Listening to Prestige 549: John Wright

LISTEN TO ONE: Blue Prelude

 This was John Wright's last album for Prestige, before retreating back to Chicago and the inside of a bottle, finally emerging from that trap to become a legendary figure in that neighborhood which he had apotheosized with his first album, South Side Soul, and in doing so he had created a persona that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was Mr. South Side Soul, and a beloved figure on the South Side of Chicago.

Musical Chicago is probably most associated in the public mind with the guitar and harmonica-based blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy,  But the piano had its place in Chicago blues, too, with performers

like Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, Big Maceo Meriwether, and Otis Spann. One of the chief architects of the Chicago blues sound was Willie Dixon, and he got his start playing the bass in a jazz trio led by Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston, a pianist in the Nat "King" Cole style that was so popular in the early 1940s. 

The piano jazz faces of Chicago in the modern era were Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis, and John Wright could well have made them a triumvirate, but for the alcoholism that took so many years from him. Even so, though he never broke out to national recognition like the other two, Chicago knew him, and his Wright Gatherings became a local musical tradition.

Like Jamal and Lewis and Caston, the piano trio was his favored lineup, and for this album, in addition to Prestige regular Wendell Marshall, who had worked with before, he used drummer Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, a Chicagoan who had gotten his start with Jamal.

The album features four Wright compositions and one by Esmond Edwards, whose compositional

contributions were extremely rare on the many records he produced, for Prestige and elsewhere.  The other three are by composers not close to the center of modern jazz, although "What's New?" by trad jazz stalwart Bob Haggart has become a much-loved standard for a wide range of jazz performers down to the present day. "Our Waltz" is by David Rose and "Blue Prelude" is by Gordon Jenkins, both pop music orchestra leaders. "Our Waltz" is not completely unknown to the world of jazz musicians always with open ears to a good melody with improvisational possibilities: both Gary Burton and Rahsaan Roland Kirk recorded it in the early 1960s. "Blue Prelude" has a little something for everyone. In addition to the many pop singers and

orchestras that have recorded it, it's been country (Bob Wills, David Houston), rhythm and blues (Sam "the Man" Taylor), and Latin (Candido, Jack Costanzo). Outside of Wright, the closest it's come to a modern jazz interpretation is George Shearing, who recorded it twice, once as an instrumental and once with Peggy Lee. Wright finds good things to explore in it, taking it somewhat more percussively and explosively than it's used to being taken--and, in fact, it became the 45 RPM single release from the session, along with his own composition "Strut." 

Edwards produced, and the Prestige release was entitled Mr. Soul.

Listening to Prestige 515: John Wright

LISTEN TO ONE: Les I Can't

 John Wright is back in the Big Apple (more precisely, Englewood Cliffs) from his home on the South Side of Chicago for one more session with Prestige, his fourth of five, although it would be the last released, bringing one of his South Side soul regulars with him--drummer Walter McCants--and picking up some Detroit-to-New York soul with Gene Taylor, then working regularly as Horace Silver's bassist.

Wright's recording career was almost nonexistent outside of these five Prestige albums. He made one other recording for a small independent label 30 years later. Prestige brought him in to play piano on a recording by blues singer Arbee Stidham, where he transformed Brownie McGhee's folk blues "Pawnshop Blues"

into a jazz gem, but there's nothing at all beyond those. Unfortunately, the answer is that most of those intervening years were spent inside a bottle. Prestige "had big plans for me," he told an interviewer years later. "But my choice of getting high was whiskey, and that was my downfall."

When he finally did escape from that whiskey trap, he stayed at home in Chicago, where he began what became a Chicago tradition -- the Wright Gathering. First organized in his home in suburban Chicago, it featured his music and the cooking of his third wife Evelyn, who would prepare the whole year for it, cooking and freezing food for the big day. When Evelyn died in 2007, he thought that would be the end of the Wright Gatherings, but friends and admirers took over the cooking and organizing, and the now-popular event was moved to a nearby park.

Prestige had Red Garland, whose trio and solo albums were popular, but he was winding up his time with the label, and perhaps they hoped Wright would fill that slot. He certainly could have, had it not been for the booze. He was a wonderful musician. This session is a mixture of originals and standard ballads. The standards -- "Stella by Starlight," "But Beautiful," "More Than You Know," "Be My Love," "'Deed I Do," are all particularly beautiful melodies, given just enough of a blues treatment to reincarnate them in Wright's image. Wright has a way of playing, and of getting into a number, that gives one the feeling of a man completely in that moment, and giving his all to it. 

For me, this feeling comes across most powerfully in one of his originals, "Les I Can't." I don't know what the title refers to. A tribute to Les McCann? But McCann was on the West Coast, just getting started, hardly a household name yet. Sammy Davis Jr.? But that phrase would not be associated with the singer for another few years. It doesn't matter. John Wright can, and he does.

Wright would record one more album for Prestige, but this would be the last one released, being held in the can until 1965, by which time Wright was all but forgotten, so one suspects it didn't get heard much. If not, that's a shame. Listen to this one. It'll enrich your soul and your concept of soul jazz. Esmond Edwards produced, and the 1965 release was on New Jazz.

Listen to Prestige 471: John Wright

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

Listening to Prestige 408: John Wright

Far too few people remember John Wright, unless they live in Chicago, where he was a local legend of the jazz scene, up until his death in 2017.  But he made a series of very fine albums for Prestige, starting with South Side Soul. Bob Weinstock brought him back to do the second of what would be five albums for the label, and since he was on hand, had him contribute to the previous day's blues debut by Arbee Stidham.  He played an important role in the artistic, if not commercial success of that album.

For the rest of his life, Wright would be known as "South Side Soul." He plays plenty of soul jazz on this album, and adds some of that South Side soul to everything he plays, but here he opens up his repertoire to show what else he can do. He plays four soulful originals from the South Side, one by Cannonball Adderley with a little New York soul, and three standards.

Bop-loving Joe Goldberg (author of the essential Jazz Masters of the Fifties), fighting a rearguard action against soul jazz, wrote the liner notes for this release, while he dismisses most new soul jazz pianists as hacks playing soul-by-the-numbers (he particularly hates Les McCann and has nothing good to say about Victor Feldman), he has nothing but respect for Wright, who, he says. 

has played church music, and has accompanied blues singers [emphasis his].  Living on Chicago's South Side, he has been acquainted with the origins of this style all his life. He does not play soul music because it is currently fashionable,  but because he was brought up hearing piano played that way. Never having had much formal training, he naturally turned to the kind of music he was familiar with when he began to play himself.

Goldberg was right about Wright not having had much formal training, but not because it wasn't available. According to a story on him in the Chicago Reader on the occasion of his 80th birthday (most of the rest of the biographical material is also from the Reader):

His siblings studied piano formally, but as Wright remembers it, their instructor refused to give him lessons, telling the family they'd be wasting their money. "Whatever we play, he plays equally as well," the teacher said. "He's not reading music, he's not using the right fingers, but he has God's gift . . . he can play everything he hears."

Wright grew up in the Pentecostal church, but at age 12 he moved over to begin playing for the Baptist church, which had livelier hymns. At 15, he heard jazz for the first time, and was won over to it. The more he learned about jazz, the more he liked it--and not just the music:

I made a vow: I was going to play jazz, drink plenty of whiskey, and chase pretty women. I kept that vow, and it almost killed me.

In 1952, he and a group of friends decided to join the Army to fight in Korea. Korea made a mark on the blues world. It was the first war after Truman integrated the armed forces, and a number of blues songs from the early 1950s contain lines like "My brother's in Korea." 

When it was discovered that Wright was a musician, he was put into Special Services and sent to Europe. All his friends went to Korea, and all of them were killed.

Wright played with some top-flight jazz musicians in Europe, became a star in Chicago's jazz firmament, where he played well enough to get invited back by Prestige for five albums, and drank whiskey well enough to knock himself out of contention and back to Chicago, where he eventually pulled himself together.

Of the three standards on the album one ("Witchcraft") was more of a current hit at the time (1957 for Frank Sinatra), but has endured to achieve standard status. It's an endearing number on this album, perky and musical (Goldberg points out that "the introduction to 'Witchcraft' is one that Red Garland has used," and there's certainly a Garland influence on Wright, but overall, this version of the song is his own). "Things Are Getting Better" is the Adderley tune, and its a good funky number that never quite became a jazz standard in spite of a vocal interpretation by Eddie Jefferson. 

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But it's soulful originals that are still the best of Wright. They fit him like an old shoe, and they satisfy like the whiskey and women that ultimately (for a while) got the best of him.

The album was called Nice 'n Tasty, a soul-suggestive title. "You Do It" and "Yes I Know" were the 45. Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes 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

Listening to Prestige 407: Arbee Stidham

Arbee Stidham was commencing a second career with this album, and although he was only 43, it was three decades after the start of his first career. From a musical family -- his father played with Jimmie Lunceford and his uncle with the Memphis Jug Band -- he had started his own band, the Southern Syncopators, by the time he was thirteen. Not too many 13-year-olds start there own band; fewer still get booked to tour with Bessie Smith, but Stidham did.

As a jazz musician,  he toured with his own band, first in the south and then in Chicago, and played with Lucky Millinder in the 1930s-40s, . A recording contract in 1947 yielded a hit recording, "My Heart Belongs to You," which went to number one on the Billboard Race Records chart (later to become the Rhythm and Blues chart) in 1948.

Stidham was a tenor saxophone player as well as a vocalist, and thought of himself primarily as a jazz musician until injuries suffered in an auto accident left him unable to play the saxophone.

But, determined to persevere in music, he took up the guitar and became a bluesman. He was aided in this by fellow Chicagoan Big Bill Broonzy, who had undergone a metamorphosis of his own. Originally a jazz guitarist, Broonzy had discovered the newly emerging folk music circuit, and had reinvented himself as a folk blues singer, and as a songwriter of major importance. Following Lead Belly's example of tailoring the blues to appeal to a new audience of white leftists, he wrote a number of protest songs, from the ironic "WPA Blues" to the anthemic "Black, Brown and White."

Stidham learned his new instrument well,  and added to his gifts as a blues singer and songwriter, it created new opportunities: a couple of singles for Atlantic subsidiary Abco in 1956, and then this album debut for Prestige Bluesville, followed by a 1961 album for Folkways, and a Folkways collaboration with Jazz Gillum and Memphis Slim that came out under Gillum's name. Then another recording drought until the early 1970s and two more albums, one for Mainstream, primarily a jazz label, and the other for Folkways. The 1970s also saw him venture into the academic world, as a lecturer on the blues at Cleveland State University.

There's plenty on this session to delight a blues lover who may not have heard Arbee Stidham before, and much for a jazz lover to appreciate. King Curtis sits in on saxophone, and on piano, the South Side soul of Chicagoan John Wright, who first recorded for Prestige in August, and would do four more sessions.

Wright is a dominant payer on a seven-minute version of Brownie McGhee's "Pawn Shop Blues," where his piano improvisation stretches out a normally song-length 12-bar blues into something else altogether. Stidham does mostly originals here, but features a few from other composers--why, it's hard to say. "Pawn Shop Blues" is a very good song, and favorite part of McGhee's repertoire, but melodically it's an interchangeable 12-bar blues. I guess it's a nice piece of change in Brownie's pocket, except that nobody ever made any money from having a jazz composition recorded, as Jackie McLean found out when he looked into suing Miles Davis for the composer credit to "Dig."

Two Big Joe Turner songs, the familiar "Wee Baby Blues" and the less familiar "Last Goodbye Blues" are also included, as is a song by drummer Armand "Jump" Jackson, "Teenage Kiss," which sounds more as though it would be given to Frankie Lymon than a fortyish blues singer, and in fact it does give King Curtis room for some hot rhythm and blues honking on the tenor. All in all, it's a fine outing for Stidham, especially if you don't listen to the words too closely, and you really don't have to. I once had a friend who told me that she loved the blues, but she really never listened to the words. I said. "That's like loving Rubens but not noticing the nudes." She said, "I do that too."

The others are all Stidham originals, including a remake of "My Heart Belongs to You," here retitled

"My Heart Will Always Belong to You." Stidham, for a latecomer to the guitar, sure knows how to play the blues on it. And as a veteran jazzman, he knows how to coordinate his blues with a couple of jazz greats. I've picked "You Can't Live in this World by Yourself" as my "Listen to One" because it shows off all of the above -- Stidham as songwriter, guitar player and blues singer, some nice ensemble work by Wright and Curtis.

And for a bonus, if you click through to the YouTube video, it's accompanied by some amazing street photographs -- by whom, I don't know.

Ozzie Cadena produced. The album came out on Bluesville, titled Tired of Wandering.



Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes 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

Listening to Prestige 390: John Wright

How does one get a recording contract? Or how did one, back in the day? John Wright was playing a gig in his native Chicago. There was a Sunday jam session at a club near the hotel where most of the touring big bands stayed, and players from the Hampton or Ellington band, or whatever band was passing through Chicago, would come and jam. After one of these sessions,

a fellow walked in and said, “I’m from New York, I’m a hiring man for one of the companies in New York, and I’ve got a spot for you. Would you like to come to New

York and record?” Well, I’ve heard of Prestige Records and Riverside, Coral, and Blue Note, those were the most prestigious jazz records back in the day. Quite naturally, I said yes. So, he gave me a plane ticket and $500. In August 1960, I went to New York City and that’s where I got to record five albums on Prestige Records.

Why not? Wright brought his regular trio with him, and he brought a breath of Chicago with him--not the breath that was hog butcher to the world, but the one that came out of the jazz clubs on the South Side.  As Wright ran it down in a later interview, the album

...was talking about the streets of Chicago; South Side Soul; Sin Corner (Sin Corner was about every corner); Amen Corner (Amen Corner was the churches); 63th and Cottage Grove; 35th Street Blues, 47th Street (47th street was a red-light district) and LaSalle Street was the financial district. The blocks on State Street, Wentworth, and Cottage Grove, were always storefront churches. It was about two or three storefront churches in every block.

One might expect such a thematic album to be entirely self=composed, but such is not the case.

Wright takes composing credit for the red light district and "63rd and Cottage Grove." bandmate Wendell Roberts contributes the "35th Street Blues" and the "Amen Corner." The financial district after hours and the sin corner were the product of another composer, and an understandable pairing, since who knows what goes on in the financial district of a large metropolis after hours, especially in those days, when the big brokerage offices were macho central? The composer was Armand "Jump" Jackson, a jazz and rhythm and blues drummer and all-around entrepreneur and impresario. "South Side Soul," which became the album's title, Wright's signature song, and part of his name--from then on he was John "South Side Soul" Wright, appears not to have been written by a Chicagoan at all. Composer credit goes to producer Esmond Edwards, and since Edwards did not make a regular habit of slapping his name on other people's compositions, it seems likely that the credit was deserved.

By the end of the 1950s, Chicago had started to make a significant name for itself as the home of the electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but Wright was making South Side soul of a different sort, the kind of piano trio jazz that Chess Records songwriter-producer Willie Dixon started out in, and that Ahmad Jamal was making in the more upscale part of the city.

But if Wright wasn't making quite the kind of hard-edged blues that Chess artists like Otis Spann were making, his South Side sound was funkier and bluesier than the uptown jazz of Jamal. The blues penetrate every note he plays, and it makes for some very good listening.

Wendell Roberts and Walter McCants are South Siders who remained part of the Chicago scene without making broader waves in the jazz world, but they know about the blues and provide sympathetic support to Wright. McCant's son Nolan has made a name for himself as a photographer.

"Sin Corner" and "Amen Corner" were released as a 45 RPM single.