Billboard : 12/02/1957
Score of 74

Bassist Curtis Counce does provide plenty of bounce, well in evidence in this set of swingers. It’s good ensemble jazz, purveyed with a fair amount of imagination. Take particular note of some top trumpet work by Jack Sheldon. Too Close for Comfort is a superb demo track. Cover art here will boost sales.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 12/28/1957
Album of the Week

Five highly respected modern musicians achieve tremendous musical unity and rapport on an infinitely satisfying sequel to the group’s first recorded session. Gratifying instrumental treatment is given a varied program of five originals and two standards with superb ensemble work and intense moving solos. The combo’s sound is clean, cohesive, and well recorded. Detailed album notes are effectively done on a colorful, attractive cover. What else can an LP offer? Contemporary deserves a lot of credit for this release, one of the year’s best. Repertoire includes How Deep is the Ocean, Too Close for Comfort, Stranger in Paradise, and Couneltation.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 01/19/1958

There was a short time near the end of the year when a rush of excellent records featuring east coast “hard bop” musicians seemed to give evidence that the easterners had caught up with and passed the cooler, somewhat softer west coast men who had caught the attention of the jazz world in the year or so preceding.

If that is true, the trend seems now to have been reversed with a handful of rather surprising records produced by men who are either west coast or play under the influence of the western school.

Among these (not foremost, perhaps, but near the top) is a Contemporary LP released under the somewhat surprising title You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce. The cover depicts a well formed young lady clad (more or less) in a doctor’s white jacket and listening with a stethoscope (quite enticingly) to her own heartbeat while she either yawns, screams or evinces ecstasy.

It is, in brief, exactly the record a reviewer would be inclined to pass over – as a strictly commercial job.

You may imagine my surprise, then, when I found an album of serious, thoughtful jazz (not too serious and not too thoughtful) produced by a group of westerners who deserve to be better known.

Counce provides a swinging bass for Jack Sheldon, who is steadily adding to his reputation on trumpet, and for tenorman Harold Land. Carl Perkins plays better piano than I had remembered and and Frank Butler is excellent on drums.

This is for somebody not too far advanced in modern jazz, one who wants to be able to hear a tune but who is still living in 1958, not 1938. Listen to Stranger in Paradise and Counceltation.

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Washington Post
Paul Sampson : 02/02/1958

Jack Sheldon, Harold Land, Carl Perkins, Counce and Frank Butler have meshed into a well-organized, swinging group. The selections are well-balanced, too. Pianist Carl Perkins, a sort of West Coast Horace Silver, is particularly effective. Recommended.

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Down Beat : 02/20/1958
Ralph J. Gleason : 4 stars

If the so-called west coast jazz movement, with its dependence on tricks of arranging, classical devices, and a generally constrained emotional content, is slowly being eclipsed by the tougher fibered, more directly blues oriented east coast style – and there is a growing realization that this is happening – then the west coast product of the future will follow the lead of Curtis Counce.

Here in this group, Counce has merged the refinements of west coast musicianship with the solidly alive content of the easterners with a resultant end-product that is top notch jazz. This would easily rate five stars if there was only a trifle more excitement present and if the excursion into the Lyle Murphy 12-tone system (Councelation) was less of a technical exercise.

Aside from that, the warmth, fluidity, emotional content, musicianship, and all the rest is excellent. Butler comes through on this LP as an extraordinarily fine drummer with imagination and a great driving beat. Perkins, of course, is one of the better piano players on the coast, Counce is a superior bassist, and Harold Land is a consistently pleasing tenor. It was Jack Sheldon who was the most surprising to me. I had not heard him play with such conviction and certainly before. It is most agreeable.

Altogether, this is a fine album and continues to indicate that Counce may yet emerge as the leader of a new, revitalized Los Angeles school of jazz.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

This is the second set by the Curtis Counce Group. Of the first (Contemporary C3526) I had occasion to write in Down Beat that “it comes through with powerful integration for so new a combo,” and integration remains a clarifying term in trying to verbalize the heartening effect this unit has.

It is becoming intriguingly clear in modern jazz that the most durable and self-evolving way for a jazzman to tell his story is in the viable context of a group. We are apparently in a period of consolidation. On the one hand, the releasing self-discoveries of Bird, Dizzy, Bud Powell, Monk and other Tom Paines of the 40s are being absorbed with a natural authority by a new generation of musicians who grew up in the modern jazz language, and accordingly, suffer no strain in elasticizing and contracting it to their own personal needs of expression.

On the other hand, those musicians who have grown deepest during this time of language-toughening have been those who have been able temperamentally, and then economically, to become part of and remain with a group of a period of months, and in the most fortunate cases, years. It is not, certainly, that jazz is no longer a solo art, but a modern mainstream of jazz has returned to a setting for solos within a group expression that resembles in spirit, if not grammar, the collectively improvising combos in the south (and later Chicago and the mid-and-southwest) from about 1915-25, and longer in some places.

Although collective improvisation in a full rather than simply nominal sense remained a vital part of jazz development into and through the 30s, the emphasis had been placed on the soloist due to the extraordinary capacity of Louis Armstrong. After the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Louis was accompanied for years by variable orchestras and combos who, for the most part, played for more than they played with him. Similarly, many other major voices of the 30s, though they had groups from time to time, created and sustained their impact primarily as itinerant soloists – Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet, Frankie Newton, etc. Significantly, the most influential and lasting body of jazz in the 30s was made by the men who played in the two bands who were closest to the sustained experience of collective improvisation. There was the Basie band that included Lester Young, Jo Jones, Buck Clayton, Harry Edison and soul brothers; and the Duke Ellington Orchestra during that period when, although Duke, of course, was the creative maker of the band, much of his scores developed during rehearsals and on the job from suggestions and alterations made by the men themselves.

During the early battle for musical and economic survival of the boppers, most of the groups formed and played in by direction-setters like Bird and Dizzy were more frameworks for extended solos with opening and closing ensemble passages than they were serious attempts to create and develop group expression. There were exceptions like some of the Parker–Miles Davis experiences, but until the Miles Davis Capitol sessions of 1949-50, the relatively free-ranging solo concept of jazz self-expression in small combos had dominated most of modern jazz. It should also be noted, however, that for nearly all the 40s, it was usually hard enough for one modern jazzman to get work, let alone an organized group. The Miles Davis unit, which made the Capitol sides, for example, worked only two weeks in public.

The impetus of the “chamber group” Davis recordings together with the previously cited fact that the younger jazzmen no longer have to familiarize themselves with the language and can therefore concentrate more on other challenges besides just getting around on their horns in acceptable modern fashion – these and other factors have led in the 50s to a re-emphasis on group expression.

The success, musical, as well as popular, of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Gerry Mulligan‘s Quartet and Sextet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and more recently, the Jimmy Giuffre 3 has further encouraged thinking players to either form or find a group in which they emotionally and conceptually belong. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out, but possibly is, that being part of a group does not stifle a jazzman’s individuality. Max Roach, for example, acquired his largest public and himself grew most as a percussionist during these recent years when he has had an integrated unit. Shelly Manne who, like Max, would have continued to develop in any case, is nonetheless most effective and, I expect, most fulfilled as leader of his tensile, collectively building combo. And Miles Davis has never had as satisfying a period musically and financially without sacrificing any integrity as in the past two and a half years with his two groups. Even Monk has never been happier than now when he has his own steadily working combo.

There are always exceptions, of course, and when another nonpareil soloist arrives with the earth-turning individuality and power of a Charlie Parker, it won’t matter whether he has a group or not. But for this era in jazz the wise jazzmen are those who can think and feel and play collectively.

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This has been a long road to the Curtis Counce Group, but it may fill in the historical jazz connotations of the word “group,” especially in this decade. Or as Curtis says: “The feelings of the entire organization are interpreted by contributions from everyone to get just the right blending of sounds… Since organizing my group, I have felt a great amount of relaxed freedom to write, play and experiment. I also try to give each individual in the group the same freedom of expression, which in my estimation, makes a very compatible blend of unity.”

Biographical data on the members of the group is contained in the first album’s liner. Briefly, leader Counce was born in Kansas City, MO, January 27, 1926, has worked with Shorty Rogers and Stan Kenton,a nd started recording with Lester Young in 1946. He has been most influenced on his instrument by the late Jimmy Blanton, and is currently studying arranging and composing with Lyle “Spud” Murphy (Gond With the Woodwinds, Contemporary C3506).

Jack Sheldon was born in Jacksonville, FL, November 30, 1931, has worked with Howard Rumsey‘s Lighthouse All-Stars, was on Jimmy Giuffre’s Tangents album, and to poach from my review of the first Counce album, “Sheldon has steadily developed, adding bones to his essentially lyrical, deftly probing style and some flesh to his tone.”

Harold Land, an assertively emotional tenor, was born December 18, 1926, in Houston, TX. He became nationally seasoned during over a year of touring with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown group in 1954-55. His conception is rooted in Charlie Parker; his early models on tenor were Coleman Hawkins and Lucky Thompson; and as is logical of a Hawkins-Parker ear, he likes among his contemporaries Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.

Pianist Carl Perkins, born in Indianapolis, IN, August 16, 1928 is a particular favorite Miles Davis with whom he has worked as well as with Max Roach and other units. He is a pianist who doesn’t have to worry about whether he’s playing “funky”; all the currently favorable definitions of that word are instantly and naturally apparent in his work.

Drummer Frank Butler, born in Wichita, KS, February 18, 1928, had never recorded before his appearance on the first Counce set, a fact that surprised me in view of his unusually arresting taste, firm time and the further advantage that he makes his set sound crisply and attractively over a stimulating range of colors.

The songs are, with three exceptions, familiar and self-explanatory. Curtis’ inviting Complete provides a rewarding forum for all in the group to indicate their blues strength and individuality. Councelation, also by Curtis, was named by Bill Davis, conductor of the only jazz program in Denver as of this writing. It is Curtis’ first composition in the Lyle Murphy 12-tone system. The stretching Big Foot is by the late Charlie Parker.

The Curtis Counce Group has already traveled an impressive distance in achieving a group identity through, not in spite of, the clear individuality of each of its players. The whole, in so far as creative jazz combos are concerned, is not so much greater than the sum of its parts but is a further entity and extension of expression in addition to its parts.