Donald Byrd died on February 4 in Dover, DE. He was 80. He was the last survivor among the great trumpeters of the hard bop era of the '50s and '60s, a short list that includes Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.
Donald Byrd was born in Detroit on December 9, 1932. He completed an undergraduate degree in music at Wayne State University. After two years in the Air Force, he moved to New York to seek his fortune. His first recording was probably Bohemia After Dark, a 1955 Savoy session led by drummer Kenny Clarke. Like many of his contemporaries, he did an apprenticeship with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1955-1956.
Byrd was one of the most frequently recorded jazz musicians of his time. His long tenure with Blue Note Records from 1958 to 1976 produced 24 albums in his name, and many others as a sideman. He also recorded for Columbia, Prestige, Riverside and Verve, among others. He had a long association with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, with whom he co-led a group from 1958-1961. Mosaic released a boxed set, The Complete Blue Note Donald Byrd/Pepper Adams Studio Sessions, 1958-1967, which is now out of print. Here are two selections from that period.
He was an informal advisor to his peers, helping them to retain publishing rights and royalties from their music.
In the '70s, his career took a turn toward commercial success as he began recording jazz-rock-R&B fusion. His CD Black Byrd was Blue Note's all time best-selling album for many years, and three of his songs made the R&B charts. His music of this period was not well received by jazz critics. You can judge for yourself.
During his later years, Byrd worked primarily as a teacher. He earned a Ph.D. in Education in 1982. He taught jazz at several universities, and he also studied law. He recorded sporadically in the '80s and '90s, returning to the musical approach that made him one of the great jazzmen of the '60s.
I've been thinking about how to review new CDs; specifically, whether or not to rate them with points or stars. One argument in favor is that a rating provides a benchmark for the review, in case my opinion is not clear from the text. The main argument against it is that I've seen how my opinion changes with repeated listening.
If CDs are to be rated, how many scale points should I use? I've seen four- and five-star systems, and even a 10-point scale. If you allow half-stars, four and five stars become 7- and 9-point scales respectively. The danger of too many scale points is false precision, which itself leads to unreliability of ratings.
I've decided to go with verbal labels, adapted from the Roots & Rhythm catalog. The categories will be "not recommended," "recommended," "highly recommended" and "essential." In this context, "recommended" is a fairly lukewarm endorsement. I am anticipating that, in the short run, a lot of CDs will be "highly recommended," and very few will be "not recommended."
Does that mean I'm a generous grader? Not at all. I guarantee you that when I was at WIUP-FM listening to all the free CDs sent to us by record companies, the majority of them went into the "not recommended" pile. But these days, I have to pay for my thrills. My selections come from known favorite artists or reviews I've seen elsewhere, supplemented by internet sampling.
Maybe someday I'll have enough readers to ask the record companies to send me freebies for the blog.
The Grammys are the time we find out
the favorite jazz and blues recordings of the older pop music
performers and technicians who dominate the voting. I suspect many
of the voters don't pay much attention to either genre. Jazz and
blues fans should return the favor by not paying much attention to
the Grammys.
Blues has been demoted to a single
category. Gone is the old separation between “traditional” and
“contemporary” blues, which seemed to confuse the judges anyway.
Dr. John won the Best Blues Album Grammy for Locked Down.
The other nominees were Shemekia Copeland, 33⅓;
Ruthie Foster, Let It Burn;
the Heritage Blues Orchestra, And Still I Rise;
and Joan Osborne, Bring It On Home. I like Locked Down,
but calling it “blues” really stretches the category. I would
have given the Grammy to Shemekia or the Heritage gang.
The entire Dr. John
album is listenable on You Tube. I'm surprised Nonesuch Records
hasn't cracked down on that. I picked “Revolution” because I
like the visuals as well as the song.
One category is too
few for the blues. One indication of this is that Bonnie Raitt was honored for her CD, Slipstream, in a category called Americana. How about a Blues Song of the Year?
Jazz is spread out
over eight categories. Four of them are best CD categories. The
most competitive was Best Jazz Instrumental Album, which was won by
Pat Metheny's Unity Band. The other nominees were Chick Corea,
Eddie Gomez and Paul Motion, Further Explorations; Chick Corea
and Gary Burton, Hot House; Kenny Garrett, Seeds From the
Underground; and Ahmad Jamal, Blue Moon. I would have
given it to any of the other four over Metheny.
The Best Jazz Vocal
Album went to Esperanza Spalding for Radio Music Society.
Sadly, the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album went to Arturo Sandoval for
Dear Diz. I say “sadly” because I was pulling for Ryan
Truesdell's Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans,
my choice for best jazz CD of 2012. The Best Latin Jazz album was
¡Ritmo! by
the Clare Fisher Latin Jazz Big Band.
The remaining four
jazz categories are for individual album cuts. The Best Improvised
Jazz Solo is a potentially interesting category, if the judges would
listen to a large enough sample of CDs. The award went to Chick
Corea and Gary Burton for the title cut from Hot House, a
bebop standard composed by Tadd Dameron in 1945. Here it is.
The
Best Instrumental Composition went to Chick Corea for “Mozart Goes
Dancing,” also from HotHouse. Centennial
did manage to score one victory,
the Best Instrumental Arrangement for “How About You?” Finally,
the Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist went to
Esperanza Spalding and Thara Memory for “City of Roses” from
Radio Music Society.
The International
Blues Challenge
The
International Blues Challenge is a competition among relatively
unknown blues performers sponsored by the Blues Foundation. The 29th
annual event was held in Memphis from January 29 through February 2.
The winners receive recognition, cash and gigs. A number of
well-known artists have competed in the past, including Tommy Castro,
Susan Tedeschi and Watermelon Slim. There are two categories of
competitors, Blues Bands and Solo/Duo Blues Acts. There are roughly
100 entrants in each category, sponsored by blues societies from
around the World. The Blues Society of Western Pennsylvania was
represented by the Jimmy Adler Band and the duo of Miss Freddye and
Greg “G-Man” Castille. They were not among the 17 finalists.
The winner in the Single Artist
category is Little G Weevil, sponsored by the Atlanta Blues Society.
Here's a video of his from the competition. I cannot identify the
song.
The winner of the Band competition was
the Selwyn Birchwood Band, sponsored by the Suncoast Blues Society of
Tampa, FL. Persistence pays. They were among the finalists last year. There are
several Birchwood videos available on You Tube. It's unfair to judge
a performer by amateur videos, but it's my impression that he is a
better guitarist than singer. In addition to a standard guitar, he
plays a slide guitar in his lap. Here he is doing “Crawlin'
Kingsnake,” a song originally recorded by Big Joe Williams, but
more recently identified with John Lee Hooker.
The Blues Hall of Fame
The Blues Foundation also announced
this year's inductees into the Blues Hall of Fame. The ceremony is schedule for May 8. Here are the
performers:
Otis Clay, soul singer
Earl Hooker, guitarist
Little Brother Montgomery, singer and pianist
Jimmie Rodgers, country singer and
yodeler—a surpising choice
Joe Louis Walker, singer and guitarist
Jody Williams, singer and guitarist
Otis Clay, Joe Louis Walker and Jody
Williams are still alive and performing.
The non-performers to be honored are:
Dave Clark, record promoter
Henry Glover, songwriter and record
producer
Cosimo Mattisa, record producer
The following individual songs are being inducted:
Until now, there are only two known
photographs of country blues giant Robert Johnson. Now Getty Images claims
to have authenticated a third photograph. The new photo was bought
in 2005 by Zeke Schein, a classical guitarist, on eBay, where it was
wrongly advertised as a photo of B. B. King. He is said to have
donated it to Getty. The photograph has now been restored, but it's
not clearly exactly how they authenticated it. There is no date
stamped on the photo. I'll update you when I find out more details.
Photo by Robert Johnson Estate/Hutton Archives/Getty Images
The photo purports to be Johnson, on
the left, standing next to bluesman Johnny Shines. The case for it
being authentic is a 2007 analysis by a Houston forensic expert, Lois
Gibson, who compared it to the two existing pictures and claimed that
the feature placement was identical. Johnson is known to have long,
thin fingers and one eye slightly smaller than the other.
On the other hand, blues expert Bill Dahl claims it is a fake (see the comments section attached to this article). He says that when
the late David “Honeyboy” Edwards, who was a friend of both
Johnson and Shines, was shown the photo, he said, “Who is that?”
Ann Rabson, blues singer,
pianist and member of Saffire—The Uppity Blues Women, died
yesterday at her home in Hartwood, near Fredericksburg, VA. She had
been battling cancer for several years. She was 67.
Ann
Rabson was born in New York City on April 12, 1945. She began
performing as a solo artist in 1962. She became an internationally-known musician
relatively late in life. She was working as a teacher at Germanna
Community College when she formed Saffire with two of her students,
Gaye Adegbalola and Earline Lewis. Here's the story of Saffire's
beginnings.
Their
first CD, Uppity Blues Women, was released by Alligator in 1990. They
subsequently recorded seven 'Gators, plus a greatest hits
compilation. Earline Lewis was replaced by Andra Faye in 1992. In
addition to their fine musicianship, the three women were known for
their bawdy sense of humor, and for writing original songs and
choosing songs to cover that took a feminist perspective on the
blues. Their final CD, Havin' the Last Word (2009), was
accompanied by a farewell tour.
Ann also released four solo albums,
including Music Makin' Mama, on Alligator in 1997. Here's the
title tune.
Last
year, she teamed with guitarist Bob Margolin to record Not Alone
on Vizztone. It is nominated for a Blues Music Award as the best
acoustic album of 2012. The winners will be announced in May.
Eddie C. Campbell
Bob Corritore's Newsletter reports that Chicago singer and guitarist Eddie C. Campbell
suffered a stroke and a heart attack while touring in Germany last
weekend. Eddie is a member of the second generation of Chicago
electric bluesmen that includes Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Otis Rush,
Magic Sam, Luther Allison, Magic Slim, Carey Bell and Eddy Clearwater. Those that survive
are now in their seventies. His latest CD, Spider Eating
Preacher, was released on Delmark last year.
Guitarist and singer McHouston “Mickey”
Baker died of heart and kidney failure on November 27 at the age of 87 at his home
in Montrasuc-la-Conseillere, near Toulouse, in the south of France.
While he is best known for his duets with Sylvia Vanderpool, Mickey
Baker's influence on rock and roll guitar was every bit as great as
better-known guitarists such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Ike
Turner. He is less well known because many of his greatest
recordings were made as a sideman, his name not appearing on the
label.
McHouston Baker was born in Louisville,
KY on October 15, 1925. His mother, Lillian, who was black, was 12 years old when he was born and it is believed that his father was a
white musician who passed through Louisville at the time. He spent
his earliest years in and out of orphanages, sometimes getting into
trouble with the law. He made his way to New York in 1941 at the age
of 15. He took up the guitar because he couldn't afford his first
choice, a trumpet. He aspired to be a jazz musician, and his first
gig was with a bebop group, Jimmy Neely's Incomparables. However,
after the success of Pee Wee Crayton's guitar instrumental “After
Hours Blues,” he decided he could make a better living playing
rhythm and blues.
Mickey's Baker's first career was as a
session musician, where he became the guitarist of choice for almost
all New York R&B recordings in the '50s. He played in sessions for Atlantic,
RCA, King, Decca, Okeh and others, often accompanied by his friend
Sam “The Man” Taylor on tenor sax, backing such vocalists as Ruth
Brown, Ray Charles, Joe Turner, the Drifters, the Coasters, Louis
Jordan, Wynonie Harris and Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
Meanwhile, he recorded several
instrumentals under his own name and pseudonyms such as “Big Red
McHouston.” His first session was for Savoy (“Riverboat”/”Guitar
Mambo”) in 1952. His biggest hit (at least in the New York area)
was “Shake Walkin'” for Rainbow in 1955. In 1959, he released an
instrumental album for Atlantic, The Wildest Guitar,
which has grown in reputation over the years. Mickey's instrumentals
for labels other than Atlantic are collected on the CD Rock
With a Sock, released by Bear
Country, a German reissue label.
While
with Rainbow, he began a second career, recording duets with Sylvia
Vanderpool (later Sylvia Robinson), who had previously recorded as
“Little Sylvia” for Columbia, Savoy and Jubilee. They had a
couple of moderately successful records, most notably "Real Gone Lover," but in late 1956, their
Latin-tinged pop song, “Love is Strange,” went to #1 on the R&B
charts (#11 on the pop charts). Mickey and Sylvia recorded a couple of dozen other songs,
one of which (“There Ought to Be a Law”) charted, but many of
them sounded like “Love is Strange” retreads. After Sylvia
retired, he recorded with Kitty Noble as Mickey and Kitty.
The
melody and guitar riff of “Love is Strange” were written by Bo
Diddley under the title “Paradise,” but he never recorded it. He
“gave” the song—or maybe sold it for a small amount—to
Mickey, who retitled it and wrote the lyrics. After it became a hit,
the Chess Brothers, who published Bo Diddley's songs, initiated a
lengthy lawsuit that was eventually decided in Mickey's favor. (Chicago guitarist Jody Williams, a member of Bo Diddley's combo at the time, also claims authorship of the riff.)
Most
people assume the man who talks/sings with Tina Turner on “It's Gonna Work
Out Fine” is Ike Turner—and he did sing it when they performed it
live. However, Mickey Baker was the voice on their 1959 record.
In
1962, Mickey Baker moved to France, in part because African-American
musicians were more popular and faced less discrimination in Europe.
He lived in Paris for a while, then moved to the Toulouse area.
There he embarked on a varied third career. He played and recorded blues
and jazz, working with other American expatriates such as Champion
Jack Dupree and Memphis Slim. He studied with European composers and
began writing and recording classical music. He wrote a series of
successful jazz guitar instruction books. Here he is in the '60s playing a song
called “South of France Blues,” with Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, for French TV.
My
favorite album from his European period is a 1973 CD he recorded as McHouston
Baker for Maison de Blues. Called Mississippi Delta Dues,
it includes country blues songs by Charley Patton, Robert Johnson,
Son House, Leroy Carr, J. B. Lenoir and three of Mickey's own
compositions. It was released on CD in 2006 and is well worth
seeking out. This song is not on the CD, but this 1972 performance of the New Orleans novelty tune "How Come My Dog Don't Bark?" is the closest to McHouston Baker singing country blues that I could
find on the internet.
Unfortunately,
Mickey Baker's death received little notice in this country. In the
next few weeks, I will try to catch up with some other important
deaths that occurred in late 2012, when I was not blogging.
Last Wednesday night was the grand
opening of the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, a $64 million facility
said to be the first stand-alone building specifically designed for
jazz in the U. S. The opening concert, hosted by Bill Cosby,
featured many notables, including Joe Lovano, McCoy Tyner, Joshua
Redman, Chick Corea and Esperanza Spalding. The 700 seat auditorium
was financed by SFJazz, a Bay area nonprofit organization.
Now would be a great time to be living
in San Francisco. Check out this neat picture.
Jimmy Adler
The Pittsburgh East section of the
Post-Gazettehad an article this week about Pittsburgh bluesman Jimmy Adler. Jimmy and
his band won the group competition of the Pittsburgh Blues Challenge,
sponsored by the Blues Society of Western Pennsylvania. They will
travel to Memphis to participate in the International Blues Challenge
beginning Tuesday night. This is an extremely competitive event.
You can't just be a cover artist. You must perform six original
songs. Here they are doing one of those originals, “Midnight
Rooster.” Good luck to Jimmy and the band.
Tina Turner
Tina Turner has come a long way. She
has applied for citizenship in Switzerland, where she has been living since 1995 on the
shore of Lake Zurich with her partner, record executive Erwin Bach.
She is giving up her American passport.
This is a reminder of the fact that,
during the latter half of the 20th century, many jazz and
blues artists emigrated to Europe. First of all, they found more
work there. Europeans like our music better than we do. Secondly,
black artists say they experience less discrimination in Europe than
in this country.
It's also a good excuse to play this
cool 1969 video.
