Julian "Cannonball" Adderley himself speaks a few words at the beginning of this album, before the music starts. He says: "First of all, there are people on earth who really can get with Ernie Andrews right down to what he's talking about,into the middle of the nitty-gritty. Since we know this is possible, right now we'll take care of business. Here's the great Ernie Andrews, ladies and gentlemen!"

Speaking of the nitty-gritty, very few singers epitomize this basic, bare-feet-in the-mud, utterly human quality, in the great tradition of Mamie and Bessie Smith, Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday. Ernie Andrews does.

Ernie has been in the process of being "discovered" for the past twenty years. He is singing today with a maturity and depth developed out of that two decades of professional experience that render this newest re-discovery of him both an inevitability and a joy. It is more thah fitting, therefore, that the instrument in the presentation of Ernie Andrews should be Cannonball Adderley. The Adderley- Andrews alliance is eminently justified on the most basic ground - as memorable singing and as lusty jazz.

To gauge the wealth of vocal experience summed up in Ernie Andrews today, it is worthwhile glancing back to 1945 when the 17-year-old Ernie made a hit record called "Soothe Me" with Red Callender's band. In those days the sale of 300,000 records almost guaranteed instant fame and fortune. Curiously, both eluded Ernie. The fame he did enjoy consisted of hard-core cognoscenti who dug him then and still do. A Hollywood jazz disc jockey named Gene Norman, a man with sound knowledge and love of jazz to bolster his opinion, wrote of Ernie, "He is everything an outstanding modern singer should be... Eckstine, Hibbier and Williams combined."

The twenty-year shaping of Ernie Andrews included band work with everything from obscure groups to a two-year-hitch with the famous aggregation of Harry James. There was a two-month tour of Europe during which audiences on the Continent first tasted the Andrews talent, there were highly successful appearances in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, and a South American tour with the James orchestra. In this album Ernie's voice is conjoined with the unbridled joy of jazz a la Cannonball Adderley. The group includes the altoist's brother Nat Adderley on cornet, Joe Zawinul on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Louis Hayes on drums. Cannonball's arrangements fairly blaze, maintaining a spontaneity of feeling that Ernie summarized when he said of the session, "It's live and impromptu - but it's got fire!"

The essence of Andrews emerges immediately in his reading of Big City. He gets a poignancy, a sheer intensity of sound that lets the listener know, right now, that Ernie knows the big city, he's been and gone through so many of them, he's lived the fulfillment and the heartbreak implicit within.

There is always with Ernie, deep down, never really buried and always poised to well up, always the blues. Next Time I See You is such a heartfelt expression, conventional only in its construction, and with Andrews telling it truly and vigorously. Next Ernie tackles I'm Always Drunk in San Francisco. By Tommy Wolf, the composer of "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," this offbeat, but emotionally charged song has a hint of the earthy - the bawdy, even - that is finally belied in the lyric's closing phrase, an 0. Henry switch not to be revealed here.

The first four measures of Bill Bailey establish that the Adderley/Andrews conception pumps the juice of new life into the old boy. There's a touch of irony in Ernie's treatment of I'm a Born World Shaker, and a dryly laconic solo by Cannonball to enhance this unusual, compelling song. Cannonball's accompaniment for Ernie on Don't Be Afraid of Love ranges wide - from the sweetly lyrical to the stabbingly uninhibited. In Since I Fell for You we take a nostalgic look back to Ernie's earliest days as a professional vocalist, when the song was one of the more popular blues ballads of World War 2. The feeling of the period is recaptured both by Ernie and the Adderley accompaniment. And the closing track of the album, If You Never Fall in Love with Me, has a fine Andrews vocal intensified by Cannonball's obbligato and brief, burning solo.

It isn't necessarily axiomatic that the teaming of a top jazz group such as Cannonball's with a singer of the caIibre of Andrews will guarantee success, artistically or commercially. In Cannonball's case, however, the method seems to work without fail. There's his fine earlier album with Nancy Wilson on Capitol. And there's the undisputed triumph, documented in this album, that has resulted from the musical alliance of Cannonball Adderley and Ernie Andrews.

Anthony Corbett

Produced by DAVID AXELROD