Cashbox : 10/13/1956

Earl Coleman is a vocalist, who, in the late 1940’s, created a stir, but was sidelined because of illness. This release has the expressive, deep-voiced singer easing his way through 8 tunes, standards and originals. Backing Coleman is a 7 man combo including Art Farmer (trumpet) and Gigi Gryce (alto). Those who recall Coleman’s earlier career, and jazz fans wanting to acquaint themselves with a top-drawer vocalist, ought to investigate this Prestige issue.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 10/14/1956

Earl Coleman Returns may launce a new career for this little man with the big voice. Coleman started in 1939 and his course since has been marked by more ups and downs than a roller coaster. He has sung with such as Earl Hines, Jay McShann, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron and Gene Ammons, but has made few records. Today, because of a bronchial condition, he has an occasional catch in his voice which seems to add to, rather than detract from his phrasing. Coleman gets exemplary back from pianist Hank Jones, trumpeter Art Farmer, bassists Wendell Marshall and Oscar Pettiford (three sides each), altoist Gigi Gryce (on three), and drummers Shadow Wilson and Wilbert Hogan (three each). The arrangements allow the two groups plenty of blowing room on their own, of which they make good use.

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Pittsburgh Courier : 10/27/1956
Harold L. Keith : 4 stars

This is a disc made to order for a lovelorn bachelor.

All that the “wolf” has to do is lure the unsuspecting female into his lair, put on Prestige’s disc, Earl Coleman Returns and let this throaty appealing singer turn on the heat.

Earl Coleman is a convincing singer… so convincing that it is a mystery as to why this voice has not achieved the heights that it should in comparison with other singers of more meager ability.

On this disc Coleman sings a sextet of ballads, including, It’s You or No One, Say It Isn’t So, Come Rain or Come Shine, Reminiscing, No Love, No Nothin’ and Social Call.

He is backed up by Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Hank Jones, Oscar Pettiford, Wendell Marshall, Shadow Wilson and Wilbert Hogan. Coleman’s return is a good one. He has lost none of his pleading delivery which was memorably displayed on the new defunct Dial label’s Dark Shadows, This is Always and Yardbird Suite.

This reviewer was “charged” by Reminiscing which received all of the throaty, appealing delivery that Coleman could muster. On this particular item, Coleman succeeds in impairing an air of nostalgia to the listener. One can almost feel the warmth that Earl has in his remarkable voice.

Beautiful too is the background treatment given the Coleman vocals by Gryce, Farmer and company. Gigi shows up well on It’s You or No One and on Say It Isn’t So we find Hank Jones’ delicate touching lending a haunting air to a strange treatment of this oldie. The item features an off-beat rhythm upon which Art Farmer’s trumpet goes to town.

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Down Beat : 05/02/1957
Dom Cerulli

Baritone Earl Coleman, who sang with Charlie Parker and other groups in the bop and postbop era, is back on the recorded scene with an entry called, Earl Coleman Returns. The rich, resonant baritone is reminiscent of early Billy Eckstine, with whom Coleman traveled and, on occasion, filled in for.

There’s an edge in the voice now, a bite that makes it quite authoritative, even on the ballads.

Earl sings Say It Isn’t So; Reminiscing; Social Call; It’s You or No One; Come Rain or Come Shine, and No Love, No Nothin’ accompanied by a group including Art Farmer, trumpet; Gigi Gryce, alto; Hank Jones, piano, and Oscar Pettiford and Wendell Marshall, bass. Jones, Gryce and Farmer have some fine spots of blowing on nearly every track.

Coleman is at his deep-voiced best on Say It Isn’t So, Reminiscing (written by Gryce and John Hendricks), and Social Call.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

This is the Earl Coleman story. I don’t think you’ve heard it before. Many of you have never heard his name much less his story, for although he has been well known and appreciated by musicians for a long time, he has been unpublicized and virtually unrecorded in the last five years. His story is an interesting one not only for Earl himself but for the glimpse of days that have left us – the happy days when bands were in abundance and in motion all over the country, breeding ideas and producing talent.

Born in Port Huron, Michigan on August 12, 1925, Earl found himself transplanted to Leland, Mississippi at the age of two, when his parents decided to move. He remembers that his mother could sing “pretty well.”

In high school at Leland, Earl had an agriculture teacher who “knew music and played the saxophone.” Earl had been inspired by Dan Grissom, a Leland boy who was the vocal star with Jimmy Lunceford‘s band. When Dan would visit the town during a Lunceford lay-off it was a big event. Dan’s nephew Jimmy, now singing with Duke Ellington, was a couple of grades beneath me but we used to hang out together. The two boys listened to records, discussed singing and sang. When Earl heard Billy Eckstine‘s record of Wait Till It Happens To You, he realized what could be done with a baritone voice, “that it could be real pretty.” He repeated asked the teacher to give the class music lessons. Since he was only getting paid for teaching agriculture, he refused and became very irritated with Earl, who reacted by quitting school. If no one would teach him, he would have to teach himself. That summer of 1938, Earl hitchhiked to Chicago, stayed for the summer and “starved to death” before hitchhiking home.

One Sunday, shortly after his return, he sang at Pineywoods (a school noted for its music) with Don Clifton’s Collegians. Mr. Lawrence C. Jones, headmaster of the school, liked what he heard and Earl was given a scholarship.

After a year at Pineywoods, Earl headed for Chicago again, not the green kid of 1938 but still not ready for the big town as he soon found out. Auditions were being held at the Club De Lisa and he hurried out there. It was there he heard Leroy Felton, known professionally as “Bling” Williams. “What a thrill. He was the greatest. I decided they didn’t need another singer at the De Lisa or in the whole town of Chicago.”

Late in 1939 Earl went to Indianapolis. There, he remembers, he met Matthew Gee (“most underrated trombone player in the business”) who was playing with the Trenier twins. The Treniers heard Earl at the Cotton Club there and got him a job with Clarence Love’s band which was in the process of leaving town on a bus. “They told me to get on and we drove back to the office. Love told the other singer to get off just on the Trainers’ word.”

After a month with Love, Earl left to replace Melvin Moore (“a very underrated singer – been singing good for 17 years at least”) in the Ernie Field‘s band during a period when Moore was recovering from an injury. The female vocalist was Helen Humes.

Next stop on the Coleman tour was the West Coast where he sang with Bardu Ali‘s band at the Lincoln Theatre. In the trombone section was Melba Liston.

Leaving Ali, Earl set up a new base of operations during 1942-43 in Kansas City where he sang at the Chez Paree. Charlie Parker who was then playing tenor with Earl Hines used to come in to listen to Earl and talk with him. Jay McShann came into town and Earl replaced Al Hibbler who was leaving to join Duke Ellington. Jay had a swinging band which included John Jackson (“the only other cat besides Bird who was playing that style at the time”) on alto, Willie Cook, trumpet, Paul Quinchette, tenor and Gene Ramey, bass. At the end of 1943 Earl’s “dream came true” and he replaced his idol, Eckstine, in the Earl Hines band. There was Wardell Gray, playing alto at the time, Willie Cook again, and Sarah Vaughan “another inspiration” to him.

Earl’s next job was with the band of Chicago trumpeter King Kolax. In Indianapolis where “bands used to lay-off a lot” he met Jay Jay Johnson who was working as a dishwasher. Earl reminisces, “Jay Jay was wailing but he didn’t think so. Benny Carter‘s band was in town and he needed a trombone player. I told him about Jay and then persuaded Jay to go down and audition. He joined the band and has been knocking everyone out since.”

In 1944 Earl came to New York and immediately looked up Wardell Gray who has been his best friend in Hines’s band. Like most of the musicians living uptown at that time, Wardell was at the Dewey Square Hotel (others were at the Cecil). Earl expressed a desire to meet B (Billy Eckstine had been known by this signification) and Wardell took him to an Eckstine band rehearsal. B took Earl under his wing and he traveled with the band until the end of the year even standing in for Billy when the latter was ill one time in Baltimore.

The experience with Eckstine was invaluable but Earl had to start singing on his own again and the pattern of the past continued. He was on the move once more. Newport News, Virginia was next and he also “got myself a wife.” Money became scarce and Earl returned to Leland for a while before embarking on a series of jobs singing out of Memphis, Tennessee. He covered the states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas too. In 1945, after singing with a band out of Little Rock, he met and joined Jay McShann again and went to California with the band. There he saw Eckstine again and did his first record date for Keynote. The personnel for the records, which were never released, included Gene Ammons, Miles Davis and Art Blakey then of the Eckstine band.

Charlie Parker came out to the Coast in 1946 and Earl sang at numerous sessions with him. California was not ready for Bird’s music (“as usual the musicians dug him”) and disappointments and frustrations mounted up, culminating in a nervous breakdown. Before his illness, Bird had promised Earl that he would use him on his next record date. When Bird left Camarillo in 1947, he kept his word. As a result Earl cut This Is Always and the Blues Dark Shadows.

When it was released in 1948, This Is Always became a hit and on the strength of it Earl opened at New York’s Apollo Theatre in a Symphony Sid package. For some strange reason he was closed out after the first show of the day. They told him he couldn’t sing with a small group, that his voice needed a big band. On the same night, however, he opened at the Royal Roost in the first modern jazz bill ever to reach Broadway. For two weeks Earl sang with a band that included Allen Eager, Miles Davis, Kai Winding, Tadd Dameron, Curley Russell and Max Roach. This was an apex in Earl’s career and from 1948 through 1950 he free-lanced in New York but did not work too often. In this period he did record two more dates. One was for Dial with Fats Navarro, Don Lanphere and Linton Garner and included Yardbird Suite, Stranger In Town, Guilty and As Time Goes By. The last two titles were also issued on Prestige at one time. The other date was for Atlantic and had Allen Eager, Linton Garner and Kenny Clarke on it. Only I Hadn’t Anyone Till You and a blues, Don’t Bring Your Troubles To Me, were released. These and the Dial sides are virtually impossible to obtain now. If there were any collectors left, they might be considered “items.”

The Fifties have been years of bleakness for Earl. His comeback with Gene Ammons’ band in 1954 was hampered by a bronchial condition and it was not until the sessions went into the making of this LP that the Earl Coleman baritone, which moved many of us in the late Forties, returned to its former resonant warmth. The occasional crying catch of slight hoarseness (a pre-bronchitis characteristic) is still there, ever identifying and adding expression to many of his phrases. Though he may be lithe and slight in stature, Earl Coleman is a man with a big voice.

The tunes and musicians for this album were equally well chosen. Ex. Earl’s plaintive Come Rain Or Come Shine with Gigi Gryce‘s obbligatos, the pleading Say It Isn’t So in a different and interesting tempo and the beautifully painful nostalgia of Reminiscing (written by Gigi Gryce & Jon Hendricks) with sensitive Hank Jones backing and touching muted horn by Art Farmer; these are more than just a guy singing a “pretty” ballad. It’s like a good jazz musician playing a tune with a bare minimum of improvisation. The message is still delivered through the actual and implied feeling.

Earl had some afterthoughts to the interview in which I learned much of the information about his career. His favorite singers have been “Bing” Williams (“he recorded The Very Thought Of You years ago with Benny Carter but it didn’t do him justice”), Billy Eckstine, Perry Como, Dick Haymes, Nat Cole, Arthur Prysock, Melvin Moore; he also likes newcomers Bob Manning, Danny Knight, Joe Medlin and Nolan Lewis. His greatest helpers have been Red Callender, Charlie Parker and Billy Eckstine with special mention to Hank Jones “a wonderful pianist who was most helpful throughout the recording dates.”