Kenny Dorham Joins Blue Note Tone Poet Series
‘The Complete ’Round About Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia’ is the latest record to join Blue Note’s audiophile reissue series.
Blue Note Records has announced a Tone Poet Vinyl Edition of Kenny Dorham‘s The Complete ‘Round About Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia, due out April 24.
Dorham — a trumpeter, composer, and occasional singer whose name, as critic Gary Giddins once noted, has become virtually synonymous with “underrated” — was a central figure in bebop and early hard bop. He played in the big bands of Lionel Hampton, Billy Eckstine, and Dizzy Gillespie, spent time in Charlie Parker’s quintet, and was a founding member of the Jazz Messengers alongside Art Blakey and Horace Silver. When Blakey took over the Jazz Messengers name, Dorham formed his own group, the Jazz Prophets, and brought them into the Cafe Bohemia in May 1956 — just six months after the Jazz Messengers had recorded their own landmark sessions there — to cut his first live album as a leader.
The sextet that night included J.R. Monterose on tenor saxophone, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Bobby Timmons on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Arthur Edgehill on drums. The set drew on originals by Dorham, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as Great American Songbook standards. The new Tone Poet edition presents the complete recordings across three LPs, including alternate takes previously unavailable on vinyl.
Produced by Joe Harley and mastered by Kevin Gray directly from Rudy Van Gelder’s original master tapes, the set is pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI and packaged in a deluxe tip-on trifold jacket. It also comes with a booklet with previously unseen photos by Francis Wolff and an essay and track-by-track breakdown by Syd Schwartz.
