Impulse! Records, of course, is the legendary label on which John Coltrane recorded his ground-breaking music of the 1960s. It's "The House That Trane Built." Arguably, it's the world's greatest jazz label, especially to those attracted to the free-jazz scene of the 60s.
The organist Shirley Scott was signed to Impulse! in 1963 and recorded her album For Members Only that August. Her husband, the saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, didn't perform on that album. In fact, there were no saxes on the LP at all - Oliver Nelson's all-brass arrangements included trumpet and trombone, but no sax. Her Great Scott! LP, recorded in May 1964, was her second album on Impulse! and also featured Oliver Nelson brass arrangements, although two musicians, Bob Ashton and Romeo Penque, were listed as "reeds," without specifying if they were saxophones or clarinets or oboes or what.
Everybody Loves A Lover was Shirley's third LP for Impulse! and unlike the previous dates, was basically just a quarter with Turrentine on tenor sax, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Otis Finch on drums. This is the same lineup that recorded Blue Flames for Prestige in March 1964. No Oliver Nelson brass arrangements. The album was recorded in the familiar setting of Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio, and the inclusion of Turrentine in the session marks Stanley's Impulse! debut.
However, Everybody Loves A Lover has never been released on CD, so it's difficult to find. Fortunately, the first three tracks of the album were subsequently included as bonus tracks on the CD version of Turrentine's 1967 album, Let It Go, along with one track, Time After Time, recorded during the session but not included on Everybody Loves A Lover. However, the remainder of the tracks are not on Spotify and the only songs I can find on YouTube are the two closing tracks, her version of Stanley's tribute Shirley and the Bob Hammer/Bob Thiele composition, Blue Bongo. The titular track, a cover of a Doris Day tune, and Scott's own Little Miss Know It All appear to exist only in the world of vinyl.
Under Bob Thiele's direction, Impulse! was known primarily for free jazz and the avant garde, so it is somewhat surprising to find Scott on the adventurous label. However, one of Impulse's early successes was Oliver Nelson's 1961 The Blues and the Abstract Truth, and Nelson played an important role in the label's early years before relocating to Los Angeles to arrange for film and television. Nelson's arrangements on Scott's first two Impulse! albums suggest that she most likely was one on Nelson's early projects, and she later went on to record another half-dozen albums for Impulse! in 1965 and 1967.
Musically, Everybody Loves A Lover presents the same organ-and-tenor soul-jazz sound of her Prestige albums. Both the Impulse! and the Prestige albums were recorded in the same studio (Van Gelder) with the same engineer (Van Gelder) and with largely the same musicians, so consistency should not be a surprise. Unlike, say, Coltrane, they weren't looking for a new way to produce a new sound to express new feelings, but instead were content to groove in the funk and the soul of the music that they so clearly loved.
It's a shame that Shirley's early Impulse! albums are so hard to find. Her 1967 Impulse LP, Girl Talk, can be streamed on Spotify, but that's about it. Reissue them, Impulse! Free Shirley Scott!
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