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| Do the Boomerang - The Music of Junior Walker |
| Don Byron |
első megjelenés éve: 2005
52 perc |
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| (2006)
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CD |
| 4.244 Ft
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| 1. | Cleo's Mood
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| 2. | Ain't That the Truth
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| 3. | Do the Boomerang
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| 4. | Mark Anthony Speaks
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| 5. | Shotgun
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| 6. | There It Is
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| 7. | Satan's Blues
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| 8. | Hewbie Steps Out
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| 9. | Pucker Up, Buttercup
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| 10. | Tally-Ho
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| 11. | What Does It Take
To Win Your Love
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| 12. | (I'm A) Roadrunner
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Jazz / Post-Bop; Contemporary Jazz; Modal Music
Recorded: Dec 2005, Allaire, Shokan, New York
Don Byron - clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone
Chris Thomas King - vocals, guitar
Dean Bowman - vocals
David Gilmore - guitar
Curtis Fowlkes - trombone
George Colligan - Hammond b-3 organ
Brad Jones - bass instrument
Rodney Holmes - drums, tambourine
Few jazz musicians have been as full of surprise as has Don Byron. The Bronx native has over the years delved into the music of Mickey Katz, Raymond Scott, Igor Stravinsky, Herb Alpert, Henry Mancini, Sly Stone, the Sugar Hill Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire, and others with little or no direct connection to the mainstream of jazz, as well as performed his own boundary-busting compositions.
With the extremely funky Do The Boomerang: The Music Of Junior Walker, Byron's sixth Blue Note release, the ever-adventurous musician offers two big surprises. Not only does the celebrated clarinetist salute one of his boyhood heroes, the late, great Motown saxophonist and singer Autry "Junior Walker" DeWalt, but he also steps out as a tenor saxophonist of the first order.
Byron had earlier played baritone saxophone on several recordings and with Mercer Ellington and other big bands, and he played tenor saxophone on one track of his previous Blue Note CD, 2004's Grammy-nominated Ivey-Divey, on which he, Jason Moran, and Jack DeJohnette paid tribute to the Lester Young's 1946 collaborations with Nat Cole and Buddy Rich. For Do The Boomerang, however, Byron blows tenor on 10 of the 12 selections, including the Walker hits "Cleo's Mood," "Shotgun," "Pucker Up, Buttercup," and "(I'm a) Roadrunner." He plays bass clarinet on "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)" and B-flat clarinet on the title track.
During his extensive studies, Byron used a tenor saxophone when transcribing solos by John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, and others, but he refrained from playing it in public. "It was really difficult being taken seriously in the clarinet world if you played some saxophone," he explains. "I'd had a tenor for years, but I took it up again while I was studying Lester Young. That's why I played it on Ivey-Divey."
The big, searing tone that Byron gets out of his tenor on Do The Boomerang is similar to that made famous by Walker, though Byron avoids direct imitation. "I wasn't interested in that," he says. "Like on 'Shotgun,' I started the solo with a couple things that he used to play and then just kinda went from there." The influence of two of Byron's other tenor heroes, Arnett Cobb and Eddie Harris, is evident in some of his improvised flights.
Byron, who was born in 1958, was fortunate to have witnessed Walker in person on a number of occasions. As a child, he saw the saxophonist several times at Harlem's Apollo Theater, where his parents would take him on the subway. "It took like a half hour to get there from my house," he recalls. "When we used to go to the Apollo, you'd spend all day there. You could see the show two or three times and see some movies and some weird novelty acts." Later, while attending the New England Conservatory of Music, he heard Walker and his combo, the All-Stars, at a Boston bar.
"Junior Walker was one of the few instrumentalists that really had hits on the black side," Byron says. "During the '60s period that I was growing up in, Junior Walker and King Curtis were the two guys that were actually on the radio, and I was much more likely to hear that kind of radio than I was to hear some jazz radio. It was important to me that they were there."
Byron developed a deeper appreciation for Walker's music though his recent investigations of African American gospel music. "I realized that what he was playing was out of the same kind of vocal energy that comes from gospel," he explains. "Through studying Donnie McClurkin and Kirk Franklin and Yolanda Adams and Twinkie Clark, I got to a place where those notes actually meant something to me in a different kind of theoretical way. I never really could figure out exactly what would make somebody play the way he did, but now that I've experienced this kind of black gospel culture, it all really make much more sense to me."
Besides 11 numbers associated with Junior Walker, the album includes Byron's treatment of James Brown's "There It Is." "It's not so different from the kind of tune that 'Do the Boomerang' is," he says. "There's a difference in the rhythms, but in structure, all of those guys were taking parts that had heavy blues elements and pocketing them in different ways. James Brown was the guy who was definitely doing it the hardest in that moment when everybody else was looking at it."
The instrumentation on Do The Boomerang largely mirrors that of many classic sides by Junior Walker and the All-Stars. Guitarist David Gilmore, organist George Colligan, bassist Brad Jones, drummer Rodney Holmes, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, and vocalist Dean Bowman have all worked with Byron in the past. The kicking rhythm section is especially cohesive, the result of having been the backbone of Byron's wildly eclectic Symphony Space Adventures Orchestra for six years, as well as performing as a quartet under Gilmore's leadership. Blues singer-guitarist Chris Thomas King, noted for his performances in the motion pictures O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Ray, guests on four selections.
Do The Boomerang: The Music Of Junior Walker soulfully attests to the ongoing versatility of one of America's most creative musicians. "I always had the assumption that versatility was where it was at," Byron says. "I like a lot of different music. I figure out how it works, and I figure out how I want to sound on it based on some kind of historical study. It's really simple to me. It's not some kind of performance-art stunt to flip people out. To me, being a musician should mean that you can do anything musical." |
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