Wilbur Harden

[Late]

And Harden evidently played a rotary valve trumpet, at least for some of these Savoy sessions.

[Cliff Englewood]

This reissue has it all and in excellent sound, all stereo.

The same material is also on this one from Lone Hill;

[brownie]

The same material is also on this one from Lone Hill;

This is how the Coltrane photo by William Claxton looks like:

Strange that Lonehill went for a reversed image! Were they trying to fool somebody?

[mikeweil]

Mike, that 2 CD set isn't all stereo. There are some tunes with several takes where some are mono and some stereo, suggesting that the set was assembled, at least partly, from whatever LP masters they could find.

Is that so? I haven't listened to this one in quite some time ... and if so, I wouldn't care - I'm turning into a mono fan for these old sessions. RVG stereo wasn't the best. 

[Brad]

This reissue has it all and in excellent sound, all stereo.

Harden's discography can be found here.

There was awhile there where Savoy was re-issuing some great stuff. I think I picked them all or most of them up. Unfortunately, it all ended too quickly.

[Shrdlu]

Mike, that 2 CD set isn't all stereo. There are some tunes with several takes where some are mono and some stereo, suggesting that the set was assembled, at least partly, from whatever LP masters they could find.

Is that so? I haven't listened to this one in quite some time ... and if so, I wouldn't care - I'm turning into a mono fan for these old sessions. RVG stereo wasn't the best. 

Well Rudy's Hackensack monos are great. For a quintet, stereo doesn't add much anyway. The 1957 Prestige Trane sessions sound wonderful, and the CDs were not done by McMaster. Most people think that the guys at Fantasy did a great job with the humble 16 bit Prestige CDs. Prestige, unlike Blue Note, didn't normally get Rudy to record in stereo until well into 1958. Savoy apparently did go for stereo in 1958, but, judging by what's on the CD reissues, they seem to have lost the session reels, and LP masters seem to have been used.

[clifford_thornton]

The same material is also on this one from Lone Hill;

This is how the Coltrane photo by William Claxton looks like:

Strange that Lonehill went for a reversed image! Were they trying to fool somebody?

Robert Motherwell's estate?

[Guest Bill Barton]

This reissue has it all and in excellent sound, all stereo.

Harden's discography can be found here.

That's the collection I have and it's a beauty. Pulled it out for a listen when I noticed this thread. What an absolutely gorgeous sound Harden had! And several photos in this two-CD set show a rotary-valve instrument that appears to be a flugelhorn rather than a trumpet. Perhaps someone who has more knowledge of brass instruments than I do can confirm this if they have the Savoy Jazz Originals set.

[Shrdlu]

They should really have used a pic of Trane playing tenor. The one they used shows him playing alto - from a 1958 Prestige session led by Gene Ammons.

(Collectors of trivia can also see him playing alto on the video of Miles made in early 1959. He was playing in Gil Evans' orchestra in the absence of Cannonball, who was ill that day.)

Edited March 27, 2010 by Shrdlu

[Stevie Mclean]

I'm a little late to this thread but I have really been on a Harden kick lately, so I enjoyed reading everybody's contributions to this thread.

I do have one thing to add, which I found quite interesting...

In Bill Brower's interview with Curtis Fuller for the Smithsonian History Museum, Fuller has some very... interesting comments on Wilbur's playing/performance style along with what seems to be an allusion to some time spent in a mental institution.

Brower: One Time I saw Brooks and he had these toy drummers, he had all these toys drummers. In some kind of way he could… He had this laser thing that he could trigger them with. You know when the Chinese had like the –– he had like an army of toy drummers in some kind of a way he was triggering the shit.  He was out there.

Curtis Fuller: He was out there! You know where he is now, or where he was?

Brower: Insane Asylum.                                                                 

Curtis Fuller: Yeah, he and Wilbur Harden.  Now, Wilbur, ‘Trane  loved him, but I couldn’t stand to watch him. He’s a guy that you, literally, could hear him think. He would stand on the bandstand and be moving about “click, click, click, click” He would say, (scats very sparse, calculated melody).

Brower: So, he’s editing--

Curtis Fuller: He’s editing  as he’s trying to play. I mean, do you know what that is to watch? Win, and Cedar I couldn’t stand to watch. Cedar had a way like Elvin. Cedar’s time movement with his foot, I couldn’t look at it

Brower: Because he would throw you off?

Curtis Fuller: He would throw me off because his foot would move out of rhythm, with no distinct pattern or nothing. Sometimes, I would stand there and look like, “What the hell! How did you come up with that one?”

Brower: But, Wilbur Harden, on top of his playing was his significance in writing

Curtis Fuller: Who’s that?

Brower: Wilbur Harden.

Curtis Fuller: Yeah,  some writing but not a whole lot. Then, there was another guy that was just like him. ‘Trane didn’t like him too much. He ended up with Mingus. Clarence something…

Brower: Shaw.

Curtis Fuller: Yeah,  you know all these guys. Yeah, he was just late Wilbur. I never could get the gist of his… It was always something that was… He kept anticipating that he was going to play something but it would always be the complete opposite of what you thought he would do. The line would be so discombobulated. You would be like, “Where did that come from?”  That’s the way he heard it so you can question the guy. I used to stand next to him and say, “Nobody’s home.” 

It's interesting how Fuller felt this way yet still used him for the Images session. Maybe his negative comments were more influenced by Harden's playing later on, possibly due to worsening mental and physical health.

His description of Harden's "editing" style of composing an improvisation while in the middle of a performance sounds quite odd, I would have loved to see this going on firsthand! I can't say it doesn't make sense, as Fuller states in the last response, Harden had a very sparse and unpredictable sound, (which is one of the things I love about his playing, unlike Fuller.), I can kind of picture Harden standing there, thinking about his next line, in the middle of his recorded solos.