JazzWax

Perfection: Paul Smith - 'Under My Skin' (1957)

Last weekend, I posted a video clip that included pianist Paul Smith accompanying Frank Sinatra. Smith belonged to a small group of superb West Coast jazz studio pianists that included Lou Levy, Jimmy Rowles and Pete Jolly. In the late 1950s, Smith recorded four albums for Capitol that became known as the Liquid Sound sessions. One of them was Delicate Jazz, recorded in November 1957.

For this week's Perfection clip, I've chosen I've Got You Under My Skin. I'm not sure who handled the arranging, but I'd bet it was Frank Comstock. The musicians in the nifty sextet featured Bob Cooper (ts), Jules Kinsler (fl), Paul Smith (p), Tony Rizzi (g), Joe Mondragon (b) and Stan Levey (d). Delicate Jazz is probably the best of the four albums in this series, but they all have merit and are easy on the ear. [Photo above of Paul Smith]

If you like it, all four are available from Fresh Sound on a two-CD set: Paul Smith: The Complete Liquid Sounds Sessions, 1954-1958 here.

For more on Paul Smith at JazzWax, go here.

Here's Paul Smith with a sextet playing I've Got You Under My Skin...

Other Perfection tracks in this ongoing series...

• Paul Desmond and Jim Hall: Any Other Time, go here.
• John Coltrane: You Say You Care, go here.
• Quincy Jones: Funk Junction, go here.
• Art Farmer's Work of Art, go here.
• Miles Davis: A Gal in Calico, go here.
• Gene Krupa: Mulligan Stew, go here.
• Dave Brubeck: The Duke, go here.
• Horace Silver: The Back Beat, go here.
• Horace Parlan: Up & Down, go here.
• Dexter Gordon: Society Red, go here.
• Barney Kessel: You Go to My Head, go here.
• Count Basie: Corner Pocket, go here.
• Herbie Mann: Manteca, go here.
• Donald Byrd: Bronze Dance, go here.
• George Shearing: I'll Be Around, go here.
• Ammons & Stitt: You Talk That Talk, go here.
• Count Basie: Blues in My Heart, go here.
• Moonlight in Vermont, go here.
• Johnny Griffin / Matthew Gee, Here, go here.
• Jimmy Smith / Stanley Turrentine, When I Grow Too Old to Dream, go here.
• Chet Baker: Estate, go here.
• Jazz Studio 1: Tenderly, go here.
• Herb Pomeroy: Down Home Outing, go here.
• Frank Sinatra: There's a Small Hotel, go here.
• Bill Harris Herd: Blackstrap, go here.
• Gerry Mulligan: Westwood Walk, go here.
• Red Garland/Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: We'll Be Together Again, go here.
• Bill Evans: Reflections in D, go here.
• Ted McNabb & Co.: Mountain Greenery, go here.
• Maynard Ferguson: Fox Hunt, go here.
• Serge Chaloff & the Herdsmen: The Most!, go here.
• Maynard Ferguson: Starfire, go here.
• Urbie Green, Please, go here.
• Machito, Conversation, go here.
• David Allyn, Love Is a Serious Thing, go here.
• Lennie Tristano, Wow, go here.
• Teddy Charles, Borodin Bossa Nova, go here.
• Gerry Mulligan, Night Lights, go here.
• Tommy Flanagan, In the Blue of Evening, go here.
• Stan Getz, Stella by Starlight, go here.
• Erroll Garner, It's the Talk of the Town, go here.
• Sonny Stitt, Miss Ann, Lisa, Sue and Sadie, go here.
• Phil Urso, P.U. Stomp, go here.
• Jimmy Forrest, Soul Street, go here.
• Harry James, late 1950s/early '60s, go here.
• Hal McKusick, You're Everywhere, go here.
• Dexter Gordon, I Want More, go here.
• Keely Smith: The Song Is You, go here.
• Elliot Lawrence: But Not for Me, go here.
• Doug Raney: Lean Years, go here.

Video: Kenny Clarke Plays 'Black Knight' (1957)

On November 12, 1957, drummer Kenny Clarke was in a recording studio in Paris recording Kenny Clarke Plays Christian Chevallier for French Columbia. His band included composer-arranger Christian Chevallier, Ack van Rooyen (tp), Nat Peck (tb), Hubert Fol and Jean Aldegon (as), Georges Grenu (ts), Armand Migiani (bar), Maurice Vander (p) and Pierre Michelot (b).

They were there to record a tricky Chevallier tune called Black Knight. Here it is...

Fortunately, a French TV crew was in the studio at the same time filming for broadcast. I stumbled across this clip last week. Go here...

Clearly, not an easy song to play, with all the hard stops and starts. Somewhere, I suspect, there's an entire clip of the Black Knight session. Hopefully it will surface.

JazzWax tracks: You'll find this album and more by Kenny Clarke in Paris on Fresh Sound here.

'Here's Lee Morgan' (1960)

Vee-Jay Records is perhaps best known for what it couldn't pull off. The label was founded in Gary, Indiana, in 1953 by Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken, a husband-and-wife team whose initials were used for the label's name. It was one of the first black-owned record companies and dominated the R&B market in the late 1950s. It also wound up recording the Four Seasons and had the early U.S. rights to the Beatles records. 

Vee-Jay had acquired these rights through a licensing deal with Britain's EMI Records, since EMI's American affiliate, Capitol Records, initially declined to release the Beatles' first album in the U.S. As part of the acquisition, Capitol had the power to turn EMI down if it felt a U.K. release wouldn't work here. Initially, Capitol felt the Beatles were too sophisticated and foreign-sounding and wouldn't win over kids who were snapping up Beach Boys records. So EMI turned to Vee-Jay, thinking the Fab Four would work with R&B fans.

When Vee-Jay released the single Please, Please Me in February 1963, the 45 bombed. Introducing...the Beatles, the band's first album, was expected to follow, but there was a problem. One of the label's executives had used company funds to pay off a gambling debt. Lacking sizable marketing dollars, the LP's release was scrapped. It wouldn't come out until January 10, 1964, 10 days before Capitol, under pressure, released Meet the Beatles. 

Before the Beatles, Vee-Jay had made jazz history with tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and trumpeter Lee Morgan. In August 1960, the label released Introducing Wayne Shorter. Weeks later, it issued Here's Lee Morgan. The two albums were spectacular and fundamentally changed hard bop.

Now Craft Recordings is re-issuing both, remastered by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram vinyl. Here's Lee Morgan is out now and Introducing Wayne Shorter will be out on Aug. 29.

Here's Lee Morgan on vinyl is breathtaking. Recorded in February 1960 at New York's Bell Sound, in Studio B, the album featured Lee Morgan(tp), Clifford Jordan (ts), Wynton Kelly (p), Paul Chambers (b) and Art Blakey (d), who was on loan from Blue Note. The quality of the sound is astonishing, particularly because it was so well recorded to begin with by producer Sid McCoy and an unknown recording engineer. 

Vee-Jay was very clever. With Here's Lee Morgan, the label produced a Blue Note-quality LP with terrific sound that rode the coattails of the Miles Davis model that was already successful at Columbia. But most of all, the album broke ground with a new hard-bop approach that was even more blistering and thunderous.

This statement takes nothing away from the existing hard-bop intensity of groups like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the Horace Silver Quintet. But on this Vee-Jay recording, Morgan's quintet (and the one on Shorter's debut disc) sounded more unleashed and searing. Morgan's forceful, sizzling trumpet and Jordan's commanding, bossy saxophone feel liberated from the Blue Note formula. The quintet and the material seems more spirited and freer than what Blue Note had been releasing up until then.

Here's Lee Morgan is a powerful album, and the remastered vinyl teases out the warmth and dimension along with the muscular force.

The tracks:

• Terrible "T" (Lee Morgan)
• Mogie (Lee Morgan)
• I'm a Fool to Want You (Wolf, Herron, Sinatra)
• Running Brook (Wayne Shorter)
• Off Spring (Milt Jackson)
• Bess (Lee Morgan)

JazzWax tracks: You'll find the vinyl reissue of Here's Lee Morgan (Craft Recordings) here and here.

JazzWax clips: Here's Off Spring...

Here's Running Brook...

And here's Mogie...