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. For three of the seven tracks he expanded his quintet into a nonet, 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 second session as a leader, taped two months after New York Scene, and sources disagree on which of the two reached the shops first. 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 Golson tune everybody knows, but it is on New York Scene, not here. Listen instead to "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. Records this early in a leader's career 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 Modern Touch: cooler, more intimate, less concerned with announcing itself.

The ballads here are something else. "Cry a Blue Tear" and Richard Evans's "This Night" give Golson and Fuller room to do what they do best, which is hold sorrow and beauty in the same breath without letting either one win.

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 thirty-seven 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: six tracks recorded in New York on November 17 with Lee Morgan, Ray Bryant, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones, and three 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 are the whole of Benny Golson and the Philadelphians, first issued by United Artists; the Paris tracks appeared on French Columbia on an LP billed to Roger Guérin and Benny Golson. 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. "Jam for Bobbie" 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.

There is no Golson standard on this one. The two originals, "My Blues House" and "The Stroller," are new tunes stretched past nine minutes each, and the rest is other people's material: "Drum Boogie," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and "Yesterdays." It is worth spending time with what Golson does with a program like that now that he's the one leading the session.

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. The title track is Fuller's, but Golson wrote "Five Spot After Dark" and "Minor Vamp," and "Five Spot After Dark" 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.

Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack 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 Farmer and Golson were putting together that same year and would first record in February 1960. The sextet here is a different animal entirely: Lee Morgan's trumpet in place of Farmer's trumpet 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.

None of the tunes are Golson's, two are Fuller's, one is Dizzy Gillespie's and the other two are standards, but the horn writing gives 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 session came just three months after Blues-ette, 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.