Official blurb (excerpt):
[In the 70's,] a little-heralded experiment was launched by Jim and Susan Neumann, a husband-and-wife team that owned a lighting fixture business. Their passion for bebop and hard bop led to the decision they would start their own label. They chose the name Bee Hive, after a Chicago club that thrived in the 1950s. They knew nothing about running a music label, but found there were many in the community willing to offer information and support.
Their enthusiasm resulted in sixteen LPs, released over a span of seven years. Because Jim and Susan were committed to independent distribution, even though the albums got noticed they were never widely available. And they've never been available on CDs.
But that shameful state of affairs is about to be corrected...
Mosaic is very pleased to present "The Complete Bee Hive Sessions." Spanning 1977 to 1984, they include so many names you will know and so much music, you won't believe you haven't heard it.
Kudos to Mosaic records for still delivering the juiciest reissues. Several of the discs in The Complete Bee Hive Sessions have been on my most-wanted list for a long time.
Full details about personnel here. Original albums released as:
Nick Brignola – Baritone Madness
Nick Brignola – Burn Brigade
Sal Nistico – Neo Nistico
Curtis Fuller – Fire And Filigree
Dizzy Reece – Manhattan Project
Clifford Jordan – Hyde Park After Dark
Clifford Jordan – Dr. Chicago
Johnny Hartman – Once In Every Life
Sal Salvador - Starfingers
Sal Salvador – Juicy Lucy
Ronnie Mathews – Roots, Branches & Dances
Ronnie Mathews – Legacy
Roland Hanna – The New York Jazz Quartet In Chicago
Dick Katz – In High Profile
Junior Mance – Truckin’ And Trackin’
Arnett Cobb – Keep On Pushin’
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Herbie Hancock said something to the effect that you can get the wrong impression from classic jazz records, that the records are more perfect than the music was in reality.
That may be true for all those 60’s Blue Notes Herbie was on, but it’s not true on Complete Bee Hive. This is unadulterated straight ahead jazz with plenty of warts. 70’s to 80’s jazz was inconsistent to begin with; these humble sessions are squarely in the middle of that era.
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Each casual date of straight-ahead jazz is unique, with every member of the ensemble exerting a powerful influence. For collectors, cataloging is a reason to live.
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On a rather mediocre Sal Salvador session, Sam Jones and Mel Lewis swing hard together during their only documented encounter. Sam is just so damn funky, even when doing something as simple as a waltzing G pedal on “Sometime Ago.” Mel sounds like he’s really having fun with such a great bassist. The friction on “Blues in the Closet” is almost too much - Mel is slower than Sam the whole time - but it is certainly a vibe.
Eddie Bert sounds burly and vital. All I really knew about him previously was that he played with everybody's big band, so it's nice to learn something about what a good soloist he was. No such positive notices for Derek Smith, a name entirely new to me. But then again, listening to Sam and Mel deal with a nervous and notey pianist is also (perhaps) interesting.
The other Sal Salvador date is essentially unlistenable, a charisma-less affair with Billy Taylor, Art Davis, and Joe Morello. Yet even this inert matter is proof about something in the larger picture. Billy Taylor, Art Davis, and Joe Morello all have names in jazz, they are all on significant records, they are certainly good musicians, yet none of them (at least in 1978) have that little bit of extra soulful and working-class magic that, say, Sam Jones or Mel Lewis have when hired to play time for an afternoon.
It’s not fair to the box to open this review with the Salvador records, really, except that what the box does open with is even worse, a two-bari date featuring Nick Brignola and Pepper Adams. Derek Smith, Dave Holland, and Roy Haynes are the rhythm section. Jesus Christ, do they all go down with the ship on track one, “Donna Lee.” The tempo is very fast, and while Brignola at least keeps the form, Smith loses his place at least twice. Admittedly, Dave Holland and Roy Haynes are pretty ragged as well. Holland got better at this style, but in 1977 I don’t think he’d played with many musicians as authentically bebop as Roy Haynes. So it is up to Pepper Adams, who rescues us from total chaos thanks to his impeccable authority. Pepper plays a long time, perfect, almost like Coltrane or Rollins, clearly trying to teach everyone else what uptempo jazz is supposed to be. I always enjoy Adams, but his mastery is revealed as truly Olympian in this context.
Something similar happens on Junior Mance’s record with his local trio of Martin Rivera and Walter Bolden. “Mean Old Amtrak” moves along, enjoyable but not really that professional. At a hotel bar I’d be delighted to hear this band live, but they are not really meant for prime time — until David “Fathead” Newman steps in. Here we go! There truly is an infinite amount of music to be gotten out of the blues. (Note to self: Listen to more Fathead Newman.)
“Local” is really the word to describe the music explicitly concerned with Chicago. The Bee Hive Lounge was a famous club there (Mance was once house pianist) and Clifford Jordan’s two albums are called Dr. Chicago and Hyde Park After Dark.
Jordan is a perennial favorite of mine and all of his albums are worth hearing, partly because he’s unafraid of awkwardness and tension. “Hyde Park After Dark” is a blues with a bridge, a tricky form that probably only Lester Young and John Coltrane played really well. Here, the all-Chicago band struggles a bit, with that hard form finally giving up the ghost during the trades between Jordan and Von Freeman. The trainwreck is really quite obvious: Surely another take should have been possible? Perhaps Jordan is being a bit cruel here to his home team: “In New York, we play the hard forms right on the first take. Sorry, guys.”
Freeman’s ballad feature “I’m Glad There is You,” is intriguing, there’s definitely something personal and avant-garde about his tone and phrasing, but I’m still left with the impression that I never quite hear the best Von Freeman. Perhaps he needed to be experienced live.
While Victor Sproles participates smoothly enough on albums I admire from the 60's (Hill’s Dance with Death, Morgan’s The Rumproller), for better or worse I’ll let him take the heat for the bête noire of 70’s jazz, the recorded bass sound. This should be a classic Chicago rhythm section — Sproles, Norman Simmons, Wilbur Campbell — but the all-amp, hot-in-the-mix “rubber band” bass makes it regrettably hard to hear the proper relationship between the instruments. (In my opinion, only Sam Jones, Ray Drummond, and Marc Johnson seem to rise above this circumstance on this set.)
Moving on to Dr. Chicago: Vernel Fournier sounds so great. What a hell of a drummer. There must have been some extra-musical reason he wasn’t used more by the cats. The recorded sound doesn’t do Fournier any favors, but it doesn’t matter, Fournier fans will want this.
Jaki Byard fans should be a little less eager. At first glance Jaki’s inclusion is exciting but I think by 1984 he wasn’t really interested in participating with a rhythm section. He starts his solo on “Lotus Blossom” with the most gorgeous impressionism, but comes out wrong, turns the beat around, loses steam, and bewilders Fournier. The 5/4 blues “Zombie” is mono-dynamic; Jaki’s just throwing dice here. The best overall track is the duo of Clifford and Jaki on “If I Had You,” a special moment well worth returning to.
That moment of unusual duo repose is mirrored by Arnett Cobb’s gorgeous rendering of “Deep River” with George Duvivier. The rest of Cobb's set is marred by so-so Junior Mance and rather hectic Panama Francis. On the unusual blues “Keep on Pushin’,” Cobb, Joe Newman and Al Grey all play really well despite the strangely unswinging drumming. (Looking at his bio, I’m unsurprised to learn that Francis's work in rock seems more celebrated than his work in jazz.)
At the time, Cobb, Grey, and Newman were probably all taken for granted. Everybody thought there would always be jazz players like this around: cats who swung, had deep sounds, talked through their horns, and made up sophisticated bluesy melodies as easily as breathing. Now, of course, we know this isn’t the case.
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Sorry, Michael Cuscuna! You generously sent me this gorgeous box for free and all I seem to be doing is pointing at its flaws. Let me move on to some of the best music in the set.
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It’s hard to think of two straight-ahead pianists more different that Ronnie Mathews and Dick Katz, but two of their finest albums are in this box. Roots, Branches and Dances is Mathews’s all-star quartet with Frank Foster, Ray Drummond, and Al Foster. All the tracks are good, but the familiar jazz compositions “It Don’t Mean a Thing” and “Hi-Fly” really stand out. Frank Foster sounds especially great. A few years ago I didn’t always like Mathews that much but he’s grown on me, probably because I keep understanding how he’s coming out of Monk as well as McCoy.
Dick Katz also really comes out of Monk, with a hearty helping of Basie and some moderately sophisticated bop. In High Profile is the Beehive set’s best organized and best recorded session, trios with Marc Johnson and Al Harewood and quintets with Frank Wess and Jimmy Knepper. I instinctively like Katz although I seldom hear much from him; I’ve been looking for In High Profile for years as I read somewhere that Katz himself thought it was his best album. Frankly, I can see why he’s not a bigger name as reticence occasionally overwhelms statement. Still, a interesting listen, cute (obtrusively cute?) arrangements and everything, and pairing with Dr. Chicago above as an inadvertent showcase for an underrated master drummer, in this case the endlessly dancing Al Harewood. As far as I know Marc Johnson hardly ever played this kind of music but he hangs with Harewood just fine. Wess and Knepper are top tier of course. Good to have this one in circulation.
Wess is also on a session of the New York Jazz Quartet with Roland Hanna, George Mraz and Ben Riley. I adore Hanna but this didn’t quite land for me, it’s either over-thought or under-rehearsed. Ben Riley is the only one that seems to be at full power. Ditto for another Mathews session with Bill Hardman, Ricky Ford, Walter Booker and Jimmy Cobb. Hardman’s crackle is refreshing but honestly I never like Booker, especially turned up in the mix. Ford is a bit of a question mark for me, too. Still, there’s serious music here, and thanks to Mosaic, these records will be easy to return to later and assess again.
I’ll conclude this brief overview with a major disappointment, a hit, and a nice surprise.
The disappointment is a session of Dizzy Reece with some of my favorite musicians like Clifford Jordan, Albert Dailey and Roy Haynes. I’ve been hunting for this and I’m simply bereft now that I've finally tracked it down. Dailey sounds grumpy about his terribly out-of-tune piano. Art Davis does the most to ruin the session, constantly arguing with Haynes about where the beat is. (Haynes is right, Davis is wrong, although it doesn’t help that the drums sound like cardboard boxes.) Why have Ricky Ford blow when Clifford Jordan is right there? (That miscalculation is even worse thanks to Jordan seemingly being off-mic much of the time.) The leader is under-documented, trumpet specialists will need this no matter what, but I’m unconvinced that Reece’s "Woody Shaw meets Mingus" originals and complicated arrangements really work. “Manhattan Walk” seems to take an eternity rather than eight minutes.
If I could go back in time and produce the date, I'd get a different bassist, fire Ford, adjust Jordan's mic, tune the piano, and hand out accurate lead sheets of familiar pieces. (Of course the band probably would have quit on me and left the studio, though....)
The hit is Johnny Hartman’s last album Once in Every Life. As always, Hartman sounds just fabulous, lower and slower than anybody else. Apparently some of these tracks were sourced by Clint Eastwood for The Bridges of Madison County. Makes sense: it’s a good seduction record to be sure.
The nice surprise is tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico, who leads his own date with Ronnie Mathews, Sam Jones, and Roy Haynes and all but takes over Curtis Fuller’s session with Walter Bishop, Sam Jones, and Freddie Waits. There were are lot of great white tenor players who showed serious homemade mastery of the idiom in the wake of Coltrane: A partial list would include Joe Farrell, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, Steve Grossman, Gregory Herbert, Bob Berg…it would be a valid educational project to listen and compare them all. (Actually I know there are those that spend their lives doing this already.)
At any rate I’d barely heard of Nistico, but he’s right in there when playing with these blue-ribbon rhythm sections: unforced, swinging, virtuosic, but without too hard an edge. Indeed, on ballads like “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and especially “Like Someone in Love,” Nistico occasionally shows a hint of old-school rhapsodic burr. Very nice indeed.
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The liner notes by Aaron Cohen are valuable but lose some authority by praising everything indiscriminately. The producers of Bee Hive, Jim and Susan Neumann, are still alive, so that may be a factor. As my review makes clear, I think it makes more sense to put these sessions under honest scrutiny than give it all a whitewash. However, it’s important music, essential to understanding an era, and simply wonderful to have as a classy box set.
Certainly The Complete Bee Hive Sessions is great gift for any serious jazz collector -- several of whom who will undoubtedly email me with firm agreements and disagreements as soon as they see this post. ("Now, see, Ethan, the Derek Smith you need to hear is...")
It's good to support Mosaic Records whenever you can. Cuscuna sent me this one for free but I've paid for most of the rest of the many Mosaic sets in my collection. They remain the model for good historical reissues. Part of what I know about jazz is thanks to Mosaic.
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In a related topic, the tops and tails of my old post "1973-1990" have been updated slightly with better grammar and new information.