james spaulding on blue note

by the way, james spaulding is playing with his ace homie freddie hubbard at iridium april 26 through 29.



we’ve always wondered about jimmy spaulding. he was blue note’s in house alto and flute player on tons of great and seminal recordings for the label during the peak of its sound (most of the recordings by hubbard, morgan, shorter, et al). additionally, while blue note and mainstream jazz as a whole was starting to go in an increasingly spiritual and free direction, spaulding had come up with sun ra, and was down with the pharoah sanders and archie shepp camp (and plays on some of their records). and he always kills it. huge fan of his alto playing especially. but while seemingly every other major player in the blue note roster appeared as a leader on the recombinant sessions, spaulding is conspicuously absent from the leader board. we set out to figure out why. the internet provides.

found this interview with all about jazz from february 2004.


AAJ: You made so many appearances as a sideman on Blue Note. Did they ever ask you to do a record as a leader during that time?

JS: Well, Alfred Lion took me out to dinner and he asked me if I would like to record for Blue Note, if I would like a contract. I said sure, and he said [Spaulding does his best German accent] �well, you know you have a family (I had just had my first daughter) and you want to write some music for the jukebox!� He said �you want to write some �Watermelon Man.�� At the time he wanted something like Lou Donaldson�s Alligator Boogaloo, and as I was eating I said �okay Alfred, I�ll be talking to you later.� I never got back with him; I had all this stuff I�d written up, and that just killed all of that.

AAJ: What kind of stuff had you written?

JS: Well, some bebop, some swing, some traditional kinds of things. Hopefully it would�ve introduced me on the label; it was around �65. He told me that, and I love Lou Donaldson, but I didn�t want to play that stuff all night long. I wanted to play free and I wanted to play bebop all night. If I did play something with a backbeat, it would be at the end of the set where people would get up and dance. I�d go to the club and people would say �play that fatback, man!� One guy told me �play some Herbie Mann� and I thought, well� Another guy told me to play �Swing Shepherd Blues� and I thought �okay, I�ll play �Swing Shepherd Blues�� and the guy handed me a ten-dollar bill [laughs].


later in the same interview


AAJ: So how did you go about starting your label?

JS: Well, everybody�s saying �shoot, man, get your own label.� You can do what you want to do, get the musicians you want, you don�t have the record companies telling you who to use or what to play. It�s like Alfred Lion telling me what to play. The money wasn�t that great anyway for a sideman. For me, it was $250; at 12:00 they�d pick us up at the Empire Hotel and take us out to Rudy van Gelder�s studio in a taxi, and we�d be out there from noon to sunset. We�d be doing all these takes and he�d give each of us a check and we�d have to rush back to Manhattan before the check-cashing place closed (it was on the corner of 50th and Broadway), try to cash our little check and have enough money to get home and buy some groceries. I began to record a lot, my phone was ringing and I was thankful. I got married in �63 and after that we did Hub-Tones, and Duke Pearson (he was the A&R man), he liked me and started calling me for other dates, and I am thankful for that. But I wish I had recorded for Blue Note with the music I wanted to play!


a couple things jump out from these excerpts. from a historical perspective, blue note is thought of being the cream of 60s jazz. its crazy to hear spaulding talk about being broke because the label didn’t pay sidemen and that, given that these guys all played on each other’s records anyway, there was a large discrepancy between the bread you made as a leader and as a sideman. same thing with spaulding talking about an audience that wasn't hip to what was taking place on the records.

also, never really heard alfred lion or francis wolf talked about in a disparaging way. always understood that they were considered sortof saviors, or at least had a better rapport with blue note’s artists, because they were uncompromising about allowing musicians to record what they wanted. and provided such a successful financial platform. its not like everyone on blue note at that time was making groove records (andrew hill’s records aren’t easy to listen to). got to wonder what spaulding’s music would have sounded like. especially given that he was the preferred alto player for hard bop, groove, and free-ish records. ask him if you see him.