Benny Golson

This is where Golson the arranger steps to the front, and the result is one of the most underplayed large-ensemble jazz recordings of the late '50s. He assembled a full nonet for this date, Art Farmer on trumpet, Jimmy Cleveland on trombone, Julius Watkins on French horn, Gigi Gryce, Sahib Shihab, and wrote charts that give everyone space while building something bigger than any individual voice.

The result is lush without being heavy, arranged without ever sounding written. That's the trick very few people can pull off. Golson had absorbed Gil Evans and the Birth of the Cool sensibility but pushed it somewhere warmer, more bluesy, more rooted in the Philly hard bop tradition he came from. These aren't cool jazz charts. They swing.

The fact that this was recorded in 1957, the same year as The Modern Touch, is almost shocking. The man was doing everything at once, running in two completely different directions and succeeding at both. New York Scene is the one that shows you the full scope of what he was capable of as a writer. Don't skip it in favor of the smaller group dates. It deserves equal time.

If you want to understand what made Benny Golson special right out of the gate, this is the place to start. This was his debut as a leader, and he walks in with Kenny Dorham, J.J. Johnson, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Max Roach, not exactly picking up whoever was free that weekend. That lineup alone should tell you what kind of statement this was meant to be.

The whole record has this warm, unhurried confidence, like Golson already knew exactly who he was. "Whisper Not" is the song everybody knows, and for good reason: that melody is so instantly memorable it feels like it's always existed. But don't sleep on "Out of the Past", there's a melodic sorrow to it that'll stay with you for days after you first hear it.

What gets me every time is how Golson's tone on the tenor just breathes. No aggression, no showing off. He was never going to be Coltrane or Rollins in terms of pure force, but that's not what he was going for. Where those guys grabbed you, Golson pulls you in close and talks. It's a different kind of power, and on this record it's fully formed from track one.

Kenny Dorham plays with a melodic warmth that perfectly complements Golson's approach, and J.J. Johnson's trombone adds a richness to the front line that only a player of his stature could bring. Wynton Kelly swings with that effortless joy he always had. Max Roach plays with restraint for once, no drum solos, just propulsion. Debut albums don't usually sound this settled. This one does.

The title isn't wrong. Where The Modern Touch introduced him with a hard bop edge and a band that could burn, this one goes softer and deeper. Curtis Fuller joins on trombone, and that combination, Golson's warm tenor weaving against Fuller's buttery low-end, became one of the defining sounds of this era of jazz. Once you hear it, you recognize it everywhere.

Philly Joe Jones behind the kit keeps things moving without ever overpowering a single moment. Barry Harris on piano is the quiet glue, he was incapable of playing a wrong note. The session has a different temperature than the debut: cooler, more intimate, less concerned with announcing itself.

The ballads here are something else. "I Remember Clifford," Golson's elegy for Clifford Brown, is devastating in the best way, a piece of music that does what only the very best jazz can do, which is hold grief and beauty in the same breath without letting either one win. If you've never heard it, stop reading and go listen.

This record isn't trying to swing you off your feet. It's trying to sit next to you and talk. It does exactly that for the whole forty-some minutes, and when it ends you feel like something real just happened.

Philadelphia in the 1950s was one of the great jazz cities in America, and it doesn't always get the credit it deserves for that. Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Heath, John Coltrane, a staggering amount of talent from one place. This album is Golson's love letter to that world, gathering his people and letting them cook.

The hard bop energy here is looser and more joyful than his Riverside dates, less composed, more blown, like everyone showed up wanting to play. Lee Morgan sounds like he's playing for his life in the best possible way. He was barely twenty years old and already playing like a man with something to prove on every single track. Ray Bryant swings through every song with that easy, rolling touch he had.

Philly Joe Jones, drumming for a city that shares his name, is relentless. The rhythm section doesn't let up for a second. This record has a physical quality that the more restrained sessions don't, you feel it in your chest. It's the kind of album you put on when you want jazz at its most alive, most present, most swinging. Not the most polished thing Golson made, but maybe the most fun.

This compilation brings together two 1958 sessions from opposite sides of the Atlantic: five tracks recorded in New York on November 17 with Lee Morgan, Ray Bryant, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones, and six tracks recorded in Paris on December 12 with Roger Guérin on trumpet, Bobby Timmons on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass, and Christian Garros on drums. The New York tracks were originally issued as part of the Philadelphians session on Pathé Marconi; the Paris tracks appeared on French Columbia. Hearing both sessions back to back gives you Golson in two very different contexts within the span of a single month.

The New York quintet is the harder-swinging unit. Morgan's trumpet and Golson's tenor lock together with the kind of authority that comes from playing the same bandstand night after night, and Percy Heath's bass holds everything in place with that particular Modern Jazz Quartet steadiness. The Paris session has a different character entirely: Guérin's trumpet is lighter and more lyrical than Morgan's, and Timmons brings a bluesy warmth to the piano chair that shifts the whole feel of the rhythm section. Michelot, the great French bassist who played with everyone from Django Reinhardt to Miles Davis, anchors the Paris date with a singing tone.

The compilation format means this isn't a unified artistic statement in the way that a single-session album would be, but the contrast between the two bands is part of what makes it valuable. You hear Golson adapting to different rhythm sections and different trumpet voices without ever changing what he is. His tone, his phrasing, his compositional intelligence: all of it stays constant while the surroundings shift. A useful document of a great player's versatility at a moment when his reputation was still being made.

Back to the quintet, and back to business. Curtis Fuller and Golson reunite here, and by this point the two of them had played together enough to stop thinking and just communicate. That familiarity is all over this record, you can hear it in how they move around each other, how Fuller anticipates where the tenor line is going.

This one's rawer than the Riverside sessions. New Jazz had a different energy, Prestige's hipper, harder-swinging subsidiary, and the label's aesthetic shows. The production is a little more direct, a little less polished, and it suits this music perfectly. "Blues on Down" is a burner that does not quit, nine minutes of hard bop at full temperature. Al Harewood drives it like he's got somewhere important to be.

Tommy Bryant on bass is worth paying close attention to throughout. He and Ray are brothers, and that family connection shows in how naturally the piano and bass lock together. The whole record is like that: nothing wasted, everything earning its place. If you want an entry point into this catalog, this might actually be it. It's the one that sounds most like a great, spontaneous night in a small room with five people who knew each other really well.

Recorded around the same time as Gone with Golson, this companion session somehow feels even more at ease. Fuller and Golson are locked in on a level that by this point is almost telepathic. You stop hearing two instruments making their way around each other and start hearing one continuous musical thought shared between them.

"Stablemates," which Golson had written years earlier for Miles Davis, it appears on Coltrane's debut with Miles, gets revisited here, and it's worth spending time with what Golson does with his own tune now that he's the one leading the session. He knows every corner of that composition from the inside. The reading here is definitive.

Paul Chambers' bass work is phenomenal throughout, understated in the way only the greats can manage, always present without ever calling attention to itself. Art Blakey on drums plays with a rolling, relaxed authority that keeps the temperature exactly right.

By 1959, Golson had recorded something like six albums in two years while also writing arrangements, composing for other people's sessions, and co-founding the Jazztet with Art Farmer. The energy that went into all of that is staggering to think about. This might be the best album of the whole run, the most fully realized, the most settled. It's the one I reach for most.

This is Curtis Fuller's record, not Golson's, but Golson's fingerprints are all over it. He wrote the title track "Blues-Ette," which became one of the small handful of jazz tunes that every tenor player eventually has to reckon with. He also wrote "Five Spot After Dark," which is on this album and which is one of his most infectious melodies. And then he plays, which turns out to be an equally significant contribution. The two-horn front line of trombone and tenor gives the record a particular texture: darker and warmer than a trumpet-tenor combination, with Fuller's wide trombone sound sitting comfortably alongside Golson's robust tenor.

Tommy Flanagan provides the kind of piano accompaniment that makes every soloist sound better than they deserve: supportive, harmonically rich, and completely in service of the music rather than his own technique. Jimmy Garrison and Al Harewood keep the rhythm section swinging without drawing attention to themselves. The whole album has a beautiful economy to it, nothing wasted, everything in place.

Blue Note sessions from 1959 had a particular sound, a particular level of sonic attention, that makes everything recorded there at that moment feel significant. Blues-Ette is one of the best of them. An essential album that should be in any jazz collection, regardless of whether you are there for Fuller or for Golson.

This is a Curtis Fuller date, not to be confused with the Art Farmer/Golson Jazztet that would form the following year. The sextet here is a different animal entirely: Lee Morgan's trumpet in place of Farmer's flugelhorn gives the front line a harder, brighter edge, and with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Charlie Persip behind them, the rhythm section has a driving intensity that the later Jazztet's more polished arrangements never quite aimed for. Fuller and Golson had been playing together since the late fifties, and the ease between them is audible on every track.

Golson's writing is the backbone of the session. His arrangements give the three horns enough structure to sound cohesive but enough room to stretch, and the balance between composed passages and open blowing is expertly managed. Kelly's piano comping has that particular buoyancy he brought to everything he touched in this period, and Chambers and Persip lock in behind the horns with the kind of rhythmic authority that makes the whole band swing harder than six musicians have any right to.

The album predates Blues-ette by just a few months, and hearing them back to back shows how quickly Fuller was developing as a bandleader. Both records feature Golson prominently, but where Blues-ette is all warmth and economy, this session lets the horns stretch and push each other. A strong Savoy date that deserves more attention than it gets.

Lem Winchester was a vibraphonist from Wilmington, Delaware, a policeman who played jazz on the side and whose career was cut short when he died in a gun accident in January 1961. He made only a handful of records, and this co-led session with Golson is one of the strongest. The vibraphone and tenor combination gives the front line a shimmering quality: Winchester's bell-like tone and Golson's warmer, broader sound complement each other without competing, and the interplay between them on the uptempo tracks has a natural conversational ease that suggests they had been playing together longer than they had.

Tommy Flanagan is impeccable as always, providing the kind of piano accompaniment that stays out of the way during the front line exchanges and then steps forward with solos that justify the space they take. Wendell Marshall and Art Taylor keep the rhythm section swinging without drawing attention to themselves. Golson sits out "If I Were a Bell," leaving Winchester alone with the trio, and it is one of the album's quieter pleasures.

Winchester Special is both an excellent jazz record on its own terms and a reminder of what was lost when Winchester died at thirty-two. Golson's playing here has the generosity of a musician who wants his partner to sound as good as possible, and the result is one of the more underappreciated co-led dates of the late fifties.

The Jazztet was Golson and Art Farmer's co-led group, and this debut record from 1960 is the one where you understand immediately why the pairing worked. Farmer and Golson are temperamentally opposite in the best possible way. Farmer plays with a warmth and restraint that matches the flugelhorn he increasingly preferred. Golson plays with more heat, more directional energy. Together they create a front line that is always in motion but never anxious.

This is the record where "Killer Joe" first appeared, one of Golson's most enduring originals. The tune has since been recorded hundreds of times and absorbed into the standard repertoire, but the original here has a certain matter-of-fact authority that later versions rarely match. It is not flashy. It just sits in the pocket and absolutely does not move.

"Along Came Betty" is the other essential Golson composition on this album - a tune named after Betty Golson, his wife, that manages to be both tender and harmonically sophisticated at the same time. The melody has that characteristic Golson quality: you can hear the whole architecture of it on first listen, but it keeps offering new angles every time you come back.

McCoy Tyner - then twenty years old - is on piano, and he is already himself. The vocabulary he would bring to Coltrane's classic quartet is already there in embryonic form. The rhythm section swings hard and clean throughout. This is one of those debut records that comes out fully formed, because the people making it had already put in the years.

The Jazztet's second Argo release, and one that shows how quickly the ensemble had evolved. The personnel shift is significant: Tom McIntosh replaces Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cedar Walton takes the piano chair from McCoy Tyner, and Tommy Williams and Albert Heath form the new rhythm section. The result is a leaner, more compositionally focused band. McIntosh's trombone is more contained than Fuller's, and the three-horn voicings take on a slightly different character, tighter and more blended.

Golson's arrangements are the heart of the record. "The Cool One" was written with commercial intent, following up on the success of "Killer Joe" from the first album, and his version of "Blues on Down" revisits material he first recorded for The Modern Touch. Cedar Walton brings a harder, more rhythmically assertive approach to the piano chair than Tyner's more harmonically exploratory style, and the rhythm section of Williams and Albert Heath drives the band with crisp authority. The "Lament" feature for McIntosh shows the trombonist's ballad capabilities.

The album includes nine tracks, a generous program that covers the full range of what the Jazztet could do: blues, Latin, ballads, and uptempo hard bop. "Five Spot After Dark" closes the set with the same tune that appeared on Blues-ette, and hearing it in the Jazztet arrangement shows how Golson's writing adapted to different instrumental settings. A strong entry in the catalog that deserves more attention than it gets.

The title has the looseness and forward energy of the music itself. Golson was at his most prolific as a recording artist in the early 1960s, and the sheer quantity of music he produced could have diluted the quality. It did not. Across these quartet sessions the consistency is remarkable, the same quality of invention and the same depth of swing regardless of the context.

What distinguishes this particular session is the tempo range. Golson explores the full spectrum from brisk hard bop to genuine ballad pacing, and his tone adapts to each register without losing the essential quality that makes it his. On the faster material he drives forward with urgency; on the slower pieces he lets the tenor do what it does best, wrapping around a melody with that big warm sound that carries feeling without having to announce it.

Paul Chambers was perhaps the most important rhythm section bassist in New York during this period, and having him on this date elevates everything. He and Art Taylor had a natural rapport that provided the kind of foundation a front line could rely on completely. A consistently satisfying quartet session.

The playful title points toward a certain lighthearted energy that runs through this album without ever turning into mere entertainment. Golson had a sense of humor in his music that sometimes gets overlooked in favor of the more obviously serious qualities of his playing and composing. Here the humor is present in the phrasing, in the way certain melodic ideas get turned inside out and revisited from unexpected angles, in the looseness of the whole enterprise.

Cedar Walton is a significant upgrade in the piano chair for this date. He was developing a style that would make him one of the more distinctive pianists of the following decade, rhythmically strong and harmonically inventive without the kind of abstraction that would have pulled against the directness of Golson's playing. The combination is particularly effective on the mid-tempo material.

Tommy Williams brings a different quality to the bass role than Paul Chambers did, more forward-leaning and slightly more aggressive rhythmically, and it pushes the band in a direction that is slightly edgier than the earlier quartet records. A distinctive and undervalued entry in the Golson catalog.

The Jazztet's final studio album before the group's twenty-year hiatus, and the last document of the original ensemble concept. By 1962 the band had cycled through multiple personnel changes: Grachan Moncur III now held the trombone chair, Roy McCurdy had replaced the earlier drummers, and Harold Mabern and Herbie Lewis rounded out the rhythm section. The three-horn front line remained the defining feature, but the sound had evolved with each personnel shift.

Moncur's trombone has a different quality from either Fuller or McIntosh: slightly more angular, with a modernist edge that pushes the ensemble writing in new directions. Mabern's piano stays close to the blues-inflected hard bop center, and McCurdy drives the band with a crisp, propulsive energy. The rhythm section gives the album a character of its own within the Jazztet catalog, leaner and more direct than the earliest recordings.

Listening to this record now there is a quality of completeness to it. The band had developed as far as it was going to develop in its original form, and this album shows what that development had produced: a genuinely original ensemble voice that had no equivalent in jazz at that moment. The Jazztet would not record again until 1982.

Golson spent a significant portion of the mid-1960s exploring the commercial end of the music, writing advertising jingles, recording pop-inflected albums, and generally testing how far his skills could extend beyond the hard bop world that had made him famous. This album sits at the beginning of that exploratory period, and it has a genuine curiosity behind it rather than the cynicism that later commercial jazz often projects.

The formula in the title is literal: take popular songs, apply jazz phrasing and swing feel, and see what happens. What happens is that Golson's tone and conception are strong enough to carry the material regardless of its pop origin. He is not diminished by playing these tunes; he just plays them the way he plays everything, with attention and craft and a sound that transforms whatever it touches.

This is a record for context rather than for repeated listening as a whole. It shows where Golson's commercial instincts led him in 1962, and those instincts were not wrong exactly: the playing is good throughout. But the best of his work from this period is elsewhere, in the sessions where he was not trying to bridge worlds but simply inhabiting one completely.

Golson with the Miles Davis rhythm section: Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, the trio that had been together since Kind of Blue and knew each other's playing so thoroughly that they functioned as a single organism. Recorded in late October and early November 1962, Turning Point catches Golson at a crossroads in his career, between the Jazztet years and the commercial period that would follow, playing with a rhythm section that could make anyone sound good but that made great players sound extraordinary.

Kelly's comping behind Golson is a study in responsive accompaniment: nudging, supporting, occasionally pushing, always listening. Chambers and Cobb lock in with the kind of rhythmic certainty that only comes from years of playing together, and Golson rides that foundation with audible pleasure. The title may refer to Golson's own career trajectory, but the music itself sounds less transitional than settled: this is a player doing exactly what he does best with musicians perfectly suited to the task.

Turning Point and Free were recorded within weeks of each other in late 1962, and together they represent Golson at his most focused as an improviser, playing straight-ahead hard bop with two of the finest rhythm sections available. Both albums deserve far more attention than they have received.

The personnel list alone makes this record essential: Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Curtis Fuller, and Grachan Moncur III, all playing Golson's arrangements. Recorded in April 1962 for the Audio Fidelity label, this is Golson the arranger at his most ambitious, writing for a ten-piece ensemble that includes some of the most important voices in jazz at that exact moment in history.

Golson's writing for this group is masterful: he voices the horns with the richness of a big band while keeping the arrangements open enough for the soloists to stretch out. Dolphy's alto is unmistakable on his featured passages, angular and singing at the same time. Shorter and Hubbard were both in their early twenties and already playing with the authority that would define their later careers. Bill Evans's accompaniment is characteristically beautiful.

Originally released on Audio Fidelity and long out of print, Fresh Sound Records reissued it as "Walkin'" in 1997. The title track, a Richard Carpenter tune associated with Miles Davis, swings with the collective weight of ten extraordinary musicians all playing at their peak. A hidden gem in the Golson catalog that deserves far more attention than it has received.

Free is one of the strongest entries in Golson's early discography, a quartet session recorded in December 1962 with a rhythm section of immense quality. Tommy Flanagan brings the same quiet brilliance to this date that he brought to everything he touched: impeccable taste, fluid lines, and a harmonic imagination that lifts the music without ever competing with the front line. Down Beat's Harvey Pekar gave the album five stars and wrote that Golson's improvising here was the most consistently excellent he had put on record.

Ron Carter was still a relatively new presence on the scene in 1962, but his bass work here already displays the authority and intonation that would make him the most recorded bassist in jazz history. Art Taylor drives the session with the muscular, swinging time he brought to dozens of the era's finest Blue Note and Prestige dates. Together, the trio gives Golson a foundation that allows him to play with both freedom and structure.

The title track and Golson's treatment of his own compositions show a player in full command of his instrument and his musical conception. This is Golson at his most focused, playing hard bop of the highest order with three musicians who understood exactly what the music required. An essential album that deserves to be much better known.