"Dr. Buzzard's
Original Savannah Band"
(RCA,1976)

By MILO MILES Of all the albums I mention as masterpieces, "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band" draws the most blank stares, so it's clearly a great work in need of further celebration. The record announced itself back then in the best possible manner: with a Top 40 single that jumped out of the background when it came on the radio. "Cherchez la Femme" was bubbly and saucy in a way that made other hot dance numbers of the time sound like punishment. That song and the record it came from remain as unlikely and original as they were two decades ago. A pair of Haitians in the Bronx, Stony Browder Jr. and his brother Thomas (who renamed himself August Darnell), formed Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band in 1974 with singer Cory Daye as the centerpiece. Her voice was light and limber, given to tripping scat rather than roars and moans, and the group's music was an effortless blend of big-band swing, jump blues, show tunes, and Caribbean boogie. The album begins with Stony hissing "Zoot Suit city!" and Darnell has described the liberation he felt the first time he put on baggy yellow pants and a wide-brim hat. The outfit was the perfect mask to unleash the brothers' creativity, and "Dr. Buzzard's" was the first release in many years to suggest that the pop-music past was not dead, an object of nostalgia or ridicule, but held untapped freedom. The debut album was an optimistic glimpse of a partytime society that never came to pass. The male and female revelers were happy chameleons who tried on cultures, romantic roles, and historic attitudes with childlike insouciance. Darnell sassed his lovers constantly, but he was such a layabout scamp ("Mr. Softee" was one later persona) that he never seemed brutish. And Cory Daye demolished every trouble with a smile, a sigh, or a shrug. She's such a joyful, confident ironist that it can be heartbreaking to hear the old sides now, because time has brought about a sad change. Dr. Buzzard made a dull second record and never recovered airplay. The brothers had a falling out and Darnell went on to make wondrous albums all through the '80s as Kid Creole and the Coconuts. But he was lots bigger in Europe than here, and many tours were canceled. Now Darnell, like Daye and Browder before him, has fallen silent. The band's manager, mentioned in the first lines of "Cherchez la Femme," was Tommy Mottola, who went on to become the president of CBS Records and Mr. Mariah Carey -- not the sort of fellow associated with (as the song describes him) "blowing his mind on cheap grass and wine." It would be a sin to lump Dr. Buzzard in with one-dimensional imitators like Odyssey ("Native New Yorker"), or worse, hapless campers like Tuxedo Junction ("Chattanooga Choo Choo") from the same era. Darnell, Browder, and Daye's cultural kaleidoscope is far too vivid and desirable to become another disco relic.

Download a clip (1MB) of "I'll Play the Fool"
from "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band"

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