Full disclosure: not being a jazz buff, I had never heard of Lou Donaldson who died this week at the ripe old age of 98. This is his masterpiece.
A saxman rather than a batsman, he nevertheless enjoyed a “good innings” though he would probably have liked to see a century on the board.
Looking him up, I discovered he was a sax man – “an excellent bop altoist influenced by Charlie Parker, but with a more blues-based style of his own.”
Then I took to YouTube and this easy-swinging slice of bebop (OK, I had to look that up) called Blues Walk was the first I found. And, apparently, recognised as his “undisputed masterpiece.”
So I must have remarkably good taste, even when it comes to genres with which I am not so familiar. Either that or YouTube’s algorithms have triumphed again.
Recorded in the year of my birth, it reminds me of the sort of soundtrack you’d find in a Sixties heist movie, perhaps as a gang make elaborate preparations for their forthcoming theft.
I wonder if some jazz aficionado like Tim Cowen is now going to tell me that that’s exactly what it was composed for and that I’ll have heard it in something like The Italian Job.
Donaldson started playing clarinet when he was 15, soon switching to the alto and started recording for Blue Note in 1952, with a fully-formed sound by the age of 25.
This tune, recorded with Herman Foster on piano, Peck Morrison on bass, Dave Bailey on drums and the newly recruited Ray Barretto on congas, is the title track of the 1958 album regarded as his finest.
He was a bandleader from the mid-’50s to the early 2020s, with a bluesy style that often veered into soul-jazz (and, later and less successfully, into funk), incorporating congas and often preferring an organist to a pianist.