While he will forever be most famous as the pianist in the amazing ‘50’s quintet of Miles Davis, between 1956 and 1960 Red Garland also recorded nearly two dozen albums under his own name, and ‘58’s All Mornin’ Long is one of the best. It finds Garland leading his own five-piece band, and with John Coltrane on sax and Donald Byrd on trumpet, a high level of quality is assured. The LP’s freshly available in a 200gm edition courtesy of the Analogue Productions enterprise, and anyone looking to add an exemplary and undersung 1950s post-bop session to their collection should consider picking it up.
Red Garland may not be the first name mentioned when the discussion turns to Modern Jazz piano, but he is inarguably one of the most important. The evidence for this assertion comes through Garland’s participation on a run of superb, and in a few cases, absolutely indispensable albums recorded under the leadership of Miles Davis. For starters, there was ‘55’s The Musings of Miles, a quality quartet showing for Prestige that along with holding work from stalwarts Philly Joe Jones on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass, also served as Davis’ debut on 12-inch LP (previously his work had been issued via 10-inch.)
The same year came Miles, the first record from Davis’ ‘50s Quintet, a group composed of Davis, Garland, Jones, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonist John Coltrane. Alternately titled by Prestige as The New Miles Davis Quintet (though there was no old one; this was his first working band), it’s a very good album, but it essentially serves as a starting point for a group who, besides Davis, was quite young and collectively little known at the time.
The masterpieces came a little later, as the group honed their sound on club stages. ‘57’s ‘Round About Midnight, made for Davis’ new label Columbia, is amongst the greatest of jazz LPs (though its rep has been a grower, not being particularly well received initially.) And in between Miles and ‘Round About Midnight, the quintet undertook a spate of recording in two sessions. Through sheer volume the sum total actually surpasses the majesty of the Columbia disc.
On the 11th of May and the 26th of the following October of 1956, Davis assembled his band for two studio dates in Hackensack, NJ that effectively fulfilled his obligation to Prestige. Though compositions credited to the trumpeter, Garland and Coltrane do appear, the selections were largely a bum’s rush of standards, and the efforts effectively freed Davis up to sign with Columbia (the label that would be his home for the next two decades.)
If a contract fulfiller, the music from those sessions, subsequently released on a run of LPs titled Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’, are also the sound of a brilliant, though occasionally rough-edged band (they were still youthful after all, and the majority of the recordings are first takes), captured on tape for immortality by the great engineer Rudy Van Gelder.
And it’s those four records that give the deepest insight into Red Garland’s massive spate of recordings as a leader for Prestige. Partially due to its insane level of prolificacy in catering to a specifically jazz clientele, the company Garland called home is one of the most important in jazz history, but it’s also somewhat notorious as a “jam session” label. Unlike Blue Note, Prestige head Bob Weinstock didn’t pay for rehearsal time.
So in terms of ‘50s post-bop, if a listener desires hearing top-flight guys digging into standards and blues, Prestige will do very nicely. But if exploring one of the era’s masterpieces is what’s on the agenda, the record will far more likely spring from the discographies of Blue Note, Columbia, or Atlantic. Prestige did manage more than a handful of masterworks however, and a high number of those featured the involvement of Red Garland.
Most prominent are those four Davis quintet albums. But the pianist’s own work also occasionally cozies up to the standard of mastery. In ’56 Garland commenced his leadership debut with A Garland of Red, an LP featuring Chambers and drummer Art Taylor, and the trio followed it up the next year with two more records, Red Garland’s Piano and Groovy.
And in ’58 they served as the rhythm section for John Coltrane and the Red Garland Trio, the saxophonist’s third LP as a leader, also notably made under the Prestige banner. If rehearsal time wasn’t in the cards Weinstock was dealing out, the frequency of playing with familiar band mates surely raised these sessions to a higher artistic level.
Coltrane and Taylor are also a part of All Mornin’ Long. But for the date, Chambers is replaced by the now rather obscure bassist George Joyner (later known as Jimil Nasser) and Donald Byrd is added on trumpet. While a cursory listen might lead one to surmise that this disc is but one example of Prestige’s jam date norm (a bluesy Garland-penned original and two standards complete the LP), a deeper inspection finds it residing much closer to the eternally beating heart of ‘50s post-bop vibrancy.
It’s important to note that the group did manage to play some live dates in the Autumn of ’57, the album being cut in November of that year. Sometimes Coltrane was absent from those gigs, since he was also a member of the Thelonious Monk Quartet. Occasionally Lou Donaldson joined the band on alto. And the reality of these performances, working it out and coming together on stage, helps to illuminate why All Mornin’ Long remains such an outstanding LP.
Another reason comes down to Coltrane. While he was not yet at the point of his early peak, a creative high-point best evidenced by his cornerstone ’59 LP for Atlantic Giant Steps, he does display the same sorta gusto that made his sole recording as a leader for Blue Note, ’57’s Blue Train, such a complete killer, and his first of many masterpieces. Tellingly, Blue Train was cut exactly two months prior and in the very same studio as All Mornin’ Long.
At the point of this album’s recording, Coltrane was deep in his “sheets-of-sound” period, and the tough intensity of his immediately recognizable blowing style likely turned off more than a few that heard it at the time. The fact remains that many ‘50s-era observers, even those that considered him an important new voice in jazz, felt that Coltrane was, at least partially, tapping into faulty new sonic terrain.
But from the vantage point of the eternal now, ‘Trane’s playing connects as rich and vigorous, and on All Mornin’ Long’s twenty minute a-side title track he delivers an unperturbed stream of intellectual blues. The cut opens with a nice gust of casually expressed collective sophistication, but before sixty seconds have elapsed the saxophonist has stepped to the fore.
And his turn on tenor is fantastic, offering spontaneously unwinding ideas pitched perfectly between the poles of invention and focus. But as Coltrane solos, some very deft movements from the rhythm section become increasingly apparent behind him. This state of affairs continues as ‘Trane drops out and Byrd steps up, the trumpeter’s turn bringing nary a bit of disappointment.
Byrd gets tough treatment from some hardened jazz maniacs, but for me his work up to the late ‘60s is generally very fine stuff. I even really dig his ’69 fusion album Electric Byrd. I don’t rate him as highly as his post-Clifford Brown trumpet contemporary Freddie Hubbard, but that’s mainly down to Hubbard being more open to and at ease in advanced settings. Here of course, Byrd’s in full-on post-bop mode, a locale where he was always very comfy (perhaps too much so for some listeners), but his solo is well fleshed out and loaded with energy.
However, “All Mornin’ Long” is really Red Garland’s show. Starting at 7:36 he puts on an extended clinic in the possibilities of the piano solo, not wrapping up, and certainly never running short of ideas, until the 14:50 mark. To say it’s a total treat is understatement. And the deluxe showcase is additionally valuable for providing an extensive tour into the details of Garland’s creative voice.
Red Garland was a Texas guy. This means he was deeply conversant with the blues. In Miles’ group he served as both a slick anchor and adroit soloist, but he also lent some bluesy essence to Davis’ music. But Garland was also completely modern, and was notably a big Ahmad Jamal supporter (probably another reason that Davis, a huge Jamal advocate in the face of Nat Hentoff’s tossed-off assertion that the pianist was merely a purveyor of cocktail jazz, dug Garland so much.)
Garland’s solo here is steeped in bluesy feeling and deeply conversant with the approaches of various pre-bebop piano greats. To the ears of this relative jazz lightweight, a connection to Art Tatum can be detected. But Garland’s playing has also been double-dipped in modernity. He’s been credited for the advancement of the block-chord style first established by George Shearing and Milt Buckner, though Garland’s artistry is better suited for the tougher environments of post-bop (he’s more bluesy, even when the tune ain’t a blues) than is Shearing’s more stately style.
At times here, Garland comes off a bit like a Jamal that had paid some dues on the roadhouse circuit. That’s to say he’s both cerebral and salty. And he really gives the keyboard, and I mean the whole of the 88s, a workout without ever edging close to solo-spot grandstanding. As such, it’s a very special seven minutes. What’s even cooler is that he then steps partially aside and lets bassist Joyner nearly steal the freaking show.
Post-bop bass solos, even when they’re well executed, are often more a statement on form than anything else. Therefore, predictability can certainly set in; here comes to point where the bassist will solo, and after it’s finished, the moment hasn’t exactly redefined the use of the instrument in Modern Jazz terms. And that’s cool, since post-bop can be effectively assessed as a formalist’s paradise.
But it’s even cooler when a bass player goes above and beyond, as Joyner (who later worked at length as the bassist in Jamal’s trio) does on this LP. He doesn’t just use his instrument to communicate a common mode of genre expression, he instead actually explores it, but without stepping outside of the genre context. And as he does so, it becomes clear that, like Garland, he’s caught a case of the advanced blues. As the pianist and Taylor fool around behind him, he plucks thick, meaty lines from his strings and goes far in conjuring melodic statements from a musical tool that’s uncommonly resistant to such treatment.
All that’s left is for the whole group to reemerge with the theme and then close it out. Needless to say, Taylor does a splendid job behind the kit throughout. And while the title track is really the meat of All Mornin’ Long’s matter, both of the flip side cuts, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” (courtesy of the Gershwin Brothers) and especially the tidy and brisk “Our Delight,” (from the pen of the great bop pianist Tadd Dameron) are strong statements.
The former is mainly a showcase for Coltrane and Byrd’s improvisational tactics, though Garland’s solo is a sweet and far more concise examination of territory similar to his dishing on the A-side. And it sheds even more light on Garland’s personality. If something of a groundbreaker, the pianist was far from any implicit avant-gardist. It becomes very clear that, unlike scores of his post-bop cohorts, Garland wasn’t just using standards as a platform; as his solo progresses, he gets into not just deep synch with the Gershwin’s artistry, but also their spirit.
“Our Delight,” is bop to the core though, and it provides Taylor’s moment to really shine. The drummer, one of the true post-bop greats, is sorta slept on today in comparison to Jones or Max Roach or even Kenny “Klook” Clarke, even though Taylor played on a near insurmountable aural avalanche of ’50s jazz motion (after decades of jazz connoisseurship, I still haven’t hear it all), including the aforementioned Giant Steps.
The Dameron tune is basically designed for the rigorous melodicism and gutsy soloing that defined the bop era and its later acolytes, but without an energetic and inventive kit-man the effort will only be so good. And Taylor really brings the goods; he’s loose enough to navigate the tune’s considerable changes, but he always keeps a secure handle on momentum.
Taylor also asserts his personality on the snare and bass drum during his mate’s solo spots, and does so without becoming too busy. When it’s Garland’s turn, he then makes a crucial adjustment in delivery, shifting focus to the hi-hat. And unsurprisingly, his brief solo spot is handled with boisterous grace.
All Mornin’ Long isn’t really the first stop for those wishing to become acquainted with Red Garland’s music. Naturally, the introduction should commence with the Davis quintet material, but there’s also Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section to contend with. That one’s a wickedly satisfying LP pairing the outstanding and troubled West Coast saxophonist with Garland, Jones, and Chambers, then still active in Davis’ group and already ranked at the date of the record’s making as one of the finest rhythm teams in post-bop.
But in no way should this LP be passed over even by even casual fans of 1950s jazz. Much more than just another instance of some talented guys meeting in a room to jam on some tunes, it’s the sound of a dyed-in-the-wool working band using the studio to document some magic. They existed as a unit only briefly, but in that short span this incarnation of the Red Garland Quintet was very great.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
