Sometimes having chops and playing with a buncha important band leaders doesn’t really matter. Of course, the timing of one’s career has as much to do with success as anything else. One might be the most talented performer in a particular mode, but be incapable of finding an appropriate audience to put it all on display for.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to Junior Cook – no one’s going to argue that he was a once in a life time kind of player. Adept, perhaps, but nothing approaching shocking. He was a talented  tenor player, though. That’s not up for debate. His tone falls closer to Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins as opposed to the Lester Young school. But regardless of that, Cook just sprung up at a time when the genre was becoming engorged with players.

Reared in Florida and shuffling around a bit in order to find an hospitable scene from which to work eventually landed Cook in Washington DC. There he met  a few folks that would eventually comprise a clutch of players who would provide substantial backing for a variety of well thought of bop outings. A few of ‘em wouldn’t make it through to a natural end, drugs getting in the way. But Cook was able to work in a number of properly documented ensembles during the mid to late fifties and into the following decade.

Gigging with Dizzy Gillespie, perhaps the most friendly of bop’s public faces, and Horace Silver made a name for this tenor player. And when Cook finally left Silver’s employ along with the ill fated Blue Mitchell, the pair’s subsequent work could have been guessed to take the genre in a new direction.

That just wasn’t the case, though.

Mitchell’s story is pretty well documented. And even if some of his solo recordings had teeth, at this late date, pretty much no one other than genre enthusiasts really care too much. The same can basically be said for Cooks work – although his playing comes off less lyrical and personal than Mitchell's.

Either way, the pair went in on a Cook led date in 1961 entitled Junior’s Cookin’. Apart from the fact that the album title has a few too many punctuation marks to make it memorable, the song selection isn’t too strong. A spate of average – and borrowed – tracks populates the majority of the disc.

It’d be nice to figure that Mitchell’s composition – “Blue Farouq” – engenders the exotic flair its name suggest, but it doesn’t. That can’t render the entire affair a bummer, but it unquestionably lacks the heart of innumerable recordings from roughly the same period.

Classic or not Junior’s Cookin’ has really aged and turned into what folks cite is borrowing about bop in the broadest terms. The distance between Charlie Parker’s work – even that disc with strings – and anything here is staggering. Both Mitchell and the album’s leader are able to ramble off some interesting solos, but nothing that’s gripping enough to beg for repeat listens. Too bad, it shoulda been a great set,