Friday, November 3, 2017

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet - "Country Preacher" (1970)


"Country Preacher" (1970) - The Cannonball Adderley Quintet

Written by Josef Zawinul * 45: "Country Preacher" / "Hummin'" * LP: Country Preacher: "Live" at Operation Breadbasket * Label: Capitol * Billboard charts: Hot 100 (#86), soul (#29) * Entered: 1970-01-18 (Hot 100), 1970-01-31 (soul)

A swirl of sociological energy accompanied the release of alto sax man Cannonball Adderley and his quintet's Country Preacher album, which was recorded at one of Reverend Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket meetings at a church in Chicago. These were gatherings for ministers, musicians, and political figures—an initiative that had been launched by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.—at a time when, as jazz writer Chris Sheridan puts it in his 2000 Dis Here: A Bio-Discography of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, "the battle for political rights was over, but that for economic equality had just begun."

Other strong components in the narrative surrounding Country Preacher had to do with the pros and cons of commercial acceptance for jazz and the record's reliance on blues, gospel, and a "racial memory" of the South, as Lorenzo Thomas calls it (in reference to Adderley) in his Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (2008)The album's title track was written as a tribute to Jackson by Josef Zawinul, the Austrian musician who sits conspicuously white behind his Wurlitzer on the album's back cover and reminds us visually to get over the race thing and just listen to the music, which is where the real energy is. (Zawinul, who aided and abetted in Adderley's attempts to find widespread acceptance for quality jazz in spite of criticism, would later continue to do so with his own band, Weather Report.)

On "Country Preacher," as with Adderley's 1967 radio hit "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," the audience interaction with the music is crucial to the recording's appeal—at two specific points it sounds like the intensity will boil over, but then it stops dead... and then continues all dialed back, cool and collected, much to the room's pleasure and approval. It's a musical approximation of a skillful, hypothetical country preacher's cadences, bringing forth the same kind of congregational responses. The 45 version doesn't include Adderley's spoken introduction of the number from the album; the B side includes a rare studio take of "Hummin'" (written by Cannonball's brother Nat, the band's cornet player) rather than the live version that leads off the album. This would be the last chart appearance for Cannonball Adderley, who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1975.

Side A: "Country Preacher"


Side B: "Hummin'"



No comments:

Post a Comment