Benny Golson

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.