At the Cafe Bohemia Volume 2

This is the second half of one night: Wednesday, November 23, 1955, at the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village. The band, the club and how the Jazz Messengers came to be there are told in the notes for At the Cafe Bohemia Volume 1 (BLP 1507). Leonard Feather wrote one set of notes for both records, and it was the same five men: Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and Art Blakey.

Blue Note taped four sets that night. Volume 2 leans on the early part of the evening. "Like Someone in Love" and "I Waited for You" come from the first set, "Avila and Tequila" and "Yesterdays" from the second, and "Sportin' Crowd" opened the fourth. The discography also lists a broken-off take of "The Theme" on this record; Wikipedia's listing does not include it.

After a short word from Blakey, Mobley's "Sportin' Crowd", a fast blues riff, sends Dorham, Mobley, Silver and Blakey off in turn. The Burke and Van Heusen standard "Like Someone in Love" is, for Feather, the high point of the night:

the most relaxed and charming moments

Leonard Feather, original liner notes

"Yesterdays" belongs to Dorham, who had recorded it before, and Feather thinks this one is better on both counts:

Kenny sounds far maturer and far better engineered here than he did on a previous version.

Leonard Feather, original liner notes

"Avila and Tequila", another Mobley tune, has a long percussion opening before the theme arrives, with the whole band on shakers and whatever else came to hand; Feather singles out Blakey and Watkins. The record ends with "I Waited for You", Gil Fuller's tune, once Dizzy Gillespie's closing theme, with Dorham taking the first chorus.

The critics liked this one a little more than the first. Nat Hentoff gave it four and a half stars in Down Beat and put it down to the programming, and Cash Box said the two volumes belonged side by side. As with Volume 1, Wikipedia credits the cover design to John Hermansader and the photograph to Francis Wolff.

Mobley had already cut "Avila and Tequila" for his own ten-inch, BLP 5066, with Silver, Watkins and Blakey. Most of the rest of the night, including "Lady Bird" and "Gone with the Wind", came out later, first in Japan and then on the 2001 CDs. A year later, on November 10, 1956, Mobley and Watkins were back with Silver at Van Gelder's, in the new Horace Silver Quintet.