Eastlawn ELD #045
Buy on BandcampRJ 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 many of the musicians heard in his current work. Saxophonist Russ Miller was a longtime member of the Sun Messengers; guitarist Ralph Tope played in an organ trio with Spangler for more than a decade; bassist Kurt Krahnke was associated with both the early Sun Messengers and the Blues Insurgents; and drummer Jeff Shoup has a longstanding musical relationship with Heid.
Those overlapping relationships form 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.
