Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Lonnie Johnson is back, this time with an old friend. Victoria Spivey, who had not been active professionally for a decade, may well have been another reclamation project by producer Chris Albertson, as Johnson had been, but it was reunion for the two old entertainers. In the 1920s, Spivey was one of the reigning queens of the blues who changed the face of American music in the 1920s, after Mamie Smith's recording of "Crazy Blues" blasted away the prevailing wisdom that there was no market for records by a black singer. And Lonnie Johnson was a superb jazz violinist and guitarist who found that he could make a living as a blues singer, although it wasn't what he loved most. But when Johnson was brought in to accompany Spivey, on songs like 1927's "Dope Head Blues," you got something of a taste of just how good he was.
Both Johnson and Spivey were consummate entertainers, whose careers lasted beyond the end of the First Blues Craze of the 1920s. As all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing motion pictures began to gain popularity, Spivey was cast in one of the first of them, King Vidor's Hallelujah! She continued with a career on stage (including the hit Broadway musical Hellzapoppin'!), until retiring from show business in 1951. She made her return with this album and a couple for Prestige, then--always a strong, independent woman--started her own record label. She died in 1976.
The three tracks with Spivey are the highlight of the album, but not because there's anything wrong with Johnson's solo tracks, just because she's the new girl in town. Two of those are Spivey compositions ("I Got the Blues So Bad" and "Idle Hours," originally recorded for Okeh in 1926-27). She was one of the great American songwriters. Johnson was no slouch either, and the rest of the songs are his. Never fully committed to the blues as a way of life, Johnson is often much more drawn to romantic love as subject matter, though he manages to fit it nicely into the 12-bar blues format.
Added to the mix is pianist Cliff Jackson, heard once before with the Swingville All Stars.
One of my policies in writing this blog is don't look ahead too much, take history and music trends as they come. So I really wasn't expecting, when I reported folklorist Art Rosenbaum's teenage experience in discovering Scrapper Blackwell, that Blackwell would be the next artist up in the Prestige story.
But here he is, and here's a little more of Rosenbaum's recollection, this from the liner notes of the Bluesville album:
In the summer of 1958 a Negro woman I know in Indianapolis told me of a man who could "sing blues and Christian songs" and "could play the guitar so it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck." I went to the address she gave me, a shabby house in the shadow of the big Methodist Hospital on Senate Avenue, and met a slender, soft-spoken man who said that he would play for me if I got him a guitar, as he did not have one. He told me that he had once been a blues recording artist but had quit shortly after his partner's death in 1935. This man was "Scrapper" Blackwell, one of the greatest blues singers and guitarists. and he had been living in obscurity in his home town for more than 20 years.
This is roughly equivalent to buying an Edward Hopper painting at a yard sale because you like the frame. And like the mythical painting buyer, Rosenbaum did not realize what he had, at least not right away. He did bring Blackwell a guitar, but the old bluesman needed one more thing..."Bird food."
Bird food?
"You got to get some bird food for the bird, before the bird sings." Rosenbaum still didn't understand, so Blackwell spelled it out..."Beer." Unfortunately, Rosenbaum was too young to buy beer. Fortunately, the patient Blackwell explained, if the kid would buy, the bird would fly. All he had to provide was the money.
Another producer, jazz photographer Duncan Scheidt, also recorded Blackwell in Indianapolis, and his session was released on the British label 77 in 1959.
Blackwell recorded for Rosenbaum and Goldstein in July or 1961. He had mostly stopped playing, and completely stopped playing professionally, when Leroy Carr died in 1935, so his repertoire was essentially from that era--songs he and Carr had played together, or familiar songs like "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out."
Blues lyrics in those early days were swapped and hybridized. There was not a powerful sense of ownership of lyrics, and so verses would travel from one blues to another, from one singer to another, and yet so many of these early blues performers produced intensely personal and original work. Blackwell, on an early recording, "Down South Blues," sings about goin' where the Monon crosses the L&N-- the Monongohela and Louisville and Nashville railroads. W. C. Handy reported that his first exposure to the blues came when he was waiting for a train at a small Mississippi depot, and heard someone playing a guitar and singing a song with one line: "Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog." The Southern was the Southern Pacific railroad, the Dog was the "Yellow Dog" -- the Yazoo railroad. Railroads were important to the post-slavery blues culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--they were an escape from sharecropping. Crossroads had symbolic importance in African culture, which carried over to blues culture. And for this record, Blackwell put together his old verse with Handy's: "Goin' Where the Monon Crosses the Yellow Dog."
As to whether the Monon did cross the Yellow Dog, I don't know. But this was 1961, not 1921, and Blackwell's new audience was young white college kids, who didn't care. The audience of his younger days would have known, and would have called him out on it.
Blues performers may not have felt especially proprietary about their lyrics, but they did about their guitar styles, and Blackwell was one of the very best stylists of the blues guitar, which is why he was chosen as a partner by Leroy Carr, one of the great blues innovators. He may not have owned a guitar by the time the 1960s rolled around, but he had lost none of his virtuoso skills, as he shows everywhere on this album, but especially on the instrumental numbers, "'A' Blues" and "'E' Blues."
He leans heavily on material developed by him and Carr, but one of them in particular is interesting in our context. "Shady Lane" is an Indianapolis blues, written by the two of them during a walk in their hometown neighborhood. They had a lot of help with the lyrics from another neighbor: Flossie Franklin, mother of Guitar Pete Franklin.
Blackwell would make one more record for Bluesville, but his life was tragically cut short. In 1962 he was killed by a mugger in Indianapolis, another unsolved murder of a black man.
Pete Franklin, born in 1928, was a good deal younger than most of the blues artists recruited for Prestige's Bluesville subsidiary, but stylistically he had more in common with those older artists, and much of his career involved accompanying or collaborating with them: St. Louis Jimmy, Roosevelt Sykes, Tampa Red. Jazz Gillum, Sunnyland Slim.
Much of his career was involved in recording with them, and although he generally recorded in Chicago, and he could play the electric guitar if called upon, he mostly stayed with this older style of blues, rather than getting involved in the electric blues sound
being pioneered by Chess Records. And perhaps that's understandable: when he was growing up in Indianapolis, he mother took in boarders, and one of those boarders was Leroy Carr, arguably the greatest influence on that generation of blues musicians. Franklin, though he called himself Guitar Pete, was equally capable on the piano, where he played very much in the style of Carr. An important influence on his guitar playing was Carr's frequent collaborator Scrapper Blackwell.
The Bluesville session was his only full length recording session, and one of the very few released under his own name. It was recorded in his hometown of Indianapolis by Kenneth S. Goldstein and another folklorist, Art Rosenbaum, who had grown up in Indianapolis and, as a youngster, had almost accidentally made one of the gret discoveries of the blues revival. As he recalled it years later in an interview with Fred C. Fussell of Georgia Music Magazine:
I rediscovered Scrapper Blackwell, but I honestly didn’t know who I had rediscovered – at least not until I was talking to a friend who was slightly older than me. I said, “Hey, I met this really great guitar player who said he made some records back in the old days. His name is Scrapper Blackwell.” Well, this guy, Ted Watts, just hit the ceiling! “You mean Scrapper’s living here?” he said. Scrapper hadn’t recorded for many years, and was not active as a musician anymore except for going around to play at house parties. But he still could play amazingly well, and he sang with a very poignant voice.
Franklin was recorded alone, accompanying himself on both piano and guitar. Unusually for a rediscovered blues singer, he did not repeat any of the songs he had previously recorded, instead choosing mostly songs he liked off earlier recordings by others: "Doctor" Clayton, Curtis Jones, Tampa Red, and of course, Leroy Carr. He sang a couple of songs that had just been around forever, and one of his own composition, "Guitar Pete's Blues," the song he is now most remembered for. Guitar Pete Alexander isn't hugely remembered at all--not part of the generation of Leroy Carr and Tampa Red, never part of the newer sound of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam. But he was a solid bluesman, and another reason to be grateful for the arrangement struck between Kenny Goldstein and Bob Weinstock.
The album was called Guitar Pete's Blues, and it has been rereleased on CD by Concord as part of their Original Blues Classics series. It's worth a listen.
King Curtis joins with another giant of rhythm and blues, Sam "The Man" Taylor, for the first of two blowing sessions that would ultimately make a Tru-Sound album called It's Party Time with King Curtis.
And party time it is. A solid groove for dancing, a tight arrangement, not a lot of room for improvisation, but some goose-bump-inducing solos by two masters if the art of wailing sax, and two of the most in-demand session men in New York. If your saxophone break on the hottest rocker of the moment wasn't by Curtis, it was probably by Taylor.
They were backed up by Curtis's regular group, plus a couple of extra musicians who--uncharacteristically for a Prestige session at Van Gelder Studio--weren't identified in the session log. Those were the trumpeter and the bongo player, both of whom performed on "Slow Motion."
And dig him here, with a tight band, led by a man who knew how to run a tight ship and keep it loose and swinging. Amazingly, nothing from this session was released on 45.
Paul Griffin on piano and Jimmy Lewis on bass were Curtis's regulars. Ernie Hayes played on this and the second Party Time session, and would be called on for other Prestige sessions, but Curtis didn't always use an organ, so he can't really be called a regular.
Billy Butler joined Curtis from Bill Doggett's band, where he had co-written and played the guitar solo on "Honky Tonk." Like all of the other musicians on this session and in Curtis's orbit, he was one of the session players that made the New York sound of the 1950s and early 1960s so powerful. A recent movie has shown us the incredible Detroit musicians who were the anonymous backbone of the Motown sound in the soul era, but the contributions made by the guys in the studios of the Big Apple in the rhythm and blues/rock and roll era of the 1950s were equally important. New York was the jazz center of the world in those days. It's where people came to play.
And it provided its own talent, from its own streets. Drummer Ray Lucas is a case in point.
Lucas grew up in Harlem, where music was everywhere. He recalled those early years in an interview with Jim Payne for Modern Drummer magazine.
I was still in high school when I heard “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters, with King Curtis on sax. At that time I was playing bebop and jazz. I didn’t care nothin’ about rock ’n’ roll. I was born and raised in Harlem. All I knew was New York and bebop. If you didn’t know Blue Mitchell, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, you weren’t in my league. But Curtis had a unique style of playing, and when I heard him on that Coasters record, I was knocked out.
A few years later, when Belton Evans was leaving and Curtis was auditioning drummers, Eric Gale arranged for Lucas to try out. When he got to the audition, he found that he was to be judged by Curtis and Roy Haynes.
Afterwards Roy looked at Curtis and said, “That’s a good kid. He’s all right.” I was nineteen or twenty at the time. I played with Curtis from 1961 to 1966, and that was the best band I was ever in.
The artists that Lucas played for, and the records he played on, would fill a book. But here's Ron Carter, recalling one session.
I got a call to come by and do this record with a young singer named Roberta Flack playing with this New York band. Ray Lucas on drums — an incredible drummer — Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar and some wonderful arrangements. That record ["Compared to What"] put her on the map.
His resume would have to include the Beatles, for whom the King Curtis band opened on their second US tour. And here's Lucas remembering a young guitarist-singer whom Curtis hired:
Jimi Hendrix, man, you’re talking about one of the nicest guys. He was so kind and courteous. He played with his teeth and all that, but he could play. Jimi would play Curtis’s tunes and then do some of his own. He would sing more or less down-home blues, rather than the psychedelic things he got into later. We were doing mainly contemporary tunes. He stayed with us for about six months, and then he went on his own.
Jimi and I used to play together in the studio, just me and him. He’d try all kinds of different things. He’d plug into the Leslie speaker from the organ. I’d play a backbeat or a shuffle or whatever. This went on for maybe two or three weeks. It was a studio on 54th Street. That’s how he built his recordings. I never heard any of the final versions.
One day a little later I ran into Jimi on the street downtown. He said, “Hey, Ray, what are you doing?” I said I was in between gigs. He said, “Man, I got my passport and my papers from the State Department. I’ve been trying to do my thing here, but it’s not working out that great. I just got an offer from England. If you want to do it, I can get the finances together. Do you want to come with me?” Of all the drummers he knew, he asked me. I told him I couldn’t do it, and in less than two years he was the biggest thing out there.
And finally, here are some other musicians reminiscing about playing with Lucas:
Bernard Purdie: Ray was an absolutely phenomenal player. He had no problem doing
what he needed to do. He had great time and a superb touch. He could be the quietest person in the world and be in the groove, and when he had to be fatback, he had no problem. And he had no problem swinging either. That’s why I enjoyed him so much—he could change. Whatever the feel was, whatever the attitude needed, he had it.
Watching Ray, he was like an acrobat. So light on his feet—he danced on the pedals. He could take sticks and make them sound like brushes.
Chuck Rainey: I enjoyed playing with Ray. He had very good time, and he played jazz real well. Ray was always very amusing too. He laughed a lot and told a lot of jokes.
Cornell Dupree and Ray and I went out on the road with the Coasters—who were great—and with the Supremes and Patti LaBelle, and with Jim “Mudcat” Grant, who was a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. He read poetry while we played.
When we opened for the Beatles, Ringo and Paul did everything they could to stay far away from all the acts from the States. John and George hung out with us on our part of the plane, though. They even came off their floor in the hotel and were very cool. We played cards, took pictures, stuff like that.
Ray played on my first record, The Chuck Rainey Coalition. I used to always get a kick out of him taking drum solos with his bare hands. He was sort of known for that. Not like congas—he played just like he had sticks in his hands. I’m proud to say that I came up with Ray Lucas.
Charles Collins (The O’Jays, MFSB, the Salsoul Orchestra): Ray Lucas was such a sweet cat, and he had a great touch. He could make one snare drum sound like 500 different snare drums, to give the music different colors. We’d do gigs back in ’71, ’72 with Dionne Warwick. [Collins was in a band called the Continentals, which opened for Warwick.] I learned how to play in auditoriums and in concert halls by listening to Ray. I’d go all over the room. Sometimes I’d go way in the back, and I’d still hear that snare drum—bow! bow!—and just different little tasty sounds he could do. He was very creative.
You've heard Ray Lucas, many times over. With Illinois Jacquet, Mongo Santamaria, Bobby Timmons, Shirley Scott, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick--with whom he toured for 12 years, then quit the business. Disco was coming in, and he just wasn't interested.
This was Roland Kirk's only recording for Prestige. He had been in the studio a couple of times, beginning in 1956 with a rhythm and blues session for King. Moving from Louisville to Chicago, he recorded for Argo in 1960, with Ira Sullivan.
Even in his rhythm and blues days, he was already experimenting with his exotic instruments, and with playing more than one horn at the same time. And if this was originally presented as a gimmick, it was never a gimmick. Hank Crawford first heard him playing as a 14-year-old on the rhythm and blues circuit, and remembers (quoted in Wikipedia):
He would be like this 14 year-old blind kid playing two horns at once. They would bring him out and he would tear the joint up...Now they had him doing all kinds of goofy stuff but he was playing the two horns and he was playing the shit out of them. He was an original from the beginning.
The other horns Kirk primarily used were the manzello and the stritch. The manzello is a modification of the saxello, itself a modification of the soprano saxophone. The stritch is a modified alto sax, straight like a soprano rather than curving into a bell like conventional alto (the manzello adds a bell to the conventional soprano structure). Playing all three at once, he could do something no other horn player could do: make chords. But he was also a brilliant flute player, and he made use of all sorts of sound-making devices, in the manner of Yusef Lateef (or Spike Jones), but playing all of them himself.
Kirk's musical knowledge and influences stretched from rhythm and blues to classical, from ragtime to electronic music. So it was interesting that Prestige paired him, for this outing, with a guy who essentially played one thing, though he did it very well.
But why not? I have a theory: given jazz musicians of quality and imagination, there's no such thing as a bad pairing. Here on Listening to Prestige, we've heard Eric Dolphy paired with Juan Amalbert's Latin Jazz Quintet, a session often criticized as "a mismatch, with Dolphy and the quintet paying little attention to each other," but it's not true. They're listening to each other, and their playing is affected by the context, in interesting ways. The same criticism was leveled by critics at Charlie Parker playing with Machito, or by Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and it was never true in either of those cases. Just listen, and you'll hear how they're relating to each other.
One of the most delightful jazz singles ever is "Slim's Jam," featuring a dead serious avant gardist (Parker), an irreverent cutup (Slim Gaillard), and a rhythm and bluesman (Jack McVouty, in Gaillard's language, McVea in anyone else's). And how about the Birth of the Cool nonet, who made some of the tightest, most trailblazing music in jazz history, led by Miles Davis, Lee Konitz (RIP), Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis, all of whom came from very different places and went very much in separate ways? Jazz is all about reaching out of your comfort zone, so putting together great musicians from different schools is always going to be worth listening to.
And in this case, although Kirk could draw on almost any musical language you cared to name, he had a solid grounding in soul jazz. You're certainly going to get things here that you would not necessarily get on any other Jack McDuff album, but you're going to get that "jazz with a beat" and that down home sound. Kirk plays the flute in addition to his big three instrumens, and also uses a siren.
Four of the numbers here are Kirk originals. Two are standards: "Makin' Whoopee," by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, was originally a vehicle for Eddie Cantor in a 1928 Broadway musical. "Too Late Now," by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, was first sung by Jane Powell in the 1951 Powell-Fred Astaire vehicle, Royal Wedding. And one that you really wouldn't expect to find on a Jack McDuff soul jazz album, "The Skater's Waltz," by 19th century French composer Charles Emile Waldteufel. I'm not sure Waldteufel would recognize what these guys do to it, but he might also be given pause if he could visit the mid-20th century and hear his "Estudiantina Waltz" sung as "My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer."
Joe Benjamin and Art Taylor round out the quartet. Taylor is a veteran of many many Prestige sessions, and if you think of him as primarily a bop era drummer, from his work with Miles, Red Garland and others, prepare to think again. He establishes himself here as a giant of funk drumming.
The album was called Kirk's Work. It was later released as Roland Kirk--Pre-Rahsaan, which in fact it was. The name Rahsaan would come later, not out of Islamic religious leanings (he was never a Muslim), but because the name came to him in a dream. Even this early in his career, though, he had already been named by an oneirological impulse.. His birth name was Ronald, but a dream told him to switch the letters around.
"Kirk's Work" and "Doin' the 68" were the first 45 RPM release from the session, followed by "Funk Underneath," split into two parts, and then "Three for Dizzy," also a two-sider.
Esmond Edwards is listed as "Supervision" rather than as producer. I'm not sure of the difference.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle!
Volumes 1-3 are also 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
This short session of four songs, reminiscent of the old 78 RPM days, was recorded in Houston by Texas folklorist Mack McCormick and Kenneth S. Goldstein. Lightnin' Hopkins's path may have crossed with Chis Strachwitz as he headed for California while the latter was heading for Texas, but the Lone Star state was home ground for Hopkins, and he returned.
These four songs would be added to a longer 1962 session to make the Bluesville album Walkin' This Road by Myself, and I'll write more about it when we get to that second session.
Three of the songs are credited to Hopkins, but "Baby Don't You Tear My Clothes," a cheerfully bawdy number in the hokum tradition, goes back at least to the 1930s, is generally credited as "traditional," has spawned a number of other songs with the same melody, the best-known being Bob Dylan's "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down." It was first recorded in 1935 by the State Street Boys, a Chicago group that sometimes worked with Big Bill Broonzy and Jazz Gillum.
The fourth, "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," is credited as "Traditional," but it probably does have a progenitor--the first Sonny Boy Williamson, who recorded it on Bluebird in 1937 and is listed on that record as composer.
Also on July 7, a quintet led by Gene Casey, consisting mostly of guys who had played with the Latin Jazz Quintet plus Ray Barretto, had a recording session at the Van Gelder Studio, but it was never released. Too bad. Anything with Ray Barretto is worth hearing.
K. C. Douglas has the kind of easygoing command of both his voice and his guitar that can go all night, and on this recording session, produced in Oakland by Kenneth L/ Goldstein and Chris Strachwitz,and engineered by he did exactly that, or pretty darn close to it, recording 23 songs that would go onto two separate albums (double albums weren't really a thing in those days).
The rediscovery of the blues was starting to heat up by 1961. Strachwitz, a German-born blues enthusiast living in northern California, had founded Arhoolie Records, one of the most important blues labels of the era. He had gone to Texas with the idea of
recording Lightnin' Hopkins live in a local beer joint, only to find that Hopkins had given up the beer joints and was in the process of decamping for the coast. Frustrated, he cast about for another local bluesman in another beer joint, and discovered Mance Lipscomb, a 65-year-old tenant farmer and son of an emancipated slave, who had never recorded before. Lipscomb was a major find, and became a fixture on the folk and blues circuit. He recorded Douglas a number of times over the years, licensing this session to Prestige, and hanging on to other cuts, eventually releasing them on Arhoolie in 1998.
Douglas had performed on one recording before, by his friend and West Coast compatriot, the harmonica player Sidney Maiden. It was recorded in Berkeley, quite likely by Strachwitz, although I haven't been able to find that information. Although Maiden frequently backed him up in performance, and on earlier recordings, Douglas goes solo here. The session notes indicate that it was done in two sessions, both on the same day. The first session, which made up the album K. C.'s Blues, is all original songs. The second, which became Big Road Blues, is largely songs by others. Douglas is a good enough writer in the blues vein to carry an entire 12-song album, and he doesn't even include his best-known song, "Mercury Blues," which was a minor hit for Douglas in 1948, and a major hit for country singer Alan Jackson in 1993. It has also been recorded by Steve Miller, Jackson Browne, Dwight Yoakam, and several others, including Finnish rocker Pave Maijanen as "Pakko Saada BMW" (where it becomes a foreign import--the title translates as "Gotta Get a BMW").
It does include songs about good women who leave and bad women who don't ("Ain't no tellin' what she might do / She might cut you, and she might shoot you too"). He can go after women like a rootin' ground hog or a watchdog trying to find a bone, which is not likely, because he's been replaced by a younger watchdog. Hey, this is the blues.
The second session begins with Tommy Johnson's "Big Road Blues," which has been widely recorded, and was the subject of a fascinating book by blues scholar David Evans. He gives a little Howling Wolf, and a little Big Bill Broonzy, and Jim Jackson's classic take on "Kansas City." "Bottle Up and Go" has been done by a plethora of bluesmen under a plethora of titles: "Borrow Love and Go," "Step it Up and Go." I know it best by Lead Belly, but it's originally by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McLennnan. When a guy can play and sing all night, it's good that he knows a whole buncha songs.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also 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.
Back in 1949, when Bob Weinstock originally went into the studio with Lennie Tristano, everything was on 78, and a recording session was generally four tunes, for two 78 RPM singles. When the LP revolution took hold, a session was almost always a full album's worth of music, even if not every tune from the session made it onto the same album. This is the first time Prestige has booked a session to produce one 45 RPM single...if they produced it. It wasn't cut in Englewood Cliffs, and we have no session notes identifying the players, so it was more likely cut by Gonzales himself at a studio somewhere in town, and then sold to Prestige.
However it happened, it's a very worthwhile addition to the Prestige catalog: one romantic ballad and one novelty number with a political bite.
In 1961, the civil rights movement was active and growing. Martin Luther King was at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had recently formed, a younger, more impatient group. But humor as a weapon in the civil rights struggle was still in its infancy. Dick Gregory was about to change all that. Discovered by Hugh Hefner in a Chicago nightclub, he became a regular at the Playboy Club, a frequent guest on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar, and a familiar voice on best-selling comedy records. But Babs Gonzales has to be one of the first to knock on that door. It's a shame that the jazz community and the folkie community didn't have much overlap, or "We Ain't Got Integration" could have been a lot better known/
"Lonely One" is the ballad. The guy who calls himself "Little Danny" and runs a very interesting blog about music calledOffice Naps has a lot to say about this song, and the genre of music it stems from, so I'll give him the floor.
He begins by discussing some of the reasons why jazz-inflected vocalists became so popular starting in the 1960s:
Recording technology had improved enough by the ’50s to effectively capture the
sensitivity of vocal performances on the long-playing album format, most of all its quiet ballad performances. Superlative examples like Helen Carr’s Down in the Depths of the 90th Floor, Johnny Hartman’s Songs From the Heart, Chris Connor’s Sings Ballads of the Sad Cafe and Mel Torme’s It’s a Blue World were hushed expositions of atmosphere and stylized loneliness. They sounded great on hi-fidelity stereos. So did Peggy Lee’s Dream Street, Nat “King” Cole’s Love is the Thing, Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, Jeri Southern’s Coffee, Cigarettes & Memories and all of Julie London’s early small-group releases – releases that, incidentally, sold very, very well.
And so the working reality of smaller, quieter supporting groups, the vogue for torch-y jazz ballads and the affordances of modern recording technology that, made, in turn, these captured performances a rewarding experience for at-home listeners guaranteed that lot of jazz and jazz-inspired vocalists cut records in the ’50s and ’60s. Together they loosely form a fascinating, often obscure, discography of LPs and 45s.
Little Danny's main focus in his blog is individual 45 RPM records, and he goes on to consider "Lonely One":
A true original, Babs Gonzales led a fascinating, colorful life, working, in addition to myriad odd jobs, as singer, lyricist and composer, bandleader, poet, manager and active proponent of jazz and jazz culture. However, if it’s hard to pin down exactly what Babs Gonzales was, it’s because he was first and foremost a personality – a scenester, a tireless self-mythologizer and authentically colorful character.
Born Lee Brown in 1919, Babs grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Early on he showed an aptitude for music, growing up playing drums and piano and singing in local clubs barely out of his teens. He had a gift for adopting personae, too, reinventing himself as Gonzales while living in Hollywood, where he famously worked as Errol Flynn’s
chauffeur.
Gonzales returned and inserted himself into the jazz and creative world of post-War New York City, working and living there – singing, writing, recording, collaborating, hustling, generally presiding – on-and-off, with some obligatory spells in Europe, until his passing in 1980....
His most important 78 sides were recorded between the mid-‘40s and the early ‘50s, during which time he sang with top-tier beboppers – including James Moody’s orchestra and Babs’s own group, Three Bips & a Bop – and released some of his best-known compositions, including “Oop-Pa-A-Da,” recorded by Dizzy Gillespie in 1947....
Atmospheric and stunningly beautiful, “Lonely One” belongs among those [his serious, dark songs]. Recorded with an unknown trio for the great Prestige Records in a comparatively late 1961, Babs brings such harrowing, effective feeling that one wishes for more like this, but, sadly, this would be among of his last “serious” recordings as a jazz singer.
"We Ain't Got Integration" / "Lonely One" was only released on 45, and has never been included in subsequent compilations by Prestige, Fantasy, or Original Jazz Classics.
This blog grew out of a few different impulses, but one, certainly, was something that Peter Jones and I had agreed on, coming out of one of our many discussions of the music of our youth: that the recorded jazz of the 1950s, on the great independent jazz labels like Prestige and Blue Note and Riverside, had all been good.
Was it really? Or were the rose-hued glasses of nostalgia coloring our vision? After all, we couldn't have listened to everything. And our limited teenage record-buying budget meant that we were mostly spending our money on albums that had gotten four or five stars from Down Beat. And the Jazztone Society's album of the month, during the time of that great but failed experiment. And the
Columbia Record Club, which wasn't necessarily on the cutting edge of jazz (they did have Miles) and certainly wasn't on the cutting edge of rhythm and blues, but hey, who could resist that initial offer of ten albums for ten cents, or whatever it was?
Listening to every single recording session from the entire decade seemed like a pretty good test/ And the conclusion was yes. It was all good.
The 50s were our decade of pure passion, and I wasn't so sure the 60s were going to measure up, but so far, so good. And more of it is new to me. Some of it is surprising, some of it amazing. Mal Waldron, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Ron Carter...an album I'd never heard, that ascends to the level of greatness. And fresh, orginal, revolutionary--even 60 years later. That shouldn't be so surprising. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk sound fresh, original, and revolutionary 80 years later. And Louis Armstrong, 100 years later. But this was music I'd never heard of before. You're not going say the same thing about Taft Jordan playing Ellington. Letting the world know that Mal Waldron was one of his era's great composers is a thrill in itself. If I tell you that Duke Ellington was one of his era's great composers, I'm not exactly going to be in the vanguard, am I? And if I tell you what a service Bob Weinstock performed for posterity by recording some of the older jazz artists on Swingville and Moodsville, this is worth saying, but I've said it before.
So I don't have anything exciting to tell you today, except that the string continues. All good. How could it not be? Ellington veteran Taft Jordan playing some of the Duke's best-loved tunes, and the reason why they're best-loved is...you can't help but love them. Kenny Burrell! After a few years' absence, he's back for two Prestige sessions in 1961: Coleman Hawkins in February, and now on board here with Jordan. Always welcome. He'll be back off and on over the decade. It tool Listening to Prestige to introduce me to Richard Wyands, and now that I know about him I smile whenever I see name on a session. I know he's going to be giving me some good piano. And what about Joe Benjamin and Charlie Persip? From the angularities and intricacies of Waldron/Dolphy to the sweet swing of Ellington/Jordan. What time is the gig and where is the studio? Thank you, ma'am, and let's play some jazz. Play it pretty for the people. Play it loud, play it clear, for the whole world to hear. Play everything cool for me and my baby. Taft and fellas. You've got me in the palm of your hand.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also 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
Mal Waldron was recognized in his time by those who paid attention, and for more than just being Billie Holiday's pianist on the night that Frank O'Hara immortalized in "The Day Lady Died," even though he didn't get the votes in the Playboy or Down Beat reader's polls. Billboard, in reviewing this album, said, "As a composer and pianist in avant garde jazz, Mal Waldron has few peers." The Billboard reviewer put "composer" first, and that's no mistake. For whatever reason, the general public, even the Down Beat reading public, never got the message, but musicians and jazz record producers surely did. On virtually every session that Waldron was called to play on, he was asked to compose a few tunes (look at my comments for his sessions of May 2 or September 26, 1958.
"Soul Eyes," written for John Coltrane, is his best known composition, but "Fire Waltz," from this session, written for Dolphy, has attracted its share of musicians, especially in recent years. One of the many pleasures of this album is getting the chance to reconsider and re-appreciate Waldron as a composer. All the pieces recorded this day were his.
Billboard puts Waldron with the avant garde, and although his talents and interests covered the breadth of modern jazz, being asked to compose for a session with Eric Dolphy certainly gives him an opportunity to spread his avant garde wings, and he's up to the task.
There were two important jazz musicians in this era who were named after the pioneering African American educator Booker T. Washington, and both died of illness way before their time. Trumpeter Booker Little, whose collaborations with Dolphy can only leave us wondering what more the two of them might have achieved, died on October 5, 1961, at age 23.
Ervin died at age 40, in 1970...both of them of kidney failure. He had a chance to leave behind a substantial body of work, much of it on Prestige.
Originally from Texas, he got his start in the southwestern territorial band of Ernie Fields, then moved to New York in 1958, where he very quickly caught the attention of Charles Mingus. Although Dolphy and Ervin were both part of the Mingus family, they only appeared together on one recording, the Complete Town Hall Concert. This appears to be their only other joint outing.
I won't comment on each selection individually. I'd like to, but I don't have the knowledge or the vocabulary. I will say that this session made me stop and listen over and over again, and not want to go on. Charlie Persip's drumming kicks and drives and complicates the rhythm. Joe Benjamin's solid bass makes it possible for Ron Carter to move his cello up to the front line. The cello is always a touchy instrument for jazz, but Waldron finds a place for it that works. And while Waldron always adds something unique and valuable to any group that he's in, his solos on his own compositions are particularly expressive. This is a beauty of an album.
It was released on New Jazz as The Quest. Esmond Edwards produced. It would later be rereleased on Prestige under Dolphy's name as Fire Waltz. The tune, "Fire Waltz," was also played by Dolphy, Booker Little and Waldron on the Dolphy/Little Live at the Five Spot sessions, and in recent years, it has gone into the repertoire of a number of jazz musicians.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also 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
John "South Side Soul" Wright adds some uptown soul to the mix for his third Prestige album, in the person of Eddy "Cat-Eye" Williams, and some Detroit soul with drummer Roy Brooks, and they mesh to find a universal language.
I'm guessing that the new quartet was more Esmond Edwards' idea than Wright's, because according to Wright, he had never played with a horn before, and wasn't quite sure what to do. "I didn't know how to really play with horns then," he said later, "so I just started to comp behind Eddy Williams."
Wright may have been exaggerating a bit about his inexperience with horns. In an interview with Rebecca Zorach for the blog Never The Same: Conversations About Art Transforming Politics and Community in Chicago and Beyond, Wright recalled his first gig upon returning from the army after the Korean War, back when he could expect to get paid $7.50 a night:
When I came home from the military, my first job was on the West Side of Chicago at a place called, Fifth Jack, it was located at Fifth Ave. and Jackson Blvd. and it was operated by two prominent gangsters, they’re deceased now, I guess I can use their names: Butch English [this must be Charles Carmen "Chuckie English" Inglesia--TR] and Tony Accardo. I played there for one month. They told me to bring in a couple of horn players on the weekends! Well, I had met a couple of good horn players and I had invited them to play with me one weekend, they were the famous Gene Ammons, and Dexter Gordon, both tenor saxophonists.
Listening to Wright and Williams together, you'd find it hard to believe that Wright didn't know how to play with a horn player, particularly this horn player. Wright's percussive attack and Williams' hard-edged tone complement each other nicely. And they must have worked out a few ideas for the session together, because two of the best tracks on the album, "Makin' Out" and "Back in Jersey," have the two of them listed as co-composers. Two more ("Sparkle" and "Soul Search" are credited to Williams alone, and two ("Street" and "Kitty") are Wright alone.
Eddy "Cat-Eye" Williams was one of those unsung heroes, one of those guys who could play, and who could always get a job because everyone knew he could play. We know that in the 1930s and 1940s he played with Claude Williams, Tiny Bradshaw, Billy Kyle, Don Redman, Jelly Roll Morton, Lucky Millinder, Ella Fitzgerald, Wilbur De Paris, and James P. Johnson. \
Then nothing until 1958-59, when he recorded a couple of albums on Blue Note with Bennie Green. Marc Myers of the Jazzwax blog, who can track down pretty much anybody and anything, can only say
Puzzlingly, there are huge gaps of time in Williams' discography in the '50s—perhaps a result of a prolific R&B sideman career or some other reason.
The sides with Green were memorable, and were followed up by this session with John Wright. Later in the decade, a record with Pee Wee Russell and Oliver Nelson, and one with Earl Coleman.
And then? A couple of different internet bios say he "disappeared without a trace."
So this small window between 1958 and 1961, two albums with Bennie Green and one with John Wright, may be the apex of Williams's career, and if so, they give us more than a glimpse--a really good look into a really solid jazz performer, one who deserves to be remembered. We talked a lot about the swing-to-bop musicians like Zoot Sims and Coleman Hawkins, and what they gave to jazz, but the rhythm-and-blues-to-bop musicians, like Gene Ammons, King Curtis, and David "Fathead" Newman, were important too, and surely Williams was one of those.
You can hear it all on "Makin' Out," one of the Wright/Williams collaborations. Williams as a soloist, Wright as a soloist, and Wright as an inventive, intelligent and sympathetic musical collaborator with the right horn player. One of the few things we do know about Williams is that he was from Chicago, so maybe he and Wright had more of a history of playing together.
In "Makin' Out" you can also hear what a difference Roy Brooks makes. Brooks, from the jazz-intensive workshop that was Detroit, got his start with Yusef Lateef and Barry Harris. One of the more innovative drummers of his generation, he suffered from crippling bouts of mental illness that finally got the best of him. But he is certainly one of the reasons this whole session is as good as it is.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album was called Makin' Out, and it was released on Prestige. The title track, at a little less than five minutes long, could almost have made one side of a 45, but it was split and spaced over two.
Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle! Volumes 1-3 are also 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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