Detroit Life

(Reprinted from 2006 article.)

I can’t get comfortable. No, really. There is no “comfort level” in this town. There are veins of musicians here in Detroit. There are veins of music, and veins of the musicians who play those veins of music. It’s amazing how many great musicians there are in different genres of music in this town.

There is the stupendously talented, Geri Allen, who has covered everything from 60′s Miles to playing with Ornette Coleman. I mentioned recently about jazz pianist, Carlos McKinney. He’s one of our top level exports of great, kickass Detroit born and bred musicians, and he is living in New York nowadays because he’s so good that he can go to the Big Apple and thrive rather than merely survive. James Carter, the volcanic voice of Detroit jazz on any sax with a reed, is another Big Apple export. Rod Lumpkin, the high-intensity, phreak-of-nature organist, is another one. But, if I spoke about ALL the musicians playing ALL the instruments, there wouldn’t be enough room in this blurp to say anything.

When I saw Chris Codish the other night at The Buzz, I told him that I could hear a sound in his playing that was cool as hell. Chris preceded me in The Thornetta Davis band, and was responsible for me being in that band. (He needed a scapegoat so he could do his own thing. Chris is one of the most in-demand gig and session players in town. He’s still in his cocky 30s, and he’s a player who, when you look up as a musician and see him on a gig, you can dig into the music and enjoy what’s coming. He’s always well prepared and totally pro. I should be his agent and get 10% of what he makes just for liking his playing this much.

But I’d like to do the same thing with a bunch of guys around this town who are playing my chosen instrument. The legacy of keyboard players here is astounding. Occasionally, you’ll have someone like Eddie Harsh, from the Black Crowes, in town. Wanna record a rock album and get the authentic rock piano and organ sound? Look no further. Al Hill, who is part of Bettye LaVette’s band, is another great rockin, boogie, r&b, blues pianist who is also a great singer. Shawn McDonald is another kickass blues-boogie-r&b piano AND organ player, and his vocals are also excellent.

Suppose you’re a smooth-jazz kind of guy, and you need someone to rock the keys? We have Gerard Gibbs, Greg Dokes, David Lee, Bam Davis, Al Duncan, Al McKenzie, and Keith Ferguson. All of these guys are bad as hell. Gerard is so bad that he can wear a red suit to a gig. (No shit—dead red!) He also is one of the top-notch organists who plays with perhaps the cockiest musician from our town, saxman James Carter. Greg Dokes has been the music director—or MD—for national acts, like The Temptations. Keith Ferguson, I believe, is with The Spinners. Bam is, or was, with The Gap Band. David Lee and Al Duncan play with Earl Klugh.

I can’t go into any sort of detail about the throng of truly wicked keyboard players who come from the gospel community, who I don’t get to see anymore (because it’s too hard waking up on a Sunday morning when you just went to sleep at 6am). The world of gospel and smooth-jazz has a certain affinity, and the players who play that music in Detroit are comparable, and oftentimes better, than you’re going to find anywhere else in the country. That makes them some of the best in the world. But I hear that some of the gospel keyboard players in Detroit are excellent musicians. I’ve heard a couple of spillover guys, like Malik Alston. He does some gospel, as well as originals that I can’t really tell you what they sound like. He’s a really good player, even though he says he can’t play a 12-bar blues. He says, “I’ve just been playing my originals.” I stare in disbelief, of course. How do you get to originals without having a couple of days with a 12-bar blues?

Then, of course, there’s the straight up jazz guys. Ken Cox, Gary Schunk, Eileen Orr (I suddenly want to call her “Leen Cuisine”, but she might kick my ass), Bill Meyer and Scott Gwinnell come to mind. Mike Jellick is a phenom, and he’s still under 25. If I’m ever feeling full of myself for no good reason, and I look up and see these guys hanging around, I don’t need coffee to wake me up. Suddenly, I’m hearing a slow leak in my hot-air balloon as my bloated ego gets some cold water slapped on its face. Henry Gibson is one of my favorite jazz pianists in town. Henry is very dynamic, and brings a strong energy to the sound. Jim David is another favorite who can swing his ass off. Mark McGruder, who plays with Urban Transport, is still another great player. Van Cephus, thought-of by many as Rod Lumpkin’s protege’ on organ, is another great player. If you like fast swing versions of difficult songs—like “Giant Steps”—Van specializes in that. “Cherokee”? Get your tom-tom and hang on tight. I met Van at Jimmy D’s on Livernois and W. Outer Drive years ago. He was sitting in for Rod Lumpkin. Rod and Van were organ monsters!

There are some other exports besides Rod. Kelvin Sholar and Craig Taborn are major players. Both play in the same direction as Geri Allen and Carlos McKinney. Very top-of-the-line players, all of them.

Some guys hang out more in the solo piano set, but still are excellent on a band hit. Bob Mervak plays and sings. Tim “Rocket” Brockett and Mark Moultrip play and sing, too. All three are keyboard assassins. Stefan Kugaruga plays, sings, and blows harmonica! My good buddy, Charles Green, doesn’t sing. Thank goodness. But he plays his ass off, and does band sets, solo piano, and solo keyboard setups. Dale Grisa is another excellent player whose talent deserves wider recognition. Rick Jones, who we simply call “Rockin Ricky”, plays and sings and backs Detroit musicians and vocalists who have been playing gigs around this town since the 80′s and before.

If you have more fusion, avante-gard, and/or neo-progressive tastes, Amp Fiddler comes from Detroit and is lighting fires in major locations around the globe with his own music. That’s right—-with his originals. (But I’ve also heard Amp play a mean 12-bar blues swing when he played with saxman Alan Barnes.)

Likewise, Jeremy Ellis is doing dance music by mixing drum rhythms while singing and playing. Jeremy has been making trips to South America, where I hear they’re eating his very original dance music up. Jeremy is an extraordinary player, and it is fully evident when you see him mixing drum beats, playing keyboard parts, warping certain sounds with tone modulators, setting up loops, and being a musical DJ who actually plays the parts live then manipulates those structures! Very good shit.

We still have “Canadian Phil” Whitfield and Mick Dobday (of Blue Dog) here in the area. Undiscovered gems. I’ve done double keyboard gigs at different times with Amp, Jeremy, Canadian Phil and Mick, and they are all very creative players who cover a wide variety of formats. Each of these musicians can jazz it up, and each of them can play beyond the edge of the structure, into the abyss, orbit, find their way back home, and they can excavate sound, in the words of George W. Bush, “at the whim of a hat”. (That’s from “Bushisms”, which are the spoken words of the national retard.)

Then there’s Robert Jones, who can cover everything from jazz at Baker’s to The Funk Brothers to blues and r&b gigs (. . . at the whim of a hat!) without missing a gliss. Also there’s r&b and funk caught at its best with Ronnie Rushing with his signature way of interjecting hypnotic rhythmic chord clusters. Randall Poindexter is another fine established player who plays both jazz and r&b sets.

My good friend, RJ Spangler, has a host of some of the baddest players you’re going to find. Besides Shawn McDonald, who is the current keyboardist in RJ’s Rhythm Rockers, there is Duncan McMillan, who is also an excellent player who plays some of the smoothest, finely-crafted organ accompaniment around with Odessa Harris. Both play organ and piano, and have their own Hammond organs that they move around whenever they want. I just met Mark Loduca recently, and he’s an excellent player and doing some fine organ work. Martin Simmons is another great player who also sings and also blows flute.

All these individuals, at any time, are likely to pop in at a gig that I might be playing on. The best thing I can do is try to remain aware of my own groove. Otherwise, weird and bad things could happen that could shatter my music concentration and leave me hanging.

I really try to play for myself. The room should be secondary. What you’re playing should be primary. If I’m looking around too much, I might get caught up in somebody’s shit. I’m at my best when my “ear” is travelling around stage, listening to the different members of the band, and playing with the sound that becomes apparent once the alignment is established. I can hear it with my eyes open or closed, but when they’re open, I might become distracted by something going on in the area. As musicians, we have to learn to maintain our surfing legs because our attention can become wiped out by all sorts of b.s. going on in a room.

Including musician sightings.

When I first met Gerard Gibbs years ago at The Boardroom, a westside chitlin’ circuit neighborhood club where I worked with saxman Mike Fleming playing a funk-jazz-r&b jam session, I had no clue who he was. He sat directly within my line of sight throughout the whole first set. I could tell he was a musician. On the break, I went over and asked him if he played, he said he did. I told him, cool, come on up in the next set. The next set started, I played a couple of tunes, then on one of the tunes—something like “Chameleon” or whatever—G came over in the middle of the song and asked if he could play the solo, and I went along with it and got up. He sat down on my keyboard, starts playing his ass off–everybody in the bar was getting up, and shouting out and really into it. He’s a really extroverted kind of guy, and he’s playing, looking at everyone in the room with a big ol’ smile on his face like “Hey, check THIS out!” Soon he’s standing up, puts his left hand on one hip, starts doing all this Chick Corea stuff with the right hand, and I just sat there and thought: “Next time, get your own song, mutherfucker!” He was playing his ass off–on my song–and standing there posing, smiling, and making the audience say “Wow!” Things like that make you think a little harder later on, but you have to get passed that. And I have. I love when I see and hear any player who knows what he or she is doing. I love it.

Nevertheless, I vowed not to let anyone come in the middle of my song and whip up a frenzy like that again. But years later–perhaps a year, two years ago–I broke my vow and let another guy come up in the middle of my song. I wasn’t thinking. It was a jam session. The atmosphere was a little loose, but it was still a hit where people were sitting around listening. This young guy asks to sit in, once again, in the middle of a song that I started, and I went along with it. That really wasn’t a very bright idea. The player was Mike Jellick. He’s, like, one of those incarnations of one of the gods who, like, take on a human form just to, like, fuck with people like me. He wore that piano out so bad that, after he got up, the piano sat upright and puffed a cigarette. When guys do that to you, you remember them the next time. It makes you try harder, so I dig it.

Johnnie O’Neal is an Oscar Peterson-level player. If he sits down, he ain’t gettin’ back up. Period. Just call it a day. But if you want to hear some of that pure Old Style, where the two hands work at maximum capacity, playing faster than hell, yet each hand is playing independent of each other in order to do David Blaine-type magic on the piano, then Johnnie’s your guy. And he’s definitely one of the kings of piano in this town. He and Gary Schunk, who’s really from another dimension. He’s waiting for the transporter to return him to Mount Olympus.

When I played during the 70s, Lyman Woodard was the man. He held court over at Cobb’s Corner in Cass Corridor, and he would be burning. He would play way deep in his groove, and that kind of taught me what disposition a player should be in when he’s playing. He would just groove, tirelessly, and propel the sound of the whole group. I can hear Lyman Woodard grooves in my sleep because I really used to focus on what he played at that time, and that became a reference that helped me get on a page that I really wanted to be on.

Bill Heid is a killer organist who lived here for awhile. We did a gig together once with drummer Greg “Vibrations” Williams as the leader. We both looked at each other when we got there, wondering whose datebook was fucked up. But Vibrations is a bit eccentric, and he did his own ideas about how he mixed band members. Bill was the senior on the hit so I let him know that I would acknowledge him as the primary, and I would backup whatever he was doing. When you have a gig like that with two keyboardists who are used to setting up their own song structures (at the whim of a hat), you can’t just go and start playing. There has to be the acknowledgement. When you’re playing jazz standards, there are multiple ways to play the changes. So who’s gonna be in charge? Whose changes will be the ones that we go with? I’ve played with “The Professor”, Herishimo Cox, the late great organist who was every bit as eccentric as Vibrations is, so I didn’t have any problems playing the secondary. In the end, the gig with Bill was outstanding. He played keys & bass most of the night, and colored around what he played. I played a couple of songs of keys & bass as the primary because Vibrations likes my bass lines on certain things he likes to do. It was all good. We had fun, and no one was bitching in the end.

We have lost two of our most legendary keyboard hellraisers around town. Teddy Harris, who was a mentor to most of my generation of jazz players around town, passed away recently. And, just before that, Rudy Robinson passed. Teddy was the scourge of lazy musicians because he wouldn’t put up with their shit. He always taught young players the right way to play. Kinda like the legendary ex-Pistons basketball coach Larry Brown except in relation to Detroit jazz players. Teddy’s big bands and his small groups were always high caliber, and he was a true educator. If you got past his bark, you were enroute.

Rudy hosted a jam session at Bo-Macs. That’s where I got to know him. He was one funny dude. Serious player . . . . .funny guy. He would get on the mic and talk about anybody, and there was nothing you could do but laugh or leave. But, be it organ or piano, Rudy could kill those keys, even while playing bass lines. Rudy played for a lot of people. Martha Reeves, Bettye LaVette, Misty Love, and a host of others too numerous to go into. Rudy usually knew as much about the music as the person who hired him, so they couldn’t fuck with him. What I liked about him was his chords; he always played the right chords. That isn’t the easiest thing, as it turns out. But that ‘s why so many vocalists liked him: he knew the chords, and how to structure a song. Willie Wooten is like that, too. He’s another eccentric player, but he knows what the hell he’s doing. He’s a chord hawk like Rudy, and like myself.

With Rudy and Teddy, if your playing sucked, you didn’t get their approval at all. Either they wouldn’t tell you nothing, or they’d tell you where to go.

There are many, many musicians, even on keys, who I haven’t mentioned, or couldn’t go into detail because I’m about through writing this, as you can see. I would’ve like to delve into some of the gospel keyboardists I used to run into, like Twinkie Clark of the Clark Sisters, or Herbert Pickard, who played authentic gospel from the James Cleveland school. Twinkie (Hostess?) used to kick guys’ asses when all the choirs would gather at the Sunday afternoon big choir music programs at one of a network of urban churches back in the 70′s. She was kickass. Herbert Pickard had that really smooth sound, and wrote quite a few gospel standards. I know his family, and played on an album of his, featuring The Ridgeway Sisters. Although he’s an organist, he played piano and had me playing organ on all but two songs on that particular recording. (If anyone comes across that LP, let me know. Probably a ’78 or ’79…..) Rudolph Stanfield, Jr. is another monster in the gospel world. I used to see him when I was growing up because we would play at each other’s church during congregation visits. He’s gone on to become a Grammy-winner, and has played with a plethora of international stars, including Aretha Franklin.

There’s some rich history in this town, and a plethora of some of the baddest musicians on the planet. So you won’t see me getting the big head. I’m trying to stay afloat. New players are popping up everyday. I’m just trying to keep my groove growing. But I love music, and I love playing. That’s my motivation. I want everyone to keep growing and continue being an inspiration. The better everyone is, the better I can be.

phil hale / philharmonic