Nathan Davis went to Germany with the army in 1960, stayed in Europe when he was discharged, and in Paris formed a co-operative band with Eric Dolphy. After Dolphy's death in 1964 he kept the group going and hired a very young Woody Shaw. The Hip Walk is his second album for SABA, the label that would become MPS, recorded in Villingen in 1965.
The trumpeter is Carmell Jones, from Kansas City like Davis, who had just played on Horace Silver's Song for My Father and moved to Europe. Behind them is the rhythm section of the Clarke-Boland Big Band: Francy Boland on piano, Jimmy Woode on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums. Davis plays tenor and soprano.
The record was a collector's item for decades. Dusty Groove, greeting the first CD reissue, wrote that both Davis SABA albums had been "the stuff of legend for years", with some tracks known only from compilations: the title piece and Carmell's Black Forest Waltz among them. Clifford Allen at All About Jazz notes that Davis returned the favour Dolphy had done him by bringing Jones and Shaw work in Europe. Davis went home in 1969 to run the jazz programme at the University of Pittsburgh, which he did until 2013.
Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.
