Tuesday, 30 November 2010
3. Mess Around - Professor Longhair
I don’t know whether anyone remembers seeing a movie years ago called Pretty Baby and if they do, there’s every possibility they wouldn’t admit to it, given the subject matter - a young Brooke Shields growing up in a New Orleans brothel.
I’m not a movie watcher, but back when video libraries were in their infancy there was a copy of the movie on the shelves of the place I rented a video recorder from, and I can remember looking at it and noting the New Orleans factor, though I don’t recall actually borrowing and watching it.
So I have no way of knowing whether the house in New Orleans featured a piano playing Professor but I have the definite impression that every house of ill-repute in Storyville had a piano player and they were all Professor Something.
One of the names that the English music press seemed to associate with John Peel was someone called Doctor John, who had a couple of albums on Atlantic which were a strange gumbo of swamp blues from the bayous around New Orleans. Around 1972 there was a new Doctor John album which attracted a fair number of column inches, and I was intrigued to read that the album wasn’t new material, but was a greatest hits of New Orleans package.
I didn’t know a lot about New Orleans music back then, but there were names I recognised when Dr John started talking about his influences. I had a vague notion Jerry Wexler, who’d prompted the recording, was someone influential and one of the tracks (Iko Iko) was suggested by Peter Wolf of the J Geils Band. I was a huge J Geils Band fan at the time.
So Gumbo was duly ordered, collected and taken home, and I discovered that there were plenty of familiar tracks there, though I’d previously been unaware of the New Orleans connection.
The earliest track I can recall hearing that had some sort of New Orleans connection was something about Don’t You Know Yockomo by an expatriate New Zealander named Dinah Lee. And one of the all-time great New Orleans standards Ooh Poo Pah Doo, originally done by Jessie Hill, ended up as an extended jam by Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs in the early seventies.
Maybe someone more in touch with the way the music scene worked in the early to mid-sixties can explain how these things came to be, or how Normie Rowe and the Playboys ended up recording a Jaime Robbie Robertson song called The Stones That I Throw - I saw the writer’s name credited in a booklet containing the lyrics to various chart-toppers when I first started paying attention to music in about 1966, well before The Band emerged.
Don’t ask me how I can recall that snippet from the past when large chunks of more significant information have disappeared .
I wasn’t quite sure how that obscure R&B made its way down under, but it did, and when Dr John was interviewed as part of the media promotion, I learned he played on a lot of Crescent City R&B, knew many of the major participants, and had a lot to do with someone called Professor Longhair.
Professor Longhair wasn’t exactly a household name, and finding any of his stuff on record wasn’t particularly easy but I managed to track down a couple of albums and there was something about the piano playing that stuck with me.
Of course, part of the romance was reading the liner notes to House Party New Orleans Style and discovering that someone who’d produced hit singles in the fifties and influenced people like Dr John, Allen Toussaint, and the Meters had ended up sweeping the floor of a record shop somewhere in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
I’d heard about the work Sam Charters, Dick Waterman, Al Wilson and John Fahey had done tracking down old blues men at the start of the sixties, but it almost beggared belief that ten years later, with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival already underway that enthusiasts still had difficulty finding someone whose records were a regular feature of New Orleans juke boxes.
The liner notes to House Party New Orleans Style: The Lost Sessions have Quint Davis, Al Kaslow and George Wein going to see the Wild Magnolias, wandering next door to play Go to the Mardi Gras on the juke box and then spending almost a year tracing Fess in his own home town.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina we saw unforgettable footage that showed the soft underbelly of American prosperity where even someone like Fats Domino was missing presumed dead for a couple of days, and that happened in the semi-enlightened twenty-first century.
Go back thirty years before New Orleans became the party capital of the USA and maybe it’s no wonder that someone whose playing had influenced later generations from his home town could fade into obscurity.
However, once he’d been found and scrubbed up, his career restarted. Maybe not as successfully as it could have done, but there were live recordings from London and Paul McCartney’s birthday party on the Queen Mary, as well as various studio recordings. Although he wasn’t keen on travelling there were frequent live appearances in New Orleans.
Somewhere along the line I caught some footage from a film called Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together on TV one Sunday afternoon. Featuring Tuts Washington, Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint it gave an idea of a continuing tradition of New Orleans piano that stretches back at least as far as the beginnings of the jazz era.
And it’s a tradition that continues to this day, despite the ravages of Katrina. Every year the New Orleans community radio station WWOZ’s Piano Night features
So, What’s on the playlist?
