1. I’ll Be Anything for You (Bobby Hebb)
  2. Goodnight, My Love (George Motola/John Marascalco)
  3. Where Are They Now? (Brad Craich/Py Whitney)
  4. Cottage for Sale (Willard Robison/Larry Conley)
  5. Black Is Black (Tony Hayes/Steve Wadey/Michelle Grainger)
  6. Try It Baby (Berry Gordy. Jr.)
  7. This Time Tomorrow (Dee Ervin/Ylonne Watkins)
  8. Please Return Your Love to Me (Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong)
  9. Peace of Mind (Nick Woods)
  10. I’ve Got My Eyes on You (Les Reed/Jackie Rae)
  11. Suddenly (Solomon Burke/Delores Perkins)
  12. Ya Ya (Clarence Lewis/Morris Levy)

Tamiko Jones, Solomon Burke (06, 08) – vocal
Bobby Emmons (01-03, 12), Bobby Wood (01-03, 12), Richard Tee (04-11) – piano, organ
Tom Cogbill, Reggie Young – guitar (01-03, 12)
Carl Lynch (04-11), David Spinoza (04, 07, 09), Bill Fontaine (05, 06, 11), Eric Gale (08, 10) – guitar  
Mike Leech (01-03, 12), Chuck Rainey (04-11) – bass
Gene Chrisman (01-03, 12), Herb Lovelle (05, 06, 11), Bernard Purdie (04, 07-10) – drums
Warren Smith – percussion (05, 06, 11)
Ray Copeland, Harold Johnson, Mel Lastie – trumpet (01-03, 05, 06, 11, 12)
Irvin Markowitz, Marvin Stamm – trumpet (01-03, 12)  
Benny Powell (01-03, 05, 06, 11, 12), Alan Raph (01-03, 12) – trombone
Joe Grimm, Romeo Penque – saxophone (01-03, 12)
Howard Johnson, Seldon Powell, Jerome Richardson – saxophone (01-03, 05, 06, 11, 12)
Ben Blumenreich, Lewis Eley, Joseph Haber, Louis Haber, Harry Lookofsky, Joseph Singer, Irving Spice,
              Louis Stone – violin (01-04, 07, 09, 12)
Paul Gershman, Charles Libove – violin (05, 06, 08, 10, 11)
Seymour Berman, Selwart Clarke, David Sackson, Murray Sandry – viola (01-04, 07, 09, 12)
Emanuel Vardi – viola (05, 06, 08, 10, 11)
Seymour Barab, Alan Shulman – cello (01-04, 07, 09, 12)
George Ricci – cello (05, 06, 08, 10, 11)

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by Solomon Burke [rhythm tracks] and Teacho Wiltshire [strings] (01-03); Teacho Wiltshire (04-07, 09, 11); Horace Ott [rhythm tracks] and Don Sebesky [strings] (08, 10); and Artie Butler (12)

Originally issued as A&M SP 3011

Recorded on June 3 (12) and 4 (01-03), 1968, prob. at American Sound Studio, Memphis, Tennessee, and August 15 (05, 06, 11) and 29 (04, 07, 09) and September 17 (08, 10), 1968, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Strings and horns recorded at Van Gelder Studio.

01 published by Bara Joy Music Co., LLC/Bobby Hebb Music (BMI)
02 published by Robin Hood Music Co./Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc.
03 published by Northern Music (ASCAP)
04 published by Chappell-Co., Inc. (ASCAP)
05 published by Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc. (BMI)
06 published by Jobete Music Co., Inc. (ASCAP)
07 published by EMI Unart Catalog, Inc./Princess Lola Two Music (BMI)
08 published by Stone Agate Music (BMI)
09 published by Almo Music Corporation (ASCAP)
10 published by Regent Music Corp. (BMI)
11 published by Pronto Music (BMI)
12 published by EMI Longitude Music (BMI)

(P)  1968

Born Barbara Tamiko Ferguson in 1945, Tamiko Jones is a melting pot of mixed ancestry, being part African-American, Japanese, British and Cherokee. In 1963, as Timiko, she released a single, “Is It A Sin,” on Checker, and followed it up in 1964, as Tamiko, with “Don’t Laugh If I Cry at Your Party” on ATCO.

In 1966 she scored a Hot 100 hit with Herbie Mann under her new nom de record, Tamiko Jones, for “A Man and a Woman.” Most likely, it was Soul Machine arranger Jimmy Wisner who recommended Jones to Creed Taylor. Wisner had worked with Jones on the Herbie Mann sessions (as did Nat Adderley-pianist Joe Zawinul) and arranged the singer’s albums that bookend her lone A&M/CTI outing: 1968’s Tamiko and 1970’s Tamiko Jones – In Muscle Shoals. Right away, Taylor recognized that Jones possessed a cachet even Barbary lacked: hit name recognition.

The album that resulted from their union, I’ll Be Anything for You, was a fair attempt to launch the singer into the soul-diva stratosphere. But like Aretha Franklin’s earliest recordings on Columbia, the album matched Jones with material that didn’t suit her talents – and, frankly, seemed unlikely to find success at the time.1 Whereas Barbary’s Soul Machine leaned more toward Atlantic’s style of soul, Jones’ I’ll Be Anything for You imposes a mix of Stax and Motown grooves onto somewhat outmoded R&B songs.

The album’s first sessions – yielding the record’s first three tracks and “Ya Ya” – were recorded in Memphis, Tennessee,2 with the Memphis Boys, a group of studio musicians famed for backing Elvis Presley, notably on “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto.”

During this time, Memphis was a hotbed of soulful hit records and the Memphis Boys could be heard on popular records by Aretha Franklin, Merrilee Rush, B.J. Thomas, Dusty Springfield and Neil Diamond. This album’s two single releases, the nicely Memphisized “Ya Ya” and a cover of Jesse Belvin’s 1956 hit “Goodnight, My Love,” came from these sessions, yet despite their good intentions (and a sound quite unlike any other in this collection) neither managed to chart.

The sessions conspicuously mark the only occasion during Creed Taylor’s tenure with A&M that he worked away from Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, although horn and string overdubs were later recorded there. Taylor would return to Memphis nearly a year later to record the bulk of Hubert Laws’ Crying Song, an album originally said to be intended for Stanley Turrentine.3

The album’s remaining tracks were recorded on more familiar ground, back at Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio, with many of the same musicians that peopled Richard Barbary’s Soul Machine.

The bulk of the arrangements were provided by the legendary George “Teacho” Wiltshire, who died a month to the day after finishing his work on I’ll Be Anything for You. Wiltshire shines particularly on Bobby “Sunny” Hebb’s “I’ll Be Anything for You” and the obscure 30s-era ballad “Cottage for Sale.” 4 Wiltshire got his start in jazz, working on early Prestige records, but later worked as a session player on such hits as King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood for Love” and Dion’s “Runaround Sue.” He went on to arrange sides for the Drifters and Wilson Pickett as well as such notable hits as the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” The Exciters’ “Tell Him,” The Vibrations’ “My Girl Sloopy” (the original version of “Hang on Sloopy,” popularized by The McCoys) and Barbara Lewis’ “Baby I’m Yours” (which also featured Artie Butler).

Surprisingly, the nearly-unbilled Solomon Burke (1940-2010) shows up here ever so briefly as a sort of Marvin Gaye to Tamiko Jones’ Tammi Terrell. Burke, despite the lack of any mainstream hits, had a string of soul hits on the Atlantic label between 1961 and 1968. (Teacho Wiltshire worked with Burke on several of these, including “The Price” and “I Feel a Sin Coming On.”)

Sometime in 1968, Burke met up with Jones and the two developed a personal as well as a professional relationship, with Jones briefly acting as Burke’s manager. For I’ll Be Anything for You, Burke duets with Jones on the Motown sides, “Try it Baby” and “Please Return Your Love to Me,” and provides rhythm arrangements for three of the Memphis numbers. Jones later returned the favor by co-producing Burke’s 1969 Bell album Proud Mary.

Jones gives it her all and Taylor does his best to give the vocalist the lush setting she deserves, but I’ll Be Anything for You lives up to its unfortunately desperate title a little too well. Like Soul Machine, it darts over the soulful spectrum a bit haphazardly, hitting the occasional bullseye (“I’ll Be Anything for You,” “Ya Ya,” “Black is Black” and “Please Return Your Love to Me”) and going off the rails altogether with an otherwise erratic program and the just plain odd “I’ve Got My Eyes on You.”

Subsequently, neither the album nor its singles ever found much of an audience. Shortly after completing the record, Jones suddenly contracted a crippling case of polio. Her affliction required a year and a half of recovery but she returned to records with the 1970 Metromedia album Tamiko Jones – In Muscle Shoals. She later scored a Hot 100 hit with the disco-oriented “Touch Me Baby” from her 1975 Arista album, Love Trip, again recorded at Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Dance music seemed to inspire Jones with further disco hits “Let it Flow” (1976), “Can’t Live Without Your Love” (1979) and a particularly strong cover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” (1986). For his part, Creed Taylor did not produce further R&B/soul recordings until launching his “soul jazz” imprint, Kudu, in 1971, and finding success in this arena shortly thereafter for Grover Washington, Jr. and Esther Phillips.

About the Soul Machine and I’ll Be Anything For You covers: As these are the only two albums in the A&M/CTI catalog developed specifically for the pop market, they “benefit” by some mad, mod fashion shoots that would not have been out of place in David Hemmings’ studio in the 1966 film Blow-up. Both Richard Barbary and Tamiko Jones are seen in football-huddle stance with their photographic doubles superimposed on the opposite, giving these hip modsters the impression of summersaulting or “flipping out.” “Sam Antupit and I collaborated on these,” said Turner. “Creed wanted to use the two of them, but I wanted to keep going the route we’d been taking with the other covers. I had taken portrait photographs of Wes Montgomery that came across as moody, but somehow it didn’t feel right with these two to do it that way. Maybe it was because I wasn’t familiar with their music.”5 Similar exercises in hippie-chic superimpositions can be seen on such Blue Note covers of the period as Lou Donaldson’s Mr. Shing-a-Ling (1967) and Hank Mobley’s appropriately-titled The Flip (1970). Designer and photographer Blake Taylor would later do a variation of this superimposition photography on the cover of Larry Coryell’s 1993 CTI disc Fallen Angel.

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Endnotes:

  1. To be fair, however, Taylor scored a hit for Esther Phillips with the unlikely “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1976. ↩︎
  2. The inside sleeve of I’ll Be Anything for You indicates the Memphis sessions were recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Studios, the studio where Elvis Presley recorded much of his early work. But this is unlikely as the Memphis Boys, who played on the sessions, were the house band for nearby American Sound Studio, where Presley’s 1969 album From Elvis in Memphis was recorded. ↩︎
  3. This account – initially reported by Didier Deutsch in the liner notes to the 1988 CD release of Hubert Laws’ Crying Song – is suspect and very likely apocryphal. There is no indication that Stanley Turrentine was scheduled to record for CTI before the November 1970 sessions that yielded his label debut, Sugar. (Creed Taylor had only recorded Turrentine once before, as a sideman on 1964’s Up with Donald Byrd.) While the saxophonist had recorded his final Blue Note session the month before the July 1969 Memphis sessions, it appears he signed a deal around this time with the LA-based Canyon Records, recording (also in LA) the album Flipped – Flipped Out, which was issued around the same time in 1970 as Freddie Hubbard’s CTI debut, Red Clay. A likelier scenario suggests that Taylor called Laws to complete an aborted session scheduled for another flute player, Herbie Mann. This possibly explains the unissued A&M SP 3029 scheduled in Mann’s name and the later appearance of the Don Sebesky-penned “Memphis Two-Step,” recorded with the Memphis Boys, on a 1971 Mann album of the same name (discographies indicate the song was recorded in November 1970 at A&R Recording Studios in New York City, but the Memphis Boys would not have come to New York to record, so it’s likely that the listed date and the studio indicate when overdubs or edits occurred). ↩︎
  4. Another Herbie Mann connection: the flautist had recorded “Cottage for Sale” with Carmen McRae for the flip-side of an Atlantic single in 1967. ↩︎
  5. Pete Turner, “Pete Turner Interview,” interview by Richard Warner, September 2002 (courtesy of the author). ↩︎