Billboard : 07/28/1956
Score of 78

Dameron, who has been hibernating out Cleveland way for some time, makes a strong comeback in this program of his original compositions and arrangements. Fontainebleau, the ambitious title piece, is a good starter. Soloists on this date were Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Sahib Shahib, alto; Joe Alexander; Cecil Payne, baritone, and Henry Coker on trombone. Each is offered ample opportunity to score; particularly Dorham in Delirium. A delightful, well-planned session that should have wide appeal.

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Calgary Albertan
Don Cameron : 09/15/1956

So jazz is just a lot of noise, is it? Sir Thomas Beecham apparently doesn’t think so. He considered the title piece of this LP musical enough to warrant recording it with a 78-piece symphony orchestra. It is an orchestra impression by Tadd Dameron of the famous palace and forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. The Beecham recording, as yet unreleased, should be even more rewarding than this one, because, as the cover notes suggest, the tonal colors would take on an even richer hue if played by a larger group. The composter’s octet can provide here only an outline of the work’s probabilities and leaves much to the imagination in this jazz packaging. The record contains four other Dameron originals, all tastefully played. Altogether, a satisfying recording.

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High Fidelity : September 1956

Tadd Dameron, who is better known as an arranger than as a pianist, proves to be his own best interpreter on Fontainebleau, a group of five Dameron compositions performed by an eight-piece band under his own direction. His playing is warm and explicit, a welcome contrast to the heavy-handed work of most of the men in his group. A noteworthy exception is trombonist Henry Coker, who comports himself throughout with taste and thoughtfulness.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 09/16/1956

Piano-playing composer and arranger Tadd Dameron has always done excellent work for the men who hired his talent. Now he’s producing for himself and Prestige Records has him on a provocative album called Fontainebleau.

The title is taken from one of the five Dameron originals that make up this session. It’s an album with some nice changes of pace. Pianist Dameron stays out of the spotlight because he is mainly a writer for the horns. And it’s fine writing. Couple weeks back, we had the EmArcy album of Clifford Brown and Max Roach, and one of the highlights of that LP is trumpet work by Brownie on a Dameron piece called The Scene is Clean. Here on Prestige’s Dameron album you will find that same work, but called Clean is the Scene. The composer has let the horns state the theme, but then he has taken over to explore the melodic line with the piano against a soft background of walking bass by John Simmons. Drummer Shadow Wilson has a pleasant moment of Latin rhythm before the horns come in for the epilogue.

The three sax men are Sahib Shihab on alto, Joe Alexander on tenor and Cecil Payne with the big baritone. Kenny Dorham plays trumpet and Henry Coker is on trombone. All have good solos. When going together, Dameron achieved a Kenton flavor.

You can break Dameron’s writing down any one of a dozen ways, and you always find it clear and imaginative. Particularly good is his meandering against the bass and drums. In addition to his work on Clean Scene, you catch this the most just before the groundswell finale of a bit of blues Dameron calls Bulla-Babe.

The album notes say Sir Thomas Beecham recorded Fontainebleau with a 78-piece orchestra while Dameron was in England arranging for Ted Heath. The Beecham thing has never been released. I don’t think it could be bad. There’s enough solid material in the jazz tone poem to warrant a big sound.

A solid vote for this album.

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Penguin Jazz Guide
Brian Morton & Richard Cook, 2010

Trumpeter/arranger Don Sickler of Dameronia said (1989): “Someone called him the great romantic of jazz composition and I think that’s spot on. He wrote some of the best music of the bop era, and yet he’s barely known to younger musicians.”

Dameron‘s remembered now for a couple of repertory compositions – Lady Bird, Hot House– and not much else. He was an underrated performer who stands at the fulcrum of modern jazz, midway between swing and bop. He began writing arrangements in his late teens and worked with Harlan Leonard from 1939. Soon got caught up in bop and led small groups with Fats Navarro and Miles Davis. Drug and legal problems effectively ended his career. Combining the broad-brush arrangements of the big band and the new advanced harmonic language, his own recordings are difficult to date blind and a tune like On A Misty Night seems to capture the evanescence that surrounds the man and the music.

The discography is spotty. Records with Fats Navarro are usually covered under the trumpeter’s name and Mating Call is often reviewed as a John Coltrane album, though it’s the pianist who’s in the driving seat, subtly directing the ensemble. Fontainebleau dates from Dameron’s last full year of freedom before the prison sentence that took him out of the jazz stream effectively for good. The title-piece is wholly written out, with no scope for improvising. It might seem similar in some respects to John Lewis‘ similarly inspired music, but Dameron is more thoroughly a jazz composer, with little of Lewis’s classical bent. Though the title-piece is relatively formal, there is plenty of individual work else­ where, notably from Dorham. The Scene Is Clean is picked up sometimes by bop outfits, but mostly these charts are too lushly elegant for blowing purposes. Never a distinctive soloist, Dameron prefers to work within his own lush chord progressions, though he lets the group roam free on the long closing blues, Bula-Beige.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 09/30/1956

A fine, well written and well played album by one of the best modern arrangers. It’s not up with the Modern Jazz Quartet for execution or construction but it is very good.

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Virginian-Pilot
Robert C. Smith : 08/19/1956

The jazz composer-arranger enjoys a whole acceptance for the first time in the modern idiom, where written music has achieved a position of importance as a foil for the vital improvisation.

One of the earliest of this group to gain ominence was Tadd Dameron, who came out of Cleveland by way of Chicago to help foster the development of bop. After a period of absence from the scene Dameron has returned with a program of his compositions titled Fontainebleau. The composer of such modern standards as Hot House and Our Delight turns here to new works, supported by a full-sounding octet featuring trombonist Henry Coker, trumpeter Kenny Dorham and altoist Sahib Shihab. It is one of the most successful presentations of new jazz in some time. The title work is a well-integrated, rocking composition featuring clever scoring for Tadd’s piano against brass. Bulla Babe is an energetic blues. Clean is the Scene is typical forceful Dameron, with a wandering sax line underscoring the motion.

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Down Beat : 08/22/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars

Tadd Dameron, who can be one of the consistently distinguished jazz writers if he can keep himself straight, returns to records after too long a time with a largely impressive and characteristically personal LP. Fontainebleau, after which the album is titled, is a lovely three-part programmatic piece, played almost entirely in ensemble. It is a good case for those who feel that a piece can be jazz and still have no really improvised solos. I should like to hear the work played in a larger, more varied instrumentation since it cries for a full spread of timber colors.

Dameron has that rare ability to construct melodies of quality and durability (Lady Bird, for one). Delerion is a sizzling up-temp experience with two blazing solos by new tenor Joe Alexander from Cleveland who plays with a Rollins-like hardness that is also full and has its own story to tell and who could become a major tenor.

In between Alexander, is a dazzling, building Kenny Dorham statement. Scene is largely a monologue by Dameron. It’s an intriguing somewhat angular piece in which his solo is played in a rather unusual combination of dissonant, strongly rhythmed impressionism (something like a Monk with a lighter touch and more capacity to sustain a logical lyrical growth; it also has a marked Ellington influence.)

Flossie features Henry Coker of the Basie band (full personnel on all these is Coker, Alexander, Dorham, baritone Cecil Payne, altoist Sahib Shihab, Dameron, John Simmons, Shadow Wilson).

Coker plays the attractive theme and variations with warmth and strength. The last track, a uniquely seasoned blues, includes an astringently thoughtful solo by Tadd; a striking statement by Alexander; moving, simmering Coker; Shihab proving again that he should concentrate on also, which he plays cleanly and with intelligent conception, rather than on baritone; a virile Payne who has been maturing musically if not in other ways during the last year; the study (musically) John Simmons, and some final firm, sharp-edged observations by Dameron before the satisfying ensemble close.

A most worthwhile LP, particularly for Tadd’s writing (he did all the originals) and the important debut of Alexander.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

Dameron is Tadd, Tadley Ewing to be formal, one of Cleveland’s few gifts to the jazz world. His brother Caesar, an alto saxophonist, introduced him to Jazz and his first professional job was with Freddie Webster who later in Tadd’s career graced Sarah Vaughan‘s recording of Tadd’s If You Could See Me Now with some of the most soulful trumpet ever recorded.

After stints with Zack White and Blanche Calloway (Cab’s sister) Tadd arrived in Chicago and by 1940 at the age of 23, he had started to arrange. Before the war and defense work, he managed to get to New York with Vido Musso and to Kansas City where he wrote and arranged for Harlan Leonard.

When the war ended, Tadd really came into prominence through his arrangements for Jimmy Lunceford, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Georgie Auld and Sarah Vaughan. He also organized and played piano in Bab’s Three Bips and a Bop and wrote most importantly for the big band of Dizzy Gillespie. Patrons of the Royal Roost in 1948 will attest to the remarkable small group Tadd headed with Allen Eager and Fats Navarro as the leading horns.

In 1949, Tadd went to the Paris Jazz Festival with Miles Davis and remained on the other side of the Atlantic to write for England’s Ted Heath. On returning to the U.S. in 1951, he spent two years with Bull Moose Jackson and then formed his own nine piece band which played at the Paradise Club in Atlantic City, N.J. Now after hibernating in Cleveland since the demise of that band, Tadd Dameron, one of the brightest of the modern arranger-composers is back to realize all those promises he made with his lyrical, rich-textured, soul-moving compositions of the past.

Fontainebleau is the site of famous palace and vast forest in northern France, southeast of Paris, where the Bourbons used to cavort. When Tadd saw Fontainebleau he was moved to the extent of writing the impressions of what he felt in a piece of program music, depicting the various aspects of the place, both physical and historical.

Fontainebleau is divided into three parts which melt into each other without sharp lines of demarcation. First is Le Foret and the verdure stretching out in its grandeur; next Les Cygnes (the swans) as they swim on the lake; and then to the palace itself and L’Adieu, Napoleon’s farewell before leaving for Elba in March of 1814.

Knowing these facts and the ideas behind the composition are extremely interesting, but the music is excellent music for its own merit with or without any verbal qualifications. On hearing it, I immediately thought of a larger band (possibly Dizzy’s) and the many extra colors that Fontainebleau would readily lend itself to but it seems as if other people had thought along these lines on an even larger scale for Tadd tells us that Sir Thomas Beecham recorded it (as yet unreleased) in England with a 78 piece orchestra.

Delirium is a swift, rocking vehicle for Tadd’s fellow Clevelander, Joe Alexander, who blows his vigorous horn in two separate solos divided by a crackling, sparkling solo by Kenny Dorham.

The typically Dameronian The Scene Is Clean is expounded by Tadd both chordally and single line.

Henry Coker has Flossie Lou all to himself. Henry was one of the members of Eddie Heywood‘s sextet in the late Forties but is best known for his work with Count Basie since 1952.

The blues make their appearance on Bula-Beige with extended solos by a mood setting Tadd, Joe Alexander, not untouched by Sonny Rollins and Wardell Gray, a mellow Coker, plaintive Sahib, fecund Cecil Payne, walking John Simmons and Tadd again, chording and occasionally pulling an Avery Parrish before the band introduces a new theme into a swelling climax.