Musician from the United States
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17 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
5 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
3 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
2 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
2 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
2 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
2 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
3 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
2 episodes with Illinois Jacquet
The Trombone Corner Podcast is brought to you by Bob Reeves Brass and The Brass Ark. Come watch the Los Angeles Brass Alliance (LAB-A) at 7PM on May 4th at Glendale First baptist Church for their second installation of Next Up! This free concert (generously sponsored by Bob Reeves Brass) spotlights LAB-A's annual collaboration between emerging LA-based composers and brass musicians. Learn more at: www.labrassalliance.org. Join hosts Noah and John as they interview Michael Dease, commercial trombonist from Los Angeles. About Michael: Michael Dease is one of the world's eminent trombonists, lending his versatile sound and signature improvisations to over 200 recordings and groups as diverse as Grammy winning artists David Sanborn, Christian McBride, Michel Camilo, and Alicia Keys. Born in Augusta, GA, he played the saxophone and trumpet before choosing the trombone at age 17. In 2001, Dease moved to New York City to become part of the historic first class of jazz students at The Juilliard School, earning both Bachelors and Masters degrees, and quickly established a reputation as a brilliant soloist, sideperson, and bandleader. Best Next Thing (Posi-Tone, 2022), Dease's newest release, his ninth on Posi-Tone, gathers together an assemblage of exceptional musicians to help him interactively explore the essence of the blues and reframe the abstract truths of jazz as the "Best Next Thing "for today's audience of listeners. Dease, the winner of the 69th Annual DownBeat Magazine Poll for Trombonist of the Year and multi-Grammy award winner, is also a sought-after lead, section and bass trombonist with today's leading jazz orchestras. His experiences include bands led by Christian McBride, Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton, Charles Tolliver, Rufus Reid, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band. However, it is on the frontline of quintets and sextets led by master musicians like The Heath Brothers, Winard Harper, Renee Rosnes, Bill Charlap, Claudio Roditi, and Lewis Nash, where Dease has revitalized the trombone's image. Not content to simply improvise, Dease arranges and composes for many different bands, constantly adjusting his tone and timbre to add just the right flavor to the music. Dease's unique blend of curiosity, hard work and optimism has helped him earn worldwide recognition, including awards from ASCAP, The International Trombone Association, Yamaha, Eastern Trombone Workshop, New York Youth Symphony, Hot House Magazine, Michigan State University, among others. Dease was profiled in Cicily Janus' book, The New Face of Jazz: An Intimate Look at Today's Living Legends (Random House). His experience in the studio has led him to produce several recording sessions for emerging artists, often composing and writing liner notes for the releases. Dease's singular talent has made him an effective and prolific teacher, resulting in invitations, master classes and residencies at University of North Texas, Scranton University, University of Iowa, Florida State College, Broward College, and many institutions abroad. He serves as Professor of Jazz Trombone at the renowned Michigan State University jazz program and has also been on faculty at Queens College - CUNY, The New School and North-eastern University. Many of Dease's current and former students are enjoying successful careers in the music world. Always an informed, but forward-thinking musician, Dease learned the craft from trombone legends Wycliffe Gordon and Joseph Alessi. His associations have run the entire spectrum of musical experience: Alicia Keys, Paul Simon, Paul Schaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Elton John, Neal Diamond, Illinois Jacquet, Slide Hampton & The World of Trombones, Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, WDR Big Band, George Gruntz, Billy Harper, and numerous others. Dease enjoys spending every possible minute with his extraordinary wife and Professor of Percussion at MSU, Gwendolyn Dease, and their daughters Brooklyn & Charley. Michael Dease is a Yamaha Performing Artist and uses Pickett Brass and Vandoren mouthpieces exclusively. View Michael's All Music Guide entry here for a partial listing of his sideperson credits and discography.
This episode of The Other Side of the Bell, featuring trumpeter, band leader and iconic plunger mute designer Kenny Rampton, is brought to you by Bob Reeves Brass. This episode also appears as a video episode on our YouTube channel, you can find it here: "Kenny Rampton trumpet interview" About Kenny Rampton: Trumpeter Kenny Rampton grew up in Las Vegas, and studied music at both the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and the Berklee College of Music. In 1989, he moved to New York, where he quickly established his reputation as a versatile musician, touring and performing with a veritable who's who in jazz. Kenny's first road gig was a world tour with The Ray Charles Orchestra. He subsequently went on the road with legendary jazz drummer Panama Francis and The Savoy Sultans, and soon thereafter, with The Jimmy McGriff Quartet. As a sideman, Kenny has also performed with jazz greats Jon Hendricks, Chico OFarrill's Afro-Cuban Jazz Big Band, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Persip and Supersound, Illinois Jacquet, Dr. John, Edy Martinez, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Reuben Wilson, Charles Earland, Tony Monaco, Clark Terry, Slide Hampton, Marcus Roberts, Christian McBride, Geoff Keezer, Richard Bona and a host of others. Kenny Rampton joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis as a full time member in 2010. He also leads his own groups in addition to performing with the Mingus Big Band, The Mingus Orchestra, The Mingus Dynasty, George Gruntz' Concert Jazz Band, and The Manhattan Jazz Orchestra. Kenny is also well known as being the trumpet voice on the legendary Sesame Street. Some of his Broadway credits include "Anything Goes" (lead/solo trumpet), "Finian's Rainbow," "The Wiz," "Chicago: The Musical," "In The Heights," "Hair," "Young Frankenstein," and "The Producers," "The Drowsy Chaperone," "Spamalot," "Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me," "The Wedding Singer," "Hot Feet" and several other shows on Broadway. Finally, in 2020 Kenny started collaborating with Hirschman Mutes to design the innovative KR Indigo plunger mute, which has been a hit ever since its release. In our conversation today, Kenny shares how he got his start growing up in Las Vegas in a family of entertainers. Studying trumpet at the time largely meant classical trumpet, but Kenny soon developed a deep love for jazz. This took him across the country to Berklee, and the rest is history. Kenny tells us what it was like getting a sudden call from Ray Charles to join his orchestra, being on-screen on Sesame Street, and working closely with Wynton Marsalis at the Lincoln Center. And, we learn the story of how he developed the famous KR Indigo plunger mute, in the midst of the pandemic, as not just a useful tool for musicians but a way to stay engaged with the community during that tough time. Kenny Rampton is brimming with inspiration and heart, and it was a pleasure to have him on the podcast today. Podcast listeners! Enter code "podcast" at checkout for 15% off any of our guard bags! Visit trumpetmouthpiece.com for more info. Episode Links: kennyrampton.com National Trumpet Competition YouTube channel International Women's Brass Conference, May 19-24, Hartford, Connecticut. Sign up sheet for valve alignments: bobreeves.com/iwbc International Trumpet Guild Conference, May 27-31, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Sign up sheet for valve alignments: bobreeves.com/itg William Adam Trumpet Festival, June 19-22, Clarksville, Tennessee. Sign up sheet for valve alignments: bobreeves.com/williamadam hirschmanmutes.com Podcast Credits: “A Room with a View“ – composed and performed by Howie Shear Podcast Host – John Snell Audio Engineer – Ted Cragg
JAVON JACKSON “WITH PETER BRADLEY” New York City, 2022Peter Bradley, Amy's Theme, Never Let Me GoJavon Jackson (st) Jeremy Manasia (p) David Williams(b) Charles Goold (dr) guest Greg Glassman (t) KENNY BURRELL “BLUESIN' AROUND” New York, November 21 (1), 28, 1961 The switch (1), Funk junction, The squeeze, How could you, Mood indigo Illinois Jacquet (ts) Hank Jones (p) Kenny Burrell (g) Major Holley (b) Osie Johnson, (d-1) Jimmy Crawford (d) LIAM SILLERY “PRIORITE” Riveredge, N.J., December 17 & 22, 2009 A priori, Remoulade Liam Sillery (tp) Matt Blostein (as) Jesse Stacken (p) Thomas Morgan (b) Vinnie Sperrazza (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 19 de febrero, 2025 at PuroJazz.
JAVON JACKSON “WITH PETER BRADLEY” New York City, 2022Peter Bradley, Amy's Theme, Never Let Me GoJavon Jackson (st) Jeremy Manasia (p) David Williams(b) Charles Goold (dr) guest Greg Glassman (t) KENNY BURRELL “BLUESIN' AROUND” New York, November 21 (1), 28, 1961 The switch (1), Funk junction, The squeeze, How could you, Mood indigo Illinois Jacquet (ts) Hank Jones (p) Kenny Burrell (g) Major Holley (b) Osie Johnson, (d-1) Jimmy Crawford (d) LIAM SILLERY “PRIORITE” Riveredge, N.J., December 17 & 22, 2009 A priori, Remoulade Liam Sillery (tp) Matt Blostein (as) Jesse Stacken (p) Thomas Morgan (b) Vinnie Sperrazza (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 19 de febrero, 2025 at PuroJazz.
Listen to a conversation with Wynton Marsalis, a world-renowned trumpet player, composer, and educator whose artistry and influence span the worlds of jazz and classical music. Marsalis was Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1961. He grew up immersed in the jazz legacy of his hometown. His father, Ellis Marsalis Jr., was a legendary pianist and educator, and his brothers Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason are also acclaimed musicians. A virtuoso in both jazz and classical music, Marsalis was the first musician to win Grammy Awards in both fields in the same year, a feat he achieved in 1984. Marsalis was also the first jazz musician to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. Marsalis has become a global ambassador for jazz, and since 1991, he's served as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Also, hear an interview with the acclaimed Indianapolis jazz saxophonist Rob Dixon. He'll discuss his upcoming tribute to jazz legend John Coltrane “A Love Supreme: 60th Anniversary Tribute”. For Indianapolis music fans, Rob Dixon needs no introduction. He's been called the “musical mayor of Indianapolis”, a reference to his prominent role in the city's music scene. Dixon has worked with many jazz luminaries, including Illinois Jacquet, Mike Clark, and Charlie Hunter. Dixon is also the artistic director of the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation.
We are happy to present our latest Lou Volpe Jazzcast featuring Lou's latest compositions and musical ideas. Our feature song this week is "FROM THE HEART STRINGS" and included is a little story of a Joey Di Francesco recording session where Lou meets the legendary saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet! We think you'll really like this new episode! The tunes: "UP AT MIDNIGHT", "THAT'S TWICE AS NICE", "IT WAS RIGHT HERE & NOW", and "FROM THE HEART STRINGS". © 2024 BMI cosmic consciousness music. Enjoy!
It's the Music Depreciation Show...a 1944 jazz program from the Mutual Broadcasting System, that takes a few pokes at the classical music programs of the era. This episode features Illinois Jacquet, the African-American jazz tenor saxophonist recognized as performing the first R&B saxophone solo. With Herb Jeffries, a long time jazz singer-songwriter and actor, who starred in many Black cowboy movies in the 1930s. More at http://krobcollection.com
LESTER YOUNG – JONES, SMITH INC Chicago, November 9, 1936Lady Be Good, Shoe Shine Boy, Evenin' (JR-vcl), Boogie Woogie (JR-vcl)Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d), Jimmy Rushing (vcl). WOODY HERMAN – 1937-1938 (CHRONOLOGICAL) The Band That Plays The Blues – New York, October 25 & November 23, 1937I double dare you, My fine feathered friend, I wanna be in Winchell's column, Loch Lomond Clarence Willard, Kermit Simmons (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) And His Orchestra – New York, June 8, 1938Laughing boy blues, Lullaby in rhythm Clarence Willard, Malcolm Crain (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Deane Kincaide (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Bruce Wilkins (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Woody Herman Sonny Skylar (vcl) And His Orchestra – New York, December 22, 1938Indian boogie woogieIrving Goodman, Clarence Willard, Jerry Neary (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Joe Estren, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Hy White (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Mary Martin (vcl) ILLINOIS JACQUET – COLUMBIA SMALL GROUP SWING SESSIONS 1953-62 New York, February 5, 1962 & March 28, 1962Satin doll, Ydeen, Banned in Boston, Indiana, Reverie (ij vcl;re,cd out)Ernie Royal, Roy Eldridge (tp) Matthew Gee (tb) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis o Leo Parker (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith o Kenny Burrell (g) Jimmy Rowser (b) Jimmy Crawford o Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Mundy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) Continue reading Puro Jazz 12 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.
LESTER YOUNG – JONES, SMITH INC Chicago, November 9, 1936Lady Be Good, Shoe Shine Boy, Evenin' (JR-vcl), Boogie Woogie (JR-vcl)Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d), Jimmy Rushing (vcl). WOODY HERMAN – 1937-1938 (CHRONOLOGICAL) The Band That Plays The Blues – New York, October 25 & November 23, 1937I double dare you, My fine feathered friend, I wanna be in Winchell's column, Loch Lomond Clarence Willard, Kermit Simmons (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) And His Orchestra – New York, June 8, 1938Laughing boy blues, Lullaby in rhythm Clarence Willard, Malcolm Crain (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Deane Kincaide (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Bruce Wilkins (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Woody Herman Sonny Skylar (vcl) And His Orchestra – New York, December 22, 1938Indian boogie woogieIrving Goodman, Clarence Willard, Jerry Neary (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Joe Estren, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Hy White (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Mary Martin (vcl) ILLINOIS JACQUET – COLUMBIA SMALL GROUP SWING SESSIONS 1953-62 New York, February 5, 1962 & March 28, 1962Satin doll, Ydeen, Banned in Boston, Indiana, Reverie (ij vcl;re,cd out)Ernie Royal, Roy Eldridge (tp) Matthew Gee (tb) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis o Leo Parker (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith o Kenny Burrell (g) Jimmy Rowser (b) Jimmy Crawford o Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Mundy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) Continue reading Puro Jazz 12 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.
First sessions by the Illinois Jacquet Orchestra in 1945 while he was between engagements with Cab Calloway and Count Basie . .eight piece band with his brother Russell on trumpet, Henry Coker or Vic Dickenson on trombone, John Brown on alto, Arthur Dennis on bari, Tom Archia occasionally playing tenor, Sir Charles Thompson on piano, Ulysses Livingston on guitar and Charles Mingus on bass with vocals by Russell and Wynonie Harris . .the focus is on the fleet and inventive tenor playing of the leader with a minimum of the showboating for which he was often criticized --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support
durée : 00:59:25 - Un peu d'amour - par : Nathalie Piolé -
Great band straddling swing, bop and R&B, all featuring the Texas tenor, Illinois Jacquet with his brother Russell and Joe Newman on trumpets, J.J. Johnson and Henry Coker on trombones, Ray Perry on alto, Leo Parker and Maurice Simon on baritones, John Lewis and Sir Charles Thompson on piano, John Collins on guitar, Al Lucas on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support
Starting off Season 2 in 2024 with an episode featuring trombonist, educator, and composer James Burton III! We delved into James' trombone origin story, exploring his musical evolution across various music institutions and alongside legends like Illinois Jacquet to his professional stints on Broadway and in the broader music scene. Beyond his illustrious career, we explored his impactful role as an educator at Juilliard and beyond. Our Q&A session also featured insightful inquiries about setups, what James' has been listening to recently, and the prospect of relocating to NYC to pursue a career in music. This is THE episode to catch if you've ever been curious about what goes into a vibrant music career in NYC! Don't know much about James? Let's catch you up: “Trombonist, composer, arranger James Burton III has lent his sound to multiple Grammy Award-winning albums and Tony Award-winning Broadway productions. Born in Queens, now a resident of Harlem, Burton III is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the Jackie McLean Institute at the Hartt School of Music. While earning his Master's Degree and Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School, Burton held both the Morse and Gluck Fellowships and received the Schuman Prize, an award named for Juilliard's founding president and given to one graduating Masters Degree candidate annually.Burton got his professional start playing with many of the great large ensembles; the Illinois Jacquet Big Band, the Dizzy Gillespie All Stars, the Lincoln Center and Vanguard Jazz Orchestras etc. Additionally, the opportunity to perform/record with legends Jimmy Heath, Slide Hampton, Ron Carter and Christian McBride inspired Burton to co-found a 10-piece ensemble called the Uptown Jazz Tentet, which celebrated the release of a second album in late 2020, to much critical acclaim. Currently, Burton's playing and original compositions can be heard alongside band mates Jeremy Pelt and Wayne Escoffery in a dynamic new ensemble; Black Art Jazz Collective. BAJC has released three albums since its inception, the latest two reaching the #1 position on the JazzWeek Charts for international radio play. In the model of jazz education pioneer Jackie McLean, Burton is an avid educator and has been a full time associate professor at both the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music as well as Director of Jazz Education at New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Burton continues to pass on the legacy of the music via master classes, ensemble coachings and workshops for arts education institutions across the globe.” Our next live episode will be during the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, later this month and will feature special guest Trent Austin! Stay tuned for airing date and time details by following our social media channels and checking our newsletters. For more insights and updates, be sure to follow us on Instagram: James Burton III's Instagram Virtuosity Musical Instruments' Instagram J. Landress Brass' Instagram You can also explore more about our businesses on our websites: Virtuosity Musical Instruments' Website J. Landress Brass' Website Happy listening, friends!
Good News: A Canadian millionaire is using his wealth to build a tiny home community for the homeless in his area, Link HERE. The Good Word: A lovely reminder about our state of mind and contentment, from Martha Washington. Good To Know: An odd historical fact about an Irish admiral… Good News: Some great progress […]
Tonight's show: Erskine Hawkins & and His Orchestra, Illinois Jacquet, Artie Shaw, Zoot Sims, Lou Levy Trio, Mundell Lowe And His All Stars, Gil Evans, Horace Parlan, Elek Bacsik, Kenny Burrell, and Buddy Collette.
Au programme de ce mercredi 29 mars dans la tranche information de So good Radio: un accord trouvé entre l'Europe et l'Allemagne sur l'interdiction de la vente de véhicules thermiques neufs d'ici 2035, avec l'analyse du chercheur Cédric Carles; en Angleterre, le chœur de chambre professionnel des BBC Singers sauvé de l'austérité; et enfin, au Brésil, 30 % des postes de hauts fonctionnaires bientôt reservés aux personnes noires et métisses.Et chaque jour, en plus de votre fil info feel good, retrouvez L'appel du good avec Émilie de l'association La société Saint-Vincent-de-Paul qui vient en aide aux plus préciaires, Le peigne dans l'maillot, la formule secrète pour s'endormir un peu moins con consacrée aux bienfaits méconnus des légumineuses, et enfin, la chanson qui va bien avec Sophia de Illinois Jacquet. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
Il y a dans le Bronx à New York, un cimetière gigantesque baptisé Woodlawn. Ce dernier, qui s'étend sur 160 hectares, soit la moitié de la taille de Central Park, abrite les dépouilles de 300 personnes. Parmi elles, une grosse poignée de célébrités notoires telles Coleman Hawkins, Celia Cruz, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Illinois Jacquet, Tito Puente, Otto Preminger, Joseph Pulitzer, Max Roach et Miles Davis. Sur l'imposante pierre tombale de ce dernier, une trompette et les deux premières mesures de « Solar », célèbre composition du trompettiste dont il n'est pourtant pas à l'origine… Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
Después del semi descanso navideño Los Tres Tenores vuelven a sus puestos para seguir dando la nota…y bien dada. ADIVINA PELÍCULA. Mari Trini. AMORES. SAN TORAL. Illinois Jacquet – HARLEM NOCTURNE. The Cavendish Orchestra. QUINTA de BEETHOVEN. Andante. CELEBRACIONES. Micki. EL CHICO DE LA ARMÓNICA. Sonny Rollins – NO MOE. EFEMÉRIDES. Patricia Janeckova. ÉRASE UNA […] The post Los Tres Tenores 11/01/2023 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.
Sein Solo über Lionel Hamptons "Flying Home" machte ihn berühmt: Illinois Jacquets Improvisation war so gelungen, dass andere große Saxofonisten es Note für Note nachspielten. Seine Popularität nutzte er, um gegen die Rassentrennung zu protestieren.Von Karl Lippegauswww.deutschlandfunk.de, KalenderblattDirekter Link zur Audiodatei
Hello everyone, This is Mirko Guerrini, and I welcome you to the Jazz Transcription Clinic LIVE. On this episode of the Jazz Transcription Clinic Podcast Live, there is another solo to practise for the series 'Practice with Jazz Giants', where I will practise some of my solo transcriptions. You can play with me and practise with the Jazz Giants. To download this solo and other solos, please visit: https://mirkoguerrini.com/transcriptions/ I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this podcast is being recorded. I pay my respect to their Elders, past and present, and the Aboriginal Elders of other communities who may be here today. Please Subscribe to my YouTube Channel You can download this podcast episode or any other episode here: Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../jazz..... Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1oQqf6m... Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/.../8b6f521b... Background music is 'Se solo tornerai' by Mirko Guerrini. Mirko Guerrini is a D'Addario artist. DISCLAIMER Copyrighted music is here used exclusively for nonprofit educational purposes. My sole aim with this video is to teach how to transcribe solos for personal study and development on one's own musical instrument.
On tonight's broadcast, swing era and the 1950s: Cab Calloway, Fats Waller with Jack Teagarden & Eddie Condon, Louis Armstrong, Quintette du Hot Club de France, Sammy Price And His Bluesicians, Ella Fitzgerald, Shorty Rogers, Oscar Peterson, Illinois Jacquet, Ernie Wilkins And His Orchestra, Bobby Hackett, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.
On tonight's broadcast, swing era and the 1950s: Cab Calloway, Fats Waller with Jack Teagarden & Eddie Condon, Louis Armstrong, Quintette du Hot Club de France, Sammy Price And His Bluesicians, Ella Fitzgerald, Shorty Rogers, Oscar Peterson, Illinois Jacquet, Ernie Wilkins And His Orchestra, Bobby Hackett , and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.
Hello everyone, This is Mirko Guerrini, and I welcome you to the Jazz Transcription Clinic LIVE, a variation of the monthly interview podcast where we talk with accomplished jazz doctors about their lives, careers and personal transcription secrets. On this episode of the Jazz Transcription Clinic Podcast Live, I am analysing my transcription of the song Blues in Louisiana, as played by Illinois Jacquet on the video you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5agdkunK0z8 I am talking through the entire solo and explaining some of the strategies and ideas employed by Illinois Jacquet. I also elaborate on some of the most iconic blues idioms, from growling to scoops, falls etc. I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this podcast is being recorded. I pay my respect to their Elders, past and present, and the Aboriginal Elders of other communities who may be here today. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel. You can download this podcast episode or any other episode here: Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../jazz..... Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1oQqf6m... Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/.../8b6f521b... Background music is 'On the scratchy side of the street' from the album 'Mirko Guerrini e i Diavoli del Ritmo'. DISCLAIMER Copyrighted music is here used exclusively for nonprofit educational purposes. My sole aim with this video is to teach how to transcribe solos for personal study and development on one's own musical instrument.
durée : 01:55:23 - Retour de plage du mardi 23 août 2022 - par : Laurent Valero - Retour de plage aujourd'hui nous repassera le standard autour d'un thème décliné sur deux versions, l'une instrumentale, l'autre chantée. Seront convoqués Illinois Jacquet, Martial Solal, Clarence Carter, Virginie Teychené, Michel Grallier ... - réalisé par : Antoine Courtin
Tonight on Jazz After Dark: Coleman Hawkins with Thelma Carpenter, Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra, Count Basie, Cannonball Adderley, Peter Appleyard & Orchestra, Paul Gonsalves, Ray Charles, Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Rich, Chico Hamilton Lowell George, Houston Person (Etta Jones vocals), and New Orleans' Own The Dukes of Dixieland.
Rock Around The Blog perehtyy rockin alkuperäiseen syntiseen soolosoittimeen, saksofoniin. Fonin historiasta ja merkityksestä keskustelevat esimerkkien kautta Sami Ruokangas ja Pauli Kauppila. Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7BWy6mVuUy2kTC7RmJOwJ4?si=59fbe075c83b4a01 Muista myös RATB:n FB: facebook.com/RockAroundTheBlogFinland/ Tämän jakson menossa ovat mukana Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rolling Stones, Blues Live!, Adolphe Sax, Illinois Jacquet, Bill Haley And His Comets, Rudy Pompilli, Lee Allen, Phil Alvin, Dave Alvin, The Blasters, Jim Campilongo, Fabulous Thunderbirds, Gene Taylor, GA-20, Hound Dog Taylor, The HouseRockers, Alligator Records, Bruce Iglauer, Professor Longhair, Alvin ”Red” Tyler, Dr. John, Earl Palmer, Robert Parker, Charles Burbank, Charles Burbeck, Bobby Keys, Eric Clapton, Earl Bostic, Charlie Christian, Mickey Spillane, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Ennio Morricone, Pink Floyd, Neville Brothers, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Art Neville, Charles Neville, Aaron Neville, Cyril Neville, Bob Dylan, Tony Hall, Keith Richards, Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, The Meters, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Royal Southern Brotherhood, Matt Schofield, David Bowie, Donny McCaslin, Maria Schneider, Tony Visconti, Ziggy Stardust, Alice Cooper, Arthur Brown, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Screamin´ Jay Hawkins, King Diamond, John Fogerty, Sam ”The Man” Taylor, Charlie Haden Quartet West, Liberation Music Orchestra, Humphrey Bogart, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler, Chet Baker, Ernie Watts, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, James Brown, Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley, Marvin Gaye, Los Lobos, Steve Berlin, Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Supertramp, UFO, Michael Schenker, Paul Chapman, Paul Raymond, Neil Carter, Gary Moore, Bobby Womack, The Dirty Dozens Brass Band, Sakari Kukko, Piirpauke, Van Der Graaf Generator, Tom Waits, Clarence Clemons, Deep Purple ja Billy Joel.
ILLINOIS JACQUET AND HIS ORCHESTRA – New York, March 28, 1962 Ydeen-O, Banned in Boston Roy Eldridge (tp) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith (g) George Duvivier (b) Jo Jones (d) – New York, May 21, 1962 How now ?, Stella by starlight, Imagination (re,mg,cp out) Roy Eldridge (tp) […]
"Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" King Pleasure: King Pleasure Sings ¿Sabías que? Clarence Beeks nació el 24 de marzo de 1922. Se le conoció artísticamente como King Pleasure. Aunque nació en Oakdale, Tennessee, trabajó de joven en diversos trabajos en Cincinatti, hasta que a mediados de los años 40 se traslada a Nueva York para trabajar como camarero. En esa época se transformó en un gran aficionado al BeBop. Era un aficionado a cantar. En 1951 ganó un torneo de cantantes aficionados en Harlem cantando en el estilo que se conoce como vocalese sobre la versión de James Moody del tema "I'm In The Mood For Love". En 1952 graba para Prestige y obtiene un gran éxito. Sirvió para popularizar el estilo vocalese, que Eddie Jefferson llevaba practicando desde los años 40. Se especializó en trabajar a partir de solos de saxofonistas. Puso letra a solos de Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Stan Getz o Illinois Jacquet. En 1956 se instaló en la Cosa Oeste, donde actuó puntualmente. En 1960 es redescubierto y graba de nuevo antes de desaparecer nuevamente de la escena musical. Aunque falleció en 1982, sus últimas grabaciones datan de principios de los años 70. Kuto se inspiró en la versión que hizo King Pleasure de "Parker's Mood" para el homenaje a Charlie Parker en su centenario: https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=52075 El 9 de abril de 2022 se inaugurará la exposición Jean Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure. aunque no está dedicada específicamente a este cantante. "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" está basado en un solo de Lester Young en este tema. © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos/Tomajazz Remembers… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=62200 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=61576 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=47859 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=59944 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=60399 Más información sobre King Pleasure https://www.allmusic.com/artist/king-pleasure-mn0000077662 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?s=king+pleasure&submit=Search Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. Las sugerencias, quejas, felicitaciones, opiniones y el contacto en general en jazzx5 @ tomajazz.com También por WhatsApp en el teléfono de contacto. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847
Shellac Stack No. 261 cleans out a few crates of “junk records” from the back of the garage and discovers some interesting things. Bob Eberly sings Elvis! Glenn Miller's Artie Malvin tackles Buddy Holly! We've got hot western swing from the Plainsmen, sophisticated jazz from Illinois Jacquet and Dick Hyman, and rockabilly from George Jones. … Continue reading »
When the great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson first toured he made a plan, and he stuck to it. Peterson said, “If the only way I was going to make it was to frighten the hell out of everybody pianistically—if that's what it took to get the attention—then that's what I would do my best to do.”Footage of Peterson (1925-2007) making the comment appears in Oscar Peterson: Black + White, a documentary by veteran filmmaker Barry Avrich. The film slightly recasts the great piano virtuoso. During his life, he was well known for his formidable technique and charming, even ebullient presence, but some of his peak came during an era of significant Black empowerment, and the great pianist was occasionally shrugged off as an entertainer rather than a freedom fighter, a blanket charge that even Louis Armstrong faced. But the documentary is corrective, dwelling on Peterson's “Hymn to Freedom,” a song that was important to the Civil Rights movement. This song, and the fact that Peterson's star has faded a bit in the music community since his death in 2007, provided Avrich's motivation in making the film.Oscar Peter: Black + White Trailerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxYywC_4nGsOscar Peterson, Hymn to Freedomhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCrrZ1NnCuMThe great impresario Norman Granz heard him in 1949, brought him to New York, and placed him on his enormously popular Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, which enabled him to play with and alongside many if not most of the jazz legends of the era.Norman Granz (August 6, 1918 – November 22, 2001) was an American jazz record producer and concert promoter. He founded the record labels Clef, Norgran, Down Home, Verve, and Pablo. Granz was acknowledged as "the most successful impresario in the history of jazz". He was also a champion of racial equality, insisting, for example, on integrating audiences at concerts he promoted.Norman Granz opposed racism and fought many battles for his artists, many of whom were black. In 1955, in Houston, Texas, he removed signs that previously designated "White" and "Negro" restrooms, outside the auditorium where two concerts were to be performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. Between the two shows, Fitzgerald and Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet were shooting small-stakes dice in the dressing room to kill time, when the local police barged in and arrested them. After some negotiations, the artists were allowed to perform the second show and later were formally released on $50 bail. Granz, incensed by the incident, insisted on successfully fighting the charges, which cost him over $2,000.Oscar Peterson recounted how Granz once insisted that white cabdrivers take his black artists as customers, while a policeman pointed a loaded pistol at his stomach. Granz also was among the first to pay white and black artists the same salary, and to give them equal treatment even in minor details, such as dressing rooms.Granz also spearheaded the fight to desegregate the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, arguing that it was unfair that black artists could perform on the stages, but could not stay or gamble at the hotels, or even enter through the front doors.Granz was also interested in art, developing a friendship with Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1968.Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118 E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com Commercials Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-1-commercials Narratives Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-2-narrativesDo you want a free competitive analysis? Let me know at:https://marketing.wsiworld.com/free-competitive-analysis?utm_campaign=Mick_Smith_Podcast&utm_source=SpreakerWebsite:https://www.wsiworld.com/mick-smithLinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/wsi-smith-consulting/Make an appointment:https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/mick-smithBe sure to subscribe, like, & review The Doctor of Digital™ Podcast:https://www.spreaker.com/show/g-mick-smith-phds-tracksSign up for the Doctor Up A Podcast course:https://doctor-up-a-podcast.thinkific.com/
Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode, and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single
In deze aflevering praat Co met trompettist en bandleider Lourens van der Zwaag van de Valvetronic Brassband. Ze brachten gisteren hun langverwachte debuutalbum uit: Before the Dawn. Daarnaast hoor je live opnames van Illinois Jacquet op North Sea Jazz. En natuurlijk weer veel nieuwe muziek en vinyl.
In deze aflevering praat Co met trompettist en bandleider Lourens van der Zwaag van de Valvetronic Brassband. Ze brachten gisteren hun langverwachte debuutalbum uit: Before the Dawn. Daarnaast hoor je live opnames van Illinois Jacquet op North Sea Jazz. En natuurlijk weer veel nieuwe muziek en vinyl.
This show has Indie, Hiphop, Country, Rock, a little bit of blues old and new, a Native Roots of Jazz segment featuring Sioux saxophone player Illinois Jacquet and more. Brought to you by Turtle Island Radio and Pantheon Podcasts. Please, during this difficult time when artists can not play to live audiences, if you like the music you hear, go out and buy some of it. :) Tracks on this week's show are: Beatrice Deer - History Skyler Roulette & Arrow C - Despise Twice As Good - Honest I Do Anyma - All My Relations Artson & She-Roze - Heavey Heart Jade Turner - Run Carly Run Ozomatli & J.J. Fad & Lisa Lisa - Fellas Native Roots of Jazz - Illinois Jacquet Illinois Jacquet/Lionel Hampton - Flying Home Illinois Jacquet - Bottoms Up Tiger Tiger - Space Age Indian Electric Religious - Paralyzed Antithesis Crew - 4th Of You Lie Charley Patton - Moon Going Down Snotty Nose Rez Kids - Grave Digger Robert Tree Cody - Stomp Dance The Halluci Nation ft Rob Ruha - Takarita https://tunesfromturtleisland.euhttps://www.facebook.com/tunesfromturtleislandhttps://www.instagram.com/tunes.from.turtle.island/All songs on this podcast are owned by the artist(s) and are used for educational purposes only. All songs can be found for purchase or streaming wherever you get your great music. Please pick up these amazing tracks and support these artists.
This show has Indie, Hiphop, Country, Rock, a little bit of blues old and new, a Native Roots of Jazz segment featuring Sioux saxophone player Illinois Jacquet and more. Brought to you by Turtle Island Radio and Pantheon Podcasts. Please, during this difficult time when artists can not play to live audiences, if you like the music you hear, go out and buy some of it. :) Tracks on this week's show are: Beatrice Deer - History Skyler Roulette & Arrow C - Despise Twice As Good - Honest I Do Anyma - All My Relations Artson & She-Roze - Heavey Heart Jade Turner - Run Carly Run Ozomatli & J.J. Fad & Lisa Lisa - Fellas Native Roots of Jazz - Illinois Jacquet Illinois Jacquet/Lionel Hampton - Flying Home Illinois Jacquet - Bottoms Up Tiger Tiger - Space Age Indian Electric Religious - Paralyzed Antithesis Crew - 4th Of You Lie Charley Patton - Moon Going Down Snotty Nose Rez Kids - Grave Digger Robert Tree Cody - Stomp Dance The Halluci Nation ft Rob Ruha - Takarita https://tunesfromturtleisland.eu https://www.facebook.com/tunesfromturtleisland https://www.instagram.com/tunes.from.turtle.island/ All songs on this podcast are owned by the artist(s) and are used for educational purposes only. All songs can be found for purchase or streaming wherever you get your great music. Please pick up these amazing tracks and support these artists.
durée : 01:00:08 - Le jazz sur France Musique - par : Nathalie Piolé - La playlist jazz de Nathalie Piolé. - réalisé par : Fabien Fleurat
Our featured performer tonight is Tommy Flanagan, mellow jazz pianist whose recording career spanned more than four decades with his own band, as sideman on countless albums, and as the primary accompanist to Ella Fitzgerald for over a decade. We'll hear the Tommy Flanagan Trio; Tommy Flanagan with Paul Chambers, Pepper Adams, Kenny Burrell & Kenny Clarke. Then playing with the Benny Golson Quartet, Illinois Jacquet, Benny Carter, and backing Ella Fitzgerald.
“BREWS, POURS And SIPS” From AmericaOnCoffee sharing eventful happenings
Jazz At The Hollywood Bowl by Various; Art Tatum; Buddy Rich; Ella Fitzgerald; Flip Phillips; Harry Edison; Herb Ellis; Illinois Jacquet; Louis Armstrong And His Orchestra; Oscar Peterson; Ray Brown; Roy Eldridge; The Oscar Peterson Trio Verve Records (2610 058) Publication date 1958 Topics Jazz Digitizing sponsor Kahle-Austin Foundation Contributor Internet Archive Language English Tracklist: Disc 1: 1. Honeysuckle Rose - Harry Edison; Flip Phillips; Illinois Jacquet; Roy Eldridge; Oscar Peterson; Herb Ellis; Ray Brown; Buddy Rich 2. I Can't Get Started - Roy Eldridge 3. If I Had You; I've Got The World On A String - Harry Edison 4. Jumpin' At The Woodside - Illinois Jacquet; Harry Edison; Roy Eldridge 5. Drum Solo - Buddy Rich 6. How About You - The Oscar Peterson Trio Disc 2: 1. Someone To Watch Over Me - Art Tatum 2. Begin The Beguine - Art Tatum 3. Willow Weep For Me - Art Tatum 4. Humoresque - Art Tatum 5. Love For Sale - Ella Fitzgerald 6. Just One Of Those Things - Ella Fitzgerald 7. Little Girl Blue - Ella Fitzgerald 8. Too Close For Comfort - Ella Fitzgerald 9. I Can't Give You Anything But Love - Ella Fitzgerald 10. Airmial Special - Ella Fitzgerald 11. You Won't Be Satisfied - Ella Fitzgerald; Louis Armstrong And His Orchestra 12. Undecided - Ella Fitzgerald; Louis Armstrong And His Orchestra 13. When The Saints Go Marching In Pinterest --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stringer5/support
Welcome to the Digging Deeper Jazz Podcast. This podcast was originally released on July 13th, 2018 on the Jeff Antoniuk - Educator YouTube channel. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel and feel free to enjoy the video version as well.FOR ALL INSTRUMENTS !In episode #57, we talk about an issue Jeff talked to Michael Brecker about - how to get what we are currently working on to come out in our playing and soloing. It's a huge issue, and we have a powerful exercise to offer you. We also play some blues, and use a cool Illinois Jacquet lick!Mentioned in this podcast:• www.JazzWire.net - Since we announced JazzWire back in 2017, it has become an incredible Community of hundreds of adult musicians from over 25 different countries around the world. If you are looking for a plan for your practice, regular insights and wisdom on playing jazz, and a huge COMMUNITY of jazz players from around the world, this is the place for you! • Digging Deeper Jazz - All of the DDJ episodes include a pdf. Just write us at diggingdeeperjazz@gmail.com, and we'll offer you the pdfs in bundles of 50, or all 200 for a discount! We will also put you on the list to receive each new pdf, weekly. Amazing practice ideas, every week, for free. What's not to love!?
Welcome to a new edition of the Neon Jazz interview series with Veteran New York Jazz Trombonist Matt Haviland .. We talked to him on June 26, 2020 during the COVID-19 world of no live jazz about his latest 2020 CD Something to Say…Over the years, he has performed with some of the top names in jazz and popular music like Illinois Jacquet, The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Blood Sweat & Tears, Mingus Big Band, Deodato, and Lionel Hampton, and toured Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, the Caribbean, and across the US. Get to know him and dig this interview.Click here to listen.Neon Jazz is a radio program airing since 2011. Hosted by Joe Dimino and Engineered by John Christopher in Kansas City, Missouri giving listeners a journey into one of America's finest inventions. Take a listen on KCXL (102.9 FM / 1140 AM) out of Liberty, MO. Listen to KCXL on Tunein Radio at http://tunein.com/radio/Neon-Jazz-With-Joe-Dimino-p381685/. You can now catch Neon Jazz on KOJH 104.7 FM out of the Mutual Musicians Foundation from Noon - 1 p.m. CST Monday-Friday at https://www.kojhfm.org/. Check us out at All About Jazz @ https://kansascity.jazznearyou.com/neon-jazz.php. For all things Neon Jazz, visit http://theneonjazz.blogspot.com/
Barry Danielian is one of the most in demand trumpeters and arrangers in NYC, having recorded on over 400 CD’s. Barry’s music is used throughout the television and media industry. His touring and recording credits include diverse artists such as: Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Jay-Z, Tony Bennett, Sting, Tower of Power, Queen Latifah, Eddie Palmieri, Blood, Sweat & Tears, KRS One, Branford Marsalis, Paul Simon, Tito Puente, James Taylor, Billy Joel, McCoy Tyner, Illinois Jacquet, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, & The Roots. In 2016, Barry was accepted in the MSTOM program at PCOM-NY, maintaining a 3.70 GPA while continuing a busy music career. In 2020, he was one of 3 recipients of the NuHerbs Scholarship. Barry is also a lifelong Martial Artist, training and competing in Boxing, Muaythai and Grappling for decades. He is a certified instructor in Pekiti Tirsia Kali (Filipino Martial Arts) and Silat Kuntau Tekpi (Malaysian Martial Arts). Head on over to the https://qiological.com/learning-from-heart (show notes page) for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview.
"Swing dance" is a group of dances that developed with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s-1950s, the origin of the dances predating popular "swing era" music. The most well-known of these dances is Lindy Hop, a fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway, and Charleston, which originated in Harlem in the early 1920s, but includes a number of other styles such as Balboa, Shag, West Coast Swing, and Boogie Woogie. “Sunday Swing” highlights the music of the swing era and the dances that thrived in the ballrooms and dance halls. Danny Lane guides you through a one hour swing session. Do the Lindy Hop or choose your favorite dance. Just keep swingin'. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 ***** or by email at: dannymemorylane@gmail.com ***** ***** You’ll hear: 1) Here We Go Again by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 2) A-Tisket A-Tasket by Patti Austin (with The WDR Big Band [A German Band]) 3) On Green Dolphin Street by Chuck Sagle & His Orchestra 4) Flying Home by Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra [with Illinois Jacquet, tenor sax solo] 5) Sportsman's Mambo by Bill Elliott Swing Orchestra 6) I Can't Give You Anything But Love by Louis Armstrong 7) Oh! Lady Be Good by Count Basie & His Orchestra 8) The Dipsy Doodle by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra (with Edythe Wright, vocal) 9) In the Groove At the Grove by Chick Webb 10) Bluebirds in the Moonlight by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra (with Mildred Bailey, vocal) 11) Bandstand Boogie by Les Elgart And His Orchestra 12) Take The "A" Train by The Delta Rhythm Boys 13) Honeysuckle Rose by Jazz At The Philharmonic Allstars 14) Hey Pachuco! by Royal Crown Revue 15) Jazzocracy by Jimmie Lunceford 16) When I Get Low I Get High by Ella Fitzgerald & Chick Webb and His Orchestra 17) Davenport Blues by Adrian Rollini & His Orchestra 18) Rockin' In Rhythm by Duke Ellington
On this edition of the MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM, we look at Big Band era stars whose careers extended into the 50s and beyond, interviews and music of Tex Beneke and Margret Whiting and a historic recording by "Illinois" Jacquet plus a whole lot more swing and jazz!
Sintonía: "Swing Shift" - Jimmy Giuffre "Lover Come Back to Me" - Lester Young; "Lestorian Mode" - Brew Moore; "Concentration" - Gene Ammons; "These Foolish Things" - Stan Getz; "One for Prez" - Wardell Gray; "Jane´s Bounce" - Allen Eager; "Coop´s Solo" - Bob Cooper; "Port of Rico" - Illinois Jacquet; "Passport to Pimlico" - Herbie Steward; "Ain´t Nothin´ Much" - Budd Johnson; "Sweet and Lovely" - Dexter Gordon; "Let´s Get Away From It" - Al Cohn; "Don´t Worry About Me" - Zoot Sims; "Out of Nowhere" - Henri Renaud; "I´m Shooting High" - Warne Marsh; "Fine and Dandy" - Sonny Stitt Escuchar audio
Guaranteed to get you out of that “lockdown funk” - The Swingin’ With Danny Lane series highlights the music of the swing era and the dances that thrived in the ballrooms and dance halls. Danny Lane guides you through a two hour swing session. Do the Lindy Hop or choose your favorite dance. Just keep swingin'. You’ll hear: 1) Carioca by Artie Shaw & His Orchestra 2) Mr. Zoot Suit by Ingrid Lucia & The Flying Neutrinos 3) Sugar Foot Stomp by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra 4) Drop Me Off in Harlem by Louis Armstrong 5) Little Brown Jug by The American Patrol Orchestra 6) Shoo-Shoo Baby by The Andrews Sisters 7) 9:20 Special by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra 8) Stray Cat Strut by Brian Setzer & The Stray Cats 9) Minor Blues by Django Reinhardt and His Orchestra of The Ox On The Roof 10) Massachusetts by Gene Krupa Band (w/ Anita O'Day, Vocal) 11) Celery Stalks At Midnight by Bradley Band 12) 'Tain't What You Do (It's The Way That You Do It) by Billy May 13) Broadway by Count Basie 14) Alright, Okay, You Win by Bette Midler 15) Hot Lips ("When He Plays Jazz He's Got - Hot Lips") by Henry Busse and the Shuffle Rhythm Band 16) Hey Boy, Hey Girl by Oscar McLollie & Jeanette Baker (w/ The Honey Jumpers) 17) The Flat Foot Floogie by Slim & Slam (Slam Stewart & Slim Gaillard & His Flat Foot Floogie Boys) 18) Swing Lover by Indigo Swing (w/ Johnny Boyd, vocal) 19) C Jam Blues by The Sarasota Jazz Project (w/ Luke Jones, trumpet solo; George McLain, sax; and Rodney Rojas, alto sax) 20) Jackie Robinson (Brooklyn Dodgers) - Radio Call Bob Wolff 21) Here We Go Again by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 22) A-Tisket A-Tasket by Patti Austin and The WDR Big Band 23) On Green Dolphin Street by Chuck Sagle & His Orchestra 24) Flying Home by Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra [w/ Illinois Jacquet, tenor sax solo] 25) I Can't Give You Anything But Love by Louis Armstrong 26) Oh! Lady Be Good by Count Basie & His Orchestra 27) The Dipsy Doodle by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra (w/ Edythe Wright, vocal) 28) In the Groove At the Grove by Chick Webb 29) Bluebirds in the Moonlight by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra (w/ Mildred Bailey, vocal) 30) Bandstand Boogie by Les Elgart And His Orchestra 31) Take The "A" Train by The Delta Rhythm Boys 32) Honeysuckle Rose by Jazz At The Philharmonic Allstars 33) Hey Pachuco! by The Royal Crown Revue 34) Jazzocracy by Jimmie Lunceford 35) When I Get Low I Get High by Ella Fitzgerald & Chick Webb and His Orchestra 36) Rockin' In Rhythm by Duke Ellington 37) Davenport Blues by Adrian Rollini & His Orchestra Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com
PROG.Nº 661.- Dos horas para el análisis y repaso a la historia y actualidad que generan esta música americana . Todo en el tono que acostumbra este programa, en dos secciones JAZZ ANIVERSARIO y JAZZ ACTUALIDAD importantes novedades y diferentes canales de comunicación que se ofrecerán al oyente. STANDARD SEMANAL.- “Nature Boy”( Nat King Cole-Frank Sinatra- diana reeves) Hoy tendremos también como todos los fines de mes, el tema que nos ofrece Ezequiel del BAUL DEL JAZZ, con Diana Reeves). JAZZ RECUERDO ANIVERSARIO.- Denzil best-Erroll Garner -Concert By The Sea Denzil DaCosta Best (27 de abril de 1917 - 24 de mayo de 1965) fue un percusionista y compositor estadounidense de jazz nacido en la ciudad de Nueva York. Fue un destacado baterista de bebop en la década de 1950 y principios de 1960. Best nació en la ciudad de Nueva York, en una familia musical de las Indias Occidentales originaria de Barbados . [1] Entrenado en piano, trompeta y bajo, se concentró en la batería a partir de 1943. Entre 1943 y 1944 trabajó con Ben Webster , y posteriormente con Coleman Hawkins (1944–45), Illinois Jacquet (1946) y Chubby Jackson. . El baterista era conocido por sentarse en el Playhouse de Minton . [2] Participó en una grabación con George Shearing en 1948 y fue miembro fundador de su Cuarteto, permaneciendo allí hasta 1952. En 1949 tocó en una grabación con Lennie Tristano y también grabó más tarde con Lee Konitz . En un accidente automovilístico de 1953, se fracturó ambas piernas y se vio obligado a retirarse temporalmente [3] hasta 1954, cuando jugó con Artie Shaw , y luego en un trío con Erroll Garner (1955–57). Best posteriormente jugó con Phineas Newborn , Nina Simone , Billie Holiday y Tyree Glenn , y en 1962 apareció en el primer lanzamiento de Sheila Jordan . Sufrió parálisis después de esto y ya no podía jugar; murió a los 48 años en 1965, después de caerse por una escalera en una estación de metro de la ciudad de Nueva York. Composiciones Best compuso varias canciones conocidas de bebop, incluyendo "Move" (que apareció en un arreglo de John Lewis en las grabaciones seminales de 1949 y 1950 lanzadas en 1957 en el álbum Miles Davis Capitol Records , Birth of the Cool ), "Wee" , "Nothing but D. Best", y "Dee Dee's Dance", y con Thelonious Monk , " Bemsha Swing ". [4] La composición de Best "45 Degree Angle" fue grabada por Herbie Nichols y Mary Lou Williams . Influencia A diferencia de muchos percusionistas bebop, que cargaron el espacio musical con acentos contra el metro prevaleciente y, por lo tanto, crearon intensidad rítmica, Best reanudó el desarrollo legato de Jo Jones . Jugó al ritmo y rara vez usaba acentos fuertes. Tocando de esta manera, no solo fue un modelo para el jazz cool, sino que también influyó en innumerables combos de bar. Best fue conocido por su trabajo con los pinceles : el baterista Jake Hanna dijo que "podría ser el mejor pincel de todos los bateristas", [5] : 117 y Elvin Jones incluyó a Best entre sus tres primeros. [5] : 123 Fue el baterista en la muy popular grabación de Erroll Garner Concert by the Sea , junto con el bajista Eddie Calhoun . STANDARD SEMANAL.- “Nature Boy”( Nat King Cole-Frank Sinatra- diana reeves)-JAZZ RECUERDO ANIVERSARIO.- Denzil best-Erroll Garner -Concert By The Sea.-JAZZ ACTUALIDAD .- Esta semana tendremos a Amadeu Adell Trio Personal Matters.-CARMEN CUESTA-“PEACE OF MIND” JAZZ ACTUALIDAD .- Esta semana tendremos a Amadeu Adell Trio Personal Matters.-CARMEN CUESTA-“PEACE OF MIND” Personal matters trio opus 2 Es el segundo trabajo discográfico del trio valenciano formado por el bateria Pere munuera, Lucas Ibañez en las guitarras y amadeu adell en el contrabajo,bajo eléctrico , y autor de los temas del disco, el cual siguiendo la línea de su anterior trabajo y en forma de suite temática traslada al oyente por diferentes tipos de sonoridades y texturas sonoras que van relatando y describiendo la forma de las 5 piezas musicales basadas en "manías"que son descritas y desarrolladas musicalmente . Para este trabajo además de el trio "personal MATTERS"han colaborado la chelista eridani González,Andrés belmonte en las flautas,Kike Simon en el piano y la voz de payoh soulrebel ,que perfilan los arreglos y dan un toque acústico al carácter más eléctrico del trio. Un disco de jazz contemporáneo abierto al mestizaje sonoro en el que se mezclan sin tapujos las influencias del rock-jazz progresivo,el folk- urbano,la clásica o la world- music con los textos de la escritora Erica Fortuny que nos sitúan y enriquecen el paisaje sonoro
Its not all 78s this time round. Two vinyl pieces of magic from Eatha Kitt from the splendid 1956 LP, 'That bad Earth.' Freddy Randall, part of the post war trad jazz revival in Britain. Illinois Jacquet and his honking and screeching sax. Light classics from Bill Snyder, actually its rather good and laid back 'Chicago Blue.' Roy Fox and his band from 1934. Very brief vocals for Al Bowlly. A cheesey three, notable for the Walter Huston's September Song. Raymond Dance, Hal McIntyre and the banjo of Len Fillis from 1928. Record of the episode the rather naughty and suggestive Tiny Bradshaw. There's more of course.
Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many best-of collections of Doggett’s work available. This one seems to have the best sound quality and is a decent overview of his work. Information for this one comes from all over the place, including Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, and Inkspots.ca Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the fiftieth episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. We’re now ten percent of the way through our story, and also most of the way through 1956. I’m told that when history podcasts hit a big round number, it’s customary for them to do a jumping-on episode, perhaps a “story so far” which covers everything that’s been discussed up to that point, but in brief, so that new listeners can get up to speed. That’s sort of what I’m about to do here. This week, we’re going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first twenty or so episodes of the podcast. We’re going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists, but as stages in the career of a single individual. We’re going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who’d take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard-working competent jobbing player and arranger managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music. While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn’t a completely clean break with the past, and for most of the decades from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing you would want instrumental groups. The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands — the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie orchestra — all of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists. They played clarinet or trombone or piano, they didn’t sing. It was only with the musicians union strikes of the 1940s, which we’ve talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers. But well into the 1960s we’ll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental. Indeed, we probably wouldn’t have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like the Ventures in the US or the Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental records. And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn’t actually consider himself a rock and roll musician. It’s a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys, and it’s called “Honky Tonk”: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”] There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggett, for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz, and soul. There are no books about his life, and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which… has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone’s uncle. Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia, and he moved to New York in his late teens and formed his own band, for which he was the piano player. But in 1938, Lucky Millinder was looking for a new band — the way Millinder worked was that he bought out, and took over the leadership, of existing bands, which then became “the Lucky Millinder Orchestra”. This incarnation of the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, the one that was put together by Doggett before Millinder took the band over, is the one that got a residency at the Savoy after Chick Webb’s band stopped playing there, and like Webb’s band this group was managed by Moe Gale. Doggett stayed on with Millinder as his pianist, and while with the group he appeared with Millinder in the 1938 all-black film Paradise in Harlem, playing on this song: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, “I’ve Got To Put You Down”] Doggett was, from what I can tell, the de facto musical director for Millinder’s band in this period — Millinder was a frontman and occasional singer, but he couldn’t play an instrument and was reliant on the musicians in his band to work the arrangements out for him. Doggett was in the band when Moe Gale suggested that Sister Rosetta Tharpe would work well paired up with Millinder’s main singer, Trevor Bacon, in the same way that Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald had worked well together in the Chick Webb band. Doggett was the pianist during the whole of Tharpe’s time with the Millinder band, and he co-composed, with Millinder, the song that later gave its title to a biography of Tharpe, “Shout! Sister, Shout!”: [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Shout! Sister, Shout!”] If you listen to any of Tharpe’s big band recordings from her time with Millinder, it’s Doggett on the piano, and I strongly suspect it was Doggett who came up with the arrangements. Listen for example to his playing on “Lonesome Road”, another song that the MIllinder band performed on film: [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Lonesome Road”] The Millinder band were pivotal in the move from swing music to R&B, and Doggett was an important part in that move. While he’d left the band before they took on later singers like Wynonie Harris and Ruth Brown, he had helped set the band up to be the kind of band that those singers would feel comfortable in. Doggett was also in the band when they had their biggest hit, a song called “When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)”: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, “When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)”] That’s most notable now for being one of the first recordings of a young trumpeter who was just starting out, by the name of Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was quickly sacked by Millinder, who had a habit of getting rid of musicians before they reached their full potential. I’ve not been able to find out why Doggett left Millinder — whether he was one of those musicians who was sacked, or whether he just wanted to move on to other things — but whatever the reason, it can’t have been anything that put a stain on his reputation, because Doggett remained with Millinder’s manager, Moe Gale. We’ve mentioned Gale before several times, but he was the manager of almost every important black act based in New York in the late thirties and early forties, as well as running the Savoy Club, which we talked about in several of the earliest episodes of the podcast. Gale managed Millinder and Rosetta Tharpe, and also managed the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, and Louis Jordan, and so whenever one of his acts needed a musician, he would tend to find them from his existing pool of talent. And so this is how, straight after leaving Lucky Millinder’s band, Doggett found himself working for another Gale act, the Ink Spots. He joined them as their pianist and arranger, and stayed with them for several years: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “I’ll Get By”] The Ink Spots, if you don’t remember, were a vocal quartet who became the most popular black act of the forties, and who stuck to a unique formula based around Bill Kenny’s high tenor and Hoppy Jones’ low spoken bass. They had hit after hit during the forties with songs that all sound remarkably similar, and in the mid forties those songs were arranged by Bill Doggett. He was with the group for two years — starting with the classic line-up of the group, and staying with them through Charlie Fuqua being drafted and Deek Watson being fired. While he was a sideman rather than a full member of the group, he was important enough to them that he now gets counted in lists of proper members put together by historians of the band. He ended up leaving them less than two weeks before Hoppy Jones died, and during that time he played on fourteen of their hit singles, almost all of them sticking to the same formula they’d used previously, the “top and bottom”: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “Ev’ry Night About This Time”] The different acts managed by Moe Gale all sat in with each other when needed, so for example Trevor Bacon, the male vocalist with Millinder’s band, temporarily joined the Ink Spots when Deke Watson got sick for a few weeks. And so during the times when the Ink Spots weren’t touring, Doggett would also perform with Ella Fitzgerald, who was also managed by Gale. [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Time Alone Will Tell”] And indeed, during the end of Doggett’s time with the Ink Spots, Fitzgerald recorded a number of hit singles with the group, which of course featured Doggett on the piano. That included this one, which later went on to be the basis of “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, which we looked at a few episodes back: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”] Doggett moved over full time to become Ella’s arranger and pianist at some point during the couple of weeks between Deek Watson leaving the Ink Spots and Hoppy Jones dying, in early October 1944, and stayed with her for a couple of years, before moving on to Illinois Jacquet’s band, taking the same role again, in the band that introduced the honking tenor saxophone into R&B, and thus into rock and roll: [Excerpt: Illinois Jacquet, “Doggin’ With Doggett”] He also played on one of the most important records in forties R&B — Johnny Otis’ “Harlem Nocturne”, the first hit for the man who would go on to produce most of the great R&B artists of the fifties: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Harlem Nocturne”] And he also led his own band for a while, the Bill Doggett Octet. They were the ones who recorded “Be-Baba-Leba” with Helen Humes on vocals — the song that probably inspired Gene Vincent to write a very similarly named song a few years later: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, “Be-Baba-Leba”] He then moved on to Louis Jordan’s band full time, and this is where his career really starts. Jordan was another act in Moe Gale’s stable, and indeed just like the Ink Spots he’d had hits duetting with Ella Fitzgerald, who he’d first worked with back in the 1930s in Chick Webb’s band. He was also, as you may remember from earlier episodes, the leader of the most popular R&B group in the late forties and early fifties — the one that inspired everyone from Chuck Berry to Bill Haley. And as with his tenure with the Ink Spots, Doggett was in Jordan’s band during its period of peak commercial success. The timeline for who Doggett played with when, as you can probably tell, is all over the place, because he seemed to be playing with two or three acts at any given time. And so officially, if you look at the timelines, so far as they exist, you see that it’s generally claimed that Bill Doggett joined Louis Jordan in 1949. But I’ve seen interviews with members of Jordan’s organisation that suggest he joined much earlier, but he would alternate with Jordan’s other piano player, Wild Bill Davis. The way they worked, according to Berle Adams, who was involved in Jordan’s management, was that Davis would spend a week on the road as Jordan’s piano player, while Doggett would spend the same week writing arrangements for the group, and then they would swap over, and Doggett would go out on the road while Davis would write arrangements. Either way, after a while, Doggett became the sole pianist for the group, as Davis struck out on his own, and Doggett once again basically became the musical director for one of the biggest bands in the R&B business. Doggett is often credited as the person who rewrote “Saturday Night Fish Fry” into one of Jordan’s biggest hits from its inauspicious original version, though Jordan is credited on the record: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Saturday Night Fish Fry”] During his time with Jordan, Doggett continued playing on records for Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and other artists, but he was paying close attention to Wild Bill Davis, who he had replaced in Jordan’s group. Davis had discovered the possibilities in a new musical instrument, the Hammond organ, and had formed a trio consisting of himself, a guitarist, and a drummer to exploit these possibilities in jazz music: [Excerpt: Wild Bill Davis, “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be”] Doggett was also fascinated by this instrument, especially when hearing it up close, as when Davis rejoined Jordan’s band to record “Tamburitza Boogie”, which had Doggett on piano and Davis on the Hammond organ: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Tamburitza Boogie”] When Doggett left Jordan’s band, he decided to form an organ trio just like Davis’. The only problem was that it was just like Davis’. His group had the same instrumentation, and Doggett and Davis had very similar playing styles. Still, Henry Glover got him a contract with King Records, and he started recording Hammond organ blues tracks in the Davis style: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett Trio, “Big Dog”] Davis and Doggett between them gave the Hammond organ its prominence in the world of jazz, R&B, and soul music. The Hammond organ has an odd image, as most people associate it with the cheesiest sort of light entertainment — certainly for anyone in Britain of the generation older than mine, for example, the name it conjures up is Reggie Dixon, possibly the least funky man ever. But in that part of music which is the intersection of jazz and R&B — the part of music inhabited by Jimmy Smith, Booker T Jones, Ray Charles, Georgie Fame, Billy Preston and others — the Hammond organ has become an essential instrument, used so differently that one might almost compare it to the violin, where the instrument is referred to as a fiddle when it’s played on folk or country songs. And that comes from Davis and Doggett and their almost simultaneous invention of a new style of keyboards for the new style of music that was coming up in the late forties and early fifties. But after a year or two of playing in an organ trio, Doggett decided that he didn’t want to keep making records that sounded so much like the ones Wild Bill Davis was making — he didn’t want to be seen as a copy. And so to vary the style, he decided to take on a honking saxophone player to be the group’s lead instrumentalist, while Doggett would concentrate on providing a rhythmic pad. This lineup of his group would go on to make the record that would make Doggett’s name. “Honky Tonk, Parts 1 and 2” came about almost by accident. As Doggett told the story, his biggest hit started out at a dance in Lima, Ohio on a Sunday night. The group were playing their normal set and people were dancing as normal, but then in between songs Billy Butler, Doggett’s guitarist, just started noodling an instrumental line on his bass strings: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk” intro] This hadn’t been planned — he was just noodling around, as all guitarists will do when given five seconds silence. But the audience started dancing to it, and if you’re in a bar band and the audience is dancing, you keep doing what you’re doing. As Butler was just playing a simple twelve-bar blues pattern, the rest of the group fell in with the riff he was playing, and he started soloing over them: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk” guitar soloing] After three choruses of this, Butler nodded to Clifford Scott, the group’s saxophone player, to take over, and Scott started playing a honking saxophone version of what Butler had been playing: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”, sax] After Scott played through it a few times, he looked over to Doggett to see if Doggett wanted to take a solo too. Doggett shook his head. The song had already been going about five minutes and what Butler and Scott had been playing was enough. The group quickly brought the song to a close using a standard blues outro: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”, outro] And that would have been the end of that. It’s the kind of thing that bar bands have jammed a million times, the sort of thing that if you’re a musician you think nothing of. They laughed at the end of the song, happy that they’d pulled off something that spontaneous and the audience had been OK with it, and carried on with the rest of their planned set. But then, a couple of songs later, someone in the audience came up and asked them if they could play that hot new song they’d been playing before again, not realising it had just been a spur-of-the-moment jam. OK, you give the audience what they want, the band members could remember more or less what they’d been playing, so they played it again. And the crowd went wild. And they played it again. And the crowd went wild again. By the end of the night they’d played that new song, the one they’d improvised based on Billy Butler’s guitar noodling, ten times. Doggett immediately phoned Syd Nathan at King Records, his label, and told him that they had a hit on their hands and needed to get it out straight away. But there was one problem — the song was over five minutes long, and a shellac 78RPM disc, which was still the most popular format for R&B music, could only hold three minutes per side. It would have to be a double-sided record. Nathan hated putting out records where the song continued onto the other side, because the jukebox operators who were his main customers didn’t like them. But he eventually agreed, and Doggett and his band got together in the studio and recorded their new instrumental in a single take. It was released as “Honky Tonk Part One” and part two, and they pressed up five thousand copies in the first week. Those sold out straight away, so the next week they pressed up twelve thousand five hundred copies. Those also sold straight away, and so for the next few weeks they started pressing up a hundred thousand copies a week. The song went to number one on the R&B charts, and became the biggest selling R&B song of 1956, spending thirteen weeks in total at number one — dropping down the charts and then back up again. It also reached number two on the pop charts, an astonishing feat for an R&B instrumental. It became a staple for cover bands, and it was recorded by the obvious instrumental acts like the Ventures and Duane Eddy — and indeed Duane Eddy’s whole style seems to have come from “Honky Tonk” — but by other people you might not expect, like Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Honky Tonk”] The Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Honky Tonk”] And even James Brown: [Excerpt: James Brown, Honky Tonk”] Doggett never had another hit quite as big as “Honky Tonk”, though his next few records, based on the “Honky Tonk” pattern, also made the top five on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Slow Walk”] He had ten more R&B top thirty hits over the course of the 1950s. But Doggett was being promoted as a rock and roll act, and playing bills with other rock and roll stars, and he didn’t really feel comfortable in the rock and roll world. When “Honky Tonk” came out, he was forty years old — by far the oldest of the people who had rock and roll hits in the mid fifties — and he was a jazz organ player, not a Little Richard type. He was also stuck repeating a formula — over the decade after “Honky Tonk” parts one and two he recorded tracks like “Honky Tonk (vocal version)”, “Hippy Dippy”, “Blip Blop”, “Yocky Dock”, and “Honky Tonk Bossa Nova”. His career as a charting artist more or less stopped after 1960, when he made the mistake of asking Syd Nathan if he could have a higher royalty rate, given the millions of dollars his recordings had brought in to King Records, and King dropped him. But it didn’t stop his career as a working musician. In 1962 he teamed up again with Ella Fitzgerald, who wanted to go back to making music with a bit more rhythm than her recent albums of ballads. The resulting album, “Rhythm is my Business”, featured Doggett’s arrangements and Hammond organ very prominently: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Hallelujah I Love Him So”] He also teamed up in 1969 with James Brown, who around that time was trying to pay back his dues to others who’d been artists on King Records when Brown had started with them in the fifties. As well as recording his album “Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things”, Brown had also been producing records for Hank Ballard, and now it was Bill Doggett’s turn. For Doggett, Brown produced and wrote “Honky Tonk Popcorn”: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk Popcorn”] Doggett spent most of the rest of his life touring the oldies circuit, a respected organist who would play hundreds of shows a year, until his death in 1996 aged eighty. He played “Honky Tonk” at every show, saying “I just wouldn’t be Bill Doggett if I didn’t play ‘Honky Tonk’. That’s what the people pay to hear, so that’s what they get.”
Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many best-of collections of Doggett’s work available. This one seems to have the best sound quality and is a decent overview of his work. Information for this one comes from all over the place, including Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, and Inkspots.ca Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the fiftieth episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. We’re now ten percent of the way through our story, and also most of the way through 1956. I’m told that when history podcasts hit a big round number, it’s customary for them to do a jumping-on episode, perhaps a “story so far” which covers everything that’s been discussed up to that point, but in brief, so that new listeners can get up to speed. That’s sort of what I’m about to do here. This week, we’re going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first twenty or so episodes of the podcast. We’re going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists, but as stages in the career of a single individual. We’re going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who’d take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard-working competent jobbing player and arranger managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music. While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn’t a completely clean break with the past, and for most of the decades from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing you would want instrumental groups. The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands — the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie orchestra — all of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists. They played clarinet or trombone or piano, they didn’t sing. It was only with the musicians union strikes of the 1940s, which we’ve talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers. But well into the 1960s we’ll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental. Indeed, we probably wouldn’t have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like the Ventures in the US or the Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental records. And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn’t actually consider himself a rock and roll musician. It’s a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys, and it’s called “Honky Tonk”: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”] There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggett, for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz, and soul. There are no books about his life, and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which… has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone’s uncle. Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia, and he moved to New York in his late teens and formed his own band, for which he was the piano player. But in 1938, Lucky Millinder was looking for a new band — the way Millinder worked was that he bought out, and took over the leadership, of existing bands, which then became “the Lucky Millinder Orchestra”. This incarnation of the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, the one that was put together by Doggett before Millinder took the band over, is the one that got a residency at the Savoy after Chick Webb’s band stopped playing there, and like Webb’s band this group was managed by Moe Gale. Doggett stayed on with Millinder as his pianist, and while with the group he appeared with Millinder in the 1938 all-black film Paradise in Harlem, playing on this song: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, “I’ve Got To Put You Down”] Doggett was, from what I can tell, the de facto musical director for Millinder’s band in this period — Millinder was a frontman and occasional singer, but he couldn’t play an instrument and was reliant on the musicians in his band to work the arrangements out for him. Doggett was in the band when Moe Gale suggested that Sister Rosetta Tharpe would work well paired up with Millinder’s main singer, Trevor Bacon, in the same way that Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald had worked well together in the Chick Webb band. Doggett was the pianist during the whole of Tharpe’s time with the Millinder band, and he co-composed, with Millinder, the song that later gave its title to a biography of Tharpe, “Shout! Sister, Shout!”: [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Shout! Sister, Shout!”] If you listen to any of Tharpe’s big band recordings from her time with Millinder, it’s Doggett on the piano, and I strongly suspect it was Doggett who came up with the arrangements. Listen for example to his playing on “Lonesome Road”, another song that the MIllinder band performed on film: [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Lonesome Road”] The Millinder band were pivotal in the move from swing music to R&B, and Doggett was an important part in that move. While he’d left the band before they took on later singers like Wynonie Harris and Ruth Brown, he had helped set the band up to be the kind of band that those singers would feel comfortable in. Doggett was also in the band when they had their biggest hit, a song called “When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)”: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, “When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)”] That’s most notable now for being one of the first recordings of a young trumpeter who was just starting out, by the name of Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was quickly sacked by Millinder, who had a habit of getting rid of musicians before they reached their full potential. I’ve not been able to find out why Doggett left Millinder — whether he was one of those musicians who was sacked, or whether he just wanted to move on to other things — but whatever the reason, it can’t have been anything that put a stain on his reputation, because Doggett remained with Millinder’s manager, Moe Gale. We’ve mentioned Gale before several times, but he was the manager of almost every important black act based in New York in the late thirties and early forties, as well as running the Savoy Club, which we talked about in several of the earliest episodes of the podcast. Gale managed Millinder and Rosetta Tharpe, and also managed the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, and Louis Jordan, and so whenever one of his acts needed a musician, he would tend to find them from his existing pool of talent. And so this is how, straight after leaving Lucky Millinder’s band, Doggett found himself working for another Gale act, the Ink Spots. He joined them as their pianist and arranger, and stayed with them for several years: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “I’ll Get By”] The Ink Spots, if you don’t remember, were a vocal quartet who became the most popular black act of the forties, and who stuck to a unique formula based around Bill Kenny’s high tenor and Hoppy Jones’ low spoken bass. They had hit after hit during the forties with songs that all sound remarkably similar, and in the mid forties those songs were arranged by Bill Doggett. He was with the group for two years — starting with the classic line-up of the group, and staying with them through Charlie Fuqua being drafted and Deek Watson being fired. While he was a sideman rather than a full member of the group, he was important enough to them that he now gets counted in lists of proper members put together by historians of the band. He ended up leaving them less than two weeks before Hoppy Jones died, and during that time he played on fourteen of their hit singles, almost all of them sticking to the same formula they’d used previously, the “top and bottom”: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “Ev’ry Night About This Time”] The different acts managed by Moe Gale all sat in with each other when needed, so for example Trevor Bacon, the male vocalist with Millinder’s band, temporarily joined the Ink Spots when Deke Watson got sick for a few weeks. And so during the times when the Ink Spots weren’t touring, Doggett would also perform with Ella Fitzgerald, who was also managed by Gale. [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Time Alone Will Tell”] And indeed, during the end of Doggett’s time with the Ink Spots, Fitzgerald recorded a number of hit singles with the group, which of course featured Doggett on the piano. That included this one, which later went on to be the basis of “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, which we looked at a few episodes back: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”] Doggett moved over full time to become Ella’s arranger and pianist at some point during the couple of weeks between Deek Watson leaving the Ink Spots and Hoppy Jones dying, in early October 1944, and stayed with her for a couple of years, before moving on to Illinois Jacquet’s band, taking the same role again, in the band that introduced the honking tenor saxophone into R&B, and thus into rock and roll: [Excerpt: Illinois Jacquet, “Doggin’ With Doggett”] He also played on one of the most important records in forties R&B — Johnny Otis’ “Harlem Nocturne”, the first hit for the man who would go on to produce most of the great R&B artists of the fifties: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Harlem Nocturne”] And he also led his own band for a while, the Bill Doggett Octet. They were the ones who recorded “Be-Baba-Leba” with Helen Humes on vocals — the song that probably inspired Gene Vincent to write a very similarly named song a few years later: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, “Be-Baba-Leba”] He then moved on to Louis Jordan’s band full time, and this is where his career really starts. Jordan was another act in Moe Gale’s stable, and indeed just like the Ink Spots he’d had hits duetting with Ella Fitzgerald, who he’d first worked with back in the 1930s in Chick Webb’s band. He was also, as you may remember from earlier episodes, the leader of the most popular R&B group in the late forties and early fifties — the one that inspired everyone from Chuck Berry to Bill Haley. And as with his tenure with the Ink Spots, Doggett was in Jordan’s band during its period of peak commercial success. The timeline for who Doggett played with when, as you can probably tell, is all over the place, because he seemed to be playing with two or three acts at any given time. And so officially, if you look at the timelines, so far as they exist, you see that it’s generally claimed that Bill Doggett joined Louis Jordan in 1949. But I’ve seen interviews with members of Jordan’s organisation that suggest he joined much earlier, but he would alternate with Jordan’s other piano player, Wild Bill Davis. The way they worked, according to Berle Adams, who was involved in Jordan’s management, was that Davis would spend a week on the road as Jordan’s piano player, while Doggett would spend the same week writing arrangements for the group, and then they would swap over, and Doggett would go out on the road while Davis would write arrangements. Either way, after a while, Doggett became the sole pianist for the group, as Davis struck out on his own, and Doggett once again basically became the musical director for one of the biggest bands in the R&B business. Doggett is often credited as the person who rewrote “Saturday Night Fish Fry” into one of Jordan’s biggest hits from its inauspicious original version, though Jordan is credited on the record: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Saturday Night Fish Fry”] During his time with Jordan, Doggett continued playing on records for Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and other artists, but he was paying close attention to Wild Bill Davis, who he had replaced in Jordan’s group. Davis had discovered the possibilities in a new musical instrument, the Hammond organ, and had formed a trio consisting of himself, a guitarist, and a drummer to exploit these possibilities in jazz music: [Excerpt: Wild Bill Davis, “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be”] Doggett was also fascinated by this instrument, especially when hearing it up close, as when Davis rejoined Jordan’s band to record “Tamburitza Boogie”, which had Doggett on piano and Davis on the Hammond organ: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Tamburitza Boogie”] When Doggett left Jordan’s band, he decided to form an organ trio just like Davis’. The only problem was that it was just like Davis’. His group had the same instrumentation, and Doggett and Davis had very similar playing styles. Still, Henry Glover got him a contract with King Records, and he started recording Hammond organ blues tracks in the Davis style: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett Trio, “Big Dog”] Davis and Doggett between them gave the Hammond organ its prominence in the world of jazz, R&B, and soul music. The Hammond organ has an odd image, as most people associate it with the cheesiest sort of light entertainment — certainly for anyone in Britain of the generation older than mine, for example, the name it conjures up is Reggie Dixon, possibly the least funky man ever. But in that part of music which is the intersection of jazz and R&B — the part of music inhabited by Jimmy Smith, Booker T Jones, Ray Charles, Georgie Fame, Billy Preston and others — the Hammond organ has become an essential instrument, used so differently that one might almost compare it to the violin, where the instrument is referred to as a fiddle when it’s played on folk or country songs. And that comes from Davis and Doggett and their almost simultaneous invention of a new style of keyboards for the new style of music that was coming up in the late forties and early fifties. But after a year or two of playing in an organ trio, Doggett decided that he didn’t want to keep making records that sounded so much like the ones Wild Bill Davis was making — he didn’t want to be seen as a copy. And so to vary the style, he decided to take on a honking saxophone player to be the group’s lead instrumentalist, while Doggett would concentrate on providing a rhythmic pad. This lineup of his group would go on to make the record that would make Doggett’s name. “Honky Tonk, Parts 1 and 2” came about almost by accident. As Doggett told the story, his biggest hit started out at a dance in Lima, Ohio on a Sunday night. The group were playing their normal set and people were dancing as normal, but then in between songs Billy Butler, Doggett’s guitarist, just started noodling an instrumental line on his bass strings: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk” intro] This hadn’t been planned — he was just noodling around, as all guitarists will do when given five seconds silence. But the audience started dancing to it, and if you’re in a bar band and the audience is dancing, you keep doing what you’re doing. As Butler was just playing a simple twelve-bar blues pattern, the rest of the group fell in with the riff he was playing, and he started soloing over them: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk” guitar soloing] After three choruses of this, Butler nodded to Clifford Scott, the group’s saxophone player, to take over, and Scott started playing a honking saxophone version of what Butler had been playing: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”, sax] After Scott played through it a few times, he looked over to Doggett to see if Doggett wanted to take a solo too. Doggett shook his head. The song had already been going about five minutes and what Butler and Scott had been playing was enough. The group quickly brought the song to a close using a standard blues outro: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk”, outro] And that would have been the end of that. It’s the kind of thing that bar bands have jammed a million times, the sort of thing that if you’re a musician you think nothing of. They laughed at the end of the song, happy that they’d pulled off something that spontaneous and the audience had been OK with it, and carried on with the rest of their planned set. But then, a couple of songs later, someone in the audience came up and asked them if they could play that hot new song they’d been playing before again, not realising it had just been a spur-of-the-moment jam. OK, you give the audience what they want, the band members could remember more or less what they’d been playing, so they played it again. And the crowd went wild. And they played it again. And the crowd went wild again. By the end of the night they’d played that new song, the one they’d improvised based on Billy Butler’s guitar noodling, ten times. Doggett immediately phoned Syd Nathan at King Records, his label, and told him that they had a hit on their hands and needed to get it out straight away. But there was one problem — the song was over five minutes long, and a shellac 78RPM disc, which was still the most popular format for R&B music, could only hold three minutes per side. It would have to be a double-sided record. Nathan hated putting out records where the song continued onto the other side, because the jukebox operators who were his main customers didn’t like them. But he eventually agreed, and Doggett and his band got together in the studio and recorded their new instrumental in a single take. It was released as “Honky Tonk Part One” and part two, and they pressed up five thousand copies in the first week. Those sold out straight away, so the next week they pressed up twelve thousand five hundred copies. Those also sold straight away, and so for the next few weeks they started pressing up a hundred thousand copies a week. The song went to number one on the R&B charts, and became the biggest selling R&B song of 1956, spending thirteen weeks in total at number one — dropping down the charts and then back up again. It also reached number two on the pop charts, an astonishing feat for an R&B instrumental. It became a staple for cover bands, and it was recorded by the obvious instrumental acts like the Ventures and Duane Eddy — and indeed Duane Eddy’s whole style seems to have come from “Honky Tonk” — but by other people you might not expect, like Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Honky Tonk”] The Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Honky Tonk”] And even James Brown: [Excerpt: James Brown, Honky Tonk”] Doggett never had another hit quite as big as “Honky Tonk”, though his next few records, based on the “Honky Tonk” pattern, also made the top five on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Slow Walk”] He had ten more R&B top thirty hits over the course of the 1950s. But Doggett was being promoted as a rock and roll act, and playing bills with other rock and roll stars, and he didn’t really feel comfortable in the rock and roll world. When “Honky Tonk” came out, he was forty years old — by far the oldest of the people who had rock and roll hits in the mid fifties — and he was a jazz organ player, not a Little Richard type. He was also stuck repeating a formula — over the decade after “Honky Tonk” parts one and two he recorded tracks like “Honky Tonk (vocal version)”, “Hippy Dippy”, “Blip Blop”, “Yocky Dock”, and “Honky Tonk Bossa Nova”. His career as a charting artist more or less stopped after 1960, when he made the mistake of asking Syd Nathan if he could have a higher royalty rate, given the millions of dollars his recordings had brought in to King Records, and King dropped him. But it didn’t stop his career as a working musician. In 1962 he teamed up again with Ella Fitzgerald, who wanted to go back to making music with a bit more rhythm than her recent albums of ballads. The resulting album, “Rhythm is my Business”, featured Doggett’s arrangements and Hammond organ very prominently: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Hallelujah I Love Him So”] He also teamed up in 1969 with James Brown, who around that time was trying to pay back his dues to others who’d been artists on King Records when Brown had started with them in the fifties. As well as recording his album “Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things”, Brown had also been producing records for Hank Ballard, and now it was Bill Doggett’s turn. For Doggett, Brown produced and wrote “Honky Tonk Popcorn”: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk Popcorn”] Doggett spent most of the rest of his life touring the oldies circuit, a respected organist who would play hundreds of shows a year, until his death in 1996 aged eighty. He played “Honky Tonk” at every show, saying “I just wouldn’t be Bill Doggett if I didn’t play ‘Honky Tonk’. That’s what the people pay to hear, so that’s what they get.”
Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. (more…)
Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we're now moving forward into the next stage of the story. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are many best-of collections of Doggett's work available. This one seems to have the best sound quality and is a decent overview of his work. Information for this one comes from all over the place, including Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, and Inkspots.ca Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the fiftieth episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. We're now ten percent of the way through our story, and also most of the way through 1956. I'm told that when history podcasts hit a big round number, it's customary for them to do a jumping-on episode, perhaps a "story so far" which covers everything that's been discussed up to that point, but in brief, so that new listeners can get up to speed. That's sort of what I'm about to do here. This week, we're going to look at a hit song from 1956, but by someone whose career interacted with almost everyone in the first twenty or so episodes of the podcast. We're going to look again at some of that old music, not as isolated records by different artists, but as stages in the career of a single individual. We're going to look at someone who was a jobbing musician, who'd take any job that was on offer, but who by virtue of just being a hard-working competent jobbing player and arranger managed to have an astonishing influence on the development of music. While rock and roll was primarily a vocal music, it wasn't a completely clean break with the past, and for most of the decades from the 1920s through to the early 50s, if you wanted music for dancing you would want instrumental groups. The big bands did employ vocalists, of course, but you can tell who the focus was on from looking at the names of the bands -- the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie orchestra -- all of the leaders of the big bands were instrumentalists. They played clarinet or trombone or piano, they didn't sing. It was only with the musicians union strikes of the 1940s, which we've talked about before, that more through necessity than anything else the music industry moved from being dominated by instrumental music to being dominated by singers. But well into the 1960s we'll still be seeing rock and roll hits that were purely instrumental. Indeed, we probably wouldn't have rock and roll guitar bands at all without instrumental groups like the Ventures in the US or the Shadows in the UK who had hits with pure instrumental records. And one of the greatest of the early rock and roll instrumentals was by someone who didn't actually consider himself a rock and roll musician. It's a record that influenced everyone from James Brown to the Beach Boys, and it's called "Honky Tonk": [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] There is surprisingly little information out there about Bill Doggett, for someone who had such an impact on the fields of rock and roll, blues, jazz, and soul. There are no books about his life, and the only website devoted to him is one designed by his nephew, which... has all the flaws one might expect from a website put together about someone's uncle. Doggett was born in 1916 in Philadelphia, and he moved to New York in his late teens and formed his own band, for which he was the piano player. But in 1938, Lucky Millinder was looking for a new band -- the way Millinder worked was that he bought out, and took over the leadership, of existing bands, which then became "the Lucky Millinder Orchestra". This incarnation of the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, the one that was put together by Doggett before Millinder took the band over, is the one that got a residency at the Savoy after Chick Webb's band stopped playing there, and like Webb's band this group was managed by Moe Gale. Doggett stayed on with Millinder as his pianist, and while with the group he appeared with Millinder in the 1938 all-black film Paradise in Harlem, playing on this song: [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, "I've Got To Put You Down"] Doggett was, from what I can tell, the de facto musical director for Millinder's band in this period -- Millinder was a frontman and occasional singer, but he couldn't play an instrument and was reliant on the musicians in his band to work the arrangements out for him. Doggett was in the band when Moe Gale suggested that Sister Rosetta Tharpe would work well paired up with Millinder's main singer, Trevor Bacon, in the same way that Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald had worked well together in the Chick Webb band. Doggett was the pianist during the whole of Tharpe's time with the Millinder band, and he co-composed, with Millinder, the song that later gave its title to a biography of Tharpe, "Shout! Sister, Shout!": [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Shout! Sister, Shout!"] If you listen to any of Tharpe's big band recordings from her time with Millinder, it's Doggett on the piano, and I strongly suspect it was Doggett who came up with the arrangements. Listen for example to his playing on "Lonesome Road", another song that the MIllinder band performed on film: [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Lonesome Road"] The Millinder band were pivotal in the move from swing music to R&B, and Doggett was an important part in that move. While he'd left the band before they took on later singers like Wynonie Harris and Ruth Brown, he had helped set the band up to be the kind of band that those singers would feel comfortable in. Doggett was also in the band when they had their biggest hit, a song called "When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)": [Excerpt: Lucky Millinder, "When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)"] That's most notable now for being one of the first recordings of a young trumpeter who was just starting out, by the name of Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was quickly sacked by Millinder, who had a habit of getting rid of musicians before they reached their full potential. I've not been able to find out why Doggett left Millinder -- whether he was one of those musicians who was sacked, or whether he just wanted to move on to other things -- but whatever the reason, it can't have been anything that put a stain on his reputation, because Doggett remained with Millinder's manager, Moe Gale. We've mentioned Gale before several times, but he was the manager of almost every important black act based in New York in the late thirties and early forties, as well as running the Savoy Club, which we talked about in several of the earliest episodes of the podcast. Gale managed Millinder and Rosetta Tharpe, and also managed the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, and Louis Jordan, and so whenever one of his acts needed a musician, he would tend to find them from his existing pool of talent. And so this is how, straight after leaving Lucky Millinder's band, Doggett found himself working for another Gale act, the Ink Spots. He joined them as their pianist and arranger, and stayed with them for several years: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "I'll Get By"] The Ink Spots, if you don't remember, were a vocal quartet who became the most popular black act of the forties, and who stuck to a unique formula based around Bill Kenny's high tenor and Hoppy Jones' low spoken bass. They had hit after hit during the forties with songs that all sound remarkably similar, and in the mid forties those songs were arranged by Bill Doggett. He was with the group for two years -- starting with the classic line-up of the group, and staying with them through Charlie Fuqua being drafted and Deek Watson being fired. While he was a sideman rather than a full member of the group, he was important enough to them that he now gets counted in lists of proper members put together by historians of the band. He ended up leaving them less than two weeks before Hoppy Jones died, and during that time he played on fourteen of their hit singles, almost all of them sticking to the same formula they'd used previously, the "top and bottom": [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "Ev'ry Night About This Time"] The different acts managed by Moe Gale all sat in with each other when needed, so for example Trevor Bacon, the male vocalist with Millinder's band, temporarily joined the Ink Spots when Deke Watson got sick for a few weeks. And so during the times when the Ink Spots weren't touring, Doggett would also perform with Ella Fitzgerald, who was also managed by Gale. [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Time Alone Will Tell"] And indeed, during the end of Doggett's time with the Ink Spots, Fitzgerald recorded a number of hit singles with the group, which of course featured Doggett on the piano. That included this one, which later went on to be the basis of "Train Kept A-Rollin'", which we looked at a few episodes back: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, "Cow Cow Boogie"] Doggett moved over full time to become Ella's arranger and pianist at some point during the couple of weeks between Deek Watson leaving the Ink Spots and Hoppy Jones dying, in early October 1944, and stayed with her for a couple of years, before moving on to Illinois Jacquet's band, taking the same role again, in the band that introduced the honking tenor saxophone into R&B, and thus into rock and roll: [Excerpt: Illinois Jacquet, "Doggin' With Doggett"] He also played on one of the most important records in forties R&B -- Johnny Otis' "Harlem Nocturne", the first hit for the man who would go on to produce most of the great R&B artists of the fifties: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Harlem Nocturne"] And he also led his own band for a while, the Bill Doggett Octet. They were the ones who recorded "Be-Baba-Leba" with Helen Humes on vocals -- the song that probably inspired Gene Vincent to write a very similarly named song a few years later: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Be-Baba-Leba"] He then moved on to Louis Jordan's band full time, and this is where his career really starts. Jordan was another act in Moe Gale's stable, and indeed just like the Ink Spots he'd had hits duetting with Ella Fitzgerald, who he'd first worked with back in the 1930s in Chick Webb's band. He was also, as you may remember from earlier episodes, the leader of the most popular R&B group in the late forties and early fifties -- the one that inspired everyone from Chuck Berry to Bill Haley. And as with his tenure with the Ink Spots, Doggett was in Jordan's band during its period of peak commercial success. The timeline for who Doggett played with when, as you can probably tell, is all over the place, because he seemed to be playing with two or three acts at any given time. And so officially, if you look at the timelines, so far as they exist, you see that it's generally claimed that Bill Doggett joined Louis Jordan in 1949. But I've seen interviews with members of Jordan's organisation that suggest he joined much earlier, but he would alternate with Jordan's other piano player, Wild Bill Davis. The way they worked, according to Berle Adams, who was involved in Jordan's management, was that Davis would spend a week on the road as Jordan's piano player, while Doggett would spend the same week writing arrangements for the group, and then they would swap over, and Doggett would go out on the road while Davis would write arrangements. Either way, after a while, Doggett became the sole pianist for the group, as Davis struck out on his own, and Doggett once again basically became the musical director for one of the biggest bands in the R&B business. Doggett is often credited as the person who rewrote "Saturday Night Fish Fry" into one of Jordan's biggest hits from its inauspicious original version, though Jordan is credited on the record: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Saturday Night Fish Fry"] During his time with Jordan, Doggett continued playing on records for Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and other artists, but he was paying close attention to Wild Bill Davis, who he had replaced in Jordan's group. Davis had discovered the possibilities in a new musical instrument, the Hammond organ, and had formed a trio consisting of himself, a guitarist, and a drummer to exploit these possibilities in jazz music: [Excerpt: Wild Bill Davis, "Things Ain't What They Used To Be"] Doggett was also fascinated by this instrument, especially when hearing it up close, as when Davis rejoined Jordan's band to record "Tamburitza Boogie", which had Doggett on piano and Davis on the Hammond organ: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Tamburitza Boogie"] When Doggett left Jordan's band, he decided to form an organ trio just like Davis'. The only problem was that it was just like Davis'. His group had the same instrumentation, and Doggett and Davis had very similar playing styles. Still, Henry Glover got him a contract with King Records, and he started recording Hammond organ blues tracks in the Davis style: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett Trio, "Big Dog"] Davis and Doggett between them gave the Hammond organ its prominence in the world of jazz, R&B, and soul music. The Hammond organ has an odd image, as most people associate it with the cheesiest sort of light entertainment -- certainly for anyone in Britain of the generation older than mine, for example, the name it conjures up is Reggie Dixon, possibly the least funky man ever. But in that part of music which is the intersection of jazz and R&B -- the part of music inhabited by Jimmy Smith, Booker T Jones, Ray Charles, Georgie Fame, Billy Preston and others -- the Hammond organ has become an essential instrument, used so differently that one might almost compare it to the violin, where the instrument is referred to as a fiddle when it's played on folk or country songs. And that comes from Davis and Doggett and their almost simultaneous invention of a new style of keyboards for the new style of music that was coming up in the late forties and early fifties. But after a year or two of playing in an organ trio, Doggett decided that he didn't want to keep making records that sounded so much like the ones Wild Bill Davis was making -- he didn't want to be seen as a copy. And so to vary the style, he decided to take on a honking saxophone player to be the group's lead instrumentalist, while Doggett would concentrate on providing a rhythmic pad. This lineup of his group would go on to make the record that would make Doggett's name. "Honky Tonk, Parts 1 and 2" came about almost by accident. As Doggett told the story, his biggest hit started out at a dance in Lima, Ohio on a Sunday night. The group were playing their normal set and people were dancing as normal, but then in between songs Billy Butler, Doggett's guitarist, just started noodling an instrumental line on his bass strings: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk" intro] This hadn't been planned -- he was just noodling around, as all guitarists will do when given five seconds silence. But the audience started dancing to it, and if you're in a bar band and the audience is dancing, you keep doing what you're doing. As Butler was just playing a simple twelve-bar blues pattern, the rest of the group fell in with the riff he was playing, and he started soloing over them: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk" guitar soloing] After three choruses of this, Butler nodded to Clifford Scott, the group's saxophone player, to take over, and Scott started playing a honking saxophone version of what Butler had been playing: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk", sax] After Scott played through it a few times, he looked over to Doggett to see if Doggett wanted to take a solo too. Doggett shook his head. The song had already been going about five minutes and what Butler and Scott had been playing was enough. The group quickly brought the song to a close using a standard blues outro: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk", outro] And that would have been the end of that. It's the kind of thing that bar bands have jammed a million times, the sort of thing that if you're a musician you think nothing of. They laughed at the end of the song, happy that they'd pulled off something that spontaneous and the audience had been OK with it, and carried on with the rest of their planned set. But then, a couple of songs later, someone in the audience came up and asked them if they could play that hot new song they'd been playing before again, not realising it had just been a spur-of-the-moment jam. OK, you give the audience what they want, the band members could remember more or less what they'd been playing, so they played it again. And the crowd went wild. And they played it again. And the crowd went wild again. By the end of the night they'd played that new song, the one they'd improvised based on Billy Butler's guitar noodling, ten times. Doggett immediately phoned Syd Nathan at King Records, his label, and told him that they had a hit on their hands and needed to get it out straight away. But there was one problem -- the song was over five minutes long, and a shellac 78RPM disc, which was still the most popular format for R&B music, could only hold three minutes per side. It would have to be a double-sided record. Nathan hated putting out records where the song continued onto the other side, because the jukebox operators who were his main customers didn't like them. But he eventually agreed, and Doggett and his band got together in the studio and recorded their new instrumental in a single take. It was released as "Honky Tonk Part One" and part two, and they pressed up five thousand copies in the first week. Those sold out straight away, so the next week they pressed up twelve thousand five hundred copies. Those also sold straight away, and so for the next few weeks they started pressing up a hundred thousand copies a week. The song went to number one on the R&B charts, and became the biggest selling R&B song of 1956, spending thirteen weeks in total at number one -- dropping down the charts and then back up again. It also reached number two on the pop charts, an astonishing feat for an R&B instrumental. It became a staple for cover bands, and it was recorded by the obvious instrumental acts like the Ventures and Duane Eddy -- and indeed Duane Eddy's whole style seems to have come from "Honky Tonk" -- but by other people you might not expect, like Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Honky Tonk"] The Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Honky Tonk"] And even James Brown: [Excerpt: James Brown, Honky Tonk"] Doggett never had another hit quite as big as "Honky Tonk", though his next few records, based on the "Honky Tonk" pattern, also made the top five on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Slow Walk"] He had ten more R&B top thirty hits over the course of the 1950s. But Doggett was being promoted as a rock and roll act, and playing bills with other rock and roll stars, and he didn't really feel comfortable in the rock and roll world. When "Honky Tonk" came out, he was forty years old -- by far the oldest of the people who had rock and roll hits in the mid fifties -- and he was a jazz organ player, not a Little Richard type. He was also stuck repeating a formula -- over the decade after "Honky Tonk" parts one and two he recorded tracks like "Honky Tonk (vocal version)", "Hippy Dippy", "Blip Blop", "Yocky Dock", and "Honky Tonk Bossa Nova". His career as a charting artist more or less stopped after 1960, when he made the mistake of asking Syd Nathan if he could have a higher royalty rate, given the millions of dollars his recordings had brought in to King Records, and King dropped him. But it didn't stop his career as a working musician. In 1962 he teamed up again with Ella Fitzgerald, who wanted to go back to making music with a bit more rhythm than her recent albums of ballads. The resulting album, "Rhythm is my Business", featured Doggett's arrangements and Hammond organ very prominently: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Hallelujah I Love Him So"] He also teamed up in 1969 with James Brown, who around that time was trying to pay back his dues to others who'd been artists on King Records when Brown had started with them in the fifties. As well as recording his album "Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things", Brown had also been producing records for Hank Ballard, and now it was Bill Doggett's turn. For Doggett, Brown produced and wrote "Honky Tonk Popcorn": [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk Popcorn"] Doggett spent most of the rest of his life touring the oldies circuit, a respected organist who would play hundreds of shows a year, until his death in 1996 aged eighty. He played "Honky Tonk" at every show, saying "I just wouldn't be Bill Doggett if I didn't play 'Honky Tonk'. That's what the people pay to hear, so that's what they get."
In this episode, we feature music from the trombonist Illinois Jacquet, vocalist Julia Lee, and some great bop sounds from Leo Parker.
Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.
Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.
Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Goodnight My Love" by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins.----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg's website, and Etta James' autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I've pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days -- he's a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it's impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don't end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we're looking at today, "Goodnight My Love". Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when "Goodnight My Love" came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people's histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There's so little information about Belvin that if you didn't know anything about him, you'd assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B -- among musicians, especially those on the West Coast -- there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder's favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn't. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke's death, his widow kept all of Cooke's records separate from her other albums -- except Belvin's, which she kept with Cooke's. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre's "most revered stylist". And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let's talk about the life -- and the tragic death -- of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis' band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis' "Barrel House Stomp": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Barrel House Stomp"] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, "Three Dots and a Dash". Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely's saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin's first recording with the group was on "All That Wine is Gone", an answer record to "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee". [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, "All That Wine is Gone"] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, "Baby Don't Go", was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song "Dream Girl": [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, "Dream Girl"] "Dream Girl" went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit -- a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I'll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one -- but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it "Marvin and Johnny", and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn't stick with a single "Johnny". Instead "Johnny" would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as "Marvin and Johnny", including "Cherry Pie", on which the role of "Johnny" was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Cherry Pie"] "Cherry Pie" was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny's other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of "Ko Ko Mo", which didn't manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como's version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Ko Ko Mo"] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin's career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn't get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, "My Angel"] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, "So Fine"] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, "Hum De Dum"] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin's Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, "The Girl in My Dreams" was the closest thing he'd had to a big success since the similarly-named "Dream Girl" several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, "The Girl in my Dreams"] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart -- not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of "Goodnight My Love", is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved -- in particular the song "Bertha Lou" by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, "Bertha Lou"] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars -- Burnette's son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of "Goodnight My Love", the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it's normally told goes as follows -- Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge -- but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn't have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That's the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin's cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people's half-finished songs, and so it's entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Belvin's version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin's share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he'd seen with "Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like "Senorita", to doo-wop novelty songs like "My Satellite", a song whose melody owes something to "Hound Dog", credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, "My Satellite"] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge's brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin's friend Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies "gangster of love" persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like "Three Hours Past Midnight": [Excerpt: "Three Hours Past Midnight", Johnny "Guitar" Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, "Is It True": [Excerpt: The Saxons, "Is It True"] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label -- at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I've given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven't listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits -- and "Goodnight My Love" and "Earth Angel" had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding -- the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven't been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown's replacement in Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown's group, he'd developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records -- he'd made "Dragnet Blues", which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he'd also done his Johnny Ace impression on "Johnny Ace's Last Letter", a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace's death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, "Johnny Ace's Last Letter"] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called "You Cheated", which looked like it could possibly be a big hit -- except that the label it was on wasn't willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, "You Cheated"] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn't want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song -- he didn't like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre -- but a gig was a gig, and it'd be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Tommy "Buster" Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into "Handsome" Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn't spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as "The Shields" rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, "You Cheated"] That's Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn't given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry -- this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. "You Cheated" ended up making number twelve on the pop charts -- a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together -- the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn't make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, "Nature Boy", where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: "Nature Boy", the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as "You Cheated". The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn't like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn't even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label -- RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on -- and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat "King" Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was "Guess Who?", a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Guess Who?"] That song made the top forty -- hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it's not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin's death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I've not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there's a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there's also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That's just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it's impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It's my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as "the first rock and roll show of 1960", the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin's. Jesse had just recorded his second album, "Mr Easy", which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin's turn towards pop balladry in the Nat "King" Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, "Blues in the Night"] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration -- in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn't dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn't arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse's mother in LA, asking if she'd heard from them. She hadn't. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin's guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here's the thing -- within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin's car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night -- and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it's possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin's driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles -- who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we'll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse's mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, "Goodnight My Love"] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.
Fantastic show from "Command Performance" via Armed Forces Radio Service on Feb. 7, 1946. Intro to track outlines stars that are heard in this broadcast... features Lina Romay (photo), Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Illinois Jacquet, and Les Paul in an All American Jam Session - "Honeysuckle Rose"... and more! Great show.... will get your toes tappin' ... thanks for listening.
Check out the honking sound of Jump Jazz from California with Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington, Jimmy Witherspoon and MORE!
Jazz Live Galore præsenteres af Radio Jazz studievært Ole Matthiessen. Musik fra københavnske scener med Eje Thelins kvintet, Mills Brothers & Ib Glindemann, Willie The Lion Smith, Uptown All Stars med Roy Eldrigde & Illinois Jacquet, Albert Ayler Quintet, Idrees Sulieman, Arne Domnerus Group, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Bent Jædig/Dusko Goykovic, Freddie Hubbard, Jazz From A Swinging Era, Benny Carter / Coleman Hawkins / Teddy Wilson, Ray Charles, Johnny Griffin, Lasse Werner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Peter Strømberg, Basse Seidelin, Per Goldschmidt, Bengt Hallberg trio, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Jørn Elniff trio og Charles Lloyd Quartet. Sendt i Radio Jazz i 2017 Der er mere jazz på www.radiojazz.dk
Featuring Louis Jordan, Chubby Checker, The Crystals, Quincy Jones, Bobby Darin, Les Paul, Glen Campbell... We get started with Louis Jordan who had been playing Rock & Roll long before it was called that; next check out the cool version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Chubby Checker. Our twin spin includes Bill Haley & His Comets "Thirteen Women" (And Only One Man) and it's b-side "Rock Around The Clock" - yes it was really a b-side! A real treat with the very last song by the Illinois Jacquet and the jazzy original "Harlem Nocturne" before the Viscounts covered it.
Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.
Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "I Got A Woman" by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles' autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles' work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about melisma. One of the major things that you'll notice about the singers we've covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who's been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There's a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties -- not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing -- melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning -- it's when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing -- for example, at the start of "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Oh say...", there are two notes on the syllable "oh". That's melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn't, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to "Pocketful of Miracles" -- "Practicality doesn't interest me" -- but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he'd written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Pocketful of Miracles", with Sinatra singing "pee-racticality dee-oesn't interest me"] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century -- Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett -- they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers -- Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound -- but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren't stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you'd mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn't talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel -- and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we're talking about -- the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you'd sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I'm not going to unpick here -- we've got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all -- but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it's their command of melisma they're trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today's standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it's worth talking about the musical boundaries we're going to be using in this series, because while it's called "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs", I am not planning on using a narrow definition of "rock music", because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there's footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke "the greatest rock and roll singer in the world", and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called "rock and roll", but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call "soul" was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it's completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we're going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don't be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don't be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we're going to talk about a record that's been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we're going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We're going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing -- though perhaps one that's not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called "Mama", and by his father's wife, who he called "Mother". Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles' -- he didn't want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though -- and perhaps because -- he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn't going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn't want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I'm not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles' own attitude to his disability. I'm disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I'm just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase". [Excerpt; Art Tatum, "I Wish I Were Twins"] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum's musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style -- his first record, "Wondering and Wondering", was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Wondering and Wondering"] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder's band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn't how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat "King" Cole Trio and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We've heard Nat "King" Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it's still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like "Unforgettable", Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole's version of "Route Sixty-Six": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole Trio, "Route Sixty Six"] You'll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular -- Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat "King" Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the "Son" came from the Robinson in his own name, the "Mc" from the guitarist's name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio "Don't Put All Your Dreams In One Basket"] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn't perform on many of Fulson's sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson's biggest record, "Reconsider Baby", which came out shortly after Charles' time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, "Reconsider Baby"] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: "The Things That I Used To Do" by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but "The Things That I Used To Do", his most famous record, is as much Charles' record as it is Guitar Slim's -- Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim's other work, though it still has Slim's recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with "Mess Around", which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. "Mess Around" is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting -- rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing "Cow Cow Blues", a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, "Cow Cow Blues"] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled "Mess Around": [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, "Mess Around"] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers -- the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn't sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "It Should Have Been Me"] "Mess Around" and "It Should Have Been Me" were Charles' two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, "the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place." Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton's, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "One O'Clock Jump"] Charles' own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone's. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles' trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he'd been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They'd be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, "It Must Be Jesus"] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled "rock and roll", this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, "I Got a Woman", Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn't just that they were performing secular music -- it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. "I Got a Woman" went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, "I Got a Woman"] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, "I Got A Woman" became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees... Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn't stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song "This Little Light of Mine": [Excerpt: Etta James, "This Little Light of Mine"] And reworked it into "This Little Girl of Mine": [Excerpt: Ray Charles: "This Little Girl of Mine"] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn't a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 -- classic songs like "Hallelujah, I Love Her So", "Drown in My Own Tears", and "Lonely Avenue" -- he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as "My Bonnie" and "Swanee River Rock". But you can't keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we'll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.
Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For more on Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Patreon backers might want to listen to the Christmas Patreon-only episode. Most of the information here comes from Charles’ autobiography, Brother Ray, which gives a very clear view of his character, possibly not always in the ways he intended. All the Ray Charles music used in this podcast, and the Guitar Slim track, are on The Complete Swing Time and Atlantic Recordings. Charles’ work from 1955 through about 1965 covers more genres of American music than any other body of work I can think of, and does so wonderfully. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk about melisma. One of the major things that you’ll notice about the singers we’ve covered so far is that most of them sound very different from anyone who’s been successful as a pure vocalist in the last few decades. There’s a reason for that. Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it’s when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, “Oh say…”, there are two notes on the syllable “oh”. That’s melisma. But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to “Pocketful of Miracles” — “Practicality doesn’t interest me” — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he’d written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, “Pocketful of Miracles”, with Sinatra singing “pee-racticality dee-oesn’t interest me”] That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren’t stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you’d mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. [Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] We looked at gospel already, of course, but we didn’t talk about this particular characteristic of the music. You see, in black gospel — and pretty much only in black gospel music, at the time we’re talking about — the use of melisma was how you conveyed emotion. You ornamented the notes, you’d sing more notes per syllable, and that was how you showed how moved you were by the spirit. And these days, that style is what people now think of as good or impressive singing. There are a *lot* of class and race issues around taste in this that I’m not going to unpick here — we’ve got a whole four hundred and sixty-eight more episodes in which to discuss these things, after all — but when you hear someone on The Voice or American Idol or The X Factor trying to impress with their vocals, it’s their command of melisma they’re trying to impress with. The more they can ornament the notes, the more they fit today’s standards of good singing. And that changed because, in the 1950s, there was a stream of black singers who came out of the gospel tradition and introduced its techniques into pop music. Before talking about that, it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer. And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled. So today, we’re going to talk about a record that’s been widely credited as the first soul record, but which was released as rock and roll. And we’re going to talk about a musician who cut across all the boundaries that anyone tries to put on music, a man who was equally at home in soul, jazz, R&B, country, and rock and roll. We’re going to talk about the great Ray Charles. [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman”] Ray Charles had an unusual upbringing — though perhaps one that’s not as unusual as people would like to think. As far as I can tell from his autobiography, he was the product of what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. His father was largely absent, but he was brought up by his mother, who he called “Mama”, and by his father’s wife, who he called “Mother”. Both women knew of, approved of, and liked each other, as far as young Ray was concerned. His given name was Ray Charles Robinson, but he changed it when he became a professional musician, due to the popularity of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, whose peak years were around the same time as Charles’ — he didn’t want to be confused with another, more famous, Ray Robinson. From a very young age, he was fascinated by the piano, and that fascination intensified when, before he reached adolescence, he became totally blind. That blindness would shape his life, even though — and perhaps because — he had a strong sense of independence. He wasn’t going to let his disability define him, and he often said that the three things that he didn’t want were a dog, a cane, and a guitar, because they were the things all blind men had. Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m not talking here about the rights and wrongs of Charles’ own attitude to his disability. I’m disabled myself, but his disability is not mine, and he is from another generation. I’m just stating what that attitude was, and how it affected his life and career. And the main thing it did was make him even more fiercely independent. He not only got about on his own without a cane or a dog, he also at one point even used to go riding a motorbike by himself. Other than his independence, the main thing everyone noted about the young Ray Charles Robinson was his proficiency on the piano, and by his late teens he was playing great jazz piano, inspired by Art Tatum, who like Ray was blind. Tatum was such a proficient pianist that there is a term in computational musicology, the tatum, meaning “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”. [Excerpt; Art Tatum, “I Wish I Were Twins”] Charles never got quite that good, but he was inspired by Tatum’s musicality, and he became a serious student of the instrument, becoming a very respectable jazz pianist. When his mother died, when he was fifteen, Charles decided to leave school and set up on his own as a musician. Initially, he toured only round Georgia and Florida, and early on he made a handful of records. His very earliest recordings, oddly, sound a lot like his mature style — his first record, “Wondering and Wondering”, was almost fully-formed mature Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Wondering and Wondering”] But he soon changed his style to be more popular. He moved to the West Coast, and unsuccessfully auditioned to play piano with Lucky Millinder’s band, and would occasionally play jazz with Bumps Blackwell and Dizzy Gillespie. But while his association with Bumps Blackwell would continue long into the future, playing jazz wasn’t how Ray Charles was going to make his name. On the West Coast in the late forties and early fifties, the most popular style for black musicians was a particular kind of smooth blues, incorporating aspects of crooning alongside blues and jazz. Two of the biggest groups in the R&B field were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers featuring Charles Brown. Both of these had very similar styles, featuring a piano player who sang smooth blues, with an electric guitarist and a bass player, and sometimes a drummer. We’ve heard Nat “King” Cole before, playing piano with Les Paul and Illinois Jacquet, but it’s still hard for modern listeners to remember that before his massive pop success with ballads like “Unforgettable”, Cole was making music which may not have been quite as successful commercially, but which was incredibly influential on the burgeoning rock music field. A typical example of the style is Cole’s version of “Route Sixty-Six”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole Trio, “Route Sixty Six”] You’ll note, I hope, the similarity to the early recordings by the Chuck Berry Trio in particular — Berry would often say that while Louis Jordan music was the music he would play to try to make a living, Nat “King” Cole was the musician he most liked to listen to, and the Chuck Berry Trio was clearly an attempt to emulate this style. The other group I mentioned, The Three Blazers, were very much in the same style as the Nat Cole Trio, but were a couple of rungs down the entertainment ladder, and Charles Brown, their singer, would be another huge influence on Ray Charles early on. Charles formed his own trio, the McSon Trio (the “Son” came from the Robinson in his own name, the “Mc” from the guitarist’s name). [Excerpt: The McSon Trio “Don’t Put All Your Dreams In One Basket”] The McSon Trio quickly changed their name to the Ray Charles Trio, as their pianist and singer became the obvious star of the show. Charles soon tired of running his own trio, though, and went fully solo, travelling to gigs on his own and working with local pickup bands rather than having his own steady musicians. This also gave him the opportunity to collaborate with a wider variety of other musicians than having a fixed band would. Around this time Charles was introduced by Bumps Blackwell to Quincy Jones, with whom he would go on to collaborate in various ways for much of the rest of his career. But his most important collaboration in his early career was with the blues musician Lowell Fulson. Fulson was one of the pioneers of the smooth West Coast blues sound, and Charles became his pianist and musical director for a short time. Charles didn’t perform on many of Fulson’s sessions, but you can get an idea of the kind of thing that he would have been playing with Fulson from Fulson’s biggest record, “Reconsider Baby”, which came out shortly after Charles’ time with Fulson: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] So Charles was splitting his time between making his own Nat Cole or Charles Brown style records, touring on his own, and touring with Fulson. He also worked on other records for other musicians. The most notable of these was a blues classic, by another of the greats of West Coast blues, “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim. [Excerpt: “The Things That I Used To Do” by Guitar Slim] Slim was one of the great blues guitarists of the 1950s, and he was also one of the great showmen, whose performance style included things like a guitar cord that was allegedly three hundred and fifty feet long, so he could keep his guitar plugged into the amplifier but walk through the crowd and even out into the street, while still playing his guitar. Slim would later be a huge influence on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but “The Things That I Used To Do”, his most famous record, is as much Charles’ record as it is Guitar Slim’s — Charles produced, arranged, and played piano, and the result sounds far more like the work that Charles was doing at the time than it does Guitar Slim’s other work, though it still has Slim’s recognisable guitar sound. He finally got the opportunity to stand out when he moved from Swing Time to Atlantic Records. While several of the Swing Time recordings were minor successes, people kept telling him how much he sounded like Nat Cole or Charles Brown. But he realised that it was unlikely that anyone was telling Nat Cole or Charles Brown how much they sounded like Ray Charles, and that he would never be in the first rank of musicians unless he got a style that was uniquely his. Everything changed with “Mess Around”, which was his first major venture into the Atlantic house style. “Mess Around” is credited to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, as the writer, but it should really be credited as a traditional song arranged by Ray Charles, Jesse Stone, and Ertegun. Ertegun did contribute to the songwriting — rather surprisingly, given the habit of record executives of just taking credit for something that they had nothing to do with. Ertegun told Charles to play some piano in the style of Pete Johnson, and Charles responded by playing “Cow Cow Blues”, a 1928 song by Cow Cow Davenport: [Excerpt: Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”] Ertegun came up with some new words for that, mostly based around traditional floating lyrics. Jesse Stone came up with an arrangement, and the result was titled “Mess Around”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles and his Orchestra, “Mess Around”] For his next few records, Charles was one of many artists making records with the standard Atlantic musicians and arrangers — the same people who were making records with Ruth Brown or LaVern Baker. By this point, he had gained enough confidence in the studio that he was able to sing like himself, not like Charles Brown or Nat Cole or anyone else. The music he was making was generic R&B, but it didn’t sound like anyone else at all: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “It Should Have Been Me”] “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me” were Charles’ two biggest hits to date, both making the top five on the R&B charts. His breakout, though, came with a song that he based around a gospel song. At this time, gospel music was not much of an influence on most of the rhythm and blues records that were charting, but as Charles would later say, “the church was something which couldn’t be taken out of my voice even if I had wanted to take it out. Once I decided to be natural, I was gone. It’s like Aretha: She could do “Stardust,” but if she did her thing on it, you’d hear the church all over the place.” Charles had now formed his own band, which was strongly influenced by Count Basie. The Count Basie band was, like Lionel Hampton’s, one of the bands that had most influenced early R&B, and its music was exactly the kind of combination of jump band and classy jazz that Charles liked: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”] Charles’ own band was modelled on the Basie band, though slimmed down because of the practicalities of touring with a big band in the fifties. He had three sax players, piano, bass, drums, two trumpets, and a trombone, and he added a girl group, called the Raelettes, who were mostly former members of a girl group called the Cookies (who would go on to have a few hits themselves over the years). Charles was now able to record his own band, rather than the Atlantic session musicians, and have them playing his own arrangements rather than Jesse Stone’s. And the first recording session he did with his own band produced his first number one. Charles’ trumpet player, Renald Richard, brought Charles a set of blues lyrics, and Charles set them to a gospel tune he’d been listening to. The Southern Tones were a gospel act recording for Duke Records, and they never had much success. They’d be almost forgotten now were it not for this one record: [Excerpt, The Southern Tones, “It Must Be Jesus”] Charles took that melody, and the lyrics that Renald Richard had given him, and created a record which was utterly unlike anything else that had ever been recorded. This was a new fusion of gospel, the blues, big band jazz, and early rock and roll. Nobody had ever done anything like it before. In the context of 1954, when every fusion of ideas from different musics, and every new musical experiment, was labeled “rock and roll”, this was definitely a rock and roll record, but in later decades they would say that this music had soul: [Excerpt, “I Got a Woman”, Ray Charles] That song was close enough to gospel to cause Charles some very real problems. Gospel singers who went over to making secular music were considered by their original fans to be going over to the side of the Devil. It wasn’t just that they were performing secular music — it was very specifically that they were using musical styles that were created in order to worship God, and turning them to secular purposes. And this criticism was applied, loudly, to Charles, even though he had never been a gospel singer. But while the gospel community was up in arms, people were listening. “I Got a Woman” went to number one on the R&B charts, and quickly entered the stage repertoire of another musician who had church music in his veins: [Excerpt, Elvis Presley, “I Got a Woman”] Even as it kicked off a whole new genre, “I Got A Woman” became a rock and roll standard. It would be covered by the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Monkees… Ray Charles was, in the minds of his detractors, debasing something holy, but those complaints didn’t stop Charles from continuing to rework gospel songs and turn them into rock and roll classics. For his next single, he took the old gospel song “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “This Little Light of Mine”] And reworked it into “This Little Girl of Mine”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles: “This Little Girl of Mine”] Ray Charles had hit on a formula that any other musician would have happily milked for decades. But Ray Charles wasn’t a musician who would stick to just one style of music. This wandering musical mind would ensure that for the next few years Ray Charles would be probably the most vital creative force in American music, but it also meant that he would swing wildly between commercial success and failure. After a run of huge hits in 1954, 55, and 56 — classic songs like “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, “Drown in My Own Tears”, and “Lonely Avenue” — he hit a dry patch, with such less-than-stellar efforts as “My Bonnie” and “Swanee River Rock”. But you can’t keep a good man down for long, and when we next look at Ray Charles, in 1959, we’ll see him once again revolutionise both rock and roll and the music he invented, the music that we now call soul.
Join us as we find out how we can make things beautiful even during the chaos of going after our dreams. NEVER STOP RUNNING debuted as the #1 seller on Amazon on the first day of release and has remained on the top. Dr. Mel is also a feature and documentary filmmaker; including Mexico Missions, The Dolphins in Terry Cove, The Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo, Sean Kelly’s Irish Pub, Beauvoir, and Voices of the Innocent. Her film credits include producer on the independent film Dark Blue and associate producer on the films Varla Jean and the Mushroomheads and Girls Gone Gangsta. Dr. Mel has worked on films such as the two Sony films, STRAWDOGS starring Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, and Alexander Skarsgard; MARDI GRAS starring Carmen Electra and Josh Gad; On the Seventh Day with Blair Underwood, Pam Grier, Sharon Leal, and Jamie Alyson; and Dirty Politics starring Melissa Peterman, Beau Bridges, and Judd Nelson. https://drmelcaudle.com/ Jody Mayfield is a composer/producer from Atlanta GA. He is a graduate of Morris Brown College with a degree in Music Composition and Music Technology. He has performed with musical greats such as Dizzy Gillespie at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland ('81, '82) as well as James Lloyd of Pieces of a Dream; Frank Foster; Grover Washington, Jr.; Mary Lou Williams; Illinois Jacquet and the Tony Rich Project. He also opened concerts for Sarah Vaughn, Dexter Gordon, Rodney Franklin, Wynton Marsalis, Lionel Hampton, Fred Hammond,Bishop T.D. Jakes to name a few. Jody Mayfield has worked with top hip-hop producers such as Organized Noize, Anthony David, Marq (Remarqable) Jefferson of So So Def Records. http://www.jodymayfield.com/
Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Double Crossin’ Blues” by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “How High The Moon”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- A couple of notes: This one is a few hours late, as I had some *severe* technical problems with the several previous attempts at recording this. This version was recorded starting around midnight on Sunday night, which is usually the time I put them up, so I apologise if it’s lacking a final polish Resources If the episode starts you wondering about playing instruments while physically disabled, or inventing new instruments, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD box set is a very good compilation of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s best work. The quotes from Les Paul in this episode come from this book of interviews with him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To be a truly great guitarist, you need to have an imagination. You need to be inventive. And you need to have a sense of musicality. Some would also say that you need to have a lot of dexterity, and to be able to move your fingers lightning fast. Maybe also have long fingers, so you could reach further down the neck. But let’s talk about Django Reinhardt for a bit. We mentioned Django a little bit in the episode on Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. We talked, in particular, about how he was making music that sounded very, very similar to what the early Western Swing musicians were doing. We’re not going to talk much about Django in this series, because he was a jazz musician, but he *was* very influential on a few of the people who went on to influence rock, so we’re going to touch on him briefly here. He never played an electric guitar, but he still influenced pretty much every guitarist since, either directly or indirectly. And this was despite having disadvantages that would have stopped almost anyone. One point we haven’t made very much yet, but which needs to be made repeatedly, is that the people in most of these early podcasts were crushingly, hellishly, poor by today’s standards. Poverty still exists of course, to far too great an extent, but the people we’re talking about here lived in conditions that would be unimaginable to almost all of the listeners to this podcast. And Reinhardt had it worse than most. He was a Romany traveller, and while growing up his greatest skill was stealing chickens — real, proper, poverty. But he became a professional musician, and it looked like he might actually become well off. And then his bad luck got worse. His caravan caught on fire, and in trying to rescue his wife and child, he suffered such extreme burns that one of his legs became paralysed — and more importantly for Reinhardt as a musician, he lost the use of two of his fingers on his left hand. He had to re-teach himself to play the guitar, and to use only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand to play. Remarkably, he managed well enough to do things like this: [Excerpt: “How High The Moon” Django Reinhardt] Reinhardt influenced many guitarists, and one American guitarist in particular became a friend of Reinhardt and said that he and Reinhardt were the only two guitarists in the world at that time who were actually serious about their instrument. He was another jazzman, with a similar style to Reinhardt but one who had a more direct influence on rock and roll. Waukesha, Wisconsin, is not the most rock and roll town in the world. It was a spa town, before the water started to dry up, and about the most exciting thing that ever happened there is that Mr Sears, the founder of Sears & Roebuck, retired there when he got too ill to work any more. It’s a bland, whitebread, midwestern town in a state that’s most notable for dairy farming. Yet it’s also the birthplace of the only man who is in the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and who probably did more than any other individual to make the guitar a respected lead instrument. Almost every moderately-known guitarist eventually gets a “signature” model named after them, and most of these sell a small number of instruments before being discontinued. But one man has a signature model that’s so popular that other guitarists get their signatures *alongside his*. When you buy a Jimmy Page or Mark Knopfler or Slash or Eric Clapton signature guitar, there are two names on there — the name of Page or Clapton or whoever, and the name Les Paul. Les Paul was a remarkable man, whose inventions are far more widely known even than his name. You’ll almost certainly have seen musicians playing guitar and harmonica at the same time, using a harmonica holder — Les Paul invented that, as a teenager, making the first one out of a coathanger. I guess if you were a teenager in Waukesha in the 1920s, you’d have little better to do with yourself than invent coathanger harmonica holders too. But Les Paul was, first and foremost, a guitar player, and he became a semi-professional musician by the time he was thirteen. The choice of the guitar was one that was actually made by his mother. She explained to him “if you play the piano you got your back turned to the audience. If you play the drums, you gotta carry all that stuff around, it’s not musical. If you play a saxophone, you can’t sing and talk at the same time.” In his own words, she “whittled it down to guitar in a hurry”. His mother, indeed, seems to have been a remarkable woman in many ways — if you read any interviews with Les, he barely ever goes a few sentences without saying something about how much she did for him. That’s one of the defining characteristics of Les Paul’s life, really — his admiration for his mother. There were two more things that characterised him though. The first was that pretty much dead on, every ten years, he would have some major health crisis that would put him out of commission for a year. The other was his lifelong devotion to learning, which meant that he used those health crises as an opportunity to learn something new. This love of learning could be seen from his very early days. When he was just learning the guitar, the singing cowboy star Gene Autry came to town. Gene Autry was a star of Western music — the very biggest star in the country — and his music was a cleaned-up, politer, version of the kind of music Bob Wills played: [excerpt: Gene Autry “Back in the Saddle Again”]. Les and his friend went to every show in the residency, and after a couple of nights, Gene Autry stopped the show in the middle of the set and said “something strange has been happening here — every time I play an F chord, and *only* when I play an F chord, there’s a flash of light. What’s going on, how is this happening?” It turned out that Les had been wanting to learn how Autry made that chord shape, so he’d been there with a pencil and paper, and his friend had a torch, and every time he played the chord Les Paul wanted to learn, the torch would come on and Les would be trying to sketch the shape of Autry’s fingers. Autry invited Les Paul onto the stage, showed him how to make the chord, and had him play a couple of songs. A few years later, when Autry moved from radio to films, he suggested Les Paul take over his radio show. So Les Paul was always fascinated by learning, and always trying to improve himself and his equipment. And once he decided to be a guitarist, he also decided to electrify his guitar, a full decade before electric guitars became a widespread instrument. He explained that when he was starting out, he was playing at a hotdog stand, using a homemade microphone for his voice and harmonica — the microphone was made out of bits of an old telephone, and it was plugged in to his mother’s radio. People who were listening liked his performances, but they said they wished the guitar was as loud as his voice — so he took his *dad’s* radio, too, and connected it to a record player needle, which he jammed into the body of his guitar. Once electric guitars started being manufactured, Paul started playing them, but he never liked them. The electric guitars of the late 1930s were what we’d now call electro-acoustics — they were acoustic guitars, playable as such, but with pickups. There were two main problems with them — firstly, they were very prone to feedback, because the hollow body of the guitar would resonate. And secondly, most of the sonic energy from the strings was going into the guitar itself, so there was no sustain. Paul came up with a simple solution to this problem, which he called “the log”. The log was almost exactly what the name would suggest. It was a plank, to which were nailed some pickups, strings, and tuning pegs. On the front was attached the front of a normal guitar — not anything that would actually resonate, just to make it look like a proper guitar. But basically it was just a lump of wood. Les Paul wasn’t the first person to build a solid-body electric guitar — but as he put it himself later “there may be some guy out there in Iowa says he built the guitar in 1925, for all I know, and he may have. I only know what I was doing and I was out there weaving my own basket, and there wasn’t anybody else around and it had to be done.”. He perfected the solid-body guitar during the first of his years of illness — he’d been running an illegal radio station, accidentally stuck his hand in the transmitter, and not only got an electric shock but had a load of equipment fall on him. By the time he was well enough to work again, he had the idea perfected. He took his solid-body guitar idea to Gibson in 1941, but they weren’t interested — no-one was going to want to buy a solid guitar. It wasn’t until Leo Fender started selling his guitars in 1950 that Gibson realised that it might be worth doing. But by then Les Paul had become one of the most famous guitarists in the country. Even before he became hugely famous, though, he’d been one of the *best* guitarists in the country. In 1944, when the guitarist Oscar Moore was unable at the last minute to play at Jazz At The Philharmonic — the first of what would eventually become the most famous series of jazz concerts ever — Les Paul was drafted in at short notice, and the live recordings of that show are some of the greatest instrumental jazz you’ll hear, at a time when the borders between jazz, R&B, and pop music were more fluid than they became. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from “Blues, 1, 2, & 3”. [excerpt] The honking saxophone player there is Ilinois Jacquet, the man who we talked about in episode one of this podcast, who invented R&B saxophone. The pianist there was also pretty great — he was, in fact, a pianist who was already regarded as one of the best in the business, even before he started to sing, and who later had two further, separate careers under his more familiar name – one in R&B in which he inspired a generation of singers like Charles Brown and Ray Charles, and one in pop, where he became one of the great ballad singers of all time. He’s credited on the track we just heard as “Shorty Nadine” for contractual reasons, but you probably know him better as Nat “King” Cole. Listening to that you can hear musicians performing at a time when jazz and R&B and rock and roll were all still sort of the same thing, before they all went off in their different directions, and it’s hard not to wish that that cross-fertilisation had continued a while longer. But it didn’t, and it would be easy to imagine that as a result Les Paul, who was absolutely a jazz musician, would make no further contributions to rock and roll after his popularising the solid-body electric guitar. But we haven’t even got to his real importance yet. Yes, something he did that was even more important than the Les Paul guitar. It started when his mother told him she’d enjoyed something she heard him play on the radio. He’d replied that it wasn’t him she’d heard, and she’d said “well, all those electric guitar players sound the same. If you want to be a real success, you want to sound different from everyone else — at least different enough that your own mother can recognise you”. And over the years, Les Paul had learned to listen to his mother — she’d been the one who’d got him playing guitar, and she’d been the one who had told him to go and see Bob Wills, the day he’d ended up meeting Charlie Christian for the first time. So he went and spent a lot of time working on a sound that was totally different from anything else, spending days and weeks alone. He stopped working with his trio — and started working with a young country singer who renamed herself Mary Ford, who Gene Autry had introduced him to and who he soon married — and he eventually came up with a whole new idea. This episode is primarily about Les Paul, because he was such an astonishing force of nature, but it’s worth making clear that Mary Ford was very much an equal partner in their sixteen years together. She was an excellent singer — *far* better than Les Paul was — and also a pretty good guitarist herself. On their live dates she would play rhythm guitar, and often the two would do a comedy guitar duel, with her copying everything Les Paul played. She was a vital part of the sound — and of the sonic innovations the records contained, because one of the things they did for the first time was to have her sing very close to the mic — a totally different technique than had been used before, which gave her vocals a different tone which almost everyone imitated. But that wasn’t the only odd sound on the records. It sounded like Les Paul was playing two or three guitars at the same time, playing the same part. And sometimes he was playing notes that were higher than any guitar could play. And sometimes, when Mary Ford was singing… it sounded as if there were two or more of her! This was such an unusual sound that on the duo’s radio and TV appearances they made a joke of it — they pretended that Paul had invented a “Les Paulveriser”, which could duplicate everything, and that for example he could use the Les Paulveriser on Mary, so there’d be multiple Marys and she could get the vacuum cleaning done quicker. It was the fifties. But of course, what Paul was actually doing was overdubbing — recording one guitar part, and then going back and recording a second over it. He’d been fascinated by the idea for decades and he’d first done it as an experiment when he was still with the trio. He’d wanted to rehearse a song on his own, but with the arrangement the rest of the band played, so he’d recorded himself playing all the parts, using a disc cutter and playing along with previous takes. This didn’t give good results until the introduction of magnetic tape recording in the very late forties — when you recorded directly to a disc there was so much surface noise, and recording quality was so poor, that no-one would even think of recording overdubs. But in 1945, American soldiers brought back a new technology from Germany as spoils of war — high fidelity tape recording. With magnetic tape you could record sound with orders of magnitude less noise than by cutting to disc. And Bing Crosby, who often worked with Les Paul, was the first person to see the possibilities of this new technology (in his case, for pre-recording his radio shows so they didn’t have to go out live, which meant he could record them in batches and have more time to spend on the golf course). Les Paul was far more technical than Crosby, though, and far more aware of what could happen if, for example, you had two tape recorders. Or if you ran one slow so that when you played it back at normal speed everything sounded sped up. Or a dozen other obvious tricks that occurred to him, but had never occurred to anyone else. So on those Les Paul and Mary Ford records, literally every instrument was Les Paul on the guitar. The bass was Les Paul’s guitar slowed down to half speed, the percussion was his guitar, *everything* was his guitar. So now we come to “How High the Moon” itself. This is a song that originally dated back to 1940 — the Benny Goodman band had the first hit with it, and indeed Les Paul had recorded a version of it in 1945, with his trio. [excerpt Les Paul Trio version of “How High the Moon”] That was right before his experiments with tape recording started. Shortly after the first results of those were released, in 1948, there was another one of those every-decade health problems. In this case, Mary Ford was driving the two of them from Wisconsin to LA. She was from California, and not used to driving in winter weather. She hit a patch of ice and the two of them went off the road. Les Paul spent hours in ice water with multiple bones broken before anyone could get him to a hospital. For a while, it was believed it would not be possible to save his right arm — and then for a while after that the doctors believed they could save it, but it would permanently be fixed in a single position if they did, as his elbow would be unfixable. He told them to try their best, and to set it in a position with his hand over his navel, because if it was in that position he could still play guitar. As a precaution, he spent his time in hospital drawing up plans for a synthesiser, ten years before Robert Moog invented his, because he figured he could play the synth with one arm. When he got better, he and Mary Ford recorded a new version of “How High The Moon”, but at first the record label didn’t want to release it: [Excerpt Les Paul and Mary Ford: “How High The Moon”] That record sat unreleased for eighteen months, until 1951, because Jim Conkling at Capitol said that there’d been seventy-five recordings of the song before and none of them had been a hit. Conkling thought this was because the lyrics don’t make sense, but Les Paul was insistent that no-one was going to listen to the lyrics anyway. “It doesn’t matter what Mary sang or if it was done by the Four Nosebleeds. It didn’t make any difference, because that wasn’t what made the record. It was the arrangement and the performance.” And he was right — the version by Les Paul and Mary Ford was an absolute phenomenon. It spent twenty-five weeks in the Billboard pop charts, nine of them at number one, and while it was at number one another Paul and Ford track was at number two. Even more astonishingly, it also made number two on the rhythm and blues charts. Remember, that was a chart that was specifically aimed at the black audience, and between 1950 and 1955 only five records by white performers made the R&B charts at all, mostly very early rock and roll records. “How High the Moon” might easily seem an odd fit for the R&B charts. To twenty-first century ears, it’s hard to imagine anything more white-sounding. But what it does, absolutely, share with the music that was charting on the R&B charts at the time, and the reason it appealed to the R&B audience, is a delight in finding totally new sounds. The R&B charts at the time were where you looked for experimentation, for people trying new things. And also, there’s that rhythm on the record — this is entirely a record that’s driven by the rhythm. It’s not quite dance music, not like the jump bands — and there’s only guitar and vocals on it, something which would be absolutely out of the ordinary for rhythm and blues records at the time with their emphasis on piano and saxophone — but what there is in that guitar playing is personal expression. And R&B was all about individual expression. Les Paul was doing something which was qualitatively different both from jazz and from R&B, and so it’s not surprising that he ended up crossing over from one market to another. But in doing so, he also invented the way the guitar was to be used in rock and roll music. There’s a lot of Western Swing about what he’s doing on “How High the Moon”, unsurprisingly. But while the rhythm guitar is keeping to the same kind of rhythms that the Western Swing people would use, the lead guitar is much more aggressive and forceful than anything you got in country or western music at the time. It’s playing jazz and R&B lines — it’s playing, in fact, the kind of thing that a saxophone player like Illinois Jacquet might play, full of aggressive stabs and skronks. And more than that, he invented the way the recording studio would be used in rock and roll. Before Les Paul and Mary Ford’s early records, the recording studio was used solely as a way of reproducing the sound of live instruments as accurately as possible. After them, it became a way to create new sounds that could not be made live. One thing we’re going to see over and again in this series is the way technological change, artistic change and social change all feed back into each other. The 1950s was a time of absolutely unprecedented technological change in America, and people went from, in the beginning of the decade, listening to recordings played at 78RPM, often on wind-up gramophones, made of breakable shellac, to listening to high fidelity forty-five RPM singles and long-playing records which could — shockingly — last more than four minutes a side. Radio went from being something that had to be listened to as a family because of the size of the radiogram to something a teenager could listen to in bed under the blankets on a transistor radio, or something that you could even have on in your car! The combination of these changes made music into something that could be personal as well as communal. Teenagers didn’t have to share the music with their parents. All of that was still to come, of course, and we’ll look at those things as they happen during our history. But “How High the Moon” was the first and best sign of what was to come, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and music entered a totally new age. Les Paul kept playing the guitar into his nineties. Interviewed in his late seventies, when his arthritis was so bad he only had movement in two fingers, with all the others so stiff they just had to stay where he put them, he said he played better than he had when he had ten fingers, because he’d had to learn more about the instrument to do it this way. In the end, his arthritis got to the point that he could no longer move any fingers on either hand — so he just let his fingers stay where they were, but would move his whole hand to play single notes and bar chords — he could lift his fingers up and down, just not move the knuckles. But he could still play. This is him on his ninetieth birthday: [excerpt: Les Paul 90th birthday concert “Sweet Georgia Brown”] So it turns out you don’t even need the two fingers Django had left, not if you have the kind of mind that gets you into the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the inventors’ hall of fame. Les Paul died, aged ninety-four, in 2009.
Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and "How High The Moon". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- A couple of notes: This one is a few hours late, as I had some *severe* technical problems with the several previous attempts at recording this. This version was recorded starting around midnight on Sunday night, which is usually the time I put them up, so I apologise if it's lacking a final polish Resources If the episode starts you wondering about playing instruments while physically disabled, or inventing new instruments, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD box set is a very good compilation of Les Paul and Mary Ford's best work. The quotes from Les Paul in this episode come from this book of interviews with him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To be a truly great guitarist, you need to have an imagination. You need to be inventive. And you need to have a sense of musicality. Some would also say that you need to have a lot of dexterity, and to be able to move your fingers lightning fast. Maybe also have long fingers, so you could reach further down the neck. But let's talk about Django Reinhardt for a bit. We mentioned Django a little bit in the episode on Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. We talked, in particular, about how he was making music that sounded very, very similar to what the early Western Swing musicians were doing. We're not going to talk much about Django in this series, because he was a jazz musician, but he *was* very influential on a few of the people who went on to influence rock, so we're going to touch on him briefly here. He never played an electric guitar, but he still influenced pretty much every guitarist since, either directly or indirectly. And this was despite having disadvantages that would have stopped almost anyone. One point we haven't made very much yet, but which needs to be made repeatedly, is that the people in most of these early podcasts were crushingly, hellishly, poor by today's standards. Poverty still exists of course, to far too great an extent, but the people we're talking about here lived in conditions that would be unimaginable to almost all of the listeners to this podcast. And Reinhardt had it worse than most. He was a Romany traveller, and while growing up his greatest skill was stealing chickens -- real, proper, poverty. But he became a professional musician, and it looked like he might actually become well off. And then his bad luck got worse. His caravan caught on fire, and in trying to rescue his wife and child, he suffered such extreme burns that one of his legs became paralysed -- and more importantly for Reinhardt as a musician, he lost the use of two of his fingers on his left hand. He had to re-teach himself to play the guitar, and to use only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand to play. Remarkably, he managed well enough to do things like this: [Excerpt: "How High The Moon" Django Reinhardt] Reinhardt influenced many guitarists, and one American guitarist in particular became a friend of Reinhardt and said that he and Reinhardt were the only two guitarists in the world at that time who were actually serious about their instrument. He was another jazzman, with a similar style to Reinhardt but one who had a more direct influence on rock and roll. Waukesha, Wisconsin, is not the most rock and roll town in the world. It was a spa town, before the water started to dry up, and about the most exciting thing that ever happened there is that Mr Sears, the founder of Sears & Roebuck, retired there when he got too ill to work any more. It's a bland, whitebread, midwestern town in a state that's most notable for dairy farming. Yet it's also the birthplace of the only man who is in the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and who probably did more than any other individual to make the guitar a respected lead instrument. Almost every moderately-known guitarist eventually gets a "signature" model named after them, and most of these sell a small number of instruments before being discontinued. But one man has a signature model that's so popular that other guitarists get their signatures *alongside his*. When you buy a Jimmy Page or Mark Knopfler or Slash or Eric Clapton signature guitar, there are two names on there -- the name of Page or Clapton or whoever, and the name Les Paul. Les Paul was a remarkable man, whose inventions are far more widely known even than his name. You'll almost certainly have seen musicians playing guitar and harmonica at the same time, using a harmonica holder -- Les Paul invented that, as a teenager, making the first one out of a coathanger. I guess if you were a teenager in Waukesha in the 1920s, you'd have little better to do with yourself than invent coathanger harmonica holders too. But Les Paul was, first and foremost, a guitar player, and he became a semi-professional musician by the time he was thirteen. The choice of the guitar was one that was actually made by his mother. She explained to him "if you play the piano you got your back turned to the audience. If you play the drums, you gotta carry all that stuff around, it's not musical. If you play a saxophone, you can't sing and talk at the same time." In his own words, she "whittled it down to guitar in a hurry". His mother, indeed, seems to have been a remarkable woman in many ways -- if you read any interviews with Les, he barely ever goes a few sentences without saying something about how much she did for him. That's one of the defining characteristics of Les Paul's life, really -- his admiration for his mother. There were two more things that characterised him though. The first was that pretty much dead on, every ten years, he would have some major health crisis that would put him out of commission for a year. The other was his lifelong devotion to learning, which meant that he used those health crises as an opportunity to learn something new. This love of learning could be seen from his very early days. When he was just learning the guitar, the singing cowboy star Gene Autry came to town. Gene Autry was a star of Western music -- the very biggest star in the country -- and his music was a cleaned-up, politer, version of the kind of music Bob Wills played: [excerpt: Gene Autry "Back in the Saddle Again"]. Les and his friend went to every show in the residency, and after a couple of nights, Gene Autry stopped the show in the middle of the set and said "something strange has been happening here -- every time I play an F chord, and *only* when I play an F chord, there's a flash of light. What's going on, how is this happening?" It turned out that Les had been wanting to learn how Autry made that chord shape, so he'd been there with a pencil and paper, and his friend had a torch, and every time he played the chord Les Paul wanted to learn, the torch would come on and Les would be trying to sketch the shape of Autry's fingers. Autry invited Les Paul onto the stage, showed him how to make the chord, and had him play a couple of songs. A few years later, when Autry moved from radio to films, he suggested Les Paul take over his radio show. So Les Paul was always fascinated by learning, and always trying to improve himself and his equipment. And once he decided to be a guitarist, he also decided to electrify his guitar, a full decade before electric guitars became a widespread instrument. He explained that when he was starting out, he was playing at a hotdog stand, using a homemade microphone for his voice and harmonica -- the microphone was made out of bits of an old telephone, and it was plugged in to his mother's radio. People who were listening liked his performances, but they said they wished the guitar was as loud as his voice -- so he took his *dad's* radio, too, and connected it to a record player needle, which he jammed into the body of his guitar. Once electric guitars started being manufactured, Paul started playing them, but he never liked them. The electric guitars of the late 1930s were what we'd now call electro-acoustics -- they were acoustic guitars, playable as such, but with pickups. There were two main problems with them -- firstly, they were very prone to feedback, because the hollow body of the guitar would resonate. And secondly, most of the sonic energy from the strings was going into the guitar itself, so there was no sustain. Paul came up with a simple solution to this problem, which he called "the log". The log was almost exactly what the name would suggest. It was a plank, to which were nailed some pickups, strings, and tuning pegs. On the front was attached the front of a normal guitar -- not anything that would actually resonate, just to make it look like a proper guitar. But basically it was just a lump of wood. Les Paul wasn't the first person to build a solid-body electric guitar -- but as he put it himself later "there may be some guy out there in Iowa says he built the guitar in 1925, for all I know, and he may have. I only know what I was doing and I was out there weaving my own basket, and there wasn't anybody else around and it had to be done.". He perfected the solid-body guitar during the first of his years of illness -- he'd been running an illegal radio station, accidentally stuck his hand in the transmitter, and not only got an electric shock but had a load of equipment fall on him. By the time he was well enough to work again, he had the idea perfected. He took his solid-body guitar idea to Gibson in 1941, but they weren't interested -- no-one was going to want to buy a solid guitar. It wasn't until Leo Fender started selling his guitars in 1950 that Gibson realised that it might be worth doing. But by then Les Paul had become one of the most famous guitarists in the country. Even before he became hugely famous, though, he'd been one of the *best* guitarists in the country. In 1944, when the guitarist Oscar Moore was unable at the last minute to play at Jazz At The Philharmonic -- the first of what would eventually become the most famous series of jazz concerts ever -- Les Paul was drafted in at short notice, and the live recordings of that show are some of the greatest instrumental jazz you'll hear, at a time when the borders between jazz, R&B, and pop music were more fluid than they became. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from "Blues, 1, 2, & 3". [excerpt] The honking saxophone player there is Ilinois Jacquet, the man who we talked about in episode one of this podcast, who invented R&B saxophone. The pianist there was also pretty great -- he was, in fact, a pianist who was already regarded as one of the best in the business, even before he started to sing, and who later had two further, separate careers under his more familiar name – one in R&B in which he inspired a generation of singers like Charles Brown and Ray Charles, and one in pop, where he became one of the great ballad singers of all time. He's credited on the track we just heard as "Shorty Nadine" for contractual reasons, but you probably know him better as Nat "King" Cole. Listening to that you can hear musicians performing at a time when jazz and R&B and rock and roll were all still sort of the same thing, before they all went off in their different directions, and it's hard not to wish that that cross-fertilisation had continued a while longer. But it didn't, and it would be easy to imagine that as a result Les Paul, who was absolutely a jazz musician, would make no further contributions to rock and roll after his popularising the solid-body electric guitar. But we haven't even got to his real importance yet. Yes, something he did that was even more important than the Les Paul guitar. It started when his mother told him she'd enjoyed something she heard him play on the radio. He'd replied that it wasn't him she'd heard, and she'd said "well, all those electric guitar players sound the same. If you want to be a real success, you want to sound different from everyone else -- at least different enough that your own mother can recognise you". And over the years, Les Paul had learned to listen to his mother -- she'd been the one who'd got him playing guitar, and she'd been the one who had told him to go and see Bob Wills, the day he'd ended up meeting Charlie Christian for the first time. So he went and spent a lot of time working on a sound that was totally different from anything else, spending days and weeks alone. He stopped working with his trio -- and started working with a young country singer who renamed herself Mary Ford, who Gene Autry had introduced him to and who he soon married -- and he eventually came up with a whole new idea. This episode is primarily about Les Paul, because he was such an astonishing force of nature, but it's worth making clear that Mary Ford was very much an equal partner in their sixteen years together. She was an excellent singer -- *far* better than Les Paul was -- and also a pretty good guitarist herself. On their live dates she would play rhythm guitar, and often the two would do a comedy guitar duel, with her copying everything Les Paul played. She was a vital part of the sound -- and of the sonic innovations the records contained, because one of the things they did for the first time was to have her sing very close to the mic -- a totally different technique than had been used before, which gave her vocals a different tone which almost everyone imitated. But that wasn't the only odd sound on the records. It sounded like Les Paul was playing two or three guitars at the same time, playing the same part. And sometimes he was playing notes that were higher than any guitar could play. And sometimes, when Mary Ford was singing... it sounded as if there were two or more of her! This was such an unusual sound that on the duo's radio and TV appearances they made a joke of it -- they pretended that Paul had invented a "Les Paulveriser", which could duplicate everything, and that for example he could use the Les Paulveriser on Mary, so there'd be multiple Marys and she could get the vacuum cleaning done quicker. It was the fifties. But of course, what Paul was actually doing was overdubbing -- recording one guitar part, and then going back and recording a second over it. He'd been fascinated by the idea for decades and he'd first done it as an experiment when he was still with the trio. He'd wanted to rehearse a song on his own, but with the arrangement the rest of the band played, so he'd recorded himself playing all the parts, using a disc cutter and playing along with previous takes. This didn't give good results until the introduction of magnetic tape recording in the very late forties -- when you recorded directly to a disc there was so much surface noise, and recording quality was so poor, that no-one would even think of recording overdubs. But in 1945, American soldiers brought back a new technology from Germany as spoils of war -- high fidelity tape recording. With magnetic tape you could record sound with orders of magnitude less noise than by cutting to disc. And Bing Crosby, who often worked with Les Paul, was the first person to see the possibilities of this new technology (in his case, for pre-recording his radio shows so they didn't have to go out live, which meant he could record them in batches and have more time to spend on the golf course). Les Paul was far more technical than Crosby, though, and far more aware of what could happen if, for example, you had two tape recorders. Or if you ran one slow so that when you played it back at normal speed everything sounded sped up. Or a dozen other obvious tricks that occurred to him, but had never occurred to anyone else. So on those Les Paul and Mary Ford records, literally every instrument was Les Paul on the guitar. The bass was Les Paul's guitar slowed down to half speed, the percussion was his guitar, *everything* was his guitar. So now we come to "How High the Moon" itself. This is a song that originally dated back to 1940 -- the Benny Goodman band had the first hit with it, and indeed Les Paul had recorded a version of it in 1945, with his trio. [excerpt Les Paul Trio version of "How High the Moon"] That was right before his experiments with tape recording started. Shortly after the first results of those were released, in 1948, there was another one of those every-decade health problems. In this case, Mary Ford was driving the two of them from Wisconsin to LA. She was from California, and not used to driving in winter weather. She hit a patch of ice and the two of them went off the road. Les Paul spent hours in ice water with multiple bones broken before anyone could get him to a hospital. For a while, it was believed it would not be possible to save his right arm -- and then for a while after that the doctors believed they could save it, but it would permanently be fixed in a single position if they did, as his elbow would be unfixable. He told them to try their best, and to set it in a position with his hand over his navel, because if it was in that position he could still play guitar. As a precaution, he spent his time in hospital drawing up plans for a synthesiser, ten years before Robert Moog invented his, because he figured he could play the synth with one arm. When he got better, he and Mary Ford recorded a new version of "How High The Moon", but at first the record label didn't want to release it: [Excerpt Les Paul and Mary Ford: "How High The Moon"] That record sat unreleased for eighteen months, until 1951, because Jim Conkling at Capitol said that there'd been seventy-five recordings of the song before and none of them had been a hit. Conkling thought this was because the lyrics don't make sense, but Les Paul was insistent that no-one was going to listen to the lyrics anyway. "It doesn't matter what Mary sang or if it was done by the Four Nosebleeds. It didn't make any difference, because that wasn't what made the record. It was the arrangement and the performance." And he was right -- the version by Les Paul and Mary Ford was an absolute phenomenon. It spent twenty-five weeks in the Billboard pop charts, nine of them at number one, and while it was at number one another Paul and Ford track was at number two. Even more astonishingly, it also made number two on the rhythm and blues charts. Remember, that was a chart that was specifically aimed at the black audience, and between 1950 and 1955 only five records by white performers made the R&B charts at all, mostly very early rock and roll records. "How High the Moon" might easily seem an odd fit for the R&B charts. To twenty-first century ears, it's hard to imagine anything more white-sounding. But what it does, absolutely, share with the music that was charting on the R&B charts at the time, and the reason it appealed to the R&B audience, is a delight in finding totally new sounds. The R&B charts at the time were where you looked for experimentation, for people trying new things. And also, there's that rhythm on the record -- this is entirely a record that's driven by the rhythm. It's not quite dance music, not like the jump bands -- and there's only guitar and vocals on it, something which would be absolutely out of the ordinary for rhythm and blues records at the time with their emphasis on piano and saxophone -- but what there is in that guitar playing is personal expression. And R&B was all about individual expression. Les Paul was doing something which was qualitatively different both from jazz and from R&B, and so it's not surprising that he ended up crossing over from one market to another. But in doing so, he also invented the way the guitar was to be used in rock and roll music. There's a lot of Western Swing about what he's doing on "How High the Moon", unsurprisingly. But while the rhythm guitar is keeping to the same kind of rhythms that the Western Swing people would use, the lead guitar is much more aggressive and forceful than anything you got in country or western music at the time. It's playing jazz and R&B lines -- it's playing, in fact, the kind of thing that a saxophone player like Illinois Jacquet might play, full of aggressive stabs and skronks. And more than that, he invented the way the recording studio would be used in rock and roll. Before Les Paul and Mary Ford's early records, the recording studio was used solely as a way of reproducing the sound of live instruments as accurately as possible. After them, it became a way to create new sounds that could not be made live. One thing we're going to see over and again in this series is the way technological change, artistic change and social change all feed back into each other. The 1950s was a time of absolutely unprecedented technological change in America, and people went from, in the beginning of the decade, listening to recordings played at 78RPM, often on wind-up gramophones, made of breakable shellac, to listening to high fidelity forty-five RPM singles and long-playing records which could -- shockingly -- last more than four minutes a side. Radio went from being something that had to be listened to as a family because of the size of the radiogram to something a teenager could listen to in bed under the blankets on a transistor radio, or something that you could even have on in your car! The combination of these changes made music into something that could be personal as well as communal. Teenagers didn't have to share the music with their parents. All of that was still to come, of course, and we'll look at those things as they happen during our history. But "How High the Moon" was the first and best sign of what was to come, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and music entered a totally new age. Les Paul kept playing the guitar into his nineties. Interviewed in his late seventies, when his arthritis was so bad he only had movement in two fingers, with all the others so stiff they just had to stay where he put them, he said he played better than he had when he had ten fingers, because he'd had to learn more about the instrument to do it this way. In the end, his arthritis got to the point that he could no longer move any fingers on either hand -- so he just let his fingers stay where they were, but would move his whole hand to play single notes and bar chords -- he could lift his fingers up and down, just not move the knuckles. But he could still play. This is him on his ninetieth birthday: [excerpt: Les Paul 90th birthday concert “Sweet Georgia Brown”] So it turns out you don't even need the two fingers Django had left, not if you have the kind of mind that gets you into the rock and roll hall of fame *and* the inventors' hall of fame. Les Paul died, aged ninety-four, in 2009.
Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “How High The Moon”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
Welcome to the first episode proper of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs! As this is the first real episode, you may notice a couple of flaws in the production — those will hopefully get ironed out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sit back and listen to the story of “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet! (more…)
Welcome to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs! Episode 1, the first episode proper, is coming next week, but for now here’s an introduction, laying out my plans for the series. As I say in the tag at the end of every episode, please, if you like this episode, tell someone about it — word of mouth is important, especially with these early episodes. Resources Mentioned in the Podcast My book, California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s, available here. Transcript Rock and roll as a cultural force is, it is safe to say, dead. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and nor does it mean that good rock and roll music isn’t being made any more. Rather, rock, like jazz, has become a niche musical interest. It’s a large niche, and it will be so long as there are people around who grew up in the last half of the last century, but the cultural influence it once had has declined precipitously in the last decade or so. These days, various flavours of hip-hop, electronic dance music, manufactured pop, and half a dozen genres that a middle-aged man like myself couldn’t even name are having the cultural and commercial impact that in previous decades was mostly made by guitar bands. And this means that for the first time, it’s possible to assess rock music (or rock and roll — the two terms are not quite interchangeable, but this is not the place for a discussion of the terminology, which will come later) in a historical context. In fact this may be the best time for it, when it’s still interesting to a wide audience, and still fresh in the memory, but it’s not still an ongoing story that will necessarily change. Almost all of the original generation of rock and roll musicians are now dead (the only prominent exceptions at the moment being Jerry Lee Lewis, Don Everly, and Little Richard, although numerous lesser-known musicians from the time are still working occasionally), but their legacy is still having an impact. So in this podcast series I will look at the history of rock and roll music, starting with a few pre-rock songs that clearly influenced the burgeoning rock and roll genre, and ending up in 1999 — it makes sense to cut the story off there, in multiple ways. I’ll talk about the musicians, and about the music. About how the musicians influenced each other, and about the cultural forces that shaped them. In early episodes, you’ll hear me talk about the impact the Communist Party, a series of strikes, and a future governor of Texas would all have on rock and roll’s prehistory. But more importantly you’ll hear me talk about the songs and the singers, the instrumentalists and the record producers. I shall be using a somewhat expansive definition of rock or rock and roll here, including genres like soul and disco, because those genres grew up alongside rock, were prominent at the same time as it, and both influenced and were influenced by the rock music of the time. I’m sure we’ll look, when the time comes, at the way the words “rock and roll” were slowly redefined, from originally meaning a form of music made almost entirely by black people to later pretty much explicitly excluding all black musicians from their definition. But the most important thing I’ll be doing is looking at the history of rock in terms of the music. I’ll be looking at the records, and at the songs. How they were made and by whom. I’ve chosen five hundred songs in total, roughly a hundred per decade from the fifties through the nineties. Some of these songs are obvious choices, which have been written about many times before, but which need to be dealt with in any history of rock music. Others are more obscure tracks which nonetheless point to interesting things about how the music world was developing at the time they were recorded. I say “I’ve chosen”, but this is going to be a project that takes nearly ten years, and no doubt my list will change. I’ll be interested to see what suggestions listeners have, once I get them. Each podcast will be accompanied by a blog post, with a transcript of the episode (actually the script from which I’m working — I won’t be transcribing any of my mistakes) and links to sources, along with any notes — for example, I’ve already noticed a mistake in episode two which I’ll put in that episode’s notes. I’ll also be compiling an accompanying mixcloud post for each podcast. Those mixclouds will have the full versions of every song I excerpt in these podcasts, and I encourage you to listen to them. The podcasts are planned to be about twenty-five minutes on average, with the occasional shorter one, like this, as a bit of housecleaning. I’ll also, every two years, be publishing a book based on these scripts, which will eventually become a five-volume work. Anyone who backs me on patreon, at patreon.com/andrewhickey — that’s a n d r e w h i c k e y — will get free access to those books, as well as backing my blog and my other podcast. Those of you who have read my earlier work California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s will be familiar with this narrative technique I’m using here, and this series is in many ways an expansion of that book’s approach, but it’s important to note that the two works aren’t looking at precisely the same thing — that book was dealing with a particular scene, and with people who all knew each other, in a limited geographic and temporal space. Here, on the other hand, the threads we’ll be following are more cultural than social — there isn’t a direct connection between Little Richard and Talking Heads, for example, but hopefully over the course of this series we will find a narrative thread that still connects them. Obviously, just as there’s no definitive end to the time when rock had cultural prominence, there’s no definitive beginning either. The quest for a “first rock and roll record” is a futile one — rock and roll didn’t spring fully formed into existence in Sam Phillips’ studio in 1951 (when he recorded “Rocket 88”) or 1954 (when he recorded “That’s All Right”) — music evolved, and so we’ll look at R&B and country, at Merseybeat and punk, and try to find the throughlines. But to start with, we want to take a trip back to the swing era…
Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ It Ain't The Meat by The Swallows on 50s Doo Wop Essentials (Master Classics Records) 3′54″ Daddy Daddy by Ruth Brown on Ruth Brown (Rhino Atlantic) 6′08″ Louisiana by Percy Mayfield on Poet Of The Blues (Reissue) (Specialty Records) 8′05″ Lillie Mae by Smiley Lewis on True Blues, Vol. 3 (Shami Media Group 3) 11′48″ Mr. Highway Man by Howlin' Wolf on 50s Blues (Sun Records - X5 Music Group) 14′11″ Why Don't You Eat Where You Slept Last Night? by Zuzu Bollin on Texas Bluesman (New West Records) 17′08″ Two Little Girls by Jimmy Witherspoon on Jay's Blues (King Records) 20′59″ You Win Again by Hank Williams on The Best Of Hank Williams 20th Century Masters The Millennium Collection Volume 2 (Universal Strategic Marketing) 23′28″ You Know I Love You by B.B. King on Bad Case of Love (Compose Records) 26′36″ My Song by Johnny Ace on The Complete Duke Recordings (Universal Strategic Marketing) 30′28″ Have Mercy Baby by Dominoes,Billy Ward on Jukebox One Hit Wonders (X5 Music Group) 32′34″ All Night Baby by The Robins on I Must Be Dreamin' (El Toro Records Legendary Masters) 35′38″ Back Door Friend by Jimmy Rogers on Chicago Bound (Universal Special Markets) 40′49″ Juke by Little Walter on The Essential Little Walter (Universal Special Markets) 43′24″ Street Walking Woman by T-Bone Walker on The Complete Imperial Recordings: 1950-1954 (Parlophone Catalogue) 46′32″ I Don't Know by Willie Mabon on The Chess Blues-Rock Songbook (Geffen) 50′29″ Let's call it a day by Sonny Thompson on Mellow Blues (Epm) 53′36″ Goin' Home by Fats Domino on Fats Domino Swings (Capitol Records, LLC) 55′11″ You Belong To Me by Jo Stafford on Greatest Hits (Int'l Only) (Capitol Records) 58′54″ Port Of Rico by Illinois Jacquet on Verve: The Sound Of America: The Singles Collection (Universal Music Group) Check out the full archives on the website.
In this special episode, we chat with Kurt Morrow about the time he spent with Milt Hinton. Milt's wife Mona asked Kurt if he would live in faculty housing with Milt. Kurt shares some of these life-changing experiences with us today. More about Milt Hinton Milt “The Judge” Hinton was regarded as the Dean of jazz bass players. He was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1910, and at the age of eleven moved to Chicago with his family. He began his musical education by taking private violin lessons, but while attending Chicago's Wendell Phillips High School and playing in a band sponsored by the Chicago Defender newspaper, he learned to play bass horn, tuba, cello, and eventually the bass violin. Like many aspiring Southside musicians of his generation, he was influenced by the legendary educator, Major N. Clark Smith. During the late 1920s and early 30s, Milt worked as a freelance musician in Chicago and performed with legendary jazz artists including Freddie Keppard, Zutty Singleton, Jabbo Smith, Erskine Tate, and Art Tatum. His first steady job was with a band led by Tiny Parham, followed by a stint with violinist Eddie South’s Orchestra. Milt’s earliest recording come from this era. In l936, Milt joined Cab Calloway and for fifteen years performed with Calloway and renowned sidemen such as Danny Barker, Chu Berry, Doc Cheatham, Cozy Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Quentin Jackson, Illinois Jacquet, Jonah Jones, Ike Quebec, and Ben Webster. During this period he was also featured on numerous recordings accompanying Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, and Teddy Wilson - to name just a few. Most of these sessions have become jazz classics. After leaving Calloway in the early 50s, Milt began working as a studio freelancer in New York City. For two decades he played on thousands of jazz and popular records. He also played on hundreds of jingles and film soundtracks and numerous radio and television programs. In addition, he made concert and festival appearances around the world and toured extensively with Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, and Bing Crosby. Milt has played with virtually every jazz and popular artist from Ellington, Coltrane and the Marsalis Brothers to Streisand, Midler and McCartney. In the late 80s Chiaroscuro Records released Old Man Time , a double cd featuring Milt along with many life-long friends from the music world. Laughin' at Life, was released by Columbia Records in 1995 and Chiaroscuro recently released The Judge at His Best, a selection of his recordings on that label over three decades, and the Bassment Tapes, which features Milt performing with groups he assembled. Milt received honorary doctorates from William Paterson College, Skidmore College, Hamilton College, DePaul University, Trinity College, the Berklee College of Music, Fairfield University, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He won the Eubie Award from the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Living Treasure Award from the Smithsonian Institution, and he was the first recipient of the Three Keys Award in Bern, Switzerland. In 1993, Milt was awarded the highly prestigious American Jazz Master Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1996 he received a New York State Governor’s Arts Award, in March 1998 he was awarded the Artist Achievement Award by the Governor of Mississippi, and in 2000 his name was installed on ASCAP’s Wall of Fame. Milt began taking photographs of his friends in the l930s, and he has continued ever since. Over the years his collection has grown to more than 60,000 images. The work depicts an extensive range of jazz artists and popular performers in varied settings - on the road, in recording studios, at parties, and at home - over a period of six decades. In June 1981, he had his first one-person photographic exhibition in Philadelphia and since then he has had exhibits across the country and in Europe. In addition to being published in major periodicals, Milt’s photographs have appeared in documentary films including The Long Night of Lady Day (Billie Holiday), The Brute and the Beautiful (Ben Webster), and Listen Up (Quincy Jones). A Great Day in Harlem a 1994 documentary about Esquire’s photographic shoot of jazz legends in 1958, features numerous photographs by Milt as well as a home movie shot by his wife, Mona Hinton. In 1988, Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton, by Milt Hinton and David G. Berger was published by Temple University Press. It was selected Book of the Year by JazzTimes. In 1991, OverTime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton, was published by Pomegranate ArtBooks. In 1990, Milt's 80th year, WRTI-FM in Philadelphia produced a series of twenty eight short programs in which Milt chronicled his life. These were aired nationwide by more than one hundred fifty public radio stations and received a Gabriel Award as Best National Short Feature in 1990. In June 2000, a concert was held to pay tribute to Milt on the occasion of his 90th Birthday. Milt passed away six months later. In late 2002, Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photographs of Milt Hinton, a one hour documentary film was completed. It was produced and directed by David G. Berger and Holly Maxson. It debuted at the London Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003, and has been shown at film festival both here and abroad. Milt and Mona Hinton were married for fifty-seven years and have a daughter Charlotte and granddaughter Inez who live in Atlanta. The Hintons’ life-long involvement in their Queens, New York community, their strong commitment to family, and their ongoing contribution to music and photography made them both role models and an inspiration to younger generations. Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by: The Upton Bass String Instrument Company. Upton's Karr Model Upton Double Bass represents an evolution of our popular first Karr model, refined and enhanced with further input from Gary Karr. Since its introduction, the Karr Model with its combination of comfort and tone has gained a loyal following with jazz and roots players. The slim, long “Karr neck” has even become a favorite of crossover electric players. Check out this video of David Murray "auditioning" his Upton Bass! 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Fem un cop d'ull (o millor dit, d'orella) a les carreres musicals paral
Ad legend Keith Reinhard, who is also the father of our co-founder & CCO Matt, curated this month's playlist of jazz classics, complemented by Matisse visuals. Leave Me Alone — Johnny Griffin When people ask what jazz is all about, I always quote the great Chicago-born tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin who said: “Jazz is created by and for people who have decided to feel good, regardless of conditions.” His Chicago “tough tenor” sound on this recording makes me feel good regardless of what else is going on. I hope you feel the same. Intermission Riff — Stan Kenton Stan Kenton was coming onto the jazz scene about the time I was graduating from high school. Back then his sound was considered very avant-garde. I like a lot about Kenton’s music, but especially his five-trombone section that growls in close harmony on this recording. These same trombones inspired a jazz vocal quartet at Butler University in my home state of Indiana. They became famous as The Four Freshmen, with a unique sound achieved by vocalizing Kenton’s trombone charts. Take the “A” Train — Duke Ellington I live very close to a subway station in Manhattan, and every time I pass by it or descend into it, Duke Ellington’s theme song starts playing in my mental hum box. The song was written by his composing companion Billy Strayhorn when the young composer was invited to visit Duke at his apartment in Sugar Hill, Harlem. “How do I get there?” asked Billy. “Take the A Train to Sugar Hill,” said Duke. “It’s the quickest way to Harlem.” This recording is by the Ellington orchestra, conducted by Duke’s son Mercer, and featuring an impeccable tenor sax solo by Branford Marsalis. Moten Swing — Count Basie When Benny Moten played this song with his Kansas City Orchestra back in the thirties, his orchestra included Count Basie on the piano. Since then, Moten Swing has become most associated with Basie. I love the way the brass section surprises us by shouting out, in sharp contrast to Basie on piano who, as one reviewer put it, “plays little notes but gives them lots of meaning.” Moral of the story: You don’t have to be loud to be meaningful. Stompin’ at the Savoy — Benny Goodman When listening to jazz, I like to think of the different instruments and sections as being engaged in a conversation. Jazz people refer to this as “call and response.” One section “calls,” the other “responds.” This song is a great example of such dialogue. First the horn section calls “pah pah,” then the reed section responds, “bah da de da da dah.” A few bars later the call and response is reversed with the reed section calling and the horns responding. Soaring above this delightful conversation, Benny Goodman lifts our spirits with his clarinet solos. Goodman was another jazz great born in Chicago. The son of poor Jewish immigrants, he grew up to form, during an era of racial segregation, the first racially integrated jazz group. Watermelon Man — Poncho Sanchez Talk about Feelin’ Good! How can you feel any other way when you listen to Poncho Sanchez, the Mexican-American conguero (conga player) play Herbie Hancock’s composition about a watermelon vendor? Hancock, yet another Chicago-born jazz legend, composed the tune based on the men who drove their melon wagons over Chicago’s cobblestone streets and sang out about their juicy wares. Now that you know the story, you can almost hear the words “Hey, Wa-ter-mel-on man” in the five-note melodic figure that repeats through the song. Thanks to Poncho Sanchez and other Latin band leaders, this song became a bridge between Afro-Cuban and Afro-American music. Drum Boogie — Gene Krupa My high school buddy, Don Neuen, and I were both percussionists in our high school band and orchestra. We both admired the great drummer Gene Krupa, who was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, and who became a handsome teenage idol. We wanted to look like him and play like him, neither of which ever happened. My friend Don, however, did become a distinguished musician as a faculty member of the Eastman School of Music and later, director of choral music at UCLA. Lacking Don’s (or Gene Krupa’s) talent, I went on to be just a music lover. But when I hear Krupa on the drum breaks in songs like “Drum Boogie,” it brings back those high school days when I was trying to master drum rudiments like flamadiddles and paradiddles. At least I member their onomatopoeic names. Boplicity — Miles Davis Jazz people often talk about the color of notes. You can even do a Google search to find color wheels assigning different colors to different notes. I’m not that sophisticated. But I respond to what Miles Davis and his nonet (nine-person group) are doing in this recording — experimenting with a less aggressive style of playing, and what is described as warm tonal colors, even though the album title is about the birth of cool. On the subject of color, I’ve always liked what Miles Davis himself said about the relationship between music and paintings: “A painting is music you can see. Music is a painting you can hear.” Big Butter and Egg Man — Wynton Marsalis Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, educator and a leading advocate of American culture. I’m also proud to say he is my friend. We met in 1992 in São Paulo, Brazil and we’ve been friends ever since. Wynton is a multi-Grammy winner and the first jazz musician ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. I love his trumpet solo on this recording of a song that takes its title from a 1920’s slang term for a big spender — a traveling businessman who spent big bucks in nightclubs. Presumably the voice of the trumpet is the voice of a woman who would like to connect with a Big Butter and Egg Man. Wynton is very wise. I once asked him how he feels if people don’t like a brave new composition. His response: “You can’t just be weird man, people gotta dig it.” What great advice for all of us. I hope you dig Wynton on this track along with his father Ellis who is on piano. Four on Six — Wes Montgomery Wes Montgomery is one of the most influential guitarists ever in jazz. A product of my home state, Wes was born in Indianapolis, the middle and most celebrated brother of a family of musicians. He recorded with brothers Buddy, a vibraphonist, and Monk, who played the electric bass. I like the fact that, as a guitarist, Montgomery is said to have introduced many people to jazz — people who knew they liked guitar but didn’t know they liked jazz. Indiana — The Modern Jazz Quartet First recorded in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Indiana” (aka “(Back Home Again in) Indiana”) soon became a jazz standard. For years, Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars would open each public appearance with this number. As a native Hoosier, it always brings back good memories of my growing up days. This recording is a good example of one of the basic elements of jazz — improvisation or spontaneous composition. The tenor sax plays the familiar melody, followed by a series of soloists improvising on the basic tune structure. In the last :30 of the track, the vibraphonist brings us “Back Home Again” to Indiana and the original tune. Cottontail — Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra I’ve been privileged to serve on the Board of Jazz at Lincoln Center for lots of years and so I’ve been able to see and hear the best of the genre up close and personal. Under the masterful direction of Wynton Marsalis, the organization’s managing and artistic director, every member of this 16-piece orchestra could be a headliner on their own. Each musician is a composer, arranger and performer. In this closing track of my jazz playlist, the orchestra is joined by the famous tenor sax player, Illinois Jacquet. The recording is live and I hope you’ll join in the applause.
Little is known about Fred Jackson except he was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929 which today would make him 87 or 88. if he is still with us. He dropped out of the music scene around 1965 and nothing since. He came from a Rhythm and Blues background and worked with Little Richard, B.B. King and especially Lloyd Price where he was Mr. Price's musical director. Jackson is a tenor saxophonist in the style of Illinois Jacquet, Gene Ammons, Houston Person etc. Big sound, bluesy concept and total control of the horn from top to bottom. He appeared as a sideman on Baby Face Willette's classic Blue Note date called "Face to Face" and impressed Blue Note's honcho Alfred Lion who loved Jackson's playing. He did two dates for the label but only one was issued and it's tonight's Jazz feature. Fred Jackson appears with his Lloyd Price cohorts, Earl Vandyke on organ, Willie Jones on guitar and Wilbert (aka G.T.) Hogan on drums. Seven Jackson original;s reflect his blues and R&B background. "Hootin' 'n' Tootin" is a boss date.
Trombonist Matthew Gee is our Jazz Feature artist and the third in this month's presentation of great and near-great Jazz players who operated under the radar. In Matthew's case it was because he only recorded two albums under his name and the other one was a co-leadership with tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Tonight's Feature is all Matthew and it's his first. It was recorded for the then new Riverside label in 1956 and it remains a rare item. It is in two sessions with two different bands. Trombonist Gee had a long career in Jazz and played with Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons. Illinois Jacquet and Lou Donaldson plus tenures with the big bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. The first session contains three Gee originals with an all-star group with Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Frank Foster on tenor saxophone and Cecil Payne on baritone and Mr. Gee on trombone and Joe Knight on piano, John Simmons on bass and Arthur Taylor on drums. The second session is looser and is mostly standard tunes with Mr. Gee leading Ernie Henry on alto saxophone, Joe Knight on piano, the great Wilbur Ware on bass and again Arthur Taylor on drums. No nonsense Jazz is this. "Jazz By Gee!"
El jazz como una fiesta. La fiesta de las giras y conciertos de los espectáculos Jazz At The Philharmonic promovidos por el empresario Norman Granz que tuvieron lugar entre mediados de los años 40 y el inicio de la década de los años 80 del pasado siglo. En esta entrega de HDO suena una selección de temas (inéditos) grabados en Jazz At The Philharmonic, Seattle, 1956 y publicados en la grabación homónima. Suenan el Swing Set (Roy Eldridge, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Jo Jones); el Modern Jazz Quartet (John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Connie Kay); el Modern Jazz Quartet con Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie; el Gene Krupa Quartet (John Drew, Dave McKenna, Eddie Shu, Gene Krupa); el Oscar Peterson Trio (Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown); finalmente, Ella Fitzgerald con The Oscar Peterson Trio. Toda la información de la entrega en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=21608. Toda la información acerca de HDO en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=13298. © Pachi Tapiz, 2015 Hablando de oídas (HDO) es un audioblog presentado, producido y editado por Pachi Tapiz.
The great producer Norman Granz was responsible for bringing the jam session which he felt was the core of Jazz music, to the stage. He also recorded many studio produced jams with some of the greatest musicians in the world. Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Illinois Jacquet, Count Basie, Buddy Rich and literally hundreds of others. Many of these recordings are now considered classic and essential in anyone's record collection. We will play a variety of them tonight on our special Fun Drive Show.
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