Deep in the Stacks: Your Daily Jazz LP Podcast
Every day, Danny from Kissa Kissa -- the Japanese-style jazz vinyl bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn -- pulls one album from the stacks and tells you who made it, why it matters, and what to listen for. Three minutes, one record you need to hear. Calendar-driven picks tied to recording dates and artist birthdays, plus deep cuts from the Kissa Kissa collection.
Deep in the Stacks: Your Daily Jazz LP Podcast
Hip Cake Walk — Don Patterson (Prestige, 1964)
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Prestige Records in nineteen sixty four was an organ combo factory, session after session at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, most of them following the same template. Don Patterson's hip cake walk came out of that same room, same label, same year. What separates it is the tenor man. Booker Irvin was in the middle of his own classic prestige run, the book series, and he brought that same muscular, wide vibrato intensity to Patterson's date. The combination turned a solid organ session into something with real teeth. This is Deep in the Stacks, today's album, Hipcake Walk by Don Patterson. Two sessions, May 12th and July 10th, 1964. Patterson on organ, Billy James on drums, and Irvin outfront on tenor for most of the record. On the 16-minute title track, Alto saxophonist Leonard Houston steps in alongside Irvin, thickening the front line for the album's longest and most ambitious performance. The rest of the set covers range. Patterson's original Donald Duck swings hard. Sister Ruth keeps the heat up. An eight-minute take on the standard Rosetta gives Patterson and Irvin room to push each other, and then there's a tight reading of the drifter's under the boardwalk that clocks in at just three minutes. Patterson's ear for pop material showing early, something that would serve him well on later prestige dates. Patterson had taught himself Hammond B3 after hearing Jimmy Smith play a Columbus, Ohio club in 1956. Within two years, he was gigging in the same building, playing the downstairs bar at the Regal while Smith headlined upstairs in the Bum Bum Room. By the time he hit Van Gelder's studio, his sound was leaner and more combustible than most of the organ records coming out of that room. Irvin matched that intensity note for note, and James drove the whole thing from behind the kit. Start with Rosetta, eight minutes of Patterson and Irvin trading ideas over a groove that never lets up. Houston joins on alto, the arrangement stretches, and Patterson digs into extended organ passages that build and build without losing the pocket. At three minutes it's almost a throwaway, but Patterson's treatment turns a pop hit into something swinging and strange. Proof the man had range beyond the blowing session. Hipcake Walk by Don Patterson. A prestige organ date that drew blood because Booker Irvin was on the front line. I'm Danny from Kissa Kissa in Brooklyn. Go put on a record. We'll see you tomorrow.