Kenny Dorham: The Complete ‘Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia – Blue Note 1524

I think I have a new favorite hard bop record.

For many years, I considered Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers the perfect hard bop band – the Beatles of the bop set. I still do. I don’t know how Blakey managed to find the very best up-and-coming jazz musicians in America, year after year, but somehow he did. And somehow the various bands he put together, no matter who was in them, produced superlative 5-star records, year after year.

I have many Blakey/Jazz Messengers albums, and while they’re all outstanding, I’d always felt 1954’s A Night at Birdland was the absolute best. It featured an all-star cast – Blakey, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson and Curly Russell – at the peak of their talents. If you can’t groove to this record, you just aren’t meant for jazz.

Later, I discovered Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ At the Café Bohemia, and realized I may have jumped the gun. Bohemia features a slightly different band a year later in 1955 – Blakey, Silver, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins – and it’s just about as good as Birdland. I especially grew to like Dorham’s trumpet, which is every bit as interesting, if not quite as flashy, as Browns’.

Now, I concede, there may be an even better album.

In 1956, a few months after his date with the Messengers at Café Bohemia, Kenny Dorham returned to the club with his own band. The result was ‘Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia.

The cast is not as well-known as the Blakey bunch: Dorham on trumpet, J.R. Monterose on tenor, a young Kenny Burrell on guitar, fresh off recording his debut album, Bobby Timmons on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Arthur Edgehill on drums. It’s blasphemy, I know, but I’d trade Silver for Timmons, who has a light, rhythmic touch and melodic flair. And Monterose has a very Charlie Parker-ish sound, which contrasts with Donaldson’s more funky playing.

And then there’s Kenny Burrell. Sometimes bluesy, sometimes jazzy, Burrell was at the start of a long, legendary career. Here, he shows up in the second set at the Café Bohemia and fits right in with the band. His solos are understated, spirited and fun.

The 2-CD set starts with a moseying blues, then slides into a sentimental ballad, “Autumn in New York.” But just when you think this might be a mild night, the band starts swinging, beginning with a mid-tempo original, “Monaco” – it must not be the country, because Durham introduces it as Mon-AH-co – which quicky seques into a boppish jam. More bop standards follow (“A Night in Tunisia,” “N.Y. Theme” and “Royal Roost”) and now the band is really cooking.

For the next couple of hours, Dorham, Monterose, Burrell and Timmons are throwing solos back and forth, sometimes at breakneck speeds. A Dorham original, “Mexico City,” doesn’t sound Spanish so much as a Dizzy Gillsepie-ish bebop anthem.

All in all, it’s as fine an example of hard bop as any ever recorded. Dorham may not be as famous as Miles Davis, Diz, Fats Navarro or Clifford Brown, but he is a fantastic composer, an infectious trumpeter and clearly the equal of Blakey in leading a hard-driving (but short-lived) combo.

A note about the CD: Don’t get the original single-disc album with six songs. Get the 2-CD Complete ‘Round About Midnight, with 17 cuts. It’s like spending a long night at the legendary old jazz club.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Many copies available

Cost: $7 new

Blue Note App for iPad – Great Content, Cheap Price

You can’t have too many Blue Note records – but you can pay too much.

So consider the Blue Note app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The price is right – just $2 a month – and the content is huge: Hundreds of albums by 56 artists, from Andrew Hill to Wayne Shorter. In between, you’ll find lots of familiar names (Sonny Rollins, Stanley Jordan, Stanley Turrentine, Thelonious Monk and Tony Williams, just from the S’s and T’s) and tons of less-familiar folks (Johnny Griffin, Reuben Wilson, Tina Brooks, George Lewis and Dizzy Reece, among others).

Yes, you can play any artist, any album and any track. No random-play radio station here. Do you like Jimmy Smith? He’s got 12 albums here. Lou Donaldson? 13. Art Blakey? 18. The selection is huge.

But no, it’s not infinite. These are mostly albums from the 1950s and ‘60s. Nothing modern here. And yes, most albums are missing tracks. Some are missing a lot. For example, Blakey’s classic 2-CD set, A Night at Birdland, is missing 8 of the 14 tracks. That’s pretty awful. But Blakey’s Orgy in Rhythm? All 8 tracks. So it’s hit and miss, and there’s no obvious reason why Blue Note couldn’t have included every track.

And that’s just the music. Every artist has a bio, some lengthy (cribbed from AllMusic). And videos! Blakey has 20. Bud Powell has 20. Grant Green has 20. Duke Ellington has 20. Granted, some of these videos may come from YouTube. It’s hard to tell how many are Blue Note originals. Still – they’re all here in one place.

Plus there are old newspaper and magazine stories for each artist – enough to keep you in words while your ears are filled with tunes.

Bottom line: This is a great app. And at the price, can you really argue?

 

Herbie Nichols Trio – Blue Note 1519

OK, now I’m cheating. At least it feels that way.

The next CD on my quixotic Blue Note odyssey is Herbie Nichols Trio, a 1955-56 trio record by the criminally under-appreciated pianist. Great – I’m looking forward to it! I know almost nothing about Nichols, except that he was an overlooked talent who was often compared to the quirky Thelonious Monk. How can that be bad?

Except… you can’t really buy this CD. Not easily. And not cheaply.

Go to Amazon and look it up. The first thing you see is that the album is available on MP3 for just $6.99. OK, that’s good, but a last resort. I’d rather have the tangible CD for my collection. Then you see the two-CD set Complete Studio Master Takes – a Spanish import selling for $40 to $50. Um, no. Not yet. Maybe never.

There’s also Herbie Nichols Trio, Volume 2, which some nut is selling for $2,339.99 new. That has to be a typo. Used copies start at $28. Maybe when we get to Volume 2. But not yet. And even so, that’s kind of expensive.

How about eBay? There’s a $13 used copy – shipping from Japan! I’m not sure I trust that. A $15 copy shipping from South Korea. A $50 copy shipping from Japan, and two $60 copies shipping from Canada and Japan. Uh, no.

So MP3 it is. Which is great, if all I want is the music. But I don’t. I want the CD.

Sigh. Eventually. Meanwhile, the MP3s will do, says the cheater.

* * *

Oh yeah, and then there’s the music.

It’s great, just as I’d hoped. The critics are right. Herbie Nichols is just slightly less off-kilter than Monk, but they’re in the same ballpark. Clearly, he can play a tune straight, but doesn’t choose to. Each tune is full of odd pauses and note choices and rhythms that are a tiny bit off – intentionally.

It’s enough to make every song interesting. It’s cerebral bop, but not quite as extreme as a typical Monk tune. Max Roach on drums and either Al McKibbon or Teddy Kotick on bass provide the beat, but stay pretty much in the background. This is almost entirely Nichols’ show.

The biggest surprise is “Lady Sings the Blues.” Yes, that song. Nichols co-wrote it with Billie Holiday, and while it’s Lady Day’s version you remember, slow and soulful, Nichols’ version has a life of its own. The melody is recognizable, but the pace is faster and the improvisation has a whole different, boppish feel.

Actually, every tune on this wonderful CD is full of unexpected turns. This is piano trio music with a twist. It’s a great find – even in MP3 format.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Rare as a standalone CD, only available as an import; Sold as MP3 files on Amazon

Cost: $7 in MP3 format

Jutta Hipp at the Hickory House, Vol. 2 – Blue Note 1516

Raise your hand if you’ve never heard of Jutta Hipp. Yeah, me either. And yet, there she is, brooding and shadowy on the cover of her first Blue Note album.

Yes, she – a female rarity in the almost-all-male world of 1950s Blue Note. And not American, either. Like Becks and Volkswagen, Jutta Hipp is a German import, but unlike Volkswagen, Hipp is not so very different from her male American counterparts.

First, a word about finding Jutta Hipp CDs. The two CDs of Hipp live at the Hickory House, recorded in 1955, are available only as imports, but they’re not terribly expensive or hard to find. I picked up Volume 2 on Amazon for $10 used.

The CD case is hard cardboard – not like the flimsy LP covers of yore. The original liner notes by Leonard Feather are on the back, in type so small that only Nobel Prize-winning physicists using electron microscopes can read them. But then, there are also more recent, more legible liner notes form 1990 inside – in Japanese! (Apparently there is no Japanese translation for Rudy Van Gelder. His initials are all over the Japanese liner notes.)

So, how rare is Jutta Hipp on CD? Not very, despite her lack of notoriety. Amazon has 41 used and new copies of her most popular album, Jutta Hipp with Zoot Sims, for only $4 or $5. Another relatively rare CD, the “lost tapes” of 1952-55 from Germany, are readily available for $8 or $9. So if you like the fraulein, she’s not hard to find.

On the other hand, the book Blue Note Records by Richard Cook contains exactly one reference to Hipp, noting that she quickly disappeared from the jazz scene shortly after a few Blue Note recordings in the ‘50s. Not exactly ubiquitous or influential.

The music is lively and light, played with a simple piano-bass-drums trio. There’s nothing here you can’t find elsewhere, especially from Horace Silver. It’s pleasant, tune-filled and sometimes bluesy.

The CD starts with a toe-tapping version of “Gone With the Wind,” then turns nicely into a slow drag blues on Erskine Hawkins’ “After Hours.” Hipp has a nice touch, moving easily up and down the keyboard, with charming frills and turns that make you wonder why she disappeared so quickly.

The oddest tune is a solo bass version of “If I Had You,” backed by Hipp’s occasional, gentle vamping, then closing with a very boppish, nimble-fingered “My Heart Stood Still.” All told, Jutta Hipp at the Hickory House is the kind of record that makes you smile, bop your head in time with the piano and come away feeling all is right with the world. Not a bad way to start, or end, the day.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability:

Cost: $10 used