Deep Rivers

Sam Rivers was born in 1923; he died on the day after Christmas, 2011. The death of an 88-year old can't really be said to be shocking or unexpected, but Rivers' passing caught me be surprise; it sometimes seemed as if he would live forever, creating incredible music for all time.

Sam Rivers was a saxophonist (tenor and soprano), flutist, pianist and composer; he also recorded on bass clarinet and synthesizer (and as a vocalist) on occasion. Jazz is often considered a young man's game, but Rivers was a late bloomer, at least in terms of making a mark in the larger jazz world. Although he had put in stints with Herb Pomeroy's Boston big band and T-Bone Walker and had recorded a Tadd Dameron session for Blue Note (not released until many years later), he was over 40 years old and practically unknown when he joined Miles Davis's quintet for a tour of Japan in 1964.

Recordings from that tour reveal a mature, imaginative, and very individualistic musician. He knows the tunes, knows the changes, and knows how to improvise over them. But he already seems to be somewhere else; his phrasing and note choices push against the confines of the songs. Musically speaking, Rivers wanted to be elsewhere, and his association with the Davis group ended when the Japanese tour was over.

But the floodgates had been opened; by the end of the year, Rivers had recorded Blue Note sessions with Tony Williams and Larry Young, followed by Fuchsia Swing Song, his own first album. This seeming explosion of creativity marked the level of accomplishment that would last the rest of Rivers' life.

In 1970 he and his wife Beatrice opened Studio Rivbea in their Manhattan loft home. For most of the decade, audiences had the opportunity to walk through Rivers' living room to the performance space and hear some of the finest avant-garde jazz musicians in the world. Highlights from one week at Studio Rivbea were issued on five LPs - the Wildflower series on Douglas, reissued on CD as The New York Jazz Loft Sessions.

In 1991, he took a step in common with many Northern residents nearing 70 years of age - he moved to Florida. In Orlando, he found a large number of highly skilled musicians who were employed by Disney World, but were hungry to play some challenging, creative music. Rivers' name for his large ensembles was the RivBea Orchestra, and the Florida version of the big band was tight and impressive, even if some of the soloists could not match Rivers' own level of inspiration.

But for many listeners, Rivers was at his best in a trio setting, joining a bassist and drummer to play seamless sets of mostly-improvised music that flowed in and out of different keys and rhythms. His mid-70's trio, with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, was almost telepathic in the musicians' responses to each other. His Florida trio, with Doug Mathews on bass and Anthony Cole on drums, was also excellent. Mathews doubled on bass clarinet and Cole on tenor sax, so they sometimes produced surprising all-woodwind textures. Personally, I feel cheated that the only recorded evidence of a really magnificent trio, Rivers, bassist Richard Davis, and percussionist Warren Smith, is six minutes from a 1972 concert released on Rivers' Hues album.

I was lucky enough to hear Rivers perform three times. The first was at Tyrone's in Athens, Georgia, where he played a stunning duet performance with Dave Holland in 1979. He was back a week later with a quartet, but the Art Ensemble of Chicago had a concert a few blocks away the same night - what a choice to have to make! - and I went with the Art Ensemble. (As I write this, I'm listening to the two wonderful Rivers/Holland duo albums on the Improvising Artists label.)

I didn't hear Rivers in person again until 2002, when his trio with Mathews and Cole played in an old stone church with wonderful acoustics, just a few blocks from my house in Atlanta. About a year and a half later he drove up from Orlando (no limo or private jet - the jazz business ain't exactly big-time show biz) to play a concert with the Jason Moran Bandwagon trio at a concert hall south of Atlanta. One of the selections they played was Rivers' tune "Beatrice," from the Fuchsia Swing Song album; this is the only one of Rivers' compositions that has become something of a jazz standard.

And now I am left with not only the memories of some wonderful concerts, but with regret. I always meant to make the eight-hour drive to Orlando to hear the RivBea Orchestra perform, but somehow never got around to it. I was excited to have a chance to redeem myself this Spring - I was planning to meet a friend in Sarasota for some shows Rivers had scheduled in March. Now, of course, that won't happen.

Reading what I've written, I'm struck with what a shallow tribute this is. I've only scratched the surface; Sam Rivers deserves a book, not a little blog post. So long, Sam Rivers, and thanks for the endlessly creative music.

Big Jack, The Oil Man

Well, damn. I certainly didn't want to add another memorial post to this blog. But I've learned that Big Jack Johnson died of kidney failure a few days ago, on Monday, March 14. Big Jack, the Oil Man, the Last of the Jelly Roll Kings, the Fishin' Musician, is gone. He was 70.

For years, I've been telling people that Big Jack was alive only due to my quick reflexes. I heard him play at the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale in the mid 1990's - an afternoon show. Late that night I passed Red's Lounge, the famous Clarksdale juke joint, as I was driving back to my hotel. Johnson was hanging out in front, talking with a friend. As I approached, Big Jack was apparently overcome with mirth at his buddy's story, and staggered out into the middle of Sunflower Avenue, bent over with laughter. I hit my brakes and swerved, and Johnson was with us for 15 more years.

Big Jack, who was simultaneously, and paradoxically, the most traditional and the most original of bluesmen, was born in Lambert, Mississippi, about ten miles from Clarksdale. His father played guitar, banjo, and fiddle, and passed on the basics to Jack. In the early 1960's, Johnson became a member of one of the greatest juke joint blues trios of all time. Frank Frost, Johnson, and Sam Carr played throughout Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee as Frank Frost and The Nighthawks. The band hung together for 25 years or so, although they changed their name to The Jelly Roll Kings when they released their Earwig album Rockin' the Juke Joint Down in 1979, since there was already a long-established blues/rock band called The Nighthawks. The Kings rocked hard, and consistently sounded like a larger group. In the early days Frank Frost took all the vocals, as well as playing guitar and harmonica. There was no bass, but Big Jack's guitar provided the bottom. In later years, Frost played keyboards (usually a cheap organ) rather than guitar, and the vocal duties were split between Johnson and Frost.

Making a living at music was has always been difficult, and it's almost impossible in the Mississippi Delta. For years, Big Jack put food on the table by driving a heating oil truck, making deliveries all over the Delta. His day job led to his nickname, The Oil Man, and he called his band The Oilers. As he became a popular figure on the blues festival circuit, he left the Delta for periods in Chicago and Pennsylvania, but he finally moved back to Clarksdale, playing at Red's Lounge when he wasn't on the road. In recent years, Johnson was plagued by health problems; in fact, erroneous reports of his death circulated before the end came this week.

One of the things I loved about Big Jack was that he had no taste. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but it speaks to the absolute honesty of Johnson's music; he played whatever he felt like playing, whether it was musically or politically correct or not. When I heard him in Clarksdale, he followed a tough blues shuffle with a bizarre rendition of "Tequila," during which he moved from the "A" section to the bridge more or less at random. The huge grin on his face throughout showed how much he enjoyed playing the tune, as strange as it seemed to the hard-core blues fans in the audience. He had a song called "Chinese Blues," in which he sang in "Chinese." And check out his melodramatic, overwrought original called "Daddy, When Is Momma Coming Home?," which he recorded several times. All of this is in bad taste, and also a lot of fun.

But that same directness and honesty resulted in some incredible blues performances. On the last Jelly Roll Kings album, Look On Yonder Wall, Big Jack sings a warning to Frank Frost, who was right there in the studio, behind the organ: "Frank Frost, you better lay that bottle down!" Johnson, in true Delta blues fashion, wasn't particularly concerned with counting measures to the next chord change - he moved to the next chord when it felt right, and the band had better be listening. The title song of his We Got to Stop This Killin' album has choruses that are 13, 15, and 19 bars long, in addition to those that fit the standard 12-bar blues form.

Big Jack's style was intense, with a sometimes extreme vibrato applied to both his guitar and voice. Perhaps his greatest recorded performances are those made for the film Deep Blues in 1990. Johnson plays what is maybe the hottest version of the traditional "Catfish Blues" ever, weeps his way through "Daddy, When Is Momma Coming Home?," and winds up with the wonderful and bizarre "Big Boy Now," inspired by hearing country music on the radio as a child. Jack tells the tale of wanting to yodel "like those white folks on that radio," and follows the vocal with a twisted, shredded slide guitar solo that works its way higher and higher, until he is practically playing on the pickups. It's one of those performances that must be heard to be believed.

Big Jack's gone now, but he left some excellent recordings behind. I would go so far as to say that anyone with the slightest interest in electric Delta blues needs to have The Jelly Roll Kings' Rockin' the Juke Juke Down in their collection. I'm partial to Johnson's albums Roots Stew and The Memphis Barbecue Sessions, the latter a collaboration with harpist Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. And of course, there's the amazing Deep Blues soundtrack. Right now, sales of his albums at CD Baby will directly benefit his family. Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to some Big Jack Johnson. So long to the Last of The Jelly Roll Kings.

Council Spur Blues - Robert Curtis Smith, RIP

I've been wanting to write something about the great, if obscure, bluesman Robert Curtis Smith. Now it seems as though this post must serve as a memorial. Smith was not famous enough for his passing to be noted in the press, but word has reached the blues community through his family that he died in Chicago in November. Smith deserves to be remembered by the world at large, if for no other reason than because he recorded one of the best blues albums of the LP era.

R.C. Smith was an elusive figure. He was born in or around Cruger, Mississippi, at the edge of the Delta region, around 1930. For the first 38 years or so of his life he seemed to alternate between attempting to survive the poverty and oppression of life in Mississippi and attempting to escape it. He left the Delta for Chicago and Texas at various times, but apparently found little relief, since he always returned to Mississippi. In an early-1960's interview with Paul Oliver, he described the conditions in which black sharecroppers found themselves in Mississippi:

You work from the time right sun-up until sundown. Other words in choppin' (cotton)
it's three dollars a day, and it's hard to make enough money to practically do anything, because, during the week you got to live and you go to the store and take up a little groceries to carry you that week but when you paid off you owe almost half of that. So there ain't anything you can do with the little change you has got, but stay here, because you can't leave here unless you do leave walkin'.

It would be nice to report that Smith's fortunes changed when he walked into Wade Walton's barbershop in Clarksdale on the day in 1960 when Paul Oliver and Chris Strachwitz were there, searching for unknown and long-lost blues musicians. Oliver and Strachwitz recognized his talent right away, and Smith made several recordings in 1960 and 1961, including one of the most remarkable blues albums ever. Clarksdale Blues: The Blues of Robert Curtis Smith was released on the Bluesville subsidiary of Prestige records; it made absolutely no impact and sunk without a trace, never to be reissued. But for those of us lucky enough to have a copy, it's a treasure.

Smith's music shows an awareness of the blues tradition; he "covers" songs by Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy, as well as the traditional "Catfish Blues." But the really striking songs are his originals. Their power comes largely from his melodic gift (not every bluesman can create memorable, beautiful melodies) and the structures of his songs - most are based on the standard 12-bar blues pattern, but are altered or extended in very interesting and original ways. One song, "Council Spur Blues," describes conditions on Roy Flowers' plantation in great detail, mentioning Flowers and his overseer, Mr. Walker, by name. This was a brave gesture for a black man in Mississippi in 1961.

Smith finally escaped Mississippi around 1968, spending the rest of his life in Chicago. He played the blues up north for awhile, and even auditioned for a spot in Willie Dixon's band. At some point, he had the religious conversion experience he later recounted in "Lye Water Conversion" on the album From Mississippi to Chicago, and only performed gospel music after that. Most people in the blues community knew nothing of all this for years; it seemed as if this talented musician had just disappeared from the face of the earth. For a long time Jim O'Neal, owner of the Rooster Blues record label, had a picture of Smith posted in his Stackhouse record store in Clarksdale; the caption read, "Do you know this man?"

Eventually Wade Walton became aware of Smith's whereabouts; this led to his appearance at the 1997 Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale, where I was lucky enough to hear him. It was clear that this was Smith's first performance ever in a concert setting; he was uncomfortable and unsure of what to do or say on stage. But the music (all gospel songs, of course) was passionate and powerful, and over all too soon.

And now there won't be any more music by this remarkable musician. But you can still hear his recordings, if you can find them. A comprehensive discography of Smith's records has been put together by Stefan Wirz, and can be found here. It looks like a lot of records, but most of the issues are drawn from the same few recording sessions. The most easily available CD featuring Smith is I Have to Paint My Face: Mississippi Blues 1960, an anthology on the Arhoolie label; Smith's four solo selections are excellent, and there's a fun example of Wade Walton's infectious, rhythmic playing of his razor and strop to Smith's guitar accompaniment. From Mississippi to Chicago, mentioned above, features several of Smith's later gospel songs and is still in print. Clarksdale Blues, his masterpiece, is long out of print and very difficult to find, but for those who know their way around the internet, can be found for download.

I'm glad I got to hear R.C. Smith perform that afternoon in Clarksdale. So long to a talented man who overcame a lot.

Goodbye to Two Giants

I haven't posted here in awhile, and it gives me no pleasure that this post is a memorial. Two giants of avant-garde jazz (for lack of a better term) have died in the past few days. Trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon passed last week at the age of 84. And tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, 81, left us yesterday.

For much of their careers, these two men were, to an extent, outsiders - even by the already marginalized standards of avant-garde improvised music. Both were founding members of organizations whose purpose was to encourage and promote the somewhat challenging music created by their members; Dixon was the primary mover behind the Jazz Composers Guild, which grew out of the October Revolution in Jazz, a week-long series of concerts he set up in 1964. Anderson was a founding member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), the Chicago organization that gave a forum to Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, and many others. The Jazz Composers Guild soon fell apart, split by the differing aims of its members, but the AACM is still going strong.

On his first recording, a 1962 album by the Bill Dixon/Archie Shepp Quartet, Dixon sounds like a fairly conventional free-jazz trumpet player, if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms. It was soon apparent that his music went beyond Jazz with a capital J, however. His magnificent 1966 record Intents and Purposes sounds like it has at least one foot in the realm of contemporary classical music. And his trumpet style developed into one of the most distinctive and unusual in jazz - he used smears, spaces, squeezed notes, blats, sounds that were more air that pitch, and multiphonics. And it all worked; when a Dixon solo was over, it felt like a unified statement, not like a series of effects.

Bill Dixon was, by many accounts, a difficult figure to deal with. I suspect that he would have responded to such a statement by saying that he was uncompromising. He became a professor at Bennington College at Vermont in the late 1960s, and remained there for many years. Dixon recorded infrequently in the seventies and eighties, but recordings became more frequent during the last two decades of his life. His solo on "With (Exit)," from Cecil Taylor's 1966 Conquistador! album, is still one of the most striking passages in recorded music. Just as the piano, basses, and drums begin to get more agitated, Dixon enters with long, ethereal notes separated by spaces, the intervals carefully chosen. It's a beautiful moment.

For many years, Fred Anderson was even more obscure than Bill Dixon, at least to the world outside of Chicago. He made strong contributions to Joseph Jarman's first two albums in 1966 and 1968, then didn't record again for a decade. When I was a young man learning about jazz, I knew Anderson as a somewhat legendary figure who had contributed to the Chicago avant-garde scene of the the sixties, but I had no idea if he had ever recorded again. Somewhere along the way, he became something of a father figure to younger Chicago musicians such as Hamid Drake and Ken Vandermark. Recordings became more frequent, and he developed a strong reputation in the avant-garde jazz world.

His tenor sound was filled with history; you could hear Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons in his playing, although his influences were so well internalized that he never sounded like anyone except himself. While Dixon went into academia, Anderson became a saloon owner - his Velvet Lounge on the Near South Side of Chicago became a mecca for musicians and fans. For those of us who never had the chance to hear him there, there are several live albums from the Velvet Lounge, including an 80th birthday tribute CD and DVD.

Recordings by Dixon and Anderson are easier to find now than in the past, although there are still plenty of gaps in what is available. Hear them on record, since we can't hear them in person anymore. Every year, every month, fewer giants walk the earth. We've just lost two.

So Long, Snooks

To those of us who don’t play it, the guitar can be an intimidating instrument in the hands of a master. The best guitarists always sound to me like they have at least three hands. I seldom listen to Robert Johnson or Joe Pass without thinking, “How do they do that?” New Orleans R & B guitarist Snooks Eaglin, who died Wednesday at the age of 72, was one of those frighteningly accomplished players. To a non-guitarist such as myself, Snooks’ solo versions of “High Society” (complete with the clarinet solo) and “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” are jaw-dropping.

It has always amused me that Eaglin was “discovered” playing on the streets of New Orleans by folklorists, who recorded him and issued several albums (including an amazing set on Folkways) by Blind Snooks Eaglin, the unspoiled folk/blues guitarist and singer. What his “discoverers” didn’t realize was that he was recording rhythm-and-blues singles for Imperial around the same time. If you can find his early Imperial recordings, listen to the first session, the one with “Nobody Knows” and “That Certain Door.” Snooks is accompanied only by bass and drums; the songs seem modeled on Ray Charles’ gospel-tinged R & B style, but Snooks’ raw vocals and impassioned guitar playing make Ray sound positively slick in comparison. This is great New Orleans music.

I was visiting New Orleans in 1995, when Snooks’ version of “Josephine” was a local hit; it seemed like it was on the radio every time I turned it on. Instead of the genial bounce Fats Domino gave it, Snooks set the song over one of the deepest, nastiest New Orleans second-line grooves I’ve ever heard. The bass line is extremely spare, and no less powerful for that. Halfway through the song, Snooks unleashes a choppy, intense, somewhat out-there guitar solo which raises the groove to a positively ecstatic level. Although nothing else on the Soul’s Edge album reaches the heights of that amazing opening track, the entire disc is worth hearing.

I was fortunate enough to hear Snooks several times at the Rock-N-Bowl in uptown New Orleans. He sounded great when paired with Eddie Bo, as he often was, but he was at his best stretching out with a trio, like on his early Imperial recordings. To fans of New Orleans music, it seemed like Eaglin had always been around and would always be around. That, of course, is not true of any of us. So long, Snooks.

RIP, Johnny Griffin

Robo sent me word yesterday that the Fastest Tenor Player in the West, Johnny Griffin, has died at age 80. Right now my jazz record collection is out of control, but when I was about 20, it consisted of fewer than 35 records. One of those was Mr. Griffin's You Leave Me Breathless, recorded at Copenhagen's Cafe Montmarte in 1967. Then and now, it wasn't Griffin's speed of execution that impressed me, it was his wild imagination. His technique allowed him to play whatever came into his head, and what came into his head was often gasp-inducing. Within a pretty straight-ahead framework, JG played some pretty crazy stuff - and I mean that in a good way.

Listening to this old favorite record again last night, I was struck by how similar Griffin and Von Freeman sound. The basic sound is similar - round and full, but fuzzy around the edges, and with lots of tonal distortion for expressive effect. They both had/have complete command of the tenor, they both like to play long unaccompanied passages which still imply the chord changes, and both overlay a straight bebop context with some pretty outrageous ideas. I checked, and sure enough, both gentlemen went to the same high school and had the same teacher, the famous Walter Dyett. Freeman was born six years before Griffin. Who influenced who? Most likely, they were both dipping out of the same well.

RIP, Johnny Griffin.