Snooks Eaglin - With His New Orleans Friends

This is a review that I wrote in Fall 2006 and published in the November-December 2006 Jazz & Blues Report (Issue 288). I will be posting other reviews from this every few days in next couple weeks.

Universal Music on the Verve label has released the second batch of CDs in its series, The Sonet Blues Story. These sides make available albums from the 1970s that were issued in Europe on the Sonet label although some were imported in the United States and some were even issued in the US, as GNP-Crescendo issued The Legacy of the Blues recordings stateside. This latest batch includes more from that series along with other albums that Samuel Charters had produced for Sonet. I will be posting these reviews every few days.

Snooks Eaglin was represented by a prior volume in this series playing solo. The 1977 recordings represented on this latest album is With His New Orleans Friends who include the great Clarence Ford on tenor sax, George French on bass and background vocals, Bob French on drums and Ellis Marsalis on piano for a set of New Orleans R&B in the mode of Eaglin’s Imperial recordings.

The songs include Down Yonder, a Smiley Lewis number that Eaglin would keep in his repertoire decades later, Roscoe Gordon’s No More Doggin’, J.B. Lenoir's Talk to Your Daughter, Fats Domino’s Going to the River and Let the Four Winds Blow, James Wayne’s Traveling Mood (which Eaglin recorded for Imperial), Fat’s Domino’s Going to the River, and even Sir Mack Rice’s Mustang Sally (which comes off as tolerable in Eaglin’s hands. 

The band plays solidly behind Eaglin here, although not quite as inspired as the bands Snooks would have on his Black Top recordings. Charters notes how Eaglin insisted on his fuzzy tone for his guitar and there is plenty of his unique guitar playing with the band playing solidly behind him and these enjoyable sides foreshadows his spectacular Black Top recordings that started a decade later. 

I likely received review copies from Jazz & Blues Report. This may still be available new or used and as downloads. Here is a Snooks Eaglin performance

The New Orleans C.A.C. Jazz Orchestra Has A Mood Indigo

Often forgotten in Rounder Records recordings of New Orleans music in the 1980s and 1990s was the fact they did some straight ahead jazz recordings that are well worth noting. The following review of The New Orleans C.A.C. Jazz Orchestra appeared in the August 1998 Jazz & Blues Report (Issue 230). I likely received a review copy from Rounder.

In 1996, Pianist David Torkanowsky put together a big band, The New Orleans C.A.C. Jazz Orchestra, with some of the Crescent City’s greatest musicians and fronted them with three of the city’s pre-eminent singers, George French, Germaine Bazzle and Johnny Adams. Its a band that includes Herlin Riley on drums, Nicholas Payton on trumpet, and Ed Peterson, Wessell Anderson and Victor Goines on reeds. They have a recording, Mood Indigo on Rounder. The band is heard on a variety of standards from such pens as Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and Percy Mayfield. It is refreshing to hear three distinct vocal styles backed by this swinging aggregation. George French’s take on Don’t Get Around Much Anymore has a sophisticated and relaxed flavor that brings Joe Williams to mind, which is reinforced by his rendition of Carmichael’s New Orleans, a song this writer is familiar with from the sixty five year old recording by Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra that included Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing. On Sometimes I’m Happy, Germaine Bazzle provides a contrasting style as she phrases the lyrics in a staccato fashion, as if playing the lyrics on a trumpet. On the mid-tempo Ellington blues, I‘m Just a Lucky So and So, Bazzle in contrast caresses the lyric, singing in a legato fashion. On her last feature, Porter’s I Love Paris, Nicholas Payton is heavily featured with some hard bop trumpet. Adams, sings very cleanly and precisely on Percy Mayfield’s Lost Mind, a staple of his repertoire, and on which he contributes a mouth trombone solo. The three join together on Mood Indigo, opening with three-part harmony with Bazzle taking the vocal lead on parts with some exquisite trombone solos from John Touchy and Mark Mullins, two persons this writer is unfamiliar with. The recording closes with the three trading lyrics on a medley of Everyday I Have the Blues (featuring Bazzle), Stormy Monday (featuring French), and Not Trustworthy (featuring Adams on another Percy Mayfield lyric) that closes with the three singers each delivering their chosen lyric.