“Hammer And Nails”
Liner Notes
By Tim Cole
"I have never liked my own records. I was just never able to convert what was in my head with voice and instrument. This has been the first time that I have really felt satisfied ..."
The Korner experience began on a warm evening at Stuttgart International. Clearing customs with his two battered old guitar cases, Alexis kept up a rapid patter of conversation that showed me that he was somehow excited. "Tired?" I asked. "No, just eager to start", he replied. If your name is Alexis Korner, and if you have been making records for so long that you would rather not talk about it, then this is a highly unusual feeling to have. I said so. "I guess it's a feeling, a kind of premonition. I believe this is going to be a very important session for me", Alexis explained.
The thought of recording again direct-to-disc, as he was compelled to do many times back in the days before the advent of tape machines in recording studios thirty years ago, turned the musician Korner on in a way he has missed for a long time. This was the old challenge: No chance to go back and edit, no way to correct mistakes. Just one long take to complete the whole side of the record. "I think that is the way it should be", Alexis mused.
And in order to make things even harder, Alexis had set up even greater hurdles for himself: "I am going to try to play only titles that I have never practiced before. I want to try and create the true blues feeling that you can only get from improvisation", he said.
Such ambition can only be explained by Alexis Korner's firmly held convictions about music and musicians.
Essentially he has always been more of a teacher than a performer, as any one of his many pupils such as Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Eric Burdon, Ginger Baker, Graham Bond, Dick Heckstall-Smith or Danny Thompson will be glad to confirm.
It was his unique ability to create group forces and to channel them into new musical forms of expression that made him the most influential European pop musician since World War 2, as well as establishing him as the first professional white blues musician outside of America. Possibly, no one in the world has been able to experience the evolution of pop music in the last three decades as intensely as Alexis Korner. And no one surely has been so deeply discouraged by what he terms the "takeover of the music scene by the business people".
For him, the demise of modern pop music is the result of a lack of true musicians. "Today the kids become musicians the way they would otherwise become football stars or race drivers. They're in it to make money, not music. And the music business is geared to make stars out of them no matter whether they have the stuff to become good musicians or not".
So, for Alexis Korner it has become increasingly important to carry on the musical tradition of such greats as Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus or Django Reinhardt – all of whom incorporated for him the devotion to music in itself. "True musicians", he calls them – and deplores the fact that there are so few of them left around today.
And so it is only logical that he, without whom such groups as the Rolling Stones, the Spencer Davis Group, Led Zeppelin, Cream or Free would never have been possible, should finally return to a recording studio alone, armed only with his determination to make music the way he believes it should be: pure, simple, exciting, moving.
On this record you will hear Alexis Korner playing blues without any false pretenses. Straight-from-the-heart music full of the special feeling only a veteran musician of such exceptional class can produce.
You will also hear Alexis Korner doing unusual things – like singing "Hammer and Nails" with a gospel feeling that astounded even himself. "I have never been able to do that before", he said later. And then, of course, this record offers the rare delight of hearing Alexis Korner playing the piano. "I would rather have become a pianist", says one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time, "but my father would not let me play blues and boogie woogie on the piano at home. I really learned the guitar to spite him...".
The anecdote may be amusing, but don’t let it deceive you. There are not many pianists around who are able to play the blues as perfectly as Korner.
"This is going to be a very live recording", Alexis promised before he started. The microphones were left on between titles, and you can experience the sounds and comments Korner made when switching from guitar to piano after finishing the side, where he simply gets up and walks out of the room humming happily to himself.
"I love listening to this record", Alexis said later. Hopefully you will, too.
Tim Cole