If I ever want a touch of that elusive NYC late 50’s cool in my life, you know the whole Mad Men cocktails, broads, skeins of cigarette smoke snaking through a spotlight in a jazz club thang, I slip into something more comfortable and slip on Sonny Clark Cool Struttin’.
Instant time machine, you dig?
Cut by the 27 year-old pianist Sonny Clark in 1958 Cool Struttin’, despite the title, was no cool jazz, or West Coast jazz LP, it was instead a gloriously loose-limbed hard bop album. The quintet who recorded this Blue Note classic were just diamonds one and all, Art Farmer on trumpet, Jackie McLean on sax, Paul Chambers on bass and ‘Philly’ Joe Jones on drums*.
The title track is a stone cold cool classic, the strut very much in place from the first notes of Farmer onwards, the whole underpinned by a relaxed walking bassline. Clark takes the first solo and it is a masterpiece in serving tune, rather than derailing it through your own noodling, the way it maintains the internal rhythms of the piece is delicious. The mood is very much the third martini of the night, everything’s easy and still full of golden possibilities; which is a wonderful vein of feeling to tap into.
We go more uptown frenetic on ‘Blue Minor’, the brass wrapping the whole in a great opening theme and the rhythm veering ever so slightly South American. I love the way McLean lights up ‘Blue Minor’ with his playing, which I always envisage as sharp diagonals cutting against the horizontals of the rhythm. As always Clark plays underneath everything, calmly and authoritatively, never needing to grandstand, showing as all my favourite players do, that its the notes you don’t play and the spaces you leave that make the difference.
The Miles tune ‘Sippin’ At Bells’ is next up** and from Philly Joe Jones’ drum intro on in, this is a rambunctious one. Powering forward, all pistons pumping, all valves a’valving and Clark playing fast, but gliding serenely through it all. having said that it is the least inspired track on the album, for me it doesn’t quite get anywhere despite all the motion.
Last up is ‘Deep NIght’, the 1929 Charles Henderson/Rudy Vallee standard and it’s a real beaut. This one really swings, Paul Chambers really excelling here in the background as Clark and then Farmer really drive this one on home, the latter really shining on this cut. This really is a great version of a great old tune.
Always one of the biggest sellers on Blue Note Cool Struttin’ deserves its place in the jazz pantheon. This is a great album of real mood and substance played by a fabulously talented quintet. Anyone lured into jazz by Kind Of Blue really should stop off here next*^.
Sadly Sonny Clark died only 4 years after this album was released, leaving this as a very fitting memorial to a young talent.
All hail Blue Note 1588!
Cool Struttin’ is the beneficiary of yet another great Blue Note cover, this time a great Francis Wolff photograph of (label founder) Alfred Lion’s wife, Ruth. The more of their LPs I collect the higher my admiration grows for the way in which they utterly transformed the routine unimaginative medium of the LP cover into something zingy and rather à la mode.
1112 Down.
PS: Because, I’m obsessed with this as it is rather melancholy and haunting:
PPS: I have no practical evidence whatsoever for this but I shrewdly suspect that deployed during an encounter with a desired romantic partner Cool Struttin’ could lead to cool ruttin’.
*the latter two were members of the MIles Davis Quintet.
**oddly misattributed to Bird in Nat Hentoff’s sleevenotes^, my hero may be fallible. after all.
^SLEEVENOTES!! Lord above how I do love me an album with sleevenotes!
*^before lapping up Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, also released in 1958.
The album is just about as good as your words to describe it.
Ohhhh brother you know I am here for this.
Anything on Blue Note, for me.
Yup, that’s a golden rule.
Don’t know much Jazz, but the martini glass picture is awesome!!
Thanks John, I am like a combination of Picasso, that Da Vinci dude and probably some other great fella, all in one; if I do say so myself.
I had a Jazz major friend in university that did his best to educate me but I remain for the most part uninitiated. I do have copies of the big ones, like Blue Train and Kind of blue, some Oscar Peterson stuff (‘cause he’s Canadian), and I do know that Blue Note = cool.
I grew up with bits of it, but my dad liked offputtingly crazy stuff. I fell into bad company at work and my mate Martin steers me towards all manner of goodies.
Basically, anything on Blue Note records between ’58 and ’64 and you cannot go far wrong, is my tip.
Oscar Peterson ‘Night Train’ is a bulldozer of an LP!
Man, you scribbled a fly set with this mother, bro.
(’58 was a pretty amazing jazz year, eh?)
Stop trying to culturally appropriate all my Welshisms Bruce, you need to find your own hepcat lingo, dig?
’58 was amazing, but I think my absolute peak jazz year is about ’62-63; still lots of hard bop knocking about but some weirder stuff creeping in around the edges too.
Zingy Hard Bop. How did you know my stage name?
I read it on the bathroom wall.
I should have never given Ruth that sharpie