Army Times : 10/26/1957
Tom Scanlan

Go West, Man, a new LP featuring charts by Quincy Jones and solos by more than a dozen top-ranking west coast musicians is well worth hearing. There are three different groups, one featuring alto men Benny Carter, Art Pepper, Herb Geller and Charlie Mariano, one featuring tenor men Buddy Collette, Bill Perkins, Walter Benton and baritone man Pepper Adams and the other featuring trumpeters Harry Edison, Conte and Pete Candoli, and Jack Sheldon.

The alto date furnishes a good example of the vast difference between Carter and the younger alto men, all followers of Bird. Benny’s playing on this LP proves that his fertile imagination and brilliant technique are as fine as ever, and that there is one alto man who can get his message across without a strident tone.

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Billboard : 07/29/1957
Spotlight on… selection

A modern date Jones produced on the Coast that has everything: excellent writing, performances and a communicative quality that should hit the jazz initiate or long-time fan with equal impact. Divided into three sessions – trumpets, altos, tenors with rhythmic accompaniment – name value of players – B. Carter, H. Edison, A. Pepper, B. Perkins, S. Manne, C. Candoli, etc., should arouse interest of jazz browser; demonstration will sell it. Try Jim Giuffre‘s composition, Dancin’ Pants or J. Mandel‘s No Bones at All.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 09/22/1957

Three groups of top Los Angeles musicians, equipped with charts from first-rate composer-arrangers and led by Quincy Jones, one of the brightest figures in today’s jazz scene, convincingly disprove the canard that only cool sounds come from the West Coast. Four alto saxophonists, four trumpeters, and three tenors and a baritone comprise the respective front lines. They and their rhythm sections come through with some extremely relaxed and captivating music, marked by a down home feeling that should appeal to all schools.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 08/25/1957

Most of the best Hollywood musicians in a series of studio recordings supervised by Jones. There’s a tenor date, an alto date and a trumpet date and everybody but Shorty Rogers is here. It’s a gas of an LP from start to finish. The notes are by R.J.G.

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Down Beat : 10/17/1957
Dom Cerulli : 4 stars

The idea behind the album is a sound one, although it makes for somewhat less interesting ensembles. It does feature the soloists, and give the listener a splendid opportunity to assimilate each man’s style and taste.

Quincy cut three dates for the album: four trumpets and rhythm, four altos and rhythm, and four tenors and rhythm.

To my ears, the four tenors came off top dogs. Actually it’s three tenors and a baritone, but somehow the other dates don’t jell quite so firmly. For instance, on Giuffre‘s Bright Moon, yet another journey to our revered standard, How High the Moon, the tenors (and baritone) achieve a moody blend and a series of solos that are glittering. Collette kicks off the solo round with his smooth, high-toned sound; to be followed by the lighter and softer flow of Perkins; the gutty, virile baritone of Adams, and the edgy and fluid horn of Benton. This and the alto track, Dancin’ Pants, are my favorites. Also a Giuffre score, Pants is folkish in conception and studded with fine solos, notably by Pepper and Carter. Mariano proves a more forceful-sounding horn than the others, and Geller blows with strength and almost in bursts. Carter is so fine and mellow, he glistens. Art Pepper is Pepper, and how much more can be said about that?

The least successful, I thought, were the trumpet tracks, which rely on some muted work for a change of tone. Again the Giuffre piece, Blue Day, is most outstanding of the trumpets three tracks. Conte is forceful and flowing, Pete tight and muted, Sheldon big and robust, and Sweets soulful and muted. The theme itself is pretty and worthy of exploration by other groups.

One further note: listen well to the ballad medley by the tenors and Adams on Side 2. There is some tremendous feeling gathered into one track.

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Liner Notes by Ralph J. Gleason

In Southern California the evenings are cool, as many an Easterner has found out to his discomfort. But periodically the sequence of chilly dusks is broken by a hot, dry, sometimes rather nervous wind, that sweeps from the interior and changes the entire atmosphere of the area. Then you see the retired Idaho farmers sitting on their verandas rocking back and forth and watching the traffic.

They call this wind a Santa Ana. This album is NOT called a Santa Ana, but it does bring a warm, almost hot breeze to Southern California, or West Coast, jazz which shows that it need not always be cool.

And it’s time some real effort was made to demonstrate to the world that everything recorded in the Hollywood studios is not more Brooks Brothers than Madison Avenue and not more emotionally restrained than a London native in a room full of Americans. As Betty Roche wrote to Jimmy Lyons, whose nightly KNBC, San Francisco program has been a breath of warmth in what has sometimes seemed a wilderness of cool sounds, “it’s good to hear the swingers.”

Quincy Jones, who produced this album, selected the personnel, picked the instrumentation and arrangers, is a West Coast product himself – he’s from Chicago originally but settled in Seattle when he was 10 and was raised there. For that matter, most of the so-called West Coast musicians are originally from the East, or at least not the West, and they don’t always play in that tight little style that has become known as West Coast. They can get pretty funky, especially, as Shelly Manne says, “if they’ve eaten enough in those all-night hamburger joints.”

When Quincy was commissioned by ABC-Paramount to produce this album, he decided “to show the West Coast in a more relaxed, earthy atmosphere.” I think the best way to judge how well he succeeded is to listen and when you do, I am sure you will agree with me that what we have here is not West Coast or East Coast or No-Coast, but just good swinging, moving, intelligent, relaxed music that could have been made anywhere, given men of this calibre. It is individual music because the men who played it and wrote it and arranged it are individual artists. But it carries no indigenous geographical classification. It does carry the label of modern jazz, that kind of modern jazz which has been increasingly important in recent years, a jazz that is warm, vibrant, swinging and, above all, communicates to as broad an audience as possible.

The device that Quincy Jones used here was to make three separate recording dates, each with a different instrumentation. One date featured four of the best altoists on the coast – Benny Carter, Art Pepper, Herb Geller and Charlie Mariano and a rhythm section of Lou Levy, piano; Red Mitchell, bass; and Shelly Manne, drums. For this date Jimmy Giuffre and Lennie Niehaus, neither of whom play on the album, wrote the arrangements.

The second date was for trumpets and had Harry Edison, Conte Candoli, Pete Candoli and Jack Sheldon with a rhythm section composed of Carl Perkins, piano; Leroy Vinnegar, bass; and Mel Lewis, drums, with arrangements by Giuffre and Johnny Mandel, who doesn’t play here either. The third date was for saxophones and has Buddy Collette, Bill Perkins and Walter Benton on tenors and Pepper Adams on baritone (the most exciting soloist on that instrument since Serge Chaloff came up) with a rhythm section of Perkins, Vinnegar and Manne and arrangements by Giuffre and Charlie Mariano, who does play on the alto sides.

The tunes they all contributed (and each selection is an original, either outright or as a new composition on an old framework, with the exception of the ballad medley for the saxes) are either outright blues or manage to have that blues feel that is essential to good, funky jazz.

As to the men involved, Quincy Jones is one of the brightest young arrangers currently operating in jazz and a man whose maturity belies his age (24) and whose work is a constant tribute to his middle name – Delight! The alto soloists, the trumpet soloists and the saxophone soloists make, on each date, an interesting series of contrasts in style and accent the device followed on almost all tunes, of allowing them to take consecutive statements in order, adds to the interest. The rhythm section throughout performs admirably and in its members’ own solos, as well as in the group effort, swinging is the first order of business.

Of the individual tunes, I enjoyed particularly the echoes of small band Ellington in Dancin’ Pants; the unexpected differences between Conti and Pete and the way in which Edison remains a consistent solo voice, after almost two decades of activity, in Blues Day; the work of Shelly, Collette and Adams on Bright Moon in which the old familiar lunar chords rise to new heights; the Ellington quote by Edison on the Hoosier No Bones; and the deep shout of the unison saxes followed by Shelly’s explosions on The Oom is Blues.

On the second side there’s a fine drum break by Shelly on the opening side, Be My Guests; Pepper Adams and Bill Perkins completely captured my imagination. with their solos in the ballad medley; Pete Condoli seemed to indicate he may have been too long neglected as a soloist in London Derrier, (one of the great titles, by the way, fully the equal of Keester Parade); the final selection shows all four altos to have moving, if utterly different, interpretations of the blues.

One further word: in ten years of writing on jazz for Down Beat and in the San Francisco Chronicle, I have never know what “West Coast was, really, except in terms of individuals and only then for a specific time and a specific performance. This album will do considerable good if it makes people realize, as I hope it does, that all winds to not blow cool on the Pacific Coast. Sometimes they blow hot, too.