Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin' (2021 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Stereo LP)

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin' | Vinyl LP - 2021 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g (3579178, Kevin Gray/Optimal)

If you know one Blue Note cover, it is probably this one. Reid Miles's photograph of a woman's legs crossing a Manhattan sidewalk in heels has been reproduced on posters, T-shirts, tote bags and gallery walls for sixty years. It is one of the images most people picture when they think of Blue Note Records. The music inside has the same quality: immediately recognisable, impossible to mistake for anything else, and deeper than its surface suggests.

Sonny Clark arrived in New York from Pittsburgh in 1957 and recorded five albums as a leader for Blue Note within a year. The fifth was this one. The session took place on January 5, 1958 with the strongest rhythm section available: Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, both members of the Miles Davis Quintet, alongside Art Farmer on trumpet and Jackie McLean on alto saxophone.

The title track opens with Jones's hi-hat and Chambers's two-beat bass walking a medium-slow blues groove that has become one of the most quoted figures in hard bop. Clark's piano enters with block chords, funky and precise, the melody carried in unison by Farmer and McLean. It sounds effortless. It was not. "Blue Minor" follows at a slightly faster tempo, Clark building his solo from the left hand upward in a way that shows his debt to Bud Powell while sounding nothing like imitation. Together these two pieces constitute one of the strongest opening sides in the Blue Note catalogue.

Side B opens with "Sippin' at Bells," a Miles Davis composition from 1947. "Deep Night" closes the album with a two-minute trio vamp before the horns enter, Farmer's solo among the most fluid he recorded during this period. 

This Classic Vinyl Series pressing is mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analog master tapes; pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal Media GmbH.