"My Kind Of Jazz" by Ray Charles
In which The Genius makes yet another instrumental jazz album- and damn the timing.
After the dual flops of I’m All Yours and Doing His Thing, Ray Charles sought solace where it was easily found: the road. There he had drink, women, adoring crowds, a band he could work like galley slaves and pay only somewhat better. There he was in control, beyond the reach of the fickle public and the hostile indifference of ABC.
Relations with his employer were quickly approaching their nadir, especially after Jay Lasker took over as President and moved ABC’s headquarters to Los Angeles. Lasker floated an idea- why didn’t Charles record a concept album, like Ella Fitzgerald? Maybe- Ray Charles Sings and Plays The Beatles. “Nobody’s ever going to tell me what to record,” Charles groused to his old friend Larry Newton, the man who’d lured Charles from Atlantic. Newton was sympathetic but nonetheless felt compelled to say: “Maybe Jay’s right, Ray. You ain’t selling shit, and you know it.”
In an overture to contemporaneity, Ray had hired a new engineer, David Braitwhite, a veteran of Atlantic and Motown. After meeting once with Braitwhite, who was asked to install an eight-track recording system, Charles gave him $80,000 and left on tour. But Ray was only out of sight, not out of mind, as he called Braitwhite every day to inquire after his progress- much to Braitwhite’s chagrin.
When he returned, Charles immediately set about cutting tracks for his next album. In a move that seems specially designed to infuriate Jay Lasker, Ray’s next release would be an instrumental jazz album.
My Kind Of Jazz was decidedly outdated. Jazz was trapped in an inexorable decline, and that went double for the kind of ornate arrangements featured here. The album was cut live to tape, with Charles’ old comrade Quincy Jones producing. Unfortunately, neither of these world-class musicians thought to credit any of the other musicians involved in the sessions, leaving us to guess just who, exactly, is playing the delightful alto solo on the swaying, swinging “This Here”. Opener “Golden Boy”, with its swelling intro, walking bassline, and honking sax harkens back to Ellington and Goodman.
The unfortunately titled “Booty-Butt” (#13 R&B) is the album’s highlight, a laid-back blues with some great brass work and Ray’s stacked vocals spouting sublime gibberish. It’s a somewhat slight track, but that works in its favor, just as it does on the gliding, form-shifting “Zig Zag”.
“Booty-Butt”:
Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” is a ballad with beautiful trumpet filigrees, whose weary tempo provides a respite from the hard-bopping, uptempo numbers elsewhere, like their take on Lee Morgan’s classic “The Sidewinder”, featuring some superb piano work from Brother Ray.
The brass blares even brighter on “Pas-se-o-ne Blues”, a careening tumble that reminds us why more than half of the music Charles released during his vaunted Atlantic tenure was instrumental jazz. The man just knows how to arrange and perform this type of high-gloss, ultra-precise jazz. “Senor Blues”, a foreboding reading of the Horace Silver classic, closes out the album in brilliant form.
However Ray Charles intended My Kind Of Jazz to be received, it certainly wasn’t with the vast indifference that stalled it at 155 on the album charts. He shouldn’t have been surprised, and probably nobody at ABC was. Nonetheless, it was but one more strike against him.
Charles was still making bank on the road, he still had his companies, his masters, and his studio, where he could cut another album anytime he wanted. And when he did, he would return to the well that had brought him such success a decade previous with Love Country Style. And if the decision to return to country-pop sounds a little like desperation, well, that’s because it was.
All quotations are taken from Michael Lydon’s “Ray Charles: Man and Music”, Penguin Books, 1995.