3 Bones And A Quill

 

What's My Name

3 Bones And A Quill

Roost LP 2229

Royal Records - New York, N.Y.

1959

From the back cover: This is, in the most honorific sense of the expression, a chorus record: Everybody blows, and blows enough so that after a few tracks identities became clear and the force of personality becomes the dominant strength of the record.

In the most venerable and most lasting of playing procedures in jazz. the individual must emerge – and fall flat on his face or take charge. Take charge they do in this collection, all of them. They take over so completely that, I must confess, by the second side I was positively hypnotized by the streams of solos and soloists, notes, sounds and lines. The result is one of the fastest listening experiences on record. For while the stop watch registers normal elapse of time for two side of a twelve-inch disc, – well beyond a half-hour, to be exact – one feels no more than two or three minutes have passed between the brisk opening revival-meeting ensemble of Preacher and the closing diminuendo which fades out In A Mellow Tone.

It's true one knows there have been choruses a-plenty to gain the clearest impression of three trombone styles. After so much of Frank Repack, for example, there is no mistaking the smoothness of his tone, languorous almost, even up-tempo; nor can one misplace his punctuating ascents, dazzlingly fast, into and onto a high-register note. There is no confusion about Jim Dahl's trombone sound and style, ether – not after three or four of these performances, anyway: the guttural utterances, barrelhouse in texture; the relaxed phrasing that never fall far behind the beat and always, always swings. And finally, there is no question about which is Jimmy Cleveland's instrument, which his solos, or his style: this is one of the really distinctive, really distinguished sounds of modern jazz; these are the hands of a virtuoso performer. As with the great men of the trombone, one has serene confidence in the Cleveland line, that the accents are right, the tone fitting, the development of ideas unexceptional. There is in all Jimmy's playing here an evenness of scale, that suggests the lace-cuff precision of a baroque musician – but strictly on a modern, swinging kick.

This collection is also a feather in Gene Quill's cap. There is enough of Gene's alto here really to judge his thinking, his time, his tone, to hear his characteristic attack, his approach to tempo and his departure from it, his sound in an ensemble and alone. What one remembers, fourteen or fifteen choruses later, is a seasoned musician who knows his horn well, who sits and fits well beside men like the trombone triumvirate of this set, and who has managed to secure his own identity on the toughest of all instruments on which to assert a personality today. Of course the influence of Bird is there, unmistakably audible in the kind of tone and the shape of line Gene chooses. But he chooses shrewdly, imaginatively, not slavishly. He molds his own solos, not little anthologies of Charlie Parker's most famous lines. He emphasizes rest less than Bird did, plays in a manner somewhat less abrupt than Bird's while still very close in feeling to his and every other alto man's mentor.

The rest of the band is of a piece with the Bones and the Quill. On piano, Nat Pierce alternates with Hank Jones, taking two solos to Hank's three, each very much concerned to fit the chorus pattern. Whitey Mitchell, bass-playing brother of a bass-playing brother, solos thrice. Charlie Persip, a drummer long associated with Dizzy Gillespie, opens one performance, closes three, and keeps the rhythm going with an admirable steadiness throughout. – Barry Ulanov, Author fo A Handbook Of Jazz and A History Of Jazz In America

The Preacher

What's Going On Here

What's My Name

Three And One

Look Ma, No Hands

Little Beaver

In A Mellow Tone