Billboard : 02/09/1959

Ray Brown, one of the Oscar Peterson Trio, one of the top bassists on today’s jazz scene, is the featured soloist on this attractive new jazz set. It is unusual to star a bassist on a jazz album, but the winning performances of Brown here and his fine tone should intrigue a lot of jazz fans if the set is exploited. Tunes include originals and standards with a new version of the jazzmen’s favorite, Indiana, plus Take the A Train, and The Nearness of You. J. Richardson on flute and Peterson on piano add much to the disk.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 03/01/1959
Album of the Week

This is a fine jazz LP. Brown is one of the best bassists in jazz and is heard here with Oscar Peterson (on piano and organ); Herb Ellis, guitar; Osie Johnson, drums, and Jerome Richardson, flute. It’s an exceedingly pleasant album, the solos are good (Richardson on flute, Peterson on organ, and Brown on bass) and the rhythm is compelling throughout.

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Washington Post
Paul Sampson : 02/01/1959

The great bassist is showcased in a combo that includes Oscar Peterson, playing organ on several numbers; Herb Ellis, Osie Johnson and Jerome Richardson. Brown gets a lot of solo space, but unlike many LPs featuring bassists, this never becomes monotonous. Recommended.

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Down Beat : 03/19/1959
Don Gold : 4 stars

There’s no denying Brown‘s mastery of the instrument. His tone is excellent, rich and full. His approach is inventive. He is one of the strong-willed individualists so important to contemporary jazz.

Here he guides (but does not monopolize) the date, working over a variety of tunes and moods. Upstairs, for example, is a slow, writing blues. Nearness and Him are ballads. Train and Walk are medium temp. Brown plays several roles throughout. He plays melody lines, supports, solos, plays obbligato parts, and walks and weaves quite effectively.

The others romp, too. Ellis and Peterson, of course, needed no introduction to Brown. Johnson supports deftly, with excellent technical control. Peterson, by the way, drives as effectively on organ as he does on piano.

Without at any time being pretentious, this LP serves to reinforce the view that Brown is one of the handful of first rate figures in jazz. It’s a worthwhile addition to any collection.

Beware on first playing, however. The record labels are reversed; at least on my company.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Superlatives are easily obtained from musicians when Ray Brown is mentioned. Gunther Schuller, composer and critic, becomes more specific: “Ray has incomparable swing and probably the richest, most beautiful tone of all contemporary jazz bassists. It’s his tone, in fact, that helps him swing so fully. One way of describing ‘swinging’ is to say that it happens when the rhythm mass moves in a horizontal direction, and is not merely a vertical coincidence of things happening together.

“Ray’s notes,” Schuller explained, “help bring about this horizontal movement because they’re so long and because his tone projects. He, therefore, gives you the feeling of moving forward all the time. Take by contrast a competent bass player whose tone, however, stops immediately – even though it may be a big tone. As a result, he plays isolated entities of notes that don’t go anywhere and that don’t drive a band. Ray, however, is superb at driving a unit of any size.

“Ray,” concluded Schuller “was one of the first after Blanton – who influenced him – to develop a modern concept of continuous forward rhythmic motion.” Ray has also mentioned in conversation his early indebtedness to the late Walter Page. “Page,” adds Schuller, “did make a significant start in this matter of forward motion years ago through his development of the walking bass. It involved more of a linear direction than skipping all over the bass.”

Ray’s associates on this date include Oscar Peterson, of whose trio Ray is still a member; Herb Ellis, until recently part of that trio; and the consistently driving, tasteful Osie Johnson. Of interest is Oscar’s playing the organ much more than he usually does on records; and the presence on flute of Jerome Richardson.

Richardson, who makes a lot of New York recordings, previously worked with Lionel Hampton, Earl HInes, Lucky Millinder, Cootie Williams and other bands. He plays tenor, clarinet and alto besides flute. Richardson has been trying to make a jazz instrument of the flute since around 1940-41. He believes his flute solo in Quincy Jones‘ Kingfish with Lionel Hampton’s band sometime between 1949 and 1951 was the first jazz flute solo on record after Wayman Carver with Chick Webb. Since he came to New York in 1954, he’s been studying the instrument seriously with Victor Just, formerly on the ABC staff.

Richardson doesn’t think anyone now playing jazz flute has yet “arrived” on the instrument. “Very few have bene able to combine a good, swinging beat with the correct inflection and a non-classical tone. Many tongue the flute on nearly every note and you don’t get a real good swinging bow with it that way. By ‘bow’ I mean the way the cats bow when they’re swinging. Frank Wess, I think, is the best of the jazz flutists.”

Richardson is working on his own approach that he thinks can result in making the flute fully a jazz instrument. On the evidence here and in other recent work of his, he’s already one of the most convincing of the jazz flutists.

Of the date as a whole, Richardson said he felt privileged to have been ask to participate by Ray. “I like,” he said, “a driving player on any instrument,” and on this session, he was to find all the other musicians to be of similar temperament.

The album is of particular value in the chance it affords to hear Ray in extended solos, solos not only of thorough technical ease but of warmth, inventiveness and that extraordinary quality of tone. In all respects, Ray has done much to set so high a criterion for present-day jazz bass playing as now exists.