Kathleen Loves Music

Charles Walker & the NYC Blues Band > Scratch My Back

The whole story of this record is too long and too good to go into in one short blog post. (Some day on the Oblivion blog.) Suffice it to say it goes from discovery to borrowed guitars in South Bronx pawn shops to money borrowed from friends to a Harlem funeral with dueling, crying wives.

My friend and partner Tom Pomposello was a bluesman (Italian, from Long Island, but truly, a bluesman) with an evangelical vision of New York, more known for Frank Sinatra and the Brill Building than blues. I’ve forgotten right now where he first met Charles, but Tom became convinced he was the ticket.

Subsequently he fell for every scam Charles laid on us, particularly the ones that required an immediate cash outlay (”You can never move too fast in this business, Fred.”) all the way to Charles’ aforementioned [Read more…]

Mississippi Fred McDowell > My Babe

In late 1971 I was 20 years old and visiting my hippie friend Tom Pomposello at his “liberation” record store in our home town of Huntington, Long Island. He asked if my college radio staion had any recording equipment, and would I please come to the (Greenwich) Village Gaslight and record him playing bass with bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. The only blues I knew about was what I’d seen during the rock blues revival at the Fillmore East like B.B. and Albert Kings, but I figured that anyone with “Mississippi” in their name playing the very cool Gaslight must be famous. How Tom came to be playing with anyone famous is a question unanswered to this day. I dragged my friend Roy down with me and the mono tape recorder; we recorded the show and played it on my radio show.

A couple of years later Tom and I got the bright idea [Read more…]

Hank Jones > Bloomdido

I’ve posted about Hank Jones a couple of times before and it isn’t just because I’ve produced some records, on him, but because when I think of the list of pianists I listen to he is consistently the first three or four on the list.

When I first started producing records they were labors of love, passion projects with avant-gardists I admired and wanted to share with the world. Then I got a couple of paying gigs with organists and beboppers. For about 10 minutes into the first session with Willis Jackson I put up with it (the music was so old school) until I found myself happier than I’d ever been in a recording studio. By the time Hank came out of 25 years at the CBS in-house orchestra I was ready for the best session of my life. After than it was downhill, and I left recording for more happiness in TV.

Hank Jones [Read more…]

Joe Lee Wilson > It’s You or No One

After having the time of my life playing Farfisa organ in blue eyed rock/soul bands during high school, I decided George Martin and Jerry Wexler were my new role models. I’d become a “record producer”. Having no actual idea what that meant, my buddy Tom Pomposello and I borrowed a few dollars and started Oblivion Records. We’d record blues records to slake his passion and jazz records for my recently invented one.

Four LPs later a few of my college radio pals kept ragging me that I’d missed the session of a lifetime when I was out the hot July night Joe Lee Wilson played live at WKCR-FM on Sharif Abdus-Salaam’s program.

I hadn’t particularly liked most jazz singing before (or since) but this tape blew me away and we immediately made plans to release it (difficult when you’re completely broke and most of the other records you’ve released didn’t [Read more…]

Jason Plapp (co-creator of Bradwurst, “the only character who’s ass you can see from all directions”) asked me about some jazz he could check out. I assume because I started my career as a jazz record producer. So Jason’s giving me inspiration to search out and post some of my favorite jazz tracks. There won’t be any other rhyme or reason other than that I like them, but maybe they’ll be useful pointers. And I’ll link to Wikipedia biographies to help guide whatever sketches I put up.

Hank Jones is one of the great journeymen of his (and our) time. He comes from Detroit, made his name as a bebopper in the 40s, and settled in as one of the most versatile stylists of any era, equally comfortable in music popular before and after his coming of age. His brothers Elvin (from John Coltrane’s great quartet) and Thad (Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band) also [Read more…]