Tomorrow: White Bicycles and Jolly Dwarfs

I occasionally post on the Best of the 60’s Music Facebook page. As a result of having too much time on my hands, I sometimes riffle through YouTube to check out both familiar and unfamiliar sounds from that decade. I recently ran across My White Bicycle, a really excellent song by Tomorrow, now known mainly as the band from which Steve Howe left to join Yes. I was so taken with t that I ordered Tomorrow’s one and only album. The band started out as the In Crowd, playing soul covers (“we played Otis Redding and Otis Redding”). In 1966, the drummer Twink joined up, after which the band changed its sound and name. As Tomorrow, they cut My White Bicycle, based on the Dutch Provos’ distribution of free white bicycles for public use. After the all-too-common ego clashes, the band declined and broke up by 1969.

Tomorrow the album is in many ways an artifact of its era. Strongly influenced by the Beatles and the Kinks, some of the songs are interesting albeit derivative, especially a couple of Eleanor Rigby-style “personality songs, but they lack Paul McCartney’s genius or Ray Davies’s irony. On the other hand, songs like Three Jolly Little Dwarfs, Now Your Time Has Come, and Hallucinations have a quirky charm all their own. There’s also a nice version of Strawberry Fields Forever. Like many bands, they had great potential that was never quite realized before they broke up. Their one album is well worth a listen.

Here's My White Bicycle (later covered by Nazareth!).

Ronnie Mathews: Doin' the Thang!

There were so many great jazz pianists in the Sixties that some of them, like Ronnie Mathews, never got the attention they deserved. His first album as leader, Doin’ the Thang!, highlights both his playing and compositional gifts. The first three tunes—The Thang, Ichi-Ban, and The Orient—all have a pleasingly exotic sound. The Thang) is a 5/4 blues, Ichi-Ban is derived from a bass warm up that sounded Oriental to the composer, and The Orient is based on Well, You Needn’t. In contrast, Let’s Get Down is boppish all the way, and a nice change at that point in the album. I get the feeling that Mathews put a lot of thought into his first date—at least the tune sequence seems to reflect that. Duke Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss gives Mathews a chance to play some Tatumesque runs (Tatum was an early influence on him, as he was for just about every jazz pianist then).

A 25-year-old Freddie Hubbard does some typically bravura playing on the date—what a talent he was! I’ve admired Charles Davis’s baritone work since I first heard him on Kenny Dorham’s Jazz Contemporary, and my esteem only increased when I got into his playing on Illuminations, the great Elvin Jones-Jimmy Garrison recording on Impulse. He’s typically fine, here, including on 1239-A, his own composition. Tootie Heath and Eddie Khan provide sound support on drums and bass, respectively. Tootie is still going strong!

Doin’ the Thang! is an excellent recording, available on a Prestige twofer (Mathews is also the pianist on the other date, led by Roland Alexander), in those halcyon days before the soulless companies that currently own this culturally important music stopped releasing their back catalogs and ceded what market there was to the Andorrans. Comes the revolution…

Here's the The Thang.

And here's The Orient.

Trad Goes Bop!: The Anachronic Jazz Band Cooks Up Some Not-So-Moldy Figs

By 1976, the whole late 1940s conflict between traditional jazz enthusiasts (“moldy figs”) and modern jazz proponents (boppers) had pretty much run its unproductive course, replaced by equally sterile arguments about the avant-garde, jazz rock, and fusion. Maybe it was time to take a look at a middle ground, or at least that was the feeling. At a traditional jazz festival in Paris, the Anachronic Jazz Band began playing bop tunes in traditional style (quelle horreur!). A couple of albums, along with some extensive European touring, provide the only aural documentation of this interesting experiment but relatively short-lived experiment.

Anthropology, a two-CD compilation of those albums and a cross-section of live recordings, says a couple of things about figs and boppers. First, if traditional bands had stopped followed the Anachronic way and stopped playing some of the old croakers in favor of some challenging new material, a lot of great music could have resulted. Second, playing modern jazz compositions in an earlier style shows that the gap between the two schools wasn’t as wide as was assumed. As far as I know, though, the Anachronics haven’t had any successors, but their legacy is pretty darn great.

I was really impressed at how easily tunes like Denzil Best’s Move and Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring. Even the title tune makes a lot of sense within the older idiom. Of course, it’s not surprising that Ask me Now and Blue Monk work well; Thelonious Monk’s music has deep roots in the tradition, and even Salt Peanuts and Giant Steps aren’t that alien to the New Orleans tradition. Also, the soloists, like trumpeter Patrick Artero, are consistently excellent throughout.

Happily, the Anachronic Jazz Band has reunited in recent years, with some of the original players like Marc Richard (sax and clarinet) and Philippe Baudoin (piano) still on hand. 

Here are two live performances: a Seventies version of Yardbird Suite (a couple of different versions are on the CD) with a spectacular solo by Goran Ericksson on recorder; and a more recent take on Charlie Parker's’s Confirmation (not on the CD―could we hope for a new anachronic jazz recording?).

Yardbird Suite:

Confirmation:

Doug Carn and the West Coast Organ Band Stage a Free for All

Doug Carn made a number of albums for the Black Jazz label in the 1970s, but I had lost track of him until I saw Free for All, his latest album on Pete Fallico’s Doodlin’ Records. Doodlin’, as one might expect, leans toward the more soulful side of organ jazz, but Free for All, named after the Wayne Shorter composition that electrified the jazz world when Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers recorded it, points forward to more hard bop and post-Coltrane sounds. Carn uses two tenors―Howard Wiley and Teodross Avery―who blaze away on the title track, Bobby Hutcherson’s Little B’s Poem, McCoy Tyner’s Search for Peace, and Woody Shaw’s Beyond All Limits. Even Tadd Dameron’s On A Misty Night takes on a certain muscularity in the band's hands. Carn’s organ playing supports and drives the band, with Dezron Claiborne on drums keeps the rhythm going nicely. I enjoyed this record a lot, and makes me want to seek out Carn’s first album, too.

I couldn’t find any tracks from Free for All on YouTube, so go on out and buy the album and give back to these fine musicians. For a taste, here’s another version of Little B’s Poem with some of the same players.

Back at the UK Chicken Shack: British Hammond Heroes of the Sixties

A few years ago, I explored the jazz side of Manfred Mann, but it wasn’t the only Sixties rock aggregation that came out of the jazz/R&B/ beat scene in the UK. After listening to Hammond Heroes: 60s R&B Organ Grooves on Bear Family Records, maybe the question should be which British rockers weren’t part of that scene. Tons of well-known bands (Ten Years After, the aforementioned MM, the Spencer Davis Group, and the Small Faces) and artists (Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Ronnie Wood, and Peter Frampton) turn up in various incarnations on this record, playing jazzy, funky, and―dare I say it?―groovy organ-based instrumentals. The keyboardists aren’t bad either―Brian Auger, Graham Bond, Keith Emerson, Stevie Winwood, and more. Some of the other protagonists are more obscure (at least to me)―Dave Davani, Steve Miller (not THAT Steve Miller), and Tony Ashton. An accompanying 48-page booklet provides a track-by-track history of the players and groups. It’s almost like listening to an alternative history of Sixties rock, in which Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff, and Big John Patton replace Muddy Waters and Lonnie Donegan.

Note: out of curiosity, I took a look at the Amazon ratings for Hammond Heroes; the two reviews seemed to think there was a certain sameness to the music. Wrong! OK, there’s a lot of B-3 goodness, but I found enough variety sustain repeated listening and enjoyment. For example, Brian Auger turns in a steaming performance on Ellis Island. 

The Dave Davani Four sound like they're Workin' Out at the Key Club in Newark, NJ, circa 1965.

This track, unissued at the time features Steve Miller on organ and the amazing and much-missed Paul Kossoff on Guy Stevens Blues

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Here's Grow Your Own, an outstanding unissued track from the Small Faces, Ian MacLagen on organ.

Finally, a great display of proto-prog from the Nice, With Keith Emerson going full bore on Charles Lloyd's Sombrero Sam.

Running the Bopstacle Course: Jimmy Ford and Stephen Fulton Tear It Up!

I first read about Jimmy Ford ages ago in an old Downbeat Annual. The gist of the article, as I recall, was that you could find excellent jazz in surprising places―in this instance, Houston―where the author had run across Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Ford, all playing at a club. I knew about Cobb and already was (and still am) a big Cleanhead fan, but I didn’t know anything about Ford. In those pre-Internet days, that was it for many years. I saw the occasional reference to Ford as being a gunslinging alto with Maynard Ferguson in the early Sixties, around the time of the A Message from Birdland album. A few years ago, I ran across a couple of video clips of Ford playing in Germany with Cobb, in which he showed off some fiery bebop chops. Just recently, there was a very interesting thread about Ford over at the Organissimo jazz board, along with several other examples of his work. One of the videos was from a 1993 date co-led by trumpeter/flugelhornist Stephen Fulton. I turned out to be out of print, but I snagged a copy on Ebay for a quite modest sum.

Jimmy Ford/Stephen Fulton Volume II has great liner notes by Ira Gitler, who first met Ford in 1948 when he was with Tadd Dameron, playing Lester-Young-style tenor along with Allen Eager, at the Royal Roost. After returning to his native Houston to shake off a problem that beset all too many musicians of the era, he hit the New York scene the next year as a Charlie Parker-style alto saxophonist. After another retreat to Houston in the Fifties, her went on the road with Maynard, then spent most of the rest of his life in his hometown as a musician and teacher. Stephen Fulton, no slouch himself, has done stints with Woody Herman and many other artists, and enjoyed a long association with the great Clark Terry.

Ford and Fulton are a great combination, with both of them channeling the bebop era in a series of Fulton’s original compositions (Ford Blue is a finger buster!) and standards, along with a blistering Bird Gets the Worm/Lover Come Back and Chasin’ the Bird by the master himself. It’s a real pleasure to hear Ford, a first-generation bopper, play so fluently in the classic style. Fulton really gets around on the flugelhorn on the up-tempo numbers, and both he and Ford play beautifully on ballads―Ford on For All We Know and Fulton on For Heaven’s Sake. Richard Rozelle was a very interesting pianist with great ideas, G.T. Hogan, under a variety of names, played drums for tons of people on scads of recordings, and Erin Wright provides solid bass support and a nice solo on Pass the Hat, another Fulton original. All in all, an excellent date!

Two notes: (1) I’d love to get a copy of Jimmy Ford/Stephen Fulton Volume II if anyone comes across one, (2), I’m fantasizing that somewhere in Houston there are tapes of alto battles between Jimmy Ford and Cleanhead Vinson only waiting to be unearthed and sprung upon the world. Let it be so!

Here’s Bring ‘Nuff Clothes.

Balkan Blues: Dusko Goykovich and Swinging Macedonia

In the Fifties and Sixties, American critics tended to view European jazz musicians the way Samuel Johnson viewed women preachers; like dogs walking on their hind legs, “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all" (and that’s the way the same critics viewed women jazz musicians, for that matter). Whenever an American bandleader hired a European musician, he (and it was almost always “he”) was seen as the exception that proved the rule. Dusko Goykovich, the Serbian trumpeter, worked with Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman, which allowed said critics to condescend to him a bit.

Listening to his 1966 album, Swinging Macedonia (original cover art at left), reveals a major talent in the hard bop vein who could keep up with the likes of sidemen Mal Waldron and Nathan Davis. The 1988 CD reissue doesn’t list composer credits, but apparently all of the tunes are by Goykovich except Billy Reid’s The Gypsy, which became a minor jazz standard after Charlie Parker recorded it at the notorious Lover Man session (it’s a feature for Nathan Davis here―a seriously underrated musician). Most of them are based on Macedonian folk motifs―themselves products of the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans―which fit in perfectly with the interest in non-Western music fostered by John Coltrane and others. Macedonia, Saga Se Kame, and Balcan Blue are good examples, whereas Jumbo Uganda is a sort of African highlife melody, with Goykovich taking a soaring Dizzy-like break. Peter Trunk on bass and the wonderfully named Cees See on drums provide strong rhythmic support in the true Balkan spirit. Overall, Swinging Macedonia is an outstanding recording, right up there with the best of the mid-Sixties. Goykovich, in his late 80s, is still active in music. I need to check out more of his music.

Here are Macedonia, Wedding March of Alexander the Great, and Balcan Blue.

"You Can Never Capture It Again": Zoot Sims, "Live" in Philly

Eric Dolphy once said, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.” When you think about the years of gigs musicians rack up in pursuit of their art, his remark really resonates. Maybe some of the greatest music ever made exists only in the memories of the musicians who made it and the audiences who heard it. Fortunately, some of these moments are still with us in the form of live recordings, like Zoot Sims: "Live" in Philly.

Recorded in an anonymous club in Philadelphia, probably in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and featuring Zoot Sims on tenor and soprano saxes, Ben Aronov on piano, Major Holley on bass, and Mickey Roker providing strong rhythmic support on drums. Zoot et al. must have played hundreds of shows like this one, which for unknown reasons was recorded. It’s a great set, featuring three familiar Duke Ellington compositions (In a Mellow Tone, I Got It Bad and that Ain’t Good, and Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me). On the first and third of these tunes, Zoot demonstrates the lost art of effortless mid-tempo swing so typical of Lester Young and his musical descendants, while on I’ve Got It Bad, he brings out all of the song’s sweet sadness. Polka Dots and Moonbeams features Major Holley’s  hum-along technique on bass, providing humor without sacrificing a real feeling for the song.

For me, though, the album’s emotional core is I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You, with Zoot on soprano. After taking up that notoriously tricky horn in the 1970s, he developed a beautiful, expressive sound. Ghost must have been a favorite of his―he recorded it at least one other time―but this performance is hauntingly beautiful. Ben Aronov follows with a striking solo, as he does throughout the record. It’s the track I come back to most often.

I don’t know how this recording came about, but I’m grateful for it. Here are Ghost and Polka 

Dots―enjoy!

Walter Norris: Never Should It End

Many years ago, my local Barnes and Noble got in a raft of remaindered Concord Records CDs (back then, Concord was a first-rate indie jazz label, not today’s corporate conglomerate).  I scooped up a bunch based on the Concord brand and artist name recognition―and then let them submerge into the Great Unplayed Pile. I was rooting around in that ever-growing mass recently and ran across Sunburst, a date led by Walter Norris. In my recollection, Norris was an esteemed pianist of a rather austere bent, considered willing to move out of the mainstream in his playing. The album featured Joe Henderson on tenor―a good sign, and I hadn’t remembered that. Time to look into Norris a bit more.

He had an interesting career. Originally from Arkansas, he eventually moved to the West Coast and played on Something Else!, Ornette Coleman’s first album, so “willing to move out of the mainstream” was right, at least for 1958. He then spent several years in New York as musical director of the Playboy Club. In 1974, he joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band. According to his Wikipedia entry, he had a brief and frightening experience with Charles Mingus in 1976 and then moved to Germany, where he taught and gigged until his death in 2011. (Note: I saw Mingus and his Jazz Workshop on several occasions and can attest that he was indeed a formidable presence. The trumpeter Clarence [Gene] Shaw had an experience similar to Norris’s, as I recall.) In the 1990s, Norris signed with Concord, one of the products of which was Sunburst.

Now to the music. It’s really excellent. Most of the tunes are standards of one sort or another (Stella By Starlight, What’s New, Naima) or Norris originals (the title track, Never Should It End, Rose Petals). Especially in their introductions, Norris and Henderson both like to take the Lee Konitz approach of not going straight into the melody line, which freshens up the standards.  The high point of the album for me is Naima, a gorgeous, soaring rendition that evokes the spirit of Trane without imitation. Bird is an off-kilter tribute to another jazz genius, with fresh ideas aplenty. (Note to readers: the composition is listed as by Charlie Parker but I can’t decide whether it’s one composition or a compilation of Bird phrases. It’s not on YouTube, but can any ornithologist who owns or can find Sunburst clue me in?) Larry Grenadier supplies solid backing and some fine solos on bass, and Mike Hyman keeps things going nicely on drums.

All in all, Sunburst is a fine recording that pays back even more with repeated listening. I could find only a couple of tracks on YouTube, but I’d really advise hunting down the whole thing, or any other Walter Norris recoding you run across.

Here's Sunburst:

And What's New.

Nothing But the Flirtations: South Carolina Soul in the UK

I've always been interested in one-hit wonder bands, especially when I really liked that hit. Take the Flirtations, for example. Nothing but a Heartache is an absolutely killer late 60s soul record. I had totally forgotten about it and them until fairly recently, when I ran across the song on YouTube. Based on their hit, they should have been bigger. Why not?

Based on Sounds Like the Flirtations, their first album, which features a number of cuts that are right up with Nothing but a Heartache, it wasn’t lack of talent. Curiously, the group, consisting of the Pearce sisters―Earnestine and Shirley―joined by Viola Billups after sister Betty left, had to head to the UK to hit at all. Originally performing as the Gypsies and then the Flirtations, they put some records to little acclaim before Vi Billups saw A Hard Day’s Night, which reinforced her fondness for the Beatles, and convinced the group to take their shot in the UK. They quickly were signed by Deram Records. Nothing but a Heartache, backed by a Christmas song (!) did well in the UK but really broke loose in the States. Nothing else hit big, and the group cashed in tis chips a few years later, only to reform when their music hit big in the UK Northern soul wave. As of a few years ago, they were still performing―not bad for one-hit wonders, after all.

Note: RPM records, which put out the reissue, fell short on QA, at least on my copy of the CD. The booklet has lots of good info but the signatures were stitched incorrectly, resulting in my having to puzzle out the Flirtation story―I hope other purchasers fare better.

Here are Nothing but a Heartache, Once I Had a Love, and Keep on Searching, all of them well worthy of your attention.

Bobby Forrester, Jazz Warrior: Bobby's Blues

Toward the end of Bob Porter’s excellent book Soul Jazz, there’s a paragraph that rounds up all of the great jazz organists who never quite made the commercial splash that the musicians covered in his earlier chapters managed to achieve, and Bobby Forrester is one of them. For many years, he was Ruth brown’s accompanist and music director, and gigged around New York with many of the greats of jazz, R&B, and rock (think Bonnie Raitt) before his untimely death in 2002 at the age of 55. Like many jazz musicians, to paraphrase the poet John Davidson, he “fell, face forward, fighting, on the deck.”

Before he left town, though, he recorded several albums, including Bobby’s Blues. There are no liner notes, but the copyright data indicates it was recorded and mixed in 1993 and mastered in 2013. Forrester is accompanied by Joey “G-Clef” Cavaseno on alto, William Ash on guitar, and Clarence “Tootsie” Bean. It’s a classic slice of soulful organ combo music. Forrester has a distinctive style and digs deep, as in the title track. Ash is technically proficient but can get down with the best on the blues. Cavaseno, like the others on the date, is a stalwart of the NYC scene, and Bean provides strong rhythmic support throughout. I was a bit unsure when I looked at the song list, but even a chestnut like I’ll Never Smile Again gets a grits-and-greens makeover.

Check out Bobby Forrester―I’ll be doing so in the future, believe me. Here are a couple of the tastier tracks, but if you like music from the golden age of soul jazz, you’ll like all of Bobby’s Blues. Note: I hope to write more about Porter’s Soul Jazz in a future post.