Billboard : 03/30/1958
Three stars

This is Sonny Clark‘s second featured LP for Blue Note and it shows growth on the part of this young pianist of the hard bop school. Around him are a group of young musicians of the same school including Don Byrd on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, John Coltrane on tenor, Paul Chambers on bass and Art Taylor on drums. It’s a swinging, driving set that will appeal to aficionados of the wide open style. Tunes include three stands, best of which is With a Song in my Heart and two originals that give the group a chance to blow.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 05/25/1958
When Good Ones Work Together, The Intermeshing Is Amazing

The best jazz improvisation in some ways comes when the musicians have worked together long enough so that they know and can anticipate each other. This is true, of course, only if the quality of their musical inspiration is good. It is no help to work with a dull musician.

But when two good ones work together and get to know one another, they can merge into a unity in their playing which is quite remarkable. You will find a beautiful example of this in the two new Sonny Clark LPs, Sonny Clark Trio (Blue Note 1579) and Sonny’s Crib (Blue Note 1576).

On the first, Clark is accompanied by Philly Joe Jones on drums and Paul Chambers on bass. These two men have worked together for most of the last three years as members of the Miles Davis Quintet and on numerous recording dates. This constant exchange of ideas, sometimes for as much as 12 hours at a stretch and often every night for months, has resulted in a really amazing intermeshing of musical thought which is evident as they accompany Clark on this LP.

On the other album, Clark’s accompaniment includes Chambers again but there is a different, even though excellent drummer, Art Taylor. The difference between Taylor’s and Jones’ manner of working with Chambers is evident on close listening. With Taylor the basic rhythm is kept flowing correctly at all times but that is really all. With Jones the basic rhythm is kept going, but on top of it there are countless other points of embellishment either by use of other sounds on the drums or by the way in which he anticipates Chambers and works as a unit with him.

Jones, by the way, is by far the best drummer playing today in almost any contest. He has a Riverside LP coming out shortly in which he has written and performed a drum suite that should be a real tour de force.

The discussion of the rhythm accompaniment does not mean to imply that it is the only point of value about these albums. Clark has developed into an excellent pianist in the Horace Silver–Bud Powell tradition with a wonderful directness and earthy concept that is impressive to hear. For Clark’s own work, I like the trio LP best, perhaps because of the inspiration of Jones and Chambers as a rhythm section.

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Down Beat : 06/26/1958
Martin Williams : 2.5 stars

Speak Low is the best track, and everyone is good on it.

I think that Clark‘s chief virtue is the range of the things he can do. He can play in the “funky” manner, but he can also use a more directly bopish style, and he can play with a kind of lyricism as well. His comping can have a fine power and life. His solos, however, often seem to me to be a series of fragmentary phrases.

Neither Clark nor Byrd ever really get on top of the fast clip at which Song is taken, and Byrd was not showing that relaxed purposefulness that he seems to be developing lately. Certainly, there is nothing here that shows the sense of logic and form that his solo on Senor Blues with Horace Silver ever did.

Fuller is still dealing largely with J.J. Johnson originals – and stating them with more robustness than Johnson has done some of the time lately.

Crib is one of those 12-12-8-12 blues with a bridge, which have become almost a standard in the east.

No one is at his best on this record, but I would like to use it as an excuse to say some things about John Coltrane.

Coltrane has been called a follower of Sonny Rollins. Perhaps he is in a sense, but I don’t know how enlightening it is to say so. His playing has also been called a development of “rhythm and blues” tenor playing and even of simple blues guitar. Both these suggestions are valid descriptively. In the past year he has developed greatly – and the long stay with Monk had a lot to do with that development.

Basically, he has real originality, I think. And the most original thing about him is rhythmic. He can play whole choruses without ever using a phrase that directly states the beat (and the rhythm and blues man often does little more than state it over and over, of course) but there is no question of swing or of good time. he can use a rhythm almost indirectly and play jazz free of the task of reminding himself or the listener of the basic pulse.

But he is not a disciplined soloist.

The startling effect of his entrances from unexpected places is something strong enough to carry for a whole chorus. But by his second or third chorus, he has often almost gushed out all he hast to say. Also, he seldom approaches a number for what he can find in it, but often uses it as a vehicle for what he can play on its chords, pouring out everything, as I say, almost as fast as he can, it seems.

He learned when he worked with Monk, but he has not yet learned, I think, an essential artistic lesson that Monk knows well: a disciplined sense of the nature and limitations of his own talent. Perhaps it is not time for him to learn it yet. Perhaps he still needs to discover things he can do, before he arrives at the best form to use them in. But when he does discipline his talents, he may be a great soloist.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

Conrad Yeatis Clark, whom his musician friends call Sonny, is a short, sad-eyed, pensive little man who comes alive when he sits at the piano. For much of the past six years he has been in California, a part of the so-called west coast jazz scene; in it but not of it. He is back in New York now, and that is as it should be; the sinewy, aggressive brand of jazz for which he stands is better represented, and can provide him with more sympathetic surroundings, when Birdland is only a Subway ride away.

Sonny was an almost unknown name when, as a member of the Buddy DeFranco Quartet, he came east in January 1954 to form part of a show called Jazz Club USA. This was a group I had assembled for a European tour. Sonny was one of three pianists in the show – the others were Beryl Booker, who had her own trio, and Carl Drinkard, Billie Holiday‘s accompanist. Sonny was also the youngest musician in the unit, 22 years old and inwardly excited about the chance to see a little of the world at this early stage in his career.

Though Beryl opened the show with a whole set of her own playing admirably in a Garnerish style, and though Drinkard was of course prominent throughout Billie’s closing set, it was Sonny who attracted the fascinated attention of the younger and more ambitious foreign musicians, and of the fans whose tastes leaned toward the Bud Powell and Monk schools of keyboard thought. on the opening night Buddy gave Sonny a number to himself, Over the Rainbow; in addition to the solo item he had a chance to spread freely over limitless choruses of the blues and other comfortable themes.

In three and a half weeks, chasing through Scandinavia and Germany, on dates in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, I never heard Sonny play a bad show. Not even when he had just stepped off an inadequately heated bus, in which he had just made a 300-mile trip from the previous one-nighter, in the depths of a close-to-zero German winter.

It was a pretty impressive record and it struck me then that the time might soon be ripe for Sonny to branch out with an album of his own. But that was in 1954, and Sonny promptly went back to California and remained with Buddy’s group for some time; after that, though he spent a full year at the Lighthouse and was fairly well accepted in local jazz circles, the prominence he had seemed to deserve failed to materialize. Not until he decided to settle in the east again in 1957, when Alfred Lion rewarded him for the decision with the album Dial S For Sonny on Blue Note 1570, did the harvest of his own talent begin to accrue to him in fair measure.

On this, his second Blue Note LP, Sonny has a group around him that is, except for the retention of Curtis Fuller on trombone, different in personnel from the previous combo.

John Coltrane has been heard previously on Blue Note with Paul Chambers on BLP 1534 and with Johnny Griffin on BLP 1559; he will be heard as leader of his own combo on BLP 1577. Born in 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, Coltrane made his professional debut with a cocktail combo in Philadelphia in 1945 before spending two years in a Navy band in Hawaii and paying some rhythm and blues dues with Eddie Vinson‘s group from 1947-8. After working with Dizzy Gillespie in 1945-51, he spent a couple of years with Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges, emerging on the new jazz scene in 1955 as a member of Miles Davis‘s group. One of the most self-assured tenor men of the hard bop school, “Trane” names Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz as his favorites. (Sonny says “I’d always admired Coltrane but had never had a chance to work with him before. It sure seemed to work out fine.”)

Donald Byrd, the young Detroiter who came to prominence with the George Wallington combo and with Art Blakey‘s Messengers in 1955-6, has recently earned a substantial token of recognition as the nominee for “New Star” on trumpet in the latest Down Beat Jazz Critic’s Poll. Curtis Fuller already has two LPs of his own (BLP 1567 and BLP 1572) as well as appearances with Bud Powell on BLP 1571. Paul Chambers, a Pittsburgher like Sonny, and Art Taylor, whose credits include the combos of [Artist43215,DeFranco} in ’52, Bud Powell off and on since ’53 and Wallington in ’54, supply Sonny with a pulsingly emphatic rhythm backing of the kind that lends itself ideally to his own surgingly expressive style.

The set starts with a … composition, With A Song in my Heart, which began life as a show tune (in Spring is Here) and is extended here to long meter, which makes the chorus 64 measures long. Byrd outlines the melody at a very bright tempo while Fuller expresses some casual thoughts on the sidelines; then a sharp break leads into two trumpet choruses that reveal not only Byrd’s influences (Dizzy and Miles) but his own hard-hitting fluency. Coltrane drives energetically through a similarly exciting two-chorus excursion, followed by a slightly more subdued Curtis Fuller. Sonny’s own chorus, which follows, typifies his own fleet and well-articulated lines.

Speak Low, a Kurt Weill composition dating back to 1943, opens with a Latin-tinged ensemble that conveys what one might indelicately call the guts of the tune, as well as its heart, with Coltrane leading the way in a deceptively light-toned style that almost suggests an alto sound. Trane has the second chorus to himself; Byrd and Fuller split the next, with the former implicitly bowing to J.J. Johnson. Again Sonny has the final solo.

Come Rain or Come Shine, a 1946 Harold Arlen melody from St. Louis Woman, is taken very slowly, with Curtis Fuller handling the melody introspectively and with only occasional variations. Notice the effective suspense created by Paul Chambers on the measures that lead into the second chorus, played by Sonny. The third and final chorus is split by Coltrane and Byrd, Paul resorting to his bow during the tag.

Sonny’s Crib provides the ingredient that is almost a sine qua non of any modern jazz session that wants to establish a firm groove: it’s a plain old B-Flat blues, with a simple unison theme built around the tonic. For variety’s sake, though, there is an eight-bar release which gives the solos a 12-12-8-12 construction, a formula currently in increasingly popular use. Coltrane, Fuller, Byrd and Clark are all in their element here, and around the ninth chorus Paul indulges in a pizzicato solo, with triplets galore, that reminds the listener of the technical prowess of this astonishing youngster.

News for Lulu opens with a left-hand figure by Sonny that is continued and repeated as an accompanying riff to the melody, an attractive minor theme with a 32-bar chorus. This time it is Sonny who gets the solo proceedings underway, two loosely swinging choruses at a medium tempo he seems to find particularly effective. Byrd, Coltrane and Fuller have two choruses apiece, in that order. Coltrane, even more than his teammates, seems particularly at ease in the minor mode. Fuller’s solo, too, is among his best of the entire session; note particularly the surprise effect of the high D that starts his second chorus, and the ingenious return to it on a different beat a couple of measures later. Chambers again has a superb pizzicato solo before the theme returns. (The Lulu of the title, by the way, is not a girlfriend, as might normally be expected. Lulu is a half-chow and half-German shepherd, and Sonny had to leave both halves behind in California.)

An unusual feature of this session – unusual, at least by the standards of contemporary customs on small combo record dates – is that there are no “fours” at any point. Possibly the men felt that there was no need for them to appear to be giving the impression of trying to outdo each other by indulging in four-measure chases, since they were able to express themselves individually and comprehensively in their own full solo choruses. Whatever the reason, and no matter how effective fours may be as a spur to the soloists under some conditions, they were certainly not missed here, for there are enough 32s, 64s and even 128s to provide a maximum of improvisation and inspiration.