Review: Ray Charles - Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961)

Tracks: 1) From The Heart; 2) I’ve Got News For You; 3) Moanin’; 4) Let’s Go; 5) One Mint Julep; 6) I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town; 7) Stompin’ Room Only; 8) Mister C; 9) Strike Up The Band; 10) Birth Of The Blues.

REVIEW

There was nothing reputationally questionable for Ray Charles to sign a special contract with a different record label for his side projects in jazz... particularly since the freshly formed Impulse! Records, which would become especially notorious for releasing all those classic Coltrane albums, was a daughter label of ABC-Paramount anyway. However, I do question the weird title of the album, abusing the population’s trust in simple arithmetics to shameful effect. I mean, if Genius + Soul = Jazz, wouldn’t that automatically imply that Jazz - Soul = Genius? That’s, like, doing both genres a terrible disservice, when you come to think of it — and with a record like this, Ray Charles was actually trying to appeal to the thinking part of his fanbase, so the title does leave a lot to be desired.

In any case, this is arguably the most famous and the most efficient of all of Ray’s forays into jazz territory, for the simple reason that it does not stray too far away from the Ray Charles Big Band formula first put into effect on The Genius Of Ray Charles — in fact, this record is a straightforward inheritor to that one since, just like it was back there, half of the tracks are arranged and produced by Quincy Jones and the other half by Ralph Burns, except that this time around they are interspersed rather than separated, nor is there any strict distinction between «Quincy Jones brass» and «Ralph Burns strings» sub-styles. But the actual jazz numbers covered by Ray are usually arranged as (relatively) catchy pop numbers, and there are even a couple vocal numbers thrown in for diversity’s sake. Both would later be released as the A- and B-side of a separate single: Roy Alfred’s ‘I’ve Got News For You’ sounds like a slowed-down, sludged-up cousin of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, with a lengthy, if not particularly exciting, organ solo in the middle — and the old blues standard ‘I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town’ is distinguished by a nice creative touch from Quincy, who concludes each of Ray’s «threatening» verses with an atmospherically coherent explosion of brass fanfare. (Which, actually, makes this more of a Quincy Jones number than a Ray Charles one — but that’s hardly bad news, is it?).

As usual, Ray throws in a small bunch of his own compositions, none of which strike me as being particularly «modern» — certainly more in the vein of Count Basie than the beboppers, although I do appreciate that at least the tempos for all three are different: ‘From The Heart’ is slow and carefree, ‘Mister C’ is a mid-tempo bluesy shuffle, and ‘Let’s Go!’ is appropriately speedy, with Ray barely able to keep up with the band, though he does manage a respectable enough solo. He sticks to the organ all through the record, by the way, which is a little problematic — things ultimately get quite monotonous, and since Uncle Ray, whatever the fanboys might object, is not a bonafide virtuoso on his instrument, he sets pretty much the same general mood whenever he steps into the spotlight. Once again, we are reminded that Ray’s playing always works best in the company of his singing — and that having him compete with the likes of Oscar Peterson or, in fact, Count Basie himself is like having some great basketball player compete with some great wrestler.

A particularly good comparative example is offered by Ray’s brave cover of Art Blakey’s ‘Moanin’, which he and Quincy whittle down from the original nine minutes to three, retaining only the main theme and the keyboard solo (replacing Bobby Timmons’ piano with Ray’s organ). The original tune is a classic, featuring one of the most memorable themes in all of Fifties’ jazz — and Ray does it full justice, preserving the thrilling, suspenseful mood of the opening piano riff while translating it from piano to organ, while Quincy beefs up the brass section, adding tightness, loudness, and bombast to its musical response. But there is nothing they can do about the middle section, in which Ray sounds totally generic and predictable next to Bobby Timmons’ wild mood swings on the original. In the end, Ray and Quincy simply convert the song into high-class lounge entertainment, losing its «explorative» aspects — and is that any surprise?

What they probably should have done instead of trying to put their own stamp on contemporary classics is go ahead and «jazzify» some songs that had never been jazzy in the first place — because, indeed, their one and only stab at such a feat here is unquestionably the major highlight of the album: an instrumental cover of the old Clovers hit ‘One Mint Julep’. You know there just has to be something magical about a fully instrumental number that rises all the way to the top of the R&B charts (and even hits the Billboard Top 10), and indeed, Quincy’s transformation of the song’s original vocal melody into a tight-as-heck brass riff, strollin’ across the boardwalk to a metronomically pulsating rhythm section, is almost magical — it takes the humorous, vaudevillian aspect of the original composition and mutates it into an assertive, proto-funky piece of swag. Ray’s own organ part here is subdued and almost minimalist compared to the other recordings — "just a little bit of soul now...", he quietly, but audibly mumbles during one of the stop-and-start segments, immediately settling into a quiet and oddly pensive solo that Ray Manzarek must have idolized for all of his life (because this is almost precisely how he tends to sound during at least half of his improvisations on the Doors’ live recordings).

To the best of my intuitive understanding, this isn’t really «jazz» — more like «soul-pop» — but then again, barely anybody probably understood what «jazz» was back in 1961, and it’s really a good thing that this album just keeps on violating all sorts of possible borders between jazz, blues, R&B, soul, and pop music. Of course, the very fact that you don’t want to settle down into a strict, cozy formula does not automatically guarantee a win; thus, I can barely sit through the closing number — an excruciatingly meandering five-minute long dialog between directionless organ and rambling brass, which used to be an old standard called ‘Birth Of The Blues’ but here is more like ‘Bureaucratization Of The Blues’. But the record’s overall stylistic variety saves me from expanding that feeling across all the other tracks, at least.

Like most of Ray’s work from the early Sixties, Genius + Soul = Jazz tends to get overpraised and overrated; once you get over the formal excitement of Soul Brother #1 laying his imprint on jazz legacy, it is not likely that you shall frequently return to it when you can instead enjoy the jazz legacy as such. (Who needs this, really, if you can just listen back to Art Blakey and Count Basie themselves?). But it definitely has lots more class and taste than the pure lounge entertainment of Dedicated To You — at least you do get to hear Ray Charles as an actual musician, with elements of both professionalism and spontaneity that his regular vocal recordings at the time tended to forego in favor of bombast and sentimentality. And as for the recording of ‘One Mint Julep’, yes, it is all the way up there with ‘Hit The Road, Jack’, ‘Unchain My Heart’, and any other of Ray’s vocal pop hits of the epoch. The man may have been corrupted by fame and fortune, but, fortunately for us, that corruption was essentially skin-deep, never tainting the "just a little bit of soul" deep in the heart.

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