Medeski Martin & Wood - Note Bleu (2006)

Since its inception in 1991, when they played their first gig together under the tony lawfirmish moniker of Medeski Martin & Wood (at the historic Village Gate in New York City), t his talented triumvirate has demonstrated an uncommon chemistry on the bandstand along with an almost unquenchable desire to play strictly on the improvisational edge and in the moment. As Rolling Stone's David Fricke once urged readers, "Go out on a limb with them; you'll always find a reason to dance".

It's no surprise, then, that the unorthodox trio built up a cult following - through tireless road work during the early 90's (as many as 200 dates a year)- comprised of Phish fans, Deadheads, and assorted neo-hippies who flocked to their cause, galvanized by the group's irrepressible groove-power and intrigued by the band's willingness to push the envelope to heightened levels on a nightly basis.

After documenting their signature amalgam of funk, jazz, avantgarde, hip-hop, neo-punk, and improvisatory expansiveness on their ambitious, self-produced 1992 debut, Notes from the Underground (on the independent Hap-Jones label), Medeski Martin & Wood were signed by Gramavision Records and began developing a wider audience on the strength of three potent offerings in 1993's It's a Jungle in Here, 1994's Friday Afternoon in the Universe, and 1996's Shack Man (recorded entirely in the remote jungles of Hawaii in their jam parlor affectionately known as "The Shack").

Critics pegged them as walking a fine line between Weather Report and the Meters. Josef Woodard in Jazziz called them "groove merchants of a new-old order", a reference to their reverence for the organ trio tradition and their simultaneous eagerness to push the music forward into the great beyond. Boston Globe critic Bob Blumenthal called them "too audacious to be mere fusion, too infectious to be overlooked".

After signing in November 1997 with Blue Note, a label that afforded them a higher profile and came with an incredibly rich legacy to boot. Medeski Martin & Wood continued to pull no punches in its pursuit of pure, spontaneous artistic expression. Indeed, their first album for the label, 1998's Combustication, was almost defiantly umcompromising in its overall scope. While another band in that same position might have gone for something a bit more accessible on its first offering out of the gate with a new label (and one so conspicuosly associated with the hallowed jazz tradition, no less), Medeski Martin & Wood pushed the envelope with subversive glee on that edgy experiment in nasty tonalities, reveling in the resultant outburst of creative energy.

"Sugar Craft" from that initial Blue Note outing is grounded by Chris Wood's minimalist groove-anchor on electric bass and fueled by Billy Martin's slyly syncopated, Clyde Stubblefield/Jabbo Starks-informed funky drummer backbeats. Keyboardist John Medeski works his own funky magic on top of that popping undercurrent with grunge-toned Hammond B3 organ while turntablist DJ Logic (Jason Kibler) layers on provocative little ear cookies and wacky funhouse screams that dance in and out of the boogaloo mix. As Martin noted of Logic, an honorary Medeski Martin & Wood member who toured with the band that year: "He's a quintessential musician. He's always looking for sounds, rhythms, and textures. His personality comes right through, you can hear it".

Wood's melodic electric bass lines open the spacious and moody "Nocturne", a chamber-like piece from Combustication that unfolds with the meditative calm of a Chopin nocturne (with some characteristic Medeski Martin & Wood tweakage along the way). Medeski's solovox can be heard fluttering in the mix, alternating with ethereal strains from a mellotron as Martin underscores the textures with subtle brushwork and some coloristic playing on the kit. The other piece here from Combustication is the shuffling groover "Hypnotized", in which Medeski dials up some of his sickest, most severely effected, wah-wah inflected, ring-moduled organ tones while also underscoring the dissonant proceedings with some soulful Les McCann-styled comping on a warm-tuned Wurlitzer piano. And "Hey-Hee-Hi-Ho" (heard here in its illy B remix form) is an infectious dancefloor number of a funky clavinet and Meters-inspired organ riffs. Martin also engages in a spirited percussion jam on this number which harkens back to his street samba work with Brazilian ensembles like Pei De Boi and Batacuda.

For their follow-up, Medeski Martin & Wood documented an extended all-acoustic engagement at Tonic, New York's premier venue for alternative jazz and edgy experimentalism located on the Lower East Side. The solo tune culled here from that organic session, "Hey Joe", was written by W.M. Roberts bt later transformed into an emotionally-charged, anthemic ballad by Jimi Hendrix on his landmark debut. It's handled here with zen-like restrained and crystalline delicacy by Medeski on piano, Wood on the doublebass, and Martin adding a sensitive, supportive touch on the kit.

Medeski Martin & Wood returned to its improvisatory, groove-oriented agenda with 2000's The Dropper, an expansive exercise in sonic extremism which was co-produced by Scotty Hard (Scott Harding), whose credits included engineering hip-hop sessions for the likes of Wu-Tang Clan, PM Dawn, and Kool Keith. On the album's title track, keyboardist Medeski, and guitarist Marc Ribot exchange ambient-noise statements in the foreground while Wood holds the center with funky, muted electric basslines coming out of the great tradition of James Brown bassists like Charles Sherrell, Bernard Odum, and Bootsy Collins. The party groover "Partido Alto" opens with Medeski on piano before he switches to burning Jimmy Smith organ mode and finishes with some soulful piano flourishes. Wood covers the bottom on electric bass while Martin works more infectious samba drumming into the fabric of this funky vamp. Medeski's composition "Note Bleu" (title track for this Blue Note retrospective) is a bouyant bossa featuring his bluesy wailing on organ, augmented by rich chordal voicing from guest guitarist Marc Ribot.

Following the critical success of The Dropper, Medeski Martin & Wood pushed the envelope even further on 2002's Uninvisible, a Scotty Hard production which combined horns and turntables with a futuristic groove-oriented twist. That landmark offering is represented here by four tunes. Medeski's "I Wanna Ride You" is an insistent boogaloo with a gospel-soaked intro that showcases the organist wailing in a funky Jimmy McGriff vein. The soulful groove "Pappy Check" features some slick turntable scratching from special gues DJ P Love while the powerfully dissonant "Off the Table" includes DJ Olive's verité sounds of a ping-pong match in the background. And the aggressively grooving title track is brimming with James Brown-styled grooves, Meters-esque organ riffs, spacey dub effects, and punchy horn pads.

Medeski Martin & Wood's swan song on Blue Note, 2004's End of the World Party presents a compelling amalgam of melodies, textures, and beats. This edgy opus, produced by John King of the Dust Brothers is represented here by the catchy "Mami Gato", underscored by Wood's humungous bass tones on the doublebass and some particularly hip, polyrhythmic playing on the kit from Martin. Medeski plays strictly piano on this rumba-flavored number, affecting an authentic Cuban sensibility on the keys as laid down by such pioneers as Bebo Valdes and Rubén Gonzalez of the Buena Vista Social Club. The raucuous "Queen Bee" is a thrashing, 1960's garage band funk rave-up fueled by Medeski's wailing organ work and a ripping guitar solo from guest Marc Ribot. And the title track from the band's final Blue Note recording is an ambitious number brimming with strings and anchored by Wood's deep doublebass tones. Medeski plays some soulful Wurlitzer electric piano here, conjuring up distant memories of 1960's soul anthems on top of Martin's insistently funky backbeat.

Today, 15 years after its inception, Medeski Martin & Wood continues its mission of pushing the envelope sonically, artistically, collectively. Thousands upon thousands of miles into their long and strange trip, these three old-school funkateers with jazz pedigrees and wide-open, forward thinking sensibilities remain humble ambassadors of the groove. Their next chapter is already being written. But for now, this collection spanning seven years captures a golden period when Medeski Martin & Wood was steadily building on its reputation as godfathers of the burgeoning jam band scene, and breaking new ground in the process.

Donald Byrd - Byrd In Hand (1959)

As the five-star Down Beat review that this album garnered at the time of its release indicates, Ira Girler was not alone in feeling that Byrd In Hand represented a new plateau for its trumpet-playing leader. The session's inspired music represents the conjunction of several critic associations that brought Byrd into his most productive and influential period as a recording artist.

The most sustained and prolific of these relationships was the one Byrd shared with his old friend from Detroit, Pepper Adams. They had started working in New York and recording together a year earlier, and would continue to co-lead bands through late 1961. While Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan had already displayed how well trumpet and baritone sax could blend in a small group, Byrd and Adams were clearly something else. The saxophonist, an acerbic dervish with a brawny tone who mixed streams of bebop and caustic quotes, was the perfect complement to Byrd's more thoughtful and tender inventions. This album, their third together and second on Blue Note (after Off to the Races), was the first to fully display the range of moods they were capable of producing. An excellent example is Byrd's haunting "Here Am I", with an atmospheric blend of vamp and melody so strong it was reprised almost verbatim two years later in Duke Pearson's composition "Say You're Mine", which was heard on another of Byrd's best Blute Note sessions, The Cat Walk.

A second important connection represented Byrd In Hand involves Thelonious Monk, a musician who is not even present. Four months before this session, Monk presented his first orchestral concert at New York's Town Hall by augmenting his working quartet (which included Charlie Rouse, Sam Jones and Art Taylor) with six additional musicians including Byrd and Adams. The Riverside album that the concert produced features strong playing from the trumpeter (a product perhaps in part of Monk's threat to replace Byrd with Lee Morgan when the former was late for a rehearsal), and Byrd was clearly satisfied enough with the experience to bring Monk's sidemen into his next project. Rouse, with his immediately identifiable sound and phraseology, is a delight here, and further complements the leader's warmth with his flinty inventions. The day after this session, Rouse, Jones and Taylor began work with their regular boss and Thad Jones on 5 By Monk By 5 of which the British critic Jack Cooke astutely observed that "The times were beginning to catch up with Monk... for a generation well versed in the search for fresh harmonic relationships through their experience of hard bop, and stimulated by that style's rhythmic devices, found themselves with a key to his music". Here we have more proof that Monk's aesthetic was spreading, even in the absence of his compositions.

For this reason, pianist Walter Davis Jr. was an ideal choice for the piano chair, given his friendship with Monk and Bud Powell. Davis was also in the midst of a period during which he collaborated frequently with Byrd. The two, plus Doug Watkins and Art Taylor, had traveled to and recorded in Europe during 1958. Upon their return, Davis began turning up on Blue Note sessions with Byrd, including Jackie McLean's New Soil (cut a month before this date) and his own Davis Cup (recorded two months later, with Jones and Taylor also present). While these albums gave the pianist far more solo space than he had enjoyed on his early recordings with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie, they were even more important in announcing Davis's talents as a composer. His writing here is notable in terms of both lyricism and structural originality. "Bronze Dance" shifts moods and meters seamlessly over a unique 28-bar chorus that allows Rouse to display his strong sense of contrast to particularly good effect, while the 44-bar form of "Clarion Calls" is handled by Adams and Byrd without strain. When Rouse gets confused during his "Clarion Calls" solo and stays on for four extra bars, Davis simply omits four bars of his own chorus and sustains a see-saw figure until he is sure that the structure is secure.

One additional point of comparison this album calls to mind involves Clifford Brown, whose influence on Byrd was receding here as Byrd establishes a deeper sense of his own personality. In this regard, the brisk yet relaxed trumpet solo on "The Injuns" should be heard next to Brown's more bravura 1953 reading of the tune on which it is based, "Cherokee", now available on Clifford Brown Memorial Album in the RVG series, from a sextet date that also finds Rouse in the tenor chair.

Melvin Sparks - This Is It (2005)

Melvin Sparks does not care much what you call his funkified approach to playing guitar: 21st century acid-jazz, jam-band nirvana, soul-city hard-groovin', whatever.

A legend to a old school soul-jazz lovers and a funk-father to young hipsters, Sparks has sketched a bluesy line that runs from Jack McDuff to Galactic, and he's still doing his thing his way. This Is It, his third recording on Savant label, is the proof.

"What I did on the last two records and not on this one is what I've done over the years ever since my days with the Upsetters" says the Houston native. "It just so happens that the music has been rediscovered by the young people. They started from the stuff that I do. Many of them have moved on and discovered themselves and left me with my music for me to play."

And play it he does. Sparks has convened a group of old and new friends including organist Jerry Z, drummer Justin Tomsovic, and saxophonist Cochemea Gastellum from Robert Walters' 20th Congress band and lets loose on a mix of original and covers that spans the stylistic horizon.

At 59, the guitarist with the grease-meets-sleek sound continues to carve out a niche for himself after complementing many of the giants of jazz, blues, rock, and funk for decades. Whoelse has performed or recorded with Little Richard, Lonnie Smith, Charles Earland, DJ Logic, Idris Muhammad, Richard Sam Cooke, Soulive and Grover Washington Jr.?

Sparks in unnecessarily modest when he talks about he hopes his listeners will get out of This Is It.

"They might be jogging or riding home, on the bus or subway with headphones and if they are in the mood for a little funky jazz, they can put this album on, and say Yeah." Yeah, indeed.

Sparks lays down a weather map's world of temperatures on this album, from deep heat to cool breezes, while never straying far from the funk that's his calling card. A few of the tunes have a bright, almost contemporary jazz feel, including the title cut, "Give Your Life to G-d" and "Watch Yo Step". He wrote several nearly a decade ago in one intense day-long stretch while he was fasting for the religion he practices, Islam.

"I started early in the day, by the time the sun went down, and when it was time to eat, I had completed them." he recalls. "It was very special and productive."

And there are the covers, including a rendition of the Temptations "My Girl" like you've never heard before, replete with a driving organ opener, quicksilver guitar improvisations and a gruff voiced and entertaining Sparks briefly closing things out with some vocalizing of his own.

"I'm no singer, I know that" the guitarist admits. "But I'm trying to make it fun. That's one thing I learned when I was in the Upsetters backing Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson, who were real singers. They knew how to make the music fun."

Sparks cover of "Hot Barbeque" is nothing but fast, funky horn-fueled fun. And his own "Bounce" with its deep R&B simmering grooves, is a lesson in history. "When I wrote that I had early Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in mind" Sparks says. "The harmony is the same as Moanin', but with a boogaloo beat."

A boogaloo beat also propels his "Bambu" which he originally recorded back in the 1970s with organist Rueben Wilson. Sparks' ringing guitar excursions on "The Light Is On" remind listeners that his ideas are as facile and original as they come. And "Heavy Fallin Out" shifts the mood again, this time with a cooler shade of blue on the mid-70s Stylistics tune.

On more than 100 albums he has appeared on, and the scores of hip hop tracks that have sampled his sound, Sparks' guitar contributions have never failed to pump the rhythms and juice the soul of every song. At the helm of his own bands and in control of the Melvin Sparks legacy, he has a straightforward vision."

"I just hope I can progress on for the rest of my life and whatever changes I make, will be natural" he says. "I won't be trying to adjust because the music has gone this way, that way or the other way. I want to grow into what's next for me. And I just love to see people have a good time. They don't have to dance if they don't want to as long as they leave happy and as long as it helps them get through whateever it is they're trying to get through."

And that's what Melvin accomplishes so well.

Scott Hamilton - Jazz Signatures (2001)

Composers write songs, musicians play them. Truth or truism? It took the pop world a few generations to acknowledge the singer/songwriter, but in jazz, the player/writer was always a recognized force. Here, Scott Hamilton -a Concord artist for more than twenty years- places his stamp on several tunes of some of jazz's best players.

With typical candor, Scott explains: "I usually fight the idea of concept albums, because they limit the material, and may end up sounding forced and uncomfortable. But this date was just a happy coincidence. I'd been playing all these tunes with this quartet last year. Most are numbers that John Bunch and I worked up on our annual Christmas gig at London's Pizza Express. When it came time to record something new, I really wanted to use John, Dave and Steve; we toured the continent to very good public reaction."

A little digging into personal history shows that Scott's coming up with this present repertoire has been a lifelong research project. The Hamiltons lived on the East Side where dad Robert, a painter, taught at nearby Rhode Island School of Design. Their house overflowed with art on the walls and music in the air. Scott would commandeer the upright piano in the hall, and proudly play his latest pieces for all who'd listen.

"When I was eight" recalls Scott, "I started clarinet lessons with Frank Marinacchio of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. He was a wonderful, legit clarinetist and I got to hear him play a little jazz on a gig. I studied a few years, but never tried to play jazz. But I was already listening to Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker."

Scott was soon wailing on tenor saxophone with guys like guitarist Fred Bates, bassist Phil Flanigan, and drummer Chuck Riggs. Providence in the 1970s no longer had the Celebrity Club, a rough-and-tumble bar where you could see Bill Doggett, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, Dinah Washington. But it did have Alarie's, a semi-upscale white restaurant for pianists like Mike Renzi; Bovi's Town Tavern for Duke Bellarie, and Fred Grady was still a beacon of bop and swing on late-night radio. Still, Scott and friends idolized the tenor sax led small bands of the swing era, and stood as stalwart throwbacks to an earlier age.

"I listened to tenor sax players for years before I began playing seriously" recalls Scott. "Ben, Hawk, Lester, Bud Freeman. When I took up tenor sax at 16, I was particularly interested in Gene Ammons, Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Lockjaw Davis, Red Prysock, Jimmy Forrest, Paul Gonsalves, and Fred Phillips. They're still the guys I listen to. Nothing compared to seeing a great player live. The times I saw Illinois play in the early 70s in Boston, are still my most truly thrilling musical experiences. Later in New York, I heard Zoot Sims and Stan Getz, who made great impressions on my playing."

Scott owned the reverence and keen ear for the sounds of Ben and Hawk, and the melodies of Illinois and Byas that he exhibits here, albeit with more savvy and suavity.

Strayhorn's masterpiece "Raincheck" starts like a riff tune, but then takes a sly slide into 16+16 song form with a hooting tag. Scott refers to Ben Webster in both content and tune, and John Bunch and Dave Green have their says.

Scott treats the Brubeck favorite "In Your Own Sweet Way", written early (1952) in his long, mellowing career, and ekes Zoot-like heat from his choruses. John's choruses span Teddy Wilson pizzazz and Hank Jones charm. The tag is played amoroso, with smears.

Waller's waltz is a waltz, a lively one, with Steve Brown whacking rimshots and tom-tom accents, as well as a capable solo. "I've recorded Jitterburg Waltz with Bucky Pizzarelli" says Scott, "but John's arrangement is so strong, we felt it was like an entirely different tune."

"If You Could See Me Now" excels a sweet ballad moan. "I've always loved Sarah Vaughan's recording" says Scott, "and I've been trying to learn it for years."

"Move" moves in forward bop fashion speedily to its conclusion, propelled by Steve Brown's snappy stick-work. Long in Scott's repertoire but premiered here on an album, it's by drummer Denzil Best, bet heard for fine brushwork in George Shering's early quintets.

Scott affords "When Lights Are Low" it's composer's wonted jaunty manner and elegant melodicism, so far as to inserting, on his last eight bars, a typically Cartesque flippant fillip. John takes a tasty bite, and Scott and Steve engage in lusty exchanges before all exit politely.

"Byas A Drink" is a variation on "Stomping at the Savoy" made in the 1940s under various titles; the riff was used years later by Clifford Brown and Max Roach.

"You Left Me Alone" is one of the first ballads I ever learned to play" recalls Scott. "Illinois wrote it in the 40s and recorded it with an all-star band in an arrangement by Tadd Dameron, who may have had a hand in this arrangement. I never had the nerve to record it before, as Illinois played it so definitively. I feel like I've figured out a way now to put a little of myself into it without losing it too much of Jacquet's original version. The number is meant as a tribute to the tenor player who I've always admired at most."

Hank Jones wrote "Angel Face" for a 1947 Coleman Hawkins date; Lucky Thompson and Milt Jackson recorded it in the 1950s, as one of Hank's most beautiful songs.

"The ringer here is John's Bunch" claims Scott. "John wrote this years ago, but it came out sounding so natural, we had to include it."

Actually, John's inclusion is a perfect capper, a bluesy bit of personal history from a composer who's been first and foremost a solid piano player. He's worked the big bands of Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, played hard for Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, and led his own tight bunches. John signes his closing stomper with a boogie flourish.

And thus have the moving fingers of veterans Scott and John, and youngsters Dave and Steve, played for us yet and another chapter in the book of jazz.

Stanley Turrentine - Sugar (1970)

During the 1960s, tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine had amassed a solid if unspectacular track record both as a leader and sideman for the Blue Note label. The Pittsburgh native might be likened to a ball-player who for a decade hits .285 without making the all-star team, or to an actor who's usually third-billed but occasionally gets to play the lead, always to favorable notices.

While never an innovator, Turrentine was surely one of Blue Note's key players in the field of soul-jazz, the strongly blues-based, gospel-influenced branch of hard bop, which itself was a simplified take on the vertiginiously complex bebop form. Fans and critics alike responded warmly to his juicy (but never overripe) tone, bluesy economy, unstinting sense of swing and soulful ballads. Most importantly, there was the unaffected way in which his solos told a story without talking down to the listener.

Turrentine, then, was a worthy choice, but by no means an obvious one, to be signed by Creed Taylor when in 1970 the successful entrepreneur and music producer launched his own CTI label. Yet Sugar -whose shortest track was 10:09 long- was a surprise hit album. The Turrentine-composed title theme, a minor-key 16-bar blues with modal implications, has become something of a jazz standart.

Lengthy selections notwithstanding, Sugar's three studio cuts constitute a sleeker, more radio-friendly version of a typical Blue Note session from the early-to-mid 1960s. Sustained grooves, tuneful solos, and the use of the then-fashionable electric piano are of the essence. Three members of both of the octets heard herein (Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter) were mainstays of Blue Note in the 1960s, while guitarist George Benson had occasionally turned up as a sideman. Plus, the masterful Rudy Van Gelder, with whom Taylor created the designer sound that would come to be associated with CTI, had engineered numerous classic Blue Note 1950s and 1960s dates.

CTI, like Blue Note, had a "look" as well. As he had at Impulse and A&M, Taylor favored gatefold sleeves for his LPs. CTI's covers featured color compositions of gallery quality by some of America's leading photographers. The pictures were often slightly mysterious and/or slyly sexy. Upon scanning the LP bins, one could immediately seperate a CTI product from the rest of the pack.

But even during the peak of the psychedelic era, most people did not purchase a disc to groove on its cover graphics, however artistic. Once one got past Sugar's erotic cover, the set's seductive grooves, both straight ahead or, as on organist Butch Cornell's "Sunshine Alley", post-boogaloo, were deep and adroitly dug. And its solos, particularly the leader's exultant tenor and Benson's flowing guitar, were repeatedly rewarding.

Turrentine's segment on "Impressions" is most instructive. Coltrane's oft-covered blues is in this case taken at finger-snapping medium tempo, rather than at the great man's gallop, with Ron Carter's bass, Billy Kaye's drums and Richard Landrum's congas doing the New York Latin-tinged bounce. Turrentine strings together phrase after piquantly bluesy phrase, resulting not only in a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts but a wholly relaxed, non-virtuosic take on a tune that's synonymous with relentless virtuosity. It's this kind of unpretentiousness that makes "Impressions", and all of Sugar, as sweet and tasty as homemade strawberry short cake.

Miles Davis - The Best of Miles Davis & John Coltrane (2000)

Miles Davis and John Coltrane were 29 years old when the first of these tracks were recorded. Davis had been a notable jazz figure since his first recording with Charlie Parker nearly a decade earlier, and an influence at least since the formation of his short-lived Birth of the Cool nonet in 1948. John Coltrane's odyssey in the same period had been little noted, despite impressive names on his resumé such as Dizzy Gillespie and Johnny Hodges. If Davis was already a man to watch, Coltrane was "John who?". Yet together they created some of the most important music in jazz history.

The pair began clicking almost immediately when Coltrane called to join the then-new Miles Davis Quintet in 1955. They would continue to do so on record for more than five years. Most of their documented collaborations are contained in the six-disc Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. This collection represents an overview of these essential encounters.

"Two Bass Hit" (26 October 1955) was the first track recorded on the original quintet's first visit to a recording studio, and also features pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. The Dizzy Gillespie/John Lewis bebop classic gave Coltrane his first real opportunity to stretch out on tape. He begins with a quote from Gillespie's solo on the classic 1947 recording, then quickly shows his commitment to more personal and explaratory ideas. Jones' drums are also in the spotlight, igniting the entire performance.

"Dear Old Stockholm" (5 June 1956) and the next two tracks were part of Davis' first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight. Originally a Swedish folk song called "Ack, Varmeland du Skona", Stockholm had been recorded by Stan Getz during a Scandinavian tour in 1951, then covered by Davis a year later in an arrangement that included the dramatic harmonic suspensions heard here. The rhythm section explodes at Coltrane's entrance, then downshifts for Davis' moodier inventions. The air of drama that characterizes so much of the quintet's music is present from beginning to end.

"Bye Bye Blackbird" (5 June 1956) was the kind of old pop tune that Davis loved to recast. He makes use of the expanded playing time available on the then-new 12" LP by stretching out while still retaining an overall focus. The track also features a major early solo from Coltrane and Garland's affirmative groove.

"'Round Midnight" (10 September 1956) is now as closely identified with Davis as with its composer, Thelonious Monk. It had brought new attention to the trumpeter when he played the ballad in an all-star jamsession at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, though even that reading pales next to this classic studio take. Every member of the quintet makes a critical contribution to the arrangement, which has been credited to Gil Evans, and Davis' muted sound is at its most penetrating. Coltrane's brilliant solo drew many listeners to the saxophonist, in the same way that the earlier Newport performance had inspired a reconsideration of Davis.

"Straight, No Chaser" (4 February 1958) and the next two track come from one of the two sessions that produced the album Milestones. Davis had broken up and reformed his band in the intervening months, making it a sextet with the addition of alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. This version of Monk's blues is an alternate take that made its first appearance in the boxed set. It features a beautifully relaxed statement by the leader, while Garland's choruses include snippets of the solo a 19-year old Davis played on Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time" -a solo that Garland quotes in its entirety on the master take.

"Milestones" was cited by Davis in his autobiography as, "Where I really started to write in the modal form". This reduction of harmonic motion by employing a scale rather than more frequently shifting chords liberates the soloists, and leads them each on highly personal paths. Note the contrast between the complex lines of the saxophonists and the distilled lyricism of the leader.

The next two tracks (recorded 2 March 1959) are taken from Kind of Blue, an album beloved as any in jazz history. It was planned around the participation of pianist Bill Evans, who had worked with Davis though much of 1958 and would soon launch his own influential trio (Jimmy Cobb had also replaced Jones on drums). Each of the album's five performances was based on brief sketches that the musicians saw in the recording studio for the first time. "So What" is simply two modes organized in the form of a typical popular song, a sequence that became the "I Got Rhythm" of modal jazz. The piano/bass introduction is another contribution of arranger Gil Evans, and each soloist confronts the challenge of blowing over the skeletal form brilliantly.

Adderley is not heard on "Blue In Green". Bill Evans claimed to have written the piece after Davis gave him some manuscript paper that contained only two chord symbols, G-minor and A-augmented. What resulted was a unique structure that the pianist described as "a ten-measure circular form". The eloquence of Evans, Coltrane and especially Davis yields one of the most beautiful performances in all music.

Coltrane formed his own quartet in 1960, but returned as a guest in the following year to record "Some Day My Prince Will Come" (20 March 1961) with a Davis unit that now included Hank Mobley on tenor sax and Wynton Kelly on piano. The performance finds the trumpeter sustaining the yearning quality at the heart of the tune, even as Kelly's solos and support impart an elfin twinkle. Coltrane, who takes the second tenor solo, had not played the piece before, and improvised while reading the chord changes off to a sheet of paper. His opening phrase provided Chick Corea with the thematic seed for the release of "La Fiesta".

Other tracks arguably might have been included in the set, such as "All of You", the master take of "Straight, No Chaser", "On Green Dolphin Set", "Stella By Starlight", All Blues", and "Teo". Such differences of opinion are, as the saying goes, what make horse racing. What Miles Davis and John Coltrane made together was immortal music, and nine of the absolutely best examples are right here.

Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple (1966)

No slight on the four musicians who directly contribute to making Adam's Apple such a memorable experience, but hearing this intriguing program of music in light of subsequent history brings to mind three additional associates of Wayne Shorter who were not present at the February 1966 session.

First and foremost is Miles Davis, whose then-current band featuring Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams was in its second year together and well on its way to being recognized as the second classic Miles Davis quintet. The legendary fivesome recorded "Footprints" eight months later on Miles's Columbia album Miles Smiles, and the success of that version (which actually saw release before the present take) helped to make the blues easily Shorter's most popular composition. Here, in its original arrangement, "Footprints" is in 6/8 meter throughout, and the heavy, pendular piano vamp suggests the feeling of the John Coltrane quartet. Davis recast the rhythmic terrain with Williams imposing an 8/8 meter against the original 6/8 as the band drifted between the three and four feelings for a more fluid and mysterious groove. Hancock's composition "The Collector" (a bonus track which first appeared in Japan) was also recorded under the name "Teo's Bag" by the Davis quintet two years after this performance, but in this instance the open form 4/4 swing feels conventional next to the version's unpredictable energy. Joe Chambers's contribution plays a critical role in generating that energy, and in the overall cohesion of all the present performances. While Chambers's name does not spring to mind as quickly as those of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams when considering Shorter's music in the 1960s, he did participate on four of the saxophonist's Blue Note albums of the period, where he proved equally sympathetic to Shorter's vision.

Jimmy Rowles, the second absent presence, wrote the haunting "502 Blues (Drinkin' and Drivin')" which could be described as a very Shorteresque ballad. The tune was originally recorded by the Bill Holman-Mel Lewis Quintet on the 1958 Andex album Jive For Five with the composer on piano and haunting muted trumpet by Lee Katzman. Here, it provides the first recorded sign of the mutual admiration in which Shorter and Rowles held each other. In the subsequent decade, Rowles returned the compliment on several of his own recordings by covering "Lester Left Town" (with Stan Getz), "The Chess Players" (in two versions), and three other Shorter compositions on a duo album with bassist George Mraz. It's a shame that Shorter and Rowles never found the opportunity to record together.

Finally, the spirit of Shorter's former frontline partner in Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Lee Morgan, hovers over the title track. "Adam's Apple" the tune proves that even an artist as singular as Shorter to bend to the soulful vamp formulations that made Morgan's hit "The Sidewinder" a template for so many subsequent Blue Note recordings. This is not one of the genre's notable successes, and one wonders if Shorter and company really had their hearts in the effort. That said, the saxophonist's use of the same riff as both entrance point to his solo and coda is a notable touch, and Hancock's ability to extend funk into outward-bound territory with his comping and improvisations is once again on display. When it comes to writing a catchy soul anthem, however, Shorter's magnum opus is "Tom Thumb" which he recorded with Bobby Timmons for Prestige a month before this session and reprised on his own 1967 Schizophrenia date - and which happens to be among the tunes reprised by the Rowlez/Mraz duo.

The remaining three compositions deserve far more attention than they have received in subsequent years. "Chief Crazy Horse" shows how the familiar 32-bar AABA form could still be empolyed with distinctive results, "Teru" is one of Shorter's most gorgeous ballads, and "El Gaucho" connects with Brazilian samba in both its rhythm and its manner of spinning fixed melodic material over elegantly mutating chords. It is rather startling to realize that all three of these gems have with rare exception been neglected during the past two decades, a period during which it has seemed that half of all new jazz albums have contained at least one Shorter composition. "El Gaucho" did get a twin-piano reading from Harold Danko and Kirk Lightsey on Shorter By Two in 1983, that Rowles's earlier efforts notwithstanding, can be seen in retrospect to have started the deluge of Shorter covers.

Lee Morgan - The Gigolo (1965)

Nat Hentoff was right on target when he predicted that The Gigolo would come to be regarded in a timeless session. Many Lee Morgan fans have cited the album as one of the trumpeter's best, and it needed features inspired playing on superior program of music. It has also won a special place in listeners' hearts because, as Hentoff could not have known at the time, it represents the final recorded example of one of the greatest trumpet/tenor sax front lines in jazz history.

Morgan and Wayne Shorter first joined forces in the summer of 1959 in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where their combination of fire, feeling, wit, and iconoclasm made instant magic. For next two years (until Blakey added trombonist Curtis Fuller to the band shortly before Morgan's departure), their conjoined sound defined one of the greatest periods in Jazz Messenger music on a series of Blue Note albums. As the leading voices in a quintet, they were also featured on albums at the time under the leadership of Wynton Kelly and Shorter on Vee Jay, and on Morgan's own release for Roulette. The Morgan/Shorter partnership on Blue Note, on hiatus for a period while the trumpeter battled personal demons, was reestablished in 1964 and continued intermittenly through 1967. Most of these later encounters involved sextet instrumentations, as on Morgan's Search For the New Land and The Procrastinator, and Blakey's Indestructible; but Night Dreamer (Shorter's first date as a leader), as well as the present sessions, gave us two more quintet gems.

Taken together, Night Dreamer and The Gigolo confirm that Morgan and Shorter remained eminently compatible despite developments in their respective careers that seemed to find them headed in seperate directions. Morgan was enjoying his greatest commercial success with his funky blues hit "The Sidewinder", recorded at the end of 1963, while Shorter was focused on more open and exploratory material as the new member and primary composer in Miles Davis's quintet, which he joined in the summer of 1964. Yet Morgan displays no hesitation in dealing with Shorter's haunting compositions on Night Dreamer, and the music there anticipates ideas Morgan would pursue in his own bands at the end of the decade. Shorter is similarly assured here, in what even at the time were considered the more traditional contours of the present music.

One major change that had taken place since the pair first met was Morgan's growing focus on composition. Unlike his early albums between 1956-1960, in which the vast majority of the writing was left to others, Morgan's Blue Note dates of the 1960s tended to focus heavily and sometimes exclusively on the trumpeter's own creations. His compositions here define a style that, while narrower and more familiar than that of Shorter, encompassed a range of forms and feelings. "Speedball" is the most famous of the originals (it quickly became Morgan's theme in live performances) and the most straighthead, and it includes a 16-bar interlude/coda that is as memorable as the primary 12-bar blues melody. The other two Morgan originals hark back to earlier works by the trumpeter without sounding like mere echoes. "Yes I Can, No You Can't" is clearly fashioned in the mood of "The Sidewinder", but employs a different chorus structure and some of its own harmonic wrinkles. "The Gigolo", heard here in two takes, brings the open 6/8 feel of Morgan's "Search For the New Land" into a structured chorus with a bridge, resulting in a form that recalls a contemporary Freddie Hubbard composition, "Blue Spirits". Each of Morgan's pieces contains a melody that stays in the listener's ear, the true sign of an accomplished writer.

The arrangement of "You Go to My Head" has also become a classic, and remade the standard for many subsequent musicians, in the way that John Coltrane did when he recast "Body and Soul" in 1960. Note also that "Trapped", the only issued performance from the first of the album's two sessions, was listed as Morgan's composition at the time of release but it is actually a Wayne Shorter piece. It might be described as a patterned blues, with ensemble choruses that underscore the rich blends the trumpeter and saxophonist archieved with regularity.

Little need to be added regarding the excellent performances here of the primary horns and the rhythm section. This was a highly compatible group, with each musician at the top of his game and clearly inspired by his partners. Morgan, Mabern, and Higgins had made similar magic earlier in June 1965 on Hank Mobley's Dippin', another title available in a RVG Edition.

Cannonball Adderley - Somethin' Else (1958)

"Miles had helped me when I first came to New York", Cannonball Aderley recalled in a 1960 article for The Jazz Review. "He told me who to avoid among the record companies, but unfortunately I didn't take his advice. Al Lion of Blue Note was one man he recommended".

Adderley's lament about not taking the trumpeter's recommendations to heart no doubt refers to both the early albums Adderley cut for Savoy and his more extensive output for the Mercury subsidiary EmArcy. In the same article, the alto saxophonist refers to the problems at Mercury, including limited control over the content of his albums and other restrictions made more onerous by the long-term agreement Adderley had signed with the company. This situation, plus the debts Adderley's working quintet had accumulated through the fall of 1957, brought him to a point at which he resolved to take greater care with all aspects of his professional situation. In October 1957 he disbanded his own combo and joined Miles Davis for what would prove to be a two-year stay. Shortly thereafter, Adderley began a transition out from under the EmArcy agreement that was not fully completed until February 1959, when the Davis sextet of the time minus its leader cut the album known alternatively as The Cannonball Aderley Quintet in Chicago and Cannonball and Coltrane.

While Adderley ultimately found a supportive home on Riverside, where he began recording in the summer of 1958 and teped the live Cannonball Aderley Quintet in San Fransisco disc in October 1959 that ensured the success of his reorganized band, he did manage to heed Davis's recommendation and create one album under the guidance of Alfred Lion. Somethin' Else was taped on 9 March 1958, nearly a month before the saxophonist made his first studio session under Davis's leadership. It carries such marks of the Davis input as the stealthy arrangement of "Autumn Leaves", which had grown much brisker by the time a later Davis band got around to recording it live in 1963, and the venerable "Love For Sale", which the Davis band recorded for Columbia three months later (though the track remained unreleased for nearly two decades). Other signs of Milesian influence are the calm, conversational delivery of the title track and the newfound lyricism in Adderley's playing that followed from his nightly experience at the trumpeter's side.

Credit for the intimate, economical force of the album should really be shared among Adderley and producer Lion as well as Davis, who was clearly putting several of his most refreshing insights into practice. The outstanding rhythm section that propels the music with such sureness and taste had ties to all three of the session's prime movers. Hank Jones had been present on Adderley's first recordings as a leader for Savoy, as well as on several early dates led by Cannonball's brother Nat. Like Davis and Blue Note iron man Art Blakey, Jones had also been an associate of Adderley's primary influence, Charlie Parker. Sam Jones was an old Florida friend of Adderley's who had joined the saxophonist's quintet at the end of 1956 and preceded to distinguish himself with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and on several recording sessions before signing back on for Adderley's second and ultimately successful turn as a leader. The instant rapport achieved by the quintet is thus the production of much shared and common history, though the tensile strength that they create throughout a totally unique feeling that can be attributed to the sensitive musicianship of all concerned, including the supposedly hard bopping leader and drummer.

In addition to the five compositions contained on the original LP issue of Somethin' Else,a sixth title from the session was unearthed in the Blue Note vaults and initially released in Japan in 1982. Logs contained no identifying information regarding the performance, and the track was given the name "Allison's Uncle" because Nat Adderley's daughter was born on the day it was recorded. Further research has revealed that the mystery tune is a Hank Jones composition that the pianist recorded as "Bangoon" with the Gigi Gryce/Donald Byrd Jazz Lab quintet for an album on the Jubilee label in August 1957.

Wynton Marsalis - Live at the House of Tribes (2005)

Jazz is not where you find it; jazz is everywhere, and Wynton Marsalis has consistently played it the world over for the last 25 years. He has led large and small bands in public and private situations across America, through Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia, Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean, South America and North Africa. Marsalis knows that the language of jazz is a lingua franca; when you swing, play the blues, deliver the romantic mood of the ballad, or lay into Latin rhythms, there is always a body of listeners ready to hear jazz as the spiritual elixir that it is. None of the talking of any sort means as much to a musician as the emotional force, the bond of soul and feeling, that gathers heat in the air when sound and the need to be moved meet. Then the space of performance and its circumstances are remade in the inimitable way we only expect from the invisible art of music.

The quality of such occasions accounts for why Marsalis has been selling out clubs and concert halls throughout his career as a leader. The endless, standing ovations, the packed dressing rooms of well-wishers and autograph seekers, the many presents brought by listeners, the small army of students he has inspired or taught or given instruments, and the family dinners to which he has been invited, all add up to encouragements to continue on his chosen task, which is to deliver the artistry and the feeling of jazz wherever and whenever he can.

The performance here is, as are all Marsalis recordings, a culmination of where he was at the time of documentation. It was captured at what is an almost annual winter performance at the House of Tribes on East 7th Street in New York's Lower East Side, a section of Manhattan where jazz, poetry, and theater have been presented in alternative situations for more than five decades. The performance space at the House of Tribes is very small but the sound is superb and the audience comes expecting to have its soul boiled in the hot oil of deep feeling. That audience is made up of all colors and is from all backgrounds and religions, a common feature of Lower East Side. For all of their differences, the people there have one thing in common; they love the propulsion of swing as it arrives in the sound of jazz. Theirs is a desire for the timeless quality of joy that the artistry of jazz packs into every second as the cold, formlessness of the moment is overcome by the heat of human personality and the refinement of empathetic interaction. Somebody could say they come looking for a groove, and somebody else could say that when Wynton Marsalis is at the House of Tribes, they get just what they are looking for -and as much of it as they can stand.

Those unaware of the expansiveness of Marsalis's career might be surprised to find him playing in a low-income neighbourhood for an audience of no more than 50 people. They would find that surprising because they know he is one of the biggest stars in the world of jazz and could command a substantial fee at any high style room or concert hall in New York City. Such people would be unaware that Marsalis comes from a lower-class community in New Orleans and has always been willing to support any organization that seeks to offer art to the people. In short, Marsalis has never been a doily afraid of the grease and the gravy on the table. He, like all great jazz musicians, is from the people and brings the message of the people, which is the fundamental good news of life. That is the optimism that defines the struggle at the center of the blues, the universal desire to meet dreams in the temporary forms of flesh and blood, or to present the sorrows and revelations of life as one has known them.

Of the House of Tribes, Marsalis says "It's a small community space where they can have theater. It has the type of feeling that those places have in the South. It is a grass roots situation. The people are devoted to keeping the community in touch with art. You can feel the dedication in the air. These kinds of places are all over the world and they exist for the same reason. People make them happen, regardless of money or attention or any of the things that we are often told you have to have in order to do something. For me, playing at the House of Tribes is like being at home, back in the environment of pure dedication, the kind of feeling that makes you want to become an artist".

"The audience at the House of Tribes is of all ages but that audience has that thing in common that is always true of jazz audiences. They come to hear people play, and they come to swing and have a good time. You can hear it in their responses, which are not cliché imitations of people having a good time. This is the sound of an actual good time, which makes you want to play more and play better. The audience can always give you that".

Though we were not there, we can now experience, over and over, first-class contemporary jazz deep in the blue pocket of swing and full of the creations one expects of its very best players. Greg Osby says that Marsalis is the most original and comprehensive trumpet player to arrive in jazz since Woody Shaw, and Shaw himself revealed his accurate sense of the future in something he told Maxine Gordon about the younger trumpet player. While they were listening to him in the concert, Shaw said he was absolutely sure that Marsalis was destined not only to take the trumpet to new heights, but that he would elevate the making and presentation of jazz music as well. Given all that Marsalis has achieved on every plane, that has proven to be true. But this recording is not about the breadth of Marsalis, it is about nothing other than playing jazz. In that context, Marsalis's extraordinary sophistication continues to deepen the power of his art while delivering it with the greatest command of his instrument since Dizzy Gillespie and Booker Little. "Green Chimneys" and "Donna Lee" should convert any doubters. The heat, sweep, scale, and substance of Marsalis's thematic inventions reiterate, at almost every captured moment, that he is, as Betty Carter once said to him "the destinity of the music. The music needed him. He had to appear, and he eventually did".

Wess Anderson, as made clear on "Green Chimneys" is a startlingly original master of the alto sax. His other equally original features prove him the kind of improvisor we hear very little of at this time of academic school boys playing memorized patterns. Though a young man, Anderson is the best version of old school; he is a genuine melody maker of the first order, heavy in his harmony, and glowing in his rhythm. "Above all" Marsalis says, "Wess has heavy soul. It goes deep but it's also bouyant, and he loves to swing all night. He and I have invaded jam sessions all over the world. Wess Anderson is always ready to play and spread that good feeling. That's why musicians and listeners love him".

"Green Chimneys" also reiterates the fact that Eric Lewis is another of the fantastic piano players that Marsalis has introduced to the jazz world. Lewis is possessed of a talent that expresses itself free of the Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner methods that have become perhaps too common among the less imaginative of the younger piano playeres. Kengo Nakamura and Joe Farnsworth are two of the most prominent rhythm section players of the day. They have control of their instruments, which means they never play too loud and throw off the balance of the band. They know how to listen, support, and drive. They are top of the line professionals with artistic sensibilities. The same can be said of guest percussionist Orlando Rodriguez.

When you put that all together, you get everything a jazz lover needs; swing, melodic invention, harmonic surprise, rhythmic freshness, and a collective sense of improvising impassioned and logical music on the wing, surely the great performance gift that jazz has brought to music. Enjoy this indelible hot scoop of soul. It was made amongst the people, and for the people, which means that the music had you in mind.

Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil (1964)

Wayne Shorter has never taken the conventional approach to his career. His exceptional gifts as a saxophonist and composer has never been combined with a self-effacing stance that has set him apart from the outset. Where his contemporaries were grabbing every opportunity to record as leaders and chomping at the bit to form their own working bands, Shorter took a far more measured and audacious approach. Despite his stature as the most original and profound of the tenor saxophonists to emerge after Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, and his similarly elevated status as a composer of uniquely original music, Shorter remained with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from 1959 to 1964; then he continued to ignore the call of leadership and joined Miles Davis. Shorter's personal discography was similarly modest. Before signing a contract as a solo artist with Blue Note around the time he left the Messengers, he could only claim a pair of albums for Vee Jay under his own name.

Fortunately, what most listeners considered the long overdue collaboration of Shorter and producer Alfred Lion took place at a period of rapid growth and prolific output for the saxophonist. Speak No Evil, Shorter's third Blue Note session in eight months, captures a pivotal moment in his evolution. His tenor playing, clearly formed by both Coltrane (the urgent tone and bold harmonic choices) and Rollins (thematic continuity and frequently broad humor), had rather facilely been considered a variation on Coltrane's work by some, and the appearance of Coltrane stalwarts McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones plus former Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman on Shorter's previous Blue Note dates only underscored the comparison. Jones is once again present here; but the rhythm section is completed in this instance by Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, Shorter's new associates in the Miles Davis quintet. Hancock and Carter bring a more open, space-conscious attitude to the music, one that Shorter into different areas without in any way diminishing the integrity of Jones's contribution. For his part, Shorter reveals a deeper lyricism and a more elegant use of unusual melodic shapes and harmonic extensions. Without sacrificing any power, his work had grown more poetic. His writing was evolving as well, "fanning out" as he puts it in his typically insightful comments to annotator Don Heckman. Shorter had already proven capable of retaining his compositional individuality while creating material for the specific needs of Art Blakey, and he would soon repeat this feat with the music he wrote for Davis. Here he is writing for himself, and the singular balanace of harmonic complexity and melodic grace, of assertion and calm that had marked such pieces as "Black Nile" and "Armageddon" (from Night Dreamer) and "Yes or No" (from JuJu) reached an even more exalted plateau with the six works heard here. The imagery, which Shorter clearly had in mind as indicated by his comments on the material, is conveyed in sound pictures that are no less apt for their structural unorthodoxies; and the overall themes of folklore and legend are realized as much by what Shorter leaves out as by what he includes. In these respects, and in such moments as the incredible opening tenor saxophone note on "Infant Eyes", it is tempting to claim the influence of the new boss on Shorter's music. Yet Shorter's ideas (what Joe Zawinul would call "the new thinking") were already headed in this direction eight months earlier on his Blue Note debut Night Dreamer, and Davis is on record as having sensed a kindred yet autonomous spirit in Shorter's music from his earliest days with Blakey.

The saxophonist could not have asked for more sympathetic musicians that the ones he recruited for this session, including his former Messengers mate Freddie Hubbard. Shorter paid them the respect their talents deserved by conceiving a program of challenging original music, and the band in turn honored him by meeting the challenge with total mastery. Together they created a body of music that has inspired musicians and listener s for over three decades, and which is supplemented in the latest RVG Edition of the album with a previously unissued take of "Dance Cadaverous". Jean Sibelius's Valse Triste, the composition that inspired "Dance Cadaverous", was coincidentally recorded by Shorter less than three months later in a sextet version, and can be heard on the Blue Note album The Soothsayer, where Hubbard and Carter are also present.

Lonnie Smith - Think! (1968)

The leader of Think! is one of two keyboard-playing Lonnie Smiths who emereged in the 1960s and have caused more than a bit of discographic confusion. The other, slightly older Lonnie Smith (Lonnie "Piano" Smith, if you will) recorded under that name with Roland Kirk and a few others. By the time he joined Pharaoh Sanders in 1969, he began using his middle name as well and was henceforth known as Lonnie Liston Smith.

The present Lonnie Smith (or Dr. Lonnie Smith, as he has taken to call himself in recent years) was born in 1942 in Buffalo and began his musical career while still a teenager in a doo-wop group that also included Grover Washington Jr. Fascination with Jimmy Smith's 1960 Blue Note album Midnight Special led Smith to the organ, an instrument he mastered without formal instruction. While sitting in with Jack McDuff's band in 1964, he met and immediately bonded with McDuff's guitarist George Benson. The encounter led to the formation of Benson's own quartet in 1966 (a band that would soon also feature drummer Marion Booker Jr.) and to Smith's recording debut with Benson and Columbia.

Benson's band made enough of a splash to earn Smith his own Columbia album, Finger Lickin' Good, but what really cemented the reputations of the guitarist and organist was their contribution to Lou Donaldson's 1967 Blue Note hit Alligator Boogaloo. Smith participated in two more sessions with Donaldson over the next year, and then landed his own contract with the label, with Think!, the first of five albums Smith recorded as a leader over the next two years.

The personnel involved here, and the variety of material featured, make this far superior to the organ-combo norm of the late 1960s. In addition to the soulful, still-underrated Melvin Sparks and the always reliable David Newman , the band includes trumpeter Lee Morgan, who had participated in some of the greatest organ jam sessions in history with Jimmy Smith a decade earlier. While taking his music into more contemporary post-bop areas at the end of his career, Morgan also began making occasional appearances with organists again. He returned for Lonnie Smith's next album, Turning Point and did guest turns with Blue Note artists Larry Young and Rueben Wilson, all in 1969. Two days before his murder in 1972, Morgan made his last studio appearance with another organist, Charles Earland on Prestige. As was the case on those other dates, Morgan never had to simplify his approach to accomodate the format (hear his turnarounds on "Slouchin") and the soulful content of his contributions were a given. He also blends well with Newman, who was Morgan's frontline partner on the trumpeter's 1967 Sonic Boom.

On "The Call of the Wild" and "Slouchin", a three-piece Afro-Latin percussion section under the leadership of Henry Brown is added. They lend a particularly orgiastic rhythm vibe to the former track. Norberto Apellaniz, credited as a second conga player here, was regularly heard on bongos in Brown's popular combo of the time, the Latin Soul Brothers.

The material is fairly straight-forward, with a minimum of harmonic movement, yet there is a variety in the arrangements and consistent quality in the solo contributions. Among the three covers is "Three Blind Mice" that borrows directly, albeit at a slower tempo, from the arrangement of the nursery rhyme that Curtis Feller crafted for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in 1962.

Smith's subsequent history is indicative of the struggles that all organists encountered. The rise of electric pianos and other keyboards in 1970 signaled what appeared to be the death knell of the Hammond B-3. Public interest dropped so precipitously that Smith's final Blue Note date, the presence of Benson notwithstanding, remained unissued for a quarter century. Odd Smith albums appeared on a variety of labels throughout the next two decades, until a few trio albums for the Japanese Venus imprint in the early 1990s reminded the world that the now-turbaned Dr. Smith remained at the peak of his powers. As these notes are written, Smith has just released a new collection under his own name on Palmetto. He continues his work regularly with Lou Donaldson, and has become the organist of choice for musicians of diverse styles and generations.

Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder (1963)

The gloss that Leonard Feather's liner notes provide Lee Morgan's career in the period immediately preceding The Sidewinder disguises what was the most dispirting stretch of the trumpeter's life. In the throes of a drug habit and after the Spring of 1961, no longer a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Morgan spent two years in a kind of career limbo. What little recorded evidence exists, such as his January 1962 Take Twelve album for Jazzland, indicates that Morgan's trumpet playing remained impressive; but his dependency kept him from regular work, and a number of other young trumpet players including Don Cherry, Don Ellis, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little stepped into the breach and attracted the public's attention.

Morgan's plunge into obscurity was so emphatic that, while back at home in Philadelphia, he reportedly heard a jazz radio program offer a Lee Morgan memorial tribute.

Fortunately for Lee Morgan and for jazz, he rallied; and Alfred Lion was there to document Morgan's new, rededicated self. The trumpeter had not been a Blue Note contract artist since 1958, having signed a deal with the Chicago Vee Jay label before his lone effort on Jazzland, yet he maintained a Blue Note presence from 1958-1961 through his work with Blakey and on his own 1960 album Lee-Way (made with Vee Jay's permission). Proof that Morgan was ready to move forward again was first heard on two Blue Note sessions from 1963 where he appeared as a sideman, Hank Mobley's No Room For Squares and Grachan Moncur III's Evolution. A month to the day after the Moncur album was taped, Morgan returned to Rudy Van Gelder's studios to record his own The Sidewinder.

What resulted was a surprise commercial hit. The title track took off, cracking the Billboard charts and ultimately serving as the soundtrack for an automobile advertising campaign. Morgan's attractive blues line, with the plunching sustained vamp that Barry Harris contributed to the arrangement and the clever harmonic wrinkle described in the original liner notes, transported the trumpeter from his recent nadir to the Hot 100. While it obviously had a significant impact on Morgan's career, "The Sidewinder" also encouraged Alfred Lion to attempt to duplicate this success with other artists in the Blue Note family. Rhythmically assertive, often over-extended opening blues tracks on subsequent Blue Note albums became the norm, though they rarely rose to Morgan's level of either inspiration or sales.

This fallout combined with sheer familiarity has left many listeners with negative feelings about "The Sidewinder" in particular and The Sidewinder in general. For them, a fresh listen should clear away the stale air of countless imitations, because the title track is filled with glorious playing. These musicians understood how to create a blues groove with feeling and intelligence, and the choices they make (Henderson's repeated figure in his second chorus and Harris's use of octaves when the piano solo begins, to cite two examples) provide lessons in how to effectively structure an improvisation that communicates. The rapport displayed throughout the album is a sign that important professional connections had been made, connections that in the case of Morgan and Higgins played themselves out over many subsequent Blue Note albums. Henderson's ability to galvanize other musicians' dates was announced in no uncertain times -his solo on "The Sidewinder" presages the similarly monumental tenor choruses he would lay down on Horace Silver's "Song For My Father" 10 months later- and the Harris/Cranshaw/Higgins rhythm section was reunited on Dexter Gordon's memorable 1965 album Gettin' Around.

Morgan's articulate descriptions of the music and the players plus Feather's astute analysis of the individual performances require only two additional comments. One concerns the alternate take of "Totem Pole", which might have sounded perfectly acceptable for the release if we did not have the superior master take. Hearing both in sequence illustrates how the slightest adjustments can lift a performance from the very good to the exceptional.

The second point concerns Lee Morgan the composer. When Morgan first recorded for the label as a leader between 1956-1958, he left the writing to others. After joining the Jazz Messengers, where he shared the front line with prolific composers Benny Golson, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and where Art Blakey always encouraged his sidemen to create original material, Morgan compositions began appearing with greater frequency, yet he still looked to others for the bulk of material on his own albums. Morgan's Jazzland LP was one of the first on which he wrote a majority of the tunes, and The Sidewinder found him responsible for all of the music for the first time.

So this album also announced that the new Lee Morgan was also a talented writer, a quality that would stand him a good stead on his subsequent Blue Note recordings.

Wayne Shorter - JuJu (1964)

This album is a central document from perhaps the central year in the artistic development of Wayne Shorter. It was recorded in August 1964, as Shorter completed a term lasting nearly five years as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. One month later, the tenor saxophonist joined Miles Davis for what proved to be an even lengthier tenure. This was also the year in which Shorter signed a Blue Note recording contract, and embarked on an intensive documentation of music under his own name that fans and followers considered long overdue.

Shorter's contributions to not one but two legendary editions of the Blakey band as both soloist and composer/musical director exceed those of any other Messenger save Horace Silver. Free For All and Indestructible, Blakey albums recorded for Blue Note earlier in 1964, remain memorable examples of his Blakey period from late in Shorter's stay. He also contributed to several earlier Messenger sessions, and to Blue Note dates led by Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, and Lee Morgan; but prior to 1964, Shorter's own recordings were surprisingly few in number. Before his Blue Note debut Night Dreamer was issued, Shorter's name had appeared on only two Vee Jay albums. That label's The Young Lions (a prescient title in more ways than one) might also be considered a Shorter date, given the prominence of his compositions; yet it, like most of Shorter's other studio appearances to that point, placed him in an ensemble with other horns. We now know that a Shorter quartet album had been cut in 1960, so "JuJu" is not chronologicaly his first work with such a rhythm section. It was the first to appear, however, which made this second Blue Note release a particularly revealing portrait.

The personnel Shorter enlisted for the album and the sound of the music they created makes consideration of the John Coltrane quartet so inevitable that the absence of reference to Coltrane in Nat Hentoff's liner notes must have been intentional. While he stressed the working relationship of Shorter and Workman, Hentoff might have added that Tyner and Jones had served in Coltrane's band almost as long as Shorter had in Blakey's, and that -before Jimmy Garrison became the bassist identified with classic Coltrane quartet music- Workman had filled the group's fourth slot. Several compositional elements employed by Shorter, including the triple meter of the title track and the harmonic suspensions on "Mahjong" and "Yes or No", had been popularized by Coltrane's group, while the size and urgency of Shorter's sound recalls Coltrane as well. Yet Shorter brought his own slant to bear, just as he put a different spin on Blakey's music than his predecessors in that band had provided. The pithiness of Shorter's expression, its combination of boldness and vulnerability, and the similar juxtaposition of structural sophistication and melodic directness in the writing signal the emergence of a truly unique style, one issuing from a mind that is highly analytical yet suffesed with the fantastic.

At this point, that style was clearly based in ideas that this particular rhythm section understood quite well. The music fits Tyner and Jones perfectly, especially in the pendular motion of several pieces, and one is hard pressed to imagine even so magnificent a trio as the Hancock/Carter/Williams unit of Miles Davis's quintet playing "JuJu" or "Mahjong" as effectively. Tyner, bursting with ideas throughout, takes dramatic advantage of his position as opening soloist on several tracks. Jones is power personified, and his complex polyrhythms are beautifully recorded. Both musicians add further evidence for the propositions that; great players who were recorded by several engineers sounded better when Rudy Van Gelder was engineering, and great players who recorded at Van Gelder Studios for several labels sounded best when Alfred Lion was producing. Above all, though, the band serves Shorter's vision, and it is just as easy to hear intimations of the saxophonist's future as any allusions to another ensemble's present. For two examples, note how "Deluge" anticipates "Tom Thumb" and the uncommon beauty that links "House of Jade" to "Infant Eyes".

As has been the case on several Blue Note sessions, compact disc technology allows the release of alternate takes, and the two heard on the latest RVG Edition version of this album are strong performances. The alternate "JuJu" is a model of urgency tempered by lyricism, though it lacks the abandon that ultimately makes the original master superior. On the other hand, the relaxed air of the alternate "House of Jade" creates a distinct aura that strikes this listener as more effective than that informing the more deliberate master.

Stanley Turrentine - That's Where It's At (1962)

At the time this album was recorded, few active musicians were as ideally suited for collaboration as Stanley Turrentine and Les McCann. Each was a young modernist with deep roots in the jazz tradition and both had risen to a prominent place in what annotator Dudley Williams refers to as "the new soul movement". Yet there were two obstacles to overcome before a Turrentine/McCann partnership could be forged. The pianist, though a native of Kentucky, lived and primarily worked in the Los Angeles area, while the saxophonist's domain was decidedly East Coast. There was also the matter of recording contracts, with Turrentine a Blue Note artist and McCann signed to Pacific Jazz. Recording projects with special guests from rival companies have become commonplace in recent years; but in the highly competitive 60s, independent jazz labels gave permission for their stars to appear elsewhere rarely if at all, and generally only when a reciprocal appearance could be arranged.

These problems were solved when McCann brought his successful trio (known as Les McCann Ltd) to New York for a stand at the Village Gate at the end of 1961. As the pianist tells the story in his liner notes to one of two Pacific Jazz albums that resulted, he met Turrentine while visiting the musicians' union, and the two immediately agreed to do an album together. A deal between the respective labels was struck, and Turrentine joined the pianist's trio, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and tenor saxophonist Frank Haynes for the aforementioned live recording, taped on December 28th. Five days later, it was Turrentine's turn to play host, and the present collection resulted.

Both men are already had favorable experience in this tenor-plus-trio format. McCann's unit had recorded in support of Teddy Edwards on the 1959 album It's About Time, before ever taping a session of its own, while one of Turrentine's initial Blue Note efforts had been his Blue Hour parley with the Three Sounds. In this instance, however, the rhythm section was not a regular working trio. As the notes indicate, Herbie Lewis was in the process of leaving the Ltd, after a year long tenure and relocating to New York, while drummer Otis Finch was in the midst of his first major jazz gig with Turrentine's wife, organist Shirley Scott. Coincidentally, Lewis had recorded with Turrentine during an earlier New York visit the previous June, on Scott's Prestige album Hip Soul.

The material here is well-paced and surprisingly varied given that the first hour tracks are blues, with a good mix of tempos that allow everyone to shout, preach, and whisper at the appropriate moments. McCann contributed four titles, of which all, save the medium-tempo "Pia", which had also been recorded by his trio. Of those, the standout is "Smile, Stacey" which also had been taped at the Village Gate without added horns. This romping opener starts at a level of great intensity and then builds, like a Mingus-like six-against-four feeling early in the tenor solo. Given this dynamic performance, it is surprising that others have not reprised "Stacy" more frequently, although trombonist Fred Wesley did a nice arrangement for four horns on his 1991 disc Comme Ci Comme Ça. "We'll See Yaw'll After While, Ya Heah", the Ltd's signoff number first heard on a live album cut in San Fransisco, is given a full treatment here for the only time on record.

Stanley's "Soft Pedal Blues" and his brother Tommy's "Light Blue" complete the program. The latter, a relaxed 32-bar opus, had been previously recorde by Horace Parlan (with Booker Ervin and Grant Green) on Parlan's Blue Note album Up & Down, where Parlan included an introduction that is omitted in these versions. The alternate take included in the new version of the album as a bonus track provides fresh solo choruses from the featured players and Lewis.

As compatible as Turrentine and McCann proved to be, they went their seperate ways for the next quarter-century, reuniting only in 1984 at the time of the Blue Note label's reemergence for two tracks on the Turrentine album Straight Ahead. Their short-lived partnership, both here and on LesMcann Ltd in New York, suggests that there was much more soulful music they might have made together.