Tuts Washington Live At Tipitina's '78 CD

Photographer: Mike Smith .
There's not a whole helluva lot of Tuts Washington out there, so any recorded legacy of the most important pre-Professor Longhair generation of New Orleans piano players has its value. He was an acknowledged influence on Fess, and while these performances are alleged to be board tapes, it sure sounds more like someone turned on a cassette recorder in the sound booth. You're right there in the front rows at Tipitina's with constant crowd chatter, the odd drink being slurped, some fairly dramatic volume fluctuations, and a house piano way closer to a honky tonk upright than a precisely tuned Steinway or Bosendorfer. It doesn't really matter, you know. Washington was one of those original, old-school songsters who mixed blues and ragtime, old-time popular standards, whatever it was people wanted to hear. Dr. John (and James Booker before him) can fall in that school and the trick is not caring about genres -- it's all about fluid melody, interpretation, rhythmic command, and common language. One can hear echoes of Cream's version of Robert Johnson's "Four Until Late" in the melody to "Miss Lucy's Blues," but who knows what song Tuts would have cited as a source, if any. Washington was more of a rolling and tumbling right-hand pianist than either Longhair or the pure boogie-woogie crew, and "Tuts Washington Blues" has some nice right-hand lines and moves. "Someone to Watch Over Me" receives a fine ballad treatment; "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Honky Tonk" are all but unrecognizable as such when Washington gets done with them (that's not a criticism). The romping "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "Poydras Street" both have a real antebellum ragtime feel and Tuts doesn't ignore the blues side, be it nodding to the Longhair left-hand foundation debt to Jimmy Yancey on "Yancey Special" or upping the tempo ante with "Pool Hall Blues." "Gravel Road Blues" is a seriously rockin' "Night Train" adaptation with memorable trills, and "After Hours" sports a naggingly familiar melody and a feel very evocative of its title before the tape fades out. The songwriting credits seem a little weird, and some of the song transitions are abrupt (to put it mildly), but the informal ambience creates a strong sense of dropping into a neighborhood club in New Orleans where the night's featured attraction was Washington. That's exactly what this performance was, and probably paints an accurate picture of how Tuts Washington spent most of his life as a working musician, playing solo piano in less than optimum conditions. There's always the New Orleans Piano Professor studio CD on Rounder for those who place higher priority on a more formal, pristine presentation and how perfect the piano sounds. ~ Don Snowden