You may have heard about the new (yes, new) Joe Williams CD. There has been a lot of talk about it. No wonder.
In the winter of 1964, Williams had an engagement with a magnificent rhythm section at Pio’s a club in Providence, Rhode Island. The weather was so bad that Williams, pianist Junior Mance, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Mickey Roker were afraid that no one would come. A few isteners did, despite the storm. So did someone else. In the liner notes for Havin’A Good Time, producer Joel Dorn tells the story. Here is a part of it.
…the city got hit with a blizzard. But blizzard or not, enough people showed up so that Joe had to perform. When Joe and the guys got there, to their surprise, they found Ben Webster, saxophone in hand, sitting in a corner. They didn’t know he was in town and, obviously, had no plans to play with him. Ben asked if he could sit in. Well, who wouldn’t want Ben Webster on the band stand with ’em? Ben, who by this time had stopped drinking was, according to Junior, “sweet and gentle.”
For me, this album is what jazz is really about. It’s what happens when world class players get together and do what cats have been doing for decades, make magic on the spot. Thank God somebody was runnin’ a tape.
There is little to add to Joel’s enthusiastic report, except to say that this is one of the best albums of Williams’s post-Count Basie career, the trio is superb, and Webster worked himself into the arrangements as if he had rehearsed with the band. The early sixties was not a particularly happy time for Webster, certainly not a high point in his career. You’d never know it from his playing that night in Providence.
If you think of Joe Williams as a great blues singer, you’re right, but he was also a master of the art of the ballad. He demonstrates both facets here. To mention only two examples, he gives a booting performance of one of his staples, Joe Turner’s “Kansas City Blues,” and a touching one of “That’s All,” a song he tells his audience he doesn’t know very well. He shouldn’t have spilled the beans. They never would have guessed.