For those unaware, RJ Spangler is a drummer, percussionist, bandleader, and producer whose career has been closely tied to Detroit’s jazz and blues communities. A co-founder of the Sun Messengers in 1980, he has spent decades performing, recording, producing, and organizing projects that connect different generations of musicians working across those traditions.

His musical relationship with pianist and Hammond organist Bill Heid began in the mid-1980s, after Heid joined a regular engagement Spangler was playing at Detroit’s Ye Olde Tap Room. Heid had come to Detroit after earlier work in Pittsburgh and Chicago, bringing experience in both jazz and blues. The two quickly found common ground, and Spangler has described Heid as both a major musical influence and an important rhythm-section partner.

Their collaboration soon extended beyond the bandstand. In the early 1990s, Spangler and Heid worked together with guitarist and singer Johnnie Bassett, eventually developing the Blues Insurgents around Bassett and later Alberta Adams. They also became frequent production partners, working together on recordings by Bassett, Adams, Joe Weaver, and others, while continuing to tour and perform together in the United States and Europe.

That long history has also connected Spangler with other overlapping relationships that have since formed the background to RJ Spangler’s Bop Insurgents featuring Bill Heid, bringing musicians with decades of shared experience together in a setting that grows naturally from their earlier work while pointing toward a different musical direction.

With Ain’t Doin Too Bad, RJ Spangler’s Bop Insurgents featuring Bill Heid brings longstanding musical relationships into a new setting. Co-produced by Spangler and Heid, the album draws on connections reaching through the Sun Messengers, the Blues Insurgents, organ-trio work, and decades of other collaborations. The Bop Insurgents name acknowledges that history without simply recreating it: as Spangler explains, this time the focus is soul jazz and bop—while keeping blues firmly in the picture. 1. Time to Remember [5:22]
2. Hard Times [5:53]
3. Estate [6:42]
4. Ain’t Doin’ Too Bad [5:40]
5. Samba Blim [7:45]
6. The Good Life [8:12]
7. It’s You or No One [4:45]
8. Ode to Billy Joe [6:20]

The eight-track program opens with resplendent fare of Neal Creque’s Time to Remember and a joyful soul that resonates throughout Hard Times and then we get treated to the souled out ambiance of the elegant Estate and the blues/jazz swing of the vocalized title cut Ain’t Doin’ Too Bad.

Along next is the frenetically-charged Samba Blim which is itself followed luxuriantly by the suppleness shown within the simply heavenly Sacha Distel track The Good Life, before the tempo is upgraded again for the buoyant It’s You or No One, the new recording coming to an all-too-son close on a succulent rendition of the Bobbie Gentry tune Ode to Billy Joe.

John Penney of WRCJ describes the result as “a relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable set of jazz and blues” made by musicians who know both the music and one another well. That observation gets to the core of Ain’t Doin Too Bad: the history behind the Bop Insurgents matters because it gives the present-day band a shared point of reference, allowing soul jazz, bop, blues, and a varied repertoire to sit naturally inside the same ensemble identity.

Musicians/Instruments:
Bill Heid — piano, Hammond organ
RJ Spangler — congas, shakers
Russ Miller — alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, flute
Ralph Tope — guitar
Kurt Krahnke — acoustic bass
Jeff Shoup — drums

Official Purchase Link

www.rjspangler.com