Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2019 March 15 • Friday

Loafing around Paris for a few days is hard work. Fortunately Paris Jazz Corner is there to take the edge off.

I hadn't been to Paris in almost twenty years and I was thrilled to find this wonderful store still going strong.

I was even more thrilled to find this fairly obscure record from 1958: Lee Shaefer and Jim Hall: A Girl and a Guitar.

Lee Shaefer was a folk singer and this is an album of a dozen folk songs sung by her and accompanied by Jim Hall on guitar.

And that's it. Just the two of them doing these songs. No band, no soloing, just intense, haunting, intimate music that casts a spell.

Anybody interested in Jim Hall should hear this record, as it might be unique in his discography. I don't think I've ever heard him play like this, dancing outside of genre borders or at least creating some kind of jazz folk blues rock and roll hybrid.

His guitar's lowest string is tuned down on several of the songs but I can't tell if the tuning has been altered beyond that.

Shaefer's voice is the perfect instrument here, clear and dynamic with perfect feel and phrasing. It's really an amazing duo and a recording that deserves to be much better known.

The liner notes acknowledge how Jim Hall's work in the Jimmy Giuffre 3 provided him with some experience playing folk music and blues. This won't come as news to most people.

More remarkable is Hall's referring to his playing on "Jacob's Ladder" as his "Mildred Falls background", Mildred Falls being the piano player for Mahalia Jackson.

So Jim Hall listened to Mahalia Jackson, and with enough time and attention to absorb influence at least from her pianist. This was news to me.