Bass Player: Paul Chambers

Another one of those sessions that is repackaged and repackaged again and again with different players presented as the session leader. This track has been released as part of the Paul Chambers Quintet album ‘Chambers Music’ but was probably originally recorded with Pepper Adams or Curtis Fuller as the session leader. John Coltrane was on this 1956 session and the record has the honour of containing the first recording of a Coltrane composition, ‘John Paul Jones’ (also transcribed on this website). The track presented here is Charlie Parker’s ‘Dexterity’ slowed down and performed in unison by Chambers and Coltrane in the lower range of the tenor saxophone. The decision to play the head in this way, slow and low, allows us to hear Chambers’s phrasing beautifully. The transcription is of Chambers’s solo at 0:46. A tougher nut to crack than the more routine blues solos posted elsewhere here.