Listening to Prestige 715: Montego Joe

LISTEN TO ONE: Haitian Lady

Montego Joe's two albums for Prestige were his only two as a leader, though he continued to be in demand as a percussionist through the 1960s and '70s. This second album leans toward what appears to be an attempt to move Joe into the mainstream of 1960s pop instrumentals. The tune that was selected for 45 RPM release is "Ouch," which uses the popular device of a repeated catch phrase, in this case "You shouldn't do that!" This is the device most successfully used in "Tequila," and "Ouch" is pretty good proof that it isn't always successful.

The session log includes a credit as arranger/conductor for tenor sax man Al Gibbons. Gibbons had a solid career without ever quite breaking through to the top ranks. He played in the orchestras of Earl Hines and Woody Herman, and also in the avant garde Jazz Composer's Orchestra. He worked with Stanley Turrentine and the Manhattan Transfer. And here his job seems to have been to create a Montego Joe for the masses, although one suspects that producer Lew Futterman's may have been the heavier hand.

Prestige, especially in the soul jazz era, was not a label to shy away from popular success, but neither was it a label to court it too assiduously, and the liner notes to this album, by Francis Squibb, seem to reflect that ambiguity. Are we courting the young crowd? Well, yes and no...

The music presented here is rhythmically akin to the rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n'  blues of the discotheques and teen hops--but with a difference. The "big beat," with which almost everyone is familiar, has been seasoned generously with a variety of twists and turns from African tribal musical traditions and from African-American music of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In short, like "Tequila." Or like Perez Prado. As someone who lived through that era, I can't help but follow the twists and turns of Mr. Squibb's attempts to find a balance. The rhythm 'n' blues of discotheques? For a start, who used the 'n' of rock 'n' roll to talk about rhythm and blues? But if you were young and representing yourself as a hip aficionado of jazz, you couldn't admit to liking rock 'n' roll...but it was sort of OK to like rhythm and blues.

Sorry, I can't help myself. Squibb's discomfort in being a jazz purist writing about impure music reveals itself in his compulsive need to put words into quotation marks, that familiar device that signals "I'm really better than this, I'm not really saying this":

The music of Wet and Wild was designed to get people to "shake that thing"--and not just that thing but everything [until] you are no longer "doing" the dance...but are  a creature of the music and--perhaps--of something beyond music as we know it. [Perhaps you have seen them] "doing" the Frug, the Monkey, or the Swim.

The tunes on this LP, intended to emphasize the "commercial" aspects, have been selected with "the younger crowd of dancers" in mind.

Montego...continues to demonstrate...the ways in which supposedly "alien" melodic and rhythmical material can be combined with "native" jazz and pop material...

So Montego Joe and producer Lew Futterman set out to make a commercially successful pop album. It was certainly something that Futterman proved good at, in his work with Jack McDuff and George Benson, and his later work with rockers like Ted Nugent. He would also become even more commercially successful as a real estate developer.

Why didn't it work with Montego Joe? Who knows why things do or don't take off commercially? But also, perhaps, Joe's heart wasn't one hundred percent in it. Although he continued to work as a percussionist on a number of jazz (and a few pop) sessions, his heart was more and more with education and youth work, as described in the notes to his previous Prestige album.

Al Gibbons, trumpeter Leonard Goines, and drummer/percussionist Milford Graves all appeared on the previous album. New for this session are Arthur Jenkins, piano; Ed Thompson, bass; and Sonny Morgan, miscellaneous percussion, suggesting that the budget may have been tighter this time around, or that for a more commercial dance sound, they didn't really need Chick Corea and Eddie Gomez. Jenkins, who during this period was primarily working with pop/reggae singer Johnny Nash, would go on to become a much-sought-after accompanist, working with John Lennon, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, among others. Sonny Morgan worked with Milford Graves on his first album as leader, and later with avant-garde vocalist Leon Thomas, among others. Less is known about Ed Thompson.

"Ouch" and "Give it Up" were the two sides of the only 45 RPM single release. Wild & Warm was recorded at Futterman's preferred Regent Sound Studios in Manhattan. I've selected "Haitian Lady," composed by Harold Ousley, as the most interesting track for me. But the whole album is pretty good for "dancing."

 

Listening to Prestige 631 - Montego Joe

LISTEN TO ONE: Dakar

 Montego Joe spent most of his life closer to Sheepshead Bay than Montego Bay, but he was in fact Jamaican-born, and his first percussion experiences were on that island, where he drummed on every flat surface he could lay his hands on, and was inspired by the playing of the brilliant and short-lived percussionist Chano Pozo. 

Moving with his family to New York when he was six, he heard the drum styles of Gene Krupa, Art Blakey and Buddy Rich. But focusing on the Latin percussion instruments, he developed quickly, and as a teenager he was already playing with some of his percussion idols, including Blakey, Max Roach

and Olatunji. He made his Prestige debut in 1962 with Ahmed Abdul-Malik in a session that blended the approaches of three very different percussionists--Joe on congas and bongos, Rudy Collins on a Western trap drum kit, and Chief Bay on African drums. In the next couple of year he would get some regular work with the label, appearing with Willis Jackson (twice), Ted Curson and Jack McDuff / George Benson.

When it came time to make his debut as a leader, Joe tapped a group of musicians who had not recorded for Prestige before, nor did they have extensive credits on the jazz scene, but they seemed to fit Joe well, because the core of them -- trumpeter Leonard Goines, reed man Al Gibbons, drummer / percussionist Milford Graves -- would be back for Joe's second and final Prestige session a year later. And, like Joe, several of them would go on to make significant marks in the fields of education and youth work.

Leonard Goines grew up in Harlem a few blocks from the Apollo Theater, where his teenage chops and ability to read music attracted sufficient notice that when the house band was short a musician, he would be called on short notice to sub. After playing professionally with Ella Fitzgerald, Donald Byrd, Duke Pearson, Yusef Lateef and Buddy Johnson in addition to Montego Joe, Goines entered academia as a visiting professor in the Black Scholars program at Pennsylvania's Lafayette College, teaching jazz history. And Goines's academic credentials went beyond his instrumental skills. According to an article in the Morning Call, Lafayette's newspaper:

Goines' background includes degrees in anthropology, psychology, counseling, political science, music education and ethnomusicology - the study of music and its relationship to culture. He's studied with Margaret Mead, the anthropologist and Nadia Boulanger, perhaps the most famous composition teacher of the 20th century.

Milford Graves, who would become a professor at Bennington College in Vermont, was another polymath. He studied to become a medical technician and  worked in a veterinary lab, where he set up and ran clinical tests to investigate new medicines. The basement of Jamaica, Queens, home became a dojo where he taught yara, a martial art of his own devising, and a laboratory, where he studied cardiology, acupuncture, and herbalism, His study of medicine and his understanding of the workings of the human body may have extended his life for a couple of years when he was diagnosed with amyloid cardiopathy in 2018 and given six months to live. He died in 2021.

Graves's extramusical interests and accomplishments should not distract one from his contributions to music. He was one of the first drummers to separate the drums from the responsibility for keeping time, a musical philosophy which he brought to the free jazz of the 1960s, playing with Albert Ayler and the New York Art Quartet, among others,

Montego Joe. after making his second album for Prestige in 1965, threw himself into youth work, with the Arts and Culture division of HARYOU-ACT (Harlem Youth Opportunities, Unliniited---associated Community Teams. He was able to record the teenage percussion group that he assembled and worked with at HARYOU-ACT, for ESP-Disc Records.

Two musicians who were on the brink of major careers in jazz were Chick Corea and Eddie (here billed as Edgar) Gomez. Corea up to this point had mainly worked with Latin groups, but his 25-Grammy-winning career would encompass everything, as his web page bio lists, "from straight ahead to avant-garde, bebop to fusion, children's songs to chamber music, along with some far-reaching forays into symphonic works."  Gomez would often work with Corea in the coming years, and with virtually every other jazz artist on the planet as well as some classical ensembles, but he is probably best known for his eleven years with Bill Evans.

Al Gibbons's musical range is shown in his list of credits, from Woody Herman and Earl Hines to Stanley Turrentine and McCoy Tyner. Robert Crowder, also known as Baba Ibekunle Bey, was known for mastery of West African drumming styles, and mentored the Women's Sekere Ensemble, a group of African percussionists dedicated to preserving the heritage of traditional West African culture. Rudy Stevenson, as a guitarist, played with Lloyd Price, Nina Simone and Mercer Ellington, but was primarily known as composer and arranger.

Lew Futterman, who tended to work separately from Bob Weinstock and Rudy Van Gelder, produced the session at Regent Sound Studios in New York City. Prestige released the album as Arriba! con Montego Joe, and "Fat Man" / "Dakar" as a 45 RPM single,