Louis Smith: Smithville – Blue Note 1594

Sometimes, thumbing through the old Blue Note catalogue, you wish for something brand new. Something not the usual Jimmy Smith – Lee Morgan – Lou Donaldson – Horace Silver. And then you find it and wonder, “Who is this guy? And what ever happened to him?”

Louis Smith is that guy.

The trumpeter recorded exactly two Blue Note albums, one in 1957, one in 1958, and then disappeared for 20 years. After listening to the 1958 record, Smithville, I can only wonder why he retreated from the recording world so quickly.

This is a really good record. It’s firmly in the Blue Note bop tradition. Smith sounds like a real disciple of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro. He keeps up on all the fast numbers, sounding fresh and fun. And he’s especially good on the two slow cuts.

The highlight is the first song, “Smithville,” written by Smith. It’s an 11-minute slow, draggy blues that shows off Smith on trumpet, Charlie Rouse on sax and Sonny Clark on piano.

Rouse would go on to star with Thelonious Monk, and Clark would lead his own stellar Blue Note recordings. (One of his best albums, Cool Struttin’, was recorded just two months before Smithville.) But this may be Smith’s best effort ever. It certainly shows what great chops he had, and terrific musical taste, too, as a player and writer. If you like bop, there’s no way you won’t like this CD.

But it does make you wonder. What if Louis Smith had decided to keep on recording, and hadn’t gone back to teaching? Would he have been the next big Blue Note trumpeter? Could he have competed with Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard? Based on Smithville and his debut album, Here Comes Louis Smith, I imagine Smith could have been a real been a star.

Sadly, we’ll never know for sure.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Unavailable new, and pricey used

Cost: Around $20 for a used CD, but just $4.45 for the MP3 files at Amazon

A Blowin’ Session – Blue Note 1559

Sometimes dumb luck makes all the difference. That’s the case with Johnny Griffin’s A Blowin’ Session.

If you’re a sax fan, this one’s for you – not one, not two, but three red-hot tenors, plus one scorching trumpet, and the legendary Art Blakey smashing the drums behind them. Three tenors? How did that happen? Pure serendipity.

Johnny Griffin, the young, new, super-fast saxman, was on his way to record at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey one day in 1957 when he ran into John Coltrane. Come along, Griffin suggested. Sure, Coltrane replied. Dumb luck.

The result is the aptly titled A Blowin’ Session. No false advertising there. Coltrane and Griffin are the stars, blowing long, complex, passages at supersonic speed. Trumpeter Lee Morgan – soon to be a Blue Note mainstay – keeps pace with his own exciting solos. The third tenor, Hank Mobley, also soon to be a Blue Note regular, has a slightly different sound – definitely bop, but slightly more relaxed and bluesy.

There’s a rhythm section, of course, but outside of Blakey, they hardly feature. Pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers are barely heard. Blakey, naturally, is the frantic, inventive timekeeper.

There’s not a lot of variety here — just four tunes, two of them Jerome Kern chestnuts and two originals by Griffin, plus one alternate take. So five cuts in all, though each is around 10 minutes long. Which means each hornman is given plenty of time to stretch out, try out ideas and just plain blow.

Track 1, the Kern standard “The Way You Look Tonight,” is the scorcher, taken faster than possibly any other bop recording in history. Only Mobley seems straining to keep up. The rest are mid-tempo tunes that offer suitable chord changes for inspired soloing.

It’s a pretty terrific CD. Would it have been half as good without Coltrane? Probably. Griffin, Morgan, Mobley and Blakey are more than talented enough to hold your attention. But it’s nice to have the fourth horn voice, though honestly, Coltrane here doesn’t sound SO different from Griffin that you’d sit up and say, “Oh, well, there’s Trane!”

A few months later, Coltrane would record his one and only album for Blue Note: the classic Blue Train. Morgan and Chambers would be there for that one, too. A Blowin’ Session isn’t quite on that level, but it’s still a pretty good showcase for four very frantic horn-players.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Easy to find

Cost: Just $3 used

Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron – The Complete Blue Note and Capitol Recordings

There aren’t many jazz records I’d consider essential. This is one.

Granted, Fats Navarro isn’t in the pantheon of jazz trumpeters. For starters, he didn’t live long enough. He died in 1950 at age 26, so his discography is short. For another, Navarro’s brief career overlapped that of trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie, and came just before trumpet greats Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. It’s hard to stand out in that crowd.

But look closer: Fats Navarro produced some fantastic bebop alongside the era’s greatest players. And he wasn’t just a secondary band member. This 2-CD collection is solid proof.

This is jazz in the heart of the bebop era – 36 tracks (including 14 alternate takes) recorded from 1947-49. And if it sounds at times like Bird and Diz… well, so what? If you like bebop, you will love these CDs.

On paper, pianist Tadd Dameron was the leader for half of these sessions, and he wrote much of the music, too. But Dameron is truly a background presence; he rarely takes the spotlight. This is an album for fans of trumpets and saxes, and Navarro’s fast, powerful voice is the star of most of these tunes.

These CDs cover seven different recording sessions, so the tone varies from date to date. The Navarro-Dameron cuts are best: pure bebop bliss. They feature saxmen such as Dexter Gordon, Charlie Rouse, Ernie Henry and Wardell Grey, alongside Navarro’s trumpet. Another series of cuts feature Bud Powell on piano and Sonny Rollins on sax, in addition to Navarro. Two of my favorite tracks, two takes of “Double Talk,” feature a trumpet battle between Navarro and Howard McGhee – barn-burners that remind me of Jazz at the Philharmonic.

And then there are a few odd cuts. Four uninteresting vocals. One cut with a Benny Goodman small group (!). And four Navarro-less tunes with a band that includes Dameron, trombonist J.J. Johnson and a very young Miles Davis.

But this is Fats Navarro’s show, and it’s a terrific one. If only he had lived longer.

(Note: An alternative to this collection is the more expansive 4-CD set The Fats Navarro Story, which includes a lot of earlier Navarro recordings with such greats as Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Kenny Dorham and Illinois Jacquet, among others, mostly for the Savoy label.)

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Easy to find, but not cheap

Cost: $22