The Quarantined Jazz Voyager
As I go about my city travels I notice how lax people are with masking and social distancing, having their self-centered need to rush to the lives they knew before the pandemic hit. This week I am selecting an album that has been a classic and one of my favorites since the day I first put on the turntable. It’s the 1965 studio recording Angel Eyes by saxophonist Gene Ammons released on the Prestige label.
The album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Two separate sessions compiled the album, tracks 1, 2, 4 & 5 were recorded on June 17, 1960 and tracks 3 & 6 on September 5, 1962. The September session was one of Ammons’ final ones before serving a long drug-related prison sentence.
Track List | 36:25
- Gettin’ Around (Gene Ammons) ~ 6:46
- Blue Room (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) ~ 5:34
- You Go to My Head (J. Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie) ~ 5:55
- Angel Eyes (Earl Brent, Matt Dennis) ~ 8:45
- Water Jug (Frank Wess) ~ 5:10
- It’s the Talk of the Town (Jerry Livingston, Al J. Neiburg, Marty Symes) ~ 4:15
- Gene Ammons ~ tenor saxophone
- Frank Wess ~ flute (tracks 1, 2 and 4), tenor saxophone (track 5)
- Johnny “Hammond” Smith ~ organ (tracks 1, 2, 4 & 5)
- Mal Waldron (tracks 3 & 6) ~ piano
- Doug Watkins (tracks 1, 2, 4 & 5), Wendell Marshall (tracks 3 & 6) ~ bass
- Art Taylor (tracks 1, 2, 4 & 5), Ed Thigpen (tracks 3 & 6) ~ drums
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Girard was born October 7, 1930 in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana and in high school he studied music under Johnny Wiggs and immediately after graduating in 1946 he became a professional musician. He played and toured with the bands of Johnny Archer and Phil Zito before co~founding the band The Basin Street Six, made up mostly of friends he had grown up with, including clarinetist Pete Fountain.
The band got a regular gig at L’Enfant’s Restaurant in New Orleans, as well as regular television broadcasts over WWL. The band started receiving favorable national attention, but being dissatisfied with it, broke up the band in 1954 and founded his own band, George Girard & the New Orleans Five. Landing a residency at the Famous Door in the French Quarter, he recorded for several labels, and got a weekly broadcast on CBS’s affiliated local radio station WWL.
His ambitions to make a national name for himself were thwarted when he became ill and had to give up playing in 1956. Trumpeter George Girard, known for his great technical ability, passed away from colon cancer in New Orleans, Louisiana on January 18, 1957. He was twenty-six.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Elmer was born on October 6, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He began his musical training as a drummer in a Brooklyn junior high school when he was thirteen years old. He briefly attended Manhattan School of Music before he became the featured jazz drummer with the All American Big Brass Band’s 16-country three-month tour of Africa.
On his return, he spent the next two years playing drums with the Pepe Morreale Trio and cornetist Bobby Hackett. Elmer then earned his B.S in Music Education from Hofstra University and took a job teaching music in a Passaic, New Jersey elementary school followed by a year-and-a-half at Manhattan Vocational- Technical High School.
At age 25, Steve took the first of many formal piano lessons with the brilliant jazz pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. After six years of intense training, Elmer decided to move away from the Tristano influence and follow his own musical instincts.
In 1969 Steve attended Queens College where he received a Master’s degree in Music Composition, and accepted an invitation to become an assistant professor. He developed a BA in Jazz Studies program where he and Count Basie alumnus Frank Foster served as the faculty.
Elmer stopped playing professionally from 1976-1991 until he met a young drummer named Myles Weinstein and discovered they were both on the same musical wavelength. He and Myles formed a group called The Jazz Mentality Chris Potter on saxophones and Ralph Hamperian on bass. The group recorded two CDs, Maxwell’s Torment and Show Business Is My Life featuring many of Steve’s original compositions.
In 2006, Steve recorded I Used To Be Anonymous, featuring nine original compositions. The trio toured Japan, recorded Fire Down Below, their second CD, in 2008 featuring ten more of his original compositions and a lot of classic jazz playing. Pianist and drummer Steve Elmer is looking forward to a return to Japan and recording his first solo piano album.
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Three Wishes
Nica asked Khalil if given what would his three wishes be and he told her to his would be:
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- “To live longer.”
- “And learn more.”
- “Let me see. I can’t put it into words, what I want. I know what it is, but I can’t put it into words.”
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tord Gustavsen was born on October 5, 1970 in Oslo, Norway and raised in rural Hurdal, Akershus where he grew up playing church music. He attended the University of Oslo with a degree in psychology before going to the Trondheim Musikkonsevatorium studying jazz for three years. Graduate school saw him with a degree in musicology at the University of Oslo, where he was a guest teacher of jazz piano and theory.
Signed to ECM Records, between 2003 and 2007 the Tord Gustavsen Trio released three albums and in 2005 won the Nattjazz prize. A later ensemble released the album Restored, Returned was recorded in 2009, which was awarded with Spellemannsprisen, the Norwegian Grammy. The quartet went on to release The Well, Extended Circle and play the Montreal Jazz Festival in several different configurations.
He has recorded as a session musician, and guested on friends’ albums, as well as collaborative projects. Pianist Tord Gustavsen continues to be highly interested in psychology and has written a lengthy thesis on the paradoxes of improvisation. He continues to express his music through performance and recordings.
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