Pause That Refreshes

Guitars & All That Jazz is on hiatus for a road trip. We'll back be back the second week of April with new entries.

Jimmy Ponder - To Reach a Dream

I first became aware of Pittsburgh jazz guitarist Jimmy Ponder from listening to some of organist Jimmy McGriff's albums of the 1970s like Let's Stay Together, Stump Juice and Main Squeeze. After that I started searching for his solo albums (his first, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, came out in '73) and purchased titles such as All Things Beautiful (1978) and Mean Streets: No Bridges (1987).

You can hear Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell in his playing (he freely admits the influences) and he's particularly eloquent on ballads like You Are Too Beautiful from To Reach a Dream, a 1991 date for Muse. The organist is Lonnie Smith and you can listen to and download the track below.

You Are Too Beautiful

To Reach a Dream has been out of print for some years. Used CD copies command ridiculous prices, starting at around $30 in Amazon's marketplace. There's one copy on eBay for $62! The album isn't available as a legal download, but you can hear two more tracks from To Reach a Dream at Jimmy Ponder's Myspace page.

Jimmy Ponder has continued to record for a variety of labels over the years, with his most recent albums, Somebody's Child and Solo: Live at the Other Side, coming out in 2007.

And finally here's a video of Ponder performing Stormy Monday Blues. The date and location of the performance aren't specified but it was uploaded to YouTube in 2008. The quality of the video and audio is only fair.

Bill McGuffie - Go! McGuffie

Today, a sampling of the work of British jazz pianist, composer and bandleader Bill McGuffie (1927-1987).

The extremely rare Go! McGuffie LP was released in the U.S. in 1955, the third of three consecutive years in which McGuffie was named Britain's top jazz pianist. He later worked conducting film scores and wrote several of his own, including Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD, based on the television series Doctor Who and starring Peter Cushing.

Go! McGuffie was likely released in his native Britain under a different title or it may be a compilation of some of his British recordings, I'm not sure. From it, comes the Gershwin tune A Foggy Day, in glorious mono from the original LP.

A Foggy Day

I don't know why this album is so rare. I haven't seen a copy for sale anywhere for a long time. It's contents don't appear to have been released digitally. But there are a number of McGuffie's later recordings available on CD and via downloads. Many of them are of the easy listening variety.

McGuffie often backed Benny Goodman on his European tours and here's a YouTube excerpt from one such concert in Italy in 1970.

Dinah Washington - Dinah Jams

You're going to find this one a little strange -- a Dinah Washington track that's an instrumental. Well, it's not really Dinah but the Clifford Brown-Max Roach group that backs her on this wonderful 1954 Los Angeles club live recording for the Mercury Records imprint EmArcy.

Alone Together is the lone instrumental on the album and features tenor saxophonist Harold Land. Listen and download from the link below.

Alone Together

This YouTube video contains both Alone Together and Come Rain or Come Shine, also featuring Land, from the Dinah Jams album.

Land's stay with the Brown-Roach group, which lasted about a year, was his first high-profile gig. He became a respected soloist (heavily influenced by John Coltrane) in the 1960s and recorded and performed regularly from his Los Angeles base until his death in 2001.

For fans of Dinah Washington, Dinah Jams is an essential purchase. It's readily available in both CD and download formats from most of the major outlets. A used CD copy can be had for less than $5.

Hollywood Studio Orchestra - Broadway Memories

Every once in a while, you get something useful (in other words, listenable) out of the bins of those no-name CDS in the discount and department stores. Case in point is this 1985 release by an aggregation dubbed the Hollywood Studio Orchestra.

The CD is European in origin but beyond that there are no meaningful credits on either the CD or cassette version of this album. But it turns out to be a pretty decent big band recording, a real orchestra at that and not some electronic concoction.

As the title Broadway Memories would indicate, most are well-known standards from stage musicals, but there are also a couple of original tunes, one of which, Autumn Nights, you can listen to and download from the link below. The MP3 is taken from the cassette version of the album.

Autumn Nights

If you like what you hear, your best bet to score a copy of Broadway Memories is probably a thrift store or the bargain bin at a CD merchant. It's a frequent visitor to those locations. It also often turns up on eBay at a low price. But be warned: Not all albums (in fact, very few) billed as by the Hollywood Studio Orchestra are as good as this one. Many are truly wretched synth recordings that you'll end using as coasters.

Sonny Stitt - Night Crawler

One of the dozen or so albums that Sonny Stitt recorded during his time on the Prestige label was this boppish-sounding 1965 date that also featured organist Don Patterson and drummer Billy James.

Stitt, a disciple of Charlie Parker, contributed only two originals among the six songs on the album, one of which was Answering Service. The tune ran 4:40 on the LP but the MP3 below is a shortened version taken from a DJ 45. Click on the link to listen and download.

Answering Service

To hear the full version of Answering Service, buy the 2001 compilation CD Boss Men, jointly credited to Stitt and Patterson and which contains the complete Night Crawler LP. It's also available as a digital download.

Nashville All Stars - All-Time Country & Western Hits

Producer Chet Atkins gathered the cream of Nashville session players in the studio to record this all-instrumental album, released exclusively to RCA Victor Record Club members in 1965.

Lead guitarist on the session was Jerry Reed and among the other musicians on the date were steel guitarist Lloyd Green, pianists Hargus (Pig) Robbins and Jerry Smith and harmonica player Charlie McCoy. Chet himself didn't play on the album.

Among the songs covered on All-Time Country & Western Hits is You Don't Know Me, first recorded by its co-composer Eddy Arnold in 1955. The tune reached the peak of its popularity in 1962 after Ray Charles included it in his ground-breaking, chart-topping album Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music.

Listen to and download the Nashville All Stars' version from the link below.

You Don't Know Me

All-Time Country & Western Hits, the only LP recorded by this particular grouping of Nashville musicians, can be purchased from Amazon and other online marketplaces. Prices vary widely.
These recordings have not been issued in a digital format.

Johnny Pearson - A Dreamer's Holiday

If you're a fan of classic easy listening instrumentals, you can do no better than to latch on to some of the box sets put out by Reader's Digest in the 1960s and '70s. Many of these turn up regularly in thrift stores or can be purchased online at reasonable prices.

Some of the material on these sets was specially recorded for Reader's Digest, often in Europe or Mexico. Other selections came from the catalogues of the major record companies like RCA Victor, Capitol and Columbia.

Stardust Memories, released in 1976, contains a lot of exclusive recordings, including A Dreamer's Holiday by British pianist Johnny Pearson. He's best known as the featured soloist with Sounds Orchestral, which had a big hit in 1962 with Cast Your Fate to the Wind.

Listen to and download A Dreamer's Holiday from the link below.

A Dreamer's Holiday

Pearson's recording of A Dreamer's Holiday has turned up on a couple of Reader's Digest CD compilations, but they're out of print. The song is available as an iTunes download, but only in several European countries and not in North America. However, both iTunes and eMusic have several of Pearson's albums available for download.

Pearson, who was the musical director for the British TV show Top of the Pops during its peak in the 1970s and who wrote the theme music for the series All Things Great and Small, died on March 20, 2011 at age 85.

David Seville - Almost Good

Almost everyone who knows anything about the history of pop music knows that David Seville, the man behind the Chipmunks series of novelty recordings (cute or annoying, depending on your point of view), was a pseudonym for musician and songwriter Ross Bagdasarian.

As a songwriter, Bagdasarian was responsible for co-writing Come On-A My House, which was a huge hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1951.

He came up with the idea for the Chipmunks in 1958 and put out The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late) on Liberty Records in time for the holiday season. Bagdasarian provided the voices of Alvin and the other Chipmunks by varying the speed of the playback tapes.

The record proved to be a phenomenal success, selling an estimated four million copies and topping the the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The Chipmunk Song has become a perennial Christmas favorite, surfacing in one form or another every year.

Its success spawned a whole series of Chipmunk recordings, a couple of animated TV series, several movies and a host of other products.

On some of the Chipmunks original singles, the flip side featured an instrumental by "The Music of David Seville." In the case of The Chipmunk Song it was Almost Good, a quirky little number that you can listen to and download from the link below.

Almost Good

Watch the spinning turntable in the best of several versions of Almost Good available on YouTube.

If you're among the select few who simply must have Almost Good on a 45 single, you're in luck. It can be had quite cheaply from a variety of sources.

George Shearing - By Request

George Shearing led one of the most popular jazz combos in the world in the 1950s and '60s, and no collection of bachelor pad music was complete without at least several of his sophisticated recordings of standards that he released on Capitol. The combo was sometimes augmented by strings.

The success of these recordings often overshadowed Shearing's accomplishments as a soloist and as a pioneer of small-combo Latin jazz.

His first album for Capitol, after a period at MGM, was The Shearing Spell, released in 1955. One of the standards on this LP was Autumn in New York, which later turned up on a budget CD release entitled By Request. The MP3 is taken from a cassette copy of this album.

Autumn in New York

The sound on By Request, released on the Pair label, was merely adequate and you can purchase a copy quite cheaply. If you're fussy about sound quality you'll want to search for the pairing of The Shearing Spell and Velvet Carpet, released by Collector's Choice in 2000 but now unfortunately out of print.

Baby-Face Willette - Behind the 8 Ball

It's back to 1964 for the music of soul-jazz organist Baby-Face Willette who released Behind the 8 Ball for Chess's Argo imprint. Willette, who hailed from Chicago, never achieved the fame of other jazz organists like Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and Brother Jack McDuff.

Willette recorded just four albums under his own name -- two for Blue Note in 1961 and two more for Argo three years later. After that he pretty much disappeared from the jazz scene and died in obscurity in 1971. He was just 37 years old.

Willette displays his gospel roots on this track from Behind the 8 Ball, a version of the traditional Amen. He's accompanied by guitarist Ben White, saxophonist Gene Barge and drummer Jerold Donovan. The MP3 is taken from a 45 rpm single.

Amen

Also from Behind the 8 Ball is Just a Closer Walk, this time from YouTube. The audio quality is very good and appears to come from a Japanese CD reissue.

Both of Baby-Face Willette's Blue Note albums are readily available on CD but his Argo recordings are almost impossible to obtain on vinyl or CD at a reasonable price. The good news is that all four of his albums are available as digital downloads.