LP-721

Budd Johnson - French Cookin'

Released 1963

Recording and Session Information

Budd Johnson, tenor saxophone; Joe Venuto, marimba, ,vibes; Hank Jones, piano; Kenny Burrell, Everett Barksdale, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; Osie Johnson, drums; Willie Rodriguez, latin percussion
RVG, Englewood, New York, January 30 1963

12148 La petite valse
12149 Le Grisbi
12150 I can live with the blues
12151 Hugues' blues
12152 Under Paris skies
12153 Darling, je vous aime beaucoup
12154 Je t'aime
12155 Je vous aime

Track Listing

La Petite Valse	E. Ellington-Claire-Heyer	January 30 1963
Le Grisbi	Gimbel-Lanjeab-Weiner	January 30 1963
I Can Live With The Blues	Budd Johnson	January 30 1963
Darling Je Vous Aime Beaucoup	Anna Sosenko	January 30 1963
Under Paris Skies	Gannon-Drejac-Giraud	January 30 1963
Hugues' Blues	Budd Johnson	January 30 1963
Je Vous Aime	Sam Coslow	January 30 1963
Je T'aime	H. Archer	January 30 1963

Liner Notes

BUDD JOHNSON is a jazz musician. He plays tenor saxophone, composes and arranges. He has been an important contributor to jazz for more than thirty years, and has been a professional musician for almost forty of his fifty- two years. Most important of all the hard facts about Budd Johnson, however, is that he is a catalyst.

Wherever Budd is a participant in any sort of musical activity, from jam session to conducting a full orchestra, the sparks seem to fly. Other musicians are inspired to extend themselves and the results are most often exciting and memorable. This collection of French Cookin' is an excellent example of Johnson the catalyst in action, as well as Johnson the hard swinging and Johnson the tender tenor man. In addition, all the arrangements are his and he has contributed two originals, French drenched blues, dedicated to a long time friend, jazz critic Hugues Panassie.

Down through his career, Budd Johnson has had a catalytic effect almost everywhere he played. He first left his Dallas home at 14 as a drummer and soon wound up stranded in Oklahoma City. There, a rotund short order cook-cum-blues shouter named Jimmy Rushing fed the band for a week and then organized a battle of the bands with a local outfit, turning over all the receipts to the youngsters to get them home.

In 1926, Budd was back on the road as a saxophone player, but this time to stay. Incidently, although he concentrates on tenor, he plays all the reed instruments well. By the early '30s, he was co-leading a combo with Teddy Wilson in Chicago until they both joined Louis Armstrong in '33. From '34 to '42, our man in motion was featured with and wrote for Earl Hines' big band.

During the latter part of this period, a number of the young sidemen in the big bands were coming under the influence of a new movement in jazz playing which centered around Minton's Playhouse in New York's Harlem. Any night when they were not on the road, Budd, Dizzy Gillespie, Howard McGhee, Fats Navarro, Charlie Christian, Thelonius Monk and of course, Charlie Parker, could be found crowding each other the tiny bandstand to have a go at what later came to be called Bea»op or modern jazz.

Of all the figures involved in this evolutionary period Budd remains today the least publicized and most underrated, although he is constantly in demand in New York by other jazzmen for one or another of his talents.

During the first half of the forties, only a handful of big bands were associated with the new music and Budd Johnson was the most common denominator. He wrote for Earl Hines and Boyd Raeburn from '42 to '44, Billy Eskstine and Woody Herman in '44 and '45, and Dizzy Gillespie in '45 and '46, while playing in all but the Raeburn crew. He was also one of the chief talent scouts for all these bands, bringing in many of the new young players who achieved their own measure of fame through the association.

In the past decade, Budd was featured with Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman most recently with Count Basie, whom he left a year ago to concentrate on writing. playing around New York with his own combo, and golf. He still keeps his finger on the big band pulse by playing with and contributing arrangemeats to a new rehearsal orchestra organized in New York by Voice of America's Willis Conover and pianist-composer Lalo Shifrin.

The enclosed recording is the first in many years under Budd's own leadership. Even when he was a catalyst in the bop era, organizing the first such recording date for Apollo early in 1944, it featured Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie and nowhere was his name mentioned. In choosing a group of French songs, Budd had two things in mind, first he wanted fresh material on which to improvise, since the date was designed as a showcase for his tenor talents. Second, he loves to play ballads and there are two unquestionably ballad melodies here, in Le Grisbi and Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup, both on side one.

Petite Valse, Je T' Aime, Under Paris Skies and Je Vous Aime are all familiar to most listeners, but listen to the unusual orchestral devices Budd employs to set up the proper mood for himself. All the numbers are scored for eight pieces, and the musicians were carefully selected by Budd for their empathy with one another. The entire recording was done in just over five hours one afternoon at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio.

In addition to Johnson, the personnel reads like The Encyclopedia of Jazz, with Hank Jones, piano; Milt Hinton, bass; Osie Johnson, drums; Willie Rodrieaez, latin percussion; Kenny Burrell and Everett Barksdale, guitars and Joe Venuto, marimba, vibes and percussion.

Whether your tastes run to French Cookin', French songs, hard-swinging tender ballad improvisations, skillful orchestrating or just plain old-fashioned good listening, you'll find it here. This disc brings back to the leader's spotlight a vastly underrated and immensely talented giant of jazz. We welcome you to the rapidly expanding circle of his admirers!

—BOB MESSINGER