Terry Gibbs, Buddy DeFranco, Herb Ellis Sextet × Memories Of You

Part 1 - "My Friend, Buddy D." - Terry Gibbs

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

This is from Terry Gibbs’ autobiography - Good Vibes: A Life in Jazz [Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2003].

“Since 1980, besides doing some TV shows with Steve Allen, I worked a lot with Buddy DeFranco and also worked as a single doing clinics and playing colleges using the Dream Band library. Working with Buddy has been the most creative and musically fun thing that I've done in the last twenty years.

I first met Buddy back in the 1940s. I think I was with Woody Herman's band and he was playing clarinet with Tommy Dorsey. We both went on to become leaders of our own bebop quartets and always felt the same way about music, especially Bird and Diz. They were our gods.

It wasn't until 1980 that Buddy and I played together. We never even played opposite each other in clubs or festivals. Sometimes we would meet on the road when he and [accordionist] Tommy Gumina had their group.

I remember Tommy, Buddy, and I appearing on a talk show with three other guests who were scientists. The host of the show was pretty hip but also knowledgeable about various subjects. It was a funny show in that when he talked to the scientists. Buddy, Tommy, and I didn't know what they were talking about at all. Because this was our younger days, the three of us were being silly. We would purposely answer every question from the host with the hippest language ever used. WE didn't even know what we were talking about. We'd just say something stupid and break up laughing. I have a photo of us on the show with Buddy, Tommy, and I breaking up and the three scientists looking like somebody just died.

I think that from the 1940s until the time we worked opposite each other in England in 1980, I was only in Buddy's company about five times. Our friendship started at Ronnie Scott's club in London, England, where we were booked as two separate attractions. We met at the rehearsal where Buddy was going to play a half-hour with a rhythm section and I was going to follow him and do the same. The reason I was going to follow him was not that I was the main attraction, it was because Ronnie Scott mentioned to us that it would be nice if we played one song together at the end of the set. Being that I sweat a lot. Buddy was nice enough to let me go on last so I wouldn't have to sit around all wet, waiting for the last song. The vibes that the club rented for me to play hadn't shown up for the rehearsal, so I rehearsed my part of the show playing two-finger piano. Buddy and I still hadn't played together.

After Buddy and I each played with our groups, I introduced Buddy and told the audience we were going to have a jam session. This was true because at the rehearsal, we never talked about what we were going to play. Buddy and I looked at each other on the stage and we picked "Lester Leaps In" for its "I Got Rhythm" chord changes, which we both knew. We also knew that the chord changes to that song wouldn't hang up the rhythm section. We thought that that part of the show was going to be a throwaway.

Immediately, we started to click, playing individual choruses, then eight bars each, then fours, twos, and ones. Then we played together and jammed for about three or four choruses. By the time we got to the end, the people in the audience were standing and cheering. We didn't believe it. Ronnie was so knocked out that he said, "Why don't you guys play two songs next time?" We did and broke it up again. This time we added Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time." We both knew the bebop songs so there was no problem there.

As the nights went on, we were playing less individually and more together. We weren't just knocking out the people in the audience, but also the guys in the rhythm section. But mostly, we knocked ourselves out. We were having the time of our lives playing together. Because Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton made the sound of the clarinet and vibes so popular, you could take any two idiots who play those instruments and it would sound good. What Buddy and I found out was that we had something special. Buddy, being a little pessimistic, wasn't sure if it was just this engagement, but I knew that there was something special there.

When we got done at Ronnie's, we agreed that when we got back to the States, we should occasionally try to work together.

I don't know how. but word must have gotten back to somebody in the States because when we got home, I got a call from my old friend Jim Washburn, one of the producers on Operation: Entertainment. Jim was now in charge of entertainment at KCET, the PBS television station in Los Angeles. He wanted us to do an hour-long TV show, which of course we did. That was the first time that Buddy and I ever worked together in the United States.

We hired Frank Collette on piano, Andy Simpkins on bass, and Jimmie Smith on drums and the show came out great. Word was really starting to get out about us because we got a call from Herb Wong, a producer for Palo Alto Records, who wanted us to record an album. After meeting with Herb, we decided to record the album live, because Buddy and I played better before an audience. It was much looser; we'd have the freedom to stretch out more, and we wouldn't be restricted to how many choruses we could play.

We booked ourselves into THE hot club in L.A. called Carmelo's. It was the perfect place to play in and record because it almost reminded me of a Fifty-Second Street club. It wasn't too big or too small; the audience was right next to the stage and it was great for getting them involved in what we were saying and playing.

We recorded about twenty songs and were going to pick about nine or ten for the album. When he listened to the tapes. Herb Wong didn't know which ones to pick because they were all so hot. So he told us that since he couldn't make up his mind, he would pay everybody for two albums and put them out six months apart.

A few months after the album "Jazz Party—First Time Together" came out, we got a surprise call from The Tonight Show telling us that Johnny Carson heard our version of "Air Mail Special" and wanted Buddy and me to play it on the show. This knocked us out. They flew Buddy in from Florida and put him up in a nice hotel. It seemed like a lot of other people liked "Air Mail Special" also. John Wilson reviewed the album for The New York Times:

“Both he (DeFranco) and Gibbs are wild swingers, which they daringly establish by opening this, their first disc together with a Goodman-Hampton specialty, "Air Mail Special." Goodman and Hampton were pretty exuberant on this number, but DeFranco and Gibbs outdo them, neither one ever sounding like his Swing Era counterpart.”

Those were very strong words coming from somebody who had never been one of my biggest fans.

We did The Tonight Show again about six months later. When we were on the first time, we didn't go on until near the end of the show. When we played our last song with the Doc Severinsen band, the show ended while we were in the middle of the song. I got to talking to Johnny before the second show and mentioned that to him. He said.

"Don't worry, I'll tell the producer to put you on first," which he did.

The Tonight Show helped us a lot, for we got booked into the lounge at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas for three weeks. We took Jimmie Smith with us and hired two local musicians who I had played with before to play bass and piano. We really broke it up and they asked us if we would like to play in the main room, using a big band. It was in a show starring Wayland Flowers, a ventriloquist who did an act with a puppet called Madame. We played there for five weeks and it was great.

Even though we had rooms at the hotel, they gave us the famous Jerry Lewis dressing room to change our clothes in. It was more of a suite of rooms than a dressing room. Every night, we'd have a lot of celebrities come backstage and tell us how much they enjoyed our playing. Playing the main room was much easier because we did two shows and would get through by midnight. In a way, the lounge was more fun because Las Vegas never had many jazz attractions play there, so after all the shows were done, we'd draw all the hip entertainers and showgirls. The people who were vacationing there would come in to see us and get a double treat by seeing a lot of famous people.

A piano player from Australia named Ron came in and told us that he could get us to play in his country. He said that his brother Stan, who was a very prominent attorney, was also a big jazz fan and was now promoting jazz concerts. He wanted his brother to hear us in person and asked us where we would be appearing in the near future.

After Las Vegas, we were on our way to Europe to do a tour for George Wein. We told Ron our itinerary and he told us that Stan would be in London at the same time and we could possibly meet there.

Buddy and I went by ourselves and George supplied us with a rhythm section. We told George that we didn't want any other horns to play with us because we had our arrangements down. All we had to do was give the rhythm section our little lead sheets that were not too hard. Any other horn would ruin the sound that we got with the vibes and clarinet.

We were starting to get known as the bebop answer to Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. You would think that the rhythm section of John Lewis on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Pierre Michelot on bass, who I didn't know, would be a ball to play with. In some ways it was okay, but they weren't made for each other. I never got to know how good Pierre was because when they backed us up, John was playing Chopin etudes, and Elvin sounded like he was starting World War VII. Maybe if they all had played the same style, we would have had more fun. We didn't know what style to go with; we just wanted to play some straight-ahead bebop.

Timing in life is everything. For example, if you are standing on a corner and move away and somebody else stands where you were and two minutes later gets hit by a car, that's bad timing. This may be a strange comparison to what happened to us, but it's all about timing.

As part of the tour, we were to play Ronnie Scott's club in London and Shelly Manne was to play drums with us. George Wein hired two English musicians to play in the rhythm section along with Shelly. Stan, the attorney from Australia, was to come into the club on our first night. He called us from his hotel in London and told us that the trip from Australia made him too tired to come in and see us and he would come the next night.

This is where the timing comes in. The first night was a catastrophe. It rained and there weren't many people in the club. The sound system was screwing up all over the place and Shelly was having trouble playing with the pianist and bass player. The next night, when Stan came in to see us, the place was packed. The P. A. system was working and Shelly had had a long talk with the other musicians. That night we swung our tuches off and the audience gave us a standing ovation. We were a winner. That's what I mean by timing.

When Stan heard us and saw how packed the place was and the audience's reaction, when it came to talking about our fee, we were in the driver's seat. I handled the business for Buddy and me and got us a great deal. Besides the money that we agreed upon, I told Stan that we wouldn't go unless we could take our wives with us, have business class seats on the airplane, and our hotels and food paid for. He was still knocked out by our last show, so he agreed to everything.

We were to play three one-nighters in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne, and he was going to try and book some more jobs, which we would be paid extra for. I also asked for a deposit on the signing of the contract. When we got back to the States and I got the contract from Stan, I couldn't understand anything that was written on it. Stan, being a trial attorney, had drawn up a contract that had "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part" in every other sentence. I didn't have the slightest idea what this was all about. I wasn't sure who the party of the first part was compared to the party of the second part. So in any sentence that I didn't understand, I wrote "by mutual agreement" so he couldn't make us do anything other than what we first agreed upon without talking about it first. He called me from Australia and told me that I was the best attorney that he ever worked with.

Stan really treated us great. In fact, he gave us a credit card to use for food just in case we wanted to eat at some place other than the hotel we were staying at. I think that if I didn't have children and grandchildren that my wife and I would live in Australia, because it's so beautiful.

Before we left for Australia, Buddy and I got called to play in the band that did the music for the Burt Reynolds picture, "Sharkey's Machine." Burt handpicked most of the musicians and was a big jazz fan, which I didn't know. Bob Florence wrote the arrangements, and Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan sang the theme song. Just to mention a few musicians on the date, Shelly Manne played drums, Ray Brown played bass. Art Pepper and Marshal Royal played alto sax, Conte and Pete Candoli and Harry (Sweets) Edison were on trumpets. Carl Fontana and Bill Watrous were on trombones, plus Buddy and myself. It was definitely an all-star band.

I wanted to meet Burt but didn't want to bug him. When I saw him talking with Pete Candoli, I walked over to them. Burt was standing there with a book under his arm and I saw that it was The Encyclopedia of Jazz by Leonard Feather. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation but it didn't look like I would be intruding, so I said, "Burt, my name is Terry Gibbs. I just want to say hello."

He looked nervous and started stuttering and fumbling, looking like he was in awe of me. "Are you kidding? I know who you are. I ASKED for you!" We talked for about a minute and then he said, "Would you mind meeting somebody?" I didn't know what he had in mind so I said sure. He took me over and introduced me to Sally Field, who ALSO had The Encyclopedia of Jazz under her arm. When Burt said, "Sally, this is Terry Gibbs," all of a sudden, SHE got flustered. Both of them seemed like they were in awe of every musician there. I felt like asking for a raise.”

To be continued in Part 2.

Yusef Lateef - Live At Pep's Volume Two (Full Album)

Be sure and checkout Yusef's Mood which kicks in at around 21.23 and its bar-walking tenor sax ending.

Sonny Rollins-A Night at the Village Vanguard (Full Album)

Sittin' In at Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s with Jeff Gold

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

Sometimes it is difficult to imagine Jazz without photography: they seem to compliment and complement one another.

You can close your eyes and listen closely to the music as it is being made on recordings or you can open them and look at photographic images of the musicians creating the music or, occasionally, do both.

Every so often a collection of photographs come along that enables you to see this dynamic in a totally different way.

Enter Jeff Gold’s new book - Sittin’ In Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s [New York: Harper Design, 2020] - which gives a new perspective on the music from the vantage point of the fans who went to listen to it in clubs located in various cities in the decades following World War II.

Jeff explains how this project all came about in the following -

INTRODUCTION

In my work as a music executive, historian, collector, and dealer I've had my fair share of crazy adventures, so sorting through the contents of a jazz collector's safe-deposit boxes in a closet-size room in a bank didn't strike me as particularly unusual. In the four hours I was there, I discovered many treasures that I coveted and eventually bought: concert tickets and handbills, autographs, contracts, letters, and other documents. But most interesting were the souvenir photographs from jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s. Each was in its own custom folder; the graphics were fantastic and so evocative of that classic era of jazz.

As I went through the boxes, I kept finding more photos—twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, and, eventually, more than two hundred—all mixed in with the rest of the collection. Some were well photographed, some were amateurish. But each had something to offer. Even before I finished., the thought struck me that the photographs would make a great book. If I hadn't seen pictures like these, I doubted many others had.

I bought all of them. Though the images were primarily of African Americans, some pictured white fans, and some showed mixed groups or white and Black people seated next to each other. There were couples on double dates, mothers and fathers with grown children, enlisted men and women in uniform, and even a picture of the Harriet Tubman Social Club. In a few, famous musicians—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, and Louis Armstrong—posed with audience members. There was plenty of alcohol, which wasn't surprising.

These quick snapshots were taken by each club's in-house photographer, developed on-site, and ready to be taken home at the end of an evening for a dollar, a cheap souvenir of a night out. Collectively, though, they are something altogether different, something important today—a visual record of a rarely seen and poorly documented world. An accidental history.

These pictures turn the camera around. We've seen photographs of these clubs before, of the performers onstage, the marquees, the lines outside. But rarely, if ever, have we seen the audiences, the fans, as we do here. And they are a critical part of what jazz pianist, composer, and educator

Jason Moran calls the "ecosystem" of jazz. Sonny Rollins told me that in small clubs like these, the audiences "sort of played with you. They're like part of the band."

If you're looking for a comprehensive history of jazz, this isn't it. The focus here is on something that hasn't been properly explored: American jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s—what some call the golden age—as seen through the lens of these audience photographs and related memorabilia. Moran says, "Seeing these images is powerful because we never document the jazz audience." The Library of Congress, for example, is home to more than 1,600 images taken by legendary jazz photographer William Gottlieb, only a tiny fraction of which picture audience members.

Almost all the souvenir photographs in this book date from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn't seem many clubs had in-house photographers before 1940, and by the end of the 1950s, most of these clubs were out of business. As New York City was already well established as the jazz center of the world, the majority of the images here are from the city's clubs. But there were hundreds of other clubs in cities across America, and we are fortunate to have a representative sampling from many of them.

These photographs were made at a time when discrimination and segregation were the norm in the United States, and some of them document how "jazz was really where the racial barriers were broken down heavily," according to Rollins.

I am incredibly fortunate that Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins, who played these clubs, agreed to speak with me about the culture, the fans, and so much more. I'm grateful to Jason Moran, who looked at these photographs through the eyes of a contemporary jazz musician and historian and shared his insights. Dan Morgenstern, a jazz historian without peer, shared his experiences as a patron of some of these clubs beginning in the late 1940s. And writer and cultural critic Robin Givhan graciously shared her insights on the photographs themselves. This book would have been a much lesser work without them.

I've included whatever information I could find about the clubs, musicians, photographers, and mostly anonymous fans. But in some cases, we have only the photos. As I study them, they continue to reveal layers of information. It is my sincere hope they do the same for you.

-JEFF GOLD

One of the highlights of the book for me was the section on the clubs in Greenwich Village in NYC. 

By the 1920s, Greenwich Village already had a small jazz scene, at clubs like the Cowboy and the Starlight Room. In the early 1930s, the Hot Feet Club speakeasy featured saxophonist Otto Hardwick's group, with Fats Waller. But it wasn't until 1937 that jazz in the Village began in earnest, with the opening of Nick's and, the next year, Cafe Society and the Village Vanguard.

In 1945, guitarist Eddie Condon opened his namesake club, which, like Nick's, presented primarily traditional and Dixieland groups. During the 1940s and 1950s, the same music could be heard in weekly jam sessions at the Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza. But in the 1950s, a new group of Village clubs began offering much more adventurous fare.

During the last few years of his life, Charlie Parker played regularly at the Open Door, a small, dark bar on West Third Street and Broadway. Cafe Bohemia featured modern jazz with groups led by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and the Horace Silver/Hank Mobley Quintet. The newly emergent hard bop, a bebop offshoot that incorporated influences from gospel, rhythm and blues, and blues, began to take hold at various Village clubs. And in 1957, the Five Spot Cafe, a small storefront bar that held only seventy-five people, opened on Cooper Square, with the Thelonious Monk Quartet featuring John Coltrane. Two years later, the Ornette Coleman Quartet, from Los Angeles, brought avant-garde jazz to the club; its original booking had been for two weeks, but the group generated so much interest— and controversy—that it was extended to ten weeks. Musicians including Lionel Hampton, Leonard Bernstein, and the Modern Jazz Quartet came and were vocal in their support, but Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie were not won over; the latter was quoted in Time magazine as saying, "I don't know what he's playing, but it's not jazz.”

In 1958, the Village Gate opened on Thompson and Bleecker Streets., and for the next thirty-eight years, the club hosted shows by established artists like Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and younger innovators like Coltrane, pianist Bill Evans, and Dave Brubeck.

Though most of the Village's jazz clubs closed long ago, the Village Vanguard, after more than eight decades, continues to be a center for jazz in New York City.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Avenue

In 1935, law school dropout Max Gordon opened the first Village Vanguard in a basement on Charles Street at Greenwich Avenue. Gordon initially planned for his club to be a hub for local poets, but after he decided to add live music, the police department denied him a cabaret license, deeming the premises insufficient. He soon relocated to the former home of a basement speakeasy, the Golden Triangle.

The new location offered a mixed bag of poetry readings, comedy, cabaret acts, folk and popular music, dancing, and some jazz. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Vanguard booked some small swing groups and musicians, including Mary Lou Williams and Sidney Bechet. In her memoir Alive at the Village Vanguard, Gordon's wife, Lorraine, recalled that before she knew Max, "the biggest reason my pals and I went to the Vanguard, though, was because there were jazz jam sessions in the afternoons on Sundays. You could go hear Lester Young, Ben Webster, all the greatest jazz musicians for fifty cents at the door, or something like that."

Sensing jazz might be something to focus on, Max Gordon brought in more musicians, and as jazz began to shift from big bands to smaller combos, he hired a resident trio featuring clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, pianist Eddie Heywood, and drummer Zutty Singleton.

In the late 1940s, Gordon ran into his future wife at a Fire Island bakery. Lorraine, then married to Blue Note Records co founder Alfred Lion, recognized Gordon. She approached him, suggesting he book Blue Note's

Thelonious Monk at the club, and he agreed. On September 14, 1948, Monk opened at the club. As Lorraine recalled: "Nobody came. None of the so-called jazz critics. None of the so-called cognoscenti. Zilch. Alfred and I sat there in a banquette at the Vanguard, and Thelonious got up at one point and did this little dance and announced, "Now, human beings, I'm going to play...." Max came running over to me in acute distress.... There was almost no audience. And Max kept crying, "What did you talk me into? You trying to ruin my business? We're dying with this guy."

By the late 1950s, Gordon was focusing primarily on jazz, and the Vanguard was thriving, bringing in countless important artists including Miles Davis, Art Blakey, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charles Mingus, and Horace Silver. Bill Evans was a regular. John Coltrane's groups played the club numerous times, resulting in his classic albums Live at the Village Vanguard (1962) and Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966).

More than fifty albums have been recorded at the club, including titles by Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, guitarists Kenny Burrell and Charlie Byrd, drummer Elvin Jones, singer Betty Carter, pianist Junior Mance, and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

When Max Gordon died in 1989, Lorraine closed the Vanguard for a single night. She then reopened and continued to run it until her death in 2018 at the age of ninety-five. The Village Vanguard continues to present important jazz today.”

You Stepped Out A Dream/Chick’s Tune - Blue Mitchell

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

"You Stepped Out of a Dream Composed by Nacio Herb Brown, with lyrics by Gus Kahn

"During the early 1940s, "You Stepped Out of a Dream" was best known as a theme song for actress Lana Turner, the leading Hollywood femme fatale of the period. The song had received prominent placement in the 1941 film Ziegfeld Girl, where Turner neither sings nor dances to the number, but merely promenades down a staircase in an extravagant costume amid a bevy of similarly clad chorus girls, while Tony Martin handles the vocal duties. Turner would never record the song, but the connection stuck—no doubt because she fit many guys' idea of precisely what they would like to see stepping out of their dreams.

Kay Kyser enjoyed a modest hit with the song at the time of its initial release, and recordings by Glenn Miller (featuring Ray Eberle and the Modernaires) and Guy Lombardo were also popular. These renditions came with little jazz content, but the song captured the attention of musicians, no doubt due to the unusual chord progression, which captures an appealingly exotic flavor while still serving as a suitable framework for improvisation. As early as 1941, George Shearing recorded "You Stepped Out of a Dream" in London, and American ex-pat Teddy Weatherford did the same in Calcutta.

Yet this song didn't become a widely played standard until the 1950s. Recordings by Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz from 1950 helped demonstrate the jazz potential of the piece, while later crossover efforts by Nat King Cole and the Four Freshmen kept the song in the consciousness of the general public. Sonny Rollins's combo performance from 1957 stands out as one of his best efforts of the period, and must have inspired a number of other saxophonists to add the song to their set lists; over the next several years, many of the leading tenorists of the day—including Dexter Gordon, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Warne Marsh, Teddy Edwards, Brew Moore, and Archie Shepp—were captured on tape performing it.

"You Stepped Out of a Dream" has retained its place in the repertoire, although I note that, in more recent years, it has been more popular with singers than horn players. The melody, which stays within an octave range (albeit a widely used fake book lead sheet shows the tune ending on a high E that you will rarely hear in actual performance), makes few demands on vocalists with its long-held notes and few wide interval leaps. The lyrics are a bit of a sentimental mish-mash—praising the lips, the eyes, the smile, etc.—but built on the same cliches that always seem to find a ready audience. A few pop-oriented crooners (Peter Cincotti, Art Garfunkel) have tackled the number. Even so, I can hardly imagine a song of this complexity ever returning to the charts."

- Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire

According to the musicologist K.J. McElrath, the song, You Stepped Out of A Dream, which was written by Nacio Herb Brown and Gus Kahn for the 1941 film, Ziegfeld Girl, … “has one of the most exotic and wandering harmonic progressions in the repertoire.  Although starting and ending on C major, this piece takes unusual twists and turns that seem to deliberately avoid settling on any one key for any length of time.”

Mr. McElrath goes on to say that “the movement within the tune is characterized by long, sustained tones and slow, harmonic rhythm. The melodic line gradually rises a third by step and then leaps up a sixth. The descent is by leaps.”

Maybe all of these unusual “twists and turns” is what makes the tune attractive to Jazz musicians, especially tenor saxophonists like Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Teddy Edwards, Warne Marsh and Brew Moore, all of whom recorded notable versions of it.

Jazz musicians often look for unusual tunes with interesting structures and chords so that they can alter the melody while retaining the song’s unique qualities as the basis for improvisation.

Such was the case when the young pianist, Chick Corea, encountered You Stepped Out of A Dream and superimposed a different melody while renaming it Chick Tune for its debut on trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s debut album for Blue Note entitled – The Thing To Do [BST-84178]

Jazz author and critic Bob Blumenthal explains it this way in his notes to The Complete Blue Note Blue Mitchell Sessions [1963-1969] [Mosaic Records MD4-178]

“Mitchell's first Blue Note release concluded with Corea's first recorded composition, a very creative take on the YOU STEPPED OUT OF A DREAM chord sequence with the decid­edly less imaginative title chick's tune. After [drummer Al] Foster's introduction, the complex theme is developed with a variety of supporting rhythmic feelings, including Latin, cut-time and stop-time.

The composer goes first here, buoyed by a ferocious [bassist Gene]Taylor - Foster groove. Corea sprinkles some [Horace] Silver-isms around his second chorus and sounds as if he was prepared to give way after chorus three before quickly extending his improvisation with a fourth chorus that alludes to another of his favorite pianists, Thelonious Monk.

[Tenor saxophonist Junior] Cook plays with great invention and continuity, reminding us that he relished a good set of chord changes and knew how to navigate his way through them while also sustaining a rhythmic dialogue with the drums.

Mitchell is more about singing and sound, though he, too, has a great hookup with Foster. Two choruses of eight-bar exchanges between the horns and the drummer help bring the track and the album to a rousing finale.”

Sad March from The Remarkable Carmell Jones on Pacific Jazz Records

Trumpet-wise, Harold Land had a penchant for finding himself in good company: first with Jack Sheldon; then with Carmel Jones; later in a quintet he co-led with Blue Mitchell. The composition is an original by Carmell. And what a rhythm section: Frank Strazzeri, piano, Gary Peacock on bass and Harold's San Diego boyhood friend Leon Pettis on drums.

Curtis Counce Quintet - Landslide

The pairing of Jack Sheldon on trumpet with alto saxophonist Art Pepper was considered to be an especially effective front line by many Jazz fans.

I thought this was also the case with Jack and tenor saxophonist Harold Land when they were upfront together as members of bassist Curtis Counce's Quintet.

See what you think.

With Carl Perkins on piano and Frank Butler on drums.