Bey Leaves

Andy Bey - Some Other Time

As promised, we will end the worst month I can ever remember living though with a remembrance of a dearly departed vocal icon.

He left us a few days ago after a long career across a multitude of variations.

Gay since birth and HIV-positive since the 1990s, he represented a rarity in what's usually a fairly heteronormative genre: an out Jazz musician.

Like a lot of listeners, I was introduced to his singular, one-syllable-and-you-know four-octave baritone through the music of Gary Bartz, in whose 1970s "NTU Troop" band Andy Bey was a charter member.

Those records, like the Harlem Bush Music series and Follow, the Medicine Man, form the basis of any essential Jazz-Funk collection and are, arguably, the finest of the flock when it comes to that stuff.

It's really Andy Bey's authoritative, commanding vocals that unify those LPs, and help stand them above all the many others in that galaxy.

Those weren't even his first rodeo with that sort of thing, either. He's all over Horace Silver's delicious United States of Mind series as well, delivering so much of what makes those platters rotate and make a holistic statement as a trilogy of related concept albums.

He really started as part of a vocal trio with his sisters, Salome and Geraldine, in the early 1960s, and by the end of the decade he was guesting as the singer in drum deity Max Roach's band.

Their song Members Don't Git Weary is, for me, one of the most potent of the Civil Rights era, with Andy's vocal rising and falling like the tides of history as he rips your heart from its moorings in verse after verse. That, until a final, emotionally dynamite-laden release that sounds like centuries of oppression falling like Goliath, slain to the ground.

He also worked with Stanley Clarke, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Cecil Taylor, as well as carrying on an impressive, decades long solo career in which he covered an eclection of artists from Duke Ellington to Nick Drake.

What made him so special and unique was a kind of Voice Of God quality he had, like what it would sound like if James Earl Jones and Eddie Jefferson had a baby.

He always balanced that stentorian aspect with an edge of fun and celebration, and this is what made all those NTU Troop and Horace Silver preach pieces sound so natural and cool in his able hands.

Anyway he lived to be 85 -- kind of amazing for an HIV survivor -- and there aren't all that many ROIOs of him, but here's a tasty one of him at the piano, by himself, in New York City after hours like it oughta be.

Andy Bey

Zinc Bar

New York City, New York USA

Summer 2014

01 There's So Many Ways to Approach the Blues

02 All My Tomorrows

03 Speak Low

04 Dedicated to Miles

05 Everything I Have Is Yours

06 Dissertation On the State of Bliss

07 Our Love Is Here to Stay

08 The Joint Is Jumpin'

09 Some Other Time

10 Three Little Words

Total time: 56:46

Andy Bey - piano & vocals

384/48K audio extracted from an mp4 file of a "Mezzo TV" European satellite broadcast

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, denoised & remastered by EN, April 2025
249 MB FLAC/direct link

That will do it from me for April... my brother died on 4/4 so I wanted to get to four this month in hizzoner. I have already got May underway, and I pre-emptively promise there will be less dead Jazzbos. Well, I can't promise more won't die, but I can at least say I have to put other music on here once in awhile or I might grow saxophone reeds for gills and float away.

But before the month dies away, I wanted to commemorate the passing of Andy Bey, who took a song all the way and, in the process, made me proud to be gay.--J.

10.28.1939 - 4.26.2025
we must get closer to the essence of life
but be aware that it takes courage and strife
expand your mind, don't let it wither and die
you'll find that it lifts your spirits high to the sky

Sax Is Bold As Love: George Adams 85

George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet - Saturday Night In the Cosmos

I've returned from the gnashing East Coast grief-fest and will finish out the month with two jazzy posts in a row, starting with this legendarily underrated figure.

He was born in 1940, so today would have marked his 85th birthday, had he not died over three decades ago.

Beginning in the road band of Sam Cooke, it took him about a decade to establish himself as a top tenor saxophone on the scene.

It was really at the point he jumped from the band of Roy Haynes, into that of Charles Mingus, that he began to surface aboveground and emerge to a wider audience.

He was often heard in the company of musicians from that group, in various permutations, for the remainder of his career.

After Mingus he joined Gil Evans' Orchestra for a few years, then moved on to McCoy Tyner's orbit before launching perhaps his most beloved group, with Mingus alumnus pianist Don Pullen.

This band toured endlessly and recorded several seminal platters over the course of the 1980s, until George Adams passed away in 1992 from respiratory issues.

Here's an essential slab of scrumptious sound from that aggregation, taped at the onset of the Eighties in Germany and Austria. Look out for another Mingus veteran -- the great Dannie Richmond -- manning the skins with an instantly identifiable touch all his own.

George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet 

Liederhalle

Stuttgart, Germany

3.17.1981

01 Saturday Night In the Cosmos

02 Don't Lose Control

03 Dionysus

04 Newcomer

05 More Flowers

06 Earth Beams (bonus track, Vienna 3.22.1981)

Total time: 1:38:49

disc break goes after Track 03

George Adams - tenor saxophone, flute & vocals

Don Pullen - piano 

Cameron Brown - bass 

Dannie Richmond - drums

sounds like a master, off-air FM reel capture of the original WDR broadcast

the bonus track was extracted from a YouTube file of the incomplete 

opening track of a master Austrian FM broadcast from a few days later

retracked, edited, repaired, denoised & remastered by EN, April 2025
586 MB FLAC/direct link

I will be back in 24 hours with the most recent deceasing, unsurprisingly also in the Jazz realm.

But let's not get ahead of our dead, OK? Please don't miss out on this essential and very representative concert featuring today's birthday guy George Adams and his cohorts, melting the minds of the masses using only their magical musical maneuvers!--J.

4.29.1940 - 11.14.1992

Flute of the Navigator: Herbie Mann 95

Herbie Mann - Dippermouth

This is the second preplanned post for April, because I'm in New York dealing with the aftermath of a family tragedy and am not sure when I will be able to return.

This post commemorates the 95th birthday of flautist Herbie Mann, which I will use to tell a Flute Story. No, not The Magic Flute.... but close.

Once upon a time I moved to the Bay Area in 1993, way back before the internet induced people into a state of antisocial-media moronitude from which our species may never recover.

About 16 months after I got there and began to establish a foothold that would see me call it my home for almost 30 years, I brought my younger brother out to SF to see if he might like it as a possible place to live.

So out he came, getting work at a moving company and starting to try to establish himself, similar to me just a year into my experience in what was already high-priced, but which became the most expensive place to live in the US.

He didn't last long in The Bay -- it just cost too much -- but in the few months he was there with us we had some great times.

One of these adventures involved a flute I had found on the BART train one afternoon, which went unclaimed at the Lost & Found and eventually came back to me in its little case.

Several friends and my brother decided one day to take a trip up to the Russian River, north of SF, and I took the flute along, struggling as I has been to even get a musical tone out of it without passing out from oxygen deprivation.

My brother, a super savant able to have any musical instrument on Earth -- no, that is not an exaggeration, I mean ANY musical instrument on the face of the planet -- ready to go in front of 10,000 paying concertgoers after a couple of hours messing around with it, promptly assembled it, recognized its sideways clarinet fingering.... and in the time it took us to get to Guerneville and the river, was playing the thing perfectly along to the songs on the car radio.

We spent the rest of the day being serenaded on a rented boat, in the middle of the Russian River, by some pretty impressive live flute music.

I don't remember whatever happened to that flute, and my brother returned to NY soon after, never to return to that part of the world.

He was soon enticed into, and essentially destroyed by, a religious cult and became compromised by a deepening mental illness, and last Friday, 30 years after he left SF, he took his own life.

So I am back in NY dealing with the aftermath, most principally the fallout effect on my already-frail 83 year old mother, with whom my brother lived and in whose condominium apartment he died.

I thought it appropriate to dedicate this post I had been assembling when this awful event occurred, full of flute fantasia as it is, to him.

Herbie Mann

Solomon's Mines

Herbie Mann Funks the Seventies

01 (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

02 New Orleans

03 Summer Strut

04 Toot Stick

05 Memphis Underground

06 Pick Up the Pieces

07 Memphis Two-Step

08 Something In the Air

09 Rhythmatism

10 Turtle Bay

11 O Meu Amor Chorou (Cry of Love)

12 Watermelon Man

13 Family Affair

14 Ooh Baby (edit)

15 Respect Yourself

16 Hi-Jack

18 Dippermouth

19 Hey Pocky A-Way

20 Blind Willy

21 Comin' Home Baby

22 The Butterfly In a Stone Garden

23 Cajun Moon (feat. Cissy Houston)

24 Paradise Music

25 Come Together

26 Push Push

27 So Get It While You Can

28 Hold On, I'm Comin'

29 Spirit In the Dark

30 Mediterranean

31 Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty

32 Do It Again

33 Superman

34 Bird In a Silver Cage (edit)

35 High Above the Andes

36 The Turtle and the Frog

37 Can You Dig It

38 Asa Branca (feat. Cissy Houston)

39 Chain of Fools (edit)

Total time: 3:57:04

disc breaks go after Tracks 14 & 26

compendium of Herbie Mann's funkiest flute fantasias from the 1970s

assembled, edited and remastered by EN, April 2025

1.36 GB FLAC/direct link

I dunno when I am coming back, and won't until I feel my mom is ok to leave there, but I wanted to use the opportunity of the birthday of flute deity Herbert Jay Solomon -- Herbie Mann, born this day in 1930, to us -- to let everyone reading this know how fondly I remember Jeff, my master musician brother who lived from 1971 to 2025, and was as naturally gifted as anyone I'll ever talk about on here, but just never found a way to put that galaxy-class, unquantifiably tremendous talent into the wider world.--J.

4.16.1930 - 7.1.2003

One Cent Jug: Gene Ammons 100

Gene Ammons - Jaggin'

Hello and welcome to April, and the first of two posts in three days I have set up to go up while I am away dealing with a family situation I will detail in the next one in a couple of days.

Today we have another of those old school Jazz figures of foundation that my page seems to lean on heavily, which doesn't make them any less deserving of attention that too easily goes elsewhere.

This cat would have made triple digits on this day, having been born in 1925 when the Earth was a much, much simpler sphere.

One of the pioneers of the Soul Jazz genre that is such a big basis of Hip-Hop sampling, his breaks have buoyed many a beat in many a banger since he blasted, bodyless, into the bardo over 50 years ago.

He started way back in the 1940s in the band of Billy Eckstine, who immediately dubbed him "Jug" for the straw hats he wore on his rather impressively sized head.

The Eckstine band, in which he played alongside Mount Rushmore Jazz figures like Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker, was just the beginning of his association with the toppermost architects of the then-emerging Bebop revolution.

He then led his first big group, which contained more deities like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt -- whom I covered a while back on his 100th b'day -- before replacing Stan Getz in Woody Herman's big band, The Herd.

In the 1950s he had the rest of Bebop Valhalla in his groups, with mega-musicians then emerging -- like Jackie McLean, Mal Waldron and John Coltrane, to name but a fraction -- entering his orbit.

At the turn of the Fifties to the Sixties he was jailed twice for drug possession, and lost most of the 1960s period to Joliet State Prison.

It was when he emerged from incarceration that he enjoyed arguably his greatest and most prolific, influential moments, when -- as I alluded to earlier -- he began to integrate elements of Soul and Rock into his music.

Those last five years, from 1969 to his untimely passing, from bone cancer, in 1974 saw him come up with a whole slew of albums -- both as a leader and in collaboration with Sonny Stitt, James Moody (we did his centenary, just weeks ago... omg! this is like a graveyard with saxophones in here, isn't it?) and others -- that cemented his generational legacy as a player for all times, that we still revere and reference today.

Maybe the Bluesiest Bebopper ever to blow into brass, he always brought the basis in the music out from within the sometimes frenetic and complicated intervals and changes, with a grainy, almost gutbucket bellowing Blues tone totally suited to the liminal spaces between Jazz and modern popular music.

There's no ROIOs of him that I am aware of, coming from an older generation of Jazz as he does, but I put together just about all his funky soul jams into one two-hour playlist and mashed it all together rather danceably, if I do say so.

Gene Ammons

Funk Jugular

1969-1974

01 Big Bad Jug

02 Brasswind

03 Son of a Preacher Man

04 The Jungle Boss

05 Jungle Strut

06 Lady Sings the Blues

07 Rozzie

08 God Bless the Child

09 Jaggin'

10 Lady Mama

11 Solitario

12 Cantaro

13 Jug Eyes

14 Crazy Mary

15 Something

16 Back In Merida

17 Papa Was a Rolling Stone

18 The People's Choice (w. Sonny Stitt)

19 Ben

20 What's Going On

21 Long Long Time

22 Chicago Breakdown

Total time: 2:00:02

disc break goes after Track 11

a compendium of Jug's most funkified 1970s tracks

selected, assembled & remastered by EN, April 2025
772 MB FLAC/direct link

Things are rough right now, which I'll explain more about in the next post in 48 hours, but I wanted to make sure I fit this Jug of Funky Soul in, in necessary honor of the centennial of the great Gene Ammons!--J.

4.14.1925 - 8.6.1974