“To be totally honest, I want to be the same kid that went into the studio and had an idea with ‘Green Onions,’ and recorded it. I want that to continue.” — Booker T. Jones, Billboard, 07/15/18
With that single observation, Booker T. Jones may have shared the secret behind his stellar track record as a musician, composer, and producer, still ongoing, and his perennial draw as a performer who keeps things fresh and funky even while playing music he composed over 60 years ago. Still channeling that same energy today, he’s also channeling his state of mind at the time: a seeker’s state of mind. The beauty of Jones’ art and his continued ability to perform it — as the spry 80-year-old will on Saturday, November 8th, at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center — is that every song, every note, reflects his practice as a perpetual student.
“Just get those scales done,” is how he puts it when we chat over the phone. “You know, I still do the Hanon scales that I was doing when I was 7, 8 years old.”
Playing in Bartlett, he says, will evoke memories of his college days, a time when he regularly drove north out of Memphis to the Indiana University Bloomington, pursuing a degree in composition and music theory even as he was recording at Stax Records on weekends. It was in the spirit of learning from his predecessors that he’d chosen that particular college. “I went to Indiana University because of Hoagy Carmichael, who had gone there,” Jones says. At the time, he thought, “‘If one of their students could write this beautiful song, that’s where I want to study music.’ So Hoagy was a large influence on me. ‘Stardust,’ you know, in bands like Tuff Green’s or Ben Branch’s, we played a song like that nightly, at parties and the clubs.”
Indeed, he’d approached those gigs around Memphis as a kind of schooling, and he took that attitude with him to his first recording session at Stax. “Carla [Thomas] was my first connection to Stax Records because I had always wanted to get in to try to play at Satellite, as we called it then, but I didn’t have an opportunity until she was recording there with her dad, Rufus, and they sent David Porter over to Booker T. Washington [High School] to get me to play baritone sax for that song, ‘’Cause I Love You.’ That was my first entrance into Stax, actually.”
Even on his first day there, Stax was a place for learning. “For me, coming from Booker T. Washington High School in the 10th grade, over to Satellite Records, as we called it, my main musical influence was Carla’s brother, Marvell Thomas. He was the piano player, and he was the one who had played around the clubs in Memphis, and he was pretty much the standard bearer, musically. Marvell was educated at that time in musical keys. He knew musical terms, he knew structure, and he was sort of the leader. Although I was playing saxophone, he was playing keys. He was the staple of Rufus and Carla’s band, and a very intellectual, knowledgeable, likable person. We really can’t have this discussion without putting him in the correct place. People like me and Isaac Hayes had Marvell as our first example.”
Part of what those players were learning at the time were the standards of the day, the backbone of both the pop and the jazz worlds. If Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the Stax artists they backed became known for a stripped-down, minimalist version of soul, they were nevertheless apprentices to a much older tradition of jazz standards. Sometimes those would pop up in the Stax catalog, as with Otis Redding’s reworking of the 1933 Bing Crosby hit “Try A Little Tenderness,” or album tracks by the M.G.’s, including contemporary hits in the style of standards like “Stranger on the Shore” and “More.”
Of course, Jones’ love of standards would really shine after he left Stax to forge his own career as a session player and producer in Los Angeles. Right out of the gate, he produced iconic hits by Bill Withers, building a reputation that eventually caught the eye of outlaw country superstar Willie Nelson. His Jones-produced 1978 album Stardust is, of course, nothing but standards, including two by Hoagy Carmichael.
That collaboration began while Jones was living in Malibu, where, as he recalls for the podcast One by Willie, “Standing on my deck one day, I saw a guy running down the beach. People always ran down the beach in Malibu, and it looked just like Willie Nelson.” When Nelson stopped to chat, “I had a little electric piano,” Jones recalls, “right by the deck, and he brought his guitar up. And we started doing what we both did as kids, playing the songs that we loved the most. … And that’s when ‘Stardust’ came up, and we tried it. And we started trying other songs, and we went through quite a few songs, and he said, ‘Well, why are we sitting out here on the deck doing this? Why don’t we go in the studio and record these songs?’”
As Nelson told Rolling Stone at the time of the album’s release, “I had had the idea for some time to make a record like this, but until I met Booker, I wasn’t really sure how I could do these songs ’cause they’re really complicated, and they have a lot of chords in them, and I needed someone like Booker to write and arrange it ’cause I couldn’t write this stuff down for my guys.”
Jones’ wide-ranging curiosity led to him being the first Black producer of a country hit and sealed his position as one of the most learned, eclectic players of his or any generation. And that holds true today, as he continues to compose the stripped-down soul instrumentals with which he made his name, all the while delving into other styles as he pleases. With his series of singles featuring variations on his 1962 hit “Green Onions,” he wears his eclecticism on his sleeve, with rocked-up versions (echoing his solo album Potato Hole, cut with Neil Young and the Drive-By Truckers) and even a Latin take, “Cebollas Verdes.”
As Jones says today, that eclecticism was always fundamental to his very being. “I never restricted myself, genre-wise. My grandmother was a classical piano teacher, my mother played classical, and there was classical music at Mount Olive [church]. And my training came from the streets of Memphis with Willie Mitchell and Ben Branch and band leaders like that, who were basically blues and jazz bands. So yeah,” he reflects, “I didn’t put any boundaries on myself.”