Who was Downbeat's trumpeter of the year from 1956 to 1958? Was it Miles Davis? Chet Baker? Dizzy Gillespie? Lee Morgan? Clark Terry? Nope, it was Don Sleet, who recorded just one album, in 1961, and who died in 1987, at the age of 48.
To say that that single album, All Members, recorded for Jazzland (then part of Riverside), bears strong similarities to Miles Davis's records of the same period touches on an important train of thought, but oversimplifies Sleet and does the album an injustice. There are some material common tones between, say, Friday Night At The Blackhawk and All Members: Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb appear on both, and both were made by quintets with a tenor and a trumpet in the front line. And there are Miles-esque moments in Sleet's solos, just as the record's tenor saxophonist, Jimmy Heath, can be reminiscent of Hank Mobley, Miles's tenor of the period.
But there are differences, and those differences are key. Take Sleet's delicately lyrical rendition of "But Beautiful." Sleet came out of the Stan Kenton band and was working in symphony orchestras at the time of All Members, and his tone on the horn is clear and burnished, more straightforward than the half-valves of Lee Morgan but stronger than, say, Chet Baker's. And, unlike Miles, Sleet is unafraid to explore the chords of a ballad like "But Beautiful." Miles, from 1961 on, was more often muted on ballads, and played notes that held across multiple chords, letting his pianist state the complexities of the chord progression. It worked for Miles, but things that work for Miles rarely work for other trumpeters. Sleet goes in the opposite direction, turning in a finely crafted, understated solo that nonetheless demonstrates his knack for picking the choicest note from a chord, a note that enhances the sound of the entire ensemble. This is especially effective because of the support from the bass; Miles had the rock-steady Paul Chambers laying down the harmonic law on his ballads, but Sleet has Ron Carter, who was more interested in moving through registers to find the best, and not necessarily the most expected, notes of a chord, which even lends the pedal point before Sleet's solo a unique sound.
All Members avoids the overt bluesiness present on early-1960s releases from Blue Note, but its personnel gives it a hard-driving sound not quite found on a Contemporary record of the same time. And Sleet himself is a bit of an anomaly, an alumnus of the big band that graduated most of the great West Coast players who did classical work and sounds equal parts Jon Gordon and Freddie Hubbard, with something unquantifiable in between. The material, too, is both standard hard bop fare and not: a tune called "The Hearing" has an almost brazenly un-bluesy vamp under its melody, and turns into a total swinger, certainly able to hold its own against any Mobley or Blakey record of the time. "Secret Love" and "Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" round out the standards in the setlist. The former was recorded by Ahmad Jamal with his Crosby/Fournier trio and by Sam Rivers, the latter by Coltrane at the Vanguard and by Larry Young, as well as by Miles (his in 1961). There are no overt conenctions, but it is worth noting that Sleet's versions manage to pull up surprises, both when compared to contemporaneous releases and to what came after. That's no easy feat.
There is a tendency, in looking back at records of the 1950s and 1960s, to cherrypick. So many discs hit the streets in the ten years between 1955 and 1965, from so many accomplished players, that it's only natural for both fans and critics to single out the Rollins or Coltrane or Miles or Duke recordings as reissues worth revisiting. But that only enforces and enlarges the divide between those artists, whose value is so firmly established that their records have an intrinsic value incidental to the music, and musicians like Sleet - just a face in a crowd in 2011, but a standout artist in his time, whose striking and original voice deserves to be more widely heard and remembered today.
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