Sonny Stitt: Tune-Up!

Back in 1971, when I began to listen steadily to jazz, I was nuts about an album that had come out that year by Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons called You Talk That Talk. I was a freshman in high school and had taken up the tenor saxophone, an instrument that was much cooler to tote around in its case in school hallways than to stand alone in a room and pra…