Between Bach and "O-o-h Child'

In 1970 the U.S. invades Cambodia, and four protesting students are killed at Kent State. The World Trade Center's North Tower is completed. The American Motors Gremlin and Ford Pinto make their first appearance, and NBC's Chet Huntley retires.

A cyclone kills half a million East Pakistanis. Earth Day begins, Apollo 13 is lost and saved, and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin expire at the age of 27. Monday Night Football, PBS, Soul Train, and American Top 40 start broadcasting. The Who perform Tommy at The Met, Black Sabbath invents heavy metal, The Beatles break up, and I enter the eighth grade, singing "O-o-h Child."

Ooh child things are gonna get easier…
Some day we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day when the world is much brighter…
Right now…

It's one of the better pop songs ever produced, a brilliant vehicle for The Five Stairsteps, the "First Family of Soul," out of Chicago. Its sermon of hope amid inchoate struggle wins over black and white audiences alike.

It crackles from Stan Vincent's economical and unusual writing. The verse opens not on the tonic home chord, but on the fourth degree chord— an "Amen" cadence, of all things. Its two stanzas seesaw back and forth between keys a third apart, F and A-flat. This is odd for any song, pop or otherwise.

Bernard Purdie's difference

"O-o-h Child" has a sparkling brass and string arrangement, and would've been a hit without an explosive extra element that launches it into a jet stream right out of pop and into You're kidding me. I felt it, all those years ago, but it came rushing back to me recently with a clarity I never heard from my WIBG-devoted transistor radio.

That extra element is the drummer.

He's a monumental force. The first thought that arose when I heard this song again was, "Who is this guy?" It took a while, since I don't know of any encyclopedia of session players, but I found him: Bernard Purdie.

I "found" him, right: Everybody in the business knows Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, who calls himself "The World's Most Recorded Drummer." He's played everything, with everybody, it seems.

He's the laid-back funk shuffle in Steely Dan's "Home at Last." He's the granite slap in Aretha Franklin's "Rock Steady" (he was the Queen of Soul's music director for a number of years). Miles Davis, Hall & Oates, Percy Sledge, Joe Cocker, Cat Stevens, B.B. King…. so many he played for, so many he recorded for.

Scruff of the neck

In an interview with WFMU's Michael Shelley, Purdie talked about striving to get his tempo across to everyone on this single, and you absolutely hear it in the recording. When Purdie was brought in for the "O-o-h Child" session, he effectively kicked in the door and grabbed the song by the scruff of the neck. His tommy-gun fills are a constant reminder of where the tempo is.

Even the cymbal ride under the opening vocal (you can barely hear the 16ths between those rim knocks: Tsit-tsit-tsit-tsit, Tsit-tsit-tsit-tsit) is a reminder from HQ that This. Is. The. Tempo. It's soft, insistent, and exactly in place: a steel needle stitching silk thread.

His high-hat is a smart bomb, not the avuncular, swung tshh-app we're used to, but gut-punched, close and hard: a small, targeted explosion. The long tom-tom runs between stanzas are rivetingly precise, and there's truth in those phrase-bridging double- and triple-flams, little giddy-ups that make me chuckle nervously.

They aren't show-off flourishes, either; they're horsewhips. Tight, righteous and never overdone: They propel the song. "O-o-h Child" is inhabited so much by Purdie, it's just not "O-o-h Child" without him.

Cellist rides herd

In Baroque music, the rhythm section is the basso continuo (meaning, usually, keyboard with cello). Baroque composers didn't have, nor need, drum kits back then. So upon hearing the soprano aria, "Mein glaübiges Herze," from Bach's Cantata No. 68 soon after my reacquaintance with "O-o-h Child," I'm thinking that the cellist was the Bernard Purdie of the Baroque.

Anyone in the continuo— harpsichord, lute, what have you— is of course responsible for maintaining the rhythm, as are all musicians in any ensemble. But the cellist especially rides herd in Baroque music, and often must.

The cellist must have a finely tuned engine, and must drive without pushing. (What a world of difference lies between those two words.) Tempo must be spot-on but alive, not metronomic, which means the cellist is always thinking, weighing, managing, on the alert to every nuance and flight of fancy.

Sometimes, the cellist must take over, which takes nerve— I think of George C. Scott's opening monologue from Patton: "Wade into them! Spill their blood!"— but sometimes the cellist must lurk in the foliage, which takes humility.

O. Henry's formula

To pull it all off takes talent, of course, and all musicians need such qualities. But these particular qualities are priorities for the cellist, and often in bang-bang succession.

Raising the stakes in "Mein glaübiges Herze," Bach even lifts the cello out of the continuo and into a soloist's chair, wildly disproportionate for an aria.

My faithful heart, rejoice, sing, be merry, your Jesus is here!
Away with sorrow, away with lamentation!

The cellist kicks down the door and becomes the aria, and you chuckle and say, You're kidding me. Just as O. Henry wrote, "You can make oyster-soup without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffeecake without coffee, but you can't make beef stew without potatoes and onions," this wouldn't be a soprano aria without that cello.

It's the kind of caper Bach pulls all the time, launching this Baroque composer into a jet stream right out of the Baroque. In the midst of wars, tragedies, beginnings and endings, death and eighth grades, some day, child, away with lamentation. Some day, when the world is much brighter. Or even… right now.♦


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