Count Basie by Alun Morgan - Part 6

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Born in Wales in 1928, Alun Morgan became a Jazz fan as a teenage and was an early devotee of the bebop movement. In the 1950s he began contributing articles to Melody Maker, Jazz Journal, Jazz Monthly, and Gramophone and for twenty years, beginning in 1969, he wrote a regular column for a local newspaper in Kent. From 1954 onward he contributed to BBC programs on Jazz, authored and co-authored books on modern Jazz and Jazz in England and wrote over 2,500 liner notes for Jazz recordings.

Chapter Six

“The new Basie band was a musical success on and off records and did good business around New York but its nationwide tours were disappointing in terms of financial return. The breakthrough came in the summer of 1953 and it was probably coincidental that a change took place in the reed section around this time. Frank Wess joined the band on tenor as a replacement for Paul Quinichette then, a few weeks later on July 27, Frank Foster took over from Eddie Davis and stayed for exactly eleven years.

Metronome magazine published a very perceptive review of the band at this time: 'This is obviously the way a big band should sound; with an even attack, a brace of excellent soloists, a dedication to the beat and a library of arrangements that permit the soloists and the sections to keep the rhythm going always…. This is not the incubator of jazz of the future as the first Basie band was. It is unlikely that a Pres will emerge out of this group to shape a whole new era of jazz. This is rather a band that sums up, that shows how it is done and how it is played, what was good and what still is good in the jazz of twenty years ago and of today. In the other arts, it is always those who sum up, who demonstrate the enduring in the past and present, who make the great artists'.

The essential rightness of these opinions was to be proved time and again during the next three decades for no barrier-breaking soloist was to emerge from the Basie ranks, rather it was a band which became the curator of jazz big band tradition. During the years Basie spent under contract to Norman Granz the impresario tried to arrange a recording session at which Charlie Parker was to have been featured with the band. (Granz had both men under contract at the time.) Parker refused because, he said, Basie would never let him sit in back in Kansas City in 1936. Count, for his part, probably found the sixteen-year old Parker too wild and unschooled a musician in the Reno Club days; a pairing on record in 1953 or 1954 might well have resulted in some extremely interesting music.

The arrival of Frank Wess was to give the band an additional tone colour for, as well as playing excellent tenor, Frank was a flutist, a not too common 'double' in jazz at the time. In fact Basie was unaware of Wess's second instrument for some weeks. 'It wasn't until Frank had been in the band for some time before Don Redman said to me one night, "Frank played any flute for you yet?" I said I didn't know he played it. So a few nights later I said to Frank, "Why didn't you tell me you play flute?" and he said "you didn't ask me!" so I said, bring your flute tomorrow night'.

Thus began a long line of flute features including She’sjust my size, The midgets, Flute juice and Perdido. In Frank Foster, Basie had not only an excellent tenor soloist rooted in the Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt tradition, but also a most workmanlike arranger. In fact the quality of the scores produced by men within the band equalled that of the more experienced outside writers.

Neal Hefti, a man with a considerable reputation gained from his work for the Woody Herman Herd, had enhanced his reputation with his scoring for the septet and octet then followed it with more writing for the new big band. Johnny Mandel, who played bass trumpet with Basie from June until December, 1953, wrote about ten arrangements for the Count of which only Straight life seems to have been recorded. Manny Albam, Sy Oliver, Buster Harding, Don Redman and Nat Pierce were the most prominent of the 'outside' arrangers.

The band recorded material in 1953 which Granz put together as a ten-track album called Count Basie Dance Session; it was greeted so enthusiastically by critics and public alike that Count Basie Dance Session No.2 was soon in the shops. The albums were important in two respects, apart from their great musical value. Firstly, the titles showed the public that Basie still considered himself to be the leader of a band which played music for dancing and secondly, the very fact that the LPs were given titles was something of an innovation. Previous Basie albums tended to be made up of 78rpm titles simply programmed as ten-inch or twelve-inch discs. The Count's Dance Session LPs were referred to as such by critics and public both at the time and even years later when the discs were reissued. Subsequently the practice of giving albums generic titles was to become the norm and in Basie's case his best-known LPs, for example The Atomic Mister Basie. On My Way And Shoutin' Again  etc., have become part of jazz history.

In March, 1954 Count made his first trip to Europe, touring Scandinavia, France, Switzerland etc. but missing out the United Kingdom due to the lingering dispute between the musicians' unions of the two countries. Back home business was good and the band was finding its feet, financially, but it needed just one extra effort to take it to the top. The missing ingredient was a singer with a commanding personality and on Christmas Day 1954, that singer arrived on stage with the big band for the first time, Joseph Goreed Williams, born in Cordele, Georgia, raised in Chicago, and just two weeks past his 36th birthday. Joe was an immediate success to the point where Granz rushed out his versions of The comeback and Everyday as a 45 rpm single suitable for the jukebox operators. This was followed by the band's Alright, okay you win and When the sun goes down-, with that rich voice well to the fore. At the recording session in May, 1955 when Williams's hits were taped (Frank Foster and Ernie Wilkins provided the scores) Basie recorded another best selling title, April in Paris. This was arranged by organist Wild Bill Davis and it was the original intention for Davis to record it with the band. Unfortunately Wild Bill's vehicle broke down on the way to the studio and what turned out to be a best-selling record was made without him. 'I sure fixed Bill's truck that day!' joked Basie years later.

The purists sneered at the Joe Williams vocals and the April in Paris record, with its 'one more time' ending and its Pop goes the weasel quotation in Thad Jones's trumpet solo but the fact remained that Basie, at long last, had financial stability. The payroll to keep sixteen men swinging got bigger each year and although the relationship between Count and his men was more cordial, relaxed and closer than that of any other band, it did not prevent the sidemen taking the leader to the union when they felt they had a case on matters such as overtime payments etc. As Nat Hentoff wrote in his revealing essay in his book The Jazz Life, 'Basie is quite conservative concerning money. He has to be pressured into giving a rise, and he deals with each man in the band individually in a divide-and-conquer technique that lessens the possibility of mass mutiny with regard to Basie pay. This absence of collective bargaining exists in many other bands. Basie was not always so close, but he has been mulcted outrageously in his years as leader'.

With his fortunes now on an upward trajectory, Basie made a change in the band which some of his men disagreed with; he sacked drummer Gus Johnson. 'I was in the band until December 22, 1954' Gus told Stanley Dance. 'On the 23rd, I was in hospital with appendicitis. I was there ten days or so when Basie wrote me to say he had got Sonny Payne and that he was doing a good job. Basie liked a lot of flash, and some of the fellows in the band though Sonny was better than me because he was more of a showman. Charlie Fowlkes told me later on that he (Charlie) fell and broke his kneecap and Basie didn't hire him back either. The same thing happened to Marshall Royal when he had to go into hospital. Moral: Don't get sick!'

Sonny Payne, who had worked with the Erskine Hawkins band and was the son of drummer Chris Columbus, was expert at juggling sticks and generally playing to the audience when the occasion demanded (and sometimes when it was not demanded). As Nat Hentoff described Payne, he was 'inclined to send up rockets when the music called for indirect lighting'. He also had a tendency to rush the beat and, for a time, Freddie Greene kept a long stick with which he poked Sonny when the time started to go awry. Gus Johnson was the very finest drummer Basie had, after the departure of Jo Jones, but the employment of a showman on the drum stool was part of the change which the band was experiencing.

More and more the bookings were for concerts and less for dancing. Audiences paid to see and hear the band as a band and Basie, who probably recalled those years in vaudeville, loved the reaction of a crowd to pure showmanship. This did not, of course, lower the band's musical abilities in any way, in fact some of the new scores called for a degree of musicianship which previous line-ups would have found too demanding. In 1956 Norman Granz released an album on which Basie and Joe Williams shared equal billing. It was clear thai Joe was now one of the band's biggest assets. Most critics damned Williams with faint praise, accusing him of not being a true blues singer and of using material which was weak, pallid and generally unsuited to the context. It is highly likely that Count smiled benignly at such criticisms as he turned to check the full list of bookings which the band was enjoying. To Count, Joe Williams was always 'my favourite son' and it is not difficult to see why he was held in such esteem for his addition to the band moved Basie into a new strata as far as fees for engagements were concerned.

In 1956 the band took off on another European tour (again missing out Britain; the inter-union problem had still to be finalised) and Granz recorded the band in concert at Gothenburg. The resultant LP came out misleadingly titled Count Basie In London but at least it gave us the opportunity of hearing how the band performed in front of an audience. Apart from the expected Joe Williams favourites, the programme also contained a new and attractive work by Frank Foster, Shiny stockings, which the band had first recorded in the studio at the beginning of the year. To be fair to Basie, he was also recording more challenging works including the extended Coast to coast suite by Ernie Wilkins.

In April, 1957 Count Basie paid his first visit to Britain and met with a most enthusiastic response wherever he played. So great was the demand for the band that arrangements were immediately put in hand to bring Basie back in the October of that year. In between the UK bookings, Count made a considerable impact on the 8,000 audience at the Newport Jazz Festival. The final concert was held on Sunday, July 7th and for the occasion John Hammond came on stage to effect the introductions. After the regular band had played its opening number a quartet of distinguished Old Boys made their appearance to be featured with the band. Lester Young, Jo Jones, Jimmy Rushing and Illinois Jacquet added their own special magic and excitement to the occasion and on the final One o'clock jump trumpeter Roy Eldridge also joined in. Granz taped almost the whole of the Newport Jazz Festival that year and the two albums on which Basie may be heard from this event were the last under his contract with Clef/Verve. In the autumn he signed with the comparatively new Roulette company and commenced his new affiliation with an album of Neal Hefti compositions which, rightly, has become a classic by any standards, The Atomic Mr. Basie.

A few days after completing the album the band flew to Britain where they performed a number of the new Hefti works including the slow and beautiful Li’l darlin and the hectic Whirly bird. So great was the response and so outspoken were British musicians in their claims that they had no chance to hear the band (as the concerts were held, naturally, while other musicians were working) that a special concert was arranged, commencing at midnight. The Roulette recording contract lasted for five years during which time Basie made some 20 albums for the label, the majority of which are excellent. Not only are they musically brilliant but the recording quality is outstanding, thanks to the experienced Teddy Reig who produced most of the LPs. While the Clef/Verve issues were acceptable some sessions, noticeably those which went into the making of the Dance Sessions albums, suffered from a slight muddiness. With The Atomic Mr Basie the music jumped from the speakers, even in mono, with a degree of separation and perspective which the Count had never previously enjoyed.

Before the European tour in the autumn of 1957 Basie made some changes, two of them to tighten discipline within the band. Bill Graham had been playing alto in the band since the early part of 1955 when he took Ernie Wilkins's place and his departure was not unexpected. As Nat Hentoff tells it 'Billy Graham, an extrovert and prankster, "played himself out of the band" as one of his fellow roisterers puts it. "Billy was not only too playful, but he used to get a little too familiar with the Chief himself. He'd even heckle Basie on the bandstand. As usually happens when a guy goes, Graham got the news during a layoff! When we came back, he just wasn't there" '.The other man to go about the same time was trumpeter Reunald Jones; born in 1910 he was older than anyone else in the band, apart from the Count himself Hentoff again: 'Seated at the extreme left end of the trumpet section, Jones was always one level higher than his colleagues. He played with one hand, as if in derision of the simplicity of the music. When the rest of the section would rise in unison, Jones invariably remained seated. His expression - no matter how much joking was going on among the men - was constantly sour. Jones's childish campaign of passive contempt was in protest at the fact that Basie never assigned him any solos. Jones was fired finally because, as a section mate says with satisfaction, 'he drank too much water'. Jones was a clubhouse lawyer, and occasionally complained to the musicians' union about overtime matters. He went to the union one time too often'. These two incidents give an insight to the extra-musical problems facing a band leader and although Basie tried to distance himself always from internal troubles, the final decision had to be his.

The other side of the coin was the excellence of the music which the band was placing on record for Roulette. Neal Hefti wrote the music for two albums, Quincy Jones another and Frank Foster was responsible for all the music on Easin' It. And Benny Carter, the master of orchestration, came up with two suites, -Kansas City Suite and The Legend; on the latter Benny sat in the reed section at the recording session. And the band was recorded 'live' to very good effect at Birdland (with Budd Johnson taking some virile tenor solos) and again down in Miami.”

To be continued

Randy Weston [1926-2018] In Memoriam

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following article,  Randy Weston In Memoriam by Robert Ham which appeared in the November 2018 issue of DownBeat prompted the editorial staff at JazzProfiles to dig through the Jazz literature on Randy Weston at its disposal and to use the material that it found to create a compilation of writings about Randy that will appear on these pages in a series of subsequent postings. It’s our small way of attempting to do justice to Randy’s career in music, one that spanned almost 70 years. Not many artists are fortunate enough to be productive for almost three quarters of a century!

The following will be among the featured writings on Randy and his music:

• “Randy Weston (Afrobeats)” and essay from Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz
• “Randy Weston Interview,” in Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists
• Liner Notes to the New Faces at Newport [1958] Metro Jazz LP [E1005]
• Liner Notes to The Modern Art of Jazz Dawn LP [DLP-1116 reissued as Dawn CD-107 by Fresh Sound Records]
• The insert notes from the booklet to the Mosaic Select Randy Weston 3 CD set [MS 004]
• The relevant excerpts on Randy and his music from The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.; Oxford Companion to Jazz, Bill Kirchner, ed.; The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, ed.
• “Randy Weston interview” in Art Taylor, Notes and Tones
• Ira Gitler, “Randy Weston, Downbeat, xxxi/6, (1964), p. 16
• Mark Gardner, “Randy Weston,” Jazz Monthly, xii/11 (1967)
• Larry Birnbaum, “Randy Weston: African Rooted Rhythm,” Downbeat, xlvi/15, (1979)
• Ted Panken, Randy Weston DownBeat Interview, August 2016.

As is our custom, once these postings have appeared on the blog, singularly or in combination, we will collect them and repost them in one comprehensive feature on Randy and his music.

Of course, now with the added advantage of so much music being available of YouTube, we will include as many musical examples of Randy’s oeuvre as possible in each of these features.

“IN 2016, WHEN PIANIST RANDY WESTON was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame, he said that he viewed his life's work as a kind of musical recipe.

"You take the black church, the calypso, the blues. Duke, Basie, Art Tatum, put them in a pot and stir them up, and add Africa: that's Randy Weston," he said in an article that initially ran in the August edition of the magazine that year.

It's a fairly apt summation of the elements that impacted the way Weston — who passed away on Sept. 1 at the age of 92 — approached his chosen instrument and the music to which he devoted his life. As with most mottos, though, it doesn't fully capture the depth of feeling and acuity in his playing, formed from years of study of the jazz and classical canon, as well as his longtime advocation of the African roots in all modern music.

Bassist Christian McBride, who recorded with Weston on the 1997 album Earth Birth, put it this way: "While many naively spoke of the connection between African and African-American heritage, he was someone who actually spent extensive time playing, studying and maintaining a business in Africa — experiencing many cultures there first-hand and bringing those experiences back to America to share with all of the musicians who learned from him. He was one of the only musicians many of us knew who could seamlessly thread the sounds of the Yorubas to bebop."

Weston's interest in both the music and history of Africa was ingrained in him at an early age. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, his parents — mom, a domestic worker; dad, a restaurateur originally from Panama — encouraged him to study his ancestral homeland at the same time he was taking piano lessons. And they supported him as he started his music career following high school and a stint in the Army.

Along the way, he found notable mentors, including his neighbor Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and jazz scholar Marshall Stearns. Through their friendship and teachings, Weston began to develop his singular playing style: a fluid, yet reserved, approach that built a percussive, angular flow off of a stride-blues foundation. He could swing with the best of them, but seemed most comfortable blending with the steady polyrhythms of the Gnawa music of Morocco or the spirited throb of highlife from Ghana.

His interest in blending the sounds of modern jazz with African rhythms began in earnest during the late '50s and flourished on early albums, like 1961's Uhuru Afrika, which included poetry from Langston Hughes, and 1963's Music From The New African Nations. Around that time, he also was conscripted to tour the western and northern parts of the African continent by the U.S. State Department. He often would return there during his life, including spending a few years living in Morocco, where he taught and helped run the African Rhythms Cultural Center.

"His association with African musicians and the time he spent traveling the continent gave him a wealth of information," remembered trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, who performed with Weston on and off during the past four decades. "A lot of other guys did similar kinds of things, but didn't seem to absorb it the same way. Randy would hear the balafon [a percussion instrument that originated in Mali] and understand that it was as much a piano as the piano was."

Weston kept up a steady output of recordings and performances throughout his long life, including his most recent work, The African Nubian Suite, a live large-ensemble album captured in 2012 at New York's Skirball Cultural Center that aimed to trace human evolution back to its African roots in the Nile River delta. He also was playing concerts until very recently, with his last appearance occurring in July in France.

In addition to his induction into DownBeat's Hall of Fame, Weston received other honors, including a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and honorary doctorates from the New England Conservatory of Music and Brooklyn College.

Above all else, according to Bridgewater, Weston will be remembered for being one of the most gregarious and kind artists in jazz.

"He treated everybody well — even the Gnawa musicians he got to know became family to him. Yesterday at Randy's funeral, somebody said, 'I never heard Randy say a bad thing about any musician or anybody,"' Bridgewater recalled after attending a Sept. 10 service at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. "That was his nature. He welcomed everybody."

—Robert Ham, NOVEMBER 2018, DOWNBEAT, p. 17.

Tommy Shepard and Richard Wess - Jazz and Swing Orchestras: East Coast Series

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The band on Shepard's Flock is an—almost—All-Star band. It was the

debut album of trombonist Tommy Shepard, who made a name for himself in the bands of Ben Bernie, Wayne King, Buddy Clark, and Stan Kenton, before joining the CBS staff orchestra.

The leader of these sessions is then, naturally, heavily featured on trombone, playing with the soft, velvety sound of Tommy Dorsey, his main influence. The memories of Dorsey's band frequently illuminate the scene, as the musicians load through familiar material and some originals. There is plenty of room for soloing by an authoritative Al Cohn, on tenor and bass clarinet, by Hal McKusick on clarinet and alto, and by the versatile Nick Travis on trumpet, all supported by a good rhythm section with Nat Pierce, piano; Barry Galbraith, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums, who keep the mainstream flowing to the end. The arrangements, which stress tight harmonic writing, are all by Manny Albam and Nat Pierce, except Darn That Dream and Stop! Look and Run  which were worked out by Al Cohn, and keep in a rolling, relaxed groove.

Music She Digs the Most is a well-organized series of sessions arranged and con-dueled by pianist Richard Wess, and highlighted by some fluid soloing by tenor saxophonist Al Cohn. trombonist Frank Rehak. and trumpeter Nick Travis. Wess has Cabin in the Sky all to himself, and ho comes off as a flowing and sensitive player. Cohn. always blowing with taste and a handsome tone; Travis sounds great throughout, particularly on Lover Man, a moving and declarative solo vehicle for his horn. Rehak managed to express himself effectively, and Richard Wess' writing on the heads is neat and spare, and helps the group achieve a nice big band feel.               —Jordi Pujol, Fresh Sound Records

“The great thing about these predominantly 1950s recordings is that many of them fall under the rubric of a "Day in the Life" of a West Coast or East Coast studio musician. You can hear the musicians and the arrangers literally learning their craft; making themselves as they go. These are essentially rehearsal bands that got a recording contract for a one-off album on minor labels like Corral, Cadet, Dot, et al, but much of the music is first-rate as is the musicianship.”

- The editorial staff at JazzProfiles

Writing in 1986, Steve Voce in his fine book about the various Woody Herman Big Bands observed:

“Despite the never ending questions about the possibility of their return, the big bands never really went away. Admittedly they were crushed by heavy taxes and the advent of television in the second part of the forties, but the format proved resilient and there are probably more big bands today than there were during the golden era of big bands in the forties.” [p. 30; emphasis mine].

As if to corroborate Steve’s point, Jordi Pujol, the owner proprietor of Fresh Sound Records is currently issuing a series of Jazz and Swing Orchestra CDs while noting as a general introduction to the series:

“When the dust from the collapse of the Swing Era settled, there were few big bands left that had survived. Yet, because they loved the swinging drive of a full-on jazz orchestra, a series of adventurous and unsung bandleaders optimistically organize some fine, but short-lived, new orchestras that were packed with jazz and studio musicians, holding the flag of Swing high”

Jordi has place two Jazz and Swing Orchestras on each CD and further group these “rare and collectible albums by unsung bandleaders” as part of the West Coast Series and East Coast Series.

From the standpoint of the high quality of musicianship on display and the intriguing and well-written arrangements, these are “must have” CDs for anyone who is a serious collector of big band Jazz and you can locate more information about the series on the Fresh Sound website by going here.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles will highlight a number of these excellent recordings in a week long series beginning with Fresh Sound CD-966 East Coast Series: Tommy Shepard, Shepard’s Flock and Richard Wess: Music She Digs The Most.

Original liner notes from the Coral album Shepard's Flock by Tommy Shepard and His Orchestra (CRL 57110)

“If you have a philosophic turn of mind, there is an unending source of wry amusement in the way that fate seems to keep the scales of humanity balanced. This extends from the rise and fall of nations, at one extreme, to — on a somewhat less momentous level — the development and succession of musicians and musical styles. Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum continues to draw something or someone to the center of the stage whenever it becomes vacant.

The point happens to be pertinent because you hold in your hand a record featuring a trombonist named Tommy Shepard. Chances are you've never heard of Tommy Shepard. But Tommy has been around for a long time (we'll take up his early history a little farther along) just as though fate had kept him standing in the wings waiting for the opportune moment to allow him to step on the stage.

You will find, as you play this record, that Tommy has a trombone technique that is very much like that of another trombone playing Tommy, the late Tommy Dorsey. In fact, it takes no very deep probing to realize that Tommy Shepard has steeped himself in the school and style of Tommy Dorsey. And this may account in part for the time that he has put in waiting in the wings. For when anyone has mastered his art as thoroughly and uniquely as Tommy Dorsey did, there is really no room for a road show version. Either it's the big show or nothing.

And now we come to the obscure moves of fate. The selections you hear on this record are not the product of a rush job following Tommy Dorsey's death when it might seem that the path was now open for a successor to his sweet, soaring style. These recordings were made six weeks before Dorsey died, at a time when there seemed no slight suggestion that he might be near the end of the road. They were made because Tommy Shepard was then deemed ready to move out onto the national scene on his own and it is only by one of life's strange, but frequent, coincidences that he is emerging on records just after his musical guide and model has left the scene.

Tommy Shepard has been playing trombone since his junior year in high school. The next year he won a national solo contest and by the time he was 19 he was on the road with Ben Bernie. After twelve months with the Old Maestro, he enlisted in the Army and played in a variety of Army bands, finally winding up with Wayne King's star-studded group at Fort Sheridan, IL, where he played for two years, making V-Discs, working bond rallies and generally supporting the nation's spirits.

Released from service in 1946, he settled down in Chicago where he has been most of the time since, working first at the Chez Paree, then on the National Broadcasting Company staff, the American Broadcasting Company staff and, currently, the Columbia Broadcasting System staff where he is under the musical aegis of Caesar Petrillo.

While he was at ABC, Shepard was granted six months leave of absence in 1953 to join Stan Kenton on first trombone (his section mates were Frank Rosolino and Bill Russo). The invitation to join Kenton was an outgrowth of a rehearsal band that Tommy had formed in 1948. It was a big swinging band which gave some of the top studio musicians in Chicago a chance to unbend and blow to their heart's' content once a week. All the arrangements were contributed and the men in the band pitched in and paid for the rent of the rehearsal hall. Tommy kept the band going until 1953 when he went with Kenton.

It is interesting, in view of this association with Kenton, to find that Tommy's trombone playing has no trace of the big, wide braying style of the Kenton trombones but, rather, reflects the influence of an earlier day in jazz when Tommy Dorsey's smooth, velvet attack was impressing young musicians. This influence carries over to the instrumental makeup of the band that he leads here which is closer to that of the old Dorsey Brothers band of the 1930s than most bands that are heard today. There is even a parallel — coincidental, as it happens — between the title of one of the Dorsey Brothers' big numbers, Stop, Look and Listen, and a tune Shepard has chosen for this set, Stop! Look and Run!

The band that Shepard appears with in his recording debut is just about as all-star as one could ask for. The leader, naturally, is on trombone. The lone trumpet man is the versatile Nick Travis. The saxophone section is led by Sam Marowitz on alto and includes Hal McKusick, doubling on alto and clarinet, Al Conn, doubling on tenor sax and bass clarinet, and Charlie O'Kane on baritone. In the rhythm section are Nat Pierce, piano; Barry Galbraith, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums.

The arrangements, which stress tight harmonic writing, are all by Manny Albam and Nat Pierce, except Darn That Dream and Stop! Look and Run! which were worked out by Al Cohn. Nat Pierce arranged Take Care, I'll Be Back for More, Misty and Here I Am In Love Again. The choice of tunes reflects a balanced blend of some of the special lovelies of the standard popular repertoire, a few new shots at "pop" perpetuity, and a pair of originals by the indefatigable Manny Albam, Walk With Me and See How You Are.”

-John S. Wilson

Original liner notes from the MGM album Music She Digs the Most by Richard Wess and His Orchestra (E-3491)

“Here's "Music She Digs the Most" — music the gal of your dreams will find "the living end"! It's music that really swings — light, relaxed with a jumping yet subtle beat. Here you'll find a brace of well-remembered show tunes and movie hits neatly mixed with a few numbers that will be new to your ears—"originals" from the pen of talented pianist Richard Wess. The performances themselves are sparked with Dick's striking solo flights on the piano. In the accompaniments, he draws the support of some of today's top jazz instrumentalists. There's imagination a-plenty about the arrangements the group utilizes — everything is fresh, breezy, neatly-delineated. So, we think that you'll find that you, too, dig the "MUSIC SHE DIGS THE MOST", because—well—it really is "the most".

About Dick Wess

Dick was still a high school student when he began carving out a career for himself in music. Before graduation, he was holding forth on a radio show in his native Long Island with a 17-piece band- The Navy claimed him subsequently, but, upon his return to New York, he plunged into serious musical studies with Elmer Bernstein, the noted composer who wrote the much-hailed background score for the film "The Man With The Golden Arm", with the famous pianist Lennie Tristano, and with a host of other musical notables.

Soon, Dick found himself in demand as arranger, conductor, pianist and as a writer of special material for innumerable singers, night club acts, stage performers and so on. Among those he worked with were Denise Lor of the Garry Moore Show, Sally Blair, Dolores Hawkins, Buddy Marino, Joey Bishop, Larry Best and Alan Drake. He has conducted recording sessions for such artists as Nona Massey and Dick Roman—and, apart from these activities, he has appeared as a jazz pianist. After a wide tour of a string of the country's most famous hotels and niteries as accompanist to Betty Riley, who is known as "The Irish Senorita", Dick returned to New York to pen production numbers for the world-famous Latin Quarter. Then, for a time he teamed as arranger-conductor-pianist with Lillian Roth, appearing and sharing billing with her throughout the country. At the present time, Dick is settled in New York and plans to concentrate upon appearances as a pianist with a jazz group of his own. In addition to piano, he plays trumpet and drums.

The personnel appearing with Dick Wess in these recordings includes Jerry Sanfino on alto and flute, Al Cohn on tenor, Frank Rehak on trombone, Nick Travis on trumpet and Osie Johnson on drums. Johnny Smith provides the guitar for Autumn Leaves, Somewhere, Honest Abe, and Blues for Someone. Mundell Lowe is the guitarist for Hey Now!, I Got It Bad, Why Shouldn't I?, and Lover Man. Tony Mottola is the guitarist for I Didn't Know What Time It Was, Give Me the Simple Life, Cabin in the Sky, and You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To. Aaron Bell is the bass on Autumn Leaves, Somewhere, Honest Abe, and Blues for Someone and Milt Hinton carries the bass chores on the remaining eight numbers.”