Word: pianos
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...star on valve trombone ever since his glory days with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Brookmeyer also plays piano on the side--and it's more than just a hobby. On Holiday, his first all-piano album since 1959, he serves up five standards, six strong originals and a blues, performed in a blunt, bracing style full of sharp corners and spicy chords and often startlingly reminiscent of his no-nonsense horn playing. What took him so long? You don't need to be a full-time pianist to revel in the part-time playing of this switch-hitting jazz master...
...GENIE Blinded at six by glaucoma, schooled in classical, gospel and every form of popular music, Charles came to Atlantic in 1953, when Ertegun bought his Swingtime Records contract for $2,500. Ray brought with him a pioneering blend of gospel melodies, R&B raunch, a suavely swingin? piano groove ? la Nat Cole and the imposing sound of a big band behind him (though typically he worked with only six sidemen). Oh, and an epochal vocal style that would make him the dominant and longest-lived soul singer of the century. Was Charles, as one of his own albums...
...After four verses of 12-bar blues, the song rollicks into some of Charles? swingin? lounge piano, then returns to the vocal, in a squealing release -"Say, have you heard, baby/ Ray Charles is in town/ Let?s mess around till the midnight hour/ See what he?s puttin? down" -that prefigures no fewer than three Atlantic songs: Charles? own "Let the Good Times Roll" and "Mess Around" and Wilson Pickett?s "In the Midnight Hour." The song ends with generic barks ("Come on! Come on, child!") that are pretty much grunts with consonants. A listener needs no English...
...year before, Cozy Cole (whose drumming career had stretched from Jelly Roll Morton to Charlie Parker, and who had recorded a Leiber-Stoller number as "Hound Dog Special" in 1954) enjoyed a two-sided hit with "Topsy." What was unusual was the four-part structure: three verses of piano, then four verses of blues patter, then the "What?d I say" chorus, and finally two minutes of boy-call-and-girl-response foreplay leading to the orgasm of the "What?d I say" chorus augmented by horns and the Raelets. After five minutes, what?d you say? Whew...
...parents, indulgent and slightly deaf, were two floors away.) I think even then I responded as much to the musical craft of the piece as to its hedonistic invitation to "shake that thing." It?s break from earlier Charles work was evident from the first note -on an electric piano that sounded like a guitar with a mitten muffling the strings. It was blues, all right, but (like so much other Atlantic music of the period) with a Latin accent, thanks to great cymbal, conga and stick work by Milt Turner. It featured his urgent vocal, but not until almost...