Isrea Butler: Congo Lament (Venus Records VR 1026)
Anyone who like me used to eagerly wait for the next Bennie Green LP to be released will love this CD by Dr. Isrea Butler. His sleeve-note really says it all: “When I first heard Bennie Green I was captivated by (his) sound and style”. Green was of course a unique trombonist but Butler manages to get pretty close to Bennie’s velvet sound with its relaxed and quite infectious delivery. Isrea is a Conn-Selmer clinician with degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Rutgers University. He is also the lead trombone with the Count Basie Orchestra. With his fellow Basie band-mate Doug Lawrence he reminds us here of how stimulating a trombone and tenor ensemble can sound either in unison or harmony. Congo Lament is very similar to Green’s uninhibited blowing sessions from the 50s when he had tenors like Budd Johnson, Charlie Rouse, Jimmy Forrest or Johnny Griffin along for the ride.
Isrea has mostly selected his repertoire from a 1962 Ike Quebec album which featured Bennie Green also titled Congo Lament. The album’s title is an attractive but neglected Green original with Butler carrying the melody over a tenor ostinato doubled by the bass. The Latin rhythm gives way to some straight-ahead blowing by the horns with Lawrence sounding like Jimmy “Night-Train” Forrest. I.Q. Shuffle is a blues by Ike Quebec although it sounds like something Charlie Parker might have written. Isrea with a plunger impresses here. Pennies From Heaven was a particular favourite of Green’s and it was his feature when he was one of the star soloists with Charlie Ventura’s Bop For The People group.The leader used to announce it as Bennie’s From Heaven. The arrangement here was first heard on the 1959 album Bennie Green Swings The Blues.
This is Isrea Butler’s first date as a leader. Hopefully there will be many more.
Gerry Mulligan: Meets Ben Webster (Essential Jazz Classics 2613CD)
In the late 50s Gerry Mulligan recorded several memorable studio sessions with luminaries like Paul Desmond, Johnny Hodges, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Annie Ross and Ben Webster. He once told me that the Webster date was his particular favourite because he “loved to play with Ben”. For a while they worked together including a notable 1959 engagement at the Renaissance club in Los Angeles with Jimmy Witherspoon which was recorded on Fantasy FCD24701. In 1962 they appeared on the Dinah Shore TV show and wherever they performed the rhythm section with the inimitable Jimmy Rowles was a constant. He was a Webster favourite and his distinctive touch and subtle chord-voicings were the work of one of the music’s true individualists.
Ben Webster was the ultimate stylist, able to communicate the maximum emotion with what seemed to be the minimum of effort. Anyone who has ever played a saxophone will know that that is only an illusion, of course. He was a consummate balladeer, and Mulligan’s Tell Me When, premiered here, fits him like a glove. It later benefited from a lyric provided by Gerry’s long-time partner Judy Holliday. There are no prizes for guessing which Gershwin standard Mulligan’s rhetorically titled Who’s Got Rhythm is based on. It inspires the principals to stretch out on some hard-swinging choruses. Webster, along with Juan Tizol, helped introduce Billy Strayhorn’s ethereal Chelsea Bridge on Ellington’s 1941 recording. His delicate vibrato is sometimes more air than note and Mulligan respectfully stands aside, leaving centre-stage to him while providing a most apposite accompaniment. In A Mellow Tone climaxes with some gentle interplay from the horns which was always a speciality of Mulligan’s pianoless groups.
There are 11 tracks here but in 1997 the entire session of 15 titles was released on Verve 539 055-2.
Gerry Mulligan & Paul Desmond Quartet: Blues In Time (WaxTime 772349)
This was the first of Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond’s many recorded collaborations over the years and probably their finest. The Penguin Guide To Jazz On CD describes the meeting as “felicitous”, saying “There has probably never been a saxophone sound as finely blended as this.” So far so good, but in discussing the repertoire it claims that “some of the tunes are obscure” which is anything but accurate. Apart from Body And Soul and Mulligan’s well-known Line For Lyons, the quartet mostly perform a selection of contrafacts based on some of the best-known examples of the songbook repertoire that have inspired generations of jazz musicians: Standstill (My Heart Stood Still), Wintersong (These Foolish Things), Battle Hymn Of The Republican (Tea For Two) and Fall Out (Let’s Fall In Love).
Elsewhere, the Blues In Time is a themeless romp on jazz music’s oldest and most basic harmony with both men in fine, uninhibited form. Coleman Hawkins, of course, wrote the book on Body And Soul with his 1939 recording but Mulligan and Desmond are pretty special here too. Gerry caresses the melody with a melodic, almost rugged tenderness before Desmond takes off on one of his fragile flights of creative lyricism aided and abetted by Mulligan’s genius as an accompanist on the baritone.
In 2011 Essential Jazz Classics found four more titles from this session which they included on their Blues In Time reissue (EJC5507).
Ray Conniff: The Best Of Ray Conniff
The list of swing bands that Ray Conniff played with in the 30s and 40s is almost a who’s who of the genre: Bob Crosby, Harry James, Teddy Powell, Artie Shaw and Jerry Wald all featured him in their trombone sections. Ray was also part of Shaw’s arranging team that included Eddie Sauter, Buster Harding, Jimmy Mundy and Lennie Hayton. Tom Nolan’s Shaw biography highlights a performance in Kansas when the band was playing Conniff’s Just Foolin’ Around when the dancers stopped dancing and got as close to the bandstand as possible. Artie said “The band was blowing up a storm… everything just came together.”
Unable to accept the innovations of bop, Conniff left the music scene in 1950, returning in 1954 when Mitch Miller recruited him as chief arranger for Columbia Records. Two years later he introduced the orchestral sound he is most associated with on his ’S Wonderful album when he added voices humming wordlessly with the band – four female singers doubled with the trumpets and four males doubled with the trombones. He remained faithful to this formula over the years, which produced 28 albums that reached the American top 40. However, this reissue of well-performed easy-listening material is unlikely to interest the discerning readers of Jazz Journal.