- The Loop (Max Hardy)
- The Whiffenpoof Song (Tod Galloway/Meade Minnigerode/George Pomeroy)
- A Trumpeter’s Lullaby (Leroy Anderson)
- April Showers (B.G. DeSylva/Louis Silvers)
- Max’s Brazilian What (Max Hardy)
- Have You Met Miss Jones? (Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart)
- Music for Night People (Alan Moorhouse/Gordon Rees)
- When I’m 64 (John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
- Camelot (Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe)
- In the Heat of The Night (Alan & Marilyn Bergman/Quincy Jones)
- Something Stupid (C. Carson Parks)
Artie Butler – piano and ondioline
Herbie Hancock – piano
Vinnie Bell, Charles Macey (01, 07), Sal Di Troia – guitar
Ron Carter – bass
Gary Chester – drums
David Carey – vibes (05, 06)
George Devens (01-04 & 07-11), Richie Ritz – percussion
Burt Collins – trumpet and flugelhorn (02-06 & 08-11)
Morton Bullman (01, 07), Thomas Mitchell (01, 07), Benny Powell (01, 07), Eddie Bert (02-06 & 08-11),
Mickey Gravine (02-06 & 08-11), Chauncey Welsch (02-06 & 08-11) – trombone
Jerome Richardson – flute and piccolo (01-04, 07, 08, 10, 11)
Romeo Penque – flute and soprano sax (02-06 & 08-11)
Arthus Bogin (01, 07, 09), Peter Dimitriades (01-04, 07, 08, 10, 11), Joseph Haber (01-04 & 07-11), Louis
Haber (01-04 & 07-11), Harry Lookofsky (01, 07), Matthew Raimondi (01, 07), David Sackson (01-
04 & 07-11), Irving Spice (01-04 & 07-11), Louis Stone (01-04 & 07-11), Julius Brand (02-04 & 08-
11), Max Ceppos (02-04, 08, 10, 11), Marvin Morganstern (02-04, 08, 10, 11), Harold Kohon (09),
Leo Kruczek (09), Archie Levin (09), Paul Winter (09) – violin
Murray Sandry (01-04 & 07-11), Bernard Zaslav (01-04, 07, 08, 10, 11) – viola
Seymour Barab – cello (01-04 & 07-11)
Corky Hale – harp (01, 07)
Produced by Creed Taylor
Arranged and conducted by Artie Butler
Originally issued as A&M SP 3007
Recorded on January 8 (1, 7), 15 (9) and 17 (2-4, 8, 10, 11) and February 28 (5, 6), 1968, at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
01 and 05 published by Quartet Music (ASCAP)
02 published by EMI Miller Catalog, Inc. (ASCAP)
03 published by Woodbury Music Company (ASCAP)
04 published by Harms, Inc. (ASCAP)
06 published by Chappell-Co., Inc./Williamson Music Co. (ASCAP)
07 published by Universal Songs of Polygram Inc. (BMI)
08 published by Northern Songs, Ltd.
09 published by Chappell-Co., Inc. (ASCAP)
10 published by Primary Wave Songs (ASCAP)
11 published by Greenwood Music Company (BMI)
(P) 1968
Have You Met Miss Jones? is perhaps the least known album in the entire CTI catalog. It’s also one of the unlikeliest. Released in June 1968, Have You Met Miss Jones? is helmed by composer/arranger/multi-instrumentalist Artie Butler (b. 1942), a ghost in the music machine who’s haunted more than a few hits in his time. By the time of Miss Jones, his debut album, the Brooklyn-born Butler had already arranged hits for such pop singers as Connie Francis, The Shangri-La’s, Neil Diamond (“Cherry, Cherry”), Janis Ian (“Society’s Child”), Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles and co-wrote the Rolling Stones’ “Down Home Girl.”
It seems fitting that two hitmakers like Artie Butler and Creed Taylor would cross paths – but it’s a strange road to follow even so. Butler, one of the famed Brill Building acolytes, played the organ on Kai Winding’s Creed Taylor-produced Rainy Day (1965). Then, for some reason, he plays percussion (!) on two 1966 recordings produced by Taylor, Stan Getz’s Voices and the obscure third-streamer Sole Forms, credited to the Brooks Arthur Ensemble. Taylor then produced a 1966 single called “Bend It” for Little Eva – she of “The Loco-Motion” fame – that’s arranged by Artie Butler and, oddly enough, engineered by the aforementioned Brooks Arthur.
Artie Butler, as his résumé might suggest, isn’t much of a jazz man and, unsurprisingly, Miss Jones isn’t much of a jazz record – despite the record’s annotator calling this intoxicating brew “happy jazz.” It’s really more of a cocktail of catchy instrumentals, buoyed by the usual pop covers and offbeat lounge tunes. The album’s title reflects its origin in cocktail party banter and the sort of easy-listening music such events require, or as one rag put it so beautifully, “(i)nsouciant arrangements just right for drinking gin and tonics to.”1
Miss Jones may not be a timeless classic but it remains a pleasurable period piece. The album succeeds in balancing spunky originals (“The Loop” and “Max’s Brazilian What” – both credited to Butler’s pseudonym “Max Hardy”) with bright covers, such as the title song (from the 1937 Rodgers & Hart musical comedy I’d Rather Be Right) and a really rather rousing take on “In the Heat of the Night.” There is much humor to be had here, from the spirited “When I’m 64” to “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby,” with nary a trumpeter anywhere in earshot. Butler plays piano and the ondioline – an electronic keyboard that had its first big hit with Kai Winding’s “More” and later popularized on Jean Jacques Perrey’s much-sampled “E.V.A.” – but he rarely leads or improvises much. Indeed, there are no real soloists here at all. Most of the record evinces rhythm guitarist Vinnie (also Vinny) Bell’s highly distinctive comping. (Bell was featured on Kai Winding’s early Verve albums and recorded his own Creed Taylor-produced album for Verve in 1964.) And any album that features Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, who both shine on “April Showers,” can’t be all bad.
Even in a time when easy listening records were all the rage – Paul Mauriat’s “Love is Blue,” Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love with You” and Mason William’s “Classical Gas” were all hits of the day – Miss Jones failed to find an audience. Perhaps no one knew what to make of it. For the album, Butler, said Billboard in one of the album’s few notices, crafted “cheerful jazz” that “swings, trips and skips through an airy, unimposing set of tunes.”2 That translates as condemnation just as easily as praise but hardly lets you know what you’re in for. For their part, listeners just passed.
Ever resolute, Artie Butler arranged several songs on the A&M/CTI albums of Richard Barbary and Tamiko Jones – his last brush with CTI – and would go on to score a huge hit the following year, arranging and playing piano on Joe Cocker’s legendary “Feeling Alright.” To imagine what Miss Jones could have been, listeners are advised to spin Butler’s own 1971 Verve recording of “Feelin’ Alright,” a single backed by the positively funky “Alice in Wonderland.”
The busy Butler went on to do marvelously underrated but lounge-y scores for such films as The Love Machine (featuring the terrific “The White Fox”), What’s Up Doc? (comically Muzaking Cole Porter) and The Harrad Experiment (featuring the groovy “A Bird in the Hand”) before doing many TV shows (“Wonder Woman,” etc.) and fashioning even bigger hits in the 70s and 80s for Neil Sedaka, Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick and many others.
About the cover: “Have You Met Miss Jones?” (1965 – Rio de Janeiro). The playful spirit of this album is captured in Turner’s 1965 photo of a man in drag – a daring conceit for the time – taken while on assignment for Holiday magazine in Rio covering the Carnaval do Brasil. Artie Butler’s silhouetted profile on the back sleeve seems to be the opposite of Jobim’s more solemn Wave profile, suggesting the album’s whimsy with a pose that asks “Who, me?”
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