Tag: Craft Recordings

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Music Record Reviews

Remembering Phineas Newborn Jr. ‘s World

As Memorial Day approaches and we pay homage to men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty, it’s also worth remembering other fallen heroes. And for this writer, Memphis music has produced no greater hero than Phineas Newborn Jr., the pianist who grew up playing Beale Street in his father’s band, then conquered the world with his transcendent talent.

At least, he should have conquered the world. Despite any acclaim he garnered amongst jazz afficionados in his heyday, he was, in his latter years, a supremely troubled human, struggling with the most pedestrian aspects of life in Memphis, a figure typically written off by the well-to-do passing him by on the street. Which made his supreme artistry on the ivories all the more heroic. (Read Stanley Booth’s masterful and poignant portrait of Newborn’s contradictions, the chapter “Fascinating Changes” in his anthology, Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers, and you’ll see what I mean.)

With Sunday, May 26th, marking the 35th anniversary of Newborn’s passing, this Memorial Day weekend will be an excellent occasion to honor his life and work.

You can find no better starting place than his 1962 platter, A World of Piano!, first released on Contemporary Records, now available as part of Craft Recordings’ Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series, featuring lacquers cut from the original master tapes (with an all-analog signal path) by Bernie Grundman, a Grammy-Award-winning engineer who once worked for Contemporary when it was one of the hippest labels in the country. Craft’s reissue, released on 180-gram vinyl last December, is a sonic marvel.

It’s also a visual marvel. Unlike many reissues which tweak the album art of classic platters, or, worse, try to update the art altogether, this and the other releases in Craft’s Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series pay complete fealty to the aesthetics of the original records. This means that the full experience of the album is in your grasp, right down to the brilliant liner notes by one of the legendary practitioners of that art (and another personal hero), Leonard Feather.

An accomplished musician and composer in his own right, Feather digs deep in these notes and offers the reader some powerful insights. The notes are a tome unto themselves; when was the last time you saw liner notes with footnotes? Better yet, in the first, Feather notes a telling detail that’s usually only acknowledged by Memphians: “1. Phineas prefers to pronounce his name ‘fine-us’ with the accent on the first syllable.”

Feather’s learned approach is in dialogue with Newborn himself. The notes read: “Of ‘Lush Life,’ Phineas says, ‘You’ll notice I used part of the Ravel Sonatine because of its harmonic structure, which is similar to part of the verse of ‘Lush Life,’ stretching out from the D flat to the F minor.'” Who else but a pianist and musicologist would elicit this quote from the virtuoso?

Indeed, the version of Billy Strayhorn’s classic tune here is a dazzler, and, given Newborn’s sheer dexterity and rapid-fire playing elsewhere, beautifully restrained. All Ravel interpolations aside, this is exquisitely sparse, letting Strayhorn’s melody shine in the first iteration, the drums and bass not entering until the chorus begins. This “Lush Life” is a revelation in its simplicity.

Other tunes, like opener “Cheryl,” display Newborn’s fireworks to the utmost, played with a ferocity that caused me to sit up at attention when I dropped the needle. Yet other tracks display the sheer groove of Newborn’s playing, as with the pounding Latin rhythms of “Manteca,” one of Dizzy Gillespie’s signature tunes, here somehow evoking a full horn section with only Newborn’s chordal blocks, hammered as if on a timpani.

“Juicy Lucy” offers a master class in swing, simultaneously lilting, playful, and sultry, while “For Carl” is the epitome of that lost art, the swing waltz. The swaying, 3/4-time number was, as Feather notes, “written by bassist Leroy Vinnegar as his memorial to the pianist both he and Phineas admired” — the one and only Carl Perkins. Actually, strike that…this guy had nothing to do with “Blue Suede Shoes,” so he should be dubbed the also and other Carl Perkins. Yet fully worthy of this beautiful homage, nonetheless.

The grooving is mutual all around, as Newborn finds himself complemented with some of the greatest rhythmists of his time. As Feather’s notes make clear, this was due to the happenstance of Newborn being in Los Angeles for these recording sessions as other bands passed through. Side One swings like it does “thanks to the presence in town of the Miles Davis combo … Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones,” Feather writes, later noting “the presence in Hollywood of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet when Phineas cut Side 2 … Sam Jones and Louis Hayes.”

Such details, along with the masterful reproduction of this album in its original form, put you in that time. Yet it’s not nostalgia that’s summoned up, but the immediacy, the vibrancy, and the modernity of that era. Thanks to Craft Recordings, you can now hold some of that bottled magic in your hands.

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Music Record Reviews

Stax Songwriters Shine in New Set of Rare Demos

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.

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Music Record Reviews

Wattstax Lives On in New Vinyl, CD Collections

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.

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Music Music Features

Stax Gospel: Reissue Reveals the Label’s Sacred Side

Wah-wah clavinet introduces the song, announcing that you are deep in the 1970s. “Talkin’ about a good time, we gonna have a time!” It’s one of the best party tracks you’ve never heard, though it’s possible you have, if you ever chanced upon the single by Jacqui Verdell in 1973, on a label under the umbrella of Stax Records: The Gospel Truth.

While music historians usually give a nod to the gospel roots of so much of the Stax soul sound, the actual gospel records released by the label are often overlooked. And yet, late in the Stax story, from 1972 to 1974, The Gospel Truth played a pivotal role in the genre. Some would even deem it a revolution, as the label championed gospel music with a funky, contemporary edge.

Craft Recordings, second to none in the business of reissues, and a longtime purveyor of classic Stax albums, has made that history easier to comprehend than ever, thanks to their new three-LP collection, The Gospel Truth: The Complete Singles Collection. If that’s not your medium of choice, the set’s also available as a digital release, but the grooves and textures of these tracks benefit immeasurably from their vinyl incarnation, cut to lacquer by Jeff Powell. It’s how the Good Lord meant for them to be heard.

Either way, you’ll get the in-depth essay by Jared Boyd, program manager at radio station WYXR and music columnist for The Daily Memphian. As he notes, “From its very launch, [the label] was formed around the strengths of the Rance Allen Group, a Michigan family band whose electrifying leader had a remarkable vocal range and an unabashed infusion of blues, soul, and rock-and-roll.”

Indeed, Rance Allen, who just passed away last October, was a force of nature. As Robert Gordon puts it in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, “Stax liked them so much, they created a new imprint, The Gospel Truth, just so they could sign them.” Beyond Allen’s singing, they were pioneers of a fresher, funkier version of gospel than what was common in their day. Many secular fans got their first taste of the group at the 1972 Wattstax festival, where the raw funk of their “Lying on the Truth” sat nicely alongside the Bar-Kays.

It’s telling that the first track in this collection is Allen’s take on the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination,” subtitled “Just My Salvation.” Nor is it surprising that the group accounts for 10 of the 34 tracks here. But the label’s other featured artists stick with that same commercial sensibility.

“Ooh, I got the vibes you’re sending with your eyes,” sings Joshie Jo Armstead on “I Got the Vibes,” a 1973 track that anticipates the onset of disco so presciently that Joshie should get royalties from the Bee Gees. “If the Shoe Fits Wear It” and “Who’s Supposed to be Raising Who,” from the same year, mine similar ground, and the group that sang them, the 21st Century, would later have a bona fide disco hit with “Tailgate,” under the name 21st Creation.

And yet the repertoire here doesn’t represent a complete break with gospel tradition, either. Rev. Jesse Jackson’s People’s Choir of Operation Push, which arose out of the Civil Rights struggle, supplies plenty of the gigantic, singalong choruses typically associated with gospel, albeit with a rhythm section that could have been right out of a Stax pop record.

In truth, the regular Stax session players don’t make much of an appearance. With Clarence Smith being the only Memphian here, among many from Chicago or Detroit. Most of these bands had their own provenance. In fact, label head Dave Clark had a knack for buying up bands’ unreleased tracks, shelved by other labels, and readying them for release by having the Stax engineers brighten up the mixes a bit. The fact that these sound so cohesive is simply a sign that this was a whole movement of bands forging a new, modern form of gospel. And most of them loved the hits that had made Stax what it was.

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Music Music Blog

Exclusive Video Premiere: Memphis Masters Series Celebrates the Bar-Kays

With so many classic albums of 1969 celebrating their half-century mark this year, it would be easy for music fans to sleep on an especially stellar LP reissued with extra care this month — and that would be a shame. The Bar-Kays’ Gotta Groove, originally released on Volt Records, a Stax subsidiary, was a watershed moment for Stax, for the group themselves, and for all things funky.

Besides helping to launch an approach to a harder-hitting funk/rock that would come to define the 1970s, the album was the result of the sheer tenacity and invention that kept Stax going. The label, having learned in late 1967 that Atlantic Records claimed ownership of the entire Stax catalog up to that point, was being reborn in a flurry of era-defining releases, celebrated by the double Soul Explosion album, which contained several hits generated by the newly restructured label in 1968.  Meanwhile, while the label lost one its greatest stars in the plane crash that claimed Otis Redding’s life, the Bar-Kays, who started out as the label’s youngest band in 1966, and enjoyed immediate success with their Soulfinger LP, lost most of their members in the same crash. But James Alexander and Ben Cauley, Jr., the only surviving Bar-Kays, forged ahead, and Gotta Groove was their shot across the bow in the name of rebirth, reinvention and survival.

This year, Craft Recordings launched a painstakingly-crafted reissue series, celebrating many of the works that marked the rebirth of Stax in the 1968-69 period. The select titles have been cut from their original analog tapes by Jeff Powell at Memphis’ Take Out Vinyl and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Memphis Record Pressing, making this a labor of love by some world-class local establishments.

JD Reager

Jeff Powell

Along with the records, Craft has created The Memphis Masters—a limited video series celebrating the reissued albums and showcasing Stax’s enduring musical legacy, as well as its influence on Memphis, TN. Created in partnership with Memphis Record Pressing and Memphis Tourism, and directed by Andrew Trent Fleming of TheFilmJerk Media, the multi-part series was shot in several locations around the city, including Sam Phillips Recording Service, Royal Studios and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Each episode—available on YouTube—will revolve around an album or collection from a singular artist or group on Stax’s roster, starting with Melting Pot from Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Other titles covered include Home, from husband-and-wife songwriting duo Delaney & Bonnie, Who’s Making Love from Johnnie Taylor and Victim of the Joke?…An Opera from acclaimed producer and songwriter David Porter. The Staple Singers will also be honored with a deluxe, seven-LP box set, Come Go With Me: The Stax Collection, available in early 2020. The majority of the single albums were recently released on November 1st, while LPs from Porter and Taylor will be reissued on December 6th.

The Bar-Kays today

And today, The Memphis Flyer is proud to announce Episode Two in The Memphis Masters series, celebrating Gotta Groove by The Bar-Kays, It’s a rare deep dive into the making of an era-defining work, with commentary by artists young and old on its lasting influence. Watch here to see how the album was created, literally from the ashes of the tragedy that claimed the lives of so many, and amidst the turmoil surrounding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then, get out to Record Store Day and get yourself a copy.

Exclusive Video Premiere: Memphis Masters Series Celebrates the Bar-Kays