Thursday, October 24, 2019

Ronnie Mathews: Doin' the Thang!


There were so many great jazz pianists in the Sixties that some of them, like Ronnie Mathews, never got the attention they deserved. His first album as leader, Doin’ the Thang!, highlights both his playing and compositional gifts. The first three tunesThe Thang, Ichi-Ban, and The Orientall have a pleasingly exotic sound. The Thang) is a 5/4 blues, Ichi-Ban is derived from a bass warm up that sounded Oriental to the composer, and The Orient is based on Well, You Needn’t. In contrast, Let’s Get Down is boppish all the way, and a nice change at that point in the album. I get the feeling that Mathews put a lot of thought into his first dateat least the tune sequence seems to reflect that. Duke Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss gives Mathews a chance to play some Tatumesque runs (Tatum was an early influence on him, as he was for just about every jazz pianist then).

A 25-year-old Freddie Hubbard does some typically bravura playing on the datewhat a talent he was! I’ve admired Charles Davis’s baritone work since I first heard him on Kenny Dorham’s Jazz Contemporary, and my esteem only increased when I got into his playing on Illuminations, the great Elvin Jones-Jimmy Garrison recording on Impulse. He’s typically fine, here, including on 1239-A, his own composition. Tootie Heath and Eddie Khan provide sound support on drums and bass, respectively. Tootie is still going strong!

Doin’ the Thang! is an excellent recording, available on a Prestige twofer (Mathews is also the pianist on the other date, led by Roland Alexander), in those halcyon days before the soulless companies that currently own this culturally important music stopped releasing their back catalogs and ceded what market there was to the Andorrans. Comes the revolution…

Here's the The Thang.




And here's The Orient.


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