Bobby Womack, J.J. Johnson

1971 is year zero for the new soul. While Marvin Gaye inaugurates the ultra-chic, polished strand with his "What's Going On", Isaac Hayes with "Shaft" points the way toward what would become another creative goldmine for black music: blaxploitation soundtracks, a genre of feature film performed mainly by Black actors and aimed at a Black audience, whose plots were meant to mark a Black victory over an American society still infected with the germs of racial discrimination. The film, which recounts the exploits of Black police detective John Shaft, achieves a resounding, unexpected success — and with it so does Hayes, who the following year turns up in Hollywood to collect the Oscar for his soundtrack.

The domino effect is guaranteed, and so 1972 is also the year in which, among others, two heavyweights of African-American music take a shot at film scoring, arriving at equally outstanding results: one is Curtis Mayfield with "Superfly", the other is Bobby Womack. A refined rhythm guitarist and young protégé of Sam Cooke, who discovered him and brought him onto his label (he would, incredibly, end up marrying his mentor's widow after Cooke's death in 1964), and already the author of some pivotal episodes in that phase of the Sixties which saw rhythm and blues transmute into soul through hefty injections of pop (think of his "It's All Over Now", which was the first real hit for the Rolling Stones), Womack belongs to that generation of talented twenty-somethings who in that same decade picked up the baton from Ray Charles, James Brown and Cooke himself, steering black music toward the global breakthroughs of the Seventies, which sprouted mainly under the banner of disco. Blaxploitation soul, meanwhile, continues its virtuous arc at least until 1975, as well documented by the compilation released in 2009 by Soul Jazz, "Can You Dig It? The Music and Politics of Black Action Films 1968-1975", which, alongside the work of Hayes, Mayfield and Womack, gathers the cinematic soundtrack exploits of James Brown, Willie Hutch, Marvin Gaye, Roy Ayers, Solomon Burke and other stars of black music who tried their hand at the genre.

"Across 110th Street" — released in Italy under the fitting but not exactly faithful title "Rubare alla mafia è un suicidio" ("Stealing from the Mafia Is Suicide") — was relaunched as a cult movie by Quentin Tarantino, who first paid it a substantial tribute in "Pulp Fiction" — in perhaps the most brutal episode, "The Gold Watch", with Bruce Willis as boxer Butch Coolidge — and then delivered a musical tribute with "Across 110th Street" opening and closing "Jackie Brown", a film itself steeped in blaxploitation references. Confirming the fascination exerted by Womack's track, in 2007 Ridley Scott also used it in the soundtrack to "American Gangster".

In terms of musical content, we find here an admirable meeting point between rhythm'n'blues, rock, soul and orchestral pop, its success also owed to the contribution of Quincy Jones's right-hand man, Jay Jay Johnson, probably the greatest bebop trombonist of all time, here acting as conductor, arranger and, at times, composer. A blend of styles, as noted, yet one that can be coherently traced back to the sensibilities of its two architects: the manifold variations of a fluid, shape-shifting soul for Womack, the refined orchestral frescoes for Johnson, more inclined to fill the streets of the Harlem neighborhood beyond the 110th Street where the films' plots unfold.

The track that gives the soundtrack its title is a vigorous, highly catchy piece of soul, built on the classic verse-bridge-chorus structure, in a driving loop that proves just as effective in its sung version (split into two parts) as in its instrumental rendering, with jazzy flourishes fueling the action it evokes. All the conditions were there for an instant funk-soul classic, yet, aside from a less-than-thrilling number 56 on the Billboard chart (and 19 on the Soul Singles chart), it would take Tarantino's rediscovery to grant the track real recognition and, with it, a second youth.

Where many soundtracks bank on a single central idea to see them through, Womack draws on the full range of his compositional gifts, delivering a lethal one-two-three punch with "Do It Right", a scintillating rock tribute to the r'n'b of godfather James Brown, "Hang On In There", an old-school soul number that follows in the footsteps of Wilson Pickett, and "Quicksand", essentially the whole idea of a musical distilled into under two minutes. As if that weren't enough, he goes toe-to-toe with Al Green and Marvin Gaye on soft-ballad territory with "If You Don't Want My Love (Give It Back)", a breathtaking slow number in which all the nighttime lights of the Big Apple seem to flicker into view; a marvel echoed by J.J. Johnson's version, whose orchestral take gives us one of the finest tributes to Bacharach ever written (others can be found on the aforementioned, equally remarkable "Shaft" soundtrack by Isaac Hayes).

The orchestra ventures into the sinister streets of New York's Black neighborhood, stamping onto the score of "Harlem Clavinette" a fusion for horns and keyboards complete with a guitar solo, and revealing its nocturnal face on "Harlem Love Theme", which whispers in our ear nostalgia for a time now long gone — or perhaps one that never truly belonged to those streets at all.

In short, everything is in its right place, not only to accompany the story of a violent, decaying city (not even that far from reality in the Seventies), but also to shine with its own light, standing free of the narrative.

Confirming the work's cult status, 2012 saw the release of a 40th-anniversary reissue, bolstered by a second disc containing Womack's two subsequent solo releases, "Facts Of Life" (1973) and "Lookin' For A Love Again" (1974), which round out one of his most fertile artistic and commercial periods. After a further golden spell in the Eighties (notably with "The Poet" in 1981), followed by years of relative anonymity, when not outright absence from the scene, the Cleveland soulman surprised everyone with a comeback in 2010, featuring on Gorillaz's hit album "Plastic Beach" — whose leader Damon Albarn would go on to produce, in 2012, "The Bravest Man In The Universe", an album that reaffirms, in a sleek, modern key, the extraordinary gifts as performer and composer of this towering figure of black music.

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09/12/2012