“Soul Power!

”: The Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s “Country Preacher”

“…when you have real change, everybody’s thing begin to change, teacher begin to
teach a new lesson, preacher begin to preach a new sermon; and the musician also
tries to capture the new thing, so that we might have melody, and have rhythm as we
do our thing…”

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, the “Country Preacher” the Cannonball Adderley

Quintet’s 1969 live recording makes titular reference to, speaks these words as he

introduces the band, ending in an exhortation to those gathered to “walk tall, walk

tall, walk tall!” The band counts off as Jackson finishes, dropping in on time with the

cadence of the Reverend’s sermonic preamble – seamlessly blending song and

sermon into, perhaps, that “real change” Jackson describes. In this way, these

opening moments of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s album mirror the whole

sound of the record: a bluesy blend of soul-jazz that, despite its powerful creative

invention never forgets its roots in the foundational forms of African American

music, nor the rural origin of these forms – an emphasis on the country in “Country

Preacher”, perhaps. The blues, of course, loom large throughout “Country Preacher”,

but this is no sentimental retreading of worn musical paths. As Cannonball himself

explains at one point during his own considerable sermonizing on the record, the

blues forms the vessel for a “soulful excursion” not of staid musical nostalgia, but of

a productive and propulsive force, combining elements of the blues, hard-bop, and

gospel among others, leaping “into the past, the present, and the future of our

music”.
 The audience gathered is not a congregation in the strictest sense of the term,

though they are assembled in a church and lead by Reverend Jackson. The recording

captures a meeting of Operation Breadbasket, the Chicago-based economically

minded wing of Dr. Martin Luther King’s national operations - of which he gave a

great deal of focus in the months before his assassination, just a little more than a

year before the album was recorded. Shorty before his death, King had appointed

Rev. Jackson as National Director of Operation Breadbasket, and the Adderley

Quintet’s record is in many ways a tribute to Jackson’s leadership of the

organization, as Cannonball’s message in the album’s liner notes explicitly states. 1

Breadbasket was a project aimed at the regeneration of inner-city neighborhoods,

and as such incorporated a deep diversity of, if not class, ethnicity and national

origin. Like many of Dr. King’s organizations, often participants found their way to

the groups via their own churches – as the recording testifies, this is an audience

familiar with the black church and its participatory nature. Thus, the Breadbasket

audience plays a crucial role in the final sound of the record – not just as

enthusiastic participant in the band’s call and response, or clapping along with the

infectious beat of “Hummin’”, though those aspects are central, but as providing a

very special kind of reception for the musical ideas of the Quintet and the moral and

political notions enunciated by Rev. Jackson. What emerges is a gleeful but deeply

serious group conversation between players, audience and the wider social,

economic and political terrain in which groups like Operation Breadbasket, and the

Cannonball Adderley Quintet, act.

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 “Country Preacher” finds the Cannonball Adderley Quintet at the top of its

game, which had for some time been a kind of combination of bop and funk, with

clear nods to the blues and other musical forms, often referred to as soul-jazz.

Cannonball’s alto saxophone, equally capable of smooth, full lines of striking beauty

and concision as well as explosive be-bop pyrotechnics of virtuosity, is paired with

his brother Nat Adderley’s cornet, which Nat blows in ways more profoundly and

explicitly aligned with the blues, and with less pyrotechnics perhaps, than his older

brother. The third main soloist of the band, important composer and longtime

Adderley band member, Joe Zawinul, a player of no less virtuosity than Cannonball,

who in this recording plays a very overdriven Wurlitzer electric piano, producing

sounds of striking warmth and presence. Webster Booker, in his first official

recording session with the band, plays the string bass largely in service to the

Quintet’s deep groove, soloing really only during “Afro-Spanish Omelet”. And finally,

on drums, another recent addition to the band, Roy McCurdy, who like Booker, had

matured in Sonny Rollins’ bands and recently gotten hired by the Adderley’s. 2

“Walk Tall”, and its aforementioned lead-in by Rev. Jackson, has a big groove

that pounds in a kind of celebratory cadence, interrupted by triumphant, yet

poignant, refrains by the Adderley brothers blowing in unison. The song has a kind

of ‘we-have-overcome” feel to it, with little soloing save for Zawinul’s overdriven

electric piano, which emphasizes short funky riffs that don’t outshine the groove.

Though Joe Zawinul’s composition “Country Preacher” is somewhat

musically distinct from “Walk Tall”, it shares a great deal in inspiration and
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sentiment. Cannonball opens with a customarily eloquent introduction in which he

explains the band’s adulation of Jackson, the ‘country preacher’, and describes the

song as Zawinul’s “concept of what the country preacher feels like to him.” Zawinul

kicks off the song with a simple melodic pattern that is poignant in ways more

obvious than the proud “Walk Tall”. Cannonball plays a sweet, vibrato-heavy and

bluesy solo that serves as a kind ramp to the, again like “Walk Tall”, refrain-like,

triumphant blasts of the Adderley’s in unison. After the refrain, which in its brevity

is really more of a long turn-around, a dramatic rest requests the audience’s

attention and is eventually broken by the return of Zawinul’s poignant Wurlitzer

pattern – and they go crazy. The tune is short, and in many ways sounds similar to a

piece of one of Rev. Jackson’s speeches: unassuming, syncopated argumentation

rising to a crescendo of both (often ‘country’ and righteous) rhetoric and audience

response. The response of the audience here is matched only by “Hummin’”, as the

Breadbasket crowd seems to see their leader well represented in the Austrian-born

Zawinul’s composition.

“Hummin’” offers the first opportunity for the Quintet’s soloists to do their

thing. Nat, Cannonball and Zawinul all take extended voyages over the infectious

groove laid by the rhythm section. The audience is moved to clapping along

immediately, and in fact so is what must be the house band of Operation

Breadbasket, which can be heard in the final seconds of the song playing along - at

least an electric guitar and perhaps a tambourine. The song is also notable for

Cannonball’s playing of a soprano saxophone, something he does nowhere else on

the record. Nat solos first, and the blues is omnipresent here. Loud, brash and
physical is how Nat dances over the heavy, yet simple, groove, with an ever-present

eye on the melody.

Like Louis Armstrong, Nat solos in ways very similar to the ways he sings:

staying close to a bluesy or rootsy melodic idea, without showy pyrotechnics or

attention-grabbing bop licks like his brother often played, but with a physical

presence and a strong dedication to the affective core of the song. On “Oh, Babe”

Cannonball introduces Nat as the group’s “person in charge of talking about the

blues”, as Nat provides the set’s sole, non-spontaneous vocal. In both his cornet solo

on “Hummin’” and his vocal here, he eventually works his way to a full-on scream,

and it is a testament to his style’s funky physicality that it just seems only natural in

both instances. These screams, and aspects of the solos that contain them, have a

kind of considered and cool take on a Lightin’ Hopkins-style ragged exuberance, and

the crowd loves it. “Please Mr. Nixon, don’t cut that welfare off on me babe”, sings

Nat, and Operation Breadbasket’s audience responds so warmly that its obvious

they feel the same about his microphone. “Go on, Joe! Tell us,” shouts one

enthusiastic audience member.

Cannonball has an altogether different take on soloing than his brother.

Endowed with the kind of bop chops that made him a Jazz force to be reckoned with,

Cannonball occasionally can’t help but blast off into virtuoso land – lashing little

Charlie Parker-like figures into solos that are often much more oriented toward the

melodic than Bird’s, especially on this recording, but nonetheless carry just as much

obvious technical mastery. On “Hummin’”, Cannonball picks up where Nat leaves off,
starting, like Nat, in a groovy, melodic exaltation of the rhythm section’s smoking

groove, but he quickly melds this bluesy, melody-conscious posture with some

Cannonball-as-virtuoso fireworks.

Zawinul offers a wide-range of stylistic manifestations on “Country

Preacher”, from a kind of funk-comping, in which he plays percussive, simple lines in

tight formation with Booker and McCurdy, all the way to the freaked-out, modal

harmony-based soloing on “Afro-Spanish Omelet”. His overdriven sound is a

massive part of the distinctive sound of this record, and has often been sampled by

producers of the Hip-Hop era: a number of rap hits of the late 90’s featured Zawinul

eclectic piano samples, many directly from this “Country Preacher” session with its

abundant and heavy 4/4 grooves. His solo on “Oh Babe”, the only one in the tune,

walks a line between Thelonious Monk-style bop piano licks, and a sparse Count

Bassie-type comping. The effect of this combinatory creation is pure funk, but with a

kind of gleeful sophistication that arrests and affects in ways typical funk or blues

piano often does not.

“Afro-Spanish Omelet” is by far the most far-out song on the album, as

Cannonball says in introduction, “its four tunes, by all the kats in the band” that he

calls “something hip”, by which “you’ll probably be able to figure out what we mean

by Spanish Omelet.” More an ordered conversation between soloists in four

movements, allowing for applause between each segment, than one long song, this is

by far the least commercially viable, least clap-able, least soul-jazz tune on the

record. Despite its slight departure from the rest of the record’s groove-heavy tunes,
“Afro-Spanish Omelet” can be seen in musical and thematic continuity with the

whole spirit and sound of Operation Breadbasket: an argument about “black music”

as an inclusive balm: both a complaint against and a kind of salve for wounds carved

by the world’s social and economic ill to be healed by a jazz-like conversation, and

then concerted action, among those concerned, interested; hip. Nat begins blowing

an obviously Spanish, or North African sounding, unaccompanied solo. Here we hear

him playing different notes than his, usually blues-centered, soloing offers, but hints

of those African-American sounds breakthrough. Next, in his only real time in the

spotlight, Walter Booker plays an evocative bass etude, almost, that the crowd takes

to immediately. Here again is a kind synthesis of Afro-European and Afro-American

styles, with the mixing flavors of both making an argument as clearly as

Cannonball’s introduction. Things get (good) weird fast, as Zawinul takes his turn.

Playing his Wurlitzer all alone, Zawinul takes us on a similarly fusion-minded

musical journey in the form of an exploration of the sounds of quartel harmonies,

which give Zawinul’s piece an otherworldly, and at the same time quite Heimlich,

quality. Finally, Cannonball takes the tune to its logical conclusion in a kind of

Calypso-like, Island sound that another tenor sax player, Sonny Rollins employed to

great effect – at times with previous band members Booker and McCurdy.

Cannonball really swings here, and the crowd responds to his clear nod to the slave

–roots of sugar cane covered Caribbean islands and the resulting sounds.

The effect of the song is a kind of reverent tour of the world with “black

music” as our guide and our destination. But, as the song itself in some way argues,

as does Adderley in his introduction, that “black music” is not an essentialist, pure
category to be played only by “black” people, but a highly inclusive call to a kind of

listening-while-dancing accompanied by a necessary celebration of the music’s

source and history. As Zawinul’s large presence in the band as both a player and

composer demonstrates, the Adderley band, although quite explicitly concerned

with “black music”, means that phrase in a way that necessarily includes the

Austrian-born Zawinul. In this way, the Cannonball Adderley Quintet mirrors the

diverse and inclusive social message of Operation Breadbasket, and this parallel

feedback loop, in which the band feels the audience feeling the band, is hugely

important to the record’s raw charisma and funk. The whole set, Rev. Jackson and

all, is one big call and response, with the band and the audience locked in a dance of

mutual stimulation and reception and trading places every moment. The effect is

magical, and terribly powerful. Though some Jazz critics find “Country Preacher”,

had “sacrificed rhythmic subtlety and invention to commercial imperatives” as one

said, and as such didn’t merit serious attention among the Adderley canon; it is

precisely the combination of rigorous musicianship and hard-bop improvisation

with infectious, and funky grooves that give this record its deep appeal. 3 It’s two

months stint atop the Cashbox R&B charts speak to that, a rare event for a Jazz

record in the era of the Beatles own popular interpretations of “black music”. 4

Discography:
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4
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Quartet, Cannonball Adderley. Country Preacher "Live" at Operation Breadbasket. Blue
Note Records, 1994.

Bibliography:

Sheridan, Chris. Dis here: A Bio-Discography of the Cannonball Adderley. Greenwood