Charlie Persip

Persip spent the fifties inside other men's bands, five years of them behind Dizzy Gillespie, and this is the only record he made under his own name until 1980. It was cut in one New York session on April 2, 1960, billed on the jacket to Charles Persip, one of the three spellings his own records carry, with a band young enough that half of it was still introducing itself. Freddie Hubbard was a week short of turning twenty-two. Ronnie Mathews had never made a record. Ron Carter was a year away from his own first date as a leader, and when he got to make it he hired the drummer from this one.

Ernie Wilkins wrote the sleeve, and it is the best short account anywhere of how Persip got there. Drum sergeant in the Elks drum and bugle corps for two years, then rhythm and blues bands around Newark, then gigs and concert dates with Benny Green, J. J. Johnson, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker. He enrolled at Juilliard and left again because the freelance recording work had grown too busy to carry both. After Gillespie broke up the big band, Harry James and a Las Vegas salary talked him into a stint out west, and Wilkins says the band and the money were treating him well but he gave his notice anyway and flew home, because by then he was thinking about a group of his own. The Jazz Statesmen are what he flew home for.

What Persip did with that band is the interesting part, because he did not make a drummer's album. Roland Alexander wrote two of the five tunes and, in Wilkins's phrase, did most of the writing for the band. The horns get the room. Persip keeps everything moving from underneath and saves his own display for the closing nine minutes, where Gillespie's "The Champ" is rebuilt as a suite in six movements. That one is his own arrangement, and Wilkins walks a buyer through it on the sleeve: the drums announce each movement in its own meter, a three-four drum solo, then a fast four, then a six-eight introduced by tom-toms, then a blues under the piano, with the ensemble answering each time with a variation until the last movement returns to the opening tempo and swings out. It is the only place on the record where the kit stands at the front of the stage, and he made everyone wait until the final track for it.

A word about the running order, because the editions disagree and the databases have made a mess of it. The original 1960 sleeve prints five titles and five timings and no composer credits at all, and it runs side one as Sevens, then "Right Down Front", then "The Song Is You". The 1978 Bethlehem reissue, retitled Right Down Front and carrying the same catalog number, swapped the middle two and added the composers: Alexander wrote "Sevens" and "Soul March", Sara Cassey wrote "Right Down Front", Kern and Hammerstein wrote "The Song Is You", and Gillespie wrote the closer. Most discographies follow the reissue. This page follows the original, which is the record as it first played.

Cassey has earned a sentence of her own. She was a Detroit composer who wrote her pieces out in full rather than as a melody over chords, played piano without performing much, and reached this session through the same Detroit network that produced Ron Carter. Wilkins tells buyers in 1960 that she was then writing for Hank Jones and Billy Taylor, and by 1978 the reissue notes call her the late Sarah Cassey, which is the spelling both jackets use. "Right Down Front" is her blues waltz, and it is the one track where Marcus Belgrave takes the trumpet chair. He was not a visitor: the jacket says in the present tense that he had already replaced Hubbard in the working band.

Billboard reviewed it in November 1960 and picked "Right Down Front" and "Soul March" as the two sides most likely to get air play, which is exactly the pair Bethlehem then coupled on a single. Sixty-five years later that still reads right. "Soul March" is the best thing here, a long gospel-shaded line of Alexander's that the band leans into without ever hurrying it, and Hubbard on the two fast tunes is already recognisably the player he became. Wilkins closed his notes by telling buyers to count the seven-bar exchanges between drums and horns on "Sevens", which is still the quickest way into the record. Four stars, and the only reason it is not five is that a session this good deserved a follow-up inside two decades.

Twenty years is a long silence between records, and Persip did not spend it idle. He worked: Billy Eckstine from 1966 to 1973 as drummer and conductor, dates for Gil Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Randy Weston, and from 1974 a teaching job with Jazzmobile in Harlem that turned out to be the second half of his career. The band that put him back on a jacket was not even his to start with. It began in the late seventies as the trumpeter Gerry LaFurn's rehearsal band, Persip joined on drums in 1979, and when LaFurn wanted to keep it together he asked Persip to front it. Persip's own account, given to George Kanzler in 2009, is disarmingly plain about why: he had the bigger name at the time.

By 1980 the band was playing a weekly night in the Village, which is where the young Carl Allen first heard it after arriving in New York from Wisconsin. Seventeen men, five trumpets, a tuba chair, and a book that reached outside the band for its charts. Slide Hampton wrote the "Manteca" that opens the record and Frank Foster wrote "Once in a While", and neither of them plays a note on it.

The two best things belong to Jack Walrath. "On the Road" and "King Duke" are his tunes and his charts, and they carry the loose, faintly unruly quality he brought out of the Mingus band, where a section can sound as though it is about to come apart and then does not. Frank Gordon's "Jupiter" closes the album with the writing at its thickest. Underneath all of it, Persip drives seventeen men the way he had been driven himself in Gillespie's orchestra, which mostly means knowing when to get out of the way.

It is a first record and it sounds like one. The band is louder than it is subtle, the studio flattens width that a room would have given it, and Gary Smulyan's baritone is the one solo voice that fully arrives. Stash never got it reviewed anywhere that mattered, and the only real notice it has ever had came from Scott Yanow decades later, who called it underrated and enjoyable and was right twice. Three stars for the record, with the band itself worth more than that.

Four years on, the band was his alone. He had broken with LaFurn, he was spelling his name Charli, and the jacket reads Superband (II) as though he wanted the discontinuity printed on the record. The personnel says it too. Bobby Watson is on lead alto, Anthony Cox is on bass, the baritone player is credited as Fred Houn, which is the name he used before he became Fred Ho, and Eddie Allen sits in the trumpets. Hardly any of them were known in September 1984 and most of them are now, which is the clearest thing anyone can say about what this band was for.

Watson wrote the title track, or rather renamed one. Michael Fitzgerald's discography lists it as "Fuller Love", retitled for the album, and it is the best thing on side one. The record closes with Frank Gordon's chart on Benny Golson's "Killer Joe", the sort of tune a young band picks when it wants to be measured against the older ones.

Down Beat measured it in December 1986 and did not care for it. John McDonough gave the album a single paragraph inside a big band round-up, praised the plunger trombone work, called "Plutonian Images" off-beat and semi-atonal, and finished by calling the whole thing curiously bland. The band wrote back, and Down Beat printed the letter in April 1987 under the heading MARSHMALLOW ROAST, signed collectively by Superband. It accused McDonough of listening from inside a room full of marshmallows, pointed out that his two unspecified tenor soloists were named plainly in the credits as Bill Saxton and Orpheus Gaitanopoulos, and closed by telling him to listen to the album first.

McDonough's printed reply is the part worth keeping. He conceded the band, said he had reheard the record and stood by the review, and offered that the band was simply not well captured on the LP, blaming multi-track studio recording for flattening orchestras generally. He may have been right about that and wrong about everything else. The chase choruses those two tenors trade on "Round About Midnight" are the closest this band ever came to sounding like the room it played in, and nothing about them is bland.

This is the best of the three big band records and the one where the book is written from inside. Four of the six charts come from men and women sitting in the band: Jack Walrath, Orpheus Gaitanopoulos twice, and the trombonist Matt Haviland on Joe Henderson's "Inner Urge". Frank Foster supplies "Thruway Traffic" from outside. Everything sounds rehearsed to the point where nobody has to think about it, which after eight years of Persip running the band is roughly what you would hope for.

Side one carries the thing this band deserves to be remembered for. Sue Terry took three Billie Holiday songs and arranged them into a single eight-minute sequence called "Strange Crazy Heartache": "Strange Fruit", then "Crazy He Calls Me", then "Good Morning Heartache". Putting those three in that order is an argument rather than a program, and the band plays it as one, with the flutes doing quiet, unnerving work behind the first of them. Terry was also one of two women in the band, alongside Melissa Slocum on bass, which was not the usual arrangement in a New York big band in 1987.

The other names to watch are Marcus Rojas in the tuba chair, Darrell Grant on piano and Pablo Calogero on baritone, whose surname the jacket prints as Calajero and every database has faithfully copied ever since. Walrath's opener, "Revenge of the Fat People", has the simultaneous-improvising, half-collapsing quality of a Mingus chart, which is exactly where he learned to write them.

Nobody reviewed it. Down Beat, which had picked a fight with the previous record, printed nothing at all about this one in 1989 or 1990, and its only notice is Scott Yanow's, written much later. That is a waste, because the title is not a joke. This is a hard book played by a band that could read it, and the four stars are for the playing rather than for the occasion.

The band changed its name once more before this record. Philip Morris ran a touring package called Superband in that era, and Persip, who maintained he had the name first, was advised not to fight a corporation over it, so the group became Supersound. Nothing else about it changed. By 2008 it had been running close to thirty years on a book Persip put at 136 arrangements, and he was an associate professor at the New School, which is where most of these players came from.

That is what the record documents: a seventeen-piece working classroom. Sharif Kales, Chelsea Crowe and the tuba player Guilford, whose first name the sources give as both Mike and Marc, were all New School students or alumni, and the band was announced as students and alumni when it played the school two years later. They are playing "Punjab" and "God Bless the Child" and seven other things at a level that has nothing to do with school, which was rather the point of Persip's whole second career.

It is also the worst-documented record on this page by a distance. There is no catalog number, no label credit beyond self-produced, no recording date, no studio, no producer and no composer credits anywhere that could be found. Discogs has never carried an entry for it. AllMusic ends his discography in 1994 and does not list it at all. The personnel above rests on one source, and for most of those names there is no second one, which is why they are printed with that said out loud rather than quietly.

Three stars, and the number is doing something unusual. The playing deserves more and the object deserves less. It is his last album as a leader; he kept the band running at the New School into the next decade, taught at Litchfield Jazz Camp from 2009, and died on August 23, 2020, at ninety-one, with no cause disclosed. For a man who put fifty years into other people's records and five into his own, it is a strange and rather fitting last entry: the band is superb, the packaging tells you nothing, and you have to already know who he was to go looking.