AL COHN AND ZOOT SIMS: TWO FUNKY PEOPLE 1952-1961 - by Simon Spillett

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“[Al and Zoot's] musical philosophy...[is] unpretentious, straight-ahead, hard-swinging, happy-go-lucky, irresistibly infectious jazz that comes from the heart, delights the ear and mobilizes the feet.”

- Mike Hennessey

Residing in London, Simon Spillett is a first-rate Jazz tenor saxophonist and an authority on the music of many of the great players of the instrument who blossomed during the second half of the 20th century, both in Great Britain and in the USA.

He is the author of The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes which Equinox has recently published in a second edition. You can locate my review of it by going here.

In addition to fronting his own quartet and big band, Simon has won several awards for his music, including the tenor saxophone category of the British Jazz Awards (2011), Jazz Journal magazine, Critic's Choice CD of the Year (2009) and Rising Star in the BBC Jazz Awards (2007).

Simon has previously shared essays on Hank Mobley, Hank with Miles Davis, Booker Erwin  and Stan Getz on this page and it's always a joy to feature more of his insightful and well-written essays on JazzProfiles.

Simon has his own website which you can visit via this link.

© -  Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

AL COHN AND ZOOT SIMS: TWO FUNKY PEOPLE 1952-1961 Acrobat ACQCD7090

“We’ve always been friends, aside from business associates. We think alike, even though we play differently”.

Al Cohn

“Playing with Al inspires me. I’m a big fan of his. Yes, a kind of telepathy does happen. Pretty soon you know what the other is thinking, more or less, and it just comes out. It’s just from working together for so long, and knowing each other’s playing that well.”

Zoot Sims

Partnerships in jazz are often mercurial, fleeting affairs, with their brief nature reflecting any number of contributory reasons. Several of the groups key to music’s growth and development – the Benny Goodman Quartet, the original Parker-Gillespie Quintet or Gerry Mulligan’s first piano-less unit, to name just three – existed for a only a small fraction of time in the overall arc of their members careers, and were more often than not riven apart by the usual issues which accompany human existence – money and ego among them – and yet each created a body of work that was both highly influential in its day and which has stood the test of the harshest of all jazz critics, time.

Then there are the kind of unions that are forged principally at the behest of record producers: the “together for the first time” A and R projects that the majority of famous names in jazz have fallen into at one time or another, very few of which are successful enough to leave one wondering what might have happened had these pairings headed out on the road. 

Just occasionally, however, even the most free-wheeling of musicians will happen upon a meeting of minds that can last a lifetime, sometimes through little more than mere circumstance. One such player was tenor saxophonist John Haley ‘Zoot’ Sims, a performer blessed with one of the most consistent of all jazz voices, able to fit into all manner of contexts. 

Such adaptability is surprisingly rare in jazz, particularly for a horn player, and it was rarer still among the musicians of Sims’ generation, who’d blossomed during the Bebop era, a time when jazz suddenly divided itself into camps of players who looked at their music as soloist-driven high art and those who persisted in believing it to be a genuinely co-operative brand of entertainment. Paradoxically, Sims’s easy-going, one-style-fits-all musicality would also prove something of a lifelong curse: having cultivated the kind of talent that could create musical magic at the drop of a hat, he spent the best part of a forty year career shuttling between a bewilderingly diverse range of settings, recording with everyone from Joe Venuti to Oliver Nelson, as well as doing musical legwork by inspiring parochial rhythm sections across the globe. 

Even in his later years, when he’d all but dropped the sideman duties, there was never anything resembling a “regular” Zoot Sims group. However, if all this makes Sims’s life sound as if it were one long solo in search of a context, it should be noted that there always remained two unshakeable constants in his art: the first was an unflappable commitment to swing, not the sub-genre as defined by jazz history books, but rather the inspirational, impossible-to-define quality intrinsic to all good jazz. Whatever the setting – indeed, whenever the era – Sims never lost sight of this, the most basic core value of the music.

The second constant was a relationship with another tenor saxophonist that had begun during the late 1940s and which would transpire to be one of the most durable of all working partnerships in jazz, such was its members utter compatibility. Indeed, the bond formed between Sims and his friend (for this truly was a friendship: a lot of jazz partnerships never quite get that far) was so deep that it also transcended all the practicalities of the jazz life. The pair might not meet musically for eighteen months or even longer, but when they did, the magic was always there. Indeed, examples of this very distinctive jazz alchemy were recorded in all four decades of their parallel careers and whilst both players matured in their differing ways, their basic understanding remained unaltered. 

Buoyed by the constant stimulus provided by another front line soloist whom he deeply admired, and framed by skillful but not over-formal arrangements that highlighted his gift to perfection, for Sims in particular it was the ultimate jazz win-win. 

Zoot's friend was, of course, Alvin Gilbert Cohn, one month his junior, and born several thousand miles away from Sims’ Californian birthplace in Brooklyn, New York City. The geographic differences were unimportant, however, because as teenagers both players had been exposed to the landscape-shrinking power of the pre-war Count Basie band, which had first emerged from Kansas City to take New York by storm and then via its radio broadcasts, records and on-the-road appearances forever altered the course of jazz. The bands powder-keg (perhaps a tad too aggressive a term for such a gentle soul: possibly powder-puff would be more applicable) had been Lester Young, the first tenor saxophonist to present a genuine alternative to the barreling, declamatory style of Coleman Hawkins. Uber-cool and with none of the noisy bluster that had come to represent swing, Young’s playing pointed towards a future that a whole musical generation were ready to embrace. 

Whether Cohn or Sims were aware of this mutual enthusiasm as they briefly said hello for the first time at Charlie’s Tavern in New York around 1946 is unconfirmed. It's more than likely though. All over the United States – and further afield – fledgling saxophonists had been transformed by Young’s example, in turn revolutionising the sound of the late Swing Era. Indeed, during World War Two, when the draft had effectively swept away an entire generation of journeymen big band players, bandleaders had been increasingly forced to staff their saxophone sections with teenagers, many of whom swore faithful allegiance to Lester. Besides Cohn and Sims, among these promising newcomers were such future stars as Warne Marsh, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Wardell Gray, Brew Moore, Allen Eager, Jimmy Guiffre, Bob Cooper and Paul Quinichette. 

It was therefore unsurprising that, having impacted so heavily on his young disciples’ individual musical skills (it was Brew Moore who once stubbornly insisted “anyone who doesn’t play like Lester is wrong”), Young’s influence began to affect the sound of the saxophone section en masse. The apex of this was the formation of the three-tenors, one baritone edition of the Woody Herman band in 1947 – the famous Four Brothers band, so-dubbed after Jimmy Guiffre’s anthemic composition of the same name, the Columbia recording of which had encapsulated much of the direction of big band arranging in the immediate post-war period. 

At around three minutes its main feature however was to provide a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to the solo playing of four of the bands saxophonists: Herbie Stewart, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Serge Chaloff. 

Replacing Stewart, Al Cohn joined the Herman band in January 1948, meeting Sims “officially” for the first time in a parking lot in Salt Lake City before boarding the coach for the first in a series of grueling one-nighters. “We hit it off immediately as soon as we met each other,” Cohn remembered. “It’s just grown from there.” Exactly how he and Sims realised their undoubted musical compatibility is obvious: playing night after night in saxophone section, where players are required to literally breathe as one soon reveals any musical disparity. Phrasing and tones have to be matched, vibrato perfected, articulation decided and so on. Given his fellow section mates' enthusiasm for the smooth Young-derived tenor sound of the day, Cohn’s talents appeared bespoke for the job.

Not that there was any sort of faceless uniformity to the three men’s playing: each had its own personality. Stan Getz’ already possessed a formidably accomplished technique, and was able to dispatch improvisations that unified lyricism with virtuosity in a highly novel way, while Sims on the other hand was altogether more robust, handing out his musical thoughts without any affected fripperies. Of the three Herman tenors, Cohn was by far the more quirky: his tone was darker than that of his section mates (the result of a particular choice of mouthpiece and reed) and his style was less overtly technical. Even at this early stage his strongest musical suit was a highly advanced harmonic mind – part and parcel of his dual-skill of arranger – and  accordingly his improvisations made up in daring what they lacked in instrumental agility. Indeed, the term “musician’s musician” might have been coined specifically for Cohn at this point, as, within the Herman ranks, he was rated second to none. Even the egocentric Getz considered Cohn - on the face of it by no means the “better” saxophone player - to be the font of all knowledge.

Al Cohn and Zoot Sims’s biographies are both well-known enough to require all but the most cursory of summaries here. Sims was the elder, born into a musical family on October 29th 1925, beginning, like Cohn, as a child clarinettist. By the time he was sixteen he had graduated to the tenor saxophone, initially inspired by Ben Webster and Sam Donahue, and had turned professional with the band of Kenny Baker, an experience from which he acquired his lifelong nickname, through the simple expedient of sitting behind a music stand with the word Zoot emblazoned on it.

There had then followed a wartime apprenticeship with bands ranging from Bobby Sherwood to Benny Goodman, with his first significant on-record appearance as a soloist coming under pianist Joe Bushkin’s leadership in 1944.

Born on November 24th 1925, Cohn’s experiences were almost a mirror image of Sims's, with the exception that composing and arranging had run alongside his instrumental skills almost since day one. At seventeen he had joined the band of tenorist Georgie Auld, before moving on through a series of associations with Lee Castle, Joe Marsala, Alvino Rey and Buddy Rich, among others. 

Apart from their association with Herman, Cohn and Sims were also heard together in the 1949 Artie Shaw band, with which the veteran clarinettist had infamously decided to “go modern,” and both also turned up on two multi-tenor recording dates headed by Stan Getz for the Savoy and Prestige labels that same year. Getz had been the first of the star “Brothers” to leave Woody Herman to go solo, capitalising on the success of his Early Autumn feature. Sims had been the next to depart, making his début recordings as a leader in Paris in summer 1950, whilst Cohn remained with Herman a little longer, cutting his first solo records for the ill-fated Triumph label in July of that year. Although they were no longer regular section-mates as the new decade dawned, Cohn and Sims would still play together whenever possible, notably at a series of informal of jam sessions held at Don Jose’s theatrical studio on New York’s West 47th Street, wherein they were joined by a host of other eager young jazz players, including Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis. “We played a lot together before we ever had our [own] group,” Cohn told British journalist Les Tomkins in 1965. “We used to blow around New York, in the days when we weren’t working so much.” 

“Nobody was working, or had any money,” Sims remembered. “But we still took a collection up, rented a studio and just played all night – for ourselves. Because we wanted to play. You can learn more with that than anything.”

When Sims was offered the chance to record a further session for Prestige Records in the autumn of 1952 (his second, taped in August 1951 had resulted in the labels first long-playing album), it was no surprise that he asked Cohn to collaborate with him, not only instrumentally but in writing four arrangements. The recording, issued on a 10” LP with the accurate title of Zoot Sims' All-Stars, marked the first date of the “official” Cohn-Sims discography and begins this survey of their work. 

DISC ONE

Established from the existing infrastructure of a record mail-order business, and headed by the go-getting Bob Weinstock, the Prestige label had been launched under the original title of New Jazz in 1949 and within a short time had set out its stall as one of the leading independent modern jazz imprints, signing, among others, Miles Davis and Stan Getz. Although it was soon issuing records that pointed the way towards the emerging blow-and-go school of Hard Bop (in particular those led by Davis), during the early 1950s Prestige had also recorded

several sessions that retained the measured air of the fashionable “cool school,” including memorable dates led by Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan and others. The Zoot Sims’ All-Stars set of September 8th 1952 sits somewhere between the cool and hot polarities, boasting a genuinely starry personnel featuring modern jazz trombone pioneer Kai Winding, bop piano legend George Wallington and a bass and drums team of Percy Heath and Art Blakey, no less. The sheer professionalism of Al Cohn’s contribution shone through not only in his typically inventive playing but in the fact that he’d arranged two of the four items recorded that day in a taxi on the way to the studio! In fact, the session had marked something of a return to out-and-out jazz for Cohn, who had briefly left the music business during the early 1950s and had only recently returned to performing by joining the band of pianist Elliot Lawrence. 

When Prestige reissued the session on a 12”LP shared with the earlier Getz-led five tenors date (under the fitting title of The Brothers), long-time Cohn and Sims  admirer Ira Gitler was tasked with writing the sleeve notes, in turn delivering a perfect summary of the two men’s favoured approach - one equally applicable to any stage of their combined careers – and worthy of reprise here:

“[R]ather than producing carbons of [Lester Young], they show they have learned from him and integrated the qualities they heard into their playing without subverting their individual personalities. Zoot is the free wheeler. His short, booting momentum-gathering phrases are joined adroitly by longer lines. Al possesses a wonderful change of pace. His swing comes up from behind the beat. The solos have marvelous structure. Occasionally he will punctuate with a long plaintive note. This characteristic led one observer on the jazz scene to state, ‘no-one can moan like Al Cohn.’”

“It was not surprising that this session, with the two complementing and inspiring one another brought forth music of multi-faceted merit,”  Gitler concluded.

The opening Tangerine – the first of many examples on this collection of Al and Zoot choosing their repertoire from the Swing Era – begins with Winding's trombone setting the theme before the three front-liners make their individual statements: instantly the two saxophonists mark out their territory, Sims with that typically dancing time-feel, Cohn with his heavier delivery.  “I’ve never been bothered with time,” Sims told Les Tomkins. “As natural as breathing? I never thought of it that way, but it’s true. Time has always been very easy for me – just to keep a tempo, you know?”

The unaccompanied “breaks” that feature in Morning Fun, the Cohn-penned blues that was to become the Al and Zoot “theme tune” on their live appearances, are as good a place as any to hear this in action, but mention should also be made of the inspirational Wallington-Heath-Blakey rhythm section, a team which in Ira Gitler’s words “swings so insistently” throughout this session. Any band featuring Blakey could be guaranteed to do so: virtual “house” drummer on Prestige at this time, he delivers a short example of the rattling, machine-shop-at-full-steam solo style towards the close here. Listen too for the off-kilter figures he places behind Wallington’s piano solo – a sign of things to come.

The Red Door is a genuine rarity: a Zoot Sims composition. Although he possessed a natural sense of musical form and could create the sort of spontaneous melody of which any writer would be proud of, Sims could rarely be bothered with the tribulations of formalised composition, preferring to leave that particular headache to his partner. His one attempt at full-scale arranging, Yucca, written for the Woody Herman band in 1948, had taken him six months to complete and was an exercise he vowed never to repeat. Nevertheless, The Red Door was his line, arranged (one suspects transcribed?) by Cohn, and dedicated to the entrance of Don Jose’s rehearsal studio. In reality the theme is little more than a launch pad for inspired improvisations from Cohn, Winding and the composer, with the trombonist offering yet more of his brand of Bop-meets-Bill Harris vocalisation. 

The popularity of this recording went some way to establishing The Red Door as a jazz standard, with the song eventually acquiring lyrics – and a new title, Zoot Walked In – by another Cohn/Sims associate, the pianist Dave Frishberg.

The really portentous item of the September 1952 set, however, is Zoot Case, an Al Cohn composition written over the harmony of I Never Knew, on which Kai Winding drops out, leaving the two tenors to engage in friendly-fire combat. Intriguingly, Cohn and Sims cut this theme on both their first and last recordings together (the latter made almost forty years later in 1982) and they make discographically interesting bookends. Indeed, if one were to look for defining examples of the two men’s respective harmonic approaches, the minor-key “bridge” section of their choruses are as good a place to start as any, with Cohn at one point offering up a pithy quote from another of his compositions, I’m Tellin’ Ya. Once again, George Wallington’s alert accompaniment stimulates both saxophonists.

There is one further piece of discographical minutiae to be added to this session: when Prestige pressed their original 10” LP release the titles of Morning Fun and Zoot Case were mistakenly reversed, a fact only rectified on later reissues. Several musicians never bothered with the correction, including another late, great tenor saxophonist, Spike Robinson, who would often play both themes under their “original” titles.

Despite their undoubted musical success, the first recordings by the Cohn-Sims axis didn’t lead immediately to a regular collaboration. In fact, aside from sidemen duties on a Miles Davis session for Prestige early the following year, the two men would not collaborate on record again until early 1956, by which time much musical water had passed beneath the bridge. In 1953, Sims joined the Stan Kenton orchestra, helping greatly to reinvigorate what had become a pretentiously overblown musical behemoth. “Nobody can have Zoot Sims sit next to him for two years and not have it affect the way he plays,” recalled the bands alto star Lee Konitz, but whilst the tenure may have been good for both Sims’s financial security and Kenton’s general reconciliation back into the jazz fold, when the tenorist departed the band a year later he found himself marooned in Los Angeles at the height of the vaunted West Coast craze. With musical experimentation to the fore, often at the expense of the individual soloist, Sims found the environment hardly to his taste. Nor it seems did the Californian jazz scene know what it had in its midst for, despite making characteristically hard-swinging contributions to recordings by Clifford Brown, Shorty Rogers and Red Mitchell whilst in Hollywood, Sims was eventually reduced to taking work as a decorator to make ends meet!  An offer to join a new sextet led by Gerry Mulligan (resulting from a guest appearance he’d made with the baritonists’ quartet at a concert in San Diego the previous December) was therefore seized with both hands and by the autumn of 1955, the saxophonist was back on his natural Big Apple turf.

Cohn on the other hand (and coast) had done rather better. A contract signed with RCA-Victor in 1955 had resulted not only in a series of LP’s under his own name, including at least one masterpiece in the album Mr. Music, but also in his fast becoming one of the most ubiquitous musicians on the East Coast studio scene. At a time when there were fiercely debated critical dividing lines between the Western and the Eastern brands of jazz, Cohn’s work was often held up as a defining example of the New York movement. In retrospect, the saxophonist wasn’t nearly so sure: “The mid-50’s was [just] the time I got busy,”  he remembered ten years later. “I don’t think I was leading an East coast school. I don’t think so. But I started getting a lot of calls in those days.”

It was easy to understand why: not only was Cohn a highly accomplished player, able to sight-read anything put in front of him, he had also emerged as a composer and arranger of rare ability, equally capable of conjuring swinging big band charts or more reflective flare, often at the shortest of notice. The best of his RCA-Victor output found him striking a fine balance between performing and what he once called “your enemy – the score paper.” Occasionally, the roles were reversed, with the saxophonists live appearances stimulating recording dates, as was the case when an engagement by a quintet co-headed with Sims at New York’s Birdland during December 1955 prompted producer Jack Lewis to organise something similar in the studio. 

The resulting RCA album – recorded the following month and inevitably titled From A to Z  – wasn’t strictly by the working Cohn/Sims unit, but rather, in adding trumpeter Dick Sherman and having other arrangers including Manny Albam, Ralph Burns, Ernie Wilkins and Milt Gold contribute pieces, it came firmly in line with the label’s policy of studio-workshop styled jazz, a palatable brand of musical modernism that stood in strong contrast with the earthier sounds of New York’s Hard Boppers.

Indeed, From A to Z is very much an album of two halves: the sextet performances have a sometimes foreshortened air to them, with as much emphasis on Dick Sherman’s trumpet as the two saxophones. Sherman was by no means a disagreeable player – his sweet-toned, lyrical style sits neatly among a whole raft of all-but-forgotten New York trumpets of the time, including Don Ferrara, Phil Sunkel, Don Joseph, Tony Fruscella, Nick Travis, Jerry Lloyd and Jon Eardley – but his presence understandably cuts into the playing time allotted the co-leaders. 

It’s also somewhat surprising to find that Cohn himself had so little hand in the six-piece arranging, offering a single, masterfully mournful theme, My Blues, cut from the same melancholy cloth as earlier arrangements like Ah-Moore and Leavin’ Town.

The albums other tracks featured the co-leaders in tandem with what by 1956 had become the first call rhythm section in New York: pianist Hank Jones, bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Osie Johnson, three musicians who had done the hitherto impossible by becoming some of the city’s first successful African-American session players. Collectively they appeared on scores of recording sessions during the mid-to-late 1950s, serving players as diverse as Ruby Braff and Phil Woods, as well as featuring on legions of more commercial album dates. With such experience, Jones, Hinton and Johnson a collective dream team for any soloist. 

The quintets Somebody Loves Me delivers a perfect summary of its leaders ideals in a little less than 3 minutes, a reminder that both Cohn and Sims were products of the 78rpm era, wherein jazz improvisers were advised to keep things short and snappy. There are other Swing Era vestiges too, including one especially glorious moment when both men spontaneously alight on a quote from Lester Young’s Tickle-Toe, supporting observations they’d later make about their uncanny musical synergy. “Our music is arranged, but it’s loose,” said Cohn. “We have a few things that we play that we never did arrange, but it sounds like it’s an arrangement. It just happened.” 

“Yes, a kind of telepathy does happen,” Sims agreed. “Pretty soon you know what the other is thinking, more or less, and it just comes out.”

East of The Sun is another – this time more graceful - appropriation of a standard, with a further ad-hoc, dovetailed ending, while the brisker From A to Z and Tenor For Two Please, Jack are more formal arrangements, the title track having been dreamed up by Cohn for the recent Birdland gig. The latter is another rare Sims composition, once again scored by Cohn, and highlights just how hard both saxophonists could swing. In fact, one of the joys of amassing so much of Cohn and Sims work in one collection is hearing how consistent was this aspect of their output.

Six months after the From A to Z album was taped, Cohn was offered a one-shot deal with Epic Records, a subsidiary label of Columbia, who, as the albums sleeve notes had it, “thought the time ripe to record a contemporary sax section” under the direction of “an arranger…who was completely oriented in jazz and dance music.”

The idea was nothing new. Ever since the invention of the LP format, A and R men had been dreaming up “concepts” to illustrate how much more of an improvement the newly extended parameters were. One of the favourite devices was themed albums featuring sections of various showcased instruments, occasionally overblown to glutinous effect. Thus the mid-to-late 1950s gave jazz listeners umpteen long-players featuring trombone choirs, trumpet summits and saxophone sections, each programmed to highlight the versatility of the featured players. Titled The Sax Section: Jazz Workshop under the direction of Al Cohn and featuring three variations on the traditional sax section doubling woodwinds, in fairness Epic’s effort was among the more tasteful of its kind, with Zoot Sims participating on four tracks, in what the label called “a Four Brothers set-up”. The results were accurately described in Burt Korall’s sleeve notes as “Basie in modern.” 

Indeed, despite growing up into the bop era, the influence of the pre-war Basie band had never really left men like Cohn and Sims, as the opening Shorty George proves in spades. However, these nostalgic enthusiasms were now being filtered through a quite different musical temperament to that which governed the loose, head-arrangement-based rationale of the original Basie-ites. Years of professional big band and studio session work had given players like Cohn and Sims, and their cohorts Eddie Wasserman and Sol Schlinger (the latter two among the hardest working session men in New York) the ultimate in professional polish. “There is no substitute for the knowledge that can be derived from sitting in a section night after night next to more knowing musicians,”  wrote Korall in the sleeve notes to another Cohn recording. “Phrasing and dynamics is given constant illustration and then there is the opportunity to learn about solo blowing from these same musicians who are constantly in your company.”

That said, listening to The Mellow Side from the Epic session, it’s hard not to escape the notion that this is primarily dance music, well-played but, dare it be said, occasionally slightly anonymous and somewhat time-locked. Elsewhere things are more engaging: The Return of The Redhead, Cohn’s tribute to the auburn-locked Sims, has both men swinging mightily over Don Lamond’s beautiful drumming, while on Blues For The Highbrow, Sims delivers an improvised lesson in economy and emotion. Another plus is yet more sparkling solo work from the urbane Hank Jones.

DISC TWO

In sharp contrast to the contained air of the Epic session, Cohn and Sims's next meeting provided not only a no-holds-barred, and in many ways even unprecedented, opportunity to stretch out, but also a chance to compare and contrast their styles with those of two other tenor saxophonists whose work sat somewhat outside their natural orbit.

As was the norm for Friday afternoons at recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, on September 7th 1956 Prestige Records' boss Bob Weinstock had convened a session under the blanket banner of the “Prestige All-Stars.” And, as was also Weinstock’s normal practise, the chosen participants had been expediently rather than carefully selected, the only difference this time being that the producer had looked that little bit further than usual for his cast-list, in effect assembling a pocket-guide to New York jazz tenor by uniting Cohn and Sims with Hank Mobley and John Coltrane. 

Yet again, 21st century hindsight has both a positive and negative effect on how to view this unlikely alliance. Those who nowadays regard Coltrane as the last great jazz visionary, a man whose quest for musical/spiritual enlightenment led him deeper and deeper into the realms of the esoteric, may well wonder how on earth their idol came to be sharing a studio jamming standards with a couple of - as Lester Young had once memorably dubbed them - “grey boys.” However, it’s worth reiterating that in terms of career stakes, Cohn and Sims were then by far the better known of the saxophonists recording at Van Gelder’s that day. 

In fact, Coltrane was still something of an unknown quantity, continuing to serve his sidemen time with Miles Davis and yet to make the break from the mire of hard drug addiction that would herald his first great musical flowering (as with several other Prestige jam session-styled dates in which he took part, this four-tenor album had occasionally been repackaged as a “Coltrane record” thus compounding the confusion). But far from revealing a score-card exercise in one-upmanship, recourse to both the music and Ira Gitler’s intelligent sleeve notes for the original Tenor Conclave LP issue confirms that the four protagonists had much more in common than might be immediately apparent. 

Gitler’s notes gave a detailed analysis of the influence and legacy of Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both of whom had touched the lives of all the tenorists present that afternoon (“The major influences on each musician have much to do with…the particular period in which he grew up”), but, as he noted, there were even more traditional forces at play, namely that of the old-fashioned jam session, a format that jazz musicians had enjoyed since the dawn of the music and which in this instance found Mobley, Coltrane, Sims and Cohn meeting on what Gitler called “common harmonic ground.”

“This was by no means a cutting session,” he asserted: “each of the four showed admiration for the other three, both tacitly and verbally.”

In fact, once one has gotten past the initial surprise of hearing Al Cohn’s treacle-tone alongside Coltrane’s laser-beam delivery, there is much to enjoy.

Tenor Conclave and Bob’s Boys are both Mobley compositions, apparently written with Cohn and Sims in mind, although neither presents anything more complex than the ubiquitous “rhythm changes” and blues sequences that formed the fabric of many Prestige sessions. The former features its composer as the first soloist, offering that curiously effective blend of a soft, yielding tone and assertive bop-derived phrasing which was to make him the role model for a generation of Hard Bop tenorists. Followed by Sims one is instantly struck by how similar their tones are when juxtaposed. Almost inevitably, both were admirers of Lester Young and although the same could also be said equally of Coltrane and Cohn, the latters tag-team efforts have a less apparent connective thread. 

Unsurprisingly, it is the fifteen minute exploration of the ballad How Deep Is The Ocean that gives each tenorist the best forum for his individual wares. At this tempo – slow, even for jazzmen of this generation – all four saxophonists offer ravishing displays of their more romantic side: Cohn at his “moaning” best, Sims with all the grace and elegance that his reputation as a hard-swinger occasionally masked, Coltrane displaying a tone that is as bleak as it is beautiful and Mobley offering support to fellow tenor Benny Golson’s declaration that he was “the most lyrical saxophonist I ever heard.”

During 1957, Cohn and Sims finally decided the time was right to brave taking their own quintet out on the road. The From A to Z album had been released to  a generally favourable critical reaction and keen to escape the treadmill of studio work, both men realized the chance to take their brand of jazz into club land. “We took the arrangements from the record date, got a little band, two cars and went on the road,” Sims remembered. “For about four months…we did the nightclub circuit – New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago,'' recalled Cohn. “We never went to California,” he added, tactfully remembering Sims’ less than happy experience out West a few years before.

Although there had been successful two-tenor units before, most notably the touring Gene Ammons-Sonny Stitt band of the early '50s, the Cohn/Sims quintet offered something a little less pugilistic and a lot more refined, thanks to Cohn’s considerable skill as a writer: indeed Al and Zoot’s tenor “battles” were to be fought with Marquess of Queensbury rules rather than with back-street, bare knuckle aggression.

Given their success in the nations jazz clubs, the next logical step was to record their regular band and once again the opportunity came via Cohn; in late 1956, he’d signed a new two-album contract with another label, Coral Records, with his first outing for the imprint partnering him with Sims’s band mate from the Gerry Mulligan sextet, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. For a follow-up date, recorded in March 1957, Cohn suggested recording his quintet with Sims, resulting in the first 12” LP entirely devoted to the group. Released under the title of Al and Zoot: The Al Cohn Quintet featuring Zoot Sims, the record contained the repertoire the band had been playing on its in-person appearances, thus making it their most accurately representative document so far.

The eight titles on the album display every virtue of the bands music: first there is the clever but unpretentious originality of Al Cohn’s writing, varying from the pell-mell inventions of Halley’s Comet and The Wailing Boat (adapted from a big band chart originally written for trumpeter Maynard Ferguson) through the catchy inventiveness of Brandy and Beer and on to the simple, honest-to-goodness, swing of Chasing The Blues. Cohn’s charts of the standard themes You’re A Lucky Guy and It’s A Wonderful World also supported annotator Burt Korall’s perceptive observation that “the roots of these two musicians run deep…Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and other figures of import in earlier jazz have played a big part in the developments of both musicians.” 

Although nowhere in his notes does Korall refer to the then new term “mainstream”  the inference was clear. Throughout their careers, he maintained, Cohn and Sims had enjoyed “the benefit of being exposed to the elements of old and new” and their jazz clearly possessed the best attributes of both.  Interviewed the previous year, Cohn himself was even more candid: “Sometimes I feel I don’t belong in the modern school at all,” he told writer Gary Kramer. “Lots of people try to be modern and lose sight of the path.” Kramer also noted that “when at home, [Cohn] usually prefers to play records for his own pleasure that go back ten years or more. ‘They had a happier more relaxed sound. In general, the solos were much more memorable and I think that is a necessary mark of great jazz.”

There was no better illustration of Cohn and Sims’ desire to get to the marrow of the music than Two Funky People, a track on which they both played clarinet. Ironically enough, on a set otherwise full of their characterful brand of tenor saxophone playing, it was this performance that was to become the albums talking point: never before had either man recorded something so “earthy [and] blue hued.” The folksy, unaffected nature of the track was further enhanced by the fact that neither man professed to be an especially virtuosic clarinettist. Nevertheless, although playing their “double” each remained easily recognisable, with Cohn again having the darker, more woody, tone and Sims the lighter, airier sound.

Even the personnel of the album straddled the old and the new: having previously featured Dave McKenna, the Cohn/Sims Quintet now boasted yet another emerging piano star in Mose Allison, who had arrived in New York from his native Mississippi only a few months prior to the Coral date. Although the sleeve notes describe his playing as being “in the manner of Al Haig” already Allison sounded like no-one but himself, fusing a rootsy down-home method of improvising with a way of accompanying so stimulating that he soon found him head-hunted by none other than Cohn and Sims former section mate Stan Getz. For the March '57 session, the pianist was joined by two players with ears for slightly more advanced brands of jazz, bassist Teddy Kotick, an ex-Charlie Parker alumni soon to join the quintet of Horace Silver, and drummer Nick Stabulus, a player who Burt Korall thought “fast climbing in the estimation of New York jazzmen.” Stabulus certainly swung, driving just that bit harder than Osie Johnson had done on From A to Z, but alas, despite Korall’s predictions, after further associations with Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, Chet Baker and others, his career appears to have petered out sometime in the 1960s. Almost ironically, some of the drummers’ best moments come on the grooving Gone With The Wind, the one item from the session which Coral didn’t include on the original Al and Zoot LP, leaving it to languish in undeserved obscurity on their Jazz Cornucopia sampler album.

DISC THREE

Amazingly, Coral also sat on the tapes of the entire quintet album for close to two years, only releasing it in 1959. In the meantime the Cohn/Sims duo had appeared on albums by several other leaders, including Gerry Mulligan, Manny Albam, Toots Thielemans, Bob Brookmeyer and even Jack Kerouac. However, what otherwise would have been a typical example of record label tardiness had for once actually helped the artists concerned. 

In January 1959, following a recommendation by publicist Joyce Ackers, the Cohn/Sims quintet had been hired to play a season at The Half Note, a small club on New York’s Hudson and Spring, which had begun presenting jazz two years earlier. Intimate and informal, the Half Note had quickly become popular with both paying customers and featured artists, boasting a near familial atmosphere. “When I stand at the bar and people come in,” said Mike Canterino, one of the Italian-American family who had lifted the club from neglect to success, “I feel like they’re coming into my house.”

“Visiting the Half Note was like being in your living room,”  Ira Gitler remembered forty years later. “Not that your living room had a bandstand, bar, a lot of table and chairs and meatball sandwiches, but it was relaxed and homey with an upbeat vibe.” The band would play on small bandstand behind and above the bar, with the bartenders working at their feet. Within days of starting their first engagement at the club, Cohn and Sims already felt like part of the family, so comfortable in fact that they colluded with the management in presenting a little showmanship for the customers, involving Cohn nonchalantly dropping an empty shot glass from the high stage, which one of the Canterino’s would invariably catch without so much as the blink of an eye. Although the trick unfailingly brought the house down, it was the band’s music that was the real attraction. According to Ira Gitler, the Half Note had at last provided the ideal forum for the two saxophonists: “On the elevated bandstand their great rapport and mutual respect were there for all to see and hear. If one was ‘hotter’ at a particular time, the other would play a shorter solo than usual in deference to his partner. For the most part, however, each man’s solo inspired the other; and the eight and four-bar exchanges would roll and broil to peaks of excitement.”

During the quintets first run at the club they were recorded by Cohn’s old producer from RCA-Victor Jack Lewis, who had now moved over to the United Artists label. Auditioning two nights worth of tapes from February 6th and 7th Lewis compiled the album Jazz Alive! A Night at The Half Note, with the aim of featuring “inspired jazz, captured in its free state on the nightclub bandstand.” It was a goal the LP achieved without any hint of compromise. Unlike the previous RCA-Victor and Coral albums, the music was far looser and more akin to a staged jam session, making it the best document yet of what Ira Gitler’s enthusiastic sleeve notes called Cohn and Sims’ “free-wheeling, hard-booting, joyous kind of music”. 

The opening roar through Lover Come Back To Me is all this and more, with Cohn launching the solo order with one of his best improvisations to date. By 1960, he was now able to back-peddle a little on his commercial arranging obligations, thus concentrating more upon performing and the effect is instantly obvious: the tone is firmer, the technical grasp likewise. As he told Les Tomkins, the regular gig at The Half Note were a tremendous help in polishing his art,: “We work, say, every three months or so. So there might be a few weeks where I wouldn’t touch my horn at all. I should practise but I’m very lazy. Then we go right back in and I just take it out of the case, find a reed and blow it for a couple of weeks.” 

Following his partner, Sims is similarly heated, offering three choruses which, according to Gitler’s colourful sleeve prose, find him “shaking the beat as a tiger might a monkey.”

For what comprised the second side of the original LP, Cohn and Sims were joined by altoist Phil Woods, one of the busiest and hardest swinging of all New York reedmen. Like the two tenorists, Woods was then spending a great deal of his time working in recording studios, appearing on all manner of albums, and was keen to blow unexpurgated jazz whenever and wherever he could. On J. J. Johnson’s blues Wee Dot he veritably tears in, throwing his hosts a formidable gauntlet. The energising inspiration of his presence can certainly be felt during Sims's solo on After You’ve Gone, during with the tenorist eats up both the changes and the tempo, never once sounding as if either is passing by too fast.

Sims's name is rarely mentioned when jazz critics discuss the great athletes of the tenor saxophone, principally because his primary concern was in playing melodic, swinging music and not in any sort of musical muscle flexing. However, his solo here provides an especially searing example of his ability to tear it up where necessary. There is no loss of lyricism though and even at this speed, it’s still possible to detect the traces of Lester Young in his musical DNA, with several passages of his solo sounding for all-the-world as if Young’s classic outings on Twelfth Street Rag and Tickle-Toe had been sped up and updated. 

Woods’s participation on the Half Note recording also supports Ira Gitler’s memory of “Zoot and Al attract[ing] many fellow players [to the club] because they are musicians’ musicians.” 

As a close friend of both Cohn and Sims, Gitler saw the two men’s non-business relationship as the key to their standing in the musical community: “Off the stand they drank together, played softball together, visited each other’s apartments and generally strengthened the bond between them,” he wrote in 1973. “The same  characteristics of warmth, humour and just plain, old-fashioned humanity that made their own friendship a reality [drew] many admirers into each man’s orbit.” Another such fan was Cannonball Adderley who arriving late one night after his own set had ended was dismayed to find the two tenorists reaching the end of the gig. “John Haley Sims! Alvin Gilbert Cohn!” he bellowed at the bandstand, “Don’t stop now!” Even to an exceptional player like Adderley, or Paul Desmond, who once described his relief at hearing Cohn and Sims regularly at the Half Note as “like having your back scratched,” the two tenorists were clearly something very special; to even younger musicians, the pair were nothing less than legends. Arriving in New York at the tail end of the 1950s, pianist Dave Frishberg found Cohn and Sims “probably the most widely admired musicians I ever came across. I used to watch other musicians listen to them and I remember how their faces would light up and how they would burst into spontaneous cheering and howling.” When the opportunity to work with his heroes at the Half Note arose soon after, Frishberg felt as if he’d finally arrived. “This was Al and Zoot, man! This was jazz playing of the highest order and purity, the most serious and sublime joy. This is why you came to New York.”

During the summer of 1960, part-way through yet another run at the “Note,” the latest incarnation of the Cohn-Sims quintet went into the studios to record for the Mercury label, under the supervision on veteran music scribe Leonard Feather. With his omniscient knowledge of the jazz  scene, Feather was well aware that there was something akin to a minor musical riot happening down at Hudson and Spring, and as well as providing Cohn and Sims yet another welcome chance to share their infectious musical wares, his sleeve notes to the resulting album - appropriately titled You ‘n’ Me -  included a typically perceptive summary of the growth of their partnership.

“Asked to name their preferences on tenor sax, Al and Zoot invariably name one another but acknowledge the primary influence of Lester Young and express their continued admiration of Sonny Stitt. Though to the casual listener the Young influence seems strong in both, protracted hearings make it evident that Al and Zoot have spread out in slightly different directions, despite their common inspiration. Al’s slightly fuller and rounder tone, Zoot’s more attenuated sound and oblique approach can be discerned as their most distinctive traits.”  He concluded by dubbing the two players “the Damon and Pythias of the tenors,” the sort of sound-bite publicists can only dream of.

With regular work at the Half Note and elsewhere during the early 1960s, recording the band now meant simply taking its working repertoire into a studio, and catching the action club-style. However, alongside such Al and Zoot specialities as The Note (dedicated to their regular gig), On The Alamo and the storming Love For Sale, Cohn had penned the ingenious title track, a mini masterpiece of two horn scoring with an unusual but logical harmonic sequence that perfectly illustrates his genius for small band writing. And, for the first time since the RCA-Victor album in 1956, the band also featured the work of two outside jazz composers: George Handy, the progressive arranger who’d been among the most radical of New York’s new breed of writers in the 1940s, contributed Awful Lonely, a plaintive exercise that gave Cohn in particular a chance to showcase his melancholy side, whilst pianist Bill Potts weighed in with a more robust original titled The Opener.

Yet again, Cohn and Sims had enlisted the services of their on-off sideman Mose Allison for the recording, whose pithy soloing (try Love For Sale) and oddly effective, clunky comping continued to fit the context like the proverbial glove. In addition to Allison, and another familiar face in drummer Osie Johnson, the band was now featuring bassist Major ‘Mule’ Holley, a remarkable instrumentalist whose career included both work with Frank Sinatra (he is featured on the vocalists recording of Mack The Knife) and a short but fondly remembered stint on the British jazz scene in the 1950s. A hard working section player who, as any of the tracks on You ‘n’ Me testify, could swing with the best of them, Holley’s real gift was his uncanny ability to sing along with his own bowed bass lines. Unlike Slam Stewart, however, who sung an octave above his own playing, Holley’s voice was deep enough to sing in unison, as can be heard on Cohn’s showcase arrangement of Angel Eyes, on which both co-leaders also provide a discreet clarinet backing. In his sleeve notes, Leonard Feather described Holley as “a jazz-with-humorous-overtones find of major proportions” and his contribution here is yet another reminder that the musical world of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims was anything but po-faced.

DISC FOUR

The undisputed highlight of the Mercury session was Improvisation for Unaccompanied Saxophones, a performance that is exactly what its title describes. Feather had suggested the idea of a duet performance an an impromptu add-on only to find that Cohn and Sims already “had a little routine along those lines that they’d played occasionally for their own amusement.”

The premise is simple: a three note phrase played in unison which is handed back and forth between the two tenors, over which one of them then improvises. On paper, it all sounds rather contrived. In performance, the effect is nothing less than magical, with both hornmen conjuring a wealth of melodic ideas in bite-sized bursts. “If there was ever evidence needed that men like Cohn and Sims have an innate facility for swinging, this proves it conclusively,” Feather concluded. Although both saxophonists make it clear that rhythm is their business, there is also plenty of harmonic ingenuity on display. The performance starts out in an implied minor key, but Cohn’s third solo segment suddenly lifts the tune into a major, the effect of which is like an emerging ray of sunshine. Sims then responds with an even more energised example of his swinging creativity before the two tenors wind down to a subtle ending. 

If such a thing could be applied to a jazz musician of Zoot Sims’s incredible consistency then 1960 clearly marked something of a purple patch. A few weeks after the You ‘n’ Me session he taped the Bethlehem LP Down Home, arguably his finest solo recording, and that autumn he went out on the road as a guest soloist with Gerry Mulligan’s newly formed Concert Jazz Band, setting down yet another series of classic solos on the bands US and Europe-recorded On Tour album. Back home, he and Cohn continued to be fixtures at the Half Note and other clubs, recording their next album, financed by the mysterious and philanthropic Fred Miles, in early 1961. Very little is documented about Miles, but the session he organised at bassist Peter Ind’s New York studio that February was issued the following year on his own Fred Miles Presents label under the title Either Way, its catalogue number the plain and simple FM1. In fact, the LP was to remain something of a rarity, and not until its reissue on another label in the 1970s did it finally reach a wider audience.

Although the majority of the album featured the by now expected sound of two tenors and rhythm, Miles had added a new wrinkle. Among the many guests to grace Cohn and Sims's Half Note gigs during the early 1960s was legendary vocalist Cecil ‘Kid Haffey’ Collier, a blues bawling singer cut from much the same cloth as Jimmy Rushing, but whose career hadn’t reached anywhere near the same level of prominence. 

Collier had actually led a very interesting life. He’d toured the TOBA circuit with Bessie Smith in the Twenties and had worked with Don Redman’s band during the Swing Era, his performing career occasionally punctuated by spells as master of ceremonies at various New York Theatres, including the world-famous Apollo. During the mid-1950s he’d guested with Count Basie in Philadelphia, but nevertheless, despite the high regard in which other performers patently held him, Haffey remained something of an underground hero, a situation Miles clearly thought a recording with Cohn and Sims could rectify.

It should come as no surprise that, given the saxophonists’ affection for the pre-war Basie band, the “Kid” sits rather well with their music, with his three features sounding very much like a junior Rushing. I Like It Like That is pure unadorned swing, while the Nat King Cole associated Sweet Lorraine takes the temperature down a little, complete with a beautifully groovy Cohn contribution. The vocalists’ tour-de-force, however, comes on Nagasaki wherein he swiftly dispenses the dreadful original lyric and embarks on a piece of nursery rhyme nonsense, all the more affective for Cohn and Sims driving accompaniment.

Ironically, for an album so undeservedly obscure, the remainder of Either Way featured some of Cohn and Sims’s best playing to date, spurred on by yet another A-Team rhythm section featuring Mose Allison, Gerry Mulligan-associate Bill Crow on bass and Basie veteran Gus Johnson on drums.

P-Town is Cohn’s mid-tempo dedication to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he and Sims had played several club dates, and appends a refreshingly simple melody to the chords of the old standard You’re Driving Me Crazy. Both frontliners sound especially relaxed here. Autumn Leaves is another busked head arrangement highlighting the lustre of the two tenorists’ tones: listen out for Cohn’s pleading solo, which pulls against the beat and once more makes the most of dynamics. 

Cohn had also brought in two more formal charts, The Thing, a particularly recherché piece of jazz archaeology, dating back to the days of the Savoy Sultans in the late 1930s, and his own I’m Tellin’ Ya, written in 1953 for his first ever album release, issued on the Savoy label. 

The real gem of the session though is a further version of the Cohn/Sims theme song Morning Fun. Nine years on from the original Prestige recording, Zoot’s softly growling solo is Exhibit A in the case for great jazzmen maturing rather than evolving, a point once eloquently raised by Sims’ friend and fellow tenorman Bill Holman; “People have wondered why Zoot doesn’t progress. I figured it out – it’s simply that guys like him don’t need to progress: they just mature. With his talent, what else do you need?”

The final two selections here are rarities in every sense, dating from a State Department sponsored tour of South America made in July 1961 by Cohn, Sims and several other US jazzmen. America’s government had been organising jazz-themed good-will tours since the days of the Eisenhower administration in the mid-1950s, when it had memorably dispatched the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band to the Middle East and Central America. For a similar ambassadorial jaunt south of the equator in the summer of 1961, Washington's powers-that-be picked another starry list of names, including, alongside Al and Zoot, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Curtis Fuller, Herbie Mann and Kenny Dorham. “Through Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero and Buenos Aries they left a trail of glorious page-one newspaper stories, proving once again that jazz is one of America’s most popular exports,” wrote one journalist of the package, but beneath all the thinly-veiled propaganda, the participants simply did exactly what they always had, regardless of locale. The concerts would feature various permutations of the players present, ranging from an all-in jam session to individual features. The highlight of each show was undoubtedly the quintet set by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, and thanks once more to the enigmatic Fred Miles, a portion of their performance from Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro on July 16th was eventually released on an album with the deliciously chewy title of Jazz Committee for South American Affairs.

The two tenors are in blistering form throughout, doubtless inspired by the opportunity to take their music to a far bigger audience than could be squeezed into the Half Note. Sims had recorded The Red Door three times since its original 1952 issue but here he sounds as if he were playing it for the first time, so fresh minted are his ideas. Another re-run of a familiar item, Halley’s Comet finds Cohn literally wailing in his solo, spurred on by the relentlessly swinging playing of drummer Dave Bailey, a musician whose regular work with Gerry Mulligan often required him to operate at lower intensity. The best moments of the track come in the shout chorus near the close, where the tenors bat a simple riff back and forth until Zoot’s “shakes” sound almost like musical laughter. A word also needs to be spoken for ex-pat British pianist Ronnie Ball, a player who had once upon a time fallen into the orbit of Lennie Tristano, before breaking away to tour with both Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. Here he plays with a heated drive that sounds a world away from his one-time inspiration. 

Although the remainder of the collaborative recordings of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims fall outside the period covered by this collection, it’s worth briefly outlining their contents. In fact, despite maintaining their working relationship at venues like the Half Note, and - as with their visits to Ronnie Scott’s club during the 1960s -  occasionally further afield, the two men appeared on record together only rarely after 1961. 

In 1965, they recorded the self-explanatory Al and Zoot in London, joining celebrated English jazzmen Stan Tracey and Peter King: in 1973 they were reunited for a storming set on the Muse label, Body and Soul, produced by long-time admirer Don Schlitten, and the following year, whilst touring Europe, the pair taped the album Motoring Along for the Swedish Sonet label. Their final album together, Zoot Case, was recorded during an informal pub gig in Stockholm in June 1982, documenting the last example of what sleeve note writer Mike Hennessey called “[their] musical philosophy... unpretentious, straight-ahead, hard-swinging, happy-go-lucky, irresistibly infectious jazz that comes from the heart, delights the ear and mobilizes the feet.”

By this time, Sims was already showing signs of the ill-health that would claim his life three years later. Cohn survived his old friend by a few years, passing away in 1988, aged just 63. As their obituaries made clear, the impact the two saxophonists made upon their audiences and fellow musicians was outdone only by that they’d made upon each other. “One of the greatest musicians and men I’ve ever met,” was how Sims described his partner in 1973, adding “It’s always a pleasure to play with him.”

“We’ve always been friends, aside from business associates,” Cohn once remarked about their relationship, and it is this convivial, mutual affection that shines through all of the recordings heard on this set. This music may now be over half a century old and date from a far less cynical age but its message is nonetheless timeless. “[We] learned a lot from each other,” Cohn once confessed of his partner. “[Zoot] used to talk about the ecstasy factor – the times when your playing becomes a kind of ecstasy.” 

These recordings offer proof positive that erudition and pleasure can sometimes go hand in hand.”

Simon Spillett

June 2015

DISC ONE:

1. Tangerine (Schertzinger, Mercer) [4.26]
2. Zoot Case (Sims) [4.26]
3. The Red Door (Sims) [4.35]
4. Morning Fun (Cohn) [5.38]*

Zoot Sims Sextet

Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Al Cohn (tenor sax); Kai Winding (trombone); George Wallington (piano); Percy Heath (bass); Art Blakey (drums)

September 8th 1952, New York City

*omit Winding

Tracks 1-4 originally issued on 10” LP Prestige PRLP 138 - Zoot Sims All-Stars with Kai Winding and Al Cohn

5. Crimea River (Burns) [3.08]
6. Mediolistic (Johnson) [3.29]
7. Sandy’s Swing (Gold) [3.23]
8. A New Moan (Albam) [3.52]
9. A Moment’s Notice (Wilkins) [3.19]
10. My Blues (Cohn) [3.14]
11. Sherm’s Terms (Sherman) [2.57]
12. More Bread (Wilkins) [3.05]

Al Cohn-Zoot Sims Sextet

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Dick Sherman (trumpet); Dave McKenna (piano); Milt Hinton (bass); Osie Johnson (drums)

January 24th 1956, Webster Hall, New York City

Tracks 5-12 originally issued on 12” LP RCA Victor LPM 1282 - Al Cohn/Zoot Sims Sextet – From A to… Z

13. Tenor For Two, Please Jack (Sims) [4.25]
14. Somebody Loves Me (Macdonald, De Sylva, Gershwin) [2.51]
15. East of The Sun (and West of The Moon) (Bowman) [4.19]
16. From A to Z (Cohn) [2.57]

Al Cohn-Zoot Sims Quintet

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Hank Jones (piano); Milt Hinton (bass); Osie Johnson (drums)

January 24th 1956, Webster Hall, New York City

Tracks 13-16 originally issued on 12” LP RCA Victor LPM 1282 - Al Cohn/Zoot Sims Sextet – From A to… Z

17. Shorty George (Gibson, Basie) [2.50]
18. The Return of The Redhead (Cohn) [3.29]
19. Blues for The High Brow (Cohn) [3.54]
20. The Mellow Side (Cohn) [2.36]

The Sax Section: Jazz Workshop under the direction of Al Cohn

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Eddie Wasserman (tenor sax); Sol Schlinger (baritone sax); 

Hank Jones (piano); Milt Hinton (bass); Don Lamond (drums)

June 28th 1956, New York City

Tracks 17-20 originally issued on 12” LP Epic LPN 3278 – The Sax Section: Jazz Workshop under the direction of Al Cohn

DISC TWO: 

1. Just You, Just Me (Greer, Klages) [9.30]
2. Tenor Conclave (Mobley) [11.05]
3. How Deep Is The Ocean (Berlin) [15.05]
4. Bob’s Boys (Mobley) [8.21]

The Prestige All-Stars

Al Cohn (tenor sax); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Hank Mobley (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); 

Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass);  Art Taylor (drums)

September 7th 1956, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Tracks 1-4 originally issued on 12” LP Prestige LP 7074 - Tenor Conclave

5. You’re A Lucky Guy (Cahn, Chaplin) [3.34]
6. Halley’s Comet (Cohn) [4.06]
7. Chasing The Blues (Cohn) [6.06]
8. Two Funky People (Cohn) 4.26]*
9. The Wailing Boat (Cohn) [6.11]
10. Brandy and Beer (Cohn) [3.46]

The Al Cohn Quintet featuring Zoot Sims

Al Cohn (tenor sax, clarinet* Zoot Sims (tenor sax, clarinet*); Mose Allison (piano); Teddy Kotick (bass); Nick Stabulus (drums)

March  27th 1957, New York

Tracks 5-10 originally issued on 12” LP Coral CRLP 57171 – Al Cohn Quintet featuring Zoot Sims

DISC THREE: The Note

1. Gone With The Wind (Wrubel, Magidson) [6.18]
2. Just You, Just Me (Greer, Klages) [5.29]
3. It’s A Wonderful World (Adamson, Savitt, Watson) [6.26]

The Al Cohn Quintet featuring Zoot Sims

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Mose Allison (piano); Teddy Kotick (bass); Nick Stabulus (drums)

March  27th 1957, New York

Track 1 originally issued on 12” LP Coral CRLP 57149 – Various Artists – Jazz Cornucopia

Tracks 2-3 originally issued on 12” LP Coral CRLP 57171 – Al Cohn Quintet featuring Zoot Sims

4. Lover Come Back To Me (Romberg, Hammerstein) [9.08]
5. It Had To Be You (Jones, Kahn) [10.14]
6. Wee Dot (Johnson, Parker) [8.50]*
7. After You’ve Gone (Creamer, Layton) [11.37]*

Zoot Sims/Al Cohn/Phil Woods

Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Al Cohn (tenor sax); Phil Woods (alto sax*); Mose Allison (piano); Nabil Totah (bass); Paul Motian (drums)

February 6th and 7th 1959, The Half Note, New York City

Track 4-7 originally issued on 12” LP United Artists UAS 5040 Al Cohn/Zoot Sims/Phil Woods – Jazz Alive! A Night at The Half Note

8. The Note (Cohn) [4.08]
9. You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To (Porter) [4.48]
10. You ‘n’ Me (Cohn) [4.36]

The Al Cohn-Zoot Sims Quintet

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Mose Allison (piano); Major Holley (bass); Osie Johnson (drums)

June 1st and 3rd 1960, Fine Recording Studio, New York City

Tracks 8-10 originally issued on 12” LP Mercury MG 20606 – Al Cohn/Zoot Sims –

DISC FOUR:

1. On The Alamo (Jones, Cahn) [4.31]
2. The Opener (Potts) [3.41]
3. Angel Eyes (Dennis, Brent) [3.13]*
4. Awful Lonely (Handy) [4.15]
5. Love For Sale (Porter) [4.54]
6. Improvisation for Unaccompanied Saxophones (Cohn, Sims) [2.24]

The Al Cohn-Zoot Sims Quintet

Al Cohn (tenor sax, clarinet*); Zoot Sims (tenor sax, clarinet*); Mose Allison (piano); Major Holley (bass); Osie Johnson (drums)

June 1st and 3rd 1960, Fine Recording Studio, New York City

Tracks 1- 6 originally issued on 12” LP Mercury MG 20606 – Al Cohn/Zoot Sims – You ‘n’ Me

7. P-Town (Cohn) [5.12]
8. I Like It Like That (Collier) [2.26]*
9. Sweet Lorraine (Parish, Burwell) [3.21]*
10. Autumn Leaves (Mercer, Kosma) [4.43]
11. The Thing (Cooper) [4.55]
12. I’m Tellin’ Ya’ (Cohn) [4.47]
13. Nagasaki (Dixon, Warren) [2.29]*
14. Morning Fun (Cohn) [6.25]

Zoot Sims and Al Cohn 

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Mose Allison (piano); Bill Crow (bass); Gus Johnson (drums); Cecil ‘Kid Haffey’ Collier (vocals*)

February 1961, Peter Ind's Studio, New York City

Tracks 7-13 originally issued on Fred Miles Presents FM 1 – Zoot Sims and Al Cohn with Cecil “Kid Haffey” Collier – Either Way

15. The Red Door (Sims) [7.01]
16. Halley’s Comet (Cohn) [6.30]

Jazz Committee for South American Affairs

Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Ronnie Ball (piano); Ben Tucker (bass); Dave Bailey (drums)

July 16th 1961, Teatro Municipal, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Tracks 15-16 originally issued on 12” LP Fred Miles Presents FM 403 – Various Artists – Jazz Committee for Latin American Affairs