Listening to Prestige 571: Brother Jack McDuff

LISTEN TO ONE: He's a Real Gone Guy

This is the first time that Jack McDuff is identified on the record label and sleeve with the sobriquet he was to use for the rest of his career. He's Brother Jack McDuff, and he's pulling out all the stops on that powerful church organ sound to make music that is pure funkadelic--screamin' that funky music, as the album's title suggests.

This time he has Kenny Burrell as the other half of that now-popular guitar-organ sound. Joe Dukes, his regular drummer, is on board, and they are joined by Leo Wright, a Texas-born player who had begun making a name for himself in the orchestras of Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie, and who had also recorded with Burrell. Wright would do some

good work in the early 1960s, including a few more sessions with Prestige. He also made records on Impulse!, Verve and Blue Note, before decamping for Europe, where he took the expatriate route. It meant that he's now not much remembered except by the most encyclopedic jazz fans, but who's to say he was wrong? Red Garland went back home to Texas out of a feeling that rock had taken over the American consciousness, but he had already established a major reputation. Wright probably made a living in Europe that he would not have been able to equal here, unless he did what a number of musicians did, playing with Dixieland bands at Disney World, or got regular Broadway show pit work like Wendell Marshall.

There were a number of guitarists, like Thornel Schwartz, who made a specialty out of playing in organ-guitar combos, and Burrell certainly isn't one of them. He plays Kenny Burrell guitar alongside the screamin' funk of McDuff and Wright, and makes it work--jazz is probably unparalleled in its

hospitability to unlikely combinations of musicians.

McDuff plays two originals and four standards: Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump," Avery Parrish's "After Hours," and two songs most vividly associated with singers. Lots and lots of people of singers have covered "I Cover the Waterfront," but no one quite like Billie Holiday. Nellie Lutcher wrote and performed "He's a Real Gone Guy," and while hardly any singers have covered Lutcher's original, the tune has had some popularity with jazz instrumentalists.

McDuff and his group cover a lot of stylistic ground here, but they really nail it with the flat-out screamin' of the title, and the best screamin' numbers are "One O'Clock Jump" and "He's a Real Gone Guy."

Screamin' was a Prestige release, Ozzie Cadena producing. "He's a Real Gone Guy," parts 1 and 2, was the first 45 RPM single, followed by "Screamin'" b/w "Somethin' Slick," from McDuff's next session.