Cashbox : 01/11/1958

The two jazz mainstays are heard on a program of originals by Lucky Thompson. Thompson, on tenor sax and Pettiford, on bass, receive the accompaniment of jazz notables Osie Johnson (drums) and Jimmy Cleveland (trombone) as they dish out the eight items. Two of the originals are Mister Man, and The Plain But Simple Truth. Everything goes off swell on the sessions. Catchy sounds.

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Miami Herald (Miami, FL)
Fred Sherman : 12/01/1957

The solo line is pulled taut in an ABC-Paramount album called Lucky Thompson Featuring Oscar Pettiford Vol. II (ABC-171). Lucky’s tenor sax flows warmly through eight of his own compositions. Only 31 minutes of music here while most current LPs are running closer to 40. Bass man Pettiford plays through the album. Making up the quintet on three of the tracks are Jimmy Cleveland, trombone; Osie Johnson, drums, and Don Abney, piano. On the trio music, it is guitarist Skeeter Best except for one bit called Once There Was where Abney sits in. This is Thompson’s most emotional sax of the session. Pettiford’s big moment comes on a real walker called Plain but the Simple Truth. This album is aimed at the Thompson cult in jazz.

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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 11/24/1957

Thompson, an excellent tenor saxophonist who seems to be gaining the recognition which has been so long overdue, is at his best on the three tracks by quintet and five by trio comprising this album. The selections give him a chance to display his virility, romanticism and earthiness, in all of which there is a feeling of Coleman Hawkins. Oscar Pettiford, who is co-featured, contributes his customary superior work on bass.

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Down Beat : 01/09/1958
Ralph J. Gleason : 3.5 stars

Despite the undoubted proficiency of all the people involved here, and also despite the undoubted moments of excitement, there is a blandness about this album which brings it down to somewhat less than one might have expected.

Perhaps it is that, by and large, Lucky sounds better on structures with which you are familiar than on frameworks of his own devising. Yet, on the lyric Once There Was, he has a formidable ability to move one emotionally. Aside from that track, the tenor was a disappointment to these ears. (The tunes, all of which are by Lucky, are neat, agile, and passable compositions without any particular individuality with the exception of the aforementioned Track 2.)

The stars on the date are Pettiford, whose descending bass run which introduces the theme on the final track is the best part of the entire LP and whose other solos and rhythm work is above reproach, and Cleveland. The latter contributes a particularly exciting bit in his chorus on the last track, a wildly swinging multi-note statement that really wails. That final track, by the way, is five-star pure Hennessey.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Lucky Thompson is a loner. His career has been so broken with obstacles, usually caused by his intractable refusal to compromise a principle, that his nickname has for a long time been an irony among musicians. Since Lucky is a strong and proud man, he learned during the times of bleakest scuffling to do for himself, to search into his reservoir of capacity and somehow face and at least hold to a draw each visitation of despair.

Lucky has worked in a self-revealing variety of musical situations, not all of them to his delight; but he has never deliberately played music he would have been ashamed to be reminded of. Because, however, he has so often had to go his own way, he has trained himself through the years to be a thorough professional who can not only handle but enliven any assignment. Lucky has recorded and worked with, among many others, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Lionel Hampton and his own band at the Savoy ballroom. He controls the rare ability to make each of these scenes in a way that satisfies the ethos of the particular band and/or leader while still retaining his own firmly personal voice. There are some complete professionals who are, by contrast, chameleons and blend into each different context so facilely that it is as if they wear a succession of masks and at some point have forgotten what became of the face beneath. Lucky works accurately and valuably for a Miles Davis or a Kenton -and that’s a long divide – while losing neither his identity nor his integrity.

In terms of style, Lucky’s sound and conception are essentially in the virile, flowing, vibrato-proud, often rhapsodic tenor tradition that was inaugurated by Coleman Hawkins and that has included such individual but essentially emphatic players as Don Byas, the late Herschel Evans and Ben Webster. For a time, it appeared as if nearly all the young tenor modernists were going in quite another direction. Some were drawn into the seemingly (but not actually) cooler Lester Young orbit, with Stan Getz the most emulated graduate of that second line and such contemporaries as Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Bill Perkins – though decidedly different in temperament and voice – generally within its broad boundaries. There were other young tenors (like Sonny Stitt) who basically adapted Charlie Parker’s alto message to the tenor. There then began to emerge the fiercely influential Sonny Rollins school of modern tenor, which was based on Parker but also went back to Coleman Hawkins and forward to constant defying of the previous limits of improvisation in terms of polyrhythms and chord-stretching. And now, there is even one superb young tenor who seems to be directly continuing the line and sound of the Hawkins-Evans-Byas-Lucky Thompson lineage. He is Benny Golson, also an unusually personal and lyrical writer, and he has recently been cited by Ernie Wilkins in Down Beat as a great soloist in his own right… from the Hawkins school, through Don Byas and Lucky Thompson …”

It appears, then, that after a long time in the shadow, so far as critics and young players were concerned, the Hawkins-Thompson way of speaking on tenor is beginning to become somewhat more fashionable again. I doubt if Lucky cares, because he has become sardonically resigned to the transitory furore of fashion, and will only play what and how he feels; but it is a heartening balancing of the tides, I feel, that there can be a Benny Golson and that a Sonny Rollins is proud to acknowledge his debt to Coleman Hawkins. If this widening of the listening frame of reference of young tenors and some critics continues, it may be more widely realized that neither the Young nor the Hawkins road was ever a dead end, and that there are major contributors from each of the several dialects and their transmutations through individual needs and experiences. Major contributors like Lucky Thompson, for example.

Although Lucky has functioned with a consistency of excellence in the previously cited range of challenges, he feels that his two LPs for ABC-PARAMOUNT (the first was ABC-111) have come closest to his own criteria of musical self-fulfillment. For once, the albums were planned to fit primarily his desires, and the lean instrumentation-trio and quintet-together with the loose arrangements allow for a spaciousness in which Lucky can improvise at satisfying length and with no need to slow down for traffic signs.

His chief colleague on both albums is Oscar Pettiford, who is respected by all jazzmen for his climax-collecting maturity of solo conception, fullness of sound and flawless time. There is an assuring strength in Oscar’s playing that is particularly tested on the trio tracks whereon he and Skeeter alone must set and keep flowing a virile enough pulsation for Lucky to build and keep building. Dick Katz, an astute young pianist, who has worked often with Pettiford, summarizes Oscar as a soloist with succinct admiration. “No matter what the context,” says Katz, “Oscar’s solos are spontaneous, full of surprises and perfectly integrated.”

Guitarist Skeeter Best is one of the inexplicably underestimated — and to too many listeners, even unknown — jazz guitarists of durable warmth, invention and power. He is especially eloquent in and with the blues. Skeeter is not on the quintet tracks where, in addition to Lucky and Oscar, the participants are Jimmy Cleveland, trombone; Don Abney, piano; and Osie Johnson, drums. Cleveland is the first modern jazzman since J. J. Johnson to excite universal respect among musicians for the startling, brilliant ease with which he commands the technical capacities of his horn. He is, however, not only an engineer, but a player with his own vigorous, swiftly exact story to tell. Don Abney is accomplished as an accompanist for singers, most notably Ella Fitzgerald; as a firm, unobtrusively blending rhythm section asset; and as a lucid soloist. The ubiquitous (in recording studios) Osie Johnson is a drummer with an arranger’s care for cohesion and an infectiously zestful spirit.

All the compositions are by Lucky Thompson and they represent, particularly the slower essays, an expansive romanticism that is characteristic of players with a temperament that feels comfortable in the vein of Hawkins, Byas, Evans and similar souls. In Paris, for further example, Lucky has recorded a number of his own ballads with lush string foliage in the background, illustrating a kind of natural bent toward Cyrano-like rhapsodizing shared particularly by Hawkins, who also loves strings. For my own rather New Englandish taste, I am glad that Lucky’s romantic soliloquies here are not blurred by strings, but instead are al fresco clear in their rounded, Rubens-like lines. Unlike some other romantics, Lucky is not flabby in tone, conception or beat; and as a result, he can wail on muscular up tempos while serenading hope and love in more introspective settings with equally convincing virility and individuality.

A final postlude for the present concerns Lucky’s recent satisfying and successful stays in France, where he has had much more of an opportunity to play in clubs and records than he has experienced in this country in the past decade. During the course of a conversation with a number of French critics, transcribed in the April, 1956, Jazz-Hot, Lucky declared: “I hope we can find again in jazz the spirit of competition … among musicians in which each would be free to play the style he wants so that each could give the best of himself and not be satisfied to imitate some leader of a school because that school simply happens to be in vogue.”

Lucky, in this case, was a preacher with the right of his own record to advise the young. He has always insisted on being free to play his own way, even when he has lived in the most externally constricting of economic and psychological circumstances. As he once told a friend, he’s not so unlucky after all. How many others, he explained, have been “lucky” enough to keep their integrity in a world fat with compromise?