Choon of the Day, redux

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0bleak

Well-known member
^very informative review by my favorite reviewer on Discogs:

"A very special reissuing of this, seminal, Dr. John record called "Babylon". Although as my very pedantic and "woke" friend Tommy Conker always likes to point out whenever I play a Dr. John record to him, Dr. John actually culturally appropriated his identity from a free man of color who was actually named "Dr. John", who was a Senegalese prince, conjurer, herbal doctor and spiritual healer. The actual Dr. John (NOT the one that made this record), he likes to say, was the proud owner of a vast array of snakes and lizards, along with embalmed scorpions and animal and human skulls, and sold "gris-gris" which were voodoo amulets designed to protect the wearer from horrible curses and things. Plus the actual Dr. John (again, NOT the one that made this record) claimed to have 15 wives, which my other friend Babish Patel says would be very nice, as he says he would be able to have lots of sexy fun with them all!!"

unfortunately some of his reviews got deleted: https://www.discogs.com/user/midnightrunner
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
Last night I started reading the David Toop book, Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John’s Gris-Gris, which has been excellent so far. I've learnt a lot about Sonny and Cher's early years - seriously! Toop doesn't avoid the cultural appropriation and racism in music angle. I'm about a 100 pages in / a third of the way through and it's been a fascinating read. I'm looking forward to reading some more later tonight. Recommended.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
precursor to gris-gris



Prince La La - Need You ( 1961 )

from the David Toop book:

“Need You”, written by Jessie Hill and presumably cut at the same session, is an even stranger thing. “Doo doo,” sings La La for the unaccompanied intro. “Waaaah, wha wha whaa,” answers the backing chorus. Again, the production is drowned in echo, another Latin beat, a slowish 6/8 with inexact inferences of Cuban bolero, the Bo Diddley beat and doo-wop, in which the murky sound fuses insistently doomy bass, woodblock, clanking metal, guitar chords and Boudreaux’s pattern of mallet-struck tom-toms, conjuring the soundworld of a nocturnal forest. La La’s sudden high-pitched shrieks pierce the agitated density, unexpected and unnerving, while Harold Battiste improvises around his voice with soprano saxophone. Like the flute in “Things Have Changed”, soprano saxophone was an unusual choice, almost certainly influenced by John Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things”, released just a few years earlier. Battiste would have been well aware of Coltrane’s innovative use of soprano – which modern jazz musician was not? – but perhaps also conscious of an ancestral connection to one of the greatest of all New Orleans jazz musicians, Sidney Bechet, one of the pioneers of the instrument.
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Battiste’s summation of Prince La La’s “Need You” was a casual description of deep convictions — “We’d recorded an African thing,” he told Jeff Hannusch, “... The arrangement was an African/New Orleans/Congo Square type of spiritual thing that you can only find here. It was something we at AFO felt.” On the subject of its relevance to the Gris-gris recordings, four years down the line, he was explicit — “Mac [Rebennack] eventually made that sound commercial…”

But the ideas Battiste expressed through his rhythmic arrangements, instrumentation selections, and studio recording techniques for Prince La La were distinctly original, as well as being a reflection of his personal search for knowledge and autonomy.

“Had he not died under mysterious circumstances in 1963,” wrote Jeff Hannusch in The Soul of New Orleans, “Prince La La might have extended a promising career, and perhaps been the rock icon Mac Rebennack - Dr John - became"
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Prince_La_La.jpg


Prince La La died of a heroin overdose, age 27 - a trend setter.
 
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