Although the premise isn’t all that different from Tenor Madness, the 1956 Sonny Rollins album that featured a sax duel between Rollins and John Coltrane on the title track, 1961’s Boss Tenors is actually more of a collaboration than a competition. The boss tenors in question, Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, were friends and had even, according to AllMusic.com, already co-led a group several years earlier. But it’s a fun album driven by the strengths of the two saxophonists.
I sometimes think of Sonny Stitt (d. 1982) as the Joe Frazier to Charlie Parker’s Muhammad Ali (ask your parents grandparents). If there hadn’t been a Muhammad Ali, people today might think of Frazier as the greatest heavyweight of all time. Similarly, if there hadn’t been a Charlie Parker, it might have been Sonny Stitt who was credited with inventing bebop and changing jazz forever. People who hear Stitt’s earlier alto work after already being familiar with Parker often assume that Stitt was copying Parker’s sound and style, and there is a pretty strong resemblance. But the story goes that Parker and Stitt met each other in 1943 for the first time and Stitt already sounded uncannily like Parker, because that’s just the way he played. Stitt started playing more tenor in the late 1940s, then made tenor his primary horn after doing time in prison for selling drugs, partly to lessen the comparisons with Parker.
Gene Ammons (d. 1974) was always a tenor player, one of the key figures in the heavily blues and R&B-inflected “Chicago style” of tenor playing and a leader in the soul jazz movement. While he was technically proficient and quite capable of playing in the bebop style, Ammons is known more for his big, expressive tone and his ability to emote through his music.
In addition to the two leads, Boss Tenors features John Houston on piano, Buster Williams on bass, and George Brown on drums.