Little Walter and Jazz

[scott <checker758@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All, 

Someone mentioned to me that there was a Little Walter thread in progress, so I wanted to check in to see what it was all about!  A few comments:

 

I don't know if LW saw himself as a frustrated jazzman of not, but he certainly was aware of (and the evidence suggests, interested in) all different stripes of popular black music of the day, which of course included jazz as well as pop, rock & roll, etc.  As far as I can tell, I don't think that he (nor his contemporaries) thought of music as being so specifically delineated into these sorts of categories.  It either moved you or it didn't, and you either played it or you didn't, and there was a lot of genre-bending and -crossing going on without so much consideration as to whether it fit precisely into one category or the other.  

 

As for his forays into jazzy material, here are a few numbers that we know he performed on live gigs but never recorded:

 

Castle Rock (Johnny Hodges)

Intermission Riff (Sonny Criss, Stan Kenton and others)

Big Boy (by Bill Doggett)

Canadian Sunset (Hugo Winterhalter and others)

Lester Leaps In (Lester Young)

Tommy Dorsey Boogie (T. Dorsey)

 

We know of these because people who actually played them with LW (Jimmie Lee Robinson, Dave Myers, Freddie Robinson and others) told us.  There may be a few others I'm forgetting right now, but I'm too lazy to consult my notes at this point.  I also think that if we'd dug deeper we might have turned up a few more titles, but I think the point that LW was playing some jazz(y) material is pretty well established by the testimony of those above, by people who saw him play, and also by the jazz things that we can identify that *did* turn up on his recordings.  For instance, "Fast Large One" uses Gene Krupa's "Let Me Off Uptown" as the jumping off point, "Back In The Alley" is based on Kenny Burrell's "Chitlins Con Carne", etc.  It should be obvious from these titles though that he really wasn't into be-bop or anything that was too "out there".  A lot of the jazz stuff he played was from the "swing" end of jazz, a lot of it was from the '40s, and a lot of it wasn't too far from b!
lues.  I
 think it's important to remember that LW was a popular artist, who knew that his nice clothes and Cadillacs were paid for with hit records.  So most of the jazz stuff he seemed to be interested in was from the mainstream, popular end of the pool, rather than the experimental, cutting edge end.

 

A couple more jazz related things: When LW's sister Lillian came to Chicago for a visit, he took her out to see a Gene Ammons gig, and she was very impressed that Ammons announced to the audience from the stage that her brother was in the house, and later that they went backstage to hang out with him.  LW also was aware enough of jazz pianist and Chess label-mate Ahmad Jamal to know how he was recorded (there's a quote in the book where he's complaining about how rough a time he's having during one of his own sessions, and he says to the recording engineer "Ahmad Jamal, see he ain't got a damn thing to do but hit the mic over his piano and wail!", which suggests that he was either at one of Jamal's Chess studio sessions, or present at one of his live club recordings at the Pershing Lounge of Chicago's south side in the late '50s.)  And here's one that didn't make it into the book: we heard a story that LW had run into Illinois Jacquet while out on the road playing in the sam!
e town on
 the same night, and that LW ended up at Jacquet's gig, onstage engaged in a "blowing contest" with him.  We didn't use it because we were never able to find anyone who was actually there and could confirm it, and we didn't want to perpetuate any unconfirmed "legends" that couldn't be verified.

 

And we tried *very* hard to avoid including hearsay and second hand stories whenever possible when writing the book - if we didn't have a *first hand* account of an event, especially a spectacular event like the one above would have been, we usually didn't even mention it in the book.  As I've said many times, one of the primary goals of the LW biography from the very beginning was to DE-mythologize him, and avoid at all costs passing on any more unfounded rumors or legends.  There was (and is) a ton of mis-information about Little Walter out there, and we made every effort to refute the legends and present a story that was as close to the objective truth as possible, warts and all.

 

Smo-joe had a few comments I'd like to address:

 

He wrote:

 

>all things considered, even if he DID have to do what Chess >wanted on records, his gigs could have allowed him to do >differently. So why didn't he? 

 

Why would you think he didn't?  Clearly, he DID do these things on live gigs.  As every person who actually played with LW's band told us, on live gigs, he did exactly what he wanted, including the jazz numbers mentioned above.  FWIW, he also often performed cover versions of other popular blues material he never recorded himself.



>The problem with people who write books: They put their own >twist on things, even if unintentional. They interview people

>(because the people they are writing about are dead). These >interviews have a habit of giving an impression one way or >another, which smacks of "Legend". I always consider the SOURCE >of the info, as I have seen things get muddled in the past.

 

I was originally going to write: The problem with people who DON'T write books: they don't do years of painstaking and meticulous research before making pronouncements on the subject they're commenting about.  But I don't want to come off as confrontational or argumentative, so I won't :)  Instead, I'll just respond with this:

 

That may be a problem with *some* people who write books, but I assure you it wasn't a problem with the people who wrote the Little Walter book.  Please see above.  For the most part, the only "twist" or personal viewpoints you'll find in this book are our evaluations of the music itself - for instance, if we felt he played something especially creative or interesting, we said so with a comment like "Walter played with drive and dynamics..." etc., etc., and by the same token when we heard something we felt was not his best, we indicated as much in our description of the music.  But this was generally confined to *the music* only.  The only instances I can think of offhand are cases where it was a clear case of 1+1=2; for example, if there was a song that was #1 on the charts, and on LW's next session he played a riff that was identical to one in that #1 song, I don't think it's some sort of giant leap or personal "twist" to assume that he had heard and liked that #1 song, in!
 which
 case we would write something like "LW had probably been listening to (such and such) on radios and jukeboxes..."  In fact, to ignore these sorts of 1+1=2 connections would have meant not telling part of the story that clearly had to be true.  It would be like hiding the evidence.  But except in clear cut cases like that, as I stated above, if we didn't have a first hand, eyewitness account of an event, we didn't mention it in the book.  In some cases, we didn't mention particularly provocative or outrageous events unless we had *multiple*, independent eyewitness accounts.  We not only consciously avoided passing on unsubstantiated "legends", we were meticulous in our efforts to REFUTE them whenever necessary.  

 

I do agree that *some* writers put their own twist on things, and often fill in the blanks with whatever makes for the best story.  With this project, we specifically set out to do the opposite, taking a "documentary" route rather than a legend-enhancing or myth-making approach.

 

Scott Dirks

(co-author with Tony Glover and Ward Gaines of "Blues With A Feeling - The Little Walter Story")




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