A Chip Off The Old Block

After the February 1963 Jimmy Smith and Never Let Me Go sessions, Stanley Turrentine went and did whatever it was that jazz musicians did in the 60s with their summer vacations. I'm picturing lots of dates at the Village Vanguard and the Village Gate, Birdland, Minton's, The Five Spot, and elsewhere.  Possibly a tour or two.  Maybe some European dates.  But he didn't return to the studio until that October.

Meanwhile the Birmingham campaign against racial segregation kicked off in April 1963 with a sit-in demonstration, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested and issued his Letter from Birmingham Jail. On June 11, Governor George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama to protest integration before finally stepping aside and allowing two black students to enroll.  On the same day, in Viet Nam, the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire to protest the oppression of Buddhists by the Diệm administration, and the next day, June 12, civil rights activist Medgar Evans was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi.  Vietnam Special Forces loyal to the brother of President Diệm vandalized Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam in August, arresting thousands and leaving hundreds dead. In the wake of the raids, the Kennedy administration ordered the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to explore alternative leadership in the country, opening the way towards an eventual coup against Diệm.  On August 28, Reverend King delivered his I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of at least 250,000 during the March on Washington, the single largest protest in American history at that time.  Tragically, just two weeks later, the "four little girls" are killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.  On October 8, Sam Cooke and his band were arrested after trying to register at a "whites only" motel in Louisiana.

Against all this background, Turrentine and his wife, the organist Shirley Scott, returned to Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on October 14, 1963 to record a handful of tunes associated with the Count Basie Orchestra.  They were joined at the session by trumpeter Blue Mitchell, trombonist Tom McIntosh, baritone sax Charles Davis, bassist Earl May, and drummer Ben Dixon.  Not unlike some previous sessions, the set was initially rejected by Blue Note for reasons unknown.

The septet pared itself down to a quintet to include Stanley and Mitchell as the only horns and replacing drummer Ben Dixon with longtime Turrentine drummer Al Harewood.  On October 21, they re-recorded the tunes from the previous session plus a handful more, resulting in the LP, A Chip Off the Old Block.  Versions of One O'clock Jump and Cherry Point from the earlier septet session were eventually included in the CD version of the album and on subsequent Blue Note compilations and box sets.  

Personally, I don't care much for the album.  The Basie material put the band squarely in the big band/dance music realm, not the soul jazz that Turrentine and Jimmy Scott were separately pioneering, and it sounds dated today.  The solos, while certainly competent, didn't have quite that soulful punch that characterized Stanley's other work of this period. Completists may want this recording for their collection, and historians may appreciate Turrentine paying homage to a black bandleader during an especially intense period of the civil-rights movement, but otherwise, this one is pretty ignorable, in my humble opinion.