Count Basie Presents The Eddie Davis Trio & Joe Newman

A Misty One

Count Basie Presens 

Eddie Davis Trio & Joe Newman

Recording Supervison: Teddy Reig

Cover Photography: Chuck Stewart

Birdland Series Roulette R-52007

1958

From the back cover: This is the first of a series of performances under the aegis of Count Basie. Sextets, quintets, quartets – whatever combination of music and musicians, of instruments and personalities, may strike Basie's fancy will make up the special shelf of jazz archives to be known as "Basie Presents."

Basie fancy is fancy indeed, at least the sense of being fresh and imaginative, the product of a taste of considerable individuality and, of course, of singular authority – on piano.

Basie's piano moves behind each of the performances in this collection. Doubling with the organ, accompanying the tenor or the trumpet, or taking off on solo flights of his own, Count is called upon early and often and Count responds. Eddie Davis is a musician to his taste, a fitting musician with which to open this series, and Basie lets him and all who listen know it: he blows.

Several qualities makes Davis a musician in the Basie pattern. He is, to begin with, a man with a beat, one who has to swing all the time because that is the cut of his temperament and hence of his performances as well. He is, to the go, a man of few notes; he doesn't just run his horn, clicking off notes like numbers on an adding machine. His phrases are short, pointed, punched, of the kind associated for more than two decades with the music of Count Basie. And he has a sense of humor, the kind that Basie himself has, that turns sentimentality into something approaching satire and makes everything bounce at least a little, no matter how ponderous the tune or portentous the lyric.

All the members of the sextet are cut from the same pattern. Joining Basie and Davis are a couple of men associated with both. On drums there is Butch Ballard, who has worked with Eddie Davis's small band and with Count Basie's big one; on trumpet, Joe Newman, a fixture for years with Basie, and as a result a sidekick of Eddie's in his tour of duty with Count. George Duvivier, the bass player, is a longtime habitué of the same musical circles, and Shirley Scott, the organist, is part of Eddie Davis' Trio right now.

Family atmosphere, you might call it. Certainly the groove they find and keep so easily is altogether familiar to all of these musicians. It never becomes hackneyed, however. They enjoy themselves too much for that, as they make their way happily down the lines of the blues and the standards and the more recent riffs. There is, too, another reason for the freshness amid familiar figures: the matching of electric organ and piano sonorities all the way through the set.

Little Shirley Scott is an astonishing musician. She has a big man's power at the manuals and pedals. As the stentor roars forth and the rhythmic impulse gathers force, on finds it hard to believe that this girl weighs, at most, one hundred pounds. But the power, effective as it is, is not Shirley's most compelling contribution. It is rather, I think, the surrealist touches with which she decorates the ballads, Don't Blame Me and Street Of Dreams – especially the latter, which is really a showpiece for her, sweet and funny and touching and odd by turns.

Shirley is a master – or should one say "mistress"? – of textures too. Listen, for example, to the way she adjusts her sound to prepare the way for Count's piano or, differently, to follow him. Follow the changes in volume and register with which she accompanies key and chord changes and the move from solo spit to background voice. Sometimes it is just a suggestion of melodrama, occasionally of a gentle thumbing of a stop, often an eloquent matching of beat and texture, as in almost all her double-time passages in the slow blues, A Misty One, which in its opening choruses offers a masterly sample of her skills.

A similar range of sound informs Joe Newman's playing here. A variety of muted elegances can be heard in Joe's solos in the fleet and flashy Marie, Telegraph and Swingin' Till The Girls Come Home an din the infectious middle-tempo Save Your Love For Me. Open, he helps make Broadway and Farourk ball along and settles Misty soldier into its insinuating mode. In the ensembles, he is the meticulous counterpart of the keyboards and the tenor, particularly noteworthy for his precise playing.

There is no guitar, but the rhythm section sounds six-men deep, and in a sense it is, because every time the sextet blows together, it blows as one. Even when it is only one soloist against two-man rhythm support, there is an impression of depth, the result of Butch Ballard's steadiness, of George Dunivier's deliberate plucking and the handsomely recorded, big bass sound upon which everything and everybody rests, cradled as in a billowing cloud.

When all is toted up and the credits distributed – and there are many – it remains Eddie Davis' album, however, for here Eddie steps out from behind his nickname, "Lockjaw," steps out of the Basie sax section and assumes a significant identity of his own. As indicated above, that means that one hears a fair number of brightly socked little phrases bout not a plethora of notes; it means a swinging wit and an engaging swagger. But there is more to bring out: ballads and solos that have a vocal flavor and all the push associated with the "Lockjaw" of yore –   but no shriek, no shake, no rub-in.

Don't Blame Me has all the expressive contours of a well-felt ballad and a fine economy of line as well, in Eddie's solo. The vocal quality seems to me unmistakable in Farouk. There, Eddie sounds like a veteran and highly talented blues singer kicking an old-time tune into line. With that estimable contribution under his mouthpiece, he turns to the bumptious Lock-Up, a kind of three or four o'clock jump, in which the leaps are all Eddie's.

One last word for Eddie's sound: it's big – the word and the sound. This is a tenor saxophone in the robust tradition inaugurated by Coleman Hawkins, but entirely up to date in time and taste, the natural complement of Basie, Scott, Newman, and the others. Need one say more? – Barry Ulanov - Author of "A Handful Of Jazz" and "A History Of Jazz In America"

From Billboard - May 5, 1958: This is the first in the label's new jazz series titled "Count Basie Presents." The man Basie is presenting here is Eddie Davis, a fine tenor man in the Coleman Hawkins tradition, but modernly styled. In addition, the Count himself is here on piano, along with a fine fem organist, Shirley Scott. Trumpet man Joe Newman helps out strongly on many of the sides. The Davis Trio, plus Basie, plus Newman, really swings and the album is an auspicious one for all concerned. Tunes include standards and originals.

Broadway

Don't Blame Me

Marie

A Misty One

Save Your Love For Me

Telegraph

Farouk

Lock-Up

Street Of Dreams

Swingin' Till The Girls Come Home