One Cent Jug: Gene Ammons 100

Gene Ammons - Jaggin'

Hello and welcome to April, and the first of two posts in three days I have set up to go up while I am away dealing with a family situation I will detail in the next one in a couple of days.

Today we have another of those old school Jazz figures of foundation that my page seems to lean on heavily, which doesn't make them any less deserving of attention that too easily goes elsewhere.

This cat would have made triple digits on this day, having been born in 1925 when the Earth was a much, much simpler sphere.

One of the pioneers of the Soul Jazz genre that is such a big basis of Hip-Hop sampling, his breaks have buoyed many a beat in many a banger since he blasted, bodyless, into the bardo over 50 years ago.

He started way back in the 1940s in the band of Billy Eckstine, who immediately dubbed him "Jug" for the straw hats he wore on his rather impressively sized head.

The Eckstine band, in which he played alongside Mount Rushmore Jazz figures like Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker, was just the beginning of his association with the toppermost architects of the then-emerging Bebop revolution.

He then led his first big group, which contained more deities like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt -- whom I covered a while back on his 100th b'day -- before replacing Stan Getz in Woody Herman's big band, The Herd.

In the 1950s he had the rest of Bebop Valhalla in his groups, with mega-musicians then emerging -- like Jackie McLean, Mal Waldron and John Coltrane, to name but a fraction -- entering his orbit.

At the turn of the Fifties to the Sixties he was jailed twice for drug possession, and lost most of the 1960s period to Joliet State Prison.

It was when he emerged from incarceration that he enjoyed arguably his greatest and most prolific, influential moments, when -- as I alluded to earlier -- he began to integrate elements of Soul and Rock into his music.

Those last five years, from 1969 to his untimely passing, from bone cancer, in 1974 saw him come up with a whole slew of albums -- both as a leader and in collaboration with Sonny Stitt, James Moody (we did his centenary, just weeks ago... omg! this is like a graveyard with saxophones in here, isn't it?) and others -- that cemented his generational legacy as a player for all times, that we still revere and reference today.

Maybe the Bluesiest Bebopper ever to blow into brass, he always brought the basis in the music out from within the sometimes frenetic and complicated intervals and changes, with a grainy, almost gutbucket bellowing Blues tone totally suited to the liminal spaces between Jazz and modern popular music.

There's no ROIOs of him that I am aware of, coming from an older generation of Jazz as he does, but I put together just about all his funky soul jams into one two-hour playlist and mashed it all together rather danceably, if I do say so.

Gene Ammons

Funk Jugular

1969-1974

01 Big Bad Jug

02 Brasswind

03 Son of a Preacher Man

04 The Jungle Boss

05 Jungle Strut

06 Lady Sings the Blues

07 Rozzie

08 God Bless the Child

09 Jaggin'

10 Lady Mama

11 Solitario

12 Cantaro

13 Jug Eyes

14 Crazy Mary

15 Something

16 Back In Merida

17 Papa Was a Rolling Stone

18 The People's Choice (w. Sonny Stitt)

19 Ben

20 What's Going On

21 Long Long Time

22 Chicago Breakdown

Total time: 2:00:02

disc break goes after Track 11

a compendium of Jug's most funkified 1970s tracks

selected, assembled & remastered by EN, April 2025
772 MB FLAC/direct link

Things are rough right now, which I'll explain more about in the next post in 48 hours, but I wanted to make sure I fit this Jug of Funky Soul in, in necessary honor of the centennial of the great Gene Ammons!--J.

4.14.1925 - 8.6.1974