Graded on a Curve:
James Booker,
Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah

Can you adjudge the greatness of an artist by their sheer accretion of natty nicknames? If so, New Orleans rhythm and blues pianist and singer James Booker was a God. He garnered a slew of colorful sobriquets over the course of his short life—the Bayou Maharajah, the Piano Pope, the Ivory Emperor, the Piano Prince of New Orleans. But the most telling is the one he bestowed upon himself—the Bronze (or sometimes Black) Liberace.

The Bayou Maharajah may be my favorite—it lets you know you’re in the realm of the swamp exotic. But the Bronze Liberace is the most accurate—it lets you know you’ve moved into the realm of the fabulous. And not simply because Booker was gay, had a flamboyant streak and knew his way around the classical music canon. New Orleans has spawned a legion of legendary rhythm and blues pianists, but only one of them was a classically trained child prodigy who was performing all of J.S. Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias professionally by age 12.

His classical skills would inform his music thereafter—his music was a one-of-a-kind stew of R&B, jazz, and classical. And he authentically loved Liberace and all the gaudy trappings; asked to record an album once, he would say sure, but I want a candelabrum on the piano. And that’s non-negotiable.

Classical music couldn’t contain Booker. He walked away from Chopin in favor of Jelly Roll Morton and by age 14 he’d released his first R&B single “Doin’ the Hambone.” Come 1960–by which time he’d toured and/or recorded with just about everybody who was anybody—he scored his only hit with the organ instrumental “Gonzo,” a fave of Hunter S. Thompson.

But he never forgot his classical roots. At one point he was given the chance opportunity to strut his stuff for concert pianist Arthur Rubenstein. Rubenstein’s response: “I could never play that … never at that tempo.” In the meantime he’d developed a heroin addiction, one that, along with mental health problems and alcohol abuse, would dog him his entire life and send him to an early grave.

Dr. John once called Booker “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” A terribly circumscribed compliment, that—just how many black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano geniuses has New Orleans produced? Better to say that one of the greatest rhythm and blues piano geniuses New Orleans has ever produced just happened to be a black, gay, one-eyed junkie, and every bit as flamboyant as Esquerita and Little Richard.

Booker’s troubles with heroin would have some rather odd consequences—a fabulist, he would tell as many stories about how he lost that eye (one had it being torn by hand from his head by an angry dealer, a better one involved a fight with Ringo Starr) as there are versions of “Junco Partner,” but the one with the most credence is he lost it in an assault in Angola Prison in Louisiana.

His stint at Angola traumatized him—he was known to launch into tirades on the criminal justice system during live performances—but the result was he spent spent the rest of his life wearing a very Ziggy Stardust eyepatch (black with glitter star!). And a New Orleans DA once helped to nullify a drug charge against Booker in exchange for Booker’s giving his son piano lessons. That son, one Harry Connick, Jr., would later say of his mentor’s playing, “Nothing was harder than that. It’s insane. It’s insanity.”

Robert Christgau once called Booker’s “the most ornate piano style ever to escape New Orleans,” and that’s not the half of it. His playing is dumbfounding—he effortlessly performs acrobatic feats on one hand while setting down a pounding back beat with the other, and the combination of arpeggios and that primal back beat leave him sounding like nobody ever has, or probably ever will. And that “effortlessly” is apt—a Booker sideman once described him performing amazing feats at a live gig while his attention was fully engaged in flirting with a guy in the audience.

Given his classical and jazz chops Booker might easily have flown off into the ether, but he never, ever lost the groove. He was butterfly and hammer in one. Even when things seem simple, they’re not. He played the Mozart honky tonk Bourbon Street blues, was “Ray Charles,” to quote a musical authority who actually transcribed some of Booker’s playing, “on the level of Chopin.” And his voice is a marvel. Quirky, supple. Sometimes high-humored, sometimes achingly plaintive. And sometimes so much so that you forget all about his piano playing. Which could be his most amazing feat of all.

Booker left behind only three studio LPs, but there are well over a dozen live albums out there, including many recorded in Europe, some behind the Iron Curtain. Overseas he played before large and appreciative audiences, which he felt was only his due. A friend tells a hilarious anecdote about Booker returning from overseas to crash at his place. Booker insisted his friend listen to tapes of his live shows. Cool, the guy was a big fan. But Booker didn’t want his friend to hear the actual songs—he would fast forward through them so his friend could hear the applause. Then smile blissfully. He did it with one song after another. Then one tape after another. He would fast forward to the applause and this big grin would light up his face. He did this for days. He did this until his exasperated friend told him he was going to have to find someplace else to stay.

At first his florid playing left me…well I won’t say cold, but suffice it to say I wanted him to keep things simpler. There was too much going on. And, being no big fan of Chopin et al, his classical flourishes at first left me cold. But the more I listened, the more his playing struck me as, to use a word everyone gets around to using sooner or later, genius. The fancy playing no longer struck me as a case of gilding the lily.

I’m partial to primitives, but James Booker converted me. That back beat kept him grounded—his playing always had that sweaty groove, even when he treated the audience to pieces like Chopin’s “Minute Waltz.” How do you funk up a Chopin waltz,” for God’s sake? Well, you change the name to “Black Minute Waltz” and proceed to perform soul alchemy. Only Booker could have pulled it off.

And pull it off he does on 1993’s live Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah, which was released some ten years after his death at age 43 from renal failure related to chronic heroin and alcohol abuse. Culled from sixty hours of recording made over ten years (1972–82) at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street in New Orleans, Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah is as good an introduction as any to Booker’s astounding gifts.

You get such N’Awlins R&B piano mainstays as “Junco Partner,” “St. James Infirmary,” and “Goodnight Irene,” as well as such greats as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Bony Maronie,” “Knock on Wood,” “”Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” And some Booker originals, such as the lyrically dumbfounding “Papa Was a Rascal,” to boot. Oh, and he throws in his take on Cuban pianist and composer Ernesto Lecuona’s “Gitanarias” while he’s at it. And when he isn’t flabbergasting you with arpeggios he’s knocking you out loaded with that bad right hand, his voice a live wire, veering from sheer, playful joy to raw, heart-breaking emotion—his vocals on “St. James Infirmary” are haunting.

One of the interesting things about Booker is this—he opens with the medley “”Medley: Slow Down/ Bony Maronie/ Knock on Wood/ I Heard It Through the Grapevine/ Classified” and it’s not so much that he seamlessly stitches them together—he actually makes them sound like the same song. Same slow and easy-as-she-goes tempo, same remorseless back beat, over which he does positively uncanny things with those rubber-flexible tonsils. There’s no classical music in that voice—it’s all jumps and flutters, repetitions and barbaric yowl.

He opens “Papa Was a Rascal” with a little bit of “Tico Tico”—a 1917 Brazilian choro song Liberace liked to play in double time, and the Andrews Sisters popularized for the WWII set. Once again, the segue is seamless, but once you’ve heard “Papa Was a Rascal” you never forget it, because the lyrics are out there, and I mean way out there. It opens with a “sweet white woman down in Savanna GA” making love with Booker’s daddy “in front of the KKK.” Well. Then the couple move to Boston where he runs off with a mafia moll.

Meanwhile, James, age nine, has found himself a “sweet russin’ woman,” which seems just a bit precocious until you learn he’s talking about morphine, which he was introduced to at the tender age of nine after being hit by an ambulance traveling 70 mph. And it ends with Booker saying we should all be looking out for the CIA, which was evidently an obsession of his. A big obsession. It may have been a part of his mental illness, but then again you know what they say—even paranoids have real enemies.

You won’t mistake Booker’s version of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” for Little Richard’s—in fact you may not even recognize it, he’s done such a New Orleans chop shop job on it. It’s far more relaxed—it may do the strut, but it’s no raver. And it segues into the relaxed (that is unless you follow his spider fingers around the keyboards) “Ballad at the Maple Leaf.” This is good times music for sure—there’s a lot of Mardi Gras in there—but its bluesy feel is there to remind you that no party goes on forever.

The very show-offy “Minute Waltz” is followed by a honky-tonkin’ version of Big Bill Broonzy’s “All By Myself.” Except he fancies things up real nice—kind of reminds me of one of those Fancy Dan piano players in old Westerns, he does. He opens Big Easy junky stalwart “Junco Partner” with some dandy piano variations before kicking into a relatively straightforward version of the number, that is if you ignore his left hand, which is turning water into Café Brulot Diaboliques. And he turns the vocals into a kind of bebop free association, tossing in references to marijuana, cocaine and heroin—he wasn’t the coy type, and if you had any doubts what the song’s about, he was sure as hell going to tell you. What would he do if had a cool mil? Why, buy himself a weed plantation, naturally.

He jazzes up the already jazzy Buddy Johnson (and later Nancy Wilson/ Cannonball Adderly) blues “Save Your Love for Me,” and his phrasing (and pathos) are remarkable. His piano playing is restrained, except when it isn’t, and is the perfect complement to that sometimes deceptively thin but always remarkable voice of his. Buddy Johnson had this giant voice, while Booker sounds like a skinny street cat on the make, but guess whose vocals carry more emotional power?

The more you listen to Booker sing, the more you realize what a double threat he was. New Orleans pianist Tom McDermott once said, “you could feel the desperation [in his voice] in a way that few singers could impart.” Before calling him a better singer than Sinatra. I don’t know about that, but when it comes to the darker human emotions (as well as the joyous ones) the guy has a point.

For proof you need only listen to Booker’s “St. James Infirmary.” His playing is almost baroque in places, but not a single note sounds superfluous. He doesn’t sing a word until the three-minute mark or so, and you’re already crushed. When he does commence to sing, well, he’ll break you. His voice may be thin in places, but it’s a kind of parlor trick. Because that voice carries fifty times its own weight in human despair on its back.

When it comes to sheer joy, you have to hear the extra jump he puts in the jump blues “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee.” It’s a house rocker, this one, and he hollers and shouts, and the crowd responds appropriately as he pounds the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. From there he segues into Ray Charles’ “It Should Have Been Me,” which he starts out in a straightforward fashion before going rococo then jumping back into the old spo-dee-o-dee. One of things that need be said about this guy is he doesn’t need a band—I’ve heard him with bands and in some cases they actually diminished his power. I can think of very few artists who can pull that off. I’ll always take a band over a solo artist, or so I thought until I heard Mr. James Booker. He’s a one-man-band.

And in my book that’s a sure sign of genius—a performer who doesn’t make me miss a band is, well, I have a hard time thinking of anybody else. Throw in the fact that he actually managed to infuse his rhythm and blues with classical elements without making me think “shtick” or “novelty act” and you’ve got something totally unique on your hands. That “Bronze Liberace” did Booker a disservice—Liberace was a competent piano player at best, a glitzy showman of limited talent and zero taste in everything but sequin Rolls Royces.

Booker had heart, soul, and talent, and he used the first two to inform the third. A lesser artist could have gotten by on sheer technical know how—he might simply have used the classical pyrotechnics to dress up his R&B. But his classical chops and his R&B chops were inextricably wound together—they were both intrinsic parts of him, as intrinsic as the manic joy and tender melancholy that were also deeply embedded in his nature.

Some would make a freak of him, would write him off as that “Big Easy R&B player who digs Chopin.” But the one informed the other and vice versa, and what comes through on record—and watching live performances—is a man who knew the two were the same thing. Soul music.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A

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