|
Wednesday, August 13
|
 |
|
Jerry Jeff Walker
|
|
Ticket Price: $22.50 adv / $25.00 dos
Doors at 7:00 PM, Show at 8:00 PM
|
 |
|
Jerry Jeff Walker
|
Jerry Jeff Walker has worn a lot of hats since he rode his thumb out of upstate New York almost half a century ago. He's been a Greenwich Village folkie, a New Orleans street busker, a ground-breaking country-rocker, a near self-parody of rock-star excess, a thoughtful and reflective balladeer, and an articulate chronicler of a life spent mostly hop-scotching from one spotlight to another. But until now, he has never harkened back to some of his earliest and, it would seem, his most influential beginnings.
Jerry Jeff Jazz, the Austin-based singer-songwriter's 32nd album, finds Walker revisiting some of the songs and artists who inhabit the Great American Songbook. This album includes selections from some of the greatest architects of the American song canon: George Gershwin, Sammy Cahn, Rodgers & Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy Van Heusen, and more. Some of the songs"How Long Has This Been Going On," "In the Wee Small Hours," "Time After Time," "There Will Never Be Another You," "I Get Along Without You Very Well," and "My Funny Valentine," have achieved a sort of free-floating, cross-generational enduring popularity. They are part of our shared musical vocabulary.
Some of the same songs on Jerry Jeff Jazz have been variously recorded by pop singers Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nat "King" Cole, Julie London, Linda Rondstadt, jazz singers Chet Baker, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nancy Wilson. Walker finds himself in very good company.
One of Jerry Jeff's recording hallmarks has always been making his records "live," to preserve the interplay and intimacy of the creative process, and Jerry Jeff Jazz is no exception. They were recorded in the time-honored way; everyone in a circle, everyone playing live. The album was recorded over two days at Two Coves Studio in Walker's hometown of Austin, Texas. Accompanying him on the album is an acclaimed quartet featuring guitarists Mitch Watkins and Tommy Nash, bassist Spencer Starnes, and drummer Steve Meador. Jerry Jeff says, “It’s the first album where I only had to concentrate on singing. No playing, or worrying about the lyrics.”
He said he thought the seeds for Jerry Jeff Jazz were planted when he and his wife Susan bought a second home in New Orleans' French Quarter in 1998.
"I bought a bunch of CDs to play while we were loading furniture into the house," Walker recalled. "I went out and got some Chet Baker and Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong, Mose Allison… Then I really started buying more stuff, like Ella Fitzgerald, the Mills Brothers, Julie London, and Chris Connor basically, a lot of stuff from the Forties and Fifties."
Those songs and artistsbasically the soundtrack of American popular music before the advent of rock 'n' rollfilled the airwaves when Jerry Jeff's was growing up on East End Ave. in Oneonta, NY.
"I grew up surrounded by music," he recounted in his 1999 autobiography, Gypsy Songman. "Mel and Alma (his parents) had been local dance champs, 1939. Alma and Aunt Norma and a friend had a singing group…the Three Queens of Melody…Grandma Jessie had played the piano as a child. She could not pass a piano without stopping to caress the keys 'to see what they have to say.'…I spent hours listening to my mom's and dad's records…" Years later he added, "I came from a family that had a hi-fi, the kind where you lift up the lid, stack six or seven albums on a post, and they dropped down, one after another," he remembered. "But I didn't have records of my own, so I would go through my parents' records and pick stuff I'd like to hear."
He recalled times when Big Apple jazz musicians like Jimmy Rushing, Kirby Walker and "Fez" Roundtree would come to "the country" around Oneonta to chill out and shake some big city grit off their shoes. They were guests of a local club owner, Jerry Monzer. “I was a staple at every jam session…I even got to sing a couple.”
Musically, Jerry Jeff recalled, it was another place in time." At that point, Elvis was coming, but Chet Baker (West Coast "cool jazz" trumpeter and vocalist) was king in ‘54 and '55. If you weren't mainstream, like Perry Como and Eddie Fischer, and you didn't live in the South, where there were rhythm and blues stations, the only alternative music was to listen to jazzthree or four piece combos that played swing, bebop, and that sort of stuff." Walker's challenge in recording Jerry Jeff Jazz was to find a way to make the music his own.
"The songs I picked are the best of the best, with really pretty melodies and stories" he said. "I didn't want to go with a piano and trumpet when we recordedif I'd done that I might have wanted to go with a Dixieland style…I had to find the (song) keys first, and then pick a tempo I wanted to do them. And then we just kind of went where it was comfortable. I can't think of another album where these songs have been done with just two guitars, bass and drums."
Both the songs and the singer have proven unusually durable. In his seventh decade, Walker still entertains beer-drinking, honky-tonk audiences with standards of his own, like "L.A. Freeway," "Mr. Bojangles" and "Red Neck Mother." But after the hoo-rawing crowds have departed, when the applause has died down and the lights have dimmed, it is the songs on Jerry Jeff Jazz that resound most strongly with him, as he convincingly sings “…in the wee small hours of the morning.”
|
|
|