Billboard : 05/05/1958

Clean modern sound is the feature of this set. Actually most of the numbers feature four players. Only two of the seven tracks spotlight the quintet. Wallington on piano is complemented by J.R. Monterose, tenor; J. Lloyd, bass trumpet; N. Stabulas, drums and Teddy Kotick on bass. Wallington’s attack is more concerned with harmonic than melodic development. The group sounds most at home on one of Wallington’s originals, Composin’ at the Composer. Choice for mainstream buyers.

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American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : July 1958

Members of the funky school of jazz (even when, like Wallington, they are holdovers from bop) tend to become as inbred and identical as Pekingese, and facility no longer counts for half so much as conviction. Most of these gentlemen, the leader of this quintet included, play at music (the choice of three tunes by Mose Allison, who is an imitation of an imitation, is indication enough of this), but fortunately J.R. Monterose is an exception. If his playing is rough, it is not merely that he has learned from Sonny Rollins, which he has, but because the ideas expressed come out best that way. Monterose showed great promise on earlier recordings, notably Mingus’ Pithecanthropus Erectus album, and is more worthy of attention than other saxists whose names and music are heard more often. Jerry Lloyd’s bass trumpet and his composition are both charming and both reminiscent of Bob Brookmeyer. Deep are the roots.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : September 1958

The rather strange alliance between Wallington’s vociferously modern and technically minded group and the down-home flavored compositions of Mose Allison (three of the seven selections here are by Allison) works favorably for neither Wallington nor Allison. Wallington’s sophisticated piano has little meaning in this context; and neither J.R. Monterose’s harsh tenor saxophone nor Jerry Lloyd’s gruff bass trumpet catch Allison’s back country feeling, although these instruments have a potentially appropriate sound texture. The group churns vigorously through the other selections in which Wallington’s playing is dapper but scarcely communicative.

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Metronome
Bill Coss : September 1958
This review covers three albums: Jazz at Hotchkiss (Savoy MG 12122), Knight Music (Atlantic 1275), and East-West 4004

Three records by one of the best of the bop pianists, of such a high calibre, that he seldom plays with musicians of his own stature, a not especially strange situation, but one which has led to what I am sure are tiresome suggestions from me to him about the value of recording with only rhythm, suggestions which he listens to politely, with the gentlemanly calm which is his.

In any case, nothing has changed very much in my opinion. The second album is by far the best of the lot, because it is a trio album. The first is a repeat performance in a studio of what the quintet played on a program at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. It is in the hard bop groove mainly because Byrd and Woods are, and George is an extremely adaptable guy. That is not to say that the music isn’t good. Woods has had many better dates, but Byrd is satisfactory, the rhythm section similarly and George plays with, rather than within, hard bop, still bubbling and tumbling with engaging ease. The third album is a bit more varied. George has used it to introduce Jerry Lloyd, who used to be a trumpeter in the early days of bop and now plays bass trumpet. Too, the compositions are varied: Mose Allison wrote three of them, Monterose two, Lloyd one and Wallington wrote only one himself. So the tunes and tempos go from the bright and catchy Composin’ which is George’s through Monterose’s hard bop ventures to Allison’s back-country kinds of things. There’s a good deal more consistency on this album. I would imagine from the sound of things, that there was a good deal more cooperation, too.

But neither of the other two match the Atlantic album where George, Teddy Kotick and Nick Stabulas do what comes most naturally and beautifully to George, the playing of his own songs (which is what the first side of the record consists of, including one cute tune by his wife, Billie), and the careful investigation of other superior songs, which is what the second side is all about. The music and playing is superior. One track, Up Jumped the Devil, must have a specific message, which perhaps some reader may uncover better than I.

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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 07/06/1958

George Wallington leads a small group through seven numbers with overtones of bop (he was one of the pioneers in this idiom). His associates include tenor J.R. Monterose and (on three tracks) bass trumpet Jerry Lloyd. Three of the tunes are by Mose Allison.

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 06/08/1958

Comparatively few present day fans know Wallington for what he is: one of the earliest bop pianists who has continued to develop without losing his original style. But I liked this set best for Jerry Lloyd’s very fine bass trumpet. The whole deal swings — in a modern fashion.

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Down Beat : 08/07/1958
Dom Cerulli : 4 stars
A review of both East-West 4004 and Knight Music (Atlantic 1275)

A pair of substantial offerings by Wallington in two contexts.

On both, George shows flashes of Mose Allison’s bluesy, abrupt style. This is particularly marked on the Allison tunes, but also crops up in such as Wallington’s own Up Jumped the Devil and on the introduction to It’s All Right.

The quintet has some bright solo work by Monterose, and some low-key bass trumpeting by Lloyd. Both LPs profit from the professional rhythm-section work of Stabulas and Kotick.

The trio album, half originals and half standards, has a truly outstanding original in Devil and some charming, often challenging work on the standards.

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Liner Notes by Timon Mahan

It is a little hard to realize that dapper George Wallington had just turned 32 when these recordings were made. His jazz accomplishments suggest that he must have been around forever. Those who date him by his best known compositions, Lemon Drop and Godchild, which go back roughly a decade, may feel justifiably that he is one of the finest flowers of the latter days of bop.

Actually, he is nothing of the sort. He can lay as valid a claim to have been a contributing force in originating bop as most of those who are accredited as pioneer boppers.

He was, in a sense, operating his own, singlehanded downtown equivalent of Minton’s at the same time that Parker, Clarke, Gillespie, Monk and company were shaking out their new ideas at that now famous Harlem spot. Wallington’s base of operations was a below-street-level bar in Greenwich Village, the Macdougal Inn, which has since given way to a more imposing landmark, New York University’s Law School. He was playing piano there in 1942, doggedly working out his own way of expressing the things that had first weaned him away from classical studies to jazz — the things that he had heard played by Count Basie, by Benny Goodman, Mel Powell, Art Tatum and, particularly, by Earl Hines.

“From listening to them,” George says, “I got my own ideas of how I felt things should be voiced. Later, when I first heard Dizzy Gillespie, I was amazed to find what he was doing with the same harmonic ideas that I had been working on.”

There was liaison of a sort between Wallington at Macdougal Inn and the experimenters at Minton’s. Charlie Parker and Max Roach stopped in to hear Wallington from time to time, to compare notes and discuss what they were doing to them. A couple of years later Wallington moved into the mainstream of bop development when Gillespie hired him for what proved to be the first bop band on 52nd Street, a group at the Onyx Club which also included Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach.

“We loved to play so much,” George recalls of those halcyon days, “that we used to keep right on after the Onyx had closed. Jerry Lloyd would come down with his trumpet, Ray Turner brought his tenor and we’d play until nine o’clock in the morning.”

Jerry Lloyd, who plays bass trumpet on four of these selections, is one of Wallington’s oldest jazz associates. They met in Wallington’s Greenwich Village days in 1943 and it was Lloyd who introduced Wallington to Dizzy Gillespie, a meeting at which Diz was so impressed by the 19-year-old pianist that he grabbed him for the Onyx Club job. Lloyd has been playing trumpet off and on ever since then (during the Forties he was known as Jerry Hurwitz) but a serious illness has prevented him from working steadily during most of that time. Lately he has been driving a taxi even though he is now able to play regularly.

Lloyd makes his debut as a bass trumpeter in these numbers. In taking up this large relative of the more customary B flat trumpet, Lloyd joins a very select list of jazzmen who function on this heavy-toned instrument — check off Cy Touff and Johnny Mandel and you’ve run through the list. Lloyd was attracted to it because of its mellow tone, a sort of mixture of sounds associated with the French horn, trombone and B flat trumpet which he finds particularly suitable for an evocative tune such as his own composition, August Moon.

The introduction of Lloyd as a virtuoso of the bass trumpet was one of three spotlights that Wallington wanted to focus in this album. The second spotlight is for the playing and writing of J.R. Monterose, the tenor saxophonist whose East Coast work with Teddy Charles, Charlie Mingus, Kenny Dorham and others has given him such marked personal identity that he no longer has to suffer confusion with the West Coast saxman and writer, Jack Montrose.

J.R. (not initials but the spelling out of the abbreviation for Junior: he is Frank Anthony Monterose, Jr.) has developed a playing style identified as “pecking”. It has no relation to the dance that was popular about twenty years ago although it comes from the same image — the action of a chicken pecking grain. Monterose’s pecking is an aural interpretation of the action, achieved by playing one or two notes in a bar, then staying off for a bar or so while the rest of the group puts something in (you can hear it in the second chorus of his own piece, The Prestidigitator, and in parts of Jouons).

In Jouons (from the French, an urgent suggestion: “Let’s play!”), Monterose uses a modulating device that is typical of his writing. Two bars are in one key, then he moves back a key for the next two, back another key for the next two, and so on.

“To play something like this you have to have good command of your horn,” Wallington notes. “You have to know all your keys because it keeps moving. It’s the kind of writing that keeps you on your toes. Just when you feel comfortable in one place, J.R. moves you.”

The third spotlight is for the compositions of Mose Allison, a pianist whose first recordings in 1957 won wide critical acclaim. Allison was born and grew up in Tippo, Mississippi, and his writing is strongly marked by a basic, folk blues quality. One of the three Allison pieces here, Promised Land, is from his Back Country Suite, a group of sketches in which he catches some of the typical sounds, sights and sensations of his Mississippi youth.

Wallington first met Allison through the ubiquitous Jerry Lloyd at a New Year’s Eve party (the 1956-57 pouring) and was immediately impressed with his playing (Mose had been working with Stan Getz at the time) and charmed by his tunes. He was so impressed, in fact, that he helped Mose get a recording contract and signed him up as a writer for his own publishing firm, Jazz Editions. These performances are the first time that Allison’s works have been recorded by anyone other than himself (Rural Route, in fact, has never been recorded at all before this).

That Wallington should be as fascinated as he is with Allison as a pianist is somewhat unusual because George is a pianist who is primarily interested in technical ideas.

“Mose isn’t technical,” Wallington admits. “But I like the feeling he gets — that simple, down-home style.”

The other pianists on Wallington’s list of favorites are somewhat more in line with his technically minded direction: Earl Hines, who made a deep early impression; Al Haig; Dave Brubeck when he is playing as a soloist, away from his quartet.

“I liked Bud Powell at one time,” Wallington adds, “but today I don’t think he’s playing as well as he once did, around the early Fifties.”

There’s one more name on his list of important pianists: the unjustly neglected and almost forgotten Clarence Profit.

“Profit had a way of using two notes in each hand that no one else had gotten onto by the time he died in 1945,” Wallington recalls. “Nat Jaffe was just beginning to pick it up but then he died in the same year as Profit.”

In his desire to throw a spotlight on Lloyd, Monterose and Allison, Wallington has modestly limited himself to a single composition — Composin’ At The Composer, his twenty-first attempt to write a theme for the New York piano room, The Composer. Sy Barron who runs the spot, finally admitted that he liked this one. And so did George — he liked it so much that he now uses it as a theme for his own group.