Cashbox : 02/01/1958

Three of jazzdoms foremost trumpeters unite their sounds to issue a disk loaded with good listening. Gillespie, Edison, and Eldridge come up with some convincing versions of The Nearness Of You, Summertime, Moonlight In Vermont, Steeplechase, and two others. The jazzists are accompanied by Buddy Rich (drums), Oscar Peterson (piano), Ray Brown (bass), and Herb Ellis (guitar). Important addition.

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American Record Guide
Martin Williams : April, 1958

Steeplechase (the chords of Get Happy) takes one side. Eldridge (the virtuoso of “swing” trumpet) soon warms up to inventiveness, Gillespie (the virtuoso of “bop” trumpet) knows how to riff along between daring runs with no blow-hot-blow-cold choppiness, and Edison (who developed a unique flowing, almost lyric, voice out of a conception basically rather like Eldridge’s) is firmly in motion until toward the end: stock phrases and all, an exciting performance showing that this instrument can, in the right hands, do the absolutely impossible—and make sense at it. Also included is a collection of “ballads” by Gillespie and Eldridge and, although each man has handled such moods better, the other side of the picture is there and the former’s Summertime is very good indeed. The other selection is the one the title of the set comes from; it seems to me to have more swing (or is it jump?) than music.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Ralph J. Gleason : May, 1958

Good examples of the contrasts in style between modern jazz musicians and their forerunners are not too easy to come by, really. This Verve LP offers a good opportunity to observe how much Dizzy Gillespie has added to the scope of jazz trumpet playing since the days of his mentor, Roy Eldridge. They are both present here in extended solos with Harry Edison, a mainstream jazz solo trumpeter of surprising warmth as a stylistic relief between Roy and Dizzy. This album is, despite its annotator’s fervent defense of a lost cause, the proof positive of Gillespie’s importance and Eldridge’s obsolescence.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : March, 1958

Most of this disc is an unusual and heartening blowing session—heartening in that three trumpeters (Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Harry Edison) are given free rein but manage to say what they have to say effectively and convincingly by holding themselves within a consistent stylistic area. One side of the disc is devoted to an improvisation in which all three use mutes, playing in a subdued, precise, almost chamberlike manner over a belting rhythm. It amounts to a glorious helping of John Kirby in extensis. This is the meat of the disc. The rest is an easy-rocking, open-horned series of solos and challenges, and one of the ballad medleys so dear to the heart of Norman Granz.

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Toronto Star (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Roger Feather : 02/01/1958
Three stars

With some thought and writing put into it, this could have been a wonderful album. As it stands it is a badly planned session with good exhibitions by three of the better trumpet men in jazz.

One side is taken up by an 18-minute version of Steeplechase. The men use mutes most of the way through and for the first seven or eight minutes the music is excellent. The selection eventually becomes very tedious with the three hornmen playing chorus after chorus of four-bar chases. The 10-minute title tune is much the same only this time the horns are open.

The rest of the LP is a ballad medley of four tunes split between Roy and Dizzy. Aithough Dizzy plays well on his tunes, I think Roy has a slight edge. On the session numbers it is fruitless to try and pick the best man. All three play with vigor and imagination but also all have done more satisfying work in better settings.

The rhythm section is forceful and swinging throughout. It is unfortunate that these enormous creative talents have to be almost wasted on albums like these. This is a good LP but it could have been much, much better.

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Down Beat : 03/20/1958
John A. Tynan : 4.5 stars

If for no other reason than Steeplechase, which takes up one entire side of this LP, you owe it to yourself to hear this one. With the rhythm section churning, bubbling, and boiling in happy abandon, Roy, Diz and Sweets get a fantastic scene going to produce some of the most exciting, yet valid, jazz I have ever heard.

They dispense quickly with the sketchy head arrangement based on the chords of Get Happy to get down to some serious blowing. The extended solos are all muted, with Roy setting a magnificent pace for Gillespie and Edison to follow. When they move into the four-bar chases, Diz and Roy are at each other’s throats instantly and they almost lose Sweets in the ensuing foray. A climactic moment is achieved when mutes are discarded and they begin to hurl the steel-tipped lances in dead seriousness.

For me, this is one of the outstanding records in many months and makes the sometimes-interminable wading through mediocrity all worthwhile.

The other side, well-performed as it is, comes as a letdown, as they play at a slower, groovy tempo on Tour de Force and Diz and Roy do two ballads each.

For Steeplechase, however, the full five stars and one more as a bonus.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

These three trumpeters were born between 1911 and 1917 – Roy and Dizzy at the ends of that span and Harry Edison in 1915. At one time it was thought by many listeners and even by a combative number of musicians that there was an ominous and steadily deepening rift of musical language between Dizzy and the musicians he represented on one side and such swing era durables as Roy and Harry on the other.

So troubled was Roy over whether what he had to say was still meaningful that a major reason for his long stay in Paris starting in 1950 was his acute need to reappraise himself and the ways jazz was going. Harry Edison continued working in the States, eventually locating himself in the Los Angeles area. His name rarely appeared on the polls or in any other places in the trade magazines; and for a time, he was rarely heard on records.

By 1955-57, however, a period of consolidation in jazz was strongly in process and such nearly ubiquitous laudatory terms as “mainstream,” “roots,” “getting back to Basic” connoted a change in perspective by many lay partisans and many musicians. It was finally recognized by almost all that when Dizzy built on Roy, he hadn’t then leapt to another kind of music but had instead added to and further enlivened by his uniqueness the basic jazz tradition, as have Roy and Harry.

It was further realized by almost all that the power and the individuality of Roy and “Sweets” Edison were as valuable and valid in 1957 as they had been ten and twenty years before. They were not historic figures only. They were sensually, sensitively, awakeningly alive. More alive than many of us and than many younger jazzmen. And their message could still shake us and break us into a sudden “Yeah!”, and sometimes just leave us shaking our head at what they had sent us to find in the rest ot us.

There were, of course, a few obscurantists still preparing tables of excommunication. The Grand Inquisitor, Hugues Panassié, in his Guide to Jazz (American edition, 1956) still writes that Dizzy “in 1945, abandoned jazz and launched out into bop.”

A sudden new representative of the opposite camp of those whose jazz world is flat is Ralph J. Gleason whose comment on Eldridge in the May 30, 1957, Down Beat If nominate as the most vacuous pronunciamento in the history of writing on jazz. Someone may tie this quotation, but no one will ever cut it for hollowness.

Wrote Gleason of an Illinois Jacquet and Roy Eldridge album: “Now they find themselves, on the verge of middle age, sort of musical anachronism. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with what they play. It is every bit as good as it was when their initial appearance made such an impression… and yet what they have to say no longer seems to have any relevance. It is tragic. They are left stranded on a plateau which they reached when it was important to get there. But now the main stream of history has gone on by, and they are talking in the language of another era to an ever-diminishing audience.”

Relevance to whom? I submit that Sidney Bechet, Edmond Hall, Vic Dickenson, Pee Wee Russell, Roy, Sweets and scores more are stranded on no plateaus musically except for those that exist in the minds of those afflicted with the Gleason syndrome. Roy, like any jazzman, is telling his story. He still feels, still perceives, still expresses his life in our time through his music. If anything, he and Harry (and Dizzy, who will apparently soon qualify for Gleason’s plateau) have added depth and even more consistency of full-strength communication with the years.

What Roy and Harry have to say is relevant to those of our emotions that are penetrated and stirred by the basics of life love, anger and hate, the blues sand the wonder of being. So long as their chops hold up, what they have to say on those subjects will always be relevant to me and to many who do not surrender to what composer Milton Babbitt terms “jazz imperatives.” those ex cathedra visions of what must be that are so alarmingly innocent of the knowledge of what is.

As for these three again, all three are swingers. Each is identifiable by temperament although all are linked by years of speaking and living the blues language. Roy is intense, sometimes ferocious, a player who loves, who needs to play. As one of his colleagues says, “If there’s no session, Roy will make one. He’s fiercely proud of being a jazz musician. Charles Mingus recalls Roy playing at his high school when he was still a boy in Los Angeles. “Don’t ever forget, Roy told him, “your own music. Don’t ever play it cheap.” There is so much energy in and around Roy that he is somehow loud in his silence after he has finished playing. He approaches music as he would a woman.

Harry Edison is described provocatively by Raymond Horricks in a new British book, Count Basie and His Orchestra (Victor Gollancz I.td., London, 1957), There is some amount of overgeneralization in the analysis since Roy is not always “taut” nor is Sweets always not. But it’s a sound beginning for further discussion: “… Edison has been one of the great natural stylists in jazz … a musician who hardly knows the meaning of sensationalism … Just like Eldridge, the playing style of Edison — upon joining Basie — revealed its owner’s tendency to break away from the simple melodic variations of Louis Armstrong (Editor’s note: they were hardly that “simple”), adopting an altogether more searching style of improvisation (Editor’s note: not more searching, but different) which contained bold, unusual intervals, intricate constructions upon the melody, volatile cascades of notes, and so on. In this respect both Eldridge and Edison pointed toward the experiments which were to take place at Minton’s Playhouse in New York in the 1940’s. Harry came to differ from Roy, however, in that he gradually took on the greater rhythmic relaxation which so distinguished the musical style of the Basie band. He still played with a direct attack as a result of his tremendous emotional feeling, yet the tautness which accompanied Eldridge’s flurry of invention was gradually erased from his work. The waves of excitement still flowed liberally through every solo he took, but the tenseness, the almost breathless desire to rush on and on which so strikes one when listening to Eldridge was … replaced by a more supple, more relaxed attack.”

Dizzy has become more confident but no less whoopingly exuberant through the years. His tone has broadened and deepened; his conception has become more rollickingly cohesive; and his humor more than ever erupts unexpectedly but never unswingingly. Like Roy and Harry, he likes to blow, and is not satiated after strings of choruses if the company in the front line is stimulating and the rhythm section remains fresh and time-right, and strong.

Strength is the mark of the house rhythm section for this date—Buddy Rich, drums; Oscar Peterson, piano; Ray Brown, bass; and Herb Ellis, guitar.

On the long rides through Steeplechase, the order of soloists begins with Roy, Dizzy and Sweets. On Tour de Force, the order is Sweets, Roy and Dizzy. The first and third ballad tracks are Roy; the second and fourth are Dizzy.