The Shout

catalog

Well-known member
Ok, here's a few bits from Will Ashon's book - he's quoting other people a lot of the time as it turns out, so this seems to be a well worn strain of thinking:

Here's a bit about Little Richard:

'He'd scream and scream and scream', writes Nik Cohn of Little Richard in his study of the birth of pop, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. 'He had a freak voice, tireless, hysterical, completely indestructible, and he never in his life sang at anything lower than an enraged bull-like roar... He sang with desperate belief, real religious fervour.' The religious fervour was never faked. Though he was homosexual and started out performing as a drag act, Richard Penniman grew up poor and Black and very much in the church. In fact, he went to them all, from Pentecostal to Baptist to Methodist to Foundation Templar. At one point, he even retired from the music business to concentrate on being a Seventh Day Adventist. As a child, he liked the Holiness Church best, both for the holy water in which they washed their feet and for the opportunity to imitate them talking in tongues, though we didn't know what we were saying.' This babbling may have influenced his vocal style, which was already well developed when his family entered church singing contests as the Penniman Singers: "The sisters didn't like me screaming... and threw their hats and purses at us', he recalled in his memoir, The Life and Times of Little Richard. 'They called me War Hawk because of my hollerin' and screamin' and they stopped me singing in church.'
 

catalog

Well-known member
And this bit is about 'The Grunt' by the JBs:

What is it about that squeal? What gives it the power it so obviously possesses? Ben Sidran has written about the importance of the cry to the roots of African American music: 'The "cry” was the trademark of the rural individual, derived from the Arwhollies, or field-hollers, and the vocalizations of the spirituals. It signaled that the individual was feeling in such-and-such a way, that he was alive and present, and that he was black.' Moreover, the saxophone-introduced into the USA as a cheap, novelty instrument-has been used in jazz since the thirties as an extension and heightening of the human voice. 'The introduction of the saxophone as a solo voice,' Sidran says, 'made the quality of vocalization more readily available to black instrumentalists, as that horn sounds like the human voice throughout its registers.'
 

version

Well-known member
And this bit is about 'The Grunt' by the JBs:

What is it about that squeal? What gives it the power it so obviously possesses? Ben Sidran has written about the importance of the cry to the roots of African American music: 'The "cry” was the trademark of the rural individual, derived from the Arwhollies, or field-hollers, and the vocalizations of the spirituals. It signaled that the individual was feeling in such-and-such a way, that he was alive and present, and that he was black.' Moreover, the saxophone-introduced into the USA as a cheap, novelty instrument-has been used in jazz since the thirties as an extension and heightening of the human voice. 'The introduction of the saxophone as a solo voice,' Sidran says, 'made the quality of vocalization more readily available to black instrumentalists, as that horn sounds like the human voice throughout its registers.'

I can't help but think of the opening of this.

 
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bassbeyondreason

Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
In the African-American (and some vernacular white) traditions, the shout is often as much communal as it is individual. Failure to grasp this is at the core of the failures of many white would-be free jazzers.
 

catalog

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Im reading james baldwin cos i got given ‘another country’ after i told my mate i never read him. Anyway, not even 40 pages in and hes talkng about the sax scream:

“There was some pot on the scene and he was a little high. He was feeling great. And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably endlessly, and variously repeated with all the force the boy had. The silence became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared.

They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you
love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odour and the odour of the men around him and 'Well, that's it,' said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig.”

Thats what we need innit.
 

catalog

Well-known member
He's surprisingly good actually, although it's a bit slow and old, and competing with a load of other stuff I've got on the go. But yeah, I'm surprised he's not more widely talked about.
 

version

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I see more and more about him these days. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube and there was a documentary a few years back.

 
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catalog

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Greg Tate talks about how James Brown was employed as a stand in screamer for Little Richard:

"If you listen to Little Richard, outside of the most well known hits, if you listen to his body of work, outside of that stuff, you can hear his impact on James Brown and Otis Redding. I mean, James is screaming, and, in fact, at a certain period, Little Richard had left the area and went to LA to record, and he left behind all these performance dates, and Little Richard’s manager hired James Brown to impersonate Little Richard. So there’s
a period of time when James spent a couple of weeks just screaming like Little Richard."
 
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