© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
For Simon Spillett I would imagine that the next best thing after playing his tenor saxophone is talking and writing about other Jazz tenor sax players, in this instance, two of the greatest to ever play the instrument - Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.
On the sidebar of the blog you’ll see a listing of “writerly attributes according to Gary Giddins” and in his essays on Jazz, Simon always manages to tick off a number of them.
Based in the UK, he leads his own quartet and big band and - speaking of great tenor saxophonists - he is Tubby Hayes’s biographer. You can locate more information about him by visiting his webpage.
It’s always a pleasure and a privilege to host his thoughts on Jazz and its makers on these pages.
© - Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.
Al and Zoot in London: Harkit HRKCD 8567
“For some, the arrival of American tenor saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims at Ronnie Scott's club in early June 1965 couldn't have come soon enough. By the middle-1960s, the envelope of “modern” jazz was being pushed to breaking point, both in the US and the UK, and to Scott his two visitors that summer represented the perfect antidote to all the Coltrane and Ornette-inspired “freedom”. Writing in Melody Maker, he described Al and Zoot as “their own men, concerned with a brand of jazz music that is to do with swing, melodic invention, good sounds.”
Scott had long been an admirer. Indeed, he had chosen Sims as the first soloist to inaugurate his club's policy of importing US guest artists four years earlier. When he returned again in late 1962, Sims brought his long-term confederate Cohn with him, upping the musical ante and delighting all those who'd admired the two-tenor team on record.
“Zoot and Al were pure jazz incarnate,” remembers saxophonist Peter King, one of many London musicians drawn to the Americans' feel-good orbit. “They loved to play, respected Stan [Tracey]'s trio and positively relished working with it. They swung their asses off night after night and had a ball, falling in love with England, the admiring audiences and the excellent musicians they met here.”
Putting the visitors on record together with their UK counterparts was a logical next step, an exercise in mutual admiration masterminded by British saxophonist Jack Sharpe, a player who did a great deal to make life comfortable for touring American jazzmen. Indeed, he'd already produced three London-made recording sessions featuring a visiting US soloist, Duke Ellington star Paul Gonsalves (one of which Change of Setting, co-led by Tubby Hayes can be heard on Harkit HRKCD 8561). His fourth such effort, again taped at Lansdowne Studios in Notting Hill Gate, this time on the afternoon of Sunday June 27th 1965, was designed to showcase Cohn and Sims alongside their regular Scott club accompanists, Stan Tracey, bassist Rick Laird and drummer Jackie Dougan and two further guests, Peter King and Sharpe himself.
Once again, Sharpe leased the resulting master to the mail-order only World Record Club, who issued the finalised LP as Al and Zoot in London in late 1967. Despite receiving some enthusiastic press reviews, including a glowing appraisal in Melody Maker, which noted the albums “highly professional jazz...concerned with form and coherence...and a belief that jazz should communicate with the paying customer”, the LP quickly went out of print. Having also never received a US release, it soon became one of Cohn and Sims most sought-after recordings.
Although Albert McCarthy's sleeve notes to the original record provided a useful précis of Cohn and Sims careers to date, they were less transparent on the specific aspects of the session itself. Fifty years on since its initial release, this new Harkit reissue (the albums début on CD and in glorious stereo to boot) provides a welcome opportunity not only to appreciate this music afresh, but also to reveal some more of its background.
As with his previous recordings centred upon Paul Gonsalves, Jack Sharpe had made the artistically healthy decision of utilizing a shuffling pack of players and arrangers. Indeed, despite McCarthy's sleeve note claim that “most of these tracks feature a four piece sax section, with the scoring presumably done by Cohn,” there is actually far greater variety, both instrumentally and compositionally. For example, Zoot's Tune (a retitling of a piece by Cohn named Fast when first recorded in the company of Sims and Stan Getz in the late 1940s) and Mr. George (another Cohn original dedicated to a verbally enthusiastic fan present at many Cohn/Sims performances at New York's Half Note club) are by a quintet line-up featuring the two American tenorists and the Tracey trio. Peter King makes up a three-tenor frontline on Shoft, while the remainder of the tracks swap instrumentation from a standard alto, two tenors, baritone sax section to a “Four Brothers” three tenors, one baritone set-up.
Fortunately, the music remains focused regardless of these shifts. Nor is there a palpable change of pace as the baton changes hands between the various composers and arrangers. Stan Tracey contributes two themes – a lilting waltz, Haunted Jazzclub, first recorded by Ronnie Scott in 1961, and Cockle Row, excerpted from his recently taped (but not then released) classic Under Milk Wood, a performance made all the more remarkable for hearing Cohn and Sims essaying material hitherto thought of as the sole property of the late Bobby Wellins, a close friend of both men. The spirit of Under Milk Wood is also strongly felt in one of Peter King's two contributions. As King remembered it in his autobiography (Flying High: A Jazz Life and Beyond, Northway Publications, 2011), he had been asked to write something for the album but “as usual, I left it to the last minute and ended up writing non-stop for a whole day and a night. I was still copying parts in the studio, on the session. I never even got around to giving the tunes titles. When the record was finally released, Jack Sharpe had named them.”
One suspects that King may have had a helping hand from Tracey too; Pete's Tune No. 2 moves from a gorgeous sax section introduction to a stark modal vamp that sounds eerily close to Tracey's Starless and Bible Black. Hearing Sims and Cohn – who is especially inspired here – improvising on such “modern”-sounding turf is intriguing, although sadly the performance is faded to a close rather than carried through to a proper climax.
The day of the session had proved especially eventful for King. Then deep in the throes of heroin addiction, he had also used what he called “masses of cocaine” to keep awake. Later that day, following a gig of his own, he was due to celebrate the success of the recording at a party in Jack Sharpe's flat, also attended by Cohn and Sims, but on the way there was involved in a car crash. “I arrived at the party with my head still bleeding, and feeling like a total idiot. Al and Zoot were there, wondering what the hell happened.”
Regardless of the personal dramas surrounding the session, Al and Zoot in London remains a classic – a rare on-record meeting between a perfectly matched Anglo-American musical alliance. All of its headliners virtues are on display: Sims' ability to levitate a band with his unwaveringly joyous sense of time; Cohn's marriage of rhythmic brinkmanship and harmonic daring, and their partnerships conjoined dedication to making music that, as Melody Maker put it in a review of a gig at Ronnie Scott's earlier in June 1965, required nothing more of an audience than “a pair of ears educated enough to appreciate simple swinging jazz.”
As for their English counterparts, there is no suggestion whatsoever of an uneven playing field. Whether on alto or tenor, Peter King sounds as authoritative and commanding an instrumentalist aged 25 as he now does as a septuagenarian veteran, while Stan Tracey, in the triple-role of accompanist, soloist and composer, gives yet another masterful display of his world-class talent. Hindsight also provides moments of revelation in the cases of both King and Tracey; the former comes across as far more rounded, less bop-centric player than many of his contemporary critiques allowed, and Tracey, especially in his careful, playful improvisation on Flaming June, shows a musical restraint that at times sounds more Basie- than Ellington-like.
Although the session and its backstory are very much part and parcel of the Golden Era of British jazz, and of the whole Zeitgeist of the early years of Ronnie Scott's club, the music on Al and Zoot In London itself stands very much on its own timeless merits. But then Cohn and Sims had never chased fashion. Interviewed by Max Jones in Melody Maker in summer 1967, a few months before this album was released, Zoot Sims observed how his and his partners preferred style had begun to sound “kind of mainstream” when compared to the pioneers of the avant-garde. At the time, fierce debate was raging in the pages of the jazz press about whether the idiom itself was dying, a victim of the scorched earth explorations of the new wave. Jones asked Sims if he thought the music was on its way out. His answer was as characteristically unpretentious as his playing; “I always say one thing: jazz has been dying for 70 years and it's going to last a lot longer than the record we're making now.”
Fifty-years on, that record is back, alive and kicking and sounding as good as ever.”
Simon Spillett
Simon Spillett is the author of The Long Shadow of The Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes (Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015)
1. Shoft (Cohn)
2. Haunted Jazzclub (Tracey)
3. Zoot's Tune [a.k.a. Fast] (Cohn)
4. Cockle Row (Tracey)
5. Pete's Tune No. 1 (King)
6. Flaming June (Cohn)
7. Mr. George (Cohn)
8. Pete's Tune No. 2 (King)
Al Cohn (tenor sax); Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Peter King (alto sax, tenor sax); Jackie Sharpe (tenor sax, baritone sax); Stan Tracey (piano); Rick Laird (bass); Jackie Dougan (drums)
All themes were arranged by their composers
Original sessions produced by Jack Sharpe and engineered by Adrian Kerridge
Recorded at Lansdowne Studios, Notting Hill Gate, London, Sunday June 27th 1965
Nobody cares about British jazz. Literally nobody.
ReplyDelete