[Dixielandjazz] American OKOM Classics as Latin Jazz? Why Not?

[Steve barbone]

List mates:

RCA Victor LPM-1101 (1954)
Voodoo Suite
St. James Infirmary Blues
In The Mood
I Can't Get Started
Jumping at the Woodside
Stomping at the Savoy
Music Makers


For a real eye opener, you might spend a buck or two and get this Perez
Prado album from 1954. Our one eyed mates (like Bill Haesler?), may not like
this record, however, even so, it is incredible music, and much overlooked
as part of the Jazz Genre. This is a BIG band. (21 pieces plus strings)

Perez Prado . . . wow. What a treat to see him live at the Palladium near
Birdland in NYC back in the 1950s. Along with all those Very Hot Latino
girls who went there to dance. The Palladium was the Latin Jazz/Dance
version of the Savoy Ballroom, 20 years later.

Fun to hear OKOM styled as Mambo's. Perhaps this is why some like to convert
Bossa's/Mambo's/Cha Cha's to Jazz? No preconceived notions in their minds
because they grew up with musical exploration all around them.


>From a Review: (Especially see last paragraph)

In April, 1954, while on one of his periodic recording trips to Hollywood,
Herman Diaz, Jr., of RCA Victor's Artists and Repertoire staff, found
himself rather routinely surveying prospective material with Perez Prado.
During the conversation ‹ at which, by one of those odd quirks of fate, RCA
Victor's jazz director, Jack Lewis, was also present ‹ and without attaching
too much importance to it at the moment, Messrs. Diaz and Lewis suggested
that, at least at some time in the future, Prado prepare an orchestral work
that would depict the marriage of primitive rhythms to American jazz‹a sort
of tone poem in which the African, the mambo and the basic aspects of jazz
would be united in such a way as to show their true relationship. As soon as
the idea was formulated, Prado expressed a wild and uncontained enthusiasm ‹
so, amidst really frantic preparations, while Diaz and Lewis corralled the
necessary musicians, Prado retired to write and arrange the music. Shorty
Rogers was called in as a consultant, and twenty-four hours later, on April
8, everyone was back in the studio ‹ Prado had his manuscript, Diaz and
Lewis had twenty-two musicians, and the recording commenced as though it had
been planned for months.

The Voodoo Suite is the result of that now-historic session. Prado's score,
which called for four saxes, six trumpets, three trombones, French horn,
bass and seven drummers, required a greater personnel than that included in
his own band, with the result that several of the West Coast's leading jazz
musicians were hastily recruited, including practically every available
drummer in the area.

The Suite opens with soft, mysterious beatings on the tom-tom, depicting an
African dawn‹the throbbing becomes increasingly more frantic until it is
joined by a series of softly chanting voices. The drums become more fiercely
predominant, introducing a heated vocal exchange. The music recedes and
starts to build slowly again, with brass and percussion still predominant,
spelling out the early African setting. A fast jazz figure enters, featuring
a walking bass, after which the entire band pours in, preluding an extended
sax solo. The part ends with a jazz figure punched out by screeching trumpet
notes.

The Six All-Time Greats which are featured on Side Two of this album
constitute Prado's tribute to some of the outstanding bandleaders of our
time. In four of these, played in mambo/La Culeta style by Prado‹Jumping at
the Woodside (Count Basie), / Can't Get Started (Bunny Berigan), St. James
Infirmary (Cab Calloway) and Music Makers (Harry James)‹Prado has added
strings to his band, producing a new, more colorful, and immensely
heightened tonal effect. In the remaining two‹Stomping at the Savoy (Benny
Goodman) and In the Mood (Glenn Miller)‹we hear the band in its usual mambo
style, but usual only in that it is what we have come to expect of the
highly contagious music of this modern master.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone