Customer Reviews

Alligator Bogaloo

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This album is one of the finest Jazz-Funk-Swing albums out there. Every song (except for one ballad) is a groove that will make your ears very happy. My personal favorite is track 4, Aw Shucks where Lonnie Smith makes the hammond organ scream....it gives me the shivers every time. I cant reccomend this album enough...it is a must have for anyone that remotley likes this type of music.

In this album, Lou Donaldson brings together an all-star group of players to create an amazing piece of music. Between the constant chemistry of Lonnie Smith and George Benson, as a result of previous years of work together, and the always groovin' Idris Muhammad (then Leo Morris) The rhythm section rocks just as hard as he, and corenetist Melvin Lastie Sr.,can. This is definitely one of my favorite, if not my all-time favorite,CDs.

I really dug this one, it is mellow and soulful and bluesy and funky all at the same time. Dr. Lonnie is something else on that church instrument of his and he and Lou always seem to make such a great team. And don't get me started on the performance of George Benson (just a young buck at the time) on guitar. Just listening to him on "One Cylinder", it blows me away every time.

This is a fantastic recording and a whole lot of fun. I enjoyed every song and every performance on the album. Besides Donaldson, Smith, and Benson the rest of the quintet is comprised of Melvin Laste, Sr. (cornet), and Leo Morris (drums). Morris does a great job and compliments the Dr. and Lou perfectly. Most Jazz fans will enjoy this one if not love it like I did. It is not hard bop, it's not light jazz, it's somewhere in the middle and it works to perfection in my humble opinion.

The alto / organ relationship between Lou Donaldson and Dr.Lonnie Smith is a particular interesting one in the history of jazz organ combos. The funkiness of the two gentleme playing together is outstanding on the late '60s Blue Note recordings of Lou. The deep blues feeling drenched in funky (r&b) rhythms is more present in Smiths B3 playing than Lou's recordings with Charles Earland and John Patton. Cornet in a jazz organ combo is more than rare but Melvin Lastie does his job very well (no jazz organ combo recordings registered with known cornet/trumpet players like Ruby Braff, Nat Adderly and Thad Jones. Braff with Heyman on theatre organ recordings don't count in the jazz organ genre). George Benson is a young George on this album and surprisingly fresh in his playing, like his first solo album with Lonnie Smith recorded a year before this recording on Columbia Records (It's Uptown With The George Benson Quartet). With originals both from Donaldson and Smith's pen and Freddy McCoy's "On cylinder", this album is a most welcome reissue and important for organ combo collectors.

Lou Donaldson is a funk expert who leads his hot shot quartet thru 5 groovers and one standard ballad. It is enjoyable and danceable,and as a matter of fact you can hear a lot of Lonnie Smith's pumping organ style in present day hiphop. So much of Lou's Blue Note output had been sampled on my favorite hiphop records that I had to know his sound better. I discovered that he don't just drop the jams but that he is a great soloist on the sax and very underrated. One Cylinder is the highlight of this album, but the whole thing is the main thang.

This album along with Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground are attributed in part with helping to launch the soul Jazz crossover. Of course, props and kudos to Horace Silver and Cannonball who were doing it years before, as well as fellow Lou Donaldson employee Big John Patton who was playing gospelly and soulful well before that - - but Alligator Boogaloo was one of the first tracks to cross the fine line from being funky to being FUNK. (The remainder of the album for the most part reverts back to Jazz, but has enough soul and grind to keep the party going, especially with Lonnie's screaming organ.) To this day the Alligator Boogaloo remains one of Donaldson's biggest selling records - - and he's still shocked about it. Lou points out, "It wasn't nothing but a 12 bar blues with a good name," ahhhhhhhh... but listen was that all it was ? Noooo way... this is butttt shaking music. Check out Blues Walk and EVERYTHING I PLAY GONNA BE FUNKY, as well as Lonnie Smith's albums (like Live at Club Mozambique) as well as Charles Earland, another graduate of the Lou Donaldson "school" of Soul Jazz ! ! !

I first heard the track alligator boogaloo on jazz comp CD, loved it but couldn't find the album and purchased midnight creeper instead. Loved that so much that I went on an all day quest until I found alligator boogaloo.

It is pure funky perfection from the cover photo of then popular model Peggy Moffitt(dressed in a Rudi Gernreich gown) to the down and dirty organ grooves. Who would have thought that an organ could sound so good.

This is funkier than any modern day acid jazz or hiphop concoction you can buy today. Check this out guys!!!

Good good stuff.

Lou Donaldson was responsible for introducing a lot of
talented young musicians in the sixties and seventies,
and his bands held an impressive list of great ones:
Lonnie Smith - King of the B3, Idris Muhammad, a
seriously funky drummer, and other first class acts
like Grant Green, Blue Mitchell, George Benson,
Melvin Sparks and Charles Earland.

"Alligator Bogaloo" is maybe the most recognized song
on here, but for me, "Aw Shucks!" and especially "One
Cylinder" stands out the most.
On "One Cylinder" the organ and the drums lay down a
wicked, slow beat with the horns and the guitar
coming in togheter, followed by some great solos.

One of the best descriptions of this kind of music comes
from the man himself:

"I don`t care what kind of style a group plays", Donaldson stated,
"as long as they settle into a groove where the rhythm keeps building
instead of changing around. It`s like the way an african hits a drum.
He hits it a certain way, and after a period of time, you feel it more
than you did when he first started. He is playing the same thing, but
the quality is different - it is settled into a groove. It`s like
settin`tobacco in a pipe. You put some heat on and make it expand.
After a while it`s there, it`s tight."

Now I'm a relative new commer to the music of Lou Donaldson but all I had to do was take one look at the back of this CD to realize it would be just the ticket for an introduction. Dr. Lonnie Smith is here on organ and the incomparable George Benson is here with his "boss guitar". One little spin of this album and it truly didn't disappoint. In 1967 the genre of soul jazz was beginning to morph into what ammounted to the earliest form of jazz-funk and this is where Lou and his quintet were at on this Blue Note release. The title song of this album says it all. The music is this rhythmically strong,stop and start funky groove with Smith's organ adding this precise,nimble puncuation in along with Melvin Lastie's likeminded cornet and Lou's soulful,sussinct alto sax. "One Cyliner" and "Aw Shucks!" both keep the funk percolating. It reminds me a little of Booker T & The MG's sometimes. There's also an appropriate influence of the African soul jazz music that was coming out at the same time in terms of the way many of the harmonic progressions are carried out. "The Thang" really brings that out too on a tune that has a heavier swing to it and a strong dancable dynamic as well. "Rev.Moses" puts a somewhat different spin on the affair with something of a gospel soul flavor to the sound. The album closes with this more traditional ballad in "I Want A Little Girl". One of the best parts about jazz in the mid 60's is the steps a lot of it,such as this album was taking in the development of the jazz-funk music that would become a primary style in the decade to come. Even though this album was performed acoustically on two track analog tape with no overdubs the same as so many of the classic Blue Note recordings it's very easy to see the direction this group was taking the music. Benson and Smith's playing on here are amazing. Benson's guitar playing in particular,on a number of these songs takes such center stage to the degree they sound like he's actually leading the band. All the musicians here are that way. Their styles are all so strong and individual that they can't help but leap out of the ensamble and be very self expressive. It all works out to be part of the great sense of working out an argument to music that jazz has always provided and especially at this historical juncture of the music that was saying a lot.

Every so often you purchase a CD because you heard a popular tune played on the jazz station. This is that CD. Alligator Boogaloo is not only popular on the station but it's a signature of the good times in jazz. This is a CD you'll play from start to finish.