Down Beat : 07/25/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4 stars

Detroit-New York Junction involves former Detroiters Jones, tenor Billy Mitchell, guitarist Kenny Burrell and pianist Tommy Flanagan with drummer Shadow Wilson and bassist Oscar Pettiford. Thad, potentially one of the most creative modern trumpeters, has almost no room to stretch during his nightly work with the Basie band, so that it has mainly been recordings like his two LPs on Debut and now this one that have indicated his growing value.

Thad, first of all, plays with a welcome brassiness in contrast to some of his younger contemporaries’ choked and/or pinched tones. Thad swings with ease and his solos always sustain interest because of his care for construction (Leonard Feather contributes a good brief analysis of his solo style in the notes). A high track is the singing Little Girl Blue, played just by Thad, Kenny, and Oscar. Thad is also particularly effective on Scratch.

Pettiford is in assured form in the rhythm section and on solos. Impressive are the relatively new (outside of Detroit) talents of Burrell and Flanagan. Flanagan also is a very good comper. Billy Mitchell plays a hard-bop tenor that also has, however, an emotional fullness and a big beat. Though his ideas aren’t especially individual or challenging, his choruses are uniformly solid in their impact. The original lines, slight but pleasant, are by Thad.

Rating would have been higher had there been more thoughtful interplay as in Little Girl and on some of the Debut tracks since as a blowing session, the solos here aren’t always incandescent though very good.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

Ever since it lost its amateur standing as a rural folk music and began to earn attention as an esthetic American art form in the view of the literati, jazz has been undergoing a process that might best be described as “citification.”

Because of the emergence of several of the early jazzmen from its nether regions, the first community thus to be citified in jazz was New Orleans, even though simultaneously with the alleged birth of jazz in that town there was no shortage of similar music in Memphis, Tenn. or Sedalia, Mo., or even New Brunswick, N.J. After that we had Chicago jazz, later Kansas City jazz, and more recently Los Angeles has produced something often described as West Coast jazz.

The citification of music may have no exact musical basis in some of these instances; in any case, rapid communications via radio, records and traveling musicians made every style the property of jazz as a whole almost as soon as it had developed. A major factor that has tended to citify jazz is the concentration of almost all the important technical facilities in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It is not until a musician or group migrates to one of these three that he has much of a chance for international recognition nowadays.

Thus the title “Detroit-New York Junction” signifies a happy marriage between the rapidly growing musical produce of Motor City and the magnetic tape of the Big Apple.

Thaddeus Joseph Jones is the latest and greatest talent to emerge from America’s automotive areas. Born March 28, 1923 in Pontiac Mich., he is almost five years younger than his brother Hank, the distinguished pianist heard lately with Benny Goodman. A third brother, Elvin, is beginning to make a name for himself as a drummer.

The three Jones boys had their own combo for a while in the late 1930s, around Detroit and neighboring towns. Thad worked in Saginaw with a Bostonian who had wandered westward, saxophonist Sonny Stitt. After some more local work in Michigan and a couple of years of Army service from 1943-6, he had his own band for a while in Oklahoma City. Back in Detroit, he spent two years in a combo led by Billy Mitchell, the tenor sax man heard as Thad’s own sideman on this LP. (Billy, at this writing, is bringing the doctrines of modern jazz to audiences in Pakistan and points East as a member of the State Department-blessed Dizzy Gillespie band.)

Thad joined the Count Basie orchestra in May 1954. It was not long before musicians, then critics, then fans began to acclaim him. He should have won the Down Beat critics’ poll in 1955 as new trumpet star of the year, but missed it by a hair (half a vote, to be precise.)

Actually Thad, in more than two years with Basie, has had less of a chance than one might expect to display his talent fully. For one thing, he has to share the solo chores with another great trumpet, Joe Newman; for another, his harmonic conception on solos may be a little in advance of those of the accompanying rhythm section or ensemble. At the memory of that everlasting Pop Goes The Weasel quote on April in Paris, his first Blue Note LP may come as an ear-opener.

The combo with him is just small enough to set him off perfectly, just large enough never to leave a bare setting. Kenny Burrell, the guitarist, and Tommy Flanagan, the pianist, are both fellow-Detroiters who have lately made their mark on the New York scene. Oscar Pettiford is too well known to need any formal presentation, while Shadow Wilson, among other credits, played drums with Hampton, Hines and Herman was well as with Basie, Jacquet and Garner.

Blue Room is treated in a buoyant, blithe fashion at an easy tempo, with the full-bodied Mitchell tenor, the loose, easy Burrell guitar and Pettiford’s incredibly agile bass all featured before Thad moves in cautiously, gracefully, like a panther about to pounce. There is a similar elegance to the grace notes of Tarriff as they trip gently over the tenor’s second line in the ingenious ensemble. And on Little Girl Blue, played simply by trumpet, guitar and bass, you may perhaps find the most distinctive moments of the entire set. The verse is played as a waltz; Oscar uses his bow; Kenny uses chords; Thad uses every weapon at his disposal, and with the dexterity of a master. This is ballad jazz of a high order.

It is on the lengthy Scratch, though, that you may find your clearest and fullest and fullest view of the magnificence of Thad Jones’ talent. The long-note phrases, in which contrasting accents compensate for the scarcity of notes, are followed by peppery passages alive with sixteenth notes. Thad’s symmetry of construction is one of his most telling virtues: hitting on a fanciful idea, he may decide to repeat it with the accents or the harmonic placement changed for the sake of variety. In other words, when he builds a solo he constructs a continuous melody, which is the end to which every improvised jazz solo should aspire, and one that few can attain.

Zec is another original, kicked off much faster than Scratch and played in trumpet-tenor unison, a boppish melody that sails right into Thad’s first solo. Flanagan’s single-note lines on his swinging solo earmark him as one of the year’s brightest new piano discoveries.

In view of Alfred Lion’s past record for nurturing new jazz talent, I’m not at all surprised that it was he who engineered this felicitous Detroit-New York junction.