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We lost Lou on November 9, 2024. Here’s a brief remembrance with more to follow in an extended feature.
Lou Donaldson was in on the birth of hard bop, and was one of the major early progenitors of soul jazz into the bargain. Deeply rooted in the blues from the outset, his adoption of a funky, soulful boogaloo style in the 1960s made him one of the most commercially successful musicians on the jazz scene, and if the trademark grooves and simplified harmonic explorations often meant a sacrifice of anything very unusual or surprising in his music, that was a sacrifice he was prepared to make in order to connect with his audience. The critics grumbled, but, as he told me in an interview in 1989, as far as he was concerned, he was not so much stepping aside from jazz as taking up his musical heritage.
“If you say I moved away from jazz when I had hit records, then I’ll say what are you talking about? In fact, I’ll say you’re crazy! The way I play, the way my band played, that’s what jazz is! Now, a lot of musicians maybe got more advanced technically and started doing a lot of other things, but the basic sound, the jazz sound, that’s what we’ve been playing. Some people, some of those critics, they just didn’t know what was happening. If a record gets hot and gets to be a hit, they yell that it’s commercial, it’s a sellout or something. But it’s not really that.
And I’ll tell you something else – nobody really knows how to make a hit. If I knew, I would have had a hit way before I did -I wouldn’t have waited so long! That kind of thing is down to luck – you put your record out, and then you find out how people are going to react. Let me give you an example – you know my tune ‘Alligator Boogaloo’? That was one of the biggest hits we ever had. But do you know how much we planned that? Zero. Nothing. We just made that tune at the end of the date, you know, it was like, let’s have some fun at the studio. But it was more successful than all the other stuff we did for that damned record!”
As quoted in Kenny Mathieson, Cookin’ Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-1965 [2002]