Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin'

by Mike Oppenheim
March 19, 2013

Throughout its history, jazz has constantly evolved, developing from and reacting against its earlier incarnations. The mid-1940s saw bebop reinvent jazz as an artist's genre, distinct from the swing style that was the popular music throughout the 1930s and '40s. Bebop was music for listening, not dancing, and the emphasis became virtuosic improvised solos instead of memorable tunes and arrangements. However, the advent of bebop itself led to further reactions and developments within jazz during the 1950s. The newer genre ...

Lee Morgan: The Cooker

by Samuel Chell
January 29, 2007

Although Lee Morgan had already made a handful of albums at the age of 19, The Cooker (1957) represents his throwing down the gauntlet as successor to Clifford Brown's vacated throne. It's close to being a pure bebop session, suggestive of a date like For Musicians Only (Verve, 1956), on which Gillespie, Stitt and Getz set some sort of record for NPS (notes per second). At the same time, the precocious trumpeter, already brimming with confidence, is not about to ...

Don Patterson/Bobby Timmons: Holiday Soul

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 16, 2004

With December ushering in the holiday season, it seemed logical to allow this month's column to address two items that fall under the category of jazzy Christmas fare. Although the repertoire in this area is really quite limited, some of the more memorable holiday jazz sides include works by Ella Fitzgerald and Jimmy Smith. For my money however, among the best sets is a pair of 1964 sides cut for Prestige by Bobby Timmons and Don Patterson. The idea for ...

Bobby Timmons: The Prestige Trio Sessions

by Jerry D'Souza
July 25, 2003

Some music never dies. It just sleeps for a while and then comes back in reissues. While some of it could well have stayed buried, this merging of two Timmons recordings is well deserving of attention. Timmons made some fine music, soul jazz if you will, the blues deeply shaded for sure. And even if he is best remembered as the composer of “Moanin’” and “This Here,” this record should put his accomplishments in better perspective.

The first six tracks, ...

Bobby Timmons: The Prestige Trio Sessions

by C. Michael Bailey
April 9, 2003

Late 2003 will see a changing of the guard at the famous Philadelphia Orchestra. Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch will turn over his baton to his younger protégé Christoph Eschenbach, providing the orchestra only its seventh conductor in its century-plus history. During a recent interview in the Paris of the West, Eshenbach pointed out that there does not exist a New York Sound or a Chicago Sound like there exists the Philadelphia Sound.

How true this is in jazz as ...

Bobby Timmons: Quartet and Orchestra

by C. Michael Bailey
August 1, 2001

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

?It would be so easy to dismiss this release as a collection of the painfully anemic efforts of a jazz giant trying to make the best of the late '60s jazz nadir using the vastly inferior popular music of the day as “the new standard". This seems to be true so far as “vastly inferior popular music" goes. Quartet and Orchestra, Milestone's most recent repackaging of pianist Bobby Timmons' work, contains many such ...

Dexter Gordon: LTD: Live At the Left Bank

by C. Michael Bailey
August 1, 2001

Long Tall Dexter in Baltimore, circa 1969.The most telling thing about this disc is a political one. Inside the liner notes, in small print, are the words. “Special Thanks to Joel Dorn." Indeed, special thanks. Dorn has based his new company, Label M, on about 300 performances he negotiated away from Baltimore's Left Bank Jazz Society that constitute his Live at the Left Bank series. It's likely that this all resulted from a quid pro quo between Dorn ...