Cashbox : 08/01/1959

Comprised of Gene Harris, piano and celeste; Andrew Simpkins, bass; and Bill Dowdy, drums, the Three Sounds offer their jazz interpretation of eight pop tunes, among them Besame Mucho, Angel Eyes, I Could Write a Book and Falling in Love with Love. With this, their second LP, the trio is fast making a name for themselves. Could be a hot jazz item.

—–

San Bernardino County Sun
Chris Perlee : 01/26/1960

A near-capacity crowd witnessed the second spectacular jazz concert to be held in recent months in Swing Auditorium, “Dimensions of Jazz,” Saturday night, with Frank Evans as emcee.

The Three Sounds, who were making their West Coast debut, started the program off with a composition from their second album, entitled Bottoms Up. The Sounds percussionist Bill Dowdy, bassist Andrew Simpkins and pianist Gene Harris. All three are very fine musicians and this made for easy and enjoyable listening.

Smooth Style

I noticed that Harris’ smooth style of piano playing seems to include the good points of Ahamed Jamal, André Previn and Erroll Garner – all rolled into one.

A highlight of The Sounds offerings was Two Base Hit, which allowed Dowdy and Simpkins to elaborate on rhythms.

Next came Anita O’Day, who established complete rapport with her audience through her wonderful stage presence and vocal style in such numbers as Honeysuckle Rose, That’s All, and Tenderly, which she does so well. Her fabulous version of Tea For Two defied all tempo. And starting out to a slow Latin beat, she sang Sweet Georgia Brown in such a vampish style that the whole audience was with her all the way.

Marvelous Job

The lovely vocalist was accompanied by two of The Three Sounds, Harris at the piano and Simpkins on bass, plus competent Frank Pool on the skins. Considering the fact that Harris and Simpkins had never worked with Miss O’Day before, they did a marvelous job.

After the brief intermission and an encore by The Three Sounds, came the poll-winning Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Dave at the piano, Eugene Wright on bass, wailing Joe Morello handling the percussion end; and, last but far from least, the nation’s No. 1 alto sax man, Paul Desmond.

The group was in great form as it went through the Brubeck version of St. Louis Blues and others of its repertoire, some new and some not so new. Although Dave didn’t announce the numbers, this took nothing away from the audience’s appreciation, since most jazz enthusiasts seemed totally familiar with Take the A Train and other themes.

There was tremendous use of counterpoint between Desmond and Brubeck and Morello’s wailing tactics thrilled the crowd, while Wright backed the group with his singing bass to best advantage.

This was the type of show which increases the ranks of jazz-lovers – not just in San Bernardino- but everywhere.

—–

Down Beat : 09/03/1959
George Hoefer : 4 stars

This is a rather unusual unit in the world of jazz. It features a light, melodic, individualistic instrumental style. As their name implies, there are three sounds, with Harris‘ piano dominant, so cohesively integrated that it sounds like an instrument with different voices being played by one man.

The results are unobtrusive but seductive. It is like listening to pleasant background music at first, but you find yourself constantly cocking an ear toward the sound to hear what is happening with the piano, drums, and bass, individually and in interplay.

The playing is highly improvisational with considerable original melodic content. Harris, who arranged everything on the set with the exception of Nothing Ever Changes, proves his inventiveness with his composition Jinnie Lou, which is a light blues tribute to a former employer. One feels the influence of old Chicago blues piano, but in a sophisticated interpretation.

Here, as pointed out in the liner notes of their first Blue Note offering, is a group developing interesting musical sounds without the help of new or unusual jazz instruments. The rhythmic effects of the group surpass anything heard before from the usual piano trio. It is subtle jazz without pretension, with all the basic elements there but brought into modern focus.

—–

Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

The most encouraging development for any unknown jazz group is an immediate, spontaneous reaction to a record debut. Without any artificial support from press agents, when the Three Sounds’ initial LP, Blue Note 1600, reached the record shops, it took off on an immediate flight from the dealers’ shelves into the homes of innumerable fans who had never before heard of them.

Stimulated by this success, the Sounds have produced a second and, I believe, even more substantial offering. The title Bottoms Up was born of a toast that took place on the day of the session in tribute to pianist Gene Harris, who had become a father that day.

The 25-year-old Harris, who worked out all but one of the arrangements (the exception is Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You) ascribed the continually improving teamwork of the Sounds to a combination of several factors: the desire of all three to keep the unit together indefinitely; the public reception accorded the first LP; and the encouragement the Sounds have had from Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley.

“Miles and Cannonball heard us several times, and talked to us between sets when we worked opposite them; they showed a great interest in the group. In fact, they’ve become a definite influence on us,” says Gene.

Of his original, personal influences, he adds: “When I was a kid my mother brought home some records by the late Albert Ammons, the boogie-woogie pianist – maybe they were the sides he made for Blue Note. Anyhow, I’d sit at the piano and try to play what he played. But it was in the Army that I really began to be surrounded by music. At service clubs I got to know Wynton Kelly and several other fine musicians, most of them out of Chicago.

“I wasn’t in special services, because I couldn’t read music at that time; I was more or less an athlete in the Army. I’ve always been a pretty fair athlete – Golden Gloves boxing, football, basketball. As far as my musical influences, I’d say Garner has been the most important one, though Peterson definitely was another. I guess I may sound a little like Red Garland, too, though I think I play my chords altogether differently.”

The session opens with Besame Mucho, originally published in Mexico in 1941 and popularized in the U. S. in 1943 by the American singer and composer Sunny Skylar, whose choice of locales for hits has ranged from Atlanta, Ga. to I Wanna Go Back to Texas. (He’s from Brooklyn.) Gene Harris approaches the soaring-and-descending contours of the melody with a policy of revivification-through-syncopation. Abetted by Dowdy‘s effusive top cymbal, he edges the theme into a new but still Latin-tinged setting for the first chorus before taking off in a forceful four in which his left hand punctuations are incisively placed and consistently timed. The third chorus employs a chordal melodic approach such as might be used by a cocktail lounge group, yet in the trio’s hands the technique acquires the added essential of an instinctive pulse, all the way through to the resumption of melody on the final half-chorus and fade.

The next track, too, was the work of a singer-songwriter. Matt Dennis, whose melodies are almost as common among jazzmen as the themes of Ellington and Gershwin (Everything Happens to Me, Let’s Get Away from it All etc.), has heard dozens of versions of Angel Eyes but, as a pianist himself, will probably dig the Harris treatment more than any he has heard in a long time. Observe, on the very slow first half-chorus, how the brushes work with piano on those little triplet fills, and how Simpkins‘ bass parallels Harris on that first beat of the fifth measure – little nuances that help to bring this combo out of the piano-with-rhythm class into the organized-unit category. On the bridge, in this opening chorus and again in the next, a climactic crescendo leads dramatically to a momentary tacet before, in a studied contrast, the melodic mood is resumed for the final eight.

Time After Time was composed by Julie Styne, a London-born veteran of the Hollywood hills. Few of his songs have rated high with the jazz elite, though this one earned its wings through a Sarah Vaughan version back in 1946. The Sounds tackle it moderato, with a neat integration of the three participants evident throughout the opening chorus. Gene gets a funky feeling into the second chorus and builds from there. Although the tempo seems almost too slow for it, there is a chorus of fours with the drums that comes off well enough to reflect special credit on Bill Dowdy. To swing a series of four-bar breaks at this relaxed gait is far less simple than he makes it sound.

Love Walked In was one of George Gershwin‘s last popular songs. Introduced by Kenny Baker in The Goldwyn Follies, a film released in 1938 after the composer’s death, it has been consistently employed as a vehicle for jazz improvisation. Gene Harris toys with the theme almost impudently before tearing off into a series of hard-driving choruses that reminded me about his basic influences. His floating, jubilant beat has something of the elation of Peterson, of the early King Cole, and occasionally of Garner; certainly there is in him more of these three than of Bud or Monk or Horace. A series of smooth eights with Dowdy precedes the closing chorus as this side reaches its breathless conclusion.

I Could Write a Book, one of two Rodgers and Hart standards heard on the second side, was one of the big songs in the 1940 Pal Joey. The introduction, 44 bars long, is a suspenseful and ingeniously planned affair with Simpkins ad libbing against persistent pedal-point Fs from Harris. The tension is broken surprisingly when Gene sails into the melody, chordally – in B Flat, which I frankly wasn’t expecting. Gene’s work here may remind some listeners of the more swinging moments of Dwike Mitchell, though I don’t suppose the Mitchell-Ruff duo, particularly with its drummerless set-up, could ever swing the way the Sounds manage to.

Jinne Lou, to me, is the most interesting track of this album – and not just because it happens to be the only original composition. Named for a lady who operates a restaurant across the street from Smalls’ in New York, where the trio worked last year, it’s one of those melodies that plainly came up the river from Funkville, U.S.A. All I have to do is tell musicians that it’s one of those B Flat-to D 7th-to G 7th-to C 7th-to F 7th-to B Flat affairs and they’ll know what I mean. The chorus is oddly constructed, Gene taking the first eight on celeste, then eight on piano and 14 on celeste for a 30-bar format. It’s taken at an easy, groovy pace and manages to generate an honesty that’s completely untainted by the calculated folksiness so prevalent in some of the pseudo-funk one hears around nowadays.

Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You is a lesser known song written in 1955 by Jack Segal and Marvin Fisher. This is the shortest track in the album, but not too short to build an effective mood, with Latin rhythm. “Andrew Simpkins liked this tune,” says Gene, “he knew it from a record Nat Cole made of it, and he figured out the arrangement on it for us.”

The finale employs the Rodgers & Hart favorite Falling in Love with Love, which in the past few years has been tackled by hundreds of jazz soloists literally from Beverly Hills to Stockholm. A high spot is the long (three choruses) solo by Simpkins, which seems to me to build in intensity and to achieve a sense of continuity – a quality unusually difficult to get across to the listener on this particular instrument. Dowdy again has a workout in a series of fours and the performance as a whole, like most closing tracks on well-programmed trio LPs, provides a valuable close-up of the trio in both individual and ensemble terms.

I don’t know whether I would have reacted this way had I heard the second LP first and the first one later, but it seems to me that the Three Sounds are improving. Though I was as much impressed as most listeners by Mr. Harris and his colleagues on the first set, the group at present seems to have even more of a sense of direction, more of a commercial potential in the better connotation of the term. The phrase “better connotation” means that they may become successful on the basis of musical merit rather than in spite of it. Nowadays, happily, you don’t have to debase your talents to find out where the loot is hidden – a situation that, I’m sure, will work out greatly to the advantage of the Three Sounds.