{"id":18121,"date":"2020-02-06T05:30:27","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T10:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=18121"},"modified":"2020-02-07T10:57:13","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T15:57:13","slug":"jerry-jemmott-the-groovemaster-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/06\/jerry-jemmott-the-groovemaster-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Jerry Jemmott: The Groovemaster (Part 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Three<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

The studio gigs kept coming. \u201cI was busy,\u201d Jemmott says. \u201cI was real<\/i> busy.\u201d But as much as he enjoyed his heavy session schedule, he was starting to burn out. \u201cDuane [Allman] and I wanted to part ways with making records at one point,\u201d he says. \u201cIn fact, I think it was probably during the last Wilson Pickett session we did that I decided, ‘Yeah, I\u2019m fed up with this record making shit. I\u2019m just going to do commercials and jingles and get paid, get respected.’\u201d He says that Allman felt similarly. \u201cHe said, ‘I\u2019m going to go home and start a band with my brother.’ So, we both went our separate ways then. I went back to New York and just did jingles and commercials basically, except for special projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back home in New York City, he was offered just such a special project. \u201cKing Curtis called me at the end of \u201870, to do this proposed tour with Aretha for the next year,\u201d he recalls. \u201cHe knew I didn\u2019t want to go on the road. But I said okay, I would do it because the band was going to be hot. And playing with Aretha was something special.\u201d Captured over three nights in April 1971, a recording from that tour would be released as Curtis’ Live at Fillmore West<\/i>. In 2005, Rhino Handmade released a limited edition box set from those tapes, Don’t Fight the Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live at Fillmore West<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The tour lasted from February to July of that year. And it was during a break in April that Jemmott landed another special project, this time for a studio session for poet, musician and proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron. He played bass on Scott-Heron’s debut album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox<\/i>. The record’s standout cut would be the opening track, \u201cThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised.\u201d Jemmott says that while the session resulted in an important and groundbreaking recording, cutting the track was \u201ca walk in the park. I came up playing in [Greenwich] Village, just me, my acoustic bass, and a poet playing,\u201d he explains. He says that the Gil Scott-Heron session was a case of \u201cdoing things I had done in my formative years, but doing it on a higher level.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In 1971 Jemmott played on the second collaboration between Les McCann and Eddie Harris, Second Movement<\/i>. Jemmott was already a big fan of McCann. \u201cHe was one of my favorites. He and Cannonball [Adderley] and Horace Silver were into this whole idea of playing more danceable, get-down music as opposed to straight bebop. And he was one of the people who had the magic touch to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jemmott was recently reminiscing with McCann about that session. \u201cI was totally intimidated! Him and Eddie Harris together? Oh, man. I had to be on my triple A game to play with them. It was one of the most intense sessions I\u2019ve ever had to do. Les\u2019s sense of timing is just incredible. The way he can just put things in and take things out so effortlessly and seamlessly … it\u2019s awe inspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most of the sessions in Jemmott took part in the ’60s and beyond, that date had the core musicians playing live in the studio. And that affected the way that everyone played. \u201cHorns, strings and vocals would be there during the rundowns,\u201d Jemmott says. \u201cSo we were able to hear the full arrangement all at one time; that made us intuitively know how much to play … and what not<\/i> to play. You could play tastefully knowing that you were playing just one of several parts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jemmott’s memory is sharp, but with the countless number of sessions he’s done over the decades, his recollections of some are lost to time. One of those is his work on Lightning Hopkins tracks that surfaced in the 1990s on an Arhoolie collection, Texas Blues<\/i>. \u201cThere are so many records in my discography,\u201d he says, \u201cI remember being there, but I don\u2019t remember what tracks I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

It’s reasonable to expect that Jemmott would have some wild tales from his countless studio sessions. But that’s not the case. He says that most of the singers, musicians and technical people he encountered in the studio \u201cwere angels. They don\u2019t want to come in there and screw around.\u201d He says that people didn’t reveal their true personalities. \u201cEverybody\u2019s on their best behavior in the studio. So you don\u2019t really get a chance to what they\u2019re really like, because they\u2019re on studio time. They don\u2019t have time to be getting an attitude; they want to get the work done. They don\u2019t want to get anybody upset.\u201d<\/p>\n

He does recount one time when a musician did lose his cool in the studio. And it turns out that musician was Jerry Jemmott. The session was a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., recently gunned down in Memphis. \u201cI was a Malcolm X man,\u201d Jemmott says. \u201cI was pissed off in ’65 when he<\/i> got killed, but I don’t remember any [tributes] going on. I wasn’t called to do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the studio to cut the MLK tribute, Jemmott found himself quite upset. \u201cI was going through a whole series of mental things while they were running it down, asking myself, ‘Why the hell am I here? I didn\u2019t support the cause.’\u201d When the recording light finally came on, he didn’t play. \u201cI packed up my bass and walked out the studio. It was a mental breakdown; I couldn\u2019t take it. That was me as a musician having an emotional episode.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that extraordinary exception, such episodes don’t figure prominently in Jerry Jemmott’s story. He would continue to work in the studio for years, and he also launched a solo career in the early ’70s. At that point, health problems were affecting his ability to play. \u201cMy playing was so shitty at that particular point, I figured nobody was going to hire me,\u201d he says. \u201cI figured, ‘I better hire myself and be my own boss,’ because the work wasn\u2019t happening, and I wasn’t comfortable playing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click to continue<\/a> …<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Three… The studio gigs kept coming. \u201cI was busy,\u201d Jemmott says. \u201cI was real busy.\u201d But as much as he enjoyed his heavy session schedule, he was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,41,69],"tags":[4091],"class_list":["post-18121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-funk","category-interview","category-soul","tag-jerry-jemmott","cat-31-id","cat-41-id","cat-69-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18121"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18298,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18121\/revisions\/18298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}