Maybe like me, you never heard of Adam Fulara. Now, like me, you can say you heard from him.
Maybe like me, you never heard of Adam Fulara. Now, like me, you can say you heard from him.
Aside from Motown maestro James Jamerson, it would be hard to name an electric bass player who had more impact on rock, soul, and R&B than Donald “Duck” Dunn, who just died at the age of 70 after playing two shows in Tokyo.
That’s Dunn playing the unstoppable bass line on “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” When he re-teamed with Steve Cropper for the Blues Brothers backup band, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd made it the opening theme of their concerts.
I always thought the sound effects at the beginning of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” were unnecessary: Dunn’s tidal bass line conveys the setting perfectly. Not that it keeps the song from being an all-timer:
“The only strings that hold me here/Are tangled up around the pier/And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss/And I will think of this/When I’m dead and in my grave/Set me adrift/I’m lost over there/But I must be insane/To go on skating on your name/And by tracing it twice I fell through the ice/Of Alice/There’s only Alice.”
Tom Waits wrote the Alice songs for a 1992 stage play directed by Robert Wilson, and for the next decade they were available only as bootlegs in various configurations. I haven’t seen the play, but I was delighted with the 2002 release of the songs. As much as I love Tom Waits’ music and growling, sardonic stage persona (I speak as someone who’s been buying every new Waits album since the Nighthawks at the Diner era), I sometimes get tired of the whole carny barker routine. The Alice songs have none of that posturing. This is the great overlooked Waits album — tender, spooky, full of longing and a sense of loss — and “Alice” is the great overlooked Waits song.
Shortly after the CD came out, I was playing it in the living room and Dances With Mermaids (then about eight) came in to listen with me. After a while, she said, “Daddy, this music is scaring me.” Smart kid. It scares me, too, when it isn’t doing a lot of other things besides.
My one glimpse of blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin in action was an unexpected pleasure — he appeared onstage during Elvis Costello’s 2005 performance at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and the two performed “Hidden Charms” with the widest possible grins on their faces. It was already a sensational concert, but it was elevated even further by their obvious pleasure in each other’s company and musicianship. The above clip was made only a few weeks ago in Montclair, so Sumlin was clearly making a habit of it.
Sumlin, who just died at the age of 80, was right-hand man to the larger-than-life Howlin’ Wolf, who for obvious reasons tended to suck up all the attention in any room. But you can glimpse him at work in some of these clips.
I hope Sumlin got the chance to see himself played by Albert Jones in the 2005 film Cadillac Records. That’s the formidable Eamonn Walker playing Wolf.
In the early 1960s, Duke Ellington found himself between recording contracts, and decided to capitalize on it by working with some of the young turks who were redefining jazz. His album with John Coltrane produced one sublime track (their beautiful version of “In a Sentimental Mood”) but was undercut by the fact that Coltrane was playing with Ellington’s regular sidemen. There was no such problem when Ellington went into the studio with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, two iconoclasts who loved Duke’s music but were equally determined to keep him on his toes every minute. (That Mingus had been fired from Ellington’s orchestra, years earlier, after he got into a brawl with Juan Tizol no doubt added a whole layer of subtext.) Not all of the tension was directed at Ellington: at one point, the legendarily combative Mingus grew so angry with Roach that he packed up his bass and headed for the elevator, and only came back after Duke spent some time smoothing his feathers.
The album that resulted, Money Jungle (1962), is a tense, often combative sounding record loaded with remarkable music, but not exactly easy listening. Except, that is, for “Fleurette Africaine,” an Ellington tune that qualifies as virtually spontaneous composition. According to Duke, he prepped Mingus and Roach by describing an image of a flower standing alone in a forest. Mingus closed his eyes and came up with the fluttering bass line that opens the song, and Roach improvised subtle but emphatic accompaniment. The tune’s a wonder, and the performance is a career standout for all three musicians. It’s certainly one of my all-time favorite Ellington compositions.
The simplicity and beauty of the tune seems to attract at least as many musicians as Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” with equally mixed results. I rather like this guitar duo treatment on YouTube:
On the opposite end of the scale is this treatment by Gary Burton and Pat Metheny. Both men have their fans, but this version is way too ornate for my tastes:
This version by the amusingly named Trio De Janeiro hath charms to soothe the savage beast:
But in the end, I prefer the simpler approach, whether from Duke or any other interpreter:
Radio station WBAI is catering to your Bob Dylan needs today with a daylong Bobfest. What more do you need to know?