The title track “I Just Want To Be Horizontal” reminds of that line in Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me’ – “I just feel like laying down.” That, combined with the presence of Bessie Smith’s “Kitchen Man” and Rosetta Howard’s “Candy Man” led this writer to believe we were getting a set of salacious tunes not unlike Maria Muldaur’s famous “Naughty, Bawdy, and Blue.” After all, Muldaur and octogenarian, legendary Jim Kweskin used to do similar material back in Kweskin’s Jug Band days. Yet, despite the presence of those tunes, I Just Want to be Horizontal is a broader swath of mostly Teddy Wilson’s 1930 recordings that featured a then relatively unknown Billie Holiday. In the past decade Kweskin has been doing projects with the versatile vocalist Samoa Wilson who here renders a mix of ballads, raunchy blues, and some better known swinging jazz standards.
Kweskin mentored Wilson during her early years and the two have played and sang the songs of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Mildred Bailey, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred Astaire, Grandpa Jones, and dozens more including many drawn from The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk music and other sources of traditional folk music, blues and early jazz. Assuming many know the storied career of Kweskin (it would take pages), Wilson is likely far less familiar. She came up in the Boston scene, brought along by Kweskin. Her duo, the Four O’ Clock Flowers, which explores gospel, blues, and jazz, with slide guitar maestro Ernie Vega, has become a staple of the thriving New York City folk community. In recent years she has formed another duo, Fatboy Wilson and Old Viejo Bones, with blues harmonicist Ernesto Gomez, a declaration of traditional blues and string band music, as well as original protest tunes written in a traditional style. Full length recordings from both projects can be found on Jalopy Records.
Now to this project, the brainchild of Kweskin and bassist Matthew Berlin. The songs Jim and Samoa selected for “Horizontal” were the subject of much discussion. “I Wished On The Moon,” “Easy To Love,” “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” “That’s Life I Guess,” and “Me Myself and I” were easy choices but somewhat obscure selections from the Teddy Wilson/Billie Holiday recorded songbook. “I Cried for You,” “Trust In Me,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Until The Real Thing Comes Along” and “Our Love Is Here To Stay” are more familiar, but Kweskin added back the original intro verses which had been dropped over time giving their treatment a surprisingly new, fresh sound. Also, since Kweskin is a renowned musicologist, he found some other unusual tunes to add to the mix. There’s the tender and abstract version of “Inchworm,” a song learned by many from Danny Kaye’s rendition in the film “Hans Christian Andersen” but also recorded by John Coltrane. Others, beyond the two mentioned in the opening paragraph, include the 1930s Hawaiian pop song “At Ebb Tide,” “After You’ve Gone,” the obscure ballad “Someone Turned The Moon Upside Down,” on the flip side of a 1950s Tony Bennett single, and the even more obscure title song of the album “I Just Want To Be Horizontal,” which comes from a video Jim found on the internet done by Bunty Pendleton.
Kweskin’s nine-piece band is study in diversity. Kweskin plays fingerpicking and rhythm guitar as well as some singing. Guitarist Titus Vollmer and altoist Paloma Ohm, of Munich, Germany had been neighbors and tenants of Kweskin’s while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston in the 1990s, and both played on albums recorded back then with Jim and Samoa. Matthew Berlin has known and recorded with both Jim and Samoa since the mid-’90s and worked in his own band with Samoa for two years playing standards and torch songs. Pianist Sonny Barbato and drummer Jeff Brown, have played together with Berlin since high school so they form a naturally tight rhythm section. Multi-instrumentalist (clarinet, fiddle, mandolin, alto sax) Dennis Lichtman is a pillar on the current New York traditional jazz scene, and he brought to the sessions Mike Davis, a player known for his elegant hot-trumpet stylings. And then there is the versatile Samoa Wilson, able to sing with depth and feeling in any style of music. There are numerous singers out there singing these types of songs, but as Kweskin (who may be just a little biased) says, “No one does them better than Samoa.”
The music is, for lack of a better description, the kind of choices a musicologist would make, not unlike Americana artists such as David Bromberg or Larry Campbell, or jazz artist Catherine Russell. Some, seeing Kweskin’s name, would deem it Americana until they realize that he plays an awful lot of jazz tunes and that he has been reinventing those categories all along. The tunes share humor, sweet melody, driving rhythm, tension, and release. Interestingly, the band plays a major role beyond the two co-headliners. Kweskin arranged just three tunes, with Volmer arranging four, Lichtman five, and Barbato five. These 17 tracks, a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, embody the essence of early American music, infused with new twists and terrific vocals for a highly entertaining listen.
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