Miles Davis • Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet Prestige/Craft Recordings CR00608
Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane • Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane Jazzland/Craft Recordings CR00611 Mal Waldron Sextet • Mal/2 Prestige/Craft Recordings CR00616
n the early 1980s, just as I was starting college, I began listening to jazz in a serious way. I mined the music of the greats, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk among them. Original pressings were hard to find and expensive, especially for a college freshman making slightly above minimum wage, so I relied on a new series of records that began showing up in my favorite store, each identified by a large information-filled sticker on the shrink wrap that resembled a Japanese obi. Fantasy Records launched Original Jazz Classics, OJC for short, in 1982, and the series grew to hundreds of titles on LP and even more on CD. Fantasy published a book on the OJC series, Original Jazz Classics Collector's Guide, which gives synopses of the 200 best-selling titles and a foldout listing of 850 OJC reissues on both LP and CD. I didn't have the book when I started buying OJCs, but many of my early choices are covered in it, confirming their musical importance. It was with no surprise that I learned Craft Recordings had resurrected Original Jazz Classics, even with the very different recorded-music market that exists over 40 years since the series first launched. Those earlier OJC LPs were budget-priced reissues -- $5.98 list, as I recall -- pressed on standard-thickness vinyl and packaged in lightweight but nicely printed sleeves. Today, vinyl is the premium format for recorded music. The new OJC releases feature remastering from Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio, 180-gram RTI pressings in Craft Recordings-branded rice-paper inner sleeves, period-authentic labels, and vibrant, heavyweight tip-on outer sleeves. The sticker is replaced by a replica obi that covers the end of the sleeve instead of wrapping around it. All three of these releases are discussed in Original Jazz Classics Collector's Guide, and they are titles any jazz hound knows well. Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet was one of four similarly titled LPs Miles Davis released hurriedly in order to fulfill his commitment to Prestige before moving to Columbia. It's a stone-cold classic, featuring the first lineup of the Miles Davis Quintet: John Coltrane on sax, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Craft has also released Relaxin' . . . , but as one of its premium One Step LPs, so I'm not sure we'll see an OJC of it, but I would bet my IRA account that the other two -- Steamin' . . . and Cookin' . . . -- will appear at some point. Each side of Workin' . . . ends with a short piece called "The Theme," which serenely bookends a series of jazz originals and one cover, Rodgers & Hart's "It Never Entered My Mind." The cover opens the album and sets a meditative tone, followed by many moments of unsurpassed beauty. Everybody wanted to play with Miles in the 1950s, and the band here was long on star power and playing restraint. This push-pull energy makes this music significant and this album a classic. Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane pairs two jazz giants who, it has been reported, didn't like each other. It was released in 1961, when stereo records were becoming de rigueur, but it mixes stereo and mono tracks taken from three different recording sessions with different lineups, all from 1957. The three stereo tracks are marked on the back with an asterisk, which denotes an "alternate master." The jumping between mono and stereo makes playing this record with a mono cartridge impossible (unless you want to potentially ruin the stereo tracks), and I'm not convinced it best serves close listening, because you immediately know when one of the stereo tracks begins. But there is no questioning the vitality of the music, all of which are Monk's distinguished and quirky compositions, and not just because of the headliners. Bassist Wilbur Ware is the unsung hero here, anchoring three cuts and giving both Monk and Coltrane a solid foundation for their solos. On other cuts, Coleman Hawkins on tenor and Gigi Gryce on alto sax add different spices to a stew that's heavy on flavor to begin with. This album, combining two strong voices -- Monk with his unique sense of rhythm and Coltrane with his teetering between power and feeling -- and cuts from multiple sessions, seems destined for failure, but it works with aplomb. It's the rare recording that succeeds because of its high ambition. Pianist Mal Waldron's Mal/2 may seem out of rank with the other two, but it sounds ahead its time. It includes Coltrane, Jackie McLean and Art Taylor working through a collection of covers and two Waldron originals in a distinctly hard-bop vein. Waldron is often referred to as being "Monk-like," but I hear a more pensive, less rhythmically obsessed pianist than Monk. A banging Waldron composition, "Potpourri," opens the album, but the highlight for me is a fluid, totally charming version of Cole Porter's "How You Look Tonight." Trumpeter Idries Sulieman has some achingly beautiful solos that add contour to this decidedly angular session. Sulieman also plays on Mal-1 from the year before, but that recording, Mal Waldron's debut as a leader, doesn't have the bluesy grit of the follow-up. The sound of these three new LPs eclipses that of their OJC forebears, due to the added care that went into their creation. Workin' . . . and Mal/2 are all mono, their purity and directness enhanced via a mono cartridge. All three pressings are better than those of the thinner originals, and they are exceptionally quiet. These new OJCs elevate the series from a bargain hunter's delight to a jazz connoisseur's go-to. To this day, finding an OJC release at a thrift store or
garage sale is a thrill, because the LPs always sound good and the pressings are quiet, if
they weren't abused. But there is no comparison between old and new OJCs, with the heavier
vinyl, authentic sleeves and audiophile pedigree of the new LPs. Craft has announced
nearly a dozen titles so far, including a pair of classics from Bill Evans and Yusef
Lateef's Eastern Sounds, which sold out quickly when it was available as the
second of Craft's One Step releases. Here's hoping that the plans for the new OJC series
are even a quarter as ambitious as those for the original Original Jazz Classics. |
