I'm quite excited to kick off this blog. The idea has actually been bouncing around in my head for some time; pretty much every time I downloaded an album from one of the other myriad LP ripper blogs out there (soon to be detailed in my links on the right...) I thought to myself: "Don't just be a lurker; you need to share!" So, here I am, a little over a year later, finally starting to contribute.
Some might see the title "Roots is for Everyone" and think this is just a reggae page, but it's not. Certainly I plan on posting some reggae, but to me "roots" is a much broader idea. I take a stab at it in the page header but I'll state it again here: simply put, to me anyway, "roots" just means "real." So, it's fitting that my first post is from such an amazing batch of musicians.
Organist Leon Spencer, guitarist George Freeman and drummer Idris Muhammad would be worthy of a record date as a trio, but put them behind the warrior reedsmen Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt and you've got the realist sh&t around. What I love so much about both Stitt and Ammons is their ability to keep it real across generations. Either guy could have just stuck with what he was doing in the 50s and still been considered the Puba, yet they both chose to infuse their music with the young guns' sounds instead. In retrospect it seems like only a fool would have passed up the chance to improvise over the pulse of Idris Muhammad, but many did.
Guitarist Melvin Sparks, who did a date with Leon Spencer, Idris Muhammad and Sonny Stitt (Turn it On, now reissued as part of the "Legends of Acid Jazz Series") put it to me this way (and I'm roughly paraphrasing here too btw): "It was actually the producer's ideas. Somebody went to Sonny and said 'why should Lou Donaldson be making all the money? Let me record you with these young guys.'" According to Sparks, Stitt was all for making the money but he also had a great time doing the session. The fiery jams on Turn It On suggest that Stitt was pretty inspired by the those guys as well. As far as I can tell though, the money never really came rushing in.
This session has a little bit more of a traditional organ, guitar n' tenor feel to it, but that's certainly not a bad thing. Enjoy this out of print album (I will never post an album that is currently available as a reissue on this page by the way) and please feel free to leave a comment for me too. It's ripped from my vinyl copy as a .wav file and I converted it to 320 Mp3. Here 'tis: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=H76J5Q0P
Oh yeah, one last thing. I haven't gotten access to a scanner big enough to scan these album covers yet, but I will. In the meantime scavenged internet images will have to suffice.
The session details (from discogs.com):
|
Tracklisting:
| A1 | You Talk That Talk! (5:55) | |
| A2 | Body And Soul (4:12) | |
| A3 | The People's Choice (6:55) | |
| B1 | Katea's Dance (6:40) | |
| B2 | The Sun Died (4:40) | |
| B3 | Out Of It (5:00) |
Posts
7 comments:
great start! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with here...
Buen disco, gracias por compartirlo
NICE. Glad to see you've got a web presence. Looking forward to some good reading and lstening in the future. It's funny, I was recently thinking about Sonny's Stax tracks for a project I'm working on and came across this:
http://stax50.com/blog/music/sonny-stitt-on-stax/
Not too many jazzers on Stax so I wasn't surprised to hear that Sonny was all for making money.
Listening to the album now, sounds great.
Thanks very much for this lovely jewel. My past time of blogg diggins has turned me on to so many great artist of the past. It's amazing how much m,usic from all over 40 yrs ago influence what we hear today. Keep up the great work!
wow billy. some cool shit here. it sounds like you're creating a real resource for people. gotta do something with all that information in your head. cool man. keep me posted.
great new site and thanks for this out
of print lp.good luck with your blog.
Thank you. Link is still alive two years on!
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