TT 492: Roberta Flack FIRST TAKE
classic album from 1969
Welcome Eugene Holley, Jr. to Substack; I recommend subscribing to Sound and the Mainstream. Holley has a valuable remembrance of Roberta Flack.
See also Nelson George’s latest post, which considers Flack alongside three other recent losses, Gwen McCrae, Chris Jasper, and Jerry Butler.
Roberta Flack’s debut album First Take remains one of a kind. Flack’s astonishing singing is the highlight, of course, but musicians also dig the casual all-acoustic situation. First Take is the perfect title, as most of the tracks demonstrate the spontaneous flexibility of live performance — or the first take at a relaxed record session.
The core rhythm section is Flack on piano, Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Ron Carter on bass, and Ray Lucas on drums. On many of the tracks there are horn & string arrangements by William S. Fischer. (See footnote.) But those horn and string “sweetenings” are generally light, tasteful, and perhaps added after the vocal and rhythm tracks were done. The dominant message is one of a band recording.
"Compared to What" (Gene McDaniels) Les McCann discovered Roberta Flack singing in Washington D.C.; he got her this record date for Joel Dorn’s Atlantic label and wrote the liner notes. A few months after the Flack session, McCann recorded a version of “Compared to What” in Montreux with Eddie Harris that would be a big hit. On the Flack record, Ron Carter is large and in charge; drummer Lucas plays a light and flexible backbeat. This track is heard during the opening credits of the 2015 Guy Ritchie reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I saw that movie in the theater, where Flack and Carter sounded just amazing coming through the big speakers.
"Angelitos Negros" (Andrés Eloy Blanco/Manuel Álvarez Maciste) Both of the opening tracks are protest songs; "Angelitos Negros" is from a 1948 movie of the same name starring Pedro Infante, who sings the song in the film. Blanco was a noted Venezuelan poet and the lyric criticizes those with darker skin who get ahead in life and then only honor white people: “You paint all our churches/and fill them with beautiful angels/but you never do remember,/to paint us a black angel.” The band strums and marches in a Spanish idiom, and Flack’s Spanish seems perfect.
"Our Ages or Our Hearts" (Robert Ayers/Donny Hathaway) The topic is a love between someone younger and someone older. Donny Hathaway would do quite a lot with Roberta Flack, and there are two Hathaway pieces on First Take. The opening chorus has full horns and strings, but after the drums come in — Lucas on light brushes and a backbeat with side-stick — the band offers a superlative and intimate feel.
"I Told Jesus" (Traditional) A slow waltz with Flack’s piano and Carter’s bass just easing along the basic form. Flack’s voice raises and breaks. A powerful and spiritual performance. Interesting to compare with Marian Anderson’s earlier recording of the same lyric, “If He Change My Name.”
"Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" (Leonard Cohen) Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen had already released recordings of this folksy torch song. Flack’s voice soars over a countrified rhythm section and strings. Her piano chorus sounds like the future Keith Jarrett on Jarrett’s “God Bless the Child.” Ron Carter is having fun. This truly outstanding bass performance on a pop record pairs with Richard Davis on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, recorded three months earlier.
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (Ewan MacColl) A huge hit; it remains in unique and luminous class of one. How many new lovers have listened to this together and then felt even more in love? Bucky Pizzarelli supplies amazing guitar glamour, while Ray Lucas does not play a beat, instead simply shimmering on the cymbals like a future ECM drummer. Ron Carter bows the last few notes.
"Tryin' Times" (Donny Hathaway/Leroy Hutson) Time for a 12-bar blues from Hathaway. The lyrics document social unrest; Carter stays right in that groove with Flack’s piano and Lucas’s side-stick.
"Ballad of the Sad Young Men" (Fran Landesman/Tommy Wolf) The album closes with a melancholy song from the 1958 musical The Nervous Set. It’s a bit in the tradition of Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” and like the Strayhorn might be especially meaningful for the gay community. Flack starts the piece absolutely straight before building into a space more like jazz.
The aesthetic is unified, but the set list is diverse. An astonishing album.
Footnote: William S. Fischer would have turned 90 on March 5. (The first version of this post suggested he was still alive, I will update the Wikipedia page myself.) He is seldom in the conversation these days but at the time of First Take he was a vital member of a certain scene, especially on Atlantic records, apparently part of a brain trust with Joel Dorn and Les McCann. Joe Zawinul featured Fischer compositions on The Rise and the Fall of the Third Stream from 1968. (I wonder if the Austrian Zawinul viewed Fischer as a kind of African-American opposite number, someone conversant in jazz, classical, and funk?) Fischer’s own 1970 album Circles is a satisfying listen, grungy moody black rock/funk with Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, guitarists Eric Weissberg and Hugh McCracken, vocalist Bill Robinson, and written parts for five cellists alongside Fischer’s esoteric synth improvisations. The composer of “Compared to What,” Eugene McDaniels, put out Outlaw in 1970 with the First Take rhythm section of Carter/Lucas and Fischer as music director.
I don’t quite command the references to put together a worthy 90th birthday post, but someone more hip to the nexus of black music, pop, and Atlantic records circa 1970 could take up that challenge…
"First Take" was one of 10 records Ron Carter singled out in 2016 when I asked him to choose his most memorable sessions. Here's what he said about it in the interview that ran in the Detroit Free Press.
Carter: She got discovered by Les McCann in Washington D.C., and they decided to make this record. As I got the story later, her working trio came to New York and they spent a couple of days trying to make this record. For whatever reasons, it didn't work out, so I got a call to come by and do this record with a young singer named Roberta Flack playing with this New York band. Ray Lucas on drums — an incredible drummer — Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar and some wonderful arrangements. That record put her on the map.
Stryker: Who came up with the bass line on "Compared to What"?
Carter: That was her idea, and it was my job to make it work. The bass lines were some of her choices and some of my choices. She's also a wonderful piano player. When singers ask how to get better I say listen to singers who play piano — Carmen McRae, Shirley Horn, Roberta Flack, Sarah Vaughan, Blossom Dearie.
Eugene McDaniels is such an interesting figure. In the early sixties, as Gene McDaniels, he was a singer in style of Brook Benton, Jerry Butler (RIP), etc. and then did a huge 180. His follow-up to Outlaw, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, is a funky, dark masterpiece with, among others, Miroslav Vitous and Alophose Mouzon.