Album Review by Scott Yanow

            A versatile and passionate saxophonist, David Halliday has performed with everyone from Randy Brecker and Wycliffe Gordon to Galactic and the Utah Symphony. He has recorded regularly on his Lone Peak Sound label during the past 15 years.

            The music on Fat Soul was recorded in 2003 and has been available as a CD ever since but recently made its debut on digital. Halliday, heard on tenor and alto, is joined by guitarist Justin Cash (who has three vocals), bassist Ben Johnson, drummer Stephen Lyman and, on two selections, guest guitarist Mark Fasbender.

            The wide-ranging program gives one a strong sampling of the talents of this group. The set begins with Henry Mancini’s famous television theme song “Peter Gunn.” After the melody, the group excels on the rhythmic one-chord vamp with Halliday taking a particularly passionate tenor solo. He is also in top form on Bill Frisell’s atmospheric “Strange Meeting” (which has a dreamlike melody) and a high-energy and cooking romp on Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean A Thing” which includes a duet passage with drummer Lyman.

            David Halliday caresses the melody of “Brazil” and puts plenty of feeling into the famous and soulful melody of ‘Harlem Nocturne.” Justin Cash contributed the next two songs, taking a good time vocal over the funky beat of “Mama Said” and singing on the country-tinged “You And Me.” The program concludes with the bluesy “Lucky Lou,” a rollicking version of the early Ray Charles hit “Mess Around,” and “Amazing Grace” which is transformed into a surprisingly electrified soundscape while always keeping the melody in mind.

            The performances on Fat Soul may be 17 years old but the music is as fresh and lively as when it was originally released. It is easily recommended.

Scott Yanow, jazz journalist/historian 

Liner Notes by David R. Halliday

In his seminal 1987 book Jazz: Myth and Religion(Oxford University Press), scholar Neil Leonard discusses jazz as a quasi-religion: its musicians as charismatic prophets; its critics and historians as priests; its fans as communicants; its lore as myth-like “tales of origins and heroes.”  Perhaps not surprising, then, is the fact that Fat Soul, the eponymous name of this album, should not only evoke contemporary vernacular but also allude to the best-selling religious book of all time:

The soul of the sluggard desireth and hath nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat (Proverbs 13:4, KJV).

Fat Soul was a jazz quartet consisting of four diligent musicians – leader/saxophonist David Halliday, guitarist/vocalist Justin Cash, bassist Ben Johnson, and drummer Steve Lyman – whose primary musical dedication is to jazz. The venue where they played regularly during the first decade of the new millennium – the Zanzibar – was a jazz club, featuring live jazz six nights a week in physical surroundings consummately conducive to experiencing live jazz in all its creative energy, infinite subtlety, inspiring spontaneity, and soul-healing power.  The club featured subdued, indirect lighting, stylish décor, comfortable seating, and a well-lit corner stage upon which sat a fine Yamaha baby grand piano, with such added perks as a well-stocked bar and a kitchen that prepared satisfying food – a veritable sanctuary for true jazz believers – at least potentially so.

But these physical surroundings drew a mixed clientele: on the one hand, a group of “diligent” true jazz believers – local musicians and zealous jazz fans who came specifically to listen; on the other, a group with scant appreciation for the music who came mainly to socialize and party in a “cool” place.

This latter group of unappreciative “sluggards” presented a challenge for the performing jazz musicians, who had to play over their raucous blather.  This problem was not unique to the Zanzibar; it is replicated in clubs across the country and only the most exclusive venues have the physical and/or fiscal capacity to solve the problem by erecting physical barriers between the listeners and the louts or by enforcing “shut-up-and-listen” policies during performances.  Sadly, in most cases, the louts must be accommodated as a necessary evil without whose money – paid in cover charges and the purchase of food and drinks – these clubs could not pay their bills.

At the Zanzibar, Fat Soul adapted to this situation by altering their repertoire to include tunes outside the usual jazz offerings – themes from popular TV shows, New Orleans R&B, Texas and Chicago blues, gospel, funk, Latin, and pop songs – which still allowed the band to exercise their jazz chops on generally more familiar or accessible music, played more aggressively, often with an insistent backbeat.  Some samples of this approach appear here, beginning with the album’s opening performance, Henry Mancini’s theme from the 1960s TV detective series, “Peter Gunn.”

This performance opens with bassist Johnson and drummer Lyman boldly laying down the song’s powerful signature groove, into which Halliday’s tenor saxophone intrudes like a jungle creature with a piercing scream capable of startling even the most self-absorbed sluggard and immediately launches into Mancini’s hard-charging melody and an energetic improvised solo.  Cash’s gritty funk/rock-inspired guitar solo follows and the two of them join forces to close with a restatement of the melody.

Halliday’s big “Texas tenor” sound is on full display here – a sound that served him well in his years on the road with blues diva E.C. Scott, gigs with the Temptations and the Four Tops, as a member of the New Orleans funk band Galactic, on his forthcoming funk album with the Big Easy’s premiere drummer Stanton Moore (to be released this year), and on guitarist Corey Christiansen’s recent soul jazz albums Roll With Itand Outlaw Tractor.  But there’s more than that sound to the overall appeal of Halliday’s musicianship.

As Billy Kerr wrote in his Saxophone Journalreview of Christiansen’sRoll With It, “Halliday’s playing matches the music perfectly, but make no mistake, he is no ordinary R&B player.  His saxophone playing and his music are at the highest levels, great dark, fat sound, wonderful time and feel, as well as a clean, fast technique. Judging from this recording, I’m sure he could play any kind of music.”

Indeed, Halliday’s versatility extends beyond that big R&B sound through the sensitive, straight-ahead jazz ballad-playing on his album Dreamsvilleto his gig as a featured soloist with the Utah Symphony, performing John Williams’s knuckle-busting virtuoso piece for alto saxophone “Joy Ride,” from the score of the film Catch Me If You Can.

Halliday also plays alto on “Strange Meeting,” the second track on the present album, beginning with a statement of Bill Frisell’s haunting melody followed by a scintillating improvisation over an inspired accompaniment that evokes musically the complementary principles of Taoist cosmology: Yin (the fluid undulations of Cash’s sustained guitar chords) and Yang (the structurally explicit insistence of Lyman’s four-to-the-bar side-stick on his snare).  All this then gives way to Cash’s expertly constructed guitar solo, which builds to a soaring climax preceding his flurry of descending notes into Halliday’s restatement of the melody.

And on the subject of Cash’s guitar solo, a shout out must be given to Mark “Big Finger” Fasbender, recording engineer, proprietor of Barking Pig Recording Studios, and master of the grossest politically incorrect humor this side of Gavin McInnis, who rummaged through a secret storage closet and brought out a big Marshall amp, which he tweaked with some sort of esoteric wizardry to capture perfectly Cash’s playing on this track.  Listening to it long after the album’s release, Halliday lamented that he should have given Big Finger a co-producer credit for the track.  

The album’s third track again features Halliday’s alto on a bebop romp through Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” A high point here comes midway through Halliday’s improvisation, when Cash and Johnson lay out, leaving Halliday to contend with drummer Lyman in a percussive, pyrotechnical battle royale.

On the album’s fourth track, Halliday’s tenor in the song’s verse takes us to a peaceful Rio beach at sunrise before the throng of sun worshippers appear, to frolic on the sand, at which point the band launches into one of the most familiar Latin tunes of all time, “Brazil,” the infectious samba popularized in the 1943 film The Gang’s All Hereby “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, shimmying and shaking with all that fruit on her head.

Judging by listener responses, the fifth track here, “Harlem Nocturne,” is this album’s crown jewel – a distinction attributable not only to Fat Soul’s powerful performance (more about that later) but also to the song itself – a song whose lasting appeal is evident in the fact that since its composition, in 1939, it has been recorded by more than 500 artists in a remarkable variety of styles: big band versions by Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Johnny Otis, Stan Kenton, Harry James, and Woody Herman, among many others; Latin versions by Tito Puente, Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann, and David Sanborn; a virtuoso electric guitar performance by Danny Gatton, who labeled his style “red neck jazz”; a dorky “space age lounge” version by Esquivel; vocal versions by Mel Torme, Ernestine Anderson and The Eddie Thomas Singers; blues and jazz harmonica versions by Charlie Musselwhite and Toots Thielemans, respectively; a ska version (the Jamaican precursor to reggae) by The New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble; an “elevator music” version by the king of that genre, Mantovani; and a version by Mink DeVille, the house band at CBGB, the East Village incubator of punk rock in the late 70s. 

A version of “Harlem Nocturne” by Spike Jones, available on a YouTube collection by Little Miss Lounge, appears there under the heading “Crime Scene,” subtitled “Spies, Thighs, and Private Eyes,” suggesting the song’s shared ambience with the “pulp” crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, whose hard-boiled detective heroes transitioned inevitably into the cycle of American crime films of the 40s and 50s known as film noir. Spillane’s hero Mike Hammer is the protagonist of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly(1955), widely considered to be the “apex of noir style in the 1950s,” and it was only a matter of time before tough guy Hammer made his way to TV, which he did twice, in a late 50s series starring Darren McGavin, and a mid-80s series starring Stacey Keach, which enjoyed a revival in the late 90s – all of which featured as their musical theme “Harlem Nocturne.”    

Earle Hagen composed “Harlem Nocturne’ while in Ray Noble’s band in honor of Duke Ellington and Duke’s most famous alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and numerous alto players have put their stamp on the song since then, including Hodges himself, Noble’s alto player Jack Dumont, Rene Bloch in the Johnny Otis version, along with such giants of the instrument as Earl Bostic, Lou Donaldson, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Criss, and David Sanborn.

But since the 1950s “Harlem Nocturne” has mainly been identified with a big tenor saxophone sound, a phenomenon that began with a recording of the song made by the Viscounts, an instrumental combo featuring Harry Haller on tenor, which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and again upon its rerelease in 1965. Since then a long list of tenor players have recorded the song, including Illinois Jaquet, Georgie Auld, Sam “the Man” Taylor, Eddie Harris, King Curtis, Sil Austin, Sam Butera, Booker Ervin, Boots Randolf, And Big Jay McNeely among others.  

Into this illustrious company David Halliday now steps, with a performance of “Harlem Nocturne” that does not disappoint.  Making full use of his big tenor sound, he states the melody with authority and precision over the forceful accompaniment of his rhythm section, which gives way to a brief, bluesy guitar solo by Cash, after which Halliday improvises the kind of passionate solo that invariably captivated the Zanzibar crowd – listeners and  louts alike. He ends by restating the melody with stark, anthem-like deliberation, evoking in his final notes the enticing thrills, the lonely anonymity, and the potential menace of the urban night.

On “Mama Said,” the sixth track of this album, Fat Soul gets funky. An original (music and lyric) by the band’s guitarist, Justin Cash, the performance begins with Ben Johnson’s aggressive electric bass and Steve Lyman’s layered drumming, laying down an infectious groove, which Halliday enhanced with overdubbed tambourine and cowbell, thus providing a compelling context for the song’s melodic hook, Cash’s vocal and gritty guitar solo, along with Halliday’s honking, percussive tenor improvisation.

The album’s seventh track, “You and Me,” another Justin Cash original, extols the simple joy of young love in all its sweetness and innocence – refreshing sentiments in this jaded age of damaged and fractured relationships. Written with his wife Annie in mind, Cash reflects here, over the tropical atmosphere conjured by Lyman’s imaginative percussion, on some of the places to which he and Annie might journey to enjoy sun and sand, palm trees and the “rhythms of the sea,” or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, “where the music flows down every street” – mere flights of fancy that, for the moment must remain so, because this couple lacks the monetary means to fulfill them.  But it doesn’t matter because all Justin and Annie need “is love and you and me” – “Let’s take a walk right on down our street/I’ll pick you a rose and we’ll smile at the people that we meet/we’ll both know there ain’t much that we need/wherever we go all we need is love and you and me” . . . Simple? Yes. Sweet? Yes. Innocent? Yes.  But naïve? No, not, at least for Justin and Annie, who a decade and a half later have three children and are still happily married. The ever-creative recording engineer and proprietor of Barking Pig Studios, Mark “Big Finger” Fasbender was inspired to make a musical contribution to this track and, with the unanimous approval of the band, pulled out his own guitar and picked a countrified solo that fit the proceedings perfectly, followed by Halliday’s alto solo, which gives a subtle nod to Ornette Coleman – nothing like a bit of counter intuitive but surprisingly apt musical diversity.       

“Lucky Lou,” the album’s eighth track, distinctive for the sliding notes integral to its melody, was composed as an instrumental by Chicago bluesman Jody Williams, who backed such luminaries as Charles Brown, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush, and Bo Diddley as well as leading his own bands on guitar and vocals. Williams recorded “Lucky Lou” in 1957 for the Chess label in Chicago with Willie Dixon on bass and Kansas City tenor saxophonist Harold Ashby, who played in Duke Ellington’s band from 1968 to 1975.  Halliday eagerly assumes Ashby’s role on the present recording, growling out the blues with passion and authority.  Not to be outdone, Cash matches Halliday’s prowess with a searing guitar solo that blends all the rawness, discipline, speed, and imagination that made him a Zanzibar favorite.

“Mess Around,” this album’s ninth track, first recorded by Ray Charles in 1953, later became a staple of New Orleans R&B piano masters Professor Longhair and Dr. John.  The song’s structure is a basic twelve-bar blues with anticipatory breaks on the first four bars and a sanctified beat on the following eight.  Fat Soul takes the tune at a rousing tempo, with solos by Halliday, hinting at the style known as yakkety-sax, Cash, in a Latin vein, and Big Finger, again showing off his country chops. 

About this album’s tenth track, in the title of his book about “Amazing Grace,” Steve Turner calls it “America’s most beloved song.”  That may be an exaggeration, but “Amazing Grace” might well be America’s most beloved hymn, included in over 1000 published hymnals according to the Dictionary of American Hymnology, the Library of Congress has collected over 3,000 recorded versions of it, and it is estimated to be performed about 10 million times annually, here and abroad.  Ironically, the song’s origin was not American but British, and that is but one of several ironies connected to the history of “Amazing Grace.”

The song’s lyric was written and first published in the 1770s by John Newton, an erstwhile slave trader who, during a life-threatening storm at sea, underwent a religious conversion and eventually became an Anglican clergyman and ardent abolitionist, allying himself with William Wilberforce, the parliamentarian whose ultimately successful twenty year struggle to ban the slave trade in the British Empire is chronicled in the 2006 film, appropriately titled “Amazing Grace,” in which Albert Finney plays the role of Newton.  Set to the traditional melody of “New Britain” by William Walker, the words and music to “Amazing Grace,” as we know it today, were first published in 1847, coinciding with the latter years of the Second Great Awakening and becoming a staple of popular revival meetings and churches, both black and white.  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the song into her 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which profoundly influenced the abolitionist movement in America and, in the twentieth century “Amazing Grace” has been famously performed in a black gospel style by numerous singers, including Sister Rosetta Tharp, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and the black South African Soweto Gospel Choir.  But the song has been every bit as popular among white country singers, with an abundance of recordings by the likes of Johnny Cash, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Alan Jackson, and Willie Nelson.  But the song has been recorded in several other styles, as well.

Louis Armstrong, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Hubert Laws, Joey Alexander, and Marcus Miller have recorded instrumental jazz versions of “Amazing Grace”, with interpretations by the Byrds and Rod Stewart adding to the mix.  Two singles of the song have landed on the Billboard Hot 100 – and here lies another irony.  The first was folk singer Judy Collins’s 1970 release, which peaked at #15 and remained on the charts for fifteen weeks.  For Collins, who marched against the Vietnam War, which at the time was still raging, “Amazing Grace” served as an anti-war – even anti-military – protest.  How ironic, then, is the fact that the other version to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 was by a military band, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, senior Scottish regiment of the British Army, which peaked at #11 in 1972 and stayed in the Hot 100 for eleven weeks.

Fat Soul’s performance of “Amazing Grace” begins with Cash’s meditative statement of the melody on unaccompanied guitar, giving way on the last note to Lyman, who expertly using his bass drum to great advantage, lays down a powerful, bare bones funk beat, over which guitar and horn combine with Big Finger’s studio tricks to lift the proceedings into a mysterious, otherworldly realm of overlapping echoes that suggest both the chaos of Newton’s near-death crisis at sea and the mystery of redeeming grace that he credited with saving his sorry ass from sin and death.  Cash then sings the song’s first verse over Halliday’s bagpipe-like drone and the two then launch into a wild, back-and-forth improvisation that brings the performance to a triumphant climax, before receding back into a meditative denouement, evoking the calm after a storm. 

“Amazing Grace” was Fat Soul’s customary closer at the Zanzibar, rousing the crowd to a state of tempestuous excitement and leaving them wanting more.