I first read about Jimmy Ford ages ago in an old Downbeat
Annual. The gist of the article, as I recall, was that you could find excellent
jazz in surprising places―in this instance, Houston―where the author had run
across Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Ford, all playing at a club.
I knew about Cobb and already was (and still am) a big Cleanhead fan, but I
didn’t know anything about Ford. In those pre-Internet days, that was it for
many years. I saw the occasional reference to Ford as being a gunslinging alto
with Maynard Ferguson in the early Sixties, around the time of the A Message from Birdland album. A few
years ago, I ran across a couple of video clips of Ford playing in Germany with
Cobb, in which he showed off some fiery bebop chops.
Just recently, there was a very
interesting thread about Ford over at the Organissimo jazz board, along
with several other examples of his work. One of the videos was from a 1993 date
co-led by trumpeter/flugelhornist Stephen Fulton. I turned out to be out of
print, but I snagged a copy on Ebay for a quite modest sum.
Jimmy
Ford/Stephen Fulton Volume II has great liner notes by Ira Gitler, who
first met Ford in 1948 when he was with Tadd Dameron, playing
Lester-Young-style tenor along with Allen Eager, at the Royal Roost. After
returning to his native Houston to shake off a problem that beset all too many
musicians of the era, he hit the New York scene the next year as a Charlie
Parker-style alto saxophonist. After another retreat to Houston in the Fifties,
her went on the road with Maynard, then spent most of the rest of his life in
his hometown as a musician and teacher. Stephen Fulton, no slouch himself, has done stints with Woody Herman and many other artists, and enjoyed a long association with the great Clark Terry.
Ford and Fulton are a great combination, with both of them channeling
the bebop era in a series of Fulton’s original compositions (Ford Blue is a finger buster!) and
standards, along with a blistering Bird Gets
the Worm/Lover Come Back and Chasin’
the Bird by the master himself. It’s a real pleasure to hear Ford, a
first-generation bopper, play so fluently in the classic style. Fulton really
gets around on the flugelhorn on the up-tempo numbers, and both he and Ford play
beautifully on ballads―Ford on For All We Know and
Fulton on For Heaven’s Sake. Richard
Rozelle was a very interesting pianist with great ideas, G.T. Hogan, under a
variety of names, played drums for tons of people on scads of recordings, and
Erin Wright provides solid bass support and a nice solo on Pass the Hat, another Fulton original. All in all, an excellent
date!
Two notes: (1) I’d love to get a copy of Jimmy Ford/Stephen Fulton Volume II if
anyone comes across one, (2), I’m fantasizing that somewhere in Houston there
are tapes of alto battles between Jimmy Ford and Cleanhead Vinson only waiting
to be unearthed and sprung upon the world. Let it be so!
Here’s Bring ‘Nuff
Clothes.
