Complete Felsted Jazz Recordings Box

[Ron S]

The Complete Felsted Jazz Recordings (6 CDs)

Felsted Records, a subsidiary of London Records, began in New York City in 1957 and was primarily a pop label. However, there was a series of 9 albums produced by Stanley Dance and released in 1958 and 1959 that concentrated on mainstream jazz artists, many who had began recording in the early 1930s and had fine-tuned their craft. These wonderful sessions have never before been issued on CD. Many of the dates have a small group Basie-flavor to them and sidemen include Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Vic Dickenson and Earle Warren. The session leaders included Rex Stewart (in a session that included Willie The Lion Smith), Earl Hines, Cozy Cole, Buster Bailey, Buddy Tate, Coleman Hawkins, Dicky Wells, under-rated tenorman Budd Johnson (w/Charlie Shavers), Billy Strayhorn (w/Johnny Hodges) and Dicky Wells.

Mosaic "Future Projects" page

[J.A.W.]

Howard McGhee/Freddie Redd's Music from "The Connection" (1960) was also released on Felsted, but I guess this falls outside the scope of the projected set.

[Chuck Nessa]

Some of these were issued on cd by New World, IIRC.

[brownie]

And a number of them have also been recently released on the Lonehill label out of Barcelona-Andorra, including the Hawkins, the Strayhorn, the Dicky Wells...

[jazzbo]

Odd not to include "Music from the Connection!" (But then I've had it on cd forever it seems, so no big deal!)

Going to be a great little set!

[JSngry]

This will hopefully be as much of a tribute to Stanley Dance as it will anything else. He deserves it.

[Clunky]

what's the Dicky Well's set like ?

[Chuck Nessa]

what's the Dicky Well's set like ?

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There were 2 Wells lps:

-Bones for the King- : Dickie Wells and his Orchestra : Dickie Wells, Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, George Matthews (tb) Skip Hall (p) Major Holley (b) Jo Jones (d)

New York, February 3, 1958

Bones for the king (*) Felsted FAJ7006, (E)SJA2006

Sweet daddy spo-de-o - , -

You took my heart (*) - , -

Buck Clayton (tp) Dickie Wells (tb) Rudy Rutherford (cl-1,bar) Buddy Tate (ts,bar-1) Skip Hall (p) Everett Barksdale (g) Major Holley (b) Jo Jones (d)

New York, February 4, 1958

Hello Smack ! Felsted FAJ7006, (E)SJA2006

Come and get it - , -

Stan's dance - , -

-Trombone -Four-in-Hand- : Dickie Wells, Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, George Matthews (tb) Skip Hall (org, p) Kenny Burrell (g) Everett Barksdale (b) Herbie Lovelle (d)

New York, April 21, 1959

Blue moon Felsted (E)FAJ7009

Airlift -

It's all over -

Wine-O-junction -

Kenny Burrell (g) out, Everett Barksdale (g,el-b-1) Major Holley (b) added

New York, April 22, 1959

Heavy duty (1) Felsted (F)FAJ7009

Short, tall, fat, small (dw,vd vcl) -

Girl hunt -

[Clunky]

thanks Chuck ,

I recalled seeing one of his sets and thinking the line up was a little odd ( four tromobones and organ is somewhat usual !!) .

Is Wells on form on these?

[trane123]

Slightly off topic -- I wonder what happened to the Buddy Rich set. It's off of the "Future Projects" list but not in the "Upcoming Releases". Hmm...perhaps lost in the Mosaic void?

[Chuck Nessa]

Is Wells on form on these?

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He's very fine on these. In fact, mention of them made me pull out Bones for the King. It will hit the turntable later today.

[AllenLowe]

the Wells sessions are solid - not great if you know what Dickey was capable of, but worthy, especially considering how little he recorded -

[andersf]

I had most if not all on vinyl once, if memory serves med right I would on the whole regard them higher than the Columbia Small Group Swing Sessions. Possibly the difference being that Stanley Dance had a personal vision of in which contexts the musicians would perform best.

[Stereojack]

The Coleman Hawkins album "The High and Mighty Hawk" is IMO one of his greatest sessions, and was available for several years as a domestic CD on the London label distributed by Polygram. I recommended it to several dozen customers over the years, and was sorry to see it go out of print.

I've got all the other LP's, and overall this is a fine series. The Budd Johnson is a standout as well.

[Chuck Nessa]

I always had a soft spot for the Buster Bailey.

[Spontooneous]

Wasn't there a Barney Bigard date in this series too?

[Chuck Nessa]

Wasn't there a Barney Bigard date in this series too?

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Nope.

[paul secor]

Affinity released all of these on LP in the 1980's - I believe I have them all except for the Hines and Cozy Cole dates. I love these recordings. I probably won't buy them again (unless there are unreleased tracks included), but anyone here who hasn't heard them should grab them when they become available.

[AllenLowe]

I believe the Hawkins LP had a song with maybe my favorite song title - Miss GP -

[mikeweil]

Some of these were issued on cd by New World, IIRC.

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Yes, and I have seen British and Japanses reissues of most of them as well. Before that, some were on British Affinity LPs. What I have is worth a listen - agree on JSngry's wish that this should be a Stanley Dance tribute - he did a very fine job with this series.

The Budd Johnson is my favourite.

[JSngry]

...agree on JSngry's wish that this should be a Stanley Dance tribute - he did a very fine job with this series.

Definitely. And not just on this series. Dance was one of the true advocates for this type of jazz, and he understood the life it represented better than most who wrote about it. Yeah, he didn't really dig bop (although, based on his writngs in Jazz Journal International, away from American eyes, I do believe that a lot of his later antagonistic words towards bop were as much posturing to make a point as they were anything - after all, he wrote the first piece on McCoy Tyner, and it was a favorable one), but he dug how the whole organ scene evolved, and what it represented in terms of the "sociology" of it all. The cat knew, and that's more than I can say about a lot of more supposedly "sophisticated" critics.

It took me a while to realize that he was more than the Duke Ellington Pimp that my first encounters with him in the 70s led me to believe. But once I got into reading what he had to say, I realized that, yeah, Stanley Dance didn't talk about everything, didn't care about everything. And what he didn't like, he didn't like in no uncertain terms. But what he did like, he knew and knew damn well.

Stanley Dance was a motherfucker.

[Larry Kart]

I have (or have listened to at one time) most of the Felsted series (but not the Buster Bailey), and my memory is that only one of them, "The High and Mighty Hawk," and odd parts of others (Hines' "Brussel's Hustle") are at the level they perhaps could have/should have been. Much of this seems to have been the result of Dance's being more deferential and less-toughminded than he needed to be in the studio and/or in judging which of these vets were now playing at a high enough level so as not to drag down colleagues who were still at or close to their best (judging by the results, Dance's Brit mainstream compatriot Albert McCarthy of Jazz Monthly had the same problem on the records he produced at the time with Swing Era vets). Also, I believe that Dance's and McCarthy's goals were a bit "let's bring back the good old days" revivalistic, which failed to take account of the fact that some of the players they had assembled (e.g. Budd Johnson) no longer were as drenched in the sensibility of, say, 1937 as the producers thought or wished they were. There's not a whiff of that on "The High and Might Hawk" though, nor is there, by and large, on the Prestige Swingville albums that were being made around that time with some of the same players. I think the track record at Prestige Swingville was much higher (compare the Felsted and Swingville Budd Johnsons, for example). In particular, I recall few if any Swingville rhythm sections that weren't just fine or even better (often with judicious insertions of simpatico near or actual "modernists" -- e.g. Wendell Marshall, Tommy Flanagan, Ray Bryant -- who were then making a lot of record dates), while a fair number of Felsted rhythm sections were a bit ramshackle in execution at times.

[Ron S]

So, Larry, I take it you won't be writing the notes for this set?

[Larry Kart]

BTW, I'm aware that there are actual or potential trade-offs involved when you use those "modern" rhythm section players like Tommy Flanagan in such contexts. An on-form Sir Charles Thompson, for instance, would be preferable IMO, depending on who else was in the studio with him. The thing is, you still need to use your ears when you're producing a record with the Gods of Your Youth (perhaps especially so in such cases), and I'm not sure that Dance was doing that well enough pr often enough. I know Chuck likes the Felsteds more than I do, but to me he's a perfect example of a producer-listener who, to adapt a phrase that I recently ran across, "never hears what is not there." (FWIW, the original phrase comes from D.R. Shackelton-Bailey's -- a great Brit name, no? -- biography of Cicero. S-B writes: "What Cicero's volatile mentality could never have found congenial was Caesar's core of adamant. The austerity and authority of Caesar's literary style he could appreciate, for all its unlikeness to his own; but the presence of the man who never saw what was not there made him uncomfortable.")

[ghost of miles]

Odd not to include "Music from the Connection!"  (But then I've had it on cd forever it seems, so no big deal!)

Going to be a great little set!

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I think it's a bit odd, too, if the set is being titled "The Complete Felsted Jazz Recordings." I have the CD as well; it's brief, but interesting to hear, and of course Tina Brooks fans would be quite happy to have it included.