Milt Jackson Quintet – That’s The Way It Is

More Milt Jackson

Yet Another Record We’ve Discovered with (Potentially) Excellent Sound

  • You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound and fairly quiet vinyl on both sides of this is a killer live jazz album from Shelly’s Manne-Hole
  • Big, rich and real, with the kind of relaxed Tubey Magical sound that not many live albums achieve
  • Wally Heider engineered and he knocked it out of the park – You Are There, and even better, it’s 1969
  • “This is not experimental jazz. It’s beyond that, or as they say in New York, outside that. This is solid, rooted, sweet-smelling earth of an enduring style, as played by masters.”

We dropped the needle on a copy of this record last year and could hardly believe how good it sounded. So rich, so tubey, so big and clear – this is one of the best Impulse records we have played in a very long time.

It’s clearly another “sleeper” discovered by your friends here at Better Records. Who else is finding vintage albums with this kind of sound and music?

This vintage pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting right there in the audience, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What the best sides of That’s The Way It Is have to offer is not hard to hear:

  • The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
  • The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1969
  • Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
  • Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
  • Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We’re Listening For on That’s The Way It Is

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
  • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
  • Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering — which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
  • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, way behind the speakers. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Excerpted from the Liner Notes

This is not experimental jazz. It’s beyond that, or as they say in New York, outside that. This is solid, rooted, sweet-smelling earth of an enduring style, as played by masters. Well said, and even if the record labels had already begun to abandon this “enduring style”, it’s reassuring in hindsight to know that it was still out there, almost underground perhaps, but like the best that art has to offer it was simply biding it’s time until the world would be once again ready to embrace it.

Excerpted from The Jazz Record Review

That’s The Way It Is finds the pair playing a jazz style that by 1969 had fallen out of favor with the listeners of popular music (at least in terms of record sales), but that’s the reason I love a record like this: it gives a sense of what you would find in smaller jazz clubs during this period when this music was supposedly a dying art form. This was a time when post bop, electric jazz and fusion were the stylistic watchwords of the day, so it’s nice to see that Impulse! had the sense to record Jackson and Brown playing in a modern jazz style that they once helped to popularize. Even though the record is fairly mellow, the musician’s love of the classic jazz sound shines through, and the subtle nature of the music seems a conscious choice against the more in-your-face electric jazz that was gaining momentum all around them. One can imagine the audience members kicking back with their cocktails, nodding their heads in appreciation at the calm and collected grooves being laid down in front of them.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Frankie And Johnny
Here’s That Rainy Day
Wheelin’ And Dealin’

Side Two

Blues In The Basement
Tenderly
That’s The Way It Is

The Jazz Record Review

As the story goes, Milt Jackson and Ray Brown would meet up once a year for a run of gigs at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, not because they couldn’t find work elsewhere, but rather (as the liner notes put it) for “the pleasure of making music”. That’s The Way It Is comes from a pair of 1969 shows with a stellar quintet that featured three jazz masters (Teddy Edwards and the two headliners) along with the young up-and-comer Monty Alexander, who would go on to have an impressively long and varied career that is still going strong today. The somewhat obscure Dick Berk manned the drummer’s chair, admirably laying down the tempo for this set of hard bop jazz that not surprisingly harkens back to a simpler time of blues-based jazz music.

Jackson and Brown’s friendship went way back, they first played together in the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s band from 1946 to 1951. The other members of the rhythm section, not coincidently, were John Lewis and Kenny Clarke, who would soon thereafter go on to form The Modern Jazz Quartet with Jackson, the group for which he is most often associated with. Brown is best known for his enduring work with the Oscar Peterson Trio, whom he played with for nearly fifteen years from 1951 until 1966. Apparently the two men remained close throughout the years, resulting in their yearly meetings at the famous Hollywood jazz club. In addition to this live LP, they would also record a couple of big band albums together for Impulse!, both of which remain pretty obscure.

That’s The Way It Is finds the pair playing a jazz style that by 1969 had fallen out of favor with the listeners of popular music (at least in terms of record sales), but that’s the reason I love a record like this: it gives a sense of what you would find in smaller jazz clubs during this period when this music was supposedly a dying art form. This was a time when post bop, electric jazz and fusion were the stylistic watchwords of the day, so it’s nice to see that Impulse! had the sense to record Jackson and Brown playing in a modern jazz style that they once helped to popularize. Even though the record is fairly mellow, the musician’s love of the classic jazz sound shines through, and the subtle nature of the music seems a conscious choice against the more in-your-face electric jazz that was gaining momentum all around them. One can imagine the audience members kicking back with their cocktails, nodding their heads in appreciation at the calm and collected grooves being laid down in front of them.

No need to extoll the great talents of Jackson and Brown here, if you are unfamiliar with their work go check out the Modern Jazz Quartet and Oscar Peterson Trio, but a few quick words on Teddy Edwards seem appropriate. By the time of That’s The Way It Is he had certainly fallen out of favor with the jazz mainstream, but in the late 1940s he was considered one of the best (if not the most influential) tenor saxophone players along with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray. In 1947 Edwards and Dexter Gordon released the “The Duel”, a recording that would cement both men’s legendary status in the jazz world. It seems Edwards didn’t achieve the same level of fame as his counterparts from the ’40s due to his decision to remain in Los Angeles rather than head east, but that would explain Jackson and Brown tapping him to play in their quintet at a Hollywood jazz club, and what better choice for this set of music than a cat like Edwards who by this time had presumably seen and played it all.

While the quieter tracks on the album feature some outstanding bass work from Brown (particularly his solo work on “Tenderly”), I’m certainly more partial to the upbeat tracks, in particular “Wheelin’ And Dealin'” and the title track that closes out the record. The band swings and there is an instant delight in the interplay between the musicians. Nothing fancy, just some great jazz music. I’ll quote Morgan Ames’ liner notes again, as he sums up the recording quite well: “This is not experimental jazz. It’s beyond that, or as they say in New York, outside that. This is solid, rooted, sweet-smelling earth of an enduring style, as played by masters.” Well said, and even if the record labels had already begun to abandon this “enduring style”, it’s reassuring in hindsight to know that it was still out there, almost underground perhaps, but like the best that art has to offer it was simply biding it’s time until the world would be once again ready to embrace it.”