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Sounds of New Orleans: WWOZ on CD-Volume 2 |
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Wednesday, 18 January 2006 19:02 |
WWOZ on CD: The Sounds of New Orleans
Volume Two (Fall 1994)
By John Sinclair
This is Volume Two of The Sounds of New Orleans, now a continuing series of CDs being produced by WWOZ Radio to be given away as premiums during the station's semi-annual fund-raising drives. Volume One, released last spring, featured performances recorded by WWOZ 'live' at the 1993 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
This disc presents a program of music by New Orleans artists recorded in performance by WWOZ at several community music venues in the Crescent City (and, in one case, elsewhere) between the Fall of 1992 and the Summer of 1994.
Most of these selections were taken from a series of recordings made during JazzFest 1994, and all the performances were intended for 'live' broadcast, although several never made it onto the air for one reason or another.
JazzFest '94 marked another high point for WWOZ. Thanks to some last-minute special funding by the Jazz & Heritage Foundation, BET-On-Jazz Television, and the City of New Orleans though its City Council, we were able to broadcast 'live' from the Fairgrounds all seven days of the festivities there, bringing the sounds of music in performance, artist interviews, festival actualities and impromptu performances to listeners throughout the New Orleans area from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm daily.
Initially faced with an utter lack of funds with which to underwrite the costs of the Festival broadcast, our General Manager David Freedman had virtually written off the project until a last-minute infusion of cash was suddenly made available.
We had exactly one week to design and plan this relatively mammoth undertaking, yet we were on the air the first Friday morning of the Fest with full-scale coverage from our broadcast trailer.
But this wasn't quite enough. Once the JazzFest broadcast was set, the fertile minds of WWOZ's staff and volunteer programmers went into overdrive, and a series of remote broadcasts from community venues was hastily scheduled for nights after the Fairgrounds shut down and days between and after the Fairgrounds performances.
Several of the recordings in The Sounds of New Orleans, Volume Two resulted from this series of guerrilla sessions conducted by WWOZ's Michael Kline and this writer at several Crescent City venues during JazzFest 1994. Most of these cuts were recorded by Tony Brooke and Cory Smith--two young men who came in from California on a wing and a prayer, crashed on Dave Freedman's floor for 10 days, and volunteered their services to engineer and record the string of 'live' broadcasts from which these selections were drawn.
The series started with Earl Turbinton & Friends from the By-Water Barbeque on Friday, April 22, and continued through Monday, May 2 with a 'live' program from Tower Records on Decatur Street featuring Kermit Ruffins & the Barbeque Swingers, the Zion Harmonizers, the Tony Dagradi Trio, the Hackberry Ramblers and the Bluerunners.
On Saturday night, April 23, we were at the House of Blues at 225 Decatur Street for the annual BlackTop Blues-A-Rama show, starring Earl King, Guitar Shorty, Robert Ward, Grady Gaines, Carol Fran & Clarence Hollimon, W.C. Clark, and Big Dave & The Dynaflows.
On Sunday we broadcast the Creole Blues Revue with Deacon John, Chuck Carbo, J.D. Hill and Danon from the Cafe Istanbul on Frenchmen Street.
On Monday it was Doctor John plus the Heavy Metal Horns from Tipitina's, at Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas Streets uptown. On Tuesday there was another in-store presentation at Tower Records starring the great Charles Brown.
Wednesday brought a 'live' doubleheader, both ends of which were tragically blocked from the airwaves by a previously-scheduled WTUL broadcast from the Howlin' Wolf club which utilized the same portable transmitter frequency we had planned to use for our own signal.
The first concert, Trombone Shorty's Second Annual Treme Brass Band Blowout at the Louisiana Music Factory on N. Peters, struggled from noon to 3:00 pm to get on the air before we threw in the towel.
The mounting confusion resulting from the jammed broadcast precluded the achievement of a proper mix inside the record store, and our single selection from this presentation, the Chosen Few Jazz Band's "Salty Papa Blues" with Lady Linda Young on vocal, made it onto tape only when a visiting radio producer, Steve Rowland, witnessing our many difficulties on-site, whipped out his portable DAT machine and a stereo microphone and planted himself in front of the stage with his mike stuck out at the music.
That night we moved uptown to Tipitina's for the Professor Longhair Foundation's 6th Annual Piano Night, a gala invitational concert that had long been promised to our listeners. But the WTUL broadcast kept our transmission from Tipitina's off the air all night, and we had to be content with the recording of the evening's proceedings which was captured by Tony Brooke and Cory Smith and eventually produced for actual broadcast in June.
Piano Night yielded three selections for this CD: the opening rendition of his 1955 hit, "I'm Wise", by the great Eddie Bo (recorded the next year as "Slippin' and Slidin'" by Little Richard); the premiere solo piano performance by David Torkanowsky, who improvised this emotional tribute to the late Danny Barker as the opening salvo in an extremely powerful performance; and the soulful Jon Cleary reading of his composition "Been and Gone," initially featured by Marva Wright on her CD Born With The Blues and positioned here to close out the program.
"Door Poppin'," the spritely offering by former Dew Drop Inn regular Carol Fran and her husband, Clarence Holliman--legendary guitar star of Bobby 'Blue' Bland's masterful Duke singles of the 1950s--was recorded at the BlackTop Blues-A-Rama at the House of Blues. The original studio recording of this hip little song can be heard on their current BlackTop CD, See There! Bruce 'Sunpie' Barnes & his Louisiana Sunspots were the hit of the Jubilee CityFest in Montgomery, Alabama, this past May, when a production team from WWOZ was engaged by Alabama State University station WVAS-FM to direct their 'live' broadcast from the Montgomery riverfront. Engineer Keith Keller captured this fresh breath of "Louisiana Saturday Night" during Sunpie's triumphant appearance on the opening night of the festival there.
The Earl King recording of his timeless Ace Records classic from 1955, "Those Lonely, Lonely Nights," comes from another guerrilla recording of a concert that never made it onto the air, the WWOZ Mardi Gras Party in Congo Square on February 20, 1993. The Marcia Ball Band opened the show, which featured Tommy Ridgley & The Untouchables with special guests Ernie K-Doe, Al 'Carnival Time' Johnson, and the one-and-only Earl King, and engineer Mike Pelopolous managed to get the proceedings down on tape.
The rare recording of pianist/vocalist Sammie 'Ironing Board Sam' Moore was a welcome last-minute addition to the CD and resulted from an impromptu appearance by the pianist on this writer's "New Orleans Music Show" during the week when the music for this disc was being selected for mastering. Ironing Board showed up at the station on a rainy Wednesday morning in late July and quickly laid down a series of musical treats, including this poignant tale of marital woe and resultant "Non-Support" proceedings in front of the judge.
Tony Dagradi and his mighty trio with Jim Singleton and Johnny Vidacovich performed this sinewy version of the Thelonious Monk composition "Nutty" during an in-store concert at Tower Records the day after JazzFest '94. An entire program of the trio's magical ensemble improvisations can be heard on Live At The Columns, the recent release from Turnipseed Records.
The Zion Harmonizers' selection, "Brother Moses Smote the Water," was recorded at the same Tower Records engagement and was also broadcast 'live' on WWOZ. A great set of this historic group's current repertoire, along with the studio version of this cut, can be heard on Best of New Orleans Gospel, Volume Two, on Mardi Gras Records.
For the next cut, the producer has exercised his prerogative to include a verse-and-alto-saxophone performance of his poem "Spiritual," accompanied by legendary alto saxophonist Marion Brown during his brief residency in the Crescent City between early January and late April, 1993. This piece was recorded by Mark Bingham and an early edition of the WWOZ DAT Patrol at the Louisiana Music Factory as part of the record shop's vigorous Mardi Gras Week festivities.
A stellar edition of Michael Ray's Cosmic Krewe is featured here with the entirely improvised performance which closed out their three-and-a-half-hour presentation at the Voo Doo Boo at the late, lamented Charlie B's nightclub on October 30, 1992, just after the conclusion of WWOZ's 'live' broadcast. Tony Dagradi delivered the muscular tenor solo heard here while dressed in a Batman costume, his saxophone poking out in front of a standard-issue bat mask.
We sincerely hope those of you who have contributed to our Fall 1994 pledge drive do enjoy this new CD, the product of the work of many, many people and most of all of the New Orleans-based musicians who have donated their performances to this effort.
These are some of The Sounds of New Orleans--just a sampling of the infinite musical resources that abound in the Cradle of Jazz and the Home of the Blues.
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