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,
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