Cliff Jordan and John Gilmore: Blowing in From Chicago – Blue Note 1549

Imagine if Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, at the height of their popularity in 1957, invited a couple of sax guys you’ve never heard of to play with them.

The result would be Blowing in From Chicago – a lively, wonderful record firmly in the Blue Note bop tradition.

The rhythm section is extremely familiar: Art Blakey on drums, Horace Silver on piano and Curly Russell on bass. It’s the same rhythm section that powered the Jazz Messengers in their great set, A Night at Birdland, just three years earlier.

And on sax, we have the co-leaders Cliff Jordan and John Gilmore, a pair of little-known tenors who are, despite their lack of renown, genuinely first-rate. If you’ve never heard of them, or this record, you’re missing something.

As the title implies, the sax men are from the Windy City. The liner notes say Jordan and Gilmore bring some kind of unusual musical spirit from their hometown. Well, hardly. If there’s a difference between their playing and that of better-known New York boppers of the same era – say, Lou Donaldson or Hank Mobley – I don’t hear it. And that’s a good thing.

The record kicks off with a fun, fast bop number called “Status Quo,” with toe-tapping solos from the two Chicagoans, and short choruses from Silver and Blakey. “Bo-Till,” an original by Jordan, starts with a Latin-ish theme, then quickly switches to straight bop. More lively fun.

The mood shifts a bit for straight, noir-ish blues on Gigi Gryce’s “Blue Lights,” then the Charlie Parker bebop classic “Billie’s Bounce.” The latter starts with a kick in the head from Blakey’s powerful drums, then nine minutes of superlative solos from Jordan, Gilmore and Silver. It’s the highlight of the album.

Three more straight bop numbers finish the record, including one more tune by Jordan, one by Silver, and a previously unreleased number of unknown provenance. It’s a strong outing that makes me wish Jordan and Gilmore had played a lot more together.

After Blowing In, Jordan recorded a bunch of well-reviewed records through the 1980s, but he never became a household name. For Gilmore, this was his one and only gig in the leader’s chair. He spent the rest of his career playing in Sun Ra’s Arkestra – again, a relative unknown.

But for this one moment, Jordan and Gilmore are every bit the equal of any past or future Jazz Messengers. It’s an enjoyable record, well worth picking up.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Readily available

Cost: $5 used (although I sprung for $12 to get a new copy)

Hank Mobley: Dippin’ – Blue Note 4209

1965 was an interesting year musically, and Hank Mobley’s Dippin’ tries – mostly successfully – to capture all of it. It’s a hodgepodge of styles that were very popular that year, ranging from soul to pop, hard bop to bossa nova.

It’s a fun listen – but don’t expect any kind of consistent feel.

The record pairs two of the standard-bearers of 1960s Blue Note soul-jazz: Mobley on tenor sax and Lee Morgan on trumpet. While you can enjoy Dippin’ without knowing a thing about the 1965 music scene, the album makes even more sense when you consider what came immediately before it.

Just one year earlier, Morgan himself released arguably the best and most popular soul-jazz record ever, The Sidewinder. Both the album and the single of the same name were hits. Dippin’ is very much the son of Sidewinder. The opening track, “The Dip,” is a happy, infectious bit of soul-jazz with great solos by Mobley, Morgan and funky pianist Harold Mabern Jr.

But wait, that’s only the start of Mobley’s hitting the 1965 music trends.

The next cut is “Recado Bossa Nova,” a tune that obviously trades on the popular bossa nova trend of the early and mid-1960s. Just three years earlier, Stan Getz started the fad with his hit album Jazz Samba, and continued the trend with the albums Big Band Bossa Nova, Jazz Samba Encore, Getz/Gilberto and Getz/Almeida. “Recado Bossa Nova” is more of the same – catchy and maybe a little cheesy, but a happy little toe-tapper.

By 1965, hard bop – Blue Note’s bread and butter since the 1950s – was on the decline, but it wasn’t gone just yet. The third cut, “The Break Through,” has Mobley and Morgan plowing head-first into the old Blue Note hard bop vein. It’s marvelous.

But wait… there’s one more mid-1960s musical trend to tap. Cut No. 4, “The Vamp,” is the very epitome of modern jazz. The opening theme, with its jarring, staccato theme, sounds like it could have been written by Thelonious Monk, who was very popular in the 1960s. It also sounds like it could have been recorded in the 1980s or ‘90s as part of a modern jazz CD. So just when you think Dippin’ is a soul-jazz album, or a bossa nova album, or a hard bop album, it changes into something else. Mobley and Morgan are covering all the bases.

The last two cuts are anticlimactic. “I See a Face Before Me” is a pleasant but not memorable balled (almost every Blue Note album had to have a ballad) and “Ballin” is another hard bop piece, with nice solos again by Mobley, Morgan and Mabern.

All in all, Dippin’ is a wonderful record that hits all the musical tropes of 1965. It’s diverse, and that’s a good thing. Just a few years later, hard bop, the bossa nova and soul-jazz would be old hat. But for this one record, at least, they all come together nicely.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Easy to find

Cost: I found a used copy for $4 at a music store – it’s more like $7 or $8 used on Amazon

Art Blakey: Orgy in Rhythm, Volumes 1 and 2 – Blue Note 1554 and 1555

This may be the strangest album ever released on Blue Note Records, and I don’t like it.

I hate saying that.

I love music, and I try to find something to like in everything. I try occasionally to go beyond the familiar. Opera baffles me, but I can’t deny there are some beautiful melodies and powerful arias. Country music is cornball to my ears, but I do love me some Johnny Cash. And what is bluegrass but country jazz?

So why can’t I warm up to Orgy in Rhythm?

I knew going in that this 1957 recording would be alien turf. It’s a tough listen. Yes, this is Art Blakey, but there are no Jazz Messengers here, and precious little jazz. It’s drumming, drumming and more drumming, and not even the conventional kind. If you like African chants, wood flutes, poly-rhythms and every variety of odd banging, this record is for you.

No one can accuse Blakey of false advertising. Orgy in Rhythm is exactly what the title promises: 68 minutes of almost nothing but drum kits, bongos, congas, whistles and such. Most jazz starts with a melody or chord changes, then improvises. None of that here.

Granted, it’s not all pounding. One track of the eight, “Come Out and Meet Me Tonight,” is a child-like ditty with actual singing and English words. It starts with a cute little flute melody, two choruses of what can only be described as a silly nursery rhyme, then lots of drums, some piano vamping, and back to the ditty. It’s the only melody on the whole album.

The closing number, “Abdallah’s Delight,” starts as conventional bop, with nice flute and piano solos, then abruptly switches to all drums. It’s 10 minutes total, only 3 of which are anything like familiar jazz.

Everything else is unexpected. Even after several listens, it never felt satisfying.

I’m sorry. I know there is an audience for this unusual record. It’s just not me.

A word about availability: Originally released as two separate LPs, Orgy in Rhythm is available on one CD, but it’s not cheap. The least expensive used copies are $30 to $40. I got the MP3 version at Amazon for $9.49. No liner notes, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend $30 on a curiosity.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 5) – Maybe more if you really like drums

Availability: Pretty expensive as a single CD — $30-$40 used

Cost: $9.49 for MP3 files

Paul Chambers: Whims of Chambers – Blue Note 1534

At Blue Note Records in the 1950s, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones were about as common as grits at a Southern diner. And about as noticeable, too – not flashy, just solid and reputable.

Blue Note never had a “house band,” but if it had, Chambers and Jones would have been the hard bop core. Art Blakey may have been the more famous and more aggressive Blue Note drummer, and Charles Mingus the more famous (non-Blue Note) bassist, but arguably there is no finer rhythm section in jazz than Chambers and Jones.

The pair started playing together with Miles Davis in 1955, and in the next three years alone they wound up together in at least 15 bands led by such giants as Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Sonny Clark, Hank Mobley and Chet Baker.

So here we have Chambers’ first recording as a leader. It’s a 1956 date with Jones and four other jazz legends. The result, Whims of Chambers, is a terrific little hard bop album that punches all the right buttons, and then some.

First, a note about the players. Yes, John Coltrane is here, but he is not the star, or at least not the only star. In 1956, Coltrane was not yet the popular and adventurous saxman of My Favorite Things (that came five years later), or the spiritual Trane of A Love Supreme (1965), and certainly not the wild man of the later Impulse years (Om and Kulu Se Mama, for example). Here, Trane is simply an above-average tenor who plays on four of the seven numbers. Solid, but not spectacular.

Besides Chambers and Jones, the record features three more Blue Note all-stars: pianist Horace Silver, guitarist Kenny Burrell and trumpeter Donald Byrd. They play well together.

On the opening track especially, Byrd sounds a lot like Dizzy Gillespie, spitting out notes high, hard and fast. It’s not exactly a surprise because the tune, “Omicron,” starts with a Latin-ish intro that sounds remarkably like Dizzy’s “Manteca,” and then abruptly restarts as a standard bop number.

Everyone gets a turn to shine. You expect bluesy, toe-tapping bop solos from Silver, Burrell, Byrd and Coltrane, and you get them. But you also get a beautiful ballad, “Dear Ann,” featuring Burrell’s gentle guitar and Byrd’s wistful trumpet. And there’s a playful exchange between Chambers and Jones, trading two bars each, back and forth, on the weirdly named “Tale of the Fingers.” (Weird because Chambers plays the bass with a bow, instead of the usual bop finger-plucking.)

All in all, this is a really nice set from a group of Blue Note regulars who know exactly how to swing.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Availability: Unlike many 1950s Blue Notes, you won’t find $4-5 copies used copies on Amazon

Cost: $8.99 on MP3, more on used CD