Side one

INTRODUCTION :07
FUN
(composer: Nat Adderley. Upam Music/BMi. 7:33)
GAMES
(composer: Nat Adderley.Upam MusiciBMi. 8:03)
MERCY, MERCY, MERCY
(composer: Josef Zawinul. Zawinul Music/BMi. 5:07)

The 1967 US Top Chart
The 1967 Grammy Awards
The 1967 Capitol Awards

Side two

STICKS
(composer: Julian Adderley. Dillard Music/BMi. 3:53)
HIPPODELPHIA
(composer: Josef Zawinul. Zawinul Music/BMi. 5:43)
SACK O'WOE
(composer: Julian Adderley. Upam Music/BMi. 10:45)

In the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, the Club De Lisa was one of the swingingest spots in Chicago's South Side. It shut down for a while. A little over a year ago, my friend and fellow deejay Pervis Spann and I had the pleasure of reopening it under our own management as The Club, and behold, it's wailin' again! It never wailed more than it did on the five nights Cannonball, Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, and the other musicians in the Quintet played their first stand for us - the first, we hope, of many. They played like blue smoke. They played like sweet preachin'. They played like nobody was ever going to go without honey butter again.

The Club seats 800. Cannonball drew in better than 1200 customers a night, and we were seating the overflow out in the lounge. Everybody went away gassed. That Quintet of his is five giants, all climbing up the beanstalk at once. Cannonball - I call him CannonBird because he says things musically in his own way like nobody has said things in his own way since Charlie Parker - is the tremendous alto sax talent of our day. Nat can cut anybody with his horn. Vic Gatsky on bass and Roy McCurdy on drums are the greatest. And how about that Joe Zawinul! An Austrian fellow you'd think would be at home playing pretty waltzes, and he comes here to the States and lays down jazz like he was the fellow invented it.

The music the Quintet knock people out with is composed by themselves. Nat wrote "Fun" and "Games." How's that for a double header? Cannonball contributed "Sticks" and his jazz classic "Sack 0' Woe." Joe Zawinul created "Hipadelphia" and the great hit that is used as the title of this album, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!" This last may well be the finest flight-lights composition since Avery Parrish's great "After Hours." Joe plays it on the electric piano.

Capitol Records came into The Club one night before showtime, strung their equipment all over, and took a full evening's performance down on tape. That was one of those great and providential blessings of history. What if there'd been no publisher around to provide a typesetter when Tolstoy wrote "War and Peace"? No Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo got itchy to paint a ceiling? What my friend Cannonball did at The Club is now preserved forever, and it'll be around a long, long time, as among the definitive works of a master. I'm proud The Club played a part in it.

E. RODNEY JONES

(E. Rodney Jones Is the well4lked WVON deelay who, with his WVON colleague Pervis Spann, has made The Club, on Chicago's great street State street, one of the places in the nation to go.)