Z.T.'s Blues

As Steve Leggett noted in his AllMusic review of Stanley Turrentine's Dearly Beloved, "although the hard bop sax/organ template (which later came to be called soul-jazz) seemed to fit Turrentine like a glove, his first sessions for the (Blue Note) label found him working with a more standard jazz format highlighted by a piano-led rhythm section."

On September 13, 1961, roughly three months after Stanley and his wife Shirley Scott recorded a pair of swinging bop sax/organ albums, Blue Note booked Stanley for another session with a piano-led rhythm section.   But rather than Horace Palan's bluesy Us Three combo, this rhythm section consisted of Tommy Flanagan on piano; Paul Chambers on bass; and Art Taylor on drums. 

Stanley had previously recorded with Chambers and Taylor on the Art Taylor Sextet album A.T.'s Delight (remember their cover of Coltrane's Syeeda's Song Flute?).  But the best attribute of the September  '61 session was the addition of guitarist Grant Green.  On the Turrentine album that eventually got released as Z.T.'s Blues, Stanley, Green and Flannagan swung with a deeper groove than heard on any previous Stanley Turrentine L.P.  Stanley and Green, in particular, trade off on solos ably supported by Flanagan's piano, while the Chambers/Taylor rhythm section holds everything together.

The entire album contains original Turrentine compositions - gone are the maudlin covers of Broadway show tunes that weighed down the previous LPs.  In career retrospective, it appears that Blue Note's early efforts to tie Turrentine down with traditional melodies and a laid-back blues rhythm section had done him a disservice.  This album, along with his pair of LPs with organist/wife Shirley Scott, are a better preview of what was to come than the more formal recordings with Horace Parlen's Us Three.

This 1961 session wasn't released as an album until 1985, probably to profit off of Turrentine's late-70s popularity.