|
Yockamo All Stars: Dew Drop Out |
E-mail |
|
New Orleans
|
|
Sunday, 22 January 2006 09:11 |
Yockamo All Stars
Dew Drop Out
Hannibal/RykoDisc
By John Sinclair
The Yockamo All Stars is an exuberant aggregation of creative natives and well-seasoned transplants assembled by Mark Bingham at his Boiler Room studio in uptown New Orleans with the intention of capturing the full spirit and feeling of the Crescent City sound at its purest and most intense.
Call it Rhythm & Blues, Roots Jazz, Second Line Grooves, or whatever you will, but what you hear is the essence of what this music is all about--a bunch of great players having a good time with one another, soloing their hearts out, knocking back the familiar ancestral riffs for people to party off of, shake their ass and have a ball.
New Orleans has been a big party town since the very beginning. They call it "The City That Care Forgot," and while that's not really how it goes in real life, the residents of the Crescent City have always known how to forget their cares and follow the party wherever it takes them.
This funky, quasi-tropical city on the banks of the Mississippi has also been described as "the northernmost port of the Caribbean," "the cradle of American civilization as we know it," and the farthest point you can get from the American way and still be in the USA.
New Orleans has been a different place for 280 years, and the amazing thing is how the city manages to preserve, protect and continue to develop its precious cultural identity against the relentless encroachment of conspicuous consumption and mindless pop culture which has levelled the rest of America.
What makes New Orleans such a great place, more than anything else, is and always has been its spectacular music and the people who make it. Joyously distilled from a roiling stockpot filled with roots from West Africa, the Caribbean, the Choctaw Nation, France, Spain, Mississippi and mainstream America, the exuberant, relaxed, swinging, good-time-feeling sound of New Orleans is a wonderful gift from its citizens to the world at large.
New Orleans jazz and the music that grew out of it dominated American musical consciousness for the first half of the 20th century. The second half was touched off by the mighty innovations of Roy Brown, Professor Longhair, Dave Bartholomew, Paul Gayten and the other Rhythm & Blues giants who followed them onto the airwaves and into the viscera of millions of dancing Americans--including that vast legion of inventive musicians who've spent the last 50 years attempting to decode the sound of New Orleans and bring it to life in their own environments.
Getting inside the New Orleans sound is easy as pie for the players who've grown up here and almost as accessible to the considerable population of scholars of the second-line who have settled in the Crescent City to pursue their studies without distraction. It starts with the beat of the street, the Afro-Caribbean shuffle that drives the brass bands and propels the frantic gang chants of the Mardi Gras Indians, indoctrinating the denizens of the city's African-American precincts with the sounds they'll hear and thrill to as long as they may live--the music that will literally follow them to their graves.
For players like drummer Herlin Riley, member of a venerated New Orleans musical family, or bassist Walter Payton, music educator and father of young trumpet star Nicholas Payton, there's no escaping the sound that's been with them all their lives, and they lay down a rhythm that's as natural and in-bred as it is fresh and compelling. They've backed up cats like Leroy Jones and Jesse Davis and Clarence Johnson and Reggie Houston since they were kids, playing together in brass bands on the streets and in little dance combos at corner bars and late-night joints all over town. Like most good New Orleans musicians, they're all equally comfortable with blues, traditional jazz, R&B, bebop and spirituals, and they play the music the occasion calls for with democratic vigor and drive.
They're joined here by immigrants from Indiana to Japan like guitarist/composer/producer Mark Bingham, pianist/composer Glenn Patscha, master saxophonist Tim Green, trombonist Craig Klein, and (on "I Hear You Knockin'") guitarist June Yamagishi--accomplished young men who have made a careful study of the New Orleans sound, then ripped up their textbooks and put their feet in the street to immerse themselves in the real-life context from which this delightful music has arisen.
There's really nothing like hanging out at Joe's Cozy Corner or the Little People's Place in the Sixth Ward on a late Sunday afternoon while the fellas start to congregate on the bandstand and then dig out a groove and swing it for hours in the company of their friends, neighbors, and musical peers, solo following solo in an endless stream of sound.
This record is just about as close as you'll get to that particular manifestation of reality. It captures the sound of the old Dew Drop Inn, the Paul Gayten combo, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, Professor Longhair & the Blues Scholars, the immortal house band at Cosimo Matassa's recording studio in the Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues (1945-60) laying down the music for epochal hit sides by Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Earl King, Bobby Mitchell, Sugar Boy Crawford, Shirley & Lee, Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns.
Like Jerry Brock, New Orleans music maven and co-founder of WWOZ radio says, "This is the record [the late saxophonist] Fred Kemp and [the late pianist/composer] Ed Frank always wanted to make--just get the cats together in the studio and play those great old grooves that everybody grew up on and have a ball."
Mark Bingham and the Yockamo All Stars have done it here--there's an instant party embedded in this disc, and guess what? Y'all invited! So come on in, enjoy a libation, take off your coats and stay a while--the music ain't gonna stop until everybody's had their say and the festivities are well under way.
--New Orleans
January 28, 1998
(c) 18=998, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Resreved.
Yockamo All Stars Dew Drop Out Hannibal/RykoDisc
1 Rich Woman (Dorothy LaBostrie-Mac "Li'l" Millett) 3:2
8 2 Ain't Got No Home (Clarence "Frogman" Henry) 6:15
3 Dew Drop Out (Bingham-Patscha?) 4:31
4 Falling In Love (Harold Battiste) 6:42
5 Talk To Me, Baby 3:31
6 Jambolero (Patscha?) 6:21
7 Ice Cool (Patscha?) 4:21
8 Blow Blow Tenor (Bingham-Patscha?) 3:18
9 I Hear You Knocking (Bartholomew-Domino-Pearl King) 3:30
10 Bhang Bhang (Bingham-Patscha?) 4:42
11 Gravel Grinder (Bingham-Patscha?) 3:37
12 Rat Cheer (Bingham) 2:33
Produced by Mark Bingham
Executive Producer: Joe Boyd for RykoDisc
YOCKAMO ALL STARS:
Mark Bingham, guitar, tambourine
Glenn Patscha, piano
Walter Payton, bass
Herlin Riley, drums
Leroy Jones, trumpet
Craig Klein, trombone
Jesse Davis, alto saxophone
Tim Green, tenor saxophone
Clarence Johnson III, tenor saxophone
Reggie Houston, baritone saxophone
June Yamagishi, guitar solo on "I Hear You Knocking"
Recorded at the Boiler Room, New Orleans, October 1997
3.1.6116 |
|
Share Link: 
