Moodsville: A Day of Ballads on the Small Prestige Labels

The one that named the series. Red Garland on piano, Sam Jones on bass, Art Taylor on drums, recorded December 11th, 1959.

Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis gets equal billing on the sleeve and plays on three of the eight tracks. The rest is the trio. It’s worth knowing that before you sit down with it, because the record people describe is usually the Davis record, and what you actually hear is mostly Garland working through Stella by Starlight and When Your Lover Has Gone with nobody in a hurry.

Frank Wess spent most of the fifties in the Count Basie reed section. Here he’s out front with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Eddie Jones on bass and Bobby Donaldson on drums, recorded May 9th, 1960 and produced by Esmond Edwards.

Wess plays flute on much of it, which in 1960 was still an unusual thing to hear carrying a jazz date. Leonard Feather reviewed it in DownBeat and called it lovely, languid music for nocturnal relaxation. He meant it as praise, and he gave it four stars.

Coleman Hawkins invented the tenor saxophone as a solo instrument in the 1920s. By February 28th, 1961 he was fifty-six and recording for a ballad label, with Kenny Burrell on guitar, Ronnell Bright on piano, Andrew Cyrille on drums, and a bassist named Ron Carter who was twenty-three.

Three years later Carter joined Miles Davis. Cyrille went on to a decade with Cecil Taylor. On this record neither of them is doing anything but holding a slow tempo very steady underneath a man who’d been playing longer than they’d been alive. It’s one of the loveliest things either of them turned up on that early.

All three are being reissued by Craft Recordings in its Moodsville Acoustic Sounds Series: 180-gram vinyl, pressed at Quality Record Pressings, mastered all-analog from the original tapes, in tip-on jackets.

They come out on September 18th. We’re playing them on the 13th, which is the whole reason for the date. If you want to hear what an all-analog cut of a 1959 Van Gelder session sounds like on a system built for it before you decide whether to buy one, this is the five-day window where that’s possible.

Swingville and the wider Prestige catalog are on all day alongside them. The reissue campaign itself is Moodsville only, so the rest of what you hear will be our own copies.