JJ Cale was born 76 years ago today. Cale, who died on July 26, 2013, was a singer-songwriter and musician who was one of the originators of the Tulsa Sound, a loose genre drawing on blues, rockabilly, country and jazz influences. Cales personal style has often been described as laid back. Songs written by Cale that have been covered by other musicians include After Midnight by Eric Clapton, Phish and Jerry Garcia, Cocaine by Eric Clapton, Clyde by Waylon Jennings and Dr. Hook, and Call Me the Breeze by Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Mayer and Bobby Bare. In 2008, he was a Grammy Award winner, jointly with Clapton. Cale was born in Oklahoma City. He was raised in Tulsa and graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1956. Along with a number of other young Tulsa musicians, Cale moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where he first worked as a studio engineer. Finding little success as a recording artist, he later returned to Tulsa and was considering giving up the music business until Clapton recorded Cales After Midnight in 1970. His first album, Naturally, established his style, described by Los Angeles Times writer Richard Cromelin as a unique hybrid of blues, folk and jazz, marked by relaxed grooves and Cales fluid guitar and laconic vocals. His early use of drum machines and his unconventional mixes lend a distinctive and timeless quality to his work and set him apart from the pack of Americana roots music purists. In 2013 Neil Young remarked that of all the musicians he had ever heard, J.J. Cale and Jimi Hendrix were the two best electric guitar players. Cale often acted as his own producer, engineer and session player. His vocals, sometimes whispery, would be buried in the mix. He attributed his unique sound to being a recording mixer and engineer, saying; Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound. Cale died of heart failure in July, 2013, at the age of 74, in La Jolla, California. Here, Cale performs a concert with Leon Russell in Los Angles in 1979.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 10:01:40 +0000
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