Flack History

 

Roberta Flack - Sunday & Sister Jones (OGWT 1973)


You hate to have to write these memorials, but you can't thrash and wail with inassuageable grief too much when someone lives to be 88 years old, after a lifetime no one here will forget maybe ever, can you?
OK, maybe you can... but they're still gonna be as dead as we all are eventually gonna be, and you'll be all out of Kleenex and Häagen-Dazs.
So while we can't sit, shivering (gosh these puns are grounds for homicide in their own right, aren't they?) and pining for the departed, we can be somewhat solemn in remembrance of the beloved deceased.
At least until we get a hold of the sangria stash at the reception after the burial, at any rate.

What is there to say about an artist such as Roberta Flack anyway, what BS could I possibly put here that would add to the conversation that started when she first took over the world 50+ years ago?

She didn't explode and have Johnny Carson crawling around on the floor of the Tonight Show studio right away, you know. It took a couple of years from when Les McCann, who essentially discovered her, first broke her out nationwide from Washington D.C. and her first couple of LPs registered.
It really all came down to Clint Eastwood... it always does, somehow, doesn't it? Do you feel lucky?

It was when he luckily insisted that 1) she allow her version of Ewan MacColl's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which had been released as a single some time before and failed to chart, to be used in his acclaimed directorial debut, Play Misty for Me and, 2) she not re-record it at a faster tempo and in a "rock"-ier arrangement for the film, as she told him she wanted to do when he suggested the song. For contrast, see the version recorded for Top of the Pops at Christmas of 1972 below.

Once it was seen on the big screen, the song and her career went through the roof faster than SpaceX debris from yet another failed launch, crashing into your house in the middle of a bathroom break. Just in the other, more ascending direction.

When she followed that breakthrough with what a whole lot of people contend is the greatest song ever recorded by anyone -- you know, the one where Don McLean strums Lori Lieberman's fate with his fingers, and sings her life with his words, in some sort of songwriters' unspoken, mutually psychic tête-à-tête for the ages -- she ascended to iconhood immediately and stayed there, like royalty, until a few weeks ago when she finally left us.

So many magical songs followed that advent, with solo gems and of course the many duets with galactic luminaries like Donny Hathaway and Peabo Bryson blowing up the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B pages like a neverending fireworks display of absolute, visionary artistry.

It's no kind of hyperbole to suggest that any singer-songwriters now and in the future will not be able to avoid driving on the roads Roberta Flack paved with her almost effortless, otherworldly mastery.

All right, this is a celebration of life, so enough solemnity tears and words of performative, faux gravitas from my pedantically small corner... it's time to get into the sounds, which is what moves the air the right way and what we're here for. And since I strive more and more to make creative stuff and not just post the most common bootlegs verbatim like on any other page, I guarantee it's gonna be firmly in the Not Sold In Stores category.

Roberta Flack
Flack History: Screen Gems
1970-73

01 Angelitos Negros (Boboquivari 1970)
02 Save the Country (Boboquivari 1970)
03 Ballad of the Sad Young Men (Boboquivari 1970)
04 Reverend Lee (Boboquivari 1970)
05 Let It Be (Boboquivari 1970)
06 Do What You Gotta Do (Montreux 1971)
07 Freedom Song (Mike Douglas 1972)
08 Mister Magic (Flip Wilson 1972)
09 Let It Be Me (Flip Wilson 1972)
10 Suzanne (Flip Wilson 1972)
11 Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer (Old Grey Whistle Test 1973)
12 Sunday & Sister Jones (Old Grey Whistle Test 1973)
13 Killing Me Softly (Johnny Carson 1973)
14 Just Like a Woman (Johnny Carson 1973)
15 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (Top of the Pops 1972)
16 Gone Away (Soul to Soul 1971)

Total time: 1:17:19

audio extracted from assorted early 1970s film & television appearances
assembled from the best available sources, edited, repaired & remastered by EN, March 2025
418 MB FLAC/direct link

So yeah, the vocals are little hot at times... the mics they were using back then for TV were largely unable to handle vocals of Roberta's power and range, with the one the poor, underfunded public TV techies used for the Boboquivari PBS segment probably having to be melted down for scrap after the performance. But despite the occasionally less-than-perfect sonics, I put this thing together and made some pretty Houdini-caliber repairs if I do say so, and the result is 77+ minutes of near-total ecstasy courtesy of one of our epoch's greatest Maestros.

That's right, a CD's worth of (mostly) television appearances -- all meticulously remastered individually by me -- and with all live vocals and almost all live accompaniment (no lip synch, mostly live bands), showcasing this sublime superstar's initial climb to the top at the turbulent dawn of the Seven Tease.

That will do it for this month from me, unless I get stir crazy and can't resist doing more. Truth be told, I'm already working on April... come she will and I wanna be ready. But before we close out the March to springtime, I wanted to share this tribute full of screen gems in memory of the divine Roberta Flack, whom I'm obviously not alone in saying is surely one of my favorite music people of all time, bar none.--J.

2.10.1937 - 2.24.2025
painters, why do you always paint White virgins?
Don't you know there are beautiful Black angels
in Heaven also?

Ten Times Tenor: James Moody 100

James Moody Quartet - Gingerbread Boy/Giant Steps

Hey! You there! It's been 48 hours since my last blast of Old Dead Jazz Cat, and you look like you could use some Hard Bop!

March was heavy, with two major league, heavyweight centennials.

What's so cool about Roy Haynes and James Moody is that they shared a stage more than once, most principally in a band Roy hilariously titled The Fountain Of Youth, as it contained no one under the age of 80 at the time.

So by now you've sussed that James Moody -- one of the Hall Of Fame saxophone deities of our age, most certainly -- would have, like a soaring thermometer at the heated height of summertime, hit triple digits today.

Another of those ultra-rare players that's identifiable by a single note due to his unique and organically memorable, woodsy tone, he began as a professional in 1946 when, after discharge from the military, he joined the band of Bop brahmin Dizzy Gillespie.

He led his first session -- for Blue Note, because why not start with the best? -- in 1948, before moving to Europe to escape the dehumanization suffered in the US by the unwhite and unfascist.

That's where he was based and was recording, when in 1952 he had a surprise smash hit with a tune that became both a signature for him and a Jazz standard in general, Moody's Mood for Love.

Having never learned to read music up to this point, he began to study theory and orchestration, and eventually became a highly respected educator in the Music realm.

After a million sessions and tours with his own bands and guest shots with others -- including a return to Gillespie's orbit in the mid 1960s and experiments with funk and soul stylings in the funky, soulful '70s -- he settled on the late-career quartet that appears in the main part of today's (oh yes it's good) concert.

This one is, as far as I could determine, nearly totally uncirculated, and was likely dubbed by the soundperson at the desk on the first night of this festival, at the Skidmore College Jazz Institute where our hero taught.

I was able to tack on a few contemporaneous bonus cuts from 12 days earlier, at another event in upstate New York where JM was a sought-after Jazz teacher. This segment also contains a few insightful interview comments from the Maestro, which were interspersed with the music and which I rearranged to be less interruptive.

James Moody Quartet

Skidmore College Jazz Festival

JCF Theater

Saratoga Springs, New York USA

6.26.2007

01 Invitation

02 Body and Soul

03 JM speaks

04 Gingerbread Boy/Giant Steps

05 Benny's from Heaven

06 talk: JM & Todd Coolman

07 Con Alma

08 Moody's Mood for Love

09 St. Thomas

10 interview 1

11 Wave

12 interview 2

13 Polka Dots and Moonbeams

14 interview 3

15 Au Privave

16 interview 4

17 Giant Steps

Total time: 1:52:47

disc break goes after Track 07

James Moody - tenor saxophone & vocals

Renee Rosnes - piano 

Todd Coolman - bass 

Adam Nussbaum - drums

Tracks 10-17 are bonus tracks from Kilbourn Hall @ The Eastman School of Music, Rochester NY 6.14.2007

James Moody - tenor saxophone & flute

Bill Dobbins - piano

Phil Flanagan - bass

Mike Melito - drums

totally uncirculated (AFAIK) soundboard capture of indeterminate origin, edited and remastered by EN, March 2025

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz

bonus tracks are from a 224/48k PAL DVD of a digital satellite broadcast of indeterminate origin

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making the bonus tracks equivalent to a preFM source

extracted and converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked, denoised and remastered by EN, March 2025
706 MB FLAC/direct link

I shall return with one more Marchy thing on Friday, that I've been hard at play concocting and tweaking for a while, to memorialize a Goddess who departed this realm a few weeks ago.

One deity at a time, though! Today we honor the centenary of James Moody, a tenor sax superbeing born this day in 1925 and still alive in sound.... so let's get in the Mood!--J.

3.26.1925 - 12.9.2010

100% Humility

 

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre - Morning Prayer (excerpt)

We'll continue backloading March some more, this time with -- surprise, surprise -- another classic Jazz berfday.

This guy, who is criminally unsung, would have been 89 today. I'd have waited for 90, but that's a whole year away!

We'll keep this short because, in keeping with the obscurity quotient, there aren't a whole lotta pix of him.

An original AACM cat, he began in the Free Jazz scene in Chicago in the 1960s and soon got involved playing with other luminaries of that time and place, like Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams.

It wasn't long before he was leading his own groups and recording seminal platters like Humility In the Light of Creator and Forces and Feelings.

He spent a good deal of the late 1970s and beyond battling addiction issues, but kept playing until he passed away in 2013.

Anyway I have always wanted to put him on here, so today's the day to celebrate the tremendous Maurice McIntyre, whom the world knew simply as Kalaparusha.

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre

Europe 1976/1977

01 unidentified medley & improvisations

Kalaparusha & The Light

Jazztage 1976, Berlin DE 11.4.1976

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre - tenor saxophone & clarinet

Juma Sultan - bass, african drums, horns, congas & percussion

John Betsch - drums

320/48k audio of indeterninate origin sourced from an HD YouTube file

spectral analysis is lossless to and stops at 15 kHz, so probably from an FM broadcast

converted to 16/44 CD Audio & remastered by EN, March 2025

02 Morning Prayer

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre Quartet

Jazzpulsations, Nancy FR 10.11.1977

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre - tenor saxophone

Ahmed Abdullah - trumpet

Brian Smith - bass

Charlie Persip - drums

1st gen cassette of the original ORTF FM broadcast

remastered by EN, March 2025

Total time: 53:54
329 MB FLAC/direct link

I'll be back in 48 with something really great, so don't hesitate to repatriate, and don't be late.

Meantime, no matter where the sun is in your sky, you should get your Morning Prayer together and wish a happy birthday to Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, your new favorite tenor player!--J.

3.24.1936 - 11.9.2013

Ayers & Graces

 

Roy Ayers - Red, Black & Green


As promised, we'll start to get to some of the passings of recent weeks.

When I do this stuff, there's always a preliminary phase at the end of every month where I start to hammer out whatever I might be into working on that coincides with whatever birthdays and anniversaries are imminent.

With the deaths, I try to wait for the person's next birthday, unless it just happened and I don't wanna wait the 11 months for it to come back around.

Or unless the deceased is a person of such seismic, globally impactful significance that I feel obligated to play undertaker and assist, in some tiny way, in the grieving process people are feeling, by providing a vibrant representation of what whoever just died meant whilst they were alive and doing whatever it was they did to become someone people would mourn upon their departure.

There have been a whole chunk of those type of farewells of late, not least of which was Roy Ayers -- known for just this sort of cultural Ubiquity -- this past March 4th.

As we know he first came to prominence in the second half of the 1960s in the band of flautist Herbie Mann, a few of those years spent in the front line alongside volcanic guitar shaman Sonny Sharrock.

Both of these immeasurably influential artists -- each regarded in the highest echelon by millions of music lovers and players, and in totally divergent, singular ways almost entirely distinct from each other -- branched off and out of Herbie Mann's orbit as the Sixties flowed, lava-lamp-like, into the musically fulsome, ultra-diverse and very bell-bottomed Seventies.

Whilst Sonny Sharrock went on to inspire countless guitarists as a player somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and horn melters like Pharoah Sanders, Roy Ayers went on to a whole career as a musician capable of fusing the Jazz and Rock worlds in a wholly different -- and way more popular, in terms of the charts and the dancefloor -- vibe. Yeah that's right, vibe! You didn't think I would go a whole one of these things without breaking out at least one cringeworthy pun, did you?

He also scored a few films, including perhaps the best of the Blaxploitation genre flicks, Coffy. Which featured a title song so catchy, there surely must have been coffee commercials that use it, although I don't think I've ever seen one. Sure a whole lot funkier than that one where the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup, anyways. Plus, it had Pam Grier to get you out of the bedroom, at least metaphorically.

So as I was saying, when I am working these things up and going through the phase where I decide what of the b'days and concert anniversaries that are coming up feature music I can stand to hear over and over again while I'm tediously fixing (and hopefully improving, lol) the sound of them, I sometimes notice who and which have milestone ones ending in 0s and 5s, and make a mental note to try and get to those if I can.

I remember last September, telling myself oh yeah, he'll make it to 85 next year, no problem! So no need. See me for Lotto numbers later on, I guess.

He may not have gotten to 85, but man! He sure trod those boards until he fell over... I remember watching a concert of his from not that long ago, so he toured well into his 80s.

Here is one from just 9 years ago, where he and his ultra tight band put it on some enthusiastic Serbians maybe not used to something this funky.

I turned down the drums a little -- and turned up the occasionally indistinct vocals -- using the handy dandy AI stem separator in Audacity, to correct the drum-heaviness of the mix. Which was caused, I thought when watching the video from which this comes, by the placement of the drummer's vocal mic -- he sings almost the whole time -- picking up too much of the guy's actual drums. You can see it in the thumbnail cover I made for it, now that I'm high enough to notice!

Roy Ayers
Terminal Music & Arts Festival
Letnja Scena Kabare
Sombor, Serbia
8.4.2016

01 introduction
02 Searchin'
03 Running Away
04 Red, Black & Green
05 Everybody Loves the Sunshine
06 Spirit of Doo-Doo
07 We Live In Brooklyn Baby
08 I Wanna Touch You Baby
09 The Black Family
10 Life Is Just a Moment
11 Don't Stop the Feeling

Total time: 1:30:04
disc break goes after Track 06

Roy Ayers - MIDI vibraphone, percussion & vocals
John Pressley - vocals & percussion
Donald Nicks - bass & vocals
Bernard Davis - drums & vocals
Everett Freeman, Jr. - keyboards & vocals

320/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube video
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, repaired, edited, tracked, demuxed, rebalanced and remastered by EN, March 2025
561 MB FLAC/direct link

I have a bunch of crunch lined up for the end of the munch as we vie, Olympian-like, for the much-coveted title of Best Old Dead Jazz Guys Blog, but I will try to spread out the memorials so we don't become crushed, like grapes of wrath, under the weight of our obsidian, immovable grief.

It's closer to the truth to say that when they alter the DNA of music with universal messages of positive, shared insight -- and then make it to old age, like Roy Ayers did -- we really shouldn't let ourselves get too hung up in the moment of loss at all. And that their passing -- inevitable as it is, as we all will shed these bodies and return to the Bardo Of Between at some point -- is cause for not so much the grief brought by tragedy, but for the celebration of life well lived. That may seem to trivialize the shock and immediacy of death, and minimize its trauma.... but like Red, Black and Green, if you think about it, you'll know what I mean.--J.

9.10.1940 - 3.4.2025
everybody loves the sunshine