Roach war wohl damals eh in vielen Dingen eine Ausnahme… ja, war eine Frage, da ich Discogs notorisch misstraue und die CD nicht suchen mochte.
Das Kahn-Buch hab ich derzeit ausgeliehen aber noch nicht reingeschaut (muss ich auch hinsichtlich des Ayler-Threads mal noch machen). Er gibt für A(S) 1 bis 8 als VÖ-Jahr 1961, „Into the Hot“ ist dann die erste von 1962 (das geht bis A(S) 23, „Out of the Afternoon“ von Roy Haynes).
But Africa/Brass also serves as sad bookend: the last project Creed Taylor would complete for the label that he had brought down the long road from concept to reality.
The Call from Verve
It seemed almost inevitable. As Impulse’s star continued to rise and shine brightly, so its creator brought attention to himself. Before the summer of 1961 was half over, before Impulse itself was a year old, Creed Taylor was approached by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to take over Verve Records. Just six months before, the Hollywood-based entertainment conglomerate had purchased the label from its founder, Norma Granz, for $2.5 million, and the company wanted the right person to oversee its investment.[p. 51][…]
Taylor’s switchover proceeded rapidly: June 4 was the second session of Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album for Impulse at Van Gelder’s studio. July 14 was the first session of Getz’s sax-and-strings album Focus for Verve, recorded at Webster Hall. For the few weeks in between, the producer remembers closing up shop on one side of Broadway while starting up business on the other. „I was floating; the MGM offices were just across the street. John came over and we finished Africa/Brass at Verve!“
Taylor had initiated three other Impulse albums, which his new obligations at Verve prevented him from completing. Two survived the producer’s departure to become five-star classics, both featuring drummers.
Art Blakey’s emphatically titled Art Blakey!!!!! Jazz Messengers!!!!! [Impulse A(S)-7] was a small-group session powered by one of the Blakey group’s most legendary lineups: saxophonist Wayne Shorter, trombonist Curtis Fuller, trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt. Max Roach’s meticulously constructed and self-produced Percussion Bitter Sweet [Impulse A(S)-8] was the politically charged follow-up to his Freedom Now Suite from the year before, benefiting from a few of the same soloists (vocalist Abbey Lincoln, trumpeter Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester) and new talent (Dolphy, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianist Mal Waldron, bassist Art Davis). Margo Guryan, already at Verve with Taylor, wrote the liner notes at Roach’s request. [p. 54][…]
But the last of Taylor’s final three projects for Impulse is arguably the strangest, and certainly hints at the lack of a firm hand on the wheel in fall of 1961. With album covers already manufactured bearing the name and image of Gil Evans for the arranger’s next album, Evans chose nonetheless to approach the project more as a contractual obligation than a follow-up to Out of the Cool – as the title Into the Hot suggested. During two recording sessions in September and October 1961, Evans opted to sit in the producer’s chair in the studio control room, having handed over his album to the music of – and performances by – trumpeter (and Thorhnill alumnus) John Carisi and avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor.
Interestingly, Into the Hot was eventually released as Impulse A-9 in early 1962, while Evans’s first album for Verve, The Individualism of Gil Evans, would not be recorded until the fall of ’63. What seemed another Evans album was anything but.
Evans „got ahold of Cecil Taylor and me,“ recalled Carisi. „He got his own group, I got my own group, and Gil acted as an A&R man. He sat there in the booth, and asked for certain things to be played over again… he didn’t write one note. If you read the liner notes, you see that everything was done by other people.“
„We just kind of wound up with that Into the Hot thing,“ shrugs Creed Taylor today, equally matter-of-fact about his departure from the label that launched and defined his career. „I just don’t look back. I was there and that was that.“ [p. 56]~ Ashley Kahn: The House That Trane Built. The Story of Impulse Records, New York/London, 2006, S. 51-56
Damit ist alles geklärt, bis auf die Frage, wer die Blakey Session „überwacht“ hat (ein Produzent, der eingreifft, war wohl eh nicht vonnöten). Und die Creed-Taylor-Box ist damit ebenfalls rehabilitiert, auch wenn mich das Schattendasein von Into the Hot nach wie vor ärgert! Die drei Carisi-Stücke hätten schon längst als Bonus auf einen CD-Reissue von Out of the Cool gehört!
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #159: Martial Solal (1927–2024) – 21.1., 22:00; #160: 11.2., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba