Billboard : 03/24/1958

Attractive modern readings here by pianist George Wallington and his trio of show tune standards and a group of jazz classics, penned by Wallington himself. Show tunes include It’s All Right With Me, and The End of a Love Affair. Jazz classics are Wallington’s Godchild and Serendipity. Wallington is backed on these sides by T. Kotick on bass and N. Stabulas on drums. One of the best Wallington LP’s to date, and one that could appeal to more than a jazz audience.

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Cashbox : 05/03/1958

The group, led by Wallington’s expressive keyboard style, renders five originals and six standards. The evergreen items include The End Of A Love Affair, It’s All Right With Me, Will You Still Be Mine and In A Sentimental Mood. The trio is rounded out by Teddy Kotick (bass) and Nick Stabulas (drums). The musicians display a driving delivery and a great sense of timing. Top jazz addition.

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Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT)
Jack Bishop : 03/30/1958

He has no precise classification in the jazz field but George Wallington plays a good piano. He’s probably closest to the bop kick but, continuing his mystery, he appears on a new Atlantic Records LP as a pianist dedicated to the sweeping style of playing that is associated with show tune scores. Album’s called Knight Music by the Wallington Trio and, by George, George gains gloriously with such numbers as It’s All Right With Me, Will You Still Be Mine and his own composition, Up Jumped The Devil. But actually Wallington should have done this thing solo for the boys behind him, drums and bass, seem too scared to bark.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : May 1958

Wallington, a neat, precise pianist whose approach is intellectual rather than emotional, goes about his business calmly and without flourishes (or much excitement) in turning out one side of originals and one of sophisticated ballads.

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Metronome
Bill Coss : September 1958

A review of Jazz at Hotchkiss (Savoy MG 12122), Atlantic 1275 (“the best of the lot”), and The Prestidigitator (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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Miami Herald (Miami, FL)
Fred Sherman : 08/03/1958

Another thoughtful man at the piano keyboard is George Wallington. With Nick Stabulas on drums and Teddy Kotick at the bass, Wallington plays 11 compositions for an album called Knight Music (Atlantic 1275). The five on the opening side are Wallington compositions. The moods are contrasting. I enjoyed the happy skipping feeling in three minutes of Serendipity. The flip side offers five standards plus Noel Coward’s World Weary.

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Miami News (Miami, FL)
William G. Moeser : 06/01/1958
Two stars

George Wallington, perhaps best known for his bop compositions, Lemon Drop, and Godchild, is presented on an Atlantic release, Knight Music (1275). The post-bop influence has been strongly exerted in Wallington’s playing — even to nicely toning down Godchild. But he is a resourceful, romping pianist and backed by drummer Nicky Stabulas and Teddy Kotick playing bass, George sets forth on his “knightly” crusade with aplomb and vigor. The fidelity is excellent.

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

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 Leonard Feather

The career of George Wallington has followed a strange and seldom predictable pattern. Though he was a part of the bop movement early enough to qualify as a Pioneer First Grade, he remained completely unknown outside New York until the late 1940s, because of his failure to storm the recording studios. Though his best known compositions are such bop standards as Lemon Drop and Godchild, he has sought in recent years to find a niche in Tin Pan Alley, collaborating with lyric writers in the endless search for the elusive overnight hit song. Though his associations as a jazz pianist have been established in the history-making company of Gillespie, Parker and Roach, he has become adept in the art of catering to the sophisticated type of night club audience that likes to listen to show tunes. These adaptable keyboard characteristics are here represented in two effectively contrasted sides, the first comprising original compositions, the second devoted to East-Side-type standards.

The road along which George has traveled to this dually effectual objective began on Oct. 27, 1924 in Palermo, Sicily. George’s father, an opera singer, immigrated to this country the following year. Even as a schoolboy George was showing signs of developing into the suave clothes-horse he was to become; his reputation as a potential Tailored Man soon earned him the nickname “Lord Wallington.” His interest in an academic career was perhaps less passionate, for in 1940 he quit high school before his sixteenth birthday and began gigging in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn night clubs.

Thus catapulted into the world of professional musicians, George might have been expected to resemble an amateur photographer’s first work, underdeveloped and overexposed. Fortunately, during those formative years, he ran into a few men who were to act as inadvertent signposts, guiding him to a future in modern jazz. He met Max Roach. He ran into a wonderful pianist, the late Clarence Profit, whom he recalls as an important early influence. Soon he found himself working with a guitar player named Rector Bailey in a small Greenwich Village cellar bistro, the name of which he dimly recalls may have been the Welcome Inn.

“Max used to come in, and Little Benny Harris and Charlie Parker. Then Jerry Hurwitz, the trumpet player, introduced me to Dizzy Gillespie. I guess Jerry gave me a big buildup with Diz, ’cause soon after that I ran into Diz one day, when I was out of work and he was looking for a piano player, and he offered me the job. I’d never even heard him play at that time.”

“We went into rehearsal with Don Byas, Max Roach and Oscar Pettiford, and a week later we opened at the Onyx Club. I guess this was in 1944. We stayed there about six months. After word got around about Diz, the place did big business and pretty soon it was packed every night.” If the members of this historic quintet, actually the first bop band ever to play on 52nd Street, were aware of their pioneering roles, they showed no signs of it. “The job was a ball,” George recalls. “Dizzy would dance and clown around and new tunes would grow out of improvisations so fast that the men would have to remind one another to write them down.”

George recalls two surprising facts concerning this period. The group made some test records with Sarah Vaughan at the Nola Studios that were never released; and when Byas left the band, his immediate replacement was Lester Young. “Diz was trying to get Charlie Parker,” says George, “but Charlie didn’t have a horn. So Lester came in and worked a few days. He sounded terrific — the way he always sounds. Then Budd Johnson took over for the rest of the time at the Onyx.”

Though it is automatically assumed that Wallington developed his style by listening to Bud Powell, the remarkable fact is that he had never heard him until one night when Bud came and sat in at the Onyx. “Rector Bailey had told me about Bud. He said, ‘This is someone who thinks along the same lines as you do.’ But I never heard him until that night he sat in at the club. Of course, I was amazed.”

After the Onyx gig ended, George moved down the street to the Hickory House, where he put in a year with a curiously attractive band that combined traditional and modern jazz, under the leadership of the veteran clarinetist Joe Marsala, with Chuck Wayne on guitar. Later he drifted from combo to combo. For no particular reason, during this entire period, a germinative phase for bop in general and George in particular, he made no records; his first sessions as a sideman were made in the late 1940s and it was not until the early ’50s that he completed his initial date as a leader.

Aside from a couple of chaotic weeks with Lionel Hampton’s band in Scandinavia several years ago, George has never played in a big band and has never worked abroad. He rarely leaves New York City, preferring to lead a trio (or occasionally a quintet) in one of the local clubs, and spending much of his time in his upper West side apartment working on new material to build up his ASCAP credits. An introverted, bashful and often uncommunicative personality, he opens up when the conversation turns to music, clothes, sports cars, or radio transmitters — George is a “ham” and if you would care to contact him for further details about this album, his call letters are W2DSE.

On these sides, George is backed by Teddy Kotick, who was playing bass with him on a club date at the time, and Nick Stabulas, the drummer who has been with him off and on for a couple of years.

Godchild, written in 1949, is best known through its associations with the Miles Davis band, for which Gerry Mulligan orchestrated it. In this treatment, George plays the original melody on the release, which has never before been used, and uses Mulligan’s out chorus in a keyboard adaptation of Miles’ record.

Serendipity was named after a shop on East 58th Street patronized by the urbane Mr. Wallington. The word, which you may find in some of the bulkier dictionaries, means the art of finding something unusual, by chance or sagacity, and of recognizing the value of your discovery. In its present musical connotation Serendipity is a fast-tempo series of choruses marked by the Wallington brand of inspiration, continuity and technical agility. George says that John Ore, the bass player, helped with the development of this theme.

Billie’s Tune is one of a number of compositions produced by George’s publicist wife and the first of these to earn the husbandly seal of approval in the form of a recording. The Ghostly Lover is a relaxed, moderato performance. Up Jumped The Devil, of which George says “One of my pupils, Henry Carino, helped me write this,” is of course not related to the similarly titled work recorded in the 1940s by Earl Hines’ band. It has an ambiance strongly evoking Bud Powell’s Un Poco Loco.

On the second side the show tunes are subjected to a resourceful amalgamation of careful respect for the melody and Wallingtonian recourse to improvisation. Cole Porter’s It’s All Right With Me has a lengthy structure – 16, 16, 16 and 24 measures respectively in each segment of the chorus — that makes for easier continuity. The End Of A Love Affair (1950) is delineated with a sort of rhumba-beguine beat. Matt Dennis’ Will You Still Be Mine, first introduced by Connie Haines with the Tommy Dorsey band in 1941, is another long-chorus tune (16-16-8-16). Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood, a lovely ballad that has survived the test of time for 23 years, is played slowly in a melodic style for which George is no less completely equipped. World Weary, a 1928 Noel Coward tune which George came across while leafing through a book of tunes sent him by a publisher, is treated with swinging simplicity right down to its shave-and-a-haircut coda. The side closes with One Night Of Love, the 1934 popular song composed by Victor Schertzinger, the motion picture director, who died in 1941.

These are the two sides of George Wallington, the knight in immaculate armour. Conceivably other sides of his protean personality will be revealed in due course. Perhaps he will be lucky with a few songs, and some day there may be an album (not on this label) called Oscar Peterson Plays George Wallington. Or possibly he will be the winner in a new Down Beat poll category for the Best Dressed Musician of the Year. No matter in which direction the future may take him, it can be safely assumed that George Wallington will not be satisfied until he has done to perfection whatever job is demanded of him. The evidence can be found in everything that has happened along the road from Greenwich Village to 52nd Street to the land of Noel Coward and serendipity.