Teddy Edwards

The first thing you notice about Edwards on this record is the tone. Warm in a way that seems deliberately opposed to everything happening on the East Coast at the time. Coltrane was building sheets of sound. Rollins was doing his thing on bridges. Edwards was playing as if none of that pressure existed, as if the only obligation was to make the horn sound beautiful, and to mean it.

The split format, with Joe Castro's trio taking the second half of the album, might seem like an awkward compromise. It isn't. Castro's side is excellent on its own terms, and the contrast highlights what makes Edwards distinctive: where Castro's piano is precise and architectural, Edwards is flowing and conversational, finding the melody and then finding ten other ways to say the same thing without once losing the thread.

"Sunset Eyes" appears here in what may be its first properly documented recording, Edwards's most famous composition. Even in this early version you can hear why it stuck. It's a minor blues with a melody so natural it sounds like it always existed, something that was already in the air before Edwards wrote it down.

Les McCann was twenty-two years old in 1960, soulful and exuberant, with gospel roots he'd never tried to hide. Edwards was thirty-six, a West Coast veteran with a tone that had taken years to develop. The combination shouldn't work as well as it does.

What saves it is that McCann is a better listener than his reputation sometimes suggests. He doesn't bulldoze the date with the gospel fervor that would define his later records. He plays to Edwards's warmth, supports the tenor lines, and when he solos he does it with enough restraint that the album feels like a real conversation rather than two soloists taking turns at the microphone.

Leroy Vinnegar's bass is worth noting throughout: steady, harmonically rich, exactly the kind of foundation both soloists needed to take the risks they do. Ron Jefferson's drums sit in the pocket and stay there. This is a record that earns its title.

The title is the composition, and the composition is the reason Edwards is remembered. "Sunset Eyes" is a blues in the most essential sense: minor, melancholic, built from intervals that feel inevitable once you've heard them and impossible to get out of your head afterward. Edwards had been playing it for years by 1960. This Pacific Jazz recording is where it got properly documented.

The rest of the album lives in the same emotional register. These aren't performances designed to impress; they're designed to be believed. Edwards plays with the authority of a musician who has decided that technique is only valuable if it gets out of the way of feeling, and on this record it does exactly that, every track, start to finish.

Billy Higgins on drums is twenty years old and already doing things nobody else is doing with brushes. Vinnegar walks the bass with the unhurried authority that made him one of the great sidemen of the California scene. The rhythm section gives Edwards exactly the space he needs, and he fills it exactly as much as he has to.

The title sounds like a joke but it's not. By 1960, Edwards had been playing professionally for fifteen years, had recorded with Charlie Parker and Howard McGhee in the forties, and was still being treated as a regional figure while tenors with fewer years and less depth got the critical attention. Teddy's Ready! is an album that sounds like a man who is done waiting.

Joe Castro on piano is the perfect foil: quick, harmonically sophisticated, never getting in the way. Leroy Vinnegar and Billy Higgins are one of the great underrated rhythm sections of the West Coast scene, and here they play with the focused energy of a group that believes completely in the material.

The ballads are the other revelation. Edwards at slow tempos is a different animal from Edwards burning through a fast blues. He finds the center of a melody and inhabits it without ornamenting it to death, and the result is the kind of ballad playing that makes you stop whatever you're doing and pay attention until it's over.

Avalon is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and this album has the feeling of a man walking through familiar streets with a full band behind him. The sessions were recorded in December 1960 but shelved for thirty-five years, not seeing release until 1995, which partly explains why this one sits just outside the usual Edwards canon despite belonging there comfortably.

This is Edwards's only octet date from the period, a much larger canvas than the quartet records on either side of it. The writing is ambitious: Nathaniel Meeks on trumpet and Lester Robertson on trombone give the arrangements a fullness that the quartet dates can't reach, and Jimmy Woods on alto adds a second voice to the reed section that lets Edwards write contrapuntal lines he couldn't otherwise attempt.

Danny Horton at the piano is the quiet center of the group, holding the harmonic frame steady while Edwards builds around it. Larance Marable's drums push the ensemble without overwhelming it. A bigger, more complex record than the others in this run, and a fascinating glimpse of an alternate path Edwards chose not to pursue.

Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards had recorded together in the late forties, two young West Coast players at the beginning of everything. By 1961, fifteen years had passed. McGhee had gone through serious personal difficulties. Edwards had been grinding the California circuit. The reunion could have been nostalgic. It's more interesting than that.

What Together Again!!!! captures is two musicians who have both been changed by time and are discovering what they still share. Phineas Newborn Jr.'s piano is spectacular throughout: one of jazz's most technically gifted pianists giving a performance that is never merely technical. Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, fresh from Peterson's trio, provide the same impeccable foundation they gave the Verve records.

The four exclamation marks in the title are earned. This is the kind of reunion that actually delivers on its premise: two old friends playing with the shared vocabulary of a decade-old partnership and the energy of musicians who are genuinely glad to be back in the same room.

The title is exactly right for the mood: warm, celebratory, a little extravagant. Good Gravy! is Edwards in a relaxed setting, a supportive rhythm section, no pressure to make a statement. The result is one of the most purely enjoyable records in his catalog, the kind of album you put on when you want jazz to feel like a pleasure rather than a study.

Danny Horton handles most of the piano duties, a solid and reliable accompanist who gives Edwards room to breathe. The two tracks with Phineas Newborn Jr. are the standouts: Newborn's virtuosity adds a different kind of energy, and Edwards rises to meet it. Leroy Vinnegar is back, which means the bass is right. Milt Turner's drums are tasteful throughout without drawing attention to themselves.

This isn't Edwards at his most ambitious or his most urgent. It's Edwards doing what he does best when nobody is asking him to do anything except play, and that turns out to be quite a lot. An easy record to underestimate on first listen and an easy record to love by the second.

The last of the great early-sixties Edwards records, and the most emotionally direct. Gerry Wiggins on organ gives the album a completely different texture from anything else in the Edwards catalog: warmer, rounder, with a sustain that wraps around the tenor in a way no piano can. It's an inspired pairing, and Edwards plays to it beautifully.

Edwards had been playing ballads his whole career, but the performances on Heart & Soul have a quality the earlier records don't quite reach. The title track, the old Hoagy Carmichael tune, is played so slowly and with such concentrated feeling that by the end it sounds like something different from the song it started as. Wiggins shapes the organ part around the melody rather than underneath it, and the effect is remarkable.

Leroy Vinnegar again, Milt Turner again: the rhythm section playing with the quiet authority they'd built together across the Contemporary sessions. This is the record that earns Edwards his place in the conversation, and the one to put on first if you want to understand what made him worth the attention.