By Michael Ullman

I wonder why this fine session was withheld for 49 years. It might be the bitter-sounding texts, or the very fact of vocals in a jazz session.

Clifford Jordan, Drink Plenty Water (Harvest Song Records)

Born in Chicago in 1931, saxophonist Clifford Jordan was admired immoderately by many of his peers. He could play “seemingly effortlessly in any genre,” said Boston’s Sonny Carrington, as we read in the notes to Drink Plenty Water. He was a valued sideman on many of the best recordings of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s: he’s on J.J. Johnson’s J.J. Inc, Lee Morgan’s Expoobident, Max Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet, Horace Silver’s Further Explorations, and Joe Zawinul’s Money in the Pocket. He was a key member of the musicians’ collective Strata-East in the early ’70s (they issued his Glass Bead Games), and later he was the saxophonist on Carmen McRae’s Carmen Sings Monk. In the summer of 1964 he was a member of the Charles Mingus sextet. Mingus used him as a kind of foil to Eric Dolphy’s wilder excursions. (He’s on The Great Concert of Charles Mingus.) With Mingus, Jordan was steady and mostly in the pocket. His versatility made him a perfect partner for Art Farmer’s lyricism on such sessions as Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn. He could also go out: Dolphy used him on soprano sax on the avant-garde Iron Man, and he fit into Andrew Hill’s idiosyncratic musical world on Shades.

Jordan co-led his first LP in 1957 with another saxophonist, John Gilmore. Blowing in from Chicago (Blue Note) was a powerful hard bop session: the saxophonists were accompanied by Horace Silver, Curley Russell, and Art Blakey. But there was far more up Jordan’s sleeve than performing unacknowledged tributes to the Jazz Messengers. In 1965, he recorded These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly. Nat Hentoff implies in his notes that the jazzification of Leadbelly’s sometimes eccentric folk melodies is a simple matter. Maybe, but I admire Jordan’s arrangements of such tunes as “Grey Goose” (with a banjo solo!) and “Yellow Girl,” along with his sweetly rocking “Silver City” and the dark-toned “Take This Hammer.” It’s not a collection of 12-bar blues. There’s variety as well as ingenuity on Plays Leadbelly. (It helps that Jordan gathered such sterling sidemen: Richard Davis’s playful bass accompaniment behind Julian Priester’s solo on “Goodnight Irene” is a marvel.)

Drink Plenty Water was recorded almost a decade later, but was lost in the shuffle and is here released for the first time. The arrangements are by bassist Bill Lee. The front line of this extraordinary band features trumpeter Bill Hardman, trombonist Dick Griffin, Charlie Rouse (on bass clarinet), and Bernard Fennell on cello. The lead singer is Clifford Jordan’s daughter, Donna Harris. The compositions and, with the exception of the “Talking Blues,” the lyrics are by Jordan. The melodies are memorable, catchy, and sophisticated. The lyrics are sometimes deeply serious. Except for the uptempo blues, “I’ve Got a Feeling for You,” these aren’t love songs.

“Drink Plenty Water and Walk Slow” is a musical monologue spoken by David Smyrl that starts with a duet between Jordan and cellist Fennell, backed eventually by bassist Lee. “Ain’t nothing to it, a baby could do it,” Smyrl advises. Gradually we realize that the speech is by an older prisoner (he’s been in jail for 30 years) to a young man in for nine years for something to do with drugs. The youngster started out, in this fable, doing lesser crimes: “snatching hams is your game.” Miraculously, the old man knows all the details, as if it were an old story. Both the narrative and its musical setting are powerful. This is, the old man advises, “your last chance to get yourself together.” And, by the way, he tells the newly imprisoned youngster, the bottom bunk is reserved for the cell’s senior resident.

“The Highest Mountain” begins with the vocalists contributing a delightfully dissonant introduction. Then Jordan enters. The piece is about understanding the world as it is now: “Make your move and take your time,” and “Ain’t no pie in the sky.” “My Papa’s Coming Home” begins with some uptempo patter from the great drummer Billy Higgins. It’s a cheerful theme, but reminds this listener that Jordan’s pieces are about disruption, whether the imprisonment of a young man, the loss of a lover, or in this tune, the papa coming home. From what? “Talking Blues” is about a bad luck boy with a “mind of my own.” He gets a secondhand car, or rather a series of secondhand cars, and temporary careers, some legal and not so legal, including pimping, “scrimping,” and drug dealing. He is eventually given “10 years by folks who were not my peers.” Eventually we are told, “It’s not the clothes you wear or the way you swear … it’s not what you get but what you have.” “Don’t you look to the sky for some piece of pie.” The album ends with an instrumental version of the “Talking Blues”; Jordan does the preaching, the trombone and trumpet provide the responses.

I wonder why this session was withheld. It might be the bitter-sounding texts, or the very fact of vocals in a jazz session. Yet the vocals are seamlessly part of the striking compositions, and the texts, full of witty rhymes, reflect the point of view of older and considerably wiser people. And they swing. There are fine solos and group improvisations throughout Drink Plenty Water. Donna Jordan Harris said that this session and the rehearsals that came before allowed her to become part of her father’s world. It’s a world well worth exploring.

Michael Ullman studied classical clarinet and received a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. The author and co-author of two books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and other venues. His articles on Dickens, Joyce, Kipling, and others have appeared in academic journals. For over 20 years, he has written a bi-monthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also reviews classical music. At Tufts University, he teaches mostly modernist writers in the English Department and jazz and blues history in the Music Department. He plays piano badly.