Billboard : 10/14/1957
Special Merit Jazz Album

Package sells itself on the collective and individual excellent of all participants. Ballads are notable for the usage of harp, which lends a fullness of background to solos; the toe-tappers notable for the thrust and interplay of rhythm section – M. Roach, O. Pettiford, Hank Jones – and the surging soundings of tenorist S. Rollins and trumpeter Dorham. Try I’ll Remember April as demo-band.

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Cashbox : 11/02/1957

The two featured performers in this beautifully inventive series of six takes are backed by such jazz notables as Oscar Pettiford (bass); Max Roach (drums) and Hank Jones (piano). Three of the sessions (But Beautiful, Clifford Brown‘s Lurue, My Old Flame) are warm ballad moments, which feature Dorham and the sensitive harp work of Betty Glamann. The crew swing delightfully through the remaining three items (Falling In Love With Love, La Villa, and I’ll Remember April). Excellent name-value jazz waxing.

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Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 10/12/1957

Jazz Contrasts, a new LP featuring trumpeter Kenny Dorham and tenor man Sonny Rollins will probably interest some readers of this column. Dorham plays the kind of deliberately restrained trumpet apparently favored by many these days, and Rollins plays a Bird-like tenor that honks and wanders. (I confess I am not always sure just what Rollins is building). Max Roach, the most popular bop drummer, is much in evidence throughout (very loudly so at times) and bassman Oscar Pettiford and pianist Hank Jones, two pros, are also along for the ride. Tunes are I’ll Remember April (taken way up), Falling in Love with Love, My Old Flame, But Beautiful, the late Clifford Brown‘s Larue and an original by Dorham called La Villa. Harpist Betty Glamann sits in on Larue and La Villa.

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Hartford Courant
Jack Bishop : 10/27/1957

For the very modern look in music there is available a progressive – jazz album offering performances by a man who came to Hartford last week. Powerhouse drummer Max Roach, highly regarded for his unusual effects on the skins, can be heard in the new Riverside Long – Player, Jazz Contrasts. The album also showcases other stars that are at the top of the Bop totem pole. Listen for the strong structure Roach provides for the “way – out” instrumentals of Oscar Pettiford, Hank Jones, Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham. Oh yes, Betty Glamann swings the harp.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 03/30/1958

Jazz Contrasts by Kenny Dorham is just that. The trumpeting leader swings out with tenor saxist Sonny Rollins on four of the six tracks. First-rank rhythm section consisting of Max Roach, Hank Jones and Oscar Pettiford. For the contrasting soft side, the harp of Betty Glamann is added. Lots of jazz in these sessions.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 11/03/1957

Trumpeter Dorham is cast in a Miles Davis mold but is uneven in performance. The support here is excellent: Sonny Rollins, Hank Jones, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach, but it doesn’t live up to the possibilities.

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Down Beat : 01/23/1958
Don Gold : 4 stars

This record may not shock anyone, but it is a delightfully listenable, productive representation of jazz on a professional level.

A consistently high creative level is maintained throughout, with Dorham in fine form, punching ack-ack fashion on the up-tunes and soaring lyrically on the ballads. Rollins continues to play imaginatively, seasoning his expression with a kind of sardonic wit that makes it unique. Pettiford is a delight, handling the bass with the command and dignity of a Hemingway hero. Jones is the sympathetic section man and tasteful soloist. And Roach is Roach, musical and inventive. Miss Glamann, utilized on two tracks, maintains an inobtrusive, mood-sustaining quality.

The first side opens the set rhythmically, with Falling taken at a medium tempo and the group remembering a particularly hectic April. Side two emphasizes ballads, with Clifford Brown‘s Larue the high point. Gigi Gryce arranged Larue and Flame. Beautiful, arranged by Dorham, is a vehicle for his melodic horn; it is not a Hackett horn, but it is warmly communicative. Villa, a Dorham original, concludes the set with the group surging strongly.

For those who demand an attention to melody, as well as a firm rhythmic base, this is recommended. There’s a whole lot of blowin’ goin’ on here and almost all of it is meaningful.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

Kenny Dorham is by now established as one of today’s major trumpet stars. Like all the trumpet men who came up in the bop period or thereafter, he has had to serve several years of what might be called involuntary apprenticeship: overshadowed more than a little by those style-setting youngish “elder statesmen,” Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. But that apprenticeship can now be considered to have been left far behind him. A rich-toned and powerful horn man, whose approach to jazz has always been marked by freshness and buoyancy, “K.D.” has in recent years also displayed a steadily developing maturity of conception. By now, both his fellow musicians and an ever-growing percentage of the jazz public have recognized that Dorham’s trumpet speaks with its own personal voice, that he is an individual and valuable artist. In short, Kenny Dorham has arrived.

For this album, Kenny has chosen to demonstrate the very broad scope of his playing. Three of the six numbers here are ballads with a mood and feeling that is rather unique in small-band jazz. The ‘differentness’ is keynoted by the addition of a harp. In these scorings – two by the notable young arranger, Gigi Gryce, and the other by Dorham – the harp is not merely used to produce rich background voicings at random: it serves, as Gigi puts it, as “the orchestra,” its function being to combine with the rhythm section in creating an unusual sound that provides a full setting for some extremely warm and soulful trumpet work.

On the two numbers of Side 1 and the final selection on the second side, there is a considerable change of mood. These are in the swinging, medium-to-up-tempo vein for which Dorham is best known. Here Kenny is joined by the formidable talents of Sonny Rollins (who also appears on one of the ballads), and here he shows his ability to blow jazz that is not only exciting but meaningful and uncliched – even at speeds at which most horn men would find it necessary to devote all their attention and energy merely to making sure they could hit all the notes. (For special kicks, note how Dorham and Pettiford spur each other through the opening chorus of a rip-snorting I’ll Remember April.)

Kenny Dorham, born in Texas in August 1924, made his first appearance on the jazz scene during the mid-40s heyday of bop. Among those he worked with in the middle and late 1940s were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine‘s big band, and Lionel Hampton. More recently he was a member of Art Blakey‘s original Jazz Messengers, and then with the Max Roach Quintet, as the able successor to the late Clifford Brown (to whom he pays tribute here by the inclusion of Brown’s moving ballad, Larue.)

Kenny benefits from having selected, as his associates on this album, a remarkably talented group of musicians. Sonny Rollins has quickly become recognized as the major new tenor sax stylist of the mid-50s, and has already exerted a vast influence on a very substantial number of young tenor men. He played alongside Dorham in the Roach group. At the time of this recording he had just left Roach to concentrate on musical studies, and then joined Miles Davis’ quintet.

The Jones-Pettiford-Roach rhythm section can hardly be considered without going into superlatives. Ever since his early work on Charlie Parker’s celebrated first Dial records, Max Roach has been the most highly regarded and most widely influential and most frequently imitated of bop and post-bop drummers. Oscar Pettiford, frequent poll-winner and immediate inheritor of the mantle of the late Jimmy Blanton, occupies a position among bassists quite comparable to Roach’s among drummers. Hank Jones, less widely known to the public, is undoubtedly most musicians’ choice as today’s top rhythm-sectionist pianist. Harpist Betty Glamann, most recently featured with Pettiford’s big band, combines thorough-going skill with a jazz feeling that is certainly rare on her instrument.

Although this LP is clearly an expression of Dorham’s individual jazz ideas and taste the presence of Rollins and Roach on one hand, and Pettiford, Miss Glamann and two scores by Gryce (who has written a substantial portion of the book for Oscar’s orchestra) on the other, gives the album two subsidiary flavors that are both impressive and highly dissimilar. All of which helps to point up the wide range of the Jazz Contrasts that Dorham so effectively presents here.