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Flamingo --- Earl Bostic. Listen to him go:About everything I knew about Bostic until tonight I learned from Carolina Beach Music mix tapes given to me in the early '80s by my personal music archivist, Larry K, and miscellaneous articles now lost in the canyons of my minds. I recognized him as a swinging tenor man with a gravelly tone who worked the higher registers of his instrument. Wrong... or maybe 25% correct. Tonight I find that Earl actually played an alto, but he used a hard rubber alto mouthpiece tricked out with a tenor reed! Nifty hack --- I don't remember ever hearing an alto sound like this. (Still an embarrassing error by someone who played a fair amount of alto and tenor for about 10 years... and considering that Bostic is shown holding his Martin Alto on the jacket of For You. Geez.)
Anyway, this is what I consider to be Earl's classic performance of "Flamingo." Unfortunately, because he seems to have recorded half a zillion versions of his biggest hits later for the teen dance market, I don't know the date of this recording. A different YouTube video purports to be the original 1951 release, so I'm a confused guy. And evidently I'm not the only guy who is confused: the first album cover displayed in the YouTube slide show after you click the play button is a Bostic reissue on the Living Era label that in fact depicts Bull Moose Jackson blowing a tenor. Um, erf?!?
Between Bostic's tone and the predominant role of the vibes accompaniment, the sound of his combo is unmistakable. The later '50s reissues of "Flamingo," "Night and Day," and others, sound "whiter" to my ears. I think that's because he was making a good living selling dance records to teenagers in the early rock era, and so like so many other R&B tunes that were co-opted into the rock repertoire, these latter-day versions emphasized flash and novelty --- lots of shakes, falls, schmaltzy vibrato, tonguing tricks, and so forth. Somewhere I read that they typically released later Bostic recordings with pictures of sexy ladies on the sleeve to conceal the fact that Earl was an African American; suburban parents were jumpy enough about plain old rock and roll during the Eisenhower years without needing to be alarmed by the horrors of race music and the rampant miscegenation that would inevitably follow repeated listenings. The earlier versions of Earl's combo work sound "smokier" to me, and they have a more authentic swing to them, and this is one of them.
Doing my Fish Fry homework tonight I discovered that Bostic had a much richer jazz career than I was aware of during the 1940s, and he had the deep respect of giants (reed players and otherwise) like Coltrane, James Moody, Benny Golson, Stanley Turrentine, and Art Blakey. The Wiki article reports that Earl once cut Charlie Parker in an alto battle, and who am I to argue with Sweet Papa Lou Donaldson about this seemingly improbable scenario? Anyway, I love a number of Bostic recordings from the early '50s and am now inspired to dig deeper into his jazz career.
Flamingo, Earl Bostic (not dated, King Records), via YouTube.
PS: if the 59er knows about Bostic and/or the Carolina Beach Music scene I'd be grateful to hear about it.
Excellent-- the best Fish Meeting yet!
ReplyDeleteCarolina Beach Music definitely has it's following in these parts. If you "Google" it you'll find plenty, from the "Beach Music Festival", to the awards shows, and there are radio staions that devote blocks of programing to the genre. You'll have to dig around but several stations do broadcast over the internet.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a huge fan of it. Reminds me of Pat Boone doing Little Richard, but that said, being a guitar player I could easily pick up an axe and noodle along.
Bostic definitely fits right in. I could tell right away. Beach music has a style all it's own. Although I grew up on 60's pop, rock, and country, I'm diggin more jazz and blues in my (cough) older age.
But as far as beach music goes for me, it will always be The Ventures, Dick Dale, and surf.
BO: Thanks!
ReplyDelete59er: thanks for commenting. The thing that always puzzled me about Beach was that it co-opts so many different music eras, from the early '50s at least through '70s performers ranging from Chairmen of the Board and the Boxtops. Larry K. says the unifying principle is that it's easy to dance the shag to. I haven't visited your site lately (not on the computer much) but will do that tonight. You might consider finding YouTubes of lesser-known surfer delights to display and write about. I don't know much about surfer music beyond the Top 40, but I do know that there was quite a bit that was punkier sounding than Jan and Dean.