McCoy Tyner - He's The Cat

Enlightenment, 1973

As an college student in the late 70s, I wasn't much of a jazz fan.  I didn't dislike jazz, I just didn't know anything about it and didn't listen to it.  My record collection at the time was probably less than 100 albums, and exactly none of them were jazz albums.  

Instead, the records spinning in my dorm room were (among others) the Allman Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, David Bromberg, The Who, Devo, and Leon Russell.  And because my roommate was a fan, I also got a steady diet of Led Zeppelin.  (I came to appreciate Led Zeppelin somewhat more later, but at the time I mostly just tolerated them.)  

At some point in my college career (things are a little hazy), I picked up my first jazz album.  Even though I don't remember when it was, I do remember what it was: McCoy Tyner's 1973 double album titled Enlightenment (above), recorded live on July 7, 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Tyner ca. 1964

To be honest, when I bought the album I don't think that I even knew who McCoy Tyner was.  But one sunny day the university bookstore set up racks of used records for sale outside the student union, so I stopped to have a look.  I'm not sure what attracted me to Enlightenment.  It may have just been curiosity or the great cover photo of Tyner on stage at the Montreux Festival dripping with sweat.  Whatever the reason, I decided to give it a try. 

As it turned out, I managed to pick a pretty out there selection to start my jazz journey.  Some 40 years and more than 5,000 jazz LPs later (including 43 by McCoy Tyner), Enlightenment remains a sentimental favorite, but there are many other Tyner albums that I like better now.  I didn't know it at the time, but Enlightenment accurately reflects the two divergent styles that dominate Tyner's music.  The first is a John Coltrane-inspired, free form approach that is heavily percussive, atonal, and, frankly, hard to listen to.  The other strain features Tyner's amazing virtuosity in a more traditional, straight-ahead bop style, although usually with a twist or two.

Live at Montreux, 1973

The first track on the album, "Enlightenment Suite, Part 1," is an amalgam of Tyner's two styles.  The song leads off with a long crescendo of pounding piano chords on top of a wailing soprano sax by Azar Lawrence and shimmering cymbals played by drummer Alphonse Mouzon.  

After about a minute, when the discordant tension is nearly unbearable, Mouzon and bassist Juini Booth (left) drive the song forward until it resolves into a beautiful melodic theme that features incredible improvisations by Tyner and Lawrence.  The two swirl and soar around each other for about ten minutes.  Holy guacamole, I had never heard anything like it.  It gave me goosebumps.  Pace lovers of rock 'n' roll (of which I'm one), but this is music and musicianship on a completely different level.  After one listen, I was hooked.  [Click to hear the album track.  There is a video of the entire Montreux performance here that's worth watching to see the intensity and interplay of the band and to realize just how hard these guys are working, but the sound isn't as good.]

About half of the Coltrane albums that Tyner played on

Back in my dorm, being blown away by Enlightenment, I knew nothing about Tyner's place in the jazz world or that in the first half of the 1960s, while still in his early 20s, Tyner had anchored a string of classic John Coltrane albums that included Olé, Coltrane's Sound, Live At The Village Vanguard, Impressions, John Coltrane And Johnny Hartman, Live At Birdland, My Favorite Things, Ballads, Crescent, and A Love Supreme.  [If Tyner had retired at 25, he would still be in the Pantheon of jazz legends.]  And of course I had no idea that Enlightenment was already Tyner's 12th album as a leader at the tender age of 34.

The great Bud Powell

Tyner was born in Philadelphia in December, 1938.  He grew up in a city that was one of the true fountainheads of modern jazz, with established stars such as as Dizzy Gillespie, Red Garland, Benny Golson, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, and Billie Holliday.  Tyner began taking piano lessons at 13, and as a young pianist, he couldn't help but be influenced by the wealth of jazz talent produced by his native city.  The great pianist Bud Powell, while not from Philadelphia, came to stay at his brother's apartment in West Philly for a brief period in 1954, when Tyner was 15.  Powell's apartment was just around the corner from the Tyner family.  Since there was no piano in the apartment, he would walk over to the Tyners' house to play their piano.  To a young, aspiring jazz pianist like Tyner, it must have felt like having Mozart stop by.  So it's no wonder that Tyner credits Bud Powell as one of his primary influences.

McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane

In addition to the established stars, in the mid 1950s Philadelphia was bursting at the seams with future jazz greats, including Albert Heath, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Smith, Philly Joe Jones, Lee Morgan, Reggie Workman, Jimmy Garrison, Kenny Barron, and Ray Bryant.  While Tyner crossed paths and played with many of these musicians, the most consequential "Philly" jazzman for him turned out to be a transplant from North Carolina named John Coltrane.

In a 2008 interview with Downbeat writer Bill Milkowski, Tyner says that he met Coltrane for the first time in October of 1956 when he (Tyner) was playing in a band led by Cal Massey at a club called the Red Rooster in Philadelphia.  At the time, Coltrane was with the Miles Davis group.  Tyner goes on to say, "But we really got acquainted with each other when he left Miles’ band the first time [in April, 1957, when Miles fired him because of his heroin addiction], and returned to Philly to live with his mother [to kick his habit].  I used to go by there and play with John.  She had an upright piano, and we’d play together at his home.  And he’d also come by my place and play with me. My piano was in my mother’s beauty shop [which was the Tyner family living room].  So, we used to have jam sessions at her beauty shop with John and guys from the neighborhood. He was 12 years older than me, so he was like a big brother to me.”

Tyner, Coltrane, Garrison, and Jones

Coltrane was clearly impressed with Tyner's ability and took the younger musician under his wing.  He promised Tyner that when he formed his own band some day, he would include Tyner on piano.  Three years later, Coltrane kept his promise.  In 1960, after Coltrane had left Miles for good, he put together his own group with Tyner on piano.  It wasn't an entirely linear process, as a few musicians came and went.  But the core members of Coltrane's legendary quartet, until it broke up in 1965, were McCoy Tyner on piano, John Coltrane on tenor and soprano sax, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums.  

In an interview with NPR correspondent Nate Chinen in 1997, Tyner spoke candidly about the lasting impact of that experience even after he had left the group.  "I was so immersed in the music when I was with John.  The influence was so great, and the roles we all played in that group were so powerful; you couldn't divorce yourself from it just because you weren't physically there. For a while there, all the horn players that were with me wanted to sound like John. So I deliberately started using alto sax instead of tenor, and other instruments, because I wanted to kind of try something different."

The early Blue Note years

While still part of Coltrane's quartet, Tyner launched what would become an incredibly successful and prolific solo career, recording five albums for Impulse Records (Coltrane's label) from 1963-65.  After leaving Coltrane's group, he also switched labels, and from 1967-72 recorded his next five albums for Blue Note:  The Real McCoy, Tender Moments, Time For Tyner, Expansions, and Extensions (above).  While Coltrane's influence is easy to hear in almost all of Tyner's music, nearly all these early solo works were much more mainstream bebop than free jazz.  It may have been just the harsh reality of the market -- free jazz may have been professionally satisfying, but it didn't sell -- and Tyner and his labels naturally wanted to make a profit.  The exceptions are Tyner's last two albums for Blue Note, Expansions and Extensions, which give away the game in their titles.  On these two albums Tyner starts to carve out his own creative space, combining elements of bebop, free jazz, modal music, and increasingly drawing on African and other international influences.  

Sahara

In 1972, Tyner once again switched labels, signing with Milestone Records, a division of the Fantasy group.  His first Milestone album was 1972's Sahara, which continues the probing experimentation of his last two Blue Note releases.  The cover photo of Sahara (left) is telling, if somewhat incongruous. It shows Tyner sitting alone on a wooden crate in a field of rubble playing a Japanese koto.  It seems to say:  "We're tearing down all the old structures of jazz and building something new."  It wasn't immediately clear what the "something new" would be, but apparently it would involve a koto.  Sahara is the last album before the release of 1973's Enlightment, and there is no question that the Montreux concert and Sahara are of a piece.  Although none of the songs overlap, Enlightenment feels like Sahara on steroids, with the added excitement and urgency of a live show. 

Sama Layuca, 1974

For the next 35 years, the only thing predictable about Tyner's output was its unpredictability.  No doubt to the detriment of his bank account -- since his audience never knew what to expect next -- Tyner's output zigged and zagged from free form to bop to big band to an assortment of small group ensembles with an ever-changing mix of styles, instruments and influences.  As pianist Brian Auger wrote in the liner notes to Tyner's 1974 release Sama Layuca (a decidedly free-form work), "Tyner is one of those rare musicians who pursues without hesitation his chosen path, without regard for whether that seems the road to personal success or gain."  Which is a polite way of saying, "This album is some weird shit and probably won't sell many copies."

Big Band, 1991

Even though I'm an avid fan, there are a number of Tyner albums (like Expansions and Sama Layuca) that I just can't abide.  I feel the same way about the later works by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  I can appreciate that, like Miles and Coltrane, Tyner wanted to continue to evolve musically and stretch the creative boundaries of jazz.  And I can even stipulate that avant-garde and modal music were important contributions to jazz that opened up new pathways for countless other musicians.  But I don't have to listen to it.  Luckily for me, McCoy Tyner (not to mention Miles and Trane) produced so many great albums that it's easy enough to skip the ones I don't like.  And in Tyner's case, he continued to produce outstanding and accessible traditional jazz (including wonderful big band albums) up until the end of this career.

Tyner died in 2020 at the age of 81, leaving a 60 plus-year legacy as a performer and jazz iconoclast.  I'll give the last word to bassist Avery Sharpe, who often played in Tyner's trio in the 2000s.  “People always talk about McCoy’s power and the whole thing that he created with Trane, but McCoy had an incredible sense of calm.  He could play behind singers, he could play behind anybody, because he was really very sensitive . . . But at the same time, he could just run everybody off the stage if you want to bring the energy level up . . . I’ve been in all-star situations where cats have egos, but they’ll all look over at McCoy and go, ‘He’s the cat. We’re all great players, but he’s the cat.’”

Enjoy the music!

Concord Jazz -- Still Swinging After 50 Years

Downtown Concord, CA

About 30 miles east of San Francisco is the city of Concord, CA.  The photo I found online of Concord's downtown (above) makes it look quite fetching.  Since I've never been, I can't say for sure, but the next time I'm in the Bay area I'll try to stop by and report back.  For the moment, I will just say that all jazz fans owe a large debt of gratitude to Concord, CA.  Pound for pound, it's one of the most important cities in the history of jazz.  

Concord's favorite son, Dave Brubeck

First of all, Concord is the birthplace and childhood home of Dave Brubeck, one of the seminal figures in jazz music.  Brubeck was born in 1920 and lived at the family's home on Pacheco Street in Concord (where his mother gave piano lessons) until he was 12.  On the Concord Historical Society web site, there is a page dedicated to Brubeck that quotes him as saying: "I have many happy memories of life in Concord. It was an ideal place for a boy to grow up. I recall playing in Todos Santos Park on summer evenings . . . I roamed the hills surrounding Concord on my Cleveland bike and door to door peddled apples from our back yard tree."  Brubeck alone is more than enough to put Concord on the jazz map of the world.

Carl Jefferson
at the Concord Pavilion

But Concord also boasts another famous long-time resident who had an enormous impact on jazz music.  Carl Jefferson was born in 1919 (almost exactly one year before Brubeck) in Alameda, CA, a suburb of Oakland about 20 miles west of Concord.  Jefferson moved to Concord in 1958 to become the general manager of a car dealership called Montclair Motors.  Two years later, he bought out the owner and renamed the dealership Jefferson Motors.  By the end of the 60s he was one of the premier Lincoln Mercury dealers in the country.  As a big jazz fan (who apparently loathed rock 'n' roll music), Jefferson wanted to help promote jazz and give back to the community that had made him quite wealthy.  What better way than to sponsor a jazz music festival in Concord?  He contributed seed money, recruited donations from his friends in the business community, talked the city into matching their contributions, and together they launched a summer music festival in Concord.

The first edition of the festival opened on August 26, 1969, just one week after Woodstock closed in upstate New York.  According to the "Visit Concord" website: "The music showcase was called the Jazz in the Park Festival, and was held in a field near Concord High School.  More than 17,000 jazz fans showed up to hear music by Vince Guaraldi, Stan Kenton, Jean Luc Ponty, Carmen McRae, Don Ellis, Mel Torme, and the Buddy Rich Band."  Not a bad lineup to kick off a jazz music festival.  A brief report in the September 6 issue of Billboard Magazine (correctly) refers to the event as the "Concord Summer Festival" and adds that artists Bola Sete, Shelly Manne, and Cal Tjader also performed.  (By 1972 the name of the festival had changed from the Concord Summer Festival to The Concord Jazz Festival, but both names appear interchangeably in news articles for a couple of years.)

Vintage post card of the Concord Pavilion

The Jazz Festival grew so quickly and became so popular that after only a couple of years, Jefferson began to urge the city to build a performing arts center that could serve as a permanent home for the event and that would attract other cultural performances to the community throughout the year.  In 1973, a search committee (including Jefferson) made a fact-finding tour of performance sites around the country.  Based on the committee's recommendations, the city agreed to a $4.5 million bond issue to fund construction and hired architect Frank Gehry to design the Concord Pavilion, a covered, open-air venue in the hills east of the city.  The Pavilion opened in May, 1975, in time to host the 7th Festival.

If Jefferson's only contribution to the promotion of jazz had been the creation of the Concord Jazz Festival and the construction of the Concord Pavilion, that still would have been significant.  But as it turns out, Jefferson was just getting started.  As a fan of straight-ahead jazz, Jefferson lamented how rock music was changing jazz, pushing the music toward fusion, free jazz, and other non-mainstream styles.  He is quoted as saying that "The major labels are no longer making the kinds of records I like to listen to."  If you are a determined, wealthy businessman with a long list of musician friends and growing influence in the jazz music world, what do you do?  Well, if you are Carl Jefferson, you start your own label.

According to the founding lore, the light-bulb moment came during the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  After one of the shows, Jefferson invited some of the performers out for drinks at a local inn.  Among the musicians present were jazz greats Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, and Ray Brown.  During the conversation, the musicians expressed their sadness at how the music industry was changing and said that for the first time in a long time, they were having trouble getting a record deal.  Sources differ somewhat on Jefferson's exact response, but it was something on the order of:  "Well, hell, how much could it cost to make a record?  I’ll make a record with you.  How do you do it?"  Within a few short months, Jefferson had started his own record label and named it Concord Jazz.  [It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the label was formed.  The date the label was incorporated, January 5, 1974, is often cited as the founding date, but it seems clear that things were up and running well before the end of 1973.]

In the beginning, Jefferson ran the label out of his Lincoln Mercury showroom.  John Burk, a former producer for Concord Jazz who eventually became president of the Concord Music Group, says that "They literally ran the label out of the dealership.  The guys who washed cars would pack records.  It was a great way to start a label, because all the overhead was covered by the car dealership.” 

The 1st release on the Concord Jazz label

True to his word, the first album released on Jefferson's new label featured guitarists Joe Pass and Herb Ellis, with Ray Brown on bass and Jake Hanna on drums.  The album (left), catalog number CJS-1, is titled Jazz/Concord, and perhaps not surprisingly for a record label run out of a car dealership, it seems a bit slipshod.  

To begin with, the cover art has a home-made feel to it -- which turns out to be the case.  The drawing is credited to Jay Toffoli, who, at the time, was the teenage son of the Executive Director of the Concord Summer Festival, John Toffoli.  The fact that the references in the drawing -- a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train, a stage coach, a festival ticket, and the large "C" on a red flower background (the logo of the city of Concord) refer to the Summer Festival and the city and not to Herb Ellis and Joe Pass leads one to believe that Jefferson pressed the advertising agency for his car sales into service, and they recycled a poster from the festival for the album cover. 

Beyond that, there is confusion about where and when the session was actually recorded.  While the album cover art and title imply that this is a live session from the Concord Jazz Festival, the credits on the back of the jacket say: "Recorded at Wally Hyder (sic) Studios in Los Angeles on July 29, 1973."  Hmmm.  In the first place, the studio is Wally Heider's.  But regardless, it couldn't have been recorded there on July 29, 1973, because Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna were the featured performers at the 4th Annual Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, CA on that date.

In his extensive liner notes on the back of the jacket, San Francisco music critic Philip Elwood doesn't provide any explanation.  Even when he comments on the track titled "Happiness Is The Concord Jazz Festival," he doesn't take the opportunity to reveal if the track was, you know, actually recorded at the festival.  

Jazz/Concord Mk. II

In his AllMusic review of the album, critic Scott Yanow states that the album "was recorded at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival."  In my experience, Yanow knows his stuff, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  However, the recording doesn't sound live, as there is no audience noise or applause, and no patter between the performers.    

I couldn't find the precise release date for the first album, but it appears to have come out at the beginning of 1974.  (Although a couple of sources indicate that it may have been released in late 1973.)  Interestingly, not long after the album's debut, a second version with a new cover (right) was released.  The new cover replaced the "Festival" drawing montage with a mocked-up image of ticket stubs from the 1972 Festival.  While the new cover looks more professional, it actually adds to the confusion by suggesting that the recording might have been made made at the 1972 Festival.

Herb Ellis signed copy of CJ-2

The revised version of Jazz/Concord came out around the same time as the label's second release, in February of 1974, which was titled Seven, Come Eleven.  Since a professional team (credited as Dan Buck Graphic Design on the back of the jacket) were thankfully brought on board to create the second cover, it appears that Jefferson may have taken the opportunity to have the team revamp the first cover in order to create a more uniform look for his new label.  The team from Dan Buck also came up with a new label design and a new corporate logo (below) both of which were used on the second album and subsequent releases.

The original logo (left) and revised logo (right)

There is no mystery about the source for the music on CJ-2, Concord's second release.  The subhead on Seven, Come Eleven (named for the second track on the album, a classic written by Benny Goodman and guitarist Charlie Christian) reads: "From their live performance at the Concord Summer Festival."  The lineup is the same as the first release, with Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna.  The back cover of the jacket features photos of the quartet onstage at the 1973 festival.  [Fun fact: My copy of CJ-2 (above left) is signed on the front in green ink by Herb Ellis.  I bought the album online, and didn't know it was signed until it arrived.  The inscription is a little hard to make out, but says: "I Loved It - Herb Ellis."  I don't know if he's referring to the Festival or something else, but it's very neat having his signature on the album.

In his AllMusic review of Seven, Come Eleven, Scott Yanow states that "The second Concord album was recorded the day after the first with the same lineup."  Which would mean that CJ-2 was recorded at the Festival on July 30, 1973.  Once again, I'm assuming that Yanow knows what he's talking about, which means that the first two Concord Jazz releases actually make up Vols. 1 and 2 of Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna live at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  In contrast to the first album, Seven, Come Eleven is clearly a live recording, with lots of applause and other audience noise, as well as Carl Jefferson's welcome remarks and introduction of the band.

Jefferson may have started Concord Jazz as a sideline (or almost as a barroom boast), but it wasn't long before the label was the dominant player in straight-ahead or mainstream jazz.  While most of the major labels were promoting free jazz, fusion, or other new crossover trends, Carl Jefferson stuck with making records that he liked.  By the fall of 1978, just four and a half years after he started the label, Concord Jazz had a catalog of 69 albums, including recordings by veterans like Bud Shank, Hank Jones, Barney Kessel, Joe Venuti, Tal Farlow, and Louie Bellson, as well as newcomers like Scott Hamilton and Grant Geissman.  

In 1980, Jefferson sold his car dealership in order to devote full time to running the label.  At its peak, Concord Jazz put out 30-40 new albums each year.  By the time Jefferson died in 1995, he had supervised the release of more than 650 albums.  (The last vinyl release was CJ-397 in 1992, which featured Gene Harris And the Philip Morris Superband on an album titled Live At Town Hall, N.Y.C.)  Jefferson is listed as "Producer" on almost all Concord Jazz titles, although numerous sources say that he had little musical or creative input into the recordings, giving the artists a free hand to play what they wanted.  Like other successful independent jazz labels such as Contemporary, Pablo, and CTI, Jefferson had an in-house stable of musicians who regularly played on each other's sessions and toured together to play at music festivals around the world (not least of which, the Concord Jazz Festival).

Shortly before Jefferson's death in 1995, he sold Concord Jazz to Alliance Entertainment.  In 1999, Alliance was bought out by a group of investors that included film and TV producer Norman Lear.  In 2004, Concord Jazz bought the Fantasy Group of labels, and renamed the new, combined company the Concord Music Group.  Today, the Concord Music Group is the largest independent music organization in the world, controlling a staggering number of classic labels, including Concord Jazz, Milestone, Pablo, Prestige, Riverside, Savoy, Stax, Telarc, Vee-Jay, and many others.

Sadly, the Concord Jazz Festival folded in 2004 after 35 years.  In 2019, the Concord Music Group put together a one-time 50th anniversary festival to honor founder Carl Jefferson and his festival, which featured an all-star lineup of current and former Concord label performers (poster above).

A note about the labels on Concord Jazz albums.  The original label that first appeared in 1974 on CJ-2 (and on the revised CJS-1) is white with black text and a gray Concord logo at top (left below).  The logo is cleverly designed to be both a "c" connected to a "J" for Concord Jazz, as well as an eighth note.  Beginning with the release of CJ-80 in 1979, the redesigned label (right below) features "Concord Jazz" in a new, white font at the top on a gray/silver checkerboard background covering the entire label.  The gray squares (which can appear tan-colored in the right light) are copies of the original Concord logo that used to appear at the top in the old label.  The revised label was used from CJ-80 up until the last LP (CJ-397) in 1992.

The original 1974 label at left was used up until CJ-80 (right), which was released in 1979

Be aware that many of Concord Jazz's early titles were reissued over the years.  If you find a title with the catalog number CJ-1 through CJ-79 on the checkerboard label, then you know it is a reissue from 1979 or later.

I have about 175 of the 379 Concord Jazz releases on vinyl.  Almost without exception they are great, swinging, mainstream jazz.  You (almost) can't go wrong with any title in the catalog.  The engineering and mixing (mostly by Phil Edwards) is first-rate, as is the mastering (mostly by Leo Kulka and George Horn).  In general, Concord Jazz titles sold well and most are not difficult to find.  However, because of the high quality of the catalog and the enduring appeal of the music, they remain in demand and usually sell for $10-15 in VG+ or NM condition.  If you are a fan of mainstream jazz and run across any Concord Jazz titles, I urge you snap them up.  

Enjoy the music!

A Great Lost Album From 1975

Pop quiz!  Name the group in the photo below.  No peeking.

Give up?  Here's a hint, it's the back cover photo from one of the most neglected albums of 1975.  Despite the growing scourge of disco and punk rock, 1975 was still a pretty good year for rock music.  Among the classic releases that year were Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, Katy Lied by Steely Dan, A Night At The Opera by Queen, Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, One Of These Nights by the Eagles, Young Americans by David Bowie, and Patti Smith's Horses.  Alright, 1975 was no 1969, but it was no slouch either.

As happens every year, there are some really fine albums that fall through the cracks, don't find an audience, and don't sell nearly as well as they should.  Assuming you haven't guessed the group in the photo, it's the back cover from the album Change by Spanky & Our Gang (front cover photo way down below).  Not only was Change one of the best albums of 1975, I'd argue it's pretty high up on the list of all-time great neglected albums.  Yeah, yeah, just hear me out.

New Wine Singers - first album, 1963

In the early 1960s, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane (b. 1942) left Peoria for Chicago where she hoped to make it as a singer.  Her first paying gig was in 1962 with a jazz-based vocal group called the Jamie Lyn Trio.  By 1963, she was singing in a folk group called The New Wine Singers.  The New Wine Singers had some modest success and put out two albums of folk and protest music in 1963 and 1965.  

For the purposes of our story, The New Wine Singers are important because it was here that McFarlane got the nickname "Spanky."  Reports vary as to why, but in a 2012 interview, McFarlane says that the band liked to watch reruns of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedy shorts, and the resemblance between the name of the child actor who played Spanky -- George "Spanky" McFarland -- and McFarlane, was too hard to resist, so she became Spanky McFarlane.  It was also during her time with The New Wine Singers that McFarlane met multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Hale, who would later join Spanky & Our Gang.

By late 1965, The New Wine Singers had split up, and McFarlane headed to Florida.  The story goes that she met musicians Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering when they were trapped for three days by a hurricane.  They apparently hit it off, and McFarlane invited the guys to come see her in Chicago sometime. 

Mother Blues nightclub in Oldtown Chicago

Some months later, in early 1966, McFarlane was living in an apartment over a Chicago club called Mother Blues.  (It's unclear, but she may also have been working at the club).  In any case, the club's co-owner, Curly Tait, knew McFarlane and knew she was a singer, and asked if she could put together a house band to open for the headliners at his club (including the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Muddy Waters).  McFarlane quickly convinced her Florida hurricane buddies, Pickering and Bach, to come up to Chicago, and together they formed an acoustic jug-band trio, with Pickering on guitar, Bach on bass, and McFarlane singing and playing kazoo and washboard.  Since they didn't have time to rehearse a lot of songs, the group mixed in silly costumes, gags and novelty bits.

The trio called themselves Spanky & Our Gang, which was originally meant to be a joke.  After (somewhat surprisingly) getting some favorable press and attracting a local following with the name, they decided to keep it.  As word spread and the group began to play bigger venues, they brought in McFarlane's old bandmate from The New Wine Singers, guitarist and percussionist Malcolm Hale, to fill out their sound.  Soon they were in demand at the hottest spots in the Windy City.  Curly Tait signed on to manage the group.

First single, 1967

Mercury Records was based in Chicago, and pretty soon the label took notice of the up-and-coming group in their backyard and offered Spanky & Our Gang a contract.  Once the group was on board, the label shipped them off to New York to give them more exposure and assigned their NYC A&R man Jerry Ross to help polish their sound and get them ready for the studio.  Their first single (which had been rejected by The Mamas And The Papas) was "Sunday Will Never Be The Same."  It was released in May, 1967 and quickly charted, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Two more top 40 hits, "Lazy Day" and "Making Every Minute Count" followed in short order.  By late summer, the group added drummer John Seiter to the line up, and Mercury sent them to Los Angeles to record tracks for their first LP.  

First album, 1967

The eponymous Spanky And Our Gang album was released on August 1, 1967.  Unfortunately, as Bruce Eder writes on Allmusic, "The group's debut LP demonstrates what can go wrong, even with a group enjoying a trio of hit singles.  Though those hits are here, the album is the least representative of what the group was about and a mixed bag for fans."  

Indeed, the stylistic confusion of the material -- which included everything from the spoken-word song "Trouble" (from the Broadway show The Music Man) to a make-believe "Commercial" for pot to John Denver's "Jet Plane" to the depression-era dirge "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" -- made it difficult to get a handle on the group's style.  Historically, they've been lumped into the category of bubblegum pop, but that really just applies to their hit singles and doesn't do justice to their gorgeous multi-part harmonies and McFarlane's world-class vocals.  Unfortunately, the goofy Vaudevillian patter, the novelty songs, and the collage of "old-timey" photos inside the jacket showing the male band members in turn-of-the-century costumes with stiff, high-collared shirts, straw boaters, bowler hats, leather football helmets, and handlebar mustaches, all combine to make it difficult to take the group seriously.  

1968

For their second album, Like To Get To Know You, released in 1968, the high jinks continued with a 1920s gangster theme complete with Tommy Guns, fedoras, and Keystone Cops (on the back and inside the gatefold).  Though buoyed by two top 30 hit singles "Like To Get To Know You" and "Sunday Morning," the album was once again a confusing mish-mash of slick pop singles, a novelty song about paying bills, a terrific cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," all topped off with Hoagy Carmichael's 1942 classic "Stardust."  Eclectic doesn't begin to cover it. 

1969

Spanky & Our Gang's third and final studio album, Without Rhyme Or Reason, was released in early 1969.  Although the album received more favorable critical reaction than their first two LPs, it didn't sell as well.  It featured only one charting song, a beautiful and powerful protest song called "Give A Damn."  Otherwise it was another hodge-podge of styles and genres, this time including hard rock, another Hoagy Carmichael period piece ("Hong Kong Blues"), alongside some signature pop ballads with beautiful harmonies.

Graphically, however, the album was a big departure.  The cover, with the band all in white with puffy shirts and peace chains, looks like a lost Fifth Dimension album.  Which might help explain why the album didn't sell so well.  I suspect that many of their fans, who were charmed by the nostalgic, retro style of the previous albums, may have been put off by the full-blown psychedelia of the new release.  In addition, the band didn't tour to promote the album because by the time it was released in early 1969, the group had already broken up.  Oz Bach left in early 1968, and then Malcolm Hale tragically died (either from pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning) on Halloween night.  Soon after, drummer John Seiter accepted an offer to join The Turtles, and then McFarlane announced she was pregnant and was quitting to raise a family.  Though Mercury would release a bootleg live set in 1970, Spanky & Our Gang phase one was over.

Change, 1975

Which (finally!) brings us back around to Spanky's great lost album.  In 1974, six years after the original group broke up, McFarlane decided to put together a new gang.  With her old friend Nigel Pickering -- the only holdover from the original band -- she recruited Bill Plummer on bass, Marc McClure on guitar, banjo, and steel guitar, and Jim Moon on drums.  After some touring to tighten up the band and compile a set list, the Gang (Mk II) went into the studio to cut their only album, Change, released in 1975 on Epic Records (right).

In his liner notes for the album, Jim Charne, who was head of marketing at CBS Records, writes: "I had instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "country" (even though they are - sort of), and instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "rock" (which they also are - sort of)."  In fact, the new group was very much in the style of a wave of mid 70s country rock artists like Marshall Tucker, The Doobie Brothers, The Eagles, The New Riders Of the Purple Sage, Loggins And Messina, and The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Nashville Cat and
Producer Chip Young

The details of the recording of the album are unclear.  Radio World (an industry trade publication) reported in their July 5, 1975 issue that the new Spanky & Our Gang "have signed a long-term contract with Epic Records" and have completed recording their first album for the label with producer (and noted Nashville Cat session guitarist) Chip Young (left) at his Young'un Sound Studio in Murfreesboro, TN, about 35 miles outside Nashville.  (Young had recently been working with Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge.)  

However, the credits on the jacket note that only track A1 ("I Won't Brand You") was produced by Chip Young.  The rest of the album is "Produced with Spanky & Our Gang."  I can't say for sure, but it sounds like the band at some point took the reins back from Young and did it their way.  Paul Grupp at the Record Plant in L.A. is given credit as Associate Producer, and the mixing was done at Mama Joe's Studio in Hollywood by Alex "The Turk" Kazanegras (who did a lot of work with Loggins And Messina and Poco, among others).  A photo of the test pressing for the album on Discogs shows that it was mastered at Allen Zentz in San Clemente, CA.  Epic Records was a subsidiary of Columbia, so the album was pressed by Columbia Records.

Regardless of the provenance, Change sounds great and delivers a first-rate selection of tracks by songwriters like Guy Clark, Ronee Blakley, Tom Waits, and Gary Busey (yeah, the actor guy).  In contrast to Spanky's first three albums, this time the songs fit together to create a coherent feel - ballads skillfully mixed with more up-tempo folk/country rockers that all flow together nicely.  

In addition to the core band, a long list of crackerjack studio pros and guest artists lent their talents, including legendary Nashville arranger Bergen White, banjo wizard Herb Peterson, Richard Thompson (from Fairport Convention) on piano, Jerry Yester (late of The Lovin' Spoonful) on backing vocals, the Tower of Power Horns, Juke Logan on harmonica, bass player Ray Neapolitan, and guitar ace Rick Vito.  Thompson and Yester also scored gorgeous string arrangements for several songs.  Gone are the sunshine and lollypops and the goofy gags.  The music on Change is sophisticated Americana, beautifully-arranged and tightly played, with Marc McClure's ethereal steel string guitar and the heavenly multi-part vocal harmonies floating over it all.  

If all you know about Spanky & Our Gang are the hit singles from the 1967-69 albums, you are in for a pleasant surprise and a musical treat.  I've listened to the LP three times in the last couple of days and it still raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The album has never been released on CD or re-released on vinyl.  If you want your own a copy of Change, your only choice is the original 1975 LP.  Luckily, copies are easy to come by and available (as of this writing) for less than $10 (plus shipping) in NM condition.  Cheap for a forgotten gem. 

Enjoy the music!

Deciphering Dave Brubeck

I've always been a little ambivalent about Dave Brubeck.  While I appreciate his genius as a composer, musician, and jazz innovator,  most of the time I don't really connect emotionally with his music.  Don't get me wrong, I have 55 (!) Brubeck albums and play and enjoy many of them regularly.  But while Brubeck often gets my toes tapping, I find that I don't always get into the music as much as I should because I'm busy thinking about key changes, time signatures, and poly rhythms.  Something that never happens when listening to a record by, say, Bill Evans. 

Bill Evans moves me.  When I'm listening to him play I don't think about keyboard technique or the structure of the tune.  I'm just transported by the lyricism and the beauty of the music.  It's kind of like how I can enjoy and admire a painting by De Kooning and appreciate the tension between his use of form and color and space.  But when I look at a painting by Van Gogh, I just marvel at the beauty without thinking about his brushwork or technique.

After recently reading the 2020 biography "Dave Brubeck: A Life In Time," by British musician and musicologist Philip Clark, I think I finally figured out what's going on.

Clark spent 10 days shadowing Brubeck's quartet during their 2003 tour of the UK.  Brubeck rented a house in London as a home base and hired a bus to shuttle the band back and forth to gigs around England.  During the sometimes lengthy bus rides, Clark and Brubeck spent long hours talking about Brubeck's life and discussing his music in microscopic detail.  (Brubeck's wife, Iola, and other members of the band often take part as well.)  Clark mines these conversations to provide insights into Brubeck's life and music.  

While I do recommend the book, be aware that a lot of it is tough sledding.  The first hundred pages or so are an in-depth look at Brubeck's musical influences, with long sections devoted to explaining the theories of Brubeck's primary teacher, the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud, with whom Brubeck studied at Mills College in Oakland, CA.  You will learn far more than you probably ever wanted to know about Milhaud, George Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Louis Dorey and a host of other French composers who, under the influence of Cubism and surrealism, attempted to rewrite the rules of classical composition.

In a not atypical passage, Clark describes an early Brubeck composition called "Playland-at-the-Beach" thus: "The opening section darted agitatedly between three distinct keys, with jolts and collisions in the orchestration -- like a trumpet line being snatched and sucked inside the texture like a Venus flytrap -- matching the non sequitur upsets of Brubeck's harmony."  Venus flytraps eating trumpets, yep, my thoughts exactly.

Of another Brubeck composition, Clark says it: ". . .re-accented the 3+3 of 6/8 to become 2+2+2 of 3/4, a neat rhythmic pun to chew on as Brubeck's harmony feasted on another, more existential ambiguity: Was this music in the major or the minor?"  Very good question.  I took piano lessons for ten years and I have have no idea what he's talking about.

While there is a fair amount of interesting background information about Brubeck's life and family, the book isn't a normal biography.  Instead, it's a detailed dissection of Brubeck's music with hundreds of pages devoted to analyzing Brubeck's choice of time signatures and keys, his use of counterpoint, rhythm, and tonal contrast.  Reading the book didn't tell me a lot about Brubeck the man (except that he was a complete egghead), but it did give me a much better understanding of why his music sounds like it does.  Brubeck combined jazz with French modernism -- a classical movement that embraced polyrhythm and polytonality -- that is, musicians playing different time signatures and different chords at the same time.  My takeaway is that Brubeck was not a classical musician who became a jazz composer, he was an avant-garde classical composer who became a jazz musician.  [Hmmm.  Discuss.]

Even though this interpretation of Brubeck's music only came to me after reading Clark's book, Brubeck's place in the history of jazz has long been a subject of debate.  As one of the originators of "West Coast" jazz, Brubeck and his mostly white contemporaries were often dismissed by the predominantly black East Coast beboppers.  In his harrowing autobiography "Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper," white West Coast alto saxophonist Art Pepper describes how at some gigs the black musicians he was playing with were so disdainful of a white jazz musician from California that they wouldn't even acknowledge his presence.  He says they resented him and other white jazz musicians who they felt were appropriating "their" music.

Miles Davis apparently had similar feelings.  He was famously quoted as saying that "Brubeck doesn't swing."  Not all black musicians agreed however, as Charles Mingus wrote a letter to Downbeat magazine upbraiding the (at the time) very young trumpeter for his comment, saying: "At Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands.  If a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down you back . . . then Dave is the swingingest by your definition."  I don't know if anyone but Mingus could have smacked down Miles like that and lived to tell about it.  But it apparently had an effect.  Clark reveals in his book that some time later, at a late-night jam session at the famed Black Hawk night club in San Francisco, Miles sidled up to Brubeck at the bar and by way of a grudging apology, said: "You swing. Your band don't swing."  (It helps if you think about how that would sound in Miles' raspy voice.)

In addition to the obvious racial component, the schism between East Coast and West Coast jazz was based on the feeling that East Coast was the true jazz idiom pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke and other black jazz musicians.  Real jazz had its roots in the blues and evolved organically from juke joints and jam sessions in the black bars and clubs of Harlem, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, where young, hungry black musicians (like Miles Davis) took part in late-night cutting sessions, challenging each other and showing off their chops.  Only the best players survived.  As Miles Davis latter said of his early days playing jam sessions in New York City, "If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's (in Harlem) and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you, you might get your ass kicked."  

While white, West Coast musicians like Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Shorty Rogers, Zoot Sims, (and Dave Brubeck of course), had impressive chops, on the whole the West Coast style was more lyrical than East Coast jazz.  The audience for many of the West Coast groups were suburbanites and white college students.  What's more, the West Coast cats often played from charts (for goodness sakes) and many of them earned a living playing sessions for television shows and movie soundtracks, or backing up crooners like Frank Sinatra.

The music press and record labels lost no time in promoting the rivalry between the two styles of jazz in an effort to sell records.  There were a number of albums (including the one above) from the 1950s that played up the West Coast - East Coast split.  It is telling that in the photos of the musicians on the cover of the West Coast Vs. East Coast album, only two of the West Coast players are Black, while only two of the East Coast musicians are white.

Which brings me back to Dave Brubeck.  As Clark relates in his book, Brubeck struggled for years to sell albums and find an audience for his cerebral style of jazz.  The turning point came in the early 50s when he began to focus on performing at colleges, where he finally found a receptive audience of young, white college kids.  Brubeck quickly became a media darling -- a safe, white, jazz musician who didn't use drugs, didn't drink or smoke, and didn't scare the bejeebers out of the parents of white kids.  By 1954 Brubeck was on the cover of Time magazine (below), and his career and record sales took off.

While Brubeck certainly benefitted from his status as a clean-cut, white jazz musician, this is in no way meant as a criticism.  The fact is, Brubeck was a stand-up guy in the fight against racism in the United States and abroad.  In 1958 he refused an offer to tour South Africa when he was told that his bassist Paul Morello (who was Black) would not be allowed to play.  And in 1959, Brubeck cancelled most of the dates on an extensive (and highly lucrative) tour of southern U.S. universities when the schools said that Morello could not appear on stage with the quartet.  What's more, wherever they played, Brubeck insisted that audiences at his shows not be segregated and demanded that Morello be given the same treatment and be allowed to use the same dressing rooms and facilities as the rest of the band at a time when blacks were regularly forced to use the back entrance or segregated toilets.  And for what it's worth, Brubeck was said to have been mortified that he was on the cover of Time, as he thought the honor should have gone to his hero, Duke Ellington.  (For the record, Ellington got his own cover two years later.)

All this is by way of saying that Brubeck was a genius and an upstanding human being who is rightly considered one of the greatest jazz innovators of all time.  His work forever changed the history of jazz.  But in the end, as much as I appreciate and enjoy Brubeck's music, it just doesn't resonate with me like the work of many other jazz artists.

Here's another way to put it: If my house is on fire and I only have time to save Brubeck's Take Five or Kind Of Blue, by Miles Davis, I'm taking Miles.

Enjoy the music!