F*U*N*K*Y New Year's Eve G*R*O*O*V*E

... comes this year from the Los Angeles-based outfit Senor Soul, from 1969.

Senor Soul released two albums for Double Shot in 1968-69, It's Your Thing being their second; the group was composed by Willie Briggs, Ed Stevenson, J.T. Crump, Howard Talley and Charles Miller. True to their style, their 1969 LP features funky (& soul-jazzy) instrumentals, many of them adapted from known songs (like Proud Mary, Working In The Coalmine and others). The title song It's Your Thing reached the Top 40s R&B. And that's just about all I know about the LP, really. If you got two spare minutes, find out more about their album over at GrooveAddict and Funk-o-logy.

There are two heavy funk pieces on this album, »The Mouse« and »Make The Funk Jump« ... just the right stuff for New Year's Eve. Hear them below!


A peaceful 2013 to all of you!
May everything you desire come true.


Senor Soul: »The Mouse« / »Make The Funk Jump« from the Double Shot LP # DSS-5005 (1969):

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My God, my Freedom

Jewel/Paula ad in Billboard,
Aug. 11, 1973, p. 25

In November 1971, Stan Lewis of Jewel-Paula signed Fontella Bass. »She is the daughter of the great gospel singer, Martha Bass. Fontella was the musical accompanist for her mother and traveled extensively through the country playing Gospel music. In 1969 Fontella and her family moved to Paris, and there she recorded several albums with The Art Ensemble of Chicago. One was the soundtrack of the French film "Les Stances à Sophie." Fontella also has had numerous successes on the domestic scene. Now she'll be released on the Paula label« ran the short Billboard notice a few days later (Dec. 04, 1971, p. 14).

Billboard, Sept. 11, 1971, p. 35

At this time, around 1970-71, Fontella's career was indeed at a turning point. For one thing, she had started to work outside the pop and soul circuit, as with the above-mentioned Art Ensemble of Chicago (The soundtrack LP Les Stances à Sophie was recorded and released in France in July 1970, and in the US only in 1971). For another thing, she was picked up by Jewel-Paula in late autumn 1971 and embarked upon another pop-/soul career. However, the resulting album Free (Paula LPS # 2213, rel. 04/1972) was to be her last LP release in the field of secular music. In August 1973, her LP Free was, justly, described as »an instant success«, and Paula- Jewel announced »plenty of tunes still waiting for release« (BB, Aug. 11, 1973, p. 22). Yet these tunes were never released for their major part, and only some of them are found on the CD re-release of the 1972 Paula LP (Varese/Sarabande 2000).
     Fontella's 1972 LP is certainly, as has often been claimed, a lost jewel in the realm of post-1970 soul music (read a review here). It was arranged and produced by Oliver Sain, Fontella's old mentor, producer and musical manager. Lightyears away from the often shallower pre-1970's productions, this LP comprises a wide array of well-arranged songs: love songs, political songs, and gospel, all adorned and made special by Fontella's outstanding performance. That we find a gospel song on her 1972 Paula LP prefigures the turn her later career took, when she focused mainly on gospel. Although she occasionally appeared live to sing R&B stuff, she only released gospel material after 1972 (apart from less than a handful of other songs exclusively on 45''). An incomplete overview over her post-1972 LP/CD releases would include the following:

• From the Root to the Source (Soul Note LP # 1006, 1980, together with her mother Martha)
• Everlasting Arms (1991)
• No Ways Tired (1995, arranged by James Cleveland and nominated for the 1996 Grammy Award of Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album)
• Speaking In Tongues (1999, together with saxophonist David Murray; read a review by Stan North here)
• Travellin' (Fontella Bass with The Voices of St. Louis, 2001)

From her 1972 Paula LP comes this gospel gem, written by accomplished guitarist Morris Dollison (his real name being said to be Maurice Dollison; he often used his showbiz name Cash McCall) and entitled »My God, My Freedom, My Home«. Musicians and background singers are not credited, so we have to live with the simple fact that it's Fontella singing. But that just about suffices, doesn't it? Ah, by the way, it could well be Fontella herself playing piano on this recording; in any case she did it on a number of other occasions. (If somebody can corroborate this, please let me know.)

Blessed Sunday all!

Fontella Bass: »My God, My Freedom, My Home« from the Paula LP Free (1972):

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Fontella Bass, 1940-2012

From the back cover of Paula LP # 2213 (04/1972) (click to enlarge)

Her wonderful voice on one of the best recordings she ever did: 

Fontella Bass:  »I Want Everyone To Know« from the Paula LP Free (rel April 1972):

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Listen on this blog to other great songs of Fontella Bass:

»My Good Loving« on Prann # 5005 (feat. The Ikettes)

»Poor Little Fool*« / »This Would Make Me Happy« on Vesuvius # 1002 (1963/9) (*feat. Tina Turner)

»Baby What You Want Me To Do« on Checker # 1097 (1965) (with Bobby McClure)

»You'll Miss Me« / »Don't Jump« on Checker # 1111 (1965) (with Bobby McClure)

»Soul Of The Man« / »I'm A Woman« from the Checker LP # 2997 (02/1966, mono)

»I Surrender« / »I Can't Rest« on Checker # 1137 (03/1966)

»Lucky In Love« / »Sweet Lovin' Daddy« on Checker # 1183 (08/1967)

»In The Garden« from the Soul Note LP # 1006 (1980)

Update: August 13, 2013.

Farewell ...

... sweet-timbred light of (my) soul !!!

Fontella Bass: »Rescue Me« from the Checker LP # 2997:

Tuesday's Twosome # 16

April 9, 1966: Billboard announces the release of a certain Tune-Tone LP (about which more in a second). Several months later, in the October 22 issue of the same year, the Billboard announcement is repeated (for whatever reasons) and the said LP was awarded a mediocre 3-star rating; the album was categorised as »popular«. After that, we hear nothing more of the said LP.

Tune-Tone LP # 121 (04/1966)

The artists featured on the said LP are Bonnie & Clem, prominently billed on the cover as »The Aero-Dynamic Singers«. I really have not the faintest idea what this was supposed to mean, and if you search for »Aero-Dynamic Singers« using the various net ressources at our disposal you'll get a mere 0 results. However, the singers are familiar enough, maybe even household names to some aficionados: Bonnie Davis and Clem (Clement) Moorman, wife and husband at this stage of their career (they divorced only several years after in the early 70's).
Bonnie Davis (this being her stage name; for the law she was Gertrude Melba Smith) was born in New Orleans and grew up in Alabama. She met pianist Clem(ent) Moorman in or around 1942 when both worked in Newark. Clem was playing at the local Piccadilly Club, forming the house band, i.e. a trio made up of himself (piano), Al Henderson (bass), and Ernie Ransome (guitar). They soon became the Piccadilly Pipers, Al Henderson was replaced by Henry Padgette, and that's how they finally encountered Bonnie Davis. Bonnie on the other hand was around Newark as a singer with saxophonist Teddy Hill's band and in 1942, when the Piccadilly Pipers were looking for a female singer, all teamed up together. Early on, they also recorded as the »Bunny Banks Trio«. Their first sessions with Savoy produced a #1 R&B hit (»Don't Stop Now«), and their follow-up records during the 1940's were likewise more or less successful. But it was only in 1949 that the group appeared officially, for the first time, as »Bonnie Davis And Clem«. -- Well, this is just a digest of a much longer and more interesting story which was researched in detail by Marv Goldberg (read it here: »The Piccadilly Pipers«). Equally informative proved a long entry at Google Answers, read it here. There, reference is also made to the study of Barbara J. Kukla: Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925-50, Philadelphia 1991 (I haven't checked this reference).

The Piccadilly Pipers (feat. Bonnie Davis)

The Piccadilly Pipers (feat. Bonnie Davis) recorded into the mid-50's, after which Bonnie went to Decca (the group was by then already under contract with Coral, a Decca subsidiary) and started a solo career (of sorts; Clem of the Pipers was playing piano at all her sessions). This didn't lead anywhere, and soon The Piccadilly Pipers were back in business, with changed personnel. They continued to record until the end of the 50's before they finally disbanded. Bonnie & Clem went ahead as a duo, touring supper clubs and lounges, thus sharing the fate which the merciless 1960s had in store for many late-40's/early 50's artists who had lost, it appears, touch with the younger audience, were by now lacking overall success and in any case were regarded by many as relicts of the past; musicallywise they usually offered, or were forced to offer, the somewhat outdated tunes popular in the cocktail lounge circuit which still appealed to an elderly, white middle-class public.

Publicity shots of Bonnie Davis, from the 1950's

Their Tune-Tone LP, released only in 1966 (according to Billboard; Marv Goldberg mentions the earlier date of 1964), was hopelessly outdated when it was released (at least if measuring it at what was current on the charts of the time). In fact, even the portraits of Bonnie & Clem on the cover probably date to the 1950s, as becomes apparent if comparing Bonnie's photo with some of her former publicity shots. Weirdly, the back cover of the album has no complete song list but features, among other things, two short career sketches of Bonnie and Clem and a list of places »both have appeared as a duo«. All texts on the back cover focus heavily on their TV and concert appearances and downplay their former history as »The Piccadilly Pipers«; probably the LP was meant to be sold after their stints in the various clubs. The disc labels yield the following song list:

• A1   No Man Is An Island
• A2   Basin Street
• A3   The Heart Of A Fool
• A4   You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
• A5   Madeira
• A6   All I Want Is You
• B1   Just A Little Lovin'
• B2   Exodus
• B3   Capucciana
• B4   Moonlight In Vermont
• B5   When I Lost You
• B6   It's Alright With Me

Several of these songs were recorded, I presume, in the years before 1966, but I cannot give any dates. »You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You«, for example, was recorded by Bonnie & Clem in 1959 for the first time. Moreover, Clem appears as a duet partner of Bonnie in only about five songs; the rest are Bonnie solos (with Clem on the piano). The two duets which, to my mind, stand out from the rest are »All I Want Is You« and »Just A Little Lovin'«. The first tune is an original Davis-Moorman composition, exhibiting much witty playfulness and even some features of a typical novelty song; the second tune, classically romantic, is much different in mood and performance as you will easily notice ... so in between these songs we can capture the wide range of musical styles Bonnie & Clem could cover with much charm and skill:

Bonnie & Clem: »All I Want Is You« / »Just A Little Lovin'« from the Tune-Tone LP # 121 (1966):

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Anyhow, there are still two things to consider here, one biographical and the other musical.
    The biographical bit: It may not be remembered generally that Gertrude Melba Smith (aka Bonnie Davis) is the mother of known singer Melba Moore. However, the surrounding details are somewhat unclear: Both Bonnie and Clem said later that they fell in love the moment they met in Newark, that is, in 1942 at the latest. Melba was born in 1945 while Bonnie was married still to Teddy Hill (the bandleader of her for- mer engagement), and Melba was nine when Bonnie remarried Clem Moorman. So was she married before to Clem, divorced him sometime before 1945 and remarried him in c.1954? Or maybe the mention of a remarriage is a mistake and Bonnie actually married Clem for the first time in c.1954, although they had been in love for a considerable time before. Melba, in any case, later acknowledged to have been much influenced by her stepfather Clem and even took her stage name »Moore« from Clem's family name »Moorman« (while »Melba« refers, obviously, to her mother). In the July 1970 issue of Ebony (p. 31), we read the following about Melba Moore:

As a child growing up in New York and Newark, she was "turned on" to show biz by her parents, both of whom performed with a group called the Piccadilly Pipers. "I met a lot of people through them," Melba relates, "for they have a great facility for making friends wherever they go. My initial impulse was to get into nightclubs singing and playing the piano, since that's what they do, and I thought I could get started in that most easily. My brothers, my sister and I were all musically inclined and we enjoyed taking lessons. At one time I was really heavy into jazz piano."

   The musical bit: There is one song on this LP, another duet, entitled »Capucciana« (which Bonnie & Clem consistently pronounce »Capuccina«). It obviously is meant to be a funny pun on cappuccino and is partly sung in Italian, one of the myriad of pseudo-Italian songs popular in the early 1960's and impossibly kitschy for my personal taste (but well-suited to a supper club audience which presumably had often its fair share of nostalgic Italo-Americans). Now, there is no such song, really, as »Capucciana«,and the song is little more than an adaption of Nicola Arigliano's hit single »Permettete, Signorina« from 1960. The Italian parts run, in case it is of interest:

          Permettete signorina
          Vi dispiace se vi chiedo di ballar
          Non c'e' bimba piu' carina
          Che mi possa questa sera far sognar   ... ... ...
          O mia bella signorina
          Baciami ancor
          Dammi dammi un bacio
          Un lungo bacio
          E ciao ciao ciao amor!

Bonnie & Clem: »Capucciana« from the Tune-Tone LP # 121 (1966):

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Still Reminiscing ...

... ah well, I am still thinking, with no little nostalgia, about my late summer trip to Greece ... while around here the golden leaves are falling on the ever colder ground and the sun, when she does appear through the misty haze of the autumn sky, struggles more and more every day to reach her meridian over the horizon. At night, the moon is often obscured by batches of dark clouds as if his silver disk is waylaid by a swarm of hungry bats. So best I can come up with today are two songs which dispel my gloomy autumn mood and bring back the memories of sunnier days ... and of places like this, on a lonely beach in southern Crete called Sweetwater:

(Click to enlarge)

When I looked through some of my records, summer songs proved less easy to find than I thought! At the end, I ended up with a version of Gershwin's classic »Summer- time«, by Brenda & The Tabulations (recorded in Philadelphia and released on their one-and-only Dionn LP # 2000 Dry Your Tears in May 1967). Following up their hit »Dry Your Tears«, Brenda & The Tabulations rushed out, as was common, an accompanying album which, for all the speed with which it was produced, contained many covers and known standards, among which the said song. A Billboard critic of the epoch (June 3, 1967 issue, p. 86) nevertheless stated that Brenda's mono version of »Summertime« gives an »excellent treatment« to the tune, so it did no go unnoticed. There will be some out there who have never heard Brenda's version before, and although I do not think that hers is the definitive version of that tune it strikes me as a particularly melancholic version, and the song in itself is essentially melancholic! (Thus it well fits my actual mood ...) Brenda's high-pitched voice, somewhat echoing and distant in the recording, confers an almost mystic atmo- sphere. And mind that at around 02:18 into the song, before the organ sets in, there is a noticeable break which must be due to bad cutting, I guess. In any case, it does not seem caused by the LP nor by the pressing.

As for the second tune, I took it from an album you all know, yet it arguably is - given that almost all songs from this album have become landmark recordings - the least remembered of them all: Aretha Franklin's »Hello Sunshine« from her 1968 Atlantic LP Now. The song was penned, in or little before '68, by King Curtis and Ron(ald/nie) Miller. As you know, Curtis was present in person at the December, 19, 1967 session which produced the track, and the backing vocals are due to none less than The Sweet Inspirations ... Like »Summertime«, »Hello Sunshine« is again a melancholic song, even if Aretha's room-filling powerhouse voice wasn't fitted to produce a version you could call »mystical«. As only she could (and, well, can), she effortlessly blasts the tune away into the blissful heaven of immortal recordings!

Brenda & The Tabulations: »Summertime« from the Dionn LP # 2000 (1967, mono) /
Aretha Franklin (feat. The Sweet Inspirations): »Hello Sunshine« from the Atlantic LP # 8186 (1968):