LISTEN TO ONE: Lonely Avenue
It's 1965, and Prestige is fully committed to riding the wave of soul jazz, and no one exemplified that better than Freddie McCoy, who was tapped by Johnny "Hammond " Smith (later known as Johnny Hammond) on a couple of Prestige albums before getting this shot at an album under his own name--a position he was not to relinquish quickly. He would release seven albums on Prestige over a three year period, then one album on a tiny independent label in 1971, then nothing. He dropped out of sight, apparently left the music business. He died in 2009 in Morocco, where he was living under his adopted Muslim name of Dit Ahmed Sofi.
Larry, of the Funky16Corners blog, rates McCoy as "the finest, purely 'soul jazz' vibraphonist I’ve ever heard, and while others may lay claim to that distinction--and I would never tout any artist (well, except for Louis Armstrong) as the finest of anything, a strong case could be made for Freddie McCoy as the quintessential soul jazz vibist. His commitment to this signature jazz sound of the 1960s seems to have been total, and his ability to coax soul out of an instrument that does not allow much for the slurs or microtonalities of the blues.
McCoy's first entry into ars poetica of soul jazz, his first tune of his first session, first cut (and the title cut) on his first album, was Doc Pomus's 'Lonely Avenue," originally recordeed by Ray Charles, inspired by the Pilgrim Travelers' gospel song "How Jesus Died." My first thought on seeing the set list was "What made Freddie McCoy think he could possibly do this?" Just as my first thought on hearing Ray's version was "How could he do it? This could so easily go wrong--how did he make it so right?" Surprisingly, it's had rather a lot of covers since Ray's masterpiece, including British Invasion soft rockers Peter and Gordon (mistake) and the Everly Brothers (big mistake -- the Everlys could sing almost anything, including several other Ray Charles covers, but they couldn't sing this.
In short, I wasn't expecting much.
And it didn't take long to convince me otherwise.
If you loved the sound of the vibraphone, as Prestige's Bob Weinstock apparently did, and you were convinced that soul jazz was what was going to keep your label afloat in the 1960s, you had found your guy. With the vibraphone playing off the full sound of trumpet, baritone sax, trombone and organ, with a brilliant arrangement by trumpeter Gil Askey, it was pretty clear that Prestige had come up with another winner in the soul jazz sweepstakes.
Freddy McCoy, at 32, may have been a new face on the soul jazz scene, but soul jazz was not an entirely new sound (see my book, Jass with a Beat), and McCoy and producer Cal Lampley came up with some veteran talent to make this session work. Tate Houston, 40, made his first recordings with Billy Eckstine in 1946. He followed that up with stints with Sonny Stitt and Milt Jackson, and played at Detroit's Blue Bird Inn. He moved from bebop to rhythm and blues with Hal "Cornbread" Singer and Big John Greer. Napoleon "Snags" Allen's career goes back even further, being one of the first to introduce the electric guitar to the New York scene in the 1930s. Martin Rivera is probably best known for his work with Junior Mance in the 1980s, but his recording career goes back to the mid-1950s, and like Houston and Allen, was one of New York's reliable studio musicians. Like Ray Lucas, he has recorded on Prestige betore -- Rivera with Kenny Burrell, Lucas with Bobby Timmons and King Curtis. Organist James Thomas is almost certainly not the British classical organist and choir director of the same name, and I haven't been able to find out anything else about him.
The abum was recorded in two sessions, January 25 and February 16, and the second session was augmented with trombonist Dicky Harris, another veteran whose roots go back to Erskine Hawkins in the 1930s, and whose rhythm and blues credentials include work with Lucky Millinder, Ruth Brown and Sam Cooke.
t's unusual to see an arranger credit on an album by a small jazz combo, but Gil Askey certainly deserves it here. Askey, a 25-year veteran of the jazz scene (Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie) took on this gig on the way to a full time job that would keep him occupied for the next decade and more. He had just gotten a call earlier in the month from a young Detroit entrepreneur who was starting a new label.
Berry Gordy was to describe Askey as ""the glue that kept everything together" at Motown, and he is generally recognized as one of the important creators of the Motown sound. He was instrumental in developing the Jackson Five, and when the brothers were first booked on Ed Sullivan, little Michael was afraid to go until he was reassured by the sight of "Uncle Gil" in the wings.
Askey's musical roots go back to the Austin, Texas, Anderson High School Marching Band (Kenny Dorham was a bandmate), one of the first Black marching bands to gain prominence. He developed his skills in rhythm and blues as an arranger for Buddy Johnson, and touring with 1950s package shows as the backup band for Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, the Clovers, Jackie Wilson, Lloyd Price and many more.
None of these musicians played on subsequent McCoy recordings. McCoy was talented enough, and attuned enough to the zeitgeist, to build a successful career on his own talents. But these veterans, and especially the arranging genius of Gil Askey, gave him a particularly powerful debut.
Lonely Avenue became the title of the album, and also the A side of its first 45 RPM single release. The B side was "Collard Greens," continuing a rhythm and blues tradition of giving soul food titles to tunes, like Hal Singer's "Cornbread," Eddie Vinson's "Kidney Stew" and Frank Culley's "Cole Slaw" -- a tradition that had continued into the soul jazz era with Booker T's classic "Green Onions." The February 16 session yielded more soul food, and another single, with "Belly Full of Greens" (flip side the standard "Willow Weep for Me"). McCoy would continue the theme on subsequent albums Peas 'n Rice and Beans & Greens.
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