Junior Cook’s solo on “Kiss Me Right” (1961)

I was introduced to Junior Cook through this album and this tune. This tune, in a way, started the research journey for me.

As I explain in the introduction to the Junior Cook biography, a college friend hipped me to the Harper Brothers (Philip and Wizard) and their CD release, “Remembrance - Live At the Village Vanguard.” The band played a cover of Horace Silver’s “Kiss Me Right,” and I was really digging it. Digging it so much that I sought out the original recording of the tune to see how it compared. When I found that original recording — “Doin’ the Thing: The Horace Silver Quintet at the Village Gate” on Blue Note Records — I found Junior Cook on tenor saxophone.

Cook, by 1961, had a few years under his belt as Horace Silver’s ensemble. From the outside listening in, he seems more confident, more assured — assured of his own tenor voice and assured of his role and home in this band.

If you squint with your ears, you may still hear some Mobley (Hank Mobley) in Cook’s playing (just the same, Mobley has no trademark on flowing eighth notes). That said, the ‘Junior Cook’ in Junior Cook’s playing is right here before you.

(Horace Silver has a great story in an interview with Ben Sidran. He acknowledges how much he idolized Bud Powell and imitated him. Silver notes, however, that after one recording, he listened to his performance and he heard something in his solo that was not Bud Powell. Silver honed in and dedicated himself to pulling that thread and develop that something that he had heard because, he surmised, that something was Horace Silver’s own original piano voice trying to come out. “Horace Silver on Soul Jazz” on YouTube.)

My mom would say Cook just “stood there, flat footed, and played.” I love this solo — the eighth-note momentum, the blues, the pentatonics, the enclosures and approach notes, the building intensity. Not only does Cook’s solo build, but it’s building pretty much in lockstep with the band — the band is simmering in Cook's first chorus and by the last chorus Cook, in his solo, and the band both seem to be at full gallop. No doubt, the esprit of the band as a unit, Silver’s vision for his band, and relationship of the band members, one to another.

Check out the transcription of Junior Cook’s solo on “Kiss Me Right”. The transcription is written for Bb instruments, specifically for tenor saxophone. The solo transcription is set to the original recording on YouTube here.