BLP 4145

Don Wilkerson - Shoutin'

Released - May 1965

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 29, 1963
Don Wilkerson, tenor sax; John Patton, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Ben Dixon, drums.

tk.4 Sweet Cake
tk.8 Cookin' With Clarence
tk.12 Movin' Out
tk.13 Happy Johnny
tk.17 Easy Living
tk.21 Blues For J

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images / 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Movin' Out	Don Wilkerson	29 July 1963
Cookin' With Clarence	Don Wilkerson	29 July 1963
Easy Living	Robin, Ranger	29 July 1963
Side Two
Happy Johnny	Don Wilkerson	29 July 1963
Blues For J	Don Wilkerson	29 July 1963
Sweet Cake	Edward Frank	29 July 1963

Liner Notes

"SHOUTIN' is Don Wilkerson's third celebration of the blues heritage for this label. (His previous Blue Note albums are Preach Brother!, 4107 and Elder Don, 4121.)

Wilkerson plays a very basic style of jazz, a genre that has gone largely untouched by post-Bop advances (at least not by many beyond those of Horace Silver and the early Sonny Rollins) and which is informed almost exclusively — technically and inspirationally — by the essential sources, gospel and the blues. The scope and breadth of its expression is restricted pretty much to the experiences and emotions which these sources are about. On this basis, and by the standards of 1963, it is probably valid to call Wilkerson's jazz "primitive". But this is not meant to imply a derogation of either the music or the man who is making it, rather it is intended to define both in their relationship to other contemporary jazz forms and artists.

Wilkerson's music is no less contemporary than, say, Ornette Coleman's or Cecil Taylor's is, for it too would express a contemporary reality, in Wilkerson's instance the reality of Harlem — most immediately, for him, East Texas Harlem, and New York, Chicago or San Francisco Harlem as well. If the Colemans and Taylors have somehow managed to transcend their origins, escaped the trappings of the ghetto, gone on to discover other realities, and learned how their origins can nourish rather than confine their art, the Wilkersons work within the limitations of what is accessible to them, the traditions and sources they are permitted to claim. But compelling music can be made within these boundaries as the album at hand will witness, for Wilkerson and his associates are into the music. Their work has fire and commitment and these finally are all that matter because it is these energies which move and touch.

Many jazz musicians will describe that prerequisite quality and dimension of "Soul" as the badge of the hardships that are endured in the struggle to merely survive. But "soul", when it is genuinely present, is also more than that. The very act of making music is, in itself, not only a means of coming to terms with the circumstances of the environment, but also a way of transcending the environment. "Soul" comes from the victories that one may win over the environment, which is to say the ability to make use of one's creative capacities. It is about feeling good too, and the best of our jazzmen, the most "soulful" of them, have arrived at this.

Obviously Wilkerson has. Much jazz of this genre is blunted by anger. But Wilkerson's music would seem to be more about joy than anger. Sweet Cake is the work of a New Orleans musician and friend of Wilkerson's named Edward Frank. But Movin' Out, Cookin' With Clarence, Happy Johnny (which has undertones of Miles Davis' Milestones) are all Wilkerson's lines, all of them simple, rhythmically alive and infectious. Blues For J, also by Wilkerson, is an impassioned communication of the basic statement. How sophisticated Wilkerson and his colleagues are as regards the kind of jazz they choose to play, is perhaps most stirringly demonstrated on this track.

Rhythm is the key virtue of Wilkerson's talent. As an instrumentalist he is not in the possession of the big, booming sound of many of his similarly pursuaded colleagues, but his solos have great movement and lifting rhythmic charge. Happy Johnny and, to an even greater extent Cookin' With Clarence, on which the entire group excells (Grant Green and John Patton contribute electric solos) are exemplary of this. Wilkerson is also able to sustain a ballad tempo (on this album it is Easy Living) without the price of melodic paralysis. Patton's accompaniment on this number is especially lovely.

Wilkerson came to this series of Blue Note recordings with a background firmly entrenched in the idiom, though he has not gone entirely untouched by more advanced jazz players. He was born in Moreauville, Louisiana, in 1932 and grew up in Shreveport, La. and Houston, Texas. His first jobs were in those areas and later he traveled to Southern California where he worked and recorded with R&B bands, notably those of Amos Milburn and Charles Brown. During that period on the coast he also got to play with such jazz musicians as Sonny Clark, Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray. In 1954 Wilkerson joined a newly organized band of Ray Charles and he is the featured tenor soloist on many of Charles' most popular recordings; I Got A Woman, This Little Girl Of Mine, Come Back Baby, Halleluiah, I Love Her So, etc.

The tenor saxophonists whom Wilkerson acknowledges to have made the strongest impressions upon him have been Sonny Stitt, Ike Quebec, Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Gene Ammons, Paul Gonsalves and Sonny Rollins. These are exceptional players, at least one is more than that, but it is not unlikely that Wilkerson, in the not too distant future, will achieve a similar stature.

The accompanying players on this set; Green, guitar, Patton, organ and Ben Dixon, drums, are outstanding exponents of the idiom in their own right. Two of them, Green and Patton, have their own series of Blue Note albums, and Dixon has participated in a number of sessions for the company. Green is generally considered to be one of the most talented of the newer guitar players and probably only Kenny Burrell challenges his new and lofty eminence on the New York scene. Listen particularly to his fascinating work on Cookin' With Clarence and Happy Johnny. Patton can claim an original ear and, though he too can shout, a uniquely gifted sense of the more subtle expressive possibilities of the organ. His comping on all the numbers in this set is brilliantly alive.

"Alive" is a word that could be accurately applied to what happens on the entire album. The conditions which these musicians have come out of is hardly conducive to anything but the opposite of that word, but Wilkerson, and the others have discovered in their music, where the life is.

—ROBERT LEVIN

Cover Design by REID MILES
Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER