In 1972, the advertising executive David McCall noticed that his young son was having trouble memorizing his multiplication tables despite being able to memorize the lyrics of Rolling Stones songs without any comparable difficulty. As one of the principals at the firm McCaffrey and McCall, he tasked a jingle writer with putting the multiplication tables to music. When that writer failed, creative director George Newall suggested the jazz pianist and vocalist Bob Dorough.
Dorough returned with a song that was catchy yet substantive, soulful, spiritual, even intimate in a way that went wildly beyond what any ad executive had any right to expect.
That song was Three Is A Magic Number.
Three is a magic number
Yes it is, it's a magic number
Somewhere in that ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
Faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number
… A man and a woman had a little baby
Yes, they did
They had three in the family
And that's a magic number
The song also happened to be genius in presenting the multiplication tables for 3, presenting them in sets and forward and backward.
Tom Yohe, an illustrator at McCaffrey and McCall, heard the song and set it to animation. Radford Stone, the account representative for ABC, suggested they pitch it as a television series, which caught the attention of Michael Eisner, then vice president of ABC, and cartoon director Chuck Jones. Three Is a Magic Number originally debuted during the debut episode of Curiosity Shop on September 2, 1971.
Dorough recalls writing the song:
"I had a great thrill when I wrote it cause I was trying to think of all these things that three means. I researched in a couple of magic books and the Bible ... so when I started writing the song, I was determined to tell the kids about a lot of things besides the multiplication table. ... I suddenly had a great inspiration, about the man and the woman and a little baby. To me, it was like a visit from the muse. I remember that vividly. That came from nowhere."
Schoolhouse Rock! debuted as a series in January 1973 with Multiplication Rock, a collection of animated shorts adapting the multiplication tables to songs written by Bob Dorough. Dorough also performed most of the songs, with the jazz-funk drummer Grady Tate performing two songs and jazz pianist and vocalist Blossom Dearie performing one during the first season.
Over several seasons of Schoolhouse Rock!, Dorough wrote most of the material and performed on the vast majority of songs. To anyone whose childhood spanned 1973 to 1985, his voice is instantly and warmly recognizable. He provided piano and lead vocals on many of the classic cuts, including Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here, the lyrics and music for Conjunction Junction, and the piano for the woefully under-rated Rufus Xavier Sasparilla.
[ Rabbithole: Buffalo Tom: Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here — Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here - Bob Dorough - Live - 2017 Scranton, PA — Blind Melon: Three is a Magic Number ]
Not content to merely teach the multiplication tables, Dorough made subtle and abstract concepts clear and concrete for his young viewers.
In the inaugural ditty, My Hero, Zero, he manages to teach us the powers of ten and much more. He puts across the importance of the invention of zero — touching on the mathematical concept of zero as a placeholder digit but also in the philosophical sense of nothingness while letting us know that there are quiet and unconventional ways of being a hero.
In the prog-rock Little Twelvetoes, he goes even deeper, going far beyond teaching the 12s tables to deliver the concept of a base twelve system as opposed to the base ten system that we are all used to, imagining an alien race with twelve fingers and twelve toes who could do their 12s tables as easily as we do the 10s table. And of course, Dorough holds out the possibility of friendship and cooperation with Little Twelvetoes.
It’s bonkers to layer this level of abstraction on the already tough 12 tables but he doubles down and goes with the actual mathematic jargon of the duodecimal system.
If man had been born with six fingers on each hand, he’d probably count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, dek, el, do. Dek and do being two entirely new signs meaning 10 and 11, single digits. And his twelve would have been written do, one-zero. Get it?
In a Mad Manesque twist of fate, in the second season, Grammar Rock, in Peggy Olson fashion, “Lynn Ahrens made the switch from copy department secretary at McCaffrey & McCall to full-time songwriter after Newall overheard her playing guitar during her lunch break at the agency and asked to her to contribute. The result was A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing. Ahrens went on to write 15 more songs for Schoolhouse Rock,” including such classics as Interjections, No More Kings, The Preamble, Elbow Room*, and Interplanet Janet.
[The voting booth in The Preamble self-referentially features several of the players behind Schoolhouse Rock including the above-mentioned George Newall, Tom Yohe, and Radford Stone, as well as Lyn Ahrens who wrote and performed the song.]
While Dorough carried much of that first season, sharing responsibilities much more widely in subsequent seasons, as mentioned above, he brought in two other performers for three songs, Grady Tate and Blossom Dearie. Both delivered very fine performances, classics of the Schoolhouse Rock oeuvre.
When I was bartending around 2009 or so, I had a playlist of phat, greasy funk and soul, with cuts from the likes of Jimmy Smith, Booker T & the MGs, Budos Band, Young Holt Trio, Menahan Street Band, and The Greyboy Allstars. Buried in that mix was I Got Six, written by Bob Dorough and performed by Grady Tate. Mostly people didn’t notice it. It was just one more funky R&B song in the mix. But when they did, huge smiles would peel across their faces as the dawn of recognition hit them that Billy Preston’s Outa-Space had segued into some Schoolhouse Rock. It never failed to delight. That worked because it’s an honest to goodness, damned fine bit of funk and soul.
Grady Tate followed up I Got Six with Naughty Number Nine which teaches kids their 9s tables while giving them a peek into a decidedly seedy side of life, presumably on the South Side of Chicago around the time that Jim Croce’s Bad Bad Leroy Brown was terrorizing the neighborhood. It’s some very lowdown dirty blues to be tucking between kid’s cereal commercials on a Saturday morning.
Tate also performed the rather lackluster Lynn Ahrens penned Fireworks in the third season, America Rock.
Blossom Dearie’s contribution that first season was the most affecting and soulful number in the Schoolhouse Rock repertoire. Figure Eight is almost elegiac in its wistfulness. The song starts with a hypnotic fugue on keyboards which builds up to the arresting visual of a skater tracing a figure eight on a pond of ice. The piece then transitions to the percussive syncopation Dorough wields over and over to make tables themselves catchy and memorable, finally circling back to the pulsating fugue to form a perfect figure eight in the composition. In a particularly Doroughian touch, the song closes by pointing out that an eight tipped over on its side, ∞, becomes infinite.
Dearie’s second installment in the second season, Unpack Your Adjectives, is among the most classic numbers from the Schoolhouse Rock canon and perfectly leverages her childlike voice to take on the character of the song’s protagonist.
The great Gen X tribute to Schoolhouse Rock was De La Soul’s The Magic Number.
Three. That's the Magic Number
Yes it is
It's the magic number
Somewhere in this hip hop soul community
Was born 3 Mase Dove and me
And that's the magic number
… Showing true position, this here piece is
Kissin' the part of the pie that's missin'
When that negative number fills up the cavity
Maybe you can subtract it
You can call it your lucky partner
Maybe you can call it your adjective
…(No more no less, that's a magic number)
(No more no less)
Nerds but not Squares
These folks may have been nerds but don’t mistake them for squares.
Blossom Dearie
From the liner notes of a reissue of her 1959 Verve Records debut album Blossom Dearie:
Born in 1924, she played piano from a young age growing up in East Durham, a hamlet near Albany; classical lessons were her starting point, but by high school she was playing jazz with a dance band. Singing only became part of her repertoire after moving to the city in the mid-1940s, where she roomed with British singer Annie Ross and — by Ross’s recollection — a stripper named Rusty Lane. Just out of high school, Dearie picked up gigs in tiny clubs as a pianist and in the vocal groups that provided lush harmonies for swinging bandleaders like Woody Herman and Alvino Rey.
But the most important thing about her move was the education she found on the city’s music scene, both from the lounge singers she went to see on the East Side and the beboppers she hung out with in Gil Evans’ basement apartment on the West Side — a musical habitat that ran roughly from one end of 52nd Street to the other. “When I reached New York City, I discovered two different worlds of popular music, both of them using almost the same repertoire of songs,” Dearie once wrote in an autobiographical press release. “If you heard Sarah Vaughan sing “Embraceable You” at Birdland (52nd Street and Broadway), then rushed over to hear Mabel Mercer at the Byline Room (52nd Street and 3rd Avenue), it was like hearing one singer from Mars and another from Pluto. I tried putting them both together.”
According to Dearie, she went to Birdland to hear bebop legends like Vaughan and Charlie Parker every night for three years. That was how she became part of Evans’ inner circle, one of the only women hanging at his 55th Street studio alongside other artists whose work would wind up defining an entire era of American music. “Bebop had a great impact on me,” she told NPR. “We belonged to a kind of a social circle, and we’d meet at parties and things like that. I knew those musicians and loved them very much.” It was in Evans’ basement — where Birth of the Cool was slowly but surely being workshopped — that Dearie met Davis. She recalls that they shared an affection for the Oklahoma! tune “Surrey With A Fringe On Top,” which they both eventually interpreted memorably on wax.
Her first attempts at merging her West Side and East Side worlds came with a few record dates that incorporated scatting and the then-nascent genre of vocalese, in which singers recreate an instrumentalist’s solo note-for-note. Dave Lambert, one of the genre’s pioneers, led her first session in 1948 — Gerry Mulligan did the arrangements. A year later, she joined Stan Getz, Al Haig, and Jimmy Raney to cut two sides for Prestige that featured more wordless, boppish melodies. In 1952 she found her biggest success to that point with an uncredited cameo on singer King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood For Love,” based on a solo by saxophonist James Moody. She went back behind the piano later that year to accompany her friend Annie Ross, alongside none other than vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Kenny Clarke — what would soon become the Modern Jazz Quartet, with Dearie in place of John Lewis.
[ Rabbit Hole: Moody’s Mood for Love — Aretha Franklin (2011), Amy Winehouse (2003) James Moody feat. Patti Austin. From Quincy Jones’ 75th Birthday Celebration Live at Montreux (2008) ]
According to a profile for Marion McPartland’s Piano Jazz:
“By the late 1940s, she had become part of the New York City jazz scene, hanging out with Miles Davis, his arranger Gil Evans, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and singer Dave Lambert. They'd get together to listen to and talk about the music Evans would bring home from the public library. He was the only one with a library card.”
"I learned a lot about the music from those fellows, really," she says. "They were a very important part of my early musical education."
Back to the liner notes:
By the early 1950s, she’d begun performing alone downtown at the Club Chantilly in Greenwich Village (West 4th Street and 6th Avenue) — but her brand of intimate, jazz-oriented performance was tricky to market and she was struggling. French music producer Eddie Barclay and his wife Nicole heard her perform, though, and convinced her to move to Paris in 1952 to perform and record for his then-nascent label Barclay Records. She had reasonable success, recording her first sides as a leader with vocal group Les Blue Stars with whom she sang, arranged and played piano. The result was swinging pop versions of what were quickly becoming bop standards — their biggest hit was a French version of “Lullaby of Birdland.”
From her obituary in the Guardian, we learn:
Dearie remained in Paris for five years. When the impresario Norman Granz, who had met her in France, started Verve Records in 1956, Dearie returned to New York, and settled in Greenwich Village. She began her solo career with Blossom Dearie (1957) and made a half-dozen Verve albums concluding with My Gentleman Friend (1961). She performed at jazz clubs in Manhattan - sometimes working with Miles Davis - and Los Angeles and her television work included NBC's Today show with David Garroway, who was a big fan, and the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. She was regularly supported by a trio of guitar, bass (usually Ray Brown) and drums.
Again from the liner notes:
Ellis, and drummer Jo Jones, quickly becoming the stuff of gossip columns: One mention in early 1957 describes her as looking “very Rive Gauche in a turtleneck sweater and ‘cap’ hairdo.” She started an extended run as one member of a cabaret at New York nightlife legend Julius Monk’s then-new bar Upstairs at the Downstairs (51st Street and 6th Avenue), just as her album was released to mostly rave reviews. The only caution was, according to Billboard, that it “might be too hip for current teen tastes.”
In contrast to the way she used her girlish voice in Unpack Your Adjectives to cast herself as a young girl, in her 1957 debut album she slyly uses it in Blossom’s Blues to crosscut against the bawdy lyrics, casting herself as a maneater.
My name is Blossom
I was raised in a lion’s den
My name is Blossom
I was raised in a lion’s den**
My nightly occupation
Stealing other women’s men
I'm an evil evil woman
But I want to do a man some good
I'm an evil evil woman
But I want to do a man some good
I'm Gina Lollobrigida
I ain't Red Riding Hood
She lets her bass player vouch for her wiles.
Some men like me cause I'm happy
Some think I'm snappy
Some call me honey
And some think I've got
But Ray Brown told me that I was built for speed
You put them all together
Everything a good man needs
You put them all together
Everything a good man needs
The woman was no lightweight. She was revered as a pianist.
During the late sixties I played a couple weeks solo opposite the Bill Evans Trio at the Village Gate on Bleecker St, and had some conversations with Bill. I asked him how he came upon his piled-fourths voicing of chords, and his immediate answer was that he heard Blossom Dearie play that way and it really knocked him out. Then he did a little rave review of Blossom, naming her as one of his models of piano playing. It was such a surprising response that I never forgot it.
A decade or so later Blossom and I were doing a two-piano act, and I got to see what he was talking about. Blossom showed me some voicings she was using, and then I sat down at the same piano and tried them out but it didn’t sound like Blossom. I told her, “It sounds better when you do it.” She said, “Oh well, I know this piano, I’m used to it.” The truth is she seemed to get her special sound out of any piano. Also, she could play softer than anyone I ever heard. The accompaniment she gave herself was all carefully composed, and she played it note for note every night. Why not? It was perfect.
Name-checked in 12-bar blues by The Beatles, the woman was no square.
“Diggin’ arty French flix with my shades on … Now I’m deep into zen meditation and macrobiotics. As soon as I can, I intend to get into narcotics!”
A 1999 duet with Lyle Lovett
Bob Dorough
Bob Dorough first met Blossom Dearie in Paris where he played piano for The Blue Stars as his day job while playing seven nights a week at the Mars Club, a hot spot for English-speaking tourists on the Right Bank. When he returned from Paris, his personal style now well-honed, he recorded his debut album, Devil May Care, in 1956.
In 1956 Dorough released his debut, Devil May Care, which sported an in-the-know version of Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” and the winning “Baltimore Oriole.” The response was good, but sales were cut short when the Bethlehem label went out of business shortly after the album was released. The promise of another recording contract—with a bankrupt label, it turned out—led him to hitchhike west to Los Angeles, where he began to gig in earnest. He jammed, joined a combo, played between sets by comic Lenny Bruce, and, through a mutual friend, met Miles Davis.
“Terry Morel, a jazz singer and a fan of mine, had Miles over, and he spotted my album,” Dorough recalls. “Terry played some of it, and the next day he showed up and said”—Dorough does a raspy Miles imitation—“‘Put that on again.’ After she told me, I said, ‘Let’s go see Miles.’ I figured if he digs my LP, I gotta say hi. We went to the gig and Terry says, ‘Miles! This is Bob Dorough.’ So Miles says, ‘Hey, Bob, go play “Baltimore Oriole.”’ No ‘Pleased to meet you’ or anything. I played while he stood there watching me, and when I was done, he just walked off. After that, whenever I saw him, he always wanted me to play and sing. When I got back to New York, he even gave me an opening spot for his quintet at the Village Vanguard.”
In 1962 Dorough was invited to compose a Christmas song for Davis. They recorded his cynical “Blue Xmas” for Columbia Records’ Jingle Bell Jazz and also his “Nothing Like You.” “It was a Gil Evans arrangement,” Dorough says. “Miles called Gil up to his house, and we worked all night on the chart. The next day we recorded. I didn’t even think it turned out that well. But Miles dropped it on his album Sorcerer in 1966. Because of that, the song became quite famous.” Yet Dorough would never work with Davis again. “I kind of blew it,” he says. “I was getting busy with my family; we moved to Pennsylvania. Every time I called, his number was changed. I really lost track of him, and I’ll always regret that.” (In Davis’ autobiography, he devoted just a single sentence to Dorough, labeling him that “silly singer.”)
As critic Ben Ratliff wrote in notes accompanying a vinyl reissue of Sorcerer last fall: "The trumpeter Leron Thomas recently told me that he thinks of it as Miles's version of a Looney Tunes move: 'That's All, Folks.' "
While Miles may have thought Dorough a silly singer, he liked Dorough’s title composition well enough to record his own rendition of Devil May Care in 1962.
Dorough’s nerdy hipster credentials don’t end with being the only singer to record a vocal track on a Miles Davis album, even if the master meant it as some comic relief. Dorough played piano and served as music director for Allen Ginsberg’s album Songs of Innocence and Experience setting the poetry of 18th-century English poet William Blake to music.
In 1948, Ginsberg experienced what he described as a religious vision of William Blake appearing in his East Harlem apartment and reciting poetry to him. He was profoundly moved by this experience and inspired to set Blake's poetry to music.
According to art historian Stephen F. Eisenman, "all at once, Ginsberg later said, he apprehended the unity of things material and spiritual, religious and carnal. Looking out the window, he saw 'into the depths of the universe' and understood that 'this was the moment that I was born for.' “ Ginsberg came to believe that Blake's poems were originally composed for the purpose of being sung and that, by studying their rhyme and meter, such a performance could be roughly reproduced. He planned to record musical adaptations of poems from Blake's illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience collection, which thematized the importance and sanctity of childhood, featuring critiques of systemic child abuse ("The Chimney Sweeper"), organized religion ("The Garden of Love"), and "the institutionalized culture of benevolence that perpetuated poverty" ("Holy Thursday"). The poetry collection, Ginsberg said, "seemed the nearest thing to holy mantra or holy prayer poetry that I could find in my own consciousness".
After years of research and preparation, in 1970 Ginsberg went into the studio to record with Dorough arranging and playing piano along with several prominent jazz musicians, including Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and Elvin Jones, best known for his work as John Coltrane’s drummer from 1960 to ‘66.
Reviewing in April 1970 for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau gave the record an "A" and hailed it as "a collaboration of genius". He credited Ginsberg for singing in the manner of Blake's writing – "crude, human, touching, and superb" – and enhancing the source material with his musicians, a feat Christgau found seemingly impossible. In Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs applauded Ginsberg's vocals and found the record effortless and unpretentious, "like a labor of love, a salute from a young visionary to an ancient sage, executed with delicacy and charm". In The New Yorker, Ellen Willis said of the album, "It's a beautiful record, which makes me happy every time I hear it – but then most of what Ginsberg does has that effect on me. He should be persuaded to record a collection of mantras next."
Texas Monthly explains how Schoolhouse Rock dropped into his lap:
In the mid-sixties “Comin’ Home Baby,” a demo Dorough wrote with his bassist friend Ben Tucker, found its way to Mel Tormé, who made it a huge hit. Still, no contract came his way. In 1966 disc jockey Mort Fega recorded Dorough’s second album, Just About Everything, for his Focus label. Amazingly, after the album’s release, that label folded too. Jazz work became so scarce that Dorough took to arranging and producing pop acts like Spanky and Our Gang and writing advertising jingles.
Then he was approached by the creators of Schoolhouse Rock. The idea had been hatched about a year earlier by ad executive David B. McCall, who noted that his son couldn’t grasp multiplication tables but had memorized every word of his Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix records. Sensing an opportunity for an educational record album, McCall enlisted other talents in his firm, and together they began auditioning jingle composers. The project’s creative director, George Newall, was a pianist who haunted the Hickory House jazz nightclub, where he had befriended Ben Tucker. In addition to having worked with Dorough on “Comin’ Home Baby,” Tucker had also heard one of his experimental albums, This Is a Recording, which consisted entirely of lyrics taken from discarded scraps of paper like receipts and laundry tickets. When Newall expressed his frustration at not being able to find the right writer to transfer the rigidity of math into music, Tucker spoke up: “Get Bob Dorough. He can put anything to music!”
Schoolhouse Rock kept Dorough busy throughout the 1970s and then on and off until 2009 when he contributed a couple of songs to the Earth Rock DVD. In the 1990s and into 2000, Dorough was able to return to his hipster roots.
In 1992 he was brought in to record vocals by John Zorn’s New York avant-gardist band Naked City for their second album Grand Guignol.
WIKIPEDIA: Grand Guignol is the second full-length studio album released by John Zorn's band Naked City in 1992 on the Japanese Avant label. The album followed Torture Garden, which was a compilation of "hardcore miniatures" from Naked City and Grand Guignol. The album is notable for the inclusion of cover versions of pieces written by classical composers, the guest vocal of Bob Dorough, and also, like Torture Garden, a selection of "hardcore miniatures" (tracks 9–41) which are intense, fast-tempo, brief compositions, which feature the wailing of Zorn's alto sax, and the screams of Yamatsuka Eye. The album is titled after the infamous Grand Guignol theater in Paris, which was open from 1897 to 1962, where performances centered around extreme violence.
In 2000, Dorough recorded the Too Much Coffee Man CD, originally intended to be the soundtrack for an animated series based on the alternative comic series of the same name by Shannon Wheeler.
Grady Tate
Grady Bernard Tate was born January 14, 1932, in Durham, N.C. His family encouraged his early musical interest, and he was playing drums and singing in public at age 5. “When I was like 9 or 10,” he told All About Jazz, “I was the choice drummer in Durham . . . Some of the older cats would look askance, but I could play. And I could sing.”
… After his voice changed in his early teens, he refused to sing for several years and concentrated instead on drumming, inspired by an early meeting with Jo Jones, the longtime drummer with Count Basie.
After graduating from high school, Tate served four years in the Air Force, playing in a show band whose resident arranger was the trumpeter Bill Berry. He returned to Durham to study theater arts, literature and psychology at North Carolina College. Then he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked briefly as a postal carrier before joining the organist Wild Bill Davis on the road.
Tate moved to New York in his late 20s, but not in pursuit of a musical career: he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts to study drama. His training as an actor was curtailed after saxophonist and flutist Jerome Richardson recommended him to Quincy Jones, who had just lost his drummer.
Prior to his work with Dorough on Schoolhouse Rock, Grady Tate had been a key player in the 1960’s soul-jazz movement. Tate played on many of Jimmy Smith's and Wes Montgomery's most popular recordings, including 1964's The Cat and 1965's Bumpin'. He can also be heard on albums by such luminaries as Nat Adderley, Stan Getz, Tony Bennett, Kenny Burrell, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Roland Kirk, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, J.J. Johnson, and Kai Winding, among countless other artists. The Washington Post:
Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Tate was one of the most sought-after drummers in music, performing in big bands led by Quincy Jones and with singers as varied as Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne and Bette Midler. He played delicately enough to work in a trio led by pianist Billy Taylor, yet also had enough energy to anchor the "Tonight Show" band with Doc Severinsen for six years in the 1960s and 1970s. He performed with Simon and Garfunkel at the duo's celebrated 1981 reunion concert at New York's Central Park.
As the drummer on several recording dates by jazz organist Jimmy Smith throughout the 1960s, including "Organ Grinder Swing" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," Mr. Tate provided the rhythmic pulse that made the bluesy soul jazz a popular style of the time. He recorded with guitarists Wes Montgomery and Grant Green, saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and Oliver Nelson, and provided the strolling drum introduction to Jones's seminal 1969 recording of Benny Golson's "Killer Joe."
In the early 70s Tate played drums on Roberta Flack’s album, Killing Me Softly With His Song. The Wall Street Journal:
Ms. Flack: In the studio, I gave my arrangement a 2/4 feel and took it a little faster than the original. I wanted a groove that deepened the song’s meaning. The groove is the heartbeat of a song. Grady Tate played drums and Ralph MacDonald was on percussion.
I decided to open the song with the chorus rather than the first verse. “Strumming my pain with his fingers” was such a strong line. The rest of the chorus was powerful and set the song’s tone.
I arranged my background singers like a choir. I grew up in the church. The harmonies never left me. They deeply influence all of my music.
I also decided to play the electric piano rather than an acoustic piano. It has a more soothing sound at times. I felt it expressed what I felt in a way that the acoustic piano could not.
Beginning in 1968, Tate began a solo career with a series of jazz vocal albums beginning with his debut album, Windmills of My Mind. The title track is a cover of the theme from The Thomas Crown Affair. I have to admit that I’m not a particular fan of his solo work but others loved it. “As much as I love Grady’s drumming, it is his voice that truly moves me,” jazz singer Nnenna Freelon told the Independent Weekly of Durham in 2003. “Few singers, male or female, can touch Grady for his sensitive phrasing and emotion.”
From 1989 to 2009, Tate’s day job was teaching jazz singing and drumming at the HBCU Howard University. But for Generation Xers who grew up on Schoolhouse Rock, Tate reenters their consciousness during that time playing in 1990 on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, considered by many to be the greatest television soundtrack of all time. NPR:
For a certain pop-culture fan base, Tate will always be legendary for his cool, undulant drumming on the soundtrack to David Lynch's show Twin Peaks. Angelo Badalamenti, the composer, recently relayed Tate's joke that the score only ever inhabited two tempos: "slow, and reverse." But in addition to his delicate brushwork on the original Twin Peaks series, Tate is featured in the soundtrack to Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired this year.
One track, named in his honor, amounts to nearly two minutes of drumming in the foreground, in snappy waltz time. The track, "Grady Groove," captures the inherent musicality in Tate's beat, a gift both rare and so natural that it can still be easy to overlook.
Three Is a Magic Number
These three all lived long and winding lives. They exemplified the catch as catch can careers of working musicians, working at the pinnacle of their fields with jazz legends one minute, writing jingles for an ad firm the next, teaching jazz to university students, or scoring avant-garde television and alternative comic books. Their oddest contribution was their most impactful with Schoolhouse Rock. Because of their openness and talent, they turned in songs and performances far beyond anything we had any right to expect from a project like that.
Blossom Dearie died in her sleep after a long illness in Greenwich Village in 2009 at 82. Grady Tate died in 2017 at 85 from complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Outlasting them all, Bob Dorough passed away at 94 in 2018 …
Somewhere in that ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
Faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number
* An admittedly cringeworthy paean to Manifest Destiny and American imperialism.
** The opening lyric here will be familiar to anyone who has heard The Grateful Dead’s New Minglewood Blues, but they got it from Water Bound Blues by Texas Alexander recorded in 1929.