Tags
Workshop Jazz 2002 (A), May 1962
b/w March Lightly
(Written by Earl Washington)
The first release on Motown’s brand-new Workshop Jazz subsidiary, Hank & Carol Diamond’s sappy cover of Pat Boone’s version of Exodus, released a week before this record, had got things off to a shaky start. Luckily, this record, a spirited, uptempo band instrumental, the second release on the label, is a considerable improvement, containing as it does some actual bona fide jazz, unlike its predecessor.
No, this is definitely, categorically a jazz record, and it knocks Hank and Carol’s effort into a cocked hat. For a start, it wasn’t recorded at Motown at all – Washington was a top Chicago pianist and bandleader, and according to the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2, these recordings were originally made for that city’s Formal Records before being leased to Workshop Jazz and a hungry-for-product Berry Gordy Jr.
Besides Washington, the “All Stars” on the record are listed in the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 as being alumni of the Count Basie band – Frank Wess (flute), Thad Jones (trumpet), Frank Foster (tenor sax), Ben Powell (trombone), Ed Jones (bass) and Sonny Payne (drums). The band credits are available because – in a rare departure from standard Motown policy – they were printed on the single label (see scan, left), and when Workshop Jazz put out an entire album on Washington, All Star Jazz, that November – including both this and its B-side – the LP sleeves in some markets, following the tradition of jazz albums in Europe, gave the full band credits for each track.
(Indeed, it’s only thanks to such band credits turning up on other European Motown LPs that researchers can be sure who some of the Funk Brothers were on particular tracks; Motown were certainly not keen to publicise this information at the time, and angrily put a stop to this practice once they were alerted to what was going on.)
Anyway, Washington and the All Stars turn in a fine performance here; I’m not going to pretend to be some sort of jazz expert, but to me this calls to mind the more driving, danceable mid- to late-Fifties moments of Miles Davis’ pre-modal stuff. Washington was a stage pianist at Chicago’s Blue Note club, and his background shines through here – this is “audience-pleasing” jazz rather than anything daringly avant-garde (it incorporates a snippet of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King near the start), but that’s not to be confused with the cheesy commercialism of Hank and Carol Diamond’s record; it’s plenty of fun, and a million miles away from the cod-jazz MOR stylings of the only previous offering on the Workshop Jazz label.
Sadly for Berry Gordy Jr. and his hep cat ambitions, these Workshop Jazz single releases picked up almost no interest from either buyers, jazz aficionados or the press, to the point where Motown could put out a press release to Billboard magazine five months later in October 1962, and then another one almost a year later, in March 1963, both times claiming that they were in the process of launching the new Workshop Jazz label with a slew of LPs, neglecting to mention these two singles had slipped out unnoticed months before. If at first you don’t succeed, launch, launch again; the jazz project went back to the drawing board for retooling, and there would be no further Workshop Jazz singles until February 1963.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in the Earl Washington All Stars? Click for more.)
 |
 |
| Hank & Carol Diamond “I Remember You” |
Earl Washington All Stars “March Lightly” |
Motown Junkies 
Pingback: Has Hip Hop helped the Black culture and community like Motown did in the 1960’s? | wwwyahoo_yahoomail_video_women
I’m surprised Motown was able to stop the practise of placing the credits of the musicians on those European issues after they found out that was being done. Having lived and worked in several Western European countries since the beginning of the 1970s, I know that those nation’s laws require that those credits be listed. I’m not sure when those laws went into effect, but I suspect that they were in effect in Scandinavia, Holland and Germany as early as 1962.
LikeLike
The example usually provided is France, then the epicentre of European jazz culture, where jazz LPs routinely carried detailed musician credits – but I believe it was a custom (adopted as LPs wouldn’t sell to hardcore jazz fans without the credits) rather than a legal requirement. Several sources say that once Motown started exporting Workshop Jazz records to the French market (complete with de rigeur musician credits), the local distributors started demanding to put full musician credits on all Motown albums, jazz or not, and that this information was supposedly often provided freely to the European marketers by Hitsville admin staff (much in the same way they might deal with a request for inventory numbers or copies of shipping invoices or something), going on until 1964/5 when someone higher up the chain noticed this was happening and put a stop to it. The first Motown LP to carry officially-sanctioned, Gordy-approved musician credits was Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971 IIRC.
LikeLike
I wonder if the lessor, Don Talty, insisted that all those credits be listed. It is clear that this session wasn’t an inside Motown production. Talty worked out of Chicago (he was Jan Bradley’s producer, and owner of Chicago’s Formal Records). I can’t imagine Gordy bringing Talty into The Snakepit and having him bring down alarge group of Chicago musicians.
LikeLike
No, it seems pretty safe to say this was cut in Chicago, at a completely separate session from whatever was going on with the B-side.
With regard to the credits, I don’t know whether it was a stipulation of the lease, but it’s just as likely to have been a stylistic thing, going along with the established conventions of the jazz market, where both fans and musicians would routinely expect a label like this one to name not just the bandleader, but every member of the septet.
(I’ve had limited experience with jazz fans, but the few I’ve spoken to usually pride themselves on trainspottery trivia, even more so than Northern Soul fans. Perhaps with the exception of classical recordings, identifying individual musicians on a given performance matters most with jazz, so that it’s considered important to know who played tenor sax on an obscure limited pressing B-side from 1956 bought by only eight people. Musicians, meanwhile, would want to be named so that they could get future work from a bandleader who heard their performance.)
LikeLike
If you’re looking for a Detroit connection on this single, Frank Foster and Thad Jones are both Detroit product. (Well Foster wasn’t born there but he spent his formative years there.) As for Thad Jones, he was one of the legendary Detroit Jones brothers: Thad who was considered a good trumpeter and excellent composer/arranger, Hank, who was a great pianist…actually a favorite of mine and the legendary drummer Elvin who stoked the coals for Coltrane.
And, yes, I’m basically a jazz fan but Motown’s in the DNA too. How’s that for trainspottery?????
LikeLike