Still the One

Cannonball Adderley

Everyone has a short list of memorable events, occurrences that make such an impression that we can recall exactly where we were when they happened. I was born in 1950, so my list includes the Kennedy assassination, the first landing on the moon, and the Beatles appearances on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” Also on my list is the date August 8, 1975. Forty years ago today, I was in my car outside Rome, New York when I heard the radio announce that Julian “Cannonball” Adderley had passed away.

I’ve written about Cannonball before, and he is still my all-time favorite jazz artist. As an up-and-coming saxophonist I was first influenced by the cool toned and somewhat dispassionate Paul Desmond, who became popular alongside Dave Brubeck. But Cannonball offered something else: a perfect balance of technique, tone, and passionate delivery. The fact that he was an engaging speaker and invited the listener into the music was a big plus.

I was so into Cannonball’s recordings that I noticed when he switched saxophones, from a King Super 20 to the more iconic Selmer. I was not the only fan who noticed. During my interview with Charles McPherson, a major player in the world of jazz saxophone, we discussed this change.

MR:   Can we get a shot of you holding your horn? I’m trying to recognize what kind of horn it is.

Charles McPherson

CM:   It’s a King. Most people play a Selmer, and this is a King Super 20.

MR:   Yeah. Cannonball used to play it.

CM:   Yeah Cannonball and Bird. Yeah. And it’s a very nice horn, it’s very human-like. Very much like the human voice.

MR:   It’s interesting you say that because when I hear your tone — actually the thing that attracts me to a player is the tone first. And I hear that in your sound. And I noticed when Cannonball switched from King to Selmer that I was disappointed.

CM:   Unbelievable. I mean I know that. But I’m surprised that — well you said you play saxophone.

MR:   Yeah, but I heard it.

CM:   Isn’t that something, because I did too. And so you really do know. Because that’s a subtle thing, but it is a difference. And I remember it as a CD or record, whatever, where he did play Selmer for a while. And it was great, and it’s still great ‘cause he’s great. And I remember that oh this is great, but it doesn’t have that pop or that warmth either. And the Selmer is a great horn, and he sounded great on it. But this King, it was just something about that that, I don’t know just Cannonball sounded great on this. And Charlie Parker sounded great on this horn. I’ve heard other people on this horn that don’t sound so great, and I hope I’m not one of them.

I’d like to take a brief look at three recordings that personified the Cannonball Adderley legacy.

Cannonball burst into the New York jazz scene in the mid-1950s and his 1957 recording of the uptempo “Spectacular” demonstrated his mastery of the demanding and sometimes frantic bop style. He had so absorbed the language of Charlie Parker that the critics jumped on the bandwagon and hailed him as the new Bird. “Spectacular” is an impressive display of technique and chordal-based improvisation.

Ten years later Cannonball and his quintet had progressed into a style that critics called “soul jazz.” From the album “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” “Sticks” provides a striking example of Cannonball in full blues/gospel/soul mode. “The Sticks” is a 12-bar blues with an ear-catching melody. Brother Nat plays three exciting choruses; near the end of his third he engages in some stuttering double-tonguing. Cannonball, always aware of his musical surroundings, jumps on Nat’s phrasing at 1:27, roaring into a solo that has the live audience completely in his corner.

One year later, again in a live situation, Cannonball displayed his masterful approach to a ballad. The song “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” provided him with a highly expressive vehicle and his huge tone filled the room. If you listen to Cannon’s voice at the end of the song, it sounds like he actually choked himself up with the intensity of the song.

Drummer Roy McCurdy spent twelve years with Cannonball and spoke enthusiastically about his experience. Here he speaks of a unique method for keeping in sync with the brothers:

Roy McCurdy

RM:   Did you ever see Cannon and Nat live?

MR:   Oh, yeah.

RM:   They were really funny to me, because I was behind them all the time, looking at them. And this brother was short and Cannon was tall. And they had a way of snapping their fingers and moving, and their behinds were both in sync you know. And they would be snapping and the behinds would be in sync.

MR:   It’s almost as if you guys were creating a style as you went along.

RM:   Yeah. It was.

MR:   Did you have a name for it or did you let other people name it?

RM:   We just let other people name it. It was just music for us you know. We didn’t want to be in one particular slot all the time, like just straight ahead jazz or something. We wanted to be able to do all kinds of things and have some fun. And not only did we do funk and soul and Gospel and jazz, we also experimented with different time figures and things too at that time. Like 7/4 time, 5/4 time and things like that. We did “Seventy-four Miles Away.” That album was 7/4 time.

Vocalist Nancy Wilson credits Cannonball with jumpstarting her career, and during our interview I told her of my enthrallment with one of her early albums, “Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley.” Oddly enough, the critics were not kind to this recording.

MR:   This particular album, I can’t imagine anybody saying anything bad about it.

Nancy Wilson

NW:   Oh it was the fact that Cannonball Adderley had kind of stepped out of the jazz thing, into the pop. Because this was a huge across the board album. It was not just a jazz album. “The Masquerade Is Over,” “Sleeping Bee,” these songs just popped out everywhere. And that was the good thing about radio in those days and music is that the focus wasn’t so narrow then. We were able to play concert venues, Carnegie Hall where we were also able to go into, the south side of Chicago and play The Southerland. So you could do so many more things then than you can today. The labels kind of keep you out of places. Whereas before we tried to broaden the scope. I believe that Cannonball Adderley took jazz out of the sawdust and he was one of the more commercial jazz artists. And he made his audience understand what he was doing.

It’s hard to say what Cannonball Adderley would be doing with his musical career if he had lived. Other artists, such as Benny Carter and Milt Hinton remained productive into their eighties and nineties. The avante garde saxophonist Kidd Jordan offered his opinion on what Cannonball’s music might have evolved into, and gave us a bit of insight into his personality:

Kidd Jordan

KJ:   Cannonball was one of my favorite players too. And look, changes didn’t mean nothing to him, you know that huh? Cannonball was playing by ear. I mean he could hear changes like that, and that’s why he went and locked in all them patterns that people was playing. Well you know Cannonball, and he sounded like a first alto player, that was another thing.

MR:   That’s for sure.

KJ:   That’s right. Cannonball could lead us saxes man. I listened to that Cannonball and they’re talking about first alto players, as a soloist he’s got the same thing that all those first alto players had. You know? And changes didn’t mean nothing. Believe me. Cannonball could play through ‘cause he could hear ‘em. Now that’s a case that that’s a complete musician. And look, before he died he told me he said, “Kidd, you know what? I’m going to play some of that crazy stuff, you see the next album I do? I’m gonna do some of the crazy stuff you’re doing.” But he died before that. Now that would have been something.

MR:   What kind of guy was he?

KJ:   Oh easy, happy-go-lucky, I mean one of the most beautiful cats I ever knew. And I got — he and Alvin Batiste was great friends. And me and Alvin was brother-in-laws you know, we’ve been brother-in-laws for 50 years now, so every time Cannon would come in they’d be cooking gumbo and all, and it would be party time when he’d come to town.

I know I’ll spend this weekend listening to some of my favorite Cannonball from the LPs that I saved my money for back in the early 60s. You can read our previous blog on Cannonball entitled, “Mercy Mercy” from May of 2009.

Inside the Studios, Part IV

Our look at the studio scene will conclude with a few more scenarios experienced by some of our Archive interviewees.

Trumpeter Joe Wilder had the skill and work ethic to become an integral part of the studio scene and found that he could have played sessions almost nonstop. His professionalism led him to self-limit his participation in order to maintain his skill level. Joe observed some musicians who couldn’t resist playing every possible session they could.

Joe Wilder

MR:    I remember you talking a little bit about some fellows who would try to cut corners and play the game of booking two sessions at the same time.

JW:    These were guys who were counting every penny they could get. And someone would call you for a jingle date, a television commercial or something. And they would say well can you do a date from 10 ‘til 12. And the guy would say yes. And someone else would call and say “yeah, I’ve got a date that goes from 12 o’clock until 3, can you make it?” Now he’s got a date from 10 ‘til 12, and he’s like 15 blocks away from the other studio. It’s no way he’s going to get to the other gig on time. And so the guy would say yes to the fellow. Instead of saying I won’t be able to make it because I’m already busy, he’d say yes to the guy that has the 12 to 3 date, and show up on his date at maybe a quarter to one, and say jeez, you know I didn’t know that the other date was going to go overtime or something, not calling to warn him of it or anything, just to make the money, rather than saying let somebody else make it. There’s enough for all of us, and there was at that time, a lot. Sometimes we did three or four jingle dates on the same day. And it got to the point where, in my case, I wouldn’t accept more than three because sometimes you’d go on one and it would be so easy that you felt like you were robbing them, and then by the time you got to the fourth one it would be something so hard that you wish you hadn’t started playing the instrument. So I knew that I could handle three in one day, but four was rough.

Bass trombonist Alan Raph, who was noted in our last blog entry, further described the musical rat race which could cloud one’s judgment:

Alan Raph

AR:    At that point I was juggling. That’s the story of my life, juggling. Keeping [Gerry] Mulligan happy when I had to send a sub to the first set at Birdland every night because I was playing a Broadway show. I was doing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” which let out at 11. And Mulligan started at Birdland at 9 or 9:30. So Benny Powell used to sub for me. And I came in and did the second [set] and did the night. I’d finish at 4:00 and then go home and get up early and do a couple of dates and do a show and do that again. It was kind of interesting. But juggling. Keeping one contact while you make another, and then honoring the commitments. If you overbook, and you do this all the time, you book something that’s right on the tail of something else and then you have the problem of trying to get out of the first thing a little bit early or come to the second thing a little bit late. And there’s generally a way. I mean I only once or twice had to resort to outright subterfuge. I remember once breaking — my daughter at the time had a little plastic cow and I broke its foot off and put iodine on it. In the middle of a rehearsal I reached in and said, “oh man, I just broke my tooth.” I managed to get out of rehearsal. I left the trombone on the chair, just to make it look really good, and I went out, took my other trombone and went and did a brass quintet date Uptown. Every now and then I’d have to do something like that but not too often.

Studio work almost always paid better than the average club date, and musicians sometimes became overzealous in their quest for the extra bread. Saxophonist Kidd Jordan spoke about playing studio sessions in New Orleans, and how the players collaborated to earn a few extra dollars.

Kidd Jordan

MR:    Did you just show up and play?

KJ:    That’s right. And we had the head. They didn’t have any arrangement. We’d put a head arrangement on it and we’d go and put something on it after they started singing.

MR:    Was most of that stuff done with everybody there? Was it live?

KJ:    Oh yeah, you had to do that. And then we had a trick, you make a mistake this time, you  make a mistake the next time, and keep going round and round so you’d get overtime. ‘Cause there wasn’t no punching in, I mean everything had to go down, the vocalist, the band, the whole rhythm section so everybody had to do it. So we got our formulas for that too, and all the sessions was union sessions and we had a formula for that also.

Kidd described a now-obsolete way of making recordings: band and vocalist recording together and horn players creating a head arrangement on the spot. As technology changed, recording methods kept in lockstep. Trumpeter Lew Soloff of Blood, Sweat & Tears described how one of his signature solos was constructed:

Lew Soloff

MR:    When you did the solo on Lucretia Macevil, did they make you play a bunch of them and then choose?

LS:    God that solo, there were so many touches in that solo. Bobby Colomby produced that tune, and he would punch in here and punch in there, and that solo was very, very constructed by Bobby. I mean I like the way it came out, but it was very constructed by Bobby and I always used to think that that was wrong, but I don’t think it’s so wrong. I mean I don’t want to mention names, I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a lot of incredible pop records that are made and they’re constructed that way. My favorite playing, for the record, on that is just where they fade me out. That’s when I start to really go, just before they fade me out. I’d like to hear what I played after that.

You can listen to Lew’s solo here, starting at 3:56 in this version. It sounds like a brilliant one-take performance, which was the goal. Listen carefully to the fade out. Lew does one of those musical quotes which is still keeping me up at night, trying to figure out its origin.

Much of the music these accomplished musicians were called upon to record was harmonically simple and musically unchallenging. The jazz musicians who stayed out of the studios — either by choice or by lack of qualifications — sometimes looked askance at their colleagues who were thriving in the studio scene. Drummer Panama Francis spoke about his friends’ perception of his studio work in rock ‘n roll:

Panama Francis

PF:    By the jazz musicians I was called that rock ‘n roll drummer. It was a put down. Like we’d be in the bar at Jim and Andy’s and I’d walk in the door and they’d say, “ohhh, here comes this rock ‘n roller.” They didn’t realize how much money I was making, but when they found out how much money I was making, they was knocking the door down to make them records. But anyhow, two years ago they honored me, they gave me $15,000 and a plaque. And I went to make my acceptance speech and all I could say was “ladies and gentlemen“ and I bust out in tears, uncontrollable. Because I was hurt by the jazz musicians who knew me and knew that I worked in bands and heard me in jam sessions, and they went along with the white musicians who labeled me a rock ‘n roll musician. Because they never heard me play no jazz, because I was in Harlem all the time see, with the big bands. So they didn’t get a chance to hear me on 52nd Street. So they thought that this was all I could do, you know, that I was only able to play rock ‘n roll. And my so-called friends and brothers that knew different, never stood up and said well no man, he can play something else. I never got called for a big band date, I never got called for a jazz date. That was a label that was laid on me that wasn’t fair, because, I mean, I was able to play, you know, at the age of 13 I was playing in bands. I wasn’t playing no rhythm & blues — I was playing in bands, playing arrangements and things. But I knew how to play this music, because I used to play in the church. Just like rhythm & blues became rock ‘n roll. It’s like the word “funk.” That was a dirty word with black people. You told somebody to “funk” you’d be ready to fight. But the jazz critic heard the term being used by musicians, and they thought it was hip and it caught on. So they said, “he sure plays funky, doesn’t he.” I remember the time you used that word that you’re liable to get your teeth knocked out of you. I mean that wasn’t a nice word.

I’ll conclude this series with a brief anecdote of my own. A close friend in Utica, Bob Yauger, operated a respectable studio where I assisted as a producer and studio musician. I would often overdub a keyboard or sax part for local bands searching for their own moment of stardom. On one session I showed up with my saxophone and the producer said, “all we need is one screeching note in this two-beat break in the song.” He did his best imitation of a motivational coach and hyped me for the moment: “you rock, you’re the man, you can do it” and other similar blather. Fortunately for me, the note happened to be a high A, transposed to my alto sax, a high F#, slightly out of the range of the horn but a note that I could squeeze out with appropriate intensity. I donned the headphones, and when the moment came I screamed out a high F# for all I was worth. The producer was ecstatic. That was it. I was done — 15 minutes in and out — a first take. The question arose, what do I charge for one note? Do I charge for just the note? What about the money I saved the band for doing my part in less than a quarter of an hour? I honestly can’t remember what I ended up making for that session, but I was grateful that the producer was not one who said, “that was perfect, let’s do it again.”

That’s a wrap on our studio sequence.