'Sophisticated Giant' was recorded at Sound Ideas studios in New York City on June 21 & 22, 1977. It was produced by Michael Cuscuna, and released on the Columbia Records label in November 1977.
This album is a masterclass in large-ensemble jazz, with exceptional arrangements by Slide Hampton, a top-tier backing band, and Dexter's signature sound.
Along with Dexter on both tenor and soprano saxophone, he’s joined by what fans of this album affectionately refer to as “The Dextette.” The ensemble includes Woody Shaw and Benny Bailey on tenor saxophone, Frank Wess on alto saxophone and flute, trombonists Slide Hampton and Wayne Andre, Howard Johnson on tuba, vibes master Bobby Hutcherson, and the rhythm section consisting of George Cables on piano, Rufus Reid on bass, and Victor Lewis on drums.
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| Long Tall Dex in 1977 |
'Sophisticated Giant' is a great album with a not so great cover.
For the freeload, let’s discuss albums we bought solely based on their covers, and albums we didn’t buy for the same reason, only to later discover that they were actually great albums, or vice versa.
Bought based on album cover: Jorge Ben's self titled lp. The rich colors on it are spellbinding to me. And, its an amazing lp, too.
ReplyDeleteRefused to buy due to cover: the original lp cover for Blind Faith. Just seemed a little creepy to me given that she was so young and the airplane was kinda phallic. Yeah, its an excellent lp and I eventually did buy it.
ANON RF: Bought: Ogden's Nut Gone Flake - wanted, needed, had to have it. Was already a big fan from Itchycoo Park and its phased drum fills.
ReplyDeleteDidn't bought: David Crosby's If I Could Only [remember where I put the car keys...] Not two weeks after I had turned away from it in a huff at Scotti's in Jersey, a school mate slipped me a cassette of it and I was unabashedly sold on it.
Oh! Also bought: CS&N's first (on the day it came out, mind youse), primarily on basis of the artists' pedigrees, but also for that COOL cover.
I would've bought it anyway, but the Stones' Sticky Fingers with its zipper built into the cover was something I had to have, and the record, of course, turned out to be killer. I have a handful of hand-decorated El Saturn LPs, mostly bought at Sun Ra's gigs around Washington DC in the late 70s and early 80s. They very wildly in terms of music, cover artistry, and recording quality. But I treasure them all for the connections I have to that time and place. I remember picking up at least three of them at a particularly memorable show in the old post office building in downtown DC, which had some wild acoustics but somehow didn't seem to phase the Arkestra.
ReplyDeleteOne more bought on the strength of an unusual cover; in this case the cover being a fabric facsimile of the cotton flour sacks sold down south bearing the likeness of the renowned Sonny Boy Williamson II. Richard Newell who used the stage name King Biscuit Boy, turned out to be a very solid blues harp player influenced by both Sonny Boy, and Big Walter and the album, titled Gooduns, offered lots of chunky, Chicago style blues.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young I bought a cassette that I thought was Elvis. It was a cheap tribute and a great disappointment. Later an album by the Who was a misprint, now I wish I hadn't returned it to the shop for a correct one. With seventies jazz a lot of covers were as bad as the music was good. Th first compilation album I contributed to was one of the ugliest covers I'd seen, but one of the nicest albums I know.
ReplyDeleteYet another embarrassment for the young me. At 15 or so I bought--for 2.99USD at Leisure Landing records on Chimes Street--Buckingham-Nicks because of the cover; it wasn't terrible
ReplyDeleteSame year, same store I passed on Cale's Paris 1919; my bad.
Yeah, at that age, it was a nice cover, but otherwise a crappy disc.
DeleteAny cover with a psychedelic feel to it will attract my attention and the covers of albums like that of the Tiffany Shade, Golden Dawn and The Web's self titled album pretty much sold me without hearing a note. When I'm searching e-bay for albums if i see a Psychedelic cover and the band name has a sixties feel to it its pretty much a done deal.
ReplyDeleteAnother album I recall buying was the second Silver Convention album largely because that particular cover got banned and a censored version of it replaced it. Sadly whilst it currently sells for at least twice the price of the censored version there are a considerable number of copies of the uncensored version in circulation so it's not the collector's item I hoped it might be. Clearly plenty of people were attracted to the original cover......
On the other hand there is a compilation called 'Shadows Falling' which to look at the cover you'd think 'Night Club Soul 'Album with the likes of Lionel Richie and Alexander O' Neal' but its actually a serious 60's garage psych collectors album in the 'Nuggets' / 'Pebbles' vain and I'm not talking bands likes the Electric Prunes or 13th Floor Elevators but regional bands that probably only cut half a dozen tracks in their lifetime.
Needless say in scanning the ebay listings I must have skimmed over it dozens of times until I read somewhere about the anomaly and then checked it out. The good news being that because it didn't look like much you can still buy it new (on eBay and Amazon in the UK) for a great price despite being released over 20 years ago.
In the YAY! category:
ReplyDeleteGal Costa - índia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Dndia
https://www.discogs.com/master/117468-Gal-Costa-%C3%8Dndia?srsltid=AfmBOoqS_2KHkjSU0Ba80itcCIjKuTFME6RXTMEvMRJ2KFJmS-rs-0BA
Any Rabih Abou Khalil on Enja Records. Just gorgeous, and super expensive on vinyl!
Janes Addiction - Live on Triple X records (cassette) - something about that painting
Amália Rodrigues – Vou Dar De Beber À Dor
such an intense expression, had no idea what it was (fado)
https://www.discogs.com/release/26056363-Am%C3%A1lia-Rodrigues-Vou-Dar-De-Beber-%C3%80-Dor-
Double Live (Butthole Surfers album) - I had to have it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Live_(Butthole_Surfers_album)
In the NAY! category:
A lot of Brian Eno's albums have sub-par art. I was just talking about this last night. How can someone so talented release something so visually mundane? Of course, I bought them anyways...
Link
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/hd5MQKzGKZA
I woke up to 18" of snow! Manhattan is eerily quiet.
ReplyDeleteBlue Note covers are the hippest, thanks to Francis Wolff’s iconic photography, and Reid Miles’ graphic design.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention Warhol's beautiful line drawings.
DeleteI've seen these in person, they are excellent!
DeleteNot a connoisseur of covers, but Woody Shaw & Benny Bailey played trumpet.
ReplyDeleteThanks Babs. What's scheduled for listening today in eerily quiet New York & specifically the button factory? Stay safe & warm. Thanks Babs
ReplyDeleteRight now I'm listening to Roberta Flack's 'First Take', some "Bird" afterward, and maybe some Freddie Hubbard later.
DeleteBought many great albums because of the cover, but bought an equal amount of great albums in spite of. Good example(s): a shit-ton (that's a metric measurement) of cumbia and vallenato items from Colombia have latino cheescake sleeves, but enclosed are sublime sounds.
ReplyDeleteIt hasn't been a musical favorite for decades, but the impact Sgt Pepper had on me, and my appreciation of album art, was indelible. It was the first time I could take in a cover at the same time as listening to the music, the two worked together. It was also the first time I bought an album (on release) with my own money, a considerable investment. and great value for money. The Zappa/Schenkel projects (a unique and undervalued partnership in "fine art") quickly followed, with the revelation that album sleeves didn't have to be conventionally beautiful to be stunning and worthy of attention. Around that time I discovered Reid Miles' work for Blue Note, an artist whose influence is still seen today, and the Dead's use of SF poster artists (whose work outside record albums and the occasional underground comic was unfamiliar to me).
ReplyDeleteThe one sleeve that stands above all others is the first It's A Beautiful Day album (covered *cough* on FalseMemoryFoam©), which perfectly represents the music without falling into psychedelic cliché. I'd have that framed on my wall if I still owned records.
Bad/dull sleeves covering good music? Too many to mention. It's almost the norm, but Pet Sounds has to be the paradigm.
I would never disagree about "Pet Sounds" being an example of a dull sleeve, especially when compared to the music. However, before I had any notion of The Beach Boys, I saw the cover photo in a rack and immediately recognized the "kid feeding area" at the San Diego Zoo.
DeleteThat Zoo was, and I think still is, a great place for young people and young animals in danger of extinction. They didn't continue having a herd of small goats for children to feed by hand into the 1970s. But my family did visit there in the 60s, and I was small enough on our first visit or two that hand feeding animals was exciting and novel to me. So, loved the place and had some disposition to like the LP, even though I didn't own a copy until the era of CDs (when I'd learned a lot more about the group).
D in California
Since we're talking covers, I used to own, simply by buying them at the local record store, the *original* covers of Satanic Majesties, Sticky Fingers, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake; Sgt Peppers with all the inserts, White Album ditto; Dave Mason's cross-shaped foldout; Thick As A Brick with the newspaper; Velvets and Nico w/ banana, Low Spark and Shootout with cut corners, erm, that's all I can think of. But gone now, all gone. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteANON RF: Forgot to include my tag above, sorry.
DeleteI had all those, too, and they're all gone. It doesn't matter.
DeleteI don't know why I didn't think of this earlier...
ReplyDeleteThis place has the largest collection of horrible album cover art you can imagine:
https://ezhevika.blogspot.com/
It will take weeks if not months to peruse...
- Jon in Cali
Bought because I thought the cover was cool: “Who’s Next,” and then “Close To The Edge.” I still enjoy both those albums, and still enjoy the (different) aesthetic choices that the covers reflect. May I confess that I didn’t really “grok” that the front cover of the former reflected their just having pissed on the concrete object for ...quite a while. Certainly, I had shown it to my parents and made them listen to it over dinner many times… (They were more tolerant than then-teenage me acknowledged.)
ReplyDeleteDidn’t buy because of the cover: I don’t exactly have an example, but I will beg pardon to repeat a story I believe I wrote in comment on a different blog’s mention of Van Morrison. I once had a snack at a student coffee house on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, where an LP was being played. The setting was so memorable because my parents and sibling and I had been walking the trails through the campus, where my father was going to teach a class on the History of Science next quarter, that of Spring, 1970. And my sister had suddenly had a pretty strong allergic reaction to something in the environment – perhaps the Redwood trees, we guessed.
So, I suppose the coffee house was pretty hip, or trying to be. I thought the music on the LP was really notably bad: of course it wasn’t what I’d heard on AM radio, but it also wasn’t what I’d heard on FM; we listened to classical music, but also other programs on Pacifica Radio and the college stations. I thought the singer was trying much too hard to sound “emo” (whatever I would’ve called it then) and overwrought, and – pretentious little turd that I was – maybe like he was Black. But I could see from the cover, he was pasty white. I didn’t remember the name of the artist or title of the album, but I did remember the layout and photos pretty well.
Or so it seemed to me when I was in someone’s dorm room my freshman year (Fall of ‘74 or perhaps Spring of ‘75) and I re-heard “Moondance,” by Van Morrison. I looked at the cover and reconnected it to the memory of my sister’s swollen eyes. I don’t know that it is his best-ever LP, but it has good material, well-played and -arranged, and (of course) a popular success – now three-times Platinum in U.S. sales.
D in California
Driving on Interstate 89 in the summer of '67, stopped for a bite in Burlington Vt. Just before getting back on the 89, we went into a Kresge-like general store, near the the exit there was a rack with a few LPs. Two caught my eyes, unknowns, the banana LP, the other "Freak Out".
ReplyDeleteIn '67, these were guesses, there was no reference, "Rolling Stone" didn't exist yet... AM radio was still king, and the owners of the new FM band didn't know what kind of music they should play, and they were languishing with their muzak format, 'till a few started an "underground" playlist playing songs from albums.
It was a fascinating era. It lasted 'till '71-'72, managers were brought in, killed the free spirit of that era, and replaced AM radio as the listening experience.
Great times while it lasted. Just like "muscle" cars.
Early boomers were lucky, witnessing so much new creativity in their youth. Take care.