America owes a debt of gratitude to Ace Records. For decades, this UK-based
outfit and its subsidiary labels have hunted down, remastered, annotated, and
repackaged jump blues, doowop, R &B, Northern soul, 50s and 60s sunshine
pop, psychedelia, rock instrumentals, and a good amount of oddball stuff that together
demonstrate the incredible richness of our nation’s musical history over the
past six decades. Thanks to a familiar blend of corporate greed, negligence,
and indifference, coupled with the nature of our ever more disposable culture, the
U.S. often seems incapable of performing this important service.
Take, for example, Ace’s resuscitation of Mainstream
Records. Bob Shad was a veteran producer
of jazz (Charlie Parker at Savoy, Clifford Brown and Sarah Vaughn at
Mercury) who previously had run a small record label (Sittin’ In With) that put
out some fine late 40s blues sides. He also dabbled in rock with his own Brent
subsidiary and jazz with Time Records. On 1964, he started Mainstream, which for
the rest of the 60s issued jazz and rock material. Ace has issued some his popsike
stuff on a two-CD compilation and the straight jazz on another CD, along with
individual albums by Blue Mitchell, Harold Land, and Hadley Caliman.
By 1970, though, that straight jazz was in one of its
eternally recurrent declines, so Shad moved into soul jazz, recording both new
vocalists like Ellerene Harding and Alice Clark as well as veteran musicians
like Curtis Fuller and Charles Kynard in beat-laden contexts. The folks at Ace
were canny enough to pick out this thread in the Mainstream tapestry and put together
The
Message: Soul, Funk, and Jazzy Grooves from Mainstream Records on the
BGP (Beat Goes Public) label. As usual, it’s got a booklet containing a brief
introductory essay, commentary on each track, and numerous photographs of the
artists.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I bought this CD,
so playing it was a bit of an adventure. After I played House of Rising
Funk by Chubokos, I thought, “Pretty good!” by the time I got to
Afrique’s cover of Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa, I was
foot tapping and head bobbing too much to think about anything. Thanks to the
notes by dean Rudland, I also knew that these two bands were the same group of
studio/mainstream guys working under different names—thanks, Dean. There are so
many great cuts on this record that it’s hard to know which ones I should call
out. Funky Butt by the
Delegates (another studio band, it got its name because the 1972 political
conventions were going on at the time) features David T. Walker on guitar and
Charles Kynard (also featured on a couple of other tracks) on Hammond B-3. Ellerine
Harding kills To Whom It May Concern (All I Need), which
also has a bit of a political slant (“I don’t need your study groups or your
benign neglect” and “I don’t need your Doctor Jensens to study my IQ”). Maxine Weldon really works out on Grits Ain’t Groceries,
and Sarah Vaughn (!) gets a bit political AND spacy/funky on Inner City Blues (Make me
Want to Holler).
Most of the tracks on The
Message are instrumentals. The Jackson Five’s I Want You Back
doesn’t seem to call for a 65-piece band named Bobby Shad & the Bad Men (if
I ran a record company, I’d do my thing, too!) but it’s actually excellent—check
out the dueling trumpets toward the end. Blue Mitchell and Curtis Fuller manage
their funk quite nicely, and lots of great jazz artists pop up throughout (Don
Pullen on the B-3 for Charles Williams’s Bacon Butt Fat? Why not? Anyway, he acquits himself nobly.
OK, I’m totally taken with The Message. (I do wish that Blue Mitchell had played a little more
on the title track, but you can’t have everything.) Ace has uncovered and
revived a trend and some artists that I didn’t know about, as well as others with
whom I was familiar but in a new context. I’ll leave you with Patience by Dave Hubbard, one of the
former, who played on many organ trio dates for Prestige and other labels but
recorded only this one Mainstream album commercially. It features Albert
Dailey, one of Stan Getz’s favorite pianists, in an un-Getzian bit of
post-Trane funk. Sadly, when I Googled Hubbard, I learned that he had died just a
few days ago, so this appreciation is also a tribute to him. I hope you enjoy
it.
