Track one is almost seven minutes of one riff, and it does not get old.
Here is the part I like. Donaldson says that riff was an accident.
He cut the date on April 7, 1967 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs. The way he has told it, somebody said he was about three minutes short of a full album, he had no more material, so he made up a riff on the spot and the band fell in behind him. Worth noting that the session take numbers put the title track third of six that day rather than last, so the sequence in the story is looser than the story suggests. The invention is his own account either way.
That throwaway is the whole reason people still know the record. Donaldson said as much later on. "That's the only damn thing that sold on the record." He was not being modest. He was being accurate.
It landed on the Billboard album chart in the issue dated October 7, 1967 and peaked at 141 across an eleven week run. That number looks small. It was also his first album to chart in four years, and it put him back in business.
The band is the reason it still works. Lonnie Smith on organ, doing the thing where the bass line and the comping come from the same pair of hands. George Benson on guitar, twenty four years old, nine years before Breezin' made him a household name. Melvin Lastie on cornet, playing on five of the six tracks. Leo Morris on drums, who later in the decade took the name Idris Muhammad. Donaldson on alto over the top of it.
Nobody is showing off. Everybody is holding the pocket. Benson in particular sounds like he could take over the record at any second and just decides not to.
For a commute this is close to ideal. The title track runs 6:57, Aw Shucks! goes 7:23 and One Cylinder 6:48. Long tunes with a fixed groove are better in the car than short punchy ones, because you are not resetting your attention every three minutes. You get on the riff and stay there until traffic moves.
The album title spells it Bogaloo. The dance was boogaloo. Nobody at Blue Note seems to have cared, and neither should you.
The rest of the record earns its spot. One Cylinder is a Freddie McCoy tune and it is nastier than the title track. Lonnie Smith owns Aw Shucks! and if you like organ it is the most fun on the album. Rev. Moses has that Sunday morning feel soul jazz kept borrowing from the church. The Thang is short and does its job.
Then there is I Want a Little Girl at the end. It dates to 1930, first cut by McKinney's Cotton Pickers that year. Lastie sits out, so it drops to a quartet, and Donaldson plays it completely straight. No boogaloo, no gimmick, just a beautiful alto sound on a slow tune. That track is the reminder that Lou came up playing bebop and could do that whenever he wanted.
People sometimes talk about this era of Blue Note like it was a sellout period. Organ, backbeat, dance grooves, less complexity. I do not buy it. Getting five musicians to lock into a riff that tight, on a tune that did not exist an hour earlier, is not easy. That is the skill. It just does not announce itself.
The reissue situation is good right now. Blue Note has put it out in the Classic Vinyl series, which means Kevin Gray cutting from analog tape at a fair price. An original BST 84263 with the Van Gelder stamp will cost you real money. The reissue sounds great and you will actually play it.
A riff he invented on the spot outlived nearly everything he planned. Donaldson knew it and said so, which is more honesty than most players manage about their own hits.