Remembering Paul Weeden

From right: Paul Weeden, Don Patterson, Billy James [source]

Last week I had lengthy sessions with the music of Don Patterson, one of the post-Jimmy Smith Hammond B3 players who, more or less, followed the pattern of early Smith trios with guitar and drums. Nevertheless, he is more of a funky/groovy player for whom Smith was only an starting point from which he saw the possibilities of the organ, as a swinging (and also good-selling) instrument in jazz. So naturally, compared to early recordings of Smith (which in my opinion are among his most powerful), Patterson lacks that rich bebop vocabulary. However, Patterson, like many jazz musicians who pursued a career somewhere between the center to the margins of jazz world, has his own special merits, quite sufficient to enable the listener to stay with his music for a period of time, in my case, as long as a weekend.

Of course, one can argue that his output with Sonny Stitt are his classics, which I neither accept or dismiss. But you might have heard of a certain Paul Weeden who played guitar in Don Patterson Verve recordings of the early 1960s. If not, in a nutshell, his was a Tiny-Grimes sounding, bluesy guitarist which deserves more attention.

Blue Gene (Gene Ammons, 1958)

Blue Gene
Gene Ammons

Recorded: New York, May 2, 1958
(According to Jazz discography project recorded in Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ. That simply couldn't be true, because after all it's a Prestige session, not Blue Note. My LP liner notes say New York City is correct.)

Label: Prestige LP 7146 or Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 192-2

Musicians:
Idrees Sulieman (tp)/Pepper Adams (Barsax)/Mal Waldron (p)/Doug Watkins (b)/Art Taylor (d)/Ray Barretto (perc)

Tracks:
1-Blue Gene (13:54)
2-Scamperin’ (8:39)
3-Blue Greens and Beans (9:00)
4-Hip Tip (8:58)
Totall Time 40:31

All tracks composed by Mal Waldron.
(According to AMG some tracks are composed by Ammons himself and track three by a guy named Green (!), this is not true. Once again repulsive monopoly of AMG on music scene becomes clear, I’m tired of these worthless so-called reviews and ratings and misinformation)

Issues & reissues:
LP - Blue Gene; Blue Greens And Beans, Pt. 1&2; Biggest Soul Hits.
CD - Blue Gene; Greatest Hits: The 50s.

Session Details:
1509 Blue Greens and Beans Prestige 45-140, PRLP 7146; Fantasy OJCCD 6013-2
1510 Hip Tip Prestige PRLP 7146
1511 Scamperin' -
1512 Blue Gene Prestige PRLP 7146, PRLP 7306

We read about this album At AMG’s entry: "The final of Ammons’s series of jam sessions for Prestige features an excellent septet". First, it's not (and never intend to be) a jam session in true sense of the word, It's more a hard bop blowin' session with lots of energy but restricted in the field of the composed pieces by Mal Waldron. Second, this is not "the last" of anything because Ammons has other sessions for Prestige, after this one.
Let's forget about Scott Yanow of the AMG and dig this very good round up of two great saxophonists. This a great example of Chicago school of tenor sax by master Ammons.

See a previous post about Ammons.
See another post on Pepper Adams.

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Remembering Gene Ammons

Born from such qualified master of piano, as Albert Ammons was, Gene came into the world of jazz in 1925. Shytown, as Rushing and Basie have called it, was his birthplace. His actual talent and practice gave him the chance to participate in the revolutionary big band of Mr. “B” as he was still in his teens.

That was the year 1944. His hardboiled sound, reminding us of the masters of thirties like Herschel Evans and Hawk, with special lyricism of his own gave him the quality of a great tenor sound, like that of Stan Getz but in a much stronger and powerful volume.

He actually took Stan’s chair in that excellent band Woody Herman had back in 1949. In early fifties he and Sonny Stitt organized a heavy swinger type of a band and established a special sort of dialogue between alto and tenor sound that went for quite a while as a stylistic remedy for worn-out patterns. Jug and Stitt, when sonny was blowing the tenor, remind us of those earlier days of Ammons with Dex. And the now-forgotten 1944 recording of “Blowin’ the blues away”. I think, I have never heard from anybody else, excepting Frog, the statement about the very importance of practicing with the instrument in order to get to personal touch and more important to “sound” that would be pleasant to every ear. This was his advice to anyone playing with the idea of becoming a tenor man. Back in December 1961, he told a Metronome magazine interviewer “…What ‘d I tell? I would tell him to get a sound; the most important thing!”

This very human advice was unheard by cops who busted him because of his addiction to H. And brother they put him into the so-called custody of a federal prison in Illinois. Whereas movie stars like Monroe, Sinatra and Martin could blow their minds with coke and what not. The grey sad tone of Jug got a smokey quality after inhaling fumes of justice! Mental sickness and addiction helped to destroy a life of great lights and darkness.