Lou Donaldson

Four tracks, thirty eight minutes, and one of them runs 14:34. December 15, 1957 at Hackensack, with Donald Byrd on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Sonny Clark on piano, George Joyner on bass and Art Taylor on drums. C. Andrew Hovan, writing about the Mosaic box, calls it strictly a blowing session, and that is precisely what it is. Two Donaldson originals in "Sputnik" and "Strollin' In", plus Parker's "Dewey Square" and Gillespie's "Groovin' High".

"Sputnik" was cut about ten weeks after the satellite actually went up in October 1957, and Blue Note pulled it as a two-part 45. Nice piece of timing, and a decent measure of how fast the label could move. The three-horn front line of alto, trumpet and trombone is not a shape Donaldson used often, and that extra middle voice is what gives "Strollin' In" somewhere to go across fourteen and a half minutes without repeating itself.

The bassist has two names, which trips people up constantly. George Joyner later took the name Jamil Nasser, and Wikipedia leads with the later one. The 1958 jacket says Joyner, so that is the period credit and the one used here. Sonny Clark is the other name to keep an eye on. He is the reason the slower passages hold together, and 1957 into 1958 was the stretch where he seemed to be on everything worth owning.

Two shopping notes on this one. There is no original stereo: Discogs shows a 1958 mono, a 1961 mono deep-groove repress, and then BST 81591 in stereo only in 1966, which is Liberty-era rather than period. Look for the deep groove, no "inc" after Blue Note on the label, and RVG plus the Plastylite ear and 9M in the deadwax. No chart action, no Tone Poet, no reissue campaign of any kind. It has stayed a musicians' record.

Two sources I trust disagree about this album by two and a half stars. AllMusic gives it five, with Steve Huey calling it Donaldson's undisputed masterpiece and the title cut arguably his signature tune even above the late-sixties hits. The Penguin Guide gives it 2.5 out of 4 for the same record. July 28, 1958 at Hackensack, one session, with Herman Foster on piano, Peck Morrison on bass, Dave Bailey on drums and Ray Barretto on congas.

Barretto is the sound of the record and he was not a guest. The identical quintet had cut Swing and Soul at Hackensack in June 1957 and he comes back again on Light-Foot that December. This was a standing band with congas in it, playing blues in the middle of the hard bop era, and Donaldson's alto rides on top with the phrasing of a man who learned from Parker and then decided he would rather be understood.

Two things that come up every single time. This is not Clifford Brown's "The Blues Walk", a different tune from 1954, and Wikipedia's article opens with a hatnote saying exactly that. On the stereo: jazzdisco says BST 81593 in 1959 while Discogs gives the 1959 stereo as BST 1593 with the longer number arriving in a later renumbering. Both point at the same music, and neither is a first pressing.

Then it charted, sixty four years after release. Number 98 on the German Albums chart in 2022, sourced by Wikipedia to offiziellecharts.de. The Blue Note Classic Vinyl edition had landed one week earlier, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original tapes, cut at Cohearent, pressed at Optimal, with Ira Gitler's original notes kept. Draw the obvious conclusion if you want, but nobody has actually sourced the link. What is documented is that a 1958 record found a new audience while its maker was still alive to see it.

Two sessions, and the split is unusually clean. October 31, 1959 produced six of the seven tracks with Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Horace Parlan on piano, Laymon Jackson on bass, Dave Bailey on drums and Ray Barretto on congas. November 28 produced exactly one, "Idaho", with Sam Jones and Al Harewood in the chairs and no conga at all. Two different bands on one LP, and Wikipedia's per-track date column matches jazzdisco item for item, which is rarer than it sounds.

Blue Mitchell was a loan-out, and both the US original back cover and the 1992 Japanese reissue print that he performs by courtesy of Riverside Records. That is the kind of line that tells you how the label economy worked in 1959. jazzdisco also marks Mitchell off "Be My Love", which would make that a quartet-plus-conga performance with no trumpet on it, though neither Wikipedia nor Discogs qualifies his credit that way. One source against two.

Three stars, and I do not think that is harsh. AllMusic gives it three with no written review attached, which is its own sort of verdict. Everything here is well made and not much of it is necessary if you already own Blues Walk. Parlan is the best thing on it and the October band with Barretto has real lift, but the album never quite decides whether it is a blowing date or a conga date, and it ends up sitting between the two.

The jacket, on the other hand, is the best-documented one on this page: Reid Miles design and Francis Wolff photography both confirmed, Ira Gitler notes. Look at the addresses while you are there, because the back cover reads 43 West 61st Street and the labels read 47 West 63rd, two addresses on one package. And ignore the release years floating around. Billboard put it out in April 1960. AllMusic prints 1959, which is the session year and simply wrong.

An organ quartet with no piano, no bass and no congas. "Baby Face" Willette walks the bottom, Grant Green plays guitar, Dave Bailey drums, and four of the five tunes are twelve-bar blues. The exception is Gershwin's "A Foggy Day". January 23, 1961 at Englewood Cliffs, two Donaldson originals in the title track and "Watusi Jump", plus Parker's "Cool Blues". This is the leanest record he made and it might be the best-sounding one.

It also appears to be the first time Donaldson and Grant Green ever recorded together, and the connection runs the other way too. Wikipedia's article on Grant's First Stand says Green was recommended to Blue Note by Donaldson, who had heard him play and pushed him to move to New York. Green's own leader debut was cut five days after this session, on January 28, 1961, and released that May. Five days.

Willette is the mystery on the record. He made exactly four Blue Note sessions in his life: sideman here and on Grant's First Stand, then leader on Face to Face and Stop and Listen, both 1961, and then he left for Argo. His birth year and birthplace conflict badly enough across sources that this page will not pick one. He died in Chicago in April 1971 at thirty seven. On this album he is the entire floor the other three are standing on.

The reissue history is unusually good, which is part of why people know this record at all. Analogue Productions did it as a 45rpm double twelve inch in 2009 with Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman, then a hybrid SACD in 2010, and Blue Note made it a Tone Poet Society exclusive in April 2025 with Gray mastering and RTI pressing. Robert Baird at Stereophile calls the 2009 AP set the one worth seeking out, and nothing since has argued with him.

Recorded January 24, 1963, released June 1964. Get that straight first, because almost everything online prints 1963, which is the session year and not the release. Wikipedia's infobox cites Billboard from June 20, 1964, the Discogs original US mono is dated June 1964, jazzdisco's catalog says 1964, and there is no 1963 pressing of any kind in the version list. Seventeen months in a drawer between the date and the street.

The band is John Patton on organ, Grant Green on guitar and Ben Dixon on drums, the classic Blue Note organ unit of that stretch, and this is the quartet date in the run rather than the only one Donaldson ever made. The same core plus a trumpet turns up on The Natural Soul and again on a June 1963 vault session issued decades later. Four of the six tunes are his. Six titles cut, six titles issued, nothing rejected.

That is literally true. jazzdisco lists Blue Note 45-1896, "Good Gracious" parts one and two, as not released. An album that sat for a year and a half, and a 45 that never got out of the building. Do not try to argue the dating from catalog numbers either, because BLP 4128 was recorded the same month and came out in 1963, a higher number issued earlier. Blue Note released out of sequence all the time.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine's three and a half stars come with an observation worth stealing: Donaldson's tone is richer and fuller here than on many of his early sixties records, and he calls it one of the finest soul jazz sessions in the catalog. The Penguin Guide agrees and specifically credits Patton and Green. What it has never had is a proper audiophile reissue. Twenty three versions on Discogs and no Tone Poet, no Music Matters, no Analogue Productions, which Stereophile flagged as odd in 2025.

Donaldson had been away from Blue Note since 1963, recording for Argo and Cadet, and this is the return: April 7, 1967 at Englewood Cliffs, with Melvin Lastie on cornet, Lonnie Smith on organ, George Benson on guitar and Leo Morris, later Idris Muhammad, on drums. It charted: Billboard's Top LP's chart, issue dated October 7, 1967, peaked at number 141, eleven weeks on. His first album to chart in four years.

The band was not assembled at random. Blue Note's own account says Donaldson recruited Benson and Lonnie Smith together because they were already playing in Benson's 1966 quartet, the one that cut two Columbia albums for John Hammond. Smith then got four Blue Note albums of his own after Donaldson pointed the label at him. So the record doubles as a hiring document, and the chemistry you hear is a working band rather than a studio assembly.

That is Donaldson himself, from a 2009 interview at the Portland Jazz Festival, on how the title track came to exist. The joke is that the finished tune runs 6:57. Blue Note's own retelling adds a lot of colour about solo order and playback reactions with no primary attribution, and that article concedes the story has been told into mythic status, so read the label version as a label version. Donaldson's summary was shorter: the people bought it so we made it.

Two things people get wrong. The title is Alligator Bogaloo, one o in Bogaloo, whatever Blue Note's own store writes on it now. And no singles chart placing has ever been verified anywhere, so the album at 141 is the only hard number and anyone quoting a Hot 100 position is making it up. Melvin Lastie sits out "I Want a Little Girl", which leaves Donaldson alone with the rhythm section on the prettiest thing here. Lastie also produced the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love" in 1964, which is a career nobody sees coming.

Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" came out in July 1967 and spent four weeks at number one on the pop chart. Donaldson cut his version on October 27, 1967, roughly three months later, while it was still one of the biggest records in the country. That is not a jazz musician reaching for a standard. That is a working bandleader covering the song on the radio, and it turned into the most durable thing he ever put on tape.

The band is Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Lonnie Smith on organ, Jimmy Ponder on guitar in place of George Benson, and Leo Morris on drums. Mitchell sits out "Ode to Billie Joe", confirmed by Wikipedia and jazzdisco both, so the most famous track on the record is the one with no trumpet on it. Francis Wolff produced, credited as Frank Wolff, taking over from Alfred Lion six months after Alligator Bogaloo.

The label names A Tribe Called Quest, Kanye West, Drake, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, J Dilla, De La Soul and Eminem, which is copy written to sell records and should be read that way. The cases you can actually check are narrower: A$AP Rocky's "L$D" from 2015 uses it for the drums with Gentry credited as a songwriter, Nice and Smooth's "Old to the New" in 1994, and Tribe's "Clap Your Hands". WRTI puts the real point plainly, that the drum beat here is one of the most sampled elements in all of hip hop.

Four stars with a dissent on the record. AllMusic's Erlewine is negative about this album and rates the following year's Midnight Creeper above it, arguing Donaldson plays looser there. Fair enough, and I still take this one, because "Peepin'" is the better tune and Liberty buried it in the middle of side two instead of leading with it. The 2019 Tone Poet edition is all-analog, Kevin Gray at Cohearent, RTI pressing. Stereo only; there is no mono counterpart to hunt for.

Start with the title, because it is a trap. There is no track called "Everything I Play Is Funky". The opener is Allen Toussaint's "Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)", and the album name is a play on it rather than a match. Then there is the structure, which is genuinely odd: two sessions five months apart, with different organists and different trumpet players, spliced into one LP without a word of explanation on the jacket.

August 22, 1969 gave up "Donkey Walk" and "West Indian Daddy" with Charles Earland at the organ and Eddie Williams on trumpet. January 9, 1970 gave the other four with Lonnie Smith back and Blue Mitchell on trumpet. Melvin Sparks plays guitar on both, Jimmy Lewis is on Fender bass, and Idris Muhammad drums, credited under that name here after three albums crediting him as Leo Morris. Same man throughout the run; only the jacket changes.

That is the chart arc and it is the real story of the album. Alligator Bogaloo hit 141 for eleven weeks, Midnight Creeper 182 for six, and this one debuted July 11, 1970, peaked at 190 and lasted two weeks, all three per Whitburn's chart book. Donaldson is also playing a varitone electric alto through much of it according to Wikipedia and jazzdisco, though the jacket just says alto saxophone, and there is a vocal somewhere on the January material that no source will pin to a track.

Three stars, and Steve Huey talks me halfway out of it. His three-star AllMusic review calls this easily one of the best examples of the commercially accessible period and recommends it wholeheartedly to funk and rare-groove listeners, and he is right that the grooves are limber and unforced. He is also describing a rare-groove record rather than a Lou Donaldson record, and by 1970 that difference had stopped being obvious. One last oddity: "Tennessee Waltz" was cut first on that January morning and then held back to open the next album.