Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Lightnin' Hopkins is back, this time without Sonny Terry, although again with the rhythm section of Leonard Gaskin and Belton Evans is still there;
With Ozzie Cadena producing the session and Rudy Van Gelder at the controls, this is one of the best of the myriad recordings Hopkins produced in his lifetime. The material is familiar--songs by Hopkins, and three blues standards by others which Hopkins had performed often and recorded not infrequently--but here they're heard to their best advantage, and the reason why Hopkins lasted so long, and recorded so often, is that he was very good. This is the blues the way you want to hear it.
The originals are all good. The covers are songs that have become blues standards. "Mean Old Frisco" was written by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, and first recorded by him in 1942. It was covered in the 1940s by Brownie McGhee and Champion Jack Dupree, in the 1950s by Snooks Eaglin and B. B. King (both in 1959). Since then, it's become not only a blues standard, but a jazz tune, recorded by both Richard "Groove" Holmes and Junior Mance.
The others have more confused provenances. "Come Back Baby" was written and first performed in 1940 by Walter Davis. It was hit for him on the race records charts, and then became a hit again in 1950 with Lowell Fulson's version. That began its ascent to standard status, but it was really locked into the consciousness of the blues audience and blues performers with the Ray Charles version in 1954, the flip side of his big hit "I Got a Woman." Charles' version was brilliant, inspired, and...with composer credit somehow slid over to Charles.
Since then it's had a double life. It's been recorded by B. B. King, Mance Lipscomb, Snooks Eaglin, James Cotton and others as a straight ahead blues. By white blues revivalists like Dave Van Ronk, Danny Kalb and Charlie Musselwhite. By folkies like Carolyn Hester (with Bob Dylan on
Harmonica), Bert Jansch and Fred Neil. By rockers like Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane. Even by present-day rockers like the Lords of Altamont and the Black Sorrows...all as "Come Back Baby" by Walter Davis. It has also been recorded by Stevie Wonder, Junior Parker, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Etta James,and many others, with jazz versions by Les McCann and George Benson...all as "Come Back" by Ray Charles.
"Back to New Orleans" is credited on Hopkins' Bluesville disc to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who were Bluesville artists at the time, but where it comes from is anyone's guess. It's more often called "Baby Please Don't Go," and was probably first recorded in 1934 by Big Joe Williams. Hiw often it's been recorded since, and under what titles...pretty close to impossible to guess. French blues historian Gérard Herzhaft (quoted in Wikipedia) reckons that it is "one of the most played, arranged, and rearranged pieces in blues history." It's essentially a traditional blues with origins lost in the past. Williams gets composer credit on his original Bluebird release.
Taken all together, this is a seriously satisfying immersion in the blues. The Bluesville release was called Lightnin', and a Prestige re-release was The Blues of Lightnin' Hopkins.One 45 was released on Prestige -- Mojo Hand" / "Automobile Blues," and three more on Bluesville:
Far too few people remember John Wright, unless they live in Chicago, where he was a local legend of the jazz scene, up until his death in 2017. But he made a series of very fine albums for Prestige, starting with South Side Soul. Bob Weinstock brought him back to do the second of what would be five albums for the label, and since he was on hand, had him contribute to the previous day's blues debut by Arbee Stidham. He played an important role in the artistic, if not commercial success of that album.
For the rest of his life, Wright would be known as "South Side Soul." He plays plenty of soul jazz on this album, and adds some of that South Side soul to everything he plays, but here he opens up his repertoire to show what else he can do. He plays four soulful originals from the South Side, one by Cannonball Adderley with a little New York soul, and three standards.
Bop-loving Joe Goldberg (author of the essential Jazz Masters of the Fifties), fighting a rearguard action against soul jazz, wrote the liner notes for this release, while he dismisses most new soul jazz pianists as hacks playing soul-by-the-numbers (he particularly hates Les McCann and has nothing good to say about Victor Feldman), he has nothing but respect for Wright, who, he says.
has played church music, and has accompanied blues singers [emphasis his]. Living on Chicago's South Side, he has been acquainted with the origins of this style all his life. He does not play soul music because it is currently fashionable, but because he was brought up hearing piano played that way. Never having had much formal training, he naturally turned to the kind of music he was familiar with when he began to play himself.
Goldberg was right about Wright not having had much formal training, but not because it wasn't available. According to a story on him in the Chicago Reader on the occasion of his 80th birthday (most of the rest of the biographical material is also from the Reader):
His siblings studied piano formally, but as Wright remembers it, their instructor refused to give him lessons, telling the family they'd be wasting their money. "Whatever we play, he plays equally as well," the teacher said. "He's not reading music, he's not using the right fingers, but he has God's gift . . . he can play everything he hears."
Wright grew up in the Pentecostal church, but at age 12 he moved over to begin playing for the Baptist church, which had livelier hymns. At 15, he heard jazz for the first time, and was won over to it. The more he learned about jazz, the more he liked it--and not just the music:
I made a vow: I was going to play jazz, drink plenty of whiskey, and chase pretty women. I kept that vow, and it almost killed me.
In 1952, he and a group of friends decided to join the Army to fight in Korea. Korea made a mark on the blues world. It was the first war after Truman integrated the armed forces, and a number of blues songs from the early 1950s contain lines like "My brother's in Korea."
When it was discovered that Wright was a musician, he was put into Special Services and sent to Europe. All his friends went to Korea, and all of them were killed.
Wright played with some top-flight jazz musicians in Europe, became a star in Chicago's jazz firmament, where he played well enough to get invited back by Prestige for five albums, and drank whiskey well enough to knock himself out of contention and back to Chicago, where he eventually pulled himself together.
Of the three standards on the album one ("Witchcraft") was more of a current hit at the time (1957 for Frank Sinatra), but has endured to achieve standard status. It's an endearing number on this album, perky and musical (Goldberg points out that "the introduction to 'Witchcraft' is one that Red Garland has used," and there's certainly a Garland influence on Wright, but overall, this version of the song is his own). "Things Are Getting Better" is the Adderley tune, and its a good funky number that never quite became a jazz standard in spite of a vocal interpretation by Eddie Jefferson.
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But it's soulful originals that are still the best of Wright. They fit him like an old shoe, and they satisfy like the whiskey and women that ultimately (for a while) got the best of him.
The album was called Nice 'n Tasty, a soul-suggestive title. "You Do It" and "Yes I Know" were the 45. Esmond Edwards produced.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
Arbee Stidham was commencing a second career with this album, and although he was only 43, it was three decades after the start of his first career. From a musical family -- his father played with Jimmie Lunceford and his uncle with the Memphis Jug Band -- he had started his own band, the Southern Syncopators, by the time he was thirteen. Not too many 13-year-olds start there own band; fewer still get booked to tour with Bessie Smith, but Stidham did.
As a jazz musician, he toured with his own band, first in the south and then in Chicago, and played with Lucky Millinder in the 1930s-40s, . A recording contract in 1947 yielded a hit recording, "My Heart Belongs to You," which went to number one on the Billboard Race Records chart (later to become the Rhythm and Blues chart) in 1948.
Stidham was a tenor saxophone player as well as a vocalist, and thought of himself primarily as a jazz musician until injuries suffered in an auto accident left him unable to play the saxophone.
But, determined to persevere in music, he took up the guitar and became a bluesman. He was aided in this by fellow Chicagoan Big Bill Broonzy, who had undergone a metamorphosis of his own. Originally a jazz guitarist, Broonzy had discovered the newly emerging folk music circuit, and had reinvented himself as a folk blues singer, and as a songwriter of major importance. Following Lead Belly's example of tailoring the blues to appeal to a new audience of white leftists, he wrote a number of protest songs, from the ironic "WPA Blues" to the anthemic "Black, Brown and White."
Stidham learned his new instrument well, and added to his gifts as a blues singer and songwriter, it created new opportunities: a couple of singles for Atlantic subsidiary Abco in 1956, and then this album debut for Prestige Bluesville, followed by a 1961 album for Folkways, and a Folkways collaboration with Jazz Gillum and Memphis Slim that came out under Gillum's name. Then another recording drought until the early 1970s and two more albums, one for Mainstream, primarily a jazz label, and the other for Folkways. The 1970s also saw him venture into the academic world, as a lecturer on the blues at Cleveland State University.
There's plenty on this session to delight a blues lover who may not have heard Arbee Stidham before, and much for a jazz lover to appreciate. King Curtis sits in on saxophone, and on piano, the South Side soul of Chicagoan John Wright, who first recorded for Prestige in August, and would do four more sessions.
Wright is a dominant payer on a seven-minute version of Brownie McGhee's "Pawn Shop Blues," where his piano improvisation stretches out a normally song-length 12-bar blues into something else altogether. Stidham does mostly originals here, but features a few from other composers--why, it's hard to say. "Pawn Shop Blues" is a very good song, and favorite part of McGhee's repertoire, but melodically it's an interchangeable 12-bar blues. I guess it's a nice piece of change in Brownie's pocket, except that nobody ever made any money from having a jazz composition recorded, as Jackie McLean found out when he looked into suing Miles Davis for the composer credit to "Dig."
Two Big Joe Turner songs, the familiar "Wee Baby Blues" and the less familiar "Last Goodbye Blues" are also included, as is a song by drummer Armand "Jump" Jackson, "Teenage Kiss," which sounds more as though it would be given to Frankie Lymon than a fortyish blues singer, and in fact it does give King Curtis room for some hot rhythm and blues honking on the tenor. All in all, it's a fine outing for Stidham, especially if you don't listen to the words too closely, and you really don't have to. I once had a friend who told me that she loved the blues, but she really never listened to the words. I said. "That's like loving Rubens but not noticing the nudes." She said, "I do that too."
The others are all Stidham originals, including a remake of "My Heart Belongs to You," here retitled
"My Heart Will Always Belong to You." Stidham, for a latecomer to the guitar, sure knows how to play the blues on it. And as a veteran jazzman, he knows how to coordinate his blues with a couple of jazz greats. I've picked "You Can't Live in this World by Yourself" as my "Listen to One" because it shows off all of the above -- Stidham as songwriter, guitar player and blues singer, some nice ensemble work by Wright and Curtis.
And for a bonus, if you click through to the YouTube video, it's accompanied by some amazing street photographs -- by whom, I don't know.
Ozzie Cadena produced. The album came out on Bluesville, titled Tired of Wandering.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
A lot of the guys who have the hottest, honkin'est, rhythm-and-bluesiest tone on the tenor sax, also have the most sensitive, soulful approach to ballads, and Arnett Cobb is no exception. With Red Garland's accompaniment, this promises to be a listening treat, and the promise is delivered. This is a Moodsville set, and it could certainly set a mood for me, mixing familiar ballads with seldom-heard tunes.
The less familiar begins the set. "Hurry Home" has been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, but even with Ella, it's not really a memorable melody. The
composers were Robert D. Emmerich and Joseph Meyer. Emmerich's obit credits him with having written songs for Fats Waller, so doesn't say what they were, so it looks as though he may never have had that breakthrough hit.
He did, however, write a song called "The Big Apple," and while it may not have been a hit, Walter Winchell liked the title so much he started using it for...well, you know the rest. Joseph Meyer is better known for his bubbly, catchy, anthem-y songs like "California, Here I Come" and "If You Knew Susie."
Well, people record songs for a reason. For Ella Fitzgerald, it may have been because she'd recorded everything else that there was to record, and "Hurry Home" is not likely to make anyone's list of her greatest hits. In the case of Arnett Cobb, however, he heard something in this melody that he responded to, and his warm-toned saxophone turns it into something beautiful, that melody that you can't quite place, but you know you've heard it somewhere, even if you haven't. Like that laugh that floats on a summer night, that you can never quite recall. Cobb's warm tone burnishes the melody, and his improvisation takes it ever so subtly into the realm of honking Texas tenor--an oxymoron, but he makes it work. It ends up being one of the highlights of the album.
Well, people record songs for a reason. For Ella Fitzgerald, it may have been because she'd recorded everything else that there was to record, and "Hurry Home" is not likely to make anyone's list of her greatest hits. In the case of Arnett Cobb, however, he heard something in this melody that he responded to, and his warm-toned saxophone turns it into something beautiful, that melody that you can't quite place, but you know you've heard it somewhere, even if you haven't. Like that laugh that floats on a summer night, that you can never quite recall. Cobb's warm tone burnishes the melody, and his improvisation takes it ever so subtly into the realm of honking Texas tenor--an oxymoron, but he makes it work. It ends up being one of the highlights of the album.
Count Basie, in collaboration with movie and TV tunesmiths Mack David and Jerry Livingston, is responsible for "Blue and Sentimental," and that melody has become a favorite of crooners and instrumentalists alike. Mack David, who wrote the songs for Cinderella and other Disney projects, is the older brother of Burt Bacharach's lyricist Hal David. Jerry Livingston and Jay Livingston, in spite of the fact that they dominated TV theme music in the 1960s (Jay wrote "Mr. Ed," Jerry wrote pretty much everything else) are not related. "Blue and Sentimental" appears to have particularly appealed to the ballad side of the hot tenor players of swing/rhythm and blues/soul jazz schools. It has been recorded by Gene Ammons, Georgie Auld, Sam (the Man) Taylor, Bill Doggett with Clifford Scott, Ike Quebec, Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Tate, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Jay McShann...It's a nice melody, sweet with a touch of Basie tartness and little Bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, and Cobb does a nice job on it,
"Darn That Dream" and "Willow Weep for Me" are the best-known songs from the session, the former by Eddie deLange and Jimmy Van Heusen, the latter by Gershwin protégé Ann Ronell. Red Garland is certainly familiar with "Willow," because he recorded it for Prestige in 1956. This is a slower tempo than Garland took it in '56, understandably, because Cobb really likes to caress those notes, so Garland in his solo complements Cobb's approach. Garland has a very nice solo on this number, which at a little over seven minutes long is the longest one from the session, and very limited solo space elsewhere in the session. The other cuts are all jukebox-length, and follow the jukebox formula of one soloist as the dominant sound, although none of the songs from this session ended up being released on 45.
The Gordon Jenkins / Johnny Mercer "P. S. I Love You," written in 1934, had recently been a minor hit for the Hilltoppers, but it's not a memorable song. "Your Wonderful Love" is interesting, because Wikipedia lists it as written by two top-of-the-A-list songwriters, Dorothy Fields and Richard Rodgers, and I didn't know they'd ever written together, and I couldn't find a record of anyone else having recorded this song, except for Cobb himself, on a Columbia 78 in 1950. After way more digging than any sane person would do, I finally found a web reference to the Columbia disc. The song was written by Al Fields and Timmy Rogers (I've corrected Wiki). It's a decent song, and fits Cobb's ballad style nicely. He liked it enough to record it twice. But "Hurry Home" is still the highlight of the album for me.
The album was called Ballads by Cobb, a Moodsville release. Esmond Edwards produced.
Sonny Terry is sprung loose from his usual partnership with Brownie McGhee, and paired with a different blues guitar man. Lightnin' Hopkins was an altogether different proposition. From Texas, he was not at all of the Piedmont school of Blind Boy Fuller-influenced finger picking. He got something from serving as an on-and-off lead boy for Blind Lemon Jefferson on the streets of Houston, and by playing on the streets. He bounced back and forth between playing music, picking cotton, and working on the railroad, until in 1946 he was offered a recording contract by Aladdin Records in Los Angeles (one of his songs on that session was "Rocky Mountain Blues," which he would record again for Prestige). That began a long, strange recording Odyssey for
Hopkins, which made him, by the time he was finished, the most recorded blues musician of all time. Nobody knows how many records he made, or for how many labels? Eight hundred? A thousand? More? You pays your money and you takes your choice.
The first heyday of his recording career lasted from 1946 to 1956, the rhythm and blues years, and the small independent record label years. with a style that was loose, rough, not too overly concerned with time signatures or even staying in tune, but always powerful and authoritative. He was limited in developing a name for himself in that he didn't much like to travel and he didn't much like to leave Houston, but he left a remarkable legacy of recorded music. And he wasn't through yet.
In 1959, he was discovered by Samuel Charters, the first of the
white scholars to take a serious interest in the blues. Charters, who was married to literature professor and Beat Generation scholar Ann Charters, was particularly interested in the richness of blues lyrics. As he put it, "I really got bored with all those damn guitar solos. To me, they all sounded like B.B. King, and what I really wanted to hear was great text."
Hopkins was a perfect choice for Charters. At a time when the blues was going electric, and guitar solos were starting to dominate, Hopkins still played acoustic, and with all those recordings he made, often of the same songs over and over, he would find subtle and improvised variations on the lyrics. Filmmaker Les Blank recalls one such improvised lyric:
You make your bed hard, baby,
and calls it ease.
The blues is just a funny feelin’,
yet some folks calls it a mighty bad disease.
This line was composed late one night while I was filming what started out to be an ordinary interview. I had asked him to tell me what the blues meant to him. He picked up his guitar and started to sing about a woman named Mary who had left him. Earlier that evening his wife had left him after a nasty argument that caused her cousin to attempt to shoot Lightnin’. While the song was being sung, the cousin was lurking outside the apartment door with a loaded pistol. Lightnin’ also had a large loaded gun stuck down the front of his pants. Hardly a situation in which to delve into an academic and linear exploration of the nature of truth and the blues, but I came away feeling I knew a lot more about it than before, but I couldn’t exactly put it in words.
Charters was one of the first to ignite the new interest in the blues that would grow into the blues
explosion of the 1960s, with blues festivals and new recordings. His interest in Hopkins led to a second career for the old bluesman, one that Hopkins himself was reluctant to enter. He had played all his life for black audiences, and was almost completely unknown to whites (not completely--I had his 45 RPM recording of "Good Old Woman" on the Harlem label). But this was suddenly to change. His first appearance, on a bill with young white urban folkies to the Houston Folklore and Folk Music Society, was a huge success, and before long he was appearing in New York on a bill with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. and recording for new record companies that made LPs and marketed them to white audiences.
Like Bluesville, where he was teamed up with Sonny Terry, a bluesman who had thrived for some years in New York, playing for whites, and put under the supervision of a white producer, Ozzie
Cadena. It was an odd pairing. Terry, no less authentic a bluesman, was technically more organized, and was used to playing with musicians like Brownie McGhee who were similarly more structured. An odd pairing, but not a bad one. Each knew enough to let the other do his thing, so although the same musicians--Terry, Hopkins, bassist Leonard Gaskin and drummer Belton Evans--were there for the whole date, it was really two separate sessions, with Terry front and center for the first one, and Hopkins taking center stage for the second.
There were similarities between the two, beyond a deep familiarity with the blues. While it's probable that no bluesman has ever been as prolifically recorded as Hopkins, Terry was no stranger to the recording studio. And he, too, had often recorded variations on the same material.
Terry begins his session with "One Monkey Don't Stop the Show," one of many songs to have been written under that title. The first recorded version was by Brownie's brother Sticks McGhee, with whom Terry had also recorded, including a Prestige session just two weeks previous. McGhee's "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show" bears no relation to Terry's. His is actually a reworking of a song he and Brownie McGhee performed regularly, and recorded more than once, called "Better Day." Both songs had the same verse-chorus structure, the same melody, and the same theme--things are bad, but that's all right, because they'll get better.
To the early blues musicians, authorship of lyrics was not that important, which is why there are so many "traveling lyrics," verses that pop up in one blues after another -- and part of the reason why their descendants in the 1950s were often a little too casual about nailing down lyricist credit for a song, leading to later lawsuits over the ownership of hits like "Earth Angel" and "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." Guitar styles were a different story. Charley Patton was way ahead of Jimi Hendrix with flamboyant tricks like tossing his guitar in the air, playing with his teeth, playing behind his back. Partly it was showmanship, partly it was so that no would would quite be able to figure out what he was doing. Something not dissimilar was done with Fats Domino's recordings, which were ever so slightly speeded up -- partly to make them faster and livelier for the rock 'n roll crowd, but also so that they were not quite in any key, and couldn't exactly be duplicated.
So both of these blues masters knew a million songs, which were inexhaustible variations on a hundred or so songs, and both of them bring their mastery to this session. And if they weren't exactly made for each other, it would be hard to prove it by either Sonny is King or Last Night Blues. They are two very different sessions, each of them rewarding in its own way.
One unusual cut that showcases both of them is "Lightnin's Stroke," from the Hopkins album, a mostly instrumental number that features guitar, harmonica, and a little lick from "When the Saints Go Marching In."
Sonny is King featured songs from this session and a later one, produced by folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein. Last Night Blues had a couple of rereleases, as Gotta Move Your Baby on Bluesville and Got to Move Your Baby on Prestige. The Prestige 45, b/w "Sinner's Prayer" (not the Lowell Fulson song also covered by Ray Charles), was "Got to Move Your Baby," Other 45 RPM releases from this session, also combined with tracks from other sessions and released on Bluesville, were "The Walkin' Blues" / "Last Night Blues" and "Hard To Love A Woman" / "Back To New Orleans."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
Buddy Tate began recording for Prestige in 1959, as part of a Shirley-Scott / Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis session, made his first recording as a leader near the end of that year. This was productive period for Tate, who was also leading a group at Harlem's Celebrity Club, a gig that lasted over two decades, from 1953-1774.
Tate's involvement with Prestige was both the with the newer soul jazz sound (Scott-Davis) and the older Swingville sound, both of them connected by rhythm and blues, and both of them connected by the talent scouting and producing abilities of Esmond Edwards.
Edwards, born and raised in Harlem, had first been employed by Bob Weinstock as a photographer. Then Weinstock had him produce a couple of sessions, and by 1958 had put him in the position of recording director, and for the next several years he produced most of Prestige's sessions. Edwards was familiar with the Harlem jazz scene to a degree that Weinstock was not. He knew about places like the Celebrity Club/ He brought Tate and other musicians downtown, and out to Englewood Cliffs, and he found and signed up the younger musicians who were creating the soul jazz sound.
For this session, Tate is joined by Clark Terry, who did not come from uptown in those days. After solid stints with both the Basie and Ellington bands, he had a steady gig as a member of Johnny Tonight Show orchestra. He had appeared on a very early Prestige session, in 1950 with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, and then not again until a September 1960 session with Scott and Davis. Terry is also responsible for the lion's share of the compositions on this session, beginning with "Groun' Hog," a slow blues which, at just over eight minutes, allows all the participants to stretch out and do some beautiful work, particularly Tommy Flanagan early on, and Tate later on. It's eight minutes well spent with some master players.
Carson's
20 Ladbroke Square is credited to Tate and Esmond Edwards as composers, and it's another blues, one that opens up and allows for some inspired blowing. The address is for an apartment building in the Notting Hill section of London, not an area traditionally associate with the blues. Well, maybe there's another Ladbroke Square. The rest of the session belongs to Duke Ellington, in ballad ("All Too Soon") and swinging ("Take the A Train") tempos. The combination of Ellington and these old pros is every bit as good as you would have imagined it to be.
Having dropped back in after a decade's hiatus, Clark Terry would stick around for the next couple of years and make a number of recordings for Prestige, New Jazz, Swingville and Moodsville.
Larry Gales was relatively new on the scene in 1960, and new to Prestige with this album, although he would hook up with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin for several Prestige sessions, then move on to a career that found him playing with many of the greats, particularly Thelonious Monk for several years. He would take quite a while before making his own album as leader, however. His Monk tribute album, A Message from Monk, came out in 1990.
With Edwards producing, this Swingville release was titled Tate-a-Tate, after one of the other Clark Terry contributions. If it was Clark who came up with the pun, Buddy certainly liked it, as later projects were called Tete-a-Tate and Tate-a-Tete.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
The trouble with putting a label on a form of music is that it creates the temptation not to listen to it too closely. "Oh, yeah, that's [fill in the blank -- trad, bebop, hard bop, soul jazz], with all the clichés of the genre." What clichés? "Oh, you, know...just listen." But if you really just listen, without burdening yourself with a label, maybe they aren't clichés. Maybe every time a group of talented musicians go into a recording studio, they're there to find something that makes their getting together, and getting it down on wax or vinyl or tape or digital, worth the doing. That's why Cannonball Adderley so firmly resisted having his music called "soul jazz," for all the good it did him. Or, for that matter, why so many musicians resist having their music called "jazz."
Johnny "Hammond" Smith plays soul jazz. It's gotta be. For a start, it's got that organ, right? Like Jimmy Smith. He even has Jimmy Smith's guitar player. And he's got that bluesy-gospely feeling like Ray Charles, right? He even does a jazzy version of "Swanee River," just like Ray.
Well, yeah, except no. As the new decade found its voice, the organ was a large part of that voice, and jazz labels were signing up organists because people wanted to hear them, but they no more sounded alike or played the same clichés than did tenor saxophone players in the 1940s and 1950s.
And OK, the label is not so bad. If someone came to you and said they wanted to start a soul jazz collection, and who are some of the musicians they should collect, you'd certainly include Johnny "Hammond" Smith. But hopefully you would tell the neophyte collector, "Once you've started to pull your collection together, sit down and listen to each record separately." Just as, if you listen closely to a boxed set of Tito Puente, you'll quickly realize that no two rhythms are alike, in your soul jazz collection you'll hear some virtuosi of the Hammond organ, each of them finding his or her own way to explore it. And there are a lot of possibilities in that organ.
All but "Swanee River," on this album, are Smith originals, and "Swanee River" might as well be, in its unique deviations from anything that Stephen Foster or Ray Charles had in mind. Smith can do it as a composer, from catchy melodic hooks to intriguing development, to opening up avenues for his bandmates to explore, to finding, like Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott and other premiere organists of the day, his own intricacies of tonality and percussive experimentation.
Smith worked for the first time here with Eddie McFadden, who had come from working with Jimmy Smith, and had come from the soul jazz cauldron of Philadelphia, where, like Thornel Schwartz, he had developed a great sense of what a guitar and organ could do together. And he worked for the only time with Lem Winchester, who came from just a hop and a jump south of Philadelphia. How much Winchester might have continued to explore the soul jazz idiom we'll never know.
Smith tosses him right into the cauldron with "Dementia," giving
him the first chorus, then following him with a McFadden solo, before entering with his own. Jazz is many things, but always it's hospitable to soloists, and with "Dementia," the first tune of the day although not the first on the album, Smith serves notice that a range of solo voices, and the flexibility to play off each other, will be what he's looking for. I liked "Dementia" a lot--the way it developed, and the part that each musician played in that development. And I found the same thing happening, in different ways, through each tune on the album.
Yes, original. Yes, unique voices finding ways to challenge and blend with each other. And...soul jazz to the bone, and to the marrow in the bone. That seductive sound that tells you you're gonna dig this. You're gonna tap your feet, you're gonna get up and dance, you're gonna--in Charles Mingus's phrase--git it in your soul.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album was called Gettin' the Message and the 45 off it was "Swanee River Parts 1 and 2."
Prestige Bluesville gave Sonny Terry solo billing on an album one week after they had done the same for his partner Brownie McGhee. Brownie is not present at all on this album, but his brother "Stick," best known for the 1947 Atlantic hit "Drinkin' Wine Spo-dee-o-dee," plays on a few tracks, as does Sonny's nephew, J. C. Burris. Burris is also a harmonica player, but augments the mouth harp with a percussion instrument, the African rhythm bones. The bones are two smooth sticks played like castanets. Percussion is also provided by Belton Evans. heard previously on Bluesville sessions with Sunnyland Slim and Roosevelt Sykes, and on jazz sessions with King Curtis and Al Casey.
The Piedmont blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee was an interesting phenomenon. The Great Migration of early and mid-20th Century had its own blues migration subdivisions. Bluesmen from Texas like T-Bone Walker tended to migrate to the West Coast. The Delta blues singers like Muddy Waters came north to Chicago and Detroit, where they created the urban blues style which was most widely disseminated by Chicago's Chess records, and which strongly influenced the British blues rockers. The east coast blues musicians tended to find their way to New York, which had its own music traditions, and they weren't necessarily about the blues. New York was a jazz town--it became the jazz town. For a while, when the entertainment world had not yet settled on a name for the kind of music that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were making, that was being developed in the cauldrons of Harlem and the firepits of 52nd Street, it was called New York Music, and I half wish that name had stuck. It became a doo wop town. And was certainly a Latin music town, with Machito and Tito Puente and others making great music that is still undervalued by jazz audiences and jazz historians. But it never developed the kind of blues sound and blues audience that a town like Chicago did. Atlantic stepped into the void in its own way. When Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun scouted Ruth Brown singing in a jazz
club, and they went to talk to her afterwards, they told her they wanted her to sign with a new blues label they were starting. She said. "What do you want with me? I don't sing the blues. I hate the blues!" They assured her, this would be a new kind of blues. And it was. Ahmed and Nesuhi Ertegun, jazz lovers anxious to start a label that would be commercially viable, were among the pioneers of jazz with a beat--rhythm and blues.
So where did this leave the traditional blues players from what came to be known, for no discernible reason, as the Piedmont area-- the southern Atlantic coastal states? Their music was Finian's Rainbow.
finding a limited market, at best, with the sophisticated black audiences of New York, and blues-based music was as yet of not much interest to mainstream white audiences. Stick McGhee signed with Atlantic and had one big rhythm and blues hit (Brownie McGhee played on the recording, as did jazz bassist Gene Ramey). Other Piedmont musicians took different paths. Josh White smoothed his style, adjusted his diction to fit white audiences, and played supper clubs. Sonny Terry made his mark as a featured performer in a long-running Broadway musical that had race relations as a sub-theme,
Lead Belly had made a path for "old-fashioned" blues singers in New York. It wasn't a music that sophisticated black audiences were interested in, so Lead Belly and Alan Lomax created a new audience of white leftists who wanted to hear "the people's music." Terry often played and recorded with Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie for Folkways, a label that combined the field recordings of musicologists with the urban folk revivalists, and for Stinson, a label founded by American Communists originally to release recordings by the Red Army Chorus.
Lead Belly was a mentor to Terry. Brownie McGhee's song "Me and old Sonny....Sonny Terry is my best friend" (he wasn't) is taken from Terry's "Me and Huddie Ledbetter...." Terry's other mentor was Piedmont blues pioneer Blind Boy Fuller, who died in 1941. Those two mentorships come together on this album in the song "High Powered Women." The melody and the structure come from Fuller's "Step it Up and Go," which later, as essentially the same song, was Lead Belly's "Borrow Love and Go" (sometimes "Bottle Up and Go"). Lead Belly framed his song as a tribute to "the high powered women of today. You got women who can fly airplanes...you got radio women...they can do anything a man can do." Terry takes some of both for his version.
The 1960s blues revival may have centered around the Chicago blues musicians and their Delta forebears, but the Piedmont bluesmen, especially Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, did all right by themselves. They continued to work as a duo, playing blues festivals and college dates and European tours, until 1980, and Sonny kept on working until he died in 1986, one of his last gigs being a recording of his version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads Blues" for the movie Crossroads.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.– Terry Gibbs
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