Gene Ammons

[JSngry]

Yep!

 

 

[robertoart]

 

[fasstrack]

8 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yep!

 

 

That was the one! Thanks. How could I have forgotten that face?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

2 hours ago, robertoart said:

 

I haven't seen that before. Bloomin' WONDERFUL! Well put together little series of interviews.

But one has to stop and think - how can anyone talk about Jug better than he did on sax?

Thanks very much, Roberto.

MG

[king ubu]

(@MG: haven't read your long post ... being on Smartphone it's unreadable, 2-4 words per row and thus going on eternally ... hope it will be different once I'm back on a proper screen, but it might be a goid idea to post it again unformatted, assuming that you pasted it from a word or other document and that causes the problem?)

Other than that, interesting discussion. I really love Jug's playing and have at least a dozen and a half of his Prestige/Fantasy CDs ... but I guess I'm just too young (and from the wrong social and geographical background) to consider him amongst my top favourites ... guess he would make the extended "tenors whose playing I love" list ... but that one is pretty long really.

[robertoart]

3 hours ago, robertoart said:

 

I just came across these myself. I thought there was a chance yourself and others might not have seen these MG. Great thread and I've been enjoying learning about Jug. It's very sad to read about him being in prison for so long or at all.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Thanks for the warning Ubu. Here's what I think will be a plain text version of the long post. I copied it into Notepad and now I'm going to see what it looks like when I copy it back.

Sorry, this is quite a long post.

For about half a century, I’ve been saying, when asked and maybe on this board, that my all time favourite jazz musician was Grant Green. But for the past few years, Green’s work has become less and less important to me and Gene Ammons’ more and more, so I think I’ll change my plea and say it’s Jug now.

As I’ve ripped my collection to hard drives, I’ve been thinking more about his music and the way he was thought about, particularly by the other people who paid - record company bosses and record producers. As far as audiences - bums on seats to use a technical term – were concerned, no tenor saxophonist was so well LOVED by the black community as Gene Ammons. No tenor saxophonist had a sound as beautiful as Jug’s. He could honk, but almost never did. He could whisper sweet nothings in your ear, more sweetly and tenderly even than Ben Webster, and frequently did. He could play Bebop but never sounded at home with it; as if the constraints of Bebop didn’t free him to be himself. Bebop, created in the atmosphere of after hours cutting contests, required you to show your chops. But for players like Ben Webster, Ike Quebec, Grant Green, Gene Ammons and numerous others, who relied on having an expressive and beautiful BIG sound, and liked and needed to play deliberately enough to get their messages through in that wonderful sound, it was a trap. Of course, if you were Charlie Parker, you didn’t mind that playing fast ruined the beautiful sound you got when you played ‘Bird of paradise’. And if you were Sonny Criss, well, fast or slow didn’t make any difference; you could sound fabulous all the time.

But musicians like Criss are very rare, so Jug played Gene Ammons; at first when he could, then later, when the record company proprietors found that Gene Ammons playing Gene Ammons sold a shed load of records, more and more frequently.

Beneath Jug‘s beautiful big sound, however, was great power; power he could have used to honk the dancehalls full of knocked out audiences. But he seldom wanted to do that. He used his power sparingly, to emphasise the rhythm, to make even slow songs swing, to make everything good for dancers listening as much with their bodies as their ears. And when your lady or gentleman is in your arms, you understand deeply where that timing is leading you.

Jug had hits in the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies: ‘Red top’ in 1947; ‘My foolish heart’ in 1950; ‘Jug’ in 1951; ‘Bad bossa nova’ in 1962; ‘The boss is back’ in 1970; ‘Black cat’ in 1971; and ‘My way’ in 1972. Among the Soul Jazz fraternity, only Arthur Prysock managed something similar (though his hits in the forties were as lead singer with the Buddy Johnson band). And Prysock was a singer; that makes a hell of a difference to hit-worthiness.

Gene was the son of the great boogie-woogie pianist, Albert Ammons and was born and grew up in Chicago. He got his early music training at DuSable High School, where he studied under Walter Dyett, whose pupils included many of the greatest Chicago musicians. His early experience was with the well thought of band of King Kolax, a trumpet player. In the notes to ‘My buddy’, Sonny Stitt says… “I first met Jug in a club in Detroit. Sawdust on the floor… He was with King Kolax but I was with a big league band, Tiny Bradshaw.” In 1942, Bradshaw’s band was quite a long way from the big league, and Kolax even farther down the pecking order. But that was where you started if you were promising.

In 1944, he joined Billy Eckstine’s second new band, after Eckstine left Earl Hines. He ran his own small band, with Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt, for a while after Eckstine disbanded the orchestra and became a solo singer in 1947, then joined Woody Herman for a short period. In 1950, he started a two tenor duo with Sonny Stitt. So for six years, Jug was mostly associated with bands that played bebop. And this affected the way he was perceived by the record companies for which he recorded as a leader, to an extent that hindered what in hindsight we can say was the proper development of his career.

And unnecessarily so. He pointed the way in his first session for Mercury, with a hit record of ‘Red top’ (#3 on the R&B charts in 1947). Other material recorded at that and subsequent Mercury dates was usually rather or significantly boppish. But ‘Red top’ was true Gene Ammons material, at THE perfect Jug tempo, lithe and loosely arranged (by George Stone), with no showboating chops on display. But Mercury didn’t give Jug a chance to show his ballad style, either, until his final session, in October 1949. Still, there are plenty of nice blues among his Mercury recordings, fortunately.

However, Aristocrat recorded some lovely ballads by Gene, culminating in his whizzo recording with cavernous echo chamber of ‘My foolish heart’ in 1950. Mercury caught up when Gene recorded his last session for the label, and ‘Everything depends on you’ was recorded 4 October 1949, regrettably without the cavernous echo chamber of Universal Studios, deployed to great effect on ‘My foolish heart’.

On medium up numbers, Gene was right at home and both Chess and Prestige recorded lots of them. There’s a definitive Jug pace – the tempo of ‘Red top’ – which he made his own. 

At Prestige, Ammons made quite a lot of recordings, as leader and sideman with Sonny Stitt. Most of them ended up on one of the four ten inch LPs of singles material that the label issued. It’s interesting to reassemble the three volumes of ‘Tenor sax favorites’. Each comes a little closer to a pure Jug album. Although all the material was issued as singles, volume three seems to have been intended as an album, as it was recorded at two closely spaced sessions, and concentrates on the kind of material Jug recorded in the early sixties.

With only one chart hit at Prestige (‘Jug’ #10 R&B in 1951 - a bit of a honker), but a good deal of other material that might have been thought of as hit material, Jug left Prestige, to seek more profitable channels. 

He did a session for Decca, on 24 March 1952, which pretty well got lost. But it was a beautiful session. Jug sounded fabulous and ALL of it was pure Jug music. Gene was backed on that session by Bill Massey (tp), J J Johnson (tb), Sonny Stitt (bar), John Houston (p), Shep Shepard (b) and Bob Wilson (d).

Well, nothing happened and Decca, a company that had more or less stopped trying to cater for the black audience by then, never asked him to come back next week, so Gene tried a new Chicago label, United, and did his first session for them on 18 November 1952. It’s wondered by some why Gene went to United, when Chess in Chicago were doing so well. United may have been a new label, owned by a new player, a tailor called Leonard Allen, but it was managed by Lew Simpkins, who’d done a similar job for Lee Egalnik’s labels, Miracle, then Premium. After Premium closed, Simpkins took a good proportion of the Miracle/Premium artists with him to United. So Lew was a man with a track record; he had seen twenty of his productions become R&B chart hits since September 1947; seven of them had occupied the #1 slot for twenty weeks in total. And three of his productions had even got onto the pop top thirty. So, whereas a hit with some other company might sell in the tens of thousands, a hit with Simpkins might sell in the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps even more important; four of those #1 hits had featured jazz musicians: Eddie Chamblee; Tab Smith and Jimmy Forrest.

Chess had been successful, with 17 R&B hits since September 1948, but only 3 at #1, and only one other that made the top five. None had entered the pop chart. Chess’ great days as a money-making organisation were in the future. United’s were in the past, though no one knew it. But Simpkins died in 1953 and, though the firm made fine recordings later, it was all in the past. But the SOUND on Gene’s United discs was fantastic! United used the same studios as Chess and had that fabulous echo chamber (I can’t remember whether it was a toilet or a bathroom, the former, I think), but also a very high degree of hifi.

Savoy acquired Gene’s United masters (as well as a load of material by The Caravans) and put them together to make a ten inch LP, ‘The golden tone of Gene Ammons’. He did two more sessions for United, the last one after Simpkins’ death, in June 1953, then reported back for duty at Prestige, and remained with Bob Weinstock until his death, though moonlighting to Chess pretty frequently. 

Weinstock had a new idea for him; to make albums with one long track per side, as Miles Davis had been doing so successfully; ‘Walkin’’ was the first great rent party album. Weinstock specifically wanted Jug to do jam sessions, which Miles hadn’t wanted to do. Gene went along with it – presumably Richard Carpenter – who managed both Miles and Jug – had told him how much he could make out of those kind of albums. The first was ‘Gene Ammons all stars’ PR211, one of the last ten inch LPs Prestige issued. Art and Addison Farmer, Lou Donaldson, Freddie Redd and Kenny Clarke were with him for this. The big number was ‘Woofin’ and tweetin’’ 

After the changeover to 12 inch LPs, Gene recorded several more jam session albums. The first of them was ‘The happy blues’, the title track was a number at Jug tempo and really suited Ammons. Though Jackie McLean and Art Farmer weren’t truly into this, as everyone else solos first, their playing doesn’t sound too bad. Gene followed it up with six more jam sessions for Prestige, before his first prison sentence began. The last, and best, was ‘Blue Gene’, again featuring a tune at Jug pace; ‘Blue greens and beans’, which became something of a jazz standard. All of the tunes were written by Mal Waldron, the pianist on the session. I think Mal was the pianist most in tune with and stimulating for Jug.

None of those jam session albums were totally satisfactory Gene Ammons records. One of the things Gene seemed to like was being in charge. He always seemed at his best when he was firmly in control of proceedings. Well, after all, he was the Boss Tenor. You can hear all the GOOD jam session tracks (except ‘Woofin’ and tweetin’’) on ‘Gene Ammons greatest hits: the fifties’ OJCCD6013. The rest just show how badly mistaken about what Jug should have been doing Weinstock was. None of those albums sold poorly, so Weinstock’s accounts books showed he wasn’t all THAT wrong.

When Jug got out of jail in 1960, he went back to Prestige. By that time, Esmond Edwards was the main producer. Edwards was a black guy and KNEW how the black audience felt about jug. Between June 1960 and September 1962, he produced fourteen Ammons albums. In the same period, Jug moonlighted, officially or unofficially, for Pacific Jazz, Argo, Verve and Winley, and made nine other albums. And there is not a dud among all twenty-three of them. I put a thread up about those albums a few years ago.

Then he did time again, and was away for seven years.

After his return, from November 1969 to March 1974, he made nineteen more albums, all but two for Prestige. Most of the Prestige studio material was produced by Bob Porter, another one who understood Jug very well. After Weinstock sold Prestige to Fantasy, Porter left or was fired and Jug’s studio albums were produced by Ozzie Cadena (very good), Ray Shanklin (a guy who did NOT get Jug), Duke Pearson (pretty good), and Orrin Keepnews (surprisingly magnificent). Seven of the albums from this period are live and are variable; the two done at the Left Bank in Baltimore are (along with ‘Groovin’ with Jug’ from 1961) the best. The two with Dexter Gordon are the worst. Although Jug LIKED bop – he’d grown up with it, after all - and generally played all kinds of material slightly too fast at live gigs, he was truly not fitted for bop.

I LURVE Jug.

MG

Hope that's OK. If not, I'll send you an e-mail.

MG

[Big Beat Steve]

If it was all about the playing and listening one had done and based his judgements on, I wonder what BREW "Anybody who doesn't play like Lester Young is wrong" MOORE would have had to say about Gene Ammons?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

2 hours ago, robertoart said:

It's very sad to read about him being in prison for so long or at all.

No one's great all the way through. Jug didn't learn the first time, so he got seven years the second time. Many people thought that was excessive. But he ALSO didn't learn from Sonny Stitt's incarceration, which broke up their partnership ten years before he first did time.

Well, you've got to take people as they are and accept that what happens is what happens.

MG

[king ubu]

3 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

If it was all about the playing and listening one had done and based his judgements on, I wonder what BREW "Anybody who doesn't play like Lester Young is wrong" MOORE would have had to say about Gene Ammons?

BRU must've had one or the other JUG too many.

Thanks for the re-post, @The Magnificent Goldberg, just read your long and interesting post. Guess I guve the jams more credit - simply because they feature some great players, including a few (Idrees Sulieman!) that never really got their due.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

1 hour ago, king ubu said:

BRU must've had one or the other JUG too many.

Thanks for the re-post, @The Magnificent Goldberg, just read your long and interesting post. Guess I guve the jams more credit - simply because they feature some great players, including a few (Idrees Sulieman!) that never really got their due.

Funny you should mention Idris. I was listening to Blue Gene when I ripped the LP a few days ago and thinking that I'd never heard him so good; got to confess he's too much of a bopper for my taste. But ALL boppers can do other stuff if they want to, or if they're paid to. (Oh, I'm not sure about Jackie McLean, though , and it's definitely not true of Don Braden, though even he was pretty good on Jimmy Ponder's Christmas album. But Christmas is different; musicians become just people when doing a Christmas album.)

Anyway, glad you liked the post.

MG

[JSngry]

 

 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Message received from YouTube: the video is not available. But looking at the time - twenty minutes - I thought we were approaching people as religious fanatics, rather than those happy to make an album of jolly tunes

MG

[BillF]

5 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

If it was all about the playing and listening one had done and based his judgements on, I wonder what BREW "Anybody who doesn't play like Lester Young is wrong" MOORE would have had to say about Gene Ammons?

The sound of Lester was always there in Jug, and it's really noticeable some years before his best known recordings. Listen to his solo near the end of "The Great Lie" with Woody Herman in 1949:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NRjO2EQU14

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

Message received from YouTube: the video is not available. But looking at the time - twenty minutes - I thought we were approaching people as religious fanatics, rather than those happy to make an album of jolly tunes

MG

Oh, that's just Side 1 

Side two brings Lee Konitz and Tony Scott on and that'so when Yuletide spirits really start to rise.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Yeah, thanks for putting that on, Bill. I haven't paid Jug's period with Herman much attention and, listening just now, I couldn't sit through a bunch of that band just for the odd Jug solo, though I do appreciate that there's stuff to be got from it. On one listen, a lot of the Mercury material seems to have a similar sound.

MG

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Oh, that's just Side 1 

Side two brings Lee Konitz and Tony Scott on and that'so when Yuletide spirits really start to rise.

Someone's taking the piddle

MG

[JSngry]

Things I've heard from people who don'tlike Gene Ammons are that his pitch is irritating,  that he doesn't articulate his phrases as much as he does blurt this out, and that he had no nuance in his playing, that it's always the same thing the same way.

Those people are almost always non-African-American, but to be fair, I have met a few African-American jazz fans who have an aversion to "jukebox jazz".

As with the whole Ellington sax section thing, I feel that musical affinity is probably just the veneer on what are probably much deeper-seated world's colliding  stuff, residual tribalism and such.

1 hour ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

 

Someone's taking the piddle

MG

No man, that really happens.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Things I've heard from people who don'tlike Gene Ammons are that his pitch is irritating,  that he doesn't articulate his phrases as much as he does blurt this out, and that he had no nuance in his playing, that it's always the same thing the same way.

Thanks Jim, that looks like it might be an interesting thing to understand (or maybe not), did I understand it.

In particular, I don't understand 'no nuance'. Seems to me that, with Jug, you didn't get improvisation so much as a cartload of nuance that you didn't have to try too hard to understand. Oh, of course, I'm talking about him playing ballads. Is that not what people meant by that?

Sure, it's always the same thing the same way. Every jazz musician has their own cherished clichés. EVERY one. And we all do, whether we're musicians or not.

I can get the idea of him not articulating phrases, though, again, that's something we all do. And it means something, whether it's me or Jug doing it.

I suppose I really don't understand what an irritating pitch is, or might be. I do get the notion that a particular note is kind of represented by a small range of marginally different frequencies, which allows musicians to play slightly sharp or flat and yet still be 'in tune', even though I couldn't identify one even if it bit my ankle. But I can't think what about it might or might not be irritating. Can you explain so I can understand, please?

MG

[paul secor]

Lotta love for Jug in this thread and from me. I have to say that I can't think of any jazz, r&b, blues fan I've known who didn't like his playing. He might not be everyone's favorite saxophonist (and he's not mine), but I can't remember anyone who didn't like his playing.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

1 hour ago, paul secor said:

Lotta love for Jug in this thread and from me. I have to say that I can't think of any jazz, r&b, blues fan I've known who didn't like his playing. He might not be everyone's favorite saxophonist (and he's not mine), but I can't remember anyone who didn't like his playing.

You obviously haven't known the wrong people, Paul.

I'm sure you're right and, no matter how much I love Gator Tail, for example, I can't think everyone would be so nearly unanimous about HIM. Or Mr T or Ben Webster, for that matter.

MG

[danasgoodstuff]

Jug's got his own 'voice', in pretty much every possible way; and that's pretty much certainly not going to appeal to everyone.  Me, I'm pretty much always glad to hear him even if I only rarely go out of my way to do so.

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Things I've heard from people who don'tlike Gene Ammons are that his pitch is irritating,  that he doesn't articulate his phrases as much as he does blurt this out, and that he had no nuance in his playing, that it's always the same thing the same way.

Those people are almost always non-African-American, but to be fair, I have met a few African-American jazz fans who have an aversion to "jukebox jazz".

As with the whole Ellington sax section thing, I feel that musical affinity is probably just the veneer on what are probably much deeper-seated world's colliding  stuff, residual tribalism and such.

No man, that really happens.

No nuance? I can think of few players this side of Johnny Hodges who have more nuance going for them than Ammons. Just about every phrase is spun out, coddled, caressed, stroked, chucked under the chin, you name it.

[paul secor]

     2 hours ago, paul secor said:

Lotta love for Jug in this thread and from me. I have to say that I can't think of any jazz, r&b, blues fan I've known who didn't like his playing. He might not be everyone's favorite saxophonist (and he's not mine), but I can't remember anyone who didn't like his playing.

You obviously haven't known the wrong people, Paul.

I'm sure you're right and, no matter how much I love Gator Tail, for example, I can't think everyone would be so nearly unanimous about HIM. Or Mr T or Ben Webster, for that matter.

MG

I think I'd leave Ben out of that mix. Agree on the others.

[danasgoodstuff]

2 hours ago, paul secor said:

     2 hours ago, paul secor said:

Lotta love for Jug in this thread and from me. I have to say that I can't think of any jazz, r&b, blues fan I've known who didn't like his playing. He might not be everyone's favorite saxophonist (and he's not mine), but I can't remember anyone who didn't like his playing.

You obviously haven't known the wrong people, Paul.

I'm sure you're right and, no matter how much I love Gator Tail, for example, I can't think everyone would be so nearly unanimous about HIM. Or Mr T or Ben Webster, for that matter.

MG

I think I'd leave Ben out of that mix. Agree on the others.

No, I'm pretty sure there are people who hear Ben's 'vibrato that just won't stop even when the notes do' and nothing else - the're wrong, of course, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

[JSngry]

Regarding pitch, the end of "My Way" would be a prime example. Some of those notes are very "out of tune", VERY.

But only in one system, and only to a certain set of ears, 

But, you know, when you hang out with different peoples, really hang out informally, socially, non-prentational, you hear different nuances of speech, iflections, rhythm, accentuations, and, yes, pitch.

So, if people who talk like Gene Ammons 0lays are not something you commonly hear, then, yes, the whole thing mind sound like some lesser refined jivetalk not particularly relevant to one's lifestyle except, you know we all have a black friend or two that we save our cooltalk for.

And ok, there are people like that. But there are also people not like that.