American Record Guide
Martin Williams : April, 1958

The previous meeting of trumpeter Edison and tenor saxist Webster, Sweets (Clef MG-C717), produced what was not only one of the best records of last year but one of the best on which either man ever has played. And that is saying a great deal—especially for Webster, who still knows how to say more in one terse chorus than many other tenormen can say in a lifetime of ten-minute solos. This strangely programmed LP (the three long blues are tracked side by side) is good, but it is not Sweets.

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Metronome
Jack Maher : June, 1958

The title song along with three or four other tracks on this album, have an over-all blues character to them. Sweets, Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown and Alvin Stoller play with loose-limbed conviviality. There’s no earth shaking jazz here, but some really pleasant finger-snapping swing. Harry, because of his excellence of sound, open or under any number of different mutes, makes this pleasant.

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New Yorker
Whitney Balliett : 06/21/1958

The saxophone, an uneasy amalgam of the oboe, clarinet, and brass families invented a century ago by a Belgian named Adolphe Sax, has always seemed an unfinished instrument whose success depends wholly on the dexterity of its users. In the most inept hands, the trumpet, say, is always recognizable, while a beginner on the saxophone often produces an unearthly, unidentifiable braying. Even good saxophonists are apt to produce squeaks, soughs, honks, or flat, leathery tones. Thus, the few masters of the instrument—jazz musicians like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Harry Carney, Hilton Jefferson, and Ben Webster (classical saxophonists usually play with a self-conscious sherbetlike tone)—deserve double praise. Ben Webster, the forty-nine-year-old tenor saxophonist from Kansas City, has for almost twenty years played with a subtle poignancy matched only by such men as Hawkins and Johnny Hodges (from both of whom he learned a good deal), Lucky Thompson, Herschel Evans, and Don Byas. A heavy, sedate man, with wide, boxlike shoulders, who holds his instrument stiffly in front of him, as if it were a figurehead, Webster played in various big bands before the four-year tour of duty with Duke Ellington that began in 1939. Since then, he has worked with small units and his style, which was developed during his stay with Ellington, has become increasingly purified and refined. Like the work of many sensitive jazz musicians, it varies a good deal according to tempo. In a slow ballad number, Webster’s tone is soft and enormous, and he is apt to start his phrases with whooshing smears that give one the impression of being suddenly picked up by a breaker and carried smoothly to shore. Whereas Hawkins tends to reshape a ballad into endless, short, busy phrases, Webster employs long, serene figures that often (particularly in the blues, which he approaches much as he might a ballad) achieve a fluttering, keening quality—his wide vibrato frequently dissolves into echoing, ghostlike breaths—not unlike that of a cantor. His tone abruptly shrinks in middle tempos and, as if it were too bulky to carry at such a pace, becomes an oblique yet urgent and highly rhythmic whispering, like a steady breeze stirring leaves. In fast tempos a curious thing frequently happens. He will play one clean, rolling chorus and then—whether from uneasiness, excitement, or an attempt to express the inexpressible—adopt a sharp, growling tone that, used sparingly, can be extremely effective, or, if sustained for several choruses, takes on a grumpy, monotonous sound. At his best, though, Webster creates, out of an equal mixture of embellishment and improvisation, loose poetic melodies that have a generous air rare in jazz, which is capable of downright meanness.

Webster is in faultless condition in two recent recordings, Bill Harris and Friends (Fantasy 3263) and Gee, Baby Ain’t I Good to You: Harry Edison (Verve Clef Series MGV-8211). In the first, he is given as much space as Harris, a tufted-toned trombonist who delivers bunches of rich, dogged, vibratoless notes that seem to perforate rather than transform the melody. The contrast to Webster’s style is striking. There are seven numbers, all of them standards, including a spoofing of sweet music—Just One More Chance—that is more energetic than funny. (Jazz and slapstick just don’t mix.) Webster gives a classic five-and-a-half-minute treatment to a slow ballad, Where Are You?; plays a memorable solo in I Surrender, Dear, again at a slow tempo; and then, in Ellington’s In a Mellotone, which is done at a relaxed jog and lasts almost ten minutes, puts together a long, perfectly sustained set of variations that are possibly the best he has ever recorded. The rhythm section (Jimmy Rowles on piano, Red Mitchell on bass, and Stan Levey on drums) is precise but timid. It all brings to mind the handful of records Webster made in the mid-forties with Sidney Catlett, an incomparable drummer, who brushed aside Webster’s occastonal tendency to coast by ceaselessly pushing him with sharp, perfectly timed rimshots and bass-drum beats. Webster has never played with quite the same intensity since.

On the second record, Webster appears with the trumpeter Harry Edison, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel (guitar), Ray Brown (bass), and Alvin Stoller (drums). There are seven standards, including three extremely pleasant blues. Edison, a casual, repetitive soloist, takes up a good deal of space, which he shares with Kessel and Peterson, who are intense but equally repetitive performers. The rhythm section, indeed, has a clogged, airless sound that seems to hobble Edison, if not Webster, who, particularly in the opening of his solo in Taste on the Place, lines along as gracefully as a gull.

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St. Paul Recorder (St. Paul, MN)
Albert Anderson : 02/07/1958

An LP which, in this writer’s opinion, is bound to be a big hit with jazz fans is Harry “Sweets” Edison’s latest; Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You. Grooved for Verve, this album may well be regarded as the highpoint for Edison as a front man and recording artist. It is that good.

With an album cover designed to appeal to the imagination (Edison blows his trumpet to the enthralling delight of a female admirer in a close-up night club scene), music on the record is likewise fashioned for sensory stimulation. Seven tunes make up the set. Side One deals with three clever selections, meaningful in their interpretations. Blues for Piney Brown is named for a Kansas City cafe proprietor who befriended scores of jazz musicians and singers, including Joe Turner. Blues for the Blues depicts a yearning for that moody feeling a musician yearns for to give fullest treatment to the blues. And Blues for Bill Basie “is in celebration of a most functionally exact and hugely relaxed teller of the blues.”

The real treat comes when you listen to the flip side, however. You, no doubt, will swoon in delight when you listen to the muted trumpet of Edison playing Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You backed up by tenor ace Ben Webster and piano virtuoso Oscar Peterson. In the writer’s opinion, this is the best tune in the set. However, there are others that will send you. Moonlight in Vermont is especially appealing to lovers, while You’re Getting to be a Habit With Me and Taste on the Place are both enjoyable.

This album definitely surpasses Edison’s previous Verve LP, Sweets. Look for it to set a mark in sales receipts.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

As yet another indication of the growing respectability (using the word in all its ambivalent connotations) of jazz, jazz recordings are now reviewed in such journals as The New York Times and in London, in the New Statesman and Nation and the Sunday Times. The critic for the latter publication is Iain Laing, a stern, vintage writer on jazz whose booklet, Background of the Blues, printed several years ago, is remembered by most older collectors with detailed gratitude. In reviewing Harry Edison’s previous Verve LP, Sweets (MG V-8097), Lang recently wrote: “Twelve-inch long-players of quintets and sextets—the form which so much recorded jazz takes nowadays, for economic rather than musical reasons, call for soloists of the calibre of Charlie Parker or Lester Young to sustain interest through forty minutes or so of playing time.”

“Unlike Parker or Young,” Lang continued, “the former Basie trumpet player Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison is not an innovator but he blows so handsomely and with such sustained invention through all the nine numbers on this record that there does not seem to me a bar too many.”

There are seven longer numbers on this session, and even after weeks of listening to more jazz LPs a day than were available in a year when I was a boy, I feel on hearing Sweets and Ben in these conversations, that there isn’t a bar too many here either.

A young modernist, an unusually inventive hornman, participated a couple of years ago in a session at the Central Plaza in New York. On stand were several of the swing era masters, including Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. What the jazzman, Bob Brookmeyer, said of them that evening applies equally to Harry Edison: “In contrast to many of the musicians in our generation, they seemed so free. They put their horns up and the horns weren’t instruments any more. The horns had become voices.”

Voices that have been particularly shaped and moved by the blues, as all of this album witnesses, including those numbers not formally blues. The opening Blues for Piney Brown recalls Jo Jones’ portrait of the Kansas City Piney Brown who ran the Sunset Cafe where Joe Turner used to sing: “No performer, small or large, ever came into town but what Piney Brown was willing to help him. He loved professional people. But it had to be up to you. You had to be yourself. He didn’t like any phonies. A phony could hardly get served in a bar in Kansas City—a real guy could. Like a guy could come up to Piney Brown’s bar and say, ‘I only have thirty-five cents.’ Piney would serve him what he wanted, take the thirty-five cents and let it go at that.”

Blues for the Blues isn’t necessarily as redundant as it seems. I’ve heard a musician complain because he wasn’t lonely, because he wasn’t hurting enough to dig deeper into his horn. He may well have been neurotic, but his condition is not rare among artists, and it could be said of him that he had the Blues for the Blues. Blues for Bill Basie is in celebration of a most functionally exact and hugely relaxed teller of the blues. As for the rest of the tracks, they too are talk, the intimate, open vocalized play of horns, rhythm section and spirits that makes for a paradox in listening to jazz of this wholeness and consistency that it’s fulfilling and yet you never quite have enough.

In the rhythm section is Oscar Peterson, another blues brother as is bassist Ray Brown. The firm, unobtrusive drummer is Alvin Stoller; and on guitar, continuing the heritage of Charlie Christian and a natural blues sayer, Barney Kessel (courtesy Contemporary Records).

It is ingenuous to use the word “timeless” about anything, but so long as there is jazz, I expect this is one of the records that will be perennially new as it is already old in its knowledge of basic feelings.