Archive - May, 2007

Stax Music Academy Students to Play Kennedy Center July 4th

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Harkening back to the heyday of Stax Records and its touring acts, the Stax Music Academy 2007 Summer Soul Tour Presented by FedEx begins June 25 and will take the students on a very special tour of the Northeastern United States.

A chartered “concert bus” carrying approximately 14 student musicians and several faculty members departs Memphis on that day and arrives the following day in Cleveland, Ohio, for a performance the following night at the world renowned Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On June 29, the students will arrive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to conduct a daytime workshop and rehearsal at the Afro-American Music Institute, followed by a concert there that evening. From there, the students travel to Philadelphia, where they will perform two concerts on July 2 at the Sunoco Welcome America Festival. The trip will culminate two days later on July 4 with a very special free performance on The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in Washington, D.C. at 6 p.m.

Garth Ross, Director of Performing Arts for Everyone for the Kennedy Center, said, “I had the opportunity to hear some the Stax Music Academy students perform during the North American Folk Alliance conference in Memphis this past February. They were wonderful. I am sure it will be a great show for the Millennium Stage and our audience and a great experience for the Stax Academy students.”

Last year, 14 student traveled on an extensive peformance tour through Italy, which will be the subject of an August 2 documentary airing in Memphis on its PBS affiliate WKNO Channel 10. All of this is just more ways that the Stax Music Academy is carrying the Stax Records legacy into the future for generations to come.

Hot Buttered Soul

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

“Everybody’s got his own thing. Everybody’s got his way of doing a thing. Now we shall attempt to do a tune that is very popular. It was written by one of the great young songwriters of today. Now, I don’t know what he was thinking about or what inspired him to write this tune. But it’s a deep tune. There’s a deep meaning to this tune, because it shows you what the power of love can do. And I shall attempt here to do it my way, my own interpretation of it. Like I said, everybody’s got his own thing. I’m going to bring it on down to Soulsville…”

With this spoken, dramatic introduction to his landmark, nineteen-minute reworking of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on his album Hot Buttered Soul, Isaac Hayes lifted the sights of Stax beyond the three-minute single into more complicated, extended musical territory. Modern love, it turns out, is a complicated thing, and Hayes on Hot Buttered Soul stuffed all the complications and contradictions, all the crescendos and letdowns, of modern love into modern soul music. Hot Buttered Soul brought it on down to Soulsville for real.

Isaac Hayes was not exactly unknown to the record-buying public, even if most of that public might not have known that they knew him, in 1969. Hayes’ name appeared alongside David Porter’s as co-songwriters behind some of Stax’s biggest hit records, including nearly all of Sam & Dave’s. But Buttered introduced other facets, such as Hayes the performer, the resonantly soulful pianist and organ player, and a vocalist who projected a distinct, prepossessing sense of cool; while Hayes the arranger, with the Bar-Kays as his band plus brass and strings from the Memphis Symphony, stretched and stroked only four songs into an entire album with extended introductions and nearly hypnotic instrumental passages thick with sweet strings and pungent guitar funk.

Hot Buttered Soul is renown for such journeys through the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic “Walk on By” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” but my favorite part is actually Hayes’ double-fisted piano break over bass and drums in the almost painfully titled “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” This is one of Hayes’ most extended and exciting recorded piano solos, with the piano trio sweating out in throbbing rhythm the pumping gospel sound of Les McCann and Horace Silver, sweet as honey and smoking hot.

(By the way, the “great young” songwriter that Hayes refers to was Jimmy Webb. In addition to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Glen Campbell scored hits with Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” and “Gavelston,” as did the Fifth Dimension with his “Up Up and Away.” The combined brilliance of these three compositions almost lets Webb completely off the hook for “MacArthur Park.” Almost.)

Through Hot Buttered Soul, Hayes could enter the worldwide mainstream market more or less on his own terms. It was Stax’s first gold album and sold more than one million copies, unprecedented for an album that did not include the standard three-minute pop single. In fact, there were no singles on the Stax release schedule when this album started blowing up. It simultaneously landed in the Pop, R&B, Jazz AND Easy Listening chart (it bounced between the #1 and #2 spots on the Jazz album chart, for example, for nearly eight months!), upon which “Walk on By” and “Phoenix” were edited into a two-sided single. Each side cracked the Pop and R&B Top Forty.

“When I did Hot Buttered Soul, it was a selfish thing on my part. It was something I wanted to do,” Hayes once recalled. “Al (Bell) said, ‘However you want to do it.’ I didn’t give a damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side, rather than looking at it for monetary value. I had an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s why I did it. I took artistic and creative liberties. I felt what I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and thirty seconds. So I just stretched (the songs) out and milked them for everything they were worth.”

Isaac Hayes Hot Buttered Soul

NYC: Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival Kickoff Party celebrating 50 years of Stax Records!

Sunday, May 27th, 2007

Come join us for a night of funky soul all night long at the powerHouse Arena in Dumbo, BK. Stax Records was home to legendary acts such as Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, The Bar-Kays, Isaac Hayes, The Dramatics, The Staple Singers, The Emotions and so many more. Celebrate 50 years of Soul magic, as well as the re-launch of the label. Music will be provided by Large Professor and The Bridge and Video Music Box host, Ralph McDaniels

Event Information:
Thursday, June 07, 2007
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
21+
cover: FREE | Tickets are free, but you must be a member of Brooklyn Bodega.

Venue Information:
powerHouse Arena
37 Main St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 666-3049
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view Yahoo Maps

Links:
http://www.brooklynbodega.com

Classic Stax Single of the Week

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Johnnie Taylor: “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone”
From the Album: One Step Beyond
Originally released 1970
#1 R&B, #28 Pop

“Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” by Johnnie Taylor was co-written by Kent Barker, James Wilson and Don Davis, who was by this time quite entrenched in working with Al Bell at Stax, with venerable label stalwart guitarist Steve Cropper either leading or putting the finishing touches on the supporting instrumental ensemble. “Jody” is probably the only soul song with its chorus based on the “call and response” of typical military marching cadence, as Taylor barks out “Ain’t no sense in going home” and the backup singers reply “Jody’s got your girl and gone, each in lockstep with each other’s, and with the band’s, rhythm.

Like a genuine street-smart dealer, Taylor plays both ends against the middle in this torrid soul stomp. The song is mostly but not exclusively sympathetic to the hard-working man who got his girl ripped off by smooth operator called Jody: “Jody leaves ashes in your ashtray/ Footprints on your carpet while you work all day/ He even got the nerve to sleep in your bed/ Sit down at your table and eat your bread/ When you get home after working hard all day/ Jody’s got your girl and he’s gone away…” The instrumental backup churns out thick and hot, equal parts hurting soul and throbbing funk, right on time.

Taylor chose “Jody” to close his performance Live at the Summit Club in Los Angeles, a live version that has probably proved longer-lived than the original single. Whatever problems Taylor might have had with his backup band throughout this show seem completely hammered out and smoothed over by the time they erupt into this “Jody” finale, which stays ferociously in the pocket of its dense jungle groove, through which Taylor prowls and roars like a soul tiger.

In this live version, Taylor also riffs on the virtues of this Jody cat, who simply took advantage of the opening that the other man left because he was always at work, away from his woman at home, and raps to the crowd to bring the curtain down: “You know what I like about Jody? He had enough sense to express himself: He told her how good she looked, he told her how pretty she walked, he told her how cute she talked, ooowww!”

The complete performance Live at the Summit Club clocks in at nearly nine minutes; six-minute edits appear in the Wattstax documentary and soundtrack and on “Disc Four - Live” of The Stax Story 4-CD box set. The original, studio version of “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” was the last single Stax released in 1970; it ascended to #28 Pop single and stayed at #1 R&B single for two weeks in 1971.

Johnnie Taylor but No Jody