Harlem 29 or Twelve Men A-Swinging

The writer and broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove is currently on a tour to promote his latest book, Harlem 69, the final part of a trilogy about the development of soul music in the sixties.

Last week, under the auspices of the Rock'n'Roll Book Club, he appeared at the Walthamstow branch of Waterstones; I was present along with my Cheapo gaffe friend, and it was a real  pleasure to listen to an author so completely immersed in his subject. I have only read his book on Northern Soul, Young Soul Rebels, but from the compelling account he gave of the new work it sounds as though Harlem 69 likewise weaves several narratives together. He seemed to take a particular satisfaction in revealing that the progeny of several soul singers later became hip hop stars - a pleasing detail, although not perhaps the astonishing coincidence it first seems once you reflect upon the banal fact that, be it East Croydon or East Harlem, it's not unknown for children to adopt their parents' professions.

Harlem 69 is a few years outside my main area of interest and I probably won't buy a copy until the paperback comes out, but I can certainly recommend Young Soul Rebels. Not being a specialist in that area, I'm happy to take the word of reviewers that it provides the best published overview to date of the scene and its competing factions, but the personal details threading the book are really well done, particularly the masterly way in which he displays his obsessiveness with neither shame nor self-mockery. I loved the account of meticulous, not to say nefarious, preparations for cratedigging expeditions in obscure American towns involving such vital equipment as a razor blade and an air of innocence (read the book) and the unexpected, near-magical transformation effected in a surly shop assistant when Cosgrove, after much labour, finally comes to the counter with the precious gems he has unearthed.

But the impulse to write this post came less from Mr Cosgrove's writing than the discovery that in a few days' time he will be heading to the Scottish town of Motherwell to talk about Harlem 69 in the local library.

Now, if that statement isn't gobsmacking then either you don't hail from the West of Scotland or you are not of an age to remember the kind of restrictions which that institution used to place on the purchase of stock - or both. So I can only try to assure you from personal experience of the oddness, or rather the forbiddenness, once upon a time - of soul music or any related kind of sounds being entertained within that sanctum.

Although Motherwell Library was a pioneer in making records available to borrowers, it seemed to enforce a "strictly no pop" policy in the seventies - not that I was ever emboldened enough to query whether this was an official ruling or the whim of some individual. But the range of borrowable material was otherwise fairly wide, not to mention eccentric, and seemed to reflect the community and immigration in the Lanarkshire area. Once, for example, I borrowed a Lithuanian folk record on behalf of a teacher who could not get it in his own library; I received a bar of chocolate for my pains, which seemed vaguely demeaning as I was sixteen at the time.

Oddities I took home for my own purposes with no attendant overlay of humiliation included the electronic pronouncements of Ron Geesin (above) and McGough and McGear (two thirds of the Scaffold, below). Geesin deserves at least a footnote in this blog, as he later remastered Dell Vikings recordings for the Flyright label. I borrowed A Raise of Eyebrows, Geesin's second album, which was doo wop free, as I recall, although the only performance I retain for certain is a withering dissection of a nightclub full of Beautiful People which ends with Geesin proclaiming: "Humans pulsate! Where? Somewhere else." (It sounds better with the appropriate reverb.)

 Ah, McGough & McGear ... Now there's a funny thing - there is a funny thing: Beatles verboten in the library, yeah yeah yeah, but Paul McCartney's brother Mike is okay? Presumably the reasoning was that Roger McGough was a poet and doing a bit of recitation over a guitar so that was vaguely educational and alright. (The joke is on them, however, as Macca played uncredited on the sessions.)

Folkwise, there was a lot of stuff in the library from the late fifties and early sixties. Which suggests to me either a) the library had had a bigger budget a few years earlier or b) the purchasing of items was indeed at the whim of an individual busily engaged in recreating his youth - now that's the sort of power that can corrupt.

I'm guessing that whoever signed the cheques was also a major jazz fan because there seemed countless racks of the stuff, favouring the twenties, thirties and forties - which is how I happened to stumble across an album which contained what I still regard, forty six years on, as the greatest jazz recording of all.

I say "stumbled" because it never occured to me, or I felt too intimidated, to approach the librarians for advice about the music I was borrowing. More likely the latter: I was around thirteen, fourteen; the assistants, in their early twenties at least, seemed superior and unapproachable. I always felt a vague sense of guilt and shame anyway about the act of borrowing records, as I never did about books: it seemed to be a case of getting something for nothing, a loophole which might, for all I knew, be closed any day now: better keep my head down and not attract attention to the goodies which I was regularly sneaking out the door.

Timidity/irrationality apart, it's possible the younger librarians had little interest in most of the stock, which seemed to have been chosen by a more senior individual, reflecting his tastes (it had to be a he) growing up in the fifties during the British trad jazz boom to which the Beatles and their ilk later put paid. (John Lennon's pet hates in one of those pop mag questionnaires: "Trad Jazz and thick heads.")

 This wasn't like the cratedigging of Cosgrove and his ilk. They would know what constituted a happy discovery, however many LP sleeves they had to work through; taken away from the Top 20 and the kind of records my elder brothers might buy I had no idea of how to proceed. Until I came across this:

If my choice was anything other than random it may have been the LP's title which prompted me to pick up the PVC-clad sleeve: the promise of a single disc which encapsulated this person, telling his complete tale, thus saving me from having to choose from the baffling range of Armstrong, Ellington and other LPs, some with forbiddingly arty covers. Arty the cover of The Luis Russell Story was not.


And the sleevenotes, if I read them before taking the record to the counter, probably clinched the deal. The essays for lots of those jazz and folk LPs were usually in tiny print and very full. Brian Rust, a noted jazz authority and the author of the comprehensive and definitive discography of the era, was probably the writer of this one, and the basic premise - that this band were the missing link between older jazz and the regimentation of swing - may have been simple enough to appeal to my younger self: they were trying something new, musically, so maybe I should. And there was some detail provided about individual musicians so I was given a sense of what to listen out for. It may even have been the song titles: The Call of the Freaks? The New Call of the Freaks?!

Whatever my initial impulse, this was, as it turned out, great (and accessible) jazz, immediately apparent on numbers like Doctor Blues, with its irresistible flapper-type intro, and the sheer momentum of Panama, which had an energy, from its screaming intro onwards, I could easily equate with my experience of rock'n'roll - not to mention the sense of fun which exhuded from such tracks as Feelin' the Spirit, with a wonderfully stupid bit of gravelly-voiced scat: however technically proficient they were I had no way of knowing at the time, but they were clearly enjoying themselves, which I, if you will, "dug."

Thinking that that was it - that I now "liked jazz" - I proceeded to borrow LPs by different bands, disconcerted to find that in most cases I could not, by an effort of will, extract anything like the same fierce pleasure; my first inkling that Luis Russell's 1929-1930 Okeh recordings were not the norm for the genre.

Russell was a generous paymaster, which may have helped him retain the best players He had won the lottery in Panama in 1919 and moved to New Orleans; maybe he still had cash to spare. The band had arisen from the ashes of the King Oliver band, so they already had a pedigree (in 1927 Oliver turned down the Cotton Club gig which was to make Duke Ellington's name, which can't have impressed his musicians much).

But perhaps the main point, again going back to early jazz vs. swing, is that the band had arrangements but weren't straitjacketed: there was ample space for them to stretch out and with excellent (and well-paid) soloists like JC Higginbotham, trombonist extraordinaire, Pops Foster on bass (likened by Philip Larkin to the engine room of a great ship), not to mention Henry Red Allen (above), a trumpeter who admired Armstrong but had his own fiery style, I still feel today that some of the performances on that Parlophone LP rank among the best ever recorded in the name of jazz. 

Panama is Russell's masterpiece and my favourite ever jazz record. Difficult to say why except that the balance of control and passion feels so right: at times the pace is so ferocious they almost lose control of their instruments - but don't; each solo adds another delight yet there is never any sense of competition, only their delirious pleasure in adding to the whole. Not sure whether it was Rust but I recall reading somewhere a description of the Russell Orchestra in their prime which described them as "twelve men swinging with the power of twenty but the looseness of six."



The power of those performances knitting together on Panama is also, as I now know, about the common language of New Orleans and the experience of playing together night after night - resulting in three minutes of distilled joy which the late Humphrey Lyttleton described, with far more detail and authority than I can muster, in his appropriately entitled The Best of Jazz. He surmises that the final chorus was the result of a signal that there were still about twenty recordable seconds, and so they went for it - an astonishing thought, as the thing seems so fully formed.

Panama is the recording that I wish, above all others, I'd been present in the studio to witness. Did they realise immediately what they'd done? There are no alternate takes that I know of, so maybe they knew they'd nailed it. But from various accounts those musicians had a blast playing live, so who knows what other wonders were lost in the air night after night?

Although known well to jazz aficionados of a certain vintage Luis Russell is not as renowned as an Ellington or a Basie.There are a limited number of recordings under Russell's own name, and an even more limited number of absolutely top drawer sides, almost all of which can be found in the above LP. The excellent sleevenotes for a fairly recent, comprehensive double CD on the Retrieval label (fuller than I have seen for any other compilation) explain why the band never attained the longevity of the Ellington or Basie orchestras: economic factors and a lack of nerve (or simply common sense, given the depression?) which led to Russell emulating other bands rather than continuing to plough his own distinctive furrow - but as the notes say, "the records, in all their undimmed splendor, endure."
 
And here, to show that Panama wasn't a fluke, is Doctor Blues:

I owe a lot to Motherwell Library, and not simply for a lifelong love of Luis Russell. It relaxed its no-pop policy sometime later, as I recall listening to a borrowed cassette of Pet Sounds in the mid eighties on a brick-like Walkman. At some point charges were introduced for the privilege of borrowing music on whatever soundcarrier - did this decision influence subsequent purchasing? Was there a conscious move from stock designed primarily to educate to giving the public what they wanted? Somewhere in the library's history is there the sorry tale of a dominant figure usurped - or one who simply retired?

It may be impossible to get to the bottom of the story now but it is one which intrigues, not least because I am now in a not dissimilar line myself, and the urge to pass on what I know about music - the legacy of that unknown librarian? - is strong, even though I am aware that most of my audience neither needs nor cares for more than a tiny percent of the information. Which may explain the need to write this blog over the last decade.

It's odd to reflect that Motherwell Library helped shape my tastes by what it didn't stock as much as by what filled its racks. Had wall-to-wall pop been available when I was first of an age to borrow records would I have bothered to find out about Luis Russell? Or, for that matter, guitarist Davy Graham, whose Large As Life LP was another favourite, or others, such as Clarence Williams? I first discovered the latter's name on the sleevenotes for the album above, later described, when I bought a copy many years later at Dobell's in London, as being "rare as hen's teeth." The music-making contained inside may not have been sophisticated as those recordings of Panama or Doctor Blues but it rattled along joyfully. It may be a bit of an anti-climax after Russell but here are the Georgia Washboard Stompers with I Can't Dance (I Got Ants in My Pants):



I was also much taken with the Alabama Jug Band's version of Sister Kate on the same album - though I think both names disguised whatever musicians happened to be assembled around Williams for the date; his skills, like Russell's, seemed to lie more in the organisational than the musical side of things. This is no masterpiece, and shall not be accompanying Panama when I have to make my choice for that mythical desert island, but I think this was the first time I became aware of how excitement could build in a jazz performance.



I have no idea whether jazz is still stocked by the library these days.  If you have the opportunity and the inclination to be present at Mr Cosgrove's forthcoming oration perhaps you could have a quick look around and let me know. 

I do have a vague memory, from an unknown year, of a lot of vinyl being sold off; I bought the same copy of Clarence Williams Rarities which I had borrowed many times over the years; a track from that, the instrumental version of I'm Busy You Can't Come In, seems to provide a suitably elegiac ending for this piece.



If you do get to attend, please keep an eye out for an elderly gentleman muttering throughout proceedings, and try not to judge him too harshly. It may be that once the library was his.

(Beat.)

What? Oh, Luis Russell had a residency in 1929 at the Saratoga Club in Harlem. Look it up if you don't believe me.