Ride, Red, Ride

Stumbling around the internet, I was pleased to find that Henry "Red" Allen's World On A String is still available on CD, as well it should be. A few years after the 1957 album appeared, the young trumpeter Don Ellis called Allen, "the most avant garde trumpet player in New York." Allen's slurs, slippery phrasing, unconventional interval leaps and surprising stabs may have aroused fellow feeling in Ellis, but the great New Orleanian first made his mark in the 1920s, sounding essentially as he did the rest of his life. He died in 1967.

World On A String has Allen's house band from the Metropole, plus tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, his colleague from the Fletcher Henderson band of the early thirties. The others are trombonist J.C. Higginbotham, clarinetist Buster Bailey, pianist Marty Napoleon, guitarist Everett Barksdale, Lloyd Trotman on bass and Cozy Cole on drums. All of them play at the highest level from the beginning, "Love is Just Around the Corner," to the end, a classic "Sweet Lorraine." Along the way are several standards, including the title tune and a blazing "'Swonderful," plus a blues and the signature piece "Ride, Red, Ride" with Allen vocals, always a treat. This is a basic repertoire item.

A year later, Allen led an all-star group on the immortal CBS television program The Sound of Jazz. Hawkins was aboard, along with Vic Dickenson, Rex Stewart, Pee Wee Russell, Milt Hinton, Nat Pierce, Danny Barker and Jo Jones. They performed Earl Hines's "Rosetta," captured in good sound and with superb camera work. You can see a substandard dub of the piece if you click here, but the entire program should be in every serious jazz collection. This DVD version claims to be the complete show, without the omissions or technical flaws of previous releases.