1. Ebb Tide
2. Birthday Party Blues
3. The Shadow Of Your Smile
4. On The Beach
5. Polka Dots and Moon Beams

October 6, 1972

 LINER NOTES

Illinois Jacquet was 19, the hot spark in the Lionel Hampton band when he improvised the solo on "Flying Home" that made him a superstar in 1942. Here is the account he gave me in the course of a long conversation at his house in Jamaica, Queens - across the street from Ella Fitzgerald's old house, around a couple of corners from Count Basie's - just after New Year's Day in 1999:

"Now this is the first time I'm getting ready to make a record in my life. And it's important because its for Decca Records. It's Lionel Hampton's big band. He had made a lot of records with Benny Goodman and little all-star groups. And I idolised the man. Now he's got his band and we're getting ready to make this record.

"When I walked up there to play this solo on 'Flyin Home', Marshall Royal - an excellent musician who'd played with Louis Armstrong, Les Hite, all the bands - put up his hand to his mouth and said: 'Go for yourself!' Those were some big words to me! Go for yourself! And with the prayer that I said the night before, that all came together and that's when the solo was created."

The Jacquet version is that "the music itself, deep down, is a religion". The jazz story, in his understanding, is a long love affair in the spiritual dimensions of the music. The sound that came out of Louisiana, as he did, was Gods gift, a kind of compensation for hardship and a mode of deliverance. It was the means by which black people reminded themselves of who they were, in which Illinois Jacquet found his voice.

Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet was the youngest of six, the beloved baby in a musical family that migrated to Texas just after he was born in 1922. His father was a French-speaking black man who'd paid for his own college education at Grambling with rice and sugar from the family farm. His mother had 'double trouble', Illinois calculates, as an American Indian woman with a big black family. It was his mother - "Very very strong with her children" who considered the prospects in Louisiana and decided to head West in a horse drawn cart in 1923, to Houston as it turned out. Illinois went to Catholic schools in Houston, taught by nuns he's never forgotten. In a big busy family, self-reliance was the lesson of his youth.

Religious education and a strong family "put a fence around me," he feels. There has never been an air of piety about Illinois Jacquet, on stage or off, but he was tuned early to the spiritual meaning in the music. It is what leaps out in his conversation when he speaks of a lifetime in music, from his introduction to Nat King Cole in Los Angeles, then to Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway and Count Basie in the 1940s, through the Jazz At The Philharmonic tours and the revival in 1983 of his own 16-piece Big Band, which he still presents round the world.

This Birthday Party album was another chance connection, a stroke of Jacquet's luck, and ours. He was on tour for George Wein in the Pacific in 1972 with an all-star package. In Japan, a co-owner of the rights to 'The Shadow Of Your Smile' had heard Jacquet's treatment of 'Ghost Of A Chance' and offered to pay for the recording session if Jacquet would do the honours on Johnny Mandel's 'Shadow' and a few other tunes. From the Jacquet band and the Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan ensemble that was travelling with them came the group that made this jam session in Tokyo studio, starting around 2 am, as Jacquet remembers, after a public concert. "The band was tired, but the guys needed the money because they were going to be off for a week." By breakfast time, this unconventional mix of eminent players had recorded a Jacquet original, a birthday blues in his honour, a Lester Young standard and two ballads well known as movie themes.

Ebb Tide - Robert Maxwell wrote the lush melody on which Vic Damone had a vocal hit and Frank Chesterfield an orchestral one in 1953. The Righteous Brothers revived it in the 60s, and long after this Jacquet jam session, the song came back again in the soundtrack of the movie "Ghost". Art Farmer on flugelhorn has the melodic line and the starting role in what became a wistful if not forlorn reflection on loss. Kenny Burrell's confident voicings on guitar and Roy Haynes' touches of Latin rhythm relieve the melancholy, as if to say that even ebb tides turn!

Birthday Patty Blues - This sounds like the last dance of the night before, when an evening is ending and everybody's having the time of his life. Kenny Burrell sings the songs and frames a New Orleans feeling around it. Gerry Mulligan leads Joe Newman through two choruses, then plays the obligato role for Newman's solo through two more. Illinois Jacquet enters the first of his seven choruses like a lucky so-and-so. By the close he's neighing and honking, shuddering and squealing, wailing and talking French through his horn, telling the story of his 50th anniversary.

The Shadow Of Your Smile - Johnny Mandel's song with words by Paul Francis Webster, was a Tony Bennett hit in 1965 and won the best song Oscar as the love theme from The Sandpiper. With accompaniment by Kenny Burrell, James Moody on flute and Jimmy Smith asserting himself on piano, the Jacquet treatment affirms the poignancy of his ballad voice and his mastery of slow tempos - as if anyone wondered.

On The Beach - On Roy Haynes' cue, Jacquet takes off like a jet on an original tune that is securely founded on the chords of 'I Found A New Baby'. Jacquet named the song for his friend, the New York DJ, Ed Beach. Brubeck's bass player, Jack Six, is the marvellous motor that sustains the momentum of this piece but it's Haynes' nudging that keeps the conversation interesting! Gerry Mulligan never really gets into the spirit of the thing but Basie veteran Joe Newman surely does in a muted 52nd Street style.

Then James Moody, with steadying encouragement from Roy Haynes, makes a more modern statement on the tune, and Art farmer polishes it in a concise Miles Davis fashion. Jimmy Smith, who'd been playing organ on the tour, comps on piano. Roy Haynes, the most melodic of drummers, outdoes himself here, never losing the thread of the tune in his own polyphonic solo. It is Haynes, without a doubt, that keeps Jacquet's tune alive.

Polka Dots & Moonbeams - The tune by Jimmy Van Heusen was a Lester Young favourite, and the treatment here is openly a salute to the Prez. The manner is all Prez: gentle, conversational, soulful, seductively hesitant here and there, loving. "There was nothing but love in Lester Young," Jacquet said to me. "I mean, he was the Pope of love." Roy Haynes had been Lester Young's drummer in the late 40s and he is partner in the subtlety here, perhaps remembering Prez's admonition to drummers: "Baby, all I want is chi-chi-ching... chi-chi-ching." Jacquet had travelled with Young on the JATP tours in the 50s and was often Prez's driver.

"When we first met it was sort of two saxophone players," he said, "but when we came to know each other, we became religiously friendly. I used to fix his hair, and I'd make him eat.... I was really in love with his playing, and the passion too. He was a real soul. His whole life was soul." That is what this 'Polka Dots And Moonbeams' is all about.

Christopher Lydon