On April 7, 1967, Lou Donaldson recorded six tunes at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Melvin Lastie on cornet, Lonnie Smith on organ, George Benson on guitar and Leo Morris on drums. Alfred Lion produced the date. It was one of the last stretches of Lion's career at the label he had founded: Blue Note had belonged to Liberty Records since 1965, and Lion, who found it hard to work inside a larger company, retired that summer. Blue Note's own history gives both July and August 1967 for his departure. The record Donaldson made that day, Alligator Bogaloo, came out in August as BST 84263 and gave him the biggest hit of his career, by his own description.
Donaldson was forty, a North Carolinian born in Badin in 1926, and he had been a Blue Note musician almost from the start of the label's modern period. Lion first heard him at Minton's Playhouse in 1952 and recorded him that April on a Milt Jackson date with John Lewis, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke. Blue Note's own account credits Donaldson with bringing Horace Silver and Clifford Brown to the label, and later Grant Green, Blue Mitchell and others. He had left in 1963 and spent the next few years recording for Argo and Cadet. He came back to Blue Note in January 1967 with an ambitious nonet date arranged by Duke Pearson, with Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Pepper Adams, McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. Blue Note shelved that session for years, and the jazzdisco.org discography shows it first issued in Japan in 1980 and in the United States only in 1986, as Lush Life. Donaldson, decades later, still remembered that Blue Note had sat on it.
Three months after the nonet he was back in the studio with a small band built for groove. Smith and Benson came as a pair. They had been playing together in Benson's quartet, which made It's Uptown in 1966 and The George Benson Cookbook in 1967 for Columbia, both produced by John Hammond, and Donaldson asked them both to the date. Benson was twenty-four, born in Pittsburgh in March 1943; his triple-platinum Breezin' was nine years away. Smith was born in Lackawanna, New York, in 1942. Blue Note says it was Donaldson who drew the label's attention to his playing, and Blue Note signed him in 1968. Lastie, born in New Orleans in 1930, was an R&B trumpeter and session player who had co-founded AFO Records in 1961 and played on records by Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin. Morris, another New Orleans man, born in 1939, had played on Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" as a teenager and had already worked with Donaldson on two Cadet albums. He converted to Islam in the 1960s and went on to record as Idris Muhammad.
The story of the title track is Donaldson's, and he told it often. The version Larry Appelbaum recorded at the Portland Jazz Festival in 2009 is the most direct. "The biggest one we made, 'Alligator Boogaloo,' we made the date and we were three minutes short," Donaldson said. "I said we don't have no more material. And the guy said just play anything for three minutes so we can fill out the time. So I just made the riff and naturally the guys could follow it. That's the only damn thing that sold on the record." Then he added the line that tells you how he felt about the rest of the session: "All that other stuff we had been rehearsing, our relatives wouldn't even buy it."
Blue Note's own retelling, published in 2014, puts the riff at the end of the day, after five finished tracks that included the two short ones, "The Thang" and "I Want a Little Girl." The session sheet does not support that order. Its take numbers run in sequence through the day: "One Cylinder" at take 4, "Aw Shucks!" at take 6, "Alligator Bogaloo" at take 8, "Rev. Moses" at take 15, "I Want a Little Girl" at take 17 and "The Thang" at take 18. The title track was the third tune recorded, and the two short pieces were the last. There is also the matter of "The Thang" itself, which was not new. Donaldson's band with Morris on drums had played it at the Bon Ton Club in Buffalo in August 1965, on a live recording Cadet later issued as Fried Buzzard. The invention of the riff is Donaldson's own account and I have no reason to doubt it, but the shortage of time seems to have been noticed earlier in the day than the story has it.
Whatever the order, the tune went well past three minutes. In Blue Note's account Lastie took the melody with Donaldson, and the solos went from Donaldson to Lastie, then Benson, then Smith, stretching the piece to 6:57. Once the band heard the playback they agreed it was the best thing on the date, and it was moved to the front of side one. Donaldson, talking to Appelbaum about Smith, described exactly what makes that kind of band work: "He plays underneath the horn. Everything you do projects because he doesn't get in your way when you're playing." Smith worked for Donaldson, by Donaldson's count, for about forty years.
The album debuted on Billboard's Top LP's chart in the issue dated October 7, 1967, and peaked at No. 141 during an eleven-week run. It was Donaldson's first album to chart in four years. In his own memory the success was larger. He told Appelbaum that the record "got so popular it stayed on the charts for 52 weeks and my pockets got heavy." The Billboard album chart does not show that. What is clear is what Blue Note did next. "They wanted me to keep making records like that," he said, and he made them: Mr. Shing-A-Ling in October 1967, then Midnight Creeper in March 1968 with Benson, Smith and Morris again and Blue Mitchell on trumpet. Donaldson explained the reasoning without embarrassment. Blue Note had been sold to Liberty, he said, and the new owners had promotion men who wanted to compete in the general market.
He was blunt about why he went along. "In the record business the record company will keep you on if you sell some records," he told the Portland audience. "If you don't sell any records, you fired." He knew good musicians, he said, who could have lasted longer if they had bent a little. Asked whether he had ever played free, he said he never had, because he wanted to get paid. That is the context for Alligator Bogaloo. It came from a bebop alto player who idolized Charlie Parker, making a living in a market that had changed under him, at a label that had just changed owners.
The rest of the record is better than its reputation as a one-tune album. "One Cylinder" is by the vibraphonist Freddie McCoy, and Blue Note's essay calls it the track where Benson's guitar is at its best. "Aw Shucks!" is Smith's composition, slow and steady, at 7:23 the longest piece on the album. "Rev. Moses" is Donaldson's, an upbeat tune on which Blue Note hears Donaldson and Smith leading the band. "The Thang" is a short R&B-styled piece with shouts from the organ. All of them are long, fixed grooves, which is why the record suits my commute: with tunes this length I can settle into the riff and stay there until traffic moves.
Then the album closes with "I Want a Little Girl." Murray Mencher and Billy Moll wrote it, and McKinney's Cotton Pickers made the first recording for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on July 30, 1930, with George Thomas singing. Lastie sits it out, so the date's one ballad is played by a quartet, and Donaldson plays the melody straight, with no boogaloo in it. Blue Note calls it his "luminous lyrical showcase." It is the track that reminds me where he came from. He liked to open his late concerts by promising a straight-ahead evening, "No fusion, no confusion," and on this tune he keeps the promise.
A note on the spelling. The jacket says Bogaloo, the dance was the boogaloo, and Donaldson himself said "Boogaloo" when he talked about the tune. Blue Note has used both spellings over the years, and the current Blue Note Classic Vinyl edition, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal, keeps the original title. Donaldson died on November 9, 2024, at ninety-eight, and the riff he made up to fill a gap on an April afternoon in 1967 was still the hit he played at his concerts.