Billboard : 04/13/1957
Score of 72

Sims is all over the disk scene these days, and some caution should be exercised with this latest issue. Bob Brookmeyer, who was catalyst and spur on the Dawn and Storyville sets, is absent here, and no comparable substitute is present. Nick Travis on trumpet has some good moments, but has had better. George Handy is on piano, the fine Wilbur Ware on bass, and O. Johnson on drums.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : June, 1957

Arranger George Handy scores four melodies by his wife, the singer Flo Handy, and joins the quintet at the piano in one of his rare efforts with a small unit. Known mostly for his modern big band writing, here he restricts himself to refreshing changes on the voicing of the two horns, adding the riches of form without limiting the space for improvisation. Echoes of You, based on an idea seemingly too trite for consideration, is carried off so well that it is a highpoint of the album, another being Sims‘ benignly virile tenor on Taking a Chance on Love.

Sims also shows his skill on alto in Swim, Jim and Osmosis, an original by drummer Osie Johnson, who with Wilbur Ware, bass, makes up the bracing rhythm section. Nick Travis, trumpet, complements Sims well in the ensembles and is given more opportunity than usual to solo on his own. A varied program, in find sound, from the kicking Here and Now to the ballad Fools Rush In.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 06/23/1957

Zoot! with the Zoot Sims quintet; the alto and tenor sax star combined with Nick Travis, trumpet; Osie Johnson, drums; Wilbur Ware, bass, and George Handy coming on with the piano and the arrangements, the opening four pieces being by his wife, Florence Handy. Her Why Cry? gets a Ware-ing blending before Zoot’s warm tenor twins with the Travis trumpet. Another highlight is the trumpet echoing of the sax on Echoes of You. An intriguing composition. A solid album.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 08/04/1957

Zoot swings all the way on this one whether he plays alto or tenor. Personally I enjoy his tenor playing more than his alto playing which is interesting mainly because he’s a tenor sax stylist playing an alto, if you see what I mean. A good rhythm section with O. Johnson on drums helping out.

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Saturday Review 
Wilder Hobson : 05/25/1957

Another player who plays with great spontaneity is Zoot Sims. Here the music making process seems so utterly natural that its values may at first escape notice. But in that Iron test which is repeated phonograph playing, Sims wears like iron. His virtues are quiet, warm and feelingful and he has appropriate assistants in George Handy, piano and arrangements; Wilbur Ware, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums.

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Down Beat : 06/13/1957
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars

This is a very good, wholly swinging LP but not for the reasons stated in the notes. Annotator Orrin Keepnews implies that this is a superior Sims session because, instead of “just” blowing, Zoot and company are frameworked for most of the set in Handy arrangements of, among other things, four originals ascribed to Florence Handy. That’s not the way I hear it. The originals are pleasant but thoroughly undistinguished. To their credit, the arrangements are simple, lean, and for that matter could have been done by any of several score writers. What makes this LP worth having is the blowing, the wonderful blowing of Zoot and Travis.

The essential warmth, power, and joy of Sims have been detailed here before. Travis rarely has had so much room to wail on records, in such stimulating company, and turns out some of his very best work. He is a deeply engaged, often exultant, always swinging, bitingly inventive trumpeter whose elan is strongly contagious.

Another superior soloist is bassist Ware who plays his instrument hard but whose notes burst out like firm, mellow, king-size bullets and whose conception is one of the freshest among the younger men on the instrument.

As for the recording, the rhythm section is occasionally overbalanced, as on Tracks 3 and especially 4. Osie is excellent throughout, and Handy solos sparingly. While Handy, as a pianist, is not in the same league blowing-wise with the others, his playing is at least functional and clear.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

The “stars” of the jazz world gain their positions in a variety of ways. There is sometimes the sudden flash who reaches a top spot almost overnight (and sometimes, though not always, holds on to it for longer than that). Or there is, at the other extreme, the musician who works to master his instrument, reaches jazz maturity by way of thorough-going experience without losing any of that all-important freshness and enthusiasm, and then is not so much ‘discovered’ as ‘recognized.’ That is, there is no sudden blinding glare; there is, instead, a wide-spread and rather gradual recognition that this not only is an important jazz voice but has been one for quite some time.

The latter description happens to fit very neatly the star of these proceedings: Jack “Zoot” Sims. It is only within the past year or so that Zoot’s considerable capabilities have come to be generally recognized. In most of the barrage of jazz-fan polls conducted in 1956, including those of the two top magazines, Down Beat and Metronome, he ranked behind only two such long-standing favorites on tenor as Stan Getz and Lester Young. And the critics have begun to bring out their best adjectives and phrases for his playing.

But these recent developments should come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention. Still a comparatively very young man (he was born in Inglewood, CA in October of 1925), Zoot has been thoroughly steeped in music from the start. An older brother, Ray Sims, is a well-known trombonist; young Jack took up clarinet in grade school, and has bene a professional musician for just about half his years to date. Before he was out of his teens he had been with the bands of Benny Goodman, Sonny Dunham and Bobby Sherwood. After two years in the Army (1944-46), he spent the late 40s with Woody Herman‘s Herd, where he was first notable as a member of the “Four Brothers” sax section (Historical Note: the other brothers were Getz, Serge Chaloff, Herbie Steward). In the 50s he has toured Europe with Benny Goodman, worked with Stan Kenton and with the Gerry Mulligan Sextet, and led several groups of his own.

For connoisseurs of adjectives, those that seem most aptly to suggest the qualities of the Sims approach might include: swinging, warm, funky. (The last-named can be a fairly ambiguous term; take it to indicate here a feeling of depth and of virility-without-harshness, in contrast to the somewhat anemic “cool” reed sound.) Nat Hentoff has probably said it best by describing Zoot’s playing as “mellow, yet muscular.”

If there has been any drawback to Zoot’s previous recorded work, it would be one that ironically stems from one of his strong points. Sims is among the most consistently fluent and imaginative improvisors around; as a result, there’s a tendency to invite him to step into the recording studio and “just blow.” He does that very well, of course, but what happens on this album would seem an even better idea. Zoot has recently come into association with George Handy, one of the truly superior modern arrangers, and they have found that they operate extremely well together. So here Zoot has the advantage of working with four well-constructed Handy scorings (of originals by George’s wife, singer Flo Handy), specifically designed for Sims. There’s also an Osie Johnson tune and, by way of contrast, two standards – a swinging Taking a Chance on Love and a tender ballad-tempo treatment of Fools Rush In – that are strictly ‘head’ arrangements worked up in the studio. Two of the numbers also offer examples of Zoot’s recent, quickly-achieved mastery of the alto sax, rounding out an LP that clearly demonstrates why he has become a “star” of the longer-lasting variety.

The supporting cast here is exceptionally strong. George Handy, who first came into prominence in the mid-40s through his strikingly original arrangements for the Boyd Raeburn orchestra, has only rarely written for small groups. But he shows a remarkable ability to score with fullness and richness for instrumentation as basic as this two-horn, three-rhythm setup. Handy also makes this the occasion of one of his too-infrequent appearances on piano. Nick Travis has played with a wide range of bands, including Goodman, Herman and Saunter-Finegan. A universally respected musician, he rarely gets sufficient room to display his talents as a big-toned, inventive, modern trumpet soloist – and he makes much of that opportunity here. Wilbur Ware is quickly becoming known to musicians as the coming bassist: a sure, strong rhythm man and an unusually deft soloist. Osie Johnson is perhaps the most frequently-recorded drummer on hand today, which is simply because few drummers of any period have equaled his ability to set and hold a firm tempo and to spark large bands or small.