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| 1. | Tenor Madness
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| 2. | The Wok
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| 3. | My Shining Hour
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| 4. | Vocalese
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| 5. | Eddie Who
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| 6. | Ampedextrious
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Jazz / Soul-Jazz, Hard Bop
Eddie Harris - tenor saxophone, piano, vocal
Wendell Harrison - tenor saxophone, clarinet
Alex Rigowski - electric guitar
Ralphe Armstrong - electric bass
Tom Starr - drums
Those who know that the definition of jazz diverges more than it converges have always loved the music of Eddie Harris (1934-1996). Even if hooking up electronic gizmos to his horn, unleashing an eerily earthy vocal or digging into another funk tune, everything he played and sang was done with deep, heartfelt conviction. Harris could bop with the best, but refused to be taken prisoner by the jazz fundamentalists. Field shouts, churchy call and response, booty-shaking rhythms, the coolest R&B sounds: Eddie Harris knew they were all cut from the same African cloth. When Harris hooked up with his old Detroit friend and occasional touring partner Wendell Harrison for a joint appearance at the 1994 Montreux Detroit festival, the act was promoted as "The Battle of the Tenors." Yet, as the saxophone was only one of Eddie Harris' mediums, he agreed to go just one quick round (on Sonny Rollins' "Tenor Madness") before getting into a variety of other things (such as African vocal, piano playing, electric funk saxophone, and singing his all-time hit "Eddie Who?") that testify his complete showmanship and make this recording a true legacy.
Growing up when Detroit's hard bop scene was peaking, Wendell Harrison was mentored by pianist Barry Harris and played gigs with such as Hank Crawford, Marvin Gaye, and Esther Phillips. While commanding a fiery, juicy tenor himself, Harrison spent the last decade conquering the clarinet and making it his first instrument. On stage with Eddie Harris, he made the wise decision to step back and let his buddy do his own thing. "That's why this record is such an important document," says Harrison. "Most of his own records didn't really reflect all the things Eddie is about -- singing, comedy, saxophone, piano, tunes. This one covers the man himself."
Eddie Harris rarely recorded beside other solo tenors, so this live gig at the 1994 Montreux Detroit Jazz Festival, made two years before Harris' death, promises to be both an unusual document and an object lesson on just how different Harris was from every other tenorman on the planet. As in "Swiss Movement," Harris grafted himself onto a working group, that of local tenor favorite Wendell Harrison. Yet contrary to the title, the tenor battle premise disappears once the first three numbers are over and done with, for these two have other, more diverse pursuits in mind. "Tenor Madness" begins with some crowd-pleasing journeyman arpeggios and such by Harrison, and Harris comes in with rather straight-ahead bop, eventually coming around to his signature multi-register, funk-laced acrobatics. "The Wok" immediately takes up a different groove, a bumpy South African high-life rhythm. A deceptively broad a cappella intro to "My Shining Hour" soon turns into a long, straight-ahead up-tempo workout; the derivative Harrison tenor is first off the mark, and Harris barrels into an encyclopedia of his tenor idiosyncrasies. Harris exercises his Leon Thomas-esque African yodeling, scatting, and a brief Billie Holiday burlesque on "Vocalese" -- jes' messin' around before he gets on the piano and hauls out a clap-along version of his funny autobiographical complaint "Eddie Who?" A little-known sequel to "Freedom Jazz Dance," "Ambidextrous" -- done to a jumping funky beat -- has Harris mostly scatting again from the piano, with Harrison sounding much more individual on a saucy clarinet than as a tenorman. "Ambidextrous" finally falls apart after nearly 16 minutes, leaving listeners to marvel at the multifaceted personality that was Eddie Harris and to wonder why Enja -- the mock fight intro by Michael Nastos aside -- labeled this gig as a battle. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide
Eddie Harris
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s
Born: Oct 20, 1934 in Chicago, IL
Died: Nov 05, 1996 in Los Angeles, CA
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Jazz-Funk, Soul-Jazz, Fusion, Hard Bop, Mainstream Jazz
Long underrated in the pantheon of jazz greats, Eddie Harris was an eclectic and imaginative saxophonist whose career was marked by a hearty appetite for experimentation. For quite some time, he was far more popular with audiences than with critics, many of whom denigrated him for his more commercially successful ventures. Harris' tastes ranged across the spectrum of black music, not all of which was deemed acceptable by jazz purists. He had the chops to handle technically demanding bop, and the restraint to play in the cool-toned West Coast style, but he also delved into crossover-friendly jazz-pop, rock- and funk-influenced fusion, outside improvisations, bizarre electronic effects, new crossbreedings of traditional instruments, blues crooning, and even comedy. Much of this fell outside the bounds of what critics considered legitimate, serious jazz, and so they dismissed him out of hand as too mainstream or too gimmicky. To be fair, Harris' large catalog is certainly uneven; not everything he tried worked. Yet with the passage of time, the excellence of his best work has become abundantly clear. Harris' accomplishments are many: he was the first jazz artist to release a gold-selling record, thanks to 1961's hit adaptation of the "Exodus" movie theme; he was universally acknowledged as the best player of the electric Varitone sax, as heard on his hit 1967 album The Electrifying Eddie Harris; he was an underrated composer whose "Freedom Jazz Dance" was turned into a standard by Miles Davis; he even invented his own instruments by switching brass and reed mouthpieces. Plus, his 1969 set with Les McCann at the Montreux Jazz Festival was released as Swiss Movement, and became one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time.
Harris was born in Chicago on October 20, 1934. His first musical experiences were as a singer in church, starting at age five, and he soon began playing hymns by ear on the piano. He spent part of his high school years at Du Sable, where he studied the vibraphone under the legendary band director Walter Dyett, a disciplinarian who trained some of the South Side's greatest jazzmen: Nat King Cole, Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Julian Priester, and many others (even rocker Bo Diddley). He later returned to the piano and took up the tenor sax as well, and went on to study music at Roosevelt College. He landed his first professional job as a pianist, backing saxman Gene Ammons, and got the chance to sit in with greats like Charlie Parker and Lester Young. After college, he was drafted into the military; while serving in Europe, he successfully auditioned for the 7th Army band, which also included the likes of Don Ellis, Leo Wright, and Cedar Walton, among others. Following his discharge, he lived in New York and played in whatever groups and venues he could, still chiefly as a pianist. Harris returned to Chicago in 1960 and soon signed with the successful, locally based Vee Jay, which was better known for its R&B and blues acts. Although the label signed Harris as a pianist, he played only tenor sax on his first album. That album, 1961's Exodus to Jazz, would become one of jazz's most surprising success stories. The key track was "Exodus," Harris' easygoing rearrangement of Ernest Gold's theme from the epic Biblical film of the same name. It was an unlikely source for a jazz tune, and an even unlikelier hit, but it managed to catch on with mainstream radio; released as a single in a shortened version, it even climbed into the lower reaches of the pop Top 40. Its success pushed the LP all the way to number two on the pop album charts, and Exodus to Jazz became the first jazz album ever certified gold.
Many critics lambasted Harris for his commercial success, overlooking his very real talent; for one, Harris played so sweetly and smoothly in the upper register of his horn that many listeners assumed he was playing an alto, or even a soprano sax. Stung by the criticism, Harris long refused to play "Exodus" in concert; nonetheless, he recorded several albums for Vee Jay over the next two years that often contained attempts to duplicate his movie-theme-adaptation idea. None of his records were as popular as Exodus to Jazz, though they sold quite respectably. In 1964, Harris moved over to Columbia, pursuing a similar musical direction (albeit with orchestral backing at times). Harris switched over to Atlantic in 1965 and promptly rejuvenated his jazz credentials with The In Sound, a classic, fairly straight-ahead bop album that introduced his original "Freedom Jazz Dance" (later covered by Miles Davis on the classic Miles Smiles). On the follow-up, 1966's Mean Greens, Harris dabbled in the electric piano; later that year, on The Tender Storm, he first experimented with the electric Varitone saxophone, which was essentially a traditional instrument fitted with an amplification system and an electronic signal processor that allowed for different tonal effects. That instrument became the focus of 1967's The Electrifying Eddie Harris, a bluesy, funky soul-jazz classic that marked Harris as one of the very few sax players to develop a distinctive, personal style on the electric sax that was also unique to the instrument's capabilities. A re-recorded version of "Listen Here" (originally featured on The Tender Storm) gave Harris a second major hit single; it just barely missed the R&B Top Ten, which helped send the LP to number two on the R&B album charts. Subsequent follow-ups -- Plug Me In, High Voltage, the Echoplex-heavy Silver Cycles -- found Harris' electrified brand of jazz-funk selling well on both the jazz and R&B charts over 1968-1969, regularly making the Top Five on the former and the Top 40 on the latter.
In 1969, Harris joined pianist Les McCann's regular group at the Montreux Jazz Festival; despite a complete lack of rehearsal time together, the on-stage chemistry was immediate, and the gig was released as the LP Swiss Movement, credited to McCann and Harris. Paced by the hit singles "Compared to What" and "Cold Duck Time," Swiss Movement hit number two on the R&B charts en route to becoming one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time. Meanwhile, Harris' solo career continued apace, with increasingly playful -- and sometimes bizarre -- experiments. 1970's Come On Down! was a more jazz-rock-flavored session that found Harris singing into his horn through its effects unit. He also began to experiment with new horns, inventing such instruments as the reed trumpet (basically a trumpet fitted with a sax mouthpiece; heard most notably on 1970's Free Speech and 1971's Instant Death) and the saxobone (a sax with a trombone mouthpiece). 1972's Eddie Harris Sings the Blues further explored the concept of singing through his horn, with often strange results; the following year's E.H. in the U.K. took him to Britain to record jazz-rock with Steve Winwood, Albert Lee, Jeff Beck, and others. The spacy, heavily electronic Is It In, issued in 1974, ranked as one of his most creatively successful experiments. Subsequent albums like I Need Some Money, Bad Luck Is All I Have, and That Is Why You're Overweight were all over the musical map, but favored comic R&B-style vocal numbers, now without the electronic effects.
Harris' sales had been slipping, but were still fairly strong for a jazz artist, up until 1975's The Reason Why I'm Talking Shit, which abandoned humorous songs in favor of full-on, adults-only stand-up comedy. Only a few bits of music were interspersed between all the nightclub patter, and the results were so left-field that Harris' audience stayed away in droves. Thus, 1976's wide-ranging How Can You Live Like That? was largely ignored, and Harris parted ways with Atlantic by 1978. Harris went to RCA for two albums recorded in 1979, the limp fusion outing I'm Tired of Driving and the completely solo Playing With Myself, on which Harris dubbed horn solos over his own piano work. He didn't stay for long; over the course of the '80s and '90s, he recorded mostly for small labels like Steeple Chase, Enja, Timeless, and Flying Heart, among others. These albums found Harris returning to traditional hard bop, generally in acoustic quartet settings. He made his final studio recordings in the mid-'90s, and was forced to stop performing by the combined effects of bone cancer and kidney disease. He passed away in Los Angeles on November 5, 1996, about six months after a final concert engagement in his hometown of Chicago.
--- Steve Huey, All Music Guide |
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