Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, Torah (Spartacus Records)
The world has changed since Tommy Smith composed his Torah suite over seventy days in 1999. People of faith in many cases have moved further apart, leading to heightened fear, mistrust and violence. Yet the Christian, Jewish and Islamic beliefs all share the same creation story, as told in the five books of the Torah. Indeed, Muhammad’s arrival is foretold in the fifth book, Deuteronomy.
In his own book, The Genesis Meditations – a work that was affected by its author hearing Smith’s composition in its early performances – Neil Douglas-Klotz, a world-renowned scholar in religious studies, spirituality and psychology, argued that an emphasis on these shared spiritual beginnings would help all interfaith and inter-spiritual discussions, including practical relations between diplomats and politicians from different cultures. Shared beginnings, he believes, unite.
Tommy Smith had no grand ambitions of healing spiritual divisions through his music when he set out to encapsulate Torah in an extended jazz composition, although it’s a piece that he hopes people of all faiths and none will find approachable, stimulating and ultimately rewarding. It’s a piece also that has been subject to no little reassessment.
Originally composed for the great American saxophonist Joe Lovano as featured soloist and premiered by Lovano and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra during a weekend of concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow in February 2000, it has since been revised twice and performed by the orchestra in London and Holland with Smith in the soloist role.
Having the suite’s composer as its main voice in performance seems to underline Smith’s narrative approach. These five movements, with their subtexts of creation, departure, the Levites in the temple, the census of the Israelites in Sinai and the handing down of the commandments, are very much stories and there’s even a compositional device, the musical equivalent of an author’s “page turner”, used at the end of Leviticus to make the listener wonder what happens next.
From Genesis’ opening orchestral fanfare and tenor improvisation, Smith is in complete control of his material. This is no big bang, rather it’s a bright, confident and assertive indication of a new beginning, settling into a tenderly gliding melody played over a gently insistent piano and bass figure before the horns interject and the drums reappear. In Exodus the sense of travelling is palpable, be it in haste and excitement or more furtively, facing darker, hidden dangers.
It’s as well to note at this point that, although the saxophone enjoys the spotlight almost continuously in the suite, Smith isn’t a composer, or for that matter orchestra director, to leave his musicians counting rest bars for long periods. There’s a wealth of beautifully realised orchestral detail – subtly sighing muted trumpets; supportive chorales; emphatic punctuation – and room for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra’s pianist, Steve Hamilton, to improvise with real creative intelligence (note particularly his exchange of phrases with Smith on Leviticus) as the narrative unfolds.
That said, Smith does turn in a tenor tour de force, variously motoring over turbulent rhythms, producing bold, searching and meditative a cappella sequences and bringing out the inherent catchiness in the many passages that could easily be adapted independently as great jazz tunes.
By the time we arrive at Numbers, Smith’s improvisatory muse is on fire and it’s here that his belief in the importance of having a strong rhythm section at an orchestra’s heart is borne out with emphasis. After a fierce and exhaustive a cappella tenor exploration, Hamilton, bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer Alyn Cosker might be excused for joining Smith in this mood with some trepidation but they fall in headlong, creating a swaggering twelve-bar blues that Smith attacks with relish. There’s further orchestral detail here, too, in the form of wailed and moaned asides, the instrumental equivalent of hollered encouragement and comment.
If Smith’s onslaught continues in the final movement, Deuteronomy, there is also a feeling of resolution from the opening bars. This is Smith, the composer and saxophonist, at his most restlessly inventive, careering over a rhythm that has the relaxed but determined gait of a camel, introducing panoramic orchestral voicings and fiery trumpets, blowing freely over Hamilton’s judicious muscle, Gourlay’s stoicism and Cosker’s effervescence and inserting a brief but glorious trumpet and trombone chorale before striding through pianistic thunder into saxophone reflection that answers the questions suggested in the opening movement. How does it all end? That would be telling.
Suffice to say that, ten years on from its first performance and played by an orchestra that brings absolute assurance and collective panache to its every assignment, Torah stands as a composition that embodies artistic vision and imagination and honours the jazz tradition of making music of genuine substance come alive in the moment. It’s a major work. I’ll put it no higher, although others, in time, may well choose to.
If Ryan Quigley had his way, these words would have appeared on the back of a cardboard sleeve accommodating a vinyl LP. The Derry-born, Glasgow-based trumpeter has a great fondness for jazz on vinyl in general and the classic 1950s and 1960s Blue Notes in particular, and the music on this, his debut recording as a leader, certainly follows in the tradition of Sidewinders and Jazz Messengers while, like the best jazz, sounding as fresh as today.
The background to the recording also follows in the tradition of jazz session stories that Quigley relished reading while absorbing the music from his early teenage years onwards, although unlike the finished article’s authenticity, this wasn’t entirely by design.
Having chosen his line-up – they’re all old friends and all among the UK’s busiest musicians – Quigley ran into the familiar problem of availability. Finally, tenor saxophonist Paul Booth, touring with rock hero Steve Winwood, found a two-day window and pianist Steve Hamilton, in the throes of moving house, abandoned the packing cases to fit in.
Quigley duly booked a day’s rehearsal followed by the recording itself the next day at the acoustically ideal Alexander Gibson room in his alma mater, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Or so he thought. Five minutes in, the rehearsal was abruptly ended by officialdom, the result being that what you hear on this CD came together in an afternoon.
After spending the morning fixing microphone positions and sound levels with engineer Ross Hamilton, the musicians sight read and soloed through Quigley’s charts with admirable poise and vigour. No tune was given more than three takes and since the first run through often generated an unbeatable energy, many of these tracks are first attempts.
To those who know Quigley from a career that has seen him established him as an irresistible force in the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra’s trumpet section and an increasingly potent band leader, while building a freelance clientele that includes both Bob Geldof and minimalism icon Terry Riley, the quality and fire of this music will come as no surprise.
His writing is succinct and deftly orchestrated and his playing has strength in its concision as well as carrying a whole lot of heart, soul, sincerity and enthusiasm.
The funky, Jazz Messengers-like title track - its name a typical piece of musicianly wordplay for a tune written specially for a gig in a distillery at Islay Jazz Festival – encapsulates all these qualities. Duck Egg Blue wittily acknowledges the influence of Miles Davis’s A Kind of Blue, and if Lament has a certain defiance, this underlines Quigley’s ability to capture the personality of its dedicatee, the gloriously talented musical maverick Martyn Bennett, who died tragically young aged thirty-three in 2005.
Among tunes written for family – Buzzy Bee is for Quigley’s two boys, Michael and Connor – for friends, for love, and for fun (Feck betrays the composer’s Irish origins), Quigley has included two contrasting standards.
What is This Thing Called Love is the sextet in typically effervescent form and In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning a duet that Quigley and Hamilton recorded when the others had left for pre-arranged appointments. No afterthought, it illustrates the trumpeter’s firm adherence to the philosophy that, when playing a ballad, the lyrics are as important as the melody, while reinforcing the message that, with Laphroaig-ian Slip, Ryan Quigley’s recording career is off to a flyer.
The Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra, Exploration (Spartacus)
Their ages were given as fifteen to twenty-three and it turned out that some of them were a year or three shy of the lower end of that scale. But while they were way too young to be hanging around in bars, on a March 2003 night in Henry’s Jazz Cellar in Edinburgh they showed they had the musical maturity to play great jazz with confidence, panache and remarkable depth of feeling.
Five years on, the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra has developed into both a concert attraction in its own right and a feeder group for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and various music college courses around the world.
Smith, who knows from personal experience all about being an outstanding teenage jazz musician looking to progress, formed the orchestra to channel a torrent of young talent that he realised was emerging in Scotland.
In May 2002, he contacted leaders of education departments throughout the country, seeking assistance in discovering the most promising players. Within weeks he had held auditions and begun monthly rehearsals in Glasgow. By the end of the year TSYJO had played support gigs for SNJO. Their monthly residency at Henry’s, then the hug of Edinburgh’s thriving jazz scene, began soon afterwards and festival appearances at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen followed.
This recording took place at the end of a tour, made possible by the generous sponsorship of Shell, with the phenomenal New York-based vibes player Joe Locke. Hear how, bolstered by special guests Ryan Quigley (trumpet) and Mike Janisch (bass), they attack big band favourites A Night in Tunisia and Cottontail with relish and invest Oliver Nelson’s Hoedown with zestful enthusiasm and Kenny Wheeler’s beautifully ebbing and flowing Gentle Peace with detailed reflection.
Locke is a terrifically exciting soloist, a force of nature in any situation. Yet his young colleagues are inspired rather than daunted by his presence. Alan Benzie, who takes the solo before Locke’s on Tunisia, would become the first Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year just a few weeks later and is currently a star pupil at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Liam Heath actually hadn’t turned thirteen that night in Henry’s but he duels like a veteran with fellow trumpeter Tom MacNiven on Now, a minor blues by Swedish pianist Lars Jansson that also finds the trombone section sparring creatively as well as illustrating the orchestra’s intensity and togetherness.
There are more where these musicians come from and this is just the first documentation of a band that thrills with its vigour and ability. Welcome to the future of jazz.
Mike Whellans is the real thing, a keeper of the one-man blues band flame that burned so passionately in the work of this highly specialised form’s masters, including Doctor Isaiah Ross, Jesse Fuller and Whellans’ great British forerunner, Tony ‘Duster’ Bennett.
Like all true bluesmen and women, when Whellans sings and plays, he means it. He can set a scene of darkness and foreboding as the Boogie Man lurks, play twelve-string guitar in the grand driving blues tradition to propel his Winding Track, and sing of hugging his baby’s deserted pillow so that you really feel his loss.
The one-man blues band is self-sufficient, of course, but as with Bennett, Whellans can call on other musicians to expand his palette and yet retain the spirit of individuality that is his major strength – even when guests such as the fabulous David Bromberg have recorded their parts on different continents.
If you’re already familiar with Whellans, you’ll know to expect blues that’s fired up and ready. But if this is your introduction, prepare to hear a talent who’s not only his own man as a singer, guitarist and ace blues harpist, he’s his own rhythm section, too.
If this CD is your first exposure to Jim Mullen’s guitar playing and you’re wondering what such a hip-sounding trio is doing recording in Glasgow studio for a new Scottish label, rather than one of New York City’s more prestigious venues under, say, the Blue Note banner where this music so obviously belongs, don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Over the past thirty years or so, more often than not, newcomers to Mullen have assumed that, like their heroes whose influences he has assimilated into a style at once readily recognisable as distinctively Mullenesque and yet firmly in the tradition, he must be American. It certainly wouldn’t be the first person who, having caught a Mullen gig, engaged the guitarist in conversation only to be taken aback at being answered in a clear and, despite long years resident in London, unmistakable Glaswegian brogue.
Indeed, during their mid 1970s New York sojourn, audiences turning up to hear Mullen and his long-time partner in jazz/funk, the wonderful and, sadly, recently deceased saxophonist Dick Morrissey, were invariably astonished to learn that the band leaders were a couple of imports. The fact that those audiences regularly included musicians of the calibre of the Brecker Brothers, David Sanborn and others among the Big Apple’s first call session players, all eager to check out and sit in with the band, only emphasises Mullen and Morrissey’s authority as jazz musicians.
Like most Scottish musicians of his generation, Mullen’s first gigs were at church hall dances, having acquired his first guitar at the age of thirteen and gone public within a year. By his mid teens, by this time a committed jazz fan and working with American singer Billy Daniels and Glasgow band leader Andy Park’s ambitious, Gil Evans-influenced ten-piece, Mullen was playing double bass, an instrument that played a big part in fashioning his idiosyncratic guitar skills. A left-hander, Mullen didn’t bother to change the bass strings round. He played it right-handed and when he switched back to guitar, after watching his bass’s neck and body part company while he tried to hold it together and finish a gig, it felt natural to continue playing right-handed with his thumb like one idol – Wes Montgomery – while leading a guitar-vibes-bass trio like another idol, Tal Farlow.
Mullen’s thumb has been called many things over the years, including “bionic.” This certainly applied when, having moved to London in 1968, he was playing tear-it-up jazz/rock fusion with organist and now acid jazz god Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express in the early 1970s. As Auger and the musicians Mullen played with subsequently, including flautist Herbie Mann, soul/funk groups Kokomo and the Average White Band, and the peerless Morrissey-Mullen, concentrated more on feel and groove-based music, however, the directness and passion in Mullen’s playing made that thumb, for this listener, the best blues singer that Glasgow has ever produced.
For evidence of those blues singing qualities you need look no further than the ballads Isn’t It A Pity and For Heaven’s Sake here. On both melodies there’s a vocal warmth to Mullen’s phrasing that suggests he’s going over the song lyrics to himself as he plays notes that convey much more than mere words can say. Then having established a mood of such bereft regret, he goes on to expand on it with solos so poignant and yet simultaneously uplifting in their keen, on the edge articulation. Because as this recording also amply demonstrates, there’s an eagerness about Mullen’s playing that makes everything he plays sound fresh and exciting.
The line-up and concept here – guitar, organ and drums playing well-known, occasionally expected songs – may hark back to the 1960s heyday of Hammond organ pilots such as Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott et al, but the energy and sense of swing are unmistakably current. Mullen has for long struck this listener as being capable of creating excitement out of the most commonplace, even mundane melody and his colleagues in this trio, organist James Watson and drummer Matt Skelton, are clearly young men after his own heart.
In these hands, I Wanna Be Like You, hackneyed to death by every cabaret turn in the land but a tune whose Jungle Book origins bring to mind Mullen’s enthusiasm for and almost encyclopaedic knowledge of cartoon music, develops an urban heat and urgency more redolent of a cop car chase than a children’s feature. Similarly, very few musicians I can think of other than Mullen could take It’s Impossible from the pipe and slippers comfort of Perry Como’s famous 1970s hit version and transform it into the jumping, soulful burn-up that you hear here. That he does so is a tribute not just to Mullen’s own highly evolved ability to turn on the soloing style at will but also to Skelton’s springy drumming and Watson’s talent for combining those tricky dual Hammond roles of providing filthy, itchy-fingered chords and commentaries manually while maintaining a swinging bottom end momentum with the bass pedals.
Elsewhere you’ll find all the other facets and Mullenisms that make Mullen such an inspirational, although far from over-recorded, figure. There’s the crisp, clear phrasing of Embraceable You and As Time Goes By, the unshowy and almost casual-seeming way he has of shaping a melody with the most sensitive and creative rhythm guitar interventions, and the habit of inserting quotes from other tunes, a common enough trait in jazz but one that Mullen has turned into a witty and often crucially directive art. (He once even managed to squeeze a quote from Miles Davis’s Jean-Pierre into a thirty second Yellow Pages television commercial, but that’s another story.)
I won’t detail every hidden gem here – that might spoil the fun – but I will highlight one on Mal Waldron’s gorgeous Soul Eyes, a favourite from the Morrissey-Mullen band book, which with the saxophonist’s untimely death has become an unintentional tribute. After a particularly steamy solo from Watson, who is no slouch at creative appropriation himself, Mullen enters in his inimitable style and somehow manages to make You and the Night and the Music a central plank in his brilliantly spontaneous discourse. But then, brilliant spontaneity, forged from a lifetime’s dedication to studying, absorbing and most of all, playing great music, is what Mullen watchers have come to expect from one of jazz’s true originals. And brilliant spontaneity is what you get here – by the bucketload.
By the time Tower of Power released Ain’t Nothin’ Stoppin’ Us Now, the first of their three albums for CBS included together here, they had effectively become the answer to their own question: What is Hip?
Written to acknowledge the fickleness of passing trends and show awareness that what might be deemed hip today is likely to become passé before too long, this song from the band’s third, self-titled album has transcended musical fashions, just like Tower of Power itself has done and was already doing as the 1970s headed towards the 1980s.
Their ultra-dynamic music, variously described as ‘urban soul’ and ‘old school funk with new school flavour’, had made the band from Oakland, California a top draw in their own right on the American live gig circuit, routinely causing traffic jams when they arrived in town as headliners following major tours in support to Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Quincy Jones, and The Crusaders. Tower of Power had also made indelible impressions on two major figures in music who lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean but who share the distinction of being known by one-word names. Before he formed The Police with Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, Sting had been the bass guitar player in a Tower of Power wannabe band in Newcastle, and over in Minneapolis, Tower of Power had apparently provided the soundtrack to which Prince lost his virginity.
Hit singles, including You’re Still a Young Man, which is the song that Prince remembers with special fondness, Time Will Tell and Don’t Change Horses (In the Middle of a Stream), ensured a high profile on radio airwaves, and their fabulously tight, five-players-thinking-as-one horn section was well into a life of its own that would clock up myriad guest appearances with, to name just a few, Ray Charles, Elton John, The Eurythmics, B.B. King, The Meters, John Lee Hooker, Phil Collins and perhaps most famously, Huey Lewis on the Back to the Future soundtrack and subsequent tour.
In the UK, albums such as Urban Renewal and Live and in Living Colour, had been enthusiastically greeted and the band’s participation in the Warner Brothers Music Show package that toured Europe in 1975 and passed into legend would only be exceeded by the horn section’s magnificent contribution to fellow travellers on that tour, Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus, which is still a strong contender for the ‘best live album ever’ title.
The Tower of Power horn section may well be the first thing that springs to mind when the group’s name is mentioned, and that’s hardly surprising given the size of its output and the razor sharp quality of its work. But from the start TOP, as the group became affectionately known, boasted other strengths that many musicians would strive to emulate, not least David Garibaldi’s innovative, improbably articulate funk drumming, Chester Thompson’s sweaty keyboard creativity and Francis ‘Rocco’ Prestia’s superb poppin’ bass guitar lines.
Such features were not the musical flavour of the times in San Francisco when saxophonist and TOP mainstay and chief songwriter Emilio Castillo put the first edition of the band together in 1968 with the horn section’s anchor, baritone master Stephen ‘the funky doctor’ Kupka.
Of Mexican and Greek parentage, Castillo had moved from Detroit to Fremont in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of eleven. Already a music fan – he recalls the Platters, Bill Doggett and Booker T as early heroes – he became completely smitten with soul music when he heard and then saw San Francisco singers Roger Collins, whose She’s Looking Good single, he says, was “killin’”, and Dennis Del Aqua, who was Mr Showbiz in fronting local band the Spyders.
The Motowns became Tower of Power – because it sounded like a name that could deliver something big – and their first album, East Bay Grease, helped bring them to the attention of the mighty Warner Bros, with whom they averaged an album a year between 1971 and 1976. Their first two albums for Warners, Bump City and Tower of Power, were each bolstered by a hit single, respectively You’re Still a Young Man and So Very Hard to Go, which helped increase the group’s live following and general momentum no end, despite personnel changes in relation to singers and rhythm section players.
Despite losing them to a bigger label, Bill Graham remained a keen supporter of the band and when Aretha Franklin recorded her Live at Fillmore West album over a weekend at Graham’s venue in 1972, Tower of Power were the promoter’s immediate choice as the opening act. Drummer Garibaldi recalls standing in the wings during each of the sets that were recorded, watching Franklin’s drummer, the great Bernard Purdie, and realising that he hadn’t copied Purdie’s licks quite as exactly as he’d thought. By then, however, having assimilated the precision of Sonny Payne’s big band style with Count Basie, the relentless funk that Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Sparks brought to James Brown’s band and some Latin American grooves into a style of his own, Garibaldi had established a drumming tradition that would run through Tower of Power’s music even while he took an eighteen year sabbatical.
Castillo remembers paying even greater attention to Sly and the Family Stone – he and bassist Prestia would sneak in and watch all six sets that Sly played every night during his run at Frenchie’s club in San Francisco, savouring Sly’s entertainment value as well as his band’s superhuman funkiness – and some of that devotion rubs off on Ain’t Nothin’ Stoppin’ Us Now.
This was a turbulent period for Tower of Power. Few bands that survive forty years – as Tower of Power has done – do so without some coming and going. Castillo reckons some sixty musicians have been involved over the years and the band has had its fair share of personal as well as personnel problems. Drink and drugs took their toll before sobriety and, for some, complete changes in lifestyle were required. Rick Stevens, who replaced the band’s original vocalist, Rufus Miller, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder following a drugs binge; others, including Kupka, had more fortunate wake-up calls. On top of all that, musical fashions were changing. Disco was threatening to take over the world.
Recorded with production assistance from Alan Chinowsky, who would go on to work with artists including Huey Lewis and Melissa Manchester, Ain’t Nothin’ Stoppin’ Us Now finds Tower of Power coping admirably in the face of such changes, staying true to the band’s Southern soul roots yet sounding current. The title track is a party, full of Stax/Atlantic flavours with typically tight, muscular horns, a big, booting bass riff and crisp drums from Ronnie Beck, who had replaced Garibaldi. Doin’ Alright features singer Edward McGee showing his Otis Redding influence and two tracks, Can’t Stand to See the Slaughter and While We Went to the Moon, follow Sly Stone’s lead in merging solid get down grooves and feelgood boogie with topical social commentary, with a fine guitar solo on Slaughter from Bruce Conte.
Further line-up changes saw Michael Jeffries, another singer not afraid to wear his admiration for Otis Redding on his sleeve, replace McGee and Prestia vacate the bass guitar chair in time for We Came to Play. Again, though, with Victor Conte taking Prestia’s place and Memphis music giant and guitarist with Booker T and the MGs, Steve Cropper taking charge of production, Tower of Power delivered the goods. From the opening drum beat, reminiscent of Stevie Wonder’s immaculately drummed introduction to Superstition, this is a band playing with a smile on its face.
Cropper, whose ten years as a session musician with Stax Records had seen him playing on innumerable hits with Otis Redding (he co-wrote (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay and Mr Pitiful with Redding as well as 1960s classics Soul Man, Knock on Wood and 634-5789), brought further Southern soul authenticity to the sessions, adding rhythm guitar on several tracks and leaving his fingerprints all over Let Me Touch You and Love Bug. All the bumping precision that Tower of Power fans had come to expect is present on tracks like Lovin’ You Is Gonna See Me Through, and Chester Thompson (not to be confused with the drummer of the same name who played with Genesis and Weather Report) shows exactly why he’d be welcomed into the Santana fold later with his synth solo on Share My Life.
Thompson also ushers out Back on the Streets, with an irresistibly classy, itchy-fingered organ groove on Just Make a Move, to complete a trilogy of albums that confirms Tower of Power’s remarkable staying power. Despite further personnel changes on guitar, bass and drums (with Garibaldi briefly returning for these sessions), ten albums into the band’s career, Castillo was still masterminding high quality soul and funk music with unashamedly catchy melodies and a great groove.
Although Castillo by this time was generally hands-on in the studio, We Came to Play being the obvious exception, he was assisted on this final album in the trilogy by two producers, McKinley Jackson and Richard Evans, who each took overall control on roughly half of the tracks. Jackson had previously arranged horn parts for the band and would go on to work with Marvin Gaye in the 1980s, and Evans, a Chicago soul legend who now teaches at Berklee School of Music in Boston, arrived at the album’s sessions having not long beforehand completed work on Fire on Ice, the album that would see his fellow Chicagoan Terry Callier’s career begin its second, if short-lived phase. It was Evans who oversaw the vocal duet on In Due Time by Michael Jeffries and disco songstress Cheryl Lynn, then riding high with her first and biggest hit, Got to be Real, and other guests included the Jones Girls, singing back-up on Rock Baby, harpist Gail Levant and Brazilian percussion master Paulinho da Costa.
The long-serving Thompson aside, the one consistent factor, with regard to Tower of Power’s personnel, in these three albums is the horn section, although its line-up would change when Lenny Pickett went off to wow the Saturday Night Live television audience and club-goers and dance floor-fillers around the world with his own groove in 1981.
The style that Castillo and Kupka devised back in the late 1960s – cutting the notes short and clicking and bumping against the rhythm section – has, with the help of arrangers such as McKinley Jackson and Greg Adams, remained as sharp, punchy and personal as originally intended. Kupka concedes that, strictly speaking, this isn’t the way you’re meant to play but it brings its own energy to the music and is still in demand for extracurricular recording sessions as Tower of Power celebrates its fortieth anniversary. As Castillo will tell you, though, and as the music on these albums re-emphasises, Tower of Power is not just a five-piece horn section, it’s a whole band and hearing it in full generating mode once again, the wisdom in the band’s choice of name is reinforced: it really does produce a whole tower of power.
B.B. King, LA Midnight/To Know You is to Love You (Beat Goes On)
By 1972 B.B. King had been a national figure in the U.S. for twenty years. A career that had begun with the young Riley King forming a gospel singing group at school and had included the, for the time, not untypical bluesman’s stepping stone of singing an advertising jingle for a health tonic to secure exposure on the radio, had finally achieved its first major break when B.B. topped the Billboard R&B chart with Three O’Clock Blues in the early weeks of 1952.
It had taken much hard work to get this far and there was more in store. Brought up to the back-breaking toil of the Mississippi cotton fields, B.B. was never afraid to apply the same work ethic to playing music as he had to his day job. He was determined to be a performer, so in his teens and armed with a guitar bought for $2.50, he had practised by busking on the streets of towns around Indianola, Miss. – sometimes four different towns in one night.
Then, when he moved to Memphis at the age of twenty in 1946, to live with his second cousin, the country blues legend Bukka White, he bothered the life out of White, having him go over and over guitar licks and tricks so that he could overtake the guitarists on every street corner who were at least as good as King was at the time.
Chart success only increased the work load.
On his way to becoming one of the most distinctive and best loved guitarists and singers in the world, B.B. regularly turned in schedules of up to three hundred and forty gigs a year. The financial rewards for this were, even allowing for a hefty band and entourage payroll, rather better than the returns from the land, of course.
There was, however, also a downside to striving to make the gig – B.B.’s history of no-shows, given the intensity of his touring, was admirably minimal – and one mishap in the late 1950s that resulted from this enthusiastic gambler taking a risk on continuing to work while his tour bus, Big Red, was temporarily without insurance resulted in a bill for almost $100,000 when the bus was involved in an horrendous crash.
It took years for King to pay off the costs of settling his liability and replacing Big Red and no sooner were his finances beginning to recover when the blues began to suffer a dip in popularity as black audiences’ tastes turned towards soul music. Fortunately, King’s personal rapport with his audiences, captured brilliantly on his classic Live at the Regal album from 1965, ensured that he remained popular and his championing by white guitarists, including Johnny Winter and Mike Bloomfield in the States and Eric Clapton in the UK in the late 1960s, introduced him to a whole new, huge audience at home and in Europe.
A standing ovation before he’d even played a note at The Fillmore West in San Francisco, wildly enthusiastic receptions among his new fans for his albums Lucille and Live and Well, and a successful revival of Roy Hawkins’ The Thrill is Gone, featuring novel use of strings on what would become a theme song, were just some of the triumphs that King could look back on as he entered 1972.
It was to be a year of both consolidation and spreading of artistic wings. Already a committed provider of entertainment for prison inmates, as seen by his regular performances in prisons and as documented on his Live in Cook County Jail album, King co-founded the Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation in 1972. And before the year was out, on Thanksgiving Day, to be precise, he would make a landmark appearance in Sing Sing Prison, alongside Joan Baez, that has recently become available on DVD. He would also break free, according to some observers, of a prison of his own by recording at the home of the phenomenally successful Philly soul sound, Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, whence a different sounding but still entirely recognisable King emerged.
Before that, however, came the recording session, in the more familiar setting of California and in the staunchly blues idiom, for the first album in this set, LA Midnight.
Despite the presence of a team of heavy-hitting LA session players, including the expat British jazz pianist and percussionist Victor Feldman, who later became heavily involved in Steely Dan’s search for perfection, the first thing to note about LA Midnight is how relaxed it all sounds.
At various times King can be heard intimating, patiently and without any sense of clock watching, the kind of groove he’s after and telling his fellow players that he doesn’t like to play guitar any faster than he can talk. King’s guitar style was very much based on speech patterns and since – unlike his heroes including Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker - he’s never mastered the art of playing and singing at the same time, his singing and guitar playing tend to take over one from the other like siblings finishing each other’s sentences.
Also, being from Mississippi, he jokes, he’s not given to talking too fast anyway.
So the album’s opening instrumental, Help the Poor, becomes a conversation, with King conducting a classic call and response dialogue between his guitar and the horns that the bass guitar ultimately joins in with, while tambourine and bubbling congas emphasise, respectively, the beat and the feelgood quality of the take.
King’s good humour continues, albeit tinged with a certain ruefulness, on I Got Some Help I Don’t Need. Despite the singer’s clear and soulfully hurt disapproval of – and given the cast of domestic callers, some might say paranoia about – what’s going on behind his back during this attractive slow shuffle, he seems just as intent on listing his suspected rivals for comic effect as exacting retribution. Punctuating this tale is a classic King guitar solo that highlights another component of his playing: the bottleneck slide style that he could never quite master but still managed to incorporate through runs of stinging bent notes.
The cheated man comes closer to exasperation with the tougher Can’t You Hear Me Talking to You? and later, the relaxed I’ve Been Blue Too Long, where King is moved to threaten a call to the FBI for answers that he needs. With Taj Mahal contributing suitably terse harmonica to the former track, King wonders if his woman might not be the better of a hearing aid, since she appears to be studying her nails instead of listening, and finally threatens to take off the wig he bought for her and wrap it round her neck – a perhaps not entirely likely-sounding murder scenario from one of the blues’ most affable figures but one that doubtless played well with his prison audiences.
Midnight brings the first of two blues jams featuring guests from the rock world, Taj Mahal’s trusty, incisive guitarist from his Giant Step-era band and friend of John Lennon, the late Jesse Ed Davis, and Eagle-in-waiting Joe Walsh. Davis’s tetchy style illuminates Midnight particularly and its successor, Lucille’s Granny, with Walsh on slide, is a fitting homage to the guitar that King rescued from a fire in a roadhouse, which was caused by two men fighting over a woman and knocking over a kerosene stove in the process. When King heard that the woman in question was called Lucille, he decided to name the guitar that he ran back inside to save after her, a name now passed on to several successors, including the one he played here.
Almost as much a part of King folklore as Lucille, Sweet Sixteen returns, once again introduced by King’s signature guitar lick but with a storyline updated to make his bewildered hero a serviceman just home from a tour of duty in Vietnam. It’s a bravura vocal performance of a song King must have sung hundreds of times in its previous incarnations, illustrating his ability to make the bluesman’s pain, declarations of love and confusion as to what might next become of him sound absolutely fresh with every delivery.
If Sweet Sixteen represented a topical continuation of the King tradition, then King’s next album, To Know You Is To Love You, was a topical relocation of his voice and guitar into a sound that was not just sweeping American audiences off their feet but making a major impact on British airwaves and dance floors, too.
With their sensual orchestrations and crisp productions, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had created hit after hit for their Philly soul roster, including the O’Jays, Billy Paul and the Intruders. Now, just as he would later in the decade when he enlisted the then hugely popular Crusaders to give him a makeover, King wanted to see what the Philly sound, overseen in this instance by producer Dave Crawford and featuring the players and arrangers behind hits including Backstabbers and You Are Everything, could do for him.
Hard core blues fans baulked at what they saw as a betrayal but King found an ally in highly respected Rolling Stone writer Bob Palmer, who praised his move from what he described as “the pat stage routines of man/woman raps, stylized lyrics and quicksilver guitar in the 12-bar form which B.B. has been turning out since Live at the Regal.” These, Palmer felt, were themselves becoming a form of the very slavery to which the blues had been born as an antidote and for this long-term observer, King’s singing and playing sounded remarkably apt in their new setting.
It’s hard to argue with Palmer’s assessment as the album kicks off with I Like to Live the Love, which carries the familiar King topic of respect in a relationship on an unfamiliar – for B.B. - but highly suitable, up-tempo, Philadelphia groove. A memorable hook and a terrific series of interlocking guitar parts, set up between King and the house band, add to the song’s impact.
Only two of the eight tracks, the Delta-flavoured Love and the closing Thank You For Loving the Blues, may qualify as blues songs but the spirit of the blues shines through the album. The title track, written by Stevie Wonder with his then wife, Syreeta Wright, features Wonder himself on electric piano and finds King in powerful vocal form, his guitar spitting fiery notes over the Sigma Sound rhythm section’s dependable oomph. For Wonder, having King sing one of his creations was a long held ambition realised – as a youngster listening to late night broadcasts with his ear to the radio, Wonder had been a big blues fan generally and an admirer of King and Johnny Ace in particular.
Fears that Dave Crawford might have taken King into a smooth, easier listening realm are firmly allayed by Who Are You, with its raw, country-ish melody line singing out above the Philly sophistication and King making high-tensile guitar commentaries. And there are echoes, again, of King’s early experiences in his gospel group as The Staple Singers' Respect Yourself takes on an urgent, repetitive insistency and finds King’s guitar notes at their stinging, hot best.
Aside from King revelling in his new surroundings, one of the greatest strengths of the album, and here again it’s hard to argue with Palmer’s enthusiasm, is drummer Earl Young’s forceful precision and crackling creativity. His duetting with King’s voice and guitar on To Know You Is To Love You and his re-entry on full kit following a snare-conga-guitar break later on the same song are truly exhilarating.
In the end, as everyone now knows, the parting Thank You For Loving The Blues didn’t prove to be the farewell to the music King celebrated from his days busking on the streets onwards that some might have interpreted it as and To Know You Is To Love You proved more of a flirtation than a full-on romance with a particular brand of sweet soul music. But for a flirtation, it’s a remarkably committed one and an episode that was to prepare the way for King’s next recorded adventure, his reunion with the great Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.
