Blue Flames

On February 9, 1964, The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, marking their first live appearance on American television.  The estimated 73 million viewers watching the broadcast included one 9-year-old boy on Long Island, New York (me).  My parents expressively disapproved of them and I wasn't quite sure what to make of them either, but I knew that somehow everything had just changed. The excitement on the school bus the next morning was uncontrollable, with kids running up and down the aisle and loudly shouting for no apparent reason.  Someone produced a Beatles wig they had managed to procure and put it on and the bus driver had to pull over and make the kid take off the wig to get the bus back under control.  That confirmed it - we were in a brave new world.

It was almost as exciting on February 25, when boxer Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in a Miami Beach bout and was crowned the heavyweight champion of the world. Clay had a flamboyant style almost as magnetic as The Beatles, and a week later Clay announced on March 6 that he was a Muslim and had changed his name to Muhammad Ali.  

The Great Alaskan earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North American history, and the second-most powerful in the world, struck on March 17, 1964 with a magnitude of 9.2, killing 125 people and inflicting massive damage to the city of Anchorage.  I didn't visit Anchorage until some 30 years later, but the damage was still apparent both geologically and architecturally.

Finally, although it was far, far less noticed, on March 31 the jazz organist Shirley Scott entered Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey with her husband, the tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, and recorded the album Blue Flames for Prestige records.   The session included Bob Cranshaw on bass and  Otis Finch on drums.

Blue Flames includes a pair of Scott compositions and the rarely-performed Sonny Rollins tune Grand Street, as well as a pair of jazz standards, Flamingo and Five Spot After Dark.  The LP was released that year and went through several pressings between 194 and 1972, and was later remastered and reissued by Prestige in 1988.  The CD version was released in 1995.  I believe it is now out of print, at least in the U.S., although it can be streamed on YouTube.

The album is a typical Scott-Turrentine collaboration - a set of grooving tracks with enough jazz licks to satisfy fans of that genre and enough soul and R&B to appeal to the popular market, although in 1964, if you weren't a British Invasion rock 'n' roll band or a Phil Spector girl group, the populace was unlikely to notice your music.

But even if the jazz world, the times they were a-changin'.  In January 1964, John Coltrane released the album Live at Birdland, documenting his transition to the more avant garde realms of jazz.  Miles Davis didn't record or release anything in 1964, but was in a transition of his own to his second Quintet (Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) and the eventual emergence of jazz fusion.  Eric Dolphy had recorded Out to Lunch! and Tony Scott (no relation to Shirley) recorded Music for Zen Meditation.  

With all that as context, soul-jazz and hard bop were becoming somewhat out of style.  The question to consider is were Stanley and Shirley just not up on the "new thing," or were they being deliberate old-school adherents to the music they knew and loved?