Chris Albertson (1931–2019)

The writer, producer, and Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.

Chris was a generous person in the world of music. His blog Stomp Off! (still online) offered remarkable stuff from his archives: interviews with Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby Walker, recordings of the Duke Ellington band at a benefit concert hosted by Jackie Robinson, a Charles Mingus television appearance. (Alas, some of the audio and video files appear long gone.) I read everything, linked to a number of posts, commented on occasion, and am now surprised to see that Orange Crate Art appears in a Stomp Off! list of “cyber stops.” I wish I’d known so that I could have said thanks.

Thank you, Chris Albertson, for all your contributions to music.

Russell Procope and relativity

I like this brief exchange from Chris Albertson’s 1979 interview with clarinetist and alto saxophonist Russell Procope (1908–1981). From 1946 to 1974, Procope was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Here Procope recalls his growing awareness of older musicians in the mid-to-late 1920s:

Procope: They used to talk about Joe Oliver and Johnny St. Cyr, and all those old guys, you know.

Albertson: They weren’t really that old then.

Procope: Well, they were older than I was. I was about seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; they were probably about twenty-five. I called them old. [Laughs.]

The cornetist and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver was born in 1885; the banjoist and guitarist Johnny St. Cyr, in 1890. By the mid-to-late ’20s, they were past twenty-five, though hardly old. But age varies with perspective, right? Older than you is old.

Chris Albertson’s interview offers the rare opportunity to hear Russell Procope talk about his life and work: Part One, Part Two. And here, courtesy of YouTube, is one of Procope’s finest moments with Ellington, “Second Line,” from New Orleans Suite (1970).

Joya Sherrill (1927–2010)

The news comes this morning from Chris Albertson’s Stomp Off in C that the singer Joya Sherrill has died. She sang with Duke Ellington in the 1940s (and again in 1957 and 1963), starting in July 1942, with her mother as chaperone:

“I opened in Chicago at the College Inn in the Hotel Sherman, July of 1942. Ivie Anderson, I shall never forget, was still with the band. You called me to sing ‘Mood Indigo’ (it was Ivie’s song), and she pulled me back before I walked out to sing, and said, ‘Sing it good, or I’ll come behind you and sing it too!’ I was terrified, but determined to do a good job.”

Quoted in Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

Here, from 1943, is a sample of Sherrill’s work with Ellington: “The Blues,” from Black, Brown and Beige.

Joya Sherrill later hosted two children’s television shows on WPIX in New York. Here, from 1970, are the surviving audio clips of Duke Ellington’s appearance on Time for Joya. Listen as Sherrill sings “Heritage” and Ellington answers children’s questions and mistells the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Sherrill and the kids then correct him. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, it’s charming and hilarious, and thank goodness that it lives on.

[To listen to .ram files without RealPlayer, use VLC media player.]

Bill Withers and John Hammond

I’ve been following writer and record-producer Chris Albertson’s posts at Stomp Off in C on record-producer John Hammond. (There are now one, two, three, four, five of them.) Scanning recent issues of the New Yorker this morning, I noticed this passage in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece on Bill Withers and the documentary film Still Bill:

Though the movie captures Withers criticizing the CBS A. & R. man who suggested that he cover Elvis Presley‘s “In the Ghetto,” in the eighties, his fiercest riposte to the white “blaxperts” can be found in an interview filmed for the 2005 reissue of “Just As I Am.”

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

“CBS A. & R. man”: I’m guessing that New Yorker scruples about fact-checking require that the name be absent. But the paragraph that follows certainly implies that “In the Ghetto” was John Hammond’s idea.

Read and watch
Bill Withers (official site)
Still Bill (movie site)

Demythifying John Hammond

Writer and record-producer Chris Albertson has been at work demythifying John Hammond:

[M]any of John Hammond’s accomplishments were genuine and important enough to earn him the place he occupies in jazz history, which is why I found it so puzzling that he was making things up.

Discovering John Hammond: A Closer Look: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five (Stomp Off in C)

Other people too make things up: a 2005 PBS American Masters episode about John Hammond credits him with “discovering,” among others, Bessie Smith, Pete Seeger, and Robert Johnson. Oy. Hammond produced Smith’s final recordings in 1933. He signed Seeger to Columbia Records (first Columbia Seeger LP: 1961). And Robert Johnson was already dead when Hammond tried to find him for the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.”

“Lush Life” plus

Chris Albertson (writer, producer, Bessie Smith biographer) has posted the 1964 recording of Billy Strayhorn performing “Lush Life.” But it’s a recording with a difference: preceding the performance is a conversation between Duke Ellington and the radio personality William B. Williams. As their conversation makes clear, this performance was being broadcast on WNEW. Oh 1964 airwaves.

Related reading
Billy Strayhorn centenary