Curtis Amy - Mosaic Select [b]Disc One[/b] 01 - Searchin' 02 - Goin' Down, Catch Me A Woman 03 - The Blues Message 04 - Come

Rain Or Come Shine 05 - This Is The Blues Curtis Amy - tenor sax Roy Brewster - valve trombone Paul Bryant - organ Clarence Jones - bass Jimmy Miller - drums Recorded: August 11 & 17, 1960 06 07 08 09 10 11 Meetin' Here Early In The Morning If I Were A Bell One More Hamhock Please Angel Eyes Just Friends

Curtis Amy - tenor sax Roy Brewster - valve trombone Paul Bryant - organ Clarence Jones - bass Jimmy Miller - drums Recorded: February 1, 1961 [b]Disc Two[/b] 01 - Gone Into It 02 - Annsome 03 - Bobblin' 04 - Groovin' Blue 05 - Beautiful You 06 - Way Down Curtis Amy - tenor sax Carmell Jones - trumpet Bobby Hutcherson - vibes Frank Strazzeri - piano Jimmy Bond - bass Frank Butler - drums Recorded: December 10, 1969 & January 10, 1961 07 08 09 10 11 12 Liberia 24 Hours Blues Lisa A Soulful Bee, A Soulful Rose All My Life Bells And Horns

Curtis Amy - tenor sax Roy Brewster - valve trombone (tracks 6,7,11 & 12) Marcus Belgrave - trumpet (tracks 8-10) Roy Ayers - vibes John Houston - piano (tracks 8-10)

Victor Feldman - piano (tracks 6,7,11 & 12) George Morrow - bass Tony Bazley - drums Recorded: Tracks 8-10: January 29, 1962 Tracks 6,7,11 & 12: February 3, 1962 [b]Disc Three[/b] 01 - Tippin' On Through 02 - Funk In The Evening 03 - For Ayers Only 04 - In Your Own Sweet Way 05 - Summertime 06 - Set Call Curtis Amy - tenor sax Roy Brewster - valve trombone Roy Ayers - vibes John Houston - piano Bob Whitlock - bass Lawrence Marable - drums Recorded: July 29, 1962 Live at "The Lighthouse", Hermosa Beach, CA 07 08 09 10 11 12 Katanga Lonely Woman Native Land Amyable You Don't Know What Love Is A Shade Of Brown

Curtis Amy - tenor & soprano sax Dupree Bolton - trumpet Ray Crawford - guitar Jack Wilson - piano Victor Gaskin - bass Doug Sides - drums Recorded: February 3, 1963 13 - Very Frank Personnel as for Disc 2, tracks 1-5 Taken from the CDs: Mosaic Select 7 1-3 [b]AMG Review by Thom Jurek[/b] Of all the volumes in the Mosaic Select series -- as of this writing there are e ight -- none is more welcome or unexpected than this set by the late saxophonist , composer, and arranger, Curtis Amy. What these three CDs contain are Amy's ent ire six-album output for the Pacific Jazz label which includes his masterpiece, Katanga!. Amy's star continued to shine in different contexts after he left the label, as a tough tenor with Gerald Wilson and Ray Charles, as a soloist on the Doors' Soft Parade and L.A. Woman albums, and of course, as an arranger and band leader in R&B singer Merry Clayton's group (the pair were married). But it is the material here which cements Amy's place in the jazz pantheon. Amy hailed from Houston, and is very much a part of the rich and varied Texas tenor tradition. He migrated to Los Angeles to work, and fronted numerous soul-jazz ba nds there before recording these six albums for Pacific Jazz. The titles include the Blues Message and Meetin' Here (co-led with organist Paul Bryant), Groovin' Blue (co-led with drummer Frank Butler), and Way Down, Tippin' on Through, and Katanga! (the latter three as a solo leader), all of them issued between 1960 an

d 1963. The first three albums in this set offer the view of Amy as a bluesed-ou t soul wailer in a scene dominated by the latter heyday of cool jazzers and West Coast hard boppers. The players on these three recordings offered a glimpse int o the deep R&B roots of the Sunset Strip jazz club scene: along with Bryant and Butler, trombonist Roy Brewster, drummer Jimmy Miller, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes , and bassists Jimmy Bond and Clarence Jones played on these sessions, all of th em stalwarts on that steaming but criminally undocumented scene. The fourth albu m in the set, Way Down, features some new faces, most notably Marcus Belgrave be fore his stint with Charles Mingus, and vibist Roy Ayers before he went solo. Ot her players on the date include bassist George Morrow, and pianist Victor Feldma n. Tippin' on Through is a Live at the Lighthouse date, and Amy pulled out all t he stops with Larance Marable, Brewster, Bobby Whitlock, and pianist John Housto n. On all of these sessions, Amy is deeply rooted in the rhythm and blues and so ul traditions of the Texas tenors. His combo work is restricted rhythmically per haps, but it is harmonically brilliant in the way it stretches these forms to th e breaking point at the front line, and the pieces on the live set dovetail and turn back on themselves -- dig the large modal frames Houston lays down under Ay ers' vibes: Ayers then extrapolates them for the horns to jump off from. Textura lly too, the way solos are layered and dovetail and turn back on themselves dyna mically is quite remarkable, in that many of the New York soul-jazz dates didn't get to this place until 1966 or so. Finally, Amy was already deeply under the s way of Coltrane on Tippin' on Through: his own solos take the modal approach, an d wind around one or two phrases and blow them from the inside out, exploding in to torrents of sound without moving away from the blues. Katanga! is a case in point all by itself. It remains a jazz classic for its won drously extrapolated and striated harmonics, its knotty sense of interval, and A my's melodic sophistication, which was deeply saturated with Latin and African s calar considerations. This set also features the trumpet playing of the little-k nown and under-recorded Dupree Bolton, the elegant funk of guitarist Ray Crawfor d, and features Amy on soprano, an instrument that he mastered and became an ori ginal voice on, despite the fact that he had played it for such a brief time pre vious to this session. Here, despite the elongated compositional structures, the blues are never out of the limelight entirely. The title track, written by Dupr ee Bolton, and "Lonely Woman" (Amy's version, not Ornette Coleman's) are the hig hlights here, but there isn't a weak millisecond on this slab. In all, this coll ection is its own revelation -- not only of Amy's overlooked artistry, but of th e city of L.A. teeming with fresh sounds and approaches before the steamroller o f rock and roll overshadowed it.