Big Joe Turner: Texas Style

BIG JOE TURNER: TEXAS STYLE (1971)

1) Money First; 2) Hide And Seek; 3) I've Got A Pocket Full Of Pencils; 4) Rock Me Baby; 5) Cherry Red; 6) Texas Style; 7) T.V. Mama; 8) T'Ain't Nobody's Business; 9) Morning Glory; 10*) Rock Me Baby (take 1).

Big Joe kept on making records all the way into the 1960s and 1970s; his last LP on Pablo Re­cords came out in 1984, approximately a year before his demise. Most of these albums, however, are tremendously hard to find, and once you do find them, it is tremendously hard to understand what in the world made you look for them in the first place. They weren't popular, they weren't re­vered, and the only real differences between all of them concern who, where, and when is ac­companying Big Joe on this particular date. Because you can always count on Big Joe to sound exactly the same. The guy never lets you down, but after a very short while, it becomes extremely boring to be standing so high up all of the time.

Reviewing the couple dozen or so albums that the man recorded in between 1956 and 1985 would be even more excruciating than an attempt to collect all of them; so here is just one example, the result of an inspired, but hardly phenomenal blues & jazz session in 1971, recently re-released with bonus tracks and all. All of the songs, of course, are old standards; recording quality is not altogether good, with Joe himself kept oddly down in the mix as if the entire band were gathered around one mike except for Joe in a faraway corner.

The players, however, are distinctive. On piano we have Milt Buckner, famous for having once popularized the Hammond organ as well as allegedly inventing «block chords» (although that particular credit goes to at least half a dozen different people depending on one's biases); he takes a few magnificent solos, particularly on 'Nobody's Business', way beyond anything Pete Johnson ever had to offer (although, to be fair, on the speedier numbers Buckner never manages to let his hair down as convincingly as Pete). And on bass, we have Slam Stewart, a guy with a unique style of bowing his instrument and humming along at the same time. Granted, most of the time the resulting sound is un­dis­tin­gui­shable from creative farting in your tuba, but the trick is that the guy has no tuba and does not ac­tually fart. For the first couple of times, Slam's gimmick has some fun novelty value — later on, it becomes unbearable (which is probably why not a lot of jazzmen have copied the technique), but, fortunately, he does not do it on every track.

Needless to say that, for 1971, all of this is as abysmally retro as could be; and also, I will proba­bly not be mistaken by much if I say that, for all of those nearly thirty years, Big Joe has not come up with even one semi-original idea. (A couple of songs here are technically «new», but in reality they are just old melodies set to reshuffled lyrics). Still, there is some deeply felt satisfac­tion that in 1971, he could still sound as reckless and brawny as he did in 1938. All the sadder it is too realize that all of that tenaciousness and energy was essentially wasted on lots of self-repe­tition and subpar by-the-book recordings. At least this one has Milt Buckner.

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Big Joe Turner: The Boss Of The Blues

BIG JOE TURNER: THE BOSS OF THE BLUES (1956)

1) Cherry Red; 2) Roll 'Em Pete; 3) I Want A Little Girl; 4) Low Down Dog; 5) Wee Baby Blues; 6) You're Driving Me Crazy; 7) How Long Blues; 8) Morning Glories; 9) St. Louis Blues; 10) Piney Brown Blues.

One of the most easily available original LPs from Big Joe's career, it also explains fairly well why the popularity of the Boss, miraculously surviving into the 1950s, never made it past that de­cade. His signing up with Atlantic was an accident. It could have been Wynonie Harris, or any out of a dozen other jump blues shouters of the previous decade, all of which had their own cha­risma, too. Granted, Big Joe was a bit brawnier than most, but it doesn't matter that much: For­tune smiled upon the man by crossing his paths with Ahmet Ertegun, who modernized his sound in a way that the kids could dig.

But did he like that modernization, he himself? Possibly, but I see no way he could have loved it. Playing with big jazz bands for fifteen years, then having to dump it all in favour of all these tiny combos with (comparatively) primitive musicianship, I don't really see how he could honestly dig stuff like 'The Chicken And The Hawk' etc. Some of the feelings, at least, must have been akin to grizzled old blues-rockers of the 1960s and 1970s having to adjust their sound to the abysmal ele­ctronic values of the 1980s so they could still have record contracts.

It should come as no surprise, then, that, once re-established as a hitmaker, Big Joe would quick­ly want to profit from it by going all retro. The Boss Of The Blues is only part of the album's title: the subtitle, in honestly equally large letters, reads Joe Turner Sings Kansas City Jazz, and that is exactly what he does. Reunited with old piano pal Pete Johnson and attracting a large crew of professional jazzmen, many of them with Count Basie service time records, Big Joe records a bunch of old standards, all or most of which he'd already cut for Vocalion in the pre-war years. This time, of course, recording quality is much higher, and song lengths have been pumped up — just like before, this isn't Big Joe's show all the time, but unlike before, musicians really get to stretch out like they are supposed to be on a respectable jazz record, not on a boogie single.

The result is a technically excellent, spiritually satisfactory, but, in the end, somewhat hollow piece of lounge jazz nostalgia. Hollow, because 'Roll 'Em Pete', for instance, is given a full arran­gement instead of the original piano-only recording, and this allows the real Pete to take it just a bit — just a tiny bit! — easier than before, and no amount of rhythm swing or brass wailing can compensate for the ferocious boogie soul of the original. Clearly, Big Joe is pining for them old times, and if you forget the context, you can almost see the good old times, but if at the height of his new-found success he was still pining for the good old times, clearly, something was not quite right at the time. Yet still a thumbs up for all those who love good old jazz and blues played by respectable masters of the trade. Some of the sax and trumpet solos are mighty damn good.

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Big Joe Turner: Joe Turner/Rockin' The Blues

BIG JOE TURNER: JOE TURNER/ROCKIN' THE BLUES (1951-1956; 2000)

1) Shake, Rattle & Roll; 2) Flip, Flop & Fly; 3) Feeling Happy; 4) Well, All Right; 5) The Chicken And The Hawk; 6) Boogie Woogie Country Girl; 7) Honey Hush; 8) Corrine, Corrina; 9) Midnight Special; 10) Hide And Seek; 11) Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop; 12) Crawdad Hole; 13) Sweet Sixteen; 14) Chains Of Love; 15) (We're Gonna) Jump For Joy; 16) Teen Age Letter; 17) Love Roller Coaster; 18) Lipstick, Powder And Paint; 19) Morning, Noon And Night; 20) I Need A Girl; 21) Red Sails In The Sunset; 22) Blues In The Night; 23) After A While; 24) World Of Trouble; 25) Trouble In Mind; 26) TV Mama; 27) You Know I Love You; 28) Still In Love.

Again, this album, or, rather, couple of albums on one CD, is a non-album, or, rather a couple of non-albums. Joe Turner is a compilation of Joe's biggest hits from the Atlantic years; Rockin' The Blues, coming out a little bit later, is a compilation of Joe's medium-size hits from the Atlan­tic years. Together, this 28-song package contains all of Joe Turner from 1951 to 1956 that one really needs to hear — and no one who has not heard it can ever claim to have properly under­stood the genesis of rock'n'roll.

Fortunately, Big Joe's Atlantic career seems to have easily withstood the test of time, and all of these recordings sound just as spick and span today as they did half a century ago. Pre-war purists may show off all they want, but R'n'B does affect one's nerve centers mighty more effectively when it's driven by a well-oiled boogie-woogie rhythm section with a big and clean drum sound, not to mention ever-improving standards of sound capture that finally allow backing bands to sound just as tight on record as they do in nightclubs.

Funny enough, the man who made his first big impact on the musical world with the proto-rock'n' roll of 'Roll 'Em Pete' started off on Ahmet Ertegun's label at a slow pace: the first two years were mostly dedicated to slow loungey blues and ballads. 'Chains Of Love', 'Sweet Sixteen', 'Still In Love', that sort of thing; well in line with Atlantic's general standards, professionally and cleanly recorded, sung with Big Joe's usual soulful brawn (even his sappiest tunes have a bit of the Nean­derthal spirit to them, which makes it so much easier to stomach than Bing Crosby).

The big break comes in 1953 with 'Honey Hush': "Let it roll like a big wheel, in the Georgia cot­ton fields!". It ain't nothing Big Joe hadn't really done before, including the famous opening line which must have already figured in at least several of his 1940s recordings. All it takes is a few subtle production twists, and a wonderful «Zeitgeist» to carry it along to a success among young audiences, much huger than anything Big Joe could have hoped for in the previous decade.

'Honey Hush', 'Shake, Rattle & Roll', 'Flip, Flop & Fly', 'The Chicken And The Hawk' — they're all the same song, really, also in line with the general style of work of all pre-war artists, but al­ready the sprouts of the new age of popular music are beginning to show, because each of the numbers has a tiny individual angle of its own: a different hook in the chorus, a variation on a brass riff, an unexpected bit of vocalizing (like the famous "Hi-ho Silver!" on 'Honey Hush'). R'n'B changed the face of jump blues, and this means that there will always be a reason to put on a jump blues record (simply because it gives you a different kind of feeling); but the primary goal of jump blues was to let people have a good time, and in terms of good-time-giving, jump blues is to R'n'B what Intel 8088 is to a Pentium.

It must also be said that Big Joe's hit records on Atlantic, after 'Honey Hush', were much less di­verse than the material in general. The man did not always rock out to the exact same formula: 'Boogie Woogie Country Girl' and 'Teen Age Letter', for instance, follow entirely different recipés. Then, towards the end of that hit run, he started experimenting with speeding up old folk blues standards: the boogie version of 'Corrine Corrina' came first, the dance avatar of 'Midnight Special' came next, and both just completely chucked away the pain and anguish of the working class and replaced them with mindless good-time party atmosphere. Karl Marx must have been turning over in his grave, but the face of popular music didn't much care for that.

There always remains the issue of whiteys «stealing» this music from Big Joe and his brethren: I think that time will slowly heal this wound, and eventually those billions of miles that separate Big Joe's popularity from Elvis' will accelerate their shrinking, even if they will be doing this for the wrong reason (instead of more people learning about Big Joe, more people will start forget­ting about Elvis). Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that Elvis' version of 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' is wilder and crazier than Big Joe's: deeper, louder, speedier, and, above all, the kids really loved it when the stingy aggressiveness of the electric guitar solo ushered out the jazzy smoothness of the saxophone, which, in the 1950s, was still more of an outdated leftover from the swinging 1930s and 1940s than a «progressive» instrument (it took the birth of jazz-rock to redeem it). And, per­sonally, I'll always take the awesome distorted sound of the Burnette brothers' version of 'Honey Hush' over the original...

...which is not to say that the original ain't pretty awesome in its own right. "Come over here, woman, stop all that yakety-yak, don't make me nervous, I'm holding a baseball bat", despite the poor rhyming scheme, still has to rank as one of the most delightfully provocative lines of all time (a duet with Aretha Franklin would probably shorten all the circuits). This is golden stuff, very much of its time and still timeless, and also a perfect introduction to the world of «older» R'n'B for those who are heavily spoiled by modern values and attitudes and need a safe and steady passageway to the vaults. Thumbs up.

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Big Joe Turner: Shout, Rattle & Roll

BIG JOE TURNER: SHOUT, RATTLE & ROLL (1938-1954; 2005)

Big Joe Turner's firm place in history is that of «The Man They Stole Rock'n'Roll Away From», «they», of course, surmising Bill Haley and then Elvis Presley, both of whom made a bigger hit out of 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' than Big Joe could ever aspire to. Only with creepy black guy music gra­dually assuming its honored and hallowed place in mainstream musical press, Big Joe's R'n'B hits for Atlantic, in retrospect, eventually garnered the proper accolades.

What remains sometimes unclear to the average eye is that Bog Joe certainly did not start kicking major ass with 'Honey Hush' and 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' in boring 1954 — an impression one could get, subconsciously, if introduced to Big Joe through the retrospective Atlantic boxset, on which he appears around 1951, singing slow, languid, but burly ballads before, all of a sudden, launching into crazyass boogie three years later. In fact, he was already kicking that ass when El­vis was all of a mighty three years old — way back in exciting 1938, when him and his partner, boogie-woogie pianist hellraiser Pete Johnson, were spotted by John Hammond, brought to New York to perform at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterwards signed with Vocalion.

This is where the story begins for this 4-CD Proper Records compilation, sadly, out of print now, but one of the finest retrospectives of Big Joe's pre-Atlantic years; these days, an easier buy is JSP Records' All The Classic Hits 1938-1952, which has a little more material (5 CDs instead of 4) but does not, however, incorporate all of Proper's tracks either. My review will be of more con­cern for the overall pre-Atlantic period, anyway, rather than specifically targeted at any particular CD edition.

It should be noted that, for some reason, Big Joe, as of now, still has not received the «complete-in-chronological-order» treat­ment from any of the collectors' labels that have nevertheless given that honor to many much lesser artists — go figure — and complete discographies, with little chance of total success, have to be scrambled together from various compilations. Shout, Rattle & Roll, however, contains more than enough material to build up a proper picture of the man, and its omi­ssions will trouble the obstinate fan and the historian far more than the casual listener.

Anyway, the story begins in 1938, and oh boy, what a fine beginning, these early boogie-woogie tracks with just Big Joe belting it out over Pete Johnson's rapid-fire proto-rock'n'roll. The lyrics don't matter — most of the time, they just seem improvised on the spot, extracted and mixed out of a mass-produced set of formulae ("I got a gal, she lives upon the hill..." etc.); what matters is the generated heat, and these two guys could generate plenty of it without even a rhythm session, let alone a big band. 'Roll 'Em Pete' is, of course, one of those pre-war tunes that one must neces­sarily hear before one dies, and fully deserves the status of «one of the earliest rock'n'roll songs»; but 'Cafe Society Rag', on which Pete is joined by not one, but two other piano giants of the times — Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis — is no less deserving of your attention, even if it's not really rock'n'roll. But who ever proved ragtime cannot rock?

As time went by, Big Joe began preferring to be recorded with bigger bands, and develop a soul­ful approach in addition to hellraising. To me, he never ever sounds equally convincing in that emploi: I love the big burly guy when he is being the big burly guy, not when he gives us the big burly guy's best impression of a sentimental oaf. But, to his great honor, he never ever mutated into the sentimental oaf completely, not even during the wartime and postwar years when the de­mand for soul-soothing sap and sentimentality increased so much that crooners and balladeers al­most threatened to exterminate the world of popular music altogether.

In addition to cutting one single after another of similar-sounding, but always exciting jump blues, Big Joe had a solid knack of teaming up with all sorts of mega-players — or, rather, the mega-players always liked it when Big Joe came around, because what better stimulus can there be to tighten up one's playing than have it matched with one of the greatest blues shouters in the area? Credits here range from the already mentioned Meade Lux Lewis to Coleman Hawkins (a cheer­ful version of 'Shake It And Break It', originally made important by the grim Charley Patton); the incomparable Art Tatum (Big Joe dropped by Art's band in 1941 to sing 'Rock Me Mama'); Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew (some cuts from the early 1950s, right before his move to Atlan­tic), and plenty of others.

Even so, after cavorting with all that jazz nobility, Big Joe still took the time to get together with ol' Pete Johnson occasionally; their two-part tour-de-force on 'Around The Clock' from 1947 is one of the compilation's major highlights, and was later appropriated by Chuck Berry to form the basis of 'Reelin' And Rockin'. Right next to is the slightly cornily staged, but still entertaining 'Battle Of The Blues' between two of the epoch's biggest belters — Big Joe and Wynonie Harris, and as much as I respect Mr. Harris, my sympathies are clearly on Big Joe's side.

Of course, as a singer, Big Joe does not have the required versatility to easily last one through one hundred tracks of material — were it not for the constant rotation of musical whizz kids, at some point the monotonousness would be unbearable. He pretty much sings everything in the same key, tone, and manner, be it blues, ballad, or boogie-woogie: subtlety and modulation be damned. If the public did not clearly catch on to his style in the very beginning, there is little wonder that he couldn't locate the proper market for fifteen years after the fact, not before Ahmet Ertegun started having all the right ideas about correlating him with proper material.

Still, it should be stated very clearly that those fifteen years were not merely a preliminary foot­note to the Atlantic period, and that stuff on the level of 'Roll 'Em Pete', 'Around The Clock', and 'Café Society Rag' is every bit as much a cornerstone of XXth century American pop music lega­cy as 'Shake, Rattle & Roll'. In the light of which, thumbs up despite all the filler; as for the At­lantic period, this will be taken up in the next review, since the Proper Records boxset stops dead in its tracks around 1954, right in the middle of that period.