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Feb 17

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Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’

One of the things I loved about the Blue Note label in the early ’60s was its founders’ appreciation of the sort of basic, blues-rooted jazz to be found in the black clubs of the era, almost always featuring a Hammond organ, a guitar and a tenor saxophone. Jimmy Smith, Grant Green and Stanley Turrentine would be the most obvious examples of successful Blue Note artists in that genre, but I was also beguiled by the ones that didn’t reach their level of sales and celebrity. – or indeed, as in the case of a tenor player named Fred Jackson, any celebrity at all.

Jackson was brought to the label by his fellow tenorist Ike Quebec, who, as well as recording albums of his own, was then also functioning as Blue Note’s A&R man. Jackson made his Blue Note debut on the organist Baby Face Willette’s Face to Face in January 1961; twelve months later he recorded his own album, released later in 1962 under the title Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’. In 1963 and ’64 he appeared on two albums by another organist, ‘Big’ John Patton: the wonderful Along Came John in 1963 and The Way I Feel in 1964.

And that was it. After the session for the second Patton album, on June 19, 1964, Jackson disappeared completely and permanently from the radar screen. Nothing is known about his subsequent life (or, perhaps, death — were he still alive, he would be in his mid-nineties now).

All that we know about him is that he was probably born in 1931, probably in Atlanta, Georgia, and that at the time he recorded for Blue Note he was a member of Lloyd Price’s orchestra, through whose ranks — as with Ray Charles’s band — many fine jazz musicians passed (including John Patton). Jackson was one of those players who could switch with ease between R&B and modern jazz.

The available evidence suggests that he wasn’t what you’d call a great player, merely a very good one. But I’ve always been fond of Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’. It’s the sort of thing I remember one American critic describing as “meat-and-potatoes” jazz: no frills, no trimmings, no culinary experiments. Jackson’s accompanists are the guitarist Willie Jones, the drummer Wilbert Hogan, and, most interestingly, the Detroit organist Earl Van Dyke, best known in his role as a key Motown session man in the 1960s. How he came to be with Jackson at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on February 5, 1962 has never been explained, but it’s nice to hear the hero of soul music favourites like “All For You” and “6 by 6” in the sort of setting he would have known extremely well from countless gigs in his hometown bars.

The programme consists of seven Jackson compositions, for which the term “originals” would be misleading: they’re mostly variations on the contours of better known jazz tunes, things like Milt Jackson’s “Bags’ Groove” and Nat Adderley’s “Work Song”. This is what was then known as “soul jazz”, full of gospel phrases strained through the bebop format, emphasised by the sound of the Hammond, which started its life as a church instrument. Jackson has a strong tone, a little hoarse at times, not as immediately identifiable as other Blue Note tenorists (Turrentine, Don Wilkerson, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter). His solos are always to the point and, as in the slow blues “Southern Exposure”, fit the mood beautifully.

Very much the sort of music that belongs in places with names like the Flame Show Bar and the Thunderbird Lounge, accompanied by the sound of background chatter and clinking glasses, cutting through a fog of cigarette smoke, it’s all well executed and perfectly enjoyable. But when the producer Michael Cuscuna came to reissue the album on CD in 1997, in Blue Note’s Connoisseur series, he was able to raid the archives for seven tracks recorded two months later, for which the same line-up was augmented by the addition of the great bassist Sam Jones, whose previous work for Blue Note had included an appearance on Cannonball Adderley’s classic Somethin’ Else in 1958. And those seven tracks, intended to form a second album, tell a slightly different story.

Perhaps it’s the presence of Jones, or maybe Quebec and the Blue Note co-founder and producer Alfred Lion asked Jackson for more variety. Whatever the stimulus, these seven compositions move into adjacent territories, including straight bebop on “Stretchin’ Out”, where Jackson proves his mastery of that most demanding idiom, delivering a fluent and well argued solo full of imagination and surprise. A lovely blues ballad called “Teena” is actually a barely disguised rewrite of “St James’ Infirmary”, a neatly arranged version of “Joshua For the Battle of Jericho” is retitled “Egypt Land”, and a medium-up 12-bar called “On the Spot” together make this session a more varied and sophisticated affair. An unidentified percussionist on two Latin-inflected tracks might be Garvin Masseaux, who played the shekere on Quebec’s album Soul Samba a few months later.

According to Cuscuna, Alfred Lion seems to have concluded that 35 minutes of music was not enough to make an album (although Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ was only a minute or two longer). More likely is that the first album didn’t achieve enough sales to justify a follow-up. Blue Note often did well with 45s aimed at jukebox and radio play (such as Patton’s “The Silver Meter” and Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder”), but I can find no reference to a 45 extracted from Jackson’s first album (** I’m wrong — see Comments).

Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ is getting another reissue this spring, in Blue Note’s Tone Poet series, which features the original album in remastered 180g vinyl form, encased in a gatefold sleeve with extra session photos by label’s other co-founder, Francis Wolff, who had a way of lighting musicians that turned them — and their button-down shirts and heavyweight shawl-necked cardigans — into after-hours icons. The latest reissue won’t have is those extra seven tracks, which give a broader view of Fred Jackson’s gifts. But whatever his unknown fate, it’s nice to see him back in the catalogue.

* The photo of Fred Jackson was taken during the Hootin’ ‘n Tootin’ session and is included in The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Framcis Wolff, published by Rizzoli in 1995. The Tone Poet reissue of the album is released on April 3.

Feb 3

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Hello (and goodbye), Jimmy Reed

Half a century after his death at the age of 50, the great bluesman Jimmy Reed turned up yesterday in the New York Times obituaries section. The NYT has an excellent habit of memorialising, under the rubric ‘Overlooked’, people who weren’t seemed worthy of inclusion at the time of their death. Nice to see Reed getting his due, however belated.

While he’s not forgotten today, his influence is certainly underrated. The records he cut in Chicago for the Vee-Jay label between 1953 and 1965 were the ones that white British teenagers hoping to become musicians were most likely to start off by studying and copying in the early ’60s. Their rudimentary nature made them the easiest first lessons in the language of the blues.

The tempo of the basic shuffle didn’t vary much, usually from a slow-medium slouch to a medium lope. The characteristic twist to the basic blues chords was extremely powerful but straightforward and easy for a beginner to learn. This was what a young guitarist would master before feeling confident enough to tackle Chuck Berry’s intros or Elmore James’s slide figures. Reed’s harmonica style, with its long, high held notes, was relatively easy to imitate, as was the engaging mushmouth vocal style in which he sang his simple but compelling songs: “Hush Hush”, “Big Boss Man”, “Shame Shame Shame” and the rest. For British kids, it was like sitting the 11-plus exam: the entrance to a world of possibilities.

Reed liked having his own rhythm guitar supported by those of his friends, particularly Eddie Taylor and Lefty Bates. Somehow they never fell over each other. Sometimes there was a bass player (the young Curtis Mayfield played bass on a handful of sides in 1959) and always a drummer, first Earl Phillips and then Al Duncan, who also knew how to stay out of the way. Nowadays we can smile fondly when the beat gets turned around or Reed comes in a bar early, and yet still the record was deemed fit for release.

With those materials, Reed won the allegiance of a generation. His records were covered by those who were on their way to fame via the adopted medium of R&B — the Stones with “Honest I Do”, the Yardbirds with “I Ain’t Got You”, Them with “Baby What You Want Me to Do”, the Animals with “”Bright Lights, Big City”, the Grateful Dead with “Big Boss Man”, the Steve Miller Band with “You’re So Fine”. And the covers continued to proliferate, from Elvis Presley’s “Big Boss Man” in 1967 through Aretha Franklin’s “Honest I Do” in 1970 to Boz Scaggs’ “Down in Virginia” in 2018. And on his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan recorded a new song called “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, which has since become a regular part of his concert repertoire.

About 20 years ago I put together a proposal for a book about Reed. I’d read that he was broke when he died, and I started asking myself where all the money had gone. He’d written almost all of his hits, sold a lot of records, and seen his songs included on big-selling albums by other artists. Over the years, that would have been a great deal of money, very little of which made his way to him before his death after an epileptic attack in 1976.

I had in mind to do some serious research into what happened to his publishing copyrights — how many hands they had passed through, and who were the people, probably sitting behind large desks in Midtown Manhattan office blocks, who really made the money from them. That way I could tell the story behind the remark once made by the R&B singer Ruth Brown, who said of Ahmet Ertegun, the boss of her record company, that “for every Picasso on his wall, I had a damp stain on mine.”

I was going to call the book Meet Me in Your Home Town, after one of my favourite Reed songs. It was a reference to the way a sharecropper’s son from rural Mississippi, one of 10 children, had escaped plantation life, finding his way to Chicago and thence into the world of teenagers in just about every town in Britain, among whose number I included myself.

Sadly, the book never got written. Something else got in the way. But I’m pleased to see him being remembered in the columns of the New York Times, in an obit with which I have only one quibble. The author suggests that Reed’s delivery was “not as mesmerising, for example, as the reverberating braggadocio of Muddy Waters or the otherworldly moaning of Howlin’ Wolf.” Oh, dear writer, mesmerising is exactly what Jimmy Reed was. And still is.

* All Jimmy Reed’s Vee-Jay recordings were collected by Charly Records in 1994 in a six-CD set titled The Vee-Jay Years.