—Jerry Wexler, Solomon Burke’s producer at Atlantic Records (also produced Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, etal.)
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Every day I’m on the phone ministering to people. I’ve had so many people say to me, “What should I believe in?” I tell ’em, “Just believe in what’s real and makes you feel good. Whatever moves you, go there.”
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Every day they had a service [at my grandmother’s House of Prayer for All People], and the music never stopped. There was always a band with two or three trombones, tambourines, cymbals, guitars, pianos. When I speak of music, I get choked up. It was a message to God, something you feel down to your bones and your soul and your heart.
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I’ve learned to forgive Jerry [Wexler] . . . I’m also waiting for my check.
Albertina Walker, October 29, 1929-October 8, 2010
“I Can Go To God In Prayer” (joined, at the end, by Patti LaBelle), live, Chicago, 1991
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“Please Be Patient With Me” (with James Cleveland), live, Chicago, 1979
This track, which I first encountered 30 years ago, I never tire of hearing.
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“Lord Keep Me Day By Day,” live (James Cleveland’s funeral), Los Angeles, 1991
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lagniappe
Somebody gonna leave here feeling a little better than they did when they came in . . .
—Albertina Walker
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Happy Birthday, Monk!
In celebration of the birthday of Thelonious Monk (October 10, 1917-February 17 1982), WKCR-FM is playing his music all day—and we’re replaying some clips.
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Here is the onliest Thelonious.
Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966
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Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)
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You can tell a lot about Monk’s music—about the centrality of dance, about the interplay between melody and rhythm, about the way a melody’s irregular accents override the pulse (making the dance melodic)—just by watching, in the second performance, the way his right foot moves.
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lagniappe
He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to be.
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You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group—whatever the format—was his body.
—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
(Originally posted 11/2/09.)
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Yeah, the format might seem a little strange: soprano saxophone, unaccompanied. But Monk’s musical language—its tangy mix of geometric elegance and off-kilter bluesiness—is rarely spoken this eloquently.
Sam Newsome, Thelonious Monk Medley, live, 2008
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lagniappe
The clarity and logic of his [Thelonious Monk’s] work might have been compared with the craft of an architect. Each phrase, each fragment, each plump chord had its exact place in his musicial structure.—Mimi Clar (in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original[2009])
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‘All jazz musicians are mathematicians unconsciously’ was a favorite theory of Monk’s.—Randy Weston (in Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace [2007])
(Originally posted 11/25/09.)
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genius at work
Thelonious Monk with saxophonist Charlie Rouse, working out a number, “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” during a recording session, 1967
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Thelonious Monk (with Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Ben Riley, drums; Larry Gales, bass), “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (Underground [Columbia], 1968)
(Originally posted 12/28/09.)
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What did it sound like when Beethoven, seated at the piano, played Bach? For that we have to use our imagination. For this we don’t.
Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington, live, Berlin, 1969
[T]he only time I’ve ever seen Monk act like a little boy and looking up to somebody [was in the presence of Duke Ellington]. That was his idol.—Joe Termini (quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009])
Muscular, unadorned, direct: his playing conjures the old Chicago, when there was no Millennium Park, no flowers blooming in the middle of the street, no dining al fresco (unless you had nowhere else to eat).
Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), club owner (Velvet Lounge), March 22, 1929-June 24, 2010
Live, with DKV (Ken Vandermark, tenor saxophone; Kent Kessler, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), Chicago (Hideout), 2008
(Hamid Drake is among my favorite drummers; he’s the perfect foil, in his buoyancy and drive, for Anderson’s dark, searching, sometimes brooding lines.)
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“Spirits Came In,” live (with Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), live, New York (Vision Festival), 2002
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Live (with Jaribu Shahid, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), France (Le Mans), 2005
These guys sounded awfully good the other day—let’s hear some more.
Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, “Orleans & Claiborne,” live, New Orleans, 2010
There are a lot of things to like about this performance. One is the way Shorty, following two hot solos (tenor, baritone), doesn’t try to out-blow those guys. Instead, he changes directions (3:20). Sometimes nothing packs more punch than restraint. (Yeah, I don’t know why this clip cuts off when it does, either.)
Soon I’ll be leaving for a funeral—my uncle, Hugh Frebault. Nine days ago we sat and talked and laughed for over an hour; now he’s silent. Does life get any more understandable as you get older? I don’t think so—if anything, it seems to become only more mysterious, more unfathomable.
Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground” (1927, Dallas)
Earlier this week the last surviving member of the Chicago-based Gay Sisters passed away. She was a piano wizard—sometimes referred to as the “Erroll Garner of gospel piano.” A musical tribute is scheduled for Friday evening, April 16th, at the Prayer Center Church of God in Christ, which is located at 526 E. 67th St. in Chicago.
Geraldine Gay, 1931-April 6, 2010
Gay Sisters, Savoy Records, 1951
“I’m A Soldier In The Army Of The Lord”
That’s Geraldine on the right.
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“I’m Goin’ To Walk Out In His Name”
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“God Will Take Care Of You”
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lagniappe
‘God Will Take Care Of You’ . . . sold an easy 100,000 units (an astounding amount of records for any genre to sell at the time), which in today’s sales would be equal to the popularity of a platinum album.—Bill Carpenter, Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia (2005)
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Chicago is known the world over as the birthplace of gospel music. So it comes as no surprise that city officials can barely contain their excitement over the possibility of a gospel museum opening on the city’s south side. How excited are they? Well, an official with the Chicago Board of Tourism recently made this commitment: the gospel museum “is exactly the kind of thing,” she said, that they “would put up” on their Web site. Yes, you heard that right: a city official announced, publicly, that they would include it on their Web site. Take that, Nashville!
What a nasty one-two punch for Memphis: first Jim Dickinson, then—seven months later—Alex Chilton.
Alex Chilton, December 28, 1950-March 17, 2010
Big Star, “Thirteen” (1972)
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Big Star, “September Gurls” (1974)
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Alex Chilton, “Bangkok” (1978)
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The Replacements, “Alex Chilton” (1987)
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Alex Chilton, “There Will Never Be Another You” (1985?)
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lagniappe
Alex Chilton, the pop hitmaker, cult icon and Memphis rock iconoclast best known as a member of 1960s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the 1970s power-pop act Big Star, died Wednesday at a hospital in New Orleans.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist was 59.
“I’m crushed. We’re all just crushed,” said John Fry, owner of Memphis’ Ardent Studios and a longtime friend of Chilton’s. “This sudden death experience is never something that you’re prepared for. And yet it occurs.”
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The Memphis-born Chilton rose to prominence at age 16 when his gruff vocals powered the massive Box Tops hit “The Letter,” as well as “Cry Like a Baby” and “Neon Rainbow.”
After the Box Tops broke up in 1970, Chilton had a brief solo run in New York before returning to Memphis. He soon joined forces with a group of Anglo-pop-obsessed musicians — fellow songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens — to form Big Star.
The group became the flagship act for Ardent’s Stax-distributed label. Big Star’s 1972 debut album, #1 Record, met with critical acclaim but poor sales.
The group briefly disbanded, but reunited without Bell to record the album Radio City. Released in 1974, the second album suffered a similar fate, plagued by Stax’s distribution woes.
The group made one more album, Third/Sister Lovers, with just Chilton and Stephens — and it, too, was a minor masterpiece. Darker and more complex than the band’s previous pop-oriented material, it remained unreleased for several years.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named all three Big Star albums to its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
“It’s a fork in the road that a lot of different bands stemmed from,” said Jeff Powell, a respected local producer who worked on some of Chilton’s records. “If you’re drawing a family tree of American music, they’re definitely a branch.”
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“When some people pass, you say it was the end of an era. In this case, it’s really true,” said Van Duren, a fellow Memphis musician who knew Chilton for decades. “It puts an end to the Big Star thing, and that’s a very sad thing.”—Jody Callahan, Bob Mehr, Memphis Commericial Appeal (3/17/10)
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A day after the death of Memphis music legend Alex Chilton, shock and sadness slowly gave way to fond remembrance by friends, fans and fellow musicians.
Over the course of a remarkably varied 40-plus-year career with the Box Tops, Big Star and as a solo artist, Chilton was a creative chameleon. A teen pop hitmaker, a reluctant cult hero, a champion of Southern roots music, a visionary producer, a punk-rock provocateur and a much underrated guitarist, Chilton had carved his place as one of the most singular figures — both as an artist and as a personality — that Memphis music has ever produced.
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The news of Chilton’s death sent shockwaves through the annual South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. The massive industry gathering kicked off Wednesday night just as word of his passing began to spread.
Chilton had been scheduled to perform with Big Star on Saturday night, part of a headlining set at Antone’s nightclub, and the group was also set to be the subject of a historical panel earlier in the day.
After consulting with Chilton’s wife and festival organizers, surviving Big Star members Jody Stephens, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow confirmed that the panel and performance would go on as scheduled, effectively serving as memorials for Chilton.
“It felt like we had to pay tribute in some form,” said Auer. “In a strange way, it’s amazing that it happened around something like South by Southwest. So many people there are hyper-aware of Chilton and understand what he means musically, so it seems like the perfect place to do something like this.”
The Saturday night Big Star set is shaping up to be an all-star tribute. Though the lineup is still coming together, a variety of artists including X’s John Doe, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, indie-folk singer M. Ward, the dB’s Chris Stamey, Green on Red veteran Chuck Prophet and Chilton’s longtime New Orleans collaborators Doug Garrison and René Coman are among those expected to appear.
For Coman, the sheer breadth of Chilton’s artistry and the scope of his career remain the true measure of the man. “Alex had such a long career, and all kinds of different stages to it.” said Coman. “The people that stay in it for a really long time and still enjoy it, it seems like they wind up finding different things to keep them interested as the years go by.
Bessie Smith, Clifford Brown, Scott LaFaro, Duane Allman: the road where musicians lose their lives goes on, and on, and on.
Lil’ Dave Thompson, May 21, 1969-February 14, 2010 (killed in a car accident Sunday morning en route home to Greenville, Mississippi, after a Saturday night performance in Charleston, South Carolina)
“I Got The Blues,” live, Kentucky (Bowling Green), 2008
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“Lil’ Girl,” live, Pennsylvania (Blakeslee), 2008
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“Call Me, Baby,” live, South Carolina (Charleston), 2009
Delmar Allen “Dale” Hawkins, a rockabilly pioneer who gave the music world the hit “Oh! Suzy-Q,” died Saturday in Little Rock of colon cancer. He was 73.
Hawkins, originally from Goldmine, in Richland Parish, recorded his first hit in the KWKH Radio studios in downtown Shreveport in 1956 with then-15-year-old guitarist James Burton, who later went on to perform and record with Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, John Denver and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others.
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[Burton] recalled the guitar lick that became the hook for “Oh! Suzy-Q.”
“I wrote that little guitar lick when I was 14,” Burton recalled. “It got to be so pop in the club that Dale decided to write some lyrics to it and that became ‘Suzy-Q.’ It became a good record for him and (me) both.
“I was probably his first fan. He was a good guy, a good friend, and I think he lived life to the fullest, right up to the end.”
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Bassist Joe Osborn, whose career on hundreds of No. 1 and Top 10 hits includes work with Ricky Nelson, Johnny Rivers, the Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension and Bob Dylan, credits Hawkins with starting his career and transitioning him from the guitar to the electric bass.
“In 1956, I was working at Sears in the hardware department and Dale came in,” Osborn said. “‘Suzy-Q’ was already out and a hit, and he wanted me to play with his brother Jerry and his band at the Skyway Club. That’s how me and Dale started. If he hadn’t come in that day I’d still be at Sears, selling hardware.”
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In addition to his classic “Suzy-Q,” Hawkins recorded more than 40 songs on the “Chess” label. According to an obituary, he was the third entertainer to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and was the first white artist to perform at the “Apollo Theatre” in Harlem and the “Regal” in Chicago.
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In the mid-1980s, after moving to Arkansas and entering into a second career as a social worker and counselor, Hawkins returned to live performances in a comeback concert at then-Cowboys nightclub in Bossier City, an event put together by Oil City producer Tom Ayres.
Hawkins, a Navy veteran of the Korean War, is in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
music clip of the day 