Video of the Week #75

Willie Dixon is known as a bassist, songwriter and record producer. Here he is in 1964 singing "Weak Brain, Narrow Mind," accompanying himself on guitar. The introduction is by Sunnyland Slim.

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Johnny Winter (1944-2014)

Johnny Winter, a second generation Texas bluesman who briefly flirted with pop music stardom in the late '60s and early '70s, died on July 16 in his hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland, where he was on tour. Announcement of the cause of death is pending. He was 70.

John Dawson Winter III was born on February 23, 1944, and raised in Beaumont, TX. He began playing with his younger brother Edgar, who played alto saxophone, before they were teens. They spent the '60s playing in Texas clubs, often backing older bluesmen, and recording for small, local labels. His first album, The Progressive Blues Experiment (1968) on Sonobeat, set the pattern. Although he recorded some original songs, he mostly covered hits by great bluesmen of the '30s through the '60s.

His reputation as a slide guitarist grew, and following a Rolling Stone article and an appearance at Fillmore East, he was signed by Columbia Records. His first release, Johnny Winter (1969), featured Willie Dixon on bass and Big Walter Horton on harmonica. 

It was followed by Second Winter in 1970. His record sales peaked with Live Johnny Winter And (1971) and Still Alive and Well (1973). But his career was hampered by drug and alcohol addiction, and by his insistence on playing the blues, rather than switching to more mainstream pop material.

He made three well-received albums for Alligator from 1984 to 1986. He also recorded for MCA and Pointblank/Virgin. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1988, and was named one of the 100 greatest guitarists in a Rolling Stone poll. In his obituaty, colleague Tracy Nelson stated, “He did not overplay, like a lot of white blues guitarists.”

In he described as “the highlight of my life,” he produced his idol, Muddy Waters' best album in many years, Hard Again, for Blue Sky Records in 1976. (The title came from Muddy's reaction to the sessions.) Winter played all the guitar solos and James Cotton played harp. It earned a Grammy for Waters, as did two of three followup albums also produced by Winter. A live album featuring Waters, Cotton and Winter was released in 2007.

His most recent album was Roots, on the Magaforce label. Step Back is scheduled for release in September. 

Earlier this year, Columbia released a four-CD career retrospective, True to the Blues. A documentary film, Johnny Winter—Down and Dirty, is currently in circulation.

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Video of the Week #74

Here's Billie Holiday singing "Fine and Mellow" on The Sound of Jazz, a 1957 CBS television program. All the band members are identified by the announcer. The soloists, in order, are Ben Webster, Lester Young, Vic Dickinson, Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge.

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A Rain Forest: Charlie Haden (1937-2014)

Here is Charlie Haden talking about his somewhat Jungian philosophy of improvisation.

Charlie Haden, an influential jazz bassist and band leader whose eclectic career spanned seven decades, and ranged from the most avant-garde music to the most traditional, died in Los Angeles on July 11 at age 76.  He had been suffering from post-polio syndrome, a disease affecting people who had polio as children, which causes muscle weakness and pain and left him unable to play.  His last appearance was at the Healdsburg (Cal.) Jazz Festival in June, 2013.

Charles Edward Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa on August 6, 1937. His family played country music on the radio and barnstormed throughout the Midwest as the Haden Family Band. He first performed at the age of 2, singing and yodeling as Cowboy Charlie. He was forced to give up singing at 15, when he contracted polio, which affected his facial and throat muscles. He took up the bass, and was the house bassist on Ozark Jubilee, a Springfield, MO, TV show. He retained a lifelong interest in country music and in 2008, he released Ramblin' Boy, a country CD featuring his wife, Ruth Cameron, his son, Josh, his triplet daughters, Petra, Rachel and Tanya, his son-in-law, actor Jack Black, and several guest stars. (I only recommended it for country music fans.)

In 1851, Charlie Haden saw Charlie Parker perform with Jazz at the Philharmonic and was inspired to take up jazz. He moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Westlake College of Music, and played with Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, and Paul Bley. In 1959, he joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, consisting of Coleman, alto sax; Don Cherry, trumpet; Haden and Ed Blackwell, drums. Coleman favored a polytonal approach to improvisation known as free jazz, not bound by chords or structure. While Coleman is a revered jazz elder statesman today, his music was controversial at the time. Here, Haden explains why Coleman's approach appealed to him.

The Ornette Coleman Quartet plays “Lonely Woman,” in which Haden plays a bass melody under Coleman's solo, and “Ramblin',” with a Haden solo that quotes from country music.

Haden left the Coleman Quartet due to drug addiction and enrolled at Synanon in 1963. He rejoined Coleman from 1967 to the early '70s, and at occasional reunions thereafter. From 1967 to 1976, he performed with keyboardist Keith Jarrett's American Quartet, which also included Dewey Redman on tenor sax and Paul Motian on drums. He was also a member of Old and New Dreams, a collective consisting of former Coleman sidemen Cherry, Redman and Blackwell.

Charlie Haden's discography lists a total of 46 CDs as leader, and 132 as a sideman, including 15 with Coleman and 19 with Jarrett. In 1969, he formed the Liberation Music Orchestra with pianist Carla Bley, and released an album on Impulse. He explains:

I established it from my concerns about what was going on in the world because of the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam, and I started thinking about, “I've gotta do something about this.”. . . And maybe I could do something where I can play some political songs from the Spanish Civil War. I can write a song about my hero Che Guevara and call it “Song for Che.” I can write a piece about the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, where people were, you known, beaten on the street and jailed.

Three other LMO albums were released in 1982, 1990 and 2005. (One of the unintended effects of Republican occupation of the White House was a new LMO CD.) The most recent, Not in Our Name, protested our illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In 1971, while playing with Ornette Coleman in Portugal, then a fascist dictatorship, he dedicated “Song for Che” from the stage to anti-colonial revolutionaries in Mozambique and Angola. He was arrested at the airport and jailed for several hours.

Demonstrating his more traditional side, Charlie Haden was interested in films noir, and in movie themes and other pop songs from the late '40s and early '50s. In 1987, he formed Quartet West with Ernie Watts, tenor sax; Alan Broadbent, piano; and Larence Marable, drums. Their collaboration produced seven CDs containing songs of the period and originals written in the same style.

In 1982, he founded the CalArts jazz program and began teaching. He won three Grammy awards, one for Under the Missouri Sky with guitarist Pat Metheny, and two Latin jazz awards for Nocturne and Land of the Sun, with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. 

He was recognized as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts in 2012, elected to the Down Beat Hall of Fame in 2013, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, also in 2013. His most recent CD, released last month, is a collaboration with Keith Jarrett, Last Dance, recorded in 2007. A recording with the late guitarist Jim Hall is scheduled for release this Fall. There will no doubt be others.

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The 61st Annual Downbeat Critics Poll

Jim Hall (1930-2013)

Video of the Week #73

This week's video is a soundie from 1945, the early days of the Stan Kenton Orchestra. In addition to Kenton on piano, "Southern Scandal" features Eddie Safranski on bass, Freddie Zito on trombone, and Stan Cooper on tenor sax.

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Video of the Week #72

In 72 weeks, I haven't yet posted any Ray Charles videos. Here's Brother Ray, his band and the Raelets doing his complete concert at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival (43 min).  The playlist, along with approximate start times is:
          "Li'l Darlin'"
          "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'," (7:00)
          "Let the Good Times Roll," (13:30)
          "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying," (16:10)
          "Sticks and Stones," (misidentified as "I'll Never Let You Go," 20:45)
          "My Baby," (23:46)
          "Drown in My Own Tears," (26:55)
          "What'd I Say?" (34:19)
          "I Believe to My Soul" (39:36)

You may spot band members Marcus Belgrave on trumpet, David "Fathead" Newman on tenor sax, and Hank Crawford on alto sax. The lead singer of the Raelets is Margie Hendrix.

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Bobby Womack (1944-2014)

The death at age 70 of soul singer, songwriter and guitarist Bobby Womack was announced on June 27. The cause of death was not revealed, but he was known to have suffered from diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Known for his gravely baritone voice and impassioned delivery, he placed 28 songs on the R&B charts between 1962 and 1985, including two #1's (“A Woman's Gotta Have It” in 1972 and the remake of “Lookin' For a Love” in 1974), three #2's, and twelve in the top 10. He was nicknamed “The Preacher” and “The Poet” for the extended raps with which he began some of his songs.

Bobby Dwayne Womack was born in Cleveland on March 4, 1944, the third of five brothers. His father, Friendly, a part-time Baptist minister and a member of the gospel group the Voices of Love, molded the five boys—Friendly, Jr., Curtis, Bobby, Cecil and Harry—into the gospel-singing Womack Brothers at an early age, with Curtis and Bobby sharing the lead duties. Bobby patterned his singing after Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.

Bobby first met Sam Cooke, then the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, in 1951, at age seven, when the brothers opened for the Stirrers at a Cleveland church. Ten years later, they walked into the studio of SAR Records, a label Sam Cooke started in order to nurture young talent. The Womack Brothers released several gospel songs on SAR, but at Sam's urging, they also recorded pop songs under the name the Valentinos.  This caused a permanent rift with Friendly, Sr. Two of the Valentinos' songs made the charts. “Lookin' For a Love” (1962) was covered a decade later by the J. Giels Band, but “It's All Over Now” (1964) was covered almost immediately by the Rolling Stones. This cost them sales, but Bobby was compensated by songwriting royalties and the boost to his reputation.

During the last few years of Sam Cooke's life, Bobby was his guitarist, driver and almost constant companion. He suffered both personally and professionally when Sam was shot and killed in December, 1964 and SAR was disbanded. The melodrama was compounded when Bobby, then 20, married Sam's 29-year-old widow Barbara Campbell less than three months after Sam was slain. Although he denied that they were having an affair prior to Sam's death, the marriage made him an outcast in the music business.

Bobby survived this dry spell as a session guitarist in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, AL, and as a songwriter for artists such as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. Pickett alone recorded 17 of his songs, including “I'm a Midnight Mover” and “I'm in Love.” He also wrote an instrumental, “Breezin',” for jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, which later was a hit for George Benson.

Bobby Womack signed with Minit Records in New Orleans and made his way back onto the charts in 1968 with covers of “Fly Me to the Moon” and “California Dreaming.” In 1970, he began a long association with United Artists, which produced hit singles and albums (such as Communication [1971] and Understanding [1972]) throughout the decade. He also contributed the title song to the 1972 ghetto gangster flick Across 110^th Street. Here are his biggest hit and a non-hit that's my favorite from the peak years of his creativity.

Bobby Womack's self-confessed heavy drug use brought him down during the latter half of the '70s. However, he continued to ride the charts through the early '80s with albums like The Poet (1981) and songs like “If You Think You're Lonely Now” (1981) and “I'll Still Be Lookin' Up to You” (1985), a collaboration with the Jazz Crusaders' saxophone player, Wilton Felder.

Memorials to Bobby Womack emphasize the chaotic nature of his personal life. In addition to drug and alcohol abuse, he struggled through three failed marriages, the death of an infant son, the murder of his brother Harry, and the suicide of Vincent, his son with Barbara Campbell. In 2012, he had surgery for colon cancer.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2012, he cemented his status as a soul survivor with the release of The Bravest Man in the Universe, named by Rolling Stone as one of the 50 best albums of the year. Here is one of his last public appearances, singing "Across 110^th Street" at the 2013 Montreux Jazz Festival.

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