The Album
Recorded June 21, 1957 at Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studio, After Hours is one of a loose string of unrehearsed blues-based jam sessions Prestige built around its bullpen of contract musicians in the mid-1950s, nominally fronted here by trumpeter Thad Jones. Jones, fresh from his celebrated run in the Count Basie orchestra (which he'd joined in 1954), leads a group of Prestige regulars - Frank Wess on flute and tenor, guitarist Kenny Burrell, pianist Mal Waldron, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Arthur Taylor - through four extended, mostly blues-form performances that stretch past eight and even twelve minutes apiece. Mal Waldron, the label's de facto house pianist and a prolific composer for these dates, is credited with all four originals, giving the loosely structured jam a real compositional backbone beneath the solos. The album's concept, as the back-cover notes by Ira Gitler frame it, is mood music for musicians' own after-work hours - relaxed, unhurried blowing sessions that let the individual voices (Wess's flute on the title track, Burrell's guitar on the uptempo numbers) stretch out at length over Waldron's simple blues frameworks. The result stands as one of the more expansive and unguarded blowing dates in Prestige's mid-1950s catalogue.