Liner Notes

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra: It Is Forbidden (1974)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 03:55:33 +0000

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra
It Is Forbidden
at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile 1974
Alive/Total Energy Records

By John Sinclair

The people at the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation, producers of the 1972 and 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals, were feeling their collective oats as 1974 came over the horizon.

The 1973 Festival, headlined by Ray Charles & the Raelettes, Jimmy Reed, Luther Allison, Freddie King and Sun Ra & his mighty Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra, had been a smashing success; the two-LP Atlantic set of music from the 1972 Festival was in release and receiving rave reviews; and virtually all the music played at the 1973 Festival had been recorded and videotaped by Rainbow's own production team, who were now auditing the tapes and assembling a series of albums from the audio masters.

Rainbow Multi-Media was going great guns with its other endeavors as well: There was the 16-track mobile recording unit, the concert-size professional sound system, the artists management division with its several bands, the concert production arm specializing in blues, jazz and rock shows in all kinds of venues, the talent coordination wing that supervised the bookings for various clubs and concert halls. And there were the Rainbow Press and the Rainbow Agency to provide printing, advertising and promotional support for all these activities and more.

Beyond the non-profit Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and its productive divisions there was the Rainbow People's Party, a left-wing commune of 35 dope-crazed hippies and rock & roll beatniks who had once been known as the White Panther Party. The Rainbow people lived in two big adjacent houses on Hill Street, in the heart of Fraternity Row, and provided much of the leadership and staff of the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation.

Party members were everywhere in Rainbow Multi-Media: running the print shop like Sam Smith, managing the sound system like Craig Blazier, buying and selling ads like Anne Hoover and Kathy Kelly, art directing and making flyers and posters like Gary Grimshaw, managing bands and supervising event productions like David Sinclair and myself. The RPP also published a weekly newspaper, the Ann Arbor Sun, headed by Party members David Fenton and Linda Ross; several more members made up the band called the Up and its road crew.

The Rainbow People's Party was also active as one of the three equally-sized factions of liberals, radicals and revolutionaries which made up the more than 300 registered members of Human Rights Party, a left-wing coalition that competed with the Republicans and Democrats to control seats on the local City Council. Two Human Rights Party members, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry deGrieck, had been elected to Council in 1972, denying either established party a majority in the seven-member governing body and forcing them to approve legislation like the $5.00 fine for possession of marijuana in exchange for providing enough votes to pass the Democrats operating budgets and other measures.

So there was no way to know in the spring of 1974 that all would be in disarray by the end of the year: Rainbow Multi-Media would go out of business, the RPP would disband and the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival would disappear for almost 20 years. There was a terrible split in the Human Rights Party, precipitated by the mass walkout of the RPP faction, and an early alarm was sounded when the City Council dragged its heels on the routine matter of issuing a permit to Rainbow Multi-Media for that year's Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.

Confident that the permit would be forthcoming, RMM went ahead with its ambitious plans for the 1974 Festival, confirming bookings with B.B. King, Cecil Taylor, John Lee Hooker, the Gil Evans Orchestra, Sunnyland Slim, the Persuasions, perennial favorites Sun Ra & His Arkestra, and The Amazing Mr. Please, Please, Please The Hardest Working Man in Show Business The Godfather of Soul & Mr. James Brown!

But the City Council finally issued judgment in July: With less than two months left before the Festival's scheduled September 6th opening, the City of Ann Arbor denied Rainbow Multi-Media's application for a permit to hold the internationally-recognized musical extravaganza in its place of birth, citing RMM's failure to clean up the site immediately following the 1973 Festival as reason enough to cancel the event.

The clean-up problem was troubling. The Festival had hired scores of young people from the community to prepare the site, an empty field next to Huron High School which we had dubbed Otis Spann Memorial Field, to staff the festival grounds during the three-day event, and to clean up the site after the festivities had concluded. These workers effectively went on strike after the Festival ended without any of them getting paid and refused to do any more work, thus postponing the clean-up until enough volunteers could be organized to remove the debris.

Two decades later it would come to light that the man RMM had contracted to supervise the Festival's field operations had invested the payroll money advanced to him for the crew something like $20,000 into a multi-ton marijuana deal that, unhappily for all, failed to come off. The supervisor vanished, and the crew began a protracted muttering campaign against Rainbow Multi-Media that resulted eventually in the cancellation of the next year's event.

It is forbidden, the City of Ann Arbor ruled in July, and pandemonium reigned for several days until the festival organizers were invited to bring the banned event across the Detroit River and into the lovely outdoor amphitheater at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario & Canada. Radio powerhouse CKLW-AM agreed to serve as sponsor of the event, pledging lots of free ad spots, and the Canadians waxed enthusiastic in their professions of support for the orphaned music festival.

Thus preparations for the Festival went ahead with even greater zeal. With six weeks to go until opening night, RMM set itself upon the daunting task of convincing American music lovers to cross a fiercely-guarded international border with the insane hope of enjoying themselves en masse as they had in the liberated zone of Otis Spann Memorial Field, where the producers felt free to guarantee festival attendees A Rainbow of Music & A Real Good Time.

There would be a rainbow of music, as promised, but the Windsor gendarmes and their big brothers in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would do everything within their considerable power to keep people from having the real good time they were seeking at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile.

Advance ticket sales were light, with people seeming to take a wait-and-see attitude toward the thorny issue of crossing the Canadian border, and their worst fears were realized when Canadian border authorities turned back legions of would-be festival-goers on any grounds they could dredge up.

At the festival site, a sparse crowd was harassed by local authorities who flooded the backstage area and trooped down into the amphitheater itself to snatch up marijuana offenders and other undesirables. The musicians were getting nervous themselves as they looked out at the slim audience and visualized their paychecks floating off into the darkening gloom.

To make matters even worse, this writer Creative Director of the Festival was singled out and deported back to Detroit while trying to shepherd Sun Ra and his Arkestra through Canadian customs. The Arkestra went ahead, but I was turned back on the basis of a marijuana conviction 10 years earlier and never got to witness first-hand the debacle that ensued in Windsor nor the implementation of my Dream Show of All Time when Sun Ra & His Arkestra were followed onstage Friday night by James Brown and his fabulous revue.

I went back to my room in the Shelby Hotel Friday afternoon and watched myself talk to a television news reporter who had covered the impromptu deportation proceedings. As I witnessed the farthest-out group of characters I had ever seen in America Sun Ra & his Arkestra! -- being allowed entry into Canada while I was turned back as too far out, I was struck hard with the realization that my public persona as dope fiend, ex-convict and virulent revolutionary agitator had now cut me off from participating in the most important event in my career as a music promoter.

This marked a major turning point in my life. Watching myself sputter at the reporter on-screen, I muttered out loud: You've gone too far. It's time to turn back now. That Fall I retired from political activism and artist management to take up less grueling pursuits, working as an alternative journalist and editor for a couple of years and then opening a small arts consulting business focused on providing program development and grant-writing services to indigenous jazz artists and community arts organizations.

Meanwhile, in Windsor, Sun Ra & the Arkestra took the stage at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile following an introduction by Bobby Bass of WJZZ-FM and as the evidence on this disc indicates turned the place upside down. A long passage of introductory music improvised by Ra and the ensemble is followed by a seamless program of some of the Arkestra's greatest hits Discipline 27 and 27-II, Love in Outer Space, The Shadow World, Space Is The Place, Second Stop Jupiter, What Planet Is This, Images, Watusi and the closing Sun Ra and His Band From Outer Space plus one number which is thought to have previously been unrecorded, the daring anthem titled It Is Forbidden.

The ranks of the Arkestra included Ra's greatest reed section ever, with Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Eloe Omoe, Danny Davis, James Jacson and Danny Pekoe Thompson, plus Kwame Hadi and Akh Tal Ebah on trumpets, Dale Williams on electric guitar, Detroit's own Reginald Shoo-Be-Doo Fields on bass, Clifford Jarvis at the drums and Stanley Atakatune Morgan on congas. June Tyson and the Space Ethnic Voices, Judith Holton and Cheryl Banks, strutted and crooned out in front of the band, framing the mind-boggling keyboard improvisations and fierce chanted philosophy of their undisputed leader, the great Sun Ra.

The multi-track master tapes of the Arkestra's performance were quite reasonably withheld by recordist Chuck Buchanan when it became clear that he could not be paid for his work, and they ve never been seen again. What remains is the cassette tape recorded from the board mix during the performance, now transferred into the digital realm and available right here on CD at last. Please enjoy it while you can.

Amsterdam, December 6, 2000 /
New Orleans, February 9, 2001

The producer would like to offer special thanks to Peter M. Andrews, David Sinclair, Robert Bass, Darlene Pond, Frank & Peggy Bach, Gary Grimshaw, Jay Ross, John Chinner Mitchell, Chuck Buchanan, John Ryan, Cy Fruchter, Sun Ra & His Arkestra, the late Alton Abraham, my dear departed mother Elsie Sinclair, my daughters Celia, Sunny and Chonita, Patrick Boissel and Suzy Shaw, Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory, Pete Gershon at Signal To Noise, Chris Trent, Peter Gold, and to my wife Penny for her patience and understanding.

(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

King Biscuit Boys / Big Walter Horton: Well All Right! (1973)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:02:46 +0000

Well All Right!
King Biscuit Boys / Big Walter Horton
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973

Schoolkids Records

By John Sinclair

The first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, held at Otis Spann Memorial Field (next to Huron High School) on September 8-9-10, 1972, offered a series of five shows designed to embody and reflect the musical aesthetic traced in the phrase a rainbow of sound--a heady mixture of great blues, jazz and R&B, irrespective of period or genre.

While blues purists and jazz critics shook their heads and wagged their fingers, the Festival audiences--12,000 strong--went wild time and time again, and their enthusiasm inspired the producers to venture even further into the realm of cultural diversity as we began to lay our plans for the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.

The success of our initial effort meant that this writer, as the event's Creative Director, was given an even freer hand in selecting the artists and putting the five 1973 concert bills together. Certain artists who had proved most popular with the crowd were invited back and presented in different settings, but there were significant new additions to the program as well.

One of my most cherished dreams was realized with the presentation of a Saturday afternoon Music of Detroit show featuring Yusef Lateef, John Lee Hooker, CJQ, and a massive Motor City Blues Revue that can finally be heard on Please Mr. Foreman, the first CD in this series of festival albums from Schoolkids Records.

Perhaps the most ambitious shows were the Saturday night concert with Ray Charles & The Raelettes, the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, the great Jimmy Reed, and blues harmonica legend Big Walter Horton; and the Sunday afternoon extravaganza that brought together blues queen Victoria Spivey (now heard on Volume 3 of this series, Grind It!), the Ornette Coleman Sextet, the fantastic Johnny Otis Show, the West Coast improvisational duo Infinite Sound, and the fabled King Biscuit Boys from Helena, Arkansas--guitarists Houston Stackhouse and Joe Willie Wilkins, harmonicast Sonny Boy Blake & company.

Both Big Walter Horton and The King Biscuit Boys, although little known by the thousands of festival-goers, had strong ties to the small Ann Arbor blues community by virtue of previous appearances in local clubs and concert halls.

Big Walter was a favorite at the Blind Pig, the city's pre-eminent blues showcase, and often travelled with Ann Arbor-based guitarist John Nicholas. Later in the 1970s they made a pair of fine LPs for the bar's fledgling Blind Pig Records label, both of which can now be found on CD.

Nicholas assembled a splendid little unit to back up Big Walter's 1973 Festival set, choosing bassist Sarah Brown and drummer Fran Christina (both then based in Ann Arbor) from his own working band, The Boogie Brothers.

The King Biscuit Boys (performing as the Mississippi Delta Blues Band) had been introduced to Ann Arbor blues lovers on July 24, 1971 at UM's Hill Auditorium, the site of a wildly successful benefit concert for the student affiliate of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. My brother David had assisted in the production of the benefit, which took place while I was in prison, and his enthusiastic reports made me want to hear the music of these Delta old-timers while they were still with us. He tracked them down in Memphis, Tennessee, and helped secure their presence at the 1973 Festival.

As we were soon to learn, King Biscuit Boys is the generic name for the several sets of musicians featured on King Biscuit Time, the pioneering blues radio program broadcast on KFFA Radio in Helena, Arkansas. King Biscuit Time debuted in December 1941 as a 15-minute live blues program aired Monday through Friday, at first from noon to 12:15 and then from 12:15 to 12:30 pm.

Sponsored by the Interstate Grocery Company as a means of advertising its King Biscuit brand flour, the program featured Delta harmonica and singing star Rice Miller (renamed Sonny Boy Williamson by IGC president Max Miller for the purposes of the radio program) and guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr., who became "the first electric guitarist heard over the radio in the Delta, and the first many younger guitarists in the area heard anywhere" (Robert Palmer, in Deep Blues).

The two bluesmen would play 15 minutes of jukebox hits and their own material and announce the times and locations of their local engagements.

King Biscuit Time opened up the radio airwaves to the sound of the blues, and the program became immensely popular throughout the upper Delta. When the King Biscuit Entertainers added James "Peck" Curtis on drums in 1942 and Robert "Dudlow" Taylor on piano soon after, Sonny Boy and Robert Jr. helped create the prototype for the modern blues band which has dominated the scene for almost 50 years now.

Soon blues programs on the radio were widespread--Elmore James had a program in Belzoni, Little Walter was on KFFA, Howlin Wolf had his own show on KWEM in West Memphis, and B.B. King met his public as The Pepticon Boy, playing for Pepticon Tonic on WDIA in Memphis, by 1948 the first Black-oriented radio station in the USA.

But King Biscuit Time persevered through the 1940s, 50s, 60s and into the modern world, where it can be heard on KFFA today under the direction of veteran broadcaster Sunshine Sonny Payne, who spins the records (the show no longer features live music) and spreads the blues news throughout the upper Delta in the last days of the 20th century.

Joe Willie Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse began their association with the King Biscuit Entertainers in 1945 and 1947, respectively. Neither man enjoyed anything resembling a recording career, and both remained unknown outside the inner circles of the blues world for most of their lives.

But in the Delta, where they could be heard on KFFA and other stations every weekday for most of 20 years, their influence on an entire generation of blues players was vastly disproportionate to their impact on the world at large.

Joe Willie Wilkins, the younger of the two veteran bluesmen, was born January 7, 1923 in Davenport (Coahoma County), Mississippi, and first made his mark as a 10-year-old harmonica star in his father's band, playing country dances, suppers and picnics around Bobo, MS.

By the time Wilkins turned 12 he had learned to play the guitar and developed his talent playing in local churches. While still in his teens he traveled around the Delta playing with Rice Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson) & Robert Lockwood until he enlisted in the U.S. Navy after World War II broke out.

Upon his discharge in 1945 Joe Willie joined Rice Miller's King Biscuit Boys for their KFFA broadcasts and busy personal appearance schedule. Wilkins began his long partnership with Houston Stackhouse the following year when he joined Stack in Robert Nighthawk's little band, playing for Bright Star and Mother's Best Flour on KFFA.

Wilkins became a member of Willie Love's Three Aces in the early 1950s, playing the popular Greenville pianist's Broadway Furniture Store show on KWEM in West Memphis and recording with Love for Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi.

Joe Willie also backed up Arthur Big Boy Crudup for Trumpet and appeared on most of Sonny Boy's historic Trumpet dates during 1951-54 as well, beaming his distinctive electric guitar sound out across the country as sides like Eyesight to the Blind, Pontiac Blues, Cool, Cool Blues and West Memphis Blues captured the attention of blues deejays and their burgeoning audiences.

In the mid- 50s Wilkins travelled with Roosevelt Sykes, Willie Nix and Sonny Boy, ranging as far afield as Detroit, where he is purported to have worked the King Solomon Bar in 1954, probably during Sonny Boy's well-known residency in the Motor City.

After Trumpet Records folded in 1955 Joe Willie moved to Memphis and mostly worked outside music until 1970, when Stackhouse joined him and his second wife there (Wilkins had earlier been married to Robert Nighthawk's sister) and revived his performing career.

Wilkins and Stackhouse began appearing as the King Biscuit Boys, toured with the Memphis Blues Caravan, and continued to thrill and amaze blues lovers throughout the 1970s with their deep Delta blues and their warm, relaxed personalities. Upon his death in 1979, Joe Willie Wilkins was lauded by Jim O Neal in Living Blues as one of the greatest blues guitarists Memphis has ever known.

The history of Houston Stackhouse reads like a map of the development of the blues itself. Born September 28, 1910 on the Randall Ford plantation near Wesson, MS, as a youth Stackhouse moved with his family to Crystal Springs, where he studied violin with Lonnie Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks, learned the mandolin and soon switched to guitar.

At one point Stack lived across the street from the pioneering blues recording star Tommy Johnson, whose music made a profound impression on the young guitarist and remained a life-long influence.

Stack moved a bit north and west to Hollandale in 1931 and hooked up with his cousin, Robert Lee McCollum, a harmonica player he taught to play guitar. McCollum gained blues fame following the release of his BlueBird Records single, Prowling Night Hawk, in 1937 and reigned for almost 30 years as a seminal--and very influential--electric slide guitarist under the name Robert Nighthawk.

Stackhouse teamed up with Robert Johnson in late 1936 and played with him off and on until Johnson's untimely death in August 1938. He then joined his old mentor Lonnie Chatmon in the Mississippi Sheiks and formed a very popular Delta string band known as Mississippi Sheiks No. 2, which entertained local dancers and partiers all through the war years.

In 1946 Robert Nighthawk, back from Chicago, persuaded Stack to move with him to Helena, Arkansas and gave him an electric Gibson guitar, which Stackhouse quickly mastered as a member of Nighthawk's band on KFFA and on gigs throughout the area.

The following year Stackhouse joined Joe Willie Wilkins, pianist Robert Dudlow Taylor, and drummer James Peck Curtis in the King Biscuit Entertainers and remained with them well into the 1950s, extending his influence throughout the upper Delta and working outside gigs with Sonny Boy, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, Earl Hooker and Roosevelt Sykes.

When Sonny Boy came back to Helena in 1965, Stackhouse and Peck Curtis backed him up on King Biscuit Time and on local engagements until his death later that year.

Houston Stackhouse finally left the Delta in 1970, moving to Memphis and reuniting with Joe Willie Wilkins to tour as the King Biscuit Boys. When his old friend passed in 1979, Stack went back to Crystal Springs, gave up music, and died quietly at home the following year.

Stackhouse's recorded legacy is criminally slight, with only two CDs available to contemporary listeners: half of a fine album shared with Robert Nighthawk on Testament Records, recorded in Dundee, MS, in 1967; and Cryin Won t Help You (Genes Records), recorded in 1972 but not released until 1994. Blues scholars will enjoy reading Steve LaVere's compassionate tribute to Houston Stackhouse in the liner notes to the latter CD.

The King Biscuit Boys performance at the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was probably a typical one in terms of repertoire, relaxation, depth of feeling and musical brilliance; at any rate, it's the only live performance by this important ensemble that we re likely to hear, and it's a blessing to have it in release here.

Joe Willie Wilkins leads off the set with Little Car Blues, a tune he had played with Willie Love back in the early 50s, and nods to the spirit of Robert Johnson with "Me And The Devil Blues."

Harmonica man Sonny Boy Blake is brought to the fore on Down So Long before Houston Stackhouse takes charge to deliver his powerful readings of Tommy Johnson's "Cool Drink of Water Blues" and two Robert Nighthawk classics, "Bricks In My Pillow" and "Sweet Black Angel." Joe Willie returns with a mournful "It's Too Bad" and a sparkling tribute to his old bandleader, Sonny Boy's magnificent composition Mr. Downchild, to close out the show.

Big Walter Horton, whose 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival performance is featured on the second half of this compact disc, rivalled Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and their brilliant protege, Marion Little Walter Jacobs, in importance as the most innovative instrumentalists to apply their talent, intelligence and amplified sound to the blues harmonica.

Although well-known and much admired by his peers as a player of great creativity and emotional depth, Horton--unlike Sonny Boy and Little Walter--was never accorded the opportunity to register the full range of his musical genius in a regular series of well-produced recordings during his prime.

Yet Horton continued to perform with great definition and power throughout the 1960s and 70s, and this scintillating 1973 Ann Arbor appearance--where he was selected to open the Saturday night show for Jimmy Reed, Charles Mingus and Ray Charles--is convincing testament to the gigantic stature of this unjustly neglected amplified harmonica virtuoso.

Walter Horton was born April 6, 1917, in Horn Lake (DeSoto County), Mississippi, just south of Memphis. He began playing harmonica at the age of 5 and performed as a kid sensation at country dances and house parties.

Walter's family soon moved to Memphis, where Walter played for tips on the streets and hung out with the Memphis Jug Band, who took the 10-year-old harmonica sensation on tour playing theatres and shows around the Midwest and featured him (as Shakey Walter ) on two of the band's Victor 78s recorded in Chicago in 1927.

Walter continued playing around Memphis and the Deep South with musicians like Sunnyland Slim, Honey Boy Edwards, Buddy Doyle, Homesick James and others, purportedly recording with Doyle in Memphis for OKeh/Vocalion in 1939.

Horton moved to Chicago in 1940 and became a fixture on Maxwell Street throughout the decade (you can see Big Walter in the Maxwell Street market scene in the Blues Brothers movie, playing harp with the John Lee Hooker combo).

When Walter returned to Memphis he lucked into the beginning of his recording career when engineer/producer Sam Phillips picked him off the street to cut some sides at the Memphis Recording Service (later Sun Records) in January and February 1951.

Phillips released one 78 each on Modern and RPM (calling Walter Mumbles ), Chess ( Walter's Boogie ), and Sun ( Easy as Jimmy & Walter ) before Big Walter went back to Chicago in the Winter of 1952-53 to replace Junior Wells in the Muddy Waters Band.

Big Walter appeared on two of Muddy's Chess sessions in 1953 that's him on She's All Right (Chess 1537) and Blow Wind Blow (Chess 1550)--but Little Walter was used on Muddy's subsequent recordings, even though he had left the band in 1952.

Horton's efforts attracted the attention of composer/producer Willie Dixon, who produced Big Walter's momumental recording of Hard Hearted Woman for States Records in 1954 (the first 45 in this writer's collection, acquired as a cut-out for 25 cents on my 14th birthday the following year) and tried again for Cobra in 1956 (using Otis Rush on guitar), but Big Walter remained unable to make any significant impact in terms of sales.

Horton continued to work the Chicago club circuit with Muddy, Johnny Shines, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Young, Howlin Wolf and others into the first half of the 1960s before he recorded his first full-length album for Chess (issued on their Argo label in 1964) and subsequently toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival.

Willie Dixon picked Big Walter for his touring unit, the Chicago Blues All Stars, and Horton made several important recordings under his own name and with others for Testament, Vanguard, Arhoolie, and other small blues labels.

In the mid- 70s Horton formed his own group, Big Walter & the Rhythm Rockers, with guitarist Johnny Nicholas and drummer Martin Gross, and released the extremely tasty Fine Cuts album on Blind Pig Records in 1977 (now available on CD).

Big Walter died in Chicago on December 8, 1981, leaving behind the fond memories of his many friends and colleagues, a handful of obscure singles, a couple of fine albums, and this rare live recording from the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973, finally seeing the light of day [very briefly] on Schoolkids Records in 1996.

Big Walter is brought onstage at Otis Spann Memorial Field by a lively though unidentified announcer and takes the microphone himself to introduce the band, wryly revealing his great affection for the three young blues acolytes who accompany him so freshly and with such great sensitivity throughout the set.

Johnny Nicholas impeccable Robert Lockwood-influenced guitar parts and overall playing are a momument to restraint and good taste; Sarah Brown is steady and firm at every point; and the young Francis Christina (later to achieve fame as drummer with the Fabulous Thunderbirds) provides crisply affirmative support from behind the battery.

The band eases into a slow blues and Big Walter unholsters his harmonica to open the show, following with a definitive reading of his own "Hard Hearted Woman" and a briskly swinging instrumental that shows off the band's dynamic range. "That Ain't It" suffers from level fluctuations in the harmonica and vocal microphones, but Big Walter and the band play the song so beautifully that it was impossible to leave it behind on the cutting room floor.

The blues classics "Trouble In Mind" and "St. Louis Blues" are given Big Walter's patented treatment--deep and soulful on the slow lament, hot and swinging on the W.C. Handy perennial. Horton contributes another fine instrumental showcase before closing things down with a great performance of "It Hurts Me Too," the Tampa Red tune popularized by Elmore James. The crowd goes wild and won t let Big Walter off the stage until M.C. Roland Young placates them with the promise of a musician from Leland, Mississippi--Jimmy Reed.

That's the way it sounded in the early evening of Saturday, September 8, 1973, at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival--and, dear friends, dare we say that it sounds even better today, many years after these beloved bluesmen have passed from our earthly sphere.

But their music lives on in our hearts and minds, as a blessing beyond compare, for us to share and enjoy as long as we may live.

--New Orleans
February 10, 1996

(c) 1996, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Well All Right!
King Biscuit Boys / Big Walter Horton
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973

[1] Intro by Joe Willie Wilkins > Little Car Blues (Willie Love)
[2] Me And The Devil Blues (Robert Johnson)
[3] Down So Long (Sonny Blakes)
[4] Cool Drink of Water Blues (Tommy Johnson)
[5] Bricks In My Pillow (Robert Nighthawk)
[6] Sweet Black Angel (Robert Nighthawk)
[7] It's Too Bad (Joe Willie Wilkins)
[8] Mr. Downchild (Rice Miller)

Joe Willie Wilkins, electric guitar, vocals (1,2,7,8); Houston Stackhouse, electric guitar, vocals (4,5,6); Sonny Blake, harmonica, vocal (3); probably Melvin Lee, electric bass, and Homer Jackson, drums. Sunday, September 9, 1973.

[9] Introduction > Walter's Slow Blues (Walter Horton)
[10] Hard Hearted Woman" (Willie Dixon)
[11] Swingin Blues" (Walter Horton)
[12] That Ain't It (Walter Horton)
[13] Trouble In Mind (Richard Jones)
[14] St. Louis Blues (W.C. Handy)
[15] Walter Jumps One (Walter Horton)
[16] It Hurts Me Too (Hudson Whitaker)

Walter Horton, harmonica & vocals; John Nicholas, electric guitar; Sarah Brown, electric bass; Fran Christina, drums. Saturday, September 8, 1973.

Produced by John Sinclair for Big Chief Productions

(c)(p) 1996 John Sinclair

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 was produced by Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond & John Sinclair for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and was presented on stage at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, September 7-8-9, 1973.

These live recordings were produced by John Ryan for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation under the supervision of John Sinclair and recorded by the Butterfly Mobile Recording Service. Director of Recording and Chief Engineer: Jeff Jones. Recording Engineers: Karl Shojdahl, Robert Fries, Al Jacquez and Dave "Ball" Bartlebaugh. Special thanks to Steve Gebhardt & Robert Fries.

Digitally transferred from the original 7" stereo master tapes, edited and mastered by Keith Keller at Chez Flames, New Orleans, March 6, 1995.

The producer would like to extend special thanks to David Sinclair, Gary Grimshaw, Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond, Frank & Peggy Bach, Roland Young, John "Chinner" Mitchell, John Ryan, Jeff Jones, Bob DeDeckere, Rick Cioffi & Greg Reilly, Steve Bergman, Keith Keller, Anthony Dunbar Esq., Celia Sinclair, Bill Lynn, Elsie Sinclair, and to my wife Penny for her understanding and support.

The producer would also like to express his appreciation & gratitude to Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory for their extraordinary assistance & support during the course of this project.

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Bap-Tizum (1972)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 03:18:57 +0000

Art Ensemble of Chicago
Bap-Tizum: Live at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival
Atlantic Records, 1973; Men With Hats LP, 2001

By John Sinclair

The Art Ensemble of Chicago has been a leading force in American music since its inception in 1967 as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. The pioneering creative music collective celebrated its 30th anniversary four years ago, but the untimely death of trumpeter Lester Bowie and the semi-retirement from performance of the Brooklyn-based Zen master Joseph Jarman have effectively brought their reign to a close at the turn of the 21st Century.

The recording under hand, recorded in performance at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival shortly after drummer Don Moye had become a permanent member of the Art Ensemble, remains one of the finest of all their many recorded works, and I must admit that hearing my much-younger voice introduce the band from the stage that September afternoon fills me with pride to have been associated with this brilliant organization, as well as with the anticipatory excitement I felt at that moment as the AEC prepared to unleash its kaleidoscopic performance before an unsuspecting audience of 12,000 festive music-lovers at Otis Spann Memorial Field.

I go back a long way with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in fact, all the way back to 1965 when it was the Roscoe Mitchell Art Quartet with Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and a variety of drummers including the late great Philip Wilson and the very much alive Alvin Fielder.

Back then Joseph Jarman led his own daring ensemble of spectacular young Chicago players featuring Christopher Gaddy on piano, Charles Clark on bass, Steve McCall at the drums, and Jarman's searing alto saxophone, dynamic compositions, highly-evolved poetry and brilliant sense of dramatics.

And Don Moye, then a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, was just beginning to learn to play the drum set, woodshedding for hours each day with fellow drummers Danny Spencer and Ronnie Johnson in the basement of the Artists Workshop commune at 4825 John C. Lodge, where Charles Moore and I held the front apartment on the ground floor.

My sister Kathy had moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at Northwestern University. Kathy and her husband, Douglas Casement, publisher of Spero magazine and one of my early mentors, settled not in Evanston but in Hyde Park, on the South Side, near the University of Chicago.

One day my sister encountered Joseph Jarman strolling down a neighborhood street and struck up a conversation with the flamboyant young musician and poet. Their budding friendship led my sister into Jarman's circle of friends and musical colleagues in the heady artistic milieu of mid- 60s Chicago, and her enthusiastic response to their creative activities was quickly communicated to her brother in Detroit.

As a budding poet, jazz critic and organizer of cultural events who lived at the center of a collective of improvising jazz musicians, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers and others called the Detroit Artists Workshop, founded in the Fall of 1964, I was excited to learn of the existence of a group of kindred souls only 280 miles to the west who had banded together to advance their own activities, so similar in sound and intention to our own. Soon I was making regular trips to the Windy City to forge strong links between our respective collectives and to set up performance opportunities in Detroit for Jarman and his friends.

Jarman's musical world, like so many of his peers, was centered on the teachings and practice of the pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams and his Experimental Band, an ensemble fully dedicated to developing and playing original creative improvisational music devised by its members. Abrams and the Experimental Band formed the core of an emerging musical collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which would introduce to the world the music of Jarman, Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Lester Lashley and many others whose work was marked by its fierce individuality and complete disregard for the orthodoxies of the established jazz order.

Like the Artists Workshop, the AACM went beyond the music itself to tend to its proper presentation to the public. Nightclubs and bars were generally looking for something more easily digestible as entertainment than what the AACM members were offering, and the few jazz promoters in town stuck close to the tried and true as well. In order for their music to be heard, Muhal taught the participants in his program, they would have to stage their own concerts where they could control the circumstances of their presentations, develop their own audiences outside the mainstream and make their mark on the world through their own efforts.

The Roscoe Mitchell Art Quartet, the Joseph Jarman Quartet and other formations that grew out of the Experimental Band began to organize concerts at the University of Chicago and other community venues, attracting students, faculty members, poets, artists and street-level intellectuals of every sort to hear their challenging original music in settings of their own devise. I had the pleasure of appearing with Jarman and his ensemble at some of these presentations, including a show at UC where the players took the stage with bags over our heads and launched into an all-out assault of music and poetry which took the crowd by storm.

Now the AACM needed an outlet for their music on record, and soon Roscoe Mitchell, Jarman, Kalaparusha, Braxton and Abrams himself were documenting their original work on a series of albums for Bob Koester at Delmark Records. The first recording session I ever attended, early in 1966, produced Joseph Jarman's first album, Song For, a triumphant tour-de-force by the fiery reedman and poet which spotlighted the emerging talents of Christopher Gaddy and Charles Clark. Mitchell's debut album, Sound, soon followed, and Lester Bowie released his initial recording on former Koester associate Chuck Nessa's self-titled Nessa label.

Tragically, during the next year Gaddy and Clark, both in their 20s, passed away within months of one another, leaving their deeply bereaved leader to grieve the loss of two extremely close friends and musical partners. Now without an ensemble of his own, Jarman gravitated to Mitchell, Bowie and Favors for emotional and musical support, and before long the four improvising artists began performing together as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble.

By 1969 the Art Ensemble had developed its unique identity as a drummer-less quartet centered on the virtuostic bass of Malachi Favors and the vast array of reed, brass and percussion instruments wielded by Bowie, Mitchell and Jarman. Their music encapsulated the entire history of Africans in America and utilized elements of every stage in the development of jazz to illuminate the principle expressed in their motto: Black Music Ancient to the Future.

On stage, the Art Ensemble's message extended outward from its members iconoclastic original compositions and startling guerrilla costumery through its stunning displays of instrumental virtuosity and improvisational genius. Every conceivable reed instrument, from sopranino sax to the bass saxophone and a myriad of flutes, might well be brought into play, countered by the brass arsenal of Lester Bowie and seasoned by the sounds of an infinite variety of percussion instruments.

In the summer of 1969, having despaired of procuring work and achieving critical acclaim in their native land, the Art Ensemble left the U.S. for a long sojourn in Europe. Based in Paris, the band now known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded a series of ground-breaking albums for the BYG label, including A Jackson in Your House, Reese & the Smooth Ones and People In Sorrow, increasing their positive exposure through European festival appearances and occasional nightclub and concert-hall performances.

It was also in Paris that the Art Ensemble completed itself when its members, strolling one fine afternoon through the streets of the City of Light, stumbled over the prostrate form of a seriously inebriated American expatriate named Don Moye, now a finely studied drummer who had abandoned his studies at Wayne State to make a European jaunt with the avant-garde Ann Arbor ensemble known as the Pigfuckers. Moye joined flutist Arthur Fletcher and bassist Ron Miller to barnstorm the continent under this questionable moniker, which truth be told had been supplied by this writer when asked by Ron Miller to suggest the most vile possible name for their impromptu touring outfit.

Moye was immediately adopted into the Art Ensemble family and soon became the official fifth member of the cooperative, adding his wildly imaginative conception and skilled, exciting drumming to the line-up. The group's musical horizons broadened immensely as Moye's percussive talents were integrated into the ensemble, adding a whole new colorative palette and extending and underlining the rhythmic possibilities inherent in the members compositions and improvisations.

Now the Art Ensemble was complete, and its five members would go on to work together for almost 30 years, forging a completely unique musical identity and collectively illustrating the incredible range of musical elements inherent in their all-encompassing concept called Black Music Ancient to the Future. And, as the most visible standard-bearer of the principles and practices of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Art Ensemble of Chicago would carry the message first articulated by Muhal Richard Abrams and the Experimental Band to creative musicians and listeners all over the world.

By 1972 the Art Ensemble was back in Chicago, but their return to the USA had elicited no great deal of critical or popular response. Very few performance opportunities were presented, and their work so easily documented while they were in Europe was going largely unrecorded. Yet the Ensemble was at the very top of its game musically, and their infrequent public performances were quickly becoming legendary.

When I was presented with the opportunity to select and schedule to artists to appear at the first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, my very first impulse was to replace the usual jazz-festival attractions with the cream of the creative music avant garde. I felt that the vast majority of the people we hoped to attract to our festival wouldn t know one jazz artist from another, and that this gave me the chance to introduce them to the artists whose music I found most exciting.

Miles Davis and Charles Mingus were the closest to the mainstream I wanted to get with my line-up, and as it turned out, Mingus was too ill to make the date and was replaced by Pharaoh Sanders. Archie Shepp, New Dalta with Leo Smith and Marion Brown, Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra, the CJQ of Detroit and the Art Ensemble of Chicago were more to my contemporary taste, and all were available.

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 was the Art Ensemble's first U.S. festival appearance. They were presented on a Saturday afternoon bill titled Music of Chicago which kicked off with Hound Dog taylor & the Houserockers, followed with the Mighty Joe Young band and special guests Lucille Spann, Willie Dixon and Koko Taylor, continued with the Art Ensemble of Chicago presentation contained in this LP and closed with a terrific set by Muddy Waters and his band. As you can hear on this recording, the Art Ensemble, surrounded by state-of-the-art Chicago blues, turned in a mind-boggling, roots-drenched performance that completely captivated the audience of some 12,000 music lovers and won over the production crew from Atlantic Records, who were there to record the music at the festival for a double-LP anthology featuring a cut each from almost 20 of the artists there.

Based on producer Michael Cuscuna's enthusiastic response to the Art Ensemble's set, Atlantic signed the band to a two-record deal which would include the release of Bap-tizum and a second album, Fanfare for the Warriors, to be recorded later in a studio setting. This provided a major boost to their career and introduced the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago to a new and much expanded audience, many members of which stayed with the AEC throughout the band's existence.

It was my extreme pleasure to be able to present the Art Ensemble to the people at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival that sunny September afternoon in 1972, and it gives me even more pleasure to introduce their performance that day by means of this LP to listeners in the 21st Century. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and g s, because they re going to take you on one hell of a musical trip before this record is through.

New Orleans
February 15, 2001

(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Rainbow Cultural History / Ethnic Folk-Dance Music: Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:13:39 +0000

Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972
Atlantic Records

Rainbow Cultural History / Ethnic Folk-Dance Music

By John Sinclair

The great American genius musician-composer Charles Mingus, in titling his major work The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady (Impulse A-35) added the sub-title Ethnic Folk-Dance Music to put the work in its proper context, i.e., the life of the people out of which the music arose and into which the music intended to return.

Or, something too serious to be falsely categorized, as "jazz" or blues or whatever, by individuals outside of the particular culture celebrated and crystallized by the music--individuals who were determined to take the music as something divorced from any human context, a thing to be labelled and analyzed away as if it were a lifeless artifact stuck up in some weird museum.

What these people forget is that the music has no meaning outside the context in which it is created--and that it is living breathing men and women who make the music happen, men and women who live lives very much like the rest of ours are. Or as Ornette Coleman explained it once, "Since there isn't too much I haven't told you about my music, I really told you about myself through it. The other autobiography of my life is like everyone else's. Born, work, sad and happy and etc. We do hope you enjoy our music." (Notes for This Is Our Music, Atlantic 1353).

The demystification of the music-making process must be effected if we are going to bring the music (or allow it to penetrate) further into our live--restoring the human context, and the human dimension of the music must be a central concern of every person who shares in the benefits of the music as a social force and who loves it in that term.

And, if the music is to realize its perfect completion as a first term in the lives of the people who are reached by it, there can be no confusion concerning where the music comes from, what it's meant for, and why it does what it righteously does to people.

Blues & jazz are both perfect examples of wqhat is meant by people's music, but at the same time both musics and their practitioners have sutfered since they came into (white) public consciousness from the mindless attempts of countless Euro-American missionaries to "legitimize" the music and "understand" it by relating it to a wholly alien standard, that is, by measuring its alleged strengths and weakncsses against a sterile European scale and then presuming to speak of the "authenticity" or the "purity" of "the form" as if it were just another vapid intellectual exercise being carried out by petit-bourgeoise academicians insulated in their experimental laboratories and by their patrons' grants from the hard cold realities of the lives of the poor, oppressed, powerless people from whom the music comes and to whom it is bound to return.

There is no blues music apart from the lives ot blues people; it is the same with jazz and rock & roll too, or any music which is a people's, or a folk, music--just as it is the same with Lawrence Welk music too, that it does not exist apart from the lives of Lawrence Welk people, and their hideous culture.

Blues music is music which is played in bars, at rent parties, barbeques, street dances, over the radio and into the lives of a particular people, where it does truly exist as a first term of those lives, or one of the things around which that people's lives are organized.

It is a functional music first of all, a music which is meant to lift people out of their infinite misery and get them on their feet dancing, or just swaying back and forth, taken out of their troubles for a while and given a respite from the incessant cruelties of the industrial society into which they have been forcibly impressed.

And it is a music which has been made from its inception by people who shared completely the life of their audience--by field hands in the South who learned to play guitar on crude hand-made cigar-box contraptions at night in the dark after working all day in the fields, and who were then called upon by their brothers and sisters to come forth at public gatherings to enable them to dance for a few hours before the next day's work; or by factory workers in the North who spent their days on the assembly line or in the foundry making their living and then picked up a few extra bucks at night and on the weekends grinding out some tunes in buckets of blood and other places where the full brunt of industrial life is brought to bear on all the various individuals on the scene, where men kill each other over a few dollars or a drink or a woman's attentions, havhlg learned from their employers the infintesimal value which is placed upon the life of a single man or woman.

Blues (and its flower jazz, which has grown straight from the root) has enjoyed another important function also, a function which has instlnctively heen learned and applied by rock & roll people--the music, as part of an entire seamless culture, has served to sustain an oppressed people through long years of captivity and exploitation at the hands of an alien people; it has served to codify and to make popular among a people certain principles of resistance and rebellion, of energy and vitality and creativity, which have inspired countless numbers of black people over the course of many many years of suffering in this place to hold on through the worst parts and to begin to fight back when the time gets right.

But first of all this music is people's music, it is made and transmitted by men and women off the streets of America and its first term is always the people who stand under it and use it in their daily struggle for survival. That is to say they are popular musics, blues & jazz (and rock & roll) have always been popular musics, and to try to deny them this primary term bv positing them as "pure" or "art" musics as Western intcllectuals will do is to miss the entire point of their meaning for the musicians and the people they "play" for.

Making music is making a living for these musicians, they work at reaching the most possible people in the most direct possible way, and when they perform or record they are reaching for the widest possible audience they can attain. They can't afford not to, having nothing but their music to keep them alive, and with the assembly line, the cotton field, the foundry, or a gun in the hand their only alternatives to making their music as popular as they can.

It is the people they depend upon, it is the people (and not "history or "art") they address with their musics, and it is the people's daily lives, encompassing the entire range of human experience, which provide the context out of which the music issues and into which it always returns.

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 was organized by Peter Andrews and this writer as one attempt out of many we make to restore the music to its rightful context and its righteous primacy as a first term in the lives of a people who need the music, who relate to it as a basic need in their lives (just as black people have done before them), and who are as open to its magic and its precise utility as the people who first gave rise to it and who continue to create and aabsorb it as a first term in their lives.

We wanted to make the Festival a gigantic party open to 12,000 of our sisters and brothers, with the highest-energy blues & jazz music we could attract and the most open possible setting for the music to work its magic on those folks gathered there for the three-day soiree. And we wanted particularly to destroy the elitist Euro-American presumption that these musics belong only in museums, on records or in intimate small gatherings of intelligentsia who think themselves the only truly appreciative audience for such quaint esoterica.

You can hear for yourselves the response these "limited" rude & beautiful musics drew from the barbarian horde which assembled at what we formally dedicated as Otis Spann Memorial Field the weekend of September 8-9-10, 1972.

And you should know that those people truly partied down, in the highest and really the purest spirit of the blues & jazz musics they were subjected to: Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, Koko Taylor & Willie Dixon, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Dr. John, Junior Walker & the All-Stars, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, CJQ, Lucille Spann with Mighty Joe Young, Freddie King, Luther Allison, the Boogie Brothers, Johnny Shines, Otis Rush, Sippie Wallace, and the infinitely dangerous Sun Ra and his Solar-Myth Arkestra.

These are the people you can hear playing their smoking music on this album, and although it isn't by any means all the music that came out into the open air that weekend, or even the particular chronology which went down there, it sure enough captures the feeling, and the spirit, and the beautifully human depth of feeling (and good feeling at that!) which were shared by the musicians and their audience at Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor those three days last fall.

That's just about as much as you could ask of it, as long as it makes you feel good and gives you some of what you need to survive and grow in this weirdo time and place. I really hope you can dig it like the thousands of brothers and sisters of ours did on the site, because if you can't you've got some real problems, my friend, and this isn't even the time to talk about them.

For everybody else, please have a good time with this record, take it into your lives and let the music reach you like the musicians intended it to when they made it. And then we can start to get somewhere--like off our asses, on our feet and moving as far as the music can take us.

Power to the People's Music
All Power to the People

--Ann Arbor
January 22, 1973

John Sinclair co-produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972, hosts a blues & jazz radio show called Toke Time on WNRZ-FM in Ann Arbor, and is the author of Music & Politics with Robert Levin (World) and Guitar Army: Street Writings / Prison Writings (Douglas/World).

(c) 1973, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Outer Space Employment Agency (1973)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:50:00 +0000

Outer Space Employment Agency
Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra

Recorded Live at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973
Total Energy Records

By John Sinclair

Sun Ra was one of the biggest hits of the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. The Solar Myth Arkestra appeared on opening night, Friday, September 8, on a bill with Howlin' Wolf, Junior Walker & The All Stars, CJQ and the Seigel-Schwall Band, and completely wowed the crowd with its spectacular presentation of space-age improvisational music and brilliant costumery.

Sun Ra & His Arkestra would have been considered an unlikely audience pleaser in Ann Arbor and the Detroit area were it not for the band's historic performances with the MC-5 during 1967-69, including shared bills at Community Arts Auditorium, the Grande Ballroom, Ann Arbor Armory, and the first Detroit Rock & Roll Revival festival at the Michigan State Fairgrounds in June 1969.

Ra was a particular favorite of the MC-5, who adapted his wild space-jazz style and his poem "There Is" into their tour-de-force number called "Starship," and the band's enthusiasm was quickly picked up by its legions of followers in the area. The Arkestra's appearance at the 1972 Blues & Jazz Festival marked its return to the area after a three-year absence and became widely regarded as a must-see event.

Just over a month after its triumphant appearance in Ann Arbor, the Arkestra made its first major label recording, a magnificent opus titled Space Is The Place issued by Bob Krasnow's Blue Thumb Records. His reception in Ann Arbor and widespread positive critical response to the new album served to thrust Sun Ra much further into the consciousness of music-loving Americans than ever before, beginning a 20-year period of steadily increasing performance opportunities and international acclaim.

When we began programming the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, the closing show on Sunday night was set aside to showcase the most popular artists from the previous year's festivities: the great Luther Allison, the irrepressible Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, the mighty Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra, plus a star-studded Chicago Blues Revue featuring Otis Rush, Homesick James, Eddie Taylor, Carey Bell and Lucille Spann, all backed by the Mighty Joe Young Blues Band.

Sun Ra's 1973 appearance was even more highly anticipated than ever before. The Arkestra--16 members strong--was at the peak of its powers, with an array of brilliant soloists like John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Eloe Omoe, Ahk Tal Ebah and Kwame Hadi continually swirling forth from Ra's inexhaustible font of music and color, fired by three sets of drums and an equal number of hand percussionists and topped by Sun Ra's intergalactic keyboards and the space voice and interpretive dancing of the magnificent June Tyson.

As a bandleader, Sun Ra had always insisted on a high level of musical and orchestral discipline as a means to unprecedented freedom of expression. These goals had been achieved through long hours of daily rehearsals over a 20-year period, augmented by the leader's endless lectures on every topic under the sun.

Now he was incorporating his philosophical disquisitions into the stage show itself, casting his views into verse and presenting them via a three-part vocal chorale to stunning effect. A new suite based on the previous year's smash success, Space Is The Place, had been prepared to introduce Ra's concept of an Outer Space Employment Agency which would put the idled workers of post-industrial America back into a productive mode outside the tired orbit of Earth.

By 1973 Sun Ra had maintained his Arkestra continuously for 20 years, rising from obscure Chicago origins to the heights of international acclaim as the premiere avant-garde big band in jazz. Like Duke Ellington, Sun Ra had developed the Arkestra as a means of realizing his unique compositional concepts and created works built around the musical personalities of life members like John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen.

The Arkestra operated under several banners--Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra, Space Arkestra, Solar-Myth Arkestra, Astro-Infinity Arkestra, Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra--according to the particular musico-philosophical goals Ra had established for each discrete series of performances or recordings to be undertaken.

Later in the 1970s and 80s, after he had incorporated a great deal of historical material by Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson and other classical jazz composers into the Arkestra's repertoire, he would bill the band as the Omniverse Arkestra and, when they starting touring regularly, the Omniverse Jet-Set Arkestra.

These traditional elements were woven into the Arkestra's seamless five-hour presentations along with Ra's space anthems, wild solo and group improvisations, throbbing massed percussion and June Tyson's other-worldly vocals. Almost invariably, at some point in the performance, the entire Arkestra would leave the stage to chant and snake-dance through the audience.

* * * * *

Born Herman Blount around 1915 and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra began to emerge as a musical force shortly after World War II. He worked with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra at Chicago's Club DeLisa during 1946-47, graduated to house pianist and musical director at several prominent Windy City showbars, and organized his Arkestra around 1952 to perform the pianist's idiosyncratic jazz compositions and arrangements.

At this point the pianist began his long association with Chicago philosopher/businessman Alton Abraham, took the name "Le Sun Ra" and began to reveal his cosmic visions through his compositions, song titles, poetry, elaborate costumery and, beginning in 1956, a series of wildly iconoclastic LPs under his own Saturn Records imprint.

Packaged in crude space-age covers and bearing titles like Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, We Travel the Spaceways, Supersonic Jazz and Secrets of the Sun, these albums presented the innovative, often startling compositional creations of Sun Ra delivered with exceptional musicianship by the Solar Arkestra.

. Sun Ra's avant-garde works utilized elements like a "space key," where the players were instructed to improvise without regard for conventional tonal centers; superimposition of one chord over another; modal pieces with no fixed harmonic structure; and songs played in multiple keys.

His works wove a musical tapestry of unusual rhythms and colors, swinging like crazy at will or moving entirely out of regular time to project a musical environment evocative of outer space.

Sun Ra also introduced several daring instrumental concepts during the mid-1950s, including early use of electric piano, Solovox, Clavioline, Hammond organ, Farfisa organ and electric bass; creating an acoustic and electric bass team; utilizing two drummers and exotic miscellaneous percussion to create unprecedented polyrhythms; crafting features for two baritone saxophones and other unusual combinations of instruments; and insisting that each member of the reed section double on flute, oboe, bassoon or bass clarinet.

Historically, Sun Ra's writing and arranging followed the advances made by Tadd Dameron and Jimmy Mundy in the 1940s and were contemporaneous with the experimental writing of Charles Mingus and George Russell. His musical concepts and extra-musical concerns deeply influenced jazz giants like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor, as well as an entire generation of Chicago musicians who became active in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

Sun Ra also had a deep and lasting effect on the self-determination movement in jazz. With long-time partner and mentor Alton Abraham, he operated his own label, Saturn Records; his own music publishing company, Enterplanetary Koncepts; and his own production company, Infinity Inc.

While he recorded for and leased masters to a variety of labels, including Transition, Savoy, ESP-Disk, Blue Thumb and ABC/Impulse, Ra continued to issue albums on Saturn Records so that as much of his music as possible could be documented and made available to his small but fanatical public.

Sun Ra was a thoroughly unique individual whose provocative persona generated endless myth and controversy. To hear him expound his philosophical equations and his views on the future of interplanetary humanity was always a delightful experience. And to witness his outlook in action as interpreted by the Arkestra--under whatever rubric--provided aesthetic thrills beyond measure.

There was only one Sun Ra, and we lost one of the most colorful and beloved figures in 20th-century creative music when the celebrated pianist, composer and bandleader left Planet Earth on Sunday, May 30, 1993, almost 20 years following the remarkable Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival performance captured on this album.

His epochal Saturn Records releases are now being made available to contemporary audiences in a series of 16 CDs issued by Evidence Records, while ESP-Disk has restored his classic Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volumes 1 & 2.

His mid-1950s recordings for Transition Records have been issued on CD by Delmark Records as Sun Song and Sound of Joy, his 1961 Savoy album The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra by Nippon Columbia, the 1972 Blue Thumb recording of Space Is the Place by MCA/Impulse, and there are many European recordings available on a variety of labels.

But there was nothing like seeing and hearing Sun Ra & his fabulous Arkestra in the full flight of performance, and no better place to witness the magic of Ra than standing in Otis Spann Memorial Field next to Huron High School on the outskirts of Ann Arbor in the early 1970s when the Arkestra took the stage after it had been absolutely leveled by Junior Walker & the All Stars or Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers and then lifted it off into space and took the audience of 15,000 unsuspecting music lovers along with it.

That'll be where you're going, too, right now, as soon as you slip this disk into your machine and turn it on. Bon voyage, dear friends, happy landings and many, many happy returns.

--New Orleans
January 24, 1999

(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Outer Space Employment Agency
Recorded "live" at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973

[1] "Discipline 99" (Sun Ra)
[2] "Love In Outer Space" (Sun Ra)
[3] "Watusa" (Sun Ra)
[4] "Discipline 27-II" (Sun Ra)
[5] "At First There Was Nothing >
[6] "The Universe Has More To Offer You" >
[7] "Wake Up Angels" (Sun Ra)
[8] "Outer Space Employment Agency" (Sun Ra)

Produced by John Sinclair for Big Chief Productions

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Sun Ra, Farfisa organ, Mini-Moog, & vocals; Kwame Hadi, trumpet; Akh Tal Ebah, trumpet, mellophone & vocals; Marshall Allen, Danny Davis, alto saxophones & flute; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone, percussion; Eloe Omoe, bass clarinet & flute; Danny Thompson, baritone saxophone & flute; Ronnie Boykins, bass; Tommy Hunter, Lex Humphries, Vic Morrison, drums; Alzo Wright, percussions; Atakatune, Odun, congas; June Tyson, space vocals.

All compositions published by Enterplanetary Koncepts (BMI)

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra appeared at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 by arrangement with Alton Abraham & Saturn Research, Inc.

Recorded live at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Sunday, September 9, 1973 by John Ryan & Jeff Jones for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation under the supervision of John Sinclair.

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 was produced by Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond & John Sinclair for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and was presented on stage at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, September 7-8-9, 1973.

These "live" recordings were produced by John Ryan for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and recorded by the Butterfly Mobile Recording Service. Director of Recording and Chief Engineer: Jeff Jones. Recording Engineers: Karl Shojdahl, Robert Fries, Al Jacquez and Dave "Ball" Bartlebaugh. Special thanks to Steve Gebhardt & Robert Fries.

Digitally transferred from the original 7" stereo master tapes, edited and mastered by Keith Keller at Chez Flames Recordings, New Orleans, March 3, 1995.

The producer would like to extend special thanks to Alton Abraham, David Sinclair, Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond, Gary Grimshaw, Frank & Peggy Bach, Roland Young, John "Chinner" Mitchell, Keith Keller, Greg Eveline, Bill Lynn, R. Curry Miller, Celia Sinclair, Sunny Sinclair, Elsie Sinclair, Chonita Michaels, and to my wife Penny for her understanding and support.

The producer would also like to express his appreciation and gratitude to Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory, 210 Decatur Street, New Orleans, LA 70130 for their extraordinary assistance and support during the course of this project.

(p)(c) 1973, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair.

Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra: Life Is Splendid (1972)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:03:27 +0000

Life Is Splendid
Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra
Live at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972

By John Sinclair

Sun Ra & His Arkestra enjoyed more than 40 years of glorious musical fruition, and for every minute of its elongated existence--from its formation as the Herman Blount Octet in the early 1950s until the leader's earthly demise in the early 1990s--the Arkestra blazed a trail across the musical firmament unlike anything that's ever been heard.

Organized by the pianist as a means of realizing his idiosyncratic compositions and nurtured in Chicago in the seond half of the 50s, the Arkestra developed around a solid core formed by several key members, including bassist Ronnie Boykins and saxophonists John Gilmore, Marshall Allen and Pat Patrick.

After five or six very productive years in the Windy City, during which the Arkestra's ever more innovative music was carefully documented in performance by Sun Ra and his visionary business partner, Alton Abraham, Ra and the band resettled in New York City in the winter of 1960-61 and soon began to play a leading role in the city's burgeoning jazz avant-garde.

Sun Ra's startling orchestral music and otherworldly space philosophy were introduced to the jazz world at large by a pair of obscure albums for Transition (1958) and Savoy Records (1960), both of which were issued almost without notice.

Ra met a slightly wider audience with the appearance of three mid-1960s LP releases on ESP-Disk, including the magnificent Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Volume 2. At the same time Ra and Alton Abraham set into motion their own record label, El Saturn, and began to issue a steady stream of Sun Ra releases drawn from the Arkestra's archives.

These albums revealed the origins of the composer's musical genius and traced its incredible growth and ever-broadening scope from the off-center bebop "little big band" charts of the early- and mid-1950s through his earliest space-jazz arrangements and their flowering into full-fledged explorations of previously unmapped musical horizons.

Abraham and Ra had been documenting the composer's music in performance by the Arkestra almost since its inception, and the hard-to-get, bizarrely-packaged Saturn albums with titles like Super-Sonic Jazz, We Travel the Spaceways, Interstellar Low Ways and Angels & Demons At Play soon began to attract the attention of adventurous listeners all over the world.

By the early 1970s Sun Ra & the Arkestra--now working under a variety of titles utilized by Ra to help define the specific function he had in mind for each musical permutation had been introduced to enthusiastic European audiences, although the U.S. jazz establishment seemed forever to regard Ra & the Arkestra--under whatever guise--as some sort of freakish oddity unworthy of serious consideration.

During their decade in New York City, which ended when the Arkestra moved en masse to Philadelphia around 1971-72, Chicago veterans John Gilmore, Marshall Allen and Pat Patrick were joined by a wild assortment of adventurous players and a vocal ensemble, the Space Ethnic Voices, led by the incredible June Tyson.VV Seasoned by daily rehearsals and regular performances at places like Slug's Saloon on the lower east side, the Arkestra was now fully skilled at bringing the composer's revolutionary musical concepts to vivid life before the public.

By the fall of 1972 Sun Ra & the Arkestra were operating at full strength. Now Ra was able to reveal the full extent of his compositional genius and utilize the Arkestra to unveil the cosmic philosophical underpinnings of his music, presented in a swirl of brightly colored costumes, leaping dancers, exotic percussion choirs and space vocal chorales, daring instrumental excursions and precisely executed ensemble passages.

The best of the Arkestra's performances during this period unfolded into one continuous multi-media exposition of the music and space philosophy of its leader, moving seamlessly from beginning to end under Ra's direction to create a splendorous tapestry of sound and sight, the likes of which had never been seen or heard before.

This is the ensemble which met what was its largest American audience to date on Friday, September 8, 1972, the opening night of the first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.

At the Ann Arbor festival Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra took the stage following stellar performances by the Seigel-Schwall Blues Band, Detroit's Contemporary Jazz Quintet, Junior Walker & The All Stars and the great Howlin' Wolf to close out the evening with a spectacular offering that thrilled the ecstatic crowd of some 12,000 music lovers.

Here at Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor Ra unveiled his latest creation, the sensational Space Is The Place suite which may now be heard--almost in its entirety--on this compact disk. (The opening sections are not available because a proper mix could not be achieved until several minutes into the performance.)

The music unfolds with seamless clarity and brilliant logic from beginning to end, modulating from theme to theme and mood to mood without a moment's lapse of focus and moving the crowd to respond with unprecedented enthusiasm, so much so that we can hear a vast chorus of people gleefully chanting the composer's name for several minutes after the performance had ended.

This wholly unanticipated display of mass acclaim for the heretofore obscure bandleader and his wildly unorthodox Arkestra provided one of the highest points of my experience as a concert producer. The greatness of Sun Ra and his potential for reaching a greatly expanded audience of popular music lovers had been demonstrated beyond contradiction, and the visionary composer was well on his way to establishing his ensemble, in the words of Mark Steuve, as the Ellington Orchestra of the second half of the 20th century.

The 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was recorded in its entirety by Jimmie Douglass for Atlantic Records and co-produced by Douglass, Michael Cuscuna and Tunc Erim under the supervision of Mark Meyerson. The original 16-track masters are presumed to have been destroyed in a warehouse fire, although several segments of the Arkestra's performance were mixed and edited by Alton Abraham and this writer to produce a track titled "Life Is Splendid" for release on the Atlantic double-LP compilation of music from the 1972 Festival released in 1973.

The music on this compact disc was digitally transferred and remastered from the 2-track stereo masters recorded simultaneously with the 16-track masters as reference tapes. These tapes have been precariously preserved and lugged by the producer from residence to residence for more than a quarter of a century.

Now they are finally finding the light of day through the release of this CD, and it gives me extreme pleasure beyond belief to present the astral music of Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra in concert at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival on that lovely Friday night in September 1972.

Tighten up your gravity belts and hold on tight--you're about to take a musical trip through the galaxies to worlds beyond, where Life Is Splendid and Space Is the Place indeed.

--Cleveland/Detroit/New Orleans
October 13-26, 1999/
New Orleans
November 2, 1999

(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra: Life Is Splendid
Live at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival

Sun Ra, piano, space organ, keyboards, lead vocals; Ahk-Tal Ebah, trumpet, flugelhorn, vocals; Lamont McClamb, trumpet; Marshall Allen, Danny Davis, alto saxophone & flute; Larry Worthington, alto saxophone; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone, percussions; Pat Patrick, baritone saxophone; Danny Thompson, baritone saxophone & flute; Leroy Taylor, bass clarinet; Lex Humphries, Alzo Wright, drums; Stanley Morgan, Russell Branch, percussions; Robert Underwood, Harry Richards, space drums; June Tyson, lead vocals; Space Ethnic Voices: Judith Holton, Cheryl Bank, Ruth Wright, vocals. Recorded in performance at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Friday, September 8, 1972.

[1] Enlightenment [2] Love in Outer Space [3] Space is the Place (includes the subsequent Gilmore tenor, Ra organ and moog solos)
[4] Discipline 27-II/ > What Planet is This? > Life is Splendid > Immeasurable
[5]Watusi
[6] Outer Spaceways Incorporated

Produced by John Sinclair for Big Chief Productions

All these compositions can be credited to Sun Ra, except for: Enlightenment (Dotson-Ra) and Watusi (Pitts-Merrill)

Festival produced by John Sinclair & Peter Andrews for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation. Recording engineered by Jimmy Douglass and produced by Jimmy Douglass, Michael Cuscuna & Tunc Erim under the supervision of Mark Meyerson and with the assistance of John Sinclair & John Ryan for Rainbow Productions. Digitally transferred from original stereo master tapes & edited by Patrick Boisell.

(c)(p) 1972, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Roosevelt Sykes / Victoria Spivey: Grind It! (1973)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:17:06 +0000

Grind It!
Roosevelt Sykes / Victoria Spivey
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973
Schholkids Records / Total Energy Records

By John Sinclair

The 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival opened at 6:00 o'clock on a sunny Friday afternoon in early September with a merry little man sitting behind a big white grand piano cracking incomprehensible jokes for the quickly-swelling crowd of college students, urban hipsters, rock & roll hippies, extended families, blues fans, jazz buffs, and music lovers of every persuasion.

His impromptu sound check completed, the rotund pianist tore into his opening number, "Driving Wheel," a blues classic he had first recorded for Decca Records back in 1936:

My baby don't have to work,
She don't have to rob and steal--
I give her everything she need:
I am her driving wheel.

The song has been a hit several times over--Junior Parker's 1960 version (Duke 335) is this writer's personal favorite--but here was the originator, the Honey Dripper himself, Mr. Roosevelt Sykes of West Helena Arkansas, St. Louis, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans and the world at large, to bring his timeless song to a new generation of listeners who stood and sat rapt under the spell of this 67-year-old show-business wizard through his sparkling set of solo piano topped by lusty, insinuating vocals and ribald witticisms.

Mr. Sykes' inspirational offering would be followed by a wildly various procession of musical idioms performed by the Revolutionary Ensemble (Leroy Jenkins, Sirone, and Jerome Cooper), Count Basie & his mighty Orchestra (featuring vocalist Jimmy Ricks), Ann Arbor's Mojo Boogie Band (filling in for the missing-in-action J.B. Hutto & the Hawks), visionary jazz vocalist Leon Thomas & his band Full Circle, and the great Texas guitarist, Freddie King and his smoking blues outfit.

Two days later, on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, the gathering crowd of 15,000 would be treated to another challenging set of musical Russian roulette, starting at noon with the imaginative jazz duo Infinite Sound (Roland Young & Glenn Howell), continuing with the legendary King Biscuit Boys (Houston Stackhouse, Joe Willie Wilkins & crew), reigning Blues Queen Victoria Spivey with the Brooklyn Blues Busters, post-modern jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and his sextet (with Texas blues crooner Webster Armstrong), and capped by rhythm & blues giant Johnny Otis, his Orchestra and Show, spotlighting Louis Jordan, Pee Wee Crayton, Delmar "Mighty Mouth" Evans, and the Three Tons of Fun.

The spritely Ms. Spivey, a best-selling recording artist for OKeh, Victor, Decca, and Vocalion Records between 1926 and 1937, emerged from general obscurity to shine as the star of the afternoon's show with her audacious snake dress, her saucy humor, riveting compositions and powerful vocal and piano delivery. Backed by her crack band of Italian and Jewish homeboys from Brooklyn, the Blues Busters, the Queen proceeded to tear up the house with a program of tunes she had originally written and recorded way back in the game, kicked off by the song she'd made for her first recording date--May 5, 1926--the eternally chilling "Black Snake Blues":

There is a mean old black snake
Suckin' my rider's tongue
You can tell by that
I ain't gonna be here long....

Then, her keening voice emerging out of the unholy wail rising up from Gary Churchill's clarinet and John Nuzzo's harmonica, Ms. Spivey drives straight into the awesome "Detroit Moan," composed during the Great Depression and recorded in 1936, with a verse that rings even more true today:

Detroit's a cold, cold place
When you ain't got a dime to your name.
I would go to the poorhouse,
But Lord, you know I'm ashamed.

Pausing between songs to introduce herself to her newly adulatory audience, the Queen says: "This old lady's sixty-seven years old....and I may be old, but I may be--uh, uh--but I'm not cold!"

No, these are a couple of hot numbers here: Roosevelt Sykes and Victoria Spivey, two giants of the blues, a pair of crafty survivors of all the perilous vicissitudes of show business who left home in their early teens to pound the piano and sing in all manner of rough establishments--barrelhouses, back rooms, country juke joints, house parties, rustic theatres and medicine shows--until they could land recording contracts during the blues boom of the 1920s and make a name for themselves with the record-buying public.

Victoria Spivey hit first, in 1926, when her "Black Snake Blues" (OKeh 8338) established the 19-year-old blueswoman as one of the label's most popular contract artists. Born in Houston, Texas, on October 15, 1906, Ms. Spivey was exposed early on to the music of her father's family string band. Three of her sisters were singers--Addie "Sweet Peas" Spivey, Elton "Za-Zu" Spivey, and Leona Spivey--and the pre-teen Victoria started working as a pianist in 1918 at the Lincoln Theatre in Dallas. She joined Lazy Daddy's Fillmore Blues Band in the Big D and appeared around Texas with Blind Lemon Jefferson and other rural blues players in the early 1920s before signing with OKeh and hitting with her first release.

Twenty more 78-rpm singles followed for OKeh Records between 1926-1929, including classics of the idiom like "Hoodoo Man Blues," "Steady Grind," "T.B. Blues," "Dope Head Blues," and "My Handy Man." Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams and King Oliver were among her accompanists, and her series of double-sided duets with Lonnie Johnson in 1928-29 doubtless enhanced the popularity of both artists.

Ms. Spivey had a starring role in King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929), the first all-Black musical talking picture, and moved over to Victor Records for seven singles in 1929-30, including "Moaning the Blues," "Blood Hound Blues" and "Haunted by the Blues," backed by jazz greats Henry "Red" Allen, J.C. Higginbotham, Luis Russell, Porter Grainger and others. She cut four singles for Vocalion records in 1930-31 in the company of people like Georgia Tom Dorsey and Tampa Red, and then suffered the fate of most blues artists during the Depression years as the record market shriveled to almost nothing and even the biggest stars went unrecorded.

Unlike most of her contemporaries in the first generation of blues recording artists, however, Victoria Spivey came back to re-establish her career in 1936-37 with a pair of singles for Decca and six 78s for Vocalion. She appeared on Broadway and in the touring comapny of the musical Hellzapoppin  in 1938-39, and she managed to keep working clubs and theatres through the 1940s and into the early 50s, when she retired from public life for several years.

The Queen was back on the scene in 1960 to enjoy the birth of the blues revival then just underway, working with stride pianist Donald "The Lamb" Lambert in New Jersey and making quite a splash in Greenwich Village during a two-week stand at Gerdes Folk City with her old OKeh Records co-star, Lonnie Johnson. The pair recorded a splendid comeback album, Woman Blues!, for Prestige/Bluesville in 1961 (now available on CD), and then Ms. Spivey started her own label, Queen Vee Records (expanded to the Spivey Record Company in 1962), where she made many fine informal recordings of great blues artists like Otis Spann, the Muddy Waters Band, Big Joe Williams (accompanied by "Blind Boy Grunt," who appeared simultaneously on Columbia Records as "Bob Dylan"), Roosevelt Sykes and other old friends.

Once "rediscovered," Victoria Spivey remained in sporadic demand through the 1960s and early 70s, putting out LPs on her Spivey Records imprint and recording with contemporaries Alberta Hunter and Lucille Hegamin a fine album for Bluesville titled Songs We Taught Your Mother, backed by Sidney DeParis, J.C. Higginbotham, Willie "The Lion" Smith and other blues and jazz veterans.

When we learned from the members of the Blues Busters, who were in the process of relocating from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor, that Ms. Spivey might be available to perform at the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, we snapped at the chance to engage her. She was a bona fide hit there and with everyone who had the good fortune to see and hear her before her death in New York City on October 3, 1976, just twelve days before her 70th birthday.

Roosevelt Sykes, born January 31, 1906 in Elmar, Arkansas (near Helena), lived even longer and made even more of an impact on the music world than his colleague Victoria Spivey. Cited by Delmark Records' Bob Koester (in the liner notes to the CD release of Sykes' Hard Drivin' Blues) as "one of the most important bluesmen of all time," the legendary pianist issued almost sixty 78 rpm singles between 1929 and the onset of World War II, recording under his own name for OKeh, BlueBird and Decca or under various disguises for several other labels.

Sykes' first single, "'44' Blues" (OKeh 8702), was a tribute to his early mentor, pianist Lee Green, from whom he'd learned the tune, although Little Brother Montgomery always claimed that the song was his (he called it the "Vicksburg Blues"). Sykes' father was also a musician, and young Roosevelt had started playing the organ in church in West Helena by the time he was ten. He taught himself piano around 1918, then ran away from home in 1921--at age 15--to work in the rough joints around Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana with Lee Green, Red-Eye Jesse Bell and other barrelhouse blues pianists of the period.

Mr. Sykes relocated to St. Louis in the late 1920s and signed with OKeh Records in 1929, cutting sides in New York City and Chicago like "Boot That Thing," "Henry Ford Blues" and "Poor Boy Blues." While enjoying success with his OKeh releases, Mr. Sykes capitalized on the growing audience for his musical offerings by recording psuedononymously for rival labels under tags like "Willie Kelly" (nine singles on Victor), "Dobby Bragg" (four 78s on Paramount), "Easy Papa Johnson" (a pair of singles on Mellotone), "Mosby and Sykes" (with violinist Curtis Mosby), "Sykes and Johnson" (with Mary Johnson) and "St. Louis Johnny" (all on Champion). His output during this period (1929-32) included such classics as "32-20 Blues," "Conjur Man Blues," "Sail On, Little Girl," "Steady Grinding," and "Highway 61 Blues."

Mr. Sykes moved to Memphis in the early 1930s and worked between there and Chicago during the Depression, making the most of his phenomenal success as a recording artist whose stature remained undiminished despite the virtual disappearance of the recording industry itself. He made a pair of singles for BlueBird in 1933 and then signed exclusively with the new Decca label in 1934.

Between 1934 and 1941 he released some 32 singles on Decca, beginning with "D.B.A. Blues" in 1934 and hitting with the riotous "Dirty Mother For You" in 1936. His third Decca single, "The Honey Dripper" (Decca 7164), was a huge smash in the race market and gave him the marquee name he was to enjoy for the rest of his career.

Subsequent recordings for Decca--most of them issued under the sobriquet "The Honeydripper"--included such masterworks of the blues as "Driving Wheel Blues," "Night Time Is the Right Time" and "Hard Lead Pencil." In the spring of 1941 Mr. Sykes settled in Chicago--where he would flourish in the city's raucous blues community for more than a decade--and switched back to OKeh Records, which issued five more 78s by the pianist during the war, including "Pay Day Blues," "Keep Your Hands Off Her" and the insistent "Let the Black Have His Way." He cut four singles for BlueBird (including his first remake of "The Honeydripper") and one each for the Black & White and Cincinnati labels in 1944-45.

By this time The Honeydripper had survived the commercial demise of both the original blues explosion of the 1920s and the post-Depression blues wave which surged between 1936 and the American mobilization for World War II in 1942. The war and the American Federation of Musicians' strike against the record industry during 1942-43 combined to cut the record business back to almost nothing once again, and when full-scale recording resumed after the the war very few popular blues artists of the 1930s were able to re-establish themselves with the post-war audience.

The music of Roosevelt Sykes, so timelessly bouyant, so fresh and personal at all times, transcended every vagarie of the marketplace and lived a vibrant life of its own, no matter what current fads or stylistic alterations held sway, all through the 20 turbulent years between 1929 and 1949. Neither Depression nor World War could slow his career pace during this period, and he entered a third stage of popular success with a series of thirteen 78-rpm singles for RCA Victor between 1946-49.

Still based in Chicago, Sykes made four discs for Regent in 1949 and cut five singles for Chicago's United Records between 1951-54. He moved to New Orleans in 1954 and recorded a pair of singles for Imperial Records under the direction of Dave Bartholomew, working around town and along the Gulf Coast. But by this time the rhythm & blues boom was over for all but the hardiest of the earlier blues stars, and by the end of the 1950s the popular recording careers of even such R&B giants as Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Wynonie Harris, Big Joe Turner, Amos Milburn, Smiley Lewis and, yes, Roosevelt Sykes were all but dead.

Another generation had taken over the affections of the record-buying public, and the veteran artists who were able to sustain a career in the performing arts were relegated to working the lower rungs of the Black show-business ladder, playing to increasingly older audiences.

Mr. Sykes sustained himself with work in Black nightspots and bars, returning to St. Louis in 1958 and then back to Chicago by 1960, when-- like Victoria Spivey and numerous others--he was "rediscovered" during the folk music boom of the early 1960s. This revived his nearly dormant recording career, leading to LPs for Bluesville, Folkways, Crown, Delmark, Spivey, Fontana, Storyville, ABC/Bluesway and other labels.

Sykes toured Europe in 1961 and again in 1965-66, then returned south to settle in Gulfport, MS and eventually back in New Orleans, basing himself at places like the Court of Two Sisters in the French Quarters and accepting engagements at clubs, colleges and festivals all over the country.

His travels had brought him to the tiny Ann Arbor bistro, the Blind Pig, where he captivated local blues lovers and recorded an album for the bar's fledgling record label operated by the young clubowners Jerry DelGuidice and Tom Isaiah. Roosevelt Sykes seemed the perfect choice to open up the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, and we were fortunate enough to secure his services to kick off our second weekend-long adventure into the many-splendored world of African-American music in the early 70s.

* * * * *

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals of 1972, 1973 and 1974 were very special events, bridging the early years of the 1970s when the canons of popular music were being stringently narrowed and the pop music community itself was becoming increasingly re-segregated.

The rhythm & blues explosion of the mid-1950s--first marketed as rock & roll, then seriously whitened, then almost wiped out by the British Invasion, then reborn as Motown and soul music in the mid- 60s and played side-by-side with rock on pop radio stations--was in the process of being imploded completely back into the Black marketplace, that relatively tiny bastion of racial segregation which flourished only in areas well beyond the notice of mainstream America.

By 1972 rock radio, itself just up from the underground of the late 60s, had begun the strenuous process of training white suburban ears to hear only music made by other white persons of their own age and social status. The music of Black people, like their very persons, was deemed unfit for proximity to white Americans, and major sub-cultural icons like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sam Cooke and Ray Charles were virtually erased from the consciousness of an entire generation.

Soul music, blues and classic R&B, which had been staples of both pop AM and "underground" FM radio programming during the 50s and 60s, were being eliminated from the playlists--and even from the record libraries--of the new rock FM stations. At the same time rock music was becoming increasingly big business, and the rock festival was a leading indicator of emerging social and economic trends.

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals followed on the great artistic success of the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals produced by University of Michigan students in 1969 and 1970 which showcased virtually every living blues master available, and were dedicated to expanding upon the spirit of the earlier events by showcasing important artists in other African-American idioms as well--especially jazz and rhythm & blues.

The producers--Peter Andrews and myself for the non-profit Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation, with the immense assistance of people like Darlene Pond, David Sinclair, Cy and Curt Andrews, Suzanne and Karen Young--were also concerned with finding a way to overcome the crippling cash losses suffered by the two earlier events which had prevented the staging of a 1971 Blues Festival in Ann Arbor.

Our first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, staged the weekend of September 8-9-10, 1972, at Otis Spann Memorial Field (next to Huron High School) had been a great success, drawing some 12,000 music lovers and coming very close to breaking even financially. The small loss at the gate was covered by the advance against producers' royalties paid us by Atlantic Records for the right to release a two-LP set of music from the event and a second, single LP by the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Our idea had been to assemble an array of musical talent from across the spectrum of contemporary Black music ("a rainbow of sound"), to present these artists in a series of challenging programs which juxtaposed performances by the masters of several styles and idioms of the music, to produce a festive setting wherein everyone could have "a real good time," and to promote the event, not only to established blues and jazz audience, but to the general rock & roll public as something just like a rock festival only with different music.

Our mission was to insert Black music in all its various splendor back into the consciousness of young white Americans, to draw the connection between the music they heard on the radio and the root forms which had given birth to it, and to present them with the opportunity to see and hear for themselves the people who had made the music what it was and who would take it where it was going--from Victoria Spivey and Roosevelt Sykes to Count Basie, Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, Big Walter Horton, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Yusef Lateef, the Contemporary Jazz Quintet (CJQ), Hound Dog Taylor, Luther Allison, Otis Rush, Homesick James, and Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra, along with an array of blues performers from the local community (now to be heard on Volume 1 of this series, Please Mr. Foreman: Motor City Blues).

It was our hope that this powerful medicine, offered in a format pop music lovers could understand and accept, might provide an antidote to the soul-crushing blandness and boredom of contemporary American life, as it had for so many of us who had been blessed with the presence of African-American music in our lives. And, of cours--all such noble aims aside--it was our intention to have a ball with a few thousand people out in a field, listening and dancing to the music of some of the greatest artists of our time. And if all else were to fail, we would sure enough have a realgood time!

* * * * *

I'd like to close these notes with a poem, "Doctor Blues," which was inspired by a statement by Roosevelt Sykes I had read in a book called Sounds So Good To Me by Barry Pearson. What he'd said sounded so good that I was moved to cast it into verse:

"Doctor Blues"
for Jerry Brock

Roosevelt Sykes,
better known as The Honey Dripper,
played the piano & sang
like f cew men who have ever lived

all the way from his home in Helena, Arkansas,
& down in New Orleans with the piano professors,
in the logging & turpentine camps
& jute joints throughout the Deep South,

with the slick characters & big shooters
in Memphis & St. Louis & Chicago,
from the early days before 1920
until his death on July 17, 1983. Roosevelt says:....

"So blues is a sort of thing
on people
like the doctor.
I'll put it this way:

There's a doctor,
he has medicine,
he's never sick,
he ain't sick, but he make the stuff

for the sick people. See,
you wouldn't say:
'Call the doctor.'
'I'm the doctor.' 'Oh,

you're a sick man?' 'No,
I just work
on the sick people.' So
the blues player,

he ain't worried & bothered,
but he got something
for the worried people. Doctor,
you can see his medicine.

he can see his patient. Blues,
you can't see the music,
you can't see the patient
'cause it's soul. So I works

on the soul
& the doctor works on the body.
Both are important, they all mixed
to one. Two makes one."

--New Orleans
November 1995

(c) 1986, 1995, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Big Chief Presents
From the John Sinclair Audio Archives
ANN ARBOR BLUES & JAZZ FESTIVAL, VOL. III

GRIND IT!
ROOSEVELT SYKES & VICTORIA SPIVEY
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973

Roosevelt Sykes, grand piano & vocals. Friday, September 7, 1973

1 Introduction by Roland Young (0:34)
2 Roosevelt Sykes Comments (0:45)
3 "Driving Wheel" (Roosevelt Sykes) (2:52)
4 "Night Time Is The Right Time" (Roosevelt Sykes) (4:16)
5 "Run This Boogie" (Roosevelt Sykes) (3:36)
6 "St. James Infirmary" (J. Primrose) (5:04)
7 "Dirty Mother For You" (Roosevelt Sykes) (5:05)
8 "Looka Here! (C'mon Let's Shake)" (Roosevelt Sykes) (1:49)

Victoria Spivey & the Brooklyn Blues Busters: Victoria Spivey, vocals & grand piano; Gary Churchill, tenor saxophone & clarinet; John Nuzzo, harmonica; Howard T. Levine, electric guitar; John Acerno, electric bass; Eric Nuyhaus, drums. Sunday, September 9, 1973

9 Intro by Chinner Mitchell & "Black Snake Blues" (4:39)
10 "Detroit Moan" (5:12)
11 Victoria Spivey Comments (0:49)
12 "You're A Rank Stud" (3:39)
13 "Organ Grinder Blues" (3:54)
14 "I'm Tired" (3:09)
15 "Brooklyn Bridge Blues" (4:10)

Produced By John Sinclair For Big Chief Productions
(P)(C) 1995 John Sinclair

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 was produced by Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond & John Sinclair for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and was presented on stage at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, September 7-8-9, 1973.

These "live" recordings were produced by John Ryan for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and recorded by the Butterfly Mobile Recording Service. Director of Recording and Chief Engineer: Jeff Jones. Recording Engineers: Karl Shojdahl, Robert Fries, Al Jacquez, and Dave "Ball" Bartlebaugh.

Special thanks to Steve Gebhardt & Robert Fries

Digitally transferred from the original 7" stereo master tapes, edited and mastered by Keith Keller at Chez Flames, New Orleans, March 3, 1995.

The producer would like to extend special thanks to David Sinclair, Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond, Gary Grimshaw, Frank & Peggy Bach, Roland Young, John "Chinner" Mitchell, Bob DeDeckere, Rick Cioffi & Greg Reilly of Gregory Paul Productions, Keith Keller, Anthony Dunbar Esq., Bill Lynn, Celia Sinclair, Elsie Sinclair, and to my wife Penny for her understanding and support.

The producer would also like to express his appreciation and gratitude to Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory, 225 North Peters, New Orleans, LA 70130 for their extraordinary assistance and support during the course of this project.

Old School Records
Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival Series

Volume I: "Please Mr. Foreman": Motor City Blues
Volume II: Little Sonny: "Blues with a Feeling"
Volume III: "Grind It!" Roosevelt Sykes/Victoria Spivey
Volume IV: "Well All Right!" King Biscuit Boys/Big Walter Horton
Volume V: "Do You Wanna Jump" (1973 Anthology)
Volume VI: Freddy King: "The Texas Cannonball"
Vol. VII/VIII: Sun Ra & His Arkestra: "Outer Space Employment Agency

Motor City Blues: Please Mr. Foreman (1973)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 06:43:11 +0000

Please Mr. Foreman
Motor City Blues
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973
Schoolkids Records / Total Energy Records

By John Sinclair

As a teen-age record collector in the 1950s and later as a resident of the Motor City, this writer had always been enamored of the peculiar strain of urban folk music known as the Detroit blues. Obscure singles by Eddie Burns, Baby Boy Warren, Bobo Jenkins, Dr. Ross, Little Sonny, One String Sam and others, on labels like JVB, Blue Lake, Sun, Excello, Anna, Checker and Chess, had revealed glimpses of an ultra-funky esthetic which had a certain character and charm of its own.

Even the one Detroit bluesman whose records gained popular status in urban blues circles, John Lee Hooker, featured a sound and approach much less focused than the disciplined attack of the Chicago blues giants whose records dominated the blues charts and jukeboxes of the time.

Detroit bluesmen had always struggled for survival in a steadily shrinking world of opportunity. Lacking the series of polished recordings which made national performing careers for B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, and other widely-recognized blues artists, most Detroit blues players were able to find work only in nasty little neighborhood joints one or two nights a week, occasionally issuing little-heard recordings that were at best few and far between.

Still there was something about this music that grabbed you. Cherished sides like "Orange Driver" by Eddie Burns on Anna, "Boogie Disease" by Dr. Ross on Sun, "Democrat Blues" by Bobo Jenkins on Chess, "Please Mr. Foreman" by Joe L. on Hi Records, and especially "I Need $100" by One String Sam on JVB became staunch personal favorites, and my curiosity regarding the whereabouts of these characters mounted over the years.

The great Aaron "Little Sonny" Willis had been well received the previous year, and it seemed likely that his lesser-known contemporaries like Bobo Jenkins, Eddie Burns, Mr. Bo, Joe L., Washboard Willie, and Baby Boy Warren would also enjoy the approval of the crowd of some 12,000 young music lovers. Dr. Ross was somewhat better known as a result of his LPs for Fortune and Arhoolie Records, and Boogie Woogie Red had gained some welcome local notoriety at the Blind Pig Cafe, which had been featuring his piano and vocal stylings on a regular basis for some months.

Then there were several even more obscure and idiosyncratic artists to be located John Lee Hooker's old compatriot, Eddie Kirkland, who had recorded LPs for Bluesville and Trix Records in the modern period; the dynamic blueswoman Johnnie Mae Matthews, whose professional efforts seemed now to be directed toward managing her son Chuckie's band called Black Nazty; and the legendary One String Sam, who hadn't been spotted for ten or fifteen years but lived on through his immortal recording of "I Need $100," preserved for the present generation on an Arhoolie/Blues Classics LP titled Detroit Blues.

As described by Detroit journalist Sheldon Annis in the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz festival program book back in 1973:

" Little Mack Collins is a versatile musician who has been working on the bar circuit for many years. He has played back-up for most of Detroit's bluesmen.

" Little Junior [Cannady], who often works with harmonica player Detroit Willie, is one of the city's most regular bar musicians. He tends to play whatever is popular nationally, currently B.B. King. He has recorded on Bobo Jenkins' label, Big Star.

" Bobo Jenkins came up from Mississippi after the war. His first recording, "Democrat Blues" on Chess, was an instant smash and is now considered a blues classic. He recorded regularly in the 50s and recently released an LP on his own label, Big Star.

" One String Sam walked into Joe's Record Shop on Hastings Street about 20 years ago and recorded two sides. He played a fretless, one-string, home-made monochord instrument. He was seen playing the streets for a few years, then he disappeared.

" Johnny Mae Matthews, one of the rare women blues singers still active around Motown, remains a distinct credit to the tradition she continues to uphold.

" Washboard Willie is the grand old man of Detroit blues. He's been playing his drums and washboard professionally since the end of the second World War. Whenever a washboard player has been needed in Detroit, Willie has been there.

" Doctor Ross is a one-man band. The band now lives in Flint, Michigan. Doctor Ross The Harmonica Boss is his most recent album. He is also known for singles like "Industrial Boogie," "General Motors Blues," and "I'd Rather Be An Old Woman's Baby Than A Young Woman's Slave."

" Boogie Woogie Red played back-up on nearly all of John Lee Hooker's Detroit recordings and was a regular part of the Hooker band during the 50s. He has toured Europe and now sometimes plays in a blind pg he won't tell you about.

" Baby Boy Warren has only recently returned to his music having been ill and having to support a large family by factory work. A rhythmic country guitarist, he recorded widely in the 50s and was one of the city's most popular musicians. He is often remembered for "Sanafee" and "Baby Boy Blues."

" Eddie Burns is often said to be Detroit's least-appreciated blues talent. He recorded regularly with John Lee Hooker in his early days and has played guitar or harmonica with nearly every major blues musician who has been in the city. He has recorded successful singles on several labels.

" Mr. Bo, still a young man, has been on the Detroit bar and club circuit for almost 20 years. He works unashamedly in the style of B.B. King, although he never sings and plays at the same moment. For many years he was under stranglehold contract to Diamond Jim, who led perhaps Detroit's best example of what was once known as the Sporting Life. That association ended recently when Jim was offed in a bar.

Sheldon Annis, 1973

* * * * *

The unbelievably raw and exciting Eddie Kirkland turned up somehow and was inserted into the lineup with his own second guitarist, bassist and drummer, still unidentified after all these years.

Demonstrating once and for all the blues roots of heavy metal rock & roll with his relentless, super-charged, over-driven guitar attack, Kirkland provided the show's highest moment when he exploded from a prone position he'd been rocking back and forth on his back on the stage floor into a full somersault, all without missing even a beat.

There were definite flashes of brilliance, including the outstanding set by Baby Boy Warren, the smooth, stirring guitar of Mr. Bo, the thrill of hearing Dr. Ross do his classic "Boogie Disease," the hard-rocking Johnny Mae Matthews rendition of her well-known composition "Send You Back To Georgia," and the unanticipated appearance of Joe L. Carter offering his great song "Please Mr. Foreman."

The amazing One String Sam, alone on stage with his primitive board-plank-and-baling-wire instrument, his other-worldly voice and captivating demeanor. He used a baby-food jar to bridge his one string and another, slightly larger jar as a combination slide and echo chamber, raising it from fretting the string to sticking it at the side of his mouth next to the microphone for extra-special vocal effects.

As it happened, One String Sam enjoyed the greatest applause of any artist at the festival and turned out to be the star of the entire weekend, hanging around the grounds and entertaining small hordes of young music-lovers here and there with his startling art and effervescent personality. An immediate hit with thousands of people who'd never even heard his name before, One String responded as if he'd been pleasing audiences of this size all his life and just went on and had himself a natural ball.

New Orleans
August 10, 1994

(c) 1994, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Little Sonny: Blues With A Feeling (1972)

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 06:17:19 +0000

Blues With A Feeling
Little Sonny
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972
Schoolkids Records

By John Sinclair

The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was a remarkable undertaking in 1972. Produced by a community-based non-profit organization staffed by long-haired music business professionals and left-wing cultural revolutionaries like this writer, it brought together a strange concatenation of modern blues giants, leading avant-garde jazz musicians, and an audience of 12,000 hippies and college students for a three-day extravaganza of Black music, sunshine and fun in a field next to Huron High School.

Following on the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals of 1969 and 1970, a pair of artistic and critical successes which unhappily lost a considerable sum of money for the student group at the University of Michigan that had sponsored them, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival reached out beyond the traditionally small knot of identifiable blues devotees to tap the curiosity of rock & roll lovers who were--in 1972 -till open to new musical experiences and anything else that could stretch their cultural horizons.

Funded by means of a chance meeting with a young man who wished to make socially righteous use of a small inheritance, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival offered this writer--as its co-producer, creative director and music programmer--the opportunity to create a musical blend previously unrealized in the USA, and this welcome opening was pursued with zeal and considerable glee.

The opening night presentation on September 8, 1972, offered 45-minute sets by the Seigel-Schwall Blues Band, Detroit's Contemporary Jazz Quintet (CJQ), Jr. Walker & The All-Stars, Sun Ra & His Arkestra, and Howlin' Wolf.

The next afternoon featured the Music of Chicago, with performances by Muddy Waters, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, and Mighty Joe Young with Lucille Spann and Koko Taylor, including a surprise appearance by the Bard of Vicksburg, Mr. Willie Dixon.

Sunday afternoon brought to the stage Freddy King, Archie Shepp, Sippie Wallace with Bonnie Raitt, Luther Allison (who proved to be the Festival's true star), and Ann Arbor's Mojo Boogie Band.

Sunday night climaxed the Festival with Miles Davis, Otis Rush (with Jimmy Dawkins), Leo Smith & Marion Brown, Lightnin' Slim, Boogie Woogie Red, and unannounced guests Robert Jr. Lockwood and Johnny Shines.

The Saturday night show was intended as the ultimate piece de resistance: the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, the great Bobby 'Blue' Bland, Dr. John's "Nite-Tripper" revue, and Detroit's own Little Sonny, soon to be acclaimed by his promoters at Stax Records as the "New King of the Blues Harmonica."

It turned out to be impossible to feature Charles Mingus--an unavoidable figure in this writer's pantheon of available musical greats--until the following year due to his prolonged illness, and he was replaced by the Pharaoh Sanders Quintet. Bobby Bland and Dr. John met every expectation, and Little Sonny opened the show with a well-paced set of originals and blues classics that showed off his vocal and harmonica mastery.

At the time Little Sonny, long one of this writer's favorite modern bluesmen, was enjoying the small surge of popular success that had followed the release of his first Enterprise LP, Black & Blue, produced by Al Bell and Zorn Productions for the Stax Records subsidiary.

It seemed exactly the right time to present Sonny to the largest audience he had faced to date, and the response his performance elicited was heart-warming indeed.

Little Sonny has his own memories of the occasion, as he recalls for Tom Gelardi in the audio memoir included at the end of this disc:

"Hello ladies and gentlemen, I am Little Sonny. I was in Memphis doing a tour of promotion. I was promoting the album Black & Blue. We went into New York, Texas, New Orleans and went into Memphis and St. Louis, Missouri.

"After I was out there for about two weeks promoting, I came back home and picked up my sons and then we went back on the road again.

"I was called by Mrs. Rodgers her booking agency was Rodgers & Rodgers. She called me at the hotel that morning and asked me to do the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. I told her to get the contracts together and I accepted.

"We came and we got our automobiles and we drove up to Ann Arbor to do the show. We got in and we was there in the range of about two hours or more before we got a chance to go on stage. We did not have a sound check we went on without a sound check, and actually we was the opening act of that particular show.

"We opened up and started the first number and the crowd just dived in with me and everybody started having a good time. Everybody seemed like they were glad to see us because this was the first time that we played the Ann Arbor Festival. The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was one of the largest festivals I ever played."

* * * * *

Aaron "Little Sonny" Willis enjoys a healthy entry in Sheldon Harris's 1979 Blues Who's Who, set off by a handsome photo of the harmonica star taken by Doug Fulton at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 (cf. pp. 578-580 in the DaCapo Press paperback edition), and immediately following the entry for his idol and namesake, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller).

According to Harris and other sources, Little Sonny was born in Greensboro, Alabama, on October 6, 1932, and raised on his father's farm. A sandlot baseball player as a youth, Sonny began his musical career working with local gospel groups until his family moved to Detroit in 1954.

An enterprising young man with the booming Motor City entertainment scene at his feet, Little Sonny soon acquired an early Polaroid Land camera and began taking pictures of patrons and players at places like the Club Plantation. He got to know several leading musical figures in the clubs and demonstrated for them his blossoming talent on the "Mississippi saxophone."

Before long Sonny was on the stand with his elders, working with Washboard Willie & His Super Suds of Rhythm at the Good Time Bar in 1955 and making a name for himself in blues circles. But let's let Sonny tell the story himself:

"I started playing the harmonica when I was a kid. My mother bought me a five-cents harmonica. I was playing harmonica all the time, but I didn't know that you could make money playing the harmonica this way.

"When I seen Sonny Boy Williamson, that give me a chance to say, 'Hey, I can make a living doing what this man was doing,' because he was playing the harmonica. And not only was he playing the harmonica when someone request a song, he would put his hand out after they request a song and they was putting dollar bills in his hand before he played the song.

"So that kind of riled me up. I say, 'This guy can do that, and so can I.' So then I went back home, and you talk about practice see, that's when I really got into the harmonica, and I say, 'Hey, I'm gonna work, and I'm gonna make this harmonica work for me the way its working for him.'

"And that's what I started doing start practicing everyday. I would drive along with the automobile, playing the harmonica while I'm driving, holding up the harmonica, playing it, and I practiced it.

"Then I was buying his records, I was buying Jimmy Reed records, and I was buying Little Walter records because these was the three blues singers, harmonica players, that I was really interested in.

"Sonny Boy Williamson was one of the first harmonica players that I had a chance to sit and watch play. I used to go to clubs every weekend to watch him play, because he would come in town and perform, and he might stay three or four weeks.

"I was going to the club that he was playing at I think it was Joe's Bar it was down on Lafayette. I was going down to see him just about every weekend, and I watched him and he was amazing to me. I used to watch the man perform, and I decided I had to play harmonica myself for a long time as a youngster, but when I seen Sonny Boy, this is what really turned me on.

"And at this particular time I was also doing photography. I had a Polaroid camera, the black & white one that developed your film in about three minutes, so actually I was taking pictures at that time.

"So I was shooting pctures of Sonny Boy as well. That's how I come by the picture of Sonny Boy. I used to sit and watch him play all night. And later on Sonny Boy became a friend of mine as well, because he came to the club where I was playing and sit in with my band.

"So we came to be friends, in either '56 or '57 it was when that Land camera first come out, but I was taking photograpy pictures. Going around with my polaroid camera I was moving into a lot of areas.

"I had a chance to move into Washboard Willie, Baby Boy Warren, Eddie Burns and speaking of Eddie Burns, Eddie Burns was one of the guys that really gave me an opportunity.

"He was like one of the first guys who give me the opportunity to sit in with his band to play, because at that particular time I didn't know but one song to play when it would come to blues, and that was Bo Diddley, 'I'm A Man' Muddy Waters cut it also, but it was Bo Diddley, 'I'm A Man.'

"I would be around there doing photography work. Eddie Burns would want to come off the stage and go where he wanted to go he would say, 'Come on up here you want to do one?' And I would walk up on stage and play 'I'm A Man,' and the crowd used to go wild.

"The crowd liked what I was doing, so at that particular time I didn't know but one song I say, 'Hey, I got to start learning some more songs.' So I started learning some more songs. "I would hang around where Eddie Burns were quite a bit, because he was the type of guy who would say, 'Hey, man, you can come up and play.'

"My first job was offered to me by the club owner where Washboard Willie was working, and that was called the Good Time Bar. What happened in 1955 I started off my first gig with Washboard Willie. The man offered me $10.00 a night to play, and I felt that was some big money.

"At that particular time I was working three nights a week making thirty bucks, and I was also working at a used car lot during the daytime, and I worked at clubs during the night taking photography pictures in between the shows to make up the difference so I could provide for my four kids and my wife.

"So, in other words, this is how I began my career. My career really began through watching Sonny Boy, Washboard Wille, Eddie Burns, Baby Boy Warren, Calvin Frazier, all of these guys. Calvin Frazier was playing with Washboard Willie at that time he was a great guitar player, one of the greatest.

"So, with all of these guys, I had a chance to associate with these particular blues artists who were some of the most popular blues artists in Detroit. My band started off with a young man named Jim Doo his name is James Crawford and Charles Slit, we called him Chuck, he was the keyboard man when I first started out. And another guy we started out with that's still around named Mr. Bo, he was the guitar player.

"My original group that I started out with, all of them today is still living, and we still keep in touch and talk to each other."

* * * * *

Following this auspicious debut, Little Sonny worked at the Bank Bar during 1956-57, moved to the Congo Lounge for 1957-59, hit the Club Caribe in 1960, worked around for a while, and then settled in for two long engagements: at the Apex Club from 1963 to 1967 and then the Calumet Bar on 4th Street from 1967 until it closed in the mid-'70s.

Sonny began making records in 1958, recording for Duke Records ("I Gotta Find My Baby"/"Hear My Woman Calling" Duke 186) and for Joe Von Battle ("Love Shock"/"I'll Love You Baby" JVB 5001), who leased the side to Excello Records (issued as #2209) for national distribution. He acquired a two-track tape recorder and made some recordings to be released on his own Speedway label in the early 60s.

Two of these sides, "The Creeper" and "Latin Soul," were leased to Detroit's Revilot Records and issued as Revilot 209 in 1966; they can be heard, through the courtesy of Little Sonny, as bonus cuts on this CD, along with a third self-produced tune from this period titled "Stretchin' Out."

Things began to pick up for Sonny in the early '70s when he hooked up with Zorn Productions and cut his first LP, Black & Blue, for Enterprise Records, a Stax subsidiary directed by Al Bell. Four Aaron Willis originals, four written for him by Bettye Crutcher and Bobby Manuel, Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do," Z.Z. Hill's "I Found Love," and a hip harmonica version of the spiritual "Wade in the Water" made up this album, which featured the Bar-Kays horn section and plenty of intense harp work by Little Sonny.

Black & Blue was given a fairly high-powered promotional push by Stax and made a little dent in the blues marketplace, but this minority share of the record market had unhappily shrunk to its smallest size since the end of the Depression, and the modern blues revival among young white listeners had not yet taken hold. Thus the success long hoped to follow upon a national recording contract was not to materialize.

Stax followed with another tasty LP, New King of the Blues Harmonica (Enterprise EN-1005), which ushered in Sonny's long association with keyboardist/producer Rudy Robinson and his band, but it too failed to gain the wide audience that was obviously targeted by the record company. An appearance at WATTSTAX, the massive Los Angeles concert produced, recorded and filmed by Stax in 1972, similarly met with indifference in the marketplace, and soon Stax itself fell into a tailspin from which it never recovered, leaving Little Sonny high and dry once again.

New Orleans
September 19, 1994

(c) 1994, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Ann Arbor Boogie / Do You Wanna Jump: Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973

johnsinclair001@hotmail.com (John) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 07:07:07 +0000