Backgrounder: Sonny Stitt's Night Crawler

When I was collecting Sonny Stitt albums as a kid in the early 1970s, my purchases divided into three categories: not bad, meh and perfection. Back then, there was no internet. Instead, I listened religiously to jazz FM radio stations and entered favorites in a small notebook that fit in my back pocket. Everyone I knew had one. Then you hunted for the ones on your list and took chances on others that either came highly recommended or looked good. Those were always a crap shoot, since once you split the LP's tight plastic seal, you owned it.

The not-bad and meh Stitt albums tended to have too many blues loaded with stock Stitt phrases, flat standards, or one or two boring, long-winded originals. Which also tended to be blues. By contrast, the perfect Stitt album was flawless, with Stitt tearing along on alto or tenor saxophone on sterling song choices and sidemen delivering hair-raising contributions.

One of these perfect Stitt LPs was Night Crawler. Recorded for Prestige in September 1965, the album featured Stitt on alto saxophone throughout, with Don Patterson on organ and Billy James on drums. As you'll soon hear, this album was solid and in the pocket

Here's the full album without the interruption of ads...