Gary Giddins, Weather Bird: Jazz At The Dawn Of Its Second Century (Oxford). I take my time getting through Giddins’s big compilations of his columns, reviews and essays. This one was beside my bed for a couple of years. I savored it a piece at a time, enjoying insights like this about Erroll Garner: “Two things invariably keep the train on the track. First, he swings hard enough to allay reservations; if he has charge of your foot, he can get to your mind. Second, and more impressively, he improvises with a matchless lucidity that allows people who glaze over at the thought of improvisation to follow Garner’s most fanciful inventions.” And this, in a chapter called “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead?”: “For half a century, each generation mourned anew the passing of jazz because each idealized the particular jazz of its youth.” Or, as Woody Herman, surveying the crowd at a dance he was playing, told me, “These people haven’t listened to anything new since high school.” Giddins, as they say, gets it.
Archives for February 2008
The Bruno Letters, Part 2
From time to time I’ll be posting parts of letters I wrote to Jack Brownlow over a period of twenty-five years or so. To my surprise, after his death a collection of them showed up among his effects. I had forgotten much of what I wrote him in our correspondence. This excerpt from New Orleans was on a WDSU-TV memo form :
August 13, 1980
To: Bruno
From: DR
I was walking through Jackson Square at the noon hour today and heard someone playing vibes. I wandered over in front of St. Louis Cathedral to see what was happening. There on a platform were (so help me) Milt Jackson, Monte Alexander, Lou Donaldson, Bob Cranshaw and Grady Tate. I had thought it was Milt when I heard the music from afar but figured that some French Quarter jugglers were playing a record to perform by. You could have knocked me over.
It turns out that Michelob is sponsoring a ten-city tour of free Jazzmobile concerts. Tomorrow night they play in Armstrong Park. Monte Alexander was playing his buns off.* I thought Lou Donaldson was dead. He sounded great. So it was old home week. I knew all of these guys except Donaldson in New York, and they were as surprised as I was. Sad thing; it got no advance publicity, so there were just a few tourists standing around in the hot sun trying to figure out what was going on.
The Jazzmobile organization is still going strong. So are Alexander, Donaldson, Cranshaw and Tate. Milt Jackson died in 1999.
* A critical term I have since abandoned.
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Weekend Extra: When Cosby Sat In With Stitt
Both Bill Kirchner and Ty Newcomb forwarded this link to a segment from the Dick Cavett show in 1973. Bill Cosby tells Cavett and Jack Benny about his brief career as a drummer. Go here.
Weekend Extra: Jazz Before Lincoln Center
Decades before there was Lincoln Center, much less Jazz At Lincoln Center, the midtown Manhattan area encompassing Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill was a jazz incubator. New York Times reporter John Strausbaugh’s video report on that piece of cultural history includes cameos by JALC curator Phil Schaap and a couple of Thelonious Monk’s childhood friends. To see it click here, then select “Jazz In New York” from the illustrated menu below.
Compatible Quotes
I object to background music no matter how good it is. Composers want people to listen to their music, they don’t want them doing something else while their music is on. I’d like to get the guy who sold all those big businessmen the idea of putting music in the elevators, for he was really clever. What on earth good does it do anybody to hear those four or eight bars while going up a few flights?
–Aaron Copland, Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music
The chief results of piped-in noise, as far as Miss Manners can see, are self-absorbed slaesclerks who don’t attend to their customers and half-shouted conversations that ought to be nearly whispered. We have gotten so used to it, that silence has come to be considered somewhat frightening–an admission of social failure, or the world’s being empty. It is now possible to make anyone confess anything–not by torture, but by looking at them in silence for so long that they will tell all, just to break it.
–Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.–Lily Tomlin
Lambert, Evans and Bird
Mr. Jazz Wax has a two-part conversation with Hal McKusick about Charlie Parker’s 1953 recording with Dave Lambert’s vocal group and a chamber ensemble put together by Gil Evans. McKusick played clarinet. The project turned out to be a bit of a mess but, as McKusick explains, not because of Parker.
Bird blew through everything. Every take was a beaut. The vocalists were trying to get it together, and Dave was struggling. He’d rehearse them the best he could in between takes to get them on track. Simplicity would have been better for Dave–a unison line with fewer singers rather than so many harmonies. It was too ambitious. The vocals wound up stepping all over Gil’s instrumental charts–but not Bird’s solos.
To read the whole thing, go here.
Mr. Jazz Wax, Marc Myers, recommends that his readers download the music
from i-Tunes. Some of us troglodytes still like CDs. You can find the issued, alternate and short takes–and there were a lot them–in this massive boxed set containing everything Bird recorded for Verve. For the completist or for someone who wants to know more about the latter days of Parker’s creative life, it’s a lovely way to spend a snowbound evening.
Make that several snowbound evenings.