured and autobiographical “I’m A Fool To Want You.”
Here is a prime example of this in what may be the total apex of the cheesecake design esthetic. I found these three Riverside Broadway Composers compilations at different times and it wasn’t until I pulled them out together that I noticed that they formed one long cheesecake image of a reclining beauty. What a neat concept!
Riverside is up there with Blue Note as having one of the all-time greatest jazz rosters. Their three greatest artists were Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Sonny Rollins. Rollins was a Saxophone Collossus at Riverside but neither Monk or Evans were big sellers for the label when they were actively recording for producer Orrin Keepnews. It took Columbia to cross Monk over the line while Verve put their (indie jazz) weight behind Evans. You can read about Monk on Riverside here and Bill Evans on Riverside here and here. I also wrote up a Bobby Timmons Riverside classic here.
The Riverside roster also included Wes Montgomery (who also became a bestseller when he moved up to Verve), Benny Golsen, Cannonball & Nat Adderley, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Charlie Byrd, Abbey Lincoln, and so many others, including John Lee Hooker. If you see a Riverside record and it costs less than a steak dinner, just do your self a favor and pick it up.
If I had my way, I’d add a fourth songbook album here for George Gershwin. That would make the four greatest songwriting titans of pre WW2 American songwriting. It turns out that Riverside had enough success with the first Great Composers series that they did a second set of three LPs, that led off with Gershwin.
Jazz artists liked recording tunes by the likes of Cole Porter, Gershwin, and Irving Berlin because the melodies were strong and memorable and the harmonic structures were interesting and offered many directions for the music to go in. These composers all had idiosyncratic touches — Jerome Kern wrote songs in the style of classical music while Porter spent time in the French Foreign Legion and added arabic touches to his music. Harold Arlen is often considered the bluesiest of the great American composers.
Here is Sonny Rollins, in his quartet with Jim Hall, laying out on “If Ever I Would Leave You.” This Lerner & Lowe ballad from Camelot is transformed into an upbeat bossa nova by Rollins and Co. The elasticity of standards is the hands of jazz musicians is one of the joys of a classically written Great Song.
Sonny has lived such a long and fruitful life that he has had to give up performing recently because he doesn’t want to play at a diminished capacity (at this writing he is 91). I saw Rollins once in Humboldt and once in San Francisco. The first time I saw him he mostly played Island tunes in the styles of “St. Thomas,” his most famous number. The second time I saw him he dug into standards. I later discovered that when Rollins didn’t trust an audience he’d play upbeat Caribbean style numbers to entertain and when he thought they could handle it he went deep into standards to express his real emotions.
There is real emotion behind these Riverside cheesecake comps.
Bing Crosby was the first modern pop star, ruling the airwaves, the charts, film, and radio before the TV age took off.
Crosby was also first in recording music in pretty much every style there was — everything from Dixieland and Swing to Country, Irish folk, and he helped popularize Hawaiian music, which his eternally laid-back, relaxed style matched perfectly. Bing got into jazz on the ground floor and had his first hit No. 1 hit all the way back in 1928. Tony Bennett deftly described Bing as the “Cool, White, Louis Armstrong” and while Crosby had developed his own style and sound he never stopped spotlighting Louis Armstrong as his #1 influence and working with him every chance he got. As a side note, Crosby even pronounced Armstrong’s first name correctly — It’s “Louis” accent on the ‘s’ at the end and not in the French way. Armstrong may have been from New Orleans but he was not, nor did he pretend to be, Creole.
Cole Porter wrote the tune “Now You Has Jazz” for High Society, the glossy movie musical retelling of the brilliant screwball comedy Philadelphia Story. The scene in the movie has many charms but High Society is filmed in such a bland, sterile, and staged Technicolor manner that we have gone with a TV appearance of Crosby & Armstrong that has the evocative black & white visual sting of film noir even as its vibes are never less than joyous.
When I was a kid I knew Peggy Lee as a weird old lady who would show up on TV or in the paper in a wig and giant sunglasses. Of course, she was once a young mother balancing raising a family (including this sunny collie), going on tour, appearing on radio shows, and knocking out hit records.
In the 1940s, Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole helped establish Capitol Records, an artist run West Coast indie that would solidify into a major when they took a chance on a nosediving Frank Sinatra right before his career took off again. Nat, Peg, and Frank pretty much defined the classic Capitol sound. Peg’s music during the Eisenhower Era is great too but there is just something so hopeful and upbeat about her ’40s recordings. Maybe Peggy Lee actually was hopeful and upbeat during this period when she enjoyed a series of Top 10 hits on Capitol, including the unstoppable “It’s A Good Day.”
The fab guitar player in this clip is Peg’s husband, Dave Barbour, who played with everybody from Billie Holiday and Lester Young to Benny Goodman and Andre Previn. Barbour had a serious drinking problem and it ended up destroying his marriage to Ms. Lee and largely contributed to an early death. Peggy Lee had her own problems and after a breakdown she came back bigger than ever in the 1950s with a different persona. The new Peg was less the sunny girl next door and more of a cool, distant, finger-snapping minimalist that you can still hear in “Fever,” “Black Coffee” and so many other classics.
Forget all of that and go back to a time when America just won a world war and even jazz musicians were settling down, starting families, and swimming in the exact kind of work they were made to do — making music.
Nick's Vinyl Picks 