The 4th Street Mess Around

 One of Ray Charles’s first hits was “Mess Around,” released on Atlantic Records back in 1953, but actually Brother Ray was a little late to the party with that tune. Many of the ideas for that song can been heard in a whole mess of New Orleans boogie piano riffs, starting as early as, say, Cow Cow Davenport’s playing the late 1920s. But if you want to go have even further — and, well, we generally do — there are references to dances called a “mess around” as far back the earliest days of jazz. For instance, in his wonderful autobiography called “Trumpet on the Wing,” the great New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone talked about watching people dance the mess-around at the fish fries of his youth in the Crescent City. Said Wingy, “The mess-around was a kind of dance where you just messed around with your feet in one place, letting your body do most of the work, while keeping time by snapping fingers with one hand and holding a slab of fish in the other!” Now, that’s a picture. Here’s a mess-around we learned from a Memphis Jug Band piece that was actually recorded 91 years this week.

Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

 Two of our all-time favorite musicians — Doug Chaffin and Bob Dylan — both turn 80 this year, Bob next week and Doug in August, and both are still going strong. Well, shoot, more than just going strong, these octogenarians-to-be are both still finding new ideas and inspiring everybody around them to do the same. For instance, check this out. To celebrate this momentous year, last night we dusted off this old Bob Dylan tune off the great “Nashville Skyline” album of 50 years ago. Listen how right from the start, Doug’s guitar work prompts his bandmates — first, Veezy Coffman, then Sam St. Clair — to find interesting new nooks and crannies in their own solos.

I'm Beginning to See the Light

 The collaboration of composer Duke Ellington and saxophonist Johnny Hodges is legendary among jazz enthusiasts. Hodges’s recording of tunes like “Prelude to a Kiss” and “Passion Flower” are the graduate level seminars on how to construct smart, moving solos. But Hodges was also a keen composer in his own right. Take for instance the 1944 pop tune that he put together with Ellington and trumpeter Harry James — “I’m Beginning to See the Light” — which to this day remains an upbeat standard in most jazz repertoires. We just recently started playing around with it. Here’s our take on the tune from last night Flood affair.

Opus One

 Midway through his seven-year stint with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the brilliant arranger/composer Sy Oliver wrote this tune which became a huge World War II-era hit for the band. The song — which Sy called simply “Opus One” — went on to be radio hits for many others, from Gene Krupa and Harry James to the Mills Brothers. Meanwhile, here’s a cool aside about the composer. Sy Oliver grew in Battle Creek, Michigan, in a very musical family. His mother taught piano, and his dad …. Well, his father was a multi-instrumentalist who made a name for himself in the early part of the century by demonstrating the versatility of saxophones at a time when the instrument was little used outside of marching bands. Well, we think the elder Oliver would be very pleased at how well our Veezy Coffman has learned that lesson. Listen as Veezy takes his son Sy’s tune and turns it every which way but loose! Here, a highlight from last night’s rehearsal, is Veezy Coffman wailing on “Opus One.”

All of Me

 Here’s a song that’s celebrating its 90th birthday this year. “All of Me” was written in 1931 by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons. It was an early hit for vocalist Mildred Bailey, recording with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and for Louis Armstrong. Of course, the definitive version came a decade later when Billie Holiday made her great 1941 rendition of it. And then a brand new generation learned the song through Willie Nelson’s inclusion of the tune on his landmark 1978 “Stardust” album, which featured hits of the great American songbook. The Flood started doing the song a couple of decades ago, but it got a new burst of energy at a recent rehearsal in Michelle’s singing twinned with Veezy’s sax solo.

Yellow Dog Blues

 It’s not every song that has an historical marker devoted to it beside the highway. But then it’s not every song that has the privilege of being composed by the great W.C. Handy. It’s hard to imagine what the early days of jazz would have been like without the songs of William Christopher Handy. “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues,” “Careless Love” and, of course, the immortal “St. Louis Blues.” The Flood does a lot of those songs, and lately we’ve been drawn to one of Handy’s earliest compositions. In 1912 he wrote “Yellow Dog Blues,” which ends with the line “Your easy rider’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” Those are railroad references about the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, known thereabouts as The Yellow Dog. And to this day, down in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, a bronze plate stands at the very spot memorialized in that classic blues line. So, here’s our take on the tune from last night’s session, with Doug and Veezy burning it up on the solos atop Danny Gillum’s rocking bass line.

Lorena

Often at rehearsals, between tunes we’re planning to work on, Doug Chaffin will just start playing a song that’s been on his mind, and lately that tune has been a sweet antebellum melody called “Lorena.” Now, while the song is of decidedly Northern origins — it was written in Zanesville, Ohio, five years before the Civil War by a young man devastated by a broken engagement with his sweetheart — “Lorena” was equally loved by homesick southerners during the war. In fact, we know from diaries and letters that both sides claimed it as their own. Meanwhile, the song has special meaning for history lovers in our part of the world, because the final resting place for the subject of that lovely ballad — Martha Ella Blocksom, later Ella Johnson — is just across the river from us here, at Woodland Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio. So here, from a recent rehearsal, are Doug, Sam and Veezy contemplating this hauntingly beautiful melody that comes down to us from more than a century and a half ago.