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Complete Original Quartet Recordings
Sonny Stitt & Hank Jones
Complete Original Quartet Recordings
Genre: Jazz
 
  •  Track Listings (18) - Disc #1


     
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All Artists: Sonny Stitt & Hank Jones
Title: Complete Original Quartet Recordings
Members Wishing: 1
Total Copies: 0
Label: Lone Hill Jazz
Release Date: 5/10/2005
Album Type: Import
Genre: Jazz
Style:
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1

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CD Reviews

Mastery
Evan Chandlee | Paris, France | 03/07/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)

"The advent of the CD, with its close-up reproduction of the sound of the saxophone, has been particularly kind to the late Sonny Stitt by bringing out his remarkable sonority on tenor and here primarily on alto. For those who knew Stitt from variable-quality LPs, the first exposure to his best recordings on CD can be hair-raising. Here on 13 cuts he is superbly accompanied by Hank Jones, Wendell Marshall and Shadow Wilson, also featured to great advantage on a recent live 50s release with Monk and Coltrane. Obviously inspired, Stitt's fiery, hard-edged yet voluptuous sound is the capper on his superb mastery of the three other parameters - melody, harmony and rhythm. Sonny Stitt did it all, as few others ever have, if truth be known. Of course as a musician who came up during the years when Charlie Parker dominated the jazz landscape, his playing is within the idiom created by Bird. But attentive listening reveals Sonny's originality and unique brilliance. Like Handel, Vivaldi and Telemann who made inestimable contributions while never reaching the level of JS Bach, Stitt's playing, while not as complex and innovative as Bird's, seemed to effortlessly attain gorgeous summits on days like these sessions with Hank Jones. His intensity and blues heat often transcends bebop and even jazz, exemplifying a popular musical form all his own, somewhere between rhythm and blues, song and the big-city night sound of the old black neighborhoods, where Stitt was a popular hero, incessantly on tour, ever constant to the blues and immensely respected for his faithfulness both to Bird's idiom and to himself. To some degree, his omnipresence and mastery consoled jazz fans for the premature departure of the incomparable Bird. These sides are exemplary of the rewards for the listener attentive to his confidence, control, kaleidoscopic yet always relevant virtuosity, and his urbane yet exalting soulfulness."
Bird Lite?
Johnny Hodges | Clark Fork, ID United States | 09/30/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)

"My first reaction to hearing Sonny Stitt was "Bird Lite", like he was a kinder, gentler Charlie Parker. After listening to this CD every day since I got it, I would refine that initial impression. Sonny flies to the heights of a Parker, but he first adheres to the melody line of the (mostly) standards on this disk. And he plays that line with beauty and control. Then, when he takes off into the improvisational stratosphere, it's a lot easier to mentally attach the variations to the melody. Also, the effect of the sudden acceleration is breath-taking. I love Charlie, but I find SS a more listenable music experience. I love garlic, but I don't eat the cloves raw, know what I mean?



My prior exposure to Sonny Stitt was through his late career recordings on Verve. The playing here seems vastly more assured. And as noted below, the remastering job is awesome: you really get to hear the delicate nature of the tone of the sax; his alto always seemed a little screechy to my ears on the Verve records. And the bonus is the piano work of Hank Jones. Wow! Complex, melodic, and perfectly simpatico with the horn.



This CD is really something special; it's one of those rare jazz records where all the elements come together perfectly. Nearly 80 minutes worth, and I'm always a little sad when it's over. If I had any complaint at all, it's that I would have liked to have heard more of his tenor sax playing, which is confined to the last few tracks.



TWO YEARS LATER:

I have developed an increasing love for Parker's 40's work, but this is still one of my all time favorite CD's. And while it's a fool's exercise to try to have a favorite jazz piano player, Hank Jones has really captured my heart here."
An American Master (but it takes a European to know)
Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 06/07/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)

"A previous reviewer, Mr. Chandlee from Paris, has crafted a concise single-paragraph review as insightful for its evaluation of Stitt's music as for its appraisal of the immediate and more lasting cultural significance of this supreme player. In fact, it's the verbal equivalent of a Sonny Stitt solo! Hardly the most innovative musician, Stitt was certainly the "most perfect" of saxophone players. It's been estimated he recorded approximately 150 sessions under his own name in his 30-year-career. On the '50s Roost recordings (the tapes were thought lost until recently), he would arrive at the studio, quickly select 10 standards and proceed to play three-minute improvised solos that could not have been better constructed if composed in advance. The syntax wasn't as complex as Parker's but was no less original or remarkable for being a more universally understood logic (as the reviewer, Mr. Hodges, states more plainly in his review). And the beauty of his sound! "Pure" and "pellucid" but also undeniably "black," or "soulful"--a fully "embodied" tone on both saxophones. And the articulations--as crisp and fluent as any other saxophonist on the planet--but also capable of introducing tones with a warmly legato tonguing, followed through by a wistful, slightly elegaic quality alternating with the utter "presence" of the uptempo numbers, whether bebop sound & fury or inner-city blues.



Stitt was not an "open" improviser. He had his formulae, which he stitched seamlessly together and worked to perfection, which some listeners hold against him. His playing, or "system," is about "closure," rather than the continual creation of tension. I don't think Sonny ever saw a tonic chord he didn't like, and whenever the opportunity presented itself, he would touch "home base" before embarking on his next melodic excursion. As a listener, there are times when a Hank Mobley or Harold Land is like a fresh breath of air, but inevitably, even after Coltrane and Dexter, I return to the mastery of Stitt, who was instrumentally to the American Songbook what Sinatra was vocally. He was a ubiquitous lone wolf, a traveling musical gunslinger for hire who loved tenor and alto "battles" (I've always felt he was a bit more creative on alto, though his audiences, and probably Sonny as well, seemed to favor the tenor, especially for the "duels").



These two Roost sessions are merely representative, not quintessential, Stitt-- but even representative Stitt is timeless, quintessential jazz. Still, you might look for "New York Jazz" (Jimmy Jones rather than Hank Jones), which is like an Art Tatum recording--a bit overwhelming but indispensable; also "Sonny Stitt with the Oscar Peterson Trio" is worth the price of the Japanese import; and "In Style" finds him in rare form on both horns, sometimes on the same tune.



Sonny played through pain, hard knocks, heavy hang-overs, but he kept playing--and 90% of it is "can't miss." But avoid anything with "Ronnie Scott's" or "Left-Bank" in the title (both are rip-offs) as well as any sessions on which he distorts his gorgeous sound with the Selmer Varitone attachment that he favored for several years in the late '60s. Also, he appeared with Blakey's Jazz Messengers on two dates in the '60s--the 2nd one, on Impulse ("Jazz Message," I believe), is particularly lame (at least for a Stitt performance).



Perhaps the most currently prized out-of-print set is "Endgame Brilliance," a single CD compilation of the two studio sessions--"Tune Up" and "Constellation"--that caused musicians and critics to "rediscover" him in the early to mid-1970s. (It may be coming out as a Spanish import.) Finally, the most fascinating match-up in the music: the six months Sonny played with Miles in 1960 following the departure of Coltrane. It's a colossal struggle--Miles' new modernist, modal bag vs. Sonny's Bird-inherited harmonic universe and bop language. Miles tries everything to shove Sonny's face in the new music, but he'll have none of it. (I caught Sonny many times in person. He could be outgoing and personable--or as cold and "ornery," stubborn and independent as they come, barely more approachable than Miles). Neither player gives an inch on the Miles-Sonny confrontations (available only on overseas recordings made in France and Sweden)."