Search - Leon Mcauliffe & His Cimarron Boys :: Take It Away the Leon Way!

Needs more like 10 stars

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 06/03/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Western swing suffers from the fact that many people don't accept it for what it is, a unique blend and the product of the unqiue creativity of the thousands of musicians who passed through it. Some folks simply want it to be their idea of "country" music. Others demand that it be full strength Jazz, rock, or either Rhythm and blues. To fully enjoy and appreciate it, we have to realize that it is its own unique combination of these musics, with creativities, and originalities that are purely its own, or that we may now see as part of these other musics but really came into them from Western Swing.



This is a really nice comfortable and enjoyable album. Leon McAuliffe was a serious musician. He knew how to lead a band, and he knew how to make rich developed musical solos and to write great tunes embodying the best aspects of swing music, country music, general pop music, jazz, and rhythm and blues. He hired progressive musicians of skill and taste and ran crack bands of his own from his release from his civilian job as a pilot trainer during WWII until the 1960s.



One thing about Leon, unlike the other great steel players, Leon was never really just a soloist whose emphasis was on the flashiness or skill of his own solos. Even playing in Bob Wills' band, let alone playing in his own bands, Leon was always a band leader. His solos might have been great, but like Duke Ellington, his real instrument was the band as a whole and his ability to temper tunes, organize solos, and shape the interplay to get the most out of the whole group, not just his immaculate and swinging playing. There is no better testament to that than this album.



No I am wrong, I forget that Leon McAuliffe was the leader in the greatest Western Swing recording of all time, "For the Last Time," the final reunion of Bob Wills's most outstanding musicians with Wills, Haggard, Hoyle and Jody Nix, and Tommy Alsup done in the ealry 1970s. To me that album has as much of Leon's own original style as it does Wills'. Wills knew this because when the idea of the recording came up, Wills said the first person he called and wanted as band leader was Leon McAuliffe even though Leon hadn't worked with Wills since WWII.



Leon McAuliffe is an important man in all American music!



This is really Leon's second postwar band. During the War he served with Glenn Miller's great sax soloist Tex Beniche in Tulsa and they played and talked together. Leon was even more enflamed to set up a straight swing band which had a pop-swing repertoire more than a Western repertoire, despite the fact that this was the era of the biggest commercial success of Western Swing when Bob Wills was the biggest selling popular music attraction of any kind out selling the top Swing Bands and vocalists for dances and theater shows. This was the period when a Battle of the Bands between the unfortuante Spade Cooley and Bob Wills on the Venice Peer in LA could pull in 10-15000 people!



The excellence of his swing band is recorded on the other album Take it Away Leon. I was particularly impressed with the hot piano playing of Moe Billington which also appears on this CD. Unfortunately, Leon simply could not make money with the big swing band and cut down to a more classic Western swing unit without all the horns, although he does use one horn or two on some of these cuts.



The sound here is more typical of Western Swing. At the same time it has the particular excellence of Leon's approach to the music. Leon always talked about how from his earliest days he listened primarily to the great horn soloists in the big swing bands. I think he also had a good listen to the way brass and reed sections were voiced in some of the top swing bands. I am no big fan of Glenn Miller, but certainly he was a genius at voicing his horns, and I think Leon was a student of that.



What we get in these recordings is not just the flashiness and speed typical of Western swing performers of that epoch, but an overall strength of the tune itselfs being voiced in a swinging way, not just by Leon McAuliffe, but by the whole band. You never lose the tune in this music to the improvisation. You also never feel as you might listening to the set of swing bands that basically descended from the guitar trio of Cameron Hill, Jimmy Wyble, and Noel Boggs that played for Wills and then Cooley, that the accompaniment or even the solo you are hearing could be on any of a number of songs.



The tune itself always stands out on Leon's recordings, no matter how great the solos, no matter how swingin the music. I think this music is good training for musicians of any kind that involves solos and improvisation to understand how to do it, or as Bob Wills used to say how "Tear it down, but don't you ruin it!"



My favorites on this album include all the big Leon Standards that I have always adored like Twin Guitar Special, Mississippi Delta Blues, Tulsa Straight Ahead, and Take it Away Leon. However, I really like some both the straight swing tunes like Night Train, In the Mood, and above all One O'clock Jump.



Earlier Sony-Columbia had a CD of recordings of Leon with the Cimmeron Boys which included some of these recordings as well as Leon's classic, the first tune Leon recorded with them "The Pan Handle Rag," which is one of my favorite Western instrumentals, one of the few I have never to try on guitar. Does anyone know why that recording does not seem to be available any more?



Last words are that Leon's music is fun, and it is comfortable. It is the kind of music you can have on at a party, and it is the kind of music people who like any kind of music, even folks who don't think they would want to hear Western, country, or Jazz music will love. This is always going to be one of those CDs that is always on the top list of ones you want to play. The only problem is that this is a hard one to get out of the CD player when you think of listening to something else.





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