Lou Donaldson - Here 'Tis
Released - November 1961
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, January 23, 1961
Lou Donaldson, alto sax; 'Baby Face' Willette, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Dave Bailey, drums.
tk.1 Watusi Jump
tk.4 Here 'Tis
tk.12 Cool Blues
tk.13 Walk With Me
tk.16 A Foggy Day
Session Photos
Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| A Foggy Day | George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin | 23 January 1961 |
| Here 'Tis | Lou Donaldson | 23 January 1961 |
| Cool Blues | Charlie Parker | 23 January 1961 |
| Side Two | ||
| Watusi Jump | Lou Donaldson | 23 January 1961 |
| Walk Wid Me | Lou Donaldson | 23 January 1961 |
Liner Notes
LOU DONALDSON organized and prepared this album with a specific purpose.
“You hear so much talk about ‘funky’ and ‘soul’ jazz these days, but very little of it is really legitimate. I think this record is a little different because all the musicians have real backgrounds in that sort of style and we tried to keep everything as simple and basic as possible without getting involved in anything intricate or experimental. I’ve been looking for guys like this to ploy with for o long time.”
Grant Green, “Baby Face” Willette and Dave Bailey were able, Lou feels, out of their common background and experience, to effectively establish and sustain the mood he sought. “Nobody’s better than Grant on guitar for sound and feeling,” Lou believes, “and Willette doesn’t ploy like a lot of organists with a lot of sustained notes — he plays more rhythmically.
“Most albums you pick up today only have soul on the cover. These guys hove all played a lot of rhythm and blues and they know what it’s about.”
The three original blues lines, Here ‘Tis, Watusi Jump and Walk Widme are a moving result of Lou’s intention and accomplishment. And if “funk” has lately become a kind of style assumed in and for itself, rather than a personal, natural and inevitable outgrowth of experience, these tracks offer a potent antidote.
In Here ‘Tis, a somber, brooding communication, “We tried to play the blues like they were originally played — like a conversation with the instruments — just talking to each other.”
Watusi Jump, says Lou, was inspired by an African dance. “I guess all jazz comes from there.” If the tune conjures up no direct suggestions of its namesake, it lacks nothing in the way of what might be described as a “jazz vitality”, perhaps a not indirect derivation of a kind right there.
Walk Widme suggested to Lou, upon hearing a playback, a picture of “walking down a back country road with no shoes on. On this number, like the others, we tried to see what we could draw out of this kind of style and set on atmosphere. It’s not easy to do. You’ve got to be in the right mood and you’ve got to have the incentive. I think we did it though.”
Donaldson’s empathetic associates in this venture will, by now, be familiar to Blue Note followers. On a tour through the middle west some years ago Lou encountered Grant Green in St. Louis and upon hearing of the guitarist’s arrival in New York in the summer of 1960, brought him to the attention of Alfred Lion. A singular attribute of green’s is his single-note rhythmic forcefulness and since coming to New York he has earned considerable praise from many caustically critical musicians. Green was born in St. Louis on June 6, 1931, become acquainted with the guitar while still in grade school and had begun, by the time he was thirteen, to play with groups around his home area. He led his own trio or awhile and worked with Jimmy Forrest, Jack Murphy and Sam Lazar. In addition to his own Blue Note recording (Grant's First Stand”, BLP 4064) he can be heard with “Baby Face” Willette (BLP 4068) in a quartet fronted by the organist.
Willette is originally from New Orleans where he was born on September 11, 1933. His appearance is slight and youthful, but it belies both his age and the blues-rooted energy that he is able to bring to, and derive from, the organ. If a recurrent expression of his is that “the eyes are deceivers” one understands that he has been confronted with astonishment over his incongruous instrumental powers on many occasions. Willette’s career has transported him across the entire country and he has worked primarily with rhythm and blues bands and traveling gospel companies. He does not read music and was first a pianist; he did not play the organ professionally until 1958. An uncle, Fred Freeman, a pianist during the 1920s, his mother, a missionary who also played the piano and his father, the minister of a Little Rock, Arkansas church, provided early musical encouragement.
Drummer Dave Bailey, who has recorded previously with Donaldson, was born in Portsmouth, Virginia on February 22, 1926. Several musicians in his family gave him his first training and after a tour in the service and a period studying at the Music Center Conservatory in New York, he worked with, among others, Al Sears, Johnny Hodges, Horace Silver, Charlie Mingus, Gerry Mulligan (with whom he toured Europe) and Ben Webster.
Of the leader it has been said that he has modeled his approach on that of Charlie Parker and he is often casually dismissed as a Parker imitator. But such appraisals while they might be to the point with say, a Sonny Stitt who has built a career around the capacities of his memory, are not entirely valid in a discussion of Donaldson. Donaldson is indebted to Parker. He is also aware that a grasp of mannerisms is only a key to the complexities of a style — why a style is that style. And if there is sometimes, as has been said, a scent of the academy about Donaldson’s work, there is also the vitality and conviction of insight. Donaldson can claim a larger cognizance than can most of his younger contemporaries of the tradition and roots of both the kind of music he plays and the instrument upon which he plays it.
Born in 1926 at approximately the same time that the saxophone was first used by jazz musicians, Lou has had occasion to hear first hand and assimilate, varying methods and approaches that antedate Parker’s innovations and this has re-suited in a foundation that gives a larger validity to the inspiration he has found in Parker and what he has done with it. Within his limitations Donaldson is concerned with exploring the capacities of the alto saxophone, but makes a point, as he has done in this album, of keeping his style what he terms a “simple” one. In the album notes for “Lou Takes Off” 1591, one of the numerous recordings he has made for Blue Note (others are 1537, 1545, 1566, 1593, 4012, 4025, 4036) I quoted him as saying, “You know, you can get as much out of one note as you can out of really intricate harmonics. Jazz should be simple and you should be able to get what you can out of it.
Apart from Parker’s influence, an experience that would explain Lou’s predilection for the blues and the manner in which he plays them is an extensive period he spent working with rhythm and blues bands. In the same notes he went on to say, “You can learn a lot playing rhythm and blues that you could never learn in school. like Coltrane and Griffin. They played a lot of that stuff and they can play jazz now with a lot of power, drive and depth.” The same might apply as well to Donaldson.
Lou’s biography has been outlined on certain of his previous LPs. Briefly, he was born in Badin, North Carolina, the son of a music instructor and a minister. His mother provided him with his first musical training and at the age of fifteen he began playing the clarinet. In 1945 after attending college in Greensboro he was inducted into the Navy where he took up the alto. Upon his discharge he returned to North Carolina and for a time worked with various local groups. Finally he decided to venture north to New York where he has worked with many groups, most significant of which, apart from his own, were led by Art Blakey.
Here ‘Tis, Wotusi Jump and Wolk Widme, discussed above, offer exemplary work by all the soloists. Certainly they must be included with the best of Donaldson’s efforts. Foggy Day, swung at a brisk tempo and containing fine, integrated solos by Green, Willette and Donaldson in that order, is the only non-blues in the set (though Willette threatens to turn his moment into almost a blues shout).
Cool Blues, of a different persuasion than the others and one of many Charlie Parker tunes Donaldson has recorded, affords the possibility of direct comparison. But ¡f it amply demonstrates Bird’s influence on Donaldson, it also exemplifies where the latter has taken that influence — through the practice room and into a personal musical experience and statement.
—ROBERT LEVIN
Cover Photo by RONNIE BRATHWAITE
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT HERE ‘TIS
Finding Lou Donaldson surrounded by organ, guitar, and drums today is hardly unusual. In the decades since this music was recorded, the setting has become as commonplace as the hat that the alto saxophonist sports on the cover of this and so many of his other Blue Note albums. In early-1961, however, the organ combo setting marked a radical departure from Donaldson’s typical, commercially proven format wherein the rhythm section featured piano, bass, drums, and conga drums. In this sense, as well as how the session compared to the majority of the era’s attempts at soul music, Here ‘Tis was indeed “a little different.”
Working with organ was not totally alien to Donaldson. Since 1957, he had been the saxophonist of choice for Jimmy Smith when a recording project called for Smith to expand his working trio. As a touring musician, Donaldson had also encountered and sometimes performed with his share of organists and guitarists. Of greatest importance was his early experience playing rhythm and blues, an apprenticeship that was common at the time and that did much to shape several of Donaldson’s sax-playing contemporaries. The technical facility and harmonic sophistication displayed in his Blue Note recordings, the earliest of which also featured such visionaries as Milt Jackson, John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, and Clifford Brown, left no doubt as to Donaldson’s modern jazz credentials; yet what he describes as his ability “to keep everything as simple and basic as possible without getting involved in anything intricate or experimental” was also central to his image and his popularity.
The kindred spirits that Donaldson required to make his first “legitimate” funk album involved one old friend and two of his personal discoveries. Drummer Dave Bailey got his start in R&B circles, but since 1955 had established his jazz profile through work with Gerry Mulligan and Donaldson. Grant Green had impressed Donaldson during the latter’s 1959 visit to East St. Louis, where Green was packing Leo Gooden’s club with his powerful, highly original mixture of bop and soul. Within the year, Donaldson had persuaded Green to move to New York and found both a regular job for the guitarist in Brother Jack McDuff’s band and a record deal with Blue Note. (Serving as a talent scout was nothing new for Donaldson, who had already led sessions where Horace Silver, Blue Mitchell, and Clifford Brown made their Blue Note debuts.) For years, Here 'Tis was considered Green’s initial session with producer Alfred Lion, although a quartet date from two months earlier emerged in 2001 on the Green disc First Session. Organist Roosevelt “Baby Face” Willette, another recent arrival on the East Coast, also received a recording contract after this session. While Green went on to become a signature artist for the label, Willette would resume the wanderlust and obscurity that marked his early career in a matter of months. Before taking to the road again, the organist created three more memorable albums with Green, two of which (Grant’s First Stand and his own Face to Face) were taped within a week of Here ‘Tis.
Previous Donaldson albums included a distinctive mixture of familiar and obscure standards, old warhorses, new hits, bebop lines, and Latin staples. Here, in contrast, four of the five titles hew to the twelve-bar form, while still spanning an emotional gamut from Charlie Parker’s fleet “Cool Blues” and the propulsive “Watusi Jump” to the more atmospheric “Walk Wid Me” and title track. The variety of moods the quartet creates on the blues form is one of the album’s greatest strengths, while the additional structural and harmonic complexity of “A Foggy Day,” with Green’s dazzling opening solo and Donaldson’s affirmative choruses, provides an infectious opening lift.
Robert Levin’s original liner notes indicate that Donaldson was still struggling to rise above the faint-praise damnation of “Charlie Parker imitator” that plagued him and many other alto saxophonists of the period, including Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, and Phil Woods, as well as Sonny Stitt. In Donaldson’s case, the struggle would continue for a while longer, until later successes with organ support such as “Funky Mama” (1962, from The Natural Soul) and “Alligator Bogaloo” (1967, from the album of the same name) elevated him to godfather status in the realm of jazz funk. Here ‘Tis announces to all who were paying attention that Lou Donaldson already had his own, funky thing.
- Bob Blumenthal, 2007
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