Review: Blues Incorporated - Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated (1965)
Tracks: 1) Blue Mink; 2) Rainy Tuesday; 3) Yogi; 4) Sappho; 5) Navy Blue; 6) Royal Dooji; 7) Preachin’ The Blues; 8) Captain’s Tiger; 9) Little Bit Groovy; 10) Anything For Now; 11) Chris Trundle’s Habit; 12) Trundlin’.
REVIEW
The release date for this album is wildly deceptive. Since it is completely instrumental, and since all of the tunes are more «jazz» than «blues», the easiest thing in the world would be to surmise — as I originally did, before remembering to at least consult the liner notes — that the recordings reflect the eventual «maturation» of Korner’s sound, as he and his sidemen, spurred on by the rapidly evolving musical scene around them, steadily recede from their role of «blues influencers» and try on ever more daring and experimental ways of advancing and expanding musical patterns. Actually, the first paragraph of those liner notes, written by Charles Fox, would be consistent with this scenario — he talks about the various stereotypes about jazz and blues music, then goes on to admire Korner for generating an innovative synthesis of the two.
At this point, however, the notes mention that all of the recordings were made as early as in the summer of 1963 (May, to be more precise), meaning even before the Herbie Goins era rather than after it. Why Decca’s sub-label, Ace Of Clubs, charged with the distribution of Blues Incorporated, would not release this material in 1963 may be understood; why it suddenly decided to make it public two years later is not nearly as clear — but I could not exclude that, perhaps, somebody out there thought that the time has truly come to unleash that sound. After all, The Graham Bond Organisation, featuring several of Alexis’ old alumni, had just made a name (if not a fortune) for themselves with The Sound Of ’65, on which they experimented with a fusion of jazz and blues not unlike the one offered here. (Incidentally, the CD edition of the album throws on, as a bonus track, a rudimentary instrumental rendition of ‘Early In The Morning’, which would later become one of the major highlights on The Sound Of ’65).
In any case, all of the music on this album was indeed recorded in mid-’63 and, for that period of time, was in general far more adventurous than the average live set of Blues Incorporated, with all of its ‘Hoochie Coochie Men’ and ‘Stormy Monday Blues’. Featuring Korner on guitar, Heckstall-Smith and Art Themen on saxophones, Johnny Parker on piano, Mike Scott on bass (not drums, for which he is credited on the At The Cavern record!), and Phil Seamen on drums (one of the most prolific UK jazz drummers of the 1950s and 1960s), the record is perhaps best described as a «jazz album with a blues underbelly»... hmm, or should that be the other way around? Anyway, I’ve got some good news and some bad news here. The good news is that the recording session does not sound anything like a stereotypical «British rhythm’n’blues» get-together — if, like myself, you have grown up with the faint historical knowledge of Blues Incorporated as the forefather platform for the Rolling Stones, this half hour-long document will blow your mind on that count. The bad news, unfortunately, is that this album... kind of blows, period.
Almost from the opening, slowly and cautiously descending chords of ‘Blue Mink’ (written by Korner himself, I assume, as are most of the tracks on the record), it is clear that these guys are looking for ways to push music forward — yet doing this in such a self-conscious, «academic» manner that they are simultaneously losing ways to make that music exciting. I am fairly sure that ‘Blue Mink’ is supposed to be a pun on Thelonious Monk’ ‘Blue Monk’ (what else could it be?), even if the two compositions have little else in common. But the genius of Thelonious was not in challenging established conventions on how to play the jazz piano; it was in convincing us that it was actually the most natural and fun thing in the world to do to challenge them. These guys, on the contrary, seem to lay down each single note with the hard-working earnestness of a beginning ballet dancer who comes to classes equipped with measuring tape and a divider compass.
It is a curious composition, by all means, primarily because it defies genre classification, veering between blues, jazz, and R&B chords, tempos, and instrumentation. But almost everybody involved «veers» with learned, practiced caution, slowly and patiently, as if inviting all of us to form a dance line and exploit it in the same cautious, dignified, one-two-three one-two-three fashion. I think that Heckstall-Smith is the only person involved here to allow himself some genuinely wild spontaneity, and since I’ve never been the greatest admirer of his musical personality, this isn’t a particularly exciting revelation. As you can easily predict, ‘Blue Mink’ sets the tone for the entire record — most of the other tracks continue in the same genre-blurring, intellectual, experimental, and basically boring manner.
The «hard bop» of people like Monk, (early) Coltrane, Art Blakey, and others does seem to be the defining influence here, particularly seeing as how «hard bop» is often defined by its openness to the musical ideas of other genres, including blues and R&B. In accordance with the pattern, Korner’s compositions usually feature a main theme (typically horn-driven, though occasionally the guitar or the piano may come in as lead instruments), followed by a minute or two of improvisation and then resolving back to the main theme. Most of the improvisation feels stilted and devoid of inspiration; the main themes can sometimes be fun (like the fast-tempo brass riff of ‘Sappho’) and sometimes utterly generic (‘Anything For Now’), but not a single one delivers a suspenseful thrill like, say, Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’ or Art Blakey’s ‘Moanin’, to name just a few possible sources of inspiration for these guys.
One number that is instantly recognizable is ‘Royal Dooji’, merely a different name for what we have already heard on two other Korner records as ‘Herbie’s Tune’. (For those not in the know, dooji — also spelled as duji, doogie, etc. — is the original African-American slang for heroin, and was first immortalized as such by Duke Ellington with his ‘Old King Dooji’ in 1938, back when nobody at Brunswick cared enough to ask him what that actually means). Unfortunately, it is not an inch more exciting than the studio version on Red Hot From Alex (if you want to experience at least a little bit of passion from these guys, go back to the extended live performance on At The Cavern), even if, strangely enough, it feels a little more polished in terms of production.
Actually, the only number on here that makes my curiosity genuinely perk up is the repetitive two-minute mantra of ‘Preachin’ The Blues’, on which the boys really try to churn up the atmosphere of a tribal ritual. Seamen rolls out the tom-toms, Korner joins him on country-blues slide guitar, and then the two sax players take up their positions on the left and the right and start playing the same melody, but ever so slightly dissonantly, intentionally fuckin’ up tempos and tonalities so that the whole thing might feel cacophonic and ugly one second, then tight and harmonious the next, much the same way, I guess, as it might happen at a real African ceremony. It’s the closest that the band gets to genuinely «wild» on here, exchanging their strict Apollonian discipline for something a bit more Dionysian — but it’s just two minutes out of thirty, and feels more like a cautious tease than an invitation to a different dimension. The very next number, ‘Captain’s Tiger’, brings us back to controlled sanity with its strictly mannered «dark waltz» attitude that, once again, feels like the soundtrack to a lesson in modern dance.
Doubtlessly, there is some historical importance to these sessions — if the live shows of Blues Incorporated pointed the way to the genesis of the British rhythm’n’blues scene, then these particular exercises ultimately laid down the foundation for the almost equally rich (though far less popular) British movement of jazz-rock, fusion, and avantgarde. Distant echoes of everything from Cream to the Soft Machine and Colosseum can be found here if you really put your ear down to the ground and all that; and it does throw in yet another layer of respect for Alexis Korner, the man who truly loved both traditional and modern music despite being unable to put his own stamp on it. But even that influence is very indirect — it is not so much the recorded music itself that provides the influence, more the very fact that people in the UK were trying to make this kind of sound as early as 1963. And, other than brushing up on your history, there is really little other reason to listen to it today if you can just go straight ahead to all those hard bop masterpieces instead.
The 2006 CD edition of the album on Castle Music does a nice job by throwing on a bunch of vocal tracks, recorded around the same time — including a rather lengthy cover of ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’, replete with a maniacal sax solo and some additional verses you don’t get to hear on regular Ray Charles versions; and a mildly interesting «bluesier» arrangement of ‘Taboo Man’, a poorly known 1962 single from a poorly remembered R&B singer, Eugene Church (the original version is quite a bit more «poppy» than the Blues Incorporated rendition). On the other hand, ‘Rockin’ is more like ‘Jump-Bluesing’, ‘See See Rider’ is a mess of brass, and ‘Blues A La King’ never specifies which particular King it is going after — Albert, Freddie, or B. B.? — making things complicated for us because the instrumental does not really sound much like any of the three. Well, there’s lotsa brass on it, so probably B. B. Whatever.
Only Solitaire reviews: Blues Incorporated