Maurice White

Gratitude to Earth, Wind & Fire...

Mar 02, 2024

I was hearing “jazz” music before I ever knew what it was or where it came from.

As a kid, my only connection to the word “Jazz” was from the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson or The Jazz Age from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The connection for me back then was more to a time than to music. That was a time for me when music had no labels - it was just musicians creating and performing. I did not know there was music labeled “Jazz” - that came much later.

As I recall now, I started to connect with music watching those early Fred Astaire movies and then again from time to time in the 1960s and early 1970s James Bond movies. In both cases, the music was more structured or constrained. However, in the mid-1970s two albums introduced music with much more freedom that found a way into my soul.

Strangely, those albums were both white - I call them the “white albums.” The first was Welcome (1973) by Santana:

And the second, which came a few years later, was Gratitude (1975) by Earth, Wind & Fire

I guess some who like labels and care to categorize music would call these albums “rock” or “pop”, but they are much more than that. Both include incredibly talented musicians, who are given a lot of room to play. On the radio in the mid-1970s, you might hear an extended rock guitar solo, but not an extended soprano or alto saxophone or a flute solo. That was not something you’d hear on the radio.

In the Fall of 1977, the beginning of my first year in high school, Earth, Wind & Fire released All ‘n All. Also at that time, Disco music was becoming popular and All ‘n All’s more dance-oriented songs, like Fantasy and Serpentine Fire, were becoming popular too. But the song on the album I liked most was Runnin’ - not a song you’d hear on the radio. Runnin’ was something entirely different to my musical ear:

No lyrics here, just Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind & Fire, and his band getting after it. The saxophone solo is by Donald Myrick and the trombone player is Louis Satterfield - both we learned about last week as part of Phil Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble. These three musicians: White, Myrick, and Satterfield formed a bond 15 years earlier at Crane Junior College in Chicago in a little-known student jazz band called the Jazzmen.

This week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll follow Maurice White’s journey through the Jazzmen to forming Earth, Wind & Fire.

Born in Memphis on December 19, 1941, Maurice White moved to Chicago when he was 17 years old. He studied at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and played drums in local nightclubs. In 1962 he joined The Jazzmen, formed by Louis Satterfield on trombone and Donald Myrick on alto saxophone. The Jazzmen later became The Pharaohs, who later recorded The Awakening (1971) and In the Basement (1972) without White.

In his 2016 autobiography Maurice White. My Life With Earth, Wind & Fire, White recalls those early days with Myrick, Satterfield, and the Jazzmen:

Early in 1962, I met James Mack, the band director at Crane Junior College. James was an instructor of the highest order and a true “music man’s man.” Well-versed in jazz and classical, he still knew what was on the pop charts. He went on to be one of the principal arrangers at Brunswick Records, as well as working for Chess, Capitol, and Columbia Records. That man is the godfather of much of the significant talent that came out of Chicago.
Mack pushed six of us – Fred Humphrey on piano, Louis Satterfield on trombone, Don Myrick on saxophone, Chuck Handy on trumpet, Ernest McCarthy on bass, and myself on drums – to form a group called the Jazzmen. We spent many hours together rehearsing nonstop, reading the music for accuracy, adding showmanship, and practicing routines. This was new to me. Much of my enduring musical work ethic was born right there.
[Mack told them] “I think you guys are ready for a challenge.”
The Harvest Moon Festival was an annual music contest that was sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times. It was a big deal. Eddie Fisher was the headliner that particular year, performing for the big finale after the contest. The odds were against us: there were many more experienced performers. We took the stage and played our hearts out, giving it our best. Amazingly, we won, in a validation of our talent and what could happen when we worked hard.
The victory put enough wind in our sails to encourage us to enter the 1963 Collegiate Jazz Festival, a two-day event on March 29 and 30 at the University of Notre Dame.
We were all nervous, except for Satt [Satterfield], who confidently said, “We got this.”
We won our division.

Here’s the Jazzmen playing Max Waltz from that Festival:

I dig Myrick’s solo. I think at this point, we need to take a moment to explore some backwaters and pay special tribute to the impact highly underrated Donald Myrick had on Chicago musicians. In an interview, Roscoe Mitchell recalls his time at Englewood High School, where he met Myrick:

I was very fortunate in Englewood High School to have met Donald Myrick, who is a founding member of the AACM. He is also a founding member of Phil Cohran’s group he headed, the Affro-Arts Theater, which later on became The Pharaohs, which they did also record under that name, and then after that became members of Earth, Wind & Fire. Now, like I said, I know that DuSable had Captain Dyett, but we had Donald Myrick at Englewood High School. And I was fortunate to meet him at that time, because he was already playing the instrument in high school, and he kind of like took me under his wing and, you know, started to show me about music.
If you remember the record, Hey Donald, that’s dedicated to my friend Donald Myrick, who went on to help establish Earth, Wind & Fire. Donald Myrick was an excellent musician when I met him in Chicago, and he was a big motivation for me.

Recorded in 1994, here’s Mitchell’s Hey Donald, accompanied by Jodie Christian on piano, Malachi Favors on bass, and Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums:

Released on Delmark Records in 1995, this is a special tribute to Donald Myrick, who in 1993 tragically died after a wrongful death shooting in Los Angeles by a Santa Monica police officer. He was 53 years old.

Maurice White’s first job was with soul singer Betty Everett. He played drums on her version of You’re No Good for Vee-Jay Records of Chicago, which became a hit in November 1963.

As a result, White got a call from Chess Records. Along with Satterfield and Handy, he was hired as a studio musician. White recalls, “That was Chess University. I could never have learned anywhere what I learned at Chess.”

In 1965, Fontella Bass recorded Rescue Me in three takes at Chess Studios in Chicago. Among the studio musicians at the session were White on drums, Satterfield on bass, Pete Cosey on guitar, Charles Stepney on vibes, and Chess receptionist Minnie Riperton on background vocals.

By June 1966, White had left Chess and The Pharaohs to join the Ramsey Lewis Trio, replacing Isaac "Red" Holt as the group's drummer.

During this time, to build and sustain a creative community and new platforms for experimentation and innovation in music, South Side musicians organized and formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). One of the founding members of the AACM was Phil Cohran. In 1967 on the South Side, Cohran formed an alternative organization called the Affro-Arts Theater and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, who we followed on last week’s journey.

Here’s the back cover of Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble’s 1968 masterpiece The Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute In Music):

It’s hard to see, but both Myrick and Sattefield are pictured here:

In 1969, White left the Ramsey Lewis Trio and joined his two friends, Wade Flemons, and Don Whitehead, to form a songwriting team who wrote songs for commercials in the Chicago area. They were able to land a recording contract with Capitol Records and called themselves The Salty Peppers. In 1969, they recorded the minor hit LA, LA, LA released on TEC Records, a soul label from Washington, D.C.:

Here’s Part 1 of LA, LA, LA:

You can definitely hear the beginnings of Earth, Wind & Fire in that song. In his autobiography White recalls:

Wade Flemons, Don Whitehead, and I had gathered several songs we had written. I had tried to interest a few artists in recording them, but with no luck. Believing the songs were good, I thought we should just go and professionally cut them in a studio and hope for the best. I booked studio time at a great place, Audio Finishers Studio, a brownstone building on Ontario Street with great acoustics and great engineers. The guys who owned Audio Finishers had gotten their start at the legendary Universal Recording studio, where I did a ton of sessions.
I found an isolated part of the studio and silently prayed that things would go well. We cut five or six songs that day. Two of them were the instrumental “La La Time” and the song “Love Is Life,” which I would later recut in Los Angeles with the original Earth, Wind & Fire.
We had a huge band. It was enhanced with a lot of horns, most of the same cast of characters that did horn dates in those days. But we still maintained that core: myself, Chuck Handy, Pete Cosey, Louis Satterfield, Wade Flemons, Don Whitehead, and Don Myrick. The great addition was the one and only Donny Hathaway.
There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that Donny was everything an artist should be. He was the one person I knew for sure I wanted in the sessions, because he was creative, soulful, and sensitive. Donny played some of the keyboards and did all the vocal arrangements. It was his idea to hire the Dick Judson singers to sing with him. My baby brother Fred was there, and I put him on the tambourine. “La La Time” was Fred’s first released recording. A few years later, Donny Hathaway would ask Fred to become his drummer.
I decided to release “La La Time” under the group name the Salty Peppers. It got a little radio play in Chicago but stalled there. Fortunately, my pal Phil Wright, who had left Chess Records a few years earlier, landed on his feet at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. They picked the record up, and it branched out to be a little hit in the Midwest.

In 1969, White and the Salty Peppers moved to Los Angeles. In 1971, he signed a new contract with Warner Brothers Records and simultaneously changed the band’s name to Earth, Wind & Fire - reflecting the elements in his astrological chart. Interestingly, the two Warner Brothers albums include Doug and Jean Carn, who were also making a name for themselves on the Black Jazz Record label.

In 1972, White changed labels again, this time signing with Columbia Records. It was with Columbia that the band started to hit its stride and soon expanded their sound to include a horn section called The Phenix Horns, which included trumpeter Michael Harris and two of Satterfield's bandmates from The Pharaohs, Myrick and trumpeter Rahmlee Michael Davis. As a result, White, Myrick and Satterfield were finally back together again. They can be heard in all their glory during Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1974 and 1975 U.S. tour documented on the mostly live album Gratitude. About the tour, White commented:

The band came together as a complete unit on that tour. We were promoting That’s The Way Of The World and the audiences could sense something happening to the band. We weren’t sounding rehearsed. It was a defining moment in our evolution, certainly, and we wanted to give our fans something to remember that moment. Gratitude was our way of saying ‘thank you’ for being a part of it.

One of the things I like most about Earth, Wind & Fire albums are the instrumental tracks. For example, from their fifth studio album Open Our Eyes (1974), with a nod to their Chicago roots, here they play the Eddie Harris tune Spasmodic Movements:

This is a wonderful jazz instrumental that few would identify as Earth, Wind & Fire. The saxophone solo is by Andrew Woolfolk, who also contributed a wonderful solo on Gratitude’s Sun Goddess, featured above. Another example is Africano/Power, the opening track from Gratitude:

Again, Donald Myrick is on fire. What makes Gratitude such a great album is that it is mostly a live performance. It was in this environment that you can hear the amazing energy of the band, often difficult to match in the studio.

Here’s another example, the semi-instrumental classic Reasons and check out Myrick’s wonderful alto solo at the 4:25 minute mark:

Here’s one more for the road to bring us back full circle to their eighth studio album the 1977 classic All 'n All, which I bought in high school when it came out. I didn’t buy a lot of new albums - my collecting years were many years away. I like the last three songs on Side 2: Runnin’, Brazilian Rhyme (interlude), and Be Ever Wonderful. This is a beautiful musical triumvirate. I still have vivid memories of putting Side 2 on the turntable, dropping the needle at Runnin’, and jumping into bed. I’d make it through Runnin’, but I generally wouldn’t make it through Be Ever Wonderful before drifting off to sleep. Here’s a beautiful extended mix of Brazilian Rhyme (aka Ponta de Areia):

I can’t leave this week’s journey without mentioning Jeff Dayton-Johnson’s @jdaytonjohnson wonderful pieces on The Seventies Soul Dharma in eight Earth, Wind & Fire songs. Anyone interested in this week’s journey should check out Jeff’s journey. This is really interesting stuff.

On February 4th, 2016, Maurice White passed away after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 74. My goal on this leg of our journey is to share my gratitude for Maurice White, who helped inspire the evolution of modern American music.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Abdul Wadud.

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Until then, keep on walking….