Bassist about town and writer par excellence Spike Perkins will be adding his unique voice to TVD all week long.
You’ve probably heard Jerry Jumonville’s saxophone, whether you know it or not.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this New Orleans native was a sought-after studio musician in Los Angeles, and played on records with Bonnie Raitt, the Doobie Brothers, Dr. John, Harry Nilsson, and many others. His two best known recordings were Bette Midler’s film “The Rose,” in which he played, wrote horn arrangements, and acted, and the sax solo on Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s The Night,” which has become such a soft rock classic it is even heard in shopping malls and dentist offices.
Jumonville moved home to New Orleans in the early 1990s, and I met him when we worked in R&B bands together. I soon found that, while he could rock with the best of them, his real love was straight-ahead jazz.
The irony was that there were barely any recordings of Jumonville playing jazz. He had a well-documented discography of all his pop and rock session work (http://www.allmusic.com/artist/jerry-jumonville-p92041/credits), but nothing that reflected his real focus and creativity.
I talked to our mutual friend Gary Edwards of Sound Of New Orleans Records (http://www.soundofneworleans.com/) about recording a jazz CD with Jumonville. Edwards was skeptical that such a project would be profitable, but thought it would be fun. Besides, Jumonville had played on many local sessions for Edwards, and he had a deep appreciation for his musicianship. We started recording in the spring and summer of 2004 at night, after Sound Of New Orleans’ regular business hours, at Gary Edwards’ old studio on Canal Boulevard. The personnel were the same as our quartet that was performing twice weekly at the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street: Jumonville on tenor sax, his old friend and fellow Dr. John alumnus Freddy Staehle (http://allmusic.com/artist/fred-staehle-p127815/credits) on drums, Steve Armstrong, a young guitarist who was then still a jazz student at UNO, and myself on upright bass.
The art of jazz is all about collective improvisation, and it is essential that musicians can communicate and interact during a recording session. The engineers at Sound Of New Orleans were more used to the pop/rock type of recording, where rhythm tracks are laid down first, with horns, vocals, etc. added later. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out how to place microphones to record all of us playing together in one room in such a way that we would still have track separation when it came to the mixing and editing process.
The upright bass, which was miked acoustically in the studio and not amplified, proved particularly problematic. I ended up playing with my bass up under a box of drum baffles on either side and over the bridge and the mike.
We also wanted to showcase Jumonville’s arranging abilities, so after the quartet recorded live, he went back and wrote saxophone section parts for all the tunes, overdubbing additional tenor, alto and baritone sax parts one at a time.
We ended up with eleven finished songs. But since this was a back burner project for Sound Of New Orleans, the tracks had still not gotten a final mix when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August, 2005. We knew the studio had flooded, but didn’t know if the Jumonville masters had survived.
Tomorrow- the scintillating conclusion to this tale and a free download!
Spike Perkins has resided in New Orleans since 1982, where he works as a musician and freelance writer. His work has appeared in the Times-Picayune, and other publications, and he has performed with many New Orleans-based artists. He wrote the cult hit “Pitbull” with Coco Robicheaux, and appears on Robicheaux’s “Spiritland” CD.
