Recording of the Week, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis & Shirley Scott, 'Cookin' With Jaws and the Queen'

Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis (Photo by Ole Brask)

The release of Cookin’ with Jaws and the Queen: The Legendary Prestige Cookbook Albums coincides with the Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis centenary, collecting select recordings made while under contract with Prestige Records, particularly those made in collaboration with organist Shirley Scott. A pioneering force in the ‘soul jazz’ genre, this run of Prestige recordings are just a small sampling of Davis & Scott’s collaborations; previously Scott guested on Jaws’ trio albums like The Eddie Davis Trio featuring Shirley Scott (Roulette Records, 1958), and a couple of years later the two formed part of the band for vocalist Mildred Anderson’s 1960 album Person to Person.

Eddie Davis, referred to affectionately as “Lockjaw” (the origins of which remain surprisingly unclear), cut his teeth as a member of numerous early big bands, with contributions to heavyweights like Cootie Williams, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie already under his belt by the time he started leading his own small combos. One of his fairly short-lived collaborations, something of a flash in the pan situation, was his soul jazz group with Scott, nicknamed the ‘Queen of the Organ’ for her technical prowess on the Hammond B-3 electric organ. Scott had begun her recording career shortly after graduating with a Masters’ from Cheyney University, with a small handful of trio recordings to her name already by the time she and Davis came to collaborating. Much like Davis, Scott similarly drew from blues as well as gospel music, and the two’s backgrounds proved to be a match made in heaven.

The band heard on Jaws and the Queen was interchangeably referred to as both the ‘Eddie Davis Trio’ and the ‘Shirley Scott Trio’ – at the time consisting of bass player George Duvivier and drummer Arthur Edgehill – while flautist (and sometime saxophonist) Jerome Richardson also appears to complete the quintet on these recordings. The material itself is taken from the three Cookbook records made by the pair, as well as Smokin’ (the honorary fourth volume in the series), all of which were taken from a handful of close sessions made across 1958 but released around the turn of the 1960s. Though Davis and Scott would record more on the record together, these four recordings still maintain a reputation among fans of both artists as some of the duo’s strongest work.

Shirley Scott (Photo by Francis Wolff)

Though there’s plentiful standards in the track listing, Jaws brings a healthy handful of original tunes to the sessions too; frenetic tunes like the opener and Jaws original ‘Have Horn, Will Blow’, which features both saxophonists playing the head melody in tight unison, and the other speedy original ‘Three Deuces’, keep a nice contrast with the more slow-burning numbers. The group’s interpretation of Johnny Hodges ‘In the Kitchen’ is an early highlight on Vol. 1, with the group’s laid-back bluesy jam lasting the best part of 12 minutes, while ‘Stardust’ is a personal favourite of the ballads, and the Davis original ‘Heat N’ Serve’ gets the group swinging with an especially searing solo from Scott. It’s quite an injustice that the organ fell out of favour in jazz during the ‘70s – Scott would switch to piano by the 1990s – because she certainly makes its presence known throughout these Prestige sessions.

If the smooth sound of organ/tenor sax-led soul jazz is your bag, you can hardly go wrong with Cookin’ with Jaws and the Queen; with its near-three hour runtime there’s enough variety among the tunes to keep things from getting fatiguing, but there’s no harm in taking it in bite-sized chunks as originally intended. And if this comp is to your liking, be sure to check out the pair’s other collaborations; 1959’s Jaws in Orbit and 1960’s Bacalao are great places to start.