Big Joe TURNER - Jumpin' Tonight 1985

Big Joe TURNER - Jumpin' Tonight 1985
PM-231

Blues

There was never another blues shouter who could match Big Joe Turner for sheer volume (it was as though the guy was equipped with an internal echo chamber) or for the ability to bawl out verse after verse of real and righteous blues. His vast repertoire was acquired during a remarkably long career which stretched back to the bars and clubs of 1920s Kansas City and forward to the dawn of rock and roll in the studios of Atlantic Records in the 1950s and onward ever onward, yea even unto the 1980s, that accursed decade of synth pop and big hair.

This 1985 Pathe Marconi LP brings together tracks from two stages of Big Joe Turner’s long career. The first nine tracks were recorded for Aladdin in 1947 while the remainder are from a 1950 Imperial session at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio in New Orleans.

In truth these years were not a happy time for Joe. His records were selling poorly and the glory days of his partnership with boogie woogie pianist Pete Johnson were a fading memory. Back in 1938 they had travelled from KC to take part in John Hammond’s “From Spirituals To Swing” concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall and had taken The Big Apple by storm. There were successful records such as “Roll ‘Em Pete” and “Cherry Red” on Vocalion, Okeh and Decca. Their music was a precursor to post war rockin’ R&B and yet as swing gave way to rhythm and blues Big Joe found himself being elbowed aside (at least as far as record sales were concerned) by newer younger talents.

He recorded some terrific sides for National (1945 – 1947) and Swing Time (1949) but as the track list below shows, little of his Aladdin material was thought worthy of release at the time. This is a pity, because the reworking of “Roll ‘Em Pete”, “Ice Man Blues” and especially “Nobody In Mind” are all rousing blues. The released “Low Down Dog” and “Back Breaking Blues” are good rockers. The sides recorded with Wynonie are probably best regarded as curiosities, live versions of cutting contests, rather than potential chart breaking recordings.

With his Aladdin recordings failing to sell, Big Joe took to the road, playing clubs around the South and frequently stopping over in New Orleans where he recorded a session for Imperial with Dave Bartholomew’s band in 1950. The band line up included Herb Hardesty on sax, Fats Domino on piano and Earl Palmer on drums. Yet even with such sterling backing and Joe himself on fine form, the Imperial recordings stiffed.
**
A1. Battle Of The Blues (Part 1) (unreleased until 1968)
A2. Battle Of The Blues (Part 2) (Aladdin 3036)
A3. Going Home
A4. Blues
A5. Roll 'Em Pete
A6. Ice-Man Blues
A7. Nobody In Mind
B1. Low Down Dog (Aladdin 3013)
B2. Back Breaking Blues (Aladdin 3070)
B3. Story To Tell (Imperial 5090)
B4. Jumpin' Tonight (Midnight Rockin’) (Imperial 5090)
B5. Lucille (Imperial 5093)
B6. Love My Baby (Little Bitty Baby) (Imperial 5093)
B7. Blues Jump The Rabbit (Bayou 015)
**
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Big Joe TURNER - Rhythm & Blues Years 1987

Big Joe TURNER - Rhythm & Blues Years 1987


Review 

This disc, along with Atlantic's 'Joe Turner's Greatest Hits,' will give you a good overall view of the man and his music. Lipstick Powder and Paint, Morning Noon and Night, and You Know I Love You are the main songs that will get you on this one. The man could sing anything. And, the kick is, he couldn't read. They say his wife used to teach him the words to the songs and when he let go, what came up came out. Big Joe Turner was and is BIG.
By Lester L. Carter.
**
Picks up the rest of the 1950s Atlantic Records motherlode. The Chicago-cut double-entendre gem "TV Mama" (with Elmore James on guitar), the lighthearted rockers "Rock a While," "Morning Noon & Night," and "Lipstick, Powder & Paint," and a rip-snorting remake of Turner's classic "Roll 'Em Pete," here titled "(We're Gonna) Jump for Joy," that in its own way rivals the original (King Curtis' blistering sax solo doesn't hurt), are among the many highlights on the 28-song collection.
By Bill Dahl. AMG.
**
Jimmy Nottingham (Trumpet), Christine Spencer (Vocals), Johnny Jones (Piano), Zal Schreiber (Mastering), Dave McRae (Sax (Baritone)), Mike Stoller (Piano), Elmore James (Guitar), Harry Van Walls (Piano), Ernie Hayes (Piano), Joe Tillman (Sax (Tenor)), Mickey Baker (Guitar), Ray Charles (Piano), Hilton Jefferson (Sax (Alto)), Bob Defrin (Art Direction), Abie Baker (Bass), Bob Porter (Reissue Producer), Sonny Cohn (Trumpet), Herb Abramson (Producer), Budd Johnson (Sax (Baritone)), Budd Johnson (Sax (Alto)), The Cookies (Vocals), Jesse Stone (Arranger), Jerry Leiber (Producer), Philip Guilbeau (Trumpet), Arlem Kareem (Sax (Baritone)), Mundell Lowe (Guitar), William Burchett (Sax (Alto)), Sam "The Man" Taylor (Sax (Tenor)), Big Joe Turner (Vocals), Joe Morris (Trumpet), Freddie Mitchell (Sax (Tenor)), Haywood Henry (Sax (Baritone)), Billy Mure (Bass), George Barnes (Guitar), Billy Mure (Guitar), Ahmet Ertegun (Producer), Jerry Wexler (Producer), King Curtis (Reeds (Multiple)), Dick Vance (Trumpet), Edward Frank (Piano), Sam Feldman (Mastering), Lloyd Trotman (Bass), Earle Warren (Sax (Alto)), Sticks Evans (Drums), Rector Bailey (Guitar), Mack Easton (Sax (Baritone)), Panama Francis (Drums), Jesse Stone (Piano), Marlowe Morris (Piano), Leon Cohn (Reeds), Marlowe Morris (Organ), Allen Hanlon (Guitar), Oscar Moore (Drums), Choker Campbell (Sax (Tenor)), Van "Piano Man" Walls (Piano), Lloyd Lambert (Bass), Taft Jordan (Trumpet), Red Tyler (Sax (Tenor)), Ahmet Ertegun (Executive Producer), Leon Cohn (Reeds (Multiple)), Mike Stoller (Producer), Wilbur DeParis (Trombone), King Curtis (Sax (Tenor)), Herb Abramson (Liner Notes), Bill Suyker (Guitar), Leonard Gaskin (Bass), Worthia Thomas (Trombone), Haywood Henry (Sax (Tenor)), Michael Chimes (Harmonica), Helen Way (Vocals), Doryce Brown (Vocals), Mel Wonzo (Trombone), Harry Van Walls (Orchestra), Al Sears (Sax (Tenor)), Gus Fontenette (Sax (Alto)), Stephen Innocenzi (Digital Transfers), Choker Campbell (?), Grady "Fats" Jackson (Sax (Tenor)), Red Saunders (Drums), Jimmy Richardson (Bass), Belton Evans (Drums), John Girard (Trumpet), Connie Kay (Drums), Jesse Stone (Orchestra), Arlem Dareem (Sax (Alto)), Ernie Hayes (Keyboards), Jerome Richardson (Sax (Alto)), Mel Wanzo (Trombone)
**
01. Don't You Cry
02. Poor Lover's Blues
03. Still In Love
04. TV Mama
05. Married Woman
06. You Know I Love You
07. Midnight Cannonball
08. In The Evening
09. Morning Noon and Night
10. Ti-Ri-Lee
11. Lipstick, Powder and Paint
12. Rock A While
13. After a While
14. Trouble In Mind
15. World Of Trouble
16. Love Roller CoastLove Rollercoaster
17. I Need a Girl
18. Teenage Letter
19. Wee Baby Blues
20. (We're Gonna) Jump For Joy
21. Sweet Sue
22. My Reasons for Living
23. Love Oh Careless Love
24. Got You on My Mind
25. Chains of Love
26. My Little Honeydipper
27. Tomorrow Night
28. Honey Hush
**
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Big Joe TURNER - Blues On Central Avenue 2002

Big Joe TURNER - Blues On Central Avenue 2002

Blues

"Boss of the Blues" Joe Turner owns the distinction of laying legitimate claim to being one of the founding fathers of both rhythm & blues and rock & roll; this in addition to being regarded as one of the most powerful bluesmen in history, a physically imposing man with a huge voice and a singing style unadorned by gimmickry. The very straightforwardness of his approach was its own recommendation: Whether shouting it out or getting into what passed for a gentle mode, Turner's voice remained a stately instrument: dynamic without being ostentatious, long on legato, short on melisma, always moving.

Turner's career dates to the mid-'20s, when he landed a job tending bar in his native Kansas City; as an extracurricular activity he took up shouting the blues with pianist Pete Johnson. Turner, Johnson, Sam Price, and Jay McShann became the key figures in a vital Kansas City music scene that merged blues and jazz into the boogie-woogie which swept the country after Turner's appearance at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1938. Turner remained in New York, ensconced at Café Society, and recorded under his own name and with other prominent jazz and blues artists. A 1956 Atlantic release, Boss of the Blues, re-creates the fertile Kansas City period of Turner's career, reuniting him with the estimable Johnson and other first-rate players on the tunes that secured Turner's early acclaim: "Cherry Red;" and "Wee Baby Blues" and "Low Down Dog," both Turner originals. In their original recordings, these and other sides that Turner cut in the late '40s constituted a new sound that would evolve into rhythm & blues -- spurred in no small measure by Turner's own voluminous 1950s recordings for Atlantic. It wasn't a long leap from Turner's style of R&B to rock & roll, as evidenced by the success of Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" in a sanitized cover version by Bill Haley and His Comets. Other of Turner's sides remain important genre-busting entries that are considered rock & roll by some, R&B by others: Of these, the most prominent are "Flip, Flop and Fly," "Honey Hush," "Corrina, Corrina" and "Sweet Sixteen." This fruitful era is well documented on Big, Bad & Blue, Big Joe Turner's Greatest Hits, Memorial Album -- Rhythm & Blues Years, and Rhino's succinct 16-song overview, The Very Best of Big Joe Turner.

Turner continued to record sporadically through the '60s, then found his career in high gear again come the '70s, thanks to producer Norman Granz, who teamed Turner with jazz giants Count Basie, Milt Jackson, Roy Eldridge, and others on several recordings for the Pablo label. Age hardly diminished the authority of Turner's singing; moreover, his stellar accompanists inspired him to fine performances. Of note here are Flip, Flop & Fly, with the Count Basie Orchestra (recorded in 1972), Nobody in Mind, with Milt Jackson, Roy Eldridge, and Pee Wee Clayton among the supporting cast; and In the Evening, a moody set featuring Turner's swaggering, laconic take on George Gershwin's "Summertime." A remarkable summit meeting defines the whole of The Trumpet Kings Meet Joe Turner, a 1974 project that found the sine qua non of blues shouters holding forth with a quartet of equally imposing trumpet masters in Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Clark Terry.

In 1983 Turner got together with the great songwriter Doc Pomus to cowrite a new tune, "Blues Train," that became the centerpiece of Turner's final album. Coproduced by Pomus (who had been inspired to become a singer and songwriter after hearing Turner's recording of "Piney Brown Blues" in 1941) and Bob Porter, Blues Train rumbles and roars mightily, with Turner backed by Roomful of Blues and Dr. John on nine cuts that take him all the way back to Kansas City and bring him forward into the present. Two years later he proved conclusively that age and experience were virtues for a blues singer, when he teamed with another master, Jimmy Witherspoon, for some low-down carousing on Patcha, Patcha, All Night Long. It was the last great testament of a great singer. Turner died in 1985, but oh, how those melodies linger on (DAVID MCGEE)
The New Rollingstone Magazine.
**
01. I Got a Gal  2.59
02. It's the Shame Old Story 2.54
03. Rebecca 2.40
04. S. K. Blues (Part.2) 2.50
05. Cry Baby Blues 2.50
06. Blues on Central Avenue 2.35
07. Ice Man 2.53
08. Johnson and Turner Blues 2.58
09. Rocks in My Bed 3.12
10. I Got My Discharge Papers 2.39
11. Somebody's Got to Go 2.53
12. Watch That Jive 2.55
13. Chewed Up Grass 2.31
14. Doggin' the Blues 3.03
15. Little Bitty Gal's Blues 3.18
16. Goin' to Chicago Blues 2.58
**
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Big Joe TURNER - The Boss of the Blues 1956

Big Joe TURNER - The Boss of the Blues 1956
Label: Collectables

Blues

How can you have a forum about Jump Blues and not mention Big Joe Turner? Big Joe Turner was born in Kansas City, and it was in that freewheeling city’s jumping nightspots that he began his career as a bartender and singer. As a young man, Turner hooked up with pianist Pete Johnson. Turner and Johnson were among the earliest to help develop jump blues by using boogie woogie to add "jump" to the blues.
Big Joe Turner has been called the "Boss of the Blues" and the "World's Greatest Blues Shouter," but he is also considered a major part of early Rock 'n' Roll. He´s a respected name in the world of Jazz, too. Although he came to his greatest fame in the 1950s with his pioneering rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and Roll", and "Flip Flop and Fly." Turner's career as a performer stretched from the bar rooms of KansasCity in the 1930s (at the age of 12 when he performed with a penciled moustache and his father's hat), on to the European jazz festivals of the 1980s.
In early 1956, Big Joe Turner took a break from his duties as one of the stars of the emerging music called rock & roll to hook up with an eight-piece band--including his longtime cohort, boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson--to make an album of the Kansas City jazz he'd helped advance as a blues shouter in the '30s. In addition to the stellar performances by Turner and Johnson, the band also consisted of a tight backing ensemble featuring veterans of Count Basie's band, including tenor saxophonist Frank Wess and trumpeter Joe Newman. Most of the material on The Boss of the Blues is from the Turner-Johnson songbook, with "Roll 'Em Pete," "Cherry Red," and "Piney Brown Blues" among the bedrock pieces of the form. Their treatment here is vigorous and swinging, but the best cut may be a long, blowzy version of "Wee Baby Blues" that sounds as much at home in today's late-night bars as Turner's work did in those of the era in which it was made. The Boss of the Blues is widely considrerd to be one of Big Joe Turner's finest albums.
**
Here is the real Kansas City stuff.The great Big Joe Turner (not to be confused with the great Harlem stride pianist Joe Turner),born in Kansas City in 1911,swings high here.The band is a real all stars one,with some Basie-ites like Joe Newman,trumpet,Frank Wess,tenor sax,Walter Page,bass and Freddie Green,guitar,a great member of Duke Ellington's band,Lawrence BRown on trombone,plus Pete Brown on alto sax,Cliff Leeman on drums and... Pete Johnson himself on piano.
The result is a great swing session,with one of the greatest blues shouters on the front line.And even if the immense Jimmy Rushing will always be my man (listen to his incredible Columbia albums,"Little Jimmy Rushing and the big brass","the jazz odissey of James Rushing Esq","Cat meet chick" and "sings the Smith girls"),Big Joe is the other great KC voice;maybe his voice doesn't have that smoky flavor Jimmy had,and maybe he isn't so much at ease on jazz tunes that Mr Five by Five (Rushing's nickname referring to his impressive stoutness),but KC's jumping blues are his thing,and he is in this music like a fish in the sea.The masterful support of Page and Greene make the rhythm section swing like mad (like in the good old times of the Count Basie band),and the drive of Pete Johnson's piano (which can sometimes be as down to earth as Montana Taylor's) brings the band back to the essence of Kansas City swing.Big Joe was starting a new career at the time this recording was made (1956),a new career that will be going on for thirty years.
As essential as his fourties sides (the 1940 duets with Willie "the Lion" Smith,the magnificent 1941 "nobody in mind" with Sammy Price or the 1944 "little bittie gal's blues" with Pete Johnson,his associate since the early thirties,as necessary as his 1971 "Texas style" album,with a great Milt Buckner on piano and the imperial Jo Jones,the greatest master of drums,this record is a great moment of music you've to treasure.
By JEAN-MARIE JUIF.
**
Frank Wess- Tenor Saxophone
Freddie Green- Guitar
Joe Newman- Trumpet
Seldon Powell- Tenor Saxophone
Lawrence Brown- Trombone
Big Joe Turner- Vocals
Walter Page- Bass
Jimmy Nottingham- Trumpet
Pete Johnson- Piano
Cliff Leeman- Drums
Pete Brown- Alto Saxophone
**
01. Cherry Red  3.26
02. Roll 'Em Pete  3.47
03. I Want A Little Girl  4.22
04. Low Down Dog  3.47
05. Wee Baby Blues  7.21
06. You're Driving Me Crazy (What Did I Do?)  4.16
07. How Long Blues   5.50
08. Morning Glories  2.15
09. St. Louise Blues  4.23
10. Piney Brown Blues  4.52
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