David "Fathead" Newman: Davey Blue

 

David Newman spent his career as a jazz musician saddled with the nickname “Fathead.” Early on, he did an album or two as “David Newman” and found out that no one knew who he was, so it was back to “Fathead” for the balance of his life. For me (and I suspect other listeners as well), the most detrimental aspect of the name is that it puts Neman into the groove/funk/soul category, which doesn’t really convey the breadth and depth of his artistry. That’s not to say he wasn’t a wailing Texas tenor (and alto and flute) player—all of the years he spent in the Ray Charles orchestra can testify to that. Personal note: I saw Ray Charles when Fathead was with him, so I actually got to hear him play, although without any memory of his playing.

Take Davey Blue, for instance. It’s got bluesy swingers (Cellar Groove), gorgeous ballads (A Child Is Born), Afro-Caribbean sounds (Amandla), jazz standards (Freedom Jazz Dance, and dig the vibes and piano solos!), and a stunning version of Duke Pearson’s Cristo Redentor. Newman is at home regardless of what he plays. The fine vibraphonist Bryan Carrott (I’ve got to listen to more of him!), the great pianist Cedar Walton, bassist David Williams, and drummer Kenny Washington all sound terrific, both individually and collectively. I’m already on the lookout for more David Newman, and you should be, too, Fathead or not.

Here's Cristo Redentor:

Freedom Jazz Dance:

and the title track.

Middle Eastern Rock from John Berberian and the Rock East Ensemble

 

The way some record labels looked at it back in the early Sixties, Ravi Shankar’s breakthrough into the rock-pop world meant that someone who played the oud might hit it big as well. That’s how John Berberian, master oud player, wound up making records for the Mainstream, Roulette, and Verve Forecast labels, the latter issuing Music and Gibran in 1968, with NYC deejay Rosko reciting Khalil Gibran’s poetry while Berberian and other fine purveyors of Armenian and Turkish music provided the background sounds. The producers for that album figured that the next step ought to be Middle Eastern Rock. Berberian loved the idea, and so John Berberian and the Rock East Ensemble was born. The record came out in 1969 and then the label, as so often happened, didn’t do much with it, and it vanished with its sounds almost unheard. Berberian went on to make numerous recordings of Armenian mujsic and is still a master of the oud, but the Rock East Ensemble was no more.

I heard it back then, though. I fished it out of a cut out bin in a drugstore and, lover of middle Eastern-tinged music that I was and am, went home and played it. I’d say it was a Middle Eastern, jazz, and rock album, in that order. Guitarist Joe Beck brought his jazz and rock chops, while Berberian, clarinetist Souren Baronian, and a clutch of other musicians brought their inter-genre skills to achieve a fascinating mix of music that stayed with me over the decades.

Now, thanks to the gang at Modern Harmonic, the fount of many an obscure reissue, Middle Eastern Rock is available on CD and just as tripped out. I highly recommend it as a true fusion record that repays repeated listening.

Here are Tranquility and Iron Maiden:

Charles Bracken: Worshippers Come Nigh

I suppose it’s emblematic of the enigmatic career of Charles Brackeen that although word of his death this past November has been circulating online, as of today, his Wikipedia entry refers to him in the past tense but provides no death date. Back in the day I remember seeing Rhythm X, his debut LP on Strata East in the bins at Back Alley Discs in Charlottesville, but didn’t pick it up (I now have in on the Mosaic Clifford Jordan/Strat East box but haven’t played it yet). To my knowledge, he didn’t lead another date until he did three records for the Scandinavian label Silkheart, all issued in 1987. He also recorded with Paul Motian on ECM and was part of the Melodic Art-Tet, which h recorded an album in 1974 that was released a few years ago by a Lithuanian label, No Business Records (currently on order).

Despite never really hearing any of his music, I was curious enough to click on a random YouTube link to the tile track of one of the Silkheart albums—Worshippers Come Nigh. I was blown away to the extent that I paid way more that I usually to buy the CD, and it’s really killing, as the jazz robots say. In addition to Brackeen, Olu Dara is on trumpet, Fred Hopkins on bass (I heard him in the 1970s with the great trio Air), and Andrew Cyrille on drums, with and assist on congas from Brackeen’s friend and fellow artis, Dennis Gonzalez. The liner notes indicate that Brackeen insisted on extensive rehearsals before recording, and it shows. The theme statements (all compositions written by Brackeen, and good ones) are crisp and declamatory. Brackeen was a fine post-Ornette player, Dara is a strong voice on trumpet, and Fred Hopkins is a hugely impressive soloist and, along with Cyrille, really drives the band—freebop at its best. Really, this is some of the most impressive music I’ve heard lately. Do give it a listen. Health issues may have deprived us of much more music from Charles Brackeen, but let’s be thankful for what we do have.

Boogie All the Time: Music of the Medicine Show Years

Recently the conversation at our house turned to medicine shows (this kind of conversational turn happens a lot around here). As a result, I dug out Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926−1937, from Old Hat Records—a bonanza of eccentric, beyond-category music from the old, weird America. The accompanying 72-page booklet comprises a history of the traveling medicine show, interviews with show veterans, and useful annotations for each track.  As The Wire put it, “Factor in assorted skillet lickers, jug stompers, fruit jar drinkers, ramblers, crackers, tarheels and tobacco tags, and you have a buried history of vernacular music, therapeutic culture and politics second to none. 

Not only is this set a mother lode of blues, old timey, and uncategorizable roots music, it can serve to clue You in on even more great stuff. For example, Swing, You Cats by Hezekiah Jenkins led me to The Panic Is On, his unblinking ode to the Great Depression. Even the booklet can lead you to a whole new world. Its discussion of Hadacol, “a Vitamin-B tonic laced with alcohol” developed and sold by former Louisiana senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, character right out of “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” led me to a raft of tunes like Hadacol Boogie, Everybody Loves That Hadacol, and Hadacol Bounce, all of which seem to focus more on the tonic’s second ingredient than the first. Check out this 2004 version of Hadacol Boogie by Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Guy! 

The Lewis/Guy performance is a latter-day example of the musical interaction across racial lines among medicine shows and their audiences that included hillbilly blues and jug band music as well as mainstream pop tunes and minstrel ditties reworked by Black songsters. Note; Some of these recordings include racially offensive terms used by both Black and White performers. The annotations point these terms and attitudes out, but excluding such recordings would sugarcoat thew way things were (and are).

If you have any interest in American music, its history, or the sheer exuberant entertainment value of this stuff, you owe it to yourself to pick up this set. The Old Hat website also has sound samples aplenty. As Bob Dylan said about Good for What Ails You, “I got nothing against downloads and MP3s, but getting this CD with all the pictures and liner notes,
well, it’s not as good as having it on the big 12” record, but at least there’s a booklet there, and believe it or not, folks, you can even read it in a power failure- as long as it’s daytime.” 

To give you a feel for this amazing conglomeration, here’s my current obsession—the Allen Brothers, a hillbilly jug band wailing the tar out of Bow Wow Blues:

And a Memphis blues classic from Frank Stokes:

Jim Dawgs: The Early Years of Ike Quebec

When writing about anyone beyond the most critically acclaimed, longest-lived jazz artists (and by no means limited just to jazz or artists), online biographical information can be sparse and repetitive. So it is for Ike Quebec, sometimes referred to online as “Ike Abrams Quebec,” who was born in Newark, new Jersey on August 17, 1918. thanks to Barbara Kukla’s invaluable Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1926−1950, his birth name was Isaac Abrams. Where did “Quebec” come from? According to Kukla, who interviewed many Newark music veterans before her book’s publication in 1991, “he used the name ‘Quebec’ as far back as anyone remembers.” “Don’t know where it come from,” said a distant family member.

Quebec started out as a tap dancer, winning an amateur contest at Miner’s Theater in downtown Newark when he was 16. He picked up piano while with a traveling show—Harlem on Parade—and gigged at the Waverly Tavern and at all-night rent parties, and sounded like the great stride master Donald Lambert. At some point, he picked up the tenor saxophone, which he supposedly taught himself to play by locking himself in a room for weeks. He stated playing dates in New York with Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, and Frankie Newton, among others, eventually moving there. He also spent time up at Minton’s Playhouse with musicians like Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and other bop pioneers, although his style remained an amalgam of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster—aggressively swinging on up-tempo tunes and breathy and romantic on ballads. In 1944, he joined Cab Calloway’s big band, with which he remained affiliated on and off until 1951.

1944 was also the year he made his first recordings under his own name for Blue Note records. While with Blue Note, he became close to Alfred Lion, who began using him as an informal A&R man and talent scout. Reputedly, he brought Monk and Bud Powell to Lion’s attention. His friendship with Lion would later play an important part in his later career as well. He also made a couple recordings for Savoy, a Newark-based label that later also issued many key bop records by Charlie Parker and other modernists but was owned by a much less savory character than Lion.

Years ago, Mosaic Records issued The Complete Blue Note Forties Recordings of Ike Quebec and John Hardee, which had all of Quebec’s early Blue Note recordings. (I’m sure the researchers at Mosaic had lots of biographical and other info about him, but I don’t have access to the liner notes, alas.) That set is long out of print and pricey but, thanks to the late, lamented French Chronogical (sic) Classics label, Ike Quebec 1944−1946, many of these early Blue Notes and Savoys can be had on the used CD market at a less exorbitant price.

Quebec’s first recordings are outstanding, aided by sidemen like Tiny Grimes and Ram Ramirez. Tiny’s Exercise is a nice composition (year later, he did an excellent version on Profoundly Blue, a long out-of-print album on Muse). Indiana is a nice up-tempo romp, Blue Harlem was a hit when it came out, and She’s Funny That Way is a good example of Quebec’s early ballad style. Later recordings also featured a larger group with Buck Clayton (I Found a New Baby is especially noteworthy). The Savoy recordings featured both more traditional (Johnny Guarnieri) and distinctly modern (Bill de Arango).

By the late Forties, Quebec’s recording career petered out, as did his life in general, thanks to the epidemic of substance abuse that beset the music in those days. As far as the author of Swing City was concerned, his career ended there (in an appended biographic dictionary of Newark musical artist, she even has him dead by 1953.) Reports of his demise were exaggerated, though. In the late 1950s, thanks to his continued connection to Alfred Lion, he would experience a renaissance that continued until his death. In a future blog post, I’ll be talking about the series of 45s he made for Blue Note that revived his career. Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of the early Ike Quebec. In order; Blue Harlem, If I Had You,  , and Jim Dawgs (Ike's nickname).

Frank Strozier: What's Goin' On

Frank Strozier is one of those artists whose great talent never broke though to a wider audience. One of a number of Memphis-born musicians who came to maturity in the late 1950s early 1960s, he recorded extensively on alto as a sideman and led a few (too few) sessions, and finally left the music business out of frustration. There’s can’t something wrong with a system in which a Frank Strozier is unable to thrive.

A good example of what we’ve lost is Strozier’s 1977 What’s Goin’ On, his second album for Steeplechase Records (after a 15-year(!) lapse in recording as a leader. With fellow Memphian Harold Mabern on piano, Danny Moore (tp) Louis Hayes (dr) and Stafford James (bs), it’s a consistently excellent date. High points include Ollie, a tribute to Strozier’s friend Oliver Nelson, Chelsea Drugs, with Strozier on flute, and Psalm for John Coltrane, an intense, Trane-like ballad.

And then there’s the title track, which is why I acquired this recording. On What’s Goin’ On, Strozier gives it everything he’s got—a brilliant extended interpretation of Marvin Gaye’s original that burns with passionate intensity. Harold Mabern follows with an almost equally extraordinary solo, both performances supported to the max by James and Hayes. It’s the kind of music that inspires and uplifts—qualities we all need in times like these.  

Here are What's Goin' On and Ollie.

Blue Meets Red: Baltimore 1966

For many years, the Left Bank Jazz Society of Baltimore put on an astonishing array of jazz concerts featuring the top players in the country. Many of these shows were recorded, but their subsequent fate makes up a convoluted tale that need not detain us. Happily, over the years a number of the tapes have been released by various small labels. A few months ago, I  posted on one of those releases, featuring Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Heath. I have a number of other Left Bank releases on my pile, including Blue Mitchell and Sonny Red: Baltimore 1966, the subject of today’s post,  courtesy of Uptown Records, an outstanding reissue label that always includes copious liner notes.

One of the things I love about these releases is the enthusiasm of the audiences. They obviously were knowledgeable about the music and liked to let the musicians know how they felt. This set is especially valuable because it documents some fine work by Sonny Red (aka Sylvester Kyner), tart-toned alto player who released a relatively small number of albums in his all-too-short career. His aggressive style contrasts with Blue Mitchell’s classic hard bop trumpet sound. John Hicks, whose piano work I need to delve into more deeply, is consistently excellent, and it’s nice to hear Joe Chambers on drums in a more mainstream context. Bassist Gene Taylor, like Mitchell, was fresh from a lengthy stint in Horace Silver’s classic band.

The repertoire mostly consists of standards like If I Should Lose You, Portrait of Jenny, and I Can’t Get Started (the latter featuring Red, even though it’s often a showpiece for trumpeters), along with Mitchell’s infectious Fungi Mama, Jimmy Heath’s All Members, and Blue Spring Variation, a semi-clone of a Kenny Dorham composition. If you like mid-Sixties hard bop, you need this album!

Here are Blue Spring Variation and I Can't Get Started.

More Pleasure Than Pain: J.R. Montrose and Tommy Flanagan

This post’s origins began with the great Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu’s solo version of Theme for Ernie, the hauntingly beautiful elegy for alto saxophonist Ernie henry, who died too young of the heroin plague in 1957. I was impress enough the composition  to do a bit of research, which turned up a lot of information on the composer, Fred Lacey, and other obscure figures, courtesy of bassist-writer Steve Wallace. As is my wont, I started listening to other versions, including that of John Coltrane, which made it a jazz standard. I then tried a duo version by J.R. Montrose (tenor and soprano) and Tommy Flanagan (pno). It totally bowled me over and sent me off to locate a copy of this 1981 recording on Reservoir Records.

A Little Pleasure (derived from one of the two Montrose compositions on the album) is a really remarkable recording. According to the liner notes, Flanagan and Montrose were friends who had worked together a number of times over the years. From my limited listening, I had thought of Montrose as a hard-charging hard bop player but this recording, mostly consisting of ballads and medium-tempo tunes, shows extraordinary sensitivity and deep emotion, beautifully complemented by Tommy Flanagan’s equally elegant and thoughtful approach (I still vividly remember a great night of Flanagan’ music in the mid-70s at DC’s Harold’s Rogue and Jar).

Whether drawing on the Great American Songbook (Never let Me Go, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square), the Modern Jazz Songbook (Con Alma, Central Park West, Twelve Tone Tune), or Montrose originals (Pain and Suffering…and a Little Pleasure, Vinnie’s Pad) these two masters produced a fine set, worthy of much ore notoriety than it apparently received over the years.

Here are Theme for Ernie and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

Appearance and Reality: Abdul Zahir Batin and the Notorious Ensemble

The drummer Abdul Zahir Batin is a mysterious character. Over the years, he’s recorded with Archie Shepp and Sunny Murray and worked with Kaki Byard, Howard McGhee, and others. If you look for him online, though, most references are to him selling his only recording as leader on the streets of New York. Per YouTube, he was still doing so just a couple of years ago, even though the recording was made for Cadence Jazz Records in 1986.

Live at the Jazz Cultural Theatre features His Notorious Ensemble, a floating aggregation of musicians gathered together to play Zahir Batin’s music. This edition features a 1980s all-star roster: Bobby Watson (as), Cecil Bridgewater (tpt), John Hicks (piano), Robin Eubanks (trom), and Curtis Lundy (bass). Most of the compositions are by the leader, except for a polyphonic medley of standards. In content, they’re hard driving post-bop tunes with excellent solos all around.

In Islamic thought, “zahir” represents outward reality, whereas “batin” stands for the inner meaning of things. True to his art and spirituality, Zahir Batin may still be out there, offering his music to the public in the most direct way possible. I like to think that he’s still around, and that one day—post-COVID—I’ll encounter him and buy another copy (the used one I have is inscribed and autographed by the artist, but not to me, of course). Meanwhile, think about what it takes to be true to your faith and your art, why don’t you? 

A Seventies Classic: Tales of the Exonerated Flea

When Horacee Arnold’s Tales of the Exonerated Flea came out, I was still reading Downbeat, and a positive review piqued my interest. Whenever I listen to it, I’m amazed that it’s not better known. With Jan Hammer, Rick Laird, Ralph Towner, John Abercrombie, Sonny Fortune, Dom Um Romao, David Friedman, Clint Houston, and George Mraz on board, all driven by their drummer-leader, it’s a cross-section of Seventies fusion jazz at its best. Tales is a forgotten classic that should be better known. Check out Sing Nightjar and Chinnereth II and you’ll see what I mean.  Happily, Horacee Arnold is still active in the music world, and planning a reimagining of Tales. I’m in!

Here's Sing Nightjar...

...and Chinnereth II.

Everyone Ought to Get Hip to Larry McKenna

I found out about Larry McKenna several years ago just before our annual trip to the Jersey shore. The local cultural foundation was sponsoring a jazz concert right after our schedule arrival and, even though I didn’t know anything about the leaders, Larry McKenna (tenor) and Tony Miceli (vibes), I bought tickets in advance. When we got there, most of the attendees in front of the venue were dressed in slightly swanky beach attire except for us and four slightly disheveled guys whom my sons immediately and correctly tagged as the band.

All of the members of the quartet were excellent, but I was most impressed by McKenna. Like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Brew Moore, and Allen Eager, he played with the relaxed sense of swing I associate with those Lester Young disciples. To me, his staying in the Philly area instead of heading for New York is the only reason he’s not as well known. His recordings have been for small labels, and I’ve managed to get a couple over time. I’ve been meaning to do a post about him, but the death of his Fellow Philadelphian Bootsie Barnes the other day made me buckle down. For one thing, McKenna and Barnes did an album together a couple of years ago; for another, they’re both in a group disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19, which made things a bit more urgent.

Larry McKenna Plays Harold Arlen: My Shining Hour includes great songs like the title track (a favorite of mine), Let’s Fall in Love, Get Happy, and many other Arlen classics, all played with an incomparable sense of swing and melodic inventiveness. He’s ably backed by Bill Shilling on piano and guitar), Dom Mancini on bass, and Butch Reed on drums. It’s a rare opportunity to hear an exemplar of a kind of jazz that’s seldom practiced my contemporary artists, who often can’t see back past John Coltrane.  Do yourself a favor in these parlous times, and check out Larry McKenna—there are lots of great examples of his playing on YouTube, and his recordings aren’t that hard to find.

Here’s Out of this World, with a very different than the Coltrane version with which I was more familiar.

Discovery: The Nathan Davis Quartet, Live in a Swiss Monastery

In a post I did last year discussing the trumpeter Dusko Goykovich, I said that the saxophonist Nathan Davis was "seriously underrated." Because most of his recordings were made in Europe in the Sixties and Seventies, he never got much acclaim in the U.S. They're either available in vinyl only or in very pricey used CDs. Yesterday, someone posted Jazz Concert in a benedictine  Monastery, a rather obscure LP on the Edici label, on YouTube. I clicked on it and was totally blown away. Davis plays wonderfully on tenor, soprano, and flute, accompanied by the always interesting Mal Waldron on piano, Jimmy Woode on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. I didn't want to waste any time drawing it to your attention, so here it is. Enjoy!

Jazz Latin Jazz: Ray Barretto and New World Spirit

I heard Ray Barretto and New World Spirit quite a few years ago at the Kennedy Center, who at that time included Joe Magnarelli and Myron Walden—not too shabby. On Contact!, The front line is Michael Philip Mossman on trumpet (and trombone on one track) and Adam Kolker on tenor and soprano. I wasn’t familiar with Kolker, and he’s excellent. As form Mossman, I really enjoyed his concert on the Latin side of Jelly Roll Morton at the Kennedy Center a few years ago, including Paquito de Rivera and a flamenco dancer—a fine trumpeter both in and out of Latin jazz.

As the liner notes say, this album is not “Latin jazz,” but rather jazz with Latin overtones. Barretto straddled both worlds, but I suspect he leaned a bit more toward the jazzier end of the spectrum.  More up-tempo tracks like Moss Code, Liberated Spirit, and Sister Sadie are really excellent, and the band is good enough to make me like their version of Michel Legrand’s The Summer Knows—and don't miss their arrangement of Caravan.Strong work from pianist John Di Martino, Jairo Moreno and Hans Glawishnig on bass, Vince Cherico on drums, Ray Vega on percussion, and, of course, Barretto on congas, makes this a go-to  recording in the vein of Conrad Herwig’s Latin takes on Miles, Coltrane, and others.

Here's Caravan and Point of Contact.

Burning: Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Heath "Live" at the Left Bank

Listening to Jam Gems: Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Health “Live” at the Left Bank, with a super- enthusiastic Left Bank Jazz Society audience testifying volubly throughout is good for what ails you, COVID-19 or not. I own several albums of LBJS material and wish that more were available. Jam Gems is pretty much all Freddie and Jimmy, although Wilbur Little, Bertell Knox, and Gus Simms provide solid rhythm support. Hubbard had amazing chops and a fearless attack, out to flamboyant use on this date, and Heath is, if anything, even more impressive (in the liner notes, he says “I took some of my longest recorded solos”). I’ve included the first track (All Members) and a link to the entire album of up-tempo killer tracks. Even Lover Man is more burner than torch song. Kick back and enjoy, and thank you, Baltimore!

Freewheelin' with Claudio Roditi

The recent death of trumpeter Claudio Roditi prompted me to pull out Freewheelin,’ his Lee Morgan tribute album. I remembered it as being an excellent hard bop outing and relistening has confirmed that recollection. I do have a couple of additional thoughts, though.

Lee Morgan was a fine composer. Aside from The Sidewinder, his biggest hit (and check out Bob Cranshaw’s amusing account of how that recording session went down), tunes like The Joker and Our Man Higgins are deserving of more attention than they usually get. I especially liked the somewhat plaintive Peyote.

Andres Boiarsky. Years, ago, when he was a part of Slide Hampton’s Dizzy Gillespie big band, I heard him at James Moody’s 80^th birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center. I had never heard of him, but he played an outrageously good solo that left him and the sax section beaming. Like Roditi, Boiarsky is Argentinian, and he’s still active on the jazz scene there. His playing is great throughout this album.

Nick Brignola. He’s on only a few tracks on baritone and soprano, but he’s always a pleasure to hear. He goes after every tune with gusto.

Claudio Roditi. In his obituary, I learned that he played a rotary valve trumpet, which looks like it’s being held sideways, rather than the more common piston trumpet, as you can see on the album cover. Supposedly the rotary trumpet produces a mellower tone, but it would take better ears than mine to detect it based on this album, which finds Roditi in a definite Morgan groove. What a fine trumpeter he was! He'll be much missed.

The rhythm section. Mark Soskin on piano, the ubiquitous Buster Williams on bass (and I really want to see the new documentary about him), and Chip White on drums all contribute mightily and get some solo room, too.

Here's the inevitable The Sidewinder:

 The Joker: 

And Peyote:

No Messing Around: The Jackie Mac Attack Live

This is some of the hottest music I've listened to in quite a while. I've always loved Jackie McLean's music but I have to plead ignorance about most of his post- Blue Note output. I've read that in his later years, his teaching duties took him away from performing, and even that his playing suffered as a result. On The Jackie Mac Attack Live, recorded at a jazz club in Belgium in 1992, "attack" is the operative word. From the first notes of Cyclical, the first track, McLean is burning. No matter what the tune or tempo, he really chews up the music . Ably abetted by the wonderfully named South Africa Pianist Idris Hotep Galeta, with strong support from the fine drummer Carl Allen (I heard him a couple of years ago with the Mack Avenue All Stars) and bassist Nat Reeves, this is a no BS, hard-charging recording from start to finish. Note: The CD I bought was billed as "new," but I had serious playback issue on a couple of tracks; when I looked at the disk, it looked worse than a lot of used CDs I've seen. Just sayin...

For a taste, here's Minor March. 

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.