The heart of rock and roll is not the beat, but the iconoclasm. Those early, rude sounds in the 1950s shattered a lot more than white middle-class illusions of security; despite the music’s obvious debt to traditional black blues and R and B, some of its harshest criticism came from the jazz community. Suddenly adherents of artists as revolutionary as Charlie Parker found themselves in the unfamiliar role of conservators of tradition and culture, decrying what they saw as a defilement of the sophisticated pop-jazz rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan, Bullmoose Jackson, and others.
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The single musical element of this revolutionary new sound that’s probably been least recognized was the rock-and-roll saxophone. Guitars and drums were used much as they had been earlier in the blues; all it took was a little goosing up of the energy level, and their adaptation to the new music was complete. The sax, however, underwent a total transformation. It was seldom included in the classic Chicago blues lineup, except for background riffing to give impetus to vocals and guitar solos. In jazz, it had been either a crooning instrument in the hands of master balladeers such as Ben Webster and Lester Young, or a hard-edged shouter of blues-tinged fire, as Coleman Hawkins and, ultimately, Charlie Parker used it. Eventually, John Coltrane and his followers made it the dominant instrument of the visionary black classical music that evolved from postbop in the late 50s and early 60s.
Joe Houston is a Los Angeles-based saxophonist who toured for years with vocalist Big Joe Turner, originator of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and an artist who spent much of the latter part of his career straddling the jump-blues and rock-and-roll camps of R and B interpretation. Turner was primarily a jazz-blues shouter in the Kansas City tradition, but he was capable of harnessing the exuberant, up-tempo rowdiness of rock and roll to maintain a relevance among young listeners that eluded many of his contemporaries. In Turner’s band, Joe Houston honed both his musical skills and his instinct for rock-and-roll irreverence. Now that he’s on his own, it’s the latter that he showcases.
More often than not, however, Houston and the band meshed nicely, although it’s somewhat disquieting to experience a context in which Chicago blues–perennially hailed as one of the most radical influences in contemporary music–sounds suddenly tame. Houston interprets even a moody ballad like T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” in an agonized, tense scream, violating the song’s sophisticated sense of weariness in much the same way as Elmore James transformed “It Hurts Me Too” into a fiery masterpiece in the 1950s. Likewise, the R and B standard “Night Train”–originally the Ellington number “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” composed by Ellington and Jimmy Forrest, not by Houston as he claimed on Friday–was given the full Houston treatment: droning phrases interspersed with honking, spasmodic note clusters laid over the nightclubby backing of the Chicago musicians behind him.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marc PoKempner.
