“The music that goes under the very broad heading of “jazz,” has undergone so many changes and branched off in so many directions in the course of its history that there aren’t many definitive statements one can make about the music as a whole. But I can think of at least one; it’s about feeling. A good jazz musician, whether it’s Kid Ory or Ornette Coleman, has always been a musician who feels what he’s doing and makes his listeners feel it too. If the feeling isn’t there, it’s not jazz. An intellectual exercise, maybe. A display of virtuosity, perhaps. But not jazz. Gene Ammons has never in his life played a note that was anything other than jazz.
Ammons has suffered much critical abuse for such imagined shortcomings as lack of inventiveness and insufficient technique, but even if the critics were right on those scores they’d be missing the point. The point is that feeling is central to Ammons’ approach and there have been few other musicians who put so much real, unaffected into everything they play. Like a great athlete whose every move is a thing of beauty, Ammons is a natural. Listening to him in action, it sometimes sounds as if playing Jazz comes as easily to him as laughing, or crying, or breathing, that he plays as though he was born to, because it’s in his blood.
This may sound a bit melodramatic, but there is at least one sense in which music really is in Gene Ammons’s blood. His parents were both musicians, and his father, Albert Ammons, was one of the undisputed giants of boogie-woogie piano. Among the earliest recordings he ever did were some sessions under his father’s leadership in the middle Forties. At the time, Gene’s playing was very much in the Lester Young bag, touched slightly by the harmonic and rhythmic advances being introduced in those years by the likes of Parker and Gillespie.
Someone under the influence of the President of both the Tenor Saxophone [known for the mellowness of his approach] and the modernists [who were becoming notorious for their defiance of tradition] might seem an unlikely sideman for one of for one of the masters of a piano style that is simple, direct and stomping. But the band between Ammons père and Ammons fils was more than simply genetic. It was one that, in a larger sense, is an essential component of the African-American experience: the bond of the blues.
The blues is perhaps the most basic form of artistic expression that has ever been developed [if, indeed, it was “developed,” as opposed to simply grown like Topsy]. It is the foundation upon which the towering edifice of Jazz is built. A Jazz musician who knows what he is doing is a Jazz musician who understands the blues. Boogie-woogie with its throbbing bass lines and its structural simplicity, is piano blues in its rawest form.Whether it was by actual study, by heredity, or by osmosis, it was clear from the beginning that Gene Ammons had picked up much of Albert Ammons’ natural aptitude for playing the blues.
The blues, pure and simple, has remained at the core of Gene Ammons’ music, no matter how many stylistic influences he has absorbed.”
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Peter Keepnews insert notes excerpt, Juganthology [Prestige P-24036]