Genius, Pure & Otherwise
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Included in the new eight-disc Ray Charles box set – “Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-59)” (Rhino 74731) – is a videotaped interview with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. In one anecdote, he tells of having just finished work on a 1956 instrumental jazz album spotlighting Charles’s piano playing, when, walking down West 57th Street near Atlantic’s office, he happened to run into Dave Brubeck. Mr. Ertegun was so enthusiastic about this new Charles album that he brought Mr. Brubeck up to his office to hear it. After listening to a track or two, Mr. Brubeck agreed it was some of the best jazz and blues piano he had ever heard.
The mid-1950s were a time when both jazz and blues were asserting themselves in brand new ways. Thanks partly to the Newport Jazz Festival, the cultural establishment was at last taking jazz seriously, and the blues were providing the foundation for a new phenomenon known as rock ‘n’ roll. To put it another way, the blues were earning economic respect even as jazz was achieving academic credibility.
Ray Charles would have turned 75 last Friday. In his youth, he changed the way people thought about what was still called “race music.” Before Charles, the white audience for the blues was primarily intellectual. Fans regarded the genre as a form of primitive expression and enjoyed it in much the same way they did pre-Columbian art or international folk music. Cafe society had embraced earthy types like Leadbelly, who were seen as instinctual performers. It was Charles who forced the world to accept blues musicians as conscious artists who refined their art in the same way symphonic composers and modern jazzmen did.
Charles was a well-trained, hardworking, and articulate artist who carefully mixed his musical colors. He incorporated the styles of countless blues and jazz players: the traditional delta blues of Muddy Waters and the Mississippi Sheiks; the classic blues of female stylists like Bessie Smith (as when he sang the Ethel Waters-associated “Am I Blue?”); the jumpin’, horndriven blues of Louis Jordan (“Let the Good Times Roll,” “Early in the Mornin'”); the mellow blues-crooning of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown (“Tell Me You’ll Wait for Me”); the gospel style of Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson; the big-band stylings of Basie and Ellington; the narrative canvas of the great Nashville songwriters; and no small amount of Latin rhythm (“Mary Ann”). It was not for nothing that Ray Charles became known as “The Genius.”
It’s also notable that just as rhythm and blues was helping to fuel the rock ‘n’ roll explosion of the mid-1950s, Charles made the conscious decision to keep out of it. His producers, Mr. Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, have always insisted that their goal, especially as far as Charles was concerned, was to keep his primary audience – black adults – paramount in their minds. If white people or kids of any color also wanted to buy Charles’s singles, well, that was cool too, but they would never record anything just because they thought it might be a crossover hit. (Unlike Elvis Presley, he also never had puerile teen-angst ballads foisted on him. Nearly everything Charles sang was worthy of his talent.) In the end, they emerged triumphant: It took Charles longer to reach the biggest possible audience, but he got there, and he stayed there.
Charles made a series of embryonic recordings, in which he doesn’t sound anything like his mature self, for Swingtime and other independents. By the time he did his first Atlantic session, with Kansas City jazz veteran Jesse Stone arranging – and Charles himself authoring three songs under the pseudonym Sammy Sweet – in September 1952, he was well on his way to finding his own voice.
The first disc of “Pure Genius” covers this era and includes such classics as “Drown in My Own Tears,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” and “I Got a Woman.” There’s also “Mess Around,” credited to Mr. Ertegun (the set includes a rehearsal take in which he sings it with Charles’s accompaniment), but which he freely admits was merely his adaption of a traditional blues form in the spirit of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” Charles himself expanded the tune into his gospel-blues-dance-party masterpiece “What I Say.”
Fifteen years ago, Atlantic compiled what they believed to be Charles’s essential recordings for the label into a three-CD set called “The Birth of Soul.” Yet none of the material in the new, much more expansive, set strikes me as marginal. Here are Charles’s instrumental jazz albums, including the trio sessions with bass great Oscar Pettiford and drummer Joe Harris that so impressed Dave Brubeck; two whole LPs with vibraphone giant Milt Jackson; a set by the Charles band under the leadership of tenor lieutenant David “Fathead” Newman; three live sets (one in Atlanta and two at Newport, the second of which is on the DVD included in the box); and the brilliant studio album on which he claimed his mantle “The Genius of Ray Charles” (1958).
“Genius” marked the first time he worked within the setting of a traditional pop singer – he cut six songs with a studio big band and six with a string orchestra – and it was also his first full-length foray into the standards songbook. Tracks like “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Come Rain or Come Shine” made it clear that Charles could do for Harold Arlen and other Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composers of his generation what he had already done for bluesmen like Buddy Johnson and Percy Mayfield; namely, to interpret and personalize them, and transform their music into Ray Charles music.
Charles left Atlantic Records in 1959: He was worth more than that label, still an independent, could pay him, and was extended an offer he couldn’t refuse (including ownership of his masters) from ABC Records, which had the considerable backing of Paramount Pictures. The ensuing years would be a particularly rich period for Charles: They were devoted to his exploration of the Great American Songbook, and resulted in his biggest-ever hit, 1960’s “Georgia on My Mind.”
The term “genius” is perhaps the most overused in all of the literature surrounding the arts. But in listening to Ray Charles’s breakthrough recordings of the mid-1950s, it’s hard to think of another word that applies.