Music

popular, jazz, and classical music

popular, jazz, and classical music

popular, jazz, and classical music

Josephine Baker

October 15, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a celebrated African-American dancer and entertainer. She became famous in the Parisian Follies Bergeres, made friends with artists and intellectuals, and eventually renounced the US to become a French citizen. Her reputation was based on the fact that in addition to her being a talented singer and dancer, she also had an effervescent personality and she performed in states of near nudity on stage. However, she was also active in the Civil Rights Movement, refused to perform to segregated audiences, participated in the French Resistance, and was awarded the Legion d’honneur by Charles de Gaul after the war.

She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St Louis, Missouri. Her mother was a descendant of black slaves, and it is thought that her biological father was white. As a child she lived in near poverty and had very little formal education. By the age of eight she was working as a live-in domestic servant for white families. She dropped out of school, became a waitress, and for a time lived on the street, sleeping in cardboard boxes.

By the age of thirteen she was married – and divorced a year later. She began singing and dancing in a street performance group. The area was rich in vaudeville, night clubs, and brothels. At fifteen she married Wille Baker, whose name she kept and used professionally for the rest of her life. But in 1925 she left him when her dancing group was booked in to a New York City venue.

The 1920s in New York was a period of what became known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. There was an artistic and intellectual explosion that took place in Harlem, NYC. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, plus musicians such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton became not only popular but fashionable.

The birth of the Civil Rights Movement gave new confidence to black Americans as an expressive force. And Josephine Baker fitted within this ambience very comfortably, performing at the Plantation Club and in the chorus lines of popular Broadway revues. Around this time she also had a relationship with the blues singer, Clara Smith.

In 1925, still only nineteen years old, she got her first big break – opening in La Revue Negre in Paris at the Theatre de Champs Elysees. She moved on to the Folies Bergere and became famous for her erotic dancing, sometimes appearing almost nude except for a cluster of artificial bananas around her waist. To this exoticism, she added the novelty of a live cheetah in her act.

She met a Sicilian Pepito Abatino who passed himself off as a count: he became her lover and manager, developing her singing skills. Her reputation became international, and she toured in South America, taking the opportunity to have an affair with the architect Le Corbusier who was designing a house for her in Paris.

She also repatriated her fame back in the United States, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936. But the reception back home was less than enthusiastic, so she returned in disappointment to Paris the following year, marrying an industrialist and becoming a French citizen.

At the outbreak of the Second World War she was recruited by the French Deuxieme Bureau (French military intelligence) as an ‘honourable correspondent’. Her role was to mingle with foreign diplomats and embassy officials (particularly the occupying Germans) picking up information on troop locations and military intelligence. She also worked for the Red Cross and entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East.

After the war she bought a chateau in Sarlat near the Dordogne and began adopting children from all over the world. She accumulated twelve orphans in all, which she called her ‘rainbow tribe’. In 1947 she married for the fourth and final time, to Jo Boillon, a French orchestra leader. Like her other formal liaisons, the marriage did not last long.

In the 1950s she returned to America, where her public reception was much better than before. She performed to sell-out audiences from Miami to New York. However, when she challenged the famous Stork Club in Manhattan for refusing to accept mixed races, she was attacked by the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. He accused her of being a Communist sympathiser, she lost her work visa as a result, and she was forced to return to France.

But her fight on behalf of racial equality did not go unrewarded. She was recognised by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The Association declared May 20 Josephine Baker Day in her honour. And at an individual level she was befriended by the film actress Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco).

In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington rally, alongside Martin Luther King. Later, when he was assassinated, his widow Coretta Scott King invited Baker to take his place as leader of the civil rights movement. She turned down the offer in order to look after her children. But in 1968 she was declared bankrupt over unpaid debts, and she lost occupancy of the chateau, which is now open as a museum in her memory. Grace Kelly gave her financial assistance and the loan of a villa in Monaco.

In 1975 she starred in a retrospective revue celebrating her fifty years in show business. The revue in Paris was financed by Prince Rainier of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It was attended by an international array of celebrities – but four days later she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died at the age of sixty-eight. At her funeral she was given full French military honours, and the Place Josephine Baker was named after her in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris.

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon UK

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon US

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Larkin’s Jazz

September 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

4-CD boxed set compilation of Larkin’s favourite music

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he used to write regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth he even harboured aspirations to become a jazz drummer. Larkin’s Jazz is a 4-CD box set compilation of his favourites.

A poet famous for his gloom (he called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’) he confessed in later life that jazz had provided him with some of the happiest moments of his life. And his enthusiasm for the foot-tapping, life-enhancing spirit of jazz music lasted from his boyhood in pre-war Coventry to his death in 1985. This multi-disc compilation of his favourite music was created as a tribute to the poet and critic on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing.

The vast majority of these tracks are what used to be called ‘hot’ jazz – upbeat and spirited music – from his first record purchase of ‘Tiger Rag’, through Lionel Hampton, to Earl Bostic’s ‘Flamingo’ (which I remember buying as a teenager in the 1950s to dispel the tedium of Family Favourites, and Those You Have Loved.

The contents of the four discs are arranged in a sequence that reflects the order in which Larkin experienced the music. The first CD brings together the recordings that he collected as a youth in the 1930s. These include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, The Chicago Rhythm Kings, and Count Basie. These might strike contemporary listeners as decidedly old-fashioned, but it should be kept in mind that jazz music at that time was regarded generally as a risque and corrupting influence, and the only music (apart from classical) broadcast by the BBC was of mind-numbing banality.

The second disc collects some of the music he experienced at University, along with fellow student Kingsley Amis who became a lifelong friend. Outstanding names here include Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and Gene Krupa. You might be tempted to conclude from this that his taste was mainly for white musicians, but to his credit Larkin was an early enthusiast for blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

The third represents the music he reviewed during his stint for the Telegraph, and appears to cast the appreciative net a little wider. Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington are featured names here. Not that Larkin’s reviews were confined to such a narrow historical period. But it’s well known that he was no lover of modern jazz, and the compilers have probably more accurately reflected Larkin’s tastes rather than including music by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and even John Coltrane that Larkin had reviewed but did not like.

Most of these recordings were originally issued on 78 rpm records, which constrained performances to about three and a half minutes maximum. But the fourth CD features more extended items taken from long playing records that Larkin used to listen to with friends in the 1970s and 1980s.

These Proper Box productions are tremendous value at four CDs for less than ten pounds, but this one has the additional bonus of an accompanying booklet that offers not one but two essays of appreciation, plus commentary notes, photographs and a full discography of every track. This scholarship is shared by Trevor Tolley, an authority on Larkin and John White, a colleague of Larkin’s at the University of Hull, biographer of Artie Shaw, and co-editor of Larkin: Jazz Writings. No wonder it’s already at the top of the best-seller lists.

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Larkin’s Jazz, London: Proper Box Records, 2010, ISBN: B003LZ38IW

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Larkin’s Jazz Essays and Reviews

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

Larkin’s Jazz is a collection of record and book reviews that has been assembled to flesh out Philip Larkin’s oeuvre of writings on jazz. It also seeks to correct the idea that he was a jazz reactionary — an impression he created himself by his introduction to All What Jazz, the collection of his monthly record reviews for The Daily Telegraph. This also covers a wider time span – starting with a piece he wrote for a school magazine and going up into the early 1980s.

It’s a collection of reviews from the Guardan the Observer and elsewhere. What emerges is a rational, humane view of jazz and related topics, a sincere concern for the plight of African-Americans (who he refers to as Negroes – which was PC at the time) and of course a lustful sense of fun for the music. He writes on Count Basie, Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, jazz photography, other jazz critics such as Francis Newton and LeRoi Jones. The editors Richard Palmer and John White do everything they can to reclaim the image of Larkin which has been generated by his biographies and published correspondence:

these book reviews give the lie to the charges of misogynist, racist and anti-modernist curmudgeon levelled against Larkin by politically correct critics who also revealed themselves as incapable of detecting irony or wit in the purple prose that vivifies much of his correspondence.

Whether they do that or not depends partly on how much else any reader already knows about Larkin and his – ahem, idiosyncratic views and tastes. But these pieces are certainly well worth reading in their own right. As a reviewer myself, I noticed how well-crafted the reviews are – amazingly short, yet combining an account of the book or the record, a personal opinion, and a neat sliver of readable journalism as well.

Of course much of what he has to say is about very traditional forms of jazz, and even though that’s clearly his own taste it’s not entirely his own fault. He was reviewing at a time when most print publications on the subject of jazz were rather conservative.

He admires the writing of Whitney Balliett, but sees its limitations:

in the end we are left with the impression of brilliant superficiality. Perhaps that is editorial policy: the New Yorker was always strong on polish. But the only thing you can polish is a surface.

This collection has been edited with loving care. Even the smallest items and least-known names are swaddled in supportive endnotes. It’s one for connoisseurs: devotees of jazz music, or those interested in the opinions and occasional writings of a very influential poet.

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Richard Palmer and John White (eds) Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, London: Continuum, 2001, pp.190, ISBN: 0826453465

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Listen to This

December 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on classical and contemporary music

Listen to This is the follow up to Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century which was a huge success when it was published last year. His new book is a collection of essays which first appeared in The New Yorker where he is resident music critic. Some readers will be amazed at the wide variety of music he covers. In one sense (to use the language of record producers) he’s monetising his back catalogue, because some of the essays date from as long as nearly twenty years ago.

In the magazine and on his blog at The Rest Is Noise he makes a vigorous effort to document, expand, and proselytise on behalf of contemporary music. And I use the term ‘contemporary’ for two reasons. The first is that although much of his writing is concerned with the traditions of church, concert hall, and chamber music stretching from the early renaissance to the present day, he rejects the term ‘classical’ as inaccurate and restricting. It does not include what we now call ‘early music’ and it excludes music being written and performed by living composers. The second reason is that it also excludes music from other genres, such as jazz, experimental modernism, and rock – some of which attract far more listeners than any ‘classical’ music has ever done.

This collection seeks to redress this narrowness and imbalance by including essays on pop and contemporary art music, alongside pieces on Brahms, Schubert, and Mozart. Not that he is entirely at ease in embracing these apparently contradictory enthusiasms. In his opening essay he wrestles with this seemingly conflicting taste for classical and pop music, and it’s significant that whilst his love of traditional music is rooted in composers such as Beethoven, Mahler, and Wagner, but he can look beyond these to modern symphonic music, his taste in popular genres is far less mature and well-informed. He’s attracted to superficial pop stars, white American rock music, and even talentless wannabes such as Bjork.

He also touches in his introductory essays on a far more interesting and fundamental issue. How is it possible, he asks, to write critically and analytically about music, when it is an abstract form of expression? Because music, despite all its power to move us emotionally, doesn’t actually mean anything. How can this be true, when so many people find such a great deal of satisfaction in listening to it? This is a paradox to which he never really finds a solution.

Ross is an incredibly fluent and entertaining writer, and he can go on for several hundred words describing his reaction to Beethoven’s Eroica. But ultimately, his account of this experience comes down to what he rightly calls the ‘purple’ school of music criticism – ‘Beethoven’s Fifth symphony begins with fate knocking at the door’.

There’s an essay on Mozart in which he examines the composer’s greatness in the process of reviewing a Philips’ issue of the complete works on 180 CDs. This gives him the opportunity to spot evidence of links between dramatic situations and musical motifs in pieces written many years apart – which he offers as evidence for the notion that Mozart had these constructions wired into his inventive DNA.

He is drawn towards biographical interpretation, but has to admit that there is precious little evidence to support it. The fact is that artists can create tragic art works during happy periods of their life – and optimistic upbeat works when they’re in the middle of personal tragedies.

An essay on the pop group Radiohead is not much more than a well-written character sketch of the band members, with some festival rock atmosphere thrown in. It’s the sort of thing which does not help his cause to enlarge the scope of what he calls ‘the music’ at all. The documentary-journalistic approach is much better employed when he gives an account of classical music in contemporary China.

The same is true of his essay on Bob Dylan. There’s plenty of biographical anecdote stressing his eccentric behaviour and amazing productivity, and in-depth consideration of ambiguity in his lyrics – but very little about the music itself. The most interesting detail to emerge from what is obviously a close acquaintance with his live concerts and recorded work is that Dylan constantly reshapes his own material – adding new lyrics to songs, changing their harmonic structures, and even recycling old lyrics with new melodies. Jazz musicians do this all the time, but it is unusual in both pop and ‘classical’ music, and it strikes me as being a topic worthy of further examination.

He has what can only be called a weakness for experimentalism. [I was surprised at his taking John Cage seriously in The Rest is Noise.] Here he creates a touching portrait of John Luther Adams, giving a sympathetic account of compositions for ninety voices that last for six hours, and continuous music that is ‘composed’ by seismic readings and temperature measurements from local meteorological stations. This is music you can ‘live in’, music that never ends – which begs the question of whether it is music at all.

Naturally he is in favour of bolstering more public support for musical education and participation in the arts, but he doesn’t seem to understand that culture in any society is produced with what’s left over after the basic requirements for survival have been met. A nation with half its population living on food stamps and state benefits hasn’t got the resources to spare for violin lessons for underprivileged children – whose parents don’t have the money or the inclination to attend concerts of classical music. In other words, his heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t seem to have thought through the relationship between art and economics. Only societies with large budget surpluses can afford to subsidise nineteenth century sized orchestras.

The best essay in the collection is his most recent – a virtuoso survey of the descending base line which appears throughout western musical history in forms from the chaconne to the twelve bar blues. This manages to combine the technical analysis of music with the ‘purple’ approach to criticism, arguing that there is something fundamental in this progression which illustrates a ‘meaning’ in this seemingly most abstract of art forms. After all, it is no accident that most ‘sad’ music is written in minor keys.

He’s amazingly well informed about the world of music as a profession, and sandwiched within these essays there are some fascinating insights which could easily be expanded into articles in their own right – the history of applause at concerts for instance, or the fact that the average member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

Although it lacks the continuous narrative and the intellectual rigour of The Rest is Noise this is a fascinating collection of studies that brings an infectious enthusiasm to the appreciation of music. He doesn’t solve either of his two main problems, but his exploration of the issues is inspiring and certainly promotes the urge to listen more.

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Alex Ross, Listen to This, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, pp.400, ISBN: 0007319061

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Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what the BBC supposes to be very controversial topics such as “Should government subsidise the Arts?” and “Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?”. He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness the same approach makes for lively reading.

What he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics which was fuelled by vainglorious recording companies and famous conductors alike. This accelerated until the whole system ground to a point of collapse brought on by their greed, by over-production, and a failure to see changes in mass media.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but it is told via a combination of detailed insider knowledge of how classical music works as a business, with celebrity vignettes, potted biographies, and what might be called lashings of The Higher Gossip.

Many of the principal conductors we think of as cultural icons and household names emerge from these pages as vain, self-seeking, and egotistical monsters – pocketing huge sums in secret deals behind the backs of their employers, and moving from one orchestra and city to another in a relentless search for more prestige.

This starts with figures such as the mercurial and dictatorial conductor Toscanini and the unscrupulous record producer Walter Legge, and then moves into more recent years with company takeovers which seem more motivated by whim and rivalry than any artistic or business logic.

He’s very well informed about all sorts of details. How Decca was a haven for gays (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davis) and how Deutsche Grammophon (owned by Siemens) had used slave labour from the death camps to keep its empire going.

The golden years are awash with lucrative record deals, and projects which replicate every popular classic known to man, ten times over. But then in the 1960s things begin to change. That’s because the record companies suddenly realise that they are making more money out of pop music.

By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

From this point onwards there was a struggle between pop and classical in the board rooms. One brought in the money, the other wasted it on a prodigious scale. Despite a temporary revival with early music, the end was in sight. And when it came there was lots of grief and pain for everyone. By the time we reach Internet downloads and Peer-2-Peer filesharing, the game is up.

You’ll love this story if you are interested in behind-the-scenes of the music world, and gossip about those people with high reputations but much lower levels of behaviour. It’s got schadenfreude by the bucketload. (Actually, that’s a fair example of Lebrecht’s style rubbing off on me.)

And yet for all his dirt-dishing on the famous, he actually supports a high patrician line of cultural conservatism. You get a strong sense of regret that things have turned out as they have. He doesn’t see the process he describes as one of change, fuelled by one technology after another, which probably has more people listening to classical music than ever before – as I am doing right now, over the Internet.

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Norman Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp.324, ISBN: 0713999570

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Natural Selection

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

‘A critic,’ Philip Larkin once declared, ‘is a man who likes some things and dislikes others, and finds reasons for doing so and for trying to persuade other people to do so.’ Gary Giddins has been doing this for many years. In several collections of jazz journalism (including the recent Weather Bird) Gary Giddins has conveyed his enthusiasm for and devotion to the music and its practitioners. This latest book Natural Selection includes pieces on jazz, but also illuminating essays on silent movies, film noir, TV shows, DVD and CD releases, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Classics Illustrated, Friedrich Durrenmatt and the Jewish novelist Soma Morgenstern.

Giddins’ firm conviction is that ‘jazz and film have much in common, beyond parallel births, changing technologies, and competing bids as America’s pre-eminent cultural love child. They are resolutely manipulative arts. Music continuously mines emotional responses; movies are structured around emotional releases, whether musical, comic, tear-jerking, shocking, pornographic, or suspenseful. Musical works and movies usually exist in concise units of time, their effectiveness dependent on tempo, rhythm, contrast, style, and interaction’.

He proceeds to apply this apercu to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and the Marx Brothers. Chaplin he suggests ‘ruined numerous comedians who wanted our tears but didn’t possess his equilibrium (Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal for starters’). The Marx Brothers ‘were grown-ups pretending to be children, pretending to be grown-ups.’

Jerry Lewis (‘Idiot Semi-Savant’) might be adored by the French, but they are mercifully unaware of ‘the sanctimonious talking head who sapped the affection of a generation with horrific television appearances.’ Bob Hope, a comic movie actor to be taken seriously, became dated as a glib and increasingly unfunny comedian, ‘increasingly sanctified as the rich, conformist, golfing buddy of every White House duffer.’ Jack Benny (not widely known in Europe, but a household name in America) ‘may be the only great comedian in history who isn’t associated with a single witticism’.

Various iconic screen stars receive their succinct dues. Greta Garbo ‘reminds us that the cinema is the ultimate expression of voyeurism: her close-ups are her money shots’. A young Marlon Brando ‘gave American actors new modes of being racked with ambiguities’. Of the latter-day Brando, Giddins asks: ‘Excepting Orson Welles, has any other actor cloistered himself in so much fat?’

Bing Crosby (Giddins is his biographer) ‘is the most conspicuously neglected of the Golden Age of Hollywood stars’. So far, so good, but the critical faculty seems alarmingly absent from Giddins’s claim that Doris Day (‘Blond and Beaming’), was ‘The coolest and sexiest female singer to achieve movie-musical stardom’. Moreover, many of the film/DVD reviews collected here are bogged down in often tedious technical detail.

Not surprisingly, Giddins is at his considerable best in jazz reviews – which include refreshing reassessments of Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday. Miller has long been dismissed by critics as ‘a humourless purveyor of diluted swing, banal novelties and saccharine vocals’ but is now being celebrated as the creator of ‘a sound that clings remorselessly to the collective memory.’

Both Miller (and Fats Waller) ‘humble critical stereotypes and show ways that jazz and pop once enriched each other, and might still’. But reviewing The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Giddins finds it almost totally worthless, with entries on jazz – ‘which one might argue is the essence of American music’ – only found after much searching.

Elsewhere, he suggests that ‘there is a correct way to sing Cole Porter, much as there is a correct way to act Shakespeare’ and commends Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald as ‘accomplished Porterphiles’. Giddins confesses to be a life-long admirer of Duke Ellington. ‘People often describe their first time with Duke Ellington in terms of losing their virginity, and for me it seemed like the next best thing’.

In an excellent piece on ‘Jazz for the Eyes’ (The Sound of Jazz/Jazz on a Summer’s Day), Giddins writes of Lester Young’s single-chorus, 39-second tenor solo on the TV (not studio) version of Fine and Mellow, that it is ‘so sublimely constructed that after you’ve heard it a couple of times, it becomes part of your nervous system, like the motor skills required to ride a bicycle’. As for the vocalist on this number, Billie Holliday: ‘if it is possible for two people to make love while one partner is playing the tenor saxophone 10 feet away from the other, that is what Young and Holliday were doing.’ And ‘Billie’s pantomime of pure pleasure embodied a sensual appreciation of the music in a way no actor has ever succeeded in doing’.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day also had its share of ‘indelible jazz images: Anita O’Day ‘in a feathered hat and black sheath dress with white fringes, thrusting her glottis at Sweet Georgia Brown‘; trombonist Jack Teagarden ‘grinning as though he’d crashed an unexpected party while Chuck Berry rocks Sweet Little Sixteen‘, and Louis Armstrong recounting his unlikely answer to the Pope, when asked if he had children – ‘No, Daddy, but we’re still wailing’.

Giddins is particularly mischievous at posing and then answering questions. One example must suffice. In a review of the movie White Palace, Giddins ponders the prevalence of oral sex in recent films and asks: ‘What’s with all these blowjobs?’ His answer: ‘They represent Hollywood’s latest code for breaking the ice, for reaching out and touching someone, for initiating a sincere and meaningful relationship. No more kissing on the mouth, no more ‘What was your major?’ Just cut to the fly, followed by a shot of an actor faking instantaneous ecstasy.’ Partly autobiographical, Natural Selection is also an artful work of ‘intelligent design’. Giddins persuades us to revisit some of the movies and books, and all of the jazz performances he so obviously enjoyed reviewing – and sharing.

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Gary Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, & Books, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.432 , ISBN: 019517951X

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The Blues – a very short introduction

August 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

history of blues music 1910 to the present

Most people imagine that ‘the Blues’ is a form of musical expression characterised by mournful lamentations about life’s hardships or expressions of lost love. Ask any musician, and they will tell you that it’s the name of a musical form, moving from the tonic to the sub-dominant fourth, then via a flattened seventh, back to the dominant. And a singer might point out that it is a four-bar ‘call’ or phrase that is repeated then completed by a four-bar ‘answer’. Elijah Wald’s strength is to show that it means all these things – and more besides. The blues is also a thorough mixture of European and African American musical elements that first became popular via very politically incorrect minstrel shows in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Wald is particularly good at explaining the distinctions between different styles – which are usually the products of different geographical areas – and showing the social and economic context out of which these styles emerged. In terms of structure he first of all covers the classic country-based blues artists of the period 1910-1930, then he looks at the blues as a mainstay of popular bands such as Count Basie, Louis Jordan, and Lionel Hampton. He several times emphasises that the big stars of this period wer almost all women singers – Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington (real name, Ruth Jones).

When it comes to the 1950s and the arrival of blues-based rock-and-roll he explains again the case he makes at length in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll. This is the argument that the new young white groups, even though inspired by the old blues masters, pushed them out of the record charts. However, it is a mistake to imagine that they universally resented this. Many of them had lost their original black audiences, and were grateful for finding new ones by association with the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

The final chapters trace the influence of the blues on American culture – first in its relation with jazz music. It’s really quite difficult to say where the blues ends and jazz begins, as all great jazz performers have have included blues as part of their repertoire from Buddy Bolden’s “Blues” to John Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary”.

It is the penultimate chapter that blues purists will find most controversial, since Wald argues that in the racially segregated world of country and western music, white performers such as Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams were just as influential on black singers as the other way round – and he has the evidence from black performers themselves to support this idea.

He ends with a chapter on the poetry of the blues – extolling the virtues of its sexual frankness and unsentimental treatment of life’s harsher realities. I thought he missed a good chance to point out the use of amazingly inventive allegories and metaphors (Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” and Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”) – but you cannot expect everything in a ‘very short introduction’.

Anyone who wants an introduction to this rich musical genre would do well to start here. I read it with my connection to www.Spotify.com open – and checked all his major recommendations. They were spot on.

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Elijah Wald, The Blues: a very short introduction, Oxford Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.140, ISBN: 0195398939

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The Life of Jimmy Scott

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

I have to confess that I only heard of Jimmy Scott quite recently. Understandably so, it turns out. He’s one of the best kept secrets in the world of jazz and ballad singing. I heard his voice on a radio broadcast, was intrigued, bought a couple of CDs from Amazon – and was completely blown away. He’s completely unlike any other male singer you’ve ever heard of – mainly because he sounds like a woman. This is the result of a congenital disease which denied him puberty.

But that isn’t all: he has a style which is stripped bare to a minimum and yet very mannered at the same time. Like all good jazz musicians, he pays attention to song lyrics and sings them as if he means them. The most interesting things about him are his voice quality – high falsetto, big vibrato – and his delivery, which is laid back to a point where you think he might fall over. But he never does. The nearest style I can think of is Billie Holliday – one of his early fans and an influence. As David Ritz puts it in this very readable biography:

The rhythms he creates are wholly original. He does more than take his time. He doesn’t worry about time. Time disappears as a restraint or a measure. As a singer, his signatures are idiosyncratic phrasing and radical, behind-the beat syncopation. His career, like his singing, has lagged far behind the beat.

Scott’s life was full of personal heartbreak: from a dysfunctional family; orphaned as a teenager; married four times; duped by record producers; constantly on the move; scorned as an outsider; drink, (soft) drugs. He lived, as David Ritz accurately puts it, the jazz life.

Oddly enough, he claims that his early influences were Paul Robeson and Judy Garland two singers who you would think were at opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

The amazing thing, for someone who is still alive and singing now (I heard him with a German tenor player only a few weeks ago) is that he cut his musical teeth with people such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Tadd Dameron. His working life spans the last half-century.

Much of the racy vivacity of Ritz’s narrative comes from the fact that he transcribes the accounts of people he interviewed in his research. There are also some very entertaining vignettes along the way – such as life on the road in the high-octane Lionel Hampton band in the late 1940s.

His biggest fans were the people who matter musically – Bird, B.B.King, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horn. Later on he was championed by Lou Reed and Madonna.

And his own musical taste is impeccable – as in his perceptive observation that Stan Getz got better as he got older “Whatever he learned from Lester—and he learned a lot—he expanded on the lessons until he became a master himself”

He started out promisingly enough, but every time he tried to make his breakthrough record albumn, an old producer would surface to block his ambition with a ‘cease and desist’ order straight out of a nineteenth century melodrama. Scott remained unembittered – though it has to be said he took out a lot of his anger on the people closest to him.

The 1970s and 1980s are like waste years, with Scott working as a hotel lift attendant and a shipping clerk to make ends meet. Then there are a succession of failed enterprises which left him living off social security. But then he finally got some recognition and success in the 1990s when largely white audiences began to catch on to him. By then he was sixty-eight years old.

So the story has a reasonably happy ending – but he had to wait almost half a lifetime for it. This is an enthralling account of a real survivor, recounted with genuine but not uncritical admiration, and supported by a scholarly apparatus of bibliography and discography which left me yearning to read and listen to more of this truly remarkable artist.

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David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002, pp.270, ISBN: 0306812290

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The Oxford Companion to Jazz

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on jazz musicians and jazz history

This latest addition to the distinguished Oxford Companion series comes with an encomium from record producer George Avakian: “No book on jazz has ever attempted the scope of this monumental collection of 60 studies by 59 writers. [It] is both a reference work for the scholar and a rewarding book to be dipped into by the casual reader.” Edited by composer, educator, and saxophonist Bill Kirchner, The Oxford Companion to Jazz is both impressive and slightly disappointing.

The essays are uneven in quality, there are several typographical errors, some of the black and white photographs are poorly reproduced, there are no ‘Notes on Contributors’, and the eye-straining ‘Selected Bibliography’ and ‘Index of Names and Subjects’ are not accompanied by a discography – although several essays are, in effect, record reviews. But this stout Companion has more strengths than weaknesses, and is a valuable addition to jazz literature. Kirchner’s contributors include such notable critics and musicians as Dan Morgernstern, Gunther Schuller, Patricia Willard, Bill Crow, Digby Fairweather, and Richard M. Sudhalter. There are also essays from Loren Schoenberg, Dick Katz, Mike Zwerin, Lewis Porter, Brian Priestly, Will Friedwall, Scott De Veaux, Max Harrison and Ted Gioia.

The topics covered range from ‘African Roots of Jazz’ (Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.) and ‘European Roots of Jazz’ (William H. Youngren) – which present two opposing views of the same topic. Extended essays also cover such neglected subjects as ‘The Jazz Age, Appearances and Realities’ and ‘Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging after World War II’.

There are chapters dealing with jazz styles – such as ragtime, swing, bop (an excellent piece by De Veaux), third stream, and fusion – and the locations of jazz – New Orleans, New York, California, and Kansas City. Even Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are exhumed and examined.

Acknowledged jazz masters (and mistresses) receive individual (and sometimes overlapping) evaluations: Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young; Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan (in a perceptive essay by Patricia Willard). There are also chapters on the modern masters Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane – though ‘cutting edge’ instrumentalists and vocalists of the past two decades receive short (or no) shrift.

Separate entries on the instruments of jazz offer some revealing insights – Michael Ullman on the clarinet, Gunther Schuller on the trombone, Don Heckman on the saxophone, Randy Sandke on the trumpet, Bill Crow on the bass, Burt Korall on the drums, Neil Tesser on ‘The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included’. There are also several essays on pianists.

In one of the best essays, ‘Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity’, David Demsey explains that ‘in a great soloist’s repertoire, every tune is like a familiar subject of conversation: although fresh ideas are always emerging, the language needed to communicate them has a consistency for each individual.’

He then applies this observation to the recorded work of masters ranging from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman. He makes a good point in his suggestion that:

It is in the solitude of the practice room – ‘the woodshed’ – where, for even the most inexperienced student and the legendary jazz master alike, the basic elements of form and harmony are ingrained, new melodies or voice-leading pathways are learned, and experiments are made in rhythmic manipulation.

The Oxford Companion to Jazz, like the music and musicians it celebrates, is hugely enjoyable but best taken in measured doses. Holding this massive tome open takes two hands. If, as the editor hopes, it also sends (or introduces) the serious or casual reader to the recorded performances of the artists discussed, so much the better.

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Bill Kirchner (ed), The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.864, ISBN: 019512510X

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The Oxford Dictionary of Music

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

definitions and an encyclopedia of musical matters

Actually this is what should be called (for the want of a better term) a dictionary of classical music, because it does not seek to cover all musical genres. Entries run from the note A to the Polish soprano Teresa Zylis-Gara, and include major (and minor) composers plus their works, famous performers and conductors, characters from operas, musical concepts and genres, musical instruments, and even mini-essays on topics such as ‘Electronic Music’.

It’s as up-to-date as one could expect for a work of reference of this kind. There are 12,500 entries on all aspects of the subject, and topics stretch from music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to potted biographies of contemporary composers such as Judith Weir and performers such as Cecilia Bartoli. I checked against (for instance) George Benjamin (b. 1960) and Thomas Adès (b. 1970) – and both of them had entries.

Its one nod towards ‘popular’ music is to include mention of song composers such as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. For anyone interested in music, whether as a student, concert-goer, record collector or Radio 3 listener, it is a welcoming book – in which the author shares his enthusiasm for the obvious as well as the obscure. To give a very typical illustrative example, the section on American composer John Adams runs as follows:

Adams, John (Coolidge) (b Worcester, Mass, 1947). Amer. composer, conductor, and clarinetist. Studies Harvard Univ. and comp. with Kirchner, Del Tredici, and Sessions. Head, comp. dept. San Francisco Cons. 1972-82. Comp-in-res., San Francisco SO 1979-85. One of minimalists, he has deliberately forged an eclectic idiom which borrows from most of the major 20th cent. composers and from jazz. Comps.:

OPERAS: * Nixon in China (1984-7) ; The * Death of Klinghoffer (1990-1); I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, mus. th. (1994-5); Doctor Atomic (2003-5).

ORCH.: Common Tones in Simple Time (1980); Shaker Loops, str. (1983); Harmonielehre (1984-5); Tromba lontana (1986); Short ride in a fast machine (1986); The Chairman Dances (1987); Fearful Symetries (1988); Eros Piano, pf, orch. or chamber orch. (1989); Chamber conc. (1991); El Dorado (1991); vn. conc. (1993).

VOICE(S) & ORCH. OR ENS.: Christian Zeal and Activity, spkr. on tape., ens. (1973); Grounding, 3 solo vv., instr., elec. (1975); Harmonium, ch., orch. (1980); Grand Pianola Music, 2 sop., 2 pf., small orch. (1981-2); The Wound Dresser, bar., orch. or chamber orch. (1988).

CHAMBER MUSIC: Pf. quintet (1970); American Standard, unspecified ens. (1973).

PIANO: Ragamarole, (1973); China Gates, (1977); Phrygian Gates, (1977).

TAPE ONLY: Onyx, (1975); Light Over Water, (1983).

The entire body text is set in Times New Roman, which for works of reference is a little unfashionable these days – but which I felt was sympathetic to the subject of classical music.

This latest revised edition has been supplemented with 1,000 new entries; lists of composers works have been brought up to date; and the entries now also include musical directors, critics, producers, and designers. Whether we call it ‘classical’ music or anything else, everything you might wish to know about it is covered here. [It’s also now available in a slightly abridged paperback edition.]

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Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, (revised edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press, sith edition, 2012, pp.976, ISBN: 0199578109

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