Legends on Parade:
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The “Flying Home” solo is often regarded as a paradigm for the tenor saxophone in rhythm and blues. Although plenty of horn players presaged Jacquet’s extroverted excess–nearly every trick in the book had already been used to comic effect by vaudevillians like Wilton Crawley and Rudy Wiedoeft–Jacquet alone pretty much galvanized the blustery, bar-walking jump-blues sax style. He never really moved on to that style himself, remaining faithful to jazz. But back in the 40s, it wasn’t so clear what jazz was: the lines between swing, bebop, and R & B were still being drawn, and the overlap made for some exciting music. You can hear the styles evolving for yourself on three new CDs from the local Delmark label, all reissues from the vaults of Apollo Records, a New York label that specialized in gospel, jazz, and R & B.
The best of the lot, not surprisingly, is Jacquet’s Jumpin’ at Apollo, a collection of sextet and octet recordings the tenor man made between 1945 and ’47. Surrounded by a slew of top-notch jazz players–including bassist Charles Mingus, drummer Denzil Best, trumpeter Joe Newman, baritone saxophonist Leo Parker, guitarist Freddie Green, and pianists Bill Doggett and Sir Charles Thompson–he blows with full-bore gusto almost all the time, whether the song at hand is a tender ballad like “She’s Funny That Way” or the barnstorming “Bottoms Up” (essentially “Flying Home” with the chord progression flipped). The high-velocity charge of “Diggin’ the Count” races with the exaggerated speed of bebop, but in the solo, where your average bopper would let loose with an endless string of tricky sixteenth notes, Jacquet goes for some low-down honking instead. Blues shouter Wynonie Harris is featured on a couple selections from 1945, further proof of the mushy border between jazz and R & B at the time.
I was just a kid in 1977, when Johnny Paycheck scored a number one country hit with “Take This Job and Shove It,” but it only reinforced my juvenile belief that country music was only for rednecks. And even after discovering George Jones, Hank Williams, and Webb Pierce and realizing the error of my ways, until recently I continued to think of Paycheck as a hokey yokel. If you still do, you might start your reprogramming as I did, with The Real Mr. Heartache: The Little Darlin’ Years (Country Music Foundation), a 1996 collection of hard-core honky-tonk, cut between 1964 and ’68, that illustrates his finesse as a singer and his envelope-pushing songwriting. His “Apartment #9” was a hit for Tammy Wynette; more recently his gripping “(It’s a Mighty Thin Line) Between Love and Hate” has been covered by Kelly Hogan, and the psychologically twisted gem “(Pardon Me) I’ve Got Someone to Kill” is resurrected by Lonesome Bob on the new Pine Valley Cosmonauts album.
