AOTW Nov 27- Dec 3, 2005

[neveronfriday]

Harry "Sweets" Edison - Sweets (click to buy)

A few weeks ago, Roundabout posted a list of new (re)releases that he called "the best batch of jazz in recent memory". That list consisted of Monk-Trane, the HalfNote Trane, new Blue Note Connoisseurs and the Cellar Door release. Instead of posting right there and then, I thought I'd save my comment for this AOTW.

I'm almost embarrased to say it on this board, but no matter how stellar those above-mentioned recordings are and how many people on this board are into this kind of stuff, it's not really my cup of tea to the extent that it is for others. Mind you, I have tons of it and I get my regular dose of bop and whatnot, but I don't really share the enthusiasm for many of the Blue Note recordings, I get tired of Monk after a CD or two, and Ornette often reminds me that I haven't been to the dentist for quite a while. To stay with my Monk example above for another minute, I love listening to him and find his music fascinating, but I often find myself turning to less cerebral stuff again soon after.

I grew up with a larger dose of Basie, Goodman, Wilson, Hawkins, Barnet, Webster and a myriad of other artists from mainly the 30's, 40's and 50's and yes, I even have the 10-disk Glenn Miller box, 4 different Goodman at Carnegie Hall issues by now, and - dare I say it - just about everything Oscar Peterson ever put out. Compared to you guys here, I don't come from another school, I just never really left Junior school. It might be a complacent attitude, but I like it there.

I sometimes wonder if I'm a bit backward and I often try my ear again at hard bop and free jazz, but it never lasts long. I realize that it's good music, I even enjoy a minute here or there, but I don't listen to it extensively. It's the same problem I have whenever I try to approach opera and other classical vocal recitals ... thanks, but no thanks. After about 20 minutes I pull out my Glenn Gould, my Ashkenazy or my Fong 'Tsu and start enjoying myself again.

To get to the point: So far, my best batch of jazz in recent memory (for me, that's 2005) is still led by "Sweets", a Verve re-release of Harry Edison and His Orchestra's vibrant 1956 recording.

For once, AMG puts it quite nicely: "Harry "Sweets" Edison got the most mileage out of a single note, like his former boss Count Basie. Edison, immediately recognizable within a note or two, long used repetition and simplicity to his advantage while always swinging." Add to this a quote from the AMG review of this week's album, you have what makes this recording so special: "Neither an innovator nor an iconoclast, trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison is simply one of the bluesiest, hardest-swinging, and downright tasty jazz musicians of the 20th century." Hyperbole aside, this mother swings. And that's what gets my motor running, ready to go.

Yes, it's steeped in tradition. Yes, there's absolutely nothing new here. Yes, you might even be tempted to say that it's the same old **** (insert expletive of your choice here), but I like it. No, I love it.

Harry "Sweets" Edison

Sweets

Recording Date: Sep 4, 1956

Label: Verve

Reissue: 2005

First issue: 1956 Clef MG C-717

Also: Universal Japan, 2005

(01) Hollering at the Watkins (Edison) - 3:37

(02) Used to Be Basie (Edison) - 6:01

(03) How Deep Is the Ocean (Berlin) - 3:47

(04) Studio Call (Edison) - 8:11

(05) Willow Weep for Me (Ronell) - 4:49

(06) Opus 711 (Edison) - 5:08

(07) Love Is Here to Stay (Gershwin) - 3:23

(08) K.M. Blues (Edison) - 3:35

(09) Walkin' With Sweets (Edison) - 7:13

P.S.: Sorry I'm a day or two late to the party ...

Edited April 11, 2006 by Jim Alfredson

[Dan Gould]

I'm with you.

I LOVE it.

Edited November 28, 2005 by Dan Gould

[MartyJazz]

To NeverOnFriday:

Nothing wrong with being where you're at. While I listen mostly to Blue Note "type" material of the '50s and '60s, I got my kicks this morning digging a side that Hawk recorded with Pee Wee Russell. And "Sweets" is just what his nickname implies. Thanks for the rec.

[neveronfriday]

I'm not alone!

Thanks guys.

I pulled this from riverwalk.org:

Harry 'Sweets' Edison by Steve Voce

The sound of Harry Edison's trumpet was, after that of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most instantly identifiable signature in jazz. It could be recognised after just one note. Edison could play a note, bend it and place it with such impeccable timing that he was never successfully copied. He swung powerfully with a sparse and repetitive simplicity. Although he had been ill for some years, his death in his sleep on Monday night was unexpected. He had been practising his trumpet as usual during the day. Many millions of people are familiar with Edison's playing without identifying it, for his muted trumpet comments and punctuation of Frank Sinatra's singing on Sinatra's best-selling Capitol albums was a vital factor in their success. Edison's earlier fame as a member of the Count Basie orchestra was eclipsed by his success as a Hollywood studio musician and he was an automatic choice whenever Nelson Riddle recorded.

The details of the beginning of Edison's association with Riddle are involved and unusual. In 1950 Edison was with the Basie band. He had been a member of it since 1938. At the time the band had no work so, as was his habit, Basie parked his sidemen in a hotel, the Woodside in New Jersey, where they were able to cook for themselves, while he went out looking for jobs. He was a way for several weeks, and when the band members heard that Basie was working in Chicago with a septet, they assumed that they had been fired. Edison decided to go west.

In the interests of getting properly fed, the Basie men had always tried to strike up friendships with waitresses, cooks and good time girls. It was one of the latter who had moved to California and told Edison that if he was ever out there he should stay with her. He sold a few belongings, managed to raise the fare to Los Angeles and moved in with the lady. One of her clients was Nelson Riddle. On one of his visits she told him about Edison. 'The famous Harry Edison?' Riddle was very excited and called Frank Sinatra. 'Get him down here!' said Sinatra. Edison was brought to the studio and was placed in the middle of a section of the finest trumpeters in the land. It then emerged that he couldn't read music. Sinatra had the answer. 'If you hear a hole Harry,' Sinatra said, 'Fill it.' The system worked brilliantly and Edison started recording at once. In the meantime Sinatra paid to have him taught to read music.

Other orchestra leaders wanted him too, and Edison always had as much work as he wanted. He became comparatively wealthy and had no need to tour, but he did and came to Europe often, largely because he enjoyed working for his friend and agent the Manchester-based Ernie Garside.

Edison never knew his father. 'He was a Hopi Indian. They were a little-known branch of the Apache tribe. The Hopis never did anything, never won any battles. My dad came into Columbus one day, moved in with my mother, stayed a couple of months and was off. The only time I ever saw him was once or twice when I was about seven. Nobody ever heard of him again.' His mother was similarly careless about recording the year of Edison's birth and nobody knows it for sure. Edison's only comment was that the year most often given in the reference books, 1915, was wrong. It was most likely to have been 1919.

'My uncle was a coal miner and a farmer. I went to live with him in Louisville, Kentucky and he taught me to play a pump organ that he had. I found an old cornet in the house, and he taught me to play scales on it. I used to listen to records by the old blues singers, and I happened to hear Louis Armstrong backing up Bessie Smith. That was for me! That was where it all started. That was the direction I wanted to go. Louis Armstrong has been my idol ever since.'

When he was eleven Edison almost died from typhoid fever. A year later his mother took him back to Columbus, Ohio. 'My mother bought me a new horn. I think it took her about five years to pay for it.' She bought a tuxedo for him, too, and he joined a local band led by Earl Hood. 'You're playing for experience,' said Hood and didn't pay him anything. After his mother intervened Edison was given 35 cents a night. In 1933 he joined the newly formed Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and moved with the band to St. Louis where he worked for two years. A visiting alto player, Tab Smith heard him, and recommended Edison to Lucky Millinder, who led a top rank band in New York. Edison joined Millinder and apart from Smith the band included the new trumpet giant Charlie Shavers, pianist Billy Kyle and the tenor player Don Byas. Millinder was an erratic leader who fired musicians on the slightest whim. 'One time he got so excited that he even fired himself.' Edison was sacked when Millinder decided he wanted Dizzy Gillespie in the band. But Gillespie soon left to join Teddy Hill, and Millinder hired Edison again. 'Then Bobby Moore, who was with Count Basie, took sick. So I joined the Basie band at the end of 1937. Basie's was not an ensemble band. Everybody in it was a soloist. I'd been playing in shows and had played with the tone and quality that had been wanted. I still played like that, often in the lower register, when I joined Basie and that's what made Lester Young start calling me "Sweets".

'At first I tried to play pretty all the time, and I took a lot of solos on record that Buck Clayton got the credit for. Buck had already built up a name with Basie, but people hadn't heard of me.' The two trumpeters, outstanding and original improvisers, shared the work, and Edison took solos on more than 50 of Basie's records from this period.

I always looked on Basie as a father. When I joined the band he just took a liking to me. I used to listen to him because I had no fatherly advice when I left home. He took me every place in New York and introduced me to Duke, Don Redman, Benny Carter and Chick Webb - to the whole scene. It was a thrill to meet James P. Johnson and all the people I had read about and admired without ever thinking I'd be shaking hands with them. 'Early on I put in my notice. There was so little written music that I wasn 't accomplishing what I wanted to. I wanted to read well and be a really good musician. "Well, you sound good," Basie said. "'But I don't know what note to hit," I said. "'Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!"' 'That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We used to do like 300 one-nighters a year because we had no place to sit down and play regularly. As more instruments were added the band became more musical and more of an ensemble.'

At that time Billie Holiday was the band's vocalist. When the band played at the Fox Theatre in Detroit the management insisted that she put black make-up on because she was too 'yellow' to appear with black musicians. 'When I came out on stage and saw her, I laughed,' said Edison. 'It was funny to me, and then she turned around and called me a motherfucker. 'She was with us when we played in the lowest places. I can remember places in the Carolinas, in the tobacco regions, and we'd play the tobacco warehouses. And all you could smell would be the tobacco, because it would be hanging in the top of those huge barns, and they would rope areas off for dancing, the dust from the floor and the tobacco smell, well - I don't know how she made it as a woman. She never got tired.

'Knowing Billie was like having a friend forever. Because if she liked you, there was nothing in the world she wouldn't give you and nothing anybody could say against you. She was like a man, only feminine, because she came out knowing how to protect herself.' In 1944 Edison and Lester Young had leading roles in Gijon Mili's classic film short 'Jammin' The Blues', done for impresario Norman Granz.

When Basie had left the band behind and Edison had moved to California he was at first reluctant to take on the studio work with Nelson Riddle. He credited Riddle's patience with him for his great success. One of the first Sinatra albums on which he made his presence felt was 'The Wee Small Hours of the Morning' (1955) and Edison and others considered that to be Sinatra's finest. He worked with Sinatra for six years. In the studio he had a mike that was separate from the rest of the trumpet section. This allowed Edison to use his Harmon mute to improvise his solos and obbligatos. He played the same role on recordings by Bing Crosby, Billy Daniels, Nat Cole, Margaret Whiting, Jerry Lewis and Ella Fitzgerald - 'I once made an album of 36 songs in three hours with Ella Fitzgerald.' He played on many film soundtracks. His commercial work gave him a permanent prosperity and the studio pension system gave him $800 a week for the rest of his life. He acquired a taste for what he saw as the finer things, and sported a full-length mink coat. He changed his Cadillac every two or three years, although there was seldom much mileage on the clock.

Through all this Edison stuck to his jazz playing. He had his own small band in Los Angeles, and he also toured with Norman Granz's all-star Jazz atthe Philharmonic unit. During the Fifties he recorded frequently with Shorty Rogers' Giants. He also played in the bands led by Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones, Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson. Edison's jazz recordings were all of the highest quality and so numerous that it is impossible to list them. One of the finest, though, was with a sextet led by Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges in 1959 that produced the two albums 'Back To Back' and 'Side By Side'.

There were frequent guest appearances with the Basie band, and in 1958 Edison returned to New York to form his own quintet. This band was resident at Birdland where it shared the bill with the Basie band. The band went out on the road and the drummer Elvin Jones recalled driving 800 miles non-stop with the band through rain and hail - with his drums on the roof of the car - to play at a festival in French Lick, Indiana. When they arrived they were greeted with 'Where have you been? You were supposed to play yesterday.'

The singer Joe Williams left Basie's band and Basie arranged for him to join Edison's group. This was a successful partnership until Edison decided to return to California during the Sixties for more studio work. For three years he played on 'The Hollywood Palace Show', a television programme fronted by Mitchell Ayres. In between a multitude of record dates Edison appeared in television shows with Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Bill Cosby, Glen Campbell, Della Reese and others. Eventually he reformed the quintet and played long engagements in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. He visited Europe annually during the Seventies, with drummer Louie Bellson 's band in 1971 and often with the ex-Basie tenor player Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis in later years. His world trips enabled him to visit art galleries and museums, and he spent much of his spare time following this new hobby. He stayed at the home of his agent Ernie Garside during his tours of Britain. On one occasion Garside, himself a trumpeter and veteran of the Maynard Ferguson band, took Edison's trumpet to bits and cleaned it. It was a mammoth and unpleasant job since this was the first time this had been done since Edison had bought the trumpet years before. 'You've ruined my career!' Edison yelled. 'I can't play it anymore. It feels like a trombone.' It was three days before he adjusted to the new state of the horn.

Edison taught music seminars at Yale University and was honoured as a 'master musician' in 1991 with a National Endowment for the Arts Award at the Kennedy Centre.

Steve Voce

Edited November 28, 2005 by neveronfriday

[Free For All]

and the Cellar Door release. ...

[Quincy]

Within the past couple of years I've been delving more into the period you love. There are some nights where I think why would I want to listen to any other tenor player than Hawkins or Webster.

When I started listening to jazz once I moved beyond Miles & Atlantic/Impulse! Coltrane I was buying a lot of Blue Notes. I still play my fair share but discovering that little label called Verve was a delightful thing to do. There's some pretty good stuff on that label, ya know? And this one is a beauty!

[Larry Kart]

Two posts from this spring:

Still have my somewhat beat up, purchased at the time it came out LP copy. That's a lovely rhythm section, some of the best Ben Webster on record, and the overall groove is great, as though everyone were on ball-bearings (quite a contrast in that respect to a later Granz album -- was it called "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You"? -- with the same front-line and an utterly airless rhythm section with Oscar Peterson). Though Edison is certainly in good form on "Sweets," I think his best post-Basie work is on the live album from the Haig. BTW, the band on "Sweets" is the same one that backed Billie Holiday on two four-tune Clef dates (8/14/56 and 8/18/56).

Just picked up the reissued "Sweets." Thanks to the handsome remastering, I was struck more than ever by the rhythm section -- in particular the way Kessel and Rowles seem to fuse into a single comping entity, a la '30s Freddie Green and Basie. Who plays what, when between Kessel and Rowles is so perfectly, subtly apportioned, to the point where some of Kessel's figures seem to vanish into Rowles' and vice versa, that you'd almost think it all had to be worked out beforehand, though of course it wasn't; and the results are tremendously stimulating to the Edison and, especially, Webster -- who was perhaps more sensitive/vulnerable to what rhythm sections were doing behind him than Sweets was. As I'd thought, the album was recorded shortly after (9/4/56) the same group had backed Billie Holiday on those two Clef dates, which no doubt accounts for the hand-in-glove atmosphere that prevails here. Kudos to Mondragon and Stoller too.

[catesta]

I guess I need to grab this one.

I love "Sweets".

[Chuck Nessa]

Not sure why anyone needs to take swipes at other "styles" to praise this great recording. It should be in the collection of any music fan "without borders".

[neveronfriday]

I wasn't taking swipes ... I was just telling the God-honest truth.

At least Ornette didn't have "Joan Crawford hair".

That could have made it a lot worse.

[BruceH]

This sure looks good to me. I love 'Sweets,' not to mention swing music in general. I'll have to check if I already have this, but if not, I'm gonna get it.

[Dan Gould]

Not sure why anyone needs to take swipes at other "styles" to praise this great recording. It should be in the collection of any music fan "without borders".

nof didn't take "swipes" at other "styles". He even calls it "good music".

All he said was that the style epitomized by Sweets is the kind of music he likes best.

[Brad]

This is just great music. Enough said.

[danasgoodstuff]

I certainly read nof's opening post as "swipes", albiet rather mild and polite ones. Your millage may vary... Point is, it's not necessary to prefer 'swing' in general over any other style in order to dig what a fine session this is. I personally love Monk, Coltrane (right up to the end) and Ayler too but think this is indeed a fine session. J. de Valk in his Ben bio dismisses this and Sweets in general by saying he played the same solo over and over...but then he doesn't like the session with Tatum either so what does he know? He loved the spirituals session discussed above, that's why I asked about it. I agree with the comments about how nice and airy the rhythm section is here and don't think it necessary to put down Oscar P (my fellow Canadian) in order to praise them (and now we've come full circle).

[B. Goren.]

I'm with you.

I LOVE it.

Me too. You are not alone.

[montg]

This has been a favorite of mine since picking it up this summer. Barney Kessel adds a lot to this session, I think--both the comping and the solos. In some of the mainstream sessions of the 50s I hear a tendency for the rhythm sections to lag or coast a bit, but not here--everything is brisk and tight.

A bright sunny session--a wonder that the Vervian conglomerate let it languish for so long.

[catesta]

I got it and I love it!

[John Tapscott]

I got it and I love it!

Ditto!

[Big Al]

The beautiful thing about this album, as with many of Sweets’ albums, is his ability to lead his group through the simplest of riffs and turn them into some of the swinginest sides you’ll ever hear. Sweets originals on this album abound with riffs that sound easy to play, but I’ll bet that only Sweets knew how to get the real SWING out of those riffs!

Then there are the covers, which are no less swinging, but a lot more structured and dare I say adventurous! The guitar intro to “How Deep is the Ocean” is luscious, one of the many highlights of Barney Kessel on this album. He has such a nice rich tone.

I like it that the album is credit to an “orchestra” because this sextet sure has as big a sound as an orchestra!

This album could easily be compared, heck played side-by-side, with THE SWINGER and MR. SWING; on those LPs, Jimmy Forrest takes over on tenor, who more than holds his own stepping in Big Ben’s shoes. And that’s another thing: Sweets was never less than inspired no matter what situation he played in; pair him with a big thick-toned tenor sax and listen to the man GO!

What a record! Thanks for picking this one!

[Peter Johnson]

In the midst of my current Basie kick (and by the way, thanks (here) for the recommendations (there), more on that later in the right thread), I ran across this in Borders and thought I remembered some discussion of it here. Didn't remember these accolades, all of which, imho, are very well-deserved. What a side! This is one of those rare records that I can put on at the office and it has me out of my seat dancing around a bit (sorry if that image disturbs... ). At home, it's a full-on one man jam session, me playing the finest in air-trumpet, air-bass, air-drums...wow. Love, love, LOVE this album!

If anyone is on the fence about this, get off the damn fence and buy it.

P.S. Ben Webster is in GREAT form on this!

[Peter Johnson]

To reiterate: god DAMN this is a great record!!!

K. M. Blues... does it get any better?

Sorry to gush...

[Big Al]

K. M. Blues... does it get any better?

Nope!