Category: Jazz, bo!

Love song

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One of the truly great ones, performed by one of the truly great singers.

Ahh, Nat King Cole. People aways go on and on about Sinatra’s marvelous gift for phrasing, and they’re right to. But for my money, Nat King Cole could go blow-for-blow with Sinatra—hell, with anybody, actually—on any stage you’d care to name and walk out of the venue with his head held high and his self-esteem intact.

Every serious singer knows about phrasing, even those that haven’t been formally schooled in the art and just came by the ability honest, so to speak. In fact, after many long years of paying close attention to this stuff my own bad self it eventually dawned on me that the better at phrasing a singer is, the more likely it is that non-musicians will THINK he’s a good singer. In fact, even if the poor schmuck can’t carry a tune in a bucket, provided he just works a little on his breathing, his pronunciation, how the words come out of his mouth, how to best fit each word together, and I guar-on-tee you he’ll have every paying customer in the joint eating out of the palm of his hand by tthe end of the set.

Especially the hot chicks, natch.

Speaking as a trained vocalist myself, I assure you Cole’s phrasing is nothing short of doggone miraculous. In fact, listening to the man sing just about anything, really, amounts to a PhD-level course in phrasing: why it matters; the vital importance of phrasing when it comes to putting the song across; how to keep your cool and do it properly without going off the rails, etc.

JAZZ cat!

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Actually, I’d call this number from jazz/R&B/pop/rock legend Ben Sidran more blues than it is anything else, but that’s probably just me. See what you think, bearing closely in mind Rule #1 with all things musical: Always go with what your heart tells ya.

The brilliantly understated piano and guitar solos work together with the likewise spare but quite tasteful fills from the tremolo-soaked Stratocaster and that perfect Hammond B3/Leslie pairing to juice this modest piece right on up to genuine “earwig” status. Sidran’s laid-back vocal stylings are just the icing on a VERY tasty cake; he and his backing musicians play so far behind the beat here that they’re in serious danger of having it come around behind to lap their asses.

Sidran has been kicking out the jams since about 1960 or so, winning his spurs with an insanely wide variety of fellow artists. To wit:

Ben Hirsh Sidran (born August 14, 1943) is an American jazz and rock keyboardist, producer, label owner, and music writer. Early in his career he was a member of the Steve Miller Band and is the father of Grammy-nominated musician, composer and performer Leo Sidran.

Sidran was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, where he became a member of The Ardells with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs left Wisconsin for the West Coast, Sidran stayed behind to earn a degree in English literature. After graduating in 1966, he enrolled at the University of Sussex, England, to pursue a PhD. While in England, he was a session musician for Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, and Charlie Watts.

Sidran joined Steve Miller as keyboardist and songwriter on recording projects, appearing on the albums Brave New World, Your Saving Grace, Number 5, and Recall the Beginning…A Journey from Eden. He produced Recall the Beginning and co-wrote the hit song “Space Cowboy.” In 1988, he produced Miller’s jazz album Born 2B Blue. He has also produced albums for Mose Allison, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones, and Diana Ross.

Sidran returned to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1971 and has spent most of his life there. He taught courses at the university (on the business of music) and beginning in 1981 hosted jazz radio programs for NPR (including the Peabody Award-winning Jazz Alive series) and TV programs for VH1 (where his New Visions series in the early 1990s won the Ace Award). While hosting that series, Sidran frequently expressed his desire to “demystify the world of jazz; jazz musicians are just like the rest of us, only more so.”

As a musician and a producer he has released over 35 solo recordings.

And even that catalog of achievement, remarkable as it is, is but the tip of the Ben Sidran iceberg. There’s a way-cool backstory for the above embed, specifically the title shared by both song and album.

The original idea for Rainmaker was to throw a party in a Paris recording studio in honor of my 80th birthday. I saw it as a way to celebrate the survival of so many things, including myself, a life without borders, and my friendship with so many musicians abroad.

I imagined that it would be a blues record, so I began by writing some original blues songs and revisiting some of my favorite classic blues too. But as often happens, what we discover is not necessarily what we were looking for, and in this case I found myself writing songs that felt dystopian, not all of them traditional blues forms, and not what you might imagine as “party music”.

But by the time we finished recording at Studio de Meudon with new and old friends from America and France, the record had found its own sound. Somewhere between tragic and celebratory, shaggy and polished, broken and healed, I guess you could say that Rainmaker really is all about surviving in the modern world.

“Just like the rest of us, only more so.” Yeah, you sure said yourself a mouthful there, Ben.

Enduring classic(s)

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Lakeside Joe posts the renowned Dave Brubeck chestnut, “Take Five,” the one and only hit record I know of written in 5/4 time. Joe calls it an “enduring classic,” and that it most certainly is. Reminded me of another good ‘un I’ve been hearing of late on the local jazz station I resort to when the Wokesterism and PC horseshit ceaselessly pissed out by my usual classical station starts to work my last nerve.

Great melody, bangin’ arrangement, and the brass and wind sections are dialed in tighter’n Dick’s hat band: enduring classic? I’d say so, yeah.

Due, and long past due

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Can’t remember if I’ve ever run this wonderful Louis Prima chestnut here before, but if not, it’s high time I made amends for that nearly-unforgivable Yuletide lapse.

Couldn’t find a vid of that tune with the incomparable Keely Smith, alas. Bound to be footage of a live Prima performance of it out there someplace—probably rotting away in a dusty cardboard box in somebody’s closet, attic, or garage—that includes Louis’s winsome wife, so maybe next Christmas it’ll turn up. Meanwhile, as we wait for that frabjous day to arrive at last, enjoy another jolt of the magical Prima elixir.

I absolutely love the note-perfect combination of Louie clowning, showboating, and generally making an ass of himself with the somber-faced Keely pretending to be disinterested, bored stiff, even downright annoyed by her ol’ man’s antics. Best of all, hard as Keely tries to keep her mask of cool detachment firmly in place, now and again the ludicrous onstage carnival before, beside, and behind her simply overwhelms her disdainful facade: she loses her self-control and above-it-all poise and breaks down into giggle-fits, sometimes into helpless laughter.

It’s all in good fun, an obvious truth placed well beyond dispute by everyone in attendance. Just a quick look at the vid tells the story: singers, backing musicians, house technicians, and audience members alike, every face has an honest, happy grin plastered all over it.

Man alive, but what a fantastic show Louis Prima, his understatedly-beautiful, alluring wife Keely Smith, and Prima’s minimalist combo put on back in the day. Louie’s longtime tenor saxomophonist, the legendary Sam Butera, was one of the very best sax-men ever to put lips to mouthpiece, take a deep breath, and just wail. Watch this one, I triple-dog dare you to disagree.

See what I mean? You’ll all recognize that number, I imagine, if only in its David Lee Roth cover-version guise. I’m just about certain I HAVE posted that vid here before, but it’s so friggin’ good it merits an encore, and plenty of ‘em too. Biographical info on sax-master Sam Butera, including a Cliff Notes-style summarization of how the blessed, incredibly fruitful musical union of the Primas and Butera came to pass.

SPOILER ALERT! Said union boils down to blind luck; happenstance; felicitous timing; and a nudge in the right direction from the notoriously fickle hand of Lady Fate. In other words, just one of those things—another of the unforeseeable turns of fortune that can sometimes occur in this Earthly vida loca. It was meant to be, no more nor less.

Sam Butera (August 17, 1927 – June 3, 2009) was an American tenor saxophonist and singer best noted for his collaborations with Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Butera is frequently regarded as a crossover artist who performed with equal ease in both R&B and the post-big band pop style of jazz that permeated the early Vegas nightclub scene.

Butera was born and raised in an Italian-American family in New Orleans, where his father, Joe, ran a butcher shop and played guitar in his spare time. He heard the saxophone for the first time at a wedding when he was seven years old, and, with his father’s encouragement, he began to play.

Butera’s professional career blossomed early, beginning with a stint in big band drummer Ray McKinley’s orchestra directly after high school. Butera was named one of America’s top upcoming jazzmen by Look magazine when he was only eighteen years old, and, by his early twenties, he had landed positions in the orchestras of Tommy Dorsey, Joe Reichman, and Paul Gayten.

As the big band era wound down and heavy touring became less common among jazz musicians, Butera re-settled in New Orleans, where he played regularly at the 500 Club for four years. The 500 Club was owned by Louis Prima’s brother, Leon, and it was this connection that led him to his much-heralded Vegas-based collaborations with Prima and Smith.

Prima transitioned from big band to Vegas somewhat hastily, having signed a contract with the Sahara without having first assembled a back-up band. From his Vegas hotel room, Prima phoned Butera in New Orleans and had him assemble a band posthaste. Butera and the band drove from New Orleans to Las Vegas in such a hurry that they had not taken time to give their act a name. On opening night in 1954, Prima asked Butera before a live audience what the name of his band was. Butera responded spontaneously, “The Witnesses”, and the name stuck.

Butera remained the bandleader of The Witnesses for more than twenty years. During that time, he performed with Louis Prima and/or Keely Smith on such Prima-associated songs as “That Old Black Magic”, “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Come on-a My House,” and “I Wan’na Be Like You” (from Disney’s The Jungle Book). Richard and Robert Sherman, composers of the songs for the Disney animated film, agreed to cast Prima, Butera and their band after executives from the Walt Disney Company urged them to travel to Las Vegas to witness the band’s live act in person.

Butera is noted for his raucous playing style, his off-color humor, and the innuendo in his lyrics. The arrangement he made with Prima of “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” has been covered by David Lee Roth, Los Lobos, Brian Setzer, The Village People, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. In addition to his accomplishments as a saxophonist and composer, Butera is widely regarded as the inspiration for the vocal style of fellow New Orleans-born jazz singer Harry Connick, Jr.

After Prima’s death in 1978, Butera renamed his band “The Wildest,” and played for another 25 years, mostly at Las Vegas lounges. As Burt Kearns recounts on PleaseKillMe, “He paid tribute to Louis Prima every night, opening each set with ‘When You’re Smiling’ and closing with ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ leading the horn section on a stroll through the audience, slapping palms, shaking hands, and somehow continuing to blow that saxophone, as always, with a smile on his face.”

Folks, THAT’S entertainment for sure and certain, of a stripe they just ain’t making anymore. They don’t make ‘em like Louie Prima, Keely Smith, and Sam Butera anymore either, and that’s a crying shame.

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