What a Disc!
The best Texas music-ever-on CD.
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No regional variation of blues and rhythm and blues rivals the raw energy or exotic appeal of zydeco, the accordion-driven dance music of French-speaking Creoles residing between Houston and New Orleans. And no zydeco act could hold a candle to Clifton Chenier, the undisputed master of the genre. Although Chenier named his backup group the Red Hot Lou-isiana Band, he claimed Houston as a place of residence and a favored re-cording site. Clifton Chenier: 60 Minutes With the King of Zydeco (Arhoolie) vividly illustrates zydeco’s appeal, which continues to grow while most other ethnic blues have become extinct. Clifton’s giant-sized accordion riffs, spurred on by brother Cleveland Chenier’s rhythm scratches on his metal rub board, and a driving, rocking band capture the excitement of a dance with none of the usual constraints typical of a studio recording.
Also recommended: Frankie Lee Sims: Lucy Mae Blues (Speciality), revealing more than has ever been known about this largely obscure Dallas electric guitar great from the fifties; Charles Brown’s One More for the Road (Alligator), the album that revived the Beaumont crooner’s career; I Believe I’m Gonna Make It: The Best of Joe Tex (Rhino), chronicling the life of the man who was the epitome of sixties-vintage Texas soul; George Coleman: Bongo Joe (Arhoolie), a piece of late-sixties Texas street blues by this San Antonio denizen who improvised lyrics while pounding on customized forty-gallon oil drums; Best of Delbert McClinton (Curb), which lacks the punch of his ABC recordings while nonetheless demonstrating how at least one white boy can sing the blues; guitarist T. D. Bell and pianist Erbie Bowser’s It’s About Time (Spindletop), on which a couple of unsung East Austin blues greats make their belated album debut; and Antone’s Women (Antone’s), featuring two generations of blues women. The current Antone’s crop, led by vocalists Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball, Angela Strehli, newcomer Toni Price, and guitar phenom Sue Foley, is impressive. But the presence of Barbara Lynn, the world’s greatest (and perhaps only) left-handed female blues guitarist, and Miss Lavelle White, who rubbed off more than a little on Barton, makes this project fly.
Honkers and Hepcats
FROM BUSTER SMITH TO KIRK WHALUM, whose swagger and bite make his contemporary brand of jazz-pop palatable, the Texas tenor saxophone tradition has been the essential ingredient of native jazz and rhythm and blues. Smith, unfortunately, hasn’t made it to CD yet, but fans of the fat and sassy brass sound have plenty to tide them over. James Clay’s Cookin’ at the Continental (Antilles), featuring recording sessions made last year, isn’t necessarily the greatest recording by this Dallas giant, who chucked a promising career in New York thirty years ago to raise his family back home. But Cookin’ is significant because it reunites Clay with David “Fathead” Newman, another Dallas tenor who has carved out an illustrious jazz and R&B career, and for introducing into the equation the trumpet of Waco prodigy Roy Hargrove. Their brass barrages on “Sister Sadie” and the testifying standard “Moanin’ ” are top rank.
Newman and Clay blow their horns on home turf on 1986’s Return to the Wide Open Spaces (Amazing), a live recording from the Caravan of Dreams that united them with New Orleans’ Ellis Marsalis and homeboy Cornell Dupree, the backbone-slipping, string-popping guitar behind the hits of Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, King Curtis, and other Atlantic label soul acts in the sixties. The group pays tribute to Buster Smith with “Buster’s Tune,” while Newman soars on flute on his own “13th Floor.” “Two Bones & A Pick,” a full-blown rave-up of T-Bone Walker, dances around the gray area dividing Texas-style jazz and rhythm and blues.
Although an alto sax player, the Texas horn with the greatest impact on the outside world is Fort Worth’s Ornette Coleman, who, as a young man, fell under the influence of Buster Smith when Coleman still blew jump and blues in the local joints. By 1954, the 24-year-old Coleman had established himself as a force on the Los Angeles jazz scene, where he hooked up with an Oklahoma cornet player named Don Cherry. Their subsequent collaborations culminated in The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic), recorded in 1959 in Los Angeles. Picking up where bebop left off, Coleman’s discordant, unpredictable phrasing presaged the experimental, avant-garde artistic style that he dubbed “harmolodic” and that eventually left even Coltrane, Monk, and Parker in the dust. While his newer material strikes many ears as indecipherable, the melody and vaguely familiar progressions on this reissue make the selections, particularly “Lonely Woman” and “Peace,” easy to digest.
Proof that Arnett Cobb had the beefiest, mellowest, and bluesiest tenor of the Texas school can be found on Live at Sandy’s (Muse), a 1978 recording on which the Houston wild man is joined by fellow home-state hornmen Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Buddy Tate. Cobb’s Show Time (Fantasy), a recording of a 1987 concert celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday, is also worth noting for its brawny, straight-in-the-pocket honks. When Cobb struts his stuff on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” he swings, gets down, and sounds sanctified all at once.
Freedom Sound (Pacific Jazz), the 1961 recording debut of a smooth little combo out of Houston’s Texas Southern University known as the Jazz Crusaders, reflects a less experimental but certainly more accessible mind-set than that of the North Texas school of jazz players. Saxophonist Wilton Felder’s tight interplay and harmonies with trombone player Wayne Henderson, wedded to the unabashedly bluesy inflections of guitarist Roy Gaines and pianist Joe Sample, was a precursor to what later became known as funk—a softer, beat-heavy approach to mainstream jazz.
Also recommended: Crossings (Gal-axy), a 1977 recording on which Red Garland, Texas’ most distinctive jazz pianist, does some of his most inspired soloing, pushed by Ron Carter’s fluid bass; and Herb Ellis’ Roll Call (Justice), a fresh nineties perspective from the dean of Texas jazz guitar.
Cosmic Cowboys and the Flying W’s
PERHAPS THE STRANGEST SYNTHESIS of them all was the brief early seventies aberration known as the Cosmic Cowboy. He was a weird breed— raised on country and western but smitten with this new-fangled hippie deal, a nowhere-but-Texas interpretation of the counterculture revolution five years after San Francisco’s Summer of Love turned to fall. When cosmic cowboydom—or progressive country, as it was also known—came into full bloom in Austin, the torchbearers were two handsome Dallas folkies in cowboy hats: Michael Murphey, whose Geronimo’s Cadillac (not available on CD) included “(I Just Wanna Be a) Cosmic Cowboy,” and Willis Alan Ramsey, who never made a follow-up to his excellent Willis Alan Ramsey (Shelter) debut. Time, though, has shunted the impact of both artists to the rear, in favor of Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, whose ¡Viva Terlingua! (MCA) is a live-in-Luckenbach opus that produced some genuine anthems, specifically Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues” (better known as the “Goin’ Home With the Armadillo” song) and Ray Wiley Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck.”
Less recognized as a progressive country landmark is Kinky Friedman’s Sold American (Vanguard), one of the era’s few remnants that still holds up. Friedman used the conventional country sound of his Texas Jewboy band as an unlikely vehicle for foisting outrage on an unsuspecting public; he skewers his own religion (“Ride ’Em Jewboy”), intolerance (“We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”), mass murder (“The Ballad of Charles Whitman”), and feminists (“Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed”).
The cosmic cowboy craze also embraced two native sons—Waylon Jennings, a bruising honky-tonker from Littlefield, and Willie Nelson, an accomplished songwriter from Abbott—and boosted their status from mere Nashville renegades to outlaw mega-stars. Whereas Waylon’s subsequent work was highly inconsistent, Willie used progressive country as an excuse to expand his musical horizons through a string of unconventional thematic albums. The linchpin was Red Headed Stranger (Columbia), a high-concept song cycle about an Old West cowboy, his woman, and his horse recorded in a Dallas studio with an acoustic guitar and little embellishment. Stranger defied every tenet of the prevailing Nashville philosophy and proceeded to put Willie at the top of pop album charts, an unprecedented feat for a “country” act. Willie’s considerable composing skills are accurately assessed on Willie Nelson: Nite Life, Greatest Hits & Rare Tracks, 1959—1971 (Rhino), which features “Mr. Record Man,” “Hello Walls,” and other originals made famous by other artists.
The Kids Are All Right
THE BIRTH OF ROCK AND ROLL coincided with an explosion of teenagers’ forming combos all across the state. The collision of country and western and rhythm and blues was a natural for Texas kids who absorbed both sounds via the radio and dance venues. Nowhere is this raw energy better evidenced than on Buddy Holly: From the Original Master Tapes (MCA). Created in the vacuum of West Texas, Holly leads his group through nitro-fueled rockabilly (“Rock Around With Ollie Vee” and “Rave On”), bluesy ballads (“Reminiscing,” featuring King Curtis on sax), and pure pop bordering on schmaltz (“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”), a portent of what Holly might have sounded like had he reached middle age.
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