Cash Box : 10/27/1956

This five man combo, headed here by Gil Mellé (baritone sax), swing lightly but persuasively through several Mellé composed numbers and two standards. A noteworthy gift of this ensemble is a clarity of contrapuntal ideas, a product, no doubt, of solid integration among the performers. Joe Cinderella‘s breezy guitar is one of highlights here. Strong bill of fare for the jazz coterie.

—–

Down Beat : 12/12/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4 stars

On Patterns in Jazz, writer-baritone saxist Gil Mellé uses a basic unit of guitarist Joe Cinderella, Oscar Pettiford, and Ed Thigpen. They’re on the two longer tracks, Arab, and Question. On the others, Eddie Bert is added. Because of the consistent quality of musicianship by all concerned, and Mellé’s thoughtful frameworks, this is an above-average LP. Pettiford is big and dependable; Thigpen indicates once more not only how tasteful a drummer he is but how sensitively he feels and can measure dynamics. It’s a mystery why he is used so relatively seldom on jazz record dates. Bert, the young old pro of jazz trombonists, is a valuable added voice.

Mellé plays some of his best horn on records in so far as extended improvisation is concerned. He has apparently relaxed as a soloist; and consequently his tone is warmer, his phrasing more rolling, and his beat more fluid. Although the writing is not as cohesive and provocative as on his recent Prestige set (Down Beat, Oct. 31), Mellé’s lines are attractive and he avoids the easy cliché. Because it is more personally Mellé, I prefer the Prestige LP, but this, too, is worthwhile, and those who’d rather hear more extended blowing will particularly dig it.

—–

Liner Notes by Barry Ulanov

The answer to the question everyone must ask about every album nowadays – “Why this one?” – is contained in the opening measures of the opening piece. It’s an up-tempo romp that comes out swinging and never stops – swinging, that is. The Set Break it’s called, and as you’ll hear, for obvious reasons: it is that set break, a bumptious staccato figure, that is blown by everybody, along and together. Because it is primarily a rhythm ramble, fittingly enough the concluding sequence of three choruses and coda which give the listening to the Break his biggest break. In that stimulating exchange, bass and drums pluck and thump fours at each other for a chorus; then each of the horns steps up in turn to take his four-bar break in alternation with the drums; and finally, there is the ensemble again, more brusque and engaging than before in the short drive home.

The answer to the question? It’s jazz, man; five musicians pushing time and pulling ideas out of a couple of familiar tunes and four sets of figures devised for the occasion by their leader, arranger-composer-baritone saxist Gil Mellé. And it’s relaxed; the only tensions are the agreeable ones necessary between improvising musicians to keep them playing together on the same number of bars from the beginning or the end of any given chorus. And it’s handsomely played, too; it has to be with a tonal specialist like Ed Thigpen drumming, making his skins really sound, and a bass player of the elegant authority of Oscar Pettiford, with a trombonist of the experience and equipment of Eddie Bert, with Gil’s own moving horn, and as always in any Mellé album, with an imaginative guitarist of commanding plectral skills in a vital position in each of the performances. In Gil’s first album it was Tal Farlow; in this second, Lou Mecca; now, it is Joe Cinderella, a Jerseyite of large resources both as a melodist and rhythm-maker. Joe follows his distinguished predecessors with ease and with every sort of feeling for the delicacies of time and texture which give GIl’s sets their identifying tang.

Beat and sound, then, are well represented here by a quintet of professionals. To begin with and to end it’s first, the beat: in the Break, which, mixing medical and jazz parlance, can be called a fracture, and in the breakaway Long Ago and Far Away, in which Jerome Kern is thoroughly rocked, particularly by an eager, effervescent Eddie Bert, who leads from strength and plays a loud and lively lead in the lusty jazz piece Gil’s quintet makes of the tune for which the film Cover Girl may be best remembered in future. Even in the misterioso mood of Weird Valley there is no mistaking the swinging motion; and in the wonderfully loose Arab Barber Blues, the listener’s foot moves all the time, swinging from the hip, keeping time with Gil and Joe as they blow chorus after chorus in tribute to a tonsorial artist from ancient Araby now doing duty behind a New Jersey chair – barber’s chair, that is. And then still more of the same in Nice Question, which lilts along just a little more forcefully than the Barber.

In the thoroughly slowed-down groove of Moonlight in Vermont, it’s the sound that counts, whether ensemble or solo, although the beat is not neglected, either in the rhythmic accents Oscar and Ed mark so clearly or in the chords with which Joe back Gil’s baritone speculations and Oscar’s lovely bass meditation before taking over himself. Eddie Bert has some handsome husky measures in Moonlight too, to make the track fully representative of the large skills of all five men.

There’s more sounding, prettily persuasive sounding, by Gil and Joe in the Valley, in the Blues, and in the Question, separately and together. Each demonstrates a wide acquaintance with the similarities of his instrument, solo and in combination. Each makes his points with such ease that one might easily miss the full implications of that very ease. For these are, as indicated above, pros – men who have the authority and the articulateness on their instruments that call for respectful attention, and really more than mere attention (no matter how respectful), absorption.

In their own quiet, well-mannered, excellently tutored way, Gil Mellé and Eddie Bert and (I would just from these performances) Joe Cinederella, Oscar Pettiford and Ed Thigpen go about their reading and writing, arranging and improvising, laying down and picking up lines as the music and the mood demand. These are the achievements of authentic jazzmen.

An achievement as well is the contribution of Gil, all of it, not only those parts of it outlined and praised above, in each of his record dates, this young man, still in his early twenties, has gathered together topnotch jazzmen to play his own music and his own versions of other men’s tunes. He has elicited superb playing from his colleagues and played at their high level himself. Quite an achievement, his, and the ultimate reason, actually, for this album, the answer, really, to the question with which I opened my notes and comment on this album, an album which I at least very much enjoyed from beginning to end.