Sporting Life
Loveless Love
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Gulf Coast Blues
St. Louis Blues
Michigan Water Blues
Aunt Hagar's Blues
Spider Crawl
Sent For You Yesterday
Farewell To Storyville
Roll 'Em Pete
Hound Dog
This Train
Kingdom Coming
I'm A Ding Dong Daddy
Railroadin' Man
Waiting For A Train
My Canary Has Circles Under His Eyes
Heebie Jeebies
Black Bottom
Magnolia
King Of The Zulus
Shine
Pleadin' For The Blues
Take Me For A Buggy Ride
Root Doctor
1919 Rag
Candy Lips
Savoy Blues
How Long Blues
Skid-Dat-De-Dat
The Curse
Down In Honky Tonk Town
Rock Island Line
Send Me To The 'lectric Chair
Kitchen Man
Jazzbo Brown From Memphis Town
This is a nicely bipartite double CD set - two for
the price of one, by the way. The first disc is by Mick Mulligan and
His Jazz Band and the second by Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band.
All the tracks were recorded between 1950 and 1957. Nothing Personal
refers to the title of the LP of the same name, the first LP to be issued
under George Melly's name, and which has never been reissued in full,
though a number of tracks have been taken from it.
The first disc covers some stylistic ground - blues, skiffle, Boogie
Woogie, and Gospel are all grist to the mill. I've always enjoyed the
sound of just Melly and guitarist Denny Wright doing Sporting Life in
1957 and the fuller-than-usual vocals of St Louis Blues. This version
of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was on a favourite compilation LP of the
time called A Scrapbook of British Jazz. (I know because one rainy afternoon
in 1977 I played it and fell in love with Jazz). At its heart though
the Mulligan band was a hard driving Chicago outfit that learned to
accommodate Melly's more specialist Classic Blues tastes - the fiery
example of their stylistic metier can best be appreciated in Spider
Crawl where tenor player Betty Smith joins them. Harry Gold guests on
a few tracks on his Rolliniesque bass sax - and John Watson proves a
congenial trombonist on the three tracks that he guests. Melly is ever
Melly - though it has to be said that his strangulated attempt at a
Jimmy Rushing vocal on Sent For You Yesterday is not amongst his imperishable
moments of glory on record. The forays into Skiffle - on This Train
for instance - are less successful than the almost contemporaneous Ken
Colyer skiffle sides.
The second disc gets right back to the beginning with a series of 1950-52
tracks. The earliest feature a rather lumbering, rugged Lu Watters style
ensemble with two banjos (most people thought one was a crime let alone
two) and tuba. The immobility of the rhythm section doesn't entirely
constrain the front line - Mulligan, trombonist Bob Dawbarn and clarinettist
Pete Hull, who shows his Doddsian credentials in his lower and upper
register work on Pleadin' For The Blues; fine preaching trombone and
forceful Mulligan lead on this track as well. These sides have a rawness
and commitment that compensate for instrumental or ensemble lapses.
Pianist Brian Burn does a Clarence Lofton-inspired turn on Root Doctor
- down home and surprisingly effective. I like the relaxation of tempo
for Savoy Blues and the set piece success of Melly's great standby Send
Me To The 'lectric Chair, though Rock Island Line is rather too heavy.
Quite a mixed bag then of the incongruous, the exploratory and the
expected. The looser early sides still pack a punch and the later ones
point to a clearer defining of Melly's repertoire - though it was never
static in any case, and never confined to Classic Blues. However you
look at it it's excellent to have them collated in this way.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
LAKE
LACD 265 [58:10 + 51:32]
