Junior Cook Takes the Newport Stage (“Tippin’”, 1958)

The transcription feature today is the first chorus of Junior Cook's tenor saxophone solo on Horace Silver's composition, “Tippin.”  Cook, with the band, performed this tune at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1958, likely within only months of Cook's joining Horace Silver's band.  “Tippin'” is a rhythm-changes tune in B-flat concert; the bridge, instead of running chords in fourths a la Sweet Georgia Brown (D maj - G maj - Cmaj - Fmaj, and back to B-flat concert), it runs D maj, Db maj, C maj, Cmin7, F7, and back to B-flat concert.  Cook, early in Silver's group and still relatively early in his professional career, sounds a tad less confident in spots, but he is nonetheless ‘foot on the gas,’ both because it is his life's dream and because he has only one choice - ride the relentless, driving pulse of the Silver rhythm section or get run over by it.

The solo features several Mobley-isms - turns of phrase and jazz vocabulary that were in the improvisational glossary of jazz tenor saxophone legend Hank Mobley, who preceded Cook as a member of Silver’s quintet. In a radio interview in 1988 with broadcaster Leigh Kamman, Cook relayed his speculation that Silver, on first hearing him, could hear some “Mobley” in Cook’s playing. The solo is a good example of Cook's dedication to the hard bop genre in which he immersed himself. Take a look at the bridge (bars 17- 24) and how Cook’s solo literally outlines the bridge chords. (A jazz commentator, reviewing a recording on which Cook had played, once criticized Cook as seemingly content to “just” play the changes. If he thought it so easy, I wonder if the commentator could do it.)

Check out Cook’s first-chorus solo on Tippin’. The transcription is written for Bb instruments (specifically for tenor saxophone for obvious reasons). The audio recording can be find here (Cook’s solo starts about 36 seconds in).