Tav Falco is the ultimate rock and roll auteur, having crafted a persona that tossed convention in the dustbin like yesterday’s news, thereby putting the world on notice. Even saying he purveys “rock and roll” is too conventional for this artist, as the songs he’s curated over the years have included tango, country and western, blues, rockabilly, and crime jazz. That alone is indicative of his ambition. He shall never don the straitjacket of the generic.
Memphians of my generation have known this for a long time. Indeed, Falco was an icon of the city’s underground when he lived here, and remains so for many, though he’s moved onto an international stage in this century, living in Europe or Southeast Asia as his muse dictates. One can still imagine him haunting back alleys and botanicas of Memphis like a juke-joint flaneur. For that reason, he’s sometimes taken for granted here. Yet who else in these days of pastiche treads the same ground with such panache?
Case in point: this year’s live album from Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios, recorded for Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country channel as he and his band toured the country last year. It’s an album that stays true to his original vision, even as it also reveals his evolution. “Ride the snake until we meet again,” reads the album’s cover. “Ride the snake until the end.”
For starters, it’s an excellent career retrospective, including songs from nearly every epoch of this artist’s growth, even as the album refashions them through Falco’s crack Italian band. The group features well-known ringer and session guitarist Mario Monterosso, who moved to Memphis from Rome years ago, joined by Giuseppe Sangirardi on bass and Walter Brunetti on drums, and here they achieve a kind of alchemy, streamlining the chaos of older versions of the Panther Burns while preserving the unhinged approach that so complements Falco’s unique vocals.
Part of the Panther Burns’ power has always rested in pairing Falco’s raw vocals and rhythm guitar with a true virtuoso. This began with the band’s co-founder, the late Alex Chilton, whose command of music led him to adopt a contrarian attitude, sometimes playing a half-step out of tune with the band with mischievous glee. Later, others like New Orleans’ George Reinecke filled that role. Today it’s Monterosso, whose youthful obsession with rockabilly and all things Memphis led to his connection with Falco, and his role as the group’s musical director.
His jazz inclinations, like Chilton’s, are a perfect foil to Falco’s preference for drama over perfect pitch. If Falco’s vocals are bent on embodying the character of each song rather than singing scales, they still rely on executing the music with a fidelity to the original flavor. Thus, the mystery of “Master of Chaos,” a co-write by Monterosso and Falco, is only heightened by the former’s knowledge of crime jazz’s dark harmonies. Introducing it as “an homage to the French literary and cinematic figure … the genius of crime, Fantômas,” Falco conjures up a shadow play with his words, savoring every syllable, while Monterosso and band march on.
The band transforms classic songs from Falco’s long career with some creative twists. “Cuban Rebel Girl,” which was originally a four-on-the-floor rocker, now takes on a swing that almost suggests striptease. And that suggestion of dishabille highlights a more erotic side of Falco’s imagined femme rebelle.
All in all, the band sound is heavier than you might expect. They hammer down as the guitars’ volume swells, with a focus and drive that sometimes eluded the more ramshackle sounds of Falco’s earlier bands. This, too, is a welcome evolution, inspiring Falco to sing with more authority than ever. If you’ve never experienced the Panther Burns before, this is the perfect entre into Falco’s world, accomplished with all the immediacy of a live performance. Pick up a copy and allow yourself to be transported to the Delta, New Orleans, Argentina, Rome, and back again to Memphis, where it all was born.
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns perform at Lafayette’s Music Room Wednesday, October 4th, 7 p.m. Click here for tickets.
While it seems surreal, the best way to imagine this year’s album by the Turnstyles, Turnstyles 2, released locally by Black & Wyatt Records and by Head Perfume Records in Dresden, Germany, is a bicycle built for two towing a garage behind it.
Technically, the band Turnstyles may not record in a garage, or even rehearse in one. But such details matter little when such oil-stained grease monkey habitats so clearly inspire the sound of this duo, composed of drummer/singer Graham Winchester and guitarist/singer Seth Moody (both of whom play in Jack Oblivian & the Sheiks, among many other bands). One can safely assume they both get under the hood, for this is a record as raw and scrappy as a hubcap full of bolts, loud as a glasspack muffler revving up in a closed shop.
Mostly, though, this garage is a place of freedom. One can try anything, and you can be sure that Turnstyles do. Sure, you can call it Maximum R&B one minute if they’re channeling The Who in their earliest incarnation, but just wait a song or two and soon they’ll be doing their best Everly Brothers-on-amphetamines act with “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad),” an angular guitar riff right out of early Eno on “Over You,” or an especially dark take on surf music, as in “Suicide Surf Break” or “Dead Surfer.”
In the end, those latter songs are telling, for surf rock is at the heart of what this guitar-and-drums duo does (other titles on the LP include “Celebrity Surf Day” and “Sex Wax”). It helps that both Winchester and Moody sing, and can even carry off some sub-Everly Brothers but nonetheless ragged-but-right harmonies when they want to. That, combined with the duo’s ear for arrangements and penchant for experimentation, helps to keep things interesting. Even if some of these tunes are pop or punk, there’s a surfer’s heart beating at their center.
“It’s a city park in the depths of dark/It’s a shopping mall in the bathroom stall/It’s a petting zoo, eating barbecue,” they sing in the pop-infused “Twilight Side Boy,” shouting scenarios in rapid-fire succession by way of venting about some rejection. And while their attitude is pure punk at such moments, both singers’ dispositions belie even their toughest lyrical spitting, for this music exudes the playfulness of two kids in a candy store.
Even when Winchester adopts the perspective of a vampire, on the album’s lead track, it’s with such a sense of abandon (the music slamming like The Jam) and roller-coaster-level fun that it’s a world away from David Bowie, Nick Cave, or any goth wannabes. Like the group’s debut, reviewed here in 2020, Turnstyles 2 is an up album — even more so, considering that this is a double platter package, with 27 of the 30 tracks clocking in at three minutes or less, and some of those even under two.
This sense of abandon makes Turnstyles one of the most exciting live bands in the city now. Their sheer energy (and stamina) proves irresistible to most crowds. And soon they’ll be taking their patented sound across the ocean to Europe, right after they play their “Turnstyles Europe[an] Tour Sendoff Show” at Bar DKDC on Saturday, September 2nd, at 9 p.m. Catch these wonder twins before they go viral — if you can.
Though not a native Memphian, Taj Mahal is well loved here, as evidenced last year when his name was added to the historic Orpheum Theatre’s sidewalk of stars. Of course, as one of the world’s preeminent blues artists, he’s dipped deeply from the well of Mid-South music, not least because of his command of the fife, not always associated with blues culture outside of North Mississippi. And, like so many Memphis artists, he’s fond of mixing up genres, his career dotted with experiments in hybrid music not often recognized by blues purists. A perfect example is 1999’s Kulanjan, made with Malian kora-player Toumani Diabaté, in spirit not too dissimilar from Otha Turner & the Afrossippi Allstars’ From Senegal to Senatobia.
Most recently, however, Taj Mahal’s restlessness has taken him not across the world, but back in time. In this year’s Savoy, he revisits the music of his parents’ era, which profoundly impacted him. Indeed, his father, Henry Saint Claire Fredericks Sr., was an Afro-Caribbean jazz arranger and pianist who often brought other players into their home. The iconic, swinging standards interpreted here are writ deep in Taj Mahal’s soul.
Accompanying the bluesman on this journey through American songbook classics is his longtime friend, acclaimed record producer John Simon, whose resume includes producing classic albums by The Band, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Simon & Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, and Mama Cass Elliot. Indeed, Savoy is the realization of a musical collaboration they’d been planning for decades.
Taj Mahal (Credit: Jay Blakesberg)
Recorded with musicians in San Francisco, Savoy is a salute to the sounds of the swing jazz big band era, its title a tribute to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom where music composed by the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong was regularly performed.
Beyond the weatherworn, earthy delivery of Taj Mahal, with which he immediately makes any song his own, this album is a testament to Simon’s arrangements, which are both inventive and tradition-savvy. As such, the tunes swing powerfully even as they avoid cloying big band cliches and remain unmistakably hip. His setting for “Summertime,” for example, is an homage of sorts to the horn parts on Gil Evans’ arrangement of the same tune for Miles Davis.
Co-produced by Manny Moreira, the album also features guest vocals by Maria Muldaur on “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and Evan Price’s violin on two tracks. Taj Mahal sings and plays harmonica, while the rhythm section, featuring Simon on piano, Danny Caron on guitar, Ruth Davies on bass, and Leon Joyce Jr. on drums, keeps things swinging.
Next week, Taj Mahal fans in the Los Angeles area will have a rare chance to hear him speak about that era of jazz and more, when he appears at the Grammy Museum on Tuesday, July 25th. For the rest of us, there’s always this remarkable album as his ultimate testament on the subject.
Dan Montgomery's Cast-Iron Songs and Torch Ballads
There’s something about the “singer/songwriter” tag that carries lingering associations with acoustic guitars. Though most singer/songwriters employ full bands on their albums, their shows are more often solo affairs and the acoustic guitar strum ultimately propels the songs. For many past Dan Montgomery albums (he’s released seven), that might have been said.
But for his 2023 album, he wanted to get back to his roots in the South — South Jersey, that is. Those roots don’t call for mandolins and fiddles, but rather axes that flat-out rock. And therein lies the beauty of his new album, Cast-Iron Songs and Torch Ballads (Fantastic Yes Records), on which the Dan Montgomery 2+3 (with Robert Mache on guitars, keys, and vocals, Candace Mache on vocals, James Cunningham on drums, and Tom Arndt on bass and vocals) rock righteously to their bandleader’s stories.
Embracing his inner hard rocker takes Montgomery back to playing party gigs in his early teens, when, he says in a release accompanying the album, “I was the youngest in the band. The first songs I played on stage were by Grand Funk, Bad Company, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It was wild.”
If those classic references seem spurious, rest assured that Montgomery really knows his way around a riff. If there’s a wellspring from which perfect three chord, stop-and-start riffs flow, he has surely tapped into it. The opening of the second track here, “If I Said It,” is a prime example, as is album closer “Rock Hard,” but there are many such moments. And there are many that pair a long-sustaining electric guitar with another that chugs away inexorably, like the wheels of fate driving the lives in each song to their destiny.
Cause after he flipped out – She started to slip out And once he shipped out – She just split town – She told me I gotta get to Beaumont tonight – Can you help me friend If I can get to Beaumont I can set things right – And I’ll never have to ask again
So Montgomery sings in “Beaumont,” and that semi-desperate protagonist is a familiar one in the songwriter’s career-long chronicle of hardship. And yet, the author staying true to the particulars of each story, there’s a glimmer of hope in “Beaumont” as well. It’s a world unto itself, promising escape. But as for hope, this album holds more than a glimmer, it positively glitters. Depending on which song you choose, that could be Gary Glitter or actual, shiny glitter, as in the song by that name:
Well it seemed so sweet so sinful – Looked so much better in the dark Now it seems so simple – And you wear it like a scar You’re never gonna get all that Glitter off you You’re never gonna get all that Glitter off you –Now you gotta go home
True, that’s a song more in the “torch ballads” segment of the program, but with this album, a chugging riff is not far off, as in the track immediately before “Glitter,” which begins with an uncanny homage to that other Glitter – Gary, that is. Anyone familiar with his “Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 2),” a classic 1972 instrumental single with one of the most distinctive sounds of its era, will crack a smile when “Sort It All Out” begins, though it soon enough becomes its own thing entirely.
And speaking of distinctive sounds, the album’s also graced with one of Memphis’ greatest guitar alchemists, Robert Mache, who, as usual, has co-produced these tracks with Montgomery in “The Shack in the Back” studio. His unerring sense of guitar tone is a crucial ingredient to all those riffs, solos, swipes, and jabs, and the deft keyboard textures (also supplied by Montgomery and guest player Rick Steff) flesh out the powerful arrangements. Ace sax man Jim Spake also makes an appearance.
All this, and the spot-on background vocals from Candace Mache and others that give the music an epic sweep, would be for naught if these weren’t, as advertised, cast-iron songs. Which I take to mean songs that have been whittled and crafted to the point of holding up over time. Songs for a lifetime, or a few.
And the real cast-iron masterpiece of the album, it turns out, isn’t a rocker at all. “Baby Your Luck’s Running Bad” is a perfect distillation of the kind of metropolitan soul that ruled the airwaves a half century ago (close to New Jersey by way of Philadelphia), sung with dry restraint by Montgomery, who could have given Johnny Rivers a run for his money back in the day:
If you wanna see God laugh Just tell him your plans He’s a spiteful so and so What a spiteful so and so
Below, a solo performance of the same song, but don’t sleep on the album version.
The Dan Montgomery 2+3 plays B-Side Memphis on Sunday, July 30, 8 p.m.
Most Stax Records fans know at least two names from the label’s roster of songwriters. David Porter and Isaac Hayes were the dynamic songwriting team behind at least 200 songs in the label’s publishing company, East/Memphis Music, and Hayes’ elevation to global celebrity only elevated the team’s profile. Yet they were only two among the dozens of songsmiths working away at 926 East McLemore Avenue in the heyday of Stax and its many subsidiary imprints.
Now, in what may be the greatest behind-the-scenes glimpse into the process of making records since The Beatles’ Anthology series, Craft Recordings is releasing a new seven-CD collection that reveals the depth of that talent. Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is like a message in a bottle from a half century ago, conjuring the spirit and soul of what was going down in the studio’s back rooms while the final recordings were being cut in the main tracking room. And while some of these demos got the full band treatment, even more of them capture the intimacy of just a singer and one or two others in a room, sketching out the basics of a song, hoping a Stax artist would make it a success.
Exhibit A, below, is a glimpse into the work of Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper as they put down their idea for a new approach to songwriting, using only numbers in the chorus. In the end, they pitched it to Wilson Pickett, who made the full band version a number one hit on the R&B charts in 1966. Yet this raw demo has its own charm. The difference between the hit and what you hear below tells you all you need to know about this extravagant and enlightening collection.
The crunch of Steve Cropper’s guitar almost makes the classic hit into a rock song. Yet such a glimpse into the making of a hit record is only one facet of what’s revealed here. Many more were recorded by Stax artists but released into semi-obscurity, some were recorded by artists on other labels, and still more never made it past the demo stage.
All of that is contained here, including three full discs from the latter category — in other words, 66 never-before-heard songs from the Stax universe. This alone would be a revelation, but even the first three discs, featuring demos for songs that ultimately were cut and released, bring what were often previously deep cuts up to the surface. If the Staple Singers’ version of “Slow Train” was overshadowed by other tracks on their Stax debut, William Bell’s stark rendering of it with just a guitarist (Cropper?) stands out as one of the most haunting tracks.
Going a step further, Carl Smith’s demo of “We the People,” also eventually released by the Staple Singers, has the wonderful loopiness of someone who’s dancing like no one’s watching, complete with squeals of “Ow! Shack-a-lack!” over a sparse — but funky — piano and drum arrangement.
From the haunted to the joyous, this is ultimately a tribute to the power of a song, no matter what form it takes, and a fitting celebration of Stax songwriters both obscure and legendary, from William Brown to Deanie Parker, from Homer Banks to Mack Rice, from Bettye Crutcher to Carla Thomas.
As it turns out, it’s also a tribute of a different kind to the key creator of the set, Cheryl Pawelski, the three-time Grammy-winning producer and co-founder of Omnivore Recordings who previously worked for Rhino, EMI-Capitol Records, and Concord Music Group. It was while producing catalog releases for the latter that she conceived of a collection of Stax demos, most of which she heard while going through the archived audio files of East/Memphis Music, owned by Rondor Music Publishing after the demise of Stax.
As Pawelski describes in the liner notes, these reference demo recordings were filed away with the accompanying sheet music as they were made, but when Stax was forced into bankruptcy in late 1975, the audio recordings were archived haphazardly, ultimately being transferred to digital formats willy-nilly as the decades wore on. It was up to Pawelski to find these gems by reviewing almost 2,000 hours of audio, much of it containing completely unrelated recordings. She identified 665 individual songs, eventually winnowing those down to the 140 tracks being released now.
It was a Herculean effort, taken up in stolen moments of time over more than a decade of Pawelski’s life (and beautifully documented in this Burkhard Bilger piece in the New Yorker). But Pawelski was not alone: her co-producers for the compilation included Deanie Parker, Michele Smith, Mason Williams, and Robert Gordon, and the liner notes by Gordon and Parker are a delight in their own right.
The two writers have the benefit of Parker’s first-hand knowledge, directing publicity for Stax in its heyday, plus the years of research Gordon put into his book, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. One recurrent theme is the deeply ingrained sexism of the male Stax songwriters, producers, and artists, leading some of the women, like Parker or Crutcher, to cook up pots of spaghetti as subtle inducements to be taken more seriously. Even then, it was an uphill battle, which makes this collection all the more important. Would-be classics like Bettye Crutcher’s “Everybody is Talking Love” can finally be heard. And even songs composed by men for women artists, often sung here by men adopting the woman’s persona in a kind of recording studio gender-bending, can finally see the light of day. On this set, you can compare Homer Banks singing his “Too Much Sugar for a Dime,” a woman’s demand for relief from her gender-defined duties, directly with Crutcher’s impassioned delivery of the same song on the next track.
If the word “revelation” is overused, this at least is one release that merits it. As Gordon and Parker write, “The history of Stax Records and Southern rhythm and blues is about to change.”
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music will celebrate the release of Written in their Soul on Friday, June 23, from 6 – 8:30 p.m. Free, RSVP required.
Yesterday, news and social media erupted with celebrations of the great jazz composer and collaborator, Sun Ra, who was born on May 22, 1914 — and rightly so. From the 1950s until his death in 1993, the musical innovator’s refusal to bow to the conventions and niceties of his day was prescient, even prophetic. Yet the most committed devotees of his story noted the birthday celebrations — ranging from discounted Ra LPs at Goner Records to the New York radio station WKCR broadcasting a full 24 hours of his music — with no little irony.
Ra himself had no use for birthdays, especially his own. In John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, the musician is quoted as saying, “I’m not human. I never called anybody ‘mother’… I’ve separated myself from everything that in general you call life.” This, he explained, impacted the very notion of a birthday in particular. “I don’t remember when I was born. I’ve never memorized it. And this is exactly what I want to teach everybody: that is is important to liberate oneself from the obligation to be born, because this experience doesn’t help us at all. It is important for the planet that its inhabitants do not believe in being born, because whoever is born has to die.”
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Sun Ra seems to be living his best life, even as we approach the 30th anniversary of his death on May 30th. Respected by only a narrow niche of jazz aficionados half a century ago, his music has continued to grow in renown to this day, both globally and right here in Memphis. The upshot being that Sun Ra’s music is more available than ever.
Case in point: the new mega-collection of three LP’s (or two CD’s), a BluRay and a DVD of material from his 1974 film, Space is the Place, courtesy of the Sundazed label’s imprint, Modern Harmonic. Not only is the feature film made available with greater clarity than ever, the soundtrack can be enjoyed as a stand-alone experience, and an entire album of unreleased material is also included.
Of course, Sun Ra contained multitudes, helping to shape free jazz even as he cherished the old Fletcher Henderson big band arrangements that he exhorted his band to learn note-for-note. Typically, one samples the various eras of Ra’s proclivities with some record-collecting time travel, with his earliest and latest years being more “conventional,” and his middle period, from the late ’60s through the ’70s, being the most “out.” Yet with this package, due to the film’s semi-autobiographical purview, one can hear all of that and more.
For the uninitiated, Ra built up a whole mythology around himself that was in full flower when the movie was made. His penchant for Afrocentric imagery and outer space themes may seem gimmicky to some, but a closer inspection reveals it to be his way of shaking off preconceptions so as to foster a more imaginative state in viewers and listeners. And the ideas — musical, theatrical, and political — that he hoped to put across were very serious indeed.
“It’s after the end of the world — don’t you know that yet?” says a voice as the film begins, and the low-budget spaceship and alien world setting of the first scenes frame all that comes after, with science fiction’s air of epochal speculation. And right from the start, the serious political intent behind such whimsy is apparent.
As Ra wanders a strange planet, bedecked in the raiment of a pharaoh, he notes that the Black people of earth could thrive there. “Without any white people there, they could drink in the beauty of this planet.” To confront the suffering of earth, he makes it clear that he’ll defy the laws of nature itself. “Consider time has officially ended. We work on the other side of time,” he quips, before proposing to “teleport the whole planet [earth] here through music.” Then the film cuts to the title: SPACE IS THE PLACE.
The realm of the fantastic permeates the film, even as it delves into the rough living in Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods, and a meandering tale of Ra gambling with a pimp-like character known as The Overseer. Without spoiling too much of it, rest assured that the film is chock-full of surprises and unexpected turns — and music.
That’s the point of the three LP’s, of course, and they make for galvanizing listening on their own. This was at the height of Ra’s embrace of experimentalism, but upon deeper listening, sonic structures emerge, as his band, the Arkestra, slaloms from wildly percussive jams to synthesizer squelches to mambo to something approaching doo-wop. Voices chant “Calling Planet Earth!” A segment featuring Ra as “Sonny Ray,” a pianist in a strip club, starts with his renditions of classic boogie woogie, only to become more eccentric and frantic (causing patrons’ glasses to explode in the film).
All of these sounds are conveyed in glorious mono, as originally intended, yet the arrangements and recording techniques help create a spaciousness that rivals the most stereophonic mixes. And for those who truly get off on vinyl, the tri-color LPs green, gold, and silver shine like gems. True, the box set runs a hefty $125, but the experience is so immersive, the world-building so complete, that any listeners looking for something fresh (from half a century ago!) will find it well worth the price.
Though Tyler Keith is based in Oxford, Mississippi, he’s a well known voice among Memphians. That’s as a rock and roll singer, of course, though Keith has also cultivated an authorial voice with a noir novel, The Mark of Cain. But don’t expect any of the usual trappings of the author-turned-songsmith in Keith’s rock and roll records. They are not filled with intricate word plays or flights of verbal finesse. But he does have a way with a phrase.
Take the catchphrase of his new album, Hell to Pay(Black & Wyatt). It rolls off the tongue in the title song as naturally as fallen fruit. And that’s what a big, pile-driving rock song needs. Right after that comes one of the album’s best, “Ghost Writer,” which steers clear of literary tropes even as he sings about writing.
“I tried to write my book/All by myself/I couldn’t find my hook/I needed somebody’s help/I need a Ghost Writer/I need you!” he sings with the perfect primitivism of the Ramones, and the simplicity of it allows the words’ meanings to breathe. Most importantly, it provides a chant-worthy chorus over an ace guitar riff.
Keith has been known to rock Memphis clubs for over 20 years now, and The Last Drag, his previous album, also reveled in guitar crunch. Yet this time around, the riffs are a little grittier, and one might say a bit more “seventies.” As opposed to the neo-60s rock of the last outing, this is neo-70s rock that borders, at times, on Stooges territory. Yet unlike that seminal group, it’s not drenched in guitar solos. It’s all about the riff.
Most of the album leans to the more thundering side of the guitar, sometimes complemented with ragged-but-right harmonies and swooping falsetto “oooohs.” The Apostles — Max Hipp (guitar, vocals), Van Thompson (bass, vocals), and Beau Bourgeois (drums, vocals) — can all carry a tune, and do so with gusto. Their playing is a perfect match for Keith’s songwriting, loose but on point.
One outlier is “Nothing Left,” which evokes the stomp of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. And like the best Young, Keith can philosophize regret and faith with a deft touch. “All I had were some words that washed away/Nothing left for me to do but pray.” Even then, the narrator isn’t sure what he’s praying to. “I don’t know if I believe in anything that I can’t see/For these times today have brought me to my knees/I’m asking someone to help me please.”
Tyler Keith and the Apostles celebrate the release of Hell to Pay at Bar DKDC, Saturday, May 6th, in an incredible lineup also featuring Jack Oblivian & the Sheiks and power pop adventurers Silver Synthetic.
With so many Stax-related anniversaries happening lately — including the 20th of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, officially this May 2nd, and the 60th of the song “Green Onions,” recently celebrated by Booker T. Jones in New York — it’s easy to forget that 50 years ago this February, the main Stax news everyone was talking about was Wattstax, the then-newly released film documenting the previous summer’s festival of the same name.
That moment can be relived visually by anyone lucky enough to dwell in cities with an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (not including Memphis, alas), with whom Sony has recently partnered in special screenings of the film. But for those who can’t see it, never fear: Stax Records and Craft Recordings have got you covered.
This year the twin labels have released and/or re-released several versions of the live albums that Stax dropped soon after the festival went down on August 20, 1972. The various packages, some documenting the day more completely than ever before, include Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection (12-CD & digital), Wattstax: The Complete Concert (6-CD & 10-LP), The Best of Wattstax (1-CD & digital), and 2-LP reissues of the original soundtrack releases Wattstax: The Living Word Volumes 1 & 2.
It’s a worthy tribute to a concert considered historic for bringing the likes of Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Carla Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Kim Weston, Albert King, Eddie Floyd and many more under one billing. It was also a watershed moment in forging a national Black identity, with up to 112,000 (mostly Black) attendees that day. That was about twice the crowd that The Beatles had at Shea Stadium six years earlier, a third of the attendance at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, and a fourth of Woodstock’s.
So while there was a palpable sense of activism to Wattstax, it was fundamentally celebratory. Al Bell, the festival’s creator and President of Stax Records at the time, called it the “most jubilant celebration of African American music, culture, and values in American history.” And indeed, there’s a mellow yet elated air apparent in the many hours recorded that day at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That’s in the context of the Watts neighborhood of L.A. enduring crushing poverty, systemic racism, and, in 1965, riots. Bell reflects in the liner notes that “the residents of Watts had lost all hope.” By bringing the best of Southern soul to the neighborhood through Wattstax, at only a dollar a ticket, Bell and Stax aimed to restore hope through Black music (and oratory) that affirmed Black culture and community at every turn.
And oh what music they brought. Among the new Stax/Craft releases, the best way to experience Wattstax as it felt at the time is listening to Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection. For lovers of ’70s soul or Stax, it’s hard to imagine a more compelling box set, even if a 12-CD collection can be rather daunting, to mark the transition from classic ’60s soul to the more complex sounds of the ’70s.
The sheer size of the collection helps it capture the luxuriousness of that sprawling day. Now, for the first time, across half of the collection’s discs (also available, without bonus material, as Wattstax: The Complete Concert), is nearly every moment of audio from the show, as recorded by the film crew and later mixed by Terry Manning back in Memphis.
Right out of the gate, we reap the benefits of the set’s completism, as the opening strains of Salvation Symphony by Dale O. Warren, conductor of The Wattstax ’72 Orchestra kick in. Previously available only in an abridged form on the 2003 three-CD release Wattstax, hearing the full 19-minute composition is a revelation. Starting with a martial, neo-classical approach, it reaches a climactic chord (not unlike the final strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra) which abruptly sinks away to make room for an extended soul organ passage, in turn giving way to an extended funk/fusion workout. After that is played out, a new classical movement is taken up. It’s a significant work in its use of multiple genres to mark a new historical moment celebrating the richness and diversity of Black life, very intentionally mastering Western traditions even as it revels in African-derived traditions too. Indeed, the fusion segment relies on an undeniably funky groove that the band falls back on time and again between artists throughout the day. It never gets old.
And there are a lot of artists. Sequenced in the style of a revue, many perform only one song, at least in the early hours of the festival. One standout, also previously unreleased, is an intriguing re-imagining of “The Star Spangled Banner” by Kim Weston and band. While her version of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was released in 1973, this take on the more conventional U.S. anthem is just as compelling in terms of artistic ambition.
After these tracks and some introductory comments, the rest of Disc 1 is centered on The Staple Singers, then at the top of their game. Having such bill-toppers kick off the festival is a generous gesture, and quite in keeping with the framing of Wattstax as a kind of gift to the audience. Disc 2 then presents a series of lesser-known Stax artists, dubbed “The Golden 13,” who sing their own hits, then team up to lead the crowd in several choruses of “Old Time Religion,” sounding more New Orleans than Memphis. There’s also a surreal moment when Al Bell receives special honors at an event that he himself planned.
True to the festival’s aesthetic, emcee William Bell reads out an official recognition of Al Bell from the Los Angeles City Council, “now therefore let it be resolved,” etc., to which William Bell adds, “translated it means: Al, you’re outta sight.”
Even more telling is the announcer who appeals to a burgeoning Black nationalism as a way to control the crowd, as he tries repeatedly to clear the stage area of hangers-on. “Folks,” he says, “we have a logistics problem that is really — well anyhow, it’s hard … Now look brothers and sisters, we have to cooperate to make a nation, and a nation doesn’t mean ‘Me, privileged.’ If you’re not working, please have the courtesy to leave the area … Now please, God don’t like ugly!”
It captures the politicized spirit of the event well, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s followed up by one of the most incendiary tracks ever released by Stax, “Lying on the Truth,” by the Rance Allen Group.
More extended sets follow on the remaining CD’s, including those by David Porter, The Bar-Kays, Carla Thomas, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, and, at the climax, Isaac Hayes. Due to technical difficulties experienced by the film crew, Hayes and company play “Theme from Shaft” twice, back to back. (The first version has never been released until now).
Overall, the performances are carried off with precision, passion, and grit, made all the more powerful if one listens across a single afternoon, immersing oneself in festival time. The buildup to Hayes’ set is inexorable, and he and his band are in top form, with the added draw of hearing Hayes take several saxophone solos.
Beyond the festival itself, the Soul’d Out set offering six more discs documenting the Stax-related music featured that September and October in L.A.’s Summit Club. Some of these made their way into the film and the Living Word LPs at the time, but the more complete collection features many never-heard tracks. What’s more, having been recorded in a nightclub, the recordings have the urgency of an interior space filled with people. That quality especially benefits a previously unheard set by Sons of Slum, a hard-hitting Chicago group that unleashes a positively frenetic cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.”
And there’s comedy, too, with not only the Richard Pryor routines originally featured in the Living Word LPs, but also a comedy set by Rufus Thomas. With these touches, not to mention the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s oration at Wattstax itself, this collection captures a good deal more than music. And the new packaging perfectly matches this time capsule from 1972, including a deluxe LP-sized book of liner notes by Al Bell, A. Scott Galloway, and Rob Bowman.
In sum, it’s an extravagant record of an extraordinary time, and, given the ongoing civil rights battles still being fought today, a history and a spirit worth treasuring in our collective memories.
Befitting a veritable capital of Vinylandia, Memphis is all over Record Store Day (RSD), and not just because Memphis Record Pressing produces such a large percentage of the nation’s LPs these days. The city also boasts a large roster of bands currently releasing product on vinyl, from the Turnstyles‘ new album to Ibex Clone. But look no further than the RSD homepage to see more: their partnership with Sun Records has now led to a 10th anniversary edition of the Sun Records Curated by Record Store Day releases; and two clicks below that one sees a celebration of the debut full-length album from boygenius, which includes Memphis’ own Julien Baker.
Yet there’s another side to Record Store Day, having arisen gradually over the years, in which it’s a chance for previously shelved recordings to see the light of day in special editions. And that’s the real gem of this year’s RSD, scheduled for this Saturday, April 22, in the form of a new release on Jazz Detective, the label of Downbeat Producer Of The Year Zev Feldman, and Reel to Real Records, the partnership between Feldman and Vancouver-based impresario and musician Cory Weeds. Included in the labels’ new trio of previously unissued LP releases of archival performances (by groups led by Walter Bishop, Jr. and Sonny Stitt) is an organ lover’s dream album: Shirley Scott’s Queen Talk: Live at the Left Bank (Reel to Real).
Taking its name from Scott’s moniker, “the Queen of the Hammond B-3,” this gig showcases the organist’s soulful side in a trio setting featuring Memphis native George Coleman on tenor sax and Bobby Durham on drums. Captured at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland on Aug. 20, 1972, the band is a study in chemistry, especially when jazz vocalist Ernie Andrews sits in on three of the album’s ten numbers.
If Scott isn’t quite the household name that Jimmy Smith or Jimmy McGriff are, she’s no less of a player for it. The late jazz organ star Joey DeFrancesco once said of Scott: “Her legacy is her tremendous contribution to jazz organ that will live on forever. … She has some great records, but live is a whole other thing because the people are so free to go in whatever direction they like.”
And that’s exactly what this trio does, as Scott leads them through her grab bag of covers, many with a decidedly pop provenance. The title tune is of course a 1944 pop-tune-turned-standard, but she gets quite contemporary as well with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim,” and, perhaps of most interest to Isaac Hayes (and Michael Jackson) fans, “Never Can Say Goodbye.”
And yet, such is the gravitas and groove of Scott, who pedals some very hip bass lines as her choppy chords and melodic flurries percolate on top, that these tunes — and even sentimental favorites like Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” — come out swinging. It’s a testament to the organist’s sympatico with drummer Durham that the forward momentum never lapses.
And the pop nature of this workout is especially interesting in light of George Coleman’s career. With what may be considered his edgiest work with Miles Davis eight or nine years behind him, it’s interesting to see Coleman in league with Scott’s embrace of radio hits of the day. Ultimately, it’s a testament to not only his versatility, but his tone. With Coleman, the edge is always there in the voice emanating from his horn.
And if “edge” isn’t quite the right word for the undeniable warmth that’s also there, let’s just agree that he contains multitudes. With “Witchcraft,” Coleman even get’s to wail over a neo-bop uptempo workout, complete with humorous interpolations. Then Scott, with her thrilling, trilling, glossy sound, takes it up a notch, as her seeming telepathy with the drummer produces time-defying hits and accents whenever she scrambles over the keyboard.
As Coleman himself says (in the LP’s excellent liner notes) after recently hearing this album’s version of a John Coltrane tune: “I was amazed, especially, by ‘Impressions.’ I don’t think I really played it that well with Miles, but on this, with Shirley, the tempo was right. And Bobby Durham was real good on it. He kept everything really in focus and so did she.”
As it turns out, Record Store Day itself contains multitudes, across a spectrum that runs from gimmicky colored discs to true vinyl gems. For fans of jazz organ and/or George Coleman, this live set by three masters of their craft is a multifaceted example of the latter, a jewel in any collection.
Instrumental albums are rare in this day and age, outside of the jazz and classical worlds, yet this year has already witnessed the release of two such works. The debut by all star trio MEM_MODS has been well covered in these pages, but another lyric-less album dropped around the same time — or at least the vinyl version did. This week, the album will be stream-able for the first time.
The album is credited to Salo Pallini, but don’t go searching the ranks of Memphis musicians for that name. It’s a band that includes Landon Moore, John Whittemore, Pat Fusco, and Danny Banks, with ace percussionist Felix Hernandez pitching in — and it’s a band energized with the spirit of musical adventure.
In 2021, the band recorded 11 songs meant to serve as a musical accompaniment for Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan. And this January that album, titled The Sirens of Titan: A Preemptive Scoring, was released as a beautiful LP. Ostensibly a wannabe soundtrack to Dan Harmon’s proposed adaptation of the novel, the album can nonetheless be enjoyed without knowing the novel or any of its permutations. And in any case, the real point of the album is to pioneer a new hybrid genre, what the band calls Progressive Latin Space Country.
In fact, it might be more accurately dubbed Progressive Latin Space Rock, for there’s always an undercurrent of classic FM sounds behind much of the composition. Indeed, that keeps the momentum up through this collection; one never knows when the coiled snake of rock will rise up and seize the reins of any particular track.
The most obvious case in point is the album’s single, “Kazak’s Bossa,” released as a video last December. It begins as if sauntering through a smoky party, it’s organ and keyboard textures weaving a spell over some very button-down jazz guitar melodies and fills. Then come the cavemen and gunshots roaring “Huh!” in the background. As with many of the tracks, it features a superb keyboard solo by Fusco (in this case on organ). After a breakdown, the congas of suspense announce a change, and suddenly we’re in rock riff land.
It’s pro-level genre-hopping not seen since the glorious ’70s heyday of Queen and Paul McCartney (or Snowglobe). And it captures in a nutshell what’s most fun about this album: its gonzo spirit.
The multi-genre song cycle isn’t the only thing about this project that evokes the ’70s. In “Malachi,” a languid rock-jazz groove not unlike Dark Side of the Moon builds into something from a ’70s action film. Later, there might be a touch of the ’90s: “Beatrice” could almost be a Built to Spill tribute, but then settles into something more like Mott the Hoople.
As the tunes roll by, we hear well-crafted unison guitar lines, or zithers, over driving conga rock, not to mention insane piano solos, angelic sopranos, treacly Moog melodies, bells, whistles, and ambient soundscapes.
Another highlight is “Goofballs,” which delivers the most genuinely Latin groove via Fusco’s deft keys, Moore’s under-groove, and Banks’ driving beat, with some zany guitar to boot. Then it loops into an entirely different rhythm and becomes a chugging rock ballad of sorts.
Salo Pallini’s strength is to always keep you guessing. Even if you know that “Malachi” and “Salo” are from the Vonnegut novel, you’ll nevertheless have fun guessing how to apply the various moods of this album to The Sirens of Titan. And if you’ve never heard of Kurt Vonnegut, this album will still keep you on your toes.
Salo Pallini celebrates the streaming release of The Sirens of Titan: A Preemptive Scoring at Young Avenue Deli this Friday, March 24th, 9 p.m., with Steve Selvidge on guitar and Pee Wee Jackson on drums.
