String Musicians In Soul Music

[Ljblanken]

so... there are a lot of awesome string arrangements in soul. especially from detroit and new york. who were these folks? were they orchestras that were simply brought in on a recording-by-recording basis? longer contracts?

i grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati (i know its not detroit, but hey, king records studio was just a few blocks from my house) and i never saw any black kids with violins! so how were these arrangements normally made? anyone know?

[Guest]

so... there are a lot of awesome string arrangements in soul. especially from detroit and new york. who were these folks? were they orchestras that were simply brought in on a recording-by-recording basis? longer contracts?

i grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati (i know its not detroit, but hey, king records studio was just a few blocks from my house) and i never saw any black kids with violins! so how were these arrangements normally made? anyone know?

I believe the Detroit Symphony Orchestra were used on many independent Soul sessions in the 60s.

I was under the impression that the big labels like Coral / Rca / etc had their own in house Orchestras that were also used on sessions for the smaller independents ?

great question !

m

Edited March 21, 2010 by mossy

[Larry Semmins]

Sol Bobrov seems to have been the man in Chicago.

[Guest]

Sol Bobrov seems to have been the man in Chicago.

I always see "The Dick Jacobs Orchestra" credited on loads of releases on decca and coral .

Edited March 21, 2010 by mossy

[boba]

Sol Bobrov seems to have been the man in Chicago.

there wasn't only one orchestra in chicago. joe savage had an orchestra that a lot of people used for example.

[Only Dreaming]

This is my first post after lurking for a few months so please be gentle!!

Great post!!. I don't know a lot about the many talented string players who added so much to the records that we all love, but I did find two pictures that catch a few of them red handed. The first picture is LaVern Baker and orchestra, presumably taken in the Brunswick Studio(Scanned fron the 'Chicago Cool Breezin' CD booklet. The second picture is taken from the back of Jerry Butler's "Sweet Sixteen" LP (1974) and gives quite a bit of info regarding players who featured on the session.

Best, Dave

[Guest Paul]

Sorry to wander from the topic just a little bit but it's interesting to note that the vast majority of string players were white - and usually hired from local orchestras and music schools etc.

And nothing has changed because even today most string sections tend to be made up of white people.

I've only ever recorded a real string section once (on a session for a Sam Dees track in 1992) and it was an all-white team, including a girl (again, you often find quite a few female string players).

In fact, almost everyone else who played on that track is white - apart from guitarist Spencer Bean, bassist James Roland (a British-born Jamaican) and Sam Dees himself of course.

So it also reminds us that most of our favourite "black" records were made by a mixture of black and white people - not just string sections but plenty of white faces in the rhythm sections too. Those "very black" sounds from Stax, Hi, Fame and Muscle Shoals are classic examples.

The same applies to Motown and Philadelphia International etc.

Sadly the individual members of string sections rarely get sleeve credits so a lot of those names are unknown.

Does anyone know of any all-black string sections???

[Guest Paul]

Sol Bobrov seems to have been the man in Chicago.

Sol seems to have played on many of my favourite albums by The Dells, arranged by Charles Stepney, and by The Chi-Lites etc.

They really got a great string sound on those Chicago tracks, no doubt helped by being recorded in a great room with a great engineer (Bruce Swedien).

[Weingarden]

I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s and '70s, and my next-door neighbors from about 70 to 75 were husband and wife violinists in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra who played many, many Motown sessions. In fact, it was a very musical neighborhood: Gordon Staples, the concertmaster/first violinist of the DSO, who did Motown session work and even got to record under his own name for Motown, lived a few blocks away, as did many other members of the symphony orchestra. The musical legacy of that neighborhood continues: Regina Carter, with whom I attended a Detroit public elementary school half a block from my house, is now one of the most famous violinists in the world. (And Derrick May, there at the same time, invented techno. And John Idan is the frontman for the current-day Yardbirds.)

For an example of a fantastic black violinist who played on lots of records, look no further than Don Harris (of Don and Dewey), a child progidy and member of the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra as a young teen.

This is kind of tandential, but Richard Evans, legendary Chicago string arranger (among other things), put together and arranged the string section for the latest Yo La Tengo album and is currently a professor at the Berklee College of Music, one of the most prestigious music academies in the U.S.

Edited March 23, 2010 by weingarden

[Guest]

I always see "The Dick Jacobs Orchestra" credited on loads of releases on decca and coral .

Dick Jacobs (29 March 1918 - 20 May 1988 ) was a musician , conductor , arranger , orchestrator, music director and an artists-and-repertoire director for several US record labels ( Coral , Decca, Brunswick and Springboard ) , who helped Jackie Wilson , Buddy Holly , Bobby Darin and others form their careers in the late 1950s and early 1960s .

Malc Burton

[Richard Bayley]

Our thread starter's avatar features the gorgeous Brenda Holloway, who was a talented string player herself. The notes to the recently released Ace CD "Brenda Holloway - The Early Years" has her learning violin, viola, flute, cello at school and even playing double bass in a jazz band! She apparently passed an audition to perform with the Southern California Symphony Orchestra as a violinist, out of 500 people from the schools of southern California. Brenda states that she was one of only seven black folk out of those 500.......

Edited March 23, 2010 by Richard Bayley

[Djmelismo]

It is kind of ironic that Motown was (at least in the beginning) more or less a black-only company and still their music sounded very "white", whereas Stax Records were white-dominated but gave us music that was very "black"-sounding.

I love the violin. In the 70´s and 80´s there were a number of commercially viable soul violinists -

like Michael White, Charles Veal, Noel Pointer, and Michael Urbaniak.

In mainstream modern jazz John Blake is an important name.

More recenty hip-hop-violinists have begun to crop up.

Here is a prime example, duo Nuttinbutstringz:

https://www.nuttinbutstringz.com

https://www.myspace.com/nuttinbutstringzmusic

https://www.amazon.com/Struggle-Subway-Charts-Nuttin-Stringz/dp/B000HKDE7Y/ref=sr_11_1/104-8699175-4748744?ie=UTF8

Stringing me along...

/Melismo

[Ljblanken]

thanks for all your inputs. learning a bunch. maybe these string musicians will need their own movie called "standing in the shadow of the funk brothers"!

[Gilly]

You'd be surprised just how many white guys were on a studio recording and i dont just mean in the string section.

[Djmelismo]

Accidentally, yesterday I was listening to white violinist David LaFlamme, three very soulful tracks from his 1976 Amherst album White Bird, the tunes were "Swept Away", "Easy Woman" and "This Man" on which he´s backed up by the Tower Of Power horn section.

[Guest posstot]

I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s and '70s, and my next-door neighbors from about 70 to 75 were husband and wife violinists in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra who played many, many Motown sessions. In fact, it was a very musical neighborhood: Gordon Staples, the concertmaster/first violinist of the DSO, who did Motown session work and even got to record under his own name for Motown, lived a few blocks away, as did many other members of the symphony orchestra. The musical legacy of that neighborhood continues: Regina Carter, with whom I attended a Detroit public elementary school half a block from my house, is now one of the most famous violinists in the world. (And Derrick May, there at the same time, invented techno. And John Idan is the frontman for the current-day Yardbirds.)

For an example of a fantastic black violinist who played on lots of records, look no further than Don Harris (of Don and Dewey), a child progidy and member of the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra as a young teen.

This is kind of tandential, but Richard Evans, legendary Chicago string arranger (among other things), put together and arranged the string section for the latest Yo La Tengo album and is currently a professor at the Berklee College of Music, one of the most prestigious music academies in the U.S.

So were the San Remo Strings one and the same as the dso?

[billb]

not only do you get the strings but you also get the horn!

My link

Edited April 18, 2010 by billb

[Ljblanken]

not only do you get the strings but you also get the horn!

My link

awesome link! i wonder what those musicians were thinking:

"this is a lot of fun!"

"i went to julliard for this?"

"gosh, i am going to start listening to more soul"

"this is silly...but an easy paycheck"

"???"

what do you think?