Jazz ain’t nothing but soul.

Empire by Jason Mulcahy
During the summers of 1970 and 1971 I was part of the small paid staff that kept the student volunteer WKCR on the air. For reasons lost to time in ‘72 I worked at my parents drug store on Long Island and only traveled into New York to produce my two weekly radio shows.

Towards the end of July I started hearing the buzz. A singer called Joe Lee Wilson had come into KCR one hot, humid, night and recorded a killer set with his quartet for Sharif Abdul Salaam’s (neé Ed Michael) Jazz Alternatives. I pretty much ignored it. After all, I wasn’t the one who did the killer recording (Don Zimmerman did, one of our colleagues who did everything better than all of us), and I never really cared too much about jazz vocalists (my background was rock and pop which led me more towards blues singers).

But one night I was tuned into someone else’s jazz show and I heard a singer who blew me away. Finally, someone who lived up to the thing that’s always said about jazz vocalists, “He (she) sounds like a horn.” What was this record? Who was this guy?