I Blame the New Software but ... Someone Feels Forgotten so

[Dan Gould]

I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

[JSngry]

Gotta love how they mashup Ben Dixon & Grant Green...

Images aplenty of the original here: http://www.discogs.com/Jimmy-Ponder-Pondern/release/5255042 I'm told that Discogs pictures never show up here, so.

Note that Pisces is a cut from a Jimmy McGriff GM album, so technically McGriff is on the record.

http://www.dougpayne.com/jpdisco.htm#PONDERN

This would be the America album I assume?

 

[Big Beat Steve]

 

Oh, if you happen to run into the Amos Milburn Blues Spectrum, consider deeply first if you want to hear a guy who's plainly lost pretty well everything he had - and he had a GREAT deal. It was so sad to hear it I got rid of it after one listen.

MG

MG, you don't have the full story there. By the time that album was recorded Amos Milburn had had a stroke and was unable to use his left hand (which would leave anybody just a shadow of his former self). At the recording session Amos Milburn played the right hand and Johnny Otis played the left-hand part. Trying to make with what they were able to do but for a noble cause, considering the circumstances.

 

 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

 

Oh, if you happen to run into the Amos Milburn Blues Spectrum, consider deeply first if you want to hear a guy who's plainly lost pretty well everything he had - and he had a GREAT deal. It was so sad to hear it I got rid of it after one listen.

MG

 

MG, you don't have the full story there. By the time that album was recorded Amos Milburn had had a stroke and was unable to use his left hand (which would leave anybody just a shadow of his former self). At the recording session Amos Milburn played the right hand and Johnny Otis played the left-hand part. Trying to make with what they were able to do but for a noble cause, considering the circumstances.

 

 

Yes, I knew that. But it's still so sad I couldn't keep it.

Les McCann had a stroke too, but it didn't leave him nearly so incapacitated as Amos. Saw him with Cornell Dupree and Ronnie Cuber a few years ago and Les was STILL playing effective music and cheerful.

And Jim, yes, that's the sleeve of the America issue of 'Ponderin''.

MG

[Dan Gould]

Thanks to Steve and MG, all things considered I am not going to go looking for this.

[Big Beat Steve]

Not wanting to discourage you, Dan, particularly since you already have picked up a couple of those Blues Spectrum LPs, but I always found this series a kind of mixed bag. I've listened to several of them way back but shunned them when they were in the shops - mainly because in general I've never liked those latter-day recreations of the original recordings (I'd been bitten a couple of times in my very early record buying days), and in the case of those late 40s/early 50s R&B heroes there is quite a gap between their original recordings (which I always preferred as the "real thing") and those remakes. Some time ago I picked up a dirt-cheap copy of the Joe Turner LP (and based on the comments here will certainly look out for the Joe Liggins LPto see how i feel about it now) but in general the series doesn't overwhem me. I've never been a fan of Shuggie Otis' busybodying on those recordings, nor of the bass guitar (which I always found out of place on jump R&B), and those horns certainly did what they could to get in a jump blues groove but if you are familiar with the original items they always sound a bit awkward like "Are we in a funk groove or are we going to try to do what our fathers and uncles did?" Others may feel differently about it but though I see what Johnny Otis tried to do to give the old masters some credit in the twilight of their careers, compared to the recordings from their prime they certainly are not essential.

 

Edited September 19, 2015 by Big Beat Steve

[Dan Gould]

Different strokes then. I've enjoyed all of the ones I've heard to date (have transferred but not listed to the Brown, Milton and two Johnny Otis issues).

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I think Steve's right about the backings being anachronistic, but I always viewed them as an attempt to show that the old guys could handle new types of backing and still make what was in its own right effective music. So I don't mind this stuff. And after all, Otis himself was one of the old guys and... 'Signifyin monkey' anyone?

MG

[Big Beat Steve]

You got me right, MG. Not that I would want to dismiss this series (after all I have heard most but not all so on some I cannot comment), and I do understand the intentions behind that series.  In general I just find these remakes a bit puzzling - you wonder where this sort of "updating" is to lead, and OTOH the updating is not different enough either to indicate a desire to really cover new ground. To anybody not being aware of the story behind these LPs, listening to a well-known R&B tune in a version from these albums would result in something like "Hey, but that's not the original version, not the real thing - so what's this???"

By comparison, I found the recordings many earlier R&B greats made at roughly the same time for (French) Black & Blue a bit more sympathetic.

[JSngry]

Johnny Otis had, very quietly, one of the more amazing lives of American music, very much of it as a "local" artist. These later remakes might have had global distribution, but the real target audience was anything but global. I'll advisedly go so far as to call him the Horace Tapscott of L.A. R&B.

Ace Records is not paying me a dime to advise any and everybody that this is a supremely essential record: