The Three Sounds: A Final Word

[I've asked my friend, Dan to provide a piece which wraps up Three Sounds month by taking a look at the group's career - and also a little bit of how it ended - prestontw]

 The Three Sounds

By

Dan Gould AKA ‘The Gene Harris Fanatic”

Gene Harris and Bill Dowdy, two-thirds of the acclaimed trio The Three Sounds, met each other in Benton Harbor, Michigan when Dowdy was five years old and Harris was just four years old.  Both had already started piano lessons.

“Gene was like Sugar Chile Robinson. He was known as a child prodigy … Gene was great, I knew, when I met him as a kid.  I always felt he had that extra something, you know what I mean?”

Dowdy soon switched to drums and when they were just teenagers, they gigged professionally as The Club 49 Trio.  Dowdy recalled with a laugh,

“I learned later that Gene’s dad was getting free booze for having us play.”

After high school graduation in 1951, both Harris and Dowdy enlisted in the US Army but a knee injury resulted in an early discharge for Dowdy, who soon moved to Chicago and began gigging with such present and future stars as Johnny Griffin, John Gilmore, Clifford Jordan, Junior Mance, Gene Ammons and JJ Johnson.  Harris was discharged in 1954 and soon found himself a member of saxophonist Benny Poole’s band.  But the lifelong friends stayed in close contact.

“I came and picked up Gene from Benton Harbor, took him to Chicago with me, to spend a few days and I took him around.  He upset everybody. ‘Who is this guy?’  Boy he sounded so good, he was just out of the service, he had been studying with Wynton Kelly.  I heard he (Kelly) was the general’s personal pianist in the army.”

Harris continued to gig with the Benny Poole quartet but Harris had bigger jazz dreams than Poole, who was happy with his steady Michigan bookings.  Dowdy told me,

“So Gene called me one day from South Bend (Indiana).  He wanted me to meet this bass player and this saxophone player.  We started rehearsing and formed a group called the Four Sounds.  At that age, you had to be daring and trustworthy to go out on your own like that. Weren’t no guarantees – we just went out and did it.”

The bass player was Andy Simpkins.  The saxophonist was Lonnie “The Sound” Walker.  The year was 1956.

Simpkins’ playing knocked Dowdy out.

“I never heard a bass sound like that before.  Andy was the unsung hero of the Three Sounds.  Andy was a better musician than all of us.  He was a quiet guy, didn’t cause no problems, he didn’t speak up, he’d go along with whatever.  He just wanted to play the bass.  Andy was the whole glue to our music – he held me together.  I depended on him, he said he depended on me.  We both developed that thing of playing on top of the beat, instead of on the beat.  All Gene had to do was do what he wanted to do and we would have covered him.”

Walker, a self-taught “ear” musician, was something of a weak musical link, and soon the band was known simply as the Three Sounds and was making a name for itself, starting in Cleveland and eventually throughout the Midwest. 

By 1957, the band moved to Washington D.C., the new city having been chosen because Dowdy’s sister was willing to host the young men.  Soon the Sounds were headlining clubs and backing stars including Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, Kenny Burrell and Lou Donaldson.

Dowdy told me,

“Whenever anybody played with us, they had to go with our program, you know, cause we were so tight.  Didn’t matter who we played with, they had to come up to par.  Gene had a way of playing –we had played together so long by then, until we all knew each other so well.”

Mercer Ellington and Horace Silver were instrumental in recommending the group to Alfred Lion of Blue Note records, and in the Fall of 1958, Blue Note Presents the Three Sounds was issued.  It was the first of what would be twenty two dates the trio led or co-led, but if Downbeat reviewer John Tynan had any influence, it would have been one-and-done.   Tynan wrote that the group has “horrible taste, trite arrangements, out of tune bass, an unbelievable cymbal, ideas so banal as to be almost funny” and concluded, “who would buy such a record as this?”

The band wasn’t worried that one bad review would destroy their career.  Dowdy recalled,

“I knew we could play and everybody else knew it. What the guy did for us was, he made us.  Cause all that stuff worked in reverse.  And they bought that record and they still buy it.”

Indeed, despite the negative review, Blue Note had a hit, and within six months, Bottom’s Up and LD + 3 (led by Lou Donaldson) was in record stores.  Bill Dowdy shared good memories of Blue Note co-owners Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff.

“(Alfred Lion) was very nice, tried to keep us in a good attitude … they would bring in booze (to the sessions).  And Frank Wolff, he would be taking pictures, he would be boppin’ around trying to keep the beat. ‘Make it swing, Bill, make it swing (pronounced with a soft “g”).’  And they knew when they liked it, that’s all they knew. They liked it or didn’t like it.  We’d just sit there and play, you know?  Sometimes we’d make a couple of takes but very few times.  First take on everything, almost.”

In 1962, The Sounds switched labels, signing first with Verve, which was followed by stints with Mercury and Limelight.  Dowdy told me,

“Blue Note had its limitations back in those days.  We were trying to reach a popular market like Ramsey Lewis, Miles on Columbia, they were reaching that wider market.  I’d say that was one of the reasons.   (But) when we started switching to these other record companies, it wasn’t like doing business with Alfred.  We could call Alfred from anywhere, he would listen.  Alfred was the man – and he was a nice man.”

The Sounds remained a popular touring band into the mid-1960s, but was hardly exempt from the changing popular tastes that the British Invasion had only accelerated.  The young men who had started out together ten years before were now thirty two (Harris) or thirty three years old (Dowdy and Simpkins), and each had families to support.  The economic pressure on the band played a role in the break-up of the Three Sounds.  It happened in the summer of 1966.

Dowdy recalled,

“We were playing in Rock Island, I think, one of the Quad Cities.  Oh man, I thought we sounded very, very good.  Really hot.  We got through playing, I went to get our money like I always do after the gig is, pay off everybody.  The guy said, ‘Gene already got it.’” 

As it turned out, Harris had gotten an advance from the club owner to pay for the car repair that had gotten the band to the gig.  Dowdy didn’t know, and he confronted Harris.

Dowdy told me,

“He swung at me.  We had a fight, a real fisticuff fight.  We had shadowboxed growing up, playing around, but (this) was serious business, man.  He had been boxing in the army but I was no pushover.  So we punched it out (laughs).  After that, I had a wife and kids at home here in Battle Creek.  I needed to get something going solid.  I didn’t want to be in another situation like that anymore.”

Perhaps by that time Bill Dowdy had played with Gene Harris long enough.

“Another thing that I never spoke about in that group, as good as we were and all that, Andy and I, we played, when you support somebody you gotta play for them, you know what I mean? I had lost my fire that I had when I was playing around Chicago.  I was so dedicated to this group, playing just for what they wanted, you can get into a real slump doing that.  Musically I was robbing myself.”

Although the two combatants eventually resumed their life-long friendship, Gene Harris, Andy Simpkins and Bill Dowdy would never again share a stage together.

So, to sum up Three Sounds month please see:

 

• An Introduction to the music and legacy of Gene Harris and The Three Sounds: say No! to the critics-jazz snobs-hard boppers who tell you the group didn't matter
• Hot Bread - Inez   [Dan's major discovery of the group's first recording as a quartet - The Four Sounds - a private acetate 78 recorded sometime in 1956 and never released until now] 
•  Beautiful Friendship  [The group's second side on Limelight in 1965 which remains vinyl-only and not available on CD - with arrangements by the Australian composer-arranger Julian Lee -  this is the last official recording with the original trio of Harris, Simpkins+Dowdy]
•  Today's Sounds [ The last side on Limelight in 1966 - another Vinyl only rarity - a live set recorded in Chicago - first appearance of drummer Kalil Madi who may have been just subbing for Dowdy for this recording - the original trio would officially split in the summer of 1966, and Madi would serve as Dowdy's immediate replacement]