Lou Donaldson - 1967 - Mr. Shing-A-Ling

Lou Donaldson 

1967 

Mr. Shing-A-Ling

01. Ode To Billie Joe 6:30

02. The Humpback 5:22

03. The Shadow Of Your Smile (Love Theme From "The Sandpiper") 6:18

04. Peepin' 8:18

05. The Kid 11:00

Alto Saxophone – Lou Donaldson

Drums – Leo Morris

Guitar – Jimmy "Fats" Ponder

Organ – Lonnie Smith

Trumpet – Blue Mitchell

Recorded on October 27, 1967.

Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist who became part of the bedrock of the jazz scene and whose soulful, blues-steeped presence in the music endured undiminished for three-quarters of a century, died on Saturday. He was 98.

His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died.

A mainstay of the Blue Note record label at the height of its influence and power, Mr. Donaldson recorded constantly as both a leader and a sideman beginning in 1952. He was a leading voice of the more elemental style that came to be called “hard bop,” an evolution out of the bebop revolution wrought by his inspiration on the alto sax, Charlie Parker. The National Endowment for the Arts named Mr. Donaldson a Jazz Master in 2012.

A player of impeccable technique, plangent tone, taste and refinement, Sweet Poppa Lou, as he was long known, nevertheless prized the raw gospel of Black church music and the gutbucket sound of rhythm and blues in his improvisations. The blues was at the heart of his sound: His album “Blues Walk,” released in 1958, is regarded as a jazz masterwork, and its title tune, which he wrote, became a jazz standard.

Mr. Donaldson also proved to be an acute talent scout for Blue Note’s owners, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, bringing to their attention both the young trumpet giant Clifford Brown and, later, the young guitar virtuoso Grant Green.

“I went down to Alfred Lion at Blue Note and gave him Clifford’s number,” he recalled in “A Wonderful Life,” his unpublished autobiography. “He brought him to New York and we made this tremendous date — tremendous date.”

Mr. Donaldson said he had also persuaded Mr. Lion to hand his close friend Horace Silver — the pianist and composer who would come to epitomize “the Blue Note sound” — his maiden recording date as a leader.

On Feb. 21, 1954, Mr. Donaldson participated in one of the first live recordings in jazz history, which to this day is still regarded as one of the greatest. Captured for Blue Note at the club Birdland in Midtown Manhattan by Mr. Lion and the master sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder, it also featured Mr. Brown, Mr. Silver, the bassist Curly Russell and the drummer Art Blakey.

The recording was initially released as a 10-inch disc and later as a best-selling 12-inch LP as “A Night at Birdland” and credited to the Art Blakey Quintet; it has gone down in jazz history as having been led by Mr. Blakey.

Mr. Donaldson, however, always maintained otherwise.

At the beginning of the engagement, the Birdland M.C., Pee Wee Marquette, introduced the quintet as “the Blue Note All Stars,” Mr. Donaldson wrote in “A Wonderful Life.” “But in the middle of the week,” he recounted, “Art put two or three dollars in Pee Wee’s pocket, because Pee Wee was a hustler, he always wanted you to give him some money and he’d advertise your name. Suddenly ‘We’ became ‘Art Blakey and his …’”

Mr. Donaldson’s years at Blue Note yielded an extraordinarily diverse catalog of recordings, including seminal collaborations with the organist Jimmy Smith, beginning in 1957. Their work together helped pioneer a new jazz genre with unexpected crossover popularity: the organ-sax combo. In 1967, Mr. Donaldson added a rising guitar virtuoso named George Benson to the mix for a Blue Note session under Mr. Donaldson’s own name, alongside the great Hammond B3 organ player Lonnie Smith.

That session generated the LP “Alligator Boogaloo,” which became a crossover hit: Its funky title track cracked the Billboard Hot 100, a rarity for a jazz record label in the 1960s. Mr. Donaldson’s sales throughout this period were exceptional for a jazz musician.

Louis Andrew Donaldson Jr. was born on Nov. 1, 1926, in Badin, N.C., about 50 miles northeast of Charlotte. His father was an A.M.E. Zion minister; his mother, Lucy (Wallace) Donaldson, was an amateur musician and a first-grade teacher. The second of four children, Lou received a strong foundation in Black history and the essentials of Black music from his mother, who also became the family’s principal breadwinner after his father was incapacitated by a stroke.

Despite having severe asthma, Lou took up the clarinet, receiving lessons from his mother. The diaphragm breathing that the clarinet required seemed to help rather than hurt his respiratory problems, he later wrote.

He entered North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro in 1942 as a 15-year-old freshman and immediately joined its estimable school band while majoring in pre-law. An athletic, powerfully built bantamweight, he also played semipro baseball until he nearly broke a finger and realized that the injury could ruin his ability to play his instrument. It ended his baseball aspirations.

Drafted into the Navy in 1945, his asthma notwithstanding, Mr. Donaldson was sent for basic training to Camp Robert Smalls in Waukegan, Ill. Its proximity to Chicago, only 40 miles away, allowed him to venture out for club crawls through the city’s renowned jazz scene. One night he discovered Charlie Parker.

“Some guy was laying back in the corner asleep,” he wrote of a visit to one club. “I thought he was a bum or something. Then somebody came in and said, ‘Man, get Bird to play one.’ So they woke him up, gave him this horn — he didn’t have a horn. Man, such saxophone I never heard in my life. I said, ‘I’m giving up the clarinet! From now on I’m going to play saxophone just like this guy, if I can,’ because his tone was so sharp it just cut right through your heart.”

Medically discharged from the Army in February 1946, Mr. Donaldson returned to North Carolina A&T, where he rejoined the school band and, in 1947, completed his degree. He played club dates with the Rhythm Vets, a group of A&T alumni who had served in the Navy. He also recorded a soundtrack with them for a 1948 movie short, “Pitch a Boogie Woogie,” produced by a short-lived Black-owned film company in North Carolina. (The American Film Institute found it fit to be restored, in 1985.)

In 1949, at the urging of touring jazzmen like the saxophonist Illinois Jacquet and the drummer Jo Jones, who had heard him play as they passed through North Carolina, Mr. Donaldson moved to New York City. In September 1950, in Harlem, he married his sweetheart from down home, Maker Neal Turner. Their marriage lasted 56 years, until her death in 2006, and produced two daughters, Lydia Tutt-Jones, who died in 1994, and E. Carol Webster. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)

Gigging regularly in Harlem’s abundant jazz venues and jamming after hours at celebrated spots like Minton’s Playhouse, Mr. Donaldson was approached one night at Minton’s by Alfred Lion. “You think you might want to record for Blue Note Records?” Mr. Donaldson recalled Mr. Lion asking him. “We’re looking for somebody that plays like Charlie Parker.”

“Well,” Mr. Donaldson replied, “That’s the way I play.”

Mr. Donaldson’s first session for the label, in April 1952, was led by the vibraphonist Milt Jackson and included a rhythm section comprising the pianist John Lewis, the drummer Kenny Clarke and the bassist Percy Heath — the four of them on the verge of becoming the Modern Jazz Quartet. He then recorded with the same unit, with Mr. Lewis replaced by Thelonious Monk, as the Thelonious Monk Quintet. He cut his first session as a leader — with Mr. Silver on piano, Gene Ramey on bass and Art Taylor on drums — that June as part of Blue Note’s “New Faces — New Sounds” series.

Mr. Donaldson’s remunerative late-1960s adventures with organ-based funk suited his sultry, grooving saxophone style. As jazz fusion became electrified, though, he maintained a classicist’s mantra: “No fusion, no confusion.”

He continued to record on and off for Blue Note until 1980, long after the label had been sold, and many of his riffs found new life in hip-hop, sampled by Kanye West, Pete Rock and other rappers.

He remained a rarity in jazz, a musician who neither smoked nor drank and unequivocally opposed the use of what he euphemistically called “vitamins,” meaning drugs, especially heroin.

Mr. Donaldson officially announced his retirement from performing in 2018, at the age of 92, though he resurfaced during the pandemic to take a bow at the Jazz at Lincoln Center club, Dizzy’s, on his 96th birthday in 2022 and returned for his 97th.

“Jazz has to hit a certain spot,” Mr. Donaldson observed toward the close of his autobiography. “There’s a groove that you’ve got to hit, and if you play enough music around musicians and play a lot in front of the people, you’ll learn where it is.”

This October 27, 1967, recording was always the best of Lou Donaldson's funky albums. It's just amazing — given the material and the awful cover art — that Blue Note put this back into circulation at all. If for nothing else, Mr. Shing-A-Ling is worth the investment for the ultra-funking "Peepin'" alone (featured for the first time on CD in last year's terrific The Best of Lou Donaldson Vol. 2 ). Composer and organist Lonnie Smith lays down a basic fatback groove and manages to glean a funk anthem that set the foundation for a whole decade worth of Lou Donaldson LPs ("Midnight Creeper" is a mere rewrite of this classic). Among Donaldson's big funk classics — "Midnight Creeper," "Brother Soul" and "The Caterpillar" — "Peepin'" reigns supreme.

The groove sets the tone for its talented principals to really strut their stuff: Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Jimmy Ponder on guitar and Idris Muhammed on drums. The credit goes to Donaldson, a talented original who learned from Bird how to structure clever solos and taught by example how to get his group to deliver one infectious line after another. This group even invests corny, overplayed tunes like "Ode to Billie Joe" and "The Shadow of Your Smile" with foot-tapping good groove. Mr. Shing-A-Ling is a hearty brew of some steaming funk.

A massive little record, and a real turning point for alto genius Lou Donaldson – as he uses the set to move from the tight bop of earlier years into a whole new spectrum of funky grooves! Key to this project is drummer Idris Muhammad – who's on the kit, already kicking it up in the way that would make him a jazz funk legend as the 70s began – but so young here, he's working under his original name of Leo Morris! The rest of the group is equally great – with the up-and-coming Lonnie Smith on Hammond and Jimmy Ponder on guitar – plus tight trumpet from Blue Mitchell, who's really hitting his most soulful sound of the 60s.