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Posts tagged ‘Percy Mayfield’

Aug 21

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“The world is in an uproar…”

Sad and lonely, all the time

That’s because I’ve got a worried mind

You know the world is in an uproar

The danger zone is everywhere, everywhere

When Ray Charles recorded Percy Mayfield’s “The Danger Zone” in New York on the afternoon of the 4th of July, 1961, a few hours before a gig in Atlantic City, the world was indeed in an uproar. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba had just been assassinated. Paris’s two commercial airports had recently been closed for fear of airborne attacks by Algerian rebels. In Cuba, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion had failed to topple the Castro regime. Black and white “freedom riders” had been attacked by racists in Montgomery, Alabama. The anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem had won a presidential election in South Vietnam, where the US government was planning to send thousands more “military advisers”. Rhodesia had just refused to give blacks a bigger say in government. A month later, the Berlin Wall would go up overnight.

I have a long list of favourite Ray Charles records, and “The Danger Zone”, with its perfectly judged vocal and gorgeous small-band arrangement, might just be first among equals. I encountered it on the B-side of “Hit the Road, Jack”, recorded that same afternoon. The words of Mayfield, a great writer, lose no power as the decades go by, and they came to mind yesterday when a track from Leonard Cohen’s forthcoming album, Popular Problems, appeared on YouTube.

I was guided to it by an item on my friend Martin Colyer’s excellent blog, Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week. It’s called “Almost Like the Blues”, and here it is. An unadorned 12-bar sequence, a simple bass-guitar, ticking hand-drums, discreet acoustic and electric keys, a female chorale, a sudden wash of synthetic strings, a distant horn section, and this, delivered as a semi-recitative by a man nearing the end of his 80th year on earth:

I saw some people starving, there was murder, there was rape

Their villages were burning, they were trying to escape

I couldn’t meet their glances, I was staring at my shoes

It was acid, it was tragic, it was almost like the blues

Like the poet Mayfield, the poet Cohen is doing what a poet does: blending the personal and the universal, the great and the small, for an audience waking up each day to the news from Iraq and Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Ferguson, Missouri. He doesn’t try to make sense of it. No one could do that. But he leaves us thinking.

There is no god in heaven and there is no hell below

So says the great professor of all there is to know

But I’ve had the invitation that a sinner can’t refuse

And it’s almost like salvation, it’s almost like the blues…

 

Mar 12

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Maxwell Davis: LA confidential

Maxwell DavisWandering amid the ruins of HMV’s Oxford Street store this week, browsing the half-empty CD racks in a jazz and blues section now relegated to the rear of the basement, I came across genuine treasure: a three-disc set on the Fantastic Voyage label titled Wailin’ Daddy: The Best of Maxwell Davis 1945-59. It had one of those big blue Xs on the cover to alert customers that here was an item marked down in what amounts to the chain’s fire sale: so for a tenner, I got myself 89 tracks of music from that era when jazz and R&B were almost indistinguishable from each other, and when Los Angeles’ Central Avenue must have seemed like heaven.

Maxwell Davis isn’t one of the better known musicians of his era, but he was a key figure. Born in Kansas in 1916, he arrived in LA as a 20-year-old saxophonist with eyes to make a name for himself on the local scene. Having switched from alto to tenor, he secured a job playing with and arranging for the Fletcher Henderson orchestra — until Henderson relocated to New York, where he became Benny Goodman’s arranger, and the band was no more.

It was after World War Two that Davis established his key credentials as a talent scout and organiser of recording sessions. His ability as an A&R man became highly valued by the heads of such local R&B-slanted labels as Aladdin, Modern, RPM and Specialty, not least because he was capable of hiring session musicians, providing them with head arrangements, and taking the tenor solos that were then almost obligatory, whether in raucous, bar-walking mode on an up-tempo number or in more subdued fashion on a ballad or a slow blues.

Dave Penny, the compiler and annotator of this exemplary collection (which was released a couple of years ago, and from which the photograph above is taken), points out that no less an authority than the lyricist and R&B fan Jerry Leiber once estimated that, between Davis’s arrival in LA and his death from a heart attack in 1970, he must have been responsible for a hundred hit records. Those we know about include such classics as Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love”, Joe Liggins’ “Pink Champagne” and Amos Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie”, none of which appears on this anthology, presumably being too familiar to qualify for inclusion. Instead, much of the pleasure of Wailin’ Daddy resides in the chance to discover such comparative obscurities as La Melle Prince’s “Get High”, Crown Prince Waterford’s “Love Awhile” and Cordella De Milo’s “I Ain’t Gonna Hush”, although there are also tracks by Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Jimmy Witherspoon, Helen Humes, B.B. King and T-Bone Walker.

Davis made his career as a high-class back-room boy, but he certainly possessed the instrumental chops to have survived in straight-ahead jazz, had he so wished: tracks here with the young Charles Mingus, the boogie pianist Pete Johnson and others leave no doubt about that. On the first disc, which is devoted to singles released under his own name, there are two tracks on which he trades choruses with Marshall Royal, later to become famous as Count Basie’s stalwart lead altoist, and he suffers not at all by comparison.

But my favourites are four instrumental tracks recorded for Modern in 1949 with a hot little eight-piece band featuring Jake Porter (trumpet), Jack McVea (alto), Davis (tenor), Maurice Simon (baritone), one “A McCoy” (piano), Chuck Norris (guitar), Red Callender (bass) and Lee Young (drums): the highlights are the rolling “Boogie Cocktails”, a forerunner of James Brown’s “Night Train”, and “Belmont Special” and “Bristol Drive”, the greasiest of shuffles. There aren’t many places I’d rather be transported back to than a Central Avenue club on a hot night in the summer of ’49, listening to that lot holding forth for the assembled hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies.