Tag: percyheath

Miles Davis, Bags Groove

Album of the Week, August 24, 2024

When we began listening to Miles over two years ago, we touched on the heroin addiction that nearly derailed his career just as it was starting. We then jumped ahead to 1955 when he began recording a series of pivotal albums for Prestige that led to his fame and fortune (and a bigger contract at Columbia). But starting at the beginning of 1954, Miles was coming back, having gotten clean from his addiction and recording newly disciplined and interesting music. Prestige released the results on 10″ LPs, and then, following Miles’ departure for Columbia, reissued them on 12″ records.

Two of those sessions, recorded June 29 and December 24, 1954 in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, make up Bags Groove (the brilliant typographic album cover by Reid Miles omits the apostrophe, ducking the question of how to do a proper possessive, and I reluctantly follow suit). The players are a pretty significant who’s who. The first session (on side 2 of the record) includes Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, while the second (side 1) features Thelonious Monk and “Bags” himself, Milt Jackson, on vibes. All tracks feature Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke, a year away from expatriating to Paris, on drums.

“Bags Groove” comes in two versions, marking the first time in this blog series that we’ve run across a classic jazz LP that actually includes an alternate take. Both takes lean toward the “cool” side of Miles’ early repertoire, thanks to Jackson’s modal introduction and Miles’ Harmon mute. The liner notes by Ira Gitler say that Miles asked Monk to lay out during his solo, which must have aggrieved Monk to no end! But Monk does as asked; in the second take he drops out for the entirety of Miles’ solo, re-entering behind Milt Jackson, where he subversively adds different and unexpected chords until Bags himself drops out and Monk takes over. Hearing Monk do his thing has to be the principle pleasure of this arrangement, in fact, aside from the fluency of Miles’ solo over what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward 12-bar blues.

The numbers with Sonny Rollins are a different story. Sonny was apparently writing compositions on scraps of paper during the June 29 session, and three of his most enduring and most-covered compositions are the result. “Airegin” (“Nigeria” spelled backwards) has more than a little of the feel of “A Night in Tunisia” in the introduction, but it pretty swiftly shifts to its own thing—not yet as volcanic as it would be in another year with Miles and Trane on Cookin’, but a pretty hot groove nonetheless. The tempo is ever so slightly more relaxed here, perhaps in part due to Percy Heath, whose walking bass line sounds like it doesn’t want to be hurried.

That same sense of relaxed groove permeates the Charlie Parker-like “Oleo,” which again is a much more laid back take than that which the First Great Quintet would record on Relaxin’. But don’t tell Sonny; he and Monk get into some understated interplay during his solo, and there’s even a great moment where he single-handedly alters the chords on his way out of the solo with just one note. Monk is a little less demonstrative in this number, perhaps because no one told him not to play!

The sole standard on this session, “But Not For Me” appears in two takes, with take 2 first. Thanks to Monk, we don’t get a straight ballad, but a sort of wink at one; he doesn’t seem to accompany the other players as much as he comments on them. Rollins’ solo is a rollicking one, with more than a little swagger in its swing as he works in bits of “Doxy” into the second verse of his solo.

Speaking of “Doxy,” the third of the great Rollins standards here, Gitler calls out the “funky” character of the music; I’d prefer to call it “suggestive,” in a slightly exaggerated Mae West-style “come up and see me sometime” spirit. Interestingly, Rollins’ own solo is the only one that doesn’t feature any intimations of either hanky or panky.

We close with “But Not For Me (Take 1)”; are we suggesting that the doxy is not for us? Here the repetition of the performance is OK with me as the solos are anything but repetitive. Miles in particular takes a unique approach to the rhythm of his solo, playing a sly hemiola before dropping completely out of the last bar before Rollins picks things up. Monk is less oblique here than on Take 2, playing an unusually straight ahead solo before he develops into the idea of commenting on the other players on the last chorus. It’s a solid ending to a solid session.

Bags Groove gives us a great window into Miles the bandleader before he put his first great band together, as we get a fascinating glimpse of what an alternate quintet might have looked like (imagine Thelonious Monk on Milestones!). Next time we’ll check on some of the players that did become part of that quintet, and the one who made it a sextet, in a live setting.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

PS – A note on collecting vinyl: Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t set out to find a copy of the 1958 second pressing of this early Miles set earlier this summer, but when I walked into the antique shop in western Massachusetts it was right there, and to my delight it was gorgeous and beautifully playable.

Kenny Dorham, Afro-Cuban

Album of the Week, October 15, 2022

We’ve seen a lot of different influences in jazz: classical music, blues, rock. But one big strain that didn’t really touch Miles, but influenced a lot of other jazz musicians, is Cuban music. Arriving in the US in the 1940s, by the mid-1950s it was a well established strain of jazz music, championed by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, among others. And trumpeter and composer Kenny Durham dove into the music for this, his second album as a leader and first for Blue Note Records.

As we’ve seen with Herbie Hancock’s early Blue Note recordings, dates for the label often drew on different groups of players who were also recording for the roster, meaning that when you pick up a Blue Note recording made in 1955, you stand a very good chance of seeing familiar names in the line-up. Afro-Cuban is no exception, with a group boasting J. J. Johnson on trombone, the great Horace Silver on piano, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Cecil Payne on baritone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. To this assemblage were added Carlos “Patato” Valdes on conga and Richie Goldberg on cowbell. The album was actually recorded in two sessions, with the musicians above appearing in session on March 29, 1955, and the first four tracks on the album were originally released on a 10” LP. Blue Note decided to reissue the record in 1957, adding three tracks from an earlier session recorded January 30, 1955 without Valdes and Goldberg, and substituting Percy Heath for Pettiford on bass.

The album opens with strong Afro-Cuban flavor with “Afrodisia,” the congas telegraphing the artistic direction of the album at once. After the brass line states the opening theme, Dorham’s trumpet provides a solo that combines the Cuban flavor with his own hard bop approach to the music, with hard bop changes alternating with the melodic licks across several choruses. Mobley’s refined sax follows, kicking the group briefly into a different unsyncopated pattern before he settles back into the swing of things and passes it to J.J. Johnson, who takes two choruses before letting Blakey and Valdes trade eights with the entire horn line.

“Lotus Flower” is a slower ballad, with the horns introducing the melody over a gently loping bass and conga pattern. Dorham provides a good opportunity to hear the differences in his approach to the horn from other players like Miles. There’s no mute here, and a good deal more motion in the line; Miles would likely have played half as many notes, but Dorham’s approach is equally lovely. The interlude is brief; “Minor’s Holiday” returns to the Cuban dance rhythms of the opening, with Dorham briskly soloing over Valdes’ Cuban rhythms and Blakey’s customarily volcanic drumming. Indeed, while Blakey is normally no slouch in bringing energy to the recording session, here he sounds positively charged by Valdes.

The only composition not by Dorham on the record, “Basheer’s Dream” (written by the redoubtable Gigi Gryce, some seven years before he adopted the Islamic name Basheer Qusim) is here steeped both in the Cuban rhythms of the opening and the post-bop approach that Gryce introduced in his work with Miles on Birth of the Cool. Johnson’s trombone solo is especially tasty here, as he pulls a minor countermelody out of the chord progressions of the song, contrasting with the high solo lines of both Dorham and Mobley.

The second side of the album reads as more straight-ahead hard bop, but it’s no less delightful, thanks to the continued excellent work of the front line. “K.D.’s Motion,” true to its name, roams all over the chords in the opening chorus and in Dorham’s solo before he passes to Cecil Payne for a rare baritone solo. The transition between Payne and Mobley is almost telepathic, with the latter picking up Payne’s swing for a brief turn before passing it to Silver who gets a relatively rare moment atop the rhythm section before the chorus returns.

Dorham’s “La Villa” begins where “K.D.’s Motion” ended, with a propulsive statement on the drums from Blakey. The tune, which can also be found under Sonny Rollins’ name in several compilations thanks to his presence on a later Dorham session, is blistering throughout as the band navigates through the changes. Solos from Dorham, Mobley and Payne are followed by a spate of trading fours with Blakey and a final statement of the theme. “Venita’s Dance” closes the second side in a mid-tempo statement that’s kept lively by Blakey and Silver’s insistent underpinnings; indeed, it’s eye-widening to listen to Silver’s melodic approach to the chords underneath each of the soloists and to reflect on the two completely different melodies at work each time.

Dorham was perpetually underrated, a situation not helped by his movement across several labels during his career in the 1950s and 1960s; he recorded four more sessions for Blue Note in between records for Riverside, Time, Prestige/New Jazz, and (after he moved to Europe) SteepleChase. He ultimately died young of kidney disease in 1972. But sessions like Afro Cuban offer tantalizing glimpses of what might have been, and are a good reminder of the pleasures to be found in what might otherwise seem to be just another Blue Note session.

You can listen to the album here: