Today’s selection is a bit of an odd one, a Tommy McCook rocksteady instrumental that was apparently unreleased for the best part of 40 years. It’s easy to see why the former Skatalites leader wouldn’t have wanted producer Duke Reid to release it at the time, as it’s an unfortunate combination of a substandard performance from McCook and his Supersonics, and a song that most likely only seemed like a good idea at the time.

The tune was issued on a Japanese Treasure Isle 7" around 2017, and although the label has the title down as “How Soon”, the tune is definitely “Speak Low”, a beautiful song written in 1943 by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash (with a little inspiration from William Shakespeare) for the play One Touch Of Venus, remade as a feature film a few years later. Since then, the song has been covered and performed hundreds of times by singers including Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett, and of course jazz musicians like Bill Evans, John Coltrane and Grant Green. The song “Speak Low” from the One Touch Of Venus film featured Ava Gardner and Dick Haymes, with Gardner’s lyrics dubbed by Eileen Wilson.

It’s more than likely that McCook would have played “Speak Low” on stage and at jam sessions, and I’m sure the other Treasure Isle session players would have been familiar with it, even if it wasn’t part of their usual repertoire. So with a bit of rearrangement – and another couple of takes – there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been one of the very best instrumentals in the Treasure Isle catalogue. Unfortunately it remains as a great example of a missed opportunity, but a fascinating glimpse into the recording process all the same.

So what went wrong? Most obviously, the drummer (presumably Hugh Malcolm, a Supersonics regular at that time) rejects the option of the relatively straightforward drum pattern so typical of the early rocksteady period and seems to be trying to inject a Benny Benjamin-style Motown groove into the proceedings. You have to wonder why someone didn’t tell him to stop, but perhaps the band were feeling a bit experimental and thought it was worth a try. The rest of the musicians are solid enough – guitarist Lyn Tait certainly sounds like he’s enjoying himself, and the bass and piano are steady if not particularly inventive.

But McCook sounds like he’s having a really bad day, especially after he splits a note coming out of the last section of the head. That said, he almost gets through the first part of his solo with his usual panache, and engineer Byron Smith adds some reverb to the sax; more squeaks and splutters follow while McCook has all sorts of problems playing the altimisso notes he’s going for before descending back down to his saxophone’s normal range for the outro (a two chord vamp rather than the song’s chord changes).

It’s a shame they didn’t revisit this lovely tune at a later date and do it justice. Perhaps McCook was comparing his disappointing performance to that of Coltrane, who is often cited as an influence on McCook, although of course it’s impossible to know for sure.

Chris Lane is a label boss, writer, producer and selector based in London. Subscribers can read more about his Fashion Records label in Neil Kulkarni’s feature in The Wire 421 via Exact Editions. You can find all of Chris’s previous columns here https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/