Liberty Records • Jazz in Hollywood Series (XIII)

Buddy Childers

Buddy Childers Quartet

✤Liberty (LJH 6013)✤

Inspiration is sometimes a quick and exciting, exacting but generous travel companion. It knows no constant wellspring; it makes no compulsive demand of one for the same backdrop against which to create a work of art.

This second LIBERTY album showcasing the trumpet talents of Buddy Childers — unlike his previous delightful presentation, Sam Songs (LJH 6009) — was born far beyond the glitter of Hollywood amid the rustling palms and calm tropicana of Nassau in the Bahamas.

It was while Buddy was on tour of the lovely isles of the Caribbean with Charlie Barnet in late 1955 and the early months of 1956 that the idea for this album was conceived. Curiously, the album's godfather was a non-musician — a genial hotel boys so at home in his Holiday House in Nassau, encouraged the lot of them to play loud, long and merrily. Says Childers, recalling those lush days and nights, "They call Ulrich Ferguson 'Playboy of the Bahamas', which he may be for all I know. 

But in the time we spent at Holiday House, he was only the perfect host. He was so wonderful to us all in his hospitality and understanding that I feel the least to be done in repayment is to dedicate this album to him".

While at this tropic hotel, the Barnet sidemen would gather round the piano and play as their liberated spirit dictated. There most of the tunes in this collection were formulated. In sets when Barnet was absent from the stand, Childers, Arnold Ross, Boone Stiles and the bass player would work out numbers among them in quartet format. 

"One evening on the job", relates Buddy, "one of the local hipsters requested 'Bernie's Tune' We worked up a head arrangement, possibly influenced by the Afro-Latin environment of the islands, and it stayed with us just that way. The version in this album is 'Bernie's Tune' as we played it in Nassau".

By the time he returned to Hollywood the idea for a quartet album was fixed in Buddy's mind. It had been such a ball playing with Ross and Stines that using others was unthinkable. But they needed a bass player. "I called Harry Babasin", Buddy says, "and the date was set. If there is one bass man who knows how to fit in with any group, it's Harry".

Thus on a March evening in 1956 the Buddy Childers Quartet gathered in the auditorium studio at Western Recorders in Hollywood and produced the following album. *John Tynan (liner notes)* 

A good blowing session with trumpeter Childers, pianist Arnold Ross, bassist Harry Babasin, and drummer Boone Stines. The rhythm section achieves a moving groove although Stines could soften his sound somewhat on up-tempos. Ross plays well, and Babasin's solos are a delight in sound, structure, and beat. Childers improvises with professional intelligence and welcome brass-proud fire although his conception is not too personally imaginative. He is particularly expressive, though a little too deliberate, on ballads. His sound is also most impressive on slow tempos.

The originals (two by Childers and one by Ross) are unlikely to be Heard from again but do allow for uncluttered blowing. Excellent engineering by John Neal and helpful notes by John Tynan who might, however, have given us some biographical data on Stines.

*Nat Hentoff (Down Beat, December 26, 1956)*

Side 1

1 - Buffy

(Buddy Childers)

2 - You Call It Madness

(Conrad, Du Bois, Columbo, Gregory)

3 - Holiday House (Take #1)

(Buddy Childers)

4 - Holiday House (Take #2)

(Buddy Childers)

Side 2

5 - It's Gotta Be Happy

(Arnold Ross)

6 - You Go To My Head

(Gillespie, Coots)

7 - Indiana

(MacDonald, Hanley)

8 - Bernie's Tune

(Miller, Stoller, Leiber)

Buddy Childers (trumpet), Arnold Ross (piano), Harry Babasin (bass), Boone Stines (drums).

Recorded at Western Recorders, Hollywood, California, March 21, 1956