Rubber City Review

Recently I took a peek at Google Analytics and noticed that RCR’s readership was up. So I thought, I’ll fix that… Time to do a post on soul jazz.

What exactly is soul jazz? Well, I’ll give you my take and we can argue about it later.

You’ve probably heard terms like acid jazz, hard bop, jazz-funk or jazz fusion. For the most part, they all refer to strains of jazz informed by blues, soul and gospel – as opposed to popular show tunes like I Got Rhythm and Love for Sale that kept swing bands and be-boppers in business through the Thirties and Forties.

But don’t take my word for it… Here’s a definition offered by the good folks at allmusic:

“Although soloists follow the chords as in bop, the basslines (often played by an organist if not a string bassist) dance rather than stick strictly to a four-to-the-bar walking pattern. The musicians build their accompaniment around the bassline and, although there are often strong melodies, it is the catchiness of the groove and the amount of heat generated by the soloists that determine whether the performance is successful.”

Put another way, black jazz artists who were playing predominately black clubs knew what their audiences wanted to hear, and it wasn’t Broadway show tunes. In the Fifties, they were listening to Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker. And hard boppers like Nat and Cannonball Adderley were starting to incorporate more blues-based riffs and danceable grooves in their jazz compositions to create classics like this one: Work Song

As soul and funk became the dominant sounds of the next two decades, those influences were often channeled through the organ combo and jazz artists like Jimmy Smith and Grant Green. We touched on the former and a few of his many B3 disciples here, and sang the praises of Green in this post. If you like your jazz served up with a lot of funky guitar, heavy grooves and late-night ambience, you can’t do much better than this next tune, which features Green with organist Big John Patton: Soul Woman

While Green and Patton were laying down this little nugget in ’66, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were heading in far more ethereal and abstract directions – with Coltrane traveling through Interstellar Space the following year before leaving his mortal coil behind in July. But Miles had his ear to the dancefloor and eventually recorded some of the nastiest, funkiest music that can still be tagged (albeit loosely) as jazz. I wouldn’t call this next number “soul jazz,” but it definitely proves that Miles was paying a lot of attention to James Brown and Sly Stone in 1970: Duran (Take 4)

That number features guitarist John McLaughlin, who went on to form the jazz fusion supergroup the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Now I’m not going to head down that path, even though I listened to a fair amount of fusion in my younger days. Some of that stuff makes me cringe today – and I’m not sure the word “soul” can be applied to bands like Return to Forever and The Eleventh House that mainly seemed interested in performing daring feats of technical prowess rather than music with a human essence to it.

But I also won’t suggest that all the great soul jazz was recorded 40 or 50 years ago (although we’ll include a few more classics from the era at the end of this post). In fact, I’d argue that Charlie Hunter, Galactic, Medeski Martin & Wood, The Bad Plus, Garage a Trois and a few other contemporary acts are building on the soul jazz tradition by recognizing the most important lesson from those wayward fusion years: It’s all about the groove, stupid. Case in point: Bear No Hair

As you can tell, the guys in Garage a Trois have chops for days – and I’m sure guitarist Charlie Hunter could play an entire song in 32nd notes if someone put a gun to his head. Hell, he already learned how to play bass and lead guitar at the same time. But why play blazing fast leads if they don’t serve the song? And why write a song that requires a shitload of 32nd notes?

Stanton Moore

OK, I’m done ranting. Here’s another modern soul jazz standout. This one features Stanton Moore, who leads his own band… drives the rhythm section for Galactic, Garage a Trois and a few other bands I’m not even aware of… and remains the most dangerous drummer in a city with many great ones, New Orleans (this cut also features Charlie Hunter on guitar). Tchfunkta

Another first-rate contemporary band in the soul jazz vein just turned 20 – Medeski Martin & Wood. And they’re celebrating the occasion by releasing 20 new tracks (digital only), two per month until the end of the year. The songs are available on iTunes, Amazon, MusicToday and other digital retailers. Before you check those out, I’ll play you a sample from one of the band’s Blue Note releases… must be a tribute to the esteemed label that practically invented soul jazz back in the Fifties and Sixties. Note Bleu

Speaking of Blue Note, let’s head back to the era and touch on a few classics that should be part of any self-respecting soul jazz collection.

Someone at the label (maybe the boss, Alfred Lion) had the bright idea to team up jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell with master conguero Ray Barretto. And the smooth sound of Mr. “Hard Hands” lifts Burrell’s Midnight Blue into the realm of soul jazz nirvana: Midnight Blue

Sonny Stitt

This next track also includes Barretto, but this time with sax legend Sonny Stitt and one of the great B3 players of all time, Brother Jack McDuff. It’s from a sizzling session recorded in 1962 for the Prestige label: Nother Fu’ther

On some of his funkier soul jazz outings, Stitt liked to use an electric sax called a Varitone – which is sort of like putting Charlie Parker through a digital delay or Billie Holiday through Autotune. Interesting, but unnecessary. Still, you can’t deny the greatness of Stitt, especially when he’s settling into a deep groove like this one – with a perfect handoff from guitarist Melvin Sparks: Turn It On

That cut features three unsung heroes of soul jazz – Sparks, organist Leon Spencer and drummer Idris Muhammad. Other standouts of the form include guitarists Boogaloo Joe Jones and Billy Butler, organists Shirley Scott and Charles Earland, and sax man Rusty Bryant (a long-time resident of Columbus, OH). Seasoned musicians who could easily play straight-ahead jazz, but really earned their keep as session players on some of the best soul jazz outings of the Sixties and Seventies. And none of them ever got the recognition they deserved.

Here’s Boogaloo Joe burning through one of his originals, with fine backing from Earland and Bryant: Right On

Idris Muhammad

And here’s Idris Muhammad driving a dance tune originally recorded in 1969 by The Fabulous Counts, a Detroit-area funk band. The leader for this live date from ’71 at Detroit’s Club Mozambique? The one and only Grant Green: Jan Jan

We’ll close with one of the most soulful sounds in all of jazz – the big, bad sax of Gene Ammons. Just ask Texas blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, who has an obvious weakness for Ammons-inspired instrumentals with healthy doses of B3. Here Ammons is joined on a ’61 studio date by Brother Jack on organ and our go-to guy for soul jazz conga, Ray Barretto: Twisting the Jug

Birth of a power trio… Enjoy the first 10 minutes of a film by Marie Pierre Jaury on Medeski Martin & Wood – part documentary, part primer on modern soul jazz (or whatever you want to call it). Includes great clips of MMW in action.

I have more than 21,000 songs on my iPod. And I wrap tin foil around my head to keep out the gamma rays.

Do you think less of me? I’m referring to the iPod, of course. Normal people would find this to be a symptom of OCD. Audiophiles would scoff at the idea of listening to all this music in a highly compressed electronic format. My brother thinks I should be more selective in terms of what I put on my iPod. But my wife likes the fact that hundreds of CDs, records and tapes are now stashed away in the deep recesses of my basement (where I routinely hunt for liner notes to help me with these posts).

One thing about having this many songs on your iPod is that you can put it on shuffle and still feel that sense of discovery. I mean, how many of those tunes could I actually listen to before I dumped them into my library? It’s like tapping into a radio station programmed by a guy with… well, tin foil wrapped around his head.

And that’s the subject of today’s post. No, not mental illness. I thought I’d put the entire contents of my iPod on shuffle and write about what pops up.

This exercise was not audited by the blog authorities. You only have my word that I didn’t screw with the results. As usual, I was surprised by what the little genie in my iPod chose to play. And, as usual, the results reflect the fact that I am completely out of touch with today’s youth culture (Exhibit A: use of term “youth culture”).

But first, let me point out that I typically don’t put my entire iPod on shuffle. It’s simply too dangerous, especially if I’m driving. I once almost drove into oncoming traffic after Coltrane segued into Coldplay, which I’m sure ended up on my music library by accident.

I prefer using playlists – even if they include several hundred songs – and I’ve got some great ones.  Drinking songs (see “There Stands the Glass“)… pure, unfiltered honky tonk… post-war jump blues and R&B, including some rare reissues that appeared on CD for about five minutes (see “Jumpin’ the Blues“)… choice cuts from the glory years of Blue Note… playlists devoted to other great labels like Stax, Sun, Fania, Riverside…

I even have my own genres – mainly because I don’t like the ones provided by the record companies. For example, I think Freddie King, Link Wray and Lonnie Mack belong in the same category as Dick Dale. So I created the genre “Surf & Beyond.” Django Reinhardt doesn’t really go with my jazz stuff… he has his own genre. The Black Keys’ “Chulahoma,” G. Love’s “Coast to Coast Motel” and John Hammond’s “Wicked Grin”? Dirty Blues. And, as I’ve already pointed out, R&B ain’t Kool & the Gang. It’s Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Turner. So take that, Mister Genre-Impaired, Think-Inside-The-Box Record Man!

But back to the grand experiment. The first tune selected by my iPod is… Strollin’ With Bone, from T-Bone Walker’s “Complete Imperial Recordings.” Whew… damn good start! I’ve always been a big fan of T-Bone, and this is one of his best numbers. T-Bone started out as a street dancer, which helps explain his almost percussive attack along with a completely original sense of time and phrasing. And he had a huge influence on virtually every blues guitarist who followed – especially flamethrowers like Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Strollin’ With Bone/T-Bone Walker

Next up – honky-tonk hero Dwight Yoakam, from his 2005 comeback of sorts, “Blame the Vain.” This isn’t my favorite cut from the album (the title song is one of Dwight’s best). But there’s a lot to like on “Blame.” Dwight’s singing is less affected than on his first recordings. And his new hot-shit guitarist, Keith Gattis, has plenty of opportunities to show off… like this nasty little riff he uses to bring the song back down to the key of E: Intentional Heartache/Dwight Yoakam

Now the iPod genie picks the great Professor Longhair, the King of New Orleans Piano. This is from the 2-CD set “The Mercury Blues ‘n’ Rhythm Story 1945-55: Southwest Blues” – actually one of four releases in a first-rate overview of Mercury’s landmark R&B recordings. I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a bad cut by Longhair. I can highly recommend the nine that show up on the Mercury collection… as well as Rhino Records’ “’Fess: The Professor Longhair Anthology” and especially “House Party New Orleans Style,” which features two of my favorite guitarists of all time – Gatemouth Brown and Snooks Eaglin. Been Fooling Around/Professor Longhair

Here’s a tune written by Johnny Cash but performed by the Louvin Brothers, who showed up in our recent post on harmony singing. You have to wonder what pit of despair Cash stumbled into to write this one: “Lord have mercy on me was the kneeling drunkard’s plea, and as he knelt there on the ground I know that God in heaven looked down… Bring my darling boy to me was his mother’s dying plea, and as he staggered through the gate alas he came just one day too late.” Give me a few minutes to recover… I’ll be right back. Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea/The Louvin Brothers

We stagger from that one to Hearsay by The Soul Children – a vocal quartet, split evenly across gender lines, that recorded for the Stax label in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Both of the male Soul Children – Norman West and J. Blackfoot – still perform today. This tune sounds oddly reminiscent of Soul Man, which is exactly what Stax songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter had in mind… They were hoping to strike gold with a different combination after Sam & Dave slipped away (they remained with Atlantic following a split with Stax in ‘68). You can find Hearsay on a two-disc compilation from 2007 celebrating Stax’s 50^th Anniversary. Hearsay/The Soul Children

From Memphis we head up to Chicago – following the same route that Howlin’ Wolf took from Sun to Chess Records back in 1953. A year later he cut the song Forty-Four, one of many interpretations of a blues standard first recorded by Roosevelt Sykes in 1929. The original is more curious than menacing, with “44” used to reference a gun, a train and a cabin. Wolf, on the other hand, has one thing in mind, and that’s pumping lead into the poor sonofabitch who messed with his woman. Essential Chicago blues – with Hubert Sumlin and Jody Williams on guitars, Otis Spann on piano, Willie Dixon on bass and Earl Phillips on drums. Forty-Four/Howlin’ Wolf

And why wouldn’t you follow up that one with the dazzling sax of Sonny Stitt, playing the George and Ira Gershwin favorite Nice Work If You Can Get It? Yeah, I’m starting to get a little whiplash too. But at least this one’s by a master like Stitt, and not Sting (thankfully, I have a very effective “Sting-B-Gone” filter installed on my iPod). This version is from the 3-CD box set “Stitt’s Bits: The Bebop Recordings, 1949-1952”… with liner notes by Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar (“American Splendor”). Nothing groundbreaking on it, so don’t run out and get it – unless you happen to like beautifully executed jazz by one of the greatest sax players to ever roam the planet. Nice Work If You Can Get It/Sonny Stitt

Talk about whiplash… now we’re back in the honky tonks, this time with California cowgirl Heather Myles. I love the collection this song is from: “Rum and Rodeo,” which pulls select cuts from Heather’s first two albums on the Hightone label. She’s got a lot of that hard, Bakersfield sound in her… I’m sure she’s a woman you wouldn’t want to trifle with. An American original with loads of talent – playing music that’s authentic, honest and heartfelt. Wonder why she never caught on in Nashville? The Other Side Of Town/Heather Myles

Now let’s go down to the Crawdad Hole with Big Joe Turner. This tune is from “Big, Bad & Blue,” an essential overview of Big Joe’s storied career as the Boss of the Blues. You could argue that his glory days were long gone by the time he recorded this number in 1983 with R&B revivalists Roomful of Blues. But I would’ve paid good money to hear Big Joe sing along with the organ player at the ballpark. Now strap me in a time machine and take me back to Kansas City, 1935, Big Joe shoutin’ the blues over the boogie-woogie piano of the great Pete Johnson. Crawdad Hole/Big Joe Turner

We should’ve stopped right there… but I let my iPod play one more song, and up pops Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye. Actually, once you get past the crappy production, it’s a pretty damn good song. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone has ever celebrated the joys of getting it on with as much passion as Mr. Gaye. Well, maybe R. Kelly… but the only healing R. has in mind involves Feelin’ On Yo Booty (this is the same guy who recorded Heaven, I Need A Hug??). Come back, Marvin – we need you now more than ever…

R.I.P., Harvey… On the same morning I pushed the button on this one, Harvey Pekar passed away. Here’s a nice tribute in today’s New York Times. I found it interesting that Pekar might have been banned from the Letterman Show for lashing out against General Electric, then Letterman himself started trash-talking GE toward the end of his tenure at NBC. Here’s a clip of Harvey’s tirade… he’ll be missed (now I feel silly for wasting even a sliver of bandwidth on LeBron).

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!