Requisites
Make Everybody Happy ~ MJT + 3 | By Eddie Carter
Submitted for your approval from my library this morning is one of the tightest, most underrated hard bop groups to emerge out of Chicago, Illinois, at the beginning of the sixties. MJT+3 (short for Modern Jazz Two + Three) was co-founded by drummer Walter Perkins and bassist Bob Cranshaw, who solidified the lineup by recruiting three young Memphis musicians: trumpeter Willie Thomas, alto saxophonist Frank Strozier and pianist Harold Mabern. “Make Everybody Happy” (Vee-Jay VJLP 3008/VJSR 3008) was the second of four albums the quintet made together and captures the ensemble delivering a distinct Midwestern brand of hard bop and firing on all cylinders. I own the 1960 U.S. Stereo misprint reissue (a stereo label on both sides listing the mono catalog number).
The title track, Make Everybody Happy by Harold Mabern, opens the album with sanctified blues and gospel overtones in a marching melody by the quintet. Frank enters first with a biting tone and imaginative ideas. Willie follows with a superbly constructed reading, and Harold cooks consistently into the theme’s reprise and close. The Trolley Song by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane was introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Perkins and the rhythm section mimic a train coming down the track toward the ensemble’s theme. On this twelve-minute trip, Willie, Frank, and Harold each take turns at the controls ahead of the quintet’s closing melody and Perkins’s fade-out.
Sweet Silver by Booker Little is a bluesy tribute to pianist Horace Silver, and the group’s opening chorus gets into a good groove right out the gate. Frank’s opening solo will have the listener popping their fingers, then Willie impresses on the following statement with solid assurance. Harold delivers a final, concise reading that swings comfortably before leading the quintet into the reprise. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore by Duke Ellington and Bob Russell opens Side Two, with the ensemble’s melody giving this old favorite fresh clothes. Willie and Frank both take short solos, with Walter and Bob offering a concise comment before the closing chorus.
Up next is My Buddy by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn. After the front line’s introduction, Frank takes the lead on the melody, and Willie switches to a mute to join him. Frank shapes the first solo with a touch of the blues. Willie follows with an exquisite reading, smooth as glass. Harold then delivers an impressive statement before the climax. Harold Mabern’s original, Richie’s Dilemma, kicks the energy level up for the quintet’s medium melody. Willie goes first with a laid-back solo, then Bob takes a short walk in the following interpretation. Frank works his magic next, followed by Harold, who provides a delightfully constructed reading. Willie and Frank share an impressive offering with Walter, leading to the group’s climax.
The quintet eases back on the throttle one final time for Love Letters by Edward Heyman and Victor Young. The opening ensemble begins with Willie’s elegant mid-tempo bounce. Frank’s opening statement is warm and compassionate. Then Walter has his say next and gives a short, deeply satisfying moment. Willie puts an exclamation point on the song with a mellow performance, before the group reconvenes for the closing chorus. The session was supervised by Sid McCoy, but the recording engineer is not known. The album’s sound quality is excellent, with a soundstage that’s warm, engaging and musical.
Make Everybody Happy by MJT + 3 is an overlooked gem with a well-balanced lineup and thoughtful repertoire. Willie Thomas and Frank Strozier create a compelling two-horn conversation, while Harold Mabern adds harmonic richness and rhythmic drive. Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins anchor the ensemble with steady, assured support. Together, MJT + 3 offers the listener a prime example of soulful, bluesy jazz that, as the title suggests, is sure to Make Everybody Happy every time it’s on the turntable. I highly recommend it for your library, and I hope you’ll check it out the next time you visit your favorite record store!
~ Don’t Get Around Much Anymore – Source: JazzStandards.com ~ Love Letters, The Trolley Song – Source: Wikipedia.org © 2026 by Edward Thomas Carter
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carmen Lundy was born November 1, 1954 in Miami, Florida and at the age of six began to study the piano. After joining her church junior choir, she decided to become a singer when she was 12 years old. While an opera major at the University of Miami she sang with a jazz band and her decision to sing vocal jazz was cemented.
Moving to New York in 1978 Carmen was hired by the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones Big Band and performed her first engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Two years later she formed her own trio, performing with pianists John Hicks and Onaje Allan Gumbs. She has also performed with Walter Bishop Jr. Don Pullen, Mulgrew Miller, Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, Courtney Pine, Bill O’Connell, Steve Berrios, Marian McPartland, Kenny Kirkland and numerous others.
Lundy recorded her first album of original compositions Good Morning Kiss in 1985 followed by her sophomore project Night and Day the next year featuring musicians Kenny Kirkland, Alex Blake, her brother Curtis Lundy, Victor Lewis, Rodney Jones and Ricky Ford.
Carmen played the lead role in the European tour of Duke Ellington’s Broadway musical, Sophisticated Ladies. Off-Broadway she portrayed Billie Holiday in Lawrence Holder’s They Were All Gardenias. She made her television debut in 1990 as the star of the CBS pilot-special Shangri-La Plaza in the role of Geneva.
A composer, arranger, producer, actress, painter, and sophisticated vocalist well known for her progressive bop and post-bop styling’s, Lundy has composed and published forty songs with favorites such as Quiet Times, Forgive Me, The Out Crowd, and Never Gonna Let You Go that have been recorded by Kenny Barron, Ernie Watts and Straight Ahead. With thirteen albums to her credit Carmen Lundy continues to focus on original material as she moves her three-decade career forward.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1896 as a result of the rape of her teenaged mother, Louise Anderson by pianist and family acquaintance John Waters. Raised in poverty and never living in the same place for more than 15 months she had a difficult childhood.
Waters grew tall, standing 5’9½” in her teens, married at the age of 13, but soon left her abusive husband and became a maid in a Philadelphia hotel working for $4.75 per week. On her 17th birthday, she attended a costume party at a nightclub on Juniper Street and persuaded to sing two songs, she impressed the audience so much that she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland.
After Baltimore, Ethel toured on the black vaudeville circuit but success fell on hard times and she joined a carnival. Leaving that life in Chicago she headed to Atlanta, working the same clubs with Bessie Smith, singing ballads and popular songs instead of blues. But fame found her after her move to Harlem and its renaissance in the 1920s. She landed her first club gig in Harlem at Edmond’s Cellar, became an actress in the blackface comedy “Hello 1919”, and in 1921 became the fifth black woman to make a record, on the tiny Cardinal Records label. She later joined the Black Swan Record label where Fletcher Henderson was her accompanist.
She recorded for numerous labels over her career, played untold clubs and tours throughout the U.S. introducing standards like Dinah, Sweet Georgia Brown, Am I Blue and Black and Blue and worked with Duke Ellington. Film wooed her in 1933 with Rufus Jones for President featuring child star Sammy Davis Jr. in the title role. She went on to star at the Cotton Club singing Stormy Weather, had a featured role in the wildly successful Irving Berlin Broadway musical revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933, where she was the first black woman in an otherwise white show introducing Heat Wave and Supper Time to the world and was the highest paid performer on Broadway. In 1942 she starred in the Vincent Minnelli directed success Cabin In The Sky, reprising her 1940 stage role as Petunia.
She has three songs in the Grammy Hall of Fame, her version of Stormy Weather is on the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in Route 66, was the second Black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for her role in Pinky, has a star approved but not funded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, has written two autobiographies – His Eye is on the Sparrow and To Me, It’s Wonderful.
Ethel Waters, the blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress, passed away on September 1, 1977, aged 80, from uterine cancer, kidney failure, and other ailments in Chatsworth, California.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Clifford Brown was born on October 30, 1930 into a musical family in Wilmington, Delaware. Organized into a vocal quartet with three of his youngest brothers buy his father, by age ten he started playing trumpet at school after becoming fascinated with the shiny trumpet his father owned. By age thirteen, he had his own trumpet and was taking private lessons.
Junior year in high school he received lessons from Boysie Lowrey, played in a jazz group that Lowery put together, made trips into Philadelphia while earning a good education from Howard High. He briefly attended Delaware State University as a math major, before switching to Maryland State College that had a more vibrant musical environment. He played in the fourteen-piece, jazz-oriented, Maryland State Band.
In June of 1950, he was seriously injured in a car accident and during his yearlong hospitalization Dizzy Gillespie visited the young trumpeter and pushed him to pursue his musical career. Limited to the piano for months due to his injuries, Clifford never fully recovered and would routinely dislocate his shoulder for the rest of his life. However, he quickly became one of the most highly regarded trumpeters in jazz.
Brown was influenced and encouraged by Fats Navarro. His first recordings were with R&B bandleader Chris Powell. He worked with Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, and J. J. Johnson, before forming a band with Max Roach. The Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet was a high water mark of the hard bop style with pianist Richie Powell, tenor saxophonists Harold Land, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Rollins and bassist George Morrow, throughout the tenure of the group.
Brownie, as he was affectionately called had a sound that was warm and round, and notably consistent across the full range of the instrument. He could articulate every note, even at very fast tempos which seemed to present no difficulty to him; serving to enhance the impression of his speed of execution. He had a highly developed sense of harmony, delivered bold statements through complex chord changes of bebop harmony and fully expressed himself in a ballad.
Clifford never touched drugs and had no fondness for alcohol, however his clean living would not save him from his tragic death on the rainy night of June 26, 1956 due to an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That night band member Richie Powell and his wife Nancy would also lose their lives.
At age 25 trumpeter Clifford Brown would leave behind only four years of recordings, nonetheless, he influenced later jazz trumpet players like Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, Valery Ponomarev, Wynton Marsalis and many others. His compositions “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud” are jazz standards. He won the Down Beat critics’ poll for the “New Star of the Year” in 1954; and was inducted into the Down Beat “Jazz Hall of Fame” in 1972 in the critics’ poll.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Matthias Lupri was born Matthias Albrecht Lupri on October 29, 1964 in Germany but grew up in Manhattan, Kansas and Alberta, Canada. Initially he played the drums, playing in blues, rock and country music bands as a teenager. In his early 20’s he studied music at Mount Royal College, where he heard Gary Burton‘s recordings and became interested in jazz vibraphone music.
Lupri practiced the instrument for the next five years while on the road with rock bands as a drummer, and then enrolled at Berklee College of Music to study with Burton himself.
After graduating Matthias easily slid into the jazz circles in the U.S. and around the world. He has performed and recorded with Greg Osby, Chris Potter, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Mark Turner, Reuben Rogers, and Rick Margitza among others. He continues to be sought after on the national and international jazz festival circuit.
Vibraphonist Matthias Lupri’s has released six recordings as a leader that have charted in radio’s Top 40 Gavin, CMJ and Chart Magazine Canada, has been heard on the television show “Alias”, and was named as a rising artist on vibraphone twice in the Down Beat critics poll. He continues to perform, collaborate, record and tour.
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