New Orleans is a city considerably plentiful of music, from breeding Cajun & Zydeco (the former is a dance music of French American which is characterized on accordion and fiddle, the latter is a more rhythmic music of African American) to painting jazz or R&B in its own color. Although many musicians played for life in New Orleans, a number of songs spread themselves from coast to coast. Chris Kenner, with a little hoarse voice which makes you feel both sad and funny, was one of them, making many songs simple but impressive.
His most famous song is almost determined to be Land of 1000 Dances covered by Wilson Pickett, which should be airplayed if any radio station had a program of soul music of 1960s. I first met with its original song when I borrowed from a library "Atlantic Rhythm and Blues" , which were then seven CD sets. I felt it boring, for it had many noises and it was too simple to surpass the version of Wilson Pickett in terms of boldness of the arrangement and intensity of voice. And then I listened to Something You Got on Eddie Floyd's album "Knock on Wood" (whose sleeve was good for bad design of Eddie swinging down an ax toward a tree), and I caught in the ear the phrases which were simple but tasty. And I also couldn't stand still when I listened to the version of Alvin Robinson singing muddy and slowly in the Japanese compilation "Gumbo Ya-Ya~New Orleans 28 All-Time Hits".
Chris Kenner's "I Like It Like That~Golden Classics" contains I Like It Like That (his own greatest hit), Land of 1000 Dances (less noises), Something You Got and so on. Because of Kenner's singing career as a young member of gospel groups, many of his tunes are accompanied with call-and-response gospel chorus, and this provides a pretty interesting contrast with performances by Allen Toussaint, who is a successor of the loose and easy and rolling piano style as you may hear at New Orleans' clubs. Especially, Land of 1000 Dances begins with the adoption of the spiritual Children Go Where I Send You, and the way of tying the gospel and the world together is exquisitely wonderful. The introduction was omitted from its single version, however, I think this song should be completed with it. Back in the late '50s Chris Kenner also released some tunes from different labels, which include his light-hearted reading of Sick and Tired from Imperial Records and Rocket to the Moon from Ron Records. (The former is on the album "The Big Beat of Dave Bartholomew" (Dave Bartholomew was the partner of Fats Domino) and the latter on "We Got a Party~The Best of Ron Records" .)
As compared with the sophisticated urban sound of Motown and Atlantic, it's also good for this cheerfully easiness before 'the dawn of soul music', before the hard days of Vietnam War. Because of a drinking problem and a stay in a prison the life of Chris Kenner ended not so good, though, his legacy of easy-going stuffs, it seems to me, brings me a temporary mind-trip to New Orleans. (2004/06/20)(2005/04/14)