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It might sound crazy to the outsider, but it has been possible, and will perhaps remain so, for a certain type of jazz artist to build a career, a life, a philosophy, around a single chord progression without at any time experiencing those pangs of creative claustrophobia which so often signal the beginning of the end. The twelve-bar blues is not much one jazz sequence among many as a subsection of the jazz art, one whose constraints bring with them their own special disciplines and, if you have a touch of the old Adam, their own special rewards. Big Joe Turner was born in 1911, so, taking into account the habitual precociousness of the natural jazz artist, it is safe to surmise that he has been shouting the blues for fifty years at the very least, without ever finding that he has come to the limits of his art.
In fact, the blues is constraint all the way. The same few chord changes. The same three lines of rough-hewn petry, with the first line almost always repeated. Less thematic material than that could hardly be imagined. And yet Big Joe remains perfectly at home with his work, in the literal sense, for, having been born in Kansas City, he very often sings of his home town, using it as a kind of marker for the healthy appetite, for what an English swinger called H.G. Wells once defined, in a burst of sublime inspiration, as the jolly coarsenesses of life. If the blues of Big Joe Turner are to be believed, there was a period in the social history of Kansas City which would explain those otherwise incomprehensible lines of William Wordsworth: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven."
It is not much use the blues shouter being what polite society likes to think of as a good singer, any more than it would suit the purposes of an eagle to comply with the pecking order of a suburban aviary. Blues shouters like Big Joe sing about a few basic verities, and they differ from popular singers in exactly the same way that the blues differs from the art-song. This difference is in the relationship between what is often laughingly called Life and what is equally laughingly called Art. The blues deals with the real world, discusses real problems, describes real emotions, defines real sufferings and discomforts. To fall back on an overworked fashionable cliche, the blues are streetwise, as becomes crystalclear in every one of these tracks, where even the exceptions prove all the rules.
Condition:NEW.
TRACK LISTINGS
A1 Down Home Blues 5:17
A2 Call The Plumber 6:58
A3 Since I Fell For You 4:44
A4 Kansas City Here I Come 4:24
B1 Big Leg Woman 8:35
B2 Sweet Sixteen 5:56
B3 Time After Time 4:58
Made in Germany
OJC 743 (2310 904)
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