“Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”

When Ray Charles suddenly returned to the instrumental jazz music he loved in 1970 after a 9-year sabbatical, he added a smooth version of John Anderson’s “Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues” to his April 1970 LP My Kind Of Jazz.

“Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”, sometimes written “Passeone Blues”, was written in 1962 by trumpeter Anderson, who had played with the likes of Stan Kenton and Count Basie. Anderson included it on his 1966 Tangerine LP Time Will Tell, where the liner notes described the song as “strictly the blues with feeling”. (Oddly, an early episode of The Twilight Zone featured a pair of trumpet players, played by Jack Klugman and an actor also named John Anderson, but not the actual jazz trumpeter. Spooky? Dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee-dee!)

Over four and half minutes, Ray Charles and his band move languidly through their arrangement of “Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”, led at first not by a trumpet but what sounds like a soprano saxophone. There is an adventurous, somewhat audacious sax solo that alternately deflates the atmosphere with down and dirty lows, and galvanizes with more forceful chains of notes.

John Anderson’s Time Will Tell LP from 1966, including “Passeone Blues”.

Finally, a trumpet comes in, presumably courtesy of Phillip Guilbeau, Ray’s long-time horn player. There is an asperity to the acidic trumpet solo, and it underscores a duality that runs through this take on “Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”, something that Ray had been known for but was really starting to explore around this period of his career: shades of light and dark, of soft and hard, mixed together. He was starting to proactively and unapologetically combine opposing elements to produce intriguing, dynamic balances and complicated moods that threw each other into greater prominence.

Throughout “Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”, Ray’s production and mixing underscore this approach: the track is languorous, no doubt, but the soloing instruments, in turn, are mixed higher and pierce the ether like buzzsaws. It gives the entire take an angular shape, all sharp corners and menacing clouds with the frequent flash of lightning. As on much of Ray’s 1970s jazz, his own piano is kept strictly in the background, gently supportive and often barely undetectable.

“Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues” shows how Ray Charles was able to put disparate elements together to create a very unique and new thing: it has a smooth underbelly and a sharp, more fearsome upper section, like a spiny alligator moving through the swamps of his native northern Florida. Only available on My Kind Of Jazz, it was never released on a single. Fortunately, copies of the LP are very easy to find.

Listen to “Pas-Se-O-Ne Blues”

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