Wes Montgomery: The Small Group Recordings

There's an unwritten law in this household that our protracted Sunday morning breakfasts are accompanied by jazz. Nothing too challenging, but jay-azz nonetheless. And the other Sunday, the Good Wife announced that these small group recordings by the great guitarist, Wes Montgomery, are the perfect accompaniment for pancakes and coffee.

It's one of those Verve 'select double' collections that came out in the mid '70s and in this case it's basically the renowned Smokin' At The Half Note album with a few extras: three restored slower numbers that were originally rejected from the Half Note album, then dressed up with superfluous orchestration for subsequent release; and two long mellow grooves recorded with a more restrained Jimmy Smith, the dynamic Hammond organist, and one of my Latin heroes, 'Mr. Hard Hands', the conguero Ray Barretto.

The Half Note tracks do indeed smoke without kicking up the kind of conflagration that would distract you from your pancakes. This was what made the man with the 'golden thumb' unique. I've always loved the notion that brother Wes – who recorded in the pre-Verve days on the Riverside label, sometimes with older brother, Buddy, on piano and vibes, and younger brother, Monk, on bass – developed an ability to kick up a quiet storm by using his thumb rather than a plectrum for practice sessions so as not to annoy the neighbours.

Apparently, some pretentious English critic expounded a theory that his use of the thumb 'reflects a repressed racial minority's eternal quest for that which will make him stand apart from his former masters'. It sounds like the stuff of some particularly specious doctorate of philosophy. Wes himself was more lucid. 'I went into the back room of the house and started using the flat part of my thumb to pluck the strings,' he explained. 'Then, to make it even quieter, I began the octave thing, playing the melody line in two different registers at the same time'.

Not, alas, being a musician, I can never hope to understand 'the octave thing', but I do know that it produced an instantly recognisable unique sound. George Benson came close, but you can tell – as indeed George never denied – that it was a case of the master's apprentice. Comparing the single-note technique of my other favourite jazz guitarist, Grant Green, as sharp as a well-honed plectrum, highlights what makes Wes Montgomery's octave technique, based on muted mellow chords, quite so different.

Another guitar great, Pat Metheny, apparently learnt how to play by listening to the Half Note album. The Half Note no longer exists, but it was reputedly small and intimate and the feeling of the audience's proximity as you listen to the music helps to give the session such an engaging feel. It's one of the last great moments of Old Wes before the onset of New Wes: in other words an uncluttered small group recording like his Riverside classics, this time in the company of Miles Davis's former rhythm section of pianist Wynton Kelly, the great Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, before the last commercial temptation of the boss guitarist got the better of him.

Wes started and finished early. He began learning the guitar when he was a  12-year old growing up in Indianopolis, switching from four to six strings at 20 after hearing Charlie Christian, the pioneer of the jazz guitar. He died of a heart attack at the tender age of 43, again in Indianopolis. For the last two years or so of his life, he experienced the kind of commercial success that was unprecedented for an era when jazz was the poor relation to rock music.

Jazz purists, of course, were none too happy and it's a shame that Wes Montgomery's greatness has always been a little mitigated by the slur of selling out. On the last side of this double record, the two long tracks with Jimmy Smith, 'James and Wes' and 'Mellow Mood', recorded less than two years before his premature demise, suggest that he could have kept on creating on beautiful simple swinging music right up until the end. But Wes was a family man, who held down a day job manufacturing radio parts while gigging in the evenings for six years before first achieving critical success, so who could possibly blame him for succumbing to the filth of lucre?

At its worst, New Wes was overblown and saccharine, but the lack of taste was more that of the producers. At its best, there are still some isolated gems, like the wonderful 'Sun Down' – a basic blues with the addition of some extraneous brass only right at the end – from the album California Dreaming, which has been described as 'basic pop fluff'.

Personally, I've never bothered with the late, late Montgomery. I'm with Pat Metheny, happy to stick with this splendid double and glad to enjoy unembellished versions of Errol Garner's 'Misty' and the beautiful 'Willow Weep for Me'. Given that he lived such a short life, it's nice to think that this truly great guitarist enjoyed both critical and commercial success. What's more, the functionaries of Indianapolis named a park after their famous son. That's something which Lesley Knope and her colleagues from our family-favourite American sitcom, Parks & Recreation, would applaud.

Maiden Voyage

Credit where credit's due. When I worked at an unemployment benefit office in a well-known resort on the south coast of England, a befuddled young man released from the safety net of higher education, I was befriended by a human problem known to his fellow officers as the poisonous dwarf. Since no one wanted to deal with the problem, he was offloaded onto the section of a new and callow supervisor who knew nothing outside the covers of a modern American novel. Moi.

Predictably, he proved a pain in the rear. Even though I would have come to it eventually under my own steam, give the fellow some Brownie points, he did introduce me to Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. It seems hardly credible that such a sociopathic little snot-rag would have appreciated anything of such intricate beauty, but maybe the private person behind the public persona was not quite so obnoxious. He was certainly fervent enough in his enthusiasm for Herbie's earliest masterpiece almost to force it into my hands. There was no alternative but to listen to it.

I knew the gorgeous title track – one of the most hummable and beguiling melodies in the whole of jazz – via Brian Auger & the Trinity's fine album, Befour. But I couldn't believe at that point in my musical education that any modern jazz album could be consistently up to such quality. It is. In fact, I realised on first playing it back at home, that I knew both the opening title track and the final, equally beautiful 'Dolphin Dance' – via one of Grover Washington jr.'s polished if somewhat samey albums.

Book-ended by two such indelible melodies, Maiden Voyage is one of the most accessible jazz records of the modern age. Yet my initial unease was born out to a degree by the chaotic fury of 'The Eye of the Hurricane' and 'Survival of the Fittest', both of which – take out of context – could be considered a little challenging.

In between these two more difficult tracks, lies the beautifully hypnotic 'Little One', taken at an even slower tempo than the version which appears on Miles Davis' ESP. The link between these two great albums is not serendipitous. Hancock recorded Maiden Voyage with the other two members of the rhythm section that propelled Miles Davis' legendary quintet of the 1960s – with Freddie Hubbard substituting for Miles himself on trumpet and one of my unsung heroes of the tenor saxophone, the surprisingly delicate 'Big George' Coleman, sitting in for Wayne Shorter.

Taken all together, too, the five extended tracks work thematically in the way that the five tracks of Miles' earlier Kind Of Blue, say, slide one after another into a modal suite. Given such obviously thematic titles as 'Maiden Voyage', 'The Eye of the Hurricane' and 'Dolphin Dance', it's easy as you listen to picture in your mind some sailing vessel negotiating the wind-tossed waves of 'Hurricane' and 'Survival of the Fittest' to reach the final calm of 'Dolphin Dance'. Which is one reason why individual tracks lifted onto a Best of compilation can never work as well as they do in the context of the album. And which is one reason why Jazzwise magazine selected it as one of their '100 albums that shook the world'.

When you think that another listed Herbie Hancock album, The New Standard, was recorded more than 40 years later, it gives you an idea of how incredible has been the pianist's durability. Part of that, I suppose, comes from his willingness – like that of his former employer – to explore new musical frontiers. In between the two albums came Herbie Hancock's other indisputable unalloyed masterpiece, Headhunters, which more or less created the template for jazz-funk. The ridiculously infectious funk of 'Chameleon' would serve as a soundtrack to my one and only year in a hall of residence.

Not long after that, my brother drove his girlfriend and me to the French Alps to visit an old friend. Never shy of spending a bob or two on the latest technology, he had an in-car stereo cassette player that bettered any others I have heard since. I only have to hear his disco-era vocod-ified Columbia hit, 'I Thought it was You', and I'm transported straight back to a long tree-lined road rising gently but relentlessly up from the environs of Grenoble to the dark ominous mountain peaks ahead.

Thankfully, I don't think of the poisonous dwarf every time I hear Maiden Voyage. Instead, it continues to delight and wonder as it reinforces my conviction that it was the finest hour of one of the jazz world's most charming, intelligent and innovative artists – and, for me, one of the five greatest jazz albums made during my lifetime.

Southern Nights

Well, it's the Toussaint holiday here in France: that dreary time of year when autumn is just starting to merge with winter and families place chrysanthemums on the graves of their predecessors. And since my November radio show is a tribute to the great singer, songwriter, pianist, producer and generally gracious individual who left his native New Orleans roughly a year ago for a celestial destination unknown, what more appropriate subject for La Vie en Albums than Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights?

It's a crying shame that his death wasn't marked by a special show to celebrate his life on the BBC. Only the cognoscenti appreciate that this modest man, in terms of the history of black music, was every bit as influential as Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Gamble & Huff, James Brown and others of their kidney. There may yet be a documentary on BBC Four, but then I suppose the discreet charm of this delightful man wouldn't have been quite so discreet had he been as lauded as he deserved.

Even as a songwriter (although probably for contractual reasons), he often hid his light under a bushel: as his alter ego, Naomi Neville (his mother). Mr. Toussaint and/or Mrs. Neville wrote so many songs that it's almost impossible to log them. Even as a fledgling Music O'Phile, I encountered him subliminally as the author/producer of Lee Dorsey hits that were occasionally aired on Top Of The Pops. 'Holy cow, what ya doin' now?' Working in a coalmine, actually. Or sitting in la-la, waiting for my ya-ya.

No, clearly it wasn't profound stuff. He was keeping that, I should imagine, for occasional solo projects like Southern Nights and it's only-marginally-inferior successor, Motion. But when it came to hit records, my! could he churn them out. And the thing about the genres of New Orleans rhythm & blues and soul that Allen Toussaint did so much to popularise is that the lyrics are often little more than an excuse for that infectious, quirky and quite unique rhythm.

Jessie Hill's 'Ooh Poo Pah Doo' for example is pure pounding onomatopoeia. If it's still out there, you can find it among many other mini masterpieces on a compilation released by the Charly label in the late '80s: Mr. Joe's Jambalaya. I bought it as a cassette and duplicated it almost immediately in case anything untoward should happen to it. Certainly it was never allowed anywhere near a car, to risk being chewed and spewed by a cassette player.

The Mr. Joe in question is Joe Banashak, a local impresario who founded Minit and a stable of tiny independent sister labels, for all of which Toussaint became the sine qua non. He's there as producer, songwriter and/or session pianist on everything from Ernie K. Doe's 'Mother-In-Law' to Irma Thomas's southern soul classic, 'Ruler Of My Heart', which Otis Redding would modify to 'Pain In My Heart'. And, although you won't find them for some inexplicable reason on this particular compilation, Mr. T. was also responsible for Benny Spellman's 'Fortune Teller' (to be covered by the Stones and a million others) and, my personal favourite, Chris Kenner's delirious 'Land of 1,000 Dances', which even knocks spots off 'Wicked' Wilson Pickett's subsequent classic. 

After a stint in the army, Toussaint teamed up with music publisher Marshall Sehorn to found the Sansu organisation, which incorporated more boutique indie labels, for whom Toussaint continued to play, write and produce. The customary common denominator on records by the likes of the good Dr. John was a house band synonymous, like Booker T. & the MGs up in Memphis, with some of the funkiest sounds ever put down by a four-piece. The name of the eight-legged beast was The Meters and it was via the Meters – and albums like Fire On The Bayou and Rejuvenation – that I finally, at last, came to the shadowy maestro who pulled the musical strings.

By the time Southern Nights came out in 1975, as Toussaint's third solo ablum, the Sansu team had opened the Sea-Saint studios in New Orleans. Artists from far and wide were now coming there in search of the magic touch: the Pointer Sisters, when they were still a kind of retro black Andrews Sisters; that wonderful vocal trio, the Mighty Diamonds, for a misguided attempt to blend reggae with Noo Orlinz soul; the mighty Labelle, for the monumental 'Lady Marmalade'; and a whole host of disparate others, including Robert Palmer of all people. I heard the title track of his Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley LP at a small free festival in a former graveyard near the centre of Bath and thought, I've got to have this NOW! (unaware that it, too, was written by Allen Toussaint

for Lee Dorsey).

The modest Monsieur Toussaint openly admitted to being much happier behind the scenes, which probably explains why he produced so few albums under his own name. The irony is that he had a lovely velvety tenor voice and could play the piano as fluidly as his hero and R&B forerunner, Professor Longhair, and his contemporary collaborator, Dr. John. He had the studio set-up, a coterie of finest local musicians (including all four Meters) and, above all, he had the songs. The mushy dame to whom I'm married only has to hear the song 'Southern Nights' and she dissolves into jelly. She has never knowingly dissolved to Glen Campbell's jauntier hit version of the song.

Late of the Steve Miller Band, Boz Scaggs picked the beautiful ballad on the same side of Southern Nights as the title track, 'What Do You Want The Girl To Do?' to adorn his hit album, Silk Degrees, just as he had picked on Aaron Neville's fabulous 'Hercules', another Toussaint classic, for its predecessor, Slow Dancer. Goodness me, it's like a severe case of six degrees of separation. But then it would be difficult not to mention the name Allen Toussaint in the same breath as that of the music of New Orleans.

Southern Nights is replete with up-tempo funky numbers like 'Basic Lady' and the opening 'Last Train', moody soulful pieces like 'Cruel Way To Go Down' and the memorable ballads I've already cited. It also has the distinction of echoing its title track before rather than after its actual appearance, as a link between the penultimate and the final track on the first side. It all adds up to probably the finest example of his more personal and less commercial work.

One of those commercial songs goes by the title of 'Everything I Do Is Going To Be Funky'. Everything he did was also marked by the kind of style and grace that anyone who has ever seen the documentary Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together will appreciate. Although he never thought of himself as a performer, his performance on-film suggests not only a superb pianist in his own right, but a raconteur and educator able to illustrate so compellingly some of the otherwise indefinable qualities that make New Orleans rhythm & blues so magical.

The Smiths' 'This Charming Man' might have been written with Allen Toussaint in mind and it's no accident that another cultured man, the soon-to-be ex-President Obama, had the sense and judgement to award him the National Medal of Arts. How lovely that, for once, such an accolade came in his lifetime. Two years later Allen Toussaint died of a heart attack. He was 'only' 77, but what a packed and creative life he led and what a legacy he left.

Rufusized

I had a brief love affair with Chaka Khan. It didn't, alas, come to much. In fact, without wishing to sound too sexist about it, my ardour died somewhat after seeing her on an episode of The Tube. Dressed in fish-net tights and thigh-length black leather boots and sporting about half as much weight again as the already buxom 'wild child' with a huge ear-to-ear smile on the cover of Rufusized, she looked well, frankly rough.

As she sings on the album, anticipating her biggest solo hit, 'I'm a woman/I'm a backbone'. She sho' 'nuff was. And for a few years, Chaka Khan, Chak-Chak-Chaka Khan, was here, there and everywhere. She was the queen of soul during the interregnum between Aretha Franklin and... well, who is the queen of modern soul? Probably not Erykah Badu, certainly not Angie Stone, possibly not even Sharon Jones with or without her Daptones.

In any case, Rufus were more on the cusp of rock and soul, which made this album a perfect point of departure at a period of my life when my main focus was shifting from rock to black music in all its wonderful facets. A mixed-race five-piece band, they were in many ways the heirs to the throne that Sly & the Family Stone had recently vacated and the album is full of songs that feature hard rocking rhythms driven by the swirling organ associated with Sly's band of troubadours and the chugging wah-wah guitar passed on by James Brown. It's surely no coincidence that drummer André Fischer had been part of Curtis Mayfield's group, another pioneer of the soul/rock genre.

The Curtis connection is a clue to the group's origins: in the Windy City of Chicago, home to the Curtom label (and of course Chess and Vee-jay). Chaka, apparently, was an ardent young fan of the group and befriended the band's original vocalist, who persuaded the other band members on leaving them to sign up her young friend. She even stayed on long enough to coach the future star through the band's repertoire. Now that's what I call a friend.

At that point, the band didn't really look like it was going places. Their first album sank with almost no trace, but – in recording it and its successor in LA – they hooked up with a couple of Fischer's mates whose guitar and bass would give the band the funkier edge they needed for long-term success.

The apogee of the six-piece Rufus Mk1 is the infectious 'Tell Me Something Good', which was given to the band by Stevie Wonder when he heard them recording their second album in the studio. This remarkably generous gesture is reminiscent of Lennon and McCartney giving the Stones their first hit, 'I Wanna Be Your Man'. Almost as compellingly funky as 'Superstition', 'Tell Me Something Good' became a Grammy-winning million-selling hit single and in the process must have earned the group's benefactor a fistful of royalties.

The replacement chantousse obviously exuded star quality and the second album, Rags To Rufus, went platinum. I must have picked up on the surrounding publicity when Rufusized was recorded and rush-released the same year (1974). One particular first-year student spent too big a part of his parent's parsimonious financial contribution on a gatefold copy. Already by now the band was billed as 'Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan', which would serve, ominously, as the fourth album's title.

Rufusized starts and concludes with its two best tracks: the dynamic brass-infused 'Once You Get Started' (oh it's hard to stop), with Chaka Khan's utterly irresistible high-octane vocals, and the simmering Bobby Womack-penned 'Stop On By', whose relentless shuffling groove leads the tone-arm to its final resting place. In between, there are plenty of good numbers, mainly up-tempo and funky, including the instrumental title track that showed how the group could, for now, get along well enough without their star vocalist.

It certainly hooked me and from Rufusized I first went backwards to its less polished, earthier predecessor and then forwards to several later releases, including the Quincy Jones production, Masterjam, which is the only one of those later albums that would remain on my shelves. Part of the problem perhaps derived from the customary situation of the singer outgrowing the group. Internal tensions led to changes in personnel and, perhaps, to Chaka Khan's first, eponymous, solo album – which gave the world the immortal 'I'm Every Woman'.

The situation wouldn't have been helped by the fact that Chaka's solo efforts sold like hot cakes, while Rufus albums without her sank like mobsters in the Chicago River. Chaka Khan would return for a couple of albums to fulfil contractual obligations, but apart from the wonderful 'Ain't Nobody', they were fairly forgettable. Nevertheless, the divine Miss Khan and what became effectively her backing band would both earn nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Chaka Khan would also go on to publish a co-authored autobiography, but such is the extent to which my ardour diminished over the years that I never bothered to investigate. I'm content enough now to listen to her belting it out on 'Once You Get Started', 'Ain't Nobody' or 'I'm Every Woman', that lithesome imp with a radiant smile that spoke of the vitality of youth and a self-confident belief in her future.