The Three (And Four) Sounds - Hot Bread/Inez [78 Acetate, Private Recording]

[Here's a major find and fantastic piece of research and scholarship by Dan!! prestontw]

The Three (And Four) Sounds

By

Dan Gould AKA The Gene Harris Fanatic

From my online handle you may presume that I am a Gene Harris completist.  That is true, but in the interests of full disclosure I will tell you that contrary to conventional wisdom, Astral Signal, In a Special Way, Nexus, and Tone Tantrum were not recorded by Gene Harris.  You may tell me otherwise but I consider them a figment of George Butler’s imagination.

It was that completist instinct that led me to search “Gene Harris” on eBay in the spring of 2005.  It was five years after Gene Harris passed away, and by that point I had every official release.  But for whatever reason, I typed in “Gene Harris” under the Records category and there it was:  “78 Acetate Four Sounds.”  What is this, I thought. I knew from liner notes that the band started in the Midwest as the Four Sounds with some forgotten saxophonist.  After ditching the saxophone, they moved east to D.C., and with the help of Horace Silver among others, came to the attention of Alfred Lion at Blue Note.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

But there is a history few know about, and even fewer have heard the recorded traces of it.

Gene Harris met Andy Simpkins in South Bend, Indiana in 1956.  When they played together with Andy’s friend, saxophonist Lonnie Walker, Gene asked drummer Bill Dowdy, his friend and musical partner since the age of 5, to join the group. The new band needed a name, and Walker’s nickname, “The Sound” gave it to them.

When I spoke to him, Bill Dowdy remembered Lonnie Walker this way.

“Nice guy.  He was older than we were, had road experience, helped us out that way. He saved us a lot of money, we’d go to grocery stores to get food, he’d cook it up for us. Eat real good, you know?”

He also remembered the rough clubs the band worked.

“I used to carry my cymbals as a shield, instead of something to play … but I wasn’t doing nothing but playing my drums, laughing and smiling, staying out of the way if I saw someone getting ready to fight.”

Gene’s widow Janie Harris repeated to me some of Gene’s stories about the clubs The Four Sounds played in.

“Lonnie kept a gun in his horn case for self defense. There were a few clubs that Gene played where shootings occurred. One gal shot her husband for messing around on her. Gene said he would just keep playing unless it looked like it would get too dangerous. If it did he would take a break, wait for the shooting to stop and then go back up.” 

Ultimately, she said, when Lonnie waved the gun at a club owner to ensure payment, Gene decided it was time to let Lonnie Walker go.

Bill Dowdy had a different recollection.

“He had a lot of women, he was a playboy, that’s what he was.  He wasn’t no violent person, he was a smiling guy.  Don’t know about that gun thing but he might have had another side of him I didn’t know about.  Up there on that stage, you were in the middle of the bar and that stage revolved, you could be a target up there if you were doing a lot of womanizing.”

According to Dowdy, it wasn’t Walker’s gun but his musicality that led to his dismissal from the band.

“(He) wasn’t quite up to par musically.  He was a self-taught musician … he wasn’t keeping up musically.  He was an ear player, he couldn’t read. (But) he had a sweet sound as you can hear on that record.”

Harris and Dowdy also differed on how this recording came about.  Gene told her they recorded a demo of the group so that they could expand their bookings. 

Dowdy told me that Cleveland was their home base, and they often rehearsed at a recording studio, Boddie Recording.  The owner had brand new equipment, and according to Dowdy, would practice with his equipment by recording the band while they rehearsed.  He does not recall a demo recording being produced.  I will leave to the reader to decide if this recording was produced surreptitiously or not.  It definitely sounds to me as if the band was recorded with their full knowledge.

Janie Harris believes that both tracks are Gene Harris originals.  “Hot Bread” occupies the netherworld between jazz and R&B, its popular and sophisticated elements existing in equal and complimentary measure.  Nat Cole, Bill Doggett and Ray Charles among many others mined this style to great success.  Given what we know about Walker it is not surprising that he sounds so at home.  Gene Harris displays a locked-hands approach reminiscent of Red Garland, who was an early influence, although the chord voicings are more reminiscent of George Shearing or Nat Cole.

“Inez” is a feature for Walker and it is very disappointing that the group is faded out just as Harris’ solo begins.  Walker seems not quite as comfortable on alto as he does on tenor, but he plays the pretty melody with a lot of feeling.  It is easy to hear why he was called “The Sound”!

So in 1956, at the Boddie Recording studio in Cleveland, a fledgling band recorded two tunes.  An acetate 78 was pressed, with hand-lettered labels, of the first recording by Gene Harris, Andy Simpkins and Bill Dowdy.   It apparently never left Cleveland.  Forty nine years later, it was rescued from obscurity.  According to the dealer:

“It was found in a box of old discs in a Cleveland garage – the owners had no idea where the records came from.” 

In the interim, the trio would record twenty one times for Blue Note, Verve, Mercury and Limelight. But this was the first.  And now you can hear it for yourself.