Gillian's Found Photo #20

Even I'm at a loss for comment about the Fang's contribution this week. A masked debutante Satanist ball? The hand signals alone seem to point in that direction. Who are these women and what are they doing? Who dressed them like that and why? And what is that gesture they're making with their right paws? Year and place unknown, but I can't help but notice that my birthday, May 23rd is on the board in the back for a scheduled assembly. Perhaps they were gathered together to herald my coming to earth? Rather unlikely. Then again May 24 is also on the schedule, birthday of both Bob Dylan and Sun Ra, maybe it's a birthday party for the both of them....

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Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk: Oct. 1944

Coleman Hawkins, whose 1939 version of Body and Soul would forever define the sound of the tenor saxophone, not only in jazz but in all music, is one of the most profoundly important musicians of the 20th century. And one of the most rightly heralded, he even got his own stamp.
But in the conventional wisdom that is often the lie that becomes truth, most especially in telling the story of American music, he is often remembered as a traditionalist. As the star of the Fletcher Henderson band, we hear the sad tale of his replacement-- Lester Young. Henderson's wife would constantly play Hawkins records whenever Prez was around, in hopes that Prez would start to play more like Hawkins (aka Bean). Hawkins played with a fat tone, plenty of vibrato, and a gutsy sound. Lester Young of course founded his own school of playing, with a light, vibrato-less tone, in the airy upper register he often sounded like he was playing an alto sax, and soon Henderson shipped his ass back to Kansas City where he could play the way he liked as the star of the up and coming Count Basie band. This has little to do with Hawkins himself, who was always a forward looking (and playing) musician, and if he never bothered attempting to use Lester Young's harmonic innovations in his own playing, he certainly appreciated them. He once burned out the motor of a brand new car to make a jam session with Young that was hundreds of miles away. Hawkins did use the innovations of musicians who would come in Young (and Art Tatum's) wake to create what would be called be-bop. In fact, the very first session that employed these young "bop" musicians would be recorded under Hawkins guise. On Feb. 16, 1944 Hawkins cut a session for the Apollo label using Dizzie Gillespie, Leo Parker and Max Roach, it would be the first waxing of the new music that would cause such a rift in the jazz world. Eight months later (Oct. 11, 1944), Bean who was then working on 52nd St. brought his small band in the studio for the Joe Davis label to cut four tunes. It would be the first session for the already legendary pianist and composer Thelonious Monk who played piano on these sides along with Edward Robinson on bass and Denzil Best on drums. These four tunes, sometimes used to fill out various Prestige compilation CD's, are in my mind one of the greatest jazz sessions of the era, a pivotal moment where through the music the listener can look (or hear) the future of jazz, or just kick back and say-- "How come music doesn't sound this good anymore"?
Monk was already well known amongst fellow musicians, holding down the piano chair at the jam sessions at Mintons (see the Charlie Christian posting), and his songs were beginning to make the rounds, but he was considered too weird, too eccentric for listeners to get, and work was hard to come by for the young Monk. Coleman Hawkins recognized his talents and hired him for his first downtown gig on 52nd Street. And brought him into the studio for the session that is our subject for today.
The most striking thing about these recordings are how much Monk sounds, well, just like Monk. His style is fully developed, listen to the intro on Drifting On A Reed, it could have been recorded at virtually any time in Monk's career, he emerged with his style fully formed (there are many musicians, to this day, who think Monk was a crappy pianist, including my pal Mathew Shipp, one of the finest players in the world today, who once told me he couldn't stand to hear Monk play piano). On the same tune we hear Hawkins incorporate the new ideas into his sound with an ease that is hard to describe. He never changed his style either, but he never stopped growing, he had huge ears, he could take inspiration for anywhere, and he had huge ideas, and the talent to turn them into jazz. Flying Hawk, the only uptempo number recorded, gives Monk plenty of space. On The Bean catches Hawkins in a swinging mood, he gives Monk a short solo in the middle eight, and responds to Monk's quirkish chording with authority and ease. Recollections, a ballad, captures everything Hawkins did best, his lyricism, his soulfulness, and his technique (the double stop triplets on the first solo) all come together for a two and half minute piece of mood sculpture, I can just imagine coming in out of the rain and fog to a half empty club on 52nd St. to be met with that sound wafting through the doorway, as if to say-- you're in the right place. 52nd St isn't there anymore. Well, there's a 52nd St, but every building that housed a jazz joint has been bulldozed and replaced by ugly, modern high rise office buildings and hotels.
Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk are long gone, no one could ever replace them.
And jazz, like R&B and rock'n'roll is something that used to be great, it exists, but modern audiences are too dumb to understand it, too lazy to develop on ear for it. It's safe to say the best of it it is long gone, and we'll never see anything like what happened in American music in the 2oth Century again....

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Gillian's Found Photo #19

It's that ape again! See Gillian's Found Photo #3 (March 9, 2009) for the original appearance
of Zip in the pages of the Houndblog. Zip, according to Red Boy was a character on the Howdy Doody television show, of which I have few memories of (born in '59, I only remember Howdy himself and Clarabelle). Anyway, the two non-simeon's look like they just stepped out of a late 40's road noir like They Live By Night or Gun Crazy (recently retitled Deadly Is The Female for Lord knows what reason, why change the title of a movie sixty years later?). Then again, the guy looks a bit like Boston cult leader/record collector/musician Mel Lyman , but I don't think it's him. What do you think is in her cup? My guess is a coffee/Benzedrine combination.

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Little Walter B.C. (before Checker)

Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs, b. 1930 in Marksville, Louisiana) was a monster. The bulk of his recorded output was for the Chicago based Chess Records' Checker subsidiary and should be one of the building blocks for any good record collection. No other blues instrumentalist so completely changed the sound of their instrument (with the arguable exception of T-Bone Walker), making the harmonica into both an effective lead and rhythm instrument, using amplification and echo, not to mention the chromatic harp to expand it's vocabulary in a dozen different directions. But the subject of Little Walter is too large and complex to take on here, besides I have little to add to the excellent and definitive biography of Little Walter-- Blues With A Feeling: The Little Walter Story (Routledge, 2002) by Tony Glover, Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines, a volume that anyone who cares about the subject should invest in. No, today's subject is one session, eight songs, recorded by Little Walter and guitarist/vocalists/drummer Baby Faced Leroy along with their boss Muddy Waters in January of 1950 for the Parkway label, four 78 rpm singles were issued, three on Parkway and one on Regent (later re-issued on Savoy), two each billed to Baby Face Leroy Trio and Little Walter Trio.
Walter had already recorded once for the Ora Nelle label in 1947, and was a member of Muddy Waters' group (known around Chicago as Muddy Waters' Drunk-Ass Band), but Leonard Chess, who had found his first success with Muddy, recording him solo with just guitar and stand up bass on the hit Rollin' Stone b/w Feel Like Goin' Home, refused to record Muddy with his band in the studio, and chomping at the bit for some exposure of their own, Baby Face Leroy and Little Walter (who had arrived in Chicago together and played without Muddy on Maxwell Street most Sunday mornings, in violation of Musician Union rules) showed up at the door of the new Parkway label, run by record distributor Monroe Passis, with Muddy in tow, to record what would be one of the high water marks of Chicago blues.
Given Parkway's numbering system it's a bit hard to figure out the order that these discs were issued, not that it matters. Parkway 104 might have been the first-- issued as Baby Faced Leroy Trio-- Boll Weevil b/w Red Headed Woman is a crude slice of country blues sung by Leroy who also keeps time on the bass drum. Walter is present on harmonica, Muddy on guitar, and there has been much speculation over the years if the second guitar heard is Jimmy Rogers, the guitarist in Muddy's working band, or Baby Face Leroy playing guitar along with the bass drum simultaneously. Either way, it's a fine record, much rougher around the edges than anything Chess would have issued.
Parkway 501 also issued under Baby Face Leroy's name was not only the best of what was recorded that January afternoon, but in my estimation one of the two greatest electric blues sides of the fifties Chicago style (the other-- Howlin' Wolf's Moanin' At Midnight b/w How Many More Years was oddly enough recorded in Memphis for Sam Phillips and leased to Chess in '51). Rollin' and Tumblin' pt.1 b/w Rollin' and Tumblin' pt. 2 features Muddy's scraping slide guitar and Little Walter's percussive harp playing, riding over a relentless drum beat from Leroy's foot. The a-side, which is an adaptation of the tune recorded in 1929 by Hambone Willie Newbern, find Leroy's vocal, part chant, part song, answered by Muddy's wordless humming as it builds like a voodoo ceremony. By pt. 2 the words have all but vanished and Leroy and Muddy are simply moanin' and wailin' away wordlessly as musical stew boils over into a mind numbing froth. Jungle music indeed. When word got back to Leonard Chess that Muddy had recorded this tune for another label, Chess got right on the case and had Muddy in the studio to re-record the song and kill the smaller label version. Unfortunately, Chess forgot to have Muddy bring Little Walter and Baby Face Leroy with him, and the re-recorded version is nowhere near as good as the Parkway original. If you were going to pare your record collection down to a dozen or so discs, this is one that would make the cut.
Parkway 502 was billed to Little Walter Trio and the a-side-- Just Keep Lovin' Her a remake of the same tune that Walter had recorded for Chance in 1947 at his second session. This version is better than the Chance recording, an upbeat blues with Walter's vocal and harmonica just starting to show the authority he would wield so effortlessly in the next decade of recording.
The b-side however-- Moonshine Blues I find more interesting for the first appearance on record of Little Walter's guitar playing. That's Walter playing lead, with a distorted, nasty edge to his sound. Muddy's guitar can be heard underneath, holding the proceedings together. Walter really was a hell of a guitar player (he thought himself much superior to Muddy, whose playing he considered crude and old fashioned according to Glover, Dirks and Gaines). There's a hint of Guitar Slim in his attack.
The final two sides from that day, also issued under the moniker Little Walter Trio-- Muskadine Blues b/w Bad Acting Woman appeared on as Regent 3296, on the New Jersey label that acquired the masters to satisfy a debt. Regent would soon itself be acquired by Savoy, the jazz-gospel-R&B indie out of Newark, N.J. run by the ignoble Herman Lubinsky, the least liked record man of his day.
Both sides of this platter are dominated by Little Walter's guitar playing. Muskadine Blues is the Robert Lockwood tune-- Take A Little Walk With Me, a tune many think to have been penned by Robert Johnson, one of two so called "lost tunes" that Johnson never got around to recording (the other was also eventually recorded and credited to Lockwood-- Little Boy Blue). Walter doesn't hold back much on the guitar, taking the solos in a crude, overboard fashion
that sounds great over Muddy's slide playing. Bad Acting Woman seems to pick up exactly where Muskadine ends, and again it's a side so primitive it's unlikely that Chess would have issued it. In fact the entire session probably would have been shelved by Chess, which prided itself in well recorded, well played blues records. Many critics have written about these recordings, singling out Rollin' and Tumblin' as a masterpiece and writing off the other sides as mere curiosities, and many have criticized Walter's guitar playing as inept.Going back to Glover, Dirks and Gaines again, their opinion is that Walter's guitar playing is "functional if not particularly noteworthy...if nothing else, the session makes it obvious where his real talent lies" (i.e. playing the harmonica). I beg to differ, I think Little Walter was a unique and interesting guitarist, once again, it's hard to get away from the word crude, but in blues crude is good, no one listens to blues to hear slick (except idiots), and I think these sides (readily available on the Delmark CD The Blues World Of Little Walter which is rounded out by excellent early and obscure sides by J.B. Lenoir and Sunnyland Slim) are as worthy of a listen as anything he later recorded for Checker, and Little Walter's Checker output was of a very high standard indeed. But it's a different side of Little Walter, not the sharkskin suited musical visionary whose Checker recordings still sound futuristic and modern, but the rough and tumble kid who slept on pool tables and hustled for spare change on the streets of Chicago's Jewtown. It's the best look at early Little Walter we have, and it's the next best thing to having been there.

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Small Faces

Nothing to say this week, been sick and don't really feel like writing, but since I've been reading Simon Spence's Immediate (Black Dog Publishing), an excellent look at Andrew Oldham's UK label, I started looking at these Small Faces clips that I'd book marked over a year ago. Some excellent footage of a great band that here in America were basically a one hit wonder (Itchycoo Park). I don't think they ever toured here, and certainly were rare to see on TV. The top clip is lip sychned but nice to see in color and with the added presence of ex-Ikette P.P. Arnold (First Cut Is The Deepest). The German Beat Club clips are killer, even though I've never liked Sha-La-La-La-Lee much (neither did they, Steve Marriot refused to sing it live after 1966). I like how their instruments look so huge (because they were so tiny). Tiny or not, they packed a punch. I recommend you find the BBC sessions (look here and notice the pw for unstuffing is mud) which make a great addition to their studio sides which I assume everyone has already.

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