Craft Reissues Curtis Counce on Contemporary

Cover of the Craft Recordings reissue of You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce (courtesy of Craft Recordings)

Almost exactly four months ago, I wrote about what was, at that time, the latest Craft release of remastered Contemporary albums. This was a box set of the recordings made by saxophonist Sonny Rollins for Contemporary. The latest release in the series is the second “volume” in a set of recordings by the Curtis Counce Group. The original title of the album was You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce. Back in the days when vinyl was the only option, the disc was often enclosed in an inner sleeve, whose outer surfaces were often used to promote other albums. That was how I first came to know about this volume. It piqued my curiosity but not my wallet!

Counce began his career when he moved to Los Angeles in 1945, when he was emerging from his teens. His first recordings were made in 1946 with Lester Young, and he quickly cultivated a “literacy” for the many different jazz genres at that time. When he formed his quintet in 1956, his favored genre was hard bop. The members of that quintet were tenor saxophonist Harold Land, trumpeter Jack Sheldon, pianist Carl Perkins and drummer Frank Butler with Counce playing bass. The Bounce album was their second Contemporary release.

Only two of the seven tracks were Counce originals; and it does not take long for the attentive listener to “feel the bounce.” However, whether one is listening to the originals or to the more traditional tunes (such as Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean?”), there is no shortage of hard bop “punctuations,” many of which originate from Butler’s drum kit. Taken as a whole, the album is definitely satisfying, making it more than a tragedy that Counce died of a heart attack at the age of 37 on July 31, 1963.

As of this writing, the Contemporary release is only available from its Amazon.com Web page as a vinyl release. However, that Web page includes hyperlinks to the CD version of the original release and a Web page for MP3 download. There is also a Web page on the Craft Web site for a high-resolution digital download, but I would be amiss if I did not mention that the URL was flagged by my Avast security software.