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Ayana Contreras

Recorded January 26, 1972 at RCA Studios in Chicago, The Dells sing Dionne Warwicke’s Greatest Hits is an album that features nearly a dozen of Charles Stepney’s magical reimaginings of Burt Bacharach/Hal David compositions. On the as-released version of the album, idiosyncratic Dells baritone Marvin Junior growls pleasingly (in concert with the rest of the Mighty Mighty Dells), delivering a completely different energy than Miss Dionne exuded in her versions of songs like “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”.

But it is an altogether different miracle to experience the original reel to reel tape of the backing arrangements from the session (that I previewed recently courtesy of the Stepney archives). Sans vocals, it’s an opportunity to hear compelling details, color and ornamentation previously obscured in the final mix of the album.

It’s an opportunity to hear legendary Chess Records session musicians including Phil Upchurch on guitar and Morris Jennings on drums and memorable featured artists like Derf Reklaw and Louis Satterfield (best known as members of Earth, Wind and Fire), who at the time were playing with The Pharaohs. The tracks, purportedly recorded live to tape, bristle with energy.

“I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” is a funky, wah-wah guitar-inflected, nearly seven minute long workout, while “Wives and Lovers” is a lean, spritely jam packed with gorgeous orchestration and Stepney’s compelling keywork. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” is transformed from a square AM radio staple into a swaggering, swinging stepper. Charles Stepney’s treatment of “Walk on By” is nothing less than epic, boasting the sort of dizzying ebb and flow usually reserved for a wooden roller coaster.

Stepney’s genius is in full flower: both as a distinctive keyboardist (playing at varying times piano, harpsichord and Fender Rhodes) and as a masterful arranger at the height of his powers. An underpinning of sparkling, swirling strings supplied throughout by Sol A. Bobrov and the standard crew of Chicago Symphony Orchestra players perfectly counterbalance the set’s percussive, elastic horns and percolating drum, conga and bongo licks.

Another revelation exposed by the backing track reel-to-reel is that an additional cut that was not on The Dells sing Dionne Warwicke’s Greatest Hits was recorded at the session: Charles Stepney’s slinky, conga studded treatment of “The Look of Love” that ultimately surfaced on the 1972 Dells album Sweet As Funk Can Be. This revelation is certainly not surprising, however. I have always thought of “The Look of Love” as my favorite cut from The Dells’ Warwicke album. A song that, only by mere technicality, was not included on the record. Not just because “The Look of Love” is a Bacharach/David tune, but because stylistically, it’s much more akin to the Warwicke album than Sweet As Funk. Finally hearing the tune in its original context was enlightening.

The instrumental arrangements of the Warwicke album session serve a crucial element of Charles Stepney’s indelible legacy of invention and command. It’s a collection that can stand up unflinchingly alongside his canonical work with Rotary Connection, Ramsey Lewis, Minnie Riperton and Earth Wind and Fire.

(originally published in the February/March 2021 installment of the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s JazzGram)

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This holiday season, much ado was made about the sweat that snaked down actress Viola Davis’ neck. It was the sort that smeared her pancake makeup and kohl eyeliner. Viola’s earthy portrayal of the saucy titular character in the recent film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (replete with a period-correct horsehair wig) caught a lot of flack on social media for being unglamourous. However, the controversial sweat was simply a slice of stylistic realism, considering the film takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1927, long before central air conditioning was widespread. Decked in pancake makeup, sweat and glorious beads, this portrayal (while lacking the perfect Instagram-filtered veneer some might have craved), reflected the autonomy and the freedom to adorn that Ma and Black women like her clung to every time they got the chance.

The film led me to imagine that on that summer day in a recording studio nearby, as Ma was belting out her latest blues, perhaps fellow Paramount Records artist Lovie Austin sat at a piano, head arranging a song. In fact, Ma Rainey’s first Chicago recordings at Paramount were accompanied by Lovie Austin and her Blues Serenaders.

Lovie, like Ma, relished in crafting her presentation. Unlike Ma, she mainly worked in the background, supporting Blues vocalists like Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter and Ida Cox, while leaving an outsized impression on those who dared to glance beyond the spotlight.

In the liner notes for the 1977 compilation Jazz Women: A Feminist Perspective, the powerhouse pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams described her first encounter with Lovie, which occurred when Williams was a child:

“I remember seeing this great woman sitting in the pit and conducting five or six men, her legs crossed, a cigarette in her mouth, playing the show with her left hand and writing music with her right. Wow! I never forgot this episode…My entire concept was based on the few times I was around Lovie Austin.”

Lovie Austin was born Cora Calhoun in Chattanooga, Tennessee on September 19, 1887. After studying music theory at Roger Williams University and Knoxville College, she played the Vaudeville circuit before making her way to Chicago. During the 1920s, she served as a house musician at Paramount Records and accompanied primarily blues vocalists. She also composed a number of cuts including “Charleston Mad” and, perhaps most notably, “Down Hearted Blues”, a song she co-wrote with now-legendary blues singer Alberta Hunter in 1922.

Lawd, he mistreated me and drove me from his door,

Yes he mistreated me and drove me from his door.

Ah, but the good book says, you got to reap just what you sow

Later made famous by Bessie Smith, Lovie’s ability to transcribe and obtain a copyright for the song (without relying on the less-than honorable record men around them), allowed Lovie and Alberta to reap the fruits of their labor: Bessie’s recording sold three quarters of a million copies in 6 months.

By the end of the 1920s, sightings of Lovie Austin, dressed to the nines and tooling around the South Side in a leopard skin-upholstered Stutz Bearcat roadster became the stuff of folklore and the embodiment of the New Negro as expressed by Alain Locke in 1925:

“With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter

a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of

conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap…”

Lovie’s jaunty roadster was in stark contrast with pianist Sammy Price’s recollection of the South of that time, captured in the 1989 documentary Wild Women Don’t Have The Blues:

“I remember vividly…in 1927… we were passing through Jackson, Mississippi. And the Blacks always rode in a special car, which they called Jim Crow car. The whites started throwing rocks and bricks and anything that they could get their hands on when the train passed, when it slowed down in the city. And that was quite a hectic affair.” But in the North, he noted that “There was more freedom. When you went to Chicago, you had the Dreamland, you had the Club DeLisa. In New York City you had Smalls Paradise where you could actually go in there and buy a drink and drink it and didn’t have to bow your head… in order to get out of the place.”

According to Daphne Duval Harrison’s Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, by 1932 record sales had dropped dramatically, plunging to 6 million records sold, compared with 106 million just five years earlier. The blues recording craze subsequently died down, and Paramount Records shuttered in 1935. Lovie went on to serve as musical director of the Monogram Theater on South State Street.

In a 1950 profile of Lovie published in DownBeat, she lamented that after the death of Paramount’s owner her royalty checks stopped coming, and by 1954, a piece in Hue Magazine titled “What Happened To Lovie Austin?” revealed that after twenty years at the Monogram, she was working as a pianist at a dance studio in Chicago. A photo that ran with the piece showed Lovie, in spectacles and gray upswept hair, working with small children.

Before leaving this earth in 1972, Lovie Austin recorded one final album with Alberta Hunter, 1961’s Chicago: The Living Legends. Even though the majority of her career was spent in the shadows, her swagger, talent and her gutsy percussive playing style left their mark on this world. And during those heady days slinking in that Stutz Bearcat, she was as formidable as the heroine of “Down Hearted Blues”:

Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand,

Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand,

And if you want it, sweet papa, you got to come under my

command

Installation view, Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, 2020. Photo: Kendall McCaugherty.

The Seeing Chicago exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago(curated by Duro Olowu), immediately bombards you with powerful works by Chicago-bred artists. AfriCOBRA and Judy Chicago alongside Amanda Williams. But what it offers is even more than that.  It’s a reflection of Chicago’s kaleidoscopic lens, trained towards the world.

Seeing Chicago is at the MCA until May 10th, 2020. Audio of Duro Olowu and Naomi Beckwith was provided by the MCA and produced by Antenna.

This piece originally aired on Reclaimed Soul with Ayana Contreras. Catch a full two hours of soulful power on Thursdays at 8pm (CST) or Sunday at 8am on Vocalo 91.1fm in Chicago, streaming live worldwide here. Or you can catch a one hour fun-size version on Friday night at 10 on WBEZ 91.5fm.

Ayana hosts Reclaimed Soul on Vocalo and WBEZ and co-produces Sound Opinions on WBEZ. She also can’t stop digging…

Top Chicago Releases of 2019

This has been an incredible year for Chicago music, so far. Here’s a short list of releases I’ve fallen for:

The Oracle – Angel Bat Dawid (International Anthem) This woman’s bright and powerful spirit is all over this record, as is her connection to the deep well of spiritual jazz that has come before her (particularly out of Chicago). The record feels very immediate, and was for the most part recorded and dubbed by Angel on her phone while touring. She is of this time, but out of this world. 

 

Resavoir (International Anthem) A tight collective of musicians led by Will Miller, this album is absolutely refreshing. With features by Knox Fortune, Sen Morimoto and Brandee Younger, this album is full of freshness while steeped in a jazz-funk tradition that rings true to me.

 

Furthermore – Theaster Gates & The Black Monks (Vinyl Factory/Black Madonna) Blending field hollers, gospel, preaching, and thumping house, Furthermore flies a flag for the Southern-ness at the core of Black Chicago culture.

Where Future Unfolds– Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble (International Anthem) I first heard this album driving down the 405 in Los Angeles. Lushness and sky just beyond the road. It feels open like that. The record gives me flavors of Eddie Gale’s outstanding jazz-with-voices, wed with Damon’s inventive use of sampling and 808 programming. It feels huge and hopeful and keeps ringing in your head long after the songs are over.

Intellexual (Fantasy) – Nico Segal and Nate Fox deliver a laser-sharp, intricate mashup of yachtrock, hooky jazz and hip hop… which may sound strange to the uninitiated, but is perfect like guava and cheese empanadas. More please.

LEGACY! LEGACY! – Jamila Woods (Jagjaguwar) This album is both rumination and celebration of a wide variety of artists of all stripes, from MUDDY to BASQUIAT to ZORA. Extoling dimensional emotion, she plays with mood like a painter plays with color. And it bumps. The sonic palate pulses with a continuously fulfilling groove.

Stomping Off From Greenwood – Greg Ward Presents Rogue Parade (Greenleaf Music) This record might be situated off Greenwood, but it’s also at the delicious intersection of slightly glitchy art-rock and cinematically scaled bebop.

 

you can see the full list (including artists from around the globe) on vocalo.org