Billboard : 03/16/1957
Jazz Disk Jockey Programming Album

A few may find this on the old-fashioned side, but this is a session that has to be called “great” by any yardstick. Ben Webster never gave a more forceful demonstration of his right to be considered one of the “titans of the tenor.” “Sweets” Edison certainly has one of his finest hours on disks here. Terrific support is given by Barney Kessel, Jimmy Rowles, Al Stoller and Joe Mondragon. If this isn’t a best seller, there just ain’t no justice.

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Metronome
Bill Coss : August, 1957

9 tracks with Ben Webster, Jimmy Rowles, Barney Kessel, Joe Mondragon and Alvin Stoller playing six originals by Harry; all the selections more or less in the Basie groove. For my tastes, there is a bit too much ringing cymbal from Al Stoller on several of the selections, but the rhythm section is a hard swinging one as might be expected from the musicians involved. The combination of Ben and Harry is pretty much irresistible—their trading on Studio Call is one of the highlights of the album. And, elsewhere, these two, Jimmy and Barney, too, play big virile music that makes this album a good buy for all jazz listeners, regardless of the era in which they are most interested.

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New Yorker
Whitney Balliett : 06/01/1957

Like Eldridge and Rushing, Ben Webster, whose instrument is the tenor saxophone, belongs to a small and diminishing group of musicians who were prominent during the swing era and have now—for a number of reasons, including the collapse of the big-band business and the peculiar cult of progress-for-progress’s-sake that guides many musicians and listeners—become as unfashionable as the boater. Nevertheless, Webster, who has a generous, soft tone and a lilting, slanting manner of approaching a melody, is a master saxophonist, who ranks alongside Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker. On a record made by another Basie alumnus, Harry Edison, called Sweets: Harry Edison and His Orchestra (Clef MG C-717), he solos on each of its nine slight, Basie-like tunes with all of the compelling, moving warmth he exhibited fifteen years ago when he was with Duke Ellington. Edison, a clear, ringing trumpeter in the Armstrong tradition, is in superior form, and the rhythm section—Jimmy Rowles, piano; Barney Kessel, guitar; Joe Mondragon, bass; Alvin Stoller, drums—glides like a swan.

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Saturday Review
Martin Williams : 05/11/1957

The mature authority of this set is rare. Webster has seldom sounded so creative on records – perhaps never before. Edison, despite some of his stock licks and some rather pointless “yelling” on K.M. Blues, plays singing horn. Other assets: Barney Kessel’s subtly timed “comping” (his solos are mostly vague strings of other people’s clichés, however) and the easy rhythm.

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Down Beat : 04/18/1957
Nat Hentoff : 5 stars

Here is the essence of the muscular relaxation, the flowing swing, and the natural spontaneous expression of emotion that is the mainstream of jazz. The rhythm section gets a quality of wholly yet ball-bearing pulsation that has marked the best of the Basie sections.

The horns are definitions of jazz maturity – each has his own authoritative sound; each has conception that is logical, personal, and thoroughly heated by inner emotional drive; each lets his statements breathe deeply in a phrasing that is neither rushed nor flaccid.

Each combines virility with sensitivity. I would only have wished for more time for big Ben, who plays some of his most moving horn on recent records here. Sweets is superb. Fine, tasty solos by Rowles and Kessel. An essential LP.

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Liner Notes by Unknown

It was just plain Harry Edison out of Columbus, OH, until one winter afternoon in 1936 when the members of the Count Basie band were assembled in a bus outside the Woodside Hotel in New York. The band was about to leave on tour. Lester Young, the tenor saxophone star, was talking and at one point he made mention of “that fine trumpet cat, Sweets Edison.” Sweets? The other musicians took it up quickly and since then the nickname has proved a durable part of the musical scene. When Lester Young slaps a nickname on a musician it sticks – as witness his designation of Billie Holiday as “Lady Day.”

In any case this album belongs to Sweets, as its title would imply. All the selections here were arranged by Sweets and six of them are his own compositions. Of the Edison originals there is Hollering at the Watkins, the Watkins Hotel being, as Sweets puts it, “Los Angeles’ answer to the Woodside in New York. I’ve lived at the Watkins now and again for a long while and this place is my – uh – retribution.” Edison’s Used to be Basie, which he wrote late in 1956, is a tribute to the Count. Sweets, of course, played with Basie for 14 years – from 1937 through 1950. “I had great times with Bill Basie,” Edison says. “It seemed a natural enough thing to put some of that into music.” His Studio Call, a romp at medium tempo, was another that seemed natural for a title since Sweets has had a “studio call” or two in his career. As for Opus 711, this one is an effort on Sweets’ part, he says, “to woo the Muse of gambling.” The initials in K.M. Blues, Edison shrugs, is something of a mystery and figures to remain one.

In recent years Harry Edison has been one of the busiest musicians on the Coast. You can hear his trumpet in Nelson Riddle’s orchestra on the filmed Rosemary Clooney television series and in a number of motion picture soundtracks, including of late those for Step Down to Terror, starring Anthony Quinn, and The Girl Most Likely starring Jane Powell. When Frank Sinatra last appeared at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas he sent for Sweets to lead his trumpet section, and when Nelson Riddle led the orchestra at President Eisenhower’s televised birthday party in the fall of 1956 there was Harry Edison with his trumpet at hand. Harry Edison sums up his theory of the horn very briefly. “What I want is to have an original sound, a sound that’s my own and no one else’s,” he says. “Even after all these years, I’m still working on it.”

As it stands, Sweets Edison does have a readily identifiable sound – a powerful, virile, insinuating sound that is one of the most interesting around today, one which is in the Louis Armstrong – Roy Eldridge tradition and one which will be fresh when all the ephemeral cult sounds have been forgotten.

The artists: Harry “Sweets” Edison, trumpet; Ben Webster, tenor saxophone; Barney Kessel, guitar (courtesy Contemporary Records); Jimmy Rowles, piano; Alvin Stoller, drums; Joe Mondragon, bass.