Walk Tall: The Music and Life of Julian Cannonball Adderley

Copyright © 2013 by Cary Ginell

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Published in 2013 by Hal Leonard Books

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ginell, Cary.

Walk tall: the music and life of Julian Cannonball Adderley / Cary Ginell; with a foreword by Quincy Jones.

pages cm. — (The Hal Leonard jazz biography series)

Includes bibliographical references and discography.

ISBNs: 978-1480-3430-3-0 (ePub); 978-1-4803-4304-7 (Mobi)

1. Adderley, Cannonball. 2. Jazz musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

ML419.A27G56 2013

788.7’3165092—dc23

[B]

2012048395

www.halleonardbooks.com

Hipness is not a state of mind, it is a fact of life.

JULIAN CANNONBALL ADDERLEY

Contents

Foreword by Quincy Jones

Preface by Dan Morgenstern

Introduction

1. Cannibal

2. A New York Minute

3. The New Bird

4. Milestone

5. Cannonball on a Roll

6. Kind of Blue

7. Cannonball Takes Charge

8. Spontaneous Combustion

9. Work Song

10. A Very Important Cat

11. Onska

12. Olga

13. The Cannonball Express

14. An Assault on the Tyranny of Style

15. The Club

16. Welcome to Club Capitol

17. Accent on Africa

18. Country Preacher

19. The Black Messiah

20. As Ambient as All Hell

21. With His Hammer in His Hand

22. Big Man

Acknowledgments

Sources

Discography

Photo Insert

Foreword

Quincy Jones

Ididn’t find Cannonball Adderley. Cannonball found me. It was 1955. I was living in a basement apartment at 55 West Ninety-second Street on the West Side, and one day he and Nat came by. They had just gotten into town from Florida and were looking for a label. Oscar Peterson gave Cannon my number.

I asked him, Have you ever recorded before? He said, Yes, and he gave me this record, a home acetate with a blue label on it. On one side was Frankie & Johnny, and on the other, I think, an original song or something like that. He pretended he had recorded before, but he hadn’t done anything but that one acetate. When I listened to it, that record knocked me on my ass. I remember saying to myself, Damn, this cat’s the next Bird. I had never heard anything like that before. He was groundbreaking, just like Clifford Brown was.

At that time I was working as an arranger and composer and A&R for EmArcy Records and Bobby Shad. Two years later, we made a deal with Philips to sign all of our jazz artists for $100,000 apiece. That was unheard-of back then. I signed Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Paul Quinichette, and Clark Terry, my idol and guru since I was twelve years old. But that came later. Cannon was the first.

After the Adderleys left, I called Bobby Shad and I said, Bobby, this is the cat, man. You got to hear this guy. He’s the next Charlie Parker. So Bobby said, I hear you, I hear you. I don’t need to hear him. If you think that much about this guy, I believe you. Now here’s what you do. Book the studio, get the engineer, get the musicians, and write the arrangements. I’ll see you at the studio on Tuesday. We only had a few days to get the session together—not a whole lot of time. So we went with the flow. Together Cannon and I picked the songs and wrote some others. I remember Cannon and I wrote a song called Fallen Feathers that was dedicated to Charlie Parker. We got to the Capitol Studios on Forty-fourth Street and Bobby said, Take 1. That’s all he had to do because all the other stuff was done.

We became close friends. Closer than close. After he and his beautiful wife, Olga, moved to Bel Air, I was invited to his house with all of our friends, including Sidney Miller, every Sunday, relaxin’ and groovin,’ tellin’ lies, drinkin’ and stinkin’.

Cannon had a mind as sharp as a tack. He had studied with Professor William P. Foster, who was the band director down at Florida A&M. Foster was a brother, but he didn’t even want his students to play boogie-woogie. He taught them music theory and how to read. Cannon was an old-school musician. Every musician from the old school had to read music perfectly. And if you came out of Florida A&M, you knew how to read music.

I remember how robust he always was, and what a beautiful, sparkling, original personality he had. He was smart as well as personable, which was a rare combination. You can tell when someone knows who they are and is happy with who they are. That was Cannon. He had that sense of humor, that congeniality, and that charisma, and knew how to reach out to people in the world. Cannon made everything a joy to receive. Nothing was ever a problem for him. Instead, it was a puzzle, because a puzzle you can always solve.

Nadia Boulanger used to tell me, when I was studying with her in Paris, Quincy, music will never be more or less than what you are as a human being. That’s really true. That’s where the music comes from. You can have all the technique and knowledge in the world, but if you haven’t lived and don’t have your own story to tell, you’ll have nothing to say musically. Music is a reflection of who the person is, and whatever it was, Cannonball had it.

Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit, and Cannonball Adderley made a habit of excellence. I will never forget him, and neither will my daughter Kidada, for he was her godfather. One of our proudest possessions is Cannon’s gold flute that he left her, which hangs on the wall behind my bar along with Dizzy’s original upright trumpet. As long as I live, Cannon will always be with us, and deep within our hearts.

Preface

Dan Morgenstern

Imissed Cannonball’s fabled New York debut but did see him not long after, for the first of many happy times. While more than effective on record—and we are fortunate that he was so well represented, as leader and sideman, studio and live, during his splendid but all-too-brief twenty-year run—Julian (which is what I called him) was most fully appreciated when heard and seen in person. That was when the warmth of his sound, voice, and personality was truly realized in three dimensions.

Julian began his professional life as a teacher, and he never lost that aspect of his persona. This was one reason he became such an effective communicator, on bandstand and stage, and, I’m sure, such a successful bandleader. He just loved to connect with people, and to give them some words to go with the music. In that sense, he was truly a jazz messenger.

But it wasn’t just his own music that Julian promoted. His special relationship with the record producer Orrin Keepnews, as an unofficial advisor and talent scout, brought about, most significantly, the overdue emergence of Wes Montgomery and, on an entirely different but charming level, his narration of Riverside’s History of Jazz LP. For another label he produced an album for singer and alto saxophonist Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, who he felt had been undeservedly neglected, and he surely did lots of less visible coat pulling on behalf of other musicians.

Inevitably, a prominent jazz musician as articulate as Julian was enlisted by the media as a spokesman, and he did well in that role. When I was with Down Beat I managed to involve Julian in a panel discussion that focused on new currents in jazz, feeling that I would need a voice of reason, and though a gig came up after our date had been set, he showed up for as long as he could (most others would just have begged off). And he did indeed provide that voice in what became a free-for-all. (For readers into ancient history, it was published in Down Beat’s Music ’66 as Point of Contact.)

A much more enjoyable point of contact occurred when Julian attended one of the annual meetings of the National Endowment of the Arts’ Jazz Advisory Panel. The jazz program had been growing slowly but steadily and had reached a point where there was some decent funding at our disposal, but Julian rightly felt that there should be more. I served on that panel longer than anyone, first as an adviser, then as consultant, and thus had the pleasure of working with a large number of musicians, many of them dedicated to the cause. But none was as inspirational as Julian, who in the course of two days of meetings raised the level of consciousness and ambition to new heights. He would have made a fabulously effective politician. On a lower plane, this also provided an opportunity to observe Julian in his Cannonball role—as eater. We had lunch in situ, so to speak, and fixed our own sandwiches from an ample spread. The ones—and more than one, to be sure—that Julian fixed, with all the trimmings, were truly gargantuan, and were dispatched at a tempo fit for the Adderley Quintet at its fastest.

Mention of the Quintet brings his brother, Nat, to mind. The two were, I’m certain, the closest musical brothers in jazz history, artistically and personally. Their togetherness in ensembles was unique, not least because their rhythmic sense seemed to stem from a single heartbeat. Nat carried on the message after Julian’s big heart stopped beating much too soon, but not before the creation of a musical legacy, lovingly traced in these pages by Cary Ginell, and very much still with us.

Introduction

Cary Ginell

My fascination with the music of Cannonball Adderley began when I was a boy of thirteen, immersed in the pop and rock broadcast on Los Angeles radio station KHJ, then at the height of its omnivorous Boss 30 music format. KHJ was known to have played everything and anything, so long as it was popular. The late 1960s was a time when jazz instrumentals crossed over and became best sellers. Through the radio I discovered hits by Ramsey Lewis (The In Crowd), Hugh Masekela (Grazing in the Grass), and El Chicano (Viva Tirado), and many other hit singles. The songs were rhythmic and jazzy, and all had infectious hooks.

Through my older brother, an inveterate and much more advanced jazz fan, I found other artists who played this catchy music, mostly on 45-rpm singles (we couldn’t afford to buy very many LPs on a seventy-five-cent a week allowance) with edited performances of what were longer works on LP. As a Beatles fan, I always was drawn to the colorful yellow-and-orange swirl design Capitol Records used on their singles in those days, so when I was thumbing through my brother’s album binder of 45s, I came across a record by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. The name Cannonball fascinated me, so I asked him about it and he put the record on his turntable. The record was Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. I had already developed a love for soul music, which I was probably drawn to by Ramsey Lewis’s music, with its unmistakable gospel swing, and also enjoyed the few Ray Charles records we had in the house; so when I put the needle on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, I was instantly captivated. The song was not just jazzy and soulful, but singable; a good melody always grabbed my attention, and my still developing ear for jazz loved the sound.

In time other Adderley singles became favorites: the ripping excitement of I’m on My Way and the exotic beat of Gumba Gumba. I yearned for more and began checking out jazz LPs from the Brand Library in Glendale, devouring the longer versions of some of his songs, such as Work Song and Jive Samba. As a musician myself, I had a better than average ear, and through the cornucopia of styles I was hearing on KHJ, my musical taste rapidly expanded to include soul jazz, the most accessible kind of jazz for general consumption.

I was never aware of the racial element of music. In listening to all different kinds of styles while growing up, the objectivity of radio’s audio-only limitations made it unnecessary to distinguish between white and black performers. Even the 45s that we so eagerly craved did not reveal the races of the performers. Along with a national awakening to civil rights in the 1960s, it is likely that this had something to do with jazz’s crossing of racial barriers during this period, when radio stations desegregated themselves by playing whatever was selling, and not just music by one particular racial group.

As it turned out, what happened to me was also happening to other youngsters throughout the United States. Through the portal of Top 40 radio, soul jazz indoctrinated many fans, both white and black, into the world of Jimmy Smith, Ramsey Lewis, and Herbie Mann. In time, I learned the lineage of Cannonball Adderley’s development: how he started as a neophyte bop musician but changed with the times, eager to embrace different influences and experiment with music of different cultures, always with a youthful and joyous enthusiasm.

Cannonball Adderley changed jazz because, to him, jazz wasn’t just an intellectual process—it was fun. The joy and exuberance of Adderley’s music was infectious. You can see it in any of his band’s performances that stream over YouTube. As opposed to the stoic, introspective, and self-absorbed musicians of bebop, Cannonball Adderley clearly enjoyed everything he played. But watch him when he is not playing. His right hand is in constant motion, fingers snapping and hand waving in a circular motion to the percolating soulful beat. His feet tap a steady rhythm. He smiles often, especially when Nat is playing cornet. When Cannonball has a good time, his audience does as well.

But for me, the best thing about listening to Cannonball Adderley’s records was his spoken introductions. At thirteen, I had no idea what jazz was all about, but Cannonball explained all I needed to know. He spoke not in the pedantic manner of a teacher, but as an entertainer. Still, I couldn’t help but learn from those humorous and hip intros to his songs. He always identified the songwriter, explained the derivation of the often kooky-sounding song titles, or, if there was no real explanation, merely chuckled about it, such as on Mini Mama. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest when I later learned that Cannonball had started out as a music teacher himself.

What Cannonball Adderley did was make jazz accessible to the average person’s ears. Previously, jazz was an in-group genre. You had to get it from the inside out. With Adderley, you didn’t have to understand complex chord progressions, modal scales, or arcane musical references. All you had to do was dig the groove.

Cannonball Adderley exploded onto the jazz scene in the early 1960s by making the same impression on audiences as he did on me. He brought an enthusiasm for his music to nightclubs around the world, expanding jazz’s boundaries with a fresh exuberance as the music progressed from the bebop of the 1940s and ’50s to combine with gospel and soul to help pioneer the subgenres of hard bop and soul jazz in the ’60s. Beginning with his single of African Waltz, Cannonball Adderley pioneered the barrier-breaking influx of pop-oriented singles into Top 40 radio, which continued throughout the decade.

But Cannonball Adderley’s influence was much greater than that of a mere popularizer of the constantly changing sound of jazz. Through his series of music clinics and lectures, Adderley explained and demonstrated the history of jazz to youngsters who had no other means of getting to know the music. Like me, they were too young to attend concerts at nightclubs that served alcohol and had limited means of traveling to places where they could hear his music. So Cannonball brought the music to them, conducting sessions in countless high schools, talking about the music in language they could understand, with a good-natured personality that turned him into a veritable Pied Piper of jazz.

In the spring of 1975 I was an undergraduate student at UCLA working at the campus radio station when Cannonball Adderley came to deliver one of his seminars. The radio station was situated in the rear of the student union assembly hall and although I was on the air at the time, I would poke my head out into the hall periodically to hear what was going on. The hall was filled to capacity, and I remember seeing Cannonball, all by himself, giving a freewheeling lecture on jazz punctuated by recorded musical demonstrations. I don’t remember much about what he said, mainly because my attention was distracted by my on-air duties at the station, but the image of him and the enthusiastic reaction of the students in the massive hall will stay with me always.

Cannonball Adderley died shortly after that, at the all-too-young age of forty-six. By that time jazz had mutated again, and fusion had become its latest incarnation. I have no doubt that had he lived, Cannonball would have absorbed whatever the latest trend was in jazz and would have spearheaded still other avenues it would take in succeeding generations. But Cannonball Adderley embodied the spirit of the 1960s, when everything hip