Freddie Mitchell

As the giant green saxophone suggests, this Boogie Bash is a honkin' sax outing for Freddie Mitchell, with his band of New York musicians.

Although this collection appeared on the "X" label in about 1957, the recordings were made for Derby from 1949-52, when Mitchell was its music director.

Mitchell had a propensity to update old tunes in jump style, so here we have everything from Mendelssohn's wedding march, to jazz riffs like Till Tom Special, to Maurice Chevalier's Louise.

In addition to the 10 numbers on the LP, I've added six from 78s, including Freddie's take on Easter Parade (below) and his hit, Doby's Boogie. The latter was a tribute to Larry Doby, the first African American baseball player in the American League. For a tribute, it isn't much of a tune, seemingly completely improvised.

The LP contains two vocals that are attributed to Sarah Dean (although I wouldn't have guessed they are by the same vocalist).

This post is a follow-up to the Todd Rhodes material below. Like Rhodes, one of Mitchell's records was adopted by disk jockey Alan Freed for theme music. Freed used Rhodes' Blues for the Red Boy when he was in Cleveland, and Mitchell wrote Moon Dog Boogie for Freed.

Jimmy Yancey

Returning to the Label "X" series of blues and jazz reissues, here is Jimmy Yancey, a Chicago pianist who achieved a certain renown relatively late in life.

This 10-inch record collates sides that Yancey made in 1939 and 1940 for Bluebird, the RCA label. They were among his first recordings, and the first for a major label. He was about 40 years old (his birth year is disputed).

At that time Yancey had been a Chicago White Sox groundskeeper for some years and did not play music full-time. But his playing nonetheless was held in high regard by his fellow pianists. Yancey's imagination and sense of style are in full display here.

The cover of this album, in common with the others on Label "X" featured on this site previously, is by Paul Bacon.

You can read more about Yancey here. He died in 1951.

Kings of the Blues

This is a follow-up post to our item on Ida May Mack and Bessie Tucker. That was Vol. 2 in Label "X"'s Backgrounds of Jazz series, and this is Vol. 3. (Don't have Vol. 1.)

Remarkably, most of these sides were recorded in Memphis during the same week of August 1928 as the Mack and Tucker recordings.

As with the earlier LP. this must be one of the first albums ever devoted to reissuing the blues records of the 1920s. I should mention, though, that many of these sides are not really blues, strictly speaking.

Jim Jackson and Frank Stokes were experienced medicine show entertainers. Furry Lewis lasted long enough to appear with the Rolling Stones. He even showed up on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Ishman Bracey may be the least known of the group, having produced only 16 sides.

The two Jim Jackson songs on this record may be familiar to those who grew up in the 60s because they were rerecorded by two good-timey folk rock bands - I'm Wild About My Lovin' by the Lovin' Spoonful and This Mornin' She Was Gone by the Youngbloods (under the title Grizzly Bear). I wonder if those groups knew this album.

The cover is by Paul Bacon, who also did the cover of the Mack-Tucker LP, in a much different style.

LINK

Ida May Mack and Bessie Tucker

Reissued blues records are very common today, but not so in 1955 when this record of two obscure blues artists appeared. This rare record made available eight recordings cut by two Texas women in Memphis eighty years ago next week.

The singers are Ida May Mack and the somewhat rougher Bessie Tucker, both of whom were accompanied by pianist K. D. Johnson. Little is known about any of these artists, except that the singers are believed to be from the Dallas area, and the pianist from Memphis.

The performances are quite good, as are the recordings, although it does sound like the 1950s engineers added some reverb (some things never change). The records were made for the Victor Company, and the reissue was by Label "X," a short-lived RCA Victor subsidiary that put out many excellent records. This was in a series called Backgrounds of Jazz. At that time, reissues sold mainly to jazz collectors who valued the performances as much for their relationship to jazz as for their intrinsic merits.

Mack recorded these sides, and, I believe, a few others. Tucker recorded enough so that her records have been collected into a Document CD. The latter singer has something of a following for her strong voice and intensity. There is a interesting page here that speculates on her background based on clues in some of these recordings.

I don't find this record's artwork to be especially attractive, but it is an example of the skills of Paul Bacon, a distinguished designer who did many book jackets and jazz record covers, and who was a jazz musician himself.