Barry Mayo was a very successful African-American radio executive. He is considered the first radio programmer to put rap records into regular rotation at station WRKS in New York. He now lives here in the Hudson Valley and he recently donated about a dozen boxes of records to The ARChive. The boxes included lots of jazz, gospel (including many sermons by Rev. C.L Franklin) and assorted other sounds.

Today a record that he donated caught our attention. It is called Triple Play Stereo: Pop + Jazz = Swing (Audio Fidelity 3P-AFSD 5978, 1962) and it states right on the cover: “The most amazing Stereo record ever made!” The idea of the album is this: an ensemble of pop musicians (ie, easy listening strings, think: Percy Faith) play on one channel of the stereo mix, a group of jazz musicians play on the other, with both sides sharing the rhythm section. When your stereo balance is placed in the middle, you get both worlds at once, creating an all new performance.

The concept seems a little odd, but when you see that it was made by the legendary record producer Tom Wilson, you take a closer look. During his career, Wilson worked with such fabulous artists as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Bob Dylan, The Mothers of Invention, The Animals and The Velvet Underground. For this project, he rounded up some of the best talent available to him, including top notch string players for the ‘pop’ side—such as Julius Held, Gene Orloff and Harold Coletta plus Jerome Richardson on flute. For the jazz portion we get Freddy Hubbard, Bill Hardman, Curtis Fuller, Grachan Moncur, Eric Dolphy and Wayne Shorter. The rhythm section is Bill Evans, Ron Carter and Charlie Persip, with Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb on one track.

I mean, this record has ERIC FOOKIN’ DOLPHY!!! He gets five solos on alto saxophone, playing incredible post-Charlie Parker licks.

The whole thing was orchestrated and conducted by Benny Golson—a top notch, award-winning fellow who worked extensively on both pop and jazz recordings.

If you follow jazz, you will know that many jazzbos like to create their music using old standard songs as templates—they’ll follow the changes but mess with the melody a bit (or is it the other way around) and give it a new title. On Triple Play Stereo, the musicians show how it’s done. For example, the jazz band plays Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” while the pop musicians play “How High the Moon,” on which it is based. This record is also educational.

If all this sounds nuts, it is because it is nuts. However, it works, because the musicians and the orchestrations are so good that they make it work.

As Tom Wilson writes in his liner notes for the album: “POP + JAZZ = SWING stresses the musical affinity of good pop and good jazz music, and is dedicated to your greater enjoyment of both these great art forms.”

We agree. Thank you Barry Mayo for the groovy records!

Further, we’d like to note here that one of the recording engineers assigned to this project was William Hamilton, whose offspring (Carrie and John) are personal friends.

for reference, here’s a few relevant links:
Barry_Mayo
Tom Wilson
Benny_Golson
Eric_Dolphy