Eddie Jefferson
The Jazz Singer (Inner City 1016)
The Main Man (Inner City 1033)

Eddie Jefferson, born in Pittsburgh in 1918, was a true jazz original. He began working as a tap dancer in the ’30s, but by the late ’40s he had developed a singing approach called “vocalese,” in which he took the recorded solos of jazz horn players, wrote lyrics to them and sang them as tributes to their creators.

One of the first of these was James Moody’s tenor saxophone solo in a recording of I’m in the Mood for Love. Jefferson recreated it as Moody’s Mood for Love, which became a big hit when recorded by the rhythm and blues man King Pleasure in 1952.

But Jefferson was not to be outdone, and in succeeding years recorded a string of humorous and moving lyrics to saxophone solos by Charlie Parker (Now’s the Time), Lester Young (I’ve Got the Blues) and Jimmy Forrest (Night Train). He took Miles Davis’s trumpet solo from So What and devised words to that.

Jefferson never achieved the recognition that his innovative contribution deserved — that was taken by his many imitators. He was ultimately shot and killed outside a club in Detroit in 1979 — another tragically curtailed jazz life.

His album The Jazz Singer includes songs recorded in three sessions in 1959 and 1961, when he was performing with Moody and trumpeters Howard McGhee and Johnny Coles.

Jefferson is in ebullient and boppish mood, and the wit and lucidity of his singing radiates his customary joy of giving back thanks to the musicians who inspired him to write about them.

So What begins the album, a praise song to Davis and Coltrane, with tremendous zest and verve before Moody swings in for a brief solo, a preface to Moody’s Mood for Love in which the sax man himself shadows Jefferson’s words attuned to his own chorus.

The version of It’s Only a Paper Moon lyricises a Lester Young solo. As Yuri Gagarin and the space dog Laika were circling the Earth in real time, Jefferson’s words take his listeners up there in vocalese. “Goodbye world! put your suit on and we’ll soon be off,” he sings before a breezy scat interval.

Jefferson’s version of Now’s the Time is a tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker’s sheer brilliance just four years after his death. “Come reminisce with me, and think about the Birds,” he sings, bursting into ultra-rapid phrases recalling Parker’s own supersonic alto saxophone bursts. “I never thought he’d be, so awfully close to me, until I heard his message, and he set me free.”

Coleman Hawkins’s famous solo from his 1939 recording of Body and Soul is given vibrant new life by Jefferson, and the Hawk’s gigantic jazz stature and recognition all over the world is set down in Jefferson’s lyrics.

In Baby Girl he sets words to Young’s 1947 recording of These Foolish Things, imagining the hospitalised horn man writing a letter to his wife. Very touching it is too as its empathy moves right inside the great tenorist’s mind.

The Main Man was cut nearly 20 years later in 1977, two years before Jefferson’s death, and he has a stellar band to accompany him, with a rhythm section of drummer Billy Hart, bassist George Duvivier and Harold Mabern of Memphis on piano.

They all move off grooving with Jeannie with a zooming Richie Cole alto solo and Forrest’s big hit Night Train is made into vocalese with Jefferson waiting at the station for his girlfriend, singing of his anticipation before the gravelly baritone saxophone solo by Hamiet Bluiett.

There are new versions of Moody’s Mood for Love and Body and Soul, while Bird’s Confirmation has rapid-fire scatting and lyrics and Cole and trombonist Slide Hampton swinging out.

But the classic track, rocking with humour, is Benny’s from Heaven, with the familiar tune telling the story of a US soldier returning from three years fighting the war in Europe, finding his wife with a new-born child, whose arrival, she tells him, must be by immaculate conception, hence the title. Charles Sullivan’s crackling trumpet and Mabern’s piano add their solo commentary.

Jefferson sings George Gershwin’s Summertime straight, with a powerful upsurge of rhythm and oral energy and a gusty solo by Junior Cook’s tenor.

He sang of Bird that he “left a lot of swing in the air.” So did the unique Jefferson, and it streams and gushes from both these albums.