The book In With the In Crowd, named after Ramsey Lewis’ big 1965 hit, has two major threads. One thread is factual, devoted to giving us details about the lives of the performers whose music was popular in the black community in the 1960s and the infrastructure-radio and record labels-that brought their music to listeners. The second thread lays out the case that the kind of jazz that was commercially viable in the black community in the 1960s has been overlooked in jazz history writing. Author Mike Smith says that the attention that might have been given to popular performers like singer Nancy Wilson, pianists Ramsey Lewis and others has instead been focused on the avant-garde, aka “The New Thing,” as personified by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and a few others.
Other recent books have a similar complaint and cover adjoining territory, including Jazz With a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940-1960 and Bob Porter’s Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975. Smith’s thesis is that the need to “elevate” jazz from a popular musical form to one “equal” to European and other Western forms of music is the key factor. Early attacks on jazz he says, “led to a defensiveness and a need to seek legitimacy that continued into the 21st century.” This idea goes back to the 1920s, Paul Whiteman’s efforts to “make a lady out of jazz” perhaps being the most well-known. Smith believes this comes largely from the white community although historically, critiques of jazz have come from both races.
Smith says that since media loves conflict, jazz writers’ attention has been more likely to be drawn to the drama surrounding people like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. He writes that this music reflects a more non-conflictual perspective on black life; people just wanting to enjoy themselves, in communities that were more than just “ghettoes”; that there was not just struggle and trauma in people’s lives, but beauty as well. Bear in mind that he also talks about the “activist” aspect of this music, making the point that it was appropriate to its era, the tumultuous 1960s. I can only say that trying to parse such a complex situation is not easy. Interested readers may or may not be convinced by Smith’s arguments.
Possibly more interesting to readers of The Syncopated Times are Smith’s factual forays into the lives of the protagonists and into the way the music was promoted and recorded. Singers written about include Nancy Wilson, Dakota Staton, Dinah Washington, Etta Jones, Etta James, Gloria Lynne, Lorez Alexandria, and Aretha Franklin. Nancy Wilson is the performer whose absence from jazz history Smith finds most irritating, as she sold millions of records and received many honors. She recorded straight-ahead jazz and jazz with a soul or R&B element.
Smith dislikes the terms “soul jazz” or “early funk” as applied to some of the music of this era. Labels have always been applied to types of jazz. It’s a marketing device, but whether or not you think a label has been mis-applied is pretty subjective. I never liked the appellation “Hard Bop,” for example and calling something “West Coast Jazz” often has no application to the music that supposedly falls in that category. In any case, I think that listeners in the 1960s would want to know that while Stanley Turrentine and Albert Ayler both played the saxophone, they did so a little differently.
I found Smith’s history of the Hammond organ fascinating. Inventor Lorens Hammond developed patents for 3-D movies and the first electric clock and he used that technology to create a compact organ. In the 1930s, he sold his organs to black churches in place of pipe organs and eventually created the famous B-3 model in 1954. He fought the Leslie speaker, invented by Don Leslie in 1940, but it was a losing battle. The two became paired and have been ever since.
Smith has a lot to say about the organists of the era-Jack McDuff. Shirley Scott, Groove Holmes Larry Young and John Patton. Jimmy Smith, although not of the first generation of jazz organ players, became the instrument’s key popularizer. I hadn’t known of Ethel Smith, but she was important in bringing the Hammond organ to a wide audience. She toured with actors and singers and in Brazil, where she picked up the song “Tico-Tico.” She played that song in the 1944 movie Bathing Beauty which led to it becoming a hit in the U.S.
Smith correctly says that the organ trio format lifted the careers of guitarists Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, George Benson, and Pat Martino. And, that the success of these musicians motivated non-jazzers to use the organ. Think of Ray Charles, Booker T and the MG’s, Sly Stone, Spencer Davis, Keith Emerson, Brian Auger and Billy Preston.
He writes about Eddie Harris, who had a hit in “Exodus to Jazz” 1961 with Vee-Jay record company. The story of that rare black-owned and run record company is interesting and a history of that relatively short-lived company would be welcome. Vee-Jay recorded all kinds of music, blues, R&B, doo-wop, and jazz, including early sides of Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan, but they struck gold when they got early American distribution rights to the Beatles in 1963. Yet, they were out of business by 1966.
An important point Smith makes is that, unlike the New Thing, much of this music was danceable. Smith points to the groove in Herbie Hancock’s 1962 “Watermelon Man.” In combination with the recording’s fine ensemble work and solos, it became a big seller-even more so when picked up by Mongo Santamaria. Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder” was a similar phenomenon, and its success spawned umpteen imitations.
Smith writes about the importance of live performance. He traces the history back to a live recording of Norman Grantz’s Jazz at The Philharmonic in 1944. Errol Garner’s Concert by the Sea in 1955 and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers’ A Night at Birdland in ’55-’56 were big sellers and many others followed. Cannonball Adderley’s ability to connect with an audience with entertaining, often droll introductions is well known. Less so is the fact that his Live at the Club album, which became Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at the Club was actually taped in a studio with a live audience, as the audio taken at the Lighthouse nightclub was unusable.
I knew that disc jockeys were ever-present on the scene at that time, but Smith details just how important they were to the propagation of the music. First of all, radio, not TV or film, was the medium in which black culture found wide expression. People could tune into music, sermons, PSAs and ads for black-friendly local businesses. DJs like Daddy-O-Daylie, Herb Kent, Jack Cooper, Rufus Thomas, and Riley King (who became B.B. King) were important personalities in their communities. DJs introduced new music, wrote liner notes and MC’d events.
Musicians dedicated tunes to DJs like Oscar Treadwell, a Cincinnati DJ who was the subject of Charley Parker’s “An Oscar for Treadwell” and Wardell Grey’s “Treadin’ With Treadwell.” Daddy-O-Daylie was named in Nat Adderley’s “One for Daddio-O” and Oliver Nelson’s “Dailie’s Double.” Local authorities understood their status in the community and turned to DJs to try and help quell violence in the wake of the killing of Martin Luther King. Smith says that in 1960, the most trusted man in white America might have been Walter Cronkite, but in black America “that title would probably have gone to a deejay. Probably Daddy-O-Daylie.”
Smith’s story of the derivation of the song “Compared to What” was new to me. I knew the song was written by Eugene McDaniels, but I didn’t know it was the same Gene McDaniels who’d performed “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and a few other hits. Pianist Les McCann recorded the song in 1966, but it took off with the release of the 1969 Swiss Movement album. The group that recorded it was McCann, Eddie Harris (Sax), Benny Bailey (trumpet), Leroy Vinnegar (bass), and Donald Dean (drums). It was basically a pickup group, and the chord changes had to be called out by McCann while they played. It sold over a million copies.
It’s indisputable that a lot of great music was created in that era and Smith fills in a lot of interesting details about how the music was created, recorded and distributed. Whether or not the music has received due appreciation is an open question. The author makes some valid points and some contradictory ones. No matter how one feels about the question, In With the In Crowd is worth looking into.
In With the In Crowd:
Popular Jazz in 1960s Black America
by Mike Smith
University of Mississippi Press; 228 pp.
www.upress.state.ms.us
Hardcover: ISBN 9781496851147; $90
Paperback: ISBN 9781496851154; $30
