Happy Girl — Nathan Davis (Saba, 1965)

Deep in the Stacks, Episode 13: An expatriate tenor man in the Black Forest with Woody Shaw, Larry Young, and a band that had no business being that good.

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Woody Shaw was twenty years old, Larry Young was twenty four. Neither had let a record date yet, but in January of nineteen sixty five, both turned up at a studio in the Black Forest to play on someone else's session, a tenor player from Kansas City who had left the States two years earlier and never come back. That session became one of the most sought-after records in the Saba catalog. This is Deep in the Stacks, today's album, Happy Girl by Nathan Davis. The Saba label operated out of Villingen, deep in Germany's Schwarzwald region, and by the mid-60s, producer Joachim Ernst Barend was turning it into one of Europe's most serious jazz operations. Nathan Davis had landed in Paris after an army stint in Berlin, playing the Expatriate Circuit alongside Kenny Clark and Art Blakey. Barent brought him into the studio on January 31, 1965, with a band that looks absurd in hindsight. Shaw on trumpet, Young on piano, Jimmy Wood, a Duke Ellington veteran, on bass, Billy Brooks on drums. Davis plays tenor, soprano, and flute across seven tracks, all originals and covers. The range is wide. The flute in the blues is exactly what it sounds like. Bluesy, grounded, with Davis switching to flute over a loose groove. Spring can really hang you up the most is a slow ballad. Evolution is edgy and searching, the track where Shaw and Young push hardest, and theme from Zoltan had enough hook that Saba released it as a single. The album went out of print on vinyl for decades, a gap that only made the reputation grow. It finally resurfaced for Record Store Day in 2025. Collectors had known all along. Start with Evolution. The quintet opens up here, and you hear Shaw and Young testing the edges of the material. Davis switches instruments and the whole feel changes. The rhythm section drops into something groovier, earthier, a different band almost. Happy Girl by Nathan Davis on Saba, a Black Forest session with Woody Shaw and Larry Young before anyone knew their names. I'm Danny from Kissa Kissa in Brooklyn. Go put on a record. We'll see you tomorrow.