I have had a copy of Blues & Ballads for most of my adult life so imagine my joy when they finally released the second album of material from the session (it only took 38 years!) These songs are a joy to listen to - two old masters who had not seen each other in decades are clearly enjoying this chance to musically reminisce. The entire session is combined to one link here.
Blues, Ballads and Jumpin' Jazz, vol 2
1. Lester Leaps In 6:13
2. Blue And All Alone 5:39
3. On The Sunny Side Of The Street 6:50
4. C-jam Blues 4:12
5. New Orleans Blues 2:21
6. Careless Love 4:58
7. Stormy Weather 10:34
8. Stormy Weather 10:34
9. I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None O... 5:28
10. Birth Of The Blues 2:54
Blues & Ballads, vol 1
1. Haunted House 5:02
2. Memories Of You 4:24
3. Blues For Chris 5:07
4. I Found A Dream 4:37
5. St. Louis Blues 3:08
6. I'll Get Along Somehow 4:30
7. Savoy Blues 4:14
8. Back Water Blues 5:07
9. Elmer's Blues 3:31
10. Jelly Roll Baker 4:16
"New Orleans–born guitarist Lonnie Johnson was perhaps the only musician to have been a pioneering major influence in both the jazz and blues fields. He was as at home in the company of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as he was accompanying blues singers and crooning the blues himself.Blues and Ballads, a 1960 album that paired Lonnie Johnson with fellow guitarist Elmer Snowden, produced some of the most moving performances of Johnson's prolific career. Now,
38 years later, comes more from that remarkable session. Four tracks are typically melancholy Johnson vocals featuring his sweetly stinging guitar, while the other six are instrumentals showcasing Snowden's rhythmically riveting jazz attack. One of those, the gently loping "Careless Love," is a Johnson-Snowden guitar duet that recalls Johnson's celebrated work of three decades earlier with Eddie Lang."
Singing guitarist
Lonnie Johnson looms as a major stylistic innovator in both the jazz and blues fields. His single-string approach to soloing and sophisticated harmonic sense left a profound mark on several generations of guitar players, including Eddie Lang, Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, and B.B. King. “He had a somewhat modern style—that is compared to the stuff that I was playing and a lot of other people were playing,” King said in 1968. “He had a modern technique of chord progressions.”
Born in New Orleans, either in 1889 or ’94, Johnson was originally a violinist and later learned banjo, mandolin, guitar, and piano. During the late 1920s, the versatile Johnson was much in demand as a guitarist for recording sessions and was as comfortable accompanying “primitive” country blues singer Texas Alexander as he was in the faster musical company of Lang (with whom he recorded a remarkable series of duets), the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five.
It was as a vocalist, however, that Johnson received the greatest public acclaim. His recording of the sentimental pop song “Tomorrow Night” spent seven weeks at the top of Billboard’s “race” chart in 1948. He had three additional hit singles on King Records over the next two years, but by the end of the Fifties, he had dropped out of music entirely and was working as a janitor at a Philadelphia hotel. Disc jockey Chris Albertson located him there in 1960 and brought him the attention of Prestige Records, for whom Johnson recorded seven albums over the next two years. He remained an active performer until his death in Toronto in 1970.
Elmer Snowden (October 9, 1900 – May 14, 1973) was a banjo player of the jazz age. He also played guitar and, in the early stages of his career, all the reed instruments. He contributed greatly to jazz in its early days as both a player and a bandleader, and is responsible for launching the careers of many top musicians. However, Snowden himself has been largely overlooked in jazz history.
Born in Baltimore, Snowden is remembered today mainly as the original leader of the Washingtonians, a group he brought to New York City from the capital in 1923. Unable to get a booking, Snowden sent for Duke Ellington, who was with the group when it recorded three test sides for Victor that remain unissued and are, presumably, lost. Ellington eventually took over leadership of the band, which contained the nucleus of what later became his famous orchestra. Snowden was a renowned band leader – Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Bubber Miley, "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Frankie Newton, Benny Carter, Rex Stewart, Roy Eldridge and Chick Webb are among the musicians who worked in his various bands.
Very active in the 1920s as an agent and musician, Snowden at one time had five bands playing under
his name in New York, one of which was led by pianist Cliff Jackson. Unfortunately, most of his bands were not recorded, but a Snowden band that included Eldridge, Al Sears, Dicky Wells and Sid Catlett appeared in a 1932 film, Smash Your Baggage. Snowden also made numerous appearances as a sideman on almost every New York label from 1923 on. Unfortunately, he rarely received credit, except for two sides with Bessie Smith in 1925, and six sides with the Sepia Serenaders in 1934.
Though Snowden continued to be musically active throughout his life, after the mid 1930s he lived in relative obscurity in New York. He continued to play throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s, but was far from the limelight. After a dispute with the musicians union in New York, he moved to Philadelphia where he taught music, counting among his pupils pianist Ray Bryant, his brother, bassist Tommy Bryant, and saxophonist Sahib Shihab (Edmond Gregory).
Snowden was working as a parking lot attendant in 1959 when Chris Albertson, then a Philadelphia
disc jockey, came across him. In 1960, Albertson brought Snowden and singer-guitarist Lonnie Johnson together for two Prestige albums, assembled a quartet that included Cliff Jackson for a Riverside session, Harlem Banjo, and, in 1961, a sextet session with Roy Eldridge, Bud Freeman, Jo Jones, and Ray and Tommy Bryant—it was released on the Fontana and Black Lion labels.
In 1963, his career boosted, Snowden appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. He toured Europe in 1967 with the Newport Guitar Workshop. He moved to California to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and played with Turk Murphy.
In 1969, Snowden moved back to Philadelphia, where he died on May 14, 1973.
My friend and morning coffee mate Les Muscutt is also a banjo/guitar guy who was friends with Elmer and Elmer told him it had been decades since anyone expressed interest in his guitar playing when Chris Albertson asked him to do this session. He surely must have been playing at home because his playing here is phenomenal. Lonnie defers most of the solos to Elmer despite what reviewers who think Elmer was playing rhythm might say - they clearly did not listen well enough to either the playing or the conversations between the two.
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