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January 2005:
The classic Blue Note recordings of
the 1950’s and 1960’s feature five consistently brilliant tenor
saxophonists who recorded a plethora of albums for the label. Wayne
Shorter, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley
are the powerful 5 musicians I am referring to. Coltrane and Sonny
Rollins are left out because they belong in a different, incredible
category; Sam Rivers, Ike Quebec, Stanley Turrentine and Yusef Lateef
are not addressed because they weren’t as prolific as the power elite of
Shorter, Gordon, Mobley, Henderson and Griffin. Dex was called “long
and tall” and Johnny was referred to as “the little giant”. Mobley died
in 1980’s, Dex in the early 1990’s and we just recently lost Henderson
in 2001. “The little giant” lives and performs in France nowadays, while
Wayne leads an all-star group of musicians in New York (check out
Michele Mercer’s biography of Shorter called Footprints- it has
an amazing intro my Carlos Santana).
Henderson’s Inner Urge is one
of the most played songs by jazzmen today (Ravi Coltrane is one of the
many musicians who chose to include it on one of his albums, and he
steams through it with Steve Coleman); yet his La Mesha (from
Page One, with Kenny Dorham) is most likely his most memorable-
although it is rivaled, in terms of popularity, by Blue Bossa.
Griffin played with Monk during a good part of the fifties (filling in
for Coltrane some of the time) and you can really hear him blowing hard
on their recording of In Walked Bud. I have a French bootleg of
Johnny hitting things even harder with Straight No Chaser (yet it
has Bud Powell on piano rather than Monk). Blowin’ Session was
his biggest success on Blue Note. Coltrane is featured on this album
just because Johnny and Alfred Lion ran into him in midtown before they
took off to the New Jersey session (they asked him to sit in, and he
agreed).
When Dexter Gordon left the country in the late 1950’s, Blue
Note kept him as a house artist. He recorded Dexter Calling in
England and Our Man In Paris in France (which features Bud Powell
at his best). Yet it is Mobley that recorded the most albums for Blue
Note Records. Choose which one you want to listen to accordingly (a
wise choice for funk is a Caddy for Daddy, yet try Soul
Station for a swinging affair). The Turnaround is one of the
best examples of stylish cover art by Reid Miles. All of these tenor
players’ work on Blue Note inspired the younger players of today like
Seamus Blake, Chris Potter and Mark Turner.
The closest thing we have to
Blue Note’s extensive inventory of ready-and-able tenor players is found
on Amsterdam’s ‘Criss Cross’ record label. Though Criss Cross- as Mike
Karn once told me when referring to Eric Alexander’s recent leap to
Milestone- is a good transitional label to be on, but tenor players’
can’t depend on it to pay the bills like they could at Blue Note in the
1950’s and 1960’s (he was trying to explain to me during a sax lesson
that it takes a 100,000 dollars yearly salary to live comfortably in
Manhattan today, which is a rare occurrence for a modern jazzman not
signed to a major record label).
There sure are a good deal of tenor
players inspired by the power elite of classic Blue Note men, yet the
listener should be ready to only hear diminished returns in the
contemporary work of these artists. It is unfortunate that there aren’t
more content rich labels out there today, yet at least there are still
some talented people designing cover art for these weak projects.
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