There aren’t many things on my bucket list, but getting “that sound” on the tenor sax is way up there. It’s called a growl or some such thing. I’m getting close. Anyway, it’s in this cut.
“Shotgun” is a 1965 single by Junior Walker & the All Stars. It was written by Walker and produced by Berry Gordy Jr. and Lawrence Horn, was number #1 on the U.S. R&B Singles charts for four non-consecutive weeks and got to number four on the Billboard Hot 100.
Under the heading “music doesn’t have to be complicated to be great, “Shotgun” uses only one chord in the entire song — A-flat seventh.
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There’s a store that sells old vinyl a few blocks from my house in Toronto. I’m not really a collector. And given all the options for accessing music, it makes no sense to me to get my music that way. I know a few audiophiles who swear by the quality of the sound. I’m not going to argue with them. They are very passionate. But I can’t be bothered.
These days I buy vinyl for the album art. Some of it is so interesting. This afternoon I picked up an album by the Jonah Jones Quartet. It’s called Swingin’ at the Cinema. It was released in 1959. It contains a number of songs from movies of the day.
Jonah Jones was a trumpet player and singer who was, according to one entry, “best known for creating concise versions of jazz and swing standards that appealed to a mass audience.”
I was drawn to the album cover art because, well, I’m old, not dead. Whatever else Jonah Jones did with his music, he certainly liked women, and even recorded a song called “I Dig Chicks.” Terribly sexist and inappropriate and all that but, hey, think of it as musical anthropology as in the study of man before he walked upright.
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When I first got to Toronto in 1980, some people I met suggested I get down to George’s Spaghetti House to hear Moe Koffman. Koffman booked the venue and also played there on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I never managed to do that. And now it’s gone and so is Moe.
Moe played at the venue so much, in fact, that a joke making the rounds in the day had a prospective attendee to the club calling up and asking who was preforming that night, then quickly adding “and I won’t take Moe for an answer.”
Koffman was best known as a flute player, though he played the sax and clarinet, which is a common form of multi-instrumentalism, or doubling, as they say. In 1957 he had a hit with “Swingin’ Shepherd Blues,” an incredibly catchy tune the likes of which appeals to music fans who might not otherwise care much about jazz. In fact, it’s just the kind of cross-over hit that makes jazz purists squirm. You wouldn’t want the uninitiated digging your music. In a way, it’s like Vince Gauraldi playing those Peanuts Christmas songs. For a lot of folks it’s the only jazz they might ever appreciate.
“Swingin’ Shepherd Blues” is a fun tune to listen to and fun to play. Good enough for me. Koffman died in 2001, but he had a pretty good run, having played with some of the brighter lights in jazz like Dizzy Gillespie and Peter Appleyard. And he did a lot of session work on the Canadian scene, including music for movies. Basically, he had a decent career in music, which is no easy task.
Sure, “Swingin’ Shepherd Blues” is kitschy, but catchy too.
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For some people “Sixty Minute Man” will be familiar as having been featured in the 1988 movie Bull Durham. Think Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and toenail painting, after you thought it was something else. The song follows a theme well-known in blues music in which a singer brags about abilities of a sexual nature, which is why it was banned from some radio stations at the time of its original debut.
“Sixty Minute Man” was written by Billy Ward and Rose Marks and released as a single on Federal Records in 1951 by Billy Ward and His Dominoes. The line-up around this time would have been (I believe) Bill Brown, Billy Ward, Clyde McPhatter, Charlie White and Joe Lamont.
It reached #1 on the R&B charts in May 1951, stayed there for 14 weeks, and also rose to #17 on the pop charts, one of the first R&B songs to cross-over. It is also generally cited as a song that helped shape rock and roll.
What made The Dominoes special, besides the excellent arrangements and McPhatter’s unique voice, was their appeal beyond the usual racial lines of demarcation. They were huge in the black community, but they were also one of a relative handful of R&B acts that developed a small but fiercely loyal following among younger white listeners as well during the early ’50s, which didn’t matter a lot at the time — and, as things worked out, was only incidental to their fate — but helped to plant a seed that blossomed into the full-blown rock & roll boom four years later.
The group had significant success in the ’50s as one of the best selling acts of the period, with three Billboard Top-40 hits by the end of the decade.
Joe Jones (1926 – 2005) was born in New Orleans. He was an R&B singer, songwriter and arranger, and is often cited as having discovered the Dixie Cups, a pop girl group best known for the 1964 hit “Chapel of Love.”
“You Talk Too Much” was released by Joe Jones & His Orchestra on the Roulette label and reached No. 3 on the pop charts in 1960. The song was written by Reginald Hall, Fats Domino‘s brother-in-law, but Domino decided not to record it.
“You Talk Too Much” was the high point of Jones’ career – a nice high point.
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Not that jazz can’t be happy music, but this one is a particularly upbeat thing. “The Preacher” is by Horace Silver, recored first by Silver’s quintet in February of 1955. That would be Silver on piano, with Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Doug Watkins (bass), and Art Blakey (drums).
I was searching for some fingerstyle jazz today and came across Laurence Juber. Though I have played for decades, and read some of the niche magazines for players, I was not aware of Mr. Juber, which seems like a serious oversight.
His website says the following about him:
A music graduate of London’s Goldsmith’s College, he was featured guitar soloist with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra before becoming established as a studio musician in the mid-1970’s. First internationally recognized as lead guitarist in Beatle Paul McCartney’s Wings, with whom he won a Grammy, Juber has since established himself as world-renowned guitar virtuoso and entertainer.
He has more than two dozen albums to credit, the latest of which is his fourth album in a series of arrangements for solo guitar of Beatles songs called The Fab 4th.
Here is Mr. Juber with an impossibly beautiful version of my absolutely favourite Beatle song, “I Will” from the aforementioned The Fab 4th album. By the way, here’s a link to an Acoustic Guitar review of the album. Nice read.
If you were wondering what the Billboard top single of 1955 was, wouldn’t you think that maybe it would be the Bill Haley and His Comets version of “Rock Around the Clock,” or one of the three versions of “The Ballad of Davey Crockett” released that year, or even Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” In each case, you would be wrong. The Billboard year-end top single for 1955 was “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Perez Prado.
Prado recorded the song as an instrumental with his orchestra featuring trumpet player Bill Regis, although lyrics do exist in both French (Jacque Larue) and English (Mack David). The music was written by Louiguy. Louiguy is a nom de plum of Louis Guglielmi, a Spanish-born French musician of Italian descent.
Dámaso Pérez Prado (1916 – 1989) was a Cuban bandleader, pianist, composer and arranger who popularized the mambo in the 1950s, which was the key to the song’s massive popularity at the time. And why is that you ask?
In the 1950’s, the mambo was the most popular dance craze in the Western world. Mambo dancers became famous, and the New York Palladium, a showcase for mambo music, gained international attention. Afro-Cuban band leaders like Damaso Perez Prado …and Mario Bauza, (1911-1993), became legendary.
Another interesting bit about the tune is that Perez Prado first recorded it for the movie Underwaterin 1955 for a scene which involves Jane Russell dancing in some way (well, we know what kind of way). As you might imagine it was set around the ocean with ample opportunity for Ms. Russell to wear bathing attire.
It would seem that fads or, to be kinder, short-lived popular interests, can influence all sorts of things. In this case, the mambo craze made a song number one in 1955. Go figure.
Sadly, I could not find a clip a Jane Russell dancing, but here’s Perez Prado with that characteristic trumpet sound introducing the main theme, which I think is the only part of the tune I actually remembered.
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Though Chuck Mangione would become an international superstar in the 1970s with smooth jazz mega-hits like “Feels So Good,” and “Chase the Clouds Away,” he started out as bebop trumpeter in the Dizzy Gillespie tradition.
While Chuck was studying at the Eastman School, he and his brother Gap (keyboards) co-led a bop group called The Jazz Brothers, which recorded several albums for the Jazzland label.
About this 1960 album, Scott Yanow at AllMusic writes this was “not only the debut recording of trumpeter Chuck Mangione but is the first appearance on record by tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico, pianist Gap Mangione, and drummer Roy McCurdy; altoist Larry Combs and bassist Bill Saunders complete the group.”
I can’t blame Mangione for wanting to make a good living, but this early material is some fine jazz. The Jazz Brothers recorded two further albums, and then moved on.
“When I Fall in Love” was composed by Victor Young with lyrics by Edward Heyman for the 1952 film One Minute to Zero. The lyrics did not, however, appear in the film, the plot of which is summarized thusly in an IMDb entry:
Wartime drama about an idealistic young UN official (Ann Blyth) who finds out about the horrors of war when she falls in love with Colonel Steve Janowski (Robert Mitchum), the officer in charge of evacuating citizens from Korea.
Hence the tone of the lyrics, e.g., “In a restless world like this is, love is ended before it’s begun.”
There are many covers of this song, including by: Doris Day (1952), Nat King Cole (1956), Johnny Mathis (1959), Sandra Dee (1960), The Letterman (1962), and Tom Jones (1966). Jeri Southern had the first recording, featured below, in 1952, with Victor Young arranging and conducting.
