Review: Ray Charles - At Newport (1958)
Tracks: 1) Night Time Is The Right Time; 2) In A Little Spanish Town; 3) I Got A Woman; 4) Blues Waltz; 5) Hot Rod; 6) Talkin’ ’Bout You; 7) Sherry; 8) A Fool For You.
REVIEW
For some reason, there is no existing live footage of Ray Charles’ performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival — even if this is precisely the same festival that was filmed for Bert Stern and Aram Avakian’s masterful documentary Jazz On A Summer Day (an absolute must-see even for those with only a passing interest in jazz). The argument that Ray did not play «jazz» as such does not count, because (a) as we can see from the album, Ray did play jazz, and (b) the movie did its best to showcase the diversity of the performances, including clips of Big Maybelle singing R&B, Mahalia Jackson singing gospel, and even — goodness gracious! — Chuck Berry playing rock’n’roll, which pissed off a bunch of purists at the time but was enthusiastically received by the general crowd all the same. So I am going to have to assume that either the crew ran out of tape by the end of Saturday, July 5, or that they had some beef with Atlantic Records, who were unwilling to share their top prize.
Atlantic Records, however, had no beef with the Newport Jazz Festival, and went to the trouble of recording Ray’s set in superb sound quality and putting it out as a live album later in the year — not just Ray Charles’ first live album, but the very first live album released on the Atlantic label, and possibly even the very first live R&B album ever made, though about this I cannot be 100% certain. In any case, the historical importance of both the album and the event itself cannot be denied. If Chuck Berry’s performance at the Festival, most likely, was generally perceived as a bit of lightweight entertainment to set the stage for the really serious artists, then Ray, judging by the rave reviews of the event, got the serious jazz public to accept soul music and R&B as a respectable form of art — among the slowly, but surely growing white-crowd respect for the African-American spiritual traditions.
There was another extremely important, if a bit more technical, side to the concert and the record: it gave Ray a chance to really stretch out, ditching the restricting format of the three-minute single and being able to play his songs — or, more precisely, to perform his rituals — for as long as he wished, at whatever tempo he wished, and with (almost) as much emotional freedom as he wished. Of the four songs previously released as singles, three are extended by a good two minutes or so, while ‘A Fool For You’ is extended by a good four, and not even because of extra verses or instrumental passages — no, by simply slowing the tempo down to a crawl, letting each note and each vocal inflection sink in properly. Inside the studio, R&B still had not received the same privileges that jazz music got almost instantaneously after the invention of the LP format — five-to-ten minute long LP jazz tracks were nothing special by 1958 — but the live format changed all that, so here is just one more reason why At Newport went such a long way in bringing respectability to the genre.
That said, Ray did not exactly step on that stage as a self-conscious iconoclast and revolutionary. As we all know, The Great Ray Charles had already launched a parallel jazz career for him one year earlier, and for his Newport setlist the Genius had split his forty-minute set equally between extended versions of his R&B hits and completely instrumental jazz compositions — for one of which, ‘Hot Rod’, he even ditches the piano and switches to saxophone (not coincidentally, it is Ray in his sax-holding pose, rather than Ray at the piano, captured on the album sleeve). This is both a classic case of Ray’s genre-bending versatility and a sort of humble when-in-Rome homage to the Festival (though probably more of the former, since a brief look at Ray’s average setlist from 1958 shows him frequently performing the same jazz numbers whenever he went at the time, even at New York’s Apollo Theater).
Predictably, the jazz numbers are only impressive if you really appreciate Ray’s jazz side and think that he rightfully belongs next to the average jazz greats of the time. But at least they are diverse. ‘In A Little Spanish Town’ has absolutely nothing to do with the classic schmaltzy versions of Paul Whiteman, Virginia O’Brien, Bing Crosby etc., but is completely re-written as an energetic, danceable cha-cha-cha number with a quirky stop-and-start structure and tightest discipline from the entire band. Max Roach’s ‘Blues Waltz’, on the other hand, is played much closer to the original, albeit with predictably larger emphasis on Ray’s mini-army of brass players. The above-mentioned ‘Hot Rod’ is a bebop piece played at breakneck speed; and ‘Sherry’, credited to Ray’s musical director Hank Crawford, is relaxing mid-tempo lounge entertainment with Ray back at the piano, clearly enjoying himself. I cannot get too excited at any of these pieces, but they certainly couldn’t be the worst ones played at the Festival — though nobody would probably list them among the best, either.
Clearly, want it or not, the real meat is in the R&B stuff. ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’, opening the set, was not even recorded in the studio until several months after the show — most people heard it for the first time on this album, along with Margie Hendricks’ crown minute of glory, when she takes the lead over Ray and almost literally sings him under the piano. (If you want an even more overwhelming vocal performance, you can check out the earlier version by Nappy Brown, though it is less interesting in all other respects than the vocals). The song is the first of several classic Ray numbers to more or less literally transfer the mechanics, emotions, and sensations of the sexual act to music — at a sparingly slow tempo, for now, without the acrobatic energy of ‘What’d I Say’, but arguably more realistic than the latter (I mean, it would be easier to syncronize the old in-and-out, in-and-out to ‘Night Time’ than it would be to ‘What’d I Say’, right? right? okay, maybe I’m getting too old or something). I do feel a little sorry for Mrs. Elaine Lorillard, though, if she actually had to attend that particular part of the show...
For ‘I Got A Woman’, Ray pulls out the old fake-start trick, introducing a seemingly slow, soulful, epic ballad and then, 30 seconds later, steering it right into the uptempo giddiness of his signature song — and then letting it ride on and on, piling up ecstasy and ad-libbing his way through three extra minutes without missing a single bar. The Raelettes do not join him on this solo showcase, but they do for ‘Talkin’ ’Bout You’ — the definitive version of this rave, with the classic uh-huh-huh introduction (so nicely interpreted by Eric Burdon and the Animals years later) and a slightly sped-up tempo, compared to the relatively timid studio original.
Still, I would say that Ray wisely saves his best for last: ‘A Fool For You’ is stretched out to seven minutes, with the Raelettes gone and the big backing band reduced to drums, bass, and a laconically atmospheric brass following — essentially, it’s just Ray and his piano, introducing the ladies and the gentlemen of the audience to "something that we’re sure that each and everybody can understand — and that’s the blues". It’s not necessarily a better version than the studio recording — it’s more like a magnifying-glass version of the song, slowing it down in real time rather than artificially, allowing us to scrutinize every pimple and wrinkle on Ray’s worn-out old soul. You don’t even have to like it, no more than you «have to» like some intentionally stretched out camera take in an arthouse movie; it is more than enough to simply acknowledge its existence — the right of an artist to directly expose the epicness concealed within his 3-minute single, especially in front of an audience that is hardly likely to take a 3-minute single seriously in the first place. I know I myself get a little bored here, waiting for the punchline — but when Uncle Ray hits that final desperate wail before the very last line, reprising it from the studio version, it is still that perfect payoff we’d all been waiting for, made even more precious by the lengthy waiting time. And the enthralled audience explodes in rapture.
As far as Ray’s live albums go, At Newport is clearly not the perfect first choice for the newbie, who would do much better with 1965’s In Concert — more songs, more hits, even better sound quality, and none of those oddball jazz numbers that will only confuse those who are quite happy with the Father of Soul staying within everybody’s comfort zone. For the quasi-Hegelian historian of musical Spirit, though, At Newport will naturally be the single most important Ray Charles live album, if not one of the most important live albums ever released — capturing one of pop music’s greatest innovators in the very middle of his transformative magic, rather than accepting a respectable and safe existence in the sanctified shrine of stardom. The latter might very well be far more entertaining, but the former will probably be far more inspirational — so take your choice depending on what you’re after in this day and age.
Only Solitaire: Ray Charles reviews