Stanley Meets Ike Quebec

One of the pleasures of listening to jazz music is that if you listen long and hard enough, you'll discover that eventually everybody seemingly plays with everyone else at some point or another.

Another case in point: On January 20, 1962, not three weeks after the Jan. 2 studio session with Les McCann, Blue Note arranged for Stanley Turrentine to perform in a studio session with Ike Quebec.  The tracks languished for decades in Blue Notes vaults, but were eventually released in 1981 as Congo Lament, and then again in 1987 as Easy Living.

So who was Ike Quebec?  Not many people know - I didn't before settling down to write this.  Ike was from an older generation of jazz musicians - Stanley was only 27 years old during the 1962 session but Ike was already 43.  Ike had begun his career in the big band era of the 1940s, performing with Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, and Cab Calloway. Due to struggles with heroin addiction and the fading popularity of big bands, Ike recorded only sporadically during the 1950s.  However, he kept abreast of new developments in jazz and his later playing incorporated elements of hard bop, bossa nova, and soul jazz.

In 1959, Ike began a comeback with a series of albums on Blue Note.  Alfred Lion was reportedly fond of Ike's music, but was unsure how audiences would respond to the saxophonist after a decade of low visibility.  In the mid-to-late 1950s, Blue Note issued a series of Quebec singles for the juke box market.  Audiences responded well, leading to a number of well-received albums. The comeback was short-lived, however, as Ike died in January 1963 from lung cancer.

Ike Quebec was the lead tenor on the album, and as he had a bluesy style not unlike Stanley's, it's a bit difficult to guess which solo is by which performer.  My best guess is that following the usual convention, the first tenor solo would be Quebec and the second would be Stanley. On Que's Pills, a Turrentine composition, my guess is that after the ensemble playing, the first solo starting at the 0:30 mark is Ike, and Stanley jumps in at 2:48 after the trombone solo.  

In addition to Ike and Stanley, the session included Bennie Green on trombone, Sonny Clark on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Art Blakey on drums.  It was the first and only time Stanley performed with either Green or Hinton. Milt, of course, was a legend of the big band era and is considered the Dean of jazz bass players, having played extensively with Cab Calloway, as well as Count Basie and Louie Armstrong, as well as innumerable mainstream artists from Jackie Gleason to Frank Sinatra. From the mid-1950s through the early 70s, he contributed to thousands of jazz and popular records as well as hundreds of jingles and film soundtracks. He would regularly play three studio sessions per day, requiring him to own multiple basses that he hired assistants to transport from one studio to the next.

Sonny Clark was previously on Stanley's Stan "The Man" Turrentine LP and would play with Turrentine again later that year on the Jubilee Shout LP.   Stanley had performed with Art Blakey before during his Max Roach years and during a 1960 date for Dizzy Reece; the Ike Quebec set represents the last time the two would play together, although they both went on to have productive and prolific careers. 

And that's really all there is to say about the album; it's actually more than I had thought I could say when I started.  The LP can be considered an interesting glimpse into Ike's short lived jazz career, or as a historical document of Stanley's lone performance with Ike and Milt.  Beyond that, there's nothing much here musically that hasn't been said before.