Wall Street Journal 6/2000
'The Deepest Blues We Ever Heard'
BY Nat Hentoff
BLUES REVIEW, a handsomely produced magazine published in Salem, W. Va., has an international audience, because the blues know no boundaries. In April, 1998, a domestic reader of the Review, Steve Salter, reported in a letter to the editor that blues giant Otis Spann was in Burr Oak Cemetery on Chicago's South Side, but his grave was unmarked.
Readers sent in more than $2,000, and in June, 1999-during the Chicago Blues Festival-a headstone was dedicated with an inscription by blues harmonica virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite:
"Otis played the deepest blues we ever heard. He'll play forever in our hearts."
Spann was as penetrating a pianist as he was a singer. In the brochure given to those attending the dedication of the headstsone, Muddy Waters-with whom Spann played for years-was quoted: "There's a man raised singing the blues . . . There's no one left like him who plays real solid bottom blues like he does."
Born in Jackson, Miss., on March 21, 1930, Spann played in juke joints and house parties as a teenager. (When he was eight, he earned his first pay-a $25 first prize at a Jackson blues contest.)
He went on to Chicago and at 17 was hired by Muddy Waters. He also recorded as a side man with Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and other blues bards.
Spann made his first solo album in August, 1960, and I was the A&R man, the guy responsible for Spann's relationship with the record company on this particular session. I'd heard him often with Muddy Waters, and he was on my list of people I wanted to record when, for a short time, I was able to actually live a jazz fan's fantasy by having the freedom to record anybody I wanted to.
Archie Bleyer, owner of a successful pop music label, Cadence, said he wanted to do something for jazz and asked me to start a new label for him, Candid Records. When the sales of Cadence releases diminished, Candid was shut down. It has had a number of owners since, and the sets are still selling in many countries. I only got paid for the sessions I did. No royalties, then or since.
The first album I did with Spann, "Otis Spann Is the Blues," has recently been released here on Artists Only! Records (212)941-9900, also generally available in record stores).
Of all the Candid sessions-with Charles Mingus, Max Roach Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell, Cecil Taylor, et. al.?the Otis Spann date was the most spontaneous. Two albums were recorded in one afternoon. My only role was to send out for sandwiches and, for one number "Otis in the Dark," to turn out the lights. He wanted it that way.
Spann just sat down at the piano and told his stories. As I remember, nearly every number was done in one take. His four vocals in the set included memories of hardscrabble years, but the stories were told with the resounding triumph of a man who had always known what he was in this world to do.
The "cry" of the blues was in his voice, but also a mellowness, sometimes wistful, always sure of what his basic audience wanted to hear-and how.
"Most of the people who come to hear us," he told me, "work hard during the day. What they want from us are stories. The blues for them is something like a book. They want to hear stories out of their own experiences, and that's the kind we tell."
His solo piano was powerfully, exultantly compelling. "People were wondering at first," he said, "about what I could do because I have short fingers. They figured I couldn't physically play that much piano. But the piano is made for both hands, and you can make an instrument do what you want it to do."
There are two tracks of the Spann piano alone, and the rest of the album has four numbers by Robert Lockwood Jr., a blues singer Spann had brought to the date. Lockwood worked with the best Chicago bluesmen. He had been taught guitar by the legendary Mississippi blues force, Robert Johnson. Murdered at the age of 22, Johnson continues to influence generations of blues players.
In the September 1999 issue of Blues Review, Moses Glidden, a white blues enthusiast, wrote a memoir of his friendship with Otis Spann, starting when Spann stayed at Mr. Glidden's home when he used to play the college town of Madison, Wis.
"Spann would play his amplified keyboard off the porch," Mr. Glidden writes. "I don't know what all the white adult neighbors thought about the music, but as the afternoon progressed, a mob of kids from two years to 12 appeared and grew just below the porch, dancing in the grass."
Every time Spann and Mr. Glidden would see each other in the years afterward, Spann would say, "You remember those kids, all dancing down there on the grass?"
"At times," Mr. Glidden writes, "Otis definitely could get the blues, but he also had an ocean of joy in him that poured out in his music and in his life."
Among other available Otis Spann CDs, two are on Testament, a division of Hightone Records in Oakland, California (510-763-8500). Their titles: "Otis Spann's Chicago Blues" and "Otis Spann with Muddy Waters and His Band/Live the Life." In his notes for the latter set, Dick Shurman makes the cogent point that Spann's life work is a "reminder that great blues is as much about 'take your time, son!' and giving the music and beat a chance to breathe as it is about in-your-face high energy."
The second Otis Spann session we did on that August afternoon 40 years ago, "Walking The Blues," will be out later this year on the Artists Only! label. (All the Candid releases are now owned by Alan Bates's Black Lion Records in London, and most will eventually be released here.)
Otis Spann died in Chicago on April 24, 1970. He had just reached the age of 40. He d had three previous heart attacks. "Please tell my mother I'm gone," he used to sing. "Everybody's gonna miss me when I'm gone."
