LP-722

Illinois Jacquet - The Message

Released 1963

Recording and Session Information

Illinois Jacquet, tenor saxophone; bassoon; Ralph Smith, organ; Kenny Burrell, Wally Richardson, guitar; Ben Tucker, bass; Ray Lucas, drums; Willie Rodriguez, percussion
RVG, Englewood, New York, May 5,7-8 1963

12447 On Broadway
12448 The message
12449 Turnpike
12450 Like young
12451 Bassoon blues 12452 Bonita
12453 Wild man

Track Listing

The Message	Ben Tucker	May 5,7-8 1963
Wild Man	I. Jacquet	May 5,7-8 1963
Bassoon Blues	E. Edwards, I. Jacquet	May 5,7-8 1963
On Broadway	Leiber, Stoller, Mann, Weil	May 5,7-8 1963
Like Young	Andre Previn	May 5,7-8 1963
Turnpike	I. Jacquet	May 5,7-8 1963
Bonita	E. Edwards	May 5,7-8 1963

Liner Notes

THE career of Illinois Baptiste Jacquet has been punctuated by commercial highs and lows. He served his musical apprenticeship in the Southland, largely in Texas where he was reared and he paid dues aplenty while learning his craft. When he joined the Lionel Hampton band in Los Angeles he was only eighteen and an unknown except to those restricted audiences privileged to have heard him play the tenor saxophone so exuberantly in obscure clubs and dreary dance halls. Hampton, always a discerning judge of musical talent, was startled the first time he heard him blow and immediately predicted greatness for him and an assured place in the pantheon of jazz. Jacquet worked with the Hampton organization for three turbulent years, polishing his style and learning from his accomplished boss all the tricks of showmanship. A year spent with both the Cab Calloway and Count Basie bands groomed him further for the stardom which came inevitably, and when in 1947 he decided to quit the role of sideman and lead his own group he had already been adjudged one of the most important and creative performers on his instrument.

If this latest album of Jacquet's, The Message, contains a message it is an emphatic statement that the Latin American influence on American jazz is pervasive and profound and that the Latin rhythms can be applied to the blues with exhilarating results. Much of this album is Latin but the idiom is American. All his life Illinois Jacquet has been sentimentally attached to French influence in art and music, but Latin melodies and rhythms have exerted an increasingly powerful impact on him. The Afro-Cuban explosion in U.S. jazz rocked him traumatically. The samba stirred him. The subtlety and melodic beauty of the Brazilian bossa nova fascinated him.

"Latin rhythms, played well with appropriate melodies, can create a wonderful, satisfying feeling", Jacquet observes enthusiastically. "Latin music gives you a grip, something exciting to work with. Making this album mainly in the Latin manner was an experience for Jacquet, precisely because his own small group seldom plays this of material or in this style."

Drummer Ray Lucas, who plays with the King Curtis group, inflamed the ardor of the other participating musicians and gave a priceless unifying drive to the sessions which were spread over two days. Lucas has a sureness of beat, great versatility and the ability to adrust to almost any problem posed. He avoids a fault of many contemporary drummers; creating unnecessary volume with the bass pedal. He communicates effectively and makes the soloist feel the rhythm patterns he creates. "You always know that Ray is there", says Jacquet, "and there is never any problem about time, the most important thing in music".

Like Young, an Andre Previn tune, is given a warm blues interpretation by the group, with organist Ralph Smith playing the bridge and guitarist Kenny Burrell taking two exquisite choruses. Nowhere else in the album is the Lester Young influence on Illinois Jacguet's playing more evident than in his first two choruses which recall the fluent, poetic Prez of the 1930's. All of Jacquet's reverence for the great Lester Young is present in his playing on this track. "I never realized I was so close to Prez until I heard this side played back", Jacquet confessed.

Ralph Smith is a Detroiter who moved to New York in 1962 and whom Jacquet hired after hearing him play one set at the Purple Manor in Harlem. A gifted and modest man, Smith injects his religious upbringing into his playing, has excellent techmque and is ambitious and studious. "Ralph Smith has a blues stream in his soul", Jacquet says poetically. "He could become one of the great organ players of our time".

The blues, Turnpike was written by Jacquet while playing an engagement at Lennie's Turnpike, a small club in West Peabody, Massachusetts, where he has a host of faithful fans who provide him with some of his best audiences. Jacquet venerates the blues, regards them as the foundation of his art. He has written many blues tunes and says "I've got many more blues to write". His earliest memories of the blues reach into his childhood in Houston, Texas where his father, Gilbert Jacquet, led a blues band which Jacquet listened to for hours. It was in Houston where Illinois aspired to become a dancer and formed a dance trio with two older brothers, Russell and Linton. He danced before he learned to play a saxophone. "We were born with the rhythm and raised on the blues", Jacquet says with pride. "If you can't play the blues, you're not a jazz musician".

Esmond Edwards, who was A & R man for this album, wrote Bonita, a minor blues-like number with Latin overtones. An oddly beguiling melody, Bonita provides Jacquet with an excellent vehicle for delightfully demonstrating the creative marriage of American jazz and Latin themes.

Bassist Ben Tucker, who wrote The Message, flew up from Washington to record the album at the invitation of Jacquet, who admires his instrumental talent as well as his compositional gifts. Ralph Smith plays the organ with fine restraint under Jacquet's soft but strong tenor line. What message does Ben Tucker here convey? Jacquet offers this explanation "Ben is saying who he is and where he came from, what he thinks and what he believes".

Wild Man, an uptempo blues, was written by Jacquet and dedicated to Boston disc jockey, Wild Man Steve Gallen. Jacquet, blowing with the big "Texas sound", that characterizes so much of his playing, dominates, but Kenny Burrell's long intricately-executed guitar solo is one of the memorable performances of this album. Jacquet knows a lot of disc jockeys around the country. "Disc jockeys are some of the most important people in this country", he maintains. "They are the salt of the earth for they spin musicians' records day and night for millions of people and thus help keep the business going".

Ever since that day in 1957 when he purchased a bassoon in Berlin while touring Europe with a Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe, Jacquet has wanted to play the instrument competently enough to record with it. A college music instructor visiting his Long Island home showed him how to assemble the instrument and explained the G Scale to him. Jacquet practiced on the bassoon usually when relaxing at home after grueling road tours. He played it in public for the first time last year at the Shanty Lounge in Boston and was encouraged. During the recording session it was decided that Jacquet should do a number with the bassoon and this blues theme was created on the spot. "I have a lot of blues in me", says Jacquet with a knowing smile.

Now 41 and a composed and reflective man, Illinois Jacquet is content to play the smaller clubs backed by Ralph Smith and drummer Jual Curtis. The lush years of the big money are behind him now, but he finds immense satisfaction in his attractive family and golf. Life has been good to him and he had no regrets today, even though his income does not approach the high-water mark of $250,000 he earned in 1947 and 1948. "It isn't the money you make", he says philosophically, "but how you live life that counts".

—Allan Morrison

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

LP-720

Lorez Alexandria - For Swingers Only

Released 1963

Recording and Session Information

Lorez Alexandria, vocal; Ronald Wilson tenor saxophone, flute; John Young, piano; George Eskridge, guitar; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Philip Thomas, drums
Ter Mar, Chicago, January 2-3 1963

12097 Love look away
12098 The end of a love affair
12099 All or nothing at all
12100 Traveling down a lonely road
12101 That old devil called love
12102 Little girl blue
12103 Baltimore oriole
12104 Mother earth

Track Listing

Baltimore Oriole	Hoagy Carmichael-Paul F. Webster	January 2-3 1963
Little Girl Blue	R. Rodgers-L. Hart	January 2-3 1963
All Or Nothing At All	Jack Lawrence-A. Altman	January 2-3 1963
Traveling Down A Lonely Road	M. Galdieri-N. Rota-D. Raye	January 2-3 1963
Mother Earth	P. Chatman	January 2-3 1963
Love Look Away	Rodgers-Hammerstein	January 2-3 1963
The End Of A Love Affair	Edward C. Redding	January 2-3 1963
That Old Devil Called Love	Allan Roberts-Doris Fisher	January 2-3 1963

Liner Notes

LOREZ ALEXANDRIA is a poised, vital, articulate girl who, singing or talking, makes it clear at all times that she is a person of strong convictions and has the courage to express them. These are important personality traits for any real individualist; when you add to them the virtues of attractive timbre, a natural sense of style and phrasing, the elusive element sometimes known as soul, and top them all off with an instrumental accompaniment. you can be reasonably sure results that are going to be out of the ordinary.

This is precisely what happens on For Swingers Only. In many respects I feel this is Lorez' best album to date. For one thing, her always admirable taste in selection of material is reflected here in a particularly impressive repertoire. Secondly, there are eight tracks instead of her previously customary ten; this enables her to stretch out comfortably on all of them and to add occasional variety in the form of instrumental passages. Third and most important, I believe every intelligent singer matures, learns from the study of previous efforts on records and improves with the passage of time.

Lorez, as most listeners presumably know by now, is a Chicago girl whose background is rooted in music. Her experience has ranged from early church singing to big band work (with King Fleming's orchestra) as well as vocal group work on both semi-classical and pop-music levels. Since early 1962 she has been living in Los Angeles with her husband, publicist Dave Nelson; however, these sides were taped in Chicago and are notable for the inclusion of a promising local musician, flutist Ronald Wilson, whose obligatos lend rich color to the backgrounds.

Any album titled For Swingers Only would do its name less than justice if it came up with a less than remarkable rhythm section. A glance at the personnel makes it clear that business was well taken care of in this department. Pianist John Young (well known for his work with the Eddie Chamblee combo) and guitarist George Eskridge will be familiar to many of Lorez' fans through their contribution to one of her most successful earlier LPs, Deep Roots (Argo 694). Jimmy Garrison happened to be in town with John Coltrane's quartet when the session was cut; Vernel Fournier, the New Orleans drummer (also heard on Deep Roots), was with Ahmad Jamal for several years and has been with George Shearing for the past year.

Ballimore Oriole is Lorez' second recorded version of the Hoagy Carmichael standard; she cut it for another label several years ago. The new treatment similar in approach to the original, makes a striking illustration of Lorez' warmth and assurance; listen especially for the ease with which she dips downward on the word "blackbird" not far from the opening.

"They told me Little Girl Blue has been done so many times before — I had to persuade them to let me include it," says Lorez, "because it's always been a favorite tune of mine." Noteworthy here are the oblique opening — the first nine words sung a capella, and the confidence with which Lorez' range enables her to get a low E Flat (on "unlucky") and soar soon after to a high B Flat.

All or Nothing a: All is a firm swinger all the way from Wilson's flute intro through Lorez' chorus and Young's solo. Garrison walks impressively through this unusual interpretation of the 1940 standard.

Traveling Down A Lonely Road was originally an instrumental theme heard in the movie La Strada. To my knowledge it has seldom, perhaps never, been recorded as a vocal. The moderato waltz meter is confidently handled by Lorez and there is a charming flute interlude.

The intimations of mortality in the lyrics of Mother Earth were first addressed to us by veteran blues singer Memphis Slim. On this track Ronald Wilson switches from flute to tenor sax and Lorez gets into a fittingly earthy blues groove with a 12/8 beat in the back ground.

Love Look Away is a theme from The Flower Drum Song. Once again there is a slow but solid beat and the flute adds an exotic touch.

The End of a Love Affair is handled very differently from the customarily melodramatic approach to these lyrics. A Latin beat is added, behind the vocal and during John Young's piano solo.

That Old Devil Called Love was introduced by Billie Holiday on a 1944 recording. There have been other Holiday-associated songs in Lorez' albums, but as she points out, there is never any attempt to imitate the original style or approach. ("That would be sacrilegious"). The tempo is a little brighter than that normally accorded to the tune; when you examine the meaning of the lyrics this seems very logical. George Eskridge is heard in four-bar trades with Lorez and Ronald Wilson again contributes a tasteful solo.

A concluding word about that title; it should not be inferred that only those concerned with swinging up tempos will appreciate this album. Perhaps a more comprehensive title would have been "For Admirers of Tasteful, Swinging Singing Only." On that basis, every Lorez Alexandria album would have a place in your library. But more than any previous set, I believe this one will convince any fence-straddlers that in Lorez we have one of those rare singers who can sense all the qualities required in a contemporary jazz-oriented vocal performance—and who knows how to translate those qualities into living, swinging reality.

—LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of The 'New Encyclopedia of Jazz)