“Jazz speaks for life,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared in his program essay for the inaugural Berlin Jazz Festival, in 1964. The reciprocal regard in his relationship with jazz is just one reason to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a swinging soundtrack.
WRTI will do just that on MLK Day, as Nicole Sweeney and Julian Booker spin songs of freedom and conviction by a broad spectrum of artists — historic progenitors like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as current practitioners like Terri Lyne Carrington and Johnathan Blake. As part of this year’s celebration, Booker will open the 10 o’clock hour on Late Evening Jazz with a hard-bop classic by trumpeter Blue Mitchell: “March on Selma,” released 60 years ago this spring.
The song, a blues shuffle at a brightly sauntering tempo, opened Side B of Down with It! — Mitchell’s third session for Blue Note Records, recently reissued in the Tone Poet Vinyl Series. It’s a buoyant yet determined theme that suits its subject: the series of protest marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Dr. King in March of 1965. President Lyndon Johnson declared them “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”
“March on Selma” wasn’t the only jazz tune to invoke this watershed moment: guitarist Grant Green released an almost identically titled track, “The Selma March,” on his 1965 Verve album His Majesty King Funk. (During Late Evening Jazz on Monday, Booker will play that song to start the 11 o’clock hour.) But there’s some history behind Mitchell’s recording that warrants unpacking, because of the way it connects with other, perhaps more familiar landmarks in jazz.
For starters, Down with It! joins a series of acclaimed albums that pair Mitchell with his fellow Florida native, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook. “The Blue Mitchell-Junior Cook partnership continued the trumpet-tenor saxophone front line that marked most iterations of Horace Silver’s bands,” writes Courtney M. Nero in a new biography of Cook, Have Horn, Will Travel. Indeed, the Mitchell-Cook hookup was intact from 1958-64, the longest of any in Silver’s employ; it can be heard on classics like Blowin’ the Blues Away, Doin’ the Thing and The Tokyo Blues.
When Silver overhauled his band in ‘64, Mitchell and Cook broke out on their own, often working as a dynamic duo. Mitchell’s Blue Note album The Thing to Do, recorded in 1964 and released in ‘65, featured Cook and another of their Silver band mates, bassist Gene Taylor. On drums, making his debut on record, was Al Foster (credited by his full name, Aloysius Foster). On piano, showing his open admiration for Silver, was another up-and-comer, Chick Corea.
The same quintet lineup reconvened a year later for Down with It!, recorded on July 14, 1965, just four months after the Selma-to-Montgomery march. What’s most striking about “March on Selma,” musically speaking, is the degree to which Corea and Foster embrace the parameters of a shuffle. Corea — who contributes more characteristic performances elsewhere on the album, notably on his own McCoy Tyner-inspired tune “Perception” — comps and fills with bluesy ebullience. Foster keeps his cymbal beat tight, emulating an early hero, Art Taylor.
In her liner notes for the album, Phyl Garland, then a contributing editor at Ebony magazine, shrugged off the topical resonance of “March on Selma,” suggesting that the tune “bears no actual tie to the civil rights movement, but can simply be dug because it’s such a catchy lick.” One can only wonder what led her, or Mitchell, toward such a disavowal — and whether the song might have been received differently had it been released sooner.
Whatever the case, Garland was right to say the song is catchy, and that it can simply be dug. In his keynote for the Berlin Jazz Fest, Dr. King shed light on that very quality. “For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man,” he wrote. “Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.”
Tune in on Monday, Jan. 19 to Evening Jazz, 6 to 10 p.m., and Late Evening Jazz, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., to hear WRTI’s tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
