Billboard : 04/07/1958
Three stars

Red Garland gets a chance on this new disk to lead a small combo, instead of the trios he usually cuts with, and he comes off exceedingly well. Men supporting him are Donald Byrd, John Coltrane, Art Taylor, and a newcomer, George Joyner on bass. Garland’s piano work is first rate, especially on the lengthy title tune which takes up one side of the LP. It’s hard bop, but in a warming mood than usual. Performances, names and attractive cover should help sell this set.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : August, 1958

The informality of this session extends the title track to fill one side of the record with the pre-dawn sounds of the sort of blues usually reserved for the last set of an inspired evening. Red Garland punches out the lines in firm, declarative statements on the keyboard before subsiding into an insistent prodding of the horns. Not that much is needed, for John Coltrane on tenor sax and trumpeter Donald Byrd welcome a chance to illuminate some of the eternal truths of the subject. They thrive in a setting which permits a free flow of ideas, unimpeded by anything other than an inherent sense of form and unimpeded by technical exercises and meaningless outbursts. Bassist George Joyner is accomplished in his solos and Art Taylor drums in a manner to make the whole proceeding seem effortless.

The quintet is not a studio group, having played engagements during the leader’s sabbatical from Miles Davis last fall. Byrd reworks the melody of They Can’t Take That Away From Me, and a dynamic reading of Tadd Dameron’s Our Delight provides a whirlwind finish.

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Metronome
Bill Coss : July, 1958

There are times when All Mornin’ Long, the title song of the Red Garland album which occupies side A of that LP, seems as if it were all of that, that is as if it had been going on all mornin’ long. That is not meant so much as a criticism as it is a comment about giving everybody unlimited choruses to blow: it may be good enough for jazz, but it only infrequently results in anything that is consistently good jazz. That is not to say though that this is a worthless fifteen or so minutes. Among the seemingly unending choruses, there are good contributions by every one as the personnel should assure and the general accompaniment is nearly always above-the-ordinary. It is Garland’s date and he understandably has a lot of the solo room which is all to the good for his modern-basic piano, which even has some allegiance to Garner, is full-bodied and swinging. Since it is his first date, some mention should be made of bassist George Joyner, who shows quality which time will certainly turn into an important contribution to modern bass playing.

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Miami Herald (Miami, FL)
Fred Sherman : 08/03/1958

All Mornin’ Long by the Red Garland quintet (Prestige 7130) is a well programmed set of three by a tightly swinging group. Pianist Garland is working here again with John Coltrane on tenor sax and Donald Byrd, trumpet. The title piece takes the entire first side with plenty of imaginative solo improvisation on the gentle blues. A ballad and Tadd Dameron’s bopish Our Delight occupy the flip side.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 04/15/1958

One of the fascinating things about jazz is the way a tough musician—and most jazz men have to be tough, not only on their horn but in their personalities in order to survive in a musical jungle and remain true to themselves—can also be a sensitive artist and a warmly lyrical musical voice.

In a new Prestige LP, All Morning Long (Prestige 7130), pianist Red Garland, a former professional lightweight boxer, indicates once again that he is one of the most important jazz voices being heard today. His work is lyric, there is warmth and sympathy in his playing, yet there is toughness, too; toughness enough to enable him to chase the tenor and trumpet and even the drums in exchanges on the fast tunes. And never, for one bar, does he lose sight of the fact that, wildly exciting as jazz may become, deep as its debt to rhythm is, it still must be musical.

This album is Garland’s first venture as leader of a group larger than a trio (the customary combo for piano players). Here he is accompanied by John Coltrane, his tenor sax sidekick from the Miles Davis Quintet; Donald Byrd, one of the most consistent performers among the young trumpet players; Arthur Taylor, the fine drummer who has accompanied Garland on his previous trio LPs, and a fine new bassist, George Joyner.

What Garland does, whenever he is on a recording date and no matter how frantic the other instrumentalists may get, is to keep the central idea firmly tied to the blues, to a solidly swinging groove and to a lyric conception. Some of the things that Garland has recorded in the past, such as his Please Give Me Someone to Love, and now the title song, All Morning Long, are among the best piano blues efforts of the past decade. They are the sort of solo effort to which other musicians will return again and again for inspiration and I am certain that phrases and figures from these numbers will be quoted by pianists for years to come.

There are only three selections on this LP. One entire side is given to All Morning Long. On the back there are two tracks, They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a wonderfully pretty ballad that was something of a hit in the thirties via a Tommy Dorsey recording, and Our Delight. The latter is a jazz classic. It was written by Tadd Dameron for the Dizzy Gillespie big band of the 40s, the seminal influence of modern big bands for some years. It is a favorite of jazzmen but seldom recorded. Here it offers excellent solos and a stimulating exchange of ideas.

For those meeting tenor John Coltrane and trumpeter Donald Byrd for the first time, the blues side, All Morning Long, shows each in a particularly effective framework. Throughout, the rhythm section neatly assists the Garland rolling rhythm and the entire LP is very well recorded.

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 12/21/1958

After an opening in which Donald Byrd uses an astonishingly corny trumpet “shake,” the quintet settles down to some honest wailing in the long title track. Coltrane is excellent even though this is not the best Coltrane; Garland demonstrates how effectively a piano can swing without ceasing to be lyric. A record to own – if Byrd’s opening doesn’t bug you too much.

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Down Beat : 06/26/1958
Don Gold : 4 stars

The title track of this LP consumes one side of the record. Ordinarily, this means that the musicians are content to struggle with variations of the theme. In this case, however, Mornin’, an earthy blues, is a series of stimulating extended solos vividly rooted in jazz tradition. The standard and Tadd Dameron’s Delight, which complete the LP, continue, at a slightly less effective pace, the significant sounds of the first tune.

Coltrane speaks more authoritatively here than I have heard him speak before. Byrd is a significant young trumpeter, capable of technical control and creative eloquence. His fluency is impressive, if not flawless, and his approach is based on an awareness of much of jazz history.

Garland’s roots are deep, too. He can play fleetly, but is knowing enough to realize he can communicate lucidly in many ways, without overpowering the listener with hollow notes.

Joyner, a young bassist from Memphis (a city, by the way, which is contributing more able jazzmen than many larger cities), is quite capable in support and as soloist. Taylor plays tastefully throughout.

Blowing sessions rely on the ability of the participants for their success; this one is particularly valuable because the participants were ready.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

New York’s jazz scene may not be equal to what it was during the heyday of West 52nd Street but no longer can one complain about there being no place to hear live sounds in the Apple. The concentration of clubs on one block is not the setting but rather the whole metropolitan area and environs.

There are the important Greenwich Village and off Village clubs like the Bohemia, Vanguard, Five Spot and Half Note; midtown has Birdland and plano rooms like the Composer and the Hickory House; Harlem offers Small’s and The Melody Room; in Brooklyn, it’s the Continental; in Newark, Sugar Hill; on Long Island, the Cork And Bib.

Besides serving as showcases for the more permanent, established groups, these clubs feature units composed of the many fine musicians living in the New York area who band together for short engagements, between their jobs with “name” leaders, or longer tenures between periods of no work.

The Red Garland Quintet is not a group that it currently playing clubs in New York or touring the country, for Garland and John Coltrane are back with Miles Davis at this writing. Byrd, Joyner and Taylor are still together, however, and in the company of other tenormen and pianists (Charlie Rouse & Junior Mance, for instance, at the Bohemia in January 1958) are carrying on. The group, as you hear it here, did play around New York in the fall of 1957. Sometimes it would include Lou Donaldson on alto; Coltrane was a member when he wasn’t playing with Thelonious Monk’s quartet. There were engagements of the Sugar Hill and the Continental; Sunday jam sessions too, at places like the Palm Garden.

Red Garland’s keyboard eloquence has been heard on Prestige in the context of his own trio on three separate occasions and he has also been featured on the recordings made by the Miles Davis quintet and the quartets of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. This, however, is his first small band date under his own name. This makes him the “leader.” Leader can be a very nominal term today. A group that records is not necessarily a permanent unit and may appear on record under any one of its members’ names but it is still the responsibility of the “leader” to choose some of the numbers and also to occupy a good part of the solo time. In All Mornin’ Long, the titular blues, Red fills the requisites by way of a many-splendored, deep-dish demonstration of feeling, mood and melody.

In writing of Garland in a review of his trio LP, Groovy (Prestige 7113), critic Ralph Gleason said, quite accurately, “He has brought back some long absent elements to jazz piano, made them acceptable to the ultra-modernists and proven over again the sublime virtue of swing and a solid, deep groove.”

John Coltrane has established himself as one of the leading saxophonists by virtue of his work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in 1956-57. He has arrived at a high level of performance on a consistent basis, his playing in this sot is a perfect example of this.

Donald Byrd received much praise when he did his first playing in New York in the mid-Fifties. He never let it prevent him from working hard at improvement and has constantly moved upward in means and depth of expression. His potential has not been exhausted either.

Arthur Taylor is another example of a musician who is mellowing and improving with experience although he is not yet approaching any ripe old age; A.T. won’t be thirty until 1959. He, too, has reached a happy level of consistency.

All of the players involved have made many appearances on Prestige with the exception of George Joyner and therefore, the words concerning him will be more biographical and of greater number than those dealing with the returnees.

George was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1932 and was started in music at a very early age by his mother who played piano at church, but it wasn’t until high school that he really become interested in becoming a musician. His father, who was teaching him how to cook (literal, not jazz meaning), helped him buy his first bass at the age of sixteen. The first week, George stayed up late and played along with the radio; the second week he got a gig and has been working ever since. In order to travel ground the country and broaden his musical scope, he did an act with his bass which sometimes found him riding it like a jockey. From 1949-52 he attended Arkansas State and led the dance band there which won the Pittsburgh Courier contest in 1951. Then George went into the Army. The first year he played tuba in an Army band; the second year, bass in a Special Services show unit which also included Phineas Newborn and Wynton Kelly. Upon his discharge in 1955 he joined B.B. King’s blues band on electric bass and received some valuable lessons in “soul.” In March of 1956 he come to New York with Phineas Newborn and met Charlie Mingus who inspired him to play and study by lending him a bass to replace the beat-up one he hod been using. George’s studies with Michael Krasnapolsky, recommended by Ray Brown, have been carried on ever since.

After a year with Newborn, George left to play a summer job with Teddy Charles and Idrees Sulieman in the Adirondacks. In the fall of 1957 he returned to New York and has since worked with Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard, Anita O’Day at the Cork And Bib and the Garland (or whoever was leading) group in the engagements mentioned earlier. His favorite bassists are Brown, Mingus and Pettiford, “each one for something else.” That Joyner is one of our most promising young bassists will be evident to you in this set. He certainly lives up to his last name as he helps fuse the rhythm section and his extended solo on All Mornin’ Long presents some arresting ideas.

The first side opener, and closer, is a rocking, funky (there’s that word again) blues which bears the title from which the name of the entire album derives. All the solos are of some length but do not lack in interest because of the soloists themselves and the devices employed by the rhythm section. Red does an interesting thing in his fourteenth chorus as he combines two phrases that Miles Davis originally played on Charlie Parker’s recordings of Billie’s Bounce and Now’s The Time.

Donald tenderly phrases the first sixteen bars of They Can’t Take That Away From Me as the rhythm section answers him. Coltrane has the bridge and Donald returns for the last eight. Trane, Donald and Red solo, Donald handles the majority of the theme again with George getting the bridge.

It’s a delight to hear Tadd Dameron’s Our Delight once more. Trane and Donald are spurred on by the dynamic rhythm section in their solos. It is interesting to compare Donald’s solo with the one he played on the same tune with George Wallington (Prestige 7032). Red’s piano is in a hard-swinging Bud Powell groove. Then he plays tag with the horns as they interject strains from the arrangement of Our Delight that Dizzy Gillespie used to play.