Charlie Persip

LP version. No Dummies Allowed is a big band record led by drummer Charli Persip, the former drummer of Dizzy Gillespie's band, with his Superband. It was recorded on 19 and 25 November 1987 and released by Soul Note in 1989. Persip had formed the Superband with trumpeter Gerry La Furn, and by the time of In Case You Missed It, the band's 1984 Soul Note album, he had parted from La Furn and dropped the final e from his first name. This is the band's third album and the last under the Superband name, before Persip renamed the group SuperSound, a band he kept for decades.

The credits list a band of more than twenty: four trumpets with Jack Walrath, four trombones, Marcus Rojas on tuba, five reeds including alto saxophonist Sue Terry, and a rhythm section of pianist Darrell Grant, bassist Melissa Slocum and percussionist Eli Fountain behind Persip. Giovanni Bonandrini produced, Jon Rosenberg recorded the dates and W. Royal Stokes wrote the notes. Persip came to this band with a long history behind the kit. Nate Chinen's WBGO obituary places him on more than a dozen Gillespie albums, among them Dizzy Gillespie at Newport (1957) and Sonny Side Up (1959), and lists later work with Randy Weston on Uhuru Afrika and Gil Evans on Out of the Cool. Walrath was already in the Superband on its 1981 debut. The programme runs to six long pieces, most between seven and ten minutes, so the soloists get room. It opens with the brisk Revenge of the Fat People, includes a medley built around Strange Crazy Heartache, and stretches out on Thruway Traffic, the longest track at almost ten minutes, before closing with Inner Urge.

This is the original 1989 Soul Note LP, catalogue 121 179-1, a 140-gram copy of the first pressing that CAM Jazz, owner of the Soul Note catalogue, rediscovered in its vaults: original stock, not a reissue.