The Southern University Jazz Ensemble’s Live at the 1971 American College Jazz Festival and Goes to Africa With Love LPs were privately pressed by clarinetist and teacher Alvin Batiste in the early 1970s on the Jazzstronauts label and given away as souvenirs. The new editions of both by the Now-Again label mark the first commercial release for these recordings, with the contents revelatory and the sounds warm and distinctive. They deepen their decade’s already substantial spiritual jazz milieu, delivering sweet ear-candy for the discerning jazz lover. Both sets are out now on vinyl; Goes to Africa With Love is expanded to a double album with previously unreleased instrumentals.
To say that the late Alvin Batiste didn’t record much is inaccurate. The reality is that he didn’t cut many albums as a leader. By extension, his profile never rose particularly high. Batiste’s first recordings were made with in the 1950s with the American Jazz Quintet; that group’s archival Gulf Coast Jazz release was reviewed extensively on The Vinyl District by this writer back in 2014, the piece backgrounding the clarinetist’s early activities with such major New Orleans figures as tenor saxophonist Harold Battiste, pianist Ellis Marsalis, and drummer Ed Blackwell.
The notes for the Now-Again sets by Bret Sjerven detail that Batiste travelled to New York City circa 1964 to cut a session for Riverside that’s never been released. Batiste’s connections for this date were the Adderley brothers. Trumpeter-cornetist Nat Adderley’s 1962 album In the Bag, which was recorded for the Riverside subsidiary Jazzland in New Orleans, included two Batiste compositions and featured the playing of American Jazz Quintet alumni Marsalis and tenor saxophonist Nat Perrilliat, plus New Orleans drummer James Black.
In the Bag was produced by Nat’s brother, the decidedly higher profile alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. It was Cannonball who flew Batiste to NYC for that unreleased Riverside session. Jump forward to 1972 and Batiste is amongst the players on Cannonball’s David Axelrod-produced live 2LP The Black Messiah for Capitol.
But if Batiste wasn’t recording in the period after the American Jazz Quintet’s dissolution, he was certainly playing, and in 1965 he began teaching at the historically Black Southern University, which prompted a move with his family to Baton Rouge. Along with cutting In A Soul Session with the Southern University Stage Band for the Whit label (a benefit for the University’s marching band), by the end of the decade Batiste had established The Jazz Institute at Southern, a program that directly led to the sets under review here.
While the two records have some similarities, they are quite distinct. Live at the 1971 American College Jazz Festival is actually split between a performance from the full Southern U Ensemble on side A and a trio of pianist Henry Butler, bassist Julius Farmer and drummer Herman Jackson on the flip. Opening with Batiste’s dedication of the ensemble’s performance to Louis Armstrong, the first side has a few moments that dive with authority into the collegiate jazz big band experience, and understandably so.
In particular, there’s a version of Freddie Hubbard’s “Straight Life” that gives a great big bear hug to the concept of unison horn charts. As the group play is non-trite and the accompanying solos hot and sharp, there’s not a thing wrong with that. But that’s not even the half of it, as the soul-jazz-ish track dishes a wild rhythmic redirect in its second half, effectively blending American funk and African roots. The horns then take a marching band turn and cap it all off with a brief swirling free-jazz blitz.
Coltrane is a big influence across the ensemble side, as his “Tunji” is given a lively and confident reading. Additionally, to audible applause, the “A Love Supreme” vocal refrain is part of side A’s closer “North American Idiosyncrasy,” a Batiste original introduced to the Jazz Festival crowd as having been written for Cannonball Adderley. And prior to the Coltrane chant, vocalist Ernest Jackson sings the famous verses from T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday Blues.” It all effectively underscores the ensemble’s breadth under Batiste’s direction.
A disinterest if not disdain for a codified notion of jazz is an appealing trait these album’s share, though with the exception of a funky workout of the spiritual “God Save Us a Song,” the piano trio’s source material on side two of Live derives from cornerstones of the form. Specifically, Duke Ellington’s “In My Solitude” is sandwiched between two Miles Davis compositions, “Milestones” and “So What.” Though even here, the musicians put their own stamp on tradition rather than merely replicating it. Farmer plays an electric bass for the set.
It’s important to note that the trio’s performance attains a professional jazz standard throughout (Sjerven notes they were singled out for praise by the great jazz writer Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker shortly after the competition), with Butler, Jackson, and Farmer having all moved on to extensive recording careers after (this extends to many members of the full ensemble). The set here is doubly impressive for how pianist Butler’s playing exudes grace amid an assertiveness that befits the nature of the competition.
Goes to Africa With Love presents a different scenario, having been recorded in a Baton Rogue studio ahead of a month-long US State Department-sponsored African trip Batiste and his group undertook in 1973. Where the live record possesses a rawness that magnifies its origin as a private press (this is not a fault), its counterpart connects like it could’ve been released at the time by the Black Fire, Muse, or Strata-East labels.
There’s more from Batiste as a player and composer across the set (I mean, a lot more), which, along with the stretching out of grooves by a wicked sharp band, kicks Goes to Africa up a notch. And note that this isn’t strictly a band of active students. While bassist Charles Singleton, who went on to the group Cameo, was then a Southern attendee, his cousin Sweet Willie Singleton, who plays trumpet, had already graduated.
Fitting the record’s theme, there’s a lot of percussion in the mix, but also organ from Antonio York and electronic tone generator from George Mitchell, who dubbed his instrument the “thing-thang.” This is part of what Sjerven astutely describes as Batiste’s “genius eclecticism,” as the electronics and a general spirt of progressivism blends with the old-school crooning style of vocalist Edward Perkins, whose role is also considerably expanded on this album. Sjerven mentions Mel Tormé in relation to Perkins, and that’s palpable, but so is Leon Thomas in non-yodel mode, and that’s as good as homemade gumbo.
Both albums feature the Batiste original “Music Came,” heard in a brief version after the Armstrong dedication on Live, and in full flower on Goes to Africa. Celebrating Black cultural perseverance and triumph over adversity (a struggle that continues), both recordings offer the vocal repetition “slavery didn’t make no difference,” the phrase finally punctuated with the track’s title…“music came.” This composition and the entirety of both albums drive home the brilliance of Alvin Batiste as a musician and an educator and make plain that he was a wonderfully decent human being on top of it all.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
Live at the 1971 American College Jazz Festival
A-
Goes to Africa With Love
A-
