Vibraphones, flutes and California Latin jazz

I’ve posted extensively about Afro-Latin music in California (here, here, here and here). The subject fascinates me, so I’ll try not to belabor the point too much.

Latin jazz in the post-War Bay Area and Los Angeles was a diffuse, small-scale phenomenon. It’s not entirely accurate to summarize the cities as “scenes” the way one refers to Latin music in New York City as a “scene.” Even so, the West Coast version of Latin jazz had its own sound. If one were pushed to generalize, one might say that it was more atmospheric, less fiery than the East Coast version. Jazzier, if you will. Why the difference? To some degree, it’s a matter of demographics.

At least initially, the West Coast didn’t have the substantial Puerto Rican or Cuban communities to nurture Afro-Latin music, and, consequently, early California Latin jazz experiments were comprised to a greater degree of jazz musicians. East Coast bandleaders like Tito Puente or Eddie Palmieri, on the other hand, had groups with higher ratios of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, musicians who’d grown up playing Afro-Latin music as actual participants in the culture. These New York City groups played Afro-Cuban jazz, or mambo jazz, usually as part of a broader repertoire of guaguanco, cha cha, guajira, son montuno, plena and bomba.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, California society orchestras and Mexican-American bands like Chuy Reyes’ had updated their repertories with fashionable boleros, rumbas and danzones, of course, but their music remained polite - supper club stuff. There was mambo and montuno in the pioneering Mexican-American swing and R&B of the Pachuco Boogie Boys and Lalo Guerrero, too, but only in the most elemental form. Latin jazz in post-War California would largely begin as an import, that is, not an in situ development of the community as
New York City’s Latin jazz was.

The Panamanian-born percussionist Benny Velarde summed up the differences another way in an interview:

“On the East Coast they were playing music that was called “Afro Cuban Jazz”. It was heavily influenced by Chano Pozo who played with Dizzy Gillespie and Mario Bauza. On the West Coast we were playing what was called “Latin Jazz” - which meant jazz standards with Latin percussion …Another difference was that on the East Coast the music was played by Big Bands like those lead by Dizzy Gillespie and Machito. But on the West Coast we did not have Big Bands but the music was played by smaller combos.”

Post-War appearances of Latin jazz pioneers Machito and His Afro-Cubans and the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra (with Chano Pozo) - and later Tito Puente and mambo king Perez Prado - dazzled West Coast audiences. Few in the audience, it seems, would be more greatly affected than jazz musicians. They were a diverse bunch, the early California converts to Afro-Latin music and Latin jazz. Pianist Eddie Cano and vibraphonist Bobby Montez, for example, were Mexican-American, and major draws in Hollywood clubs. White vibraphonist Cal Tjader came from a bop background, and so did black bassist Al McKibbon, though Tjader was basically a native son, and McKibbon arrived from New York City. Percussionist Ricardo Lewis played in some early (and sadly underdocumented) Bay Area Latin jazz combos, and hailed from New Orleans, where he began as a jazz drummer. Like so many others, Los Angeles bandleader Stan Kenton began adding Latin rhythms to his arrangements after a firsthand introduction to the Machito Orchestra. Pianist George Shearing was British, and blind. The list goes on.

The remaining, and most critical, component of early Latin jazz sessions was the seasoned Afro-Latin congueros, bongoceros and timbaleros. Percussionists like Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Luis Miranda, Benny Velarde, Carlos Vidal, Armando Peraza and Francisco Aguabella had grown up in playing in the tradition. They were masters, and they were indispensable.

Together, at least in Los Angeles, these groups might play huge music ballroom events like the Mambo Jumbo, Joe Garcia’s nights at the Zenda ballroom or Lionel Sesma’s ongoing Latin Holidays at the Hollywood Palladium - events that presented visiting Afro-Latin orchestras.

More often, however, Latin jazz groups traveled along the same circuit of jazz venues, supper clubs and upper-crusty nightspots that jazz combos did, playing places like the Crescendo, the Latin Quarter, Ciro’s, the Garden of Allah and Slapsi Maxi's in Los Angeles and the California Hotel, the Copacabana Club, the Black Hawk, Bop City and the Frisco Club in the Bay Area.

These places fostered a certain dynamic, which brings us finally around to this week’s artists. Jazz players found that an exotic tone poem in the setlist was a clever way to transform a club’s atmosphere, and, additionally, it afforded a certain latitude to explore new sounds, modes, and time signatures. Latin jazz combos, too, found the same experimental freedom in exotica. Certainly it was a great way to put those vibraphones to dramatic effect.

Their audiences didn’t quite get all this, but found it all very diverting nonetheless - long enough to idly consider flute lessons before the last gin and tonic kicked in, at least.

1. Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharaoh’s Curse (GNP)
Singer, bandleader, bassist, percussionist and vibraphonist Tony Martinez was an incorrigible showman. He wound up - where else - in television in the late ‘50s, and, for better or worse, those years as Pepino on The Real McCoys will probably be the ones that he’s remembered for.

Martinez’s spotlight flair bore its greatest fruit in music, however. There is drama in his handful of brilliant mambo-jazz 45s from the early- to mid-‘50s - this selection, for instance, as well as previously posted “Ican.” The virtuosic performance with his combo (with Eddie Cano on piano) in 1956’s Rock Around the Clock is pure showmanship.

Tony Martinez was born in 1920 in Puerto Rico. A gifted musician, he studied in San Juan, moving to New York City in the ‘40s to attend Juilliard. He’d form a few groups of his own there, and play bass for pianist Noro Morales, a pioneer of jazzy rumbas. Destined for balmier shores, though, Martinez relocated to Hollywood in the late ‘40s. His combos would be among the first to play the mambo and heavier Afro-Latin material. He was a local phenomenon; by the ‘50s he was a featured act both at upscale Sunset Strip clubs and at huge ballroom events like the Palladium’s Latin Holiday dance nights.

The Pharaoh's Curse (1957). Thanks to the fabulous Bleeding Skull for the screen shots.

Though unusual, especially the organ, this selection - written for the 1957 mummy must-see Pharaoh’s Curse - was not that uncharacteristic of Martinez, who of anyone knew his way around a spooky melody (see “Ican,” again). The movie itself was spearheaded by Bel-Air, an early independent production house known for low-budget ‘50s genre movies, which meant that most of its production values wound up in this selection. Exotica hero Les Baxter wrote this selection, by the way, and provided the rest of the soundtrack. (Note: if anyone’s seen Pharaoh’s Curse, I would love a description.)

This would not be the last of Martinez’s involvement with film industry. He’d been landing small parts in the movies since the late 1940s, and, when offered the role of Pepino Garcia on The Real McCoys in 1957, he accepted. It was a breakthrough role for a Latino on network television, though a highly problematic one - a Puerto Rican playing a Mexican farm hand, and a role scripted with every cliché in the book.

For a time, Martinez’s work was divided between television and music. There would be a good 1960 live album with Eddie Cano and bongo player Jack Constanzo. There would also be The Many Sides of Pepino LP - a sort of novelty-personality album that exploited his stereotyped image - best forgotten except for the storming instrumental “Mandarin Mambo.”

Tony Martinez’s music days wound down, and so did The Real McCoys, finally ending in 1963. Stage and screen occupied the remaining decades of Martinez’s life. He played Sancho Panza in 2,245 performances of Man of La Mancha, according to his obituary, and devoted much of his subsequent energies to creative and executive roles in the Mexican and Puerto Rican film industries.

Tony Martinez passed on in 2002.

2. Pepe Fernandez and His Afro-Cubans, G.I. Rhapsody (Key)
One distinguishing feature of “G.I. Rhapsody” is that it absolutely represents California Latin jazz: flutes, vibraphones, a combination of jazz musicians and Latin percussionists, an exotic port-of-call sensibility.

The other distinguishing feature is a total lack of forthcoming information - great, if you like unresolvable mystery. I identified Pepe Fernandez as a New York bandleader in an early post. This record changes that, of course, but adds little else, despite the musician’s roster on the label. Flautist Bob Messenger was a studio musician who later played winds on Carpenters albums. Wally Snow is a percussionist and vibraphonist who still turns up on Los Angeles sessions. Pianist Amos Trice played on some West and East Coast jazz recordings, mostly in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. These are the best known players here, which says something, and, either way, nowhere else are they credited for their work in the Afro-Cubans.

Key Records was a tiny Hollywood record label, with probably no more than a dozen or two 45 releases from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, mostly country and rock 'n' roll. There were also several long players on Key, notable only in that they were almost entirely anti-Communist screeds, albums with titles like Our Nation’s Pact With the Devil and The Two Fists of Communism. Not to mention 1960’s Rendezvous With Destiny, an album of speeches by then-political-upstart Ronald Reagan. The album’s back cover praises Reagan for his logic, which reminds us just how nutty the Cold War mentality got, though there’d be far worse to come.

“G.I. Rhapsody” was recorded in the early part of 1958. One wonders if its goofy patriotic introduction was a stipulation of the same brainiac who commissioned all of those albums.

3. Manny Duran and Orchestra, Tabu (Fantasy)
Mexican-American jazz pianist Manny Duran grew up in San Francisco playing music with his two brothers - also excellent jazz musicians - guitarist Eddie and bassist Carlos. The three, inspired by the urbane jazz of the wildly popular Nat King Cole Trio, first performed professionally as the Duran Brothers in the late ‘40s, and would continue to play on each others’ records over the coming decades.

Fixtures in San Francisco, the Durans would also play, individually and collectively, with the major names of post-War Bay Area jazz. Foremost among these was vibraphonist Cal Tjader, whose string of ‘50s and ‘60s Latin jazz recordings convened many of the West Coast’s finest Latin jazz and bop musicians, and set the mold for the sound of California Latin jazz. All three Duran brothers would enjoy residencies early on in Tjader’s working combos, with Eddie playing on a Tjader bop session in late ’54, and Manny and Carlos appearing on Tjader Plays Mambo - one of two watershed Latin jazz releases by Tjader, also that same year.

That incarnation of Tjader’s Latin combo dissolved after only a year or two together. But Manny and Carlos, along with Benny Velarde - also from Tjader’s group - would continue as a working unit through 1960, including a long residency at the Copacabana Club. Only two records - this 1960 reading of the exotica warhorse “Taboo” (on the premier Bay Area jazz label Fantasy) and the equally stunning “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Mambo” - came of it. Both were incredibly hip records with everything going for them except sales, which is not the last time you’ll see that around here.

A gifted professional, Manny Duran was like all but only the most fortunate of musicians. He continued to divide his time between Latin jazz and bop, enjoying an active recording and gigging career without becoming any sort of recognizable star, insofar as such is possible in the world of jazz and Latin jazz.

Manny Duran passed away in December 2005.

Incidentally, according to Benny Velarde, Duran assembled the Mambo Devils, one of San Francisco’s first Latin music groups, in the early 1950s.

Naked City Latino

Few of Tinseltown’s directors, writers, cinematographers or creative minds - and certainly none of its soundtrack and television composers - turned a blind eye to opportunism in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Each location or genre came with its familiar set of musical formulas, moods, metaphors and cues. North African epics with their sweeping “Bolero”-style scores, caper movies with their saucy continental themes. And detective movies and crime dramas with their jazz.

The point, and the money, was in indulging audiences’ fantasies, not social realism. In the 1950s, the studios’ hipper soundtrack composers knew a good moment when they saw one. They seized upon the jazz phenomenon, bebop especially. Rippling piano chords registered looming danger. Heart-stopping moments of suspense were followed with lonesome saxophone reveries. Villains' exploits went hand-in-hand with screaming brass as inevitably as dangerous men would just as soon shoot you. Bop was sophisticated and gritty. Bop could be a bit menacing to those only comfortable with Swing-era big bands.

Consider Latin jazz part of the same commercial equation. Sometimes there were mambos done fairly accurately. Henry Mancini’s Touch of Evil was a masterpiece of the crime genre; the Machito Orchestra could have practically played its main theme. More often there were standard crime charts embossed with a spray of rhumba rhythms and Latin percussion. Leith Stevens’ Private Hell 36 had its “Havana Interlude,” Billy May’s Johnny Cool had its “Juan Coolisto,” Warren Barker’s 77 Sunset Strip had its “77 Sunset Strip Cha Cha,” Stanley Wilson’s Music From M Squad had its “Cha-Cha Club” and so forth.

Like bop, Latin jazz was urbane, if not a bit exotic, and Hollywood arrangers and composers plundered the genre and its popular appeal indiscriminately. Tito Puente’s thundering percussion, the cool vibes of Cal Tjader, the after-hours themes of George Shearing: all were colors to paint an impression of the urban jungle. Any time the hero wandered into El Barrio or across the border? Better cue those bongos. It was utter fantasia, of course, the Latin Quarter one more neighborhood in an artfully typecast Gotham.

1. Neil Lewis with his Quintet, Harlem Nocturn (Gee)
The immortal ”Harlem Nocturne” was conceived by Earle Hagen, who, before his prolific Hollywood career, worked as an arranger and trombonist in the big bands of the ‘30s. Hagen was behind loads of memorable soundtracks and television themes - The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, Gomer Pyle, The Mod Squad, among others - but his ”Harlem Nocturne,” recorded in 1939 during a stint with the Ray Noble Orchestra, is the source of his enduring fame.

“Harlem Nocturne,” big band success and later R&B instrumental staple, was performed most famously in 1959 by New Jersey’s Viscounts (excerpt here), though hundreds of versions would be committed to record whenever high drama was needed. “Harlem Nocturne” is a crime soundtrack gold standard.

Little seems to be known about Neil Lewis, however, or his fine Latin version of the theme. If names are any indication, Lewis, along with Alfred “Alfredito” Levy and the Harlow brothers, was one of a few non-Latino New York City bandleaders to record in more authentic modes. Lewis recorded a total of four 45s, all released in the mid-‘50s for local labels, all excellent jazzy small-group mambos and cha chas. This would be his second of two 45s on the Gee label, both recorded in 1954.

Lewis’s version is where mood music meets the dissipated side of midnight, its most prominent feature the way it alternates the understated theme with a mambo-driven chorus. Kind of like you alternating whiskey with beer last night. Too bad you drank away all of next month’s rent.

2. Curtis Amy, Bongo Blue (Palomar)
“Bongo Blue” is a sexy blues done by West Coast jazzmen. It’s got style, smoke and atmosphere. It’s got desperate characters nourished on liquor and cinematic cliché. “Bongo Blue” conjures the nightclub tableau that every private eye movie aspires to.

Curtis Amy is one of a select coterie of Texas-born musicians - saxophonists, especially - to distinguish themselves in California’s post-War jazz scene. Born in Houston in 1929, Amy was a clarinetist first and later a saxophonist; after earning a music degree, his early career days would be divided amongst the Army, occasional club gigs and a Tennessee teaching job. Relocating to Los Angeles in 1955, Amy would, after the perfunctory years of R&B and jazz supporting roles, record a half-dozen excellent LPs as a bandleader for the Pacific Jazz record label in the early ‘60s.

Amy and other transplanted Texans - among them James Clay, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and the Jazz Crusaders - defied the cliché of post-War California jazz as a refuge of homogeneous cool jazz. He also happened to be very, very good, a musician with an attractively hard tone and a deft way of infusing the blues into sophisticated post-bebop improvisations. In addition to accompanying his wife - singer Merry Clayton - Amy would remain in Los Angeles, teaching music and appearing on pop and rock sessions. His career as a recording bandleader would essentially be finished by the mid-‘60s, however, his six Pacific Jazz LPs forming the bulk of his recorded legacy. And to that end one cliché was upheld: Curtis Amy epitomizes the forgotten jazzman.

“Bongo Blue” is an obscure 45 recorded with some of the then-vanguard of Los Angeles jazz and Latin jazz: Roy Ayers (vibes), Horace Tapscott (piano), John Gray (guitar), Arthur Wright (Fender bass), Henry Franklin (acoustic bass), Moises Obligacion (conga) and Tony Bazley (drums). Curtis Amy also recorded an uninspired album of current pop hits (The Sounds of Broadway, The Sounds of Hollywood) on the obscure Palomar label, but that effort did not include this mid-‘60s gem, which seems only to have seen release on 45 rpm format.

Curtis Amy passed on, sadly, in 2002.

3. The Embers, Peter Gunn Cha Cha (Wynne)
The component parts of crime music - its bombast, jazzy allure and torrid moods - had largely coalesced when Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” (excerpt here), one of the genre’s signature pieces, blared forth from a nation of tiny television speakers in 1958.

With its instantly identifiable metallic guitar riff and macho swagger, the “Peter Gunn Theme” told us, basically, that justice was something on the move. The Embers’ “Peter Gunn Cha Cha,” from 1959, might have lacked the original’s thrilling audacity, but it told us that justice was not always tireless. Justice liked to take it easy sometimes, too. You know, drop in La Cubana for a plate of ham and cheese croquetas. Emphasis on cheese.

The Embers were a jazzy R&B instrumental group from, I believe, Philadelphia, and released at least one other fine 45 - the exotic “Alexandria” - on Newtime Records. This selection features the redoubtable Candido Camero, a Cuban-born musician whose Latin percussion graced many bop sessions in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In 1965, Henry Mancini released a Latin-inspired album, The Latin Sound of Henry Mancini, an LP that included his own exoticized take on the theme, "Señor Peter Gunn.”

Message from the ghetto

What ties this week’s selections together is not merely their spoken word component (though it’s significant, certainly). Nor is it just their cause of change and greater societal welfare. Awareness-raising ballads, agitprop invective, activist commentary, summons-to-action and subversive parody are everywhere in recorded music - African-American or otherwise.

Their defining aspect, rather, is their specificity. “Invitation to Black Power,” “It’s Free” and “I Care About Detroit” aren’t broad laments of urban blight or gospel-liberated anthems. Theirs are messages associated with specific causes, specific religious organizations, specific cities, specific venereal diseases, even, and they’re calibrated to their communities accordingly.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s would be the apogee of this sort of thing, specialized message records reflecting the general tumult of the era - the counterculture, the assassinations, the radical strategizing and the sexual and cultural politics. Music suffused the era’s upheavals, and the years’ idealism and anger inspired more than a few to disseminate the word in turn on the very model of audio expediency, the 45 rpm record. It’s music meets message meets shiny black wax this week on Office Naps.

1. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Despite its reference to the "long, hot summer” - Detroit’s deadly spell of rioting and discord in 1967 - I believe that “Invitation to Black Power” was actually produced in Chicago. The selection was likely recorded in 1968 or 1969 - after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, certainly. But no substantive light can be shed on the Shahid Quintet or Richard or Earl Shabazz, who, either way, were probably not related. (Shabazz is a frequent surname assumed by Nation of Islam adherents.)

Its mysteries aside, “Invitation to Black Power” is a fascinating, a one-of-a-kind snapshot of a particular dimension of the black inner-city experience of the late ‘60s. It’s a bit amateur, sure, and its format is more a throwback to earlier beat-poetry-with-cool-jazz collaborations than the screeching saxophones and intellectual aspirations of contemporaries like Archie Shepp or Amiri Baraka. But it succeeds in one account: running down, humorously and unpretentiously, the Nation of Islam promise of rebirth, equality and separation of the races.

2. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Which is not to say that “Invitation to Black Power” was ever a proselytizing tool espoused, officially or otherwise, by the Nation of Islam in the local communities. It has more the flavor of a vanity project, the handiwork of a ragged jazz combo and two men with poetic and theatrical proclivities and the zealous energies of the converted.

Earl Shabazz and Richard Shabazz might have envisioned their record finding its way to their local Black Nationalist bookstore, they might have seen it being sold at local poetry readings. Some forty-odd years later, though, they likely wouldn’t have foreseen that their recording had landed mostly in hands of white record collectors, the inevitable home to such cultural ephemera.

3. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, I Care About Detroit (Motown and Stein & Van Stock, Inc.)
A name that looms large in America’s pop music annals, William “Smokey” Robinson was born in 1940 in Detroit and grew up singing and writing songs for the local vocal group the Five Chimes. The Five Chimes became the Matadors who, in turn, metamorphosed into the Miracles, the group with whom Robinson, the very icon of the romantic, urbane tenor, would go on to become one of the definitive voices of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Besides his considerable vocal gifts, there was Robinson’s acumen behind-the-scenes at Motown Records and his longstanding partnership with the man at the head of the Hitsville U.S.A. empire, Berry Gordy, Jr. It was Berry Gordy, then an aspiring producer, who recorded the Miracles for their first single “Got a Job,” a minor hit for the New York City-based End Records in 1958. It was Gordy who signed the Miracles as one the first groups to his fledgling Tamla Records (later absorbed under the Motown Record Corporation aegis) and it was Gordy, too, who made Smokey Robinson the company’s vice-president in 1961.

If early Miracles records failed to catch fire, 1960’s million-seller “Shop Around” changed all that. It would be the first in a decade-long series of hits like “Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion” and “The Tears of a Clown.” Robinson’s successes as in-house songwriter and, later, producer mirrored both the ascendancy of the Miracles as one of the decade’s great soul groups and the broader fortunes of Motown.

The little-known “I Care About Detroit” was Motown in full 1968 flower, the synthesis of social consciousness and soulful groove, the embodiment of young, interracial, turned-on America. Penned by Michigan labor attorney Jack Combs and Detroit R&B vocalist Jimmy “Soul” Clark, this was the second of two Motown 45s produced for “Detroit Is Happening,” a summer-long education and recreation program implemented after the Detroit riots of 1967.

The record industry was not quite the cynical monolith in 1968 that it is today. Still, Motown Records was a mainstream tastemaker and hardly one to hurl itself at a cause without a certain reflexive measure of caution. If Motown is to be commended for their gesture to public service, then Detroit’s disillusionment was that much more acute when Motown Records abandoned the imperiled city for its sleek new Los Angeles headquarters in 1972. Coming together for unity and progress seemed like a good idea until everybody had tried out their new, leather-upholstered swivel chairs.

Officially parting with the Miracles in 1972 to pursue a solo career, Robinson’s success as an adult-contemporary R&B singer - and unwitting pioneer of the dreaded quiet storm format - tapered off sometime after his biggest solo hit, 1981’s “Being With You.” A vice-president at Motown until the company’s sale to MCA in 1988, Robinson has remained semi-retired since, with a few albums of smooth ballads and gospel in the last decade-and-a-half.

4. Bishops of the Holy Rollers Fallout Shelter with Curtis Colbert, It’s Free (CAVDA)
This spoken-word gem was written and performed in part by Gylan Kain, a poet and a founding member of the Last Poets, easily the best-known spoken-word group in the pre-rap era. To the relentless beat of conga drums, the Last Poets spieled unsparingly about revolution, racist society, poverty and the plight of African-Americans. Kain, though he never actually recorded with the Last Poets, took their aesthetic one step further on his sole LP, 1971’s Blue Guerrilla, a potent stew of psychedelic, funky jazz and Kain’s incendiary poetry and surreal incantations.

Produced by Gylan and Denise Kain (his wife, presumably) for the Chicago-based Citizens Alliance for VD Awareness, “It’s Free” has moments that bear resemblance to Blue Guerilla’s colorful, stream-of-consciousness imagery. If the references to “johnsons” and pre-AIDS unprotected sex seem a bit quaint in 21st Century America, then the level-headed humanism and candor of “It’s Free” seem positively radical in cultural terrain presently mediated by sinister, regressive forces like the Christian Coalition. Still, “It’s Free”’s quandary is not unlike that of any organization attempting to connect with a younger demographic. It’s hip, it’s direct, “It’s Free” rises to the challenge of outreach with aplomb and intelligence. The problem was neither its message nor how it was conveyed, though. The problem, rather, was the stomach-turning imagery of "It's Free." No one ever, ever played this record, which explains why this 45 is always in perfect condition when you find it.

In recent years, Gylan Kain has collaborated with the Dutch jazz and turntablist group Electric Barbarian.

West Coast boogaloo, part two

(Ed. Note: More this week on West Coast versions of the quintessential ‘60s Spanish Harlem musical phenomenon, the boogaloo, that fusion of black R&B aesthetic with Latin rhythms and orchestration. Broadly speaking, the boogaloo's West Coast cousins tended to be a lot jazzier and more relaxed, a Pacific balm to El Barrio's Nuyorian grit.

The first post on California boogaloo can be found here. Other Office Naps posts about West Coast Latin music can be found here and here, with, finally, an introductory post about the boogaloo here.)

1. Ricardo Luna and The Latin Jazz Quintet, Strolling the Cha Cha (Blue-Rubi)
The chugging Afro-Latin rhythms, the R&B sensibilities, the dancefloor mojo: don’t let the title’s “cha cha” reference throw you, this is pure boogaloo. This is pure boogaloo with, of course, that infusion of jazziness so prevalent among the West Coast Latin groups. More time is given over to instrumental solos, more time to general breeziness. Even that rarest of exotic Pacific birds, the jazz flute, gets some precious seconds here.

This, I believe, is Ricardo Luna of los Hermanos Luna, an obscure and jazzy Los Angeles-based Latin combo that pianist Ricardo led with his brother. Along with a few 45s on Revolvo Records, the brothers Luna issued one LP (Bailando a lo Latino) on Discos Corona Records in the ‘60s.

The vocal chorus of “Strolling the Cha Cha” refers obliquely to the Diamonds’ “The Stroll.” No one knew that a cha cha could be strolled until this 45. As “Strolling the Cha Cha” probably sold in exclusive - that is to say, negligible - quantity, no one would really think much of that possibility after this 45, either.

“Strolling the Cha Cha” was likely recorded around 1967.

2. Harold Johnson Sextet, Sorry ‘Bout That - Part I (HME)
Probably the best known of this week’s artists - which really isn’t saying that much - the Harold Johnson Sextet was a young Los Angeles combo that existed for three albums of hip, late ‘60s instrumental soul jazz and Latin modes. Harold Johnson, a pianist who grew up playing in his father’s church, first formed his sextet in the mid-‘60s; the Sextet's first record, this selection, would be released while Johnson was still a senior at Los Angeles’s Washington High School in 1967. Succeeding full-length releases would feature an ever-shifting roster, always revolving, however, around Harold Johnson.

By the early ‘70s the popular vogue for modish combo jazz had basically dissolved, and so had the Harold Johnson Sextet. A series of unsubstantiated connections suggests that this is the same Harold Johnson who later played keyboards on, among other mainstream R&B sessions, numerous Motown recordings during the label’s ‘70s Los Angeles years. These connections suggest, too, that this is the same Harold Johnson who has recently played organ behind expatriate black gospel diva Liz McComb.

Lo, from a primordial soup of emails, inference and unsubstantiated speculation an Office Naps post is born.

3. Harold Johnson Sextet, Sorry ‘Bout That - Part II (HME)
Addressing the boogaloo fad, the Harold Johnson Sextet’s “Sorry ‘Bout That” is a revealing demonstration, West Coast-style, of the whole phenomenon. “Sorry ‘Bout That” is an understated instrumental, more Latin jazz than torrid El Barrio fare, more polyglot stew of jazz musicians and Latin percussionists than Puerto Rican anthem. It doesn’t so much invite one to dance as it invites one to have a seat, relax.

Run by local record impresario Harry Mitchell, HME Records was a tiny label that was home to a few interesting Latin-ish releases, including Reggie Andrews and the Fellowship’s Mystic Beauty and Harold Johnson’s first full-length, House on Elm Street.

The musicians of “Sorry ‘Bout That” (a song which only appeared on 45) probably reflect, in some form, the personnel of House on Elm Street: David Crawford (flute), Billy Jackson (conga), Jimmy Nash (bass), Mike Shaw (tenor sax), Alfred Patterson (alto sax), Eddie Synigal (alto sax), Ronald Rutledge (drums) and Harold Johnson (piano).

4. Tony Done’s Hollywood Quintet, Micaela (Vance)
Recorded around 1967, Tony Done’s “Micaela” is a spare reading of a minor Latin hit for New York City bandleader Pete Rodriguez.

The mysterious Tony Done's Hollywood Quintet’s repertoire, if this EP is any indication, was based in guaguanco, bolero, mambo, son montuno and boogaloo - styles familiar to any late ‘60s working New York Latin combo, styles which would have made his combo both curious anomaly and perfect fit in Hollywood's after-hours club playgrounds.

“Micaela” is not only the most obscure of three obscure selections this week, it’s also the most representative of Spanish Harlem-born boogaloo. What else can one say, though? The legacy of Tony Done’s Hollywood Quintet leaves us with precious little save a four-song EP and that familiar, gnawing sense of Office Naps mystery.

Ed Bland

Ed Bland is an American composer, musical arranger and producer with a considerable catalog of contemporary classical compositions - “Art Music,” as Bland would note - to his name. Bland is, at least among a coterie of vintage soul fans, also identified with his recordings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, singular R&B and jazz arrangements so distinct that they unwittingly dominate the music at times. You’ll know what I’m talking about by the end of this post.

Ed Bland was born in 1926 and grew up in Chicago’s South Side, studying as a young saxophonist and clarinetist at the University of Chicago and the American Conservatory of Music after World War Two. Composition studies behind him, infatuated by philosophy and West African drumming, he immersed himself in avant-garde musical theory as well as the intellectual life of post-War Chicago trying, all the while, to get his songs and compositions published. In 1959, he co-produced the experimental film Cry of Jazz, an exposition of race and jazz (with rare early footage of Sun Ra), before moving with his family to New York City in the early ‘60s.

In New York City, Bland found work as a freelance producer, composer and arranger on the strength of his jazz and conservatory pedigree. Ed Bland’s musical objective was to “create a raw, colorful, funky, soulful sound combined with complex linear patterns,” according to his own abstract musical philosophy. Therewith he would spend much of the next two decades in the record industry, eventually becoming a producer and A&R head at Vanguard Records from 1974 to 1978.

Settling in Los Angeles in 1984, where he continues to live and work, Bland wrote music for motion pictures, TV and occasional record productions, composing the scores for A Raisin In the Sun and The House of Dies Drear and orchestrating A Soldier’s Story. Bland still actively composes, his recent score for 34th St. NYC and albums of compositions like Urban Classical: The Music of Ed Bland (Cambria) and Dancing Through the Walls (Delos), though with no obvious connection to his days as an R&B innovator, evincing an idiosyncratic vision at work.

Looking over his discography, one gets the feeling that Ed Bland is one of these gifted American musical minds who successfully navigated the straits of the record industry but who was rarely granted the latitude to fulfill their vision - especially on the industry’s commercial terms. There’s something of a maverick quality to Bland, a musical individualist if not eccentric, which perhaps explains why his handiwork never found a more consistent niche in an industry that rarely rewards such qualities. Helloooo, Office Naps.

1. The Pazant Brothers, Skunk Juice (RCA Victor)
Brothers Eddie (saxophone) and Alvin Pazant (trumpet) were raised in a musical family in Beaufort, South Carolina, though it was in New York City with Lionel Hampton where Eddie’s professional career first took root in the late ‘50s and also where, a few years later, both Eddie and Alvin met Ed Bland, then a freelance arranger with Hampton. Forming their own group in 1964, their sporadic records as the Pazant Brothers would alternate throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s with supporting gigs in Hampton’s band and Pucho & the Latin Soul Brothers (among other notables).

Theirs, mostly, is a long discography of jazz, R&B, soul and rock session work, but with the Pazant Brothers’ handful of late ‘60s 45s - as well as their 1975 LP Loose and Juicy - something different is clearly happening. One senses that in the Pazant Brothers Bland had found his ideal protégés, musicians who were both sympathetic to his unorthodox vision and had the chops to realize it. Tellingly, the ‘70s recordings the Pazant Brothers issued without Bland’s involvement - and there are a handful of such 45s - suffer as merely decent instrumental funk.

There are identifiable solos, riffs and verses in Bland’s charts, it’s just they’re never conventional. By his standards, 1969’s “Skunk Juice,” with its wildly kinetic expressions of melody, is still quite exceptional, though. Whole honking flocks of geese, whole brass bands, are swallowed and spat back out, all in march tempo. Hope is renewed for tuba players everywhere.

The Pazant Brothers play today as leaders of the Cotton Club All-Stars.

2. James Moody, If You Grin (You’re In) (Sceptor)
An important and accomplished post-War bop composer, saxophonist and flautist, James Moody was born in 1925 in Georgia, grew up in New Jersey, and, like many other second-generation beboppers, found himself in army bands overseas during World War Two. His return to the states included - again, like many of his generation - a formative apprenticeship in the pioneering bop orchestra of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Though much of his post-War time was spent abroad in Europe’s more jazz-sympathetic cities, Moody established a higher profile with some leader dates in the late ‘40s, recording “Moody’s Mood for Love,” (based on Jimmy McHugh’s “I’m In the Mood for Love”) in Sweden, a significant hit in 1949 and an even bigger hit in 1952 with singer King Pleasure’s vocalese reading.

Moody also spent an increasing part of his days in his cups, a struggle later recounted on 1958’s Last Train From Overbrook. The five decades since have seen Moody leading small groups of his own, and, with the exception of a few funkier sessions and some years spent as a backing musician in Las Vegas in the ‘70s, he’s rarely veered from sterling, straightahead bop. Though well regarded amongst other musicians and devotees, Moody’s consistent, prolific output has perhaps been overlooked by casual jazz fans only interested the latest Blue Note reissues.

“If You Grin (You’re In)” was taken from Moody’s 1964 LP Running the Gamut and was recorded with a group including Patti Bown (piano), Albert Heath (drums), Reggie Workman (bass) and Thad Jones (trumpet). Though it is an early recorded date for him, the arrangements and wild horn play are unmistakably Ed Bland. There’s no logic anywhere that says a single, unwavering organ chord should sound so funky, but it does, and gloriously so, and I suppose that is why, finally, Ed Bland was the arranger here and not you or I.

Ed Bland also produced Moody’s ’76 album Timeless Aura. James Moody himself is still very much active.

3. Lionel Hampton and his Inner Circle of Jazz, Greasy Greens (Glad-Hamp)
Jazz’s best-known vibraphonist. Born in Kentucky in 1909 and attracted to music - drums, originally - from an early age, Hampton played a few early ‘30s Chicago vibraphone dates, some of jazz’s earliest, before being discovered in Los Angeles by clarinetist Benny Goodman. Famous swing dates with both Goodman and with his own all-star groups ensued, and though he played piano and drums capably, it was Hampton’s spellbinding, consummately swinging work on vibraphone which made him a star during the swing era. After World War Two, Hampton continued leading his own big bands and absorbing popular tastes. Sometimes his groups reflected bebop, just as often they sounded like R&B, but Hampton remained popular with audiences as one of jazz’s elder statesmen until his death in 2002.

Hampton’s own Glad-Hamp Records was a label that was home to many of his ‘60s albums. It was label that, in between endless iterations of warhorses like “Flying Home,” one can find some interesting selections. Take this, for instance, a number commissioned for Ed Bland by Hampton in 1967. “Greasy Greens,” thumpingly funky, sounds unlike anything Hampton, or anybody else, had ever done - not counting other Ed Bland productions, of course. Hampton would later make other funk-tinged records in the early ‘70s for Brunswick Records, but nothing so bracing.

Credit Hampton for making this record, and for making “Greasy Greens” something of a concert staple. The musicians on this first version include Wallace Davenport (trumpet), Ed Pazant (alto sax), Dave Young (tenor sax), John Spruill (piano), Billy Mackel (guitar), Skinny Burgan (bass), Ronnie Kole (drums) and Hampton on vibraphone.

4. Phil Upchurch, Muscle Soul (Milestone)
Chicago’s Phil Upchurch has long enjoyed a fairly high profile, which has as much to do with his infectious, funky R&B instrumental hit, 1961’s “You Can’t Sit Down,” as it does with his professional musical career.

Upchurch never quite recaptured the spotlight of “You Can’t Sit Down.” Nor did he have to: beginning with late ‘50s blues and R&B sessions for Vee-Jay Records and, later, soul and jazz for Chess Records in the ‘60s, Upchurch has been a wildly successful studio guitarist (and bassist), his name showing up everywhere over the decades - on Donny Hathaway albums, on Staple Singers albums, on Cat Stevens albums, on Chaka Khan albums for that matter. Upchurch also has his own extensive recorded history as a leader, and while his late ‘60s soul jazz releases like The Way I Feel have some psychedelic rock moments, mostly his solo releases mirrored the straight ahead pop, blues, soul, jazz and R&B of his studio work.

“Muscle Soul” is more straightforward than this week’s other arrangements. If, that is, straightforward can be said to consist of five things going on where in Bland’s case there’d normally be ten: it’s still a jolt of crashing freneticism. This selection originally appeared on what is Upchurch’s first and probably strongest jazz-oriented LP, 1967’s Feeling Blue, with Ed Bland providing arrangements. The album also includes Al Williams (piano), Chuck Rainey (bass), Bernard Purdie (drums), Warren Smith (congas), Wallace Davenport (trumpet) and John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Eddie Pazant (saxophones).

Now based in Los Angeles, Phil Upchurch is as active as ever.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop mix

This is the rose-colored soundtrack I strive to cocoon my life in, a CD-length metaphor for the first time you watched Solaris. Part of the ongoing Office Naps psychedelic pop mix series.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop Mix

The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (7", Prince)
The Deep Six, Rising Sun (7", Liberty)
The Buff Organization, Upside Down World (7", Original Sound)
Chip Taylor, You Should Be From Monterey (7", Rainy Day)
The Gordian Knot, Year of the Sun (7", Verve)
Celebrated Renaissance Band, Heavy Is the Sundown (7", Lion)
Hard Times, Blew Mind (Blew Mind, World Pacific)
Phil Cordell, Red Lady (7", Janus)
The Glass Family, Agorn (Elements of Complex Variables) (7", Warner Brothers)
Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (7", Capitol)
Mercy, Our Winter Love (The Mercy and Love (Can Make You Happy), Sundi)
The Group Therapy, Thoughts (7", Mercury)
English Setters, Wake Up (7", Jubilee)
Dave Miller Set, Mr. Guy Fawkes (7", Spin)
Art Guy, Where You Gonna Go (7", Valiant)
Smokey and His Sister, Creators of Rain (7", Columbia)
The Raik's Progress, Why Did You Rob Us, Tank? (7", Liberty)
The Federal Duck, Peace In My Mind (The Federal Duck, Musicor)
Sonny Bono, Motel II (Chastity, soundtrack, Atco)
Peter Pan & the Good Fairies, Kaleidoscope (7", Challenge)
The Collection, Both Sides Now (7", The Hot Biscuit Company)
Pipes of Pan, Monday Morning Rain (7", Page One)
Emil Richards and the Factory, No Place I'd Rather Be (7", Uni)
The Sandals, Coming Down Slow (The Last of the Ski Bums, soundtrack, World Pacific)
Thomas Edisun's Electric Light Bulb Band, Common Attitude (7", Tamm)
The Yardbirds, Glimpses (Little Games, Epic)
Eden's Children, Echoes (Sure Looks Real, ABC)
The Soundz, Freak Out, pt. 1 (7", Crown-Psychedel*lite)

Bossa America, part two

(Ed. Note: This is essentially a continuation of an earlier Office Naps installment on American versions of the Bossa Nova. That first post can be found here.)

It’d started in the mid-‘50s with sophisticated young Rio musicians hooked on American jazz and pop, a new music that translated Brazil’s samba rhythms to guitars and trap drum sets with native African and Portuguese elements swirled all into the mix. In due time, American jazz musicians would be drawn to it, musical collaborations and overseas tours would ensue, and, next thing you know, strains of “Girl From Ipanema” wafted from your downstairs neighbor’s cocktail parties.

Like the mambo craze a decade earlier, the Bossa Nova was an “exotic” musical import to this country that was endlessly copied and endlessly bastardized. Blame can be fixed on America’s mostly appalling, occasionally endearing, habit of unapologetic indifference to the finer points and sensitivities of other cultures.

But, by some point in the ‘60s, everybody, and I do mean everybody, was having a go at the Bossa Nova. It could be a token version of “Corcovado” enlivening a lounge singer’s musty live repertoire. It could be whole albums of interpretations and original material by a Frank Sinatra or a Lionel Hampton. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But for every sour hornful of “Girl From Ipanema” that the aging Louis Armstrong blew forth, there was the thumping “Bossa Nova Blues” by Doris Troy or Nancy Ames’s sparkling, vibraphone-laden version of “Mas Que Nada.” Like this week’s selections, the Bossa Nova proved more a matter of attitude than authenticity.

1. Eddie Russ Trio, Natasha (Cascades Sound)
A jazz pianist and keyboard player who preferred to work from the ‘60s onward in his adopted state of Michigan - and one of innumerable talents struggling to stay relevant in the years of mainstream jazz’s declining popularity - it was perhaps always Russ’s lot to remain underappreciated.

Still, Russ would manage some notable, if obscure, recording dates, especially in the ‘70s. From straight ahead collaborations with aging bebopper Sonny Stitt to funkier releases with Detroit jazz combo the Mixed Bag, Eddie Russ proved himself adroit, certainly, a musician capable of keeping up with the times, even if later ‘70s releases like See the Light meant synthesizers, 4/4 beats and various disco accoutrement.

Likely recorded around 1974 or ‘75, “Natasha” was clearly an excerpt from a much longer jam session, the kind that ends when three not-too-stoned jazz musicians are reminded that the tape ran out forty minutes earlier. “Natasha” also observes one of those precepts of jazz, immutable no matter the decade: compositions named for females sound more convincing with a Bossa Nova rhythm.

It is Russ himself on the wonderfully atmospheric Fender Rhodes electric piano here. The other personnel on “Natasha” remain a mystery, but conceivably included Dan Spencer (drums) and Rob Brooks (bass), then members of Russ’s working group the Mixed Bag. Cascades Sound was a short-lived label that belonged to another familiar name in Michigan jazz circles, tenor saxophonist Benny Poole.

Eddie Russ continued playing and teaching music until his death in 1996.

2. Chris Connor, I Concentrate on You (FM)
Born Mary Loutsenhizer, the fabulous Chris Connor grew up in Missouri and sang in her late teens with various college ensembles in the Columbus and Kansas City area. In 1948, she left for New York, finding vocal work shortly thereafter with the Claude Thornhill orchestra, then - with Gil Evans’s and Gerry Mulligan’s modern boppish arrangements - in its modernist incarnation. After an early ‘50s residency with Stan Kenton’s progressive jazz orchestra in Los Angeles, Connors embarked on a solo career which, in the half-century since, has generated one of jazz’s sterling vocal discographies.

Stylistically, there’s little difference among early masterpieces like 1954’s Chris Connor sings Lullabys of Birdland or 1958’s Chris Craft, mid-‘80s rarities like New Again or even Connors’s recent Everything I Love. This is all part of the hip charm of Chris Connor. If Connor’s recording career never regained its momentum of the ‘50s, when she was one of jazz’s top-selling vocalists, it doesn’t seem to have bothered her. Despite popular music’s seismic shifts in the last five decades, the small jazz combo remains her favored setting while her demeanor remains implacably cool, coaxing every last syllable of meaning from endlessly fertile sources like the Gerswhin and Porter songbooks. Diamonds and sapphires have nothing on Chris Connor. Clear winter moonlight has nothing on her, either; she stays fixed like a cool blue star in the jazz cosmos, a paradox of simultaneous swing and restraint.

This Bossa Nova-tinged version of Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You” was recorded at New York City’s Village Gate jazz club in 1963. It originally appeared on Chris Connor at the Village Gate, an album released on the brief-lived FM Records label run by Connor’s manager Monte Kay. In addition to Connor, the personnel on this selection include Mundell Lowe (guitar), Ronnie Ball (piano), Richard Davis (bass) and Ed Shaughnessy (drums).

Chris Connor still sings and tours today.

3. “Charlie,” “Charlie’s Tune” (A Charlie Record)
This record was made as a promotional tie-in for Revlon’s 1974 introduction of its Charlie fragrance. Charlie was marketed as the perfume of the modern working woman - the perfume of plaid pants suits, company fast tracks and steady samba beats.

1974. The year that Richard Nixon resigned as president. It was also, promised the record’s label, the “Year of Charlie.” Kinda young! Kinda now! Kinda free! Kinda WOW! So sang early television campaigns cheerfully of the scent. What better than the Bossa Nova, the elegant and breezy Bossa Nova, to reinforce all of this? And what better than a little dab of perfume to make the Bossa Nova, easily over a decade old by that point, feel “floral and fresh,” feel, well, pretty again? The Charlie fragrance itself? It was an instant, smashing success. 1974 was a great year all around.

“Charlie’s Tune” was produced by “Charlie’s Way,” released as “A Charlie Record,” and distributed, lest we forget, by “The Charlie People.” Which is another way of saying that a group of studio musicians were wholly responsible for this classy little Bossa Nova-lite. This anonymous crew was also responsible for the record’s A-side (hear excerpt here), a spirited vocal sketch of “Charlie,” that girl whom summertime, turned heads and a newfound sense of confidence seem to follow around, Ipanema-style.

The Charlie fragrance was relaunched fairly recently, if anyone’s curious about what 1974 smelled like.

Cinema funky

Just as its antecedents in the mid-‘60s had their sitar interludes and fuzztone atmospherics, the hipper cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s oozed with wah-wah guitars, jazz basslines and funky backbeats. And why not? Whatever Tinseltown's machinations, film had long been a dramatic and stylish medium, and its soundtrack composers were some of the coolest talents around. Movie and television scores afforded lucrative opportunities for a Lalo Schifrin or Henry Mancini to satisfy some serious interests in jazz and composition, if not to experiment with riffs from psychedelic rock or dark rhythms from funk.

Before funk became an obligatory element of every post-Shaft blaxploitation picture, though, before it became a cliché on primetime television fare like CHiPs, there were this week’s selections. Some of these were written for movies. Some of them weren’t written for the screen but wound up there. Some of these were versions of soundtrack themes that exceeded the original. At one end of town, circa 1970, there were serious young men with serious pedigrees from music conservatories sitting in studios with handfuls of annotated charts. At the other end of town, the poorer part of town, churning funk music spun out in endless iterations. And, in that planetary stretch in between, these selections happened.

1. Roy Budd, Carter (DJM)
Roy Budd was a British musical prodigy who began his professional career as a jazz pianist at the tender age of sixteen. It would be his later soundtrack work for movies like Kidnapped (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978), however, for which Budd would find his lasting fame.

Budd imparted a chilly minimalism to “Carter,” his theme for 1971’s Get Carter, a British thriller starring Michael Caine. One can run down the possibilities all day and still never account for how Budd managed, with only a motley ensemble of bass, Indian tablas, and electric harpsichord and piano, to create a tableau so perfectly redolent of both the stark landscape of northern England and of the gangsters who went shooting about there with characteristic disregard.

Budd passed on in 1993. He was forty-six.

2. Julio Gutierrez, Last Tango in Paris (Vico)
The great Julio Gutierrez emigrated from his native Cuba in the late ‘50s, pursuing his calling in both Miami and New York City with freelance stints as a composer, session pianist and musical director. Despite two very hip ‘60s Latin jazz LPs, Progressive Latin and Havana B.C., Gutierrez would never regain the stature he’d enjoyed in Cuba, where, in addition to leading the legendary Cuban Jam Sessions series, he’d been among his country’s best known modern bandleaders and composers.

1972 would perhaps represent the crowning year for the pornographic movie in its brief-lived moment of mainstream chic, and few soundtrack themes would better encapsulate its adults-only art-house cachet than Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.” 1972 would also mark one of the final years of Gutierrez’s recording career, but if his would hereafter be one of diminishing visibility, it wasn’t for lack of audacity. Other Latin bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Rosario and Tito Puente would tackle Barbieri’s continental boudoir anthem, but no one else would inject it with the same groovily psychedelic flair.

Gutierrez died in New York City in 1990.

3. The Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints On the Moon (Warner Brothers)
British-born Johnny Harris first made a name for himself in the mid-‘60s writing arrangements for pop singers like Petula Clark and Jackie Trent. Later in the decade, Harris would produce and arrange sessions for Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Shirley Bassey and other pop acts including the Flirtations. His career arc would also include turns in the late ‘60s touring with Tom Jones and serving as musical director for British singer Lulu’s brief-lived variety show Happening For Lulu.

We are not discussing a serious jazzbo or renegade experimentalist here. Harris’s, rather, was a professional kind of hip, a kind that distinguished itself as a turtleneck-and-beads-wearing young talent in the somewhat staid end of the British pop studio system.

While an ear attuned to the latest in the pop charts meant getting served with unenviable tasks like resuscitating Paul Anka’s career, it also afforded its share of fringe benefits. Like John Schroeder, Harris would release a handful of LPs and 45s under his own name. Albums like 1970’s Movements were uneven affairs, certainly, with polite, state-of-the-art covers of “Light My Fire” and “Give Peace a Chance” along with some more adventurous moments like the funky “Fragments of Fear,” “Stepping Stones” and this selection.

Inspired by the Apollo moon landings and subsequently used for the British ITV Network coverage of NASA’s lunar missions, “Footprints on the Moon” follows in the great tradition of Les Baxter’s Space Escapade or Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo’s Moon Gas, albums where the moon’s surface was imagined more as luminescent lovers’ playground than science's new frontier. Each reverberating piano note of “Footprints on the Moon” seems to bring the listener one gravity-defying step closer to their astrological love destiny. Careful, Libra, your love investments will soon pay off, but watch for a calculating Capricorn to step across your earth shadow.

Since 1972 Johnny Harris has lived in Los Angeles, working mostly in television composition, most famously for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Wonder Woman.

(Thanks go to this site for much of the information on Johnny Harris.)

Roscoe Weathers, pt. 2

(Ed. note: This is part two of a post about the great ‘60s West Coast jazz and Latin jazz musician Roscoe Weathers. Weathers is a recurring source of fascination for me.

Various bits, sub-factoids and dead end details have trickled in since first posting about Weathers in June of 2006, and I’ve worked them into the original post accordingly. The introduction from that post is quoted below. This week’s musical selections themselves are all new for Office Naps, however.

- Little Danny)

From Office Naps, June 5, 2006:

Part of it is the mystery. As far as I can tell, West Coast jazz musician Roscoe Weathers’s entire output consisted of ten 45 rpm records. Several online references place Weathers in the post-War nightclubs of the Pacific Northwest where, as a saxophonist and bandleader, he’d play with Bobby Bradford, Floyd Standifer, Warren Bracken and other young Portland and Seattle beboppers. At some point in the late 1950s, however, Weathers relocated to California. There he’d contribute to the 1958 album Stringin’ Along, an obscure West Coast jazz session led by Bob Keene. More significantly, Weathers would release a series of 45s on tiny Los Angeles labels, becoming something of a regular in the bohemian clubs and Coffeehouse of the Venice Beach scene of the ‘60s.

Then there's the music. Hip and atmospheric, the records feature Weathers's talents on flute along with his crack jazz combo. They’re great examples of the Latin jazz that flourished on the West Coast among West Coast jazzbos like Cal Tjader, Eddie Cano and Bobby Montez, a form that favored hip exoticism over the hotter, brassier style of New York musicians like Machito, Dizzy Gillespie or Tito Puente.

It’s both the obscurity and the quality of these 45s, three of them featured this week, which have spawned something akin to fascination on my part. It all leads, finally, to the question: just who exactly was Roscoe Weathers?

1. Roscoe Weathers Quintet, Root Flute (Cornuto)
This is Roscoe Weathers in his most straightforward jazz groove. “Root Flute” is still plenty atmospheric, though, with its walking bassline and Weathers’s trademark trilled flute creeping around in the space between jazz noir and wayward Kerouacian fantasy. In any other life this would have been the nightclub scene in Peter Gunn.

“Root Flute” was, I’d guess, recorded around 1962 or ’63.

2. Roscoe Weathers Orchestra, The Bob White Bird (Etulf)
“The Bob White Bird” could almost pass for a record from Spanish Harlem, its energetic Latin piano chording and tempo reminiscent of mid-‘60s maestros like Hector Rivera and Eddie Palmieri. As with all of Weathers’s material, though, there’s always that unusual kink. The piano descarga vamping may be the spirit of Nuyorica, but the whistling and birdcall flute instantly pinpoint Weathers in the Pacific Rim of Martin Denny, Les Baxter and other patron saints of exotica.

Weathers is joined here by the young Alfred “Fred” Ramirez, a pianist and vibraphonist who is still very much a torchbearer for West Coast Latin jazz. (Ramirez’s more recent recordings, if you can find them, are highly recommended)

3. Joe Wilson with Roscoe Weathers Quintet, Lady Is a Tramp (Cornuto)
Born in Oklahoma, the baritone jazz vocalist Joe Lee Wilson was a committed musician from the very start, building a career in Los Angeles, Mexico, New York and, later, Europe and Japan. The ‘70s would be Wilson’s most high-profile decade, recording with avant-garde jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp (on 1971’s “Money Blues,” most famously), releasing a few well-regarded albums like Livin’ High Off Nickels and Dimes and Secrets From the Sun and singing with jazz luminaries like Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis along the way. Wilson was also a notable pillar of New York City’s loft jazz scene of the ‘70s, founding the infamous Ladies’ Fort near the East Village in 1973.

Before the dashikis and Afrocentric ferment of ‘70s New York City, Joe Lee Wilson would simply be known as Joe Wilson, though, an aspiring young jazz vocalist working the jazz clubs of Los Angeles and cutting obscure records. Here he invests this Rodgers and Hart warhorse with the mellow balm intrinsic to so much post-War California bop.

Joe Wilson’s stint with Weathers would be more than a one-off occasion. The two released another record, “Whistle Song” (on Protone Records, a sister label of Cornuto), and would often perform together at the Gas House in Venice Beach in the early ‘60s. (Thanks to Shanna Baldwin-Moore for that information.) In Lionelle Hamanaka’s 2001 interview with Joe Wilson, Wilson provides a few more valuable details about Weathers as well, recalling of Weathers that he was, surprisingly, a jewelry maker and that he’d previously spent time playing in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra (which would have been around 1943, when Henderson was cutting some sessions on the West Coast).

1968: The R&B instrumental

It could be a jazz organist angling for a catchy original number to climb the R&B charts. It could be a young six-piece combo who played together in their high school band and who were now letting loose with a funky James Brown-style instrumental workout. It could be a handful of session musicians stretching a recycled blues riff over the two sides of a 45 rpm record.

The sixties were the R&B instrumental’s halcyon days. As well as encompassing every possible regional variation of the form, the decade’s R&B instrumentals absorbed every new development in popular music from one end (e.g., Dave “Baby” Cortez and 1959’s “Happy Organ”) to the other (e.g., Eddie Bo with 1969’s “Hook and Sling”).

Stylistic developments and differences aside, the R&B instrumental’s niche in the continuum of post-War music owes most everything to its live and spontaneously funky quality. This was much of its broader crossover appeal. The form did not set out to make history or invoke spiritual revelation. The typical R&B instrumental sounded best performed in a club in the wee smoky hours, or rattling through the boozy din from a corner jukebox. Nor did it put on airs. A few beers, copies of “Green Onions” or “The Horse,” your turntable: an R&B instrumental also sounded pretty fabulous in your friend’s living room.

If the R&B instrumental was its own self-sustained phenomenon, then its rapid evolution closely followed soul music’s rise from rhythm & blues in the sixties. As soul grew ever funkier and ever more colorful, absorbing Latin and psychedelic influences with each passing year, its instrumental counterparts would do the same.

This week’s trio of selections falls somewhere in that overlap between the mod-styled thump of shingaling soul and the polyrhythmic surge of James Brown-style funk. Its instruments? Horns, of course, and the organ, which from the powerhouse churn of the Hammond B-3 to reedier Farfisa organ, was vibrating nightclub walls with peals of piercing electricity. Its look? Dark mohair suits, turtles, leather boots, the whole works. The net result? Pure discotheque dynamite.

1. Booker T. Averheart, Heart ‘n Soul (Soultex)
Memphis-style Horn stabs, dramatic changes, minor key vamping: with a few added lyrics “Heart ‘n Soul” could have been any number of ‘60s dance crazes. Were it not, of course, for its deadly, stony-faced sense of self-possession.

The Dallas/Fort Worth area, though never the hub of Texas R&B that Houston was, still had its own vibrant club and studio scene. The independent Soultex Records, operated by local entrepreneur and guitarist Roger Boykin, was one of several musician-owned labels that served the area’s jazz and R&B musicians.

In addition to being a airplane pilot, motel owner, local music promoter, Booker T. Averheart was a Dallas-based bassist, keyboardist and bandleader. A string of four late ‘60s 45s, all excellent, exemplified Texas’s gritty, funky strain of soul and R&B. 1969’s “Heart ‘n Soul,” the follow-up to his “I Wanta Be the President,” would be the last 45 released the Soultex label.

Averheart passed on in 2004.

2. The Touch, Pick & Shovel (Lecasver)
The Touch, likely inspired by the success of funky late 60’s instrumentals like the Meters’ “Cissy Strut,” labored here under the assumption that America would also be mentally ready for the “Pick & Shovel” and its pure Cubist strains of organ. And clearly, America wasn’t, as the dizzying “Pick & Shovel” sank without a whisper. Led by the obscure session keyboardist John Frangipane, these were probably New York City studio musicians, but little is otherwise known about the Touch or how many Newports they smoked before knocking out this gem.

“Pick & Shovel” was released on New Jersey’s Lecasver label, circa 1969.

3. The Bobby Cook Quartette, Ridin High, Part 1 (Compose)
There is some evidence to suggest that the future free jazz guitar pioneer James Ulmer played on this selection, but there's precious little information about either Bobby Cook, a Detroit jazz musician, or his quartet.

The several minutes that you take to listen to both sides of 1968’s “Ridin High” will likely be several minutes that you will later have a difficult time remembering. This is the hypnotic power of “Ridin High.” Both the Hammond player (presumably Cook himself) and saxophonist take solos here but you’d barely notice them - or anything, for that matter - for all of “Ridin High”’s surging forward momentum.

4. The Bobby Cook Quartette, Ridin High, Part 2 (Compose)
This is the first of two 45s that Bobby Cook released on the Compose label. (The second, “On the Way” and its flipside “Sister Lu,” is credited to Bobby Cook and the Explosions.) Compose was a tiny label run from Ecorse, Michigan, a town outside Detroit and home to another lost nugget of gurgling Hammond gold, the Organics’ “Foot Stumping.”

The Varitone Saxophone

History has not been kind to the dreaded Varitone saxophone.

What is the Varitone? It’s an electric saxophone, simply put, part of a broader post-War trend of oddball, electrified instruments and effects.

Except for a control box with visible knobs and switches, and a cable plugged in to a separate amplifier, the Varitone looked much like a regular saxophone, but like the electric sitar or the Mandocaster the Varitone was always more than just an acoustic instrument with an electric pickup plopped into it. The entire instrument was engineered around the placement of its electronics. (For a good technical overview and picture of the Varitone saxophone, check out this article.)

The Varitone’s effect is somewhat harder to describe. The sound was, if nothing else, original. The electronics of the Varitone allowed you to add echo and tremolo to the saxophone’s signal, but the instrument’s most obvious attribute was its sub-octave buzzing effect and curious, almost vocal-like overtones. You knew it when you heard it, I’ll put it that way.

Developed around 1965 by esteemed French instrument maker Selmer Company, the Varitone saxophone would first go into commercial production a few years later. Company management must have been encouraged when Chicago-based saxophonist Eddie Harris scored almost immediately with 1968’s “Listen Here” (hear excerpt here, watch great vintage footage here), a funky, Latin-tinged hit instrumental that featured the new contraption prominently. Harris, along with creating one of jazz’s biggest-selling hits with his 1961 jazz version of the Ernest Gold theme “Exodus,” would go on in the late ‘60s to be the Varitone’s staunchest champion. Themed albums like The Electrifying Eddie Harris, Silver Cycles and Plug Me In would be wild explorations of the instrument as well as some of Atlantic Records’ top ‘60s jazz sellers.

Unfortunately for Selmer, Eddie Harris - with a few other popular dabblers like Sonny Stitt and John Klemmer - would basically be the Varitone’s only popular champion. Jazz’s critical establishment has rarely looked favorably upon gadgetry, especially electronic gadgetry, especially electronic gadgetry that reconfigured an iconic jazz instrument like the saxophone. The record-buying public? They seemed intrigued by the Varitone, at least. It wasn’t psychedelic, exactly, just different. There was always something of the air of novelty that seemed to hover about the instrument, though. You might catch a glimpse of the Varitone on the occasional soul or jazz record, but by the late ‘70s, hardly a decade after its introduction, the contrivance was basically extinct.

1. Sonny Cox, Chocolate Candy (Bell)
Landon “Sonny” Cox was a soul jazz saxophonist who, with his trio the Three Souls (including organist Ken Prince and drummer Robert Shy), worked the vibrant Chicago club scene of the ‘60s. 1969’s “Chocolate Candy” followed several Three Souls albums for the Argo jazz label, and one album (The Wailer) under Cox’s own name on Cadet Records (Argo’s sister label). “Chocolate Candy,” which only appeared in 45 form, would be Cox’s final commercial effort.

Penned by hip freelance guitarist Phil Upchurch and produced by Chicago studio legend Richard Evans, this selection brims with the accessible earthiness and vamping rhythms so characteristic of ‘60s soul jazz. At its core this selection is pretty by-the-numbers soul jazz, actually, which I think was part of the Varitone’s initial appeal for a lot of the jazz saxophonists who dared pick it up. It changed anything, now matter how banal, into an instantly groovy situation.

Sonny Cox would later coach three Illinois boys’ high school basketball