Indigenous Music

...Gentle, remarkably generous of spirit, acutely intelligent, utterly devoid of maliciousness, and ceaselessly intrigued by the endless possibilities of surprise in music, Clifford had a clarity and wholeness of spirit that was the core of his music...

...The Martin Brothers tell of "The Marion Massacre...

...None about book company employes...

...Under the headnote for "The Marion Massacre" is an earlier photograph of women workers in the mill as they walk through the town, dressed in their uniforms, smiling and waving under the United Textile Workers' banner...

...Except for musicians, and for those listeners who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, Byas is more a name than a palpable musical memory these years, but anyone who hears this set is not likely to forget the commanding emotional force of this classic tenor saxophonist who, like Brownie, was his horn...

...Might as well ask for a catalog, too...

...All the tunes are by Gigi, an exceptionally resourceful creator of felicitous lines designed for extended improvisation...

...These creators of graceful, long-lined melodies and continually resilient rhythms were Luckey Roberts and Willie "The Lion" Smith...

...and in these Reagan years, the bosses are going to bestride the catbird seat even more amply than usual...

...Well, the workers perked up a lot, and the rally ended with more determination than it had when it began...

...There is, for instance, a portrait of Mother Jones gazing straight at you with the look of: "What have you done lately for the insulted and injured...

...Or Harry McClintock's 1931 variation of prosperity lurking around the corner, "Fifty Years From Now" ("Oh everything will be lovely in fifty years from now./ In the meantime all you have to do is stand around and grin/ And do your starving gracefully or the cops'll run you in...

...The song is "The Death of Mother Jones," and the onetime cowboy singer affectingly commemorates this "fearless" woman, ending: "May the miners all work together to carry out her plan/ And bring back better conditions for every laboring man...

...What struck me at that rally, as it has so often on picket lines I've walked, is the energizing importance of music in these matters—both as an enlivening obbligato to present combat and as a bond across generations, the dead speaking to the quick about the need to be even quicker...

...As Mark Wilson says, "Times are not so different from fifty years ago that this record runs any danger of appearing anachronistic...

...The prevalent musical tone is salty, as in Dave McCarn's distillation of work in the cotton mill, "Poor Man, Rich Man" ("Ashes to ashes, dust to dust/ Let the poor man live and the rich man bust...

...Furthermore, many of the restive songs of the past remain quite topical...

...Mingus kept shaking his head in wonder at all this inventive splendor, and suddenly leaped in front of the piano, and shouted, "My God, I've got roots...

...and although it occasionally puts out some books advocating social justice and the redistribution of at least a little bit of income, the bosses there aren't much different from those of a Southern textile mill when ungrateful employes have the chutzpah to organize...

...Also part of Inner City's Paris Collection is Don Byas, a series of sessions from 1953 to 1955 with the expatriate tenor saxophonist—a magisterial im-proviser with a huge tone, deep swing, and fluent but never superficial conception...

...Choice cuts: Twenty-three years ago, I produced a session for Contemporary with two of the fabled "ticklers"—masters of expansive two-handed Harlem piano— who were shaping influences on Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and Fats Waller...

...They lost, though...

...As he once said, Byas developed a "third school" of the tenor—having been influenced by Lester Young's swift and subtle ideas and Coleman Hawkins's room-filling sound...

...There is a quite lovely bravery in their faces, and it's still there in many of their descendants as the organizing goes on...

...Listening, you'll hear how penetratingly influential Luckey and The Lion were...

...Both these nonpareils are dead, and little of their work on other labels can still be found...

...Nat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...

...Box 147, East Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141...

...Wheeler and Lamb ("The Farmer Is the Man . . . That Feeds Them All...

...After being unavailable for a long time, the set, Luckey & The Lion/ Harlem Piano, has been reissued...

...All the more reason, then, for those on the other side whose spirits need some lifting to get hold of Poor Man, Rich Man: American Country Songs of Protest (Rounder 1026, $6.00 from Roundup Records, P.O...

...A rather startling surprise is the presence of a 1931 recording by Gene Autry, who has long since become a most wealthy and conservative businessman...

...These pungent songs of social commentary, recorded between 1923 and 1936, have been assembled and il-luminatingly annotated by Mark Wilson...

...These men were only asking/ Their rights and nothing more;/ That their families would not suffer/ With a wolf at every door...

...The majority of American workers are still unorganized...

...and that union, District 65 in New York, did beat down the bosses of Harper & Row, and it'll be back at Simon and Schuster...

...The pro bono wanderer lined out a rough and ready history of native songs of class warfare in this land of equal opportunity—black, white, steelworkers, farmers...

...It's an illustrated history with prints, photographs, newspaper stories, cartoons...

...But all of the songs had been about carrying on...

...Uncle Dave Macon, the first real star of the Grand Ole Opry and a robust populist ("We're Up Against It Now"), and Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles ("Cotton Mill Blues"—"Uptown People call us 'trash'/ Say we never have no cash...

...Since they played orchestral piano, they needed no accompaniment, and each had one side of the album to himself...

...A "settlement" was immediately violated by the company, and a subsequent strike ended with six workers killed—each one shot in the back...

...All of a sudden, Pete Seeger appeared...

...Green Bailey ("Shut Up in Coal Creek Mine...

...After all, Pete's chronicles were as often about defeat as they were about victory...

...He too was lyrical, playing what was then called "bop" with such melodious, luminous, ordered passion that his extraordinary technique was far less evident than the stories he had to tell...

...Clifford Brown/ The Paris Collection/Volume 2 (Inner City) was recorded in Paris in 1953 with alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, guitarist Jimmy Gourley, bassist Pierre Miche-lot, and drummer Jean-Louis Viale...

...Once, also years ago, Charles Mingus was listening to The Lion striding, his cigar jutting out, his eyes challenging any and all comers...

...Much younger, the late trumpeter Clifford Brown also helped form many jazz apprentices...

...that thrust is too new to have a singing tradition yet...

...The music remains freshly, lyrically astonishing in its imaginative fertility, grand assurance, and elegant wit...

...Other performers, most of them country songsters, include the Dixon Brothers ("Spinning Room Blues...

...There is an accompanying booklet of song texts, and historical notes on the singers and the events that precipitated each song...

...It's worth noting that Clifford Brown may well have been the most beloved musician among his jazz peers...

...In 1929, textile workers in Marion, North Carolina, went on strike to get the daily work time down from twelve hours and twenty minutes to ten hours...

...There is also no little anger...