Boston Globe
Ralph J. Gleason : 03/25/1959

Today you can with considerable safety order any LP that has Cannonball Adderley on it and be sure it’s a valuable jazz album. And when you have Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Art Blakey and Wynton Kelly added to Cannonball you know you have something special. This album is a fine set of performances by this group of top notch jazzmen with directly moving, beautifully swinging solos from Adderley, Kelly and Jackson. The overall mood is the blues spiced with humor and swing. It’s one of the most satisfying LP’s issued so far this year.

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Portland Oregonian
John A. Armstrong : 05/24/1959

Adderley plays alto with all the verve and guttiness of a tenor sax. This album is an enthusiastic “blowing session,” with Adderley sparked by Milt Jackson on vibes, Wynton Kelly on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Art Blakey on drums. Obviously, he in turn sparked them. Cannonball plays some startling measures, series of sixteenth notes and faster, in Groovin’ High a Dizzy Gillespie composition. Jackson shines with his driving vibe soloing in Blues Oriental, but the big storm is blown up in the title tune, Thing’s Are Getting Better, Cannonball playing with a rocking, shoutin’ style.

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Toronto Star
Roger Feather : 02/28/1959
Three Stars

This is a disappointing album because although the men are all first-rate musicians they appear, through a large part of the LP, to be indifferent. There are however some worthwhile moments.

Adderley shows some sensitive, singing lyricism on Serves Me Right and has good, bluesy emotion on Sounds For Sid. The group gets a smooth-flowing, rocking feeling on the rhythmically intriguing Sidewalks Of New York. Both Jackson and Adderley play with more authority and determination here than elsewhere on the LP. Just One Of Those Things features swinging, sharp Adderley and and a fleeting, deft Jackson. The rhythm section on this tune is light and pulsating but on others, like Things are Getting Better, it is surprisingly static.

It is hard to say what went wrong here but these five should have produced much more than just an ordinary album.

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Washington Post
Tony Gieske : 02/22/1959

Everybody acts just a trifle bored on Things Are Getting Better (Riverside 12-286). But they are all such gigantic jazz figures that superior music comes out anyway.

Milt Jackson solos unenthusiastically, Cannonball Adderley offers an “original” that sounds maddeningly familiar, and it was astounding to hear either Art Blakey or Percy Heath rush the tempo on two numbers, the title track and Groovin’ High.

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Down Beat : 06/11/1959
??? : 4 stars

Here, truly, is a meeting of giants. Backed by a superb rhythm section. Cannonball and Bags range freely over seven tunes as varied in tempo as they are in mood.

Oriental is Cannonball’s and the mood fits the title. Things is a medium-tempoed exercise in funk, based on familiar blues changes. Serves is a very slow deep-purple mood in which Cannonball’s solo work plumbs the depths of the feeling. Groovin’ is taken much slower than usual, but this reduction in tempo makes for a more relaxed feeling as the altoist and vibist speak their respective pieces.

Sidewalks, which opens the ‘B’ side, is medium, happy and romping with Bags stretching in a long solo followed by some impassioned Cannonball. Sounds is very blue, very slow and quite emotional. Things, which concludes the session, is taken medium up and pretty straight at first – until the fireworks begin, first in Bags’ vibes, then in Julian’s horn.

Very good Jackson, Adderley and Kelly. Make this one.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

The main function of this album, clearly enough, is to bring together for the first time two of the most notable of today’s jazz artists, with Milt Jackson heading a most distinguished supporting cast working here under the leadership of Cannonball Adderley.

The “all-star” session seems always to be in fashion, regardless of the hard fact that friction (or even chaos) rather than special inspiration is apt to be a fairly likely result of indiscriminately throwing big jazz names into the same recording studio. There is, however, nothing necessarily fatal about “star” recording, if only someone remembers to pay attention to basic rules like making sure the artists involved happen to be really musically (and personally) compatible. Because this rule has been obeyed here, the juxtaposition of Cannonball, Milt and this rhythm section was a fully valid one, full of intriguing possibilities that, we think, turned into actualities in this recording.

Both Adderley and Jackson are striking individualists. Cannonball is regarded as primarily a formidable improvisor (although some of his recent work, as on Riverside’s Alabama Concerto LP, has given sharp indication that there is a great deal more to the man than just that). Bags, although he first brought his vibraharp onto the scene in the hot-and-heavy bop days of the late 1940s, is generally thought of in terms of the context in which he has worked steadily since 1953: as a key member of the Modern Jazz Quartet. You might think of these two, in the course of their respective normal working nights, as being at rather widely separated parts of the current jazz spectrum: Jackson with the intricate and cerebral MJQ; Adderley, throughout 1958, featured with Miles Davis‘ blowing sextet. But the fact is that both men are. far too talented and wide-ranging as musicians to be proper subjects for any such type-casting.

Bags and Cannonball belong together for several reasons not the least of which is that both eagerly welcomed the opportunity to get together. There is also the fact that both are firmly “modern traditionalists”: musicians with an awareness of jazz roots and with, in both cases, a strong rhythmic sense and an emphasis on the beat as a basic part of their playing pattern. Above all, there is one other very fundamental meeting ground on which these two come together. Both are, deservedly, highly regarded as practitioners of the blues; and it is the spirit, sometimes the specific form, and always the “soul” of the blues that furnishes the prevailing mood for this album.

Operating in this “soul” groove, and with the mutual respect and admiration these five men feel for each other as a most important element, this turned out to be one of the most relaxed and instinctively well-integrated of record dates. The lineup was a carefully selected one: starting with the basic premise that he’d be working with Bags, Cannonball felt that the other three were clear-cut and necessary choices. Art Blakey, of course, is one of the most important and most swinging of today’s drummers; the firm and sensitive bassist, Percy Heath, has played regularly alongside Jackson in the MJQ; Wynton Kelly, best known for his work with Dizzy Gillespie‘s recent big band and as Dinah Washington‘s favorite accompanist, is considered by fellow musicians as just about the best of the younger ‘funky’ pianists.

Cannonball contributes two themes: the earthy number that gives the album its appropriate title; and a slow-blues Sounds for Sid (dedicated to a favorite disc jockey) that is so strictly in a lights-out mood that except for one bulb it was recorded that way. He also provided the airy modernizing of Sidewalks of New York. Bags came up with the unusual Blues Oriental, and also set everyone straight on the changes for Dizzy’s memorable composition of the early-bop era, Groovin’ High.

This is, fundamentally, a ‘blowing’ date, in the best sense of that much-abused term. It serves, among other things, to show just how much can happen when some very good men are at their ease and feeling in very good form.