Revisiting A&M Records No. 37
Pete Jolly: ‘Herb Alpert Presents Pete Jolly’ (April/May ‘68)
‘Since liner notes are seldom written by people who come into direct contact with the artist or the recording sessions in question, and since Pete Jolly really tells his own story inside this package, I’ll forego the usual copy on his first A&M release and simply say that I’m proud to have played a part in producing an album for people of all ages with one of the finest musicians in the world today.’
That’s from this LP’s back cover, a space often filled with hyperbolic blather at this point in pop history. Underneath the blurb is an autograph that might as well read: ‘I’m Herb Alpert and I approve of this message.’
Decades before it became the norm in hip-hop for stars-turned-impresarios to introduce protégés like so, Alpert helped pave that path — although Jolly, like similarly promoted labelmate Sérgio Mendes before him, was hardly an unknown by the time of this (re)rollout.
Already a fixture of the West Coast jazz scene well into his 40s by ‘68, Jolly came to A&M a two-time Grammy nominee and highly regarded session cat. But that didn’t mean the demographic then devouring the sounds of Mendes and Bacharach had heard his equally appealing and arguably more adept ivories-tickling.
You hardly get ‘his own story inside this package’ but its 10 interpretations of tunes spanning from Jobim to John Sebastian (available on YouTube) should induce easy smiles out of anyone who enjoys finding the fine line between relevant Ramsey/Sérgio-adjacent grooves and playful kitsch. I can do without his feeble take on the Motown standard ‘Dancing in the Street,’ but I especially dig his deft handling of Roger Nichols’s feel-shifting ‘Love So Fine.’ (See No. 31 in this series for more about him.)
Certainly Jolly had the skills and style to qualify for Creed Taylor’s vaunted CTI roster; Alpert’s vested interest equated to a bigger push, even if that didn’t result in skyrocketing sales.
What Jolly’s relaunch did lead to were two more platters of high-grade easy listening — ‘Give a Damn’ and the superior ‘Seasons,’ both of which will be discussed at length when they come up in this chronology — plus a decades-deep career as a behind-the-scenes composer and performer for film and television.
If you were a regular viewer of ‘M*A*S*H’ or ‘The Love Boat’ or ‘Get Smart’ or ‘Dallas,’ you likely heard his work at some point and never realized. If you ever saw ‘Bird,’ Clint Eastwood’s excellent and underseen biopic of Charlie Parker, then you heard Jolly doing his best Bud Powell mimicry. And if you’re any fan of Tom Waits’s unique score for Francis Ford Coppola’s musical romance ‘One from the Heart’ (possibly his costliest boondoggle until this year’s ballyhooed flop ‘Megalopolis’), well, you heard ol’ Pete’s playing in that mix too.
All of which only skims the surface of a career that only let up when Jolly died 40 years ago (as of next week). Seems like some of the sharpest talents remain unsung no matter who presents them.