As I mentioned in last week’s#albumoftheweek post, we’re going through Miles’ early albums for Prestige Records. This week is the second of Miles’ last four albums for the label, released as contractual obligations after he was signed to Columbia Records and all recorded on two dates in 1956. Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet thus features the same personnel, the same ambience, and the same concept as Cookin’: Miles with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and John Coltrane in the studio, playing “live-in-studio” takes of their considerable repertoire of standards.
Except that Relaxin’ shows a different side of the Quintet. If Cookin’ showed them at their most serious (“My Funny Valentine”) and hottest (“Airegin”), Relaxin’ finds the band in a much more laid back mode, beginning with Miles’ voice in the opening groove: “I’ll start playin’ and then I’ll tell you what it is.” “If I Were a Bell” is not a well-known jazz standard—Frank Loesser wrote it for Guys and Dolls—but the band swings into it as though it were “Dancing Cheek to Cheek.” The ballad playing throughout the record is outstanding too, with Coltrane’s solo on “You’re My Everything” hinting at the great work he would do two years later on Lush Life and on his early Impulse! recordings.
Other material is less reflective but still swinging, with “I Could Write a Book” and Sonny Rollins’ “Oleo” finding the horn players burning over the great rhythm section. On that note, I’ve often thought that Garland, Jones and Chambers could make anyone sound good, but it’s interesting to hear them shift their styles in “I Could Write a Book” to reflect the differences between Miles’ cool, muted playing and Trane’s more aggressive approach. This is particularly evident in Philly Joe Jones’ drumming, which shifts from a quieter tone to a more propulsive, explosive style under Trane’s solo.
Of note, too, is that this record features two heavily bebop-influenced tunes, with both “Oleo” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody’n You” showing the influence that Miles took from his time working with Charlie Parker. All in all, another solid Prestige session for the quintet. Most of the material for the record comes from the October 1956 sessions, coming just a month after the last sessions for Round About Midnight but sounding remarkably consistent with the sound the quintet shows on the May 1956 sessions, here represented by “It Could Happen to You” and “Woody’n You.”
All in all, Relaxin’ is a great document of this great quintet, and fun to listen to. (And to look at, too: Miles may have reserved his original compositions for his Columbia recordings, but the covers for this album and last week’s are absolute works of art.)
Featuring some of the stories I’ve told on this blog, and much more, the book can be pre-ordered in many places. (Please note that, some of the options on that link to the contrary, audiobook and ebook versions aren’t available yet!) I’m so looking forward to getting the book into your hands.
For this week’s installment of #albumoftheweek, we continue driving through Miles Davis’ early albums. Last week saw Miles’ early work for Prestige, with a band that featured a young Sonny Rollins in one of his earliest recordings. But it wasn’taMiles Davis group; the players came together in the studio but hadn’t spent months together on the road. Miles was in bad shape; hooked on heroin, needing fees from recording sessions to buy the drugs. He was not a top-shelf artist.
Then, in 1955, after spending a few years kicking the drugs, returning to New York, and recording several pivotal albums for Blue Note Records, he played at the Newport Jazz Festival in a group with Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, Connie Kay and Zoot Sims. His performance wowed the critics and the record-buying public alike, as well as George Avakian of Columbia Records, who wanted to sign him. The only problem? Miles still had a year left on his contract with Prestige, and owed them four albums to boot.
Miles addressed the problem with aplomb. He negotiated in his contract with Avakian that Columbia wouldn’t release any recordings he made for them until his contract with Prestige expired. He then entered the studio with a group formed at Avakian’s suggestion and with whom he had recently played a string of dates at Cafe Bohemia: the Miles Davis Quintet. The original membership of the quintet included pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones, and tenor sax Sonny Rollins. But Rollins was struggling with his own heroin addiction, and Miles fired him and replaced him with another great young tenor player (and heroin addict): John Coltrane. With Trane on board, the group later known as the First Great Quintet was complete.
The chronology of Miles’ recordings in late 1955 through 1956, as he played out his commitment to Prestige, is a little confusing. The Quintet first entered the Columbia studio in October to record Round About Midnight, then three weeks later was in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack recording The New Miles Davis Quintet. Legendarily, Miles had to pay for the next sessions in the Van Gelder studio out of his own pocket; he returned with the Quintet in May 1956, in between recording dates with Columbia for Miles Ahead, and knocked out material that would end up on three of his last four albums for Prestige. The Quintet returned to Hackensack one last time, on October 26, 1956, to record more material with Van Gelder, including all the tracks on Cookin’.
Perhaps because of the constraints of the session time, perhaps because Miles’ attention was on the more complex sessions for Columbia, the Prestige sessions are relaxed, feature familiar jazz standards straightforwardly played, and for all intents and purposes “live” in the studio. That is not to call them simple or mediocre. On the contrary, Cookin’ in particular, especially its opening performance of “My Funny Valentine” and the second-side opener “Airegin,” rank among the greatest numbers Miles ever recorded.
What is it about these performances? Simply put, they show a group that was capable of listening closely to each other, improvising collectively in unusual ways, and expressing subtlety and hard bop in equal measures. The First Great Quintet had range, from Miles’ cool playing to Coltrane’s fire, Garland’s melodic chords, Philly Joe Jones’ power, and the incredible versatility of Chambers’ bass, both pizzicato and arco (bowed). (Chambers is featured in one of my Exfiltration Radio sessions from a while ago.) And perhaps because the sessions were recorded quickly, they are unfussy, unforced, and genuinely fun to listen to.
My copies of these albums are modern repressings, nothing too fancy to write home about, but there is still a joy in listening to the sound leap off the vinyl. Red Garland’s opening piano melody on Side One caused my sleeping dog to wake up and perk up his ears, but Jones’ brushwork on “When Lights Are Low” settled him right down again. We’ll listen to more from these sessions next time.
We’re going to be featuring a lot of Miles Davis over the next while here on #albumoftheweek, so strap in!
Today we’re talking about Dig, which is credited to Miles Davis Featuring Sonny Rollins. I dig Dig — partly for what it is, partly for what it isn’t.
Miles recorded these sessions, which also included two numbers that showed up on the Prestige Records compilation Conception, on October 5, 1951, and they were among the earliest music he released on Prestige. The music wasn’t originally released on a 12” LP, though; it originally came out on two 10” LPs, The New Sound and Blue Period. Thus, this music includes Miles’ first tracks on an LP as a leader (the Birth of the Cool sessions, featuring Davis’ nonet with arranger Gil Evans, wouldn’t be released in compiled form until 1957), and his first full album as a leader for Prestige. It also happens to be Jackie McLean’s jazz recording debut.
It’s also, perhaps more contentiously, the first album to feature Miles’ “first quintet” sound, though it isn’t actually a First Quintet album. The players—McLean and Rollins on saxophones, Walter Bishop Jr. on piano, Tommy Potter on bass, and Art Blakey on drums—have no overlap with the personnel of the group that Miles assembled for Prestige later in the decade. But the hallmarks of the classic “hard bop” sound are all there, including Miles’ relatively open chordal voicings and tempi that were less “cool” than his nonet material but also more relaxed than his earliest recordings with Charlie Parker. Put simply, it just sounds like Miles. And it sounds great.
Unfortunately, the sessions were also recorded while Miles was in the throes of his addiction to heroin, so he wouldn’t maintain the high standard of performance on this record for long. Several uneven records for Prestige followed, and he would even turn to pimping during the next few years, all to make money for his drug habit. He wouldn’t turn to greatness until he left New York for St. Louis and Detroit in 1953, kicked heroin, and found a different way to approach the music. We’ll see the fruit of that approach next time.
My copy of this album is a 2015 mono repressing on translucent blue vinyl, bought at Newbury Comics. I was relatively new to buying records at the time and didn’t realize that the translucent vinyl meant that the optical sensor on my Denon turntable, which tries to automatically select 33 1/3 or 45 RPM based on the size of the record on the turntable, would get confused and refuse to play! I now have a slipmat that eliminates the problem by covering the sensor in the platter, since translucent vinyl is, for better or worse, a common feature of 21st century repressings…
A few years ago I shared a pointer to my sister Esta’s oral history record with my uncle Forrest, including his telling of how my great-great-grandfather, whose name is varyingly spelled Obadiah or Obediah, was personally saved from being executed as a deserter by North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance. It’s a great story, one that he told over and over and over.* But there’s always been a small question in the back of my mind: where was the evidence? What was the rest of the story?
Well, last night sitting with Esta and my parents after the funeral, I went looking for the evidence. And I found it, in a 2012 book by Aldo S. Perry, Civil War Courts-Martial of North Carolina Troops. And, astonishingly, the family story is true! Mostly. And the parts I didn’t know are stranger than fiction.
So, then. Obediah Jarrett, together with his brother Jacob P. Jarrett, enlisted in the North Carolina Fifth Cavalry on May 14, 1862 in Marshall, North Carolina. The unit was, essentially, a “mountain boy” division, made up of folks from western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and they saw a fair bit of action over the next year all over the southeast, including battles at Brandy Station, Virginia on June 9, 1863, described as the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America and as a pivotal turning point in the Civil War, and at Chickamauga, Georgia on September 20, later that year. Chickamauga in particular appears to have been a bloodbath; 20% of the Confederate forces were killed.
Just exactly when Obediah attempted to desert is not clear. One source I consulted says that he deserted on August 7, 1863, between his unit’s two battles, but I think that’s unlikely unless the policy toward deserters changed. Because at his desertion recorded on August 1, 1864 in Concord, Tennessee, he was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to be executed.
Side note: Perry’s history of Obediah’s division records that the Fifth Cavalry merged with the Seventh Cavalry to form the Sixth Cavalry within the 65th Regiment, and that this merger may have been the reason for the desertion of Obediah and others. In fact, the unit led the Confederacy with 31 absences per company, 10 courts martial, and 7 death sentences. Perry notes that the North Carolina soldiers volunteered into North Carolina units of company size, but found themselves realigned into a huge regiment that included companies of Virginians and was led by a Virginian. In 1864, the captain of Obediah’s company, Company I, resigned his commission because “my command has deserted to the enemy and to the mountains of western NC and after attempting I find it impossible to get them together.”
At any rate, Obediah deserted on August 1, 1864, together with a fellow Madison County soldier, Jobe R. Redmon. They were court-martialed on separate days and both sentenced to death. Redmon wrote a letter home on November 2, 1864 from his imprisonment in Kinston, North Carolina, telling his family:
“My dear wife and children I seate myself this morning with a troubbeled harte and a destrest mind to try to rite a few line to let you no that I hird my sentens red yesterday and hit was very bad I am very sory to let you no for [one line not legible] all ready I hafte to bee shot the 9 of this month I am sory to in form you that I have but 7 days to live But I hope and trust in God when they have slane my body that God will take my sould to rest.”
So what happened to Obediah? Well, it’s remarkably like what my Uncle said. A man named H. H. Baird prepared a request for pardon for both men to Jefferson Davis, and separately sent a letter to his cousin, governor Zeb Vance, appealing the decision, and specifically citing the change in terms of his commission as a reason for clemency. In a postscript, he emphasized, “The day has not as yet been appointed for the execution of Private Obediah Jarrett.” Whatever happened, Obediah’s death sentence was remitted by SO #260, issued on November 1, 1864—strikingly a day before Redmon’s letter home. Redmon’s sentence was not commuted and he died.
Why Obediah was spared and Redmon executed is unknown, as is why Redmon had a date for execution before Obediah despite having been court-martialed six days later. The record is silent, but suggests that there was some sort of favoritism shown to my great-great-grandfather—and thank goodness.
At any rate, Obediah, his death sentence commuted, remained in prison until Union forces defeated the remainder of the 65th at the Battle of Wyse Fork, fought March 7-10, 1865, near Kinston. He was taken prisoner of war by the Union troops but released after taking an oath of allegiance to the United States, and from thence headed home.
The last part of the story as my Uncle tells it, is that my great-grandfather Zebulon B. Jarrett was named for the North Carolina governor who saved his father’s life. That part is almost certainly true. However, genealogical records give us one last wrinkle: Zeb Jarrett was born three years and 11 months before his father was freed, and a year before he enlisted. Zeb was almost certainly named after Zebulon Vance, but he had a different name at birth, which has sadly been lost due to the destruction of our family Bible when my Aunt Jewell’s dorm burned in a fire.
This is why I study history: truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s sometimes downright weirder.
* The last “over” there goes to the Applachian Barns Project’s documentation of the 19th century barn on my grandmother’s farm, documented from my uncle’s stories.
Forrest Jarrett with me and my kids, The Boy and The Girl. Photo courtesy Esta Jarrett.
We laid my uncle to rest yesterday beside his wife, my aunt Alene, in their plot in the family’s corner of the mountain cemetery where my grandparents, my Aunt Jewell, my great-grandparents, and my great-great-grandparents lie.
It was a large service, in Asheville’s First Baptist Church, full of (almost entirely) masked mourners whom I knew from my uncle’s stories, or his get-togethers at his pond, or from the wild game dinners I attended a few times that were held in his name as a fundraiser for various outdoorsy causes. But the center of it all was his story.
The story of a boy who was so shy he hid from the mailman, who trained himself to be the life of the party. Who had a frank and open face until a baseball flattened his nose (and convinced the county high school to invest in protective gear for its high school baseball catchers). Who stood with such straight and perfect posture that they called him String, until a training accident in a tank sent a recoiling 90mm gun into his back and side, leaving him with a limp and perpetual back pain that sent him home from the Army. Who was going to be his father’s heir in scientific farming, until the accident made him seek another career—a career that his second cousin, who was the political kingpin of Madison County and his lifelong quiet opponent in a family feud rooted in a land deal, told him would never be near his home. Or, as my Uncle would say, “When I come out of service, my good kinfolks, Mr. Zeno Ponder, sent word to me by my first cousin, Marvin Ball, that he’d see me in hell before I’d get a job in Madison County.”
Who was sponsored for a job with Southern Railway by famed lawman Jesse James Bailey. Who, thanks to an early job as bodyguard for railroad executive and later Southern Railway president D.W. Brosnan, followed that career through eleven Southern cities and through multiple promotions until he retired as chief of railroad police. Who managed diplomacy with the old mountain gift for giving: small favors, “pettin’ pokes” with fresh produce, country sausage, or suspiciously clear Mason jars. Or by throwing enormous all-day-long barbecues. Or by taking you hunting. Whose gift of diplomacy built a network that showed up, in force and in masks, yesterday.
Presented to Forrest Jarrett on his departure from Atlanta. He moved to Roanoke that year, where he retired.
Who, when he retired, papered the walls of a study in his home on the old family farm with certificates and plaques: certified Railroad Policeman in Indiana. Certificates of appreciation from the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the office of the mayor of Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Secret Service. Honorary Illinois state trooper. Honorary chief of police in Hickory, North Carolina. Honorary assistant Attorney General in Alabama and Georgia. Honorary Lieutenant Colonel, Aide de Camp, Governor’s Staff in Georgia. Honorary Lieutenant Colonel and Aide de Camp in the Alabama State Militia. Honorary colonel and Aide-de-Camp in the Fairfax County Police Department. Kentucky Colonel. North Carolina Order of the Long Leaf Pine. Photograph with United States Senator Strom Thurmond. Christmas card from Barbara and George H.W. Bush. Congratulatory letter from Vice President Dan Quayle. Keys to several cities, including the key to Washington, DC presented by Mayor Marion Barry. Signed and framed copies of the Crime Control Act of 1990 (S.3256), which granted railroad police the power to enforce the laws of the jurisdiction in which they were operating, and which was passed largely on the strength of his diplomacy.
And who then promptly ignored that study, except to show visitors who asked, preferring to sit on his porch and watch the mountains, or down by his pond and soak in the silence. Or to take his grandchildren down the bumpy road to the pond on the Gator.
Forrest Jarrett with The Girl, courtesy Esta Jarrett.
Because in the end, he was a man of enormous accomplishment for whom family was not only the most important thing, it was everything.
This go-round of Exfiltration Radio investigates an unusual jazz instrument, the flute. This one has been bubbling around in my mind since I started putting jazz mixes together. I kept running across unusual instrumentation on some of the recordings, well beyond the sax or trumpet plus piano/bass/drums that I first started listening to thirty years ago. First it was organ, then vibes, and today I finally started pulling together this playlist, which focuses on that other woodwind, the flute.
One thing that jumped out at me in looking through the credits on these tracks is the number of flautists who were also, or even primarily, known for their chops on the saxophone. James Moody, who leads off this set with his famous false start from his Last Train from Overbrook album, was one, but then there’s Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson on Alice Coltrane’s “Blue Nile,” and Yusef Lateef (who here is playing the xun, or “Chinese globular flute”).
But part of the fun of this set for me was digging into some of the artists who were best known for their work as flautists. Hubert Laws, whose playing graces “Windows” (here drawn from the Chick Corea compilation Inner Space, but originally released on his own Laws’ Clause), is all over recordings from the 1960s and 1970s where the flute appears — in fact, he’s also on “Blues Farm.” (There is an alternate universe in which this mix is all Hubert Laws, all the time.) Bobbi Humphrey’s fine playing on “Harlem River Drive,” though drenched in 1970s production values by the Mizells, is outstanding, as is the more modern playing on Chip Wickham’s “Soho Strut.” Finally, we come somewhat full circle on Matthew Halsall’s cover of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda.”
So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your earhole.
The Moody One – James Moody (Return From Overbrook)
The Plum Blossom – Yusef Lateef (Eastern Sounds)
The Great Pumpkin Waltz – Vince Guaraldi (It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown)
Windows – Chick Corea (Inner Space)
Blue Nile – Alice Coltrane (Ptah, the El Daoud)
Harlem River Drive – Bobbi Humphrey (Blacks And Blues)
Blues Farm – Ron Carter (Blues Farm)
Nancy Wilson – Brian Jackson, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Adrian Younge (Brian Jackson JID008)
Soho Strut – Chip Wickham (Shamal Wind)
Dogon Mysteries – Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids (Shaman!)
Journey In Satchidananda – Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra (Journey In Satchidananda / Blue Nile)
For every Miles, Trane or Monk, there is an Eddie Costa.
Even the most enthusiastic jazz reissue program inevitably falls into a rut. You get the umpteenth repressing of Kind of Blue, you get (admittedly fabulous) live concert recordings from a high school janitor who just happened to be taping Thelonious Monk. But you don’t see too many revivals of interest in players like Eddie Costa, Mat Mathews and Don Elliott.
The Clef Series, issued on Verve in the US and Columbia in the UK, consisted of recordings related to Norman Granz, the impressario behind Verve and Ella Fitzgerald. In this particular case, Granz was making a bet on some of the lesser known musicians that played the afternoon sets at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957.
Eddie Costa was on his way up then, a rising star on both piano and vibes, and was recording prolifically with his own groups and as sideman for Gigi Gryce, Gunther Schuller, Shelly Manne and others. He appeared on over 100 recordings before being killed in a car crash in 1962.
Mat Mathews, a Dutch jazz accordionist, was less well known, but he still recorded sessions with Herbie Mann, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Art Farmer, Percy Heath, Carmen McRae, Charlie Byrd and others. And Don Elliott was a multi-instrumentalist, recording on trumpet, vibes, mellophone and vocals in his career.
The sessions on this record are loose and swinging, up tempo and genuinely fun to listen to. They are not momentous, save perhaps in featuring an early recording by Don Elliott’s pianist, who had been studying with George Russell: Bill Evans. Evans would record one more album with Elliott before auditioning in early 1958 to replace Red Garland in Miles Davis’s sextet, and the rest is history.
I found this copy, of the first UK pressing, in my local bargain bin in Burlington. When I want to remind myself that jazz is supposed to be fun, I put this on the record player (or cue up the ripped tracks in Apple Music) and listen.
There doesn’t appear to be a full copy of the album anywhere, but here are a few tracks:
