In the mid 1950s, the alto sax of Lou Donaldson was at the very centre of what was known as "soul jazz". The term was an attempt to acknowledge a particularly soulful and bluesy approach to the music - a groovin' feel which, to this day, makes Donaldson records quite essential for discerning club DJs. Tunes such as Blues Walk and Alligator Boogaloo, which rely so heavily on that swinging sax and organ combination have never ceased to be serious jukebox hits.
Born in Badin, North Carolina in 1926, Donaldson's first exposure to music came from the radio. He can well remember Louis Armstrong, but that was about it as far as jazz went on the wireless. This, after all, was North Carolina in the 1930s and the predominant music on the airwaves was hillbilly and country. Donaldson loved it and, perhaps contrary to our expectations of a young black kid, he sang country songs all the time - as did all his friends and neighbours. But the second and rather more stealthy source of his love of music was ultimately far more powerful. This was his experience of church, and here he heard his father preach, his mother play organ and his brothers sing.
"My brothers sang - but not me!" he says with a telling laugh. "Hearing the music was part of church and I heard it because church was something I had to do, but I did hear it and I remembered it later. I retained all those songs and melodies. But my mother did not just play organ in the church, she was also a music teacher and she bought me a clarinet. She didn't know too much about clarinet but she bought it for me because I just wouldn't play piano. I couldn't stand those lessons and those people you had to go through. I just wanted to play baseball!"
But by the age of 15, music had begun to take more of a hold. And although there were no real thoughts of taking it too seriously, Donaldson switched from clarinet to saxophone. The main focus of his energies, however, was on his studies, and he began a college degree in political science. Everything was going well, too, but then Uncle Sam showed up with a draft notice and young Donaldson suddenly found himself in the navy. He might well have given up both on the music and the studies, but he decided to persevere. Finishing his degree would have to wait until his spell in the navy was over, but for the saxophone, there was one obvious opening. The navy band needed a horn player for rather more than just marching up and down the quayside. He joined up.
"We had to play for dances - all these arrangements for Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. And they had a lot of jazz musicians in the navy - people like Clark Terry, Willie Smith and Ernie Wilkins. They were a little older than I was and they played in another band, but I heard all this stuff they were playing. Then one day a guy came along and asked if I'd heard Charlie Parker? I said no, so he puts on this record by Jay McShann, and Parker was on it, and I said `this is the way I want to play!' I got it right away. But at that time nobody played that way but Charlie Parker. Then when everybody heard him, they all changed and everybody tried to play that way."
Enraptured by the sounds of Bird, Donaldson finally made his way to New York. And at the age of 25 he made his debut on Blue Note Records as part of the Milt Jackson Quintet. He then recorded as a leader with Horace Silver, Art Taylor and Gene Ramey and made a name for himself as a swinging be-bopper. He worked with the very best, including Monk and Mingus and (the one he singles out for special praise) Sonny Stitt. He was very quickly a prominent part of the Big Apple scene - something he could never have dreamed of back in Badin, North Carolina.
"I didn't think I'd be good enough to make a living at it, but when bands from New York came down, I'd play with them. People would say that I should be in New York so I went there first in 1947. But I was pretty sure of myself because I had got a hold of the records and I knew the songs that these guys were playing - and I could play them - so that was it. But there were a lot of musicians around in New York and all of them played well."
But if Donaldson's early recordings were definitely bop, things began to audibly change towards the end of the 1950s. He starting using a conga player and replacing piano with organ. And with his own particular feel for the bluesier side of things, the music he came up with along with Big John Patten, Baby Face Willette and others was soon dubbed "soul jazz". It seemed a lot simpler and more accessible than anything people like Charlie Parker had been doing, and it caught on. In 1958, Donaldson had a jukebox hit with the title track of the album Blues Walk. Much was made of that groovin' blues element in his playing, but as far as he was concerned, jazz was all about blues anyway.
"Yeah sure! That's the way Charlie Parker played. I didn't care if he played fast, he still played blues. He had that feeling which is very hard to get, and he got it all through his music. With us it happened like this. We started using organ because we played in places that didn't have a piano or a bass. So we eliminated that problem by using organ - because with the organ you had piano and bass right there. Then the records began to sell, because once Jimmy Smith came along, people started to love that sound. And so we could work in a whole lot of places that previously we couldn't work. You see, once I started working with my own band in clubs, I kinda got away from the other thing. Back then they had nightclubs and people would ask for requests. So you had to do what the people wanted just to keep your job."
The success of Blues Walk led directly to another couple of albums in a similar vein - Gravy Train in 1961 and Good Gracious in 1963. When a second spell with Blue Note kicked off in 1967 with Alligator Boogaloo, Donaldson found himself with two hit singles and unexpected radio play. By now the music was funky and Donaldson discovered himself all three of the following - popular, successful and under a certain amount of fire. As he went right through the 1960s and into the 1970s with albums such as Everything I Play is Funky, Donaldson disappointed a significant wedge of critics. Repeatedly they accused him of making music which was somehow less than jazz.
"People say to me I kinda got away from jazz for a while and I just got to laugh. I say you got to be crazy! Because that's what it is - that's what jazz is! It's jazz! That's the way we play. Especially black people - that's the way we play. Yeah, a lot of musicians got more advanced technically and started doing a lot of other things, but the basic sound is what we play. Some people - they didn't know what was happening. That's because there's a lot of people see, but there's a whole lot of people don't know!"
Donaldson's commercial success was countered constantly by those who despaired of the funky side of things. Perhaps they despaired equally of the fact that, contrary to the jazz ethic, Donaldson was having a few hit records. Nothing guaranteed to upset a jazz writer more.
"Well you're reading my lines! And that's what really messed jazz up the way it is now. They seem to think that when a record is hot, and gets to be a hit, that it's commercial - but it's not really that. A record like Alligator Boogaloo, we just made that at the end of the date. It was like a joke and we tagged it onto the end of the record. But it was more successful than all the other stuff that we'd been trying to play. But I always say this - if I knew exactly how to make a hit record, I'd have made it when I was 15 years old! That stuff is all luck and you just don't know how people are going to accept something until you put it out."
AND NOW, as Lou Donaldson heads for Ireland and brings organist Lonnie Smith with him, he promises a mix of swinging blues and bop. He is one of the few who can carry off both hard-bop and meaningful soul/jazz - the latter by no means the easy option in his book. He has been playing seriously since 1947. He has played with virtually everybody you can think of and he has been responsible for some of the grooviest, funkiest, swingingest slices of jazz ever made. And so Lou Donaldson is a man well worth listening to - to what he plays and to what he says. And he has plenty to say about jazz.
"Jazz seems to be losing its identity. They are taking these musicians and they come right out of school and they give them a lot of publicity. And a lot of them aren't even playing jazz! They play a lot of mechanical stuff but it's not really jazz. And so jazz is losing its identity. You can't just keep going that way because you lose your audience. If people can't understand something because it's too involved, then you lose your audience. And that's why we play a little more of the soul stuff - we have to do something to bring it back."
Lou Donaldson plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on April 23rd