Rubber City Review

Newly promoted to Keyboard Correspondent for Rubber City Review, Brother Jack is back with this look at the wonderful Otis Spann – a true giant of the blues piano…

If you were looking to broaden your musical horizons back in the Sixties, Ann Arbor was a great place to visit.  I was there at the time doing grad study in mathematics at the University of Michigan, but there were plenty of distractions.

Skip James

Ann Arbor was a hotbed of folk music in those days, thanks to places like the Ark Coffeehouse and the Canterbury House.  Blues players were everywhere – especially guitar pickers who played in the style of Mississippi John Hurt and Rev. Gary Davis.  Great performers like David Bromberg would breeze through town on a regular basis. There were “hoots” and jam sessions where you could test you own skills.  Skip James, a true blues legend, played at the Canterbury House once.  What a treat.  He was known for his guitar playing and keening voice, but he also displayed a unique piano style.

I played the acoustic guitar, but piano was my instrument.  Commander Cody was playing locally then, doing his best Jerry Lee Lewis on the ivories.  His act was good and gave me some inspiration, but guitar players ruled.  It was hard to find a piano to play, but there were a few places where I could sneak in and practice.  In my mind, I knew it was possible to get that great blues feel on the piano, but I had no idea how.

I discovered an Otis Spann LP at my favorite record store near the Michigan campus.  The album was in a series called “Archive of Folk Music” and the notes on the back of the album proclaimed that  “folk music cannot be ‘manufactured.’  Most of these efforts are rather slick and facile popularizations of either traditional tunes or ‘composed’ folk tunes.  Though pleasant, these are not folk music.”

This was the philosophy of the times, so I bought the album and quickly found that Otis was my man.  This was deep blues.  Couldn’t get much deeper.  I dropped the needle on vinyl and began trying to uncover the secrets of his playing.  It was a great sound.  The guitarists could have their Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie McTell.  I would take Otis Spann.

In keeping with musical trends in the ‘60s, record companies emphasized the folk traditions of the city blues, and Otis was folk, certainly not manufactured.  He learned his craft from the local Mississippi players and from his mentor in Chicago, Big Maceo Merriweather.  He didn’t stray from the three-chord basis of the blues, but he found new inventiveness within it.  He was slick and facile in the best sense of the words, and earned a reputation as the greatest of the Chicago blues piano players.

Otis Spann was born in Mississippi but moved to Chicago about 1946 – part of that influx of workers and musicians from the South, the same one that brought Muddy Waters to the city.  Otis began playing with Muddy in 1951 and remained a steady presence in his band until he was replaced by Pinetop Perkins in 1969.

He came from a tradition where the piano player was king of the juke joint, but adapted well to the city blues where he had to compete with amplified guitars and harmonicas.  He became Muddy’s mainstay.  Muddy gave him some space and, with his powerful attack, Otis drove the band on many of the tunes.   Listen to how he kicks off I Feel Good and how Muddy starts whooping when the rhythm starts cooking. I Feel Good

To show how the style of Otis developed beyond his mentor Big Maceo, I put together a makeshift jam session where Maceo plays the first chorus of Worried Life Blues and Otis plays the second. Worried Life Blues/Big Maceo and Otis Spann

Otis filled the spaces with blues scales and moved easily from the top to the bottom of the keyboard.  He also clearly learned a few things from another great Chicago piano player who came up from the Delta, Sunnyland Slim.

Spann’s version of Worried Life Blues is from a 1963 session in Copenhagen for Storyville records.  Once again, we owe the Brits and Europeans a great debt for preserving our music heritage (all is forgiven, Brits – 1776, Herman’s Hermits, Engelbert Humperdinck and all that).  The Storyville tracks have been assembled under different titles, and can be found on iTunes as Blues Masters, Vol. 10.  Otis played mostly solo on these, and without drums or guitars to compete with him, he opened up to show the breadth of his vocal and piano style.  These are my favorite recordings of Otis Spann.  Hear how the gentle tapping of his foot and his subtle bass line drive the rhythm better than any drummer. Love Love Love

I loved it when Otis played rumbling solos down in the bass, something you rarely hear from other players.  The smoothness of his playing brings to mind only one other person for me:  Jimmy Smith on the organ. T.B. Blues

If you want to play like Otis, there is help.  First, learn how to play the piano.  Next, get the musical transcription of his solo from the song Diving Duck.  This is from an excellent book of transcriptions called “The Best of Blues Piano,” by Todd Lowry, published by Hal Leonard.

Here’s where things get a little more technical than usual for RCR, but I’ll be brief.  Otis is very hard to transcribe.  He didn’t think in terms of three or four notes to the beat, but played however many notes he felt like squeezing in.  Take a look at part of the transcription of what he’s playing with his right hand.  Don’t worry if you can’t read music – you’ll get the basic idea.

Counting 4 bars to the measure, you can see it shows sometimes 7, 8, 9 or 10 notes to the beat and a lot of notes altogether for 9 measures, especially if you include glissandos and tremolos.  Here is what it actually sounded like (only the first part of the solo is notated): Diving Duck

So Otis wasn’t a pianist or composer in the European sense.  He was just playing the blues.  He was the blues.

With his easy rhythm and poignant lyrics, Otis had a unique style.  As opposed to Muddy’s braggadocio, Otis preferred lyrics like “I been walkin’  ‘side the river, just me and myself alone,” or “If you got to leave me, baby, please set me free.”  But he could still barrelhouse with the best.  It’s easy to see why he is called the Sweet Giant of the Blues.

The story of Otis largely follows the story of Muddy, and there are some great anecdotes about Otis in the book “Can’t Be Satisfied, the Life and Times of Muddy Waters,” by Robert Gordon.  (This book is also mentioned in the Oct. 21 RCR blog “Little Walter, By the Book.”)

Booze finally took its toll, and Otis Spann died in 1970.  He was only 40.  Muddy said of Spann, “There is no one left like him who plays real, solid bottom blues like he does.  We’d better raise another before it’s too late.”  Sunnyland Slim, on the other hand, lived and performed until he was 87.  If Otis had taken better care of himself, maybe he’d still be around delivering that solid bottom blues.

Thanks to footage available on youtube (and also the film “Piano Blues” by Clint Eastwood), you can still be astounded by vintage Otis Spann on video.  I can’t help but think, where was iTunes and youtube when I was digging through the Ann Arbor record stores?

A final note… The only person I know of who took lessons from Otis Spann is rock ‘n roll survivor Al Kooper.   In his book “Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards,” he recounts getting several two-hour lessons from Otis in exchange for dinners.   I hope Al will someday tell us what he learned… maybe write another book called “Otis Spann in Six Easy Lessons”?

‘Tis the season for holiday music playlists.  As “the guy who collects music,” I’ve received a number of Christmas-mix CDs over the years from friends, co-workers and family members.  And, sad to say, not all of them are good.  I usually come across a few smooth-jazz versions of Christmas favorites that always seem to start with those annoying wind chimes – probably twisting in the foul breeze coming from a nagging soprano sax over a faux-funky beat.  But don’t take that as another rant from someone hardened by the holidays.  I dig the classics by Frank, Dino, Bing and Ella.  And I get a little teary-eyed when I hear Nat King Cole crooning over the loud-speaker system at Best Buy.  Having said that (anyone watch “Curb Your Enthusiasm”?), I tend to prefer holiday tunes that don’t sound like they’d get beat up in the rougher neighborhoods of my iPod.  In other words, I like to hear “the root” in there somewhere, even if the root is a 14^th Century Bulgarian Peasant March (checking wikipedia on that one).  With this in mind, I’m proud to join the staff and Board of Directors at Rubber City Review to offer you this special gift for Christmas – a “sampler” of our favorite holiday tunes.  So stoke the fire, sit back and stir your nog with this meaty yule log of seasonal joy…

I guess it wouldn’t be Christmas without Elvis crooning his way through some seasonal standard.  And I had a hard time choosing among my favorite Elvis Christmas songs.  But I settled on Here Comes Santa Claus, because it seems to have a rockabilly rhythm even without the King – and I can’t resist a perfectly placed “well-a-well-a” in an otherwise hum-drum holiday song.  So slap this little nugget on the stereo as you prepare a nice meal of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches for your family this Christmas… It’s a great way to remember the man who thought of it first. Here Comes Santa Claus/Elvis Presley

A couple of posts ago I waxed poetic about the mighty Hammond B3 organ.  You can find a wide range of recordings by the master of the B3, Jimmy Smith – big band, small combo, blues, gospel, pop – so it shouldn’t surprise you that his 20-page discography includes a pretty fine holiday collection called “Christmas Cookin’.”   Here Smith joins guitarist Quentin Warren to roast Santa’s chestnuts (well, maybe slow-boil them) in the warm, soulful sound of the classic organ combo.  If I were making the rounds on Christmas Eve, I’d stop at Jimmy’s Place and go no further. Santa Claus is Coming to Town/Jimmy Smith

What is it about an ethereal harp playing a classic Christmas song?  And no, I’m not talking about the innards of a piano.  I’m talking about the Mississippi saxophone as played by one of its greatest practitioners – Charlie Musselwhite.  Charlie bends a few notes that I didn’t know you could bend on a basic diatonic harmonica, and even manages to throw in that big, throaty vibrato you tend to hear more often on songs about murder and prison rather than odes to virgins and shepherds.  But it works… because there’s nothing more soulful than a big man alone with his blues harp (and maybe a bottle or two) on Christmas. Silent Night/Charlie Musselwhite

When I was a kid, my friend’s dad got all liquored up and stole a Christmas tree out of the parking lot of Montgomery Ward (which has since gone out of business, so I can finally speak out about this).  It’s a sad story with kind of a happy ending – after all, the family did have a tree for Christmas.  But it reminds me of another cautionary tale about what happens when the old man pours a little too much rum in his nog.  And this one comes to us from Commander Cody, a guy who knows a thing or two about the dangers of Old Demon Alcohol (he was banned from Letterman for getting trashed, and his last album was titled “Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers”). Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas/Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen

Even junkie be-boppers like Christmas songs.  Take Charlie Parker, who once said that jazz was all about “playing clean and hitting the pretty notes.”  Well if that’s the case, what better vehicle for a giant of jazz than White Christmas, which certainly has more than its fair share of pretty notes.  This take was recorded in 1948 at the Royal Roost night club in New York City – hardly the place where people went to hear Christmas carols.  But Bird tears into it like it’s Ko Ko or Donna Lee or any other original he came up with to showcase his legendary chops on alto sax.   For the few be-bop hipsters remaining on the planet, this is the only White Christmas that matters! White Christmas/Charlie Parker

Here’s a little tip for those of you who play in bar bands:  learn a Christmas song that you won’t be embarrassed to play.  Our band learned this next one in about 15 minutes – and that included 10 minutes of arguing.  Which is not to say it’s a piece of fluff.  In fact, it’s a towering achievement by Emery Williams Jr., better known as Detroit Junior.  A native of Arkansas, Williams began his career as a journeyman blues piano player in Flint, Michigan, and eventually landed in Chicago, where he cut a single for Chess and played in Howlin’ Wolf’s band for seven years.  He passed away in 2005, but left us this holiday classic that practically howls with Christmas joy. Christmas Day/Detroit Junior

I like a lot of space in my music, so I was never a big fan of the Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” treatment –  which I guess includes Bruce Springsteen (sorry, Gary!).  But let’s face it, the holiday season is not a very subtle time of year.  And even though Spector throws the kitchen sink and several other fixtures into this one, he still manages to preserve the majesty of ex-wife Ronnie’s voice, which seems to exist somewhere between the playground and the red light district.  Sure, you could speculate whether “Frosty the Snowman” is code for something far more nefarious… But I’d rather take this one at face value and assume Phil and Ronnie had a nice, uneventful Christmas that year. Frosty the Snowman/The Ronettes

At this point you may be asking, what’s your favorite holiday song?  (Hey, you stuck with me this far!)  Here’s one I have no problem listening to all year round.  Led by Cissy Houston (mother of some up-and-comer named Whitney), the Sweet Inspirations were the back-up singers of choice for artists ranging from Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett to Elvis Presley and Van Morrison.  This cut was recorded in 1969 at the fabled Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and features the deep southern soul of Eddie Hinton on guitar.  It’s an American classic by any measure, but sounds especially sweet this time of year.  Merry Christmas, y’all! Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday/The Sweet Inspirations

Gold-framed photos (hand-colored) from the collection of Charles Auerbach

Amazon.com Widgets

I love the sound of a Hammond B3 doing a slow-boil under the bluesy guitar of Grant Green or Kenny Burrell, or wrapped around a warm, soulful sax.  But there’s a thin line between the best of these recordings and pure schmaltz, which is probably why the organ combo remains a criminally ignored sub-genre of American roots music.

The Hammond organ was invented in 1934 by mechanical engineer Laurens Hammond, who also invented the technology behind 3-D glasses (maybe he was a numerologist too).  And his namesake instrument was destined to remain a staple at churches, hockey rinks and old-timey movie theaters until Jimmy Smith transformed it into the “new sound of jazz” back in the 1950s.

Jimmy recorded for the Blue Note label, which found itself in a bit of a rut after a string of jazz albums that didn’t exactly light up the charts.  Upon hearing Smith for the first time at a New York City jazz club, the label’s mercurial front man, Alfred Lion, decided right then and there to sign him.  Lion eventually confessed that he wanted to sell the label to become Smith’s tour manager, just so he could hear him play every night.

Smith quickly revitalized the label by taking advantage of the new LP format with extended workouts like his take on Dizzy Gillespie’s The Champ… The Champ

At this point, it would be useful to explain that Smith is playing intricate bebop figures on top with his right hand, chording with the left, and kicking out a rock-solid bass with the instrument’s foot pedals.  So essentially, all Smith needed to fill a small club with a wall of sound was a drummer – but he created the classic B3 trio by adding a guitar, with that chair initially held by the very capable Thornel Schwartz.

But my favorite Jimmy Smith recordings are the ones that create a smoky, late-night vibe, usually with the exceptional Kenny Burrell on guitar and Stanley Turrentine on sax.  And classics like “Back at the Chicken Shack,” “Midnight Special” and “Home Cookin’” still serve as the gold standards for those who prefer the “less is more” approach.  Listen to Burrell’s perfect hand-off to Turrentine on Midnight Special… Midnight Special

Inspired by Smith’s success, many other keyboard players jumped on the B3 bandwagon and recorded their own soul-jazz classics during the ‘50s through ‘70s – most notably, “Brother” Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Shirley Scott and Dr. Lonnie Smith.  Here’s McDuff jamming with a young George Benson on guitar, before Benson moved on to his own unique brand of pop-schmaltz… Scuffin’

Even jazz greats like Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt decided they’d had enough of half-full jazz clubs and abandoned more traditional acoustic bands in favor of organ-driven soul-jazz.  And one of the finest examples of the genre features Ammons and Stitt trading riffs on this standout cut from 1971… You Talk That Talk

The organist on this cut is Leon Spencer, one of the unsung heroes of the instrument.  And his experience underscores the thin line I alluded to earlier.  Back in the day, guys like Spencer, Don Patterson, Charles Kynard, Sonny Phillips and other more obscure artists played their fair share of inner-city clubs in places like Detroit and Newark, where getting asses on the dance floor was just as important as getting your own stuff across to a new audience.  And even the best organ combo records I’ve picked up over the years have at least one tune that sounds like a second-rate version of a pop or soul standard.  Here’s Spencer cookin’ up one of his fine originals… First Gravy

And here’s Spencer toying with a watered-down version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me… Mercy Mercy Me

Hey, I’m not going to begrudge anyone trying to make a decent living – but I’ll take Gravy over reheated Motown any day of the week.

If there is such a thing as a desert-island organ combo playlist, it would have at least four or five cuts with Grant Green on guitar and Big John Patton on organ.  And it would lead off with this little slice of soul-jazz nirvana from “Got a Good Thing Goin,’” a 1966 Blue Note release (the disc’s second tune, Soul Woman, is just as good)… The Yodel

On these and other cuts by accomplished players like Green and Patton, you get the overwhelming attitude that “yeah, I can burn my way through any jazz standard you throw at me… but this is what I really want to play.”

The organ combo is far from finished.  Just pick up a recent release by Medeski, Martin & Wood or even Texas blues guitar great Jimmie Vaughan, who seems to always find a way to sneak an organ-driven instrumental into the mix.  In interviews, Vaughan has expressed his admiration of Gene Ammons and other soul-jazz giants – and his own band features Bill Willis, a former house bassist for Cincinnati’s legendary King Records who learned how to play organ from Mr. Honky Tonk himself, Bill Doggett.  On this cut from Vaughan’s first solo CD, Willis uses his left hand to play bass notes on the B3… Tilt A Whirl

I’ll leave you with this cut from Medeski, Martin & Wood’s third release, “Friday Afternoon in the Universe,” from back in 1995.  If you ever find yourself kicking back with a cocktail at the space station, you definitely want to slap this one on the interplanetary hi-fi… The Lover

Blue Note Soul-Jazz Album Covers… A few favorites:

The Doctor is In… Couldn’t resist adding this youtube video of a resplendent Dr. Lonnie Smith plying his craft on the B3… I like how he dives down to play a bass solo on the foot pedals with his hands.  He may be a Doctor, but he’s not above engaging in a little schtick!