Mr. Tambourine Man
FINDING THE FREQUENCY IN THE SNAKEPIT
There are but a few still alive.
Funk Brothers, that is. And so it was a delight to see Jack Ashford, aging gracefully, in CNN’s recent TV documentary about What’s Going On. After all, it was his tambourine which helped to bring people to church – the one located at 2648 West Grand, whose gospel went on to circle the globe and inspire followers to this day.
You need proof? Listen to Ashford’s art on Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” or Martha & the Vandellas’ “Nowhere To Run.” Or the rattlesnake menace underpinning Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Or the bolt of electricity his instrument injects into Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way” at 3:00 into the 5:42 album mix.
“I tried to use it in a way that it would have its own voice,” Ashford once told me, “and yet would still complement what was going on around it.”
Jack Ashford, second right, with (l-r) Earl Van Dyke, Robert White and Bob Cousar in London
Still, it was by accident that this Philadelphia-born musician took up the tambourine in the first place. Circa 1962, he was playing vibes with a jazz trio booked into a venue in Providence, Rhode Island. “We were bombing in this club – there were too many [other] acts on this one block.” The group’s leader was organist Charles Harris. “It’s amazing how a person can do one thing in their life, and it can have such an impact on yours.
“He came to rehearsal one day,” continued Ashford, “and had this big tambourine. It was larger than a normal thing, more than ten inches – it was about 14 inches. Now, I’d never touched a tambourine before. I mean, never.” But Harris instructed his vibes player – no argument, Jack – to use it during their set at the club that night.
“So we did a Dave Brubeck tune called ‘Take Five,’ and I picked the tambourine up, started playing – and it was amazing. I was looking at my hands, like I didn’t believe what I was doing. It just happened. Everybody was talking at the bar until I started playing. And the next thing I knew, by the time our set was over, it was packed. [People] had gone up the street, telling other people, ‘This guy’s playing jazz tambourine.’ ”
The Charles Harris Trio’s club booking was extended – by six weeks.
Naturally, Ashford made the most out of the happenstance. “I started developing it, did some techniques with it, to get different sounds. Then I started listening to the rest of the band. Because, at first, I was just playing the tambourine. Then I let it accent and complement the other players, then I started finding a way to sync it down into the rhythm section, with rhythms that would complement the other rhythms, but still have a voice of its own, its own frequency.”
JUSTICE FOR THE BROTHERS
A voice of its own? In Studio A, that was Ashford’s skill, complementing the work of the finest musicians of their time. When their names were listed on the album jacket of What’s Going On, it brought them into the daylight. Thirty years later, Standing In The Shadows Of Motown brought them justice.
When I spoke to Ashford three decades ago, Allan “Dr. Licks” Slutsky’s crusade on behalf of the Funks had barely begun. “That’s a story in itself,” the percussionist proclaimed. “I’m so glad Allan is doing what he’s doing. He’ll become a legend with this.” True enough, although Ashford and his fellow players could not have known in 1993 how long the task would take, nor could they have imagined the outcome: an acclaimed documentary, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a flow of bookings – fresh income! – in the U.S. and Europe as a touring band.
Jack Ashford (right) with Mickey Stevenson and Kim Weston, and James Jamerson leaning in
But as is often the case in showbusiness, this success produced fracture. Slutsky and Sandy Passman, his Standing In The Shadows of Motown business partner, subsequently fell out with the Funks, even having to resort to legal action at one point. Still, Slutsky today prefers to recall Ashford on the high road, not the low. “When I was in the wilderness trying to raise money for the film,” he says, “Jack came to visit me in Philly. I was dealing with a guy who hung out at the bar of the Merion Cricket Club in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His name was Beauclerc T. Rogers IV – a blue blood, part of the DuPont family. Beau was doing entertainment financing, and when he found out that Jack was in town, he told me to bring him to lunch.
“Now, the Merion Cricket Club was the seat of old-world WASP money. In the 1950s and early ’60s, they had signs on the front lawn saying ‘No Jews, No Blacks.’ I was shocked when Beau told me to bring Jack, but I did anyway. And he sat in the bar, regaling various club members with his stories, as they sat in their Brooks Brothers suits, drinking noontime cocktails. When Jack and I left, he was in seventh heaven: ‘Man, they loved me. Those people were so nice.’ ” I said, ‘Jack, you’re the first brother who ever walked into that club who wasn’t carrying a tray!’ He cracked up. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘but they still was nice.’ ”
Some 30 years earlier, it was in another old-money town that Ashford made his Motown connection. “Marvin Gaye ran into me when I was in Boston with a jazz group, playing vibes with Johnny ‘Hammond’ Smith,” he recalled for me. “Marvin came through with Kim Weston and someone else, and they heard there was a vibes player, playing some jazz tambourine. And so he came in and saw me working. I’d never heard of him before, because I was strictly jazz, [but] he took my home number.” A little later came a call from Harvey Fuqua. “He was telling me that Marvin was forming a big band and he would like me to come up and join.”
Whether or not that was a viable project, Ashford made the trip to Detroit and began working at Hitsville. “He could play the hell out of the vibraphone,” wrote Mickey Stevenson in his autobiography, The A&R Man. “He was a jazz musician, and Jack knew his stuff. What we didn’t know was how good he was on the tambourine.”
‘NOBODY LIKE JACK’
It’s a vivid memory for Ashford. “It was amazing, because when I got out there and Berry heard me play tambourine, he said, ‘We can get enough vibes players, but we can’t get anybody to play the tambourine like that.’ ” And so he became embedded into the team in that West Grand basement, complementing their rhythms, adding his alchemy, and helping to write a new testament in popular music.
“The first tambourine player is Miriam, Moses’ sister,” Ashford told the Memphis Commercial Appeal just last month (he has lived in Tennessee since 1983). “That got me interested, so I really started digging into it, and the story of the tambourine in Jewish culture. I listened to how they played that Eastern rhythm, and I found a whole wealth of things there. So I started playing those rhythms on [sessions] and it caught on. No one was playing what I was playing, and everybody wanted that sound.”
Jack Ashford’s 1977 album, Hotel Sheet
That was apparent even after Motown Records quit Detroit, abandoning the Funk Brothers (that was like “scud missile” devastation, in Ashford’s words). During the 1970s, he worked in Los Angeles, a popular recruit for sessions at Motown and elsewhere. “I remember I had a date in California, Frank Wilson flew me out there. He had Joe Sample and all the cats, but held the date up until I got there. When we got finished, David T. Walker said, ‘Man, now I know why we waited.’ ”
On another occasion, producer Hal Davis called Ashford at four in the morning. “He said, ‘Jack, there’s something missing in this song, I need you to come over here to the Paramount studio.’ ” Upon arrival, Davis played him the track in question. “So I laid out one whole third of the song,” said Ashford, “then I came in on the second third of it, and it just blew the whole thing up. That tune was a smash.”
It was, indeed: “Don’t Leave Me This Way.”
Cataloguing Ashford’s work in detail is a daunting task. In addition to his Motown years, he played on numerous sessions for others, including the Holland/Dozier/Holland operation and Golden World. He operated a variety of production outfits and labels in Detroit, including Pied Piper (with fellow Funk Brother Mike Terry) and Just Productions. He expanded his skillset to include songwriting as well as producing; Lorraine Chandler and Eddie Parker were among the beneficiaries.
After Berry Gordy moved his business west, Ashford joined Barney Ales’ Prodigal Records in Detroit, handling A&R. Later in the 1970s, he worked for Norman Whitfield’s label. After that folded, he relocated to Memphis to live, which was where Allan Slutsky contacted him for the protracted adventure which became Standing In The Shadows of Motown.
“Part of the tone Jack got on the tambourine had to do with his size,” says Slutsky today. “He was around six-foot-five with huge hands. He was also very specific about the tambourine he played: no lightweight plastic, hi-tech modern ones for him. He wanted big, old, heavyweight wooden ones with king heads – not plastic.
“I used him once on a session for a blues band I was producing. Their time was a little iffy, but Jack solidified it and made everything mesh just by playing a simple tambourine beat. Kinda like a guy walking down a stream and creating a path by stepping on all the disparate stones in the waterbed – and connecting them all.”
Music notes: almost any Motown playlist drawn from 1964-72 is going to include Ashford’s art, whether on tambourine or other percussion instruments, such as the transcendental vibes heard on the Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby.” These tracks are just a selection, among which are his own outing for Prodigal’s Blaze spinoff (“Do The Choo-Choo”) and Eddie Parker’s “Love You Baby.” For variety, the playlist includes an Ashford composition recorded by Britain’s Georgie Fame. The two became friends on the 1965 Tamla tour of Britain, when Fame was the opening act. For more non-Motown Ashford, seek out a couple of Just Productions albums compiled by England’s Ace Records, or his appearances in more recent years on sessions produced by T Bone Burnett, such as those by Elton John and the Secret Sisters.
Book notes: the colourful detail of Ashford’s professional and personal lives can be found in 2003’s Motown: The View From The Bottom, which he wrote with wife Charlene. Inevitably, he also shows up in other biographies and autobiographies, with few punches pulled. “Mickey Stevenson was an asshole,” Ashford declares in Mark Ribowsky’s The Supremes. “I told him he was, too.” Stevenson himself is a tad more gracious in The A&R Man: “Jack established a spiritual touch to the Motown sound which could not be denied.”