Neville's nostalgic doo wop CD

The Grammy Award-winning singer Aaron Neville has a nice new CD out on the venerable Blue Note label, “My True Story,” which is the New Orleans singer’s tribute to doo wop.
Although it was recorded in studios in New York and New Orleans, the relaxed session has a live feel to it. Neville and the band — which includes the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Greg Leisz on guitar, Tony Scherr on bass and others — sound as if they’re playing after hours in a small club in the French Quarter. It’s genuine downhome music as Neville sings such classics as “Money Honey,” “Ruby Baby,” “My True Story,” “Ting a Ling,” “Gypsy Woman,” “Be My Baby,” “Tears on My Pillow,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Work with Me Annie,” “This Magic Moment,” ending with Jesse Belvin’s “Goodnight, My Love.”

 Aaron Neville's "My True Story"

is his latest from Blue Note.

(Belvin died in a car wreck in Hope in 1960 at the age of 27 after appearing at the first integrated concert with Sam Cooke in Little Rock, which the future music critic Robert Palmer attended as a teenager.)

Blue Note has gone well beyond its jazz roots with the signing of Neville, Norah Jones and other pop artists. But Blue Note has not forgotten its roots and continues to issue terrific jazz.

Among its recent releases is Wayne Shorter’s “Without a Net” (reviewed here Feb. 16), a live recording of the 79-year-old saxophonist’s recent concerts in Europe and Los Angeles, which sound as good as his classic Blue Note recordings from the 1960s.

Blue Note, the world’s most famous jazz label, started in 1939 by two young refugees from Germany, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, has recorded the giants of jazz, from Albert Ammons to Thelonious Monk, from John Coltrane to Horace Silver.

The label made just one record with Coltrane, “Blue Trane,” in 1957, which kicked off his most creative period with Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones (although Coltrane made several fine Blue Note records as a sideman).

After he recorded “Blue Trane,” Coltrane left Blue Note for Atlantic Records and Impulse. He died in 1967, leaving behind his widow Alice and a baby they named for Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist. Ravi Coltrane has grown into a major jazz artist and has released his own recording from Blue Note, “Spirit Fiction,” where he plays tenor and alto saxophone. Along with his young band, he’s joined by Geri Allen on piano and tenor player Joe Lovano.

Ravi’s dad would have been proud.

The younger Coltrane has a sound that is as fresh as his father’s when he first came on the scene 65 years ago. Building on the history of modern jazz that his dad helped create, Ravi Coltrane has the good fortune to play alongside Joe Lovano. Much of “Spirit Fiction” consists of duets with Coltrane and Lovano. You have to listen closely to tell the two apart as the older musician inspires the younger Coltrane to play his best.

Lovano’s sound is as accomplished as any saxophone player of our time. His “From the Soul” from 1991 is a modern masterpiece and gets a crown rating from the Penguin Guide to Jazz CDs. It ranks up there with another great saxophone player’s late Blue Note CD, Joe Henderson’s “Live at  the Village Vanguard,” which also gets a crown rating in the Penguin guide.

Lovano, who has recorded prolifically for Blue Note, has a new CD out called “Cross Culture” with the Grammy Award-winning bassist Esperanza Spalding, West African guitarist and fellow Blue Note artist Lionel Loueke, James Weidman on  piano and
 
Otis Brown III and 
Francisco Mela on drums.

The sound is superb and the musicianship is classic Blue Note.

Byrd dies, Shorter soars

Donald Byrd, one of finest jazz trumpet players of the second half of the 20th Century, died earlier this month at the age of 80. Some of his fans might not even have known he was still around, having given up the limelight in middle age when he concentrated on music education. They had remembered him as a hard-charging musician in the 1950s and 1960s who changed directions around 1970 and started making more commercial music that harmed his reputation in some jazz circles.

Byrd, a Detroit native, made his first great jazz recordings in the mid-1950s, when he was still in his early 20s. He sounded like an old pro, when he led a group on “Byrd’s World” on the Savoy label with Frank Foster, the Count Basie veteran on tenor saxophone, Hank Jones on piano and Paul Chambers on bass. A year later, he recorded for Prestige with the great John Coltrane and Hank Mobley on tenor, Elmo Hope on piano, Philly Joe Jones and drums and again Chambers of bass.

For the next 15 years, Byrd appeared on several outstanding LPs, most of them for the Blue Note label. He was not among the top tier of trumpet players at Blue Note, where Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham were the trumpet stars, but he was up there with Blue Mitchell and Charles Tolliver, and they were good enough.

Byrd played with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers — Blakey was a great spotter of talent — and also recorded with such Blue Note stars as Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Lou Donaldson and others.

Byrd was a fine leader of his own small groups, and he also co-led with the baritone saxophone player Pepper Adams. “The Complete Blue Note Donald Byrd-Pepper Studio Sessions” from Mosaic in 2000 helped boost Byrd’s image as a hardbop player with younger listeners and older fans who’d forgotten how good he was.

He also nurtured new talent, especially the piano player Herbie Hancock, who appeared on most of Byrd’s mid-period records, including a couple of the Byrd-Pepper sessions, as well as “Free Form” with tenor saxophone player Wayne Shorter, “A New Perspective” with Hank Mobley again and “I’m Trying to Get Home” with Stanley Turrentine on tenor.

By the end of the 1960s, Byrd must have tired of bebop — playing hard takes its toll on a musician — and anyway, by the end of the 1960s, jazz was struggling. So he moved into R&B, fusion and funk and made some serious money, especially with “Blackbyrd,” Blue Note’s biggest seller.

He also became an educator and stayed out of the limelight by the 1980s. Rappers sampled his music, and he must have lived comfortably on the income from his record royalties. From all accounts, Byrd was an unassuming musician even when he led his own groups. He loved to teach and leaves behind a legacy of first-rate jazz from the 1950s and 1960s that will be heard for generations.

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Amazingly, the aforementioned Wayne Shorter is recording for Blue Note again after a 40-year absence that took him into similar territory that Byrd inhabited in the 1970s: Shorter’s group Weather Report with Joe Zawinul on keyboards was perhaps the most influential fusion group of the era, but he has returned to more traditional jazz.

Shorter plays tenor and soprano saxophone on “Without a Net,” his newest from Blue Note, which is as daring as anything he has done during his illustrious career.

His definition of jazz is “I dare you.”

He’s never been afraid to walk a tightrope for more than 50 years, starting with the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra and the Jazz Messengers. He made his biggest mark with Miles Davis in the 1960s.

Along the way, he led several important recording sessions on Blue Note. Before that, in the early 1960s, he co-led sessions on the small VeeJay label with Lee Morgan, whose collaboration is available on the astonishing “Complete VeeJay Lee Morgan-Wayne Shorter Sessions” from Mosaic.

Shorter is also heard on two other important Mosaic box sets, “The Complete Blue Note Record-ings of Art Blakey’s 1960 Jazz Messengers” and “The Complete Plugged Nickel Sessions” with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.

In his 80th year, Shorter is better than ever. “Without a Net” is a compilation of live recordings made in Europe in 2011 with a brilliant quartet that includes the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and Shreveport’s own Brian Blade on drums.

One lovely tune was recorded in Los Angeles with the Imani Winds quartet.

Some of the music is traditional jazz, much of it is free form and all of it is brilliant. After 55 years, Wayne Shorter continues to explore new sounds, taking new ideas from his collaborators, and in the meantime, reinventing the venerable Blue Note label, which has been issuing glorious music since 1939. May it continue for another 74 years.

Michael Burks, Iron Man, RIP

Michael (Iron Man) Burks, probably the most successful Arkansas blues musician of the last 10 years, suffered a heart attack Sunday at the Atlanta airport after returning from a European tour. His wife, Bobbie, a 1981 Cabot High School graduate, was with him when Burks collapsed. He was taken to a nearby hospital, but doctors could not revive him. Burks was 54.

Bobbie Burks brought his ashes home to Arkansas on Wednesday and plans a memorial service for him in Camden, Little Rock or Memphis. His family lived in Camden for generations apart from a few years in Milwaukee.

“I just wanted to say thank you to all the love and support from my classmates,” she wrote on the Cabot Class of 1981 Facebook page. “You guys are truly a great group of people…. Thank you for all the prayers. They help more than you could possibly know.”

The Iron Man, who lived in North Little Rock, headlined numerous blues festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including King Biscuit in Helena and the Eureka Springs Blues Festival, as well as smaller ones around the state. He always put on a great show. We were looking forward to his return next month to Sticky Fingerz in Little Rock, where he often played and sometimes just hung around and talked to his fans.

He was built like a middleweight boxer and had a soulful voice and played a powerful guitar reminiscent of another Arkansas bluesman, the late Son Seals. They both recorded for Alligator Records in Chicago, which issued their award-winning CDs, including Burks’ “Iron Man,” “I Smell Smoke” and “Make It Rain.” Burks and Seals: A couple of true legends.

Donations in Michael Burks’ name may be made to the Class of 1981 Memorial Scholarship Foundation, P.O. Box 200, Cabot, Ark. 72023. Donations may also be made to the Handy Artists Relief Trust at blues.org.

Levon Helm, 1940-2012

I pulled in to Nazareth, was feeling ‘bout half past dead
I just need some place where I can lay my head
“Hey mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?’’
He just grinned and shook my hand, “No’’ was all he said
Take a load off, Fanny
Take a load for free
Take a load off, Fanny
And you put the load right on me
—The Weight, 1968

Levon Helm, the drummer for The Band who passed away Thursday at the age of 71, helped open Alltel Arena in 1999 with Ronnie Hawkins, his longtime mentor, and a fellow Band member, the organist Garth Hudson.

The blues harmonica virtuoso James Cotton was also at the inaugural concert. Helm, with his propulsive drumming and downhome singing, was having a good time and appeared to be in charge, but in a good-natured way.

Like most singers from the Arkansas Delta — Levon was born in 1940 in Elaine in Phillips County — he was unassuming and a natural entertainer. He had a thin, sharecropper’s face—his father grew cotton in Turkey Scratch in Phillips County, where another blues legend, Robert Junior Lockwood, was born 25 years earlier.

Helm had been performing since the Eisenhower-Faubus years, when he was a teenager, not only backing Hawkins, but later Bob Dylan. Helm often came home and in the mid-1960s performed with the harmonica legend Sonny Boy Williamson around Helena before Williamson died in a boarding house there.

Sometime back in the 1960s, Levon even put on a show at his old high school in Helena, where he sang “Up on Cripple Creek” to the delight of youngsters.

For many years, he lived unostentatiously in upstate New York, performing almost to the end. The Band had broken up decades ago — he was the only American in the group, the others were Canadian — so it was mostly because of Levon that they evoked 19th Century America with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,”  “King Harvest Has Surely Come,” “The Weight,” “Ophelia” and so much more. Their sound  influenced generations of musicians from Credence Clearwater Revival to Eric Clapton.

This weekend, watch The Band’s “Last Waltz” farewell concert or listen to their greatest hits CD. Levon Helm will take you back to the Delta and to another time. Rest in peace, Levon, a true son of the South.

Arkansas bluesman left mark

The great Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s longtime guitarist, died last weekend at the age of 80. He’d been in poor health for several years — he carried an oxygen tank with him during performances — but he was a down-to-earth character who grew up in east Arkansas before he headed for Chicago some 60 years ago. The Rolling Stones will pay for his funeral.

His obituaries mentioned he was born in Greenwood, Miss., and grew up in Hughes in St. Francis County, although he told us he was raised on a plantation in Seyypel, just this side of the Mississippi River, some 20 miles from Hughes.

It was at a jukejoint in Seyypel where young Sumlin had first heard Wolf. Sumlin was too young to go inside, so he crawled under the building to listen to Wolf’s east Arkansas musicians, who included Pat Hare and Junior Parker (Elvis later recorded Parker’s “Mystery Train”), and maybe even Joe Willie Wilkins, who was from Mississippi but hung out in east Arkansas. Wilkins was perhaps the greatest post-war Delta guitarist, but he was hardly ever recorded.

Wolf farmed north of Parkin in Cross County during the 1930s and 1940s until he started recording in West Memphis in the late 1940s and then moved to Chicago.

He hired Sumlin soon after and sent him a train ticket to Chicago, where he made a splash as Wolf’s guitarist. They often fought, but they stayed together for more than 20 years, recording such hits as “Red Rooster,” “Spoonful” and others.

Sumlin was often imitated, especially by British rockers, who thought Hubert hung the moon. He was that good.

GOODBYE BABYLON

“Goodbye, Babylon,” from the Dust-to-Digital label, is a six-CD compilation of southern religious music from the 1920s to the 1940s and includes a 200-page book in a small cedar box with cotton around the edges to remind you where the music came from. (Dust-to-Digital is based in Atlanta.)

Included here are 135 songs from 1902-1960 — that’s dating back almost 110 years — by black and white performers, including Thomas A. Dorsey, the Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, Blind Willie Johnson, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mahalia Jackson, the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Bill Monroe (before Bill started recording bluegrass), Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Stanley Brothers, Skip James, Carl Smith, Bukka White, Josh White, Hank Williams.

These are just some of the best-known performers. Dozens of less famous artists are also well represented, from the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers to the Blue Sky Boys to Heavenly Gospel Singers to the Seventh Day Adventist Choir. The sixth disc includes 25 sermons recorded between 1926-1941.

A beautifully illustrated booklet is included. Scholars who contribute to this important anthology include Paul Oliver, David Evans, Tony Russell, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Guido van Rijn and others. Indispensable.

“Goodbye to Babylon” is available for $77 from Amazon and would make a great Christmas present for anyone who loves American spirituals and the sweet sound of music before it was homogenized and commercialized and watered down. This stuff is for real.

This is perhaps the best anthology of American spirituals with outstanding sound restoration. The set, which was released in 2003, is a favorite of rock performers like Neil Young, who gave a copy to Bob Dylan. This is the kind of music that reminds them of their roots and ours. It’s the voice of America, which you can always enjoy and appreciate.

DOCK BOGGS

Although he did not record much religious music, Dock Boggs is often mentioned when the subject of old roots music comes up. In the 1920s, he recorded only a dozen songs, along with five alternate takes, which are available on “Country Blues” on the Revenant label.

Boggs sings country songs in a haunting voice, accompanied by his banjo. His music about love and violence is powerful. He might be the greatest white performer you’ll hear on a record.

He was born in Virginia and worked in the coal mines most of his life. His wife told him to quit his music career, and he didn’t record and perform again until the folk revival of the 1960s. He died in 1971 at the age of 73.

“Country Blues” comes with an attractive booklet and additional music by Bill and Hayes Shepherd, his contemporaries. They’re not nearly as good as Boggs, but then no one was.

This CD would also make a good Christmas present, but a better one would be Revenant’s boxed double white vinyl. You can find it online for about $50. It’s worth it.

Soulful sounds still amaze

The Bo-Keys are keeping the Memphis sound alive with their brash, funky music and vocal backing from great soul singers like Otis Clay, William Bell and Percy Wiggins.


They appear on the Bo-Keys’ “Got to Get Back!” CD and LP, which we reviewed here last weekend with a special mention of trumpet player Marc Franklin, a Sylvan Hills High School graduate, who helps make the Bo-Keys’ horn section one of the best in the nation.


The veteran soul singers on “Got to Get Back!” have a long track record going back to the 1960s. Clay’s many fine records include his “Complete Otis Clay on Hi Records,” “Soul Man: Live in Japan,” “Respect Yourself,” “Gospel Truth” and several other gospel CDs.


Bell was a star at Stax, where his records included “The Soul of a Bell,” perhaps his best, and “Phase of Reality/Relating” and “Wow/Bound to Happen” (two LPs on one CD).


Percy Wiggins sent us his fine CD, “Soulful Sounds of the 60s and 70s,” which includes the singles “It Didn’t Take Much” and “That’s Loving You,” two big hits at discos around the world in the 1970s.
Percy’s brother, Spencer, also had a prolific career in the 1960s and 1970s. “The Goldwax Years” and “Feed the Flame: The Fame and XL Recordings” have been reissued on the British Kent label. His deep, soulful singles were classics of Memphis soul, but were hardly promoted when they were first released.


“Feed the Flame” was mostly recorded in Muscle Shoals, Ala., another important center for soul in the 1960s and 1970s. Both CDs are excellent and are beautifully packaged with informative liner notes.


The Numero Group pays homage to Syl Johnson, the soul singer, with a lavishly produced “Complete Mythology” box set that includes all of his Chicago recordings. The stunningly de-signed set includes 81 tracks on six LPs, which are duplicated on four CDs, as well as a lavish catalogue with photos and a text by Bill Dahl.


It’s an astonishing retrospective of ’60s and ’70s Chicago soul music from tiny labels that, according to Dahl, lacked distribution and were largely ignored by critics and record buyers when the records first came out. Johnson’s later Hi recordings in Memphis may have sold better, but his Chicago stuff is superior.


The Mississippi-born Johnson, who is often suspicious of record companies, should be pleased with the result: Numero has put him in the pantheon with Al Green, Otis Clay, James Bell, James Brown, Otis Redding and a handful of others. Johnson is that good.


Johnson’s recordings for Hi in the 1970’s helped popularize the Memphis sound. His “Complete Hi Recordings” is a two-CD set that’s available on Amazon for about $12, like Otis Clay’s, which is a bargain.


The 74-year-old Johnson, who is still performing, is the brother of bluesmen Jimmy Johnson and the late Mack Thompson (the family’s real name).


Someone should bring Syl and Jimmy Johnson to Little Rock, along with Marc Franklin and the Bo-Keys.


The Bo-Keys perform next Saturday evening at Blues on the Bluff in Memphis.

Sylvan Hills grad helps revive Memphis sound

The Bo-Keys horn section includes (from left) Ben Cauley, Kirk Smothers, Floyd Newman and Marc Franklin, who is formerly of Sherwood.

Last month in Overton Park in Memphis, the young trumpet player on stage left was blasting away with the Bo-Keys, an eight-man band that has revived the soulful sounds of Memphis from the 1960s and 1970s.

The trumpet player’s name is Marc Franklin, a Sylvan Hills High School graduate who is one of the younger members of the Mid-South’s greatest soul band, which includes several veterans from the Stax and Hi Records era.

Franklin, who’ll turn 36 on Sunday, is a former Sherwood resident who graduated from Sylvan Hills in 1993 and attended Memphis State, where he soaked up the city’s unique musical sounds.
He has toured with veteran soul-blues singer Bobby (Blue) Bland — they appeared together at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena a few years ago — but now spends his time teaching and recording in Memphis and touring with the Bo-Keys.

Ben Cauley, the other trumpet player in the Bo-Keys, is the only surviving member of the Mar Keys, who perished with Otis Redding in a plane crash in 1967.

The musicians are young and old, black and white, who put on a funky show at the park with veteran soul singers Otis Clay, William Bell and Percy Wiggins.

The free program drew a large crowd to the Levitt Shell, where Elvis Presley performed on July 30, 1954, which many people consider the first rock-and-roll show.

The Bo-Keys evoke the sounds of such instrumental groups as the Bar Kays, Mar Keys and Pac Keys, who backed Redding, Isaac Hayes, Al Green and other soul greats who made the Memphis sound.

Band members also include such Memphis soul veterans as guitarist Skip Pitts (who recorded “Shaft” with Isaac Hayes), keyboardist Archie (Hubie) Turner and drummer Howard Grimes, as well as bassist and band leader Scott Bomar and saxophonists Jim Spake, Derrick Williams and Kirk Smothers.

“I received an excellent music education at Sylvan Hills High School,” Franklin told us later. “Our band director for my sophomore and junior years was Mr. David Stuart. He instilled in us the importance of a strong work ethic and also a love of many different styles of music. This is evident in the amount of former students who still are involved with teaching, playing or engineering music.

“He had an incredible collection of LPs in his office,” Franklin continued.

“This was the first time I heard some of the great soul and funk music of the 60s and 70s. Little did I know that just a few years later I would be working with some of the artists in his record collection.

“Mr. Stuart left my senior year and was replaced by Mr. Tom Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds was a pretty good jazz piano player and worked in and around Little Rock. At the time, I really wanted to be a jazz musician, and it was great to get his insights,” said Franklin, who plays through the side of his mouth, like his mentor Scott Thompson.

The Bo-Keys have just released their soulful “Got to Get Back!” (Electrophonic), which is available on CD and vinyl. The record jumps and shouts with amazing vocal support from several soul and blues veterans: “Got to Get Back to My Baby” with Otis Clay, “Catch This Teardrop” with Spencer Wiggins, “Weak Spot” with William Bell and “I’m Going Home” with Charlie Musselwhite.

Musselwhite was the only vocalist on the record who couldn’t make it to Memphis.

The music sounds better than ever, perhaps because recording technology has greatly improved since Stax and Hi started making records some 50 years ago.

The Bo-Keys continue to tour around the country. They’ll perform again in Memphis on July 23 at the Blues on the Bluff.