Rick Diamond
When the New Orleans pianist Henry Butler reached New York in 2009, the strapping dude with sun shades and a felt hat regarded approach youthful than 61. Driving a wave of live shows and recordings, Butler, the truth is, was a migrant to town of cities.
Sightless since start, Butler grew up in a New Orleans housing undertaking, a hungry thoughts propelled by Braille to research at a college for the blind, and on to Southern College in Baton Rouge underneath the auspices of jazz maestro Alvin Batiste. Batiste harassed a grounding in “the continuum”—the road of jazz from its New Orleans ensemble model origins into totally different zones, swing to bop to John Coltrane’s sheets of sound, gathering new momentum for which previous kinds held the potential for improvisations as jazz pushed on. Steeped in blues and the basics, Butler learn relentlessly as computer-assisted texts enlarged his choices; he earned a Grasp’s in Music at Michigan State, taught a number of years at Jap Illinois, and moved residence in 1996. Instructing at U.N.O., enjoying gigs, and recording, Butler informed buddies, “Life is nice.”
All that modified in late August 2005 when Butler was pressured to flee to Boulder, Colorado, simply earlier than the Hurricane Katrina flood wrecked his spacious residence on Elysian Fields Avenue and trashed his 1925 Mason & Hamlin piano. In demand for live shows, he slowly regrouped, and at last left Colorado. Profession-wise, New York made sense.
Butler spoke in a basso profundo tone, laughing simply. His fingers on the piano moved like lightning, the left hand delivered rocking thunder that shifted in a flash to medium tempo traces, seamlessly slowing down for the correct hand to tease out whispers of melody. On Homeland (Basin Road), “Ode to Fess” celebrates Professor Longhair (Henry Roeland Byrd), the New Orleans blues wizard. From Byrd’s basic “Tipitina,” Butler unspools a lullaby, singing as if to a baby nodding off:
Oh, Professor, oh Professor
You introduced me a lot pleasure
I liked your music
Since I used to be a child boy.
In 2012 Steven Bernstein, the New York trumpeter, bandleader, and arranger visited Butler’s condo in Brooklyn. As chief of the long-running Millennial Territory Orchestra, Bernstein had additionally labored with Levon Helm, Lou Reed, and in 1996 employed Butler for soundtrack work as he scored Robert Altman’s movie Kansas Metropolis.
Butler and Bernstein obtained on effectively, seeing each other over the following years in resort rooms after live shows; however they didn’t know one another effectively till that day in Brooklyn. Henry sat on the piano, Steven’s thoughts racing with potentialities for collaborating. He requested Butler to play sure items a second time, absorbing his method. Bernstein realized that Henry Butler in his well mannered Southern approach had a commanding sense of what he needed: not a modernist’s pushing-the-threshold however a sound sprung from an older root.
For his or her band, to be referred to as the Scorching 9, Henry insisted on a rhythm part anchored within the second line beat, the sound of New Orleans road parading with percussive colorings that flowed like a candy Caribbean river via the Twenties compositions of Jelly Roll Morton to the Fifties rhythm-and-blues pulsations of Fess and Fat Domino, branching out within the Nineteen Sixties underneath Allen Toussaint, James Booker, and Dr. John, every along with his personal impressionist spin, a continuum propelled lately with Grammy-winning pianists Jon Cleary and Late Present bandleader Jon Batiste, whose “Freedom” video of second line dancers is one in every of pop music’s richest choreographies, ever. The album is plush too.
Himself an adroit arranger and swaggering bandleader, Bernstein found one thing else in Butler: a musical alter-ego. Henry had a totemic persona along with his deep, assured voice and a refined privateness with individuals on whom he relied. Behind the blind man’s shades, Bernstein slowly realized, Butler was a seer, an artist with visions of recent music formed by a convention he carried. Butler was not a star, for no matter that wicked time period is price; however throughout the guild, his chops had severe standing.
“Each live performance Henry performed—and each tune he performed—was an occasion of supreme expression and a lot spontaneity within the improvisation,” says George Winston, the prolific pianist whose new launch, Evening (Dancing Cat Data) is a rhapsodic journey with grace notes in that very same Crescent Metropolis model.
On Winston’s 2005 album, Gulf Coast Blues and Impressions: A Hurricane Reduction Profit, the lead lower “New Orleans Shall Rise Once more” is a masterly echo of the blues-driven percussive model of pianists like Fess, Toussaint, and Booker whose affect Winston absorbed via lots of of hours, listening to their information. Winston formed his personal improvisational final analysis, akin to the model he admired in Butler. The fifth lower on Gulf Coast Blues, “The Breaks,” is a Butler composition with the shimmering vary, the expansive roll from Henry’s flashing fingers.
Winston and Butler had labored collectively within the studio in years previous. Winston was co-producer on two Butler CDs earlier than Henry teamed up with Bernstein: The Blues and Extra (Wyndham Hill Jazz)and PiaNOLA Stay (Basin Road). “Henry had stunning ideas of harmonization,” Winston displays. “He might make the piano explode on the proper moments along with his uneven, two-hand model, enjoying up and down the keys—but the rhythm was by no means misplaced, despite the fact that there was no pulsing left hand bass. It’s completely elusive to me how he might maintain the rhythm going. Henry was that very uncommon pianist who performed hard-core, straight-ahead jazz, taking it into the deep blues and R&B piano of New Orleans, steering that sound as much as one other stage fully.”
As they ready for the 2014 recording Viper’s Drag (Impulse!) Bernstein at Butler’s behest sought out Herlin Riley, a third-generation New Orleans drummer whose lengthy again pages included highway excursions with Ahmad Jamal and plenty of recordings and live shows with Wynton Marsalis. Riley’s drumming anchored the second line sound, enlarged by Reginald Veal’s bass, which functioned like a tuba. This was the blueprint Henry needed. On Viper’s Drag, Butler’s clarion tone strikes from ragtime to boogie and Jelly’s leaping “King Porter Stomp,” whereas Bernstein’s jaunting horn attracts power from the rhythm part. Viper’s Drag grew to become a excessive assertion of the far-flung faculty of artists who're transforming New Orleans Model, the early 1900s root idiom, previous music made new, improvisations stretching out, homing again to the resonant line of melody.
Butler’s roaming piano model floated on this bigger idiomatic present. Wynton Marsalis constructed Jazz at Lincoln by celebrating the music’s evolution from the taproot. “Within the Courtroom of King Oliver” on Commonplace Time: Quantity 3, The Decision of Romance (Columbia), Marsalis lays out a stately line of melody in tribute to Oliver, the cornet participant who left for Chicago in 1917, took over the Creole Jazz Band and in 1922 introduced up Louis Armstrong who quickly went on to the world. Mr. Jelly Lord is Marsalis’ tribute to Morton within the Commonplace Time collection, Vol. 6.
Again in New Orleans, a loosely related faculty of musicians was charting related territory. Dr. Michael White, a Jelly devotee, did a number of information on the Basin Road label, reimagining the terrain of early jazz. “Sunday Morning” on Blue Crescent sings of the church parades, now extinct, that brass bands as soon as performed as girls in white attire sashayed on metropolis streets or nation roads. Trumpeter Gregg Stafford’s gruff vocals sound out a imaginative and prescient of that previous:
Come collectively,
Sunday morning.
Once I see you,
The sunshine pulls darkness from the sky,
Sunday morning, Sunday morning,
Once I see you
We’ll march collectively by and by.
Aurora Nealand, a reed participant of adventuresome imaginative and prescient, did an album channeling Sidney Bechet’s main songs, The Royal Roses, amid a long term collaboration with Tom McDermott, who performs the New Orleans piano as if he lived via each era. As White, Nealand, McDermott, and others mined the seminal idiom, Bernstein’s collaboration with Butler led to grand live performance dates, and a rousing return for Henry on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Competition.
Henry Butler had the world on a string till the 2016 most cancers analysis. Associates throughout the map raised funds for him to take experimental therapy in Germany. At one in every of his final gigs, a tribute to Jelly on the 2017 New Orleans jazz fest, he was frail as a leaf on the bandstand. He died lower than a yr later, in 2018, at 69.
“Nobody had a left hand like him,” Bernstein informed The New York Instances for its obituary. “It was so robust and quick, and he had such management… the tone, the dynamics, the pace. He did all these items that have been so quick that nobody else might do them. In case you checked out his palms, they have been blurs.”
The blur stayed with Bernstein as time rolled on. A lot of his work with Henry—deep journeys again to the daybreak of jazz, retrofitting new designs within the New Orleans rhythm, circling again to the current—saturated Bernstein’s psychological territory at the same time as he turned to different tasks. Henry Butler was the ghost in Bernstein’s attic, booming out the uneven two-handed thunderstorms that trailed the trumpeter like a religious pressure, softening in that deep voice, beckoning in a stage whisper, Steven, are you able to hear my impatient foot tapping? Steven, we aren't accomplished but!
Collaborating with a useless man isn't any straightforward job however Bernstein pulls it off with brio in two new vinyl releases with the Millennial Territory Orchestra on the Royal Potato Household label. Good Time Music, that includes vocalist Catherine Russell, and Manifesto of Henryism, which showcases John Medeski (organ and piano) and the pianist Arturo O’Farrill on alternate tracks, in homage to Butler.
Bernstein’s “Henryisms” is one other tackle Henry’s approach of venturing removed from the bottom rhythm, his personal journey out into the continuum, capturing shards of song-lines in variations that inevitably return and resolve to the melody in Crescent Metropolis model. Bernstein’s horn charts provide a ranging refrain. The primary lower of Manifesto is Jelly’s basic, “Black Backside Stomp” with a swift melodic line suggesting horses racing across the observe. In lieu of Henry, Medeski’s driving keyboard opens the territory for Bernstein main the horns (Peter Apfelbaum and Erik Lawrence on saxophones, Curtis Folkes) on the chase.
Bernstein’s picks on Manifesto of Henryisms sing again to that impatient ghost within the attic. Music after tune touches on Butler’s model of the continuum. The second lower, “Booker Time,” is a tribute to James Booker, the reed-thin “piano prince,” who wore a black patch and put his personal deep blues stamp on New Orleans Model, celebrated in Lily Keber’s 2013 bio-doc Bayou Maharaja. Booker, like Professor Longhair, performed with a strong left hand, shifting fluidly from rags to boogie into R&B. “Booker Time” was initially a solo piano piece by Butler; on this model, Bernstein stretches out the melodic mosaic for the band, Medeski at instances riffing like a rhythm instrument.
Bernstein does his personal deep bow to origins of the continuum, and Louis Armstrong, along with his composition “Little Dipper” which segues properly into “Dippermouth Blues,” the King Oliver tune with cornet breaks that gave Armstrong an early showcase second in Chicago. Bernstein’s half of the medley opens with Medeski’s keyboard prancing alongside until the horns seem, subtly at first, gaining a strong stride, a sweetly harmonizing tribute to the bolder sound younger Louis issued in that timeless early recording.
Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra’s tribute to the New Orleans continuum prolong properly on the Royal Potato Household’s second quantity within the Neighborhood Music releases, Good Time Music that includes Catherine Russell.
Russell has one attractive set of pipes, a singer comfortable within the vary of songs within the repertoire that Bernstein carries from the collaboration with Butler. She comes with grand pedigree. Her father, Luis Russell, was a Panamanian-born pianist who discovered his stride in New Orleans in the course of the early stirrings of jazz, migrated to New York in 1925 and by the Nineteen Thirties led the orchestra that backed Armstrong as his profession soared.
Within the Allen Toussaint tune “Sure We Can,” Catherine Russell takes the unique chorus, an up-tempo refrain sure we are able to! sure we can-can, sure we are able to! and stretches out the lyrics of hope as if kissing clouds. For “Child Let Me Maintain Your Hand”—a Professor Longhair composition, to which the vinyl cowl provides “Within the Model of Henry Butler”—you get the image of a brand new era’s spin as Russell turns lovebird crooning and belting to that dude along with his throbbing coronary heart, whereas up within the attic of everlasting music the viewfinder begins a sluggish zoom into Henry Butler, nodding to the tempos, smiling like a winner on the observe.
Jason Berry is the creator, most just lately, of “Metropolis of a Million Goals”, a New Orleans historical past and the topic of a brand new documentary.