Some Jazz Records: Jimmy Lyons Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Count Basie and His Orchestra, Jumpin' at the Woodside/Dark Rapture, Decca 2212, 1938, 10" 78 rpm.
Saxophonist Jimmy Lyons grew up in close proximity to elements of the New York jazz scene. Speaking to the French Jazz Magazine in 1974, Lyons mentioned that his grandparents at a point owned a restaurant right under the Woodside Hotel. "Do you know Count Basie’s 'Jumpin at the Woodside?'," Lyons asked his interviewers. As Ben Young indicates in his in-depth notes for Lyons’s The Box Set (see also its Highlights Digital Edition), the restaurant and hotel were situated on 7th Avenue in Harlem and Basie’s classic 1938 recording commemorated a residence there.
Tadd Dameron, A Be-Bop Carroll/The Tadd Walk, Savoy 931, ca. 1948, 10" 78 rpm.
"I really liked Ernie Henry’s playing," Jimmy Lyons said in a 1975 Down Beat profile. "He was one of my first influences, even before Bird, because Ernie’s playing was a little less complex, and I could hear a lot of things he would do with the changes: this was when he was in Dizzy’s band." Henry played alto saxophone with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra in 1948-49, when Lyons was in his late teens. Lyons heard Henry mostly from records, but the Ernie Henry Solography by James Accardi and Jan Evensmo documents very little soloing on Gillespie releases available then. Henry could be heard at greater length on 78s by Tadd Dameron, the Howard McGhee-Fats Navarro Boptet, or James Moody. "Bird would take certain freedoms, and they were right, but it took me awhile to get next to him. Parker was really my main influence, though," Lyons further told Down Beat.
Gil Evans Orchestra, Into the Hot, Impulse! A(S)-9, 1962, LP.
Jimmy Lyons moved directly from his bebop work to a long-term association with pianist and avant-garde leading light Cecil Taylor. "I had to reorganize my whole approach to music and break a lot of habits," Lyons told Robert Levin in a 1970 Jazz & Pop profile. "That’s not very easy to do. I’d spent about a year trying to get myself together scale-wise and key-wise and tune-wise. Then, all of a sudden, this other thing came up. It took me a little while to get myself together in Cecil’s music, to stop thinking chord-wise and to think about linking idea to idea. Like on the Into the Hot album, I didn’t feel I was playing as well as I should be." This Gil Evans album famously did not feature Gil Evans, and half of it was devoted to recordings by the Cecil Taylor group. Jan Ström’s Jimmy Lyons Sessionography places the beginning of Lyons’s work with Taylor very shortly before this October 1961 session.
Jimmy Lyons, Other Afternoons, BYG 529.309, 1969, LP.
The first album to appear under Jimmy Lyons’s name was made in France after a gig with Cecil Taylor. It was taped during a week of intensive recording orchestrated in August 1969 by the fledgling BYG Records. Soon, the company would acquire a low reputation in terms of business practices. Asked by Cadence if he had been paid at all for his work, Lyons answered, "Strangely enough I was, because they were negotiating with Cecil to do a record. They asked me to do one, and I said yes to bring some money back. We were working at Maeght Foundation and we weren’t making that much money. […] Anyway, surprisingly, with the short amount of time we had to do it, it turned out OK."
I think those Into The Hot tracks still stand up wonderfully even now (yes, I edit out the John Carisi material tho). Cecil has always looked like the smart one for eventually turning down BYG despite their entreaties. I think the fact that he gravitated instead to Chantal D'Arcy's Shandar may mean he was a better judge of character than many of his expat. contemporaries.
I never knew about The Woodside - that's fascinating !