With summer giving way to fall, how ’bout a little trip down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi? There, at T-Bone’s Records & Coffee, you’ll find, over in a corner, Johnny Vidacovich, longtime New Orleans drummer—he’s played at every one of the 40 annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festivals—playing, singing, chatting, goofing.
Johnny Vidacovich, live, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Most drummers I couldn’t listen to for five minutes. This guy I could listen to all day. Why? Because his playing is relaxed and unshowy. He makes use of space. Instead of trying to bowl you over, he invites you in.
BuddyHolly, Patsy Cline, Stevie Ray Vaughan, this guy: if you could somehow revive all the folks who’ve died falling out of the sky, you’d have a hell of a band.
Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness,” live, Norway, 1967
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give the drummer some/part 2
Listen to the double-time pattern Al Jackson begins playing at the start of the second verse (0:47): what a subtle, rippling urgency it creates.
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lagniappe
“[Otis would] keep pushing, and each time Al Jackson would go with him. He would enable the rest of the musicians to reach whatever Otis was trying for. Otis would record stripped to the waist. He put bath towels under his arms. He wanted those horn players live on the floor; he’d sing their parts to them and put that whole session together. Otis got a live feel that nobody else on that label [Stax] ever got.”—Jim Dickinson (in Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music [1986]; for more on Dickinson, see the 9/9/09 post)
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Bassist Duck Dunn (also in Guralnick’s book):
— “Otis would come in [the studio], and, boy, he’d just bring everybody up. ‘Cause you knew something was gonna be different. When Otis was there, it was just a revitalization of the whole thing. You wanted to play with Otis. He brought out the best in you. If there was a best, he brought it out. That was his secret.”
— “When you talked to him [Otis Redding], he was like you was. Then you see him on stage. Hey, there ain’t too many people wear the crown. Elvis wore it, and I guess Frank Sinatra wore it. And here he comes, and, boy, he wore it. He wore that halo. He knew it. He was a goddam star.”
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At Redding’s 1996 Whiskey A Go Go shows in Los Angeles, Bob Dylan “presented Redding with a prerelease copy of ‘Just Like A Woman,’ claiming his vocal approach had been Otis-inspired. ‘Otis’ appraisal of it,’ says [Phil] Walden, ‘was that it had too damn many words in it.'”—Carol Cooper
“So there’s this black guy, see, and he walks onto the stage of a concert hall in Norway, and this guy starts singing, in this Norwegian concert hall, ‘Do you like good music, that sweet soul music,’ and . . .”
Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music,” live, Norway, 1967
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give the drummer some
Listening to this performance, I’m reminded of what a terrific drummer Al Jackson was—how essential he was to the Memphis sound. Not only could he drive a band, hard, through the turnarounds (1:23-1:32, etc.); he could play with such lightness and buoyancy—just listen to what he does with the ride cymbal—that the groove floated (0:18-1:22, etc.).
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later note
One of the hazards of posting YouTube clips is that sometimes, as here, they disappear on you. But here (for the moment, anyway) is a shorter snippet from that same Arthur Conley performance (the times for the Al Jackson stuff referenced above are a little different here [the first turnaround, for instance, comes at 1:08-1:17]).
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lagniappe
“Memphis is an ugly place, but I love it. People who wouldn’t have stood a chance anywhere else were recorded here. And have traditionally been drawn here, because, I guess, it’s always been a center for crazy people.”—Jim Dickinson (in Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music [1986]; for more on Dickinson, see the 9/9/09 post)
If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.
Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009
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lagniappe
“Brass band musicians are a wild bunch. They’re hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth [Brass Band] plays definitely isn’t traditional—it might be in thirty years time.”—Lajoie “Butch” Gomez (in Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance [2006])
Here, in the city where concert halls are made of asphalt, is one of the most famous Mardi Gras Indian tribes, the Wild Magnolias.
Wild Magnolias, live, New Orleans, 2008
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lagniappe
“It was this kind of willful, wildly romantic attention to beauty—crumbling and fading beauty needing constant attention—that made this city [New Orleans] so unlike any other and such an unparalleled sort of environment for a builder.”—Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
Muddy Waters, Saul Bellow, Steppenwolf Theater Company (John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, et al.), Curtis Mayfield: a lot of great artists, musical and otherwise, have come out of Chicago in the last 50 years. Among the greatest is this group: the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the horn players (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie) got the lion’s share of the attention, what gave their music its juice—what made it dance—was (as you’ll hear) one of the finest rhythm sections ever: Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums.
Art Ensemble of Chicago, live, Poland (Warsaw), 1982 (in four parts)
Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4
Part 4 of 4
(I talk about the AEC in the past tense because, while recordings are still released under this name from time to time, with two key members [they were all “key members”] now dead—trumpeter Lester Bowie [1999] and bassist Malachi Favors [2004]—it just isn’t [nor could it be] the same.)
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subscribe
Many things in life don’t quite seem, alas, to live up to their billing. It appears that the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) service that’s referenced in the righthand column (under “Subscribe”) may fall into this category—at least, that is, for those of us who are (as the expression goes) of a certain age. The problem seems to lie at the threshold: “real simple.”
Anyway, in the life’s-too-short, keep-it-simple-stupid department, if you’d like to “subscribe” to this blog, just send me an email (rmcleeselaw@aol.com) with “subscribe” in the subject line and—voila!—you’ll be added to an ever-growing email list that will have you receiving an e-notice whenever there’s a new blog post. As indicated in the “About” section (see righthand column), this whole thing started from a very small (like, oh, two, sometimes three, folks) email list, which then grew, then grew some more. One of many miraculous things about electronic communication is that there’s always room for one more.
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