Plug Him In: Comedy, the Electric Saxophone, and Eddie Harris
Featured Album
There have been plenty of amusing jazz musicians, from Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller on down, but few as riotously funny as tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris. In 1975 he even put out a comedy record of on-stage chatter, The Reason Why I’m Talking S–t. The opening monologue is a masterpiece of audience alienation, in which he describes what’s on the minds of the men and women at that evening’s Eddie Harris concert. By the time it’s over, everybody’s chances of getting laid have plummeted.
It’s excruciatingly well observed, funny ’cause it’s true. Funky, smart, very entertaining: That’s Harris to a T. And he hadn’t played a note.
Eddie Harris (1934-96) was schooled by Chicago’s demanding, star-making music teacher Capt. Walter Dyett, and turned professional in his teens. He broke through in 1961 when an edit of his version of the movie theme Exodus became a jukebox hit. Other film tie-in tunes followed. Harris had a way of draining the sap out of “Exodus,” “The Shadow of Your Smile” from The Sandpiper, and Off-Broadway’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” goosing them with swinging/Brazilian/Latin beats. Their snap came as much from his supremely rhythmic phrasing as from the drums.
Harris’s “Theme in Search of a Movie” poked fun at the whole exhausted trend, which he threw off only by coming up with a better gimmick, shortly after signing with Atlantic in 1965. His career really took off when he picked up the Varitone amplified saxophone, outfitted with guitar-type gizmos: echo and tremolo effects, pitch filters to suppress certain frequencies, and an octave drop into a dark, bassoon-like low register. The controls were on the horn near the right hand, so he could change settings while playing.
A few peers checked Varitone out (Benny Golson, Lee Konitz…), though only Sonny Stitt came close to Harris’s level of commitment – as on Just the Way It Was, Stitt live in Baltimore 1971. Close, but not that close.
Varitone’s calling card was Eddie’s masterful “Listen Here,” recorded in 1966, and remade in a longer, superior version the following year. The secret of his success: He doesn’t lay the effects on too thick, as he curls his horn around shapely, danceable shards of tenor funk. The muffled, bass-heavy timbre accentuated his peculiar back-of-the-throat attack, at odds with the reed-biting screech other funky tenors favor. “Listen Here,” he said, changed him from a jazz artist to a funk artist.
He had more tricks up his sleeve. He’d play trumpet with a saxophone mouthpiece (as on “Turbulence” from Excursions, a grabbag of ’60s outtakes and stretched out performances from the early ’70s). Or saxophone with a trombone mouthpiece. Sideman Ronald Muldrow meanwhile played guitorgan – guitar with organ effects. Harris also sang through the amplified horn, eerily, using a wah-wah pedal. On “Please Let Me Go” from 1972′s Eddie Harris Sings the Blues, he sounds like a cross between Richard Manuel on “Whispering Pines” and the ghost of a drunken Billie Holiday.
Harris was still churning out danceable electrosax ditties – “Funkorama,” “Is It In” – well into the ’70s, and albums such as Instant Death showed how lightly he wore the formula. But the background singers, strings and R&B horns that Harris and producers like the visionary Charles Stepney might use to sweeten his albums didn’t endear him to those jazz fans who felt besieged by pop. Harris, heedless, crossed the pond to record with Jeff Beck, half of Blind Faith and three-fifths of Yes on E.H. in the U.K. Those moves help explain why he was critically underrated at the time. Why I underrated him then: the disco dross of “Get On Up and Dance” and earworms like “I Need Some Money” I didn’t want stuck in my head.
In light of all that, it was easy to overlook Harris the explorer, to miss (until George Lewis pointed it out) that the Varitone work made him a pioneer of African American electronic music. Even before that, Harris had participated in Chicago’s Experimental Band, forerunner to the avant-garde AACM co-op, whose members he urged to work in all kinds of settings, for the experience.
Once you look, the parallels between Harris’s stuff and vanguard Chicago music start jumping out. His non-traditional performance techniques, the atmospheric improvising and African percussion on “Zambezi Dance” and the Sun Ra-diffuse “Nightcap” (both on Instant Death), a long solo tenor sequence on “Oleo” (Excursions) and the unaccompanied “Ooh” all mark him as a fellow traveler. For that matter, the (electric) pianist on Instant Death, Sings the Blues, “Turbulence” and “Listen Here Goes Funky” from Excursions, and the back half of 1963′s The Lost Album Plus the Better Half, is AACM honcho Muhal Richard Abrams, a sometime Harris sideman since the late 1950s. Eddie’s smart populist funk and electric saxophone also looked ahead to the rise of Steve Coleman and Greg Osby in the 1980s.
As Harris says in one of his Talking S–t monologues, “Some of the music we play is really not geared for your bumping enjoyment. It’s geared for you to think.” Beat. “So for those of you who don’t think too much…”
