Mo’ Fess: Professor Longhair’s Band Brings The Magic Back
JUNE 26, 2019by: JOHN WIRTLEAVE A COMMENT
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Mo’ Fess isn’t a Professor Longhair tribute band. It is Professor Longhair’s former band. Four Mo’ Fess band members—drummer Earl Gordon, bassist Reggie Scanlan, saxophonist Tony DaGradi and conga player Alfred “Uganda” Roberts—performed with the ingeniously idiosyncratic pianist and vocalist. Singer-pianist Tom Worrell joins them in Mo’ Fess, filling Longhair’s spot with uncanny accuracy.
Mo’ Fess initially came together at the behest of musician and producer Carlo Ditta. In 2016, Ditta’s Orleans Records released Live in Chicago, a recording of Longhair’s 1976 show at the Chicago Folk Festival. A tape of the performance had been in the possession of guitarist Billy Gregory, one of Longhair’s 1970s-era band members, for 40 years.
To promote Live in Chicago’s belated release, Ditta invited Longhair alumni, including Gregory, Gordon, and saxophonist Jerry Jumonville, to play an album release show at the Little Gem Saloon. Worrell joined them at the piano. Gordon, impressed with Worrell’s renditions of Longhair’s classics, suggested they keep the party going with Mo’ Fess.
“I’ve played with some great keyboardists who wanted to emulate Fess,” Gordon said. “They never could, but Tom, when you close your eyes, comes the closest to Fess.”
The 2019 edition of Mo’ Fess includes Gordon, Worrell, Scanlan, Dagradi, Roberts, guitarist June Yamagishi, saxophonist Lance Ellis, and Brazilian keyboardist Luciano Leães.
Gordon, a stem cell researcher in Calabasas, California, left Longhair’s band and New Orleans in 1979. With his eyes on retirement from the medical field, he now hopes Mo’ Fess will perform more often. The next Mo’ Fess show in New Orleans is July 20 at Tipitina’s. The band’s recent gigs have also included last year’s The Professor Longhair 100th Birthday Tribute at Tipitina’s.
Gordon performed with Longhair from late 1975 through late 1979. “Everybody loved playing with Fess,” he said. “It was magic. He was magic. We’re trying to bring the magic back with Mo’ Fess.”
“It’s a special gig,” Worrell said of Mo’ Fess. “When we played at Tipitina’s, the chemistry was definitely there. It would be nice to play more, but it has to be for special occasions. We can’t play casinos. Either we have to take it on tour and do it for people who never got to hear Fess, or we do it for the people of New Orleans as a special kind of thing.”
Before Mo’ Fess, in the years before Hurricane Katrina, Worrell often performed with another of Longhair’s band members, the late Edwin “Sheeba” Kimbraugh. “He was one of my best friends in my life,” Worrell said. “We played hundreds of gigs together, sometimes just me and him. Having somebody translate the rhythm in real time, somebody who played with Fess, that was invaluable.”
Mo’ Fess at Tipitina’s on Saturday, July 20.
Yay Mo' Fess - you made the cut - AGAIN !! Check out CBS's Last.fm coverage of the 2019 50th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and specifically the "2019 New Orleans Jazz Fest Days 7-8" link just above the Trombone Shorty image, in this link below, to see your photo(s).
Feel free to share it a few times. Hope to see you next year...
Hey Guys we were recently featured with John Cleary, Trombone Shorty , Chaka and about 20 others in a CBS photos for the 2019 Jazz Fest
really neat that they included us with these giants!!!
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Nobody can play Professor Longhair’s music exactly like him. But it helps if you used to play it with him.
The core of Mo’ Fess — “Mo’ Fess” being New Orleans-ese shorthand for “more Professor Longhair” — consists of musicians who once populated his band. They include Earl Gordon, Longhair’s drummer in the late 1970s; bassist Reggie Scanlan who, before joining the Radiators, held down the bottom end for Longhair; and percussionist Alfred “Uganda” Roberts, a longtime Longhair collaborator. They complement pianist Tom Worrell, a dedicated practitioner of the Longhair style. At Tipitina’s on Saturday night, Worrell, Gordon, Scanlan and Roberts will be joined by guitarists June Yamagishi and Keith Stone, saxophonist Brad Walker and Brazilian keyboardist Luciano Laese. Show time is 9 p.m. Cover charge is $15.
Professor Longhair, aka Henry Roeland Byrd, is the patron saint of the New Orleans piano tradition. Born in Bogalusa in 1918, he moved to New Orleans as a boy. He took up the piano in the 1940s, at one point leading a band called the Shuffling Hungarians. His voice, melodic sense, wordplay and piano style, the latter a heavily percussive, Afro-Caribbean-inflected brand of Big Easy boogie-woogie, were uniquely his own.
He released a handful of singles for Mercury, Atlantic and other labels in the 1950s and 1960s. His only national hit was “Bald Head,” but his timeless recordings of “Go To the Mardi Gras” and “Big Chief” are still omnipresent during Carnival season.
Unable to sustain a music career, he quit playing to eke out an existence as a janitor and backroom card dealer. His performance at the second New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, in 1971, kicked off a comeback that established him as a local legend.
He died in 1980 at age 61, but his legacy lives on. A rendering of him watches over Jazz Fest from the peak of the main Acura Stage, and his image looms large over the stage of Tipitina’s, which is named for one of his songs.
Of all the Longhair alumni in Mo’ Fess, Uganda Roberts served the longest tenure. A Treme native, Roberts was a member of Allen Toussaint’s studio crew, contributing to several classic Meters recordings. Roberts met Longhair at the 1971 Jazz Fest and would soon join his band. He and his congas would be a constant presence in that band, supplying much of its calypso and rhumba shadings, until the pianist’s death.
Along the way, Roberts appeared on the Longhair studio albums “Rock ‘n’ Roll Gumbo” and “Crawfish Fiesta.” He and Longhair perform as a duo on “The London Concert,” a live album recorded in 1978 but not released until 1994.
Earl Gordon, a native of Canada, first visited New Orleans in 1974. After moving to the city, he formed a band with Billy Gregory, the guitarist in Longhair’s band. That connection eventually led to Gordon occupying the drum chair for Longhair from 1974 to ’79. He appears on the albums “Live in Germany” and “Live in Chicago.”
It was the long-gestating release of that latter album that led to the formation of Mo’ Fess.
For 40 years, Gregory held on to the tapes of a Longhair show recorded in Chicago in 1976; the music was never released, reportedly due to a technical glitch with the tapes.
In 2016, thanks to advances in audio technology, the tapes were salvaged. Carlo Ditta’s Orleans Records released “Live in Chicago” that year.
To celebrate the release, a group of Longhair alumni, including Gordon and Gregory, came together to play the music with Worrell, an Iowa native and veteran of Solomon Burke’s band who, much like Jon Cleary, fell under the spell of the New Orleans piano sound and moved to the city to delve even deeper into it.
Worrell has amassed an extensive local resume, from Deacon John’s band to a long tenure with Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s Roadmasters. With Mo’ Fess, he demonstrates his fluency in the Longhair style. After that initial show to celebrate “Live in Chicago,” Gordon, who now lives in Los Angeles, Gregory and Worrell realized that Mo’ Fess could become an ongoing concern. Since then, the band’s membership has evolved. Yamagishi, the longtime guitarist in the Wild Magnolias, has replaced Gregory. Tony Dagradi, another former Longhair sideman, and Lance Ellis have often been featured on saxophone with Mo' Fess, but Brad Walker will play Saturday’s show at Tipitina’s.
Mo’ Fess, its members emphasize, is not strictly a Professor Longhair tribute. While Longhair is the band’s basis and reason for being, the musicians aim to play more than just Fess’ music.
In other words, “Mo’ Fess.”