Wilbur Harden, John Coltrane, Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, Louis Hayes - Mainstream 1958: The East Coast Jazz Scene (1975 Japanese CBS/Sony Mono Vinyl LP)

Wilbur Harden, John Coltrane, Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, Louis Hayes - Mainstream 1958: The East Coast Jazz Scene | Vinyl LP, 1975 Japanese CBS/Sony Mono Reissue (SOPU-5-SY, Original Savoy Recording Series, CBS/Sony Inc.)

• Wilbur Harden’s session, not Coltrane’s, with all five compositions by the flugelhorn player who would vanish from jazz entirely within two years of this recording date
• Coltrane in March 1958, between the Monk quartet and rejoining Miles Davis, playing with the kind of restless forward motion that defined this extraordinarily productive period of his career
• Four Detroit musicians and one New Yorker, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at Hackensack on a single Thursday afternoon in March 1958, with Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Louis Hayes forming the rhythm section

Wilbur Harden is one of jazz’s genuine enigmas. He recorded with Roy Brown and Ivory Joe Hunter in the early 1950s, served in the Navy, resurfaced in Detroit in 1957 playing flugelhorn with Yusef Lateef, and then led four sessions for Savoy Records in 1958 before ill health forced him to stop playing altogether at the age of 35. He died in 1969, largely forgotten. Three of his four Savoy dates featured John Coltrane, and subsequent reissues quietly recredited the albums to Coltrane as leader. This record corrects that. Mainstream 1958 is Harden’s session: all five compositions are his, and his warm, unhurried flugelhorn is the lead voice throughout. He was one of the first trumpeters to double regularly on flugelhorn, and the instrument’s rounder, darker tone shapes the character of the whole date. “Wells Fargo” and “Snuffy” give both horns room to stretch across extended takes, while “West 42nd Street” became the most widely known piece from these sessions. Coltrane plays with force and invention, as he did on everything in this period, but he is a sideman here.

The rhythm section is almost entirely Detroit. Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Louis Hayes had all come up through the same scene, and their cohesion on this date is tight and swinging. Watkins, who would die in a car accident in 1962 at the age of 27, anchors the bottom with the firm walking tone he brought to over 350 sessions. Hayes, the youngest musician on the date, was 20 and already commanding. The recording was supervised by Ozzie Cadena for Savoy and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his Hackensack studio on Thursday, March 13, 1958. This 1975 Japanese pressing is on CBS/Sony as part of the Original Savoy Recording series, catalogue number SOPU-5-SY, in mono.