Chamblee Music - Eddie Chamblee

 

Whisper Not

Chamblee Music

Eddie Chamblee

EmArcy Mercury Records MG 36124

1958

From the back cover: For those who have heard the Eddie Chamblee orchestra during its peregrinations with Dinah Washington during the past  year or so, the music on these sides will have been expected and eagerly awaited. For others, less familiar with Chamblee's work and possibly even unaware that Miss Washington happens to be Mrs. Chamblee, these performances will come as a pleasant surprise. For the type of approach represented by what is here designated as "Chamblee Music" makes a return to a brand of combo jazz too rarely heard in recent years: a solidly swinging, harmonically unpretentious form that avoids the pitfalls of rock and roll while incorporating some of its atmosphere of rhythmic excitement.

Edwin Leon Chamblee was born February 24, 1920 in Atlanta, Georgia; the name stems from a French Huguenot strain in his ancestry. The son of a gifted mathematician who was later to become the president of a large life insurance company, Eddie attended Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago, where one of the younger students was the future Mrs. Chamblee. He had received a saxophone as an 18th birthday present from his father; by the time he had decided to take it up vocationally, he had gained enough familiarity with the horn to plunge immediately into top-rank professional work. Throughout the 1930s he toured all over the midwest with his own band. After the Army took him in 1941 he found himself with the 93rd Division Band, playing in the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. After his discharge in the spring of 1946 he organized a new orchestra, one of whose members was drummer Osie Johnson. After disbanding for a while to join Lonnie Simmons' group in Chicago, he started recording and touring with another new group of his own in 1949; then, in 1954, came an offer to join the barnstorming brigade of Lionel Hampton.

Later that year, Eddie was in the band bus in New Mexico when it was involved in a accident that took one life and severely injured many members of the band; his own foot was crushed, but, along with most of the other victims, he was able to resume work with the band three months later and was soon off the first of two European tours.

Eddie left the Hampton horde in January, 1957. On February 23 he and Dinah were married; since that time he has been on the road with his now septet, accompanying her, playing tenor sax solos and occasionally joining her in a vocal duet.

Dinah had a hand in picking the material for this initial album by Eddie. The personnel comprises Eddie Chamblee on tenor sax; Johnny Coles or Joe Newman on trumpet; Julian Priester, another Hampton alumnus, on trombone; Charlie Davis, from Chicago, on baritone sax; 21-year-old Jack Wilson from Fort Wayne, Indiana, on piano; Richard Evans on bass; Osie Johnson or Charlie Persip on drums.

On the first side you will hear Flat Beer, a happy, up-tempo unison blues theme with solos for tenor, trombone and piano; a rolling treatment of Sometimes I'm Happy, with Eddie carrying the melody initially; a revival of the 1937 Eddie De Lange standard At Your Beck And Call; a hard-swinging And The Angels Sing that controverts everything Ziggy Elman had to say on this theme in the old Goodman band; and a gently but firmly rocking Tea For Two, with solos by tenor, trumpet, baritone, bass and piano.

On the second side Eddie's staccato approach recalls Al Sears of the old Ellington band as he swings the melody in a long meter on Without A Song; Whisper Not, composed and arranged blu Benny Golson, is a more relaxed track that does justice to a theme rapidly approaching the status of a modern jazz standard. The Victor Young perennial Stella But Starlight enables Eddie to incorporate Ben Websterish touches into his fine melodic interpretation; and the final track brings us out just the way we came in, swinging the blues at medium-bright tempo, with what Quncy Jones might call "a sanctified sound." It might be said that of these performances, in which honesty and simplicity are more evident than retention or selfconscious virtuosity, that the taste of flat beer is conspicuously absent and that the mood might more fittingly be likened to sparkling burgundy. – Leonard Feather, Author of "The Book Of Jazz"

Flat Beer

Sometimes I'm Happy

At Your Beck And Call

And The Angles Sing

Tea For Two

Without A Song 

Whisper Not

Stella By Starlight

Chamblee Special