Curtis Amy

Amy's first record as a leader is a co-billed one, split with the organist Paul Bryant, and the format tells you most of what the group was for. Organ, tenor, a rhythm section, and, in place of the second saxophone the idiom usually calls for, Roy Brewster's valve trombone. It gives the front line a rounder and slightly odd blend, and it is the single thing that keeps this from sounding like any other organ date of 1960.

Five tracks over two August afternoons at Rex Productions, three of them Amy originals and two standards. The writing is functional rather than distinctive, and Bryant is the more assertive of the two leaders, filling more space than Amy asks for. What Amy has already, and would keep, is a big unhurried tone and a refusal to play a phrase faster than it needs to go.

The original liner notes record that the two men came out of these sessions believing the quintet worked, and decided to keep it together. That decision produced the better record, which is the next one but one on this page. As a debut this is pleasant and slightly anonymous, and it sits a long way below what Amy was making three years later.

Drop the organ, add a trumpet and a vibraphone, and Amy has a different band entirely. This one is co-billed with the drummer Frank Butler and it is the first of these records that sounds like it was made by people who wanted to be in the room. Carmell Jones is on trumpet, a year or so before he made Business Meetin' for Pacific Jazz and four before he joined Horace Silver. On vibes is Bobby Hutcherson, twenty years old and some way from his own Blue Note records.

Hutcherson is the reason collectors look for this, and he is worth the attention, but he is not yet the player he became: the harmonic daring is in front of him and what you hear here is a young musician with beautiful time. The more interesting thing is what his presence does to the band. The vibraphone opens the middle of the music up, and Amy, who on the organ dates had to push through a wall of Hammond, can play at a conversational volume and be heard.

Six pieces across two sessions a month apart, the title track from the first date and the rest from the second, with the same six men on both. David Szatmary's AllMusic notice calls it “another solid example of this neglected tenor man,” which undersells it a little. It is the first Curtis Amy record that rewards being played twice.

The same five men as The Blues Message, six months on, and the difference is the difference between a band assembled for a session and a band that has been working. Everything is tighter and nothing is hurried. Where the first record had the quintet feeling for the format, this one simply plays in it.

Barbara Gardner reviewed it in Down Beat in September 1961 and put the case exactly: “this group settles into a tune and cooks.” She is right, and the proof is in the two standards. If I Were a Bell and Just Friends are the kind of material an organ quintet can flatten into a shuffle, and neither gets flattened. Angel Eyes is the ballad, and it is where Amy's tone does the most work.

One More Hamhock Please is the title that makes people expect a novelty and it is not one. Of the two Bryant co-billed records this is the one to own, and it is the best thing either man put on a Pacific Jazz sleeve before Amy started making records without an organ in them.

The sleeve reads Curtis Amy Featuring Victor Feldman, which is true of four of the seven tracks: Feldman plays the February date, John Houston the January one. It is a bigger group than anything Amy had led before, a three-horn front line with vibes underneath, and the arrangements have more moving parts than the organ records ever needed.

The vibraphone player is Roy Ayers, a decade before Everybody Loves the Sunshine and credited on the original sleeve under a name that is not his. Jazzdisco reads the pseudonym as Ron Ayes and Discogs as Ron Ayers; nobody seems to know why it is there. On trumpet is Marcus Belgrave, who would leave Los Angeles for Detroit and spend the rest of his life making that city's musicians better.

Szatmary's AllMusic line, “this excellent West Coast bop featured Victor Feldman,” is fair but puts the emphasis in an odd place. Feldman is excellent. So is the writing, which is Amy's, and so is the decision to give a seven-piece band enough room that it never sounds arranged at anybody's expense.

The only live record of the six, cut at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach on a Sunday in July 1962, and the sleeve says so: the issued title carries the words recorded live at the Lighthouse. Roy Ayers is back on vibes, again under the name Ron Ayres, which is also how the third track got printed as For Ayers Only.

Live recording suits Amy in one obvious way and hurts him in another. The solos are longer than anything he allowed himself in the studio and he plays well at that length. But the club acoustic flattens the group, the vibraphone in particular, and a band that sounded balanced on Way Down sounds thinner here. Brubeck's In Your Own Sweet Way and Summertime are the concessions to the room and they are the least interesting things on the record.

It is the one of the six that feels like a document rather than an album, and worth hearing for that: this is what a working Los Angeles tenor player sounded like on a club stand in 1962, at length, without a producer shaping it. Sources disagree about when it actually came out, with Wikipedia and Discogs giving 1962 and jazzdisco 1963.

This is the one. One session, the third of February 1963, six pieces, and a band with no organ, no vibraphone and nothing to hide behind: trumpet, tenor, piano, guitar, bass, drums. Amy adds soprano for the first time on these records. Jack Wilson is on piano and Ray Crawford, who had spent the early fifties inventing percussion effects on the guitar for Ahmad Jamal, plays the middle of the music.

And on trumpet is Dupree Bolton, which is why this record has the reputation it has. Bolton left home at fourteen to play with Jay McShann, recorded with the Buddy Johnson Orchestra under another name, spent years in federal prison, and in a working life of roughly five decades appears on two records that matter: Harold Land's The Fox in 1959 and this one. Almost everything else written about him is reconstruction, most of it traceable to Ted Gioia's interviews with him in 1989. What is not in doubt is the playing, which is fast, hard, and completely unsentimental.

The title track is Bolton's and it is the best thing here. Lonely Woman is the Ornette Coleman tune, taken seriously by a band that had no obligation to take it seriously in 1963. Scott Yanow's AllMusic notice calls it “obscure but rewarding music that was overshadowed during the era,” and the overshadowing lasted: the record was out of print for decades before Blue Note gave it a Tone Poet reissue in 2021, mastered by Kevin Gray. If you buy one Curtis Amy record, buy this one.