Hartford Courant
Maitland Zane : 03/18/1956

Under the Riverside label this week are three 12-inches by three pianists, all exceptionally well-recorded.

For his efforts, the veteran Chicagan Joe Sullivan got a five-star review from Down Beat, which seems to me overgenerous. Joe plays such oldies as That’s a Plenty, a tough tune for any soloist; his own Little Rock Getaway, and others of like spirit and vintage.

It’s raggy music, full of chord-slapping, Sullivan-style; bluesy and rooted in the past. Technically Joe tends to cut the hard corners, however, and I sometimes get the feeling he has to strain to get out his ideas. Definitely for older listeners, but enjoyable nonetheless. Three stars.

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San Antonio Light
Renwicke Cary : 04/08/1956

New Solos by an Old Master, a 12-inch Riverside disc, points up the happy fact that the veteran jazz pianist, Joe Sullivan, has a lot of music left in him yet. Although the average record buyer will probably remember him best for his sessions with the Bob Crosby band of the thirties, Sullivan was around Chicago in the mid-twenties, at which time he came under the influence of Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines. Later he lent an appreciative ear to Fats Waller.

The 12 tunes on Sullivan’s new record are evenly divided between old standards and imaginative originals. And whether it’s A Room With a View or Gin Mill Blues, Sullivan is ever the sensitive artist, playing with an impeccable taste. Dave Lario is on bass and Smokey Stover on drums.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 01/28/1956

… And if the classic Chicago-style Joe Sullivan is still your dish, as he is mine, you will be happy to know that he has made new recordings of many of his old specialties. This album, full of Sullivan’s lyric warmth, points up the regrettable degree to which modern jazz pianists have neglected dynamic shading. Granted that they usually have other things on their minds; it is tempting to say that if and when they have more on their hearts they will rediscover the fact that the piano can sigh as well as scintillate, brood as well as bounce.

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Down Beat : 02/08/1956
Nat Hentoff : 5 stars

The title of this welcome set is New Solos by an Old Master. It was recorded in San Francisco in 1953 with bassist Dave Lario and Smokey Stover on four of the sides. Joe, as the able notes by Orrin Keepnews indicate, was influenced by Jelly Roll, Earl Hines and Fats Waller. I would also add Art Tatum (c.f. Joe’s Sweet Lorraine here). As Joe’s musicianship and confidence grew, he shaped his own style, one of impressive power and imagination within the traditional jazz context.

As Keepnews adds, “His solo work of recent years would seem to have expanded his horizons to include the sort of lyricism-tinged-with-moodiness to be found in numbers like Summertime and I Cover the Waterfront.”

Even on these, the lyricism has guts, and Summertime, for example, is a deeply probing, hard-handed example of the best of Sullivan. All the way through, there are Joe’s driving, striding beat; his quick, almost savage breakway punctuations, and the feeling that this is one man who hides none of his emotions from his instrument.

Recording quality could be better, but this would be worth having even on low-fi. Half the originals are Joe’s, two of them are world-mellowed standards. Last number is a boogie-woogie.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

Think about piano players. Not some local talent you admired last night, some new flash who’s sweeping the country, or some obscure primitive who can be dimly heard only on rare and battered old discs. Think of men who developed the several patterns of traditional jazz piano, whose skills are unquestioned and whose reputations are long-lived and solidly established: men such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Earl Hines, James P. Johnson. And when you turn to white pianists, you’ll probably come up immediately with the name of Joe Sullivan. It would be hard to find another name that so clearly belongs in that distinguished company.

The big, bespectacled, mild-looking Irishman, born on Chicago’s North Side in November, 1906, has been playing blues, pop tunes and Dixieland standards for a good many years now, always with a firmly driving beat, considerable sensitivity, and an unwavering affection for traditional jazz. He has played in all manner of clubs, bars, concert halls and the assorted odd spots where jazz is heard; in big bands, with small groups, and – for the most part, during the past decade – as a single.

The selections that make up this album are a fair sample of what you might hear from Joe Sullivan on any one or more of his frequent good nights at such spots as Eddie Condon’s in New York or the Club Hangover in San Francisco, where he can often be found raising what in lesser hands is known as “intermission piano” to the status of a major attraction. Joe’s approach is, as always, very much his own: he has absorbed and interpreted from a variety of sources, passing all through the filter of his particular musical personality.

His solo work of recent years would seem to have expanded his horizons to include the sort of lyricism-tinged-with-moodiness to be found in numbers like Summertime and I Cover the Waterfront, which are not exactly tunes you would hope to get to play with a Chicago-style or Dixieland band. Half the repertoire here consists of Sullivan originals, including fresh versions of his most famous tunes: the romping Little Rock Getaway and the lowdown Gin Mill Blues. Of the other four, My Little Pride and Joy dates back to 1935 and the birth of Joe’s first son, while Farewell to Riverside (the reference is to the California town, not to this label) was written in 1942. Fido’s Fantasy (dedicated to a friend’s dog!) and Hangover Blues, named after the San Francisco club, are previously-unrecorded compositions.

Joe Sullivan, youngest of nine children, has been involved with music for just about all his life. There were music lessons in school, at home, at the Chicago Conservatory (“twelve years of classical”). Then, as a high school boy, it became a way of making a living (his first job: playing lunch-time music for Montgomery Ward employees). Jazz seeped in early; Joe recalls standing outside South Side clubs he was too young to enter, listening to Jimmy Noone or to the Dodds brothers (Baby and Johnny). At a summer resort job he met young George Wettling, and there was the night they went to hear the cornetist all the musicians were talking about: Bix Beiderbecke.

Sullivan was much impressed by Bix then, and even more so later, when they jammed together at all-night sessions with such as Bud Freeman and Frank Teschemacher. But despite his early white-Chicago associations, which included membership in the earliest version of what has come to be termed “the Eddie Condon mob,” Joe has noted that he was always strongly aware of there being two main paths in jazz between which he had to choose. “There was Louis Armstrong and there was Bix, and all that each of them stood for. To this day I love Bix like I love my right arm. But I go by way of Louis.”

Actually, Joe has always done much of his playing with men like Condon, Freeman and Wettling, the ones who were “drawn to Bix and had made up their minds to follow him.” But for Sullivan, as for a musician like Muggsy Spanier, Negro jazz itself had more meaning and impact than any white derivative form. “I discovered that my heart was set with the colored musicians.”

Two pianists whose influence Sullivan quickly admits were around Chicago in the mid-1920’s: Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines. And when Joe decided to move on to New York later in the decade, “Earl told me to be sure to look up Fats Waller. I had already heard him play, liked his playing, and later became very friendly with him. That that he tried to teach me anything, but I listened – and learned.”

For the next few years there were road tours and speakeasy jobs, including a solo stand as probably the first entertainer at the first of the series of clubs on New York’s 52nd Street to be known as the “Onyx.” Then in the second half of the ’30s came what is best described as Sullivan’s “Crosby period:” a year and a half on the West Coast, working principally on Bing’s radio show and in movies; then on to New York to begin the first of two hitches with the Bob Crosby band, interrupted by a touch of T.B. After recovery came more movie work and another stint with the Bobcats, a tough grind of road tours, recording and radio during the pre-war big-band heyday. He was in New York, mostly on 52nd Street, during the war years, and since then has shuttled between the two coasts and many places in between. A long, crowded and still highly active career that surely qualifies Joe as an “old master” of jazz, but that – as these recordings vividly testify – has not robbed him of any of his inventiveness, sensitivity or spirit.