J.J. Johnson - The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson Volume 1 (1983 Japanese Blue Note Mono LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

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J.J. Johnson - The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson Volume 1 | Vinyl LP - 1983 Japanese Blue Note BLP 1500 Series Mono Reissue (BLP 1505, Rudy Van Gelder Remaster)

J.J. Johnson is the reason there is such a thing as bebop trombone. The instrument's slide mechanism had been considered too unwieldy for the rapid articulation that Parker and Gillespie's vocabulary demanded, and most slide players in the late 1940s steered around the new music rather than into it. Johnson refused to. By the time Alfred Lion offered him a Blue Note date in June 1953 he had already played on Miles Davis' first Blue Note session, briefly retired from music to work as a blueprint inspector when the gigs dried up, and earned the documented admiration of Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie and Parker himself. The 1953 sextet date (Side 1 of this LP) brought him together with the 22-year-old Clifford Brown, two Heath brothers, John Lewis on piano, and Kenny Clarke on drums. The repertoire moves between burners ("Turnpike", "Get Happy", Johnson's "Capri") and ballads ("Lover Man"), with Brown announcing his presence in the music in a way that anticipates the next three years of his impossibly short career.

The 1954 Hackensack session on Side 2 swaps the sextet for a quintet with conga overdubs from Sabu Martinez. Charles Mingus turns up on bass: by this point Mingus was already a known composer in his own right and only months away from launching his Jazz Workshop, which makes his appearance here as a working sideman one of the period's small documentary curiosities. Wynton Kelly was 23 and four years from joining Miles Davis. Kenny Clarke is the bridge between the two sessions. The 12" BLP 1505 first appeared in 1956, gathering the two earlier 10" LPs into the new long-form cataloguing system Blue Note had just adopted. This Japanese 1983 reissue belongs to the BLP 1500 Series program, the carefully-pressed Japanese editions of the original Blue Note 1500 catalogue, and crucially the remastering is Rudy Van Gelder's own.