Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited

There is much that is tragic about Tadd Dameron's story. The composer, arranger and pianist fell prey to the heroin epidemic that gripped New York's jazz world in the 1940s and 1950s. He did jail time for his addiction in 1959-60. He died at the woefully young age of 48 years in 1965. But there is nothing tragic about Dameron's legacy as a composer-arranger, the field in which he made his most important contribution to jazz. His work was unfailingly lush and beautiful and life enhancing. Dexter Gordon called Dameron the "romantic" of modern jazz—meaning he was near peerless in evoking the love between two people (not Romantic in the sense of, say, Beethoven, as some have supposed).

In 2024, Dameron is best remembered for the contributions his compositions made to other people's careers. For instance... In 1946, "If You Could See Me Now" was the A-side of the first single Sarah Vaughan released under her own name; John Coltrane, who had recorded "Soultrane" on Dameron's album Mating Call (Prestige) in 1957, borrowed the word for the title of his breakthrough album the following year, which included Mating Call's "Good Bait"; Bill Evans included "Our Delight" on his debut album, New Jazz Conceptions (Riverside), in 1957, and recorded the first of several versions of "If You Could See Me Now" on the Chet Baker album Chet (Riverside) in 1959. The star-studded list goes on and on.

"If You Could See Me Now" and "Our Delight"—and Bill Evans—all pop up on Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited, a sonically restored edition of Dameron's Fontainebleau (Savoy, 1956) and The Magic Touch (Savoy, 1962), the respectively octet and orchestral albums which booked the Mating Call quartet date. Both albums include "Fontainebleau" (check the YouTube below) and the The Magic Touch tracks include big band versions of other signature pieces including "On A Misty Night" and "Our Delight." Evans was the pianist on The Magic Touch. See below for personnel details.

As always with ezz-thetics editions, the music has been meticulously curated and the original releases' sound has been substantially enhanced by the label's sonic scientist Michael Brändli.

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