Friday Night Prayer Meeting

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Another piece (of several posted previously) masterminded by one of the most ubiquitous music men of the past 60 years.



I can't remember what I've written about Quincy Jones in the past and don't feel like looking it up, but his fingerprints are all over jazz, pop, rock, and movie scores that even people somewhat familiar with the man wouldn't suspect. The Wikipedia writeup covers a lot, but misses interesting projects. He worked for, with, or over everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Lesley Gore, Billy Eckstein, Michael Jackson, and Steven Spielberg. He did lay his share of stinkers along the way, unfortunately. His "Soul Bossa Nova" is loathsome, and practically ruins his 1962 album Big Band Bossa Nova to my overly delicate sensibilities (it's that stupid, flutey theme used in Austin Powers movies). Also, his experimentation with trying to make Louis Jordan into a rock and roll star on Mercury is interesting for an occasional listen, but the results are fairly sickening to a Jordan fan even if they sound swell in a way.

The album where this track originates, Walking in Space, is a record that made a number of alienated white high-school boys feel pretty hip. In listening, you can probably tell why. It's lush, it swings, and it's easily accessible to anyone who wants to hear. Upon recently repurchasing this album on CD, I find that I'm not quite as enamored with it as I was in 1969. Of course, I'm also no longer enamored of railroad-stripe bell bottoms and my electric blue spread-collar button-up type shirt purchased from Chess King.

Even when I was a teenager, there was a thing or two that sat wrong with me about the sound, but I couldn't put it into words. (I was just then emerging from my Leaded Gasoline Phase.) Today I'd express that uneasiness as two related criticisms. One is that the whole project pretty much talks down to many jazz listeners, even younger ones, with its relentless mellowness and too-easy solos. That recording session was staffed with major stars of all jazz eras up to that time, including "moldy figs" like Kai Winding and Snooky Young as well as younger giants like Roland Kirk, Ray Brown, and Eric Gale.  My other beef is that Jones uses only background vocals throughout without any prominent lead. (Even the solo vocal on the title track is produced like a background.) The orchestral setting seems designed to showcase a strong vocalist, but instead Jones arranges for an ethereal collection of background voices who serve roughly the same purpose here that go-go dancers served in mid-sixties rock. Today, this strikes me as somewhat creepy.

But I'm being too much of a dick about it. There's no reason to be any more of a snob about the sound of this album than Thriller, which I really enjoy a few times a year. I have plenty of space in my life for hookey, easy listening music, which is why I put it on the player tonight.

Killer Joe, Quincy Jones (1969, from "Walking In Space," Verve 314 543 499-2 [2000 CD reissue]) via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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This is a Chicago furniture store jingle as released on a promotional 7 in. vinyl single in 1970.



My general memory from the late 1950s into the 1970s is that music for broadcast commercials and radio jingles was based either on styles that were mainstream when the ad agency guys were in school---half a generation out of date to a teenager or young adult---or else an agency's smarmy exploitation version of youth-oriented music. The good people at Ember Furniture seem to have farmed out their work to a very smooth soul operator named Sidney Barnes. I have a version of this on CD---an anthology on the Numero Group reissue label. Numero's releases cover a wide spectrum, from interesting, fully listenable minor-league recordings by regional soul (and other styles of) groups to sides that sound like they came from a 1960s and '70s parallel pop music universe. And I guess that's actually the case: there is only so much room on national charts at any one time, and it tends to be allotted according to mystical protocols involving transfers of materiel and sexual favors.

Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, I'd certainly poke into a furniture store that commissioned a commercial jingle like "The Ember Song." As if (as annoying teenage girls used to say).

The Ember Song, Sidney Barnes (1970, available on "Eccentric Soul: The Nickel & Penny Labels" [2011], Numero Group N039), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.  

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

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This may be a nowhere song for many people my age, but I'm always surprised at my emotional response to it. And this reaction has no specific, schmaltzy boy/girl origin; I had to plumb the shallows of my wee brain to put my finger on it. It's about what happens when you don't notice that you've passed a fork in the road.



As pitiful as this sounds, even to me, the 1970s were the best time of my life. And that's even considering some particularly tough sledding in the '73 - '75 timeframe. I suppose memories may take on a lovely, saturated Kodachrome-type patina because our problems didn't turn out to be impossible after all, while the power and romance of wide-open possibilities turns out, for too many of us, to be a high point that can never be replicated once we start the march toward diminished options.

This pensive Earth Wind & Fire single charted in summer 1979, a time I now consider to have been an indescribable rare sunset diffusing into the crisp twilight of a formative era that was destined to end abruptly. I think I even knew that at the time, meaning I sensed the morning that would emerge east of midnight would for some reason, inexplicable to me, twist itself into a deformed and crippled facsimile of a new day. Morning In America dawned brightly to many, but to me colder than it looked through my window; languid, dank, and low in oxygen. For one thing among many, the general character of rock, soul, and pop music seemed to degenerate almost overnight. Suddenly, human vitality was aggressively being displaced through heavy application of digital production methods and all the romance that Big Business has to offer. To my ears, it all started sounding like music produced to sell instead of music to listen to and dance to. Previously, barely a majority of it had struck me that way; I'd always found plenty to like, ranging from Zappa to horn bands to wimp rock to New Wave and Power Pop. Now, in the stale new dawn of 1980, it seemed that almost nothing of that remained.

Some might complain that this track is little more than a clot of overproduced schlock romanticism. Myself, I think it finds a very sweet spot between intimacy and lushness. The layers of keyboards---there are sounds like a concert grand mic'ed for pop timbres, a classic '70s Fender Rhodes electric piano, an analog synthesizer---are washed in a classy orchestral mist. And in back of it all, those swinging, mellow EW&F horns fingerpainting together in the open spaces. If I make an allowance for poetic license, I can almost hear these poignant lyrics as an elegy for social comity, which was soon to fall ill through a plague that very few people (myself included) knew was starting to creep in from under the baseboards. But then, that's just me projecting my ruminations onto the rest of the world. Enjoy the song; I wonder what memories it might tweak in you.

After The Love Has Gone, Earth Wind & Fire (1979, from "I Am," Columbia 35730), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: I've done some editing and rewriting to flesh out the mental shorthand I was dealing out last night.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Here's something out of the ordinary for this place. I first heard this track playing in the defunct and missed Record Service in Campustown almost 20 years ago. I bought the album without hesitation. Being out of touch with emerging pop music styles back then, I wasn't really sure what the hell I was listening to. The kid in the store told me.



The Digable Planets made liberal use of samples from jazz classics, which was what immediately caught my ear in juxtaposition to the rap setting. But throughout the album the Planets repeatedly profess their adoration of Jimi Hendrix... and yet, no Hendrix samples are used anywhere. Their lyrics were readily intelligible to me, which has been a relative rarity throughout my entire life when listening to rock, blues, or soul (ear dyslexia?).

On every track, the lyrics present vivid impressions of black urban life; not always pretty (but, then, often they are), and there's not one word dedicated to misogyny or glorified violence. The difficulties of urban life come through loud and clear, though, without sweetening.

The trio delivers psychedelic hiphop poetry in mellow rap cadences, with some kind of backstory involving extraplanetary aliens, bugs (or alien bugs), and Hendrix. (Yes, the album has many amusing facets, too.) The horn sample used on this featured song was lifted with permission from Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers; other tracks borrow from Sonny Rollins, Curtis Mayfield, and the Crusaders among others.

There is one problem with this otherwise-tight video, though. Someone in postproduction seems to have overdubbed highly "stereoized" synth fills in places, and they sound kind of ridiculous and out of place. I can listen through that, though, because before tonight I'd never seen a video of this group. I think they're cool. I hope you like it.

Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat), Digable Planets (1993, from "reachin' [a new refutation of time and space], Pendulum Records 61414-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

For Marginalia

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In previous comments, Marginalia reminisced about an O.V. Wright single, "Gone For Good." I'd never heard of Wright, but thanks to YouTube I found the song in question. Unfortunately, the poster disabled the embed code so I can't display it on this page. But here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCrSDFK0vk

Give it a listen. The band sounds very "Memphis," and Wright reminds me strongly of someone---Otis Redding, maybe? I like it: this sound has the unmistakable sound of a very specific place in time, and it makes the intervening years fade from memory for a coupla minutes.

And you're right, Marginalia: you really were cool listening to Stax while your pals were listening to the Rockin' Berries. (Nothing against the Berries, but I never heard them until a few minutes ago on YouTube; don't remember them ever charting in Chicago, but then there was a strong regional rock and pop scene that may have crowded them out where I grew up in the mid-60s. I'm guessing from the sound of those guys that they were a group the girls really "dug".)

Aside to Marginalia: I notice you've adopted an alias. I hope this doesn't mean you've had to enter the witness protection program....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'll wrap up my current mini soul fugue, as prompted by a flash from Big Hussein Otis in last night's Fish Fry comments Thread. It's my favorite cut by the pride of Harvey, Illinois: The Dells!



Most Chicagoland kids who listened only to the city's two Top 40 stations never heard of The Dells until 1968, with the release of their first crossover single, "There Is." Several more big hits crossed over to Top 40 playlists over the next year, including "Stay In My Corner," "Oh What A Night," and this one, "Wear It On Our Face."

What we didn't know was that The Dells had been around since 1952, and were masters of doo-wop, jazz, and R&B in addition to the soul mode they hit big with in the late 1960s. And what I didn't know until tonight is that they provided backing vocals for the likes of Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Barbara Lewis. Neither did I know that the omnipresent Quincy Jones worked with them to help refine their sound.

As inferred by Big Otis in the comments, the Dells were at least indirectly part of the same galaxy that spawned the Twinight label in Chicago, all of them working in the orbit of a large independent soul and R&B promotional firm that handled groups signed to Chess Records, including subsidiaries Checker and Cadet (not to mention national labels like Atlantic, Motown, and Stax). But these guys were the old timers of the scene, all members having been born during the Great Depression---some of them were practically 35 when they released this side, fer crying out loud!

Wear It On Our Face, The Dells (1968, original 45 rpm release Cadet 5599, reissued on CD compilation "There Is," Chess [MCA] CHD-9288), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Maybe the love I'm looking for
Is just a wayward dream
Oh yeah...



Tonight I feel like going back to another Twinight Chicago soul recording from about 1970, which I have in my library on a CD reissue set. These compilations of little-known vintage soul recordings by The Numero Group, which I wrote about a coupla weeks ago, represent something important to me: that first-rate talent grows almost everywhere, and us ordinary citizens would get our fill of swell entertainment without Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Time-Warner, Sony, Disney, and so on.

Listen to the horn attack after the little four-bar guitar intro. That's some top-drawer shit! And the string arrangement is not merely there for "sweetener," but to help sound out the poignant atmosphere created by the plaintive vocalist, Annette Poindexter (the girlfriend of Syl Johnson, the record's producer).

The band is The Pieces of Peace, a congregation of somewhere between five and eight musicians (not clear from the skimpy documentation I've read), which was hired as the house band by the Twinight label during summer 1969. I was entertained to learn, from the Numero liner notes, that this is pretty much the complete band you hear on Young-Holt Unlimited's 1968 hit "Soulful Strut," before PoP signed with Twinight. According to the notes, "neither Isaac Young nor Redd Holt played on that session." (!)

The arrangement was powerful and beautiful, the lyrics innocent and bittersweet. I can think of only one reason, other than possibly a failure of payola, why this track didn't climb high on the soul charts, and that reason is Ms. Poindexter's performance. I don't mean that in a assily critical sense, though, because I personally enjoy it and try to dig in a bit deeper each time I listen. To the casual pop-listener's ear, Poindexter may sound like she's landing north, south and east of every other pitch, and those are the ears that promoters and radio DJs are always surrogating for. So nobody at a Top 40 or Soul powerhouse broadcaster in the mid-60s would likely give her quirky performance, ornamented with gospel sensibilities and half a dozen different kinds of blue notes, the time of day. Sides like this and others issued by Twinight in its heyday were given the "time of night," however, to brighten the hours "east of midnight" for third-shift factory laborers, cabbies, and young African American nightflies in general. In the radio business, this domain used to be known as the "lunar rotation." It was essentially a promotional "limbo" for local musicians, but probably no more hit-or-miss in quality than whatever rocketed up the national pop charts fueled with rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

Wayward Dream, Annette Poindexter and The Pieces of Peace (1970, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records [catalog number not known]; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You'd be blue
Without a neighbor next to you



This is a Chicago band, The Notations, from 1971. I may have heard a snippet of this track while surfing the AM dial when Chicago's two Top 40 stations were either playing the same song at the same time... or crap at the same time. Edging up the dial into "police band" territory I'd sneak a listen to Chicago's mighty soul giant WVON-1450---"The Voice of the Negro." Sadly for me I never stuck around long in that radio neighborhood for it to become a habit. Having been acculturated as a South Side/south suburbs kid starting in the mid-1950s, I absorbed by osmosis the idea that there was something "wrong" with, and even "dangerous" about, listening to the negro stations at the frontiers of the dial, including Chicagoland's thousand-watt jazz beacon in Harvey, Illinois, WBEE-1570. (Fortunately for me, I rediscovered WBEE after dropping out of college in 1973, and this listening experience accounts for a considerable amount of my jazz "ear" knowledge.)

The Numero Records Eccentric Soul reissue series is a compilation of "lost" recordings from America's regional and farflung soul music markets, including (believe it or not) Columbus, Ohio; Tallahassee, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona! This side is reissued on "Twinight's Lunar Rotation," an outstanding two-disc set of singles issued by the top Chicago local soul label. This Numero compilation is the best of the crop that I own, but there is lotsa strong stuff on the other half-dozen Numero compilations of different soul labels that I own. There are numerous tracks on this and the other compilations that were certainly worthy of charting nationally, and many others that might have charted but for a vocalist who was out of his or her league with top-drawer material.

There is no legitimate reason why "A New Day" should not have charted nationally, in my opinion. There were probably two problems, one being failure to tap into the crossover market using progressive promotion techniques (i.e., payola) and the other being that this sound is very reminiscent of hits by The Esquires (e.g., "Get On Up"). In the case of the latter problem, the issue would probably have been the "dated" sound because the top-charting Esquires hits came and went in 1967. You see, 1971 was probably thought to be light years beyond the 1967 soul style in the ears of the national labels. Nevertheless, here it is: a gem of upbeat, feelgood soul---a flawless performance, in my opinion. These Numero compilations feel like a glimpse into the soul music scene from a closely parallel universe. There's lots more where this came from.

A New Day, The Notations (1971, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records A4KM 2409; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Some 1970 big band soul jazz from the ubiquitous Quincy Jones:



I had the first pressing of this album, thanks to a tip from my high school pal, the late great Count. Being a fan of all things jazz-rock in the era of Chicago Transit Authority, BS&T, and Chase, this album puzzled me and still does. It's hard not to like the sound now, as an adult, but even back then I sensed something exploitative about the album that I didn't have the language to express. This is the music of Hugh Hefner and Playboy After Dark, marketed to youth at a time when hippie culture was being ravenously co-opted by establishment impresarios and entertainment moguls. The entire first side of the album on which Killer Joe appears is dedicated to Dead End and Walking In Space, "from the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Hair" (speaking hip-sploitation).

Usually I despise the flute as a solo jazz instrument, but I make a provisional exception for certain muscular-sounding performances by people like Herbie Mann and Roland Kirk (and Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, of course, although not a jazz musician). I forgive this performance because it was original and of the time. I also think the arrangement is marred by the dainty female chorus during the last half; they seem to festoon Quincy's wall of sound mostly as an audio version of Hef's mansion playmates --- mere decoration, pleasant or slightly creepy. Because of these details, both then and now I experience a mild embarrassment to admit that I enjoy this cut. And for that matter, I'd probably chat up Miss July 1970 if I ran into her at The Esquire this weekend (but she'd be lucky to snag me).

It may sound like I'm disparaging Jones a bit with these thoughts (which were pretty much unknown to me until I started typing), but no harm is intended. Quincy Jones is a monster in American musical history, and not only for his early associations with legends like Lionel Hampton, Ellington, Basie, Ray Charles, and a latter-career collaboration with Miles Davis (the trumpeter's last recording). He was behind the scenes literally everywhere as an arranger and producer, from an ill-fated 1950s effort to transform Louis Jordan into a rock star, to the top of the charts with Lesley Gore (It's My Party) and Michael Jackson (Thriller), a Sinatra collaboration, and a zillion movie soundtracks and TV show themes. His highly irritating, flute-featuring 1962 tune Soul Bossa Nova was even resurrected for the soundtrack of an Austin Powers movie and as the theme for the 1998 World Cup games. (I own it, regrettably.) Jones was responsible for any number of stinkers, but statistically that would be expected of someone involved in virtually every important aspect of postwar American jazz and pop music. The man knows how to arrange a chart exactly how it should sound, whether for good, or for... eev-ill.

Killer Joe, Quincy Jones (1970, from "Walking In Space," A&M Records)

Apropos of something: Killer Joe was composed by Benny Golson, whom we learned last week was influenced by our unlikely hero Earl Bostic.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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So go on and live....



I fell in love with this song, like so many others in the 1966 - 1967 timeframe, before dawn. The situation was this: every Wednesday evening the Williams Press truck would engine-knock up our driveway and throw me a bundle or two of The Homewood-Flossmoor Star, the biweekly area newspaper. I would roll 'em all up in rubber bands (or when they were fat or I was lazy I'd use the flat trifold method) and get to bed early. Before bed, though, I'd snatch my sister Peggy's red and white plastic transistor Sears Silvertone radio/record player, which was the size of a Belgian paver but also a marvel of miniaturization at the time, and stash it with the bulldog edition of the Star in my old-school canvas paperboy bag. Then, around 4 or 4:30 a.m. I'd drag my scrawny carcass out of bed, get dressed, and head out into the suburban dark. The important thing was that radio, even more important than the princely paycheck. I started every Thursday all alone in the calm, dark reverberating open-air auditorium of suburban concrete, brick, and cedar siding with the predawn sounds of WCFL-1000, one of Chicago's two Top 40 powerhouses in the mid-'60s. (At that time WLS-890 didn't start broadcasting music until Chrome-Dome Weber came on around 6:05, after all the farmer nonsense.) These were formative mystical experiences for me, and I gratefully soaked up everything from The Casinos to the Doors. I remember first taking note this song, "Tell It Like It Is," around February 1967. This was the same month I heard the early-morning Chicago premier of a jaw-dropping Beatles song called "Strawberry Fields Forever," which literally brought me to a dead stop in the snow flurries as I tried to puzzle out its melody and structure.

So I originally felt a little weird about luxuriating in "Tell It Like It Is" because to my innocent ears it sounded like (wait for it) serious country and western! That's right: I heard it as a crossover country-pop tune (not actually knowing that term at the time), and it would have been damn uncool for me to admit liking such a thing in the winter of 1967 even as the crocuses of The Summer Of Love were starting to think about peeping their randy little budding heads up out of the earth. (Editor's note: some country was OK by me even back then, such as Roger Miller and a Jack Jones hit or two, but that stuff kinda at least sounded like rock.) It's not that I was some kind of proto-hippie or was even aware of such things beyond how they were made fun of on "Petticoat Junction." But it wasn't rock and roll, so what the hell else could it be!?! Sorta jazzy, but definitely not jazz. Well, "country" or whatever, I'd never heard a more beautiful rhythm guitar sound before then, and the piano and percussion kept things peppy with a 6/8 beat in back of the seductive melody. And that voice... like a choir of bells.

I rediscovered this song in the mid-'70s when I started hoarding 45 rpm records from thrift stores with Larry K. With more mature ears, informed by three semesters of college-level music theory (harmony), I was bowled over by it again. By then I'd recategorized it as "country soul" in my still-underdeveloped bean, and remember thinking to myself about Aaron Neville's vocal performance, "this guy is like a white Al Green!" I don't think that it was until sometime in the 1980s that I finally discovered that Aaron Neville and his brothers were, uh, black. Today I can recognize the vivid New Orleans flavor of the chart, especially in the horn sounds and even the rhythm guitar, but I still hear "Tell It Like It Is" as a small masterpiece of country soul.

Tell It Like It Is, Aaron Neville (1966, Par-Lo Records), via YouTube.