Outstanding reissue
sam | midwest | 12/05/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Edmond Hall is one of the best blues-playing clarinetists around. From New Orleans, he retains the haunting, woody tone characteristic of many players from that area, but he also has the techinical facility of more modern mainstream players. Hall is under-recorded as a leader, which makes this reissue particularly welcome. It features Hall in a quartet setting (along with Ellis Larkin and Milt HInton) and in a sextet that includes the great Vic Dickenson. Hall and Dickenson teamed in the 40s to make some classic recordings for Blue Note and again in the early 50s for more classic sides for John Hammond on the Vanguard label. This session, recorded in 1959 for United Artists, features outstanding studio sound and is right up there in quality with those previous meetings. Great material (including some Ellington tunes) and plenty of swinging blues from masters!
Petite Fleur is produced by 'Mighty Quinn', a small reissue company with outstanding production values. It licensed this material from EMI/Blue Note and has remastered it in splendid 24 bit sound. Highly recommended!"
Edmond forever......!
ABH457 | New York | 08/21/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I was studying clarinet at school when I first heard Edmond Hall on the famous Vanguard sessions (1953-1954) led by Vic Dickenson. I fell in love with his thick warm sound immediately, still feel that way, and still wonder how he produced it. Those sides were and remain among the peaks of 1950s mainstream jazz -- an unsung period when the jazz soloist stars of the 1930s and 1940s were stretching out on the then new and longer LP sides. And they were playing with a greater maturity that was still developing in earlier decades, and they were more brilliantly recorded. Edmond Hall was among those great musicians and his clarinet had a tone and a profound expressiveness that set him head and shoulders above most other clarinetists -- and arguably alongside Sidney Bechet (who was much more deeply rooted in the New Orleans tradition) on that instrument. He is the antithesis of Benny Goodman's more classical sounding upper register fluidity. As an English clarinetist, Wally Fawkes, said admiringly at the time of Hall's visit to England with the Armstrong All Stars in 1956: "Edmond Hall simply 'crackles' in the lower register!" The bebop school of the time, with players like Buddy De Franco, were playing technically brilliant music but they told no story amd conveyed no emotion the way Edmond Hall could.
If the Vanguard sessions were Vic Dickenson's successful attempt to build on his work with Edmond Hall on Blue Note in the 1940s, and on his Boston-based club work with Hall and Ruby Braff in the early 1950s, Petite Fleur can be seen as Edmond Hall's attempt to build on his celebrated small group work in the 1940s and to produce some original tunes under his own name -- he had worked for quite some of the intervening years for Eddie Condon and with Louis Armstrong's All Stars -- this time, using fine players like Dickenson, Emmett Berry, Ellis Larkins. Petite Fleur is a fine album and it is always good to hear Edmond Hall's clarinet at such length. In all, however, it is not one of the peaks of mainstream jazz but is enjoyable,swinging and charming. The arrangements are simple, but I always felt it would have been better had he had the more dynamic, if irrascible, drummer Jo Jones to spice things up. Jimmie Crawford is a solid early swing drummer, whereas Jones has a more legato style that offered greater support and dynamics to solists. Crawford, if I recall correctly, is not very closely recorded on PF.
All in all a worthwhile purchase, if only to familarize yourself for the first time with the amazing clarinet sound of Edmond Hall."
Edmond Hall
Carlos A. Bonorino | Buenos Aires, Argentina | 10/17/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Edmond Hall was the best clarinetist I`ve ever heard. I had the only chance during his visit to Buenos Aires with Louis Armstrong in 1957. I still keep as a treasure a 45 he recorded here with the 3 top argentinian jazzists of those times. The recording starts witn a few words from Edmond to the argentina`s jazz fans and, among other beatuful tunes, my favorite is Sweet Georgia Brown. Carlos Bonorino, Buenos Aires."
