Running the Bopstacle Course: Jimmy Ford and Stephen Fulton Tear It Up!

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.