Jazzitude | Wiser Angel: A Talk With Joel Dorn (3)

WISER ANGEL:
A TALK WITH JOEL DORN (Conclusion | Page 3)

Dorn has always worked with artists who excited him rather than those who played whatever sound was popular at the time. Rahsaan, Yusef Lateef, Bette Midler, Leon Redbone, the Nevilles—none of these artists were the prevailing flavor of the moment when Dorn started working with them. “Basically,” he says, “I capture what people do. I don’t tell them what to play. When I talk about these records, I know that I’m the producer on them, but I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the artist. So if I say I think a record’s terrific I don’t mean ‘listen to my drum sound or my snappy edits.’”

Dorn’s most recent production job is on the new Telarc release, Friday Night Special from singer Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer. The album is a bit of a tribute to the great organ/tenor bands of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (featuring organist Joey DeFrancesco and saxophonist Houston Person) and evokes the atmosphere of a late nightclub set. It’s clearly an era that Dorn remembers fondly:

“Let me tell you something, pal…that was as good as this shit gets. You go in there on a Friday night in the summer, you know, you smoke a joint in the car on the way down, then you have four or five of those cheap nightclub drinks that, you know, take the buzz up…and if Duff or Stanley and Shirley, or Groove Homes, or any of those people were there…Oh-ho! You know…it was spectacular. It was unbelievable. And it was goodtime music. You know, one of the drags with jazz now is that it ain’t fun. When you would go into a club when I was a kid…” he stops mid-sentence.

“I hate to sound like one of those guys who say ‘Oh, Hershey Bars tasted better during WWII, you know…but you go catch Cannon or Horace or Rahsaan or even Miles, who was as far from entertaining as anybody could be, or Trane, who was certainly not an entertainer…you’d go in there, man, and the room would be filled with electricity…Everybody would be excited ‘cause there was new cats comin’. Blakey always had new guys. Mingus always had a new cat…Cannon, Horace…thay all had new guys. These sidemen would come out and explode! And it wasn’t just with jazz. You had Ray Charles and Little Richard and all those guys. Little Richard would come out and some guy would take a tenor solo like Lee Allen or something, and he would blow the fuckin’ roof off the place. It wasn’t this whole thing where tickets cost $114 and parking’s $37.50, and you go in and there’s smoke machines and lights and all that shit…it was a different thing.”

Dorn's enthusiasm is completely infectious, and his memories of those performances in dark, smoke-filled clubs reveals something else: jazz and other forms of popular music, including funk, soul, and R&B, all intermingled freely in that time before what Dorn calls the "pigeonhole patrol" arrived on the scene to inform all of us just what could and what could not legitimately called jazz. Hopefully we all learned something from the very dull period of retreading the past that ensued.

“When I was a kid, you go see Kool and the Gang, you got a jazz concert, a pop concert, and an R&B concert all in one set. Those bands were incredible. Bobby Bland would come to town with that band?? Ohhhh…you go catch Bobby or B.B. when he had the old bands, you know…When Ray Charles came to town when I was a kid…when Ray Charles had the seven piece band, with Hank (Crawford) and (David) Fathead (Newman) and Marcus Belgrave and Edgar Willis and Bruno Carr and the original Raylettes, Margie and them…you never saw anything like that in your life. EVER. And they played for two hours. By the time they got to “What I Say” you needed to take a shower…you were fuckin’ wasted from this shit. And I ain’t feelin’ that now.”

“Take away the smoke machines and the laser beams and the light show…gimmee somebody that can stand up there and just do it. I’m still lookin’ for that shit. And I’ll go down looking for that…I’ll sink with that ship.”