Gene Ammons

The first vault release, and one of the better ones. Late Hour Special draws from two sessions: a quartet date with Patti Bown on piano, and a ten-piece ensemble arranged by Oliver Nelson. The split could have been jarring, but Ammons holds both settings together with that tone, moving from the intimate quartet ballads to the punchy Nelson charts without losing the thread.

The big band tracks are the highlight. Nelson's arrangements give Ammons a richer harmonic backdrop than he usually worked with, and the presence of Clark Terry on trumpet adds a brightness that complements the darker tenor sound. These aren't typical Prestige blowing sessions: the charts have real structure, real dynamics, and Ammons rises to meet them.

The quartet tracks with Bown, Duvivier, and Perkins are more familiar territory: Jug playing standards with a sympathetic rhythm section, unhurried and full-toned. Ammons's own "Lascivious" comes from that date. If you're going to start anywhere with the vault releases, start here.

Three sessions across three years, stitched into an album by Prestige's editing room. The title track and "In Sid's Thing" come from the June 1960 organ combo date with Frank Wess and Johnny Hammond Smith: a warm, greasy sound that belongs in the same conversation as the Boss Tenor sessions. Wess plays tenor here with a thinner, cooler tone that makes Ammons sound even bigger by comparison.

The September 1962 tracks with Mal Waldron on piano are more contemplative. Waldron's spare, angular comping pulls Ammons into a different register, closer to ballad playing than blowing, and the results are surprisingly tender. "A Stranger in Town" is one of the loveliest performances in the entire vault catalog.

The June 1961 big band track sits between the two extremes: Oliver Nelson's arrangement of "The Song Is You" gives Ammons a full ensemble backdrop with Clark Terry and Red Holloway. It sounds like it belongs on Late Hour Special, and it was recorded on the same date. The album holds together better than it has any right to, given the patchwork origins.

The companion piece to Velvet Soul, drawing from the same two productive sessions: the June 1960 organ combo date with Frank Wess and Johnny Hammond Smith, and the September 1962 quartet with Mal Waldron. The title track is one of Ammons's finest ballad performances, that enormous tone floating over Johnny Hammond Smith's organ with a patience that lesser tenors couldn't sustain.

The up-tempo tracks, particularly "Gettin' Around" and "Blue Room," show the other side: Ammons at full cry, his phrases tumbling out with a fluency that made hard bop blowing sound like the most natural thing in the world. The Frank Wess / Johnny Hammond Smith pairing, with Wess on flute, gives those tracks a fuller sound than the typical quartet date. The mix of tempos and moods gives Angel Eyes a shape that many of these vault compilations lack.

If you want a single vault album that represents the full range of what Ammons was doing in the studio between 1960 and 1962, this is probably the one. Three ballads, three swingers, all impeccably played and well-sequenced. Prestige got the packaging right on this one.

This is the bottom of the barrel, and there's no point pretending otherwise. Sock! pulls together ten tracks from four sessions spanning eight years, with four different pianists, four different bassists, and three different drummers. The result has no coherence, no arc, and no reason to exist except that Bob Weinstock had tape and needed product.

The 1962 tracks with Mal Waldron are decent: leftover material from the same sessions that produced the better vault albums. The 1954 and 1955 tracks with John Houston and Lawrence Wheatley are rougher and thinner sounding, and all but "Blues for Turfers" had already been issued as Prestige singles in 1955 and 1956. The sequencing makes no attempt to smooth the transitions between eras.

You can hear Ammons playing well on individual tracks. He always played well. But an album needs to be more than a random assortment of competent performances, and Sock! never gets there. The vault had its limits, and this is where those limits became obvious.

Originally recorded for Argo as Just Jug while Ammons was still under contract to Prestige, this live date came over to Prestige, which reissued it in 1967. It's a trio record: just Ammons, Eddie Buster's organ, and Gerald Donovan's drums, working a South Side club on a summer night. The stripped-down format is a revelation.

Without a second horn or a piano player taking solos, Ammons has to carry every moment, and he does it effortlessly. The organ trio format was becoming a staple of the Chicago and Philadelphia jazz scenes by 1961, and this set captures the format at its most natural: long, unhurried performances where the groove matters more than the changes. Buster's organ provides a cushion of sound that Ammons floats over with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how good he sounds in this room.

The recording quality is what you'd expect from a club date in 1961: not pristine, but present and alive in a way that the Van Gelder studio records never quite capture. You can hear the room, the audience, the sense of a set building toward something. This is as close as the recorded catalog gets to what Ammons sounded like on a good night in Chicago.