Back to the Workshop

JAZZ FROM HITSVILLE GETS A SECOND SHOT; MORE TO COME?

This may be a modest milestone, but it is one, nonetheless. Today, November 11, sees the first official reissue of a Workshop Jazz album in physical form since Motown introduced the label, a mere 60 years ago.

(Those tempted to reference the 1999 appearance of the Four Tops’ lone long-player for Workshop Jazz, Breaking Through, will recall that it was never actually released in 1964, as planned.)

The late, great Detroit drummer Roy Brooks gets to be the hero of this particular moment, as his one and only Workshop Jazz LP, Beat, returns to market on vinyl via Universal Music’s Verve Records unit and the record-pressing arm of Jack White’s Third Man Records.

“Brooks was a deeply swinging drummer of uncommon creativity, flexibility, fire and conceptual imagination,” wrote Mark Stryker in liner notes for another (but non-Motown) vintage recording by Brooks, entitled Understanding, which came out last year. In his authoritative book, Jazz From Detroit, Stryker noted that the musician was mentored by the city’s “professor of bebop,” pianist Barry Harris – as was a young James Jamerson.

Beat is one of the first two albums reissued by Verve Records and corporate cousin Universal Music Enterprises under a resurrected “Verve By Request” banner. It’s available in the company of Ptah, The El Daoud, the 1970 outing by pianist Alice (McLeod) Coltrane, another Detroit jazz legend with a Motown connection (see Family notes, below). This catalogue project can call upon the abundance of relevant repertoire in the Universal Music vaults, and it has scheduled reissues into 2023, although nothing more from Workshop Jazz as yet.

The albums will be remastered from original analogue sources (“when available,” Universal Music hedges) and pressed on audiophile-quality, 180-gram vinyl at Third Man Pressing in Detroit. A limited-edition yellow colour variant will also be available.

INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Beat was recorded at Hitsville U.S.A. in the autumn of 1963, and, says Stryker, marked Brooks’ debut as a bandleader. It’s essentially a hard-bop sextet in the mode of Horace Silver – for whom the drummer served as sideman – with three others from Silver’s band of the day: Junior Cook (tenor sax), Blue Mitchell (trumpet) and Gene Taylor (bass), with Hugh Lawson (piano) and George Bohanon (trombone) added to make it a sextet. Among the composers: Alice McLeod, before she married John Coltrane; her contribution was “Soulsphere.”

Whatever the longer-term outlook, the reissue of even one Workshop Jazz LP is welcome, given how overlooked has been this small corner of Motown since the imprint’s brief 1962-64 lifespan. The Complete Motown Singles series obviously included all the tracks which originally came out on 45s, few though they were. In Europe, there have been a handful of Workshop Jazz albums from record companies exploiting public-domain availability, such as pianist Earl Washington’s All Star Jazz (from Hallmark in the U.K.) and even Brooks’ Beat (from Spain’s Fresh Sounds).

In 2012, there were two Motown Unreleased 1962 compilations, Jazz Vol. 1 and Jazz Vol. 2, loaded onto digital platforms by Universal Music. The first featured the George Bohanon Quartet’s Workshop Jazz album from ’64, Bold Bohanon, with additional material; the second offered 16 miscellaneous tracks by Beans Bowles and the Johnny Griffith Trio.

***Motown shows off its new arrival in Billboard***

To Motown followers unaware of (or unconcerned with) all that jazz, the musicians will be recognised as vital members of the Funk Brothers. Bowles, for example, played flute on Marv Johnson’s historic “Come To Me” and Little Stevie Wonder’s studio version of “Fingertips,” while Griffith’s keyboards craftwork can be heard on “Can I Get A Witness,” “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (Marvin Gaye’s take) and “Stop! In The Name Of Love.” Dave Hamilton had his own Blue Vibrations album on Workshop Jazz, but more people heard his vibes on “Heat Wave” and “My Guy,” to name but two.

Most Workshop Jazz sessions were produced by Mickey Stevenson and/or Clarence Paul, but even the former’s memoir, The A&R Man, gives short shrift to the experience. “Working our way back to Detroit,” Stevenson wrote, “we picked up this singer, Paula…uh, I can’t remember her last name. I believe it was Greer. No, that’s not it…that was the girl in Chicago.” (Mickey was right first time: Introducing…Miss Paula Greer was Jazz Workshop’s second album release.) Similarly, Berry Gordy’s autobiography makes no mention of the label, despite his avowed love of jazz.

The commercial insignificance of Workshop Jazz is common knowledge, and its demise in 1964 was hardly a surprise. When Stevenson’s research showed jazz listenership plummeting that year, he recalled in Stu Hackel’s Breaking Through liners, “that was the kiss of death.”

“On the plus side,” Mark Stryker told me recently, “[the label] is a reminder that the Motown session players were fundamentally jazz musicians – but the records themselves are mostly uneven. Not all of the players are top-shelf, and the relatively low production values, including the engineering and some of the performances, show that Berry Gordy’s heart wasn’t truly in the label. Having said that, Brooks’ Beat and Pepper Adams Plays Compositions of Charles Mingus are keepers, and The Right Side Of Lefty Edwards is a good showcase for a compelling, but little-known, Sonny Stitt-inspired saxophonist.”

FOUR TOPS + 4

Stryker’s regard for Brooks was shared earlier this year by Duke Fakir, who recalled in his I’ll Be There memoir that the Four Tops recruited the drummer and three other Detroit musicians for the group’s Las Vegas debut. “We opened with our rhythm section at the Dunes [hotel] in 1959, calling ourselves The Four Tops + 4. I was in charge of payroll. We had to split sixteen hundred dollars a week among the eight of us, which didn’t turn out to be that much.”

If there’s more Workshop Jazz material being considered for reissue, Stryker says Verve should seek out “promising, unreleased sessions” led by two trumpeters, Herbie Williams and Marcus Belgrave. In particular, he notes that the latter (“who would later mentor Geri Allen, Kenny Garrett, Robert Hurst and so many other important Detroiters”) fronted recording dates with such musicians as Bennie Maupin, Pepper Adams, Kirk Lightsey and Cecil McBee.

***You remember Paula Greer, don’t you, Mickey?***

Stryker continues, “Williams, who had played with Charlie Parker in the ’50s in Boston, recorded The Soul and Sound of Herbie Williams for the label, and a photo of the album apparently appeared on a Motown inner sleeve. But the LP never seems to have come out. I wish the folks at Universal would make finding and releasing these tapes a priority. That would be some deep Detroit jazz history that everyone would wish to hear.”

Williams and Belgrave also played on many mainstream Motown sessions. “The daily situation was that we’d be there for four or five hours doing three tunes,” Belgrave told International Trumpet Guild Journal in 2009. “We’d come back and do those same tunes the next day. In the meantime, the writers would take whatever ideas we had from the first session and then extract and add whatever ideas they had. So when we came back the next day, we’d be playing the ideas we had generated, but in a different way because the composers had worked on the music the previous night.”

If Belgrave and Brooks’ association with Motown is familiar, that’s not the case with onetime child prodigy Alex Kallao. During the 1950s and early ’60s, this blind pianist caught the attention of music fans and critics in New York and Detroit, “dazzling customers with his flashing piano pyrotechnics,” according to Time magazine in ’54. After recording an album for RCA, he settled in the Motor City, and Motown identified him – plus another pianist, Ted Sheely – in a 1963 sales brochure as belonging to “our current roster of jazz artists.” Kallao never had anything released on Workshop Jazz, although it’s thought he did play on other Motown sessions; the same applied to Sheely.

But let’s close with Roy Brooks, as Beat returns to circulation. In the LP’s original liner notes, there’s a reference to his early days (and nights) performing as a precocious teenager with Yusef Lateef, the afore-mentioned Barry Harris and other Detroit jazz masters at the Club El Sino. This hip venue, located on St. Antoine in the city’s Paradise Valley district, had previously booked the likes of Charlie Parker, Illinois Jacquet and Dizzy Gillespie – and their luminescence would have appealed to another jazz fan of the 1950s, who also happened to live on St. Antoine.

His name? Berry Gordy, Jr.

Family notes: so what is Alice Coltrane’s Motown connection? It’s sisterhood. Her younger sibling was Marilyn McLeod, the Jobete-signed songwriter known for such hits as “Love Hangover” and “Walk In The Night” (she is profiled in this earlier WGB edition). McLeod’s grandson is also in music: he’s hip-hop star Flying Lotus. On the subject of offspring, let’s also mention Beth Griffith-Manley, daughter of the above-cited Funk Brother, Johnny Griffith. Her career as a singer/actress has included touring with a contemporary Motown act, KEM, as well as recording; her most recent single was “You’ve Already Won.” (And thanks for the tip, Geoff Ruderham of Black Diamond FM.)

Music notes: this West Grand Blog playlist features a number of Workshop Jazz tracks from 1962-64, including trombonist George Bohanon’s engaging excursion into the Contours’ hit, “Do You Love Me.” Here also is one of the tracks from the Four Tops’ Breaking Through album, unavailable until 1999. Pianist Ted Sheely (misspelled as Ted Sherry in Motown’s sales brochure, shown above) had nothing released on Workshop Jazz under his own name, but was credited as co-writer of “Fever In The Funk House,” the James Jamerson track unearthed for Motown Year-By-Year: 1969. What better way to wrap up a playlist?