Save Our Souls
In his latest Deep Cuts column, Ian Zimmerman looks at two jazz and blues greats, James Booker and Johnny O'Neal and asks "without live music will there be something left for our souls?"
Last month’s Deep Cuts column focused on masters of magnetic tape. Expert splicers on the reel-to-reel wheels of steel and albums constructed in the studio. For this installment, I’ll examine two kings of the keyboard who created music in the moment. There are great studio recordings of both James Booker and Johnny O’Neal but their real art was the ability to go anywhere on their instruments, and to entertain audiences live, up-close and personal.
James Carroll Booker knew no musical boundaries. He never played a tune the same way twice. Booker, a.k.a The Piano Prince of New Orleans, a.k.a The Ivory Emperor, a.k.a The Black Liberace, was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, just steps from the infamous Crescent City red light neighborhood of Storyville, the original stomping ground of his spiritual father, Jelly Roll Morton.
Jelly Roll came up as a pianist in the cathouses, dance halls, and saloons of Storyville. In these houses of ill repute, musicians were required to play the popular hits of the day, which included just about everything from ragtime, barrelhouse (what later became boogie woogie), and tin pan alley standards to Spanish habaneras, Argentine tangos, and light classics like opera transcriptions, Chopin, and Liszt. In Morton’s music, we hear a fusion of styles reflective of the racial and cultural make up of New Orleans; Spanish, French, Caribbean, African, White, Black. and Creole. Just like Jelly Roll, Booker is one of those unique artists who deftly travelled between these musical planets forming an entire universe in which everything cosmically co-mingles and co-habitates.
Classically trained, James was playing professionally by the age of twelve. His first gigs came on the radio in backing bands. Young James was required to play all genres of music. A virtuoso pianist as well as an accomplished alto and tenor saxophone player, he was one of the very first in New Orleans to get his hands on a Hammond B-3 organ. That led to early hits like “Gonzo,” a gritty, go-go booted, organ jazz/soul groover in the style of Bill Doggett or Dave “Baby” Cortez. Hunter S. Thompson loved “Gonzo,” hooting and hollering when it played on the jukebox. It’s likely the inspiration for the journalistic genre he invented, “Gonzo Journalism.”
As a teenager, Booker desperately wanted to play at the Dew Drop Inn, the premier R&B club in New Orleans. Likely utilizing the same sort of alchemy that informed his musical creativity, he convinced his mother to emancipate him, by raising his legal age from sixteen to twenty-one. Soon he was on tour with many of the biggest names of the era: Little Richard, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Fats Domino, King Kurtis, Lloyd Price, and Mac Rebennack (Doctor John). In 1970, he was busted for heroin and did a stretch at the notorious Angola Prison. Following his release, he continued touring and backing major artists, but gained a reputation for being unreliable and prone to erratic behavior. Somewhere along the way, he lost an eye (no one knows how) and donned an eyepatch emblazoned with a silver star. He was flamboyantly gay, sartorially extravagant, and always outrageous. After a well-received solo tour of Europe he returned to New Orleans, but found it difficult to find work. He landed at the Maple Leaf, a place to revel and drink but also do your laundry.
“Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah” on Rounder Records is compiled from live solo performances at the Maple Leaf between 1977 and 1982. Recorded during the final years of Booker’s life, the performances are raw, unpolished, and wild. The piano at the Maple Leaf was an indifferent sounding honky-tonk standup, at times sharing characteristics of the baroque clavichord where the strings are plucked rather than hammered. To my ears, the broken-down bordello sound adds to the recording, giving it an evocative, authentic quality as if you’re sitting stage-side, drinking and clapping along. “Resurrection” shows you all aspects of Booker’s brilliance, an intoxicating cocktail of traditional New Orleans jazz, R&B, funk, soul, classical, and boogie-woogie. He shrieks, howls, yodels, and vamps his way through classic tunes like “Boney Maronie,” “Knock on Wood,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” There’s the sweet and lowdown poetry of Buddy Johnson’s “Save Your Love for Me.” The hippest takes you’ll ever hear of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” and Lecuona’s “Gitanarias.” You also get Booker’s two theme songs “Junco Partner” and “Papa Was a Rascal (We All Have to Watch Out for the CIA).”
One of James Booker’s more enduring qualities was the range and flexibility of his singing. Witness the bleeding soul sacrifice of the Paul Gayten ballad “True.”
In Booker’s hands, it’s reimagined, inflected with a gospel feel and a touch of Ray Charles. Booker’s interpretation of “True” is more than a torch song – it’s a lament about being forsaken by God.
The Detroit born jazz pianist and singer, Johnny O’Neal is another conjurer of spontaneous musical moments. Johnny never creates a set list, preferring to absorb the atmosphere of the room. He lets the vibe be his muse. Boasting a catalogue of more than 1,500 tunes, O’Neal treks all over the jazz landscape hopping between standards, blues, mixed in with novelties and surprises.
O’Neal didn’t start on the piano until he was thirteen. He developed quickly and soon was in demand playing behind gospel choirs. After a brief stint in Birmingham, he blossomed into a mature jazz player with drummer Kenny Gooch in Saint Louis. This led to stints with luminaries like Sonny Stitt, the Milt Jackson-Ray Brown Quintet, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. Johnny got his big break when he moved to New York. His first week there Art Blakely asked him to join the Jazz Messengers. Soon after he made his first record: a trio date with bassist Ray Brown entitled “Coming Out” on the Concord Label.
Before the pandemic, Johnny and his trio of Mark Lewandowski (bass) and Itay Morchi (drums) played every Saturday night at Smoke Supper Club on New York’s Upper West Side. The intimacy of Smoke makes it an ideal venue for O’Neal’s art. Johnny’s sets usually kick off with a standard or two such as, “You Stepped Out of a Dream” or “Easy Does It.” By the time drinks arrive at the table, Johnny and the boys have you smiling and nodding. His solos are characterized by elegant right-handed runs over the first couple choruses, generally giving way to two handed “lock-chord” solos. His playing is reminiscent of Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Art Tatum, and wisps of Messengers past like Bobby Timmons. It’s a bop base augmented by swing-era stylings, then seasoned with tasty blues flavorings. By the time he gets to singing a few tunes you feel like you’ve known Johnny for years. The trio’s tempos are as elastic as putty. “The Nearness of You” might start with a light bossanova suddenly breaking into a hard-swinging double-time. Johnny says he likes to take chances and enjoys the occasional musical train wreck. With his current unit, it’s rare to hear one because they know each other so well you’d swear they have ESP. Once in a while, Johnny will pull something out from the back of the stack. In his book are R&B pop obscurities like The Stylistics’s “Betcha by Golly Wow.” Johnny can take a saccharine pop melody from a tune like Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You,” and bake it into a tasteful jazz ballad treat.
Then it’s time for Johnny to entertain. With larger crowds, one of his signatures is the bawdy, double entendre laden “I’m Your Mailman” which is based on “Bye Bye Blackbird.” In a smaller setting, it could be “I Need a Vacation from the Blues” a stuttering, scatting vocal that describes the blues like a physical presence trying to break through the door or waft past the windows. At 1am, it’s jam session time. By nature, every jam session is different. Sometimes jazz legends came to sit in with Johnny. On other nights, it was the young lions who shyly take the bandstand to learn at the feet of the master. As an elder statesman and mentor, Johnny is a living portal back to the jazz ancestors.
In both Booker and O’Neal one can trace a direct line back to the jazz originators. O’Neal played with the early proponents of bebop and swing. Booker backed the giants of R&B, early rock and roll, soul, and New Orleans jazz. Booker is long gone and these days there are fewer living artists who shared the stage with the towering musical figures of the 20th century. In the past few months, we’ve seen club after club shut its doors due to COVID-19 The clubs that aren’t closed are on life support. When we emerge from this pandemic, there will be fewer places for Johnny O’Neal to play.
Unlike the United States, jazz musicians are revered in Europe. There’s a famous story about the famously troubled bebop pianist Bud Powell in Paris. Bud’s mental illness became more acute in his later years. The crossing guard knew to stop the traffic each day to let Bud pass because he was lost in his own world. He would hold up his hand and say, “Artiste!” and the cars would come to a screeching halt.
James Booker, loved and admired in Europe, unfortunately didn’t stay there. He died alone sitting in a wheelchair waiting to be triaged at Charity hospital in New Orleans. Johnny O’Neal’s health is also tenuous. In a 2013 video, the interviewer suggests viewers help Johnny pay for a hernia operation. He’s not the only one, Go Fund Me pages for jazz artists needing healthcare pop up frequently. It’s tragic. We know the airlines, the hotels, and other corporate entities will be bailed out. The question remains, will we bail out our artists and their haunts so that there’s something left for our souls?
Further exploration
Jelly Roll Morton
Booker live at the Maple Leaf
“Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah”
Booker Live in Montreux
The Johnny O’Neal Trio Live at The Whitaker Jazz Festival