Brothers Judd Blog

One night at Smalls, the venerable jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, I asked Spike Wilner, the venue’s proprietor, “Whatever happened to that beautiful cat that used to haunt this place?” (Though I can’t verify it as fact, it’s possible that across America, many jazz clubs have an official house cat that slinks around the club. A cat amongst cats, as they say in the jazz world.)

Spike raised an eyebrow. “Minnow. Do you know the story about Minnow?”

I did not know the story about Minnow, though I remember that regal feline creature with a spectacular mane that used to sit atop the piano, but only when certain musicians played. “Tell me about Minnow,” I said, encouraging the club owner.

The band was between sets, patrons coming and going. It was spring 2019. I sipped some tequila. Smalls is a basement joint known for its lively mix of students, hipsters, and true jazzheads from back in the day. “Well,” answered Spike, “to tell you about Minnow, I first need to tell you about Harry Whitaker. Do you remember Harry?”

I did remember the late Harry Whitaker. Beginning in the late 1990s, Harry was a regular performer at Smalls. He was a piano player of prodigious talents. I never met Harry, but I saw him play a few times at the club. I was stunned by his facility on the piano and wondered why I was unaware of this artist, who was maybe the best pianist I ever heard perform live. By then, Harry was in his 60s, heavy-set, like a big African American buddha. His hair was gray, and he had a pronounced lower lip that seemed to protrude as he got into a groove on the piano. He often slumped on the piano bench when he played, as if he were under hypnosis, eyes closed, his mind and spirit in some other place, but his artistry present in ways that tended to hush an audience into awe.

Spike’s voice became somber when he mentioned Harry’s name. I gathered that Whitaker had special meaning to him. “Okay, then,” I said. “Tell me about Harry.”

What followed was the beginning of a dialogue that started that night and would continue, off and on, over the next year. What Spike told me about Harry lingered in the ether of my imagination. As well as being a club owner, Spike Wilner is also an accomplished piano player. Harry had played a crucial role in Spike’s development as a musician, and taxed his emotions, as Harry succumbed to bouts of mental illness that would eventually be his undoing. The club proprietor and the piano legend became the inheritors of a spiritual symbiosis that is at the essence of jazz. Minnow the cat also played a role.

Much has been made of this album’s cover art — by the noted photographer William Claxton — of city guy Rollins in the Mojave Desert with cowboy hat and holster, armed with his tenor horn, but the backstory to the recording session, detailed in Koenig’s original liner notes included here, is still more revealing. (For fans of Claxton, who did several books of jazz photography, a more conventional portrait of the urbane Rollins, in dark suit and dress shirt, is also included in the new box.) Since all three musicians were performing at night, and Manne and Brown — both of whom, as Koenig noted, were just voted number one in the popularity polls of Down Beat, Metronome, and Playboy — had gigs during the day, the recording session took place between 3 and 7 in the morning.

According to Koenig, the three had never played or recorded together before. Clearly, though, they had an intuitive simpatico. Manne — who also raised horses in his ranch outside L.A. — sets the tone immediately by perfectly mimicking the clippety-clop of a Standardbred’s slow gait in “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Throughout, he and Brown are like two middle-infielders so sound they can turn a double-play blind-folded and still afford to showboat now and again. (A few years ago, when I reported on the bassist Linda May Han Oh and observed her teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, she consistently brought up Brown to her young students. “In terms of fundamentals,” she would tell me later, “if you want to be a solid working bassist and Ray Brown is all you checked out, that would be great.”)

Way Out West is traditional, at least superficially. It has a standard (“There Is No Greater Love” — Rollins wows on both takes) and a piece of Ellingtonia (“Solitude”); two originals by the leader (“Come, Gone” and the title track); and, extending the cover concept, two cow-poke ditties from the old westerns Sonny so enjoyed as a child (“Wagon Wheels” and that opener “I’m an Old Cowhand”), albeit with a modernist, hard-bop spin. But then look at the trio again, and how emphatically untraditional it is: tenor saxophone, bass, drums. It’s a configuration that had hardly been used at that point. As critic Neil Tesser writes in his informative new essay for this re-issue, “Only Lucky Thompson had recorded in this format, and he did so in only one song, in early 1956.”

It was Rollins who established and popularized this combo: He would play with just a drummer and bassist often after Way Out West and again post-hiatus — as would Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman later in the 1960s, David Murray in the ’70s, Joe Henderson in the ’80s, to Mark Turner into this century, Ingrid Laubrock, and now the 26-year-old Kevin Sun, who has absorbed Turner and so much of the jazz canon, and advances the concept in his excellent debut album Trio, just out, in which he’s joined by bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor. A sixty-year line, however undulating, from Sonny Rollins to Kevin Sun.

Without the chordal structure of the piano, Way Out West anticipated free jazz. As Rollins told Tesser last year in preparation for this re-issue, “[In the trio] I could have the rhythmic support of a drummer, and then I could have the harmonic support of a bassist. But that’s the thing about it: It wouldn’t be more intrusive on what I might be playing. It’s still very freeing to just have the bass providing harmonic content.”

Almost exactly 50 years ago, in late November 1936, a 25- year-old blues singer from Mississippi made his first records in San Antonio, Tex­as: among them “Terraplane Blues,” “Come on in My Kitchen,” “Walking Blues,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” In January 1970, just a month after Altamont, the all-day Rolling Stones rock festival, where I’d witnessed the worst violence I’d ever seen in the flesh, I walked into a record store, not looking for anything in particular; I just wanted to buy a record. I flipped through the blues rack and saw the name Rob­ert Johnson. It didn’t mean much to me; I’d noticed it as a songwriting credit on Cream LPs, for tunes called “Crossroads” and “Four Until Late.” The previous fall, I’d watched the Rolling Stones play a pristine version of “Love in Vain,” a track on their then new Let It Bleed, but I hadn’t known it was Johnson’s — for rea­sons I’ve never figured out, they credited it to someone called “Woody Payne.”

I was just starting out as a rock critic, though after Altamont I felt a hundred years old; I thought I ought to know where Cream songs came from, so I bought the Robert Johnson album, King of the Delta Blues Sing­ers. It was one of those moments when you get your life changed — like picking a college course that leads you to think for the first time, or walking thoughtlessly into a room and falling in love.