Description
Booker Ervin – Tex Book Tenor – Tone Poet Series 180 Gram Vinyl Record
Tex Book Tenor is one of the most satisfying documents of Booker Ervin’s late career, a 1968 Blue Note session built around four substantial original compositions and a band capable of meeting his enormous sound head-on. Ervin’s tenor had a grainy, declamatory force, but he was never simply a high-volume player. His phrases bend through the harmony with an almost vocal urgency, then tighten into sharply organized runs. Gichi opens the album with that full range on display, setting his horn against Woody Shaw’s trumpet and a rhythm section that can turn dense writing into forward motion.
The personnel makes this date especially distinctive. Shaw was still a young player, yet his bright tone and angular ideas already provide a vivid contrast to Ervin’s broader attack. Kenny Barron brings clarity and harmonic depth at the piano, Reggie Johnson anchors the group on bass, and Billy Higgins supplies the buoyant cymbal pulse that made him such a natural fit for Blue Note sessions. Rather than using the quintet for routine theme-solos-theme performances, Ervin writes pieces whose contours continue to matter once the improvising begins. The heads establish tensions that the soloists keep examining from different directions.
Den Tex carries a direct rhythmic charge, with Ervin and Shaw stating the material in a way that feels both rugged and precise. In a Capricornian Way opens more room around the lines, allowing Barron’s touch and Higgins’ accents to shape the performance as strongly as the horns. The entire second side is devoted to Lynn’s Tune, an extended piece that lets the group build patiently. Its length is not ornamental; the performance changes temperature as each musician enters, and Ervin’s return has the force of an argument reaching its conclusion rather than a leader merely reclaiming the spotlight.
The album was recorded during Ervin’s brief association with Blue Note and did not receive a standard commercial release at the time. That history gave the music an undeservedly elusive reputation even though the session belongs comfortably beside the tenor saxophonist’s best-known Prestige work. It also captures him with musicians associated with a newer generation of post-bop, especially Shaw and Barron. The meeting never sounds forced. Ervin’s Texas-rooted blues feeling and the younger players’ harmonic language reinforce one another, giving the date a character that is recognizably Blue Note without flattening the leader’s individuality.
This edition is part of the Blue Note Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series, produced for reissue by Joe Harley. Kevin Gray mastered the record from the original analog master tapes, and RTI pressed it on 180-gram vinyl. The presentation uses a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket, in keeping with the series’ emphasis on both sound and period-conscious packaging. UPC 602445852246 identifies this Tone Poet pressing specifically, an important distinction because earlier issues of the session do not share the same mastering chain, pressing specifications or jacket construction.
With only four tracks, Tex Book Tenor feels concentrated rather than short. Each composition has enough room to establish its own tempo, harmonic profile and dramatic arc, and every player contributes to the album’s identity. Ervin remains unmistakably the leader: his sound can rasp, cry and surge within a single chorus, yet the intensity is always connected to the structure of the tune. For listeners drawn to hard bop at the point where it opens into more modern territory, this session offers the best of both worlds—strong themes, deep swing and improvising that refuses easy resolutions.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.