Jazz Archives - Mantex

A New History of Jazz

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

Do we really need yet another weighty ‘history of jazz’ in what is already a crowded field? When the author (also a bass player) has already produced excellent biographies of (among others) Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller, and regularly presents ‘Jazz Profiles’ on Radio 3, the answer must be in the affirmative. In this expanded version of his award-winning study, Alyn Shipton offers an encyclopaedic account of ‘a music created mainly by black Americans in the early twentieth-century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.’ Throughout, he contends that up-the-river-from-New Orleans ‘histories’ of jazz distort and oversimplify what was a complex series of accidents, interactions, borrowings and innovations.

Part One contains an extended consideration of the ‘Precursors’ of jazz – including the blues and vaudeville, the classic jazz of New Orleans and Chicago, stride and boogie woogie piano, the advent of big bands (Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson and early Ellington) – and bands and combos of the Swing Era. Some readers will consider that Paul Whiteman and Cab Calloway receive more than their fair share of attention. There is also a survey of developments in jazz in the UK, France and Germany up to World War II.

Part Two, ‘From Swing to Bop’ covers Dizzy Gillespie’s early orchestra, the West Coast scene and a (very good) summary of jazz on film. Among other topics treated are impresario Norman Granz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) phenomenon. Granz is properly commended for presenting and recording such disparate players as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, J. J. Johnson, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins together in concert and on record (where they also backed Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald), helping to popularise jazz and ‘heal some of the more damaging aspects of the modern versus trad split of the 1940s.’

Elsewhere, Shipton discusses the early work of Miles Davis, the emergence of Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, the contributions of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis’s crossover into Jazz Rock, and ‘Jazz as World Music’ – in Latin America, India, Africa and Europe.

One of the many strengths of the book is an extensive use of oral histories and personal interviews with such luminaries as Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani, Sam Rivers and Cassandra Wilson. Shipton discusses little-known (but pioneering) performers, and displays an enviable familiarity with the lesser-known records of Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman, Gerald Wilson and Miles Davis.

He is particularly well informed and incisive on jazz pianists. The late Michel Petrucciani ‘overcame his lack of stature and strength to become one of the most ferociously talented pianists in jazz,’ with ‘a touch as delicately forceful as that of either [Bill] Evans or [Keith] Jarrett.’ Brad Mehldau and Martial Solal also receive honourable mention, but Jessica Williams is absent from the roster of ‘cutting edge’ pianists (a cliché Shipton overuses).

Jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Helen Merrill, Betty Carter, Carmen McCrae and Abbey Lincoln receive more extended coverage than in the first edition. Lincoln is identified as ‘the most accomplished social and political commentator in the history of vocal jazz.’ Yet despite his refreshing catholicity of taste, not all jazz singers receive the Shipton seal of approval. He is underwhelmed by Nina Simone who ‘lacked the jazz improviser’s spontaneous ability to play off her musical colleagues.’ The currently ubiquitous Norah Jones is dismissed as a purveyor of ‘jazz-inflected pop, with no improvisational edge and no profound exploration of emotion or meaning.’

In a concluding section on Postmodern Jazz Shipton argues that up to the 1970s, ‘the story of jazz is a straightforward narrative.’ But thanks [sic] to advances in technology, aspiring jazz musicians no longer sit at the feet of their idols, engage in informal jam sessions or serve apprenticeships in big bands – although college orchestras in the UK and the US serve a similar function.

Jazz artists in the twenty-first-century, Shipton suggests, are either forward or backward looking. Two popular singers resident in Britain illustrate the point: Claire Martin performs mainly original compositions, while Stacey Kent sticks to ‘the standard repertoire.’ In America, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra perpetuate the Ken Burns approach to jazz with recreations of the work of Ellington, whereas saxophonists Sam Rivers, and Joshua Redman hone and polish the ‘cutting edge’ of the jazz tradition.

A New History of Jazz is a massively detailed and well-documented interpretation of a musical form ‘inextricably bound up with the development of popular music as a whole.’ It can also be consulted as a series of discrete essays on its major (and minor) forms and practitioners. A good selection of photographs, a list of recommended CDs, and an extensive bibliography (which surprisingly does not include the late Whitney Balliett or Gary Giddins) add to the authority of a magisterial if over-weight volume. And a more attentive editor might have pruned Shipton’s always engaging but sometimes repetitive prose.

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Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz: Revised and Updated Edition, New York & London: Continuum, 2007, pp.804, ISBN: 0826417892

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Artie Shaw: his life and music

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical and illustrated biography – plus discography

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman. Shaw’s five top single recordings had sold over 65 million copies by 1965; by 1990 his total sales exceeded 100 million records. John White’s critical biographical study starts with an outline of Swing as a phenomenon of the 1930s and 1940s, then traces Shaw’s rise through countless small bands to fame as a leader in his own right. It takes in the jobbing years of the 1930s and the rise to stardom in the 1940s. And then at the height of his fame, suddenly feeling uncomfortable in the modernist phase of the 1950s, Shaw retired to Spain.

After five years he returned to the USA, and made a series of come-backs, then started writing fiction. It’s lucidly written account, fully annotated and referenced, and I particularly liked the fact that White puts the life of the musician into a socio-economic context – so we see what shaped the world of a professional musician. It’s a rich antidote to the romantic approach to jazz music criticism, which tends to be based on anecdotes and uncritical enthusiasm.

The narrative is punctuated by well-documented quotations from Shaw himself and other musicians. These often reinforce the precarious life of the professional jazz musician:

‘A cop in Boston arrested our Negro driver and tossed him into the can … We left our driver in jail, the truck in the police yard, and went on to our next stand by bus.’

What emerges is portrait of a complex, thoughtful man. He was obviously intellectually ambitious; he frequently dropped out of the music business altogether to pursue other interests; and he did finally achieve a moderate success as a writer. His autobiographical The Trouble with Cinderella is worth reading despite its often pretentious style.

Shaw was good on the race issue (first white band to have a black singer – Billie Holiday) not so good on the political issue (compromising with the Committee of Un-American Activities) and his personal life – well, let’s leave that to his eight ex-wives. These included women as glamorous as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, despite the fact that he suffered from bad breath.

After the life, the book ends with two essays – an appreciation of his style and a study of his recordings. All of this made me want to hear more , and sure enough I did, when I put on a Mel Torme recording I bought recently. There, rising between choruses from The Velvet Fog, were fluid arpeggios from the master himself. He had technique, he had taste – and amazingly enough, he survived to the age of 95. In the world of jazz, that’s quite an achievement.

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John White, Artie Shaw: his life and music, London: Continuum, 2004, pp.223, ISBN: 0826469159

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Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

March 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

biographical outline of a musical Odyssey

This is not a conventional biography but a study of the development of John Coltrane as a major figure in American musical culture in the two decades of major creativity that embraced his tragically short life. Ben Ratliff bases his study on a combination of interviews and his analyses of the recorded legacy – and he does this in a non-hagiographic manner. Indeed he seems almost over-critical of some of Coltrane’s early performances with Miles Davis, such as the Prestige sessions which were not under his control but part of the contractual obligations that Davis knocked out as quickly as possible (no planning, no rehearsals) in order to fulfil and escape his contract for the more lucrative one he had signed with Columbia.

Ratliff takes the story from the early recordings Coltrane made whilst he was still in the navy through his work in rhythm and blues bands to his seminal work with Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then to his own quartet which made such an impact with Giant Steps – which turns out to be in this account the ne plus ultra of harmonically-based jazz music.

Ratliff is very good at explaining just why Coltrane’s music was so exceptional – his profound sense of musical structure, his grasp of harmonic sequences, his compositional imagination, and his ability to completely transform musical sequences into something nobody had ever heard before. Think of how he re-shaped a banal show tune such as My Favourite Things into a thundering anthem of black cultural affirmation.

There’s quite a bit of musical theorizing, and the weakness of basing judgements on interviews is that asking any artists what they think they are doing is that first of all they might not know themselves, and even if they say they do, they might not be able to articulate it properly. Their claims might not even be true. Music is an abstract art form. It doesn’t actually mean anything, even though it is a very powerful emotional force.

The two common approaches to musical analysis point in opposite directions. The formal approach says ‘Eb7 modulates into C#6’ which might be accurate and true, but tells us nothing about the nature or effect of such transitions. The other essentially romantic approach says ‘the heart-stopping modulations in the final eight bars resolve themselves into a majestic finale which express a surge of joy’. One approach seems dry as dust, the other is just subjective and emotional. Ratliff bravely attempts to combine the two.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the high point in Coltrane’s creative life – and it might be significant that this was a period when he seemed to be free of drug addiction. After that, though Ratliff tries his best to make a case for the discordant, non-harmonic and unstructured music Coltrane produced towards the end of his career, it’s rather uncomfortable reading to be reminded of the descent into chaos that this ‘development’ represents (and I speak as someone who saw some of these concerts on his European tour with Eric Dolphy).

In the second part of the book he turns from biography to an essay on Coltrane’s influence on other musicians and a study of the development of his style. Placing this very firmly in a cultural and historical context, he reminds us that many other lesser names were more popular at the time. In the same year that Coltrane released My Favourite Things (30,000 copies sold), Atlantic’s best-selling jazz albumn was Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement (500,000 copies). There are some excellent gems about the economics of night clubs and how much musicians were paid for their performances.

Coltrane’s influence is traced in the work of other jazz musicians, in the music of rock and pop groups, and in the social influence drawn from his music in the writings of jazz critics – most of whom were themselves understandably baffled by the ‘developments’ of the early 1960s onwards. Ratliff doesn’t shirk the fact that Coltrane lost a big percentage of his audience when he embraced the ‘free jazz’ movement which was so obviously both then and now a dead end. It’s also sadly possible that Miles Davis’s claim that Coltrane died from taking too much LSD might be true.

In fact the loss occurred at a time when the material ground in which jazz took root began to disappear. Night clubs, jazz clubs, and dance halls closed as popular culture in America changed in the late 1960s, and most jazz musicians found themselves out of work. Superstars made occasional rock-concert-like appearances, but many regular musicians either took up teaching or went back to jobs in the factory.

What makes this study much more than a conventional biography or appreciation is that Ben Ratliff takes his subject even beyond Coltrane’s death to examine both the continuation of his influence and the state of jazz in the last few decades. The prospects are fairly bleak, but he sees a small glimmer of hope in Coltrane’s influence as a successful leader of bands. Let’s hope it turns out to be the classic quartet or quintet at most – and not the noisy conglomerates in which he finished his career.

There’s an excellent bibliography to the book, and a full range of notes on all his sources, but no discography. However, he does make reference to a work in progress which has since been issued as surely the most authoritative account of Coltrane’s recorded work – Yasuhiro Fujioka and Lewis Porter’s monumental The John Coltrane Reference Work.

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Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.250, ISBN: 0571232744

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How to listen to jazz

June 5, 2011 by Roy Johnson

guidance notes for beginners

Knowing how to listen to jazz isn’t easy. It’s an improvised music, but it is based upon well-defined and disciplined musical structures. Does that seem like a contradiction? Here’s how it works.

When jazz musicians play together, they often choose well-known songs. They don’t need printed musical scores, because they have all learned these songs by ear and by heart as part of their training.

The songs themselves will be based on well-rehearsed musical structures. For instance, George Gershwin’s melody I’ve got Rhythm has the typical architecture of the popular song – lasting for thirty-two bars. The parts are arranged are arranged as follows:

Eight bars of melody (A)
The same eight bars – repeated (A)
Eight bars in a different key (B)
The first eight bars played again (A)

This structure is known as AABA. (and the B part is called ‘the bridge’ or ‘the middle eight’). Thousands of songs are written in this pattern, and over time some of them have become popular with both jazz musicians and the listening public. These songs are known as ‘standards’, and jazz musicians learn them as a natural part of their own training and development.

Cole Porter’s Love for Sale
Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life
Hogy Carmichael’s Skylark

The same is true of another musical form – the twelve bar blues. This is a structure underpinning folk tunes, laments, and much of what lies at the heart of jazz performance in many styles. The architecture is similar:

Four bars of melody (A)
Four bars repeated (A)
Four bars with variation (BA)

This is grossly over-simplified, but the main point is that the jazz musicians know these patterns before they begin to play. All they need to decide between themselves is what key to play in.

They are therefore improvising, but their performance is based upon a harmonic structure known to all the musicians concerned, and they have the very advanced listening skills and musical ‘memories’ to know where they are up to in the sequence at any given time.

When they have decided what tune to play, the performance will normally have a structure or sequence of events which is determined partly by the instrumentation or make up of the group and partly by the unspoken inclinations of the musicians themselves – without requiring prior arrangement.

The ensemble will play the chosen tune
Then (often) the tune will be repeated
A ‘solo’ instrument will improvise on the tune
A second instrument might do the same
The ensemble will return to play the tune

Instrumentation

The piano has a complex, multi-functional role in a jazz ensemble. Its main purpose is to sustain the harmonic structure of the tune throughout the performance. It plays the melody, may also feature as a solo instrument, and it provides support for other instruments during their solos.

The double-bass provides a combination of harmonic and percussive support throughout any performance. It usually sustains a four beats to the bar rhythm (known as the ‘walking bass’), playing notes from the chords to the tune, and it only occasionally features as a solo instrument.

The drums provide the dominant rhythmic pulse, which is often created by a four-four pattern tapped out on cymbals, accompanied by a variety of percussive effects on drums punctuating the performance.

The saxophone is a typical ‘solo’ instrument. It plays the melody, and then is very popular with instrumentalists as a solo instrument – mainly because it is suitable for producing an individual and recognisable sound or tone. This is partly because it has an intimate connection with the propulsive force generating the music – air from the player’s lungs. The same is true of the trumpet.

The improvised solo

Basically, the soloist makes up variations on the chosen tune, which is based upon its harmonic chord sequence. Parts of the original melody may be detectable during the improvisation, but experienced jazz musicians are capable of inventing entirely new melodies which have very little in common with the original.

Indeed, some soloists are so skilful they are able to quote long passages from other familiar tunes and make them fit into the harmonic sequence of the tune being played. This is possible because they are intimately acquainted with a huge repertoire of ‘standards’ – and they do this both as a demonstration of their skills and as a homage to the tradition of this music.

The soloist is supported throughout the performance by accompanying musicians, who play a supportive role in providing the harmonic framework as a ‘reminder’, possibly whilst waiting their own turn to take a solo.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

This video clip of a live 1958 concert in Brussels shows a classic performance of the kind described above. The ensemble plays the melody (Moanin’ by Bobby Timmons) then there are three soloists – Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor saxophone, Bobby Timmons on piano, then Jamie Merritt on bass, .

I chose this example because it is played in an unusually subdued mood and slow pace. This should make it easier to appreciate the structure and the separate parts of the performance. [It should be said that most performances by this group are performed at much faster tempos and louder volume. Art Blakey is famous for his ‘High-Energy’ groups and playing style.]

Marks of quality

All great jazz musicians tend to develop an individual, recognisable style on their instrument. They create a ‘sound’ of their own, which to an experienced listener is instantly recognisable after only a few notes. The same is true for both instrumentalists and singers.

Musicians with good taste always pay respect to the tune they are playing. If saxophonists such as Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane play a ballad (You Don’t Know What Love Is, for instance) their rendition and interpretation will be sympathetic to the original meaning of the song. They will follow the nuances of the melody and even the words of the lyrics with a performance empathetic to the original. Great singers such as Jimmy Scott, Johnnie Hartman and Billie Holiday always follow this rule. Second and third rate singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Cleo Laine do not.

Having said that, great improvisers sometimes completely re-interpret a work – either by playing the melody in a new manner, by changing its underlying chord sequence, or by inventing an entirely new melody. Good examples of this process at work include Miles Davis and Gil Evan’s version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and John Coltrane’s re-working of Rogers and Hammerstein’s rather sickly show tune My Favourite Things.

Looking ahead

Needless to say, there are exceptions to all the points made above. There are groups that play without a piano; musicians who write their own original tunes; and even performances (by big bands in particular) where everybody reads the music from written scores. But if you understand the basic principles of jazz performance as outlined here you will know the conventions from which these are deviations.

It certainly helps if you know the melody before hearing a performance, because this allows you to keep the tune in mind whilst listening to the improvisations upon it. This is something which becomes easier as you develop your listening experience. And that’s what an appreciation of jazz music is all about.

Performing at Birdland one night in 1951, Charlie Parker was in the middle of improvising on a be-bop tune when he spotted Igor Stravinsky in the audience. Without losing any connection with the tune or its chord sequence, he began to pepper his solo with brilliant interpolations from the composer’s Firebird Suite, causing Stravinsky to bang his cocktail glass on the table with delight and amusement.

That captures the essence of jazz at its best.

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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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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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encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

critical and illustrated biography – plus discography

biographical outline of a musical Odyssey

guidance notes for beginners

Instrumentation

The improvised solo

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

Marks of quality

Looking ahead

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

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

history of blues music 1910 to the present

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

essays on jazz musicians and jazz history

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