Albums we love: Otis Spann
Otis Spann: Good Morning, Mr. Blues
There are an almost infinite number of doorways into the blues, but I was lucky enough to find the one that Chicago piano player Otis Spann held open.
The first blues album I ever bought — acting on little more than a vague tip and three surplus dollars — was Spann’s 1963 solo Copenhagen session, recorded while he was on tour as part of Muddy Waters’ band.
It was a great tip: I was knocked out. Spann’s piano work was gorgeous and nuanced, full of inventive brilliance. Powerful bass lines meshed perfectly with a teasing, lyrical right hand, full of darting flourishes. There was an explosive fluidity and an easy inevitability to his playing that was the perfect match for his laid-back, raspy voice. I had no idea a piano could be made to do those things.
As I soon found out, Spann was among the best who ever played, indisputably the greatest of the postwar era. But as great a soloist as he was, he may have been even more brilliant as an accompanist. He recorded with dozens of major blues artists, playing easily in their distinctive styles, yet always instantly recognizable for his own.
He backed harp players like Little Walter, Junior Wells, George Smith, Walter Horton and Sonny Boy Williamson. He played in brilliant bands led by Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Jimmy Rogers and Floyd Jones. He backed singers as varied as Big Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton, St. Louis Jimmy and Victoria Spivey. He complemented major guitarists as dominant as Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker and Buddy Guy. His full discography is much longer and even more diverse. With everyone he was the perfect accompanist: always himself, always generous, making the band sound better.
So I listened to everyone he played with. Then I listened to everyone those guys played with, and were influenced by.
Soon Otis Spann had led me from Chicago to Beale Street to Houston to Crowley, LA to Central Avenue to the Mississippi Delta to the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and everywhere else the blues flourished.
Good Morning, Mr. Blues changed forever what I expected from — and found in — music.
Tom Haydon - KMHD membership team
Artist Profile: Barbara Morrison
BARBARA MORRISON: SHE HAS WHAT IT TAKES
By Deborah DeMoss Smith
“Every once in awhile you have to sing the blues, you know?” asked the singer as the trio behind her started playing Doing the Honky Tonk. But it was not only the blues that filled the elegant Casa Del Mar lounge that autumn night in Santa Monica, but also jazz, as veteran vocalist Barbara Morrison’s first set treated the audience to I Loves You, Porgy, Them There Eyes, No Greater Love, Shiny Stockings and Sweet Georgia Brown.
Her voice, both melodic and spirited, reflected an artist in command of her talent. She has recorded over 20 albums, voice tracks for commercials and movies, and toured the world with her music. She can move your heart with a ballad or your body with swing, and speaking with her during her breaks, I learned she could also move you with her stories.
Her jazz, blues and gospel history includes performing with some of the influential names of the day: Ron Carter, Cedar Walton, Kenny Burrell, James Moody, Esther Phillips, Kenny Burrell, Leroy Vinnegar, Joe Sample, Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, Nancy Wilson and Teddy Edwards. Relaxing with her water, Barbara offered distinct memories of those moments.
From the early days, the first memory centered around bassist Ray Brown: “People always ask who you liked the most when you started your career. Well, I liked Sammy Davis, Jr.! That’s who I wanted to be like. When I finally got to meet him we talked, he encouraged me and ended up giving me a telephone number, telling me to tell the man who answered that he’d sent me, who I was and that I was serious about my career. I called soon after that. A man answered in a distracted voice calling himself Ray. I told him Sammy had given me his number and that I was a singer and wanted to work and record. Then, he put the phone away from his mouth and said something in a frustrated tone to someone in the room named Ella, then he came back to me and said to call him in 10 years and hung up! I wasn’t going to wait so I just kept singing. Not long after that I was singing in a small club and an impressive man strode into the place talking loud, saying ‘Where is she? I want to record with her, work with her at Blue Note’. Of course, I found out he was the great bassist Ray Brown and Ella was Ella Fitzgerald.”
Dizzy Gillespie, said Barbara, was not very well known to her but a European tour changed that. “I was 21 and I didn’t know all the big names yet. I didn’t know Dizzy. In fact, I missed knowing a lot of folks I wished I’d known, like Joe Turner, but I was too young. When I was in Nice, France on tour with other musicians there too, I went into the restaurant to have breakfast. I sat down and began looking at the menu. I looked around the room and saw this man reading the paper and eating. I returned to the menu again and I heard someone say very nicely ‘come over here and eat with me”. It was the man across the way. I think he mentioned something about music, so I figured he was ok, so I joined him, letting him know I was only interested in being friendly. (Barbara laughed.) We talked music, ate and joked around. Only later did I find out just who he REALLY was…Dizzy Gillespie. And I did perform with him later many times.”
As to how she honed her distinctive style, Barbara said she didn’t start with it for sure: “Early on, I’d go buy singers’ recordings and listen to them over and over again, Sarah, Esther, Dinah to try to sound like them. Then one day when I was singing with Eddie Cleanhead Vinson’s Band, he turned to me when the gig was over and said ‘Quit copying others! Get your own style!’. I took Dad’s advice - I called him Dad - and did it my way.” With a knowing smile, she adds: “I think I got my own style.”
An affinity for the blues and an interpretative voice that can push the envelope, Barbara said one memory she had for performing that genre centers around the 1984 Olympics in her now home town of Los Angeles: “I was singing at the Olympics Blues Festival and we got word that Esther Phillips had died. Of course, she was one of my blues influences and I’d worked with her. I was thrown, but then Etta James, who was on the program, walked up and we just began singing Esther classics. It was a howling time.”
In the early 1990s, while performing at SRI in Los Angeles, Barbara had quite a different experience – though a little surreal, she said: “I was singing This Bitter Earth with this big band and I begin hearing an echo of the lyrics around me. I thought what is that. I keep singing ‘This bitter earth can it be so cold, today you’re young, too soon your old’ and this female voice kept echoing what I was doing…but it wasn’t my voice. Looking around the audience, the stage and seeing nothing, I was baffled, but kept singing. When the song was over, the lights went up and there in the back was Nancy Wilson! She was singing those lyrics. Boy, not only was I glad to see her but I was really glad to know I wasn’t imagining that voice!”
Clapping her hands and laughing, Barbara headed back on stage to sing with the Stu Elster Trio: Stu on piano, Richard Simon on bass and Lee Spat on drums. She would deliver tunes with insouciance or a fiery torch or some serious scatting: Blue Skies, Paper Moon, I’ve Got the World on a String, It Don’t Mean A Thing, This Girl’s in Love with You, Yesterday, Perdido and Don’t Touch Me.
When Barbara returned to the table for our good-byes, I asked her about that last tune. She’d delivered Don’t Touch Me, a torch song, with relentless passion. As an on-air host on KMHD, I like to play the tune. The lyrics are basic emotion plus I’d known personally the composer, the late saxophonist Teddy Edwards. Seems we both did: “Teddy was a good friend of mine. After the song came out and people started covering it, including me, I called him up and said, ‘Now, Teddy, I know you wrote that song for me.’ He’d laugh but never admit it. Of course, when he was terminally ill, as his neighbor then, I’d go over to his place and help out…clean, wash his clothes and anything he might need. He was a good friend and a good man.”
And good is something Barbara Morrison should know about. After the fine performance that night, it was easy to see why she’s gained worldwide accolades for her work, for it’s no doubt she has what it takes: a genuine passion for jazz and blues, which she so richly expresses each time she sings. Though if you ask her about that, she credits her partner, the music itself: “I get to relax and be free. The problems go away. It cleanses me!”
