Old Betsy – The sound of Big Ben Webster

Jazz saxophonist Ben Webster performs 10 songs including "Jeep Is Jumpin'", "You Forgot To Remember" and more. With bassist Spike Heatley, drummer Tony Crombie, pianist Dick Katz, and Alan Haven on Hammond.

The great box-like figure and slow-rolling walk of Ben Webster have become familiar sights in European cities since 1965. When he settles - gradually but apparently permanently - into life on this side of the Atlantic (at the time of writing, late 1967, he regards Amsterdam as his base).

The sound of his tenor saxophone, though, sometimes hot and hoarse, increasingly often a stream of tuned puffs of wind. Has been known to European jazz record collectors a good deal longer. Ben Webster came to prominence, slipping out from the shadow of Coleman Hawkins, so to speak, during his comparatively short stay with Duke Ellington in 1939-43. He was in his early thirties then, and had already worked with Bennie Moten, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson and many others. There had also been an intermittent association with the Ellington orchestra from as far back as 1935.

Ben's particular contribution to the art of the tenor saxophone is - as hinted above - a curiously breathy attack, in which he seems to be blowing round the mouthpiece rather than through it. A sound that Humphrey Lyttleton on BBC's Jazz Scene one night referred to as Ben's "breathalyser technique". You can get a very clear idea of this and some of Ben Webster's other characteristics on this record, made in London in January 1967.

1. Solitude
2. Where or when
3. My one and only love
4. How deep is the ocean
5. You forget to remember
6. Just a sittin and a rock
7. Jeep is jumpin
8. Honeysukle rose
9. Exactly like you
10. Wrap your troubles in dreams