Gene Ammons

Drawn from the same October and November 1972 sessions as Got My Own, Big Bad Jug is effectively the companion volume. The split between the Sonny Phillips/Billy Cobham group and the Hank Jones/Joe Beck group continues, and the contrast between the two approaches gives the album a kind of internal dialogue.

The Billy Cobham tracks hit harder. Cobham's drumming has a precision and power that drives Ammons into his most muscular playing, and Maynard Parker's guitar adds a gritty, R&B-flavored texture. The Hank Jones tracks are more elegant, more considered, with Joe Beck's clean guitar lines and Mickey Roker's brushwork creating a very different atmosphere.

Ron Carter, present on every track, is again the unifying force. His bass lines bridge the gap between the funk-heavy Cobham tracks and the more refined Jones dates, giving the whole album a coherence that the shifting personnel might otherwise undermine. It is a testament to Ammons's adaptability that he sounds equally at home in both settings.

A previously unreleased Left Bank Jazz Society concert from June 1973, sat in the vault for almost three decades before Prestige finally put it out in 2001. The lineup is the kind of all-star band that only worked one night because it could only afford to: Cedar Walton, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins, the working trio that would become the core of Walton’s Eastern Rebellion group two years later, supporting the two greatest tenors of their generation.

This is Ammons less than a year before his death from cancer, and you can hear him conserving energy. The fast tempos belong to Stitt. The ballads, the long held notes, the unhurried solo construction belong to Ammons. There is no sense of valedictory weight in his playing, just the same enormous tone applied to material chosen for the room: standards, blues, vehicles for two horns and a cooking trio.

Etta Jones takes the vocal turn on a couple of tracks and brings the room with her. The recording quality is decent for an unedited live tape from 1973, and the running time, finally released uncut on CD, captures the way these musicians played when given enough room to develop a tune. A document of a great Baltimore jazz night that deserved its eventual release.

The companion volume to God Bless Jug and Sonny, drawn from the same Baltimore concert. Released the year after God Bless came out, this collects the encore material and second-set tunes that did not make the first volume. Same band, same room, same energy, but with the slight looseness of musicians who know the show is winding down.

The pleasure of having both volumes is hearing how the band paced the evening. The first set, captured on God Bless, has the more famous standards and the tighter arrangements. Left Bank Encores is more relaxed: longer solos, more cooking on blues forms, the rhythm section trading more openly. Etta Jones returns for two vocals.

For most listeners, God Bless is the necessary purchase and Left Bank Encores is the bonus material. Both belong on the same shelf as the better-known Together Again for the Last Time from a few months later, the three of them together documenting the final Stitt-Ammons run before Ammons's illness took him off the road for good. Sit through both in sequence to hear what one great Baltimore night sounded like.

The finest live album of Ammons's career, and one of the great Montreux recordings of the 1970s. The core band is already formidable: Hampton Hawes on electric piano brings a West Coast harmonic sophistication that lifts Ammons into a different register, Kenny Clarke's drumming is the definition of swing, and Bob Cranshaw's electric bass gives the whole thing a modern pulse.

And then the guests arrive. The closing track brings Cannonball Adderley, Nat Adderley, and Dexter Gordon onto the stage, and the result is one of those rare festival moments where the energy in the room is palpable even on record. Four horn players trading choruses with a world-class rhythm section behind them, and the crowd pushing everyone higher.

Hawes is the revelation here. His comping behind Ammons has a harmonic complexity that challenges the tenor player in ways the organ combos never did, and the result is some of Ammons's most adventurous improvising. This is the album that proves the comeback was not just a commercial exercise: at his best, Ammons was still one of the most commanding tenor players alive.

The title was not meant to be prophetic, but it was. This is the final Ammons/Stitt collaboration, recorded across three sessions in late 1973, and the music carries a weight that the earlier encounters did not. Junior Mance on piano gives the rhythm section a depth and swing that the organ combos could not match, and Sam Jones's bass is the perfect anchor.

Both tenors play with a maturity and restraint that the Boss Tenors sessions did not always have. The cutting contest is over; what remains is two musicians who have spent a quarter century in dialogue, finishing that conversation with grace and conviction. Stitt's tone is sharper, more focused; Ammons is rounder, warmer. They have never sounded more like themselves.

Released on Prestige in 1976, two years after Ammons's death, the album carries an inevitable sadness. But the music itself is not sad. It swings, it breathes, and both men play with the confidence of musicians who know exactly who they are. Duke Pearson's production keeps everything clean and warm. It is the right ending for a partnership that defined the tenor battle tradition.

The outlier. Recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley rather than Van Gelder, arranged and conducted by David Axelrod, and featuring a cast of LA session musicians including Carol Kaye, John Guerin, and George Duke, Brasswind is a deliberate attempt to reposition Ammons in a West Coast jazz-funk context. The intent was commercial, and the results are mixed.

Axelrod's arrangements are dense and layered, with brass, woodwinds, and multiple guitars creating a wall of sound that sometimes overwhelms the tenor. When the writing gives Ammons room to breathe, the results can be striking: the brass figures are bold, George Duke's keyboards add a modern harmonic dimension, and the rhythm section grooves with LA precision.

But the record struggles with the same problem as My Way: too much arrangement, not enough Gene Ammons. Prince Lasha's alto flute on two tracks adds an unusual texture, and Snooky Young's trumpet is always welcome. The production is undeniably polished. But Ammons at his best was a musician who needed space, and Brasswind does not always give it to him.

The final album, and the finest of the comeback. Recorded at CI Recording in New York across three days in March 1974, Goodbye strips away the orchestral padding, the organ combos, and the pop-crossover ambitions, and puts Ammons in front of a hard bop septet that plays with a depth and seriousness the earlier comeback records rarely achieved.

The band is extraordinary. Nat Adderley's cornet provides a soulful, stinging counterpoint to the big tenor sound. Gary Bartz on alto brings a post-bop sharpness that pushes Ammons into more harmonically adventurous territory. Kenny Drew's piano is brilliant throughout, and Sam Jones and Louis Hayes are one of the great rhythm section partnerships of the era. Ray Barretto's congas add just enough percussive color without tipping the balance.

Ammons died on August 6, 1974, five months after these sessions, of bone cancer and pneumonia. He was forty-nine. The title was chosen after his death, and it fits: this is a farewell. But the music itself does not sound like a farewell. It sounds like a man playing with total authority, surrounded by musicians who brought out the best in him. If you only hear one Gene Ammons album from the comeback years, hear this one.

Released in 1977, three years after Ammons's death, Gentle Jug is a posthumous double-LP in the four-volume Gene Ammons Story series Prestige issued in the mid-seventies. The concept is simple and the execution is elegant: take the two Moodsville ballad quartets Ammons cut with Rudy Van Gelder in 1961 and 1962, Nice An’ Cool and The Soulful Moods of Gene Ammons, and reissue them together as a single statement on what this player could do with a slow tempo.

It works because the two sessions belong together. Both were cut for Moodsville, Prestige's dedicated ballad subsidiary, which existed specifically to put working tenor and alto players in front of rhythm sections and let them sing standards. No horn section, no Latin percussion, no boogaloo. Just Ammons, a piano trio, and the American songbook. "Willow Weep for Me," "Little Girl Blue," "Till There Was You," "Skylark," "I Remember You": material that had been played into the ground by every lounge band in the country, and which Ammons treats like it matters.

The two rhythm sections are cast differently and it shows across the sides. Richard Wyands, Doug Watkins, and J.C. Heard on the 1961 date play with a light, almost Basie-era spring, the drums brushed low and the piano unhurried. The 1962 session with Patti Bown, George Duvivier, and Ed Shaughnessy is a little warmer and slightly slower still, Bown's chord voicings a touch more modern. In both cases the rhythm section knows its job, which is to get out of the way and let the tenor breathe.

What emerges from the double-LP format is an argument about Ammons that is hard to make from either Moodsville album alone: that the big tenor associated with honking R&B singles and the Stitt battles was, when he wanted to be, one of the great ballad players of his generation. The tone does all the work. He rarely runs figures, rarely double-times, rarely reaches for the altissimo. He plays the song. Paired end to end, the two sessions make the case more completely than either record does on its own. A thoughtful posthumous reissue, and a fine way to hear this side of him.