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Oh, didn’t he Wamble
Doug does it for Marsalis Music; plus Harry Connick Jr. and the Marsalis-Rounder connection
BY JON GARELICK

Part of the pleasure of Doug Wamble’s new Country Libations (Marsalis Music) is the flat-out exuberance of it. Wamble, a 30-year-old Tennessee-born singer, composer, and guitarist, sounds so thrilled to be doing what he’s doing that invention and raw talent spill over the edges of every track, in his all-out vocal delivery and in his guitar playing. That’s not to say that his choices are sloppy or ill-considered — he simply sounds like a man who’s found his voice and is reveling in it.

Country Libations is an odd album to come from a jazz musician. In its broad outlines, you could take the "country" of the title literally: Wamble plays unamplified acoustic guitar, occasionally with a slide. His line-up includes violin, bass, drums, and occasionally piano. The first track, "Libation #1 — Back of the Hymnal," starts with rolling gospel piano tremolos before Wamble’s beseeching, wordless vocals come in, joined by his slide guitar, bass, drums, and fiddle and the slap of a churchy tambourine.

In fact, gospel music and spirituals are never far from any of the tracks on Country Libations, whether Wamble is singing and playing a 2/4 country ditty like "Baby, If You’re Lyin’," ripping out a string of eighth notes to the 4/4 jazz-swing rhythm of "Libation #2 — Trouble, Lord," or preachin’ the country blues Robert Johnson–style on "Libation #4 — Ain’t Quite Four This Morning." Despite the acoustic instrument, his guitar solos allude to Ornette Coleman as much as to Django Reinhardt (Charles Burnham, a long-time Ornette associate, is the violinist). But even when his guitar lines jump in and out of the chord changes in jagged, hopscotching patterns, he never missteps — the music is all of a piece. Country Libations is a "roots" album that marries country and urban styles, eclectic but unified.

And when your ear adjusts to the smaller dynamic range of the unamplified acoustic instrument, you realize how big Wamble’s guitar sound actually is — broad and dirty, full of bends and timbral variety, even when he plays without a slide. On "The Sweet Magnolia Tree," he drops into a low, vibrato-laden passage that conjures the zither in The Third Man. There’s none of the electrified sustains of John Scofield (an early Wamble hero) or Pat Metheny, not even Jim Hall or Charlie Christian or the clean acoustic attack of Django. Wamble plays jazz with an acoustic country-blues attack.

"For me, it was all about a sound," he says from New York, where he’s taking a break from a recording session with his label’s boss, Branford Marsalis. "For as long as I’ve loved music, I’ve loved people who have had a sound. I can remember the first time I heard a Howlin’ Wolf record, and Hubert Sumlin — Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player — that sound was just so definitive. And Ben Webster. Someone’s sound gets to you before anything else does — before you figure out how hip they are melodically or harmonically, their sound is just gonna kill you."

Studying music in college, Wamble (it’s pronounced "womble") emulated heroes like Scofield and found that he sounded "like a really bad John Scofield impersonation." Then he strung his hollow-body with flat wound heavy strings and went for the Wes Montgomery sound, then Jim Hall. "I went through all these things and I was like, man, I can’t get a sound out of this sort of traditional jazz-guitar thing, the electric hollow-body through an amp. I could never get a sound that to me sounded good. And it also reflected my personality: I never liked that smooth sort of sound. Some people it fits. Some of the young guys it fits. I just got the new Peter Bernstein record, and Peter’s sound is so crystal clear and beautiful and smooth and biting and it just fits him so well. But that’s not what I hear.

"I was also learning a lot of music from the ’20s and ’30s, the pre-bebop era of jazz, which I feel is very neglected. I was trying to learn some of that music, and I was trying to emulate people like Johnny Hodges and Sidney Bechet, and I started using the slide, but not in the Delta-blues sort of way — I was trying to play these ’20s jazz solos on slide. And it just sounded better on an acoustic instrument. So I fooled around for a few years and figured out that sound was more important to me than having a remarkable amount of technical facility right away. So I got heavy strings, jacked up the action really high, and I got a good sound. I don’t have as much technique as I could have if I had an easier instrument to play. I’m willing to sacrifice that for now. Now that I have a sound I’m happy with, I’m in the midst of working on my technique so that in five years I can have flawless technical prowess." And he laughs with self-mocking glee.

JUST AS SURPRISING a release from Marsalis Music, but in a different way, is Harry Connick Jr.’s new Other Hours: Connick on Piano 1. Over the years, Connick has grown from a New Orleans piano-playing prodigy into a retro-pop crooner, New Orleans–funkmeister, sometime movie star, and occasional guest on Will & Grace. He had a hit singing standards on the soundtrack of When Harry Met Sally and has won two Grammys for Best Male Jazz Vocal Performance, in 1990 beating among others Tony Bennett. Thou Shalt Not, a 2001 Broadway musical set in post–World War II New Orleans and based on Émile Zola’s 1868 novel Thérèse Raquin, was nominated for a Tony.

So the last thing you’d expect from Connick at this point is a serious instrumental jazz-quartet album sans vocals. Other Hours comprises tunes that were all originally written for Thou Shalt Not, and it gives credence to the oft-voiced truism that the "American Songbook" catalogue is a bedrock of jazz improvisation, from Lester Young to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and beyond, simply because no one writes pop tunes with chord changes like that any more. Other Hours is chock full of the kind of ear-catching harmonic shifts that give the album an "old" sound — as if it were all based on standards.

Connick opens the first tune, "What a Waste," with deep, ugly rumblings in the low end of the keyboard; these are soon joined by train-chugging on-the-beat staccato chords in the right hand, then an entrance of the melody, and then the slashing cross-rhythms of drummer Arthur Latin II before everyone settles into straight time. Connick and tenor-saxophonist Charles "Ned" Goold give the tunes tart, blue-tinged readings. The entire album has a spare sound, and Latin and bassist Neil Caine embody the sine qua non of jazz swing: that nexus where relaxation and ferocious drive are one and the same. Listen to the way Goold lays back on Caine and Latin with his irregular, slipping phrases and light, glottal tone, as if to say, "With rhythm like this, I don’t even have to break a sweat." All he has to do is allow his ideas to tumble out, one after the other, and let bass and drums carry them downstream.

Other Hours conjures one association after another, Connick and Goold suggesting by turns the relentless single-note bass lines and light tenor sound of Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh, the block chords and martini alto of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, and at one point, I swear, as Connick interjects off-beat dissonant chords into the bass/drums mix, the spare urgency of Cecil Taylor’s Looking Ahead. Connick’s soloing is similarly understated — on the ballad-tempo "My Little World," he has the casual elegance of Red Garland. Meanwhile, his tunes float on a cloud of understated melancholy and nostalgia.

When I saw Connick and his big band play to a full house at Symphony Hall a couple of seasons ago, I couldn’t abide his singing and its witless phrasing — but the band arrangements and his own piano playing were in a different league. Other Hours offers yet another angle on the complete Harry.

MARSALIS MUSIC, which began operations in 2002, is distributed through Rounder Records, and to hear the participants tell it, it’s a Cambridge story. Branford Marsalis was looking to create a label. His manager, the Cambridge-based Anne Marie Wilkins (her clients also include Connick, Joshua Redman, David Sánchez, and Jeff "Tain" Watts), started exploring partnerships with larger labels. Eventually, she came to Rounder, which despite its reputation as a roots-music label seemed the perfect match.

"Rounder has a 33-year-history of selling some of the smaller genres in music,’ says Rounder general manager Paul Foley, "and being able to find the right places to market and be successful at it. Also, with many of the majors walking away from jazz, it seemed like a good fit." Foley points out that the move into jazz also fits with the company’s expansion into AAA artists like Bruce Cockburn and the Cowboy Junkies and poppier rock acts and singer-songwriters like Kathleen Edwards, Sarah Harmer, and the Tragically Hip. And, he adds, since Rounder has expanded (it’s now distributed through Universal Music Distribution), its management includes several folks, including himself, who have experience selling jazz at the majors.

Marsalis Music president Sherry McAdams concurs that Rounder’s skill with niche marketing was a plus. "Rounder has had a long history of putting out great music — not necessarily the most commercially viable music, but music that was maybe more niche-oriented — and putting out things they really liked and standing behind it. We had talked to other organizations but could never quite find the right fit. Another asset — not the primary asset — was that they’re right here in Cambridge, and that does make it really convenient."

There was still another connection: Rounder president and CEO John Virant studied at Harvard Law in the late ’80s and early ’90s with Wilkins’s husband, David. "David is a brilliant guy," says Virant, adding that in an academic atmosphere where faculty were sometimes out to see "how easily they can belittle their students, David is so not that way. He was one of the real bright spots as far as faculty-student relationships, and just friendly and approachable and super-smart." The two became friends, and Virant and the Wilkinses maintained their friendship over the years. It was natural, then, that Anne Marie would give John a call.

Virant also points out that jazz fits with Rounder’s adult-oriented genres. "There have always been a lot of jazz fans here [in the company], but it was never an area we were into in a big way. But then when Branford knocks on your door, that’s not a bad thing."

Harry Connick Jr. will appear at Scullers on Tuesday August 12, and Doug Wamble will be there on Thursday August 28; call (617) 562-4111. Rounder will release Branford Marsalis’s Romare Bearden Revealed on Tuesday September 9.


Issue Date: July 18 - 24, 2003
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