More often than not, Halloween jazz playlists are cause for déjà vu — another year, another spin through “I Put a Spell on You” as admonished by Nina Simone. Maybe you dig deeper and toss in Louis Armstrong’s “The Skeleton in the Closet.” Maybe you hit the jack-o’-lantern head-on, with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross harmonizing on “Halloween Spooks” or Philly Joe Jones doing a Bella Lugosi bit on “Blues for Dracula.”
What we’re missing here is an opportunity to toast one of the few major jazz artists with a true connection to Halloween. I’m referring to tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, who was born on Oct. 31, 1930 in Denison, TX, and died in New York two months shy of 40.
For most jazz fans, Ervin is probably best known for his affiliation with bassist and composer Charles Mingus, during a prolific stretch in the late 1950s and early ‘60s that yielded classic albums on the Columbia, Atlantic, Candid and Impulse! labels. Ervin also collaborated around this time with many others, like pianist Randy Weston. (“Booker Ervin, for me, was on the same level as John Coltrane,” Weston attested in the liner notes to his Verve album Monterey ‘66. “He was a completely original saxophonist.”)
So beyond the birthday synchronicity, how does Booker Ervin’s music align with Spooky Season? The short answer can be summed up in two words: “Eerie Dearie.”
The tune, an Ervin original, was recorded for his Prestige album The Blues Book — precisely 60 years ago, in 1964 — with a quintet that featured Carmell Jones on trumpet, Gildo Mahones on piano, Richard Davis on bass and Alan Dawson on drums. Jaunty in tempo and vaguely unsettled in its tonal palate, it’s an altered blues of the sort that you might expect to hear on a session of this vintage for a Prestige rival, Blue Note.
Ervin’s tenor solo, an outpouring of rivet-like runs punctuated by earthy cries, firmly roots the tune in the blues language. What’s eerie about “Eerie Dearie” is a harmonic context that Mahones and Davis conspire to draw with chiaroscuro shading — and that Mahones, in his solo, accentuates through flirtations with a whole-tone scale. (Davis, who died last year at 93, delivers an absolute master class in adventurous bass lines behind each soloist, before offering a mesmerizing solo of his own.)
The Blues Book was one in a series of releases that Ervin made for Prestige and producer Don Schlitten from 1963 into ‘64 — following The Freedom Book and The Song Book, and preceding The Space Book. It’s the only album of the bunch to include a second horn, and the only one to feature Mahones. What’s constant throughout all four releases are Ervin’s tenor and the rhythm team of Davis and Dawson, whose connection feels profound.
On the series bookends, The Freedom Book and The Space Book, the pianist in this matrix is Jaki Byard. The critic Gary Giddins once proclaimed the Byard-Davis-Dawson lineup on these albums to be “one of the best rhythm sections ever assembled.” Writing in 1999, he elaborated:
“Like Armstrong’s Hot 5 or Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, it existed only in the studio, but over the next decade it proved a telling alternative to HerbieRonTony as a combustible, cohesive, swinging unit that never tempered the individuals involved — you couldn’t believe what was going on in that cauldron.”
The same is only slightly less true of this rhythm section with Mahones, who was born to Puerto Rican parents in East Harlem, and had worked as a sideman with a wide array of acts. (That’s actually him on piano in “Halloween Spooks,” by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.) So why not peer into the cauldron with Ervin and his ghouls? However oblique the haunting in “Eerie Dearie,” you can trust Booker Ervin to deliver the shivers. In any case, it will always be the case that you can’t spell “Booker” without “Boo.”
Listen to Evening Jazz with Greg Bryant on Halloween night to hear “Eerie Dearie” in full, among other spooky fare.