Sonny Clark was 26, from Pittsburgh, and new to New York. He had come east in April 1957 after years on the West Coast with Buddy DeFranco and the Lighthouse All Stars, and Blue Note took him in quickly. Dial "S" for Sonny, Sonny's Crib and Sonny Clark Trio had all been made by the end of that year. This was his fourth as a leader.
Nat Hentoff, in the original notes, lets Art Farmer sum up Clark's playing: "There's no strain in it." Some players sound like they are trying to swing, Farmer says; Clark just goes.
The date was Sunday, January 5, 1958, at Rudy Van Gelder's in Hackensack, with Alfred Lion producing. Farmer played trumpet and Jackie McLean alto. Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, the rhythm section of the Miles Davis Quintet, had already made the trio record with Clark in October. Six tunes came out of the day.
Side one is Clark's own. "Cool Struttin'" is a blues, two 12-bar choruses joined into one 24-bar form. Hentoff says the tune was inspired by Clark's wife, and Clark says the name came from the melody itself:
a feeling of somebody struttin'
Sonny Clark, in Nat Hentoff's original liner notes
"Blue Minor" is an older tune of his, in a minor key, which he wanted relaxed and moody. Side two opens with "Sippin' at Bells," a blues with tricky changes, and closes with "Deep Night," a standard Clark had only heard played as pop until Bud Powell took it up at Birdland.
The sleeve is Reid Miles's design around a Francis Wolff photograph. Wikipedia identifies the woman in it as Ruth, Alfred Lion's wife. The look stuck: Blue Note borrowed it in 1991 for a Christmas CD called Yule Struttin'.
Not everyone was won over in 1958. Don Gold, in a review reprinted on The Jazz Tome, gave it 2.5 stars in Down Beat and wrote that "more time and more discipline were needed." Later critics were kinder, and the record has outlasted the review.
The other two tunes from the day, "Royal Flush" and "Lover," were meant for BLP 1592, which never came out. They waited for the CD. Four weeks later Clark was back on a Blue Note date, playing piano for Lee Morgan.
