Gene Ammons

Eugene Ammons was born in Chicago on April 14, 1925, the son of the great boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons. He learned his trade fast. By 1944, still a teenager, he was in Billy Eckstine's band, the famous bebop incubator, sitting in a saxophone section that at various points included Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon. Eckstine gave him the nickname "Jug" when a batch of band straw hats would not fit his head. He came up inside the new music, next to the people inventing it.

But Ammons never treated bebop as a closed church. He had grown up around his father's boogie and the South Side blues, and he kept that in the sound. In 1950 his recording of the ballad "My Foolish Heart" landed on Billboard's Black pop charts, which is not where you usually find a Parker-schooled bebopper. That instinct, to take the harmonic sophistication of bop and aim it at a popular audience, is exactly what soul-jazz would do a decade later.

That is why Ammons gets named as a founder of the style. The classic soul-jazz combo of the mid-1960s, a big-toned tenor riding on top of a Hammond B3 organ and a backbeat, is a sound he helped invent years before it had a label. He played with organists, he played the blues without apology, and he kept the melody where a dancer or a casual listener could find it. The bridge in the title is not a metaphor. He stood on both banks at once.

Ammons came out of the Chicago tenor school, with Lester Young's ease and Ben Webster's breathy weight both audible in his playing. What he built from those influences was one of the warmest, thickest tones any tenor player ever had. Where Sonny Stitt was all speed and precision and Dexter Gordon had that cool authority, Ammons had heat. He could make a single held note feel like it was leaning on you.

He used that sound like a singer. He bent notes, smeared into them, sat behind the beat, and treated a ballad melody as something to be crooned rather than dissected. You can draw a straight line from Ammons to the tenor players who carried soul-jazz through the 1960s and 1970s, Stanley Turrentine and Houston Person chief among them. They all learned that a big vocal tone on a simple tune beats a hundred fast notes for moving a room.

It is worth saying what he was not. Ammons showed little interest in the modal experiments of John Coltrane or the harmonic puzzles of Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson that were reshaping jazz at the same moment. That was not a limitation so much as a decision. He had found his thing, the warm blues-soaked sound, and he spent his life deepening it instead of chasing the avant-garde.

The tenor battle, two saxophones trading choruses and trying to top each other, runs back to the swing era. Ammons grew up in it. One of his first recorded moments of note is "Blowin' the Blues Away" with the Eckstine band, a saxophone duel between Ammons and Dexter Gordon. But the partnership that made the format famous was with Sonny Stitt. The two first joined forces around 1950, and they kept coming back to each other for the rest of Ammons's life.

What made the Ammons and Stitt records work is contrast. Stitt was the technician, fast and clean and bebop to the core, equally deadly on alto and tenor. Ammons was the heavyweight, slower to throw a punch but landing harder when he did. Put them on the same blues and you get a genuine argument between two ways of playing the saxophone, which is more fun than two players who agree. The 1961 Verve date Boss Tenors is the easy place to hear it.

That template, two strong horns built into a single blowing date, became a soul-jazz staple. The cutting contest moved off the bandstand and onto LPs you could buy, and a long line of players ran with the idea. When you hear two tenors squaring off on a 1960s Prestige or Blue Note session, you are hearing the Ammons and Stitt model, whether the players knew it by name or not.

Bob Weinstock founded Prestige in 1949, and the label's method suited Ammons perfectly. Weinstock liked to book a rhythm section, roll the tape at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, and capture players blowing on blues and standards with little fuss. For a musician whose gift was spontaneous warmth rather than worked-out arrangements, that loose approach was ideal. Ammons cut a remarkable number of records this way across the 1950s and into the 1960s.

The peak of it is the run around 1960 to 1962, and the cornerstone is Boss Tenor, recorded at Van Gelder's on June 16, 1960 and issued as Prestige PRLP 7180. The band is a beauty: Ammons on tenor, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, Art Taylor on drums, and Ray Barretto on congas. The version of "Canadian Sunset" became one of his signatures, and the whole record is a clinic in saying a lot with a relaxed, vocal sound. If you own one Ammons album, own this one.

The career was brutally interrupted. Ammons served two prison sentences for narcotics, the first from 1958 to 1960 and the second, far longer, from 1962 to 1969. The second one took seven years out of the middle of his prime. When he got out in 1969 he signed what was reported as the largest contract Prestige had ever offered, and he recorded steadily until cancer took him in 1974 at forty-nine. The comeback records lean harder into pop material and soul, but the sound is intact.

The thing to know first is that the address on the label dates the pressing. Original early-1960s Prestige LPs carry the New York City address, "446 West 50th St," on the yellow label. In 1966 the company moved to Bergenfield, New Jersey, so any copy with a Bergenfield address is a later repress, not a first pressing. For a 1960 title like Boss Tenor (PRLP 7180), the NYC-address yellow label is the original you want.

Next, look in the deadwax, the smooth run-out groove between the last track and the label. Van Gelder mastered most Prestige sessions of this era, and his hand-etched "RVG" stamp is there on the originals. You will usually also find a pressing-plant mark, often "AB" for the Abbey Manufacturing plant in New Jersey. Those etchings, more than anything printed on the label, are what separate a true early pressing from a later one. And as with most hard bop of 1960, the mono (the PRLP 7000 series) is generally the mix to chase; early Prestige stereo can sound stiffer and more separated.

The deep groove is part of the picture too. Like other labels of the era, early Prestige pressings show that ring pressed into the label from older stamping equipment. It is one more sign of an original-era copy, though on its own it is less decisive than the address and the deadwax stamps.

Here is the good news for anyone who just wants to listen. You do not need a pricey original to hear this music well. When Fantasy bought Prestige in 1971 it launched the Original Jazz Classics reissue line, and OJC pressings of Ammons titles are cheap, common, and sound very good. More recently, Craft Recordings (now the catalog's owner) has put out all-analog reissues of key Prestige titles mastered by Kevin Gray, which are about as good as these records have ever sounded on vinyl. Chase the yellow-label original if the hunt is the fun part. If you only care about the music, the modern reissues will not let you down.