By Marshall Bowden

Though he didn't use a ring modulator or play with an army of electric guitarists, Ramsey Lewis was one of the more popular jazz musicians of the mid 1960s and helped bridge the gap between gospel, blues, soul, jazz, and rock/fusion experiments. Though he played a lot of straightforward jazz, Lewis is best known for his gospel and blues-inflected pop tunes with a heavy backbeat, such as "The 'In' Crowd", "A Hard Day's Night", and "Hang On Sloopy". At the same time alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, who had first come to the public's attention as a Charlie Parker-style bop saxophone whiz was demonstrating a heavy soul and gospel influence with his famous Quintet, using such music to connect with an audience and expose them to more straightforward small group jazz sounds. Both Lewis and Adderley had huge chart-topping hits at a time when jazz was by and large unable to connect with the larger pop audience.

The Ramsey Lewis trio always included a light song in their repertoire that could hook a crowd of largely non-jazz listeners, including a jazz version of the operatic "Carmen" and the bluesy "Blues for the Night Owl". While these garnered some airplay and made the R&B charts, the breakthrough was a recording of Dobie Gray's "The 'In' Crowd" recorded live at The Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C. and released on the The 'In' Crowd album. Between 1964 and 1976 Lewis placed 19 singles on the pop charts utilizing this style that he referred to as "jazz, R&B, pop and gospel all rolled into one." The trio was awarded a Grammy for Best Instrumental Recording of 1965. Other hits in the same vein included "Since I Fell For You", "A Hard Day's Night", "Something You Got", "Hang on Sloopy", and "High Heel Sneakers". All of these songs utilize simple elements: well worn blues riffs, a strong backbeat, plagal cadences, a gospel church-meeting or party atmosphere (provided by club audiences who clap and at times even sing along with the performance), and familiar tunes. Harmonic sophistication and technical wizardry were not the point of these performances, as Lewis himself pointed out: "The most intricate chord in the whole thing, I think, is a seventh" he told Downbeat.

As so often happens, the sudden success of the trio brought about dissention, and the group was unable to stay together, with "High Heel Sneakers" being their last chart success together. Lewis knew he had something, though, and he formed a new trio with bassist Cleveland Eaton and Maurice White, who went on to found funk/rock group Earth, Wind, and Fire, on drums. The group was able to repeat the previous trio's success with recordings of Stevie Wonder's "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" and the gospel standard "Wade In the Water". The album also featured soul numbers like Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar" and "Tobacco Road". Lewis continued to move in a pop, soul, and funk direction with his music, creating some of the more interesting funk/fusion albums of the early 1970s, Funky Serenity and Sun Goddess, which again featured the work of Maurice White along with his brother Verdine. Ramsey's has recently done some gospel work with a full chorus and his 1999 album Appassionata brought him back to a trio format and incorporated all the elements and styles he's worked with over the years quite successfully. Dizzy Gillespie once commented that Lewis was, in fact, playing fusion music way ahead of the electronic experiments that the word conjures in most of our minds, and I don't think Gillespie was too far off.

Cannonball Adderley was the most successful jazz artist of the '60s, after Lewis, to cross over into the pop charts, though he was not able to do so with the kind of regularity of Lewis. Adderley's agenda was rather different as well: he played straightforward bop as well as soul and R&B-tinged jazz. Adderley's best-selling album, 1967's Mercy Mercy Mercy: Live At the Club, starts with a boppish Nat Adderley composition, "Fun", but quickly gets into the same backbeat-and-blues territory as the Ramsey Lewis Trio with another Nat Adderley composition entitled "Games". Adderley demonstrates his unique ability to play Bird-like runs while maintaining a down-to-earth blues sound that gets the crowd excited in the same manner as Lewis' "'In' Crowd". The real killer track, though, is Josef Zawinul's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy". The song does just what Lewis had been doing, incorporating a bluesy melody, albeit at a slower tempo, with the slinky sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano and a gospel-style groove. In fact, the song starts with Cannonball himself testifying to the power of music: "You know" he intones, "sometimes we're not prepared for adversity. When it happens sometimes we're caught short. We don't know exactly how to handle it…when it comes up. Sometimes we don't know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this tune. And it sounds like what you're supposed to say when you have that kind of problem—it's called 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy'". By now the audience is ravenous and they eagerly spur the group and Zawinul, who plays the only real solo of the tune, on. The track was a gigantic hit, and won the group a Grammy for Best Instrumental Performance of 1967. Other strong tunes followed, including "74 Miles Away", "Walk Tall", and "Country Preacher".

Live at the Club was produced by David Axelrod, who Adderley had requested as a producer upon signing with Capitol Records. Axelrod's greatest success at that time had been with Lou Rawls, creating a unique urban sound that have helped Rawls' Capitol releases stand as some of the best work of this career. Axelrod turned Adderley on to some of the music he'd been listening to: Amos Milburn, Lowell Fulson, and Roy Milton. Unfortunately there was no Black Music Division at Capitol and they really didn't know what to do with the kinds of sounds Axelrod was creating with Rawls and Adderley, so he was given rock band The Electric Prunes to produce, with predictably bizarre results.

Adderley went on to produce a number of interesting recordings, moving further into blues, R&B, funk, and rock while maintaining a jazz sound and edge. One of the defining characteristics of his music is that, whereas Lewis and others covered popular hits of the day as vehicles for their blues/rock/jazz jams, Adderley's group grew their hybrid sound from within utilizing the writing talents of Cannonball and his brother Nat as well as those of Joe Zawinul, who worked with Miles Davis on many of his groundbreaking electronic albums and went on to form the most interesting of the fusion bands, Weather Report. Both Lewis and Adderley were on to something, though, and demonstrated a clear way that jazz music could attract a mainstream audience without losing its identity along the way.