JazzFM Show #6

Notes on a few tunes from The Jon Cleary Show

The Friendly Travelers - “I’ve Come A Long Way From Home”

One Sunday evening, many years ago, I was cycling home from the French Quarter. As I approached the corner of Frenchmen Street and Chartres, music made me stop. Frenchmen Street then wasn’t as busy as it is now, and at the Cafe Brasil, up on the stage, playing to an audience of virtually no one, was a gospel band that rooted me to the spot. I tied the bike up and took a seat by the door, staying till the last note finished reverberating around the boomy room.

I would go every Sunday to hear The Friendly Travelers and I soon became friends with the two youngest musicians in the band, who were about the same age as me. Their names were Cornell and Big D, and the lead singer - who to me sounded like OV Wright - was Cornell's uncle, Alfred.

One night, there happened to be a keyboard on stage, and, curious, they invited me to sit in and, for a few songs at least, I became an honorary Friendly Traveler. A little while after, I was hired to put a band together for a show at the New Orleans Jazz Fest and I asked Cornell and Derwin if they’d like to do some rehearsals and play the set with me. They said, ‘Of course, what took you so long? And that was the beginning of a long friendship and the start of my band, ‘The Absolute Monster Gentlemen’.

On this cut, from an album they recorded in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 70’s for the Malaco label, you can hear Alfred Penns singing the lead on one of the songs that was a staple of their set on those nights at the Cafe Brasil. Occasionally, these days, if he’s in the neighbourhood, he’ll swing by the Maple Leaf and sit in with the Monster Gents on a couple of tunes. I love the timbre of his voice, and he’s a charmer and a very charismatic performer, too.

The Friendly Travelers have been in existence in one form or another since the 50s and still perform around town. Like many Gospel outfits, the line-up changes as older members retire or pass on and younger family members take their place. This is Church music but their style, strangely to me, has often considered a bit too funky for the more conventional Pastors and congregations in Pastors around town. You were more likely to hear them spreading the gospel in Coffee bars near the French Quarter to the, as yet, unconverted. If you happen to be in New Orleans for the Jazz festival next month you will certainly be able to track them down at the Gospel Tent.

Clifton Chenier- “Baby What You Want Me To Do”

This is a previously unreleased recording from a recently realwased Arhoolie Box set. Here, Clifton is sitting in with a band, circa 1959, with a band called Pete Mayes and the Texas House Rockers at a joint called the G&M Pleasure Spot in Lamarque, Texas. The recording was made by the drummer, Bob Murphy, on a tape recorder borrowed from a local school; that’s one very well-placed microphone!

This is the earliest known recording of Clifton, and he’s rocking the joint. Cool as the entire song is, I think it’s the very end that thrills me the most. The band is raw and cooking. Check out the drums, he’s waiting, teasing, waiting, holding back just a little throughout the tune with some firepower in reserve and only cranking up the heat in the last chorus. The crowd is going nuts, then swiftly, they delicately turn the heat down and make the most graceful, understated ending, letting the crowd back down gently. What weirdly sounds like a second, ghost accordion plays some very expensive, high-class jazz chords discreetly in the background in the last two bars (in complete contrast to the raw, pentatonic blues language used throughout the entirety of the rest of the tune) -and they’re done, it’s a wrap.

This groove is a great example of what musicians here call a ‘Texas Shuffle’. Very easy to approximate, very hard to get perfect. Just as the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, in this part of the world, there are a hundred ways of playing a shuffle - and only a few of them are right. One prominent local band-leader I know uses the Texas Shuffle as a litmus test when auditioning drummers, even though his is a funk band and he plays no shuffles in his show at all. He figures that if a young drummer can properly play a Texas shuffle, then he’s done his homework and the rest will be plain sailing.

Johnny Adams - “I Want To Do Everything For You”

I don’t know who’s playing on this, but I love it. Good production, maybe by Mac Rebbenack. He was one of the brains behind the sound of the records that came out on the Ric and Ron labels in the '60s, and he was a big advocate early on for the singing chops of the man they called ‘The Tan Canary’. I was in Johnny’s band, played with him on all kinds of gigs from backwoods black jook-joints in Mississippi to Festival stages in Japan and Europe and even once at a club in the Arctic Circle. In another life he could have been a world famous opera singer, he certainly had the vocal equipment and his dextrous falsetto range was astonishing and effortless.

He had one eye and always wore large and dark sunglasses, even inside the dimly lit ghetto barrooms that were his natural environment. I think was bitter and disappointed about the lack of a mark he’d been able to make outside of New Orleans and sadly had a cynicism, borne of experience, about anyone’s prospects of success in the music business. This made him appear thorny and unapproachable but I think I was lucky in my time around him to have been privy to occasional glimpses of the warmer and gentler side of his personality that belied that tough exterior.