Audio 
Charles A. Robertson : February, 1962

Words of praise always greet the initial recording of a jazz veteran staging a comeback, but everything depends on what is said after the third or fourth time around. Howard McGhee has steadily improved since returning to the studios with a version of the score to the “The Connection” on Felsted, and each of his albums is better than the one before. On a Bethlehem set and an appearance with Teddy Edwards on another Contemporary release, McGhee demonstrates that he can hold his own with the new crop of trumpet players. Now, stepping out with only a rhythm section, McGhee meets the supreme test and passes with flying colors by simply playing what he feels. “After I got myself together,” McGhee explains, “I began listening to what all the guys were doing, and I decided to play like me. I don’t play like I used to play, running up and down the horn and hitting the high notes. Now I play what I feel.”

At forty-three, McGhee no longer worries about current trends or fashions, but utilizes everything learned over the years to create a timeless style. He knows the blues from before the swing era, remembers the story of bop from the inside, and is mature enough now to play ballads with controlled passion and melodic imagination. The temptation to show off his old technical prowess and speed wins out briefly, however, and he whips up considerable excitement on Brownie Speaks, and his own Demon Chase. Teddy Edwards contributes Sunset Eyes, and the hearty welcome of the title tune. McGhee is complete master of all he surveys on Willow Weep for Me, and Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise. After winning attention as a young piano virtuoso, Phineas Newborn also is rapidly acquiring a sense of maturity and emotional directness, and his pointed dialogues with McGhee come off brilliantly in stereo. Leroy Vinnegar, bass, and drummer Shelly Manne give the quartet a buoyant foundation. Not only does McGhee attain a new peak, but he somehow compresses into the short span of a single set all the experience of a lifetime.

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Lafayette Journal and Courier
Frank Arganbright : 12/23/1961

Maggie’s Back in Town! is the title of another Contemporary stereo LP with Howard McGhee on trumpet, Shelly Manne on drums, Phineas Newborn Jr. on piano, and Leroy Vinnegar on bass. This is a very good array of talent. The group has a lot of class as they perform Willow Weep for Me, Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise, Summertime, and Brownie Speaks. “Maggie” is a nickname for McGhee. This is an informal session, mostly in good taste and spirited. The weakest part of the program is Demon Chase.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 02/25/1962

Maggie’s Back in Town features the return of Howard McGhee to the recording studio of Contemporary records in Los Angeles. This is one of the best quartet albums of recent months. The McGhee trumpet is a relaxed one, mixing informally here with Shelly Manne‘s drums, Leroy Vinnegar‘s bass and the piano of Phineas Newborn. Teddy Edwards, one of the brighter jazz writers today, contributed the title piece. For a sample of the McGhee sound, hear him on the short track of Softly in a Morning Sunrise.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 01/07/1962

Trumpeter Howard McGhee, whose nickname’s in the title, is heard here with pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and drummer Shelly Manne. McGhee, a veteran and important jazzman whose comeback now seems well established (currently he’s temporary replacement for Ray Nance in the Ellington orchestra) plays with fine command of his instrument and a warm communicativeness as he ranges through a well-chosen program.

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Saturday Review
Mait Edey : 04/14/1962

After a decade of nearly total silence, McGhee has recently begun recording again, and today sounds even better than he did during the Forties, when he first earned his reputation as one of the most creative trumpeters in modern jazz. Here he has a warm, golden solo on a medium-tempo blues called Demon Chase where could be a lesson in tone, phrasing, and balance for many young trumpeters. Except for Brownie Speaks, which is a bit too fast, the other pieces are nearly as good. McGhee does not waste notes. He alternates intensely lyrical phrases with rapid, flaky bop lines, and can transform even commonplace ideas by sensitive timing and expressive tone. Manne and Vinnegar are solid and intelligent; Newborn‘s work, though technically facile, is not of comparable interest.

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Springfield Republican
Gerald M. Healy : 12/03/1961

Being particularly partial to a cool trumpet Howard McGhee first deep breath catches your ear on Maggie’s Back in Town.

McGhee, who “paid his dues” with Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Pettiford, etc., is joined by Phineas Newborn, Jr., piano, Leroy Vinnegar, bass, and Shelly Manne, drums, for an informal session. Freedom appears to dominate throughout.

Titlewise; Demon Chase, Willow Weep for Me, Softly As in a Morning Sunrise, Sunset Eyes, Maggie’s Back in Town, Summertime, Summertime, Brownie Speaks. His treatment of Summertime is particularly effective and sensitive.

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Tampa Tribune
Vance Johnson : 11/05/1961

Maggie’s Back in Town features Howard McGhee, one of the really fine jazz trumpet players around. Assisting are Shelly Manne, Phineas Newborn Jr., and Leroy Vinnegar.

This outfit on Contemporary take seven tunes, three are standards, and work them over with a slick modern jazz treatment in such a way that compels the listener to follow through from the first groove. In addition to the title tune, there is Demon Chase, Willow Weep for Me, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, and Brownie Speaks. This fellow McGhee blows a swinging horn and a horn you’ll enjoy hearing over and over.

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Down Beat : 04/12/1962
Martin Williams : 3 stars

I wish I could say I thought McGhee plays as well here as he did on Together Again. That album was a real rediscovery of a talent. McGhee was very good indeed, probably better than he ever had been on records before. He plays with emotional consistency and, perhaps most important, with his own voice, with all his influences fully assimilated and a personal style in evidence.

Here, the background is somehow spelled out, the lessons on exhibit. I suppose that sort of thing sometimes happens to any improving player – and for that matter, to any composer. When there is emotional organization, such playing can have virtues of its own, as Demon Chase certainly does here.

There is no point in listing all his influences, but an indication is in order: there is a great deal of Roy Eldridge on Maggie and on Willow; Summertime begins with inevitable allusions to Miles Davis and then becomes more like virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie.

With a lesser player, one might not complain. And it is a tribute to McGhee’s achievements, especially his recent ones, that one is so aware of what happens on these tracks.

The muted Sunrise is an exception and a dancing delight. Nothing really shows but McGhee, organized, direct, and complete; the man who played on Together Again played that.

It is true what has been said about Newborn; he is using his techniques with more choice, more discretion, and more emotional involvement. Willow is fine evidence of that; he has some wonderful left-hand effects on Sunset, and Brownie shows that, with this kind of feeling, even the old tricks don’t sound so much like tricks anymore.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff
August 15, 1961

“Maggie,” as Mr. McGhee is known to his friends, is very much back on the jazz scene. There was a time when, as he puts it, he was in “a tailspin”; but as his playing in recent months with the James Moody band and on two new albums has indicated, Howard McGhee is again one of the most individual and resourceful of jazz trumpet players. He is, in fact, markedly more mature in his work, a judgement clearly proved by his Bethlehem set, Dusty Blue (BCP-6055), and his warmly relaxed reunion with Teddy Edwards, Together Again! (Contemporary M3588).

“After I got myself together,” McGhee explains, “I began listening to what all the guys were doing, and I decided to play like me. I don’t play like I used to play, running up and down the horn and hitting the high notes. Now I play what I feel.” I prefer the “new” McGhee, but I also remember with pleasure the excitement I felt as a boy when I first heard the startling power and exhilarating speed of McGhee Special, a record Howard made with Andy Kirk in 1942. That power hasn’t diminished, but it’s now more thoughtfully and imaginatively controlled. The notes are selected more judiciously, and there is a melodic flow and remarkably supple rhythmic placement in McGhee’s work never as fully there before.

Howard McGhee is a unique example of a jazzman who has spanned several stylistic eras, adapting himself to each while retaining an intensely personal tone and conception. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 6, 1918, McGhee was raised in Detroit. His first instrument was the clarinet. (“I guess that was why I used to play more notes than most of the other guys around when I switched to trumpet.”) Louis Armstrong was his initial influence, and was somewhat superseded by Roy Eldridge. (“I used to sneak a radio into my room at home and listen to Roy on the air. My folks were church people. They didn’t like jazz, and they didn’t want me to play it, but that was what I most wanted to do, and nothing could stop me.”)

McGhee’s variegated jazz apprenticeship led him through the bands of Lionel Hampton, Andy Kirk, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, a period in which he led his own combos, the rigors of JATP, Machito, and Oscar Pettiford, among other groups. It was when McGhee first came to New York with Andy Kirk in the early 1940s that he began to adapt his swing-rooted improvising to the newly challenging concepts of the Parker–Gillespie–Monk enclave. He became one of the most authoritative of the modern hornmen, the only major swing trumpeter to accomplish the transition.

“Dizzy took me over when I arrived,” Howard remembers, “and brought me up to Minton’s. I started to sit in with him and Monk and the others, and began to understand how they were altering chords and otherwise expanding the language. The time I spent with Coleman Hawkins was also very valuable. He showed me a lot of things, and besides, he was playing a lot of Monk’s compositions at that period.” Yet, as assured as McGhee became in the newer idiom, he never entirely lost the fluid rhythmic pulsation of his earlier training so that he developed into one of the most infectiously swinging of the modernists. Now, at forty-three, McGhee has begun the most important stage of his career, playing with a consistency of taste and a burnished control that should make the newer generation of jazz listeners aware of his stature and that will reintroduce him to the long-term collectors who have been wondering what happened to Howard.

This session was an informal communion. McGhee has been playing with Leroy Vinnegar at the Town Hill in Los Angeles, and was delighted to record with him for the first time. “Leroy,” Howard says, “had to leave three days before I closed that job, and it was as if the bottom fell out of the group. The man is so solid!”

Demon Chase is a blues. Howard had written it before he went to California. It acquired its title when Howard got to know Teddy Edwards, Jr., the six-year-old son of the tenor saxophonist. “That boy’s a demon,” says McGhee. “He’s got more energy than I ever saw in a kid in my life. So I named this after him.” It’s a chase piece in part with Phineas Newborn answering and otherwise commenting on McGhee’s statements as the tune gets under way. Here again, Howard’s tone is firm and brass-proud while his time is flawlessly buoyant. Worth paying added attention to is the resilient, inventive drumming of Shelly Manne who lays down an exactly complementary groove for Howard’s ebullient mood. As he showed in Together Again!, Phineas Newborn has harnessed his prodigious technique during the past couple of years into more emotionally meaningful directions, and he has come a great deal closer to the “roots” in terms of blues feeling that he had earlier. Mr. Vinnegar as usual is pervasively reliable and does indeed supply a bottom to the band that few other bassists can approach with regard to breadth as well as depth.

Willow Weep for Me is a probing, yearning performance. Howard combines an ardent lyricism with a vigor and thrust of line that make for an incisive reanimation of the standard.

Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise has been featured by McGhee and Vinnegar at the Town Hill. Note the fullness of tone and the crackling warmth of Howard’s playing. The tempo is swift but Howard does a great deal more than run changes on his horn. His work here is a brilliant illustration of sustainedly logical thematic improvisation that builds through a series of carefully paced climaxes to a satisfying resolution.

Sunset Eyes is one of the best known of Teddy Edwards’ originals because of its infectiously sinuous line. Of particular interest in this track is McGhee’s pliable sense of dynamics and the easy command he has of his horn, which allows him to continually alter his tone color for specific, expressive effects.

McGhee is the protagonist of Teddy Edwards’ salute, Maggie’s Back in Town, a minor-keyed tune that goes to a dominant seventh in its release. “The song,” says McGhee, “lays just right for a horn.” There is a high-spirited conversational cadence to Howard’s skillfully constructed solo. That ambling mood carries over into Phineas Newborn’s briskly rocking, cleverly varied statement. As in his other performances in this album, McGhee’s playing on this track conveys a surging feeling of considerable latent power. Unlike some of his young contemporaries, he knows what not to play. He is, in short, an excellent self-editor, a rarity in jazz.

While he toured with James Moody, McGhee found that his interpretation of Summertime became one of the most requested numbers in the book. This is his first recording of the Gershwin ode to the good, al fresco life, and it is a notably sensitive and personal exploration of the tune’s large capacities as a jazz framework. This is “hot” playing in the vintage sense of that term, and it is this quality of spontaneous fervor that makes his full-scale return to the jazz foreground so welcome.

“I thought that Clifford Brown was one of the greatest trumpeters I’d ever heard,” says Howard in explaining his choice of Brownie Speaks. “He had that big, fat sound and he was one of the very few guys who had everything figured out. He not only knew what he wanted to do, but he was fully capable of doing it all. I select this original of his because I’d been struck by the fact that while Brownie wrote a number of first-rate tunes, hardly anyone plays them any more. I wanted to show his writing oughtn’t to be forgotten.” McGhee whips through the demanding composition with zestful confidence and an enveloping swing. There is also a fascinating, intricately balanced solo by the dizzying Phineas Newborn.

Howard McGhee is free-lancing once again, but his plans are to form a unit with Teddy Edwards. Such a combo could certainly make a place for itself on the current jazz circuit because both hornmen play with such spirit and conviction. In any case, Howard is rapidly regaining his own important place, and as this album makes crisply evident, he has added a new dimension to his status. Maggie is back in town to say.