(Hard Bop, Modern Creative) Lawrence Marable Quartet - Tenorman - 1956 (2001 Japan Edition), MP3, 320 kbps

Ever since 1954 Lawrence Marable has been beating the bushes for a new horn man; an unspoiled "rookie" whose corners would be rough and unpolished, a voice that could speak right out unschooled, unrefined, free and dear of the restraints that tend to tie down and mould would-be jazzmen and make them hew the line of convention and sophistication.
Many times Lawrence and I talked about various "new" prospects, but our conversations would always end the same way: this boy's not just right, he's afraid to blow right out; always too much technique and too little guts, whatever feeling had been there was long since sacrified in the mod scramble for respectability.
At times Lawrence's disappointment seemed final; at times he began to think the man he was looking for had become obsolete, a victim of the mass pressure for name brands.
Then, around the end of July of 1956, I received at least a dozen phone calls in the space of one week. Among the callers were Joe Maini (who plays no mean horn himself); Jack Sheldon, John Tynan (of Down Beat), and Lawrence Marable. Everybody wanted to know if I had heard Marable's discovery, James Clay. I hadn't, but that was remedied quickly. Lawrence told me that Clay had arrived one day that week from Dallas and had sat in at the Californian (one of the remaining clubs in Los Angeles affording that opportunity to young jazzsters), that right then and there Lawrence had known that this was the one.
Two weeks later this album was recorded and a new tenor- man had arrived on the jazz scene; a 20 year old kid who wears a funny little green hat reminiscent of the cocky felts Lester Young used to sport, a shy giant-to-be who somehow or other (he's just a skinny little guy) manages to produce a sound as big as the whole heart of jazz, sometimes steel-edged along Hawkins-Rollins-Stitt lines, sometimes soft and smooth around the curves like Lester. But always felt and always swinging.
-- Herbert Kimmet