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REVIEW   DownBeat  /  December 25, 1958


Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis
The Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Cookbook

Prestige 7141

★★★★

Rudy Van Gelder Remasters
Prestige 65th Anniversary Vinyl Series
Buy it on Amazon


To avoid using our beloved word “funky” in a review of this album is not only impossibleit is unthinkable. And one must be prepared to take the set for what it is: a living, throbbing example of unadulterated funk in the most honorably basic tradition of booting jazz. The musicians involved int his mudlark gambol apparently couldn’t have been having a better time.

Lovers of the cerebral and experimental in jazz probably will look down their persnickety noses at Jaw’s roughhewn blowing on Have as well as that of the other wailers. He does not fool around, this gentleman. He blows with everything inside him behind his playing.

Fortunately, Davis also has four supporting musicians of like persuasion. Shirley Davis plays outstanding organ, modern yet rooted deep in the blues and with ample technique to implement her wide-ranging imagination. (Her sudden interpolation of whistling high treble in the solo on the slow blues, Kitchen, is just great.)

Richardson, one o the most able flutists in jazz—and a tenor man of no mean ability, too—is less rowdy than Jaws, but he more than holds his own in a series of solos revealing his polished, almost glib flute style.

Duvivier and Edgehill make a wellnigh perfect rhythm team. The former’s time, taste, and full-blooming tone can serve as an example to the youngsters on the instrument. The drummer is crisp, swinging, and unobtrusively efficient.

But Beautiful is just that, setting off Davis’ foundation in Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. This track is the more effective coming after the two opening rompers and concluding the first side.

The weakest track is the too-frantic Have Horn. From Bar 1 it tears along at the highest pitch, so that there’s no place to go but down.

A very good album because a) Jaws, b) Scott, and c) Duvivier. But let’s have some more ballads by this big man on tenor. —John A. Tynan


The Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Cookbook: Have Horn, Will Blow; The Chef; But Beautiful; In the Kitchen; Three Deuces
Personnel: Davis, tenor; Jerome Richardson, flute, tenor (Deuces only); Shirley Scott, electric organ; George Duvivier, bass; Arthur Edgehill, drums.


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