BLP 4084

 "Baby Face" Willette - Stop and Listen

Released - April 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 22, 1961
Baby Face Willette, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Ben Dixon, drums.

tk.4 Jumpin' Jupiter
tk.7 Work Song
tk.8 Stop And Listen
tk.11 Chances Are Few
tk.12 Soul Walk
tk.15 At Last
tk.18 Willow Weep For Me

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Willow Weep for Me	Ann Ronell	22 May 1961
Chances Are Few	Baby Face Willette	22 May 1961
Jumpin' Jupiter	Baby Face Willette	22 May 1961
Stop and Listen	Baby Face Willette	22 May 1961
Side Two
At Last	Mack Gordon, Harry Warren	22 May 1961
Soul Walk	Baby Face Willette	22 May 1961
Work Song	Nat Adderley	22 May 1961
They Can't Take That Away from Me	George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin	22 May 1961

Liner Notes

ONE of the established facts of jazz life is that the organ is here, as a not-at-all-miscellaneous instrument, regardless of how various quarters are likely to welcome it. Another fact is that only a very few jazz organists have been able to work the “best” jazz rooms; all others ply their trade in a particular kind of club which has acquired the generic name, “organ room.” It cannot be coincidence that many young organ players are now appearing on the scene; it means that a trend is in the making. Yet another piece of evidence is even more indicative of the future dominance of the instrument: several recordings including jazz organ are beginning to come out of the West Coast. The last time such a thing happened, if you will recall, was when the better-known West Coast musicians put away their flutes and oboes, began playing their instruments with a "harder" attack, and started recording tunes by such men as Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins. What that indicated is now history.

Many young organists are bewildered by the opposition they meet. The best reason I have ever seen given for it was in the New Statesman, and it was by British writer Francis Newton. Often it takes a tourist’s eye-view to see things the natives ore too close to recognize, just as another Briton, director Alexander MacKendrick, in the motion picture Sweet Smell of Success, captured certain facets of New York which had always eluded Americans. “Uptown,” Newton wrote, “there is the jazz of Harlem (the one that does not even get advertised in the New Yorker, otherwise a faithful guide to the music). This is the sort of noise you hear coming out of the dark belly of the L Bar on Broadway and 148th, the visceral sound of Marlow Morris’s rhythmic organ playing, rather like crystallized glue, at the Top Club on West 145th...

It is not very ambitious music, but by God the place jumps, and the clients at the bar laugh and stomp their feet as men ought to do when they are enjoying themselves. Those who listen to this music are not ‘fans’; they ore just people who like to have some entertainment while they drink. Those who play it are craftsmen and showmen, who accept the facts of life in the jungle with disconcerting calm.” This, Newton contrasted with the reception accorded Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot, saying, “if Coleman were to blow in Smalls’ Paradise in Harlem, it would clear the place in five minutes. Musicians such as he are, it seems, as cut off now from the common listeners among their people as Webern is from the public at the Filey Butin’s. They depend on those who are themselves alienated, the internal emigrants of America.”

A critic, who, by the nature of his profession, is somewhat alienated himself, will feel a closer affinity to Coleman than to the others of whom Newton speaks, and hove more to say about his music. But there is a large and vital audience for the others, and what they hove to offer cannot be ignored.

Writing on the liner of Baby Face Willette’s first LP as a leader (Face to Face, Blue Note BLP4068), Robert Levin made the statement that “... on its own level, his music is as representative of his experience as, say, Leadbelly’s was of his.” Which delineates accurately Willette’s value as a musician and also points to the problems he is likely to have.

Very few writers on jazz have shared the experience which go to make up Willette’s music, and are not likely to. Nor does the music have the kind of universality which will make an American audience respond to an Italian film. But it does speak to a great number of people, and it speaks to them simply and directly.

More to the point is that Willette is, in my opinion, a performer with a considerable degree of individuality on his instrument — something likely to be overlooked by those who tend to dismiss the organ out of hand. That individuality is most plainly to be heard on the title track, “Stop and Listen,” and is even more obvious on another Willette original, “Chances Are Few.” One would expect the prevalent church influence on jazz to show itself more directly in organists than in players of other instruments, but that has not been the case. The majority of jazz organists — most of whom are converted pianists, as is Willette — have rejected overt ties to church organ in favor of the currently fashionable funky phrases that have less in common with church music than is generally supposed. Willette obviously makes no effort to hide his apparent ties to that music. His switch from piano to organ, he has said, was prompted by listening to two Chicago church organists, Herman Stevens and Mayfield Woods. He himself had accompanied gospel groups in the past, and told Levin, “There’s not a deep concern and involvement really much difference between rhythm & blues and even church music and jazz. That’s where it all came from.”

All of the music Willette plays here is more or less directly concerned with the blues, even the two standards. “Willow Weep for Me,” the lovely Ann Ronell ballad, owes an obvious debt to the form, and “At Last,” while further removed, has its blues affinities accurately brought out in this performance.

Mention should be made of the work of guitarist Grant Green. Less aggressively “modern” than most young guitarists, his single-note lines also reflect with the blues. Something of a personal discovery of altoist Lou Donaldson, Green is considered among the most important of guitarists by almost everyone who has worked with him, most notably pianist Horace Parlan. Green’s Blue Note album as a leader (Grant’s First Stand, 4064) features the same personnel as the present set.

Drummer Ben Dixon, although he lists Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Philly Joe Jones as influences, plays here in a style quite dissimilar to theirs. He recognizes that a different context calls for a different style, and functions accordingly. Many organists prefer to record without string bass, since they can create their own bass lines with the foot pedals, and find it on economic advantage to be able to work clubs with one less musician. Accustomed to this, the sudden presence of a bassist on a recording, who undoubtedly — simply because he is another human being playing another instrument — would not choose the same notes as the organist, would add an unwanted element of confusion to the recording situation. By the same token, the bass has become the primary pulse in most contemporary jazz groups, leaving the drummer free for embellishments. In the absence of a bassist, Dixon therefore has an additional and unusual burden placed upon him which he handles here with considerable taste.

Willette is still a young performer, although not as young as the features which gave him his nickname would indicate, and that this second album seems superior to his first is the best indication that he will make a continuing contribution to his extremely basic, if often overlooked, style of music.

—JOE GOLDBERG

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT STOP AND LISTEN

Predicting a rosy future for a jazz musician has never been a safe call, even when the track record of Blue Note producer Alfred Lion is taken into account. Original annotator Joe Goldberg heard the music on this album as strong evidence that Baby Face Willette would make “a continuing contribution.” As things worked out, he barely surfaced again on the national jazz scene.

Willette first appeared at the beginning of 1961 as one of Blue Note’s new stars, and the empathy he displayed with Grant Green and Ben Dixon here and on the earlier albums cited by Goldberg suggested that the unit was poised to become one of the label’s house rhythm sections. But Willette had been a creature of the road in his earlier professional life, and chose to travel once again rather than remain in New York. By the end of 1963 he had settled in Chicago, formed a trio, and begun appearing in local clubs, including the Moroccan Village. Two LPs were cut for Argo in 1964, after which little is known beyond the information contained on a Cook County, Illinois death certificate, which indicates that Roosevelt James Willett (sic) died on April 1, 1971.

There is little point in speculating on what happened to Willette on this scant record, but his musical preferences suggest that, had he lived a longer and more productive life, it would not necessarily have been spent as a jazz musician. As both Goldberg and Robert Levin (in the notes to the organist’s earlier album Face to Face) point out, rhythm & blues and gospel music were Willette’s true foundation. This was the reason that Lou Donaldson originally recruited the organist for Here ‘Tis, an album the saxophonist described as an attempt “to keep everything as simple and basic as possible, without getting involved in anything intricate or experimental.” Not that Willette found popular song forms intimidating, as he demonstrates here on “Willow Weep for Me,” “At Last,” and the bonus track, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”; yet his inclination appears to have been to simplify, which may explain why he chose a 12-bar blues chorus for Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” rather than the composition’s 16-bar structure, and why Willette employed the first four bars of “Blues March” for his line “Soul Walk” instead of simply playing the more sculpted arrangement and substitute harmonies of the Benny Golson classic.

The point is not that Willette should have made himself into something that he was not. As Goldberg and British critic Francis Newton (the nom de jazz of historian Eric Hobsbawm) emphasize, he played a style of music that resonated within the African-American community yet escaped the appreciation of the music’s more intellectual commentators. This more populist (urban, working-class, call it what you will) style was merging with modern jazz and popular music at the time, thanks to earlier versions of songs in this collection like the Adderley opus and “At Last,” which Etta James had taken far from its origins in the Glenn Miller band. With hindsight, especially after so much of popular music has moved in other directions, the proximity of what Willette played to, say, Lou Donaldson’s more “intricate” acoustic quartet music, appears even more obvious. So it remains unclear whether, had he chosen or been able to stay in the fray, Willette would have fulfilled the prophecy with which Goldberg concludes.

Grant Green and Ben Dixon did stay in the fray, often in tandem and frequently with other organists. They were heard supporting Brother Jack McDuff at the time of this recording, and a year later would strike another memorable partnership (again at the instigation of Donaldson) with Big John Patton that yielded more than a dozen recordings in a five-year period. Larry Young and Billy Gardner also kept company with Green and Dixon on record. Green, of course, did have a significant impact on the jazz world, although one often ignored for the reasons Goldberg and Newton emphasize, at least until time provided the necessary perspective.

In the end, what might have been cannot detract from what was some very good music that Roosevelt “Baby Face” Willette recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in 1961. Without a horn soloist in the band, as he is heard here and on the earlier Grant’s First Stand, he had no problem carrying the additional solo and ensemble responsibilities, and clearly knew how to set and maintain a groove. It can only be considered music’s loss that Baby never grew up.

Bob Blumenthal, 2008