Jazz
Thingamajig · 2026 reissue
“For Django” runs past eleven minutes and is the centre of the record. It is where you hear what sets “The Call” apart from the rest of the ESP-Disk catalogue of those years: Henry Grimes lets the piece open slowly and keeps back a bowed bass solo that is the finest moment of the nine. Perry Robinson plays clarinet, a rare instrument in that context, and Tom Price keeps the drums well back, never covering either of them.
The trio recorded on 28 December 1965 and ESP issued the album in 1966. It was Grimes’s first record as a leader after years of session bass work, and what he put into it was restraint: six group originals, space between the phrases, and a harmonic sense nobody expected from his reputation at the time. “The Call” and “Son Of Alfalfa”, the last two, move furthest from the melody without ever losing it.
This edition adds three tracks from December 1966 recorded under Marzette Watts’s name, and the jump is abrupt. Grimes is back on bass, now with Clifford Thornton on cornet and trombone, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Byard Lancaster on alto saxophone and flute, Karl Berger on vibraphone, Juney Booth on a second bass and J.C. Moses on drums. Where the trio worked by subtraction, the octet works by accumulation and collective improvisation.
These are two different records in one. The 1965 trio session has a closed shape and ends where it should, and the three octet tracks, which come from “Marzette Watts and Company” (ESP-Disk, 1968) and had already been reissued in 2012, come in as an appendix. Anyone who wants both now has both; anyone coming for Grimes’s debut will find its outline altered.
The biography behind all this comes down to a handful of dates. Grimes disappeared from music in the late sixties with his bass damaged and no money to repair it, and spent three decades in Los Angeles working as a janitor and in construction; some reference books listed him as dead. In 2002 a social worker, Marshall Marrotte, tracked him down; William Parker gave him a bass, and Grimes played and recorded again for fifteen years, until Parkinson’s stopped him in 2018. He died on 15 April 2020.
Rating: 8.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents