The Kenny Burrell album Freedom contains three different sessions by two different bands.
The first sessions were recorded in March and April of 1963 and in addition to Burrell, include Seldon Powell on sax, Hank Jones on keyboards, Milt Hinton on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums.
The other five tracks were recorded on October 22, 1964 and include Herbie Hancock on piano, Ben Tucker on bass, Bill English on drums, and Ray Barretto on congas. The sax player on the second date was Stanley Turrentine, fresh off his performance with the Shirley Scott Quartet the month before.
The October 1964 tracks were Freedom, G Minor Bash, Lonesome Road, K Twist, and Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere. Turrentine doesn't perform on that last track.
The album wasn't released until 1979, and then in Japan only at that. It wasn't released in the U.S. until 2011, and it's never been issued in CD or other digital format I find this unusual given the popularity of Turrentine, Kenny Burrell, and Herbie Hancock. I don't hear anything "substandard" in the tracks that would have prevented them from being released sooner or more broadly.
The titular track was included in Blue Note's 2005 Kenny Burrell compilation called The Artist Selects and in a 2017 Universal Music Group compilation called Soul Jazz. The track Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere was included in The Artist Selects compilation and 1995's The Best of Kenny Burrell - The Blue Note Years.
Fortunately, all of the tracks can be streamed on YouTube, but you have to search for them by individual song titles.
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!
After the June 3, 1964 In Memory Of session, three full months passed before Stanley Turrentine returned to the studio again.
Three months was an eternity in 1964. On June 21, three civil rights workers were abducted and murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by local members of the Ku Klux Klan with local law enforcement officials involved in the conspiracy. Their bodies were not found until August 4. The Senate had to overcome a filibuster by Southern segregations to pass the Civil Rights Act, but on July 2, President Johnson signed it into law, officially abolishing racial segregation in the United States.
The first of the Long Hot Summers occurred in 1964, including six days of race riots in Harlem, prompted by the shooting of a teenager. Several days of Philadelphia riots in late August led to 341 injuries and 774 arrests.
On June 27, 1964, Eric Dolphy traveled to Berlin to play with a trio led by Karl Berger. He was apparently seriously ill when he arrived, and during the first concert was barely able to play. He was hospitalized that night, but his condition worsened. On June 29, Dolphy died after falling into a diabetic coma. While certain details of his death are still disputed, it is largely accepted that he fell into a coma caused by undiagnosed diabetes. His album Out To Lunch was released posthumously that August.
In June 1964, the John Coltrane Quartet (Trane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones) released the album Crescent. Trumpeter Lee Morgan released the album Search For the New Land in July.
But musically, 1964 was all about The Beatles. In April, they held the top 5 positions in the Billboard Top 40, an unprecedented achievement. The top 5 songs in America that month were: Can't Buy Me Love, Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me..
It is against this background that Turrentine returned to Van Gelder Studio on September 4, 1964. He was accompanied by McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones of the John Coltrane Quartet and trumpeter Lee Morgan. Bob Cranshaw was on bass and percussionist Ray Barretto added occasional congas. They recorded five tracks, including one Turrentine composition, one Lee Morgan number, and a cover of The Beatles' Can't Buy Me Love.
I can't stand the first 1:10 minutes of their version of Can't Buy Me Love. It's such an incredible waste of the extreme talent in that lineup. It sounds like a supermarket Muzak cover of the tune, or some insipid mass-market-friendly version produced for television. But then, surprisingly, they throw away the melody and launch into some inspired hard-bop/post-bop jamming worthy of the performers, before returning to that wretched opening theme. It's a worthwhile listen if you can ignore the bookends on either end of the track.
Turrentine's composition, Shirley, obviously named for his wife, the organist Shirley Scott (she included the song on her 1964 album Everybody Loves A Lover), is more like it. Ray Barretto opens the track with a conga line over which Tyner soon lays a hint of melody. Turrentine and Morgan then play the melody in unison, before Turrentine takes off on a lengthy solo, the first of many fine individual performances. His solo is followed by Morgan, and then by McCoy with some sparkling piano lines before the theme is restated to wrap up the track.
For whatever reasons, the tracks were not released until 1980, when Blue Note issued the Mr. Natural LP. Considering the fame and the reputation of the performers involved, not only Turrentine, but also Morgan, Tyner and Jones, it's surprising that it was kept under wraps for so long. And what's the point of recording a novelty jazz version of Can't Buy Me Love if it isn't released, at least as a single, while the song was still in the Top 40? The album is near impossible to find nowadays, but the tracks have been included in various Turentine and Blue Note box sets.
Turrentine continued to record in 1964, but this was the last session under his name until April 1965.
Between the time of the March 31, 1994 Blue Flames session and June 3, the next time Stanley Turrentine recorded in the studio, Stanley turned 30 years old (his birthday was April 5). On April 12, Malcolm X delivered his "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech in Detroit, nd the next day, Sidney Poitier became the first African-American to win a Best Actor Academy Award for Lilies of the Field.
On May 2, the first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War occurred in New York and San Francisco, with smaller marches in Boston, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin. On the 12th of May, 12 men publicly burned their draft cards in New York; the first such act of resistance to the war.
On June 3, Turrentine returned once again to Van Gelder Studio with Blue Mitchell (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Otis Finch (drums), and Mickey Roker (congas). The session also included pianist Herbie Hancock, with whom Stanley had previously recorded an unreleased session back on August 3, 1962. Coincidentally and for reasons unknown, the 1964 session with Hancock was also not released at the time, but was later released in 1979 as the album In Memory Of. That LP is also now out of print, but the tracks are available as part of the 2011 box set Blue Note Stanley Turrentine/Sextet Session.
I 'm not sure why the tracks weren't released at the time - to my ears, they sound like a fine session. In fact, although I noted yesterday that the 1964 Stanley Turrentine/Shirley Scott soul-jazz sound was starting to sound a little dated and out of step for the time, the June 3 session contains some of the most forward-sounding tracks I've heard from Turrentine up to that point. The tracks were all covers, including a Randy Wesson (In Memory Of) and a Wes Montgomery cover (Fried Pies), as well as a Bill Lee (father of Spike) tune and the usual standards and show tunes.
Fried Pies starts off sounding almost like an outtake from Miles' Kind of Blue album, and in short sections near the beginning and end, Stanley plays some gospel-influenced blues over a sparse, minimal background. If he only added some hand-clapping, it would have sounded like Mingus' Better Get Hit In You Soul. The song eventually turns into a more straight-forward hard-bop jam, but clearly shows that Stanley was listening to new music beyond the repertoire he was putting on vinyl. Herbie Hancock provides some tasty solos on the album, but you have to really listen for them - it sounds as if he were well aware that he was a sideman on this gig and mostly stays in the rhythm section.
There's a possibility that the session wasn't released at the time because Alfred Lion thought it was too forward-sounding for the Stanley Turrentine audience, and Lion didn't want to mix and match the product Blue Note was offering and confuse the public.
As noted yesterday, Miles Davis didn't record or release anything in 1964, although he was in a transition to his second Quintet, which included Herbie Hancock. Two weeks after Stanley's June 3 session, Hancock and the rest of the rhythm section of the future Quintet (Ron Carter, bass and Tony Williams, drums) returned to Van Gelder Studio with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and recorded the classic Hancock album Empyrean Isles, notable for including the track Cantaloupe Island, one of Herbie's most loved compositions. AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that, on the album, "Hancock pushes at the borders of hard bop, finding a brilliantly evocative balance between traditional bop, soul-injected grooves, and experimental, post-modal jazz."
Not that I find anything wrong with Stanley Turrentine's hard bop/soul-jazz approach - I initiated this whole review of his discography because I so enjoy that hard bop/soul-jazz sound - but Herbie was anticipating the new directions jazz would take in the 1960s, while Stanley, although aware of the new thing, was at this point being required to stay in his lane.
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?
Stanley Turrentine's last recording session of 1963 was technically the second, pared-down session for A Chip Off the Old Block, but his penultimate recording was an October 15 date for his wife, the organist Shirley Scott, that produced the album Soul Shoutin'. Earl May joined them on bass and Grassella Oliphant on drums.
The highlights of the album are probably the two Turrentine compositions,, the titular Soul Shoutin' and Deep Down Soul.
Shirley had her own Hammond B-3 style that was more rooted in gospel than Jimmy Smith's more percussive, soul-jazz style, but the level of emotional intensity and soulfulness in her playing, and her near-intuitive rapport with her husband on tenor sax, make this recording no less affecting than any of Stanley's work with Smith.
I could go on, but just listen to the two of them slow-burn together on Deep Down Soul and you'll understand better than my words can ever explain.
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.
In between the two sessions that resulted in Never Let Me Go, Stanley Turrentine performed on the classic Jimmy Smith album, Prayer Meetin', on February 8, 1963.
Jimmy Smith is a genius, an American treasure. He pretty much invented his way of playing the Hammond B-3 organ, striking single notes like on a piano rather than playing chords like a church organist. Sometimes he'd percussively play one note over and over just to explore the sound on electronic organ, allowing the organ to sustain a note long enough that it would create overtones with the next key hit. Brian Eno once called Jimi Hendrix the first true electronic musician, because he listened to and cared about how his innovative techniques on electric guitar sounded. I would argue that based on Eno's criteria, Jimmy Smith was really the first electronic musician.
Many people feel that Smith's best records were those that he recorded for Blue Note, and that his best Blue Note records were the ones he did with Stanley Turrentine. I would not argue with that proposition, but would add that Prayer Meetin' might be the best of his Blue Note Turrentine collaborations.
The album contains three original Smith compositions and covers of jazz and R&B standards, including Ivory Joe Hunter's I Almost Lost My Mind.
I Almost Lost My Mind starts off as a slow, slightly woozy, traditional blues number. Turrentine takes the first solo, and delivers a slow-burner powerhouse performance of soulful restraint with occasional, tasteful outbursts. Smith follows with as definitive an example of soul-jazz organ as you're likely to hear. To borrow from one of the reviews of Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue, if you need to know "the Jimmy Smith sound," here it is. The third solo is by guitarist Quentin Warren, who works in a quote of Ellington's Things Ain't What They Used To Be and raises the question of why we don't hear more of Quentin Warren - Jimmy Smith pretty much kept Warren for himself for almost a decade. The theme of the song is then repeated, and Stanley gets in a few more licks as the track fades out.
This was February 8, 1963. Stanley would record the second session for Never Let Me Go the next week.
Between the January 8 session with Kenny Burrell and the January 10 session with Shirley Scott, 1963 was starting out as a pretty good year for Stanley Turrentine, but outside of the studio, ominous clouds were starting to gather over the geopolitical landscape. On January 2, the Viet Cong won their first major victory in Viet Nam at the Battle of Ap Bac, and on January 14, George Wallace became the governor of Alabama, famously proclaiming at his inaugural speech, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"
On January 18, the Stanley Turrentine Quartet - Stanley, Shirley Scott (organ), Sam Jones (bass), and Clarence Johnston (drums) - returned to the Van Gelder Studio. They recorded four tracks, Without A Song, Never Let Me Go, Major's Minor, and They Can't Take That Away From Me, but for reasons unknown, the session was initially rejected by Blue Note. They Can't Take That Away From Me was eventually included on Turrentine's subsequent LP, Never Let Me Go, along with the titular track.
After that gig, Clemson University accepted its first black student on January 28 in South Carolina, the last U.S. state to hold out against desegregation. On February 8, the Kennedy Administration made travel and financial and commercial transactions with Cuba illegal. On February 11, The Beatles recorded their debut album Please Please Me in a single day at the Abbey Road Studios in London. Times were changing.
On February 13, Stanley and Shirley returned to Van Gelder Studio to record some new tracks. The lineup this time included Major Holley (bass) and Ray Barretto (congas) from the Kenny Burrell Midnight Blue session the previous month, perhaps to recapture some of the magic of that previous recording. Stanley's long-time drummer, Al Harewood, was also in the lineup. The quintet re-recorded Without A Song and Major's Minor from the ill-fated January 18 session, along with Sara's Dance, a Turrentine composition, and the usual assortment of popular show tunes and standards.
If the goal was to recapture some of the soul-jazz magic of the Midnight Blue session, it worked. The session, along with They Can't Take That Away From Me and Never Let Me Go from the January session, was eventually released in December 1963 by Blue Note as the album, Never Let Me Go.
Thom Jurek's AllMusic review gives an almost track-by-track rundown of the LP:
The set opens with a stomping version of Lloyd Price's Trouble, with Scott taking the early solo while driving the groove. Turrentine burns the edges of the tune and Barretto punches up the middle with decorative flourishes and fills. This is followed by the a deeply moving read of God Bless the Child, with Turrentine playing in his smokiest, silkiest, Ben Webster-inflected tone. Scott's solo, by contrast, is pure blues. The coolest tune on the set is Major's Minor, written by Stanley and Shirley. With its seeming quotations from So What? and Chim Chim Cherie in the foreground, it gives way to a completely funky blues, which is a bit of a surprise. But the easy swing and in-the-pocket saxophone soloing punctuated by fat, grooved-out chords by Scott make it the gem it is. The alternate rhythm section of Jones and Johnston appear on the title track. This is one of those grand ballads where the organ acts as the testifying pulpit from which to speak, and Turrentine not only speaks, he weeps and whispers and wails here. All the while his rhythm section layers washes of percussion and muted changes in ever-present but subtle shades of blue. It's a stunner.
On January 10, 1963, a mere 10 days after performing on Kenny Burrell's classic Midnight Blue, Stanley Turrentine returned to the Van Gelder Studio with his wife, the organist Shirley Scott, to record her LP, The Soul Is Willing. Even though it was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder and recorded at his Englewood Cliffs, NJ studio, the album was released on the Prestige label, not by Blue Note.
In addition to Stanley (tenor sax) and Shirley (Hammond B-3), Major Holley was on bass and Grassella Oliphant was the drummer.
The album includes two original Turrentine compositions, the titular track and I Feel All Right. The rest of the tracks are the usual combination of standards and popular show tunes.
Overall, the album is a pretty swinging affair, with Shirley and Stanley really working the grooves. While falling somewhat short of the "masterpiece" level, it's probably as good an example of the sax/organ soul-jazz sound as anything. If you like this kind of thing, you'll probably love this album. If you're not yet a fan, this album probably won't convince you.
Now it's 1963. Stanley Turrentine, 28 years old, has been a member of Earl Bostic's big band, served time in the U.S. Army, and then played with the Max Roach Quintet for a year. Starting in April 1960, he became a session player for the Blue Note label, recording under his own name and with various other Blue Note stars. He married the organist Shirley Scott in 1960 and recorded several albums with her.
For some reason, things slowed down for Stanley in 1962. While he performed on 10 to 12 albums during each of 1960 and 1961, he only performed on four sets in all of 1962, including one that was rejected by Blue Note.
Things picked up again in 1963. On January 8 of that year, he entered Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey to perform on guitarist Kenny Burrell's terrific album, Midnight Blue.
The album is probably Burrell's best-known work for Blue Note and is widely considered a jazz guitar masterpiece. Jazz Improv magazine wrote, "If you need to know 'the Blue Note sound,' here it is." In 2005, NPR included the album in its "Basic Jazz Library," describing it as "one of the great jazzy blues records." The album has been in constant release since it first dropped, being re-issued countless times by Blue Note in the U.S. and abroad.
In addition to Stanley on tenor sax, Burrell is backed by bassist Major Holley, drummer Bill English, and Ray Barretto on conga. The absence of piano lends a very "open," uncluttered sound to the session, which holds up remarkably well today for a 1963 recording.
The whle album is great and I couldn't select one single to post, so that whole LP is up above. The track list is as follows:
Chitlins con Carne (5:30)
Mule (6:56)
Soul Lament (2:43)
Midnight Blue (4:02)
Wavy Gravy (5:47)
Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You (4:25)
Saturday Night Blues (6:16)
Kenny's Sound (4:43) (Bonus track on CD)
K Twist (3:36) (Bonus track on CD)
Several of the tracks have since become jazz and blues standards, such as Wavy Gravy and Chitlins Con Carne, which has been covered by Stevie Ray Vaughn among others. Both tracks were released by Blue Note as 45-rpm singles.
Hugh Romney Jr., peace activist, professional hippy, and inspiration for a Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor, reportedly got his name "Wavy Gravy" from blues guitarist B.B. King at the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival, two weeks after the Woodstock festival. According to legend, Romney was lying onstage, exhausted, when it was announced that B.B. King was going to play. Romney began to get up, and felt a hand on his shoulder. It was King, who asked, "Are you Wavy Gravy?" (meaning "Are you high?") to which Romney replied "Yes."
"It's OK; I can work around you," King replied and then proceeded to jam with Johnny Winter for hours. Romney said he considered this a mystical event, and assumed Wavy Gravy as his legal name.
It's not clear from the story, but Wavy Gravy was one of the classic tracks and a single from Midnight Blue. If King didn't also know the expression from jazzman slang, the blues guitarist was undoubtedly familiar with Burrell's track. So, indirectly, Wavy Gravy actually got his name from Kenny Burrell via B.B. King. It's ironic that Stanley Turrentine performed on two tracks named for iconic figures from the 1969 Woodstock festival - Chip Monck on Les McCann Ltd. in New York (1961) and Wavy Gravy on Midnight Blue (1963).
The pairing of Burrell's bluesy-cool guitar and Turrentine's warm tenor worked very well, and the two recorded together again many times. Burrell appeared on at least eight subsequent Turrentine LPs, and Stanley later appeared on Burrell's Freedom LP. In addition, they played together on sets for Donald Byrd and Jimmy Smith.
It would be tempting to say that after a slow 1962, Stanley's career really took off after this recording. While that may be technically true, the reasons for his success probably had as much to do with the Turrentine sound as his reputation from Midnight Blue.
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. You'll also learn that pianist Herbie Hancock, the Zelig of jazz, managed to somehow be in the room during every milestone session and has played with virtually everyone.
Case in point: On August 3, 1962, seven months after the Ike Quebec session, Stanley Turrentine laid down some tracks at Van Gelder Studio with his brother Tommy on trumpet, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Butch Warren on bass, and Roger Humphries on drums. The pianist for this session was Herbie Hancock,
What did it sound like? Well, no one knows because for reasons equally unknown, the tracks were rejected by Blue Note. The music has been lost to the foggy mists of time.
Two months later, the ensemble returned to the studio and re-recorded the tracks, this time without that hack Herbie Hancock on piano (just kidding - that's a joke, son!). Sonny Clark filled in for Herbie on piano and Stanley's long-time drummer, Al Harewood, filled in on drums. The session was ultimately released in 1978 as part of the Jubilee Shouts album, along with some 1961 tracks that were later separately released as the Comin' Your Way LP. The 1962 session was later individually released under the title Jubilee Shout!!! (additional exclamation marks are as per the title).
Jubilee Shouts, then, was actually two different early '60s Turrentine sessions with two different line-ups, recorded over a year apart. Both session were initially rejected by Blue Note for reasons unknown, re-recorded shortly later, and still not released until 1978.
For the record, Jubilee Shout!!! contains three Stanley Turrentine compositions, including one titled Brother Tom ostensibly for his brother Tommy, one Tommy T. composition (You Said It), and a pair of show-tune covers. Nothing on Jubilee Shout!!! nor the earlier Comin' Your Way LP is exactly ground-breaking, but there's nothing inherently wrong with either set to my ears. I have absolutely no idea why the sessions had such a rocky road to release.
Sonny Clark, the pianist on this session, passed away in January 1963 at the age of 32, three months after recording Jubilee Shout!!!, which turned out be his last recording. The official cause of death was listed as a heart attack, but the more likely cause was probably a heroin overdose.
Anyway, for what it's worth, Stanley successfully recorded with Herbie Hancock at least eight different subsequent times, including dates with both Stanley- and Herbie-led combos, and with Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd.
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.
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.
Case in point: in December 1961 and January 1962, Stanley's Turrentine's path crossed that of pianist and singer Les McCann. McCann had gotten his start by winning a Navy singing contest, leading to an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Although he rose to fame in the late 1960s when he recorded the song Compared To What? protesting the Viet Nam War, his main career began in the early 1960s as a pianist with his trio, the Les McCann Ltd., for the Pacific Jazz label. One of those early records, Les McCann Ltd. in New York, featured trumpeter Blue Mitchel and the tenor saxophones of Frank Haynes and Stanley Turrentine.
The Les McCann Ltd. in New York album was recorded live at The Village Gate on December 28, 1961 and releaseed on McCann's PAcific Jazz label. The pairing of McCann and Turrentine worked so well that they followed up the gig with a studio session for Blue Note Records at Van Gelder Studio on January 2, 1962, resulting in Turrentine's LP, That's Where It's At.
The Village Gate was a legendary nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village that operated between 1958 and 1994. It was one of the "go to" spots for hearing jazz and up-and-coming comedians, as well as occasional folk and rock music. Innumerable live albums have been recorded there. I know that I was there for some shows in the mid-1970s, but for the life of me, I can't recall who I saw there (probably Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but I can't recall for sure who I saw where some 40 years ago). Now, a CVS store occupies the once-storied performance space.
160 Bleeker Street in June 2019
Les McCann Ltd. in New York opens with the McCann composition Chip Monck, named for the man who would eventually go on to become the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 (it's Monck who requests the fans to "stay off the towers" and warns about the brown acid in the Woodstock movie). Monck began working at The Village Gate in 1959, lighting comedians and jazz and folk artists, and living under the club in the basement apartment where Bob Dylan eventually wrote A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on Monck's IBM Selectric typewriter. Apparently, the lighting guy at the Gate impressed McCann enough that he named the opening song of his New York gig for him.
The live, almost-but-not-quite New Years Eve atmosphere of the In New York set obviously energized the performers, and you can hear Mitchell, Haynes and Turrentine all spur one another on to ever greater heights, even while being driven by the boogie-woogie piano playing of Les McCann. It sounds at times like all hell's about to break loose, like in some of the best Charles Mingus songs of this period, before they settle into a bluesy semblance of order.
The recording also offers the rare chance to hear Frank Haynes. Haynes moved to New York in 1959 and performed at several jazz clubs, including Birdland, the Five Spot, the Village Vanguard, and the Village Gate. In addition to Les McCann, he recorded with Kenny Dorham, Walter Bishop, T-Bone Walker, Grant Green and Randy Weston, and even cut an album of his own, Frankly Speaking, that never got released. Haynes died at the age of 37 in 1965, and his memorial service was attended by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and others.
For the studio session, Turrentine was the lone horn, backed by McCann on piano, Herbie Lewis of Les McCann Ltd. on bass, and Otis Finch of the Shirley Scott Trio on drums. Typically, a studio session doesn't have the fire and excitement of a live set, but the quartet really cooks on That's Where It's At. To my ears, these sessions, both live and in studio, represent a further progression of the "opening up" of Turrentine's sound. McCann was as much an R&B as a jazz musician, and it seems his presence goaded Stanley into playing more soulfully and with more excitement than heard before. On That's Where It's At, Stanley swings hard and seems to really be pouring himself into every note, fully marking the transition from his earlier hard-bop style to soul-jazz. All of the compositions of the album were written either by McCann or Turrentine - there are no corny show-tune covers to endure. It's easily the most exciting Turrentine record yet in his discography.
As well as the Stanley/LEs pairing went, it's unfortunate that their paths went different ways and they didn't play together very much after these sessions. Stanley contributed a short bit titled Unidentified Blues to a medley of tunes that appeared on McCann's 1967 LP, Les Is More, and then years later, LEs performed on Stanley's 1984 LP, Straight Ahead, and that was it. The witty and inventive saxophonist Eddie Harris turned out to be an excellent foil for Les in the 70s, while Stanley remained a fixture in first the Blue Note and then later the CTI roster of performers. It would, however, have been interesting to hear what would have happened if the two had collaborated some more.
The next Stanley Turrentine session after the Tommy Flannagan/Grant Green set that produced Z.T.'s Blues was a November 1961 set by Shirley Scott (aka Mrs. Stanley Turrentine).
The previous Stanley-and-Shirley session (Hip Soul) featured Herbie Lewis on bass and Roy Brooks on drums. This second session, released as Hip Twist, featured George Tucker on bass and Otis Finch on drums.
The album included two original composition by Scott (Rippin' an' Runnin' and Violent Blues) and one by Turrentine (the titular Hip Twist) in addition to the usual covers and standards, including At Last, the song made famous by Etta James).
The session really brought out the smoky best in Stanley's playing, and gave the underappreciated Shirley a chance to really show her stuff off. As mentioned here before, the soul-jazz combo of Hammond organ and tenor sax really served Turrentine well, and this is a prime example of some his best work of the period.
The Hip Twist LP was released in 1962, and Blue Note also released a 45-rpm single of the title track, with a Part 1 and Part 2 on the two sides. In 2017, Groove Yard Records released Hip Twist on CD along with the previous Hip Soul, and in March 2020, the EG Jazz label released Hip Soul and Hip Twist as one CD, which can be streamed now on Spotify and SoundCloud.
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.
As it turned out, On the Spur of the Moment was the last recording by the joint Stanley Turrentine/Horace Parlan Quintet. He sat in with Turrentine one more time, in 1971, for Stanley's CTI recording Salt Song. Horace went on to have a fine career of his own and in 1973, he moved to Copenhagen, later settling in a small village in southern Zealand. His later work included a series of duos steeped in gospel music with the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp.
In June 1961, Stanley recorded a pair of albums with his wife, the organist Shirley Scott (I may have forgotten to mention that Stanley married Shirley sometime in 1960). They were a little coy about recording together, as on the Shirley Scott album, Hip Soul, Stanley performed under the name "Stan Turner," and on the Stanley Turrentine album, Dearly Beloved, Shirley performed under the name "Little Miss Colt." There must have been a memo from Blue Note HR or something about married couples performing together.
In any event, on June 2, 1961, Stanley and Shirley recorded the album Hip Soul under Shirley's name, with Herbie Lewis on bass and Roy Brooks on drums. A week later (June 8), they recorded the album Dearly Beloved as the Stanley Turrentine Trio, featuring Brooks on drums (if Jimmy Smith taught us anything, it's that a jazz organist doesn't necessarily need a bass player). Both sets were recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in his Englewood Cliffs studio.
Shirley's Hip Soul included a cover of Stanley's Time, which was featured on the Up At Minton's live album by the Stanley Turrentine Quartet, as well as another Turrentine composition, the titular Hip Soul, and a cover of John Coltrane's Trane's Blues. Stanley's Dearly Beloved included one original composition, Wee Hour Theme; the rest of both albums were covers of mostly show tunes, as was the style back then.
Steve Legget's review of Dearly Beloved for AllMusic.com neatly puts the recording into biographical perspective:
Stanley Turrentine was fresh from his brilliant playing on Hammond B-3 maestro Jimmy Smith's Midnight Special and Back at the Chicken Shack sessions when he officially signed with Blue Note Records in 1960, but 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 label found him working with a more standard jazz format highlighted by a piano-led rhythm section. On Dearly Beloved, though, paired with his eventual wife, Shirley Scott, on the B-3 and the alert and sensitive drumming of Roy Brooks, Turrentine found the perfect pocket for his big, soulful, and slightly raw and bluesy sax tone, and for those only familiar with his later pop crossover recordings with CTI Records, it's a pretty revelatory set. Tracked at a June 8, 1961 session (and released on LP a year later in 1962), Dearly Beloved features a lightly funky and midtempo take on Ary Barroso's Baia and a gorgeous and moving version of Turrentine's own ballad composition, Wee Hour Theme, the perfect example of how jazz is never more than a thought away from being the blues. Scott and Turrentine ended up working together on some 15 albums for the Blue Note, Atlantic, Prestige, and Impulse labels before the decade ended, but this one, for all practical purposes, got the ball rolling on their creative collaborations, and it remains one of Turrentine's finest Blue Note outings.
Not only due to "equal time," but because it's significant in its own right, here's Stewart Mason's AllMusic review of Hip Soul:
In all but name, 1961's Hip Soul is a duet album between organist Shirley Scott and her new husband, Stanley Turrentine (playing under the name Stan Turner to avoid contract issues), whose excellent bop tenor dominates the entire album to the extent that sometimes Scott seems like a sideman on her own date. However, when she lets off with a characteristically joyous solo like the one at the heart of the standard By Myself, Scott's immense charms are obvious. An underappreciated master of the Hammond organ, Scott is one of the few players of her generation who declined to simply ape Jimmy McGriff, Jimmy Smith, or Jack McDuff (although she does cop to a clear Smith influence on the funky walking groove of the title track) in favor of creating her own distinctive sound. Highlights on this session include Turrentine's Brubeck-influenced Stanley's Time (with some of the couple's fiercest playing) and a meditative 11-minute take on Harold Arlen's ballad Out of This World that sounds like they'd been listening intently to Kind of Blue.
If you haven't figured it out by now, the Stanley Turrentine Quintet and the Horace Parlan Quintet are the same identical band. Both bands consist of Horace Parlan on piano, Stanley Turrentine on tenor sax, Tommy Turrentine on trumpet; George Tucker on bass, and Al Harewood on drums. Stanley and Horace alternate as bandleaders on successive recordings.
Between June 1960 and February 1961, the band had recorded Look Out! as the Stanley Turrentine Quartet (without brother Tommy), Speakin' My Piece as the Horace Parlan Quintet, Comin' Your Way as the Stanley Turrentine Quartet, and Up At Minton's as the Stanley Turrentine Quintet (with the substitution of Grant Green on guitar for Tommy).
These are essentially the same musicians playing in the same studio for the same label within a 9-month frame of time, so it all sounds pretty consistently similar. There is really no fundamental difference between the Hoarace Parlan Quintet and the Stanley Turrentine Quintet of the early 60s, except for who's name is on the front cover. The downside is that most discographies of Stanley Turrentine are incomplete because they don't list the Horace Parlan albums, and most discographies of Horace Parlan are likewise incomplete.
On March 18, 1961, less than a month after the Minton's date, the musicians returned to Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and recorded On the Spur of the Moment as The Horace Parlan Quintet. The album is another fine effort by rhe band(s) and this time includes more original material and contemporary jazz covers (there are two Booker Ervin compositions) than the show tunes that dominated the previous albums. But that's not as big as a difference as you might expect - the band just used the titular melody, whether show tune or jazz cover, as a jumping-off point for improvisation and hard bop jamming.
Although some of the Turrentine brothers solos get quite exciting at times, overall, the album is a restrained and orderly affair. Hey, it's 1961, what did you expect? Free jazz? But the restraint and order allow everything to be clearly heard and for the listener to appreciate the playing. It's a good recording.
Blue Note released the track On the Spur of the Moment backed with Ray C. as a 45-rpm single, but my favorite track on the album is probably Booker Ervin's playful Skoo Chee.
On the evening of February 23, 1961, the Stanley Turrentine Quintet performed four sets at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, New York. Instead of his brother Tommy on trumpet, the Quintet for this date included Grant Green on guitar, as well as Turrentine's usual rhythm section of Us Three (Horace Parlan, piano; George Tucker, bass; and Al Harewood, drums).
The sets were a mix of mostly show tunes popular at the time and some blues-based jam sessions. Selected songs from the sets were released that year as two separate LPs, Up At Minton's Volume 1 and Up At Minton's Volume 2. Other than different color schemes on the front, the album covers are nearly identical, and the titles Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 only appear on the back covers. The cuts culled from the February 1961 session for the two LPs were:
Vol. 1:
But Not for Me (George & Ira Gershwin) - 11:29
Stanley's Time (Stanley Turrentine) - 11:03
Broadway (Billy Bird, Teddy McRae & Henri Woode) - 10:38
Yesterdays (Otto Harbach & Jerome Kern) - 11:39
Vol. 2:
Later at Minton's (Stanley Turrentine) - 13:55
Come Rain or Come Shine (Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer) - 8:34
Love for Sale (Cole Porter) - 15:11
Summertime (George & Ira Gershwin & DuBose Heyward) - 7:14
Later At Minton's (Vol. 2, Track 1) was one of those blues jam sessions that was performed in the middle of the third set, "some very, very funky slow blues" as Stanley introduces it at the start of the track.
The archivists at The Jazz Discography Project have somehow managed to obtain the complete set list from the 1961 session. Here is is, along with references to which tracks are from which set.
1st Set
The Serpent's Tooth (Unreleased)
By Myself (Unreleased)
Blues (Unreleased)
2nd Set
Love For Sale(Vol. 2, Track 3)
In Your Own Sweet Way (Unreleased)
Come Rain Or Come Shine (Vol. 2, Track 2)
But Not For Me (Vol.1, Track 1)
3rd set
Stanley's Time (Vol. 1, Track 2)
Broadway (Vol. 1, Track 3)
Later At Minton's (Vol. 2, Track 1)
Yesterdays (Vol. 1, Track 4)
Squeeze Me (Unreleased)
4th set
Blues (Unreleased)
Just In Time (Unreleased)
Summertime(Vol. 2 Track 4)
This Can't Be Love(Unreleased)
Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise (Unreleased)
I'll Remember April (Unreleased)
Based on Later A Minton's, I'd love to hear those other two blues jams from the 1st and the 4th sets.
Minton's Playhouse is a jazz club and bar located on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem. The door to the actual club itself is at 206 West 118th. Minton's was founded in 1938 and is famous for its role in the development of bebop. Jam sessions in the early 1940s featured musicians such as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Minton's thrived for three decades until its decline near the end of the 1960s, and its eventual closing in 1974. After being shuttered for more than 30 years, the newly remodeled club reopened its doors in May 2006 under the name Uptown Lounge at Minton's Playhouse. However, the reopened club was closed again in 2010 and remodeling began in 2012. In 2013, Minton's reopened a third time as an upscale jazz club and restaurant. Due to the coranavirus pandemic, Minton's is only offering a take-out menu at this time.
Although the club was open for a little more than three decades, Minton's Playhouse will always be associated with the 1940s and the jam sessions that gave birth to bebop.
1961, the next chapter in Stanley Turrentine's discography, begins in a confusing manner. In late 1960 (December 18, to be precise), he recorded a session with his brother Tommy on trumpet and the members of Horace Parlen's Us Three (Parlan, piano; George Tucker, bass; and Al Harewood, drums). This is the same lineup as The Horace Parlan Quintet's Speakin' My Piece, but this time recording as The Stanley Turrentine Quintet.
That's not the confusing part. According to The Jazz Discography's Stanley Turrentine page, the December 18, 1960 session was rejected by Blue Note. I don't know if the playing wasn't up to their standard, if there was a problem with the recording, or if Blue Note just determined that there wasn't a market for another Stanley Turrentine album at that time. Mystery to me.
But then, a month later (January 20, 1961), exactly 60 years ago to the day, the ST Quintet returned to Van Gelder's Blue Note studio and re-recorded the same songs over again. The tracks still weren't released until 1978, and then as one disc of the two-LP album, Jubilee Shouts, along with a second disc of a 1962 session with a different lineup. The tracks from the 1961 set were also released in 1987 as a stand-alone album, Comin' Your Way.
Why were the 1960 tracks rejected by Blue Note? Why were the 1961 tracks not released until 1978, and then as part of a two-fer anthology? And then after the two-fer anthology, why was Comin' Your Way released as a stand-alone in 1987? Damned if I know, but then again, I'm not Blue Note producer Alfred Lion, so there.
The album is a relatively straight-forward hard bop set, mostly covers of popular show tunes, alternating between upbeat numbers and slower, bluesier songs. The one original composition is Tommy Turrentine's Thomasville. Another mystery - is the titular Thomasville an actual town, or a self-reference to trumpeter Tommy?
Later, Stanley would go on to record Thomasville again in 1992, with an all-star lineup including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard filling in for brother Tommy. The main thing I get from comparing the two tracks is that Hubbard really blows the doors off of Tommy's performance, but that's no disrespect to Tommy - Freddie pretty much blew the doors off of everybody.
The impatient can hear Freddie's solo between the 2:00- and 3:00-minute marks.
