Stanley Turrentine

Turrentine was twenty six and this was his first leader date for Blue Note, cut June 18, 1960 at Englewood Cliffs. Here is what nobody expects from it: this is a bop record. The tone that made him famous is already fully there, huge and slightly hoarse, but the material has nothing to do with the soul jazz he gets filed under. Clifford Brown's "Tiny Capers", Robert Farnon's "Journey Into Melody", and four originals, one of them Horace Parlan's.

The rhythm section is not a pickup crew. It is the Horace Parlan trio working as a unit, with George Tucker on bass and Al Harewood on drums, and less than four weeks later, on July 14, 1960, those same three men plus both Turrentine brothers cut Parlan's own Speakin' My Piece in the same room. Effectively one band making two albums under two leaders inside a month. You can hear it in how little anybody has to explain to anybody else.

Steve Leggett gives it four and a half stars at AllMusic and puts the useful sentence in the review: the album shows as much artful restraint as it does groove. Restraint is the word. Turrentine could have leaned on the sound and did not, and the result is a young player working inside bebop harmony rather than sailing around the outside of it. Blue Note pulled two 45s from the date and left an alternate "Little Sheri" plus "Tin Tin Deo" and "Yesterdays" unissued until the 1987 CD.

What the paperwork does not contain is any chart placement, any contemporaneous review beyond a Billboard notice in November 1960, or even a confirmed liner note author, so anyone telling you this record made a splash is filling in blanks. It did not need to. Everything on this page after 1961 is a consequence of the decision he makes here about what to do with that tone.

Billed on the jacket as Stanley Turrentine With The Three Sounds, which is honest, because the Three Sounds run this record as much as he does. Gene Harris on piano, Andrew Simpkins on bass, Bill Dowdy on drums, and they were Blue Note's house trio with their own leader catalog going in parallel. December 16, 1960 at Englewood Cliffs. Everything on the original LP comes from that one night. An earlier date with the same quartet in June 1960 was shelved whole and stayed buried until 2000.

Five tracks, four of them standards, and the record moves slowly on purpose. "Willow Weep for Me" alone runs 9:55 and "Since I Fell for You" 8:46. This is the after-hours record in the catalog and it does not blink. Harris comps behind the tenor with a churchy left hand and almost no decoration, and Turrentine sits so far back on the beat that the band sounds like it is waiting for him and is happy to wait.

That is not a joke. "Blue Hour" is a Gene Harris tune cut at the scrapped June 1960 session and first issued in 2000, so the record named after it does not contain it. Anybody writing from a streaming tracklist gets this wrong, because the modern reissue folds both sessions together and hides the seam. The one non-standard actually on the LP is Harris's "Blue Riff", which Blue Note pulled as a 45 backed with "Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You".

Five stars, and the sequencing is doing more of that work than people credit. Michael Erlewine gives the original LP four and a half at AllMusic and the expanded two-CD set only three, which tells you something about what gets lost when you pour two nights into one program. Correct the date if it comes up, too: the LP came out in 1961, but jazzdisco dates the session December 16, 1960.

An organ trio with no bass player. Shirley Scott carries the bottom herself, Roy Brooks plays drums, and Blue Note put nobody else in the room on June 8, 1961. Brooks was Horace Silver's working drummer at the time, which is a useful measure of how much muscle a supposedly small date had behind it. Recorded 1961 and released in February 1962 per Billboard, though Discogs dates the mono to 1961 and has been confusing buyers ever since.

The best story on this page is a name printed on the jacket. Scott was under contract to Prestige, so Blue Note could not use her name and billed her as "Little Miss Cott". It ran the other way too: Turrentine belonged to Blue Note, so on Scott's Prestige dates of the same period he turns up as "Stan Turner". Two married musicians appearing on each other's records under invented names because the paperwork said they could not appear at all.

They married around 1960 or 1961, depending on which page you read, and divorced in 1971. The confirmation that the pseudonym was a contract dodge rather than a joke comes later: by the time of Never Let Me Go in 1963 the jacket credits Scott properly and adds a courtesy line naming Prestige. Ira Gitler wrote the notes here, Alfred Lion produced and Francis Wolff shot the cover, though the famous Reid Miles design credit is not on the original for this one.

Steve Leggett at AllMusic calls it one of Turrentine's finest Blue Note outings and gives it four stars. The reason is the missing bass. With nobody else holding the bottom, Scott's left hand and Turrentine's tenor are the only two voices with any weight, so every phrase has to mean something or the whole thing sags. Records with fewer people on them are harder to make, not easier, and both of these musicians clearly knew that going in.

Les McCann is on this record and he wrote most of it. Four of the six tunes are his, which on somebody else's leader date is close to unheard of. Turrentine contributed "Soft Pedal Blues" and his brother Tommy wrote "Light Blue", and that is the entire book. January 2, 1962 at Englewood Cliffs, with Herbie Lewis on bass and Otis Finch on drums, and the jacket carries a courtesy line because McCann belonged to Pacific Jazz.

The visit went both ways. About a week before this session Turrentine had recorded with McCann's own group on the live date issued as Les McCann Ltd. in New York, so this is the return trip rather than a first meeting. It explains the ease of the thing. Nobody is feeling anybody out. They are picking up a conversation from the previous week, and McCann's gospel comping suits Turrentine at least as well as an organ does.

Billboard made it a Spotlight Album of the Week on September 22, 1962 and Down Beat got to it the following January. Liner notes are by Dudley Williams, an uncommon Blue Note byline worth naming, with Reid Miles design and Francis Wolff photography both confirmed on the original mono jacket, which is more than can be said for a couple of other records on this page. Blue Note assigned four singles to the date and then never released one of them.

For the pressing crowd: a mono first pressing has New York USA labels, deep groove on side B only, VAN GELDER etched on both sides, the Plastylite P on both sides, and the 43 West 61st Street address on the back cover. And a small correction, since it circulates constantly. The drummer is printed Otis Finch on the original jacket. The nickname "Candy" Finch shows up all over the secondary sources and nowhere on the record itself.

Eight pieces, four of the six tunes are covers of recent pop and soul, and it charted. July 1, 1966 at Englewood Cliffs, with Blue Mitchell, James Spaulding and Pepper Adams filling out the horns behind the leader, McCoy Tyner on piano, Grant Green on guitar, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Mickey Roker on drums. Duke Pearson wrote the charts. Green and Tyner in the same rhythm section is a combination Blue Note did not put together often, and you notice it inside a chorus.

The repertoire is a snapshot of what was on the radio. Ray Charles's "What Could I Do Without You", Sam Cooke's "Shake", Bacharach and David's "Walk On By", and "Feeling Good", which Nina Simone had cut only the year before. Only Ronnell Bright's "And Satisfy" and "Baptismal" sit outside that world. Turrentine plays them straight and lets the melodies carry, which would be the wrong instinct on a bebop record and is exactly the right one here.

That figure is the strongest chart fact on this page and it is worth being precise about: Top Soul Albums, not the pop chart. Be careful with the other number you will find. The German chart entry attached to this title belongs to the 2022 Tone Poet reissue, not to anything that happened in 1966, and presenting it as period chart action is a mistake several write-ups have already made.

A production detail explains more than it looks like it should. This is a late Alfred Lion date. He retired in 1967, so Rough 'N Tumble is among the last records he produced, and the jacket already carries a Liberty copyright because Liberty had bought the label in 1965. A first pressing therefore sits inside the Liberty era while Lion was still running sessions. Use the jacket's title styling too, capital N, whatever the article headings say.

First record for CTI after roughly a decade at Blue Note, and the one that reset the career. November 1970, and here is the continuity almost nobody points out: it was cut by Rudy Van Gelder in the same Englewood Cliffs room where Turrentine made every Blue Note date on this page. Same engineer, same walls, completely different music. Van Gelder recorded it, engineered it and mastered it, and the original deadwax carries his mark on both sides.

Three tracks fill the original LP: "Sugar" at ten minutes, Butch Cornell's "Sunshine Alley" at eleven, and roughly fifteen minutes of Coltrane's "Impressions". The band is Freddie Hubbard, George Benson, Ron Carter and Billy Kaye, with Lonnie Liston Smith and Cornell splitting keyboard duty and Richard "Pablo" Landrum on congas. Thom Jurek calls that "Impressions" one of the most solidly swinging, from-the-gut rides anyone has taken through the tune, and he has a case.

The reputation says this was a huge seller. Maybe it was. No chart data for Sugar could be verified anywhere, so this page will not put a number on it and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. What is documented is that it is rated in both the Penguin Guide and the Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide, and that Turrentine's own biography calls it a seminal recording for the label. All qualitative, all worth exactly what qualitative praise is worth.

Buy the record rather than a tracklist. "Gibraltar" was cut at the same November session, left off the album, and turns up only on CD issues, which is also why you will see a running time quoted that the three original tracks cannot possibly reach. The live "Sugar" on reissues comes from July 18, 1971 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles with a different band again. Five stars for the record that actually came out in 1970, three tracks and no filler.

Eumir Deodato arranged and conducted, and CTI's Brazilian streak runs straight through the middle of this one. The title piece is a Milton Nascimento tune, the only one of his among the five original tracks. Around Turrentine there are nine string players, three gospel voices on two of the tracks, Airto Moreira and Billy Cobham both on percussion duty, Eric Gale on guitar and Ron Carter on bass. For a tenor saxophone album that is an enormous amount of furniture in the room.

The opener is Freddie Hubbard's "Gibraltar", a tune first cut at the Sugar session the previous November and left off that album, then recorded again here with the new band. So the piece Sugar rejected is the first thing you hear on the follow-up, which is either thrifty or funny depending on your mood. Turrentine wrote one tune himself, "Storm". "I Told Jesus" is a traditional in a Deodato arrangement and is one of the two tracks carrying the singers.

Steve Huey's four-star AllMusic read is fair: smooth but not slick, accessible but not simplistic, and it has dated well partly because the arrangements do not lean on electric piano the way so much of the era does. My own reason for keeping it is Horace Parlan. He was Turrentine's pianist on Look Out! eleven years earlier, and this is one of his last American dates before moving to Denmark. Eleven years of a working relationship bracketed inside one page.

The paperwork is solid here: Wikipedia credits Creed Taylor as producer and places the sessions at Van Gelder Studio, and the LP credits Rudy Van Gelder as engineer. Keep "Vera Cruz" out of it as well: that is an April 1971 date with a largely different, flute-heavy band, with only Deodato, Ron Carter and Airto carried over, first issued on the 1975 compilation The Sugar Man and later added to CD issues of this album, never part of the original LP.

The title track is Marvin Gaye's, from the Trouble Man soundtrack, and Turrentine stretches it to 9:51. Bob James arranged and conducted, and the band is genuinely enormous: six horns beyond the leader, eight violins, two violas, two cellos, and three keyboard players at once in James, Harold Mabern and Richard Tee. June 7 and 8, 1973 at Englewood Cliffs. Four tracks and 32:40 in total, so the record is short and packed at the same time.

Two familiar names anchor it. Pepper Adams is in the horn section seven years after playing baritone in the Rough 'N Tumble octet, the same two men in very different rooms. And Ron Carter plays bass on this, on Salt Song and on Sugar, which makes him the one constant across the three CTI records reviewed here. Idris Muhammad drums the album; Billy Cobham appears only on CD bonus tracks, and getting that backward is easy since both names sit together on the same personnel list.

Three stars, and yes, Ron Wynn gives it four and a half. Here is the case for less. The playing is good and the writing around the playing has taken over. Twelve string players and three keyboardists across thirty two minutes leaves the leader roughly as much room as a soloist gets in a film cue, and Turrentine is a musician who needs space before he says anything worth hearing. Put it next to Look Out! and you can hear exactly what got traded away.

Guard the dates if you write about it. Two earlier sessions on March 14 and March 15, 1973 produced "Mississippi City Strut", "Harlem Dawn" and an alternate, all of it CD bonus material and none of it on the LP. The album as issued in 1973 is the two June dates only. Wikipedia's article is a stub with no engineer, no cover credits and no liner note author, so anything beyond that needs the jacket in your hands to confirm.