Billboard : 07/15/1957
Score of 79

Issue coincides with similar release on Columbia. An essentially boppish package that is better than most of its kind. Imaginative solo performances, integration and obviously empathy among the players, and full-boded arrangements by leader Gryce, pianist Legge and trumpeter Don Byrd make the difference. If shown, sheer provocative soloing will sell jazz buyer.

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Audio 
Charles A. Robertson : October, 1957

As contrasted to the established unit or a pickup group, the Jazz Lab Quintet is described as a cooperative. In this case, it means that compatible musicians are banded together under a nominal leader, and have made reasonable preparations before the recording date in the hope it will help in getting bookings. Altoist and leader Gigi Gryce joins with Donald Byrd, the rising young trumpeter from Detroit, in a reworking of the basic bop formula, freshening it with well-thought-out, well-arranged passages designed to give impulse to the rhythmic and melodic ideas of the soloists.

The increasingly popular practice in these circles of taking an old tune and showing how much inventiveness can be applied without straying too far from the melody is used in Zing Went the Strings of My Heart and Love for Sale, which is put into 6/8 time. Pianist Wade Legge contributes the ballad Geraldine, and has a highly individual blues solo in Straight Ahead. Gryce’s Minority and Lee Sear’s Wake Up! are uptempo romps. Drummer Art Taylor knows how to make himself felt without intruding on the soloists, and is helped by Wendell Marshall, former Ellington bass.

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Hartford Courant
Jack Bishop : 10/20/1957

Raised right here in Hartford, that’s alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, and right here in Hartford you can check his new Riverside LP called Gigi Gryce and the Jazz Lab Quintet. Most difficult to classify is the Gryce sound, for while it’s alternatively swinging then moody, it’s not run-of-the-mill modern. Take, for instance, one rendition, Love for Sale, with each of the five musicians developing a separate melodic line! Gee, Gigi!

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 06/30/1957
Album of the Week

This is modern jazz at its best with a Parkerish approach yet a definitely post-bop sound. The group has something to say and, unlike some progressive groups, they swing. Standout track is Love For Sale which engenders a wealthy of invigorating rhythmic and melodic ideas. If you’re a progressive fan, get a copy NOW because, Jack, this is a gasser!

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 09/29/1957

Original tunes by Gryce and other Eastern jazz men played by the Jazz Lab Quintet which is chiefly noteworthy for the trumpet playing of Donald Byrd. Two of Byrd’s arrangements, Love for Sale and Zing, Went the Strings of my Heart are the best things here. It is all played in a peculiarly tight and semi-formal style.

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Virginian-Pilot
Robert C. Smith : 08/18/1957

Of the numerous “cooperative” groups which have sprung up for recording or gigging purposes, one of the most interesting is the Jazz Lab Quintet of Gigi Gryce, Don Byrd, Art Taylor, Wendell Marshall, and Wade Legge. Its most valuable possessions are the fine writing of Gryce, as well as his alto work, Byrd’s cleanly conceived trumpet, and a solid rhythmic underpinning. This makes for an excellent quintet set on Riverside and a worthwhile pairing on Columbia (CL 998). Legge gets off some intriguing piano work in the Riverside set, which utilizes the quintet alone. The Columbia release has three quintet numbers and others augmented by four more horns. The group swings inventively.

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Down Beat : 10/03/1957
Ralph J. Gleason : 4.5 stars

The Jazz Lab obviously has its Bunsen burners cooking these days, and the results are fine. The fact that there is sometimes an air of reaching for effect is all that keeps his otherwise splendid performance from 5 stars.

A good deal of the reason, of course, is that the music ability of the group as a unit and individually is quote high. Both LPs were made early in 1957, and although the Columbia sides have shifting personnel, there is still a cohesion that is felt throughout.

Byrd seems to be rapidly approaching maturity as a soloist. He plays here with feeling, confidence and a steady flow of ideas. His solo on Benny Golson‘s I Remember Clifford is particularly memorable, and he cut another good one on Rainbow. He is the solo star of the dates, although Gryce, especially in the first half of his statement on Rainbow plays excellently.

There is little difference in performance between, the two LPs.

There are different instrumentations used on the Columbia disc, which makes it varied in appeal, and it also possesses the two best numbers – Speculation, one of the best jazz tunes in recent years, and I Remember Clifford, the best track on either LP.

The Riverside album offers a brace of old friends in new clothes – Love for Sale and Zing! Went the Strings, in which Byrd’s intriguing arrangements steal the show. Of Gryce’s originals, the exotic Sans Souci appeals to the most, with its whispering echo of other days.

On the Columbia disc, Speculation and Nica’s Temple bear favorable comparison to other performances of the same numbers by Gryce. If anything, the solos on Speculation are better there than on the Signal version, although the basic arrangement is the same.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This album marks the first joint appearance on records of a group that will – if there is any justice in the world – go on to make a considerable name for itself in modern jazz circles.

Of course, as well all know, there is no real assurance that there is any justice in today’s jazz world. More than a few impressively talented and ambitiously planned groups have quickly fallen apart for a variety of reasons (often including just plain failure to get enough bookings). But if talent, fresh ideas, and a degree of level-headed determination that is astonishingly rare on the current jazz scene (or, for that matter, on any other scene) are a strong enough combination to make the grade, then Gigi Gryce and his associates have to make it.

There is, in a group like this, solid reason for optimism about the future of jazz. For here are five musicians, all young but all well-seasoned by experience, proving by their own example that there is an almost limitless quantity of valid, moving, enjoyable music to be derived from the (more or less) standard materials of current jazz.

It is, admittedly, rather deceptive and unfair to refer to “standard materials.” For what is going on here is really altogether out of the ordinary. On the one hand, these are not innovators and experimenters in any wild, far-out sense of those words. (They are actually a bit concerned that the name chosen for the group might give an inaccurate impression that they are trying to be a “laboratory” of arbitrary and artificial ‘new sounds for the sake of newness.’) If you are the sort who insists on labels for music, you can safely place these men in the post-bop school of jazz. But you have to go on from there. For what is taking place in this Jazz Lab really is experimentation – of a non-esoteric, but nonetheless extremely unusual and valuable kind. It is, you can say, an attempt to push the boundaries of the kind of jazz these men love best as far forward as possible, but without making any drastic alterations of its shape or form.

Jazz forms, no matter how radical they may have been when first introduced, inevitably tend to grow stale and cliché-ridden if they continue to be approached in the same way and from the same direction year after year. The most obvious solution to this problem is to throw the old form away, or to keep the merest shell of it, and strike out in all sorts of new directions. This is what quite a few jazz artists have been doing in the past few years, with widely varying degrees of success. But the approach that Gigi Gryce has been taking, in his writing and playing, and now in his work as the guiding hand of this quintet, is both simpler and less obvious, perhaps more difficult and surely every bit as valid. As demonstrated on this LP, it involves enriching and re-invigorating the basic bop formula, rather than abandoning it – adding fresh rhythmic and melodic ideas, and effectively combining full-bodied arrangements with the freshness and enthusiasm of gifted young musicians who are themselves not the slightest bit stale or cliched.

The two horns here, Gryce and the exceptionally rich-toned young trumpeter Donald Byrd, possess extremely lyrical and melodic talents; they, and the rhythm section they are working with, have a great deal of fire and swing. And they all have the imagination and musical courage to take material that doesn’t necessarily seem particularly jazz-oriented (like the two standards in this album, Love for Sale and Zing Went the Strings of My Heart) and transform them into quite exciting jazz adventures. Take for example Love for Sale, as arranged by Byrd (with some assistance from Gryce and Ed Thigpen). Not only is it put into 6/8 time, but careful listening reveals that each of the five instruments is developing a separate melodic line. (Credit some particularly deft and sensitive engineering by Jack Higgins in helping to bring this off successfully.)

Another extremely non-“standard” feature here is that the Jazz Lab Quintet is a band, not just a haphazard collection of individuals. Group skill, the ability to mesh together, is by no means synonymous with individual talent, as ever so many “all star” recordings should have proven by now. This is a carefully chosen unit: Gryce, Byrd, and drummer Art Taylor, who are its nucleus, have a particularly strong rapport. And it is Gryce’s almost unique idea that talent, although it counts for a lot, is not all. He believes in such strange details as being familiar with an arrangement before you start recording it, and above all he believes it important that a group be entirely made up of men mature enough to “mean business,” who work well together, who think along similar lines and respect each other’s contributions. (Gigi is the leader, but in such matters as working out the concrete application of an idea or an arrangement, the band is a cooperative.) If such an approach succeeds, it could really revolutionize the music business.

Some notes on the personnel: Gigi Gryce, born in Florida (in 1927) and raised in Hartford, CT, has studied composition at the Boston Conservatory and, as a Fulbright Scholar, in Paris. A close friend of Charlie Parker‘s during his last years, Gigi is nevertheless one of the few current alto players to speak with his own voice more than with Birds’s… Donald Byrd, part of the recent wave of highly promising young jazz talent to come East from Detroit, is a trumpeter of great warmth and impressive technical skill, and widely regarded as the coming star on his instrument… Art Taylor, a hard swinger in the Blakey–Roach vein, but with a still-developing subtlety of his own, is currently among the most in-demand drummers for record dates in New York… Wendell Marshall, who was with Duke Ellington for seven years, has also provided a firm beat on innumerable recordings… Wade Legge, an impressive young pianist who spent two years with Dizzy Gillespie, also indicates his writing abilities here with the ballad Geraldine.