Coleman Hawkins - Jazz Tones (1954) lp 1984 Xanadu_ 2006 cd Xanadu - Includes Timeless Jazz: C. Hawkins & his All-Stars (Jazztone J-1201)

Album I post here is Coleman Hawkins - Jazz Tones (1954) 2006 cd Xanadu, but I have not found the CD cover.

Coleman Hawkins - jazz tones, lp 1984 Xanadu

Timeless Jazz: Coleman Hawkins and his All-Stars (Jazztone J-1201) lp- 9 tracks. Publicated between 1955-1959

Xanadu cd also have same recordings than includes on:
Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954_ 2004 cd fresh sound = Timeless Jazz, cd late 80' Fresh Sound.


Coleman Hawkins -ts; Milt Hinton -b; Jo Jones -d; Billy Taylor -p;

HONEYSUCKLE ROSE 3.04
CHEEK TO CHEEK 8.01
IF I HAD YOU 4.32
AIN'T MISBEHAVIN 7.28
UNDECIDED 4.47
TIME ON MY HANDS 7.51

Coleman Hawkins' Band: Emmett Berry -tp; Eddie Bert -tb; Coleman Hawkins -ts; Milt Hinton -b; Jo Jones -d; Billy Taylor -p;

LULLABY OF BIRDLAND 5.12
GET HAPPY 5.32
BLUE LOU 5.06
OUT OF NOWHERE 6.41
STOMPIN' AT THE SAVOY 6.13
JUST YOU JUST ME 6.05

Recorded November 08, 1954

Review by Ken Dryden- cd Xanadu
This 1954 studio date by Coleman Hawkins finds the tenor saxophonist in great form, joined by a fine group that includes pianist Billy Taylor, bassist Milt Hinton, drummer Jo Jones, trombonist Eddie Bert, and trumpeter Emmett Berry. Hawkins' boppish take on "Cheek to Cheek" moves at a fast clip, though he never exhausts himself of ideas. The full sextet is heard on a portion of the session, including a lush but brisk take of "Lullaby of Birdland," a snappy run through "Get Happy," and the old swinger "Blue Lou." There are many strong solos by the supporting cast, but it's difficult to eclipse the sound of Hawkins' tenor when he is in top form as on this CD. Although it is hard for many collectors to afford picking up every single recommended release by Coleman Hawkins, this one should be grabbed quickly, as Prevue's life as a reissue label ended rather prematurely.
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Coleman Hawkins - Complete Jazztone Rec's 1954 Jazztone_ 2004 cd Fresh Sound.

Review Scott Yanow
On one day in 1954, tenor sax great Coleman Hawkins recorded a dozen selections for the Jazztone label. The original LP had nine of the songs, but now, with the added time of a CD, all 12 have been brought together. Half feature Hawkins with the rhythm section, and most of these are ballads while the hotter numbers add trumpeter Emmett Berry and trombonist Eddie Bert. The music overall is relaxed and swinging, fitting securely in the modern swing mainstream of the mid-'50s. Hawkins sounds reasonably inspired and it is a rare treat to hear the underrated Emmett Berry in this setting.
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Jazztone Stories, Part I: For once, "Timeless Jazz" is NOT just so much advertising pufferyBy Gordon M. Brown "xgb"
This review is from: Timeless Jazz (Audio CD Fresh Sound)

On November 8, 1954, tenor sax legend Coleman Hawkins, along with five sidemen, laid down 12 tracks for the Jazztone Society label. Nine of these tracks were then issued on "Timeless Jazz: Coleman Hawkins and his All-Stars" (Jazztone J-1201). In the late 1980s, Fresh Sound Records, a Spanish company, remastered "Timeless Jazz" to digital and issued it on compact disc. In 2003, Fresh Sound released all 12 tracks on a newer issue entitled "Coleman Hawkins: The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954." More recently, the nine tracks of the original album, along with "Honeysuckle Rose," have been re-released on the Original Long Play label. "Timeless Jazz" is not merely one of the Hawk's better albums; this is a GREAT ALBUM that stands proudly alongside his finest recordings despite its obscure origins and compromised sound quality. Every fan of the Hawk, as well as lovers of jazz arcana generally, should obtain this highly collectible recording before it goes out of print one last time. For a more complete description, see my forthcoming review, "Jazztone Stories, Part III: The "sleeper" in Coleman Hawkins' discography," which is based on The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954.

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Jazztone Stories, Part III: The "sleeper" in Coleman Hawkins' discography, April 27, 2009
By Gordon M. Brown "xgb" (San Diego, CA USA)

This review is from: The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954 (Audio CD)
Just a few days shy of his 50th birthday, tenor sax legend Coleman Hawkins, and five sidemen most of whom were considerably younger, stepped into a studio in New York City to record an album for the Jazztone Society. One gets the feeling that the fledgling Jazztone label had high hopes for this event. The album that ensued--Timeless Jazz: Coleman Hawkins and His All-Stars--was to be Jazztone's first release (J-1201), and of the 12 tracks recorded in that single day, two of them made their way to two different sampler recordings released by the Society.

Little did the Hawk know how his efforts would be served so shabbily by Jazztone's indifferent recording standards, and its hasty demise less than three years after that November day in 1954.

There is much shame in this irony. That's because, by every meaningful measure, "Timeless Jazz" is truly a masterpiece. If Jazztone's liner notes are to be believed, even the Hawk himself held this album in very high regard; according to those notes, "...Hawkins, who is his own harshest critic, ranks [this album] among his best...". Had it not been for the efforts of Jordi Pujol and a handful of other jazz enthusiasts living in Spain, this already endangered specimen could easily have met with untimely, cold, black-hearted extinction. Instead, through Fresh Sound Records, which Pujol heads, the nine tracks of the original Jazztone release were evidently salvaged from existing LP copies, then mastered to digital and released on compact disc in 1989. In the years that followed, the three remaining tracks surfaced on three additional Jazztone recordings.* The 12 tracks were compiled and released by Fresh Sound in 2003 in the recording that's being reviewed here.

For starters, Hawkins could not have assembled a better supporting cast even if the continued existence of The Free World had depended on it. Trumpeter Emmett Berry, a co-player with Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson's band, firmly steeped in the tradition of swing, and whose influences from Louie Armstrong are obvious. Trombonist Eddie Bert, a highly flexible, adaptable musician who, within a year, also did gigs with the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. Pianist Billy Taylor, a protégé of Art Tatum who possesses Tatum's fluid style without the distracting embellishments. Bassist Milt Hinton, who over time became the most-recorded jazz musician ever, with more than 1,100 recordings to his credit; and drummer Jonathan "Jo" Jones, part of the notoriously great rhythm section in Basie's band, who distinguishes himself on this occasion by using brushes almost entirely throughout.

The twelve tunes are well-known standards and jazz showpieces, often performed with surprising twists. In "Cheek to Cheek," for instance, the group chose not to take it at all literally, but instead to perform it at a breakneck pace, just as frenetic as the group's interpretation of "Get Happy." (Hawkins can also be heard occasionally making snorting noises with the horn that bring a peevish elephant to mind!) In rather stunning contrast, the Fats Waller tune "Ain't Misbehavin'" (one of six tracks where Hawkins and the rhythm section play as a quartet) is taken slowly, made reflective and contemplative, with none of the implied cheeky mischief that has become cliché in the hands of others. "Time on My Hands," which at eight minutes never made it to the LP release, is another quartet arrangement, languorously and lusciously played, with extremely sensitive and sympathetic interaction between Hawk and Taylor. "Blue Lou" was a staple tune from the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. But Henderson never conceived an arrangement that smokes like this one does. This is prototypical hard bop, every bit as fresh and exciting as what Miles was doing with Walkin' that same year. Dig the muted horn by Berry, and the locomotive-at-eighty-miles-an-hour effect that Jo Jones generates with nothing more than a pair of brushes.

But what truly impresses about this album is the way Hawkins frequently and unselfishly cedes the musical ground to his younger sidemen. Often the sidemen are allowed to solo first, sometimes with the Hawk providing a gentle "left hand" underneath. An excellent and representative example would be "Out of Nowhere," in which trumpeter Berry begins by tracing out the melody in more or less literal fashion. Then Hawkins takes over with a blazing series of harmonic inventions (the signature of Hawkins' style generally) that shuns the melody entirely. But then, remarkably, all the ensuing soloists take up the gauntlet thrown down by their leader, responding with their own series of inventions, beginning with trombonist Bert, then another brilliant, lyrically fluid series by Taylor. The tune concludes cyclically, as Berry rips out another, very Satchmo-like solo, this time much less literal than his opener, but no less inventive than the others.

"Coleman Hawkins: The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954" justly deserves the label of "jazz masterpiece" for these and so many other reasons, but also because it fulfills this additional necessary criterion: it contains not a single gram of fat, not even one wasted breath or hint of redundancy. Every moment, from first to last, contributes to the artistic integrity of the whole. That's a remarkable achievement for a package that clocks in at around 71 minutes. (Yusef Lateef's Eastern Sounds and McCoy Tyner's The Real McCoy are two legitimate masterpieces from the '60s that also fulfill this criterion despite being half the length of this album. In contrast, consider a typical album of "millennial jazz," such as Chick Corea's Past, Present & Futures (2001), which is the same length as "The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954" but which--in spite of its more promising moments--drags itself down like a boat anchor with its enormous preponderance of dead weight. Just because you CAN put 70 to 80 minutes of music on a compact disc, it does not follow strictly that you SHOULD!)

Of the three recordings mentioned here, completists will want to obtain this one even though it's in short supply. It can be obtained directly from Fresh Sound Records if it's not available through Amazon or the vendors linked to Amazon. Fresh Sound's 1989 release of "Timeless Jazz" may be even more collectible due to its scarcity; copies of this CD are already fetching some pretty commanding prices. If neither of these is doable, then by all means spring for the more recent Original Long Play release (and swallow hard whenever you contemplate its unpretty utilitarian packaging). But get this album no matter what. It is almost impossible to recommend it too highly.
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*"Undecided" was originally released on a 7-inch, J-708; "Honeysuckle Rose" on a 10-inch sampler, J-SPEC 100; and "Time on My Hands" on a Concert Hall 7-inch sampler, J-SPEC-700. These facts lend considerable weight to the speculation that Fresh Sound's engineers did not have access to any master tapes or metal dies during the remastering process. For if they had, why not release all 12 tracks back in 1989?

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ABOUT THE JAZZTONE SOCIETY LABEL

The Jazztone Society record label was a short-lived offshoot of the Concert Hall Society, a mail-order company for classical-music recordings. Jazz historian George T. Simon served as Jazztone's director of research. The Jazztone label issued one LP recording per month from 1955 to 1957, after which it went out of business. These recordings were subsequently reissued in Germany, France, and the U.S. under other labels. Of the 30 to 40 titles issued by Jazztone, some were recorded exclusively for the label, while others were reissues of recordings previously minted by Dial, Savoy, Prestige, and other companies. Some of these recordings showcased music from the DixielandChicago period, but the majority of them centered on a type of mainstream jazz that mingles the traditions of swing, bop, and cool-school.

Jazztone's production values comprised a maddening mixture of excellence and mediocrity. The discs were nice, thick, fairly heavyweight pieces, and (judging from the six that I own) uncommonly generous (the Timeless Jazz LP, for instance, clocks in at an astounding 5539!). But they were encased in flimsy cardboard envelopes with wax-paper sleeves. The jacket art was interesting; it consisted of a monochrome, doubly-exposed photograph superposing an image of jazz musicians atop another image of New York skyscrapers at night. Depending on the recording in question, the monochrome would be printed in one of a variety of Atomic-Age colors magenta, orange, olive drab, turquoise-green, gray, mustard-yellow, etc. (Timeless Jazz has an orange jacket. You can also type jazztone into the Amazon search bar to see what some of these albums looked like.) The packaging pièce de résistance, however, was the Jazztone logo--a highly stylized line drawing of a jazz keyboardist that very compactly conveys a remarkable sense of urban grit and ultra-cool '50s hipness.

Unfortunately, Jazztone's sound quality did not stack up well against the best jazz recordings of the period. I would characterize the Jazztone sound as being forward with horns and winds, but having weak dynamics throughout the instruments in the rhythm section, as well as a rather flat soundstage overall. To the best of my knowledge, only four or five of Jazztone's worthiest original-release titles have ever been digitally remastered and transferred to compact disc, all of them by Fresh Sound Records of Spain. There is every reason to speculate that Jazztone's entire repository of master tapes and metal dies was either allowed to deteriorate, or was lost or destroyed, and that Fresh Sound transferred these recordings to digital using extant LPs. The remasters that I've heard (I own all but one of these discs at the moment) show improved bass response and subjectively seem to have brought the piano slightly forward. Most important, they have eliminated virtually all surface noise. Although these improvements are only incremental, and clearly lack the vividness, depth and detail of, say, the best of Rudy Van Gelder's remasters, the engineers at Fresh Sound probably did the best they could with the materials on hand.

Information about the Jazztone label is extremely hard to come by, even online. A great deal of it is anecdotal, and is posted on various blogs. After much searching on the Internet, I was unable to come up with even a single posting of Jazztone's complete catalog. Sadly, the Jazztone story appears to have largely died along with the people who originally maintained it. But that only adds to the mystique and peculiar appeal of this label. The important point is that much buried treasure remains to be excavated there, if one will but have patience, and bear with the funky recording quality and mixed production standards.