John Jenkins: The Brief Recording Career of a Forgotten Alto Saxophonist

Saying that the recorded legacy of John Jenkins as a leader is meager seems like a vast understatement. As a matter of fact, besides two sessions cut about two weeks apart in the summer of 1957 and a third one co-led with trumpeter Donald Byrd that same year, Jenkins would never enter a studio as a leader again, quietly disappearing from the jazz scene in the mid 1960s. He did appear as a sideman on several dates by the likes of Jackie McLean, Paul Qunichette, Hank Mobley, Clifford Jordan, Wilbur Ware, and Teddy Charles, yet never again as a leader. This is undoubtedly regrettable in the light of the quality of the music produced during the two summer sessions that we are discussing today. Jenkins also played alongside jazz giants such as Charles Mingus and Art Pepper, but many of these collaborations went sadly unrecorded, which is another reason why his discography looks so slim. Born in Chicago in 1931, Jenkins began his musical education by playing the clarinet, yet he soon switched to alto saxophone, and in his formative years he was influenced by his friend Jackie McLean (with whom he recorded the album Alto Madness for Prestige also in 1957) as well as by Charlie Parker; hence his preference for bop and hard bop when it came time to lead his own sessions.

The first of these dates took place on July 26, 1957 at Rudy Van Gelder’s famed studio in New Jersey and was released on a Prestige album simply titled Jenkins, Jordan, and Timmons. As the title itself suggests, Jenkins, who plays alto saxophone, is joined by Clifford Jordan on tenor, Bobby Timmons on piano, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Dannie Richmond on drums. It is a wholeheartedly bop session, and a rather brief one at that, yielding five tracks that offer plenty of room for all involved to solo. Jenkins is in fine form, acting as leader from the very beginning of the first track, a Jordan original entitled “Cliff’s Edge,” and he brings in two of his own compositions, “Princess” and “Blue Jay.” These are two excellent mid-tempo vehicles for the kind of improvisation that Jenkins enjoyed, based on swift phrases with enough unexpected notes here and there to keep the listener’s attention. “Soft Talk,” the longest track on the album, is much more fast-paced, and though it is dominated primarily by Jenkins, it does contain a compelling solo by Timmons, and even Ware gets to solo briefly on bass. Jenkins is ably supported by Timmons on “Tenderly,” both the only standard and the only ballad in the set, which stands as a fine example of Jenkins’s gusto when it comes to slow numbers.

Jenkins’s second session as a leader was held just a couple of weeks later, on August 11, at the very same studio. Jenkins is again on alto, and Richmond is again sitting behind the drum kit, but this time Kenny Burrell is on guitar and shares credit in the title of the Blue Note album that was recorded on that day, originally issued as John Jenkins and Kenny Burrell. As we can see, whoever got to decide the titles of albums by Jenkins definitely did not spend too much time pondering over complex options. This is once again a quintet date, with Sonny Clark on piano and Paul Chambers on bass—quite the all-star group, in fact! The disc kicks off with a boppish reading of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On,” built around the interplay between alto sax and guitar and one of the best examples of Jenkins’s knack for surprising the listener with unexpected notes. As in the previous session, the tune selection only affords a ballad here: in this case, it is Harold Adamson and Burton Lane’s “Everything I Have Is Yours,” usually associated with vocalist Billy Eckstine. As an interpreter of ballads, Jenkins shows that he has taken more than a tip from Charlie Parker: he exudes warmth and feeling, but like Bird, he is not afraid to show his bop leanings even at a slower tempo.

Kenny Burrell and John Jenkins

This time Jenkins contributes three of his own compositions (“Motif,” “Sharon," and "Chalumeau") all of them freshly minted melodies designed to showcase his improvisatory skills, as well as those of Burrell and Clark, who are afforded more space to shine than Chambers and Richmond throughout the set. The final track, “Blues for Two,” is credited to Burrell, and as its title implies, it is based on the blues and provides a more than satisfying way to bring the session to a close. Fortunately, both of these albums are currently available on CD format and should not be too hard to find (the Jenkins-Burrell reissue even includes two bonus tracks from the session, both of them alternate takes of cuts on the original record) and they capture Jenkins, albeit briefly, at the peak of his power, during a short time period when he was extremely active, and a few years before he drifted into obscurity and was never heard from again. In view of these two dates alone, his disappearance, whether self-imposed or not, was undoubtedly a great loss for jazz.

Bobby Timmons plays piano on Jenkins's first session as a leader

New Reissues: Gene Austin, Barbara Dane & Earl Hines, Nancy Harrow, Laurindo Almeida & Bud Shank

We discuss today four of the latest CD reissues of which we have had notice. We begin with a recent two-fer that includes two Gene Austin albums from late in his career. Then, there is an outstanding album that the always exciting Barbara Dane cut with Earl Hines in the 1950s and that has been re-released in a Hines 4-CD set, although it was already previously available on a better release. Also, he Spanish label Fresh Sounds has recently put two albums by the vastly underrated vocalist Nancy Harrow together on one CD, and finally, Jasmine Records has made available Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank's pioneering collaborations from the 1950s on an essential single CD. Let us look at these reissues a little more in depth!

Helped enormously by the introduction of the microphone, sweet-voiced crooner Gene Austin enjoyed spectacular success in the twenties and thirties with his sentimental ballads sung in a rather high-pitched voice, which turned him into a star on records and radio. Born in Gainesville, Texas, in 1900, Austin was steeped in jazz, blues, and cowboy music, and he was also an adept songwriter and later in his life would publish a very interesting autobiography, Gene Austin's Ol' Buddy. Although his recording output is rather meager throughout the forties and fifties, in 1957 NBC broadcast The Gene Austin Story, a TV movie based on his life, and this briefly revived interest in his music. Thus, Austin went into the RCA studios to cut a new album, Restless Heart, made out of both old songs, such as "Memories of You," "Where the Shy Little Violets Grow," and "Sharecroppin' Blues," and new tunes, such as Rodgers and Hart's "I Could Write a Book." The disc also aimed to showcase Austin's songwriting, and many of the tracks are self-penned—"My Restless Heart," "The More I See of Somebody Else," "Take Your Shoes Off Baby," and "There's a New Blue Heaven in the Sky," among others. He also attempts some pseudo-blues ("Wise Guys") and purposefully does not overlook his country side, and the result is a very pleasant album that finds Austin's voice sounding much lower and mellow that on his records from the twenties.

A younger Gene Austin

Austin's recording career was not over with this RCA album, though, and three years later he cut yet another one, this time for Dot Records. Entitled Gene Austin's Great Hits in Stereo, it delivers on its title's promise, offering new readings of twelve of his old classics in stereo with backing from an orchestra conducted by Billy Vaughn. The only song written by Austin here is "Lonesome Road," the focus not being on his songwriting but on his vintage hits, such as "Ramona," "Girl of My Dreams," "How Am I to Know," and of course, his career-defining "My Blue Heaven." The British label Sepia Records has joined these two albums on a single CD that is up to Sepia's usual high standards of sound and packaging, although we would have liked some background information on the recordings rather than just an excerpt from the liner notes of the Dot set. The CD also offers four medleys made in 1954 for RCA that, according to Michael Pitts and Frank Hoffman in the book The Rise of the Crooners, feature Austin himself on piano backed by George Barnes on guitar and Frank Carroll on bass. These include such classics as "She's Funny That Way," "How Come You Do Me Like You Do," "One Sweet Letter from You," and "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," among others, and find Austin exploring his jazzier side aided by Barnes's stellar guitar playing, and proving that he could also swing when he wanted to. The medleys are definitely the gems of the set, and while this Sepia CD does not replace collections of Austin's twenties and thirties recordings such as Take Two's A Time to Relax, it does work well as a companion release.

When Leonard Feather said that Barbara Dane was "Bessie Smith in stereo," he was not exaggerating in the least; if anything, such an assessment of Dane's artistry sounds rather reductionist, considering that Dane is comfortable singing not only the blues, but also jazz and folk music. Her family roots lay in Arkansas, but Dane was raised in Detroit and by the late forties had moved to San Francisco, where she sang with Turk Murphy and Kid Ory, among many others. Throughout her long career, Dane has performed with some of the greatest names in jazz and blues, including Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Lightnin' Hopkins, Jack Teagarden, Art Hodes, and Louis Armstrong, to name but a few. Though all her recordings are worth a listen, the best of them all may well be Livin' with the Blues, the album she cut with Earl Hines in 1959 for Dot Records. It showcases her gift for singing jazz on well-known tunes such as "If I Could Be with You," "Why Don't You Do Right," and "Bye Bye Blackbird," and even attempts ballads like the Jack Teagarden-associated "A Hundred Years from Today" and Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy." But most of all, she offers masterful interpretations of blues-inflected jazz classics such as the title track, "How Long, How Long Blues," and "In the Evenin'," ably supported by an orchestra led by the Fatha. This Dane-Hines collaboration ranks as one of the best vocal jazz albums of the 1950s and has been reissued by the European budget label Real Gone Jazz on a 4-CD set of Seven Classic Albums by Earl Hines that is very recommendable. However, it had already been made available last year on a much better Fresh Sounds release that pairs up Dane's Livin' with the Blues and On My Way, a 1962 effort for Capitol that is a more eclectic mix of folk, blues, and even gospel, but that includes some jazzier tracks such as "Crazy Blues" and "Good Old Wagon," with Kenny Whitson on cornet. Though the rest of the albums by the Fatha on the Real Gone set are also very interesting, the sound and packaging of the Fresh Sounds CD are superior. For more information on Barbara Dane, we refer you to her extremely interesting homepage.

Barely a year after Barbara Dane's collaboration with Earl Hines, Nancy Harrow went into the recording studio at Nat Hentoff's behest to cut an album for Candid Records. She was backed by Buck Clayton's Jazz Stars, a studio group that featured Clayton on trumpet, Dickie Wells on trombone, Tom Gwaltney on clarinet and alto sax, Buddy Tate on tenor sax, Danny Bank on baritone sax, Dick Wellstood on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Oliver Jackson on drums. With such an array of talent, it is no surprise that the band is offered plenty of room to shine, and Harrow is inspired by the company she keeps to offer her best blues-inflected jazz singing with more than a touch of Mildred Bailey. The eight tracks recorded by Harrow and the Clayton group resulted in her debut album, the excellent Wild Women Don't Have the Blues, which appropriately mixes blues numbers such as the title track, "Take Me Back Baby," "I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I've Got," and "Blues for Yesterday" with bluesy ballads ("All Too Soon") and more straight-ahead jazz tunes like "Can't We Be Friends," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and "I've Got the World on a String." Fresh Sounds Records has recently paired this masterpiece that every jazz aficionado should own with Harrow's second album, cut for Atlantic in 1962, You Never Know. Though quite different from her debut, this is an equally outstanding LP that grows more interesting the more one listens to it. Most of the tracks were thoughtfully arranged by pianist John Lewis, who plays piano on all of them, along with Jim Hall on guitar, Richard Davis on bass, and Connie Kay on drums, with the occasional addition of Phil Woods on alto and a string orchestra. Of course, blues material is still at the heart of the album ("Confessin' the Blues," "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do") but Lewis's beautifully sparse arangements ensure that the focus is entirely on Harrow's unaffected, expressive voice. Overall, this is yet another of the many outstanding reissues, complete with excellent sound and notes, to which the people at Fresh Sounds have accustomed us—and hopefully they will keep them coming! For more information about Nancy Harrow, it is a good idea to visit her homepage.

The fusion of jazz and bossa nova is usually credited to Stan Getz and João Gilberto's albums from the early 1960s, which introduced these new, exciting Brazilian rhythms to American audiences at large. However, in 1953 and 1954, alto saxophonist Bud Shank and Brazilian guitarist and composer Laurindo Almeida recorded a series of tracks in a quartet setting (with Harry Babasin on bass and Roy Harte on drums) that already foreshadow the innovations that would come in full force some seven years later. Almeida had arrived in Los Angeles from his native Rio de Janeiro in 1947, instantly finding a place within the Stan Kenton orchestra. The results of his collaboration with Shank were released by World Pacific on a ten-inch album entitled Brazilliance—and brazilliant it was indeed, a very appealing mixture of Brazilian folk rhythms and jazz improvisation, mostly on original tunes by Almeida and other Brazilian composers, but also on Latin American songs such as "Acércate Más" and standards, as in the case of "Speak Low" and "Stairway to the Stars." Shank himself does not consider these recordings as strictly bossa nova, yet what Getz, Gilberto, and others would develop in the sixties is somehow already present here, albeit in embryonic form. This music is not important merely for historical reasons; rather, it is the very enjoyable product of a group of musicians mixing all sorts of influences in a search for an innovative sound, and the occasional doubts and insecurities only add to the undeniable charm of what the rolling tape captured at these sessions.

Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida

Some years later, in 1958 and 1959, Almeida and Shank got together again to cut a few more tracks, accompanied this time by Gary Peacock on bass and Chuck Flores on percussion, which were subsequently released by World Pacific as Holiday in Brazil or Brazilliance, vol. 2. The concept for these sessions was not substantially different from those held in 1953-54, though the group concentrates more on Almeida and Shank compositions, and the latter's solos (on alto and flute) are noticeably longer and jazzier. "Little Girl Blue" and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" provide the more familiar tracks on here, but the true gems are originals such as "Nocturno," "Mood Antigua," and "Lonely." Jasmine Records has reissued both volumes of Brazilliance on a single CD, and though the sound is fantastic, there is almost no background information on the recordings, and the booklet only includes a brief adaptation of the original liner notes, which is not very comprehensive. The same material is also available on a single disc on the Poll Winners label released in 2012 with considerably more attractive packaging. Back in 2008, Bud Shank spoke to jazz writer Marc Myers about these groundbreaking, evocative recordings and the close relationship between jazz and bossa nova in a fascinating three-part interview that was published in Myers's JazzWax website. For anyone interested, here are the links to Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.