There aren’t many things more enjoyable (or more rare) than stumbling on a music or a musician when you are in no way prepared for it—when you have no context or frame of reference for it--and having it or them carry you away.
When I was a college student in New York City in the ‘70s a club on the East Side of Manhattan sponsored a month-long blues piano festival. Each weekend a different lion of the blues piano was featured. At the first installment, I was able to sit ten feet from Little Brother Montgomery (an unassuming, pleasant looking guy who began his career playing in the turpentine camps and whorehouses of Louisiana and who made his first records in 1930) as he played his signature song, “Vicksburg Blues,” the tune of which later became “44 Blues” for Howlin’ Wolf. A week later I was there for a rollicking 90-minute set by the legendary Roosevelt Sykes, the Original Honeydripper, who was just as animated as Montgomery was shy. Sykes was a born entertainer, a monster on the piano, and a great singer who turned and faced and mugged for the audience when he played, a cigar jammed defiantly into the side of his mouth.
On the last weekend of the festival the headliner was a performer with a strange name who I had never heard of or listened to. I never thought about skipping that finale, as the rest of the festival had been so phenomenal, but I didn’t both to prepare for it by checking that unfamiliar player out.
When I got to the club the band was finishing setting up. It was an unusual trio—a Fender bass player, a conga player, and the featured piano player. He was a rail-thin man clad in denim who sported a large, gold front tooth, sunglasses, and longish hair capped by a wide-brimmed hat. I was just finishing my first drink when the group kicked into their show.
This was no blues trio. And this was no blues piano player, although there was a lot of that in there. These three guys were filling the room with some kind of unreal blend of New Orleans r&b, tango, barrelhouse blues, rhumba, and calypso. Whatever it was, I had never heard anything like it, and it was as exciting and funky as hell. After a few minutes of keyboard wizardry, the piano player leaned forward into the microphone and started whistling a slippery horn riff. Then he started singing about a some “big chief” in a wild, croaky kind of voice. Whoever this guy was, he was a trip and half!
This was the great Professor Longhair, aka Roy Byrd, from New Orleans, who once explained his approach this way: “You notice I never play anything straight. Anything I do I put a little pep in it, a little bounce—something to make you know that it’s not a love song.”
Professor Longhair would have turned 100 this year. This week I got a copy of “Fess Up,” a new booklet and DVD that celebrates the awesome uniqueness, talent, and wisdom of Professor Longhair. The context is a concert scheduled in 1980 in New Orleans that would feature three legendary piano players from that city: the elder statesman, Tuts Washington, his protégé, Professor Longhair, and Longhair’s student, Allen Toussaint. The concert never happened—Longhair died in his sleep two days before the show. But the promoters had the good sense to film the three pianists rehearsing for the show, which was later released as a television special called “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together.” We learn a lot about each of the men in the film and get to observe the fascinating process by which they work together to figure out how to blend their different styles into a coherent musical program.
“Fess Up” includes a complete version of this film as well as a second DVD containing a 90-minute interview with Professor Longhair, clips of which were used in “Piano Players.” Longhair, who proves to be a savvy character and a humble person (“Those people who play sheet music, they think our stuff is crap”) who nonetheless understood how unique his music was, describes his musical beginnings, the music scene and the music business in postwar New Orleans, his brief period of retirement, and his eventual rediscovery and comeback. “Fess Up,” which comes in a handsome hard-cover booklet full of intriguing photographs and reminiscences of Longhair, is a fitting tribute to one of the great, had-to-be-seen-to-be-believed giants of American music.