Tributes

Oscar Brown, Jr.
I first remember Oscar Brown, Jr., from a teevee show called Jazz Scene, a Steve Allen produced show from Los Angeles that ran in the early 60s, of which he was the host. Great shows; I've got as many of them on VHS as I could find: Jimmy Smith, Phineas Newborn, Frank Rossolini, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne and his Men, so far; 30-minute shows with live audiences, too. He was teevee cool with a perfect speech, you know, kind'a kindly phony, that tone of voice that is programmed, and Oscar Brown, Jr., had learned the radio and teevee business at an early age, as an 18-year-old on a radio program out of Chicago called Negro News Front as a broadcaster. From there he went to the WMAQ-Chicago radio drama Destination Freedom, written by the famous black radio drama writer Richard Durham.

Oscar ran for the House of Representatives in Chicago when he was 22 years old, in 1948 (born in '26)--Paul Robeson came and sang and spoke at one of his rallies.

OBJr came to New York City in the 50s with a Broadway-type show he'd written called Kicks & Company. Got his break when he sang some of his tunes from this show on Dave Garroway's Today Show (yes, the original Today Show) and Garroway was from Chicago and into jazz and gave Oscar his chance. His show was taken over by Lorraine Hansbury's [A Raisin in the Sun] husband, Robert Nemiroff and Art DeLugoff and then OBJr got an album contract from Columbia and his first album Sin & Soul and then Max Gordon gave him a night at the Village Vanguard and Oscar was on his way. The tune "Dat Der," off this album I remember was covered so specially by Horace Silver on one of his Blue Note albums. Also, Oscar Brown, Jr., wrote a clean version of "The Signifyin' Monkey," which was from an old black prisoner way of communicating called "The Life"--rhyme--this Life poetry being an early form of rap--In fact, hell, Oscar Brown later became a King of the earliest way of rapping with his "Bid 'Em In, Bid 'Em In," where he pretends he's a white slave trader auctioning off his new batch of slaves down on the old New Orleans Slave Block, the largest slave block in the USA; even larger than the one at Charleston, South Carolina [down in New Orleans, the old slave block was located in the Vieux Carre on the site of Aunt Sally's Original Praline Shop, and I remember Aunt Sally's when I first went to New Orleans as a kid and had my photo made in front of the huge Aunt Jemima statue that stood out front that was supposedly an authentic replica of Aunt Sally, a large, happy faced, black woman who became famous in the Vieux Carre for her pralines, wonderful candy patties made from molasses and cane sugar and filled with pecans and then allowed to crystalize--later developing into the local wonderful peanut patties we down South used to eat while washing them down with R-O'C Colas [that's a Royal Crown Cola and I'll bet either you've never heard of RC Cola or at least haven't seen an RC (we pronounced it R-Oh-C) Cola in many a moon; last I saw one was in a Safeway Store in bargain cans next to Safeway's own cheap-ass cola brand Shasta. I know the original Royal Crown Cola Bottling Company was bought by old Art Linkletter--anybody remember him? He got rich off his radio shows in the 40s and then off his House Party teevee shows in the fab 50s. One of his sons, a dumber version of Art (a Canadian Christian preacher boy), Jack, got to do a lot of teevee shows until he died while still young; Art's daughter, I'm pretty sure, OD'd on drugs--she became a hippy, see, rebelling against her old strict-hypocrite daddy. I once bought an Australian oil stock because of Art Linkletter--I read where he was buying it so I immediately bought a thousand shares of it--Santos Drilling--my ex-wife ended up with them when we got divorced; that stock was worth 50 grand then. Why do I bring such things out of my past up? It has to be self-abuse].

Oscar also became famous for his great "40 Acres and a Mule," the same sort of narrative sing-song as "Bid 'Em In."

There's a PBS tribute to Oscar Brown, Jr., that you can check out and hear Oscar telling his own story. By the time he died in 2005 he was totally into doing these long rap/rhyme things like "Bid 'Em In" and "40 Acres and a Mule"--brilliant powerful performances, spoken while his pianist, Floyd Morris, backed him up with some choice blues progressions. I'm sure you can find Oscar Brown doing one of those on YouTube. Check him out; he's quite an American phenomenon who no one probably really remembers today and tomorrow he may be long forgotten.

The Signifyin' Monkey
Here's the version I memorized back when I used to perform it at private parties. Then I owned a rare little paperback called The Life; I bought it off an old friend who used to work at the famous Gotham Bookmart (now demolished) on 48th Street (Diamond Alley) in NYC; it's also pretty close to the version I had previously learned from the great raconteur and registered reverend, Johnny Otis, of the Johnny Otis Show fame--Little Esther was one of his discoveries--Shuggy Otis was his son--he was white but claimed he was black; I first heard Johnny's version of "Signifyin' Monkey" one night high on Emerald City (crystal meth) at the apartment of a saxophone genius and great friend of mine:

The Signifyin' Monkey told the Lion one day/
There's a bad motherfucker back down the way/
He's talkin' 'bout yo mamma and yo little sister Lou/
Why he's even talkin' 'bout how yo ole granny can screw/
He's talkin' 'bout yo papa and yo sissy brother Joe/
He said he thinks you eat pussy, but he isn't for shore...

Watch out for that monkey__________and all his off-the-wall jive.

Well, the Lion took off like a jungle breeze/
Knockin' coconuts down and giraffes to their knees/
He came upon this elephant and he said/
Hey, big bad motherfucker, I hear some shit about you/
'Bout all these bad things you s'posed to do/
The elephant looked the Lion out the corner of his eye/
And said, 'Hey, man, why don't you pick on somebody yo own size?'/
Well, then the Lion jumped up and made a fancy pass/
But the elephant simply kicked him right square in his ass/
Well, the Lion got up and he swung from the ground/
But the elephant knocked his old ass right back down...

Watch out for that monkey_______________and all his off-the-wall jive.

Well, the Lion came back more dead than alive/
And that's when the Monkey really started his jive/
He said, 'I thought you called yourself the jungle king?/
Why, man, you don't show me a god-damn thing/
Why, my old lady told me 'fore she left, she said/
I could probably whup yo ass my motherfuckin' self...

Watch out for that monkey______________and all his off-the-wall jive.

Well, the Monkey got happy, started jumpin' up and down/
His little left foot missed the limb and his little ass hit the ground/
The Lion was on that monkey's ass with all four feet/
Like a bolt of lightnin' and a streak of heat/
Then the Monkey started bawlin', 'Please, Mr. Lion, let my nuts out the sand/
And I'll stand back and fight you like a natural man'/
So, the Lion got up, got back, got ready to fight/
And the Monkey said, 'Bye, Motherfucker_____________/
And ran dead out of sight...

Watch out for that monkey_____________and all his off-the-wall jive.

The Only Video of Charles Parker, Jr.
You can surely find it on YouTube; it's the only complete performance by Charles Parker, Jr., ever found. He and Dizzy are guests on Broadway columnist Earl Wilson's early days, '51 (?), teevee show. They are on the show with Leonard Feather [another Brit who became a self-declared expert on America's jazz music] who represented Down Beat magazine and gave old racist Earl a couple of plaques to give to Chas and Diz as winners that year in the Down Beat jazz poll for best saxophone player and trumpet player--the Down Beat jazz poll and the album reviews used to make or break jazz musicians in the early days of "modern" jazz--both jazz rags, Down Beat and Metronome had jazz polls and album reviews but Down Beat's were the gold standard for the genre.

Most folks know the video but few know who the sidemen are on that film. Here they are, folks: Sandy Block is the bass player; Charlie Smith (a great drummer who was on Max and Mingus's Debut label) was the drummer; and Dick Hyman was the piano player. Dick was once a fairly famous organist and pianist. He played in a lot of styles from Ragtime to Dixieland to Boogie to Be-Bop, though we boppers never accepted him as a real jazz man; he was too commercial for our taste, though Dick Hyman was involved with a lot of jazz albums. He could play pretty good block chordal things, a la Milt Buckner, Lionel Hampton's piano player in his great WWII 40s band that featured Arnett Cobb and Herbie Fields in saxophone battles on Lionel's "Flyin' Home" (he wrote it with Charles Christian though Benny Goodman put his name on it, too; hey, Benny got a little piece of all the action written while a member of his band--Benny couldn't write for shit; that's why he kept the greatest arrangers of his day in his band, especially Fletcher Henderson--the original pianist in the Benny Goodman Trio, Fletcher, Lionel Hampton on drums, and Harry Goodman, Benny's brother, on bass).

One of the first LP albums I ever bought was a Lionel Hampton reissue of a bunch of all-star sessions Lionel had led in the late 30s and early 40s on RCA Victor using members of the Basie, Calloway, and Ellington bands, like Chu Berry--they do Chu's "Hollywood Shuffle"--Chu was a hero of Chas. Parker, Jr.'s; in fact, Parker named his son, Leon, after Leon "Chu" Berry. Also Ben Webster was there; Johnny Hodges; Clyde Hart, the great pianist who died very young; and the first recorded solo of a young trumpet player from Cheraw, South Carolina, named John Birks Gillespie--he does a muted solo on a tune called "Hot Mallets"--a blistering piece that turns total be-bop when Dizzy comes in blowing.

From the American Composer Lou Harrison About Charles Ives
"I got the idea intellectually from Mr. Ives of inclusivitiy--that you don't do exclusively one kind of thing. I really like what Henry Brant calls the 'grand universal circus,' and I think that Charles Ives was the great creator musically of this, just as Whitman was poetically. After all, not one thing is everything. ... It seems to me that the Ives achievement is total. It's complete, it's grand, it's world-scale, and it's there forever." [Lou Harrison interview in Charles Ives Remembered, Vivian Perlis, Da Capo Books, 1994, p. 200.]

It's So Nice to Not Have to Talk About Something as Beneath Me as WAR.


thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler