Trumpets: Herbie Williams, John “Little John” Wilson, Marcus Belgrave, Russell Conway, Johnny Trudell
Trombones: Bob Cousar, George Bohanon, Paul Riser
Saxophones: Hank Cosby, Andrew “Mike” Terry, Kasuka Mafia (Norris Patterson), Thomas “Beans” Bowles, Teddy Buckner, Ernie Rodgers, Ronnie Wakefield, Lefty Edwards, and Eli Fontaine.
Several of these names stand out as key members of the session band.
Andrew “Mike” Terry was born in Hempstead, Texas, in 1940 into a musical family that moved to Detroit around 1948, where Terry attended Cass Technical High School and started to play baritone saxophone. It was there that he met Paul Riser, who was to make his mark at Motown too.
Towards the end of the fifties, Terry joined a local band, Popcorn and the Mohawks, where he met future Motown musicians Eddie Willis, James Jamerson, Lamont Dozier, Norman Whitfield and the band’s leader Richard “Popcorn” Wylie. Together they cut the single “Custer’s Last Man” for Berry Gordy in 1959.
Terry also became a member of the Joe Hunter Band and started working at Motown on contract. It is Terry’s baritone sax that you can hear on the Miracles’ “Shop Around” from 1960. Over the next seven years, he played on thousands of tracks usually alongside tenor sax player Hank Crosby, without a credit, of course. As a freelance session player, Terry was also able to play on sessions at other Detroit studios and further afield. He is credited on tracks for Ric-Tic Records, Carla, Karen, Revilot, Solid Hit, Golden World and Groovesville in the Motor City, and also at Vee-Jay in Chicago, plus RCA Victor and Columbia.
Before leaving Motown in 1967, Terry enrolled at the Detroit Institute of Performing Arts to widen his range of skills, as he wanted to write and arrange songs, then conduct and produce in the studio. He planned to form a partnership with Jack Ashford, following a few sessions away from Motown at Golden World’s studio in 1966, and duly set up Pied Piper Productions with his Motown colleague. That year also saw the formation of the Geo-Si-Mik Production Team, a partnership between Mike Terry, George Clinton and Sidney Barnes, that later produced recordings by Laura Lee and The Parliaments. Terry later worked in Philadelphia and Chicago, arranging and producing tracks for Epic and Okeh labels.
Jason Ankeny (Allmusic.com) has summed up Terry’s importance to the Motown sound: “[Terry’s baritone sax] remains an indelible component of the famed Motown sound – his grunting, gutbucket solos electrified dozens of the most memorable hits”.
Henry R. Cosby, generally known as “Hank”, was born in Detroit in 1928. He was a serving soldier during the Korean War, during which time he played tenor saxophone in the military band. At the end of the war, he turned down an opportunity to play in Cannonball Adderley’s Jazz Band, in order to return to Detroit, where he joined the Joe Hunter Band and soon started working at Motown.
Berry Gordy was aware of his wider musical abilities as a songwriter, arranger and producer, and later set him to work as a mentor and collaborator with Stevie Wonder, alongside Sylvia Moy. Cosby also worked with many of the other stars at Motown, earning a credit on three number one hits, “Fingertips” by Stevie Wonder, “Love Child” by the Supremes and “The Tears of a Clown” by the Miracles. Typically, when working with Stevie Wonder, Cosby would arrange the final song for which Wonder had written the tune and Sylvia Moy the lyrics. It was an extremely successful partnership.
Cosby appreciated the talent of the musicians that he played with, singling out James Jamerson for special praise for his contribution to the Wonder, Moy, Cosby composition “I Was Made To Love Her”: “Fifty per cent of ‘I Was Made To Love Her’ was James Jamerson’s bass line. No one else played bass like that.” He also understood what made Motown such a strong team: “We had in-house everything: in-house engineers, in-house studio, in-house arrangers and in-house musicians. Everybody was there seven days a week around the clock.” (Spencer Leigh, 6th April 2002, in The Independent).
When Berry Gordy switched the company to the West Coast, Cosby was not convinced that it would work out well. Nevertheless, he finally moved to Los Angeles and continued working for Motown and other outside studios. He retired from the music industry in the eighties and died at the start of 2002.
George Bohanon was born in Detroit in 1937. He began playing trombone when he was just eight years old and later studied at Wayne State University and Detroit’s Institute of Musical Arts.
He first joined the session band in Studio A in 1961 and played on many sessions with all the Motown acts. He was also a member of the Chico Hamilton Jazz Quintet during this period. Bohanon recorded at Motown himself, cutting two albums for the Jazz Workshop label.
George Bohanon’s 1991 CD “Blue Phase” on the Geobo Music label
In 1968 he moved to Los Angeles and continued playing Jazz, whilst also playing in various Los Angeles studios, backing a host of well-known acts, ranging from Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra to Dolly Parton and Bonnie Raitt, plus several of Motown’s stars, including Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder. After many years of performance and studio experience, Bohanon was appointed to the post of Adjunct Assistant Professor in Jazz Performance and Trombone at UCLA.
Paul Riser was born in Detroit in 1943. He grew up listening to his mother play Gospel hymns every day on the piano and started piano lessons, but he was attracted to the trombone. He started playing Jazz and orchestral music. Riser later studied at Cass Technical High School, intending to go on to Wayne State University in order to become a classical trombonist. That plan was interrupted by a call from Motown in 1961. A friend of Riser was working at Motown and had suggested him as a possible session player, to play alongside George Bohanon. It was a tempting offer that Riser could not resist; his first session soon followed. He was seventeen years old.
Berry Gordy soon realized that Paul Riser was a special talent, who had much more to give. Riser had taught himself transcription skills as a teenager listening to Jazz. He would write out the parts for the Jazz combo he played with after listening to his favourite songs on record. Now he began to take ideas from songwriters and fill out the music, building on the hooks that the writers had come up with. He could hear the possibilities in the simple structures that many songwriters provided, and he could create wonderful arrangements that enhanced the lyrics and showed off the artists’ vocal strengths. Riser thus became doubly important. He played on a large number of recordings and also became a staff arranger at Motown, working with all the best songwriters.
Riser spent eleven years at Motown, and then moved on to apply his skills at a variety of studios. Since leaving Motown, he has arranged songs for some of the best artists of the last fifty years, including Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole and Roberta Flack.
In 2009 he was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum. His Motown legacy is highly significant, featuring a host of classic songs. Listen to the trombones on the Temptations’ “My Girl” and you will hear Riser and Bohanon at work. Listen to his rich arrangement of the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and you will hear Riser’s musical genius. He has said that his favourite arrangement was Diana Ross’ 1970 version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (in a NAMM interview in 2021), but it was “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” that brought him a Grammy for best R&B Instrumental Performance, which he shared with songwriter Norman Whitfield.
Thomas “Beans” Bowles was born during the late nineteen-twenties in South Bend, Indiana. As a youngster, he learned to play the clarinet before moving on to the flute and baritone saxophone, which soon became his chosen professional instruments. His nickname “Beans” originated as “String Beans”, a reference to his body shape. Bowles was six foot five and very slim.
Photo: Tropical Jon website
His first love musically was Jazz. When he came to Detroit in 1944 to study at Wayne State University, he was offered the chance to play with a US Navy Band, which he accepted. He later played with a number of local Jazz bands in the city. It was at a Jazz performance in a Detroit club that Berry Gordy first saw him. Bowles made an early contribution to the sound of Motown, when he was hired by Berry Gordy as a member of the band chosen to play at United Sound Studio in 1958 for the recording of Marv Johnson’s “Come To Me”.
A couple of years later, Gordy brought Bowles onto the Motown payroll in the Artist Management division of the young company. He could clearly see that Bowles would be an admirable guide and mentor for all the young artists that were being added to the payroll. It was actually Bowles who drew Berry’s attention to the need to teach most of these new artists about the business of music-making. It was also Bowles who came up with the idea of sending these performers out on the road, to drum up interest in their songs and to create an image of the Sound of Young America. Gordy put his sister Esther Gordy Edwards in charge of the Motortown roadshow, but it was Bowles who used his experience of playing on the road to set the standards and check everyone’s behaviour. In 1962, while on the Motortown tour, Bowles was involved in a serious road accident, in which one of the team died. Bowles was lucky to survive.
Many of the young singers that he taught have spoken with great affection for Bowles, because he was caring and always ready to advise and support. Martha Reeves’ tribute is typical: “He was a master of all trades. Whatever was called for, Beans did. He was a fine musician, a wonderful gentleman.”
Bowles can be heard playing flute on Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and later on “What’s Going On”. His baritone sax can be heard on the Supremes’ “Baby Love”. Probably his most memorable contribution was to Martha Reeves & the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”, with his wonderful sax solo.
Bowles left Motown in 1965 at the request of Berry Gordy, following a threat from a criminal source to blow up the Motown building. Bowles’ son Dennis tells the story behind this threat in his book about his father Dr. Beans Bowles – Fingertips: The Untold Story.
The Bowles family lived in the Michigan township of Royal Oak, where Thomas Bowles was a member of the local Board of Trustees that oversaw property developments. When an attempt was made to bribe him to secure a vote in favour of a particular development, Bowles reported the potential corruption to the local police. As a result, he and his family received threats that everyone took seriously. The police provided an armed guard for them and undertook an investigation that required Bowles to give a formal statement to prosecuting law-enforcement officials, soon after Bowles returned from the 1965 Tamla-Motown tour of the UK. Unfortunately, the criminals knew where Bowles worked. The threat to bomb Motown meant that Berry Gordy had to sack Bowles, to protect the rest of the Motown team and the business itself. He did so with a heavy heart.
Earl Van Dyke helped Bowles find work at Detroit’s 20 Grand club. Later, in 1971, Smokey Robinson turned to Bowles when he needed a musical director for his concert tours. The Four Tops also employed Bowles, before he set up a business with his sons Dennis and Harold presenting music shows in the Detroit area.
In 1974, Bowles helped to set up the Graystone Jazz Museum in Detroit, becoming director of the Museum Orchestra and continuing to mentor young musicians.
Bowles died in 2000 after a long illness. At his funeral, around twenty-five horn players led a New Orleans-style procession and Stevie Wonder played Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” in celebration of “an angel on Earth”, as Wonder described him.
Bowles was very much an unacknowledged icon of Motown. Many people were in his debt, not least Stevie Wonder, for whom Bowles wrote and played the opening melody for the flute solo on “Fingertips” (on Wonder’s album “The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie Wonder”) and then arranged the flute melody for harmonica on the hit single release. Bowles’ contribution was not credited.
Herbie Williams played trumpet in Studio A between 1959 and 1972. He was also a producer, arranger, conductor and songwriter. He was also a member of Pied Piper Productions along with Jack Ashford, Mike Terry and Joe Hunter, that operated in the city between 1965 and 1967.
Johnny Trudell studied at Cass Technical High School and then worked as a professional musician in Detroit from the early sixties. He played in Studio A on many sessions, including on recordings by Martha Reeves & the Vandellas and Marvin Gaye. He often directed the studio’s horn section and co-ordinated arrangements for the brass instruments.
Most of the other musicians listed on the session lists from 1959 to 1962 were Jazz players who performed in the clubs in and around Detroit and worked at various studios to augment their income. Not all had contracts at Motown: they were employed casually.
Header Photo: Garry Knight 2009 (rotated)
