Fats Navarro had come up from Key West through Andy Kirk's band and Billy Eckstine's, and spent 1947 and 1948 with Illinois Jacquet, with short stays alongside Lionel Hampton and Coleman Hawkins. Then he joined Tadd Dameron's band at the Royal Roost in New York. Leonard Feather, in the original notes, writes about the nickname that followed him, "Fat Girl," for his high voice and quiet ways, and how little it helped a shy man find his place. He died in 1950, at 26. Feather does not pretend to know which mattered most: the tuberculosis, the heroin, the racism or the frustration.
This second volume, like the first, came out in 1957 and puts the familiar takes beside ones nobody had heard. It draws on three dates.
More than half of it comes from Monday, September 13, 1948, at Apex Studios. Dameron brought a septet with two tenors, Allen Eager and Wardell Gray, plus Curley Russell on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums and Chino Pozo on bongos. Three of Dameron's tunes, "Lady Bird," "Jahbero" and "Symphonette," are here in two takes each. Feather tells the tenors apart for you: Eager takes the first solo on "Lady Bird" and Gray the second, while on "Jahbero" and "Symphonette" Gray goes first. Feather thought Gray the fuller tone and the more mature player. Pozo's bongos are on "Jahbero."
Four weeks later, on Monday, October 11, the McGhee-Navarro Boptet was in the same room: Navarro and Howard McGhee on trumpets, Ernie Henry on alto, Milt Jackson on vibes and piano, with Russell and Clarke again. On "Boperation" Navarro takes the first trumpet solo while McGhee comps at the piano and Jackson plays vibes, and then Navarro, Henry and McGhee trade fours. The other take of "Double Talk" has the two trumpets trading sixteens, eights and fours. On "The Skunk" McGhee solos before Jackson's piano and Navarro after it.
Two tracks are alternate takes of "Bouncing with Bud" and "Dance of the Infidels," from Bud Powell's Modernists on Tuesday, August 9, 1949, with Sonny Rollins on tenor. The Jazz Tome's listing gives August 8; the Jazz Discography Project has August 9. The issued takes are on The Amazing Bud Powell (BLP 1503).
Don Gold gave the record four stars in Down Beat at the end of 1957.
Navarro’s was a lyric bop horn. Its sound was flowing, although the tension crackled underneath.
Don Gold, Down Beat, reprinted on The Jazz Tome
The 1947 Dameron sextet and the rest of these dates are on Volume 1 (BLP 1531).
