Etta James Covers Rock Songs; Jazzbos That Dork Ken Burns Never Heard Of; Tom Petty and Steely Dan Anthologies
December 1999. Willamsburg, Brooklyn. Because they are the first hipsters this far out, a neighborhood bum wanders into their party, vomits and falls over. The host sighs, "Oh Benny!" Those who saw the incident avoid that part of the linoleum for the remainder of the evening. Acquaintance approaches and introduces the DJ as his fiancee. Girl in question grabs acquaintance's cigarette, takes drag and tells him to fuck off. She's one of three women in the room who isn't a "dancer" by profession.
4 a.m. DJ puts on "Miss You." (These people came east from the desert?home to ASU, Alice Cooper and alcohol poisoning?and they know what a case of wine looks like.) Everyone's on the floor, bumping and grinding, except a cocky-looking French kid with a band aid across his nose who stands near the door, smirking. Fucking frogs.
One year later, 4 a.m., same burg, same people, different loft. 6-foot-2 girl dances with a wine-stained shirt and a young man buried in her cleavage, guy with Santa hat humps a Christmas tree and some kid named Thor or Odin or some shit just threw a rocking chair out the window. Friend points out owner of apartment. I inform him there's a dude in the hall, passed out in puke, saying he's cold. Owner of apartment asks why am I telling him this? Then kisses me on the mouth. Stuck-up-looking French kid from last year isn't French or stuck up. Band aid wasn't from plastic surgery, but landing drunk, face first, in the ice, or so he tells girl next to him, who holds a rum-soaked paper towel to her face. Her bottom lip was busted open moments earlier by girl headbanging to Van Halen. French kid tries to comfort her. "Miss You" comes on. She asks French kid if he wants to dance. He does...
After nights like that, I figured I really understood "Miss You," at least enough to perform it at a wedding reception backed by a jam band called Elton Joel, who, not coincidentally, do neither Elton nor Joel covers. Then I heard "Miss You" on Etta James' latest CD, and realized I'm just a wrongheaded, dumb little piece of white trash from outside Waco, and Etta truly is Matriarch of the Blues.
Etta comes out with an album almost yearly, and as a friend recently commented, not all of them are winners. But this time the diva had a killer concept: cover the King, Dylan, the Stones and Creedence, and do to rock 'n' roll what rock 'n' roll did to the blues. In other words, take back the night.
In Etta's version of "Gotta Serve Somebody," Dylan's song is given the testify/gospel punch it surely always needed, and "Hound Dog" is slowed and stripped down to r&b speed. But the crown jewel in this collection of covers has to be the Stones' "Miss You." No matter how much you think you appreciated the sex appeal of Mick and Keif's ditty in the past, after you hear Etta moan, "Oooooooh, baby why'd you wait so long," you'd better have a cigarette handy. Other tracks include "Try a Little Tenderness," "Hawg for Ya" and "Born on the Bayou," which doesn't really pan out here. But fuck, maybe that's Creedence's fault. Overall, this time Etta's put out another great collection of "some blues"?as she puts it in the liner notes, "the people's music."
Tanya Richardson
But taken as distinct entities three or four decades later, these dates demonstrate how the whole environment was nurtured by the kind of cross-pollinating innovation that was going on. Cross-pollinating, because some of the same musicians who played with the titans ended up on dates with more or less forgotten entities like Duke Pearson (Freddie Hubbard, for instance). And if the rerelease of these sides appears to be barnacle-scraping at its worst, consider this: we're not likely to see a renaissance of those proportions anytime soon, so why not have every shred of evidence that it even happened in the first place at our disposal?
Not to degrade any of these artists?at one time, pianist Pearson, trumpeter Jones and tuba player Ray Draper were all poised for the same level of success as the greats. Maybe they were just a little less lucky, or maybe just a little less dynamic?in other words, what they had was good, it just wasn't all that original or exciting. But it sounds fine today, in this era of overstraining noisemakers or ultraclean, corporate neo-boppers. These guys weren't even that far removed from the original bebop generation, and it shows, particularly in the melodic approach of the musicians on opuses like Draper's Tuba Sounds, which might be the best place to start, since it's the oldest album in the series.
Draper was just 16 in 1957 when he cut Tuba Sounds, his first album as leader. He'd already guested on a Jackie McLean album, and McLean returns the favor here. That's a big plus, because at times this album suffers from the weight of two things: the relative inexperience of its leader, and the fact that the tuba ain't exactly the most versatile instrument in the world. In the realm of jazz, how many great tuba players have there been? If Draper had chosen to play, say, trumpet, who knows how far his career would've gone? Give the kid credit for being a maverick and wanting to carve out his own niche in a field where the potential, at least then, seemed limitless.
So what do you get from his debut? Aww, nothing, just a lot of fairly "pleasant" wank like almost any other Prestige or Blue Note album from the same era. Pianist Mal Waldron's "Pivot" is an octagonal figure that's more or less a showcase for its composer, although McLean does blown a lean alto solo that might as well be Art Pepper. And as far as this session goes, Draper ain't the only one to fall down the hole; whatever happened to trumpeter Webster Young, who composes the first song on the album, "Terry Anne," and who gets hyped to death on the sleeve? Spanky DeBrest, the bass player? Drummer Ben Dixon? These guys are unsung heroes of the golden age of jazz, and as such should be given their just due?although big help it's gonna do them where they are now. (Which is undoubtedly in hard-bop heaven. Draper, for example, came a-cruisin' across the scene like a nova in 1957, and died young in 1982.)
Next album is by the Prestige Jazz Quartet?and speaking of Mal Waldron, he helped birth this dinosaur, which was kind of Prestige's answer to the Modern Jazz Quartet after they fled the label for Atlantic. Although the liner notes, written by stalwart Prestige penman Ira Gitler, try to deny the obvious similarities, it's evident they copied the MJQ in not only the name, but also the lineup, which features vibes played by Teddy Charles this time, in the place of brass or reeds. Result is like any MJQ album you've ever heard. The opener, "Take Three Parts Jazz," has its moments, particularly in the soloing of Waldron, but ultimately the unnamed fourth part is boredom. And their cover of Monk's "Friday the 13th" is a vibe-laden exercise that loses a lot of its funk potential thanks to the somewhat noxious nature of that instrument, although once again Waldron solos accordingly. As for the third and fourth members of the PJQ?drummer Jerry Segal and bassist Addison Farmer (trumpeter Art Farmer's twin brother)?once again, what happened?
The same could be said for trumpeter Carmell Jones and pianist Duke Pearson. Pearson got his start playing with Donald Byrd on some of that trumpeter's Blue Note sides, and that spirit of mid-tempo hard-bop is basically what Dedication is all about (although the title refers to the trombone player Willie Wilson, who died shortly after this album was recorded). Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard guests on these sessions, and lends his usual upbeat tones to the proceedings. I've always thought it strange that Hubbard was guesting on albums like Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz at the same time he was blowing the more melodic phrases on albums like this. I guess it was the complex multiplicity of the jazz scene at the time that demanded that kind of versatility from its players. Hubbard was one of its most celebrated practitioners. Pearson, on the other hand, seems to have vanished into the same forgotten realm as a lot of the other participants on these four LPs.
Which brings us to Carmell Jones, another basically forgotten entity in the Ken Burns-approved zone of jazz consciousness. Jones played trumpet on Booker Ervin's The Blues Book in 1964. Ervin was one of the most promising tenor men of the 60s until, once again, an early death. Jones, meanwhile, assembled this date as leader shortly thereafter, and it's a fine example of mid-60s jazz-schlock at a time when the whole jazz world was bursting wide open with stuff like Coltrane's Ascension and Dolphy's Out to Lunch. Like the endless and almost interchangeable string of albums Blue Note was making at the same time, this is decent, melodic, bluesy material with an emphasis on an almost-gospel type of piano playing (Barry Harris) and a clarity of tone that would become increasingly rare in the continually maddening spectrum of 60s upheaval. Jimmy Heath plays excellent tenor sax. This album deserves to be enshrined, simply because it was the last of a dying breed?which is precisely why this reissue comes at the right time. What better time than now to reflect on how sweet it was? One thing's for sure: despite the attempts of academics like Burns, it ain't coming back.
Joe S. Harrington
The answer is in fact much more insidious: 45-minute versions of "Smoke on the Water." Sadly, the only alternative to buying a band's box set is often the 12-track greatest-hits record. For guys like Billy Squire, 16 Strokes is perfect. He finally gets to do those repairs on the Malibu family farm, and you get "Rock Me Tonight," "My Kinda Lover" and "Everybody Wants You." But with artists like Tom Petty, I found his 1993 "greatest hits" a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Therefore I am overjoyed that MCA gives us a double shot?T.P.'s two-CD greatest-hits album, Through the Years. In addition to shit like "Breakdown" and "American Girl," you'll get "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)" and the T.P./Stevie Nicks duet "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," both of which were not on the 1993 record.
The same label just released Steely Dan's twofer, Showbiz Kids. Like 1985's A Decade of Steely Dan, this one has "Reelin' in the Years" and "Peg," but you also get "Dirty Work." Recently a coworker asked, "Why do you listen to this stuff?" I knew a guy in college whose favorite band was Steely Dan, and I used to ask him the same question: "Why?" He should have told me what I told my colleague: "The only difference between us is I drink more than you do."
So the next time you see a double-CD anthology by George Thorogood & the Destroyers, Mötley Crüe or Oasis, go ahead and buy it. Sure, it's not fair that you just bought the 12-track greatest-hits version, but like my mom used to always say after telling us she only had kids so someone else would have to do the housework, "Life isn't fair."
Tanya Richardson