1. Time's Getting Tougher than Tough
2. How Long Blues
3. Corina, Corina
4. C.C. Rider
5. Roll 'Em Pete
6. Every Day
7. Goin' To Kansas City
8. Outskirts Of Town
9. Trouble In Mind
10. St. Louis Blues

• Mel Lewis
• Gerry Mulligan
• Jimmy Rowles
• Leroy Vinnegar
• Ben Webster
• Jimmy Witherspoon

December 2 & 9, 1959

 LINER NOTES

Thus we have the Rolling Stones and Cream going back to Robert Johnson and Skip James, just as Elvis Presley, a few years before, had gone back to Big Boy Crudup.

But as a result of the interest in blues precipitated by the rock groups, another area of black American blues was at first passed by, an area now coming into its own.

Young black singers, growing up in the 30s and 40s in urban America, drew on the musical roots available to them from records and from the black entertainment world and were heavily influenced by the big band jazz styles of the time.

Jimmy Witherspoon is an almost perfect example of this. His repertoire combines elements of practically every category of early blues. He sings Leroy Carr's "How Long Blues" which was one of the most successful blues compositions of the 30s as well as "C. C. Rider," with its debt to both Ma Rainey and to more recent versions. He accepts "Roll 'Em Pete," a Kansas City urban swing era feature of the music of Joe ("Shake, Rattle & Roll") Turner and the boogie woogie pianist Pete Johnson. He adopts Memphis Slim's "Every Day," using the version that was a hit in the 50s for Count Basie and Joe Williams as a base. He sings "Goin' to Kansas City," without reference to the Wilbert Harrison version but faithfully clinging to the original Lieber-Stoller script. He goes back to the classic blues of the 20s for W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" and Richard M. Jones' "Trouble in Mind," made into a blues standard when 'Spoon was a child by Bertha "Chippie" Hill. And in "Outskirts of Town," he picks up on another standard blues, itself an example of multi-influenced blues songs. Originally the creation of an obscure singer named William (Casey Bill) Weldon, it was featured by Big Bill Broonzy and then fed into the mainstream of jazz by a Count Basie big band recording with Jimmy Rushing.

'Spoon's impact on the blues scene in the 50s was substantial. First, with the Jay McShann band (a moderately successful Kansas City group which earlier had leatured Charlie Parker) and then on his own, 'Spoon brought new life to many different kinds of blues material such as the ones noted above and including the ancient "Ain't Nobody's Business" (recorded by Bessie Smith a few months before 'Spoon was born in 1923). He also had a minor hit in his first recording of the aid Big Bill Broonzy specialty,"When I Been Drinkin',"and then turned to his own contemporary Roy Brown for "Good Rockin' Tonight," written by Oakland blues specialist Bob Goddins but popularized by Brown.

Witherspoon brought to everything he did an ability to concentrate emotion in his voice and a gift for phrasing that was heightened by his association with the jazz players. Singing the blues (or anything else) with the accompaniment of the guitar alone allows for a less rigid bar structure and demands a less strict adherence to key and tonal rules than singing with piano or orchestral accompaniment. This is evident in any comparison of singers from the two schools. 'Spoon's sense of time and his phrasing is closely allied to jazz and although, like Ray Charles, he can bring to his performance elements of black church vocal music, he does it sparingly.

Jimmy Witherpsoon's training as a blues singer came in the jazz era and as a singer in a band which was basically a jazz band, in the Kansas City tradition of Count Basis and Andy Kirk. The McShann group played and featured the blues ('Spoon's predecessor was the underrated Walter Brown) but the style and the instrumentation was jazz all the way. During his tour of duty in the Coast Guard in World War 11, 'Spoon deepened his jazz influence and when he came back to the commercial entertainment world upon his discharge, the big band era was over and the time of the small blues group- the era just before the emergence of rhythm & blues as a recognizable style-was in full force.

Small blues groups of that time emphasized tight rhythm combining 4/4 and 2/4 in a style the most successful examples of which were Louis Jordan and The Savoy Sultans. They were not electric bands, frequently not even having a guitarist at all; the Chicago electric guitar bands centering around Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters emerged because the singers were already guitar players from the rural tradition. Witherspoon and his contemporaries were singers, not instrumentalists, and they went back in spirit, no matter what their repertoire, to the singers with the big bands, to men like Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie, Walter Brown with Jay McShann, Pha Terrell with Andy Kirk, Al Hibbler with Boots and His Buddies (and later Duke Ellington) and Herb Jeffries. They were drawn to a night club and dance hall style that was more sophisticated than the Chicago singers and the country blues men and which included popular ballads in addition to the blues. Many of the blues songs which they featured were blues ballads combining the blues form with aspects of the standard ballad structure of popular music. Despite their ability to sing the blues, they were striving for appeal to an audience reflecting the more broadly popular ballad styles of the time. And of all of these singers, Witherspoon consistently maintained the closest adherence to the roots of blues in style and feeling as well as in the older blues material he sang.

Thus when Jimmy Witherspoon made his return to the scene after several years of obscurity in his highly successful appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1959, he could and did instantly fit with a group of jazz musicians applying the techniques of both styles.

Witherspoon had all but disappeared from view by 1959 and was only found after a long search and brought to Monterey. His appearance there was so successful that it launched him once more on the path of success, just as Willie Mae "Big Mamma" Thornton was to be similarly re-discovered on that same stage and similarly launched a few years later.

The blues, as music, despite its international artistic stature today, was definitely controversial in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Many singers from that time, including Jimmy Rushing and Witherspoon, were subject to pressure from family and friends not to sing the blues because it was considered profane music. Jimmy Witherspoon's mother, for instance, had never heard him sing the blues in public until the Monterey Festival. A woman of deep religious convictions, she had always refused to enter a night club and Witherspoon had always sung professionally in either a night club or a dance hall. Thus it was a highly emotional moment (referred to by 'Spoon during the performance) for him to sing with his mother present in the audience.

The accompaniment for Witherspoon on the two concerts which comprise this collection includes some of the greatest performers in jazz. All of them incorporate in their playing experience deep acquaintance with the blues, but Ben Webster, the tenor saxophonist, a veteran of the Southwestern blues bands of Texas and Oklahoma long before he came to prominence with Duke Ellington, was particularly steeped in the blues tradition. His instrumental exchange here with Witherspoon is a perfect example of the mixture of jazz and blues which was an especially important strain in the jazz tradition of the 30s and 40s and survives now really only in such older performers.

It would probably surprise a traditionalist, yet there certainly is a way in which that label can honestly be applied to him. Right down to today he has continued to exercise his interest in the older blues and to combine them with his own and other contemporary compositions. "Please Give Me Someone to Love," that remarkable humanitarian plea of Percy Mayfield and Chick Morris finds itself in the same program as "Trouble in Mind" or "Ain't Nobody's Business" or "Kansas City" when 'Spoon performs. He, like Taj Mahal, has found a role not only as an interpreter and composer of contemporary songs, but as a traditionalist bringing back to today's audiences important music from a variety of older sources and melding it all together into a highly personal style and repertoire.

-Ralph J. Gleason

The greatest moment in Jimmy Witherspoon's career was his 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival performance fronting an all-star assembly of jazz artists. Fortunately, the gig was recorded and is presented anew on this collection. The reputation of the full-throated, vibrant r&b singer spread from Monterey to Europe, where his tour a few years later was an unqualified success. With the possible exception of Jimmy Rushing, 'Spoon stands alone in his unique and harmonious blending of blues and jazz elements. His distinctive vocal style is heard in the best possible instrumental context in these recordings, made originally for the Hifijazz label.

At The Renaissance

In recent years the growth of the coffee-wine-and-beer houses in Hollywood and environs has become a marked phenomenon. Several years ago at a jazz concert I attended, the master of ceremonies remarked there were some 32 such establishments in Los Angeles. By the close of 1959 (for one inclined toward such statistics) the number may have doubled, even tripled. And a cheerful subsidiary fact is that a great many coffee-beer-and-wineries maintain a steady jazz entertainment policy.

Possibly the word entertainment is not apposite here. Certainly at Ben Shapiro's Renaissance (opposite Ciro's on the Sunset Strip) a majority of the customers come not so much for entertainment but to enjoy the lively arts - of which jazz music surely is the liveliest.

Shapiro's policy of booking good jazz instrumental groups and vocalists reached an apogee of sorts when he had the inspired notion late in 1959 to combine the music of Gerry Mulligan and company with the virile and potent blues singing of Jimmy Witherspoon. As an attraction the owner figured the combination couldn't miss. He was so right. During that memorable engagement the cash register swung so hard it loosened the modern canvases from their wallmoorings and Shapiro was reported seriously considering tossing out the arts-and-crafts shop which occupies the forepart of the premises in order to enlarge the club's seating capacity.

For the booking, Mulligan brought in with him the same personnel with whom he had already recorded an album for Verve Records the great tenor sax giant, Ben Webster, and an indubitably ideal rhythm section of pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Mel "The Tailor" Lewis. The clean, sure and happy way they worked together is plainly manifest in this album. The sessions from which the record was born resulted from a wild and left-field speculation spawned in the mind of Jack Lewerke, one of the hippest record distributors ever to okay a disc shipment. When Lewerke broached the subject of recording Jimmy Witherspoon with the Mulligan-Webster group on location at the club, Hifijazz' artists and repertoire director Dave Axelrod flipped, it is rumoured. Actually, Lewerke was one step ahead of Axelrod. He had already spoken to Mulligan about such an undertaking and the baritonist assuredly dug the idea.

From that point there was no further difficulty. The choice of Ben Webster as balancing horn man was really a foregone conclusion. Axelrod had used Webster in Witherspoon's accompanying group on the highly successful date recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival the previous October, and the tenormans contribution to the musical value of that album was quite inestimable. Happiness became Witherspoon's middle name.

In these days of painstaking preparation for albums ranging from The Chipmunks to Emil Gilels, it would seem appropriate at this point to mention the "long hours of planning and thought" that went into recording 'Spoon and company at the Renaissance. Forget it. The bare bones of organization on which this date was built were completed on a Thursday evening, the following morning Axelrod and Shapiro huddled at the club and agreed to do the date following the a&r man's inspection and okay-for-sound. By 8:00 that night Hifijazz had set up the necessary equipment: by 9:30 p.m. the tapes began to roll on the first take. Here is the result of these two wailing evenings at the Renaissance.

Everest Re-issue & At The Renaissance

Following the master of ceremonies' introductory remarks, Witherspoon kicks off the medium up Time's Gettin' Tougher Than Tough as drummer Lewis lays down a solid foundation beneath him. Webster solos with Lewis' booting phrases backing him. 'Spoon comes in once more for a second vocal, then, after a series of stop-time breaks, winds things up.

Jimmy Rowles' soulful introduction catches the spirit of the slow, mournful How Long blues. Mulligan moves in behind Witherspoon's vocal then goes for himself, his big horn digging deep into the blues. When 'Spoon takes the mike again, Webster noodles in the background until all concerned take it out.

Corina-Corina finds The Tailor laying out the time on top cymbal, riding along behind the vocal, then digging in behind Webster's romping, barking and grunting solo with a rolling eight-beat. As Witherspoon resumes, Jimmy Rowles fills the gaps with piano commentary as the horns riff on to the final chorus.

A slow roll from Mel and 'Spoon launches into the classic C. C. Rider with Webster in background first, then Mulligan murmuring on the second chorus. "Shoot that man, Catch that cannon-ball," 'Spoon exhorts. Then Mulligan enters to play a thoughtful and meaningful solo that must be considered by many his best blues playing on record. After a throbbing Witherspoon cries, "Where did you stay last night?" both horns ride on to the coda.

Roll 'Em Pete is up tempo and jumping. Webster riffs behind the vocal, then embarks on his solo with 'Spoon urging him on. Another vocal, then Jimmy announces "Leroy Vinnegar," and the bassist takes a solo. The Tailor takes two solo choruses with Witherspoon announcing his name and after a final vocal it's "Bye, bye."

Side two kicks off in walking tempo with Rowles bringing in 'Spoon with an oddly happy lament, belting out Every Day. Webster's fine gutty solo concludes with a funky trill to bring in the next vocal chorus.

As both horns ride along behind the singer, it's another rideout ending. On the Outskirts of Town finds Witherspoon soulful and down. Webster comes in behind him to commiserate, then is joined by Mulligan's second voice and both horns moan in sympathy. Ben now breathes the blues all alone before 'Spoon re-enters to enunciate the risque but probably realistic lyric before concluding. Goin' To Kansas City is a jumpin', walkin' reminiscence about "standin' on the corner 12th street and Vine." Mulligan double-times his solo for two choruses, then straight-times his third. 'Spoon speaks out again with the rhythm section belting him on in a real KayCee groove. Trouble In Mind, yet another classic, is lamented by the singer with Webster telling his own story in background. Mulligan solos in almost lyric vein, and 'Spoon calls his name. The singer sums up the message by almost groaning, "Gonna lay my head on some lonesome railroad track . . ." Witherspoon's fervent "Ahh-men" brings in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues with Webster blowing strongly behind him. The Tailor slides into fast tango rhythm on the verse before Ben comes back with a preacher almost guttural in character. Leroy walks a chorus before 'Spoon returns for a final outing with Webster's tenor rooting him home. - John Tynan