Beech Tree Root Fingers and Toes of Elephants, Worcester 2022, photo by Deb Lang
Ms. Nina Simone
Old Timey supergroup featuring KC Groves, Kristin Andreassen, Abigail Washburn, and Rayna Gellert.
“Cannonball Adderley Quintet
The Main Point Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
1969
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley - alto and soprano saxophones
Nat Adderley – cornet
Joe Zawinul – keyboards
Walter Booker – bass
Roy McCurdy – drums
The Main Point was a small coffeehouse that operated from 1964 to 1981. During high school, I lived just a few miles from it and reading the list of performers at this venue, I wish I had attended many more. Here is a partial list: Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, Cat Stevens, Richie Havens, Randy Newman, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Blind Faith and many others. Note that this list does not include jazz performers, though there were a few including the Cannonball Adderley Quintet that nearly tore the roof down.
To call the Main Point intimate is like calling a small one-bedroom home, cozy. It fit perhaps a maximum of 150 patrons, similar in size to Club 47 now known as Passim. It was an ideal place to witness great musicians as all patrons were very close to the centered stage.
Nicknamed for his voracious appetite by his grade school classmates, Cannonball was featured on two of the seminal recordings by Miles Davis, Milestones (1958) and the best selling classic, Kind of Blue (1959). In 1967 he had his biggest hit with Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” which rose to number 2 on the Soul Charts and number 11 on the Billboard top 100.
The music that the quintet featured was known as a combination of soul-jazz, modal jazz, hard bop with a touch of jazz-rock. The superb rhythm section of Walter Booker and Roy McCurdy were part of the group until 1975 when Cannonball suffered a stroke from a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away four days later at the age of 46. Joe Zawinul wrote many of the pieces performed by the band and his hard driving keyboards drove their sound. His composition ”Cannon Ball” on Weather Report’s Black Market album is a tribute.
I surely do not recall the compositions that were played that night, but I do remember that they performed “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” and “Walk Tall” two of their most famous songs. The band seemed to be inspired by the small room and the very enthusiastic audience and played with deep passion and inspiration.
And a mere 53 years later I remember the performance as a powerful and mesmerizing introduction to a music I had rarely seen performed live and up close.”
In 2003 and 2005, the far reaching imaginator Sufjan Stevens began an ambitious exercise: a musical embarkation of each united state. The holds were not barred! To date only records of Michigan and Illinois exist. Each quickly combine the personal and the public, the wistful and the tragic, the dream and the train wreck. Unsurprisingly, most forms of music you can expect gets thrown at the lyricism. But especially folk and one of the more contemplative uses of the banjo that you will run into. And there are diverse choral groups, supportive horn sections, inventive new music references and consolation. Mainly the reassurance of Mr. Stevens voice. It has a heartbreaking delicacy. If your family has broken up or there is a murder in the county, the birds are singing, the trees wave in the uncertain breeze and you can still hug your dog. Inside each tragedy what else is to be found? A piano of confessional poetry? So is there then, the Michigan or Illinois state of mind created by each of us?
“This cagey song appeared in 1990. These two gentlemen are beautiful, under appreciated singers ! Mr. Eno is the principal vocalist, while Mr. Cale seems to provide a choral group woven upon the piece. In a retrospective review, Pitchfork called the work “an album of contention, contrasts, cycles, and pop songs so layered and euphoric it ranks among the best albums either artist has ever made.””
“So they rode the sea,
It went on and on
They were years away
Though it seemed so long
But the captain never told them what he knew
As the poor ship laboured on through the endless blue.
Oh the storm was strong
And the ship was so frail
But they stumbled on
Raising broken sails,
And they held the heavy sky on their open hands
And they dreamed of when their poor feet would touch the land.
Baby, we’re going round in circles!
Where is this place we’re going to?
Does anybody know we’re out here on the waves?
And are any of our signals coming through?
We’re going ‘round in circles.
We have no single point of view.
And like the clouds that turn to every passing wind,
We turn to any signal that comes through.
At the edge of the sea
Were the signs of the dove -
But the wrong way out
And the wrong way up.
We pushed the empty frame of reason out the cabin door,
No we won’t be needing reason anymore.
Ooh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah.”
Scottish Harpist Maeve Gilchrist
Ms. Jackson recorded this song in 1959. It was featured in the film “Imitation of Life.” One listener to the piece commented, “If my children don’t play this at my funeral, I’m not coming.”
