Search - Dizzy Gillespie :: Duets

A good jam session

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 08/12/2001

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This disc collects the remainder of the material recorded in the marathon 1957 session by Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins & Sonny Stitt that yielded _Sonny Side Up_. That disc was most notable for its jam-session jousting between the two tenor players on a 15-minute "Eternal Triangle" (an "I Got Rhythm" contrafact); this disc has nothing so striking, but is still a solid session. As usual with Verve's jam-in-the-studio aesthetic of the 1950s, little of the material seems to have been carefully prepared--all but one of the tunes on here is a blues, often without even a theme statement, & the tracks are all about 10 minutes long. But Gillespie carefully varies the moods: while there's nothing here as good as the classic reading of the blues "After Hours" on _Sonny Side Up_, each blues has a different groove, tempo & key, & there's good playing on each one. The one exception is "Con Alma"--if I'm not mistaken, given its first recording here. This is perhaps the most difficult tune Gillespie ever wrote, like many of his tunes something of a harmonic exercise (in this case, stepwise chordal motion): it's not fast (a medium Latin groove) but its chord changes present challenges to the improvisor. It's the only track presented here in two takes, & I'm not sure that even on the master take Stitt & Gillespie have quite got the hang of it. Nonetheless, an interesting performance.A good album, if not a great one. Mention should be made of the excellent rhythm section: Ray Bryant on piano, Tommy Bryant on bass, Charli Persip on drums. Of the six tracks, the first two feature Rollins, the last four feature Stitt (who plays tenor throughout except on "Anythin'", where he takes an alto solo)."

More duels than duets (or trios) but a fearsome symmetry non

Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 02/10/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Essentially, the Charlie Parker of the trumpet (or was Bird the Diz of the saxophone?) mentoring two of the music's most distinguished, and distinctive, proteges. Rollins is the more authoritative and adventurous, the saxophonist for those who associate the instrument with testosterone and rough edges; Stitt is simply the most perfect saxophonist of them all--the walking encyclopedia of bebop licks, the Frank Sinatra of song repertoire, the master executionist with a tone to die for--clean but embodied, pure as in pure ebony soul.



This is another Norman Granz Verve session that, more than the Van Gelder Blue Note dates, represents the "language" of the music at its zenith, an invaluable document and perpetually illuminating and scintillating conversation among musical giants--its value far outweighing all of the hard-bop, soul-jazz, funky sessions, Sidewinder formulae that offer little more than something to groove on. This music is the James Joyce of jazz; the other, the Stephen King.



Besides this one and "Sonnyside Up," look for the Diz and Getz duet session. To these three Verve dates, add two more: "Bird and Diz" and "For Musicians Only," the latter with Diz, Stitt and Getz. These five disks comprise a quintessence, a pantheon, a canon of the music at mid-century (arguably the apogee). No amount of thunder and lightning, boosted bass and drums, enhanced instruments, electronic keyboards or distorted pianos can match these meetings, where the artists rely on nothing more than their knowledge of a universal musical grammar to produce all the music on their own.



The 1970s were especially bad times for music and musicians such as these. In fact, many listeners had written off Dizzy and Stitt. How wrong we were. A group of young Swedes started their own label, Sonet, and proceeded to record their jazz heroes, beginning with Dizzy Gillespie. You can hear the results on a 1975 recording, "The Bop Session," featuring Diz and Stitt 20 years later and with a rhythm section of Hank Jones, Max Roach, and Percy Heath. Stitt's sound is as glorious as ever, but again the main man is Gillespie, making us all wonder what we were listening to at the time and why it wasn't Diz."