Dee Felice Trio, mutating into an homage to Johnny A
Mrs. K.P. asked me last Saturday if I wanted to go with her to the big used CDs and books store here, and of course I said yes. We only had maybe a half hour until we had to be someplace else, so I only got to begin going through the “95 cent bargain bin” looking for unrecognized nuggets of jazz gold to write about this week before it was time to leave… And what I found was “In Heat” by the Dee Felice Trio, a CD remastering of a 1975 vinyl issue. Put the CD in for a twirl and it was… OK. More below.
It turns out these were some pretty obscure musicians, perhaps `cause we’re not talking Miles Davis here, folks. Even Google was not much help in finding out more about them. The trio consisted of Dee Felice on drums, Frank Vincent on piano, and Lee Tucker on bass, and they played in the Cincinnati area in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I was able to excavate this much information from a page about a later recording by Vincent:
Frank Vincent arrived in Cincinnati from his home in New York as an electric accordion player. Within a short period of time he was one of the most in-demand jazz pianists in the area. He and bassist Jack Prather played a regular duo gig at the Kasbah Lounge in the basement of the Terrace Hilton Hotel. Shortly thereafter they joined the late drummer Dee Felice to form the Dee Felice Trio. When Prather moved to the West Coast, bassist Lee Tucker replaced him. The trio was the house band at the Living Room on Walnut St. in Cincinnati, which brought in many name jazz performers. They backed singers such as Carmen McRae and Mark Murphy and soloists such as trumpeter Bobby Shew.
At one point they were signed to back James Brown for a short tour and then they went out with Mark Murphy. While with Murphy, they went to Toronto and Vincent got a lesson with his hero, Oscar Peterson…
James Brown said lots of nice things about the trio on the liner notes; now I see the connection…
Actually, on several tracks Vincent sounds more like Vince Guaraldi than Oscar Peterson… which leads me to the music itself. The tracks are a mix of popular tunes and original compositions:
TRACK LIST
- 3:06 Oh Happy Day
- 3:17 Wichita Lineman
- 5:48 The Crickets Sing
- 4:00 Summer In The City
- 2:53 There Was A Time
- 3:00 In Heat
- 4:17 Both Sides Now
- 3:57 All The Time
- 2:39 Uncle
- 2:29 Never
Hmmm – 36 minutes of music… a little on the lean side for an album, even in the days of vinyl…
“In Heat,” the title track, is a pretty good circa 1970 funky melody; “All The Time” and “Uncle” are original bossa nova tunes. “The Crickets Sing” is also a bossa nova, but not original to the group. You may remember from an earlier diary that I’m not about to say anything bad about bossa nova, so moving right along, most of the rest of the tunes are…OK. Probably the best of the group, I thought, was their handling of Wichita Lineman, which got me to hear the melody, chord progressions, and improvisational potential of the tune with fresh ears. (For 95 cents, this one tune was probably worth the admission price.) It’s kind of surprising that more musicians haven’t tried their hand at improvising on Wichita Lineman – it’s a tune with some potential to become a jazz standard. Certainly more than “Summer in the City,” LOL.
The only other jazz (or blues or “country soul” or whatever) version of “Wichita Lineman” that comes to mind is the recording by Johnny A on his debut CD, “Sometime Tuesday Morning” which reeks of the cigarettes and stale beer of a smoky roadhouse lounge around 12:30 on a Saturday night. (MP3 here) Now there’s an album you must go get, if you haven’t heard it. Not only are the notes magic – but so are the spaces between. Now that is playing. NPR drooled all over their copy of the CD some time back (go here). I haven’t heard his new CD yet – has anyone out there heard it?
