Toronto 1947

More than one hour of exciting and sometimes beautiful music. Illinois Jacquet as we know him and as a surprise the underrecorded Leo Parker live. Uptown is becoming a very important label.

If you're considering buying this disc, you probably have a good idea of what you're going to hear from a musical standpoint. You won't be disappointed, but you won't be very surprised either. This is fairly typical "jump band" fare that Jacquet was known for during this time. The revelations are how good a ballad player he could be, as evidenced by the medleys on this set. Live recordings from this time period are always problematic. The balance here tends to favor the rhythm section over the solo horns, making it a real stretch to hear clearly what Leo Parker's playing in some of his solos. This is too bad since he's treated as an equal to Jacquet in the packaging of this music. Sir Charles Thompson on piano comes off quite well in this set as does Joe Newman on a couple trumpet solos. The liner notes by Bob Porter and accompanying photos are excellent. One mistake in the package; tunes 8 & 9 are mislabeled or out of order. "Mutton Leg" is no. 8 and "Robbins' Nest" is no.9. I would recommend this disc to fans of Illinois Jacquet and Leo Parker. The performances are not as musically satisfying as their studio recordings, but they accurately convey what the band was doing in live performances.

Hopes sank when I popped this in the deck ... Why did I even think for a moment this was going to be a pristine, crystal-clear recording? It's something that was recorded live in 1947 and not issued until now. Surprisingly, the sound quality picks up as it goes along. Mostly it doesn't matter. This is an outrageously infectious date with heroic blowing from the two principals. Parker is an absolute revelation. Clearly, there was more than one Parker tearing it up back in the day. Listen to his baritone drop speaker-rattling depth charges as he roars through Basie's "Mutton Leg." Jacquet, too, is on fire on the date. Here's the thing: The show sounds like they were having a wild party that night in Toronto. The crowd sounds like it's in a drunken frenzy, whooping and hollering. A few woman won't shut up during a fine "Robin's Nest" Now, jazz shows you can hear a pin drop. This is when the music was living and breathing in regular people's lives, not some highbrow, cerebral museum piece. Which is not to say there isn't complex artistry here - some of the sounds unleashed foreshadow the skronking free jazz blow of 15 years later. These players are masters. The supporting cast is great too. Twice through, I've gotten over the sound deficiencies and just get into the joy of it all. I love when either horn lock in on a single note and blow it and blow it again and mutate it and then knock it out of the park. Repetition like a hammer and then off to the races with a wicked run. The slow stuff, too, is lovely. Knock a star for sound quality, but not the show. Top shelf.

I've seen & heard Illinois many times. The last time was with his own band performing In Sarasota, Florida. I have a DVD & many CDs with Illinois featured.

it is jazz music that you do not hear today..this album has soo much gutts to it....a must listen to...Dan F

It`s all okay.

IJ, ten sx; LP, bari sx; Joe Newman, tpt; Russell Jacquet, tpt, voc; Sir Charles Thompson, p; Al Lucas, b; Shadow Wilson, dr. In 1947, Illinois Jacquet, fresh from his tenure in the Basie band and a stint with Norman Granz’s extraordinarily popular traveling series, Jazz at the Philharmonic, was a hot property. His mixture of Basie swing with a tinge of bop, and his long honking solos (the original Big Horn) had made him a star but at the same time frozen his style for years to come. This album is a record of a style of jazz that is now gone and that in other venues has not been as fully or lovingly recorded. The only other album I know like it is an album from the very early Fifties featuring the Charlie Ventura band, with Ventura on tenor and bari sax, Benny Green [?) on trombone, Boots Mussuli or Vido Musso on alto and tenor, Conte Candoli (?) on trumpet, and Jackie Cain and Roy Kral singing vocalese. Like the Ventura album, this one is long on excitement but short on originality. But that’s okay. Jazz is not only a creative music form, it’s a popular one, which should be fun, at least some of the time, and believe me, listening to this album is fun! It was Jacquet’s band so he takes the lion’s share of solos, sometimes the only solo on a number. But baritone saxophonist Parker gets his share of solos too, as does trumpeter Newman and Sir Charles Thompson on piano. Parker is one of the unsung heroes of the swing to bop transition of the mid-Forties. The album is listed with Parker‘s name as co-leader, although in fact he wasn’t in order to alert buyers to his presence. It’s a pleasure to hear him here: he was a fluent soloist with full rich tone and a very deep bottom, the antithesis of the baritone style that was to come soon with Gerry Mulligan’s ascendancy. (Both Mulligan and Parker were fluent bop players but Mulligan came from Lester Young and his sound was correspondingly light. Parker reflected the much deeper, burnished tone of the Ellington band’s Harry Carney.) In the absence of more detailed liner notes identifying who solos where, it sounds like Joe Newman takes the trumpet solos, with Illinois’s brother and business manager Russell confined to section work on trumpet plus one uninspired up tempo vocal solo. Thompson channels Thompson –no surprises her—and Lucas is a competent but uninspiring bass player for this kind of session. Shadow Wilson, as always, plays impeccably although his one drum solo could have been cut with no loss. This is the ONLY long solo I have heard from Wilson and it doesn’t cut it. The songs played are a mixture of ballad and jazz standards. Both medleys and Jacquet’s version of “Body and Soul” start with the ballads lovingly caressed but later the tempo rises and the honking starts. As I said earlier, this isn’t terribly creative music. It is demotic music, intended to engage the guts as much as the brain. On its own terms, it succeeds admirably. If it hadn’t been released all these years later, we’d be missing something worthwhile in the history of jazz as a popular medium.

Premesso che ovviamente la registrazione non è tra le migliori, sono registrazioni del 1947 quindi anche se rielaborate per il CD la qualità è quella che è. Ma Leo Parker è grandioso, è stato e rimarrà uno dei più grandi sassofonisti baritonisti del mondo.

There are not so many live jazz recordings of 1940s jazz (There was the "Jazz Off the Air" broadcasts - also from 1947, with Allen Eager/Charlie Ventura and Flip Phillips/Roy Eldridge, Ventura again with Bill Harris at the Three Deuces (1947), the July 6th 1947 concerts centered round Dexter Gordon and issued by Savoy and the famous August 1947 Just Jazz Concert with Lionel Hampton - even the Charlie Parker airshots didn't really get going till 1948), so it seems churlish to critisize this one. We must be grateful that given the bulky and primitive recording equipment of the time, anyone recorded anything in this way, and even more grateful it has survived the decades. But, what do we have here?. Well, we have Joe Newman sounding much more fiery than he would as the 50s dawned, and some rare opportunities to hear exciting baritonist Leo Parker at length, and contributions from a live and lively audience. Jacquet to my mind was the wildest of the wild tenorists of the time (Flip Phillips, Charlie Ventura, Arnett Cobb), and whilst as exciting as Leo Parker here, he can sound rather derivitive: on the ballad medley his tone and execution on "All The Things You Are" puts you in mind of Charlie Ventura in his 1946 recordings for Black & White - currently available on the Proper Box Ventura set ("Bop For The People" Properbox 41- just about still available) - rather embroidered romantic tenor. Obviously you do not expect great sound. It tends to sound, sonically, a bit like those Dexter Gordon recordings three months later,occassionaly it can sound a bit like the Parker Rockland Palace acoustic (that from 1952). The rowdy audience tends to detract a little bit (they do calm down though eventually), but it does give atmosphere: they sound the sort of audience JATP had. To sum up, I am glad I heard it, but it won't get that many repeat playings by me. As it is on a quite expensive label, I would advise hunting round to get it a bit cheaper, or second hand.It tends at the moment to be around the £8 mark on Amazon, which seems a fair price to pay. After mentioning all those 1947 live sessions if we give Lionel Hampton's 4 out of 5 for sound quality, I would put this effort between 2.5 and 3.You do get 70 minutes of music here, though, but I would advise taking it a few tracks at a time. Kudos to Uptown for issuing it though. I hope I have been fair.