| "JOHNNY
FRIGO / COLLECTED WORKS"
Frigo
composed and recorded albums from the late 1960s through to the
early 1970s for Giordano and his Chicago-based Orion record label.
Giordano set up the label to provide music for dance classes.
The music was required to be heavy on percussion and rhythm, so
Frigo filled Giordano's classrooms with a mad mix of rock, jazz,
Latin, and funk to move to. If only school was always that good!
Back then records were used to provide musical background- so
there are original Orion albums floating around collectors and
second-hand vinyl stores- but naturally they are extremely hard
to find. Fortunately the Luv N' Haight core vinyl-collecting crew
were able to unearth the whole Orion collection with the help
of Joe Bryl (or Chicago's Funky Buddha club) and Gus Giordano's
son Mark. Once the catalog was completely tracked down the Ubiquity
crew, along with DJ Egon (chief rare groovester at Stones Throw
Records) and Cool Chris (purveyor of rare vinyl sounds at San
Francisco's Groove Merchant Record Store) boiled down the albums
to a list of their favorite tunes.
"Collected Works" features the hip cool-jazz sound of
"Gazebo", the raw-funk cover of "Scorpio",
and more than your fair share of drums, odd sounds, percussive
excursions and a couple of rare groove monsters all just waiting
to be sampled.
DJ Egon interviewed Gus Giordano and Johnny Frigo for the liner
notes. Here are some excerpts touching down on why the music came
to be...
"At the time, there was no jazz dance technique, or jazz
dance music going into the dancing schools. This is why I contacted
Johnny Frigo to do the records," Gus remembers. Johnny's
wife, Mara Lynn Brown, was one of Gus' dancers. Through her, Gus
contacted her busy husband. "Gus said he wanted a group of
records done for his dance class. This was in the mid 1960s",
Johnny recalls. "He'd already instructed his students to
records he liked. So he hired me to get a group together to copy
some of these records. I rearranged them, made up different melodies
with the same amount of bars in the same style. It was a strange
combination of rock, jazz and little Latin flavor on some of them.
The whole idea was a lot of rhythm." Gus adds, "The
dancers didn't have live percussionists in the schools. They were
exposed to very percussive music, very accented music, very jazz
music. But most schools in America, except the big ones, only
had a record player, that's why I did the LPs.
Johnny and Gus took varying approaches to the music they created.
Johnny regarded the sessions as another day on the job: "I
don't remember a note of the music. I was in the studios all the
time. I wasn't into fusion at all. But when you're a studio player,
you wear a lot of hats. That's a hat I wore."
Gus, on the other hand, appreciated different aspects of the emerging
rock and funk scene. "My ear was more academic, but it was
always progressive," Gus offers. "A lot of dance teachers
stay in the same groove all the time. They're afraid to go out
of it. Not me, I progressed." Thus, Gus gave Johnny Frigo
songs by Lalo Schifrin, Galt MacDermot, Sly Stone and Dennis Coffey
to rework for his classes. Frigo responded with music that met
the expectations he had hoped for on his LP some 15 years earlier,
though as he states now, "I don't even think I knew what
the word 'funk' meant."
Gus recalls the creation of Orion records: "It was a crazy
scene. I would bring these dancers down and we would dance while
Frigo recorded. We were the ones that actually drove the musicians.
The drummer was always the lead instrument. Always. And the drum
and bass solos would follow whatever the dancer was doing at that
point. We'd have to dance quietly though!"
Most of the pieces were short and to the point, such as Gus' signature
piece- an organ based cover of Coffey's drum heavy "Scorpio".."
"Wherever we went, if we performed, we always did 'Scorpio,'
" Gus remembers. "We had 'the whiplash', a release of
the head that went on in between the beat. And the arms are flailing
around. We'd take one of those breaks and put the whiplash to
it." When asked what attracted him to 'Scorpio', Gus answers
with the mentality of a 20 year old hip hop DJ: "I think
it was the breaks. When you have that, it's much easier to choreograph.
The music tells you something: it relates that feeling from the
soul".
Gus Giordano continues to teach master classes all around the
world. For the past decade he has been the founder and executive
director of the International Jazz Dance Congress. Coincidentally
the IJDC is holding an annual meeting in Chicago mid-2002. Gus
Giordano's Jazz Dance Chicago continues to perform worldwide,
and Johnny Frigo continues to perform, including gigs at the Green
Mill in Chicago. |
