Great art can render time irrelevant. That’s especially true for music made since the phonograph was invented. The very act of putting a platter on the turntable connects you directly to those who first heard, say, Milestones when it was new, and the music is as compelling as ever.
That’s just the sort of miraculous time travel achieved by guitarist Joe Restivo’s new LP, A Beautiful Friendship, released this week. It helps that the veteran Memphis player, who’s been pivotal in both the Bo-Keys and the Love Light Orchestra, has the chops to match the high bar of performance taken for granted among creators of classic jazz records, but it also comes down to Restivo’s very specific vision of a very specific era. “This record, to me, is an homage to a couple things,” he says, “but one of the homages is to the tradition of all the great jazz guitar records from the ’50s and ’60s. It has that sort of presentation, with the amount of tunes, how long it is, the sequence, and other choices all made with that in mind.” And Restivo gets it right on every point, even down to the pithy liner notes by fellow guitarist Jim Duckworth.
“The great records on Bethlehem or Prestige by Johnny Smith, Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery — there’s a certain way they looked and sounded,” Restivo says. “It was really a lot of very working class musicians, who weren’t necessarily going through this sort of academic machine. They were going through an actual industry of record-making and playing clubs, and there was a period, a very short period, really, where a ton of these records were being made.”
Bearing all that in mind, releasing the album on vinyl was important to Restivo. “I actually created my own label, Warbler Records,” he says, and astute fans will note his new imprint’s bird logo on the cover, catalog number 001. “A lot of artists are doing this now, creating their own labels, to release their own material. Especially with Memphis Record Pressing being here. One of the reasons to do it in the first place is to make vinyl — I’m such a vinyl junkie.”
Complementing that was a commitment to making the album much as artists would have half a century ago, recording live direct-to-tape at Phillips Recording Service as Scott Bomar engineered, with “all their great microphones and the real Sam Phillips echo chamber,” Restivo notes. To top it off, he was playing a 1961 carved arch top Gibson “Johnny Smith” guitar through a late-’50s Premier amp.
Getting the cover right was also imperative, and luckily Memphis boasts one of the foremost designers of historically-inspired graphics, Kerri Mahoney, now best known for her design work on the film A Complete Unknown. “She speaks that language [of vintage album art] so fluently,” says Restivo. “When I’d send her examples of albums that I wanted to shoot towards, she already knew the illustrators who made those things back in that era. She’s very, very, very fluent in the design of those albums. And so that process was a lot of fun.”
Fun is a theme that Restivo returns to repeatedly when discussing the album. “If your sound comes out of a classroom,” he says, “it’s probably going to be fairly sterile and by-the-book. I don’t want that. You want to make a good-sounding record that somebody wants to put on the turntable. It has to be light and fun and bouncy and loose.” To that end, Restivo engaged in another kind of time travel: catching up with old friends.
To back him on the album, he recruited two players he’s known for decades, organist Charlie Wood and drummer Renardo Ward. Long before Wood married the English singer Jacqui Dankworth and became a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, and before Ward became a pastor at his own church, the two played together in Wood’s residency at King’s Palace on Beale Street.“When I would go see that trio, it was with the great Calvin Newborn, who was a huge influence. Sometimes he couldn’t make it and I would do the gig with Charlie, and that was incredibly inspirational. Charlie would not tell you what he was about to play; he would just start playing. And because he’s an organ player, he could do that. He was covering all the bases: the bass, the chords, and the vocal. And Renardo knew his book so thoroughly. Then when I would get on the gig, you just have to really be on your toes because there’s not a lot of communicating, verbally — it’s all music. So it really forces you to open your ears up and listen. And I was only 22 or whatever. I was a young man.”
Having Wood and Ward on the new record not only helped Restivo mark how far he’s come since then; it helped rekindle some of that live-in-the-club magic from those days. The trio simply set up in the studio with no rehearsal, and all the tracks were completed in one or two takes. That, too, brings a sense of fun to revered standards like the title track by Cahn and Styne, the ’30s gem “My Ideal,” Duke Ellington’s “Don’t You Know I Care (Or Don’t You Care to Know),” and “Lost Mind” by “the poet of the blues,” Percy Mayfield. But it also enlivens Restivo’s originals with a certain playfulness: the cinematic “Apollonia’s Sunday Drive,” inspired by The Godfather and sporting Felix Hernandez on percussion; “B’s That Way,” featuring Kirk Smothers on baritone sax; and “Gig Appropriate,” in a “jazz waltz” style that’s rarely heard today. “That’s just one of many grooves in Renardo’s arsenal,” Restivo says. “He plays an incredible solo at the end. I mean, he’s a guy who’s really internalized a lot of the great masters, like Max Roach. And he has that driving, on-top-of-the-beat ride cymbal that I just love because you can really play off it. It’s bouncy. It always gives me a smile.”
You could say it was that smile that inspired Restivo to make the album in the first place. “I just do things that I like to do with the people that I like and appreciate,” he says. “It really comes down to that. It’s all in the title. Personal friendships and relationships are what it’s all about.”
Joe Restivo celebrates the release of A Beautiful Friendship, with Renardo Ward on drums and Chris Hazelton of The James Hunter Six on organ, at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts this Thursday, October 23rd, at 7:30 p.m.