Billboard : 10/13/1956
Score of 71

The critics’ New Star pianist isn’t at his most impressive in this set, tho an element is added in the shape of baritone saxman Cecil Payne. This underrated gent blows up some modern flurries in most of the tunes. The tunes include The Man I Love, I Can’t Get Started and such. Moderate prospects.

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Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 04/06/1957

Weston has obviously been influenced by Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. There is a good deal of restraint here, if that’s the word, and to my mind none of the tunes swing. The up tempo Man I Love, for example, simply doesn’t make it. Baritone sax by Cecil Payne is featured. Randy is another favorite of some well-known critics and perhaps you agree with them.

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San Antonio Light
Renwicke Cary : 11/18/1956

Randy Weston – as those who keep up with their new jazz trends know well – was the Down Beat critics’ choice as the “new piano star of 1955.” And, once you’ve listened to him on Riverside discs, you are sure to applaud the choice. In the album listed as Get Happy With Randy Weston, the 6-foot, 7-inch tall musician, still in his 20s, establishes himself as a lyrical and creative pianist who always swings whether he’s unveiling an exciting original or embroidering such sharply contrasting standards as Summertime and Twelfth Street Rag.

In Weston’s second Riverside album, With These Hands, he has teamed the trio with Cecil Payne, the baritone sax virtuoso, in another stunning performance. Along with a couple of originals, there are I Can’t Get Started With You, The Man I Love (in a dazzling up-tempo), These Foolish Things and other standards.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 12/23/1956

An excellent young pianist in some good numbers which occasionally feature the baritone sax of Cecil Payne. The trio alone would have been better, as the two sides which they do by themselves plainly show.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 11/24/1956

The pianist Randy Weston has joined forces with Cecil Payne, baritone sax, and produces a number of original exercises on old themes. Weston is the fertile sort of inventor who can find wholly new and seductive possibilities in I Can’t Get Started With You, and this LP seems to me the most delightful he has made – winding up on his own charming waltz in honor of his son, Little Niles.

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Down Beat : 10/31/1956
Ralph J. Gleason : 3.5 stars

On all but two numbers, the Randy Weston trio (with bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and drummer Wilbert Hogan) is joined by baritone saxist Cecil Payne. The union is unwise.

Payne (who has worked with J.J. Johnson, Jacquet, and the Gillespie big band in the late ’40s) plays agreeably with good time and rather engaging conception as on Started. His tone is all right, considering how difficult it is to get a fully satisfactory tone out of an ungrateful instrument. But Payne and Weston are considerably apart when it comes to originality and depth of approach. Weston, particularly on this LP, is stabbingly fresh, frequently unexpected and unique although his deep roots in jazz are strongly evident from a Waller-like leaping with to a slicing Monkian humor along with a large capacity for pulsating tenderness.

What results from the mixture of Payne and Weston for the auditor is an impatience for Payne to end his solo and for the much more interesting Weston to be heard. It might have worked out better if yet another horn had been added because the baritone, of all instruments, is not of the best timber to set singly against piano, drums, bass, and it often sounds more palatable when interweaving with another, leaner horn.

The two originals, one by Weston and one by Weston-Payne are good, especially Weston’s disturbing waltz, Niles, whereon Payne plays his best. Also worth credit are the big tone and full rhythmic strength of Abdul-Malik, a most welcome readdition to the contemporary jazz scene.

In summary, Payne certainly has much to say in modern jazz, but not especially in this context – Riverside has to take particular care with the horns it invites to Weston’s sessions. They have to be rather special ones. This LP is worth buying if only for the waltz but there’s a lot of Weston besides.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

“With these hands” (as the caption to the striking cover photo puts it) Randy Weston has created another distinctive and rewarding jazz album.

Undoubtedly such hands are a great asset to a pianist. Gracefully and unusually long-fingered, they obviously deserve some share of credit for the deceptive ease of execution that is one of Weston’s most notable qualities as a performer. But the hands could hardly be expected to do the job alone – nor are they required to. For Randy also possesses a heart and a mind that (although they can’t be displayed photographically) are even more directly responsible for his comparatively quick and still-accelerating rise to a position of real importance among the very many skilled pianists to be found on the modern jazz scene.

Since his first album was released, in 1954, Weston has been deluged with an almost frightening quantity of critical acclaim. He has been singled out for remarkably high praise by some of the most respected and hard-to-please jazz writers: men who not only have sever standards, but who have also had so much recorded material to listen to in the past several years that you’d forgive them for being slightly jaded. You must assume that it really takes something special to jar them into superlatives, yet the most uninhibited creator of album blurbs could scarcely hope to out-do their pro-Weston quotes.

Randy has been described as “one of the most musically and mechanically articulate pianists around” (by George Simon, in Metronome); Wilder Hobson, in The Saturday Review, has referred to the “durable pleasure” of his “high inventive discretion”; Down Beat’s Nat Hentoff has noted his “rarity of imagination” and tabbed him as destined for “a major jazz future.” It was all neatly summed up in the Summer of 1955, when the annual Down Beat poll of leading critics included among its results a clear-cut victory for Weston as “New Star” pianist of the year.

Clearly, then, Randy has accomplished much, and will surely do much more. Thus it is not really news that on this, his fourth LP, he continues to take giant strides (no pun is intended, but it should be noted someplace that the man stands a full six feet, seven inches tall) towards rare heights of artistic maturity and achievement. But it is news that he has added here a significant “plus” item to his usual trio lineup:

Cecil Payne is a remarkable performer on that most difficult instrument, the baritone saxophone. His light has been more or less hidden under a bushel (to coin a cliché) for most of his playing career to date. This is one of those mysterious cases of virtually overlooked talent in which jazz, unfortunately, seems to abound, for Payne has been on hand throughout the modern-jazz era and has always been most highly regarded by fellow musicians. Born in Brooklyn in December, 1922, he has worked or recorded with J.J. Johnson, Roy Eldridge, Illinois Jacquet, and Dizzy Gillespie (with whose band he played regularly from late 1946 to early ’49). Possibly this record, which gives a large share of the spotlight to his incredibly agile handling of a supposedly heavy-sounding instrument, may do something to remedy past neglect.

The Weston-Payne combination is by no means a casual or accidental one. The two have known each other since boyhood, and have long appreciated each other’s music. Of late, Cecil has made several appearances at clubs as a well-integrated “added attraction” with the Weston Trio, which inevitably led to the idea of setting down on record some of their combined efforts. The results here indicate that this was a fortunate idea for all concerned – including listeners.

Payne’s buoyant tones mesh neatly with the clean-cut, firm, lyrical lines of Weston’s piano style. Randy, always a notably relaxed and swinging performer, seems obviously pleased with the combination; at any rate, he rarely ‘wails’ in top form throughout the LP. Also, there is the well-knit support provided by Wilbert Hogan‘s steady drumming and the unusually strong, full bass of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (who, as you might guess from his sound, is an unusually strong and solidly constructed man). All of which adds up to a cohesiveness that makes possible some non-standard uses of his instrumental setup. For this is not merely a matter of adding a horn to get easy “ensemble, each-of-us-takes-a-chorus, and out” routines. On the contrary, the baritone plays a specific roll in well-organized, purposeful arrangements. Note for example the handling of These Foolish Things, which demonstrates the effectiveness, in terms of impact and contrast, of simply having the baritone sit out part of a number. Note also that it’s apt to be either piano or baritone taking the melodic line, rather than both staking it jointly.

Two selections, Serenade in Blue and This Can’t Be Love, are turned over entirely to the trio. Gershwin‘s Man I Love is an up-tempo dazzler that has amazing unity and includes some figures that ought to be impossible to make on baritone sax at this speed. The wonderful Duke Ellington tune, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, is a compellingly ‘funky’ swinger; while the Vernon Duke classic, I Can’t Get Started, allows both Weston and Payne extensive solos of rare, tender beauty.

There are two originals. Like a previous waltz by Weston (Pam’s Waltz; included in RLP 2515, and dedicated to his daughter), Little Niles seeks to create a mood descriptive of a “modern child.” In this case, the present-day child suggested is a boy. The piece is named for Randy’s son. Lifetime is something of an accident: it started out as an introduction for a standard that eventually wasn’t used for this album. While it was being worked up, this writer happened by and innocently started commenting on how much he liked the “original.” Even when set straight, I insisted that it should be an original, and Randy and Cecil obligingly took it from there.

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Randy Weston was born in Brooklyn in April, 1926, and thoroughly exposed himself to modern jazz in the 52nd Street heyday of the early ’40s. He notes the early influence, dating from that period, of Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, but his playing demonstrates that by now he has absorbed these and other influences into the mainstream of a distinctive, mature and quite personal style. He has led his own trio for the past few years, having been heard in New York at such clubs as the Café Bohemia and The Embers. Appearances in Cleveland, Baltimore, Rochester and elsewhere have helped add to his rapidly growing following. Of his three previous albums, all for Riverside, the first two are 10-inch LPs, the third a 12-inch LP:

Randy Weston Plays Cole Porter (RLP 2508)
Randy Weston Trio with Art Blakey (RLP 2515)
Get Happy with the Randy Weston Trio (RLP 12-203)