Cashbox : 03/22/1958

Riverside is offering a collection of unreleased versions of the blues by some of the big jazz names (Sonny Rollins, Billy Taylor, Gigi Gryce, Art Blakey, etc.). The tunes are sessions cut from some of the past LPs the musicians have offered, and they present some really sound listening. Tunes include Funky Hotel Blues (Sonny Rollins Quartet), Let’s Blow Some Blues (Mundell Lowe Quartet), and three more. Great pressing.

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American Record Guide
Martin Williams : April, 1958

This collection of various moods of twelve-bar blues might provide a good stylistic introduction to various current approaches, but that is not to say that everyone involved is to be heard at his best, that everyone is top (or even second) drawer in his “school,” or that each of these approaches is of equal merit. The energetic, though ragged, “All-Star” track comes off best, I think. On it, Coleman Hawkins becomes strangely inarticulate for one so obviously moved and able, and bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Art Blakey seem to me to play almost brilliantly.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : August, 1958

Seemingly a collection of strays from various recording sessions, this disc aims a shade higher than most such grab bags. Herbie Mann makes a better case for the bass clarinet in a single brooding selection here than he does in all of his own current LP (Great Ideas of Western Mann), and Mundell Lowe and Billy Taylor collaborate on a darkly probing slow blues. There are also agreeable saxophone contributions by Sonny Rollins and Bobby Jaspar, but the longest piece on the disc, Blues for Tomorrow, is a disjointed, unfused series of solo excursions blown over the massive supporting rhythm section of bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Art Blakey.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 03/29/1958

There is a good deal of admirable blues playing by five different combinations on Blues for Tomorrow. Rollins is to be heard again, with a rhythm section. The East Coast All-Stars include, among others, John Coltrane and the elder statesman of the tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins (the stylistic contrast between them is fascinating – elaborate rococo as against a sweeping baroque). Mundell Lowe‘s Quintet features his own easy guitar. Bobby Jaspar‘s Quartet has the Belgian leader’s robust, thoroughly acclimated tenor saxophone, and the refined authority of George Wallington‘s piano and Elvin Jones‘ drums. Herbie Mann‘s Californians present Mann, casually seductive, on the bass clarinet, and he is found again on Great Ideas of Western Mann, the sidemen including Jack Sheldon, trumpet, and Jimmy Rowles, piano.

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Toronto Star : 03/15/1958
Four Stars

The blues are the core of jazz and this LP gives us five versions which are previously unreleased by groups who have done complete albums for Riverside in the recent past. Although the moods and tempos are contrasting, there is a definite blues feeling on every tunes thus giving the record excellent continuity.

There major item is a rough-hewn, fiery Blues For Tomorrow played by the piano-less East Coast All-Stars who, with the addition of Thelonious Monk previously made the Monk’s Music LP. After good solos by Gigi Gryce, Ray Copeland and John Coltrane. Coleman Hawkins comes on to build some tremendous throbbing choruses. Art Blakey and Wilbur Ware follow with Blakey doing some fascinating work with brushes, hands and finally sticks. This 13-minute blues, with its inspiring Blakey throughout, is worth the price of the record.

Herbie Mann on bass clarinet, aided by Jack Sheldon on trumpet do a relaxed, fluid job on A Sad Thing. Sonny Rollins, a little below his usual pulsating, dynamic standards but still interesting, does Funky Hotel Blues. Mundell Lowe, Billy Taylor and Gene Quill play well on the reflective Let’s Blow Some Blues. Tenorman Bobby Jaspar and pianist George Wallington play some excellent, swinging jazz on The Fuzz.

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Down Beat : 04/17/1958
Don Gold : 3 stars

The blues continue to provide inspiration for jazzmen. This LP is a series of blues, cut at dates for previously released Riverside LPs but retained for release in this blues package.

The results are as varied as the groups involved.

Tomorrow was cut by a group from a Monk session after Monk had departed. It is a lengthy, generally unproductive blues exploration, with Ware the outstanding soloist. Thing is a slow blues, with Mann on bass clarinet. Funky, with Rollins and a fine rhythm section in authoritative form, is the best track. Rollins plays penetratingly but manages to inject a humorous allusion to Stephen Foster twice during the course of the blues stroll. Let’s Blow is a satisfactory relaxed blues pace, with Lowe, Quill, and Taylor soloing. The closer, Fuzz (dedicated to Orrin Keepnews’ beard, not the police), features Jaspar in a Bird-inspired flight, with Wallington, Little, and Jones joining in.

Aside from the Rollins track, which is excellent, the quality of the material is middle-of-the-road with little of either low or high quality included. Blues lovers may want this for their collections, but the varied efforts, when presented in one package, do not acquire sufficient significance to merit strong recommendation.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

The blues remains, as it has always been, just about the best way of separating the men from the boys in jazz. This album, then, presents several groups of men.

Although the blues is always in some danger of being attacked as a basically primitive form of limited imagination (or words to that effect), the chances are that it will continue to prove indestructible; always at least a little more powerful and deeper and more satisfying than its critics. The fact – ably demonstrated by this LP – that many of the best of today’s jazzmen find challenge, inspiration and unflagging pleasure in playing the blues, helps to underline the point.

The blues apparently actually preceded jazz per se, having evolved as a rough-hewn vocal music in the South late in the nineteenth century. it soon developed into the generally (though by no means universally) used 12-bar, three phrases form; statement, repetition, resolution. Although it quickly became a key part of instrumental jazz, the blues reached its first great peak largely through the magnificent singers of the 1920s (Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and others). Kept alive instrumentally through the ’30s by a few of the big bands (notably Count Basie‘s), it surged forward again with the coming of modern jazz. It may seem strange that the blues was looked on with favor in that celebrated jazz revolution that turned its back on so many of the trappings of the past. But many of the major pioneers of modern jazz were men with roots not far removed from the blues (Charlie Parker was from Kansas City; Thelonious Monk‘s varied musical roots include church music) and with that paradoxical high regard for fundamentals that is so often a characteristic of the revolutionary.

Thus blues variations become an important part of bop. These may have sounded impossibly far-removed from the blues of Bessie or of Jelly Roll Morton, but time and repeated listening have shown that the differences were much more of the surface than of the soul. All blues are part of the same vital jazz mainstream.

It was with thoughts like these in mind that Riverside began the effort to put together a varied collection that could serve as an informal partial anthology of modern blues. Either by specifically asking for an extra selection at a session, or by utilizing one sort of special circumstance or another, this unusual album gradually buit itself:

Blues for Tomorrow, for example, although it is a pianoless selection, is a direct offshot of a Monk septet recording session (RLP 12-242: Monk’s Music). The leader had left, but the others in his star cast were still on hand; a blues was suggested, a figure was improvised, and they were off. It turned into rather a full-scale project of its own, running some thirteen and a half minutes and proving to be a fine sample of the loose-limbed, free-blowing, “funky” spirit that is one of the major virtues of Eastern jazz. The horn solos are, in order, by: Gigi Gryce, alto sax, Ray Copeland, trumpet; John Coltrane (who was present through the courtesy of Prestige Records) and then Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxes. There is also impressive solo work by two rhythm men uniquely qualified to carry the weight of this much ‘strolling’ – the formidable Art Blakey on drums, and Wilbur Ware on bass. Particularly noteworthy is Hawkins’ performance: the veteran, who was the earliest and for many years the unchallenged king of tenor sax stars, surely demonstrates both his own musical timelessness and that of the blues.

A Sad Thing was a specifically requested extra, made in Los Angeles during the recording of an album designed to feature Herbie Mann‘s mastery of an instrument unusual in jazz: the bass clarinet (RLP 12-245: Great Ideas of Western Mann). The four cool Californians – Jack Sheldon, trumpet; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Buddy Clark, bass; Mel Lewis, drums – who join with Mann here, help make this an example of a facet of modern jazz very different from that of the preceding selection.

Funky Hotel Blues – dedicated by Sonny Rollins to just about all the hotels that musicians have to stop at on the road – was cut at the final session of Rollins’ first LP for Riverside (RLP 12-241: The Sound of Sonny). It features the big tone (probably the fullest tenor sound since Hawkins) of the most amazing new jazz star in years, already recognized as a major force and influence. you might say that he uses the blues here to prove that he clearly belongs among the very best. His rhythm section is: Sonny Clark, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

Let’s Blow Some Blues is from a Mundell Lowe session that also featured pianist Billy Taylor (courtesy of ABC-Paramount Records). It was arbitrarily omitted from the LP cut at that time (RLP 12-238: A Grand Night for Swinging) in favor of a bast-blues treatment of the same theme. But like the numbers in that album, it serves to demonstrate that both the guitarist and Taylor, sometimes accused of having overly soft approaches to jazz, can be as funky and tough-minded as anyone. Gene Quill, an outstanding young altoist, is also very much on hand, along with Ed Thigpen on drums and Les Grinage, bass.

The Fuzz (which is intended as a reference to the sort-of-beard of the writer of these notes, not the slang term for police), spotlights a young tenor man from Belgium who would appear to have mastered the idiom of jazz better than any other non-native horn who comes to mind. And what better proof of this mastery than his version of something as thoroughly native and idiomatic as the blues. Pianist George Wallington, still-young veteran of the early 52nd Street days of bop; the unusual young drummer, Elvin Jones; and bassist Wilbur Little complete Jaspar‘s quartet.