Recordings
Pruett, Mark
frustrating. Maybe there was no other choice; but then maybe is the main word for this film. TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics currently reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches...
...Recordings ALL THAT JAZZ SEVEN STEPS TO A LEGACY I F THERE WERE no other reason to continue to invest in LPs, the fact that they preserve a small part of our jazz legacy would be reason enough...
...We (bishops, priests, theologians, and religious educators) are purveying, Martin tells us, a limpid, watery, weak soup of the Gospel which cannot butleave people malnourished and hardly prepared to live as witnesses in the word today...
...In time with the music, I hope...
...This is Martin's fundamental thesis...
...Here is a peerless singer's finest work, as well as some of the best small-group jazz of the late 1930s...
...Indispensable -- as are Volumes 2 and 3 of the series (PG-32124 and PG-32127...
...For Martin, the reason for the crisis of truth is straightforward...
...This is merely an example...
...In other words, we find ourselves prisoners of modemity...
...CERTAINTY, THE WORLD & FUNDAMENTALISM Are charismatics off course...
...The documentation is accompanied by notes that bring together capsule biographies, informal interviews, and background material...
...Art Tatum: Masterpieces (MCA 2-4019...
...Walk into any reasonably large record store these days and you will find the jazz bins stuffed with inexpensive, superbly produced reissues covering approximately half a century...
...If you own no jazz record made before 1950, if you own no jazz record at all, if indeed you have always regarded jazz as an uncongenial or tuneless music, you may wish to sample the records described below...
...Johnson's raw, powerful voice carves its way through a lyric while his guitar, like one of the demons he sang about, howls, spits, and goads him unmercifully...
...In Peter Berger's apt metaphor, a world with a place for transcendence is a world with windows...
...Of all the major movements it has spread by far the fastest and to the most Catholics worldwide...
...The cornetist Bix Beiderbecke is present in spirit, but the sessions really belong to Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden...
...On the sides collected here it is an orchestra in itself...
...No one is going to sink his savings into a noiseless playback system for the privilege of listening to transfers of old 78s...
...That's it...
...two records...
...Johnson was sought for the first Spirituals to Swing concert but was murdered before its promoters could locate him...
...one record...
...Here they are...
...God's word is being undermined and silenced...
...Featured are Teddy Wilson, I..ester Young, Count Basle, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Buck Clayton, Buster Bailey, and many others...
...Although many of my liberal friends might disagree, I believe his thesis is fundamentally correct...
...We are in a battle for naming reality, and to an alarmingly I I I I great extent, transcendence has collapsed into a rampant immanentism...
...Today, virtually every record Goodman made for RCA between 1935 and 1939 is available on the company's Bluebird label, packaged in eight two-record sets...
...Since its inception some twenty years ago, it stands apart in the depth of its impact on the church community...
...Yet they had been performing for years and already had behind them an astonishing body of recorded work...
...A Jazz Holiday (MCA 2-4018...
...The first three volumes in this series (CL-851, 852, 853) team Armstrong with several important musicians, notably Earl Hines...
...It has also precipitated the exit from the Catholic church of large numbers of people, including some deacons and priests, this often in order to join (or start their own) either evangelical or pentecostal churches...
...All sides were recorded in 1936 and 1937...
...On any number of fronts the church has capitulated to modernity...
...What existed would in some cases have been electronically "enhanced" for stereo by means of a technique that suggested an orchestra in a fishbowl...
...Twenty years ago, for instance, a fan wishing to collect the recordings of Benny Goodman's fwst orchestra would have found little available on LP...
...MARK PRUETF (Mark Pruett is a free-lance writer living in Eugene, Oregon...
...He is also a wonderful accompanist, as shown in his elegant backing of singer Joe Turner on six blues sides included here...
...Fats Waller Piano Solos, 1929-1941 (Bluebird AXM25518...
...Goodman's playing, less honeyed than it would become in his trio and quartet recordings a few years later, is alive with inventiveness on tunes like "Someday Sweetheart" and "After You've Gone...
...Seven albums, seven steps to -- but enough rhapsodizing...
...It is an excellent time to begin building a jazz collection, not the poorest reason for which is that few of the recordings I'm referring to will ever be issued on Compact Disc -- at least not while the promise of superfidelity is the primary marketing strategy...
...Yet under his swift fingers a popular tune is often tickled into revealing more character than you had thought it possessed...
...The best values are to be found in double albums, which normally range between $8 and $11...
...Where to begin...
...And never have reissues been compiled and annotated with such completeness and care...
...Thus we imbibe from our environment a kind of latent or implicit heresy...
...This is all history...
...Tatum was a capable composer but, like many jazz pianists, was content to record mostly standards...
...Take that, Compact Disc...
...A final word about cost is pertinent here: Volume 1 of The Billie Holiday Story is a moder9 March 1984:147 ately expensive reissue as reissues go, yet you will pay less for its thirty-two selections than you would have paid for the original 78s over forty years ago...
...The master recordings, interspersed with a few alternate takes, are presented in chronological order;, the final volume serves up a good helping of unissued sides...
...I've selected seven reissues, all from roughly the same period, that reflect the exuberance and variety characteristic of jazz as a whole...
...The Billie Holiday Story, Volume 1 (Columbia PG-32121...
...two records...
...But by 1929, when the first of these sides was recorded, something had happened that would transform jazz: Armstrong's singing caught up with his playing...
...Articles by him have appeared in the Seattle Times and other publications) PLURALISM...
...Those theologians who signed the Hartford appeal said no differently...
...Highlights on this set include Lester Young on clarinet behind Helen Humes's silken vocal, two piano solos by James P. Johnson, the collaboration of boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson, blues vocals by Big Bill Broonzy, Ida Cox, and Joe Turner, and the stunning virtuosity of trumpeter Hot Lips Page and guitarist Charlie Christian...
...As demonstrated by these recordings from the early 1940s, Tatum does not depart from a melody so much as investigate it -- sniff out the alleys, skip over the rooftops, throw open the windows, rummage through the closets...
...1 cannot deal with all of the issues Martin raises, Commonweal: 148...
...two records...
...It is also one in which much of the church has taken up residence...
...What has happened to our missionary thrust...
...JUAN-LORENZO HINOJOSA teaches at the Oblate School of Theology in Texas and is the director of the Lay Ministry Institute there...
...It has been a source of spiritual awakening for countless people -- some of whom remain active in the movement -- others who do not...
...Louis Armstrong Favorites (The Louis Armstrong Story, Volume 4) (Columbia CL-854...
...People have misunderstood and purposefully misinterpreted the Second Vatican Council...
...Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia CL-1654...
...Each set's discography meticulously identifies which musicians were playing which instruments on which date...
...It is the answers that he gives which are inadequate, because his analysis of the problem is faulty...
...This is a collection of sides made between 1928 and 1934 by groups whose personnel shifted somewhat less noticeably than the names under which they recorded: Benny Goodman & His Boys, Adrian RoUini & His Orchestra, Joe Venuti-Eddie Lung All-Star Orchestra, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies...
...Yes, I believe Martin raises some of the right questions...
...The price of most domestic reissues, moreover, is about half that of newly recorded LPs...
...When .these Carnegie Hall concerts were recorded, in 1938 and 1939, most of the great jazz and blues artists on the program were still unknown to the general public...
...As Avery Dulles can say in his important article "Unmasking Secret Infidelities," "Many of the unspoken assumptions of our culture are out of harmony with Christian faith...
...On other Bluebird sets Waller's Harlem Stride piano is abetted variously by trumpet, clarinet, sax, and other instruments, and by the inimitable Waller vocals...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics currently reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...
...The second volume (PC-30034) is worth having, though it lacks the comprehensive documentation that accompanies this collection...
...Record companies, through the efforts of a few dedicated and extremely patient individuals, have for more than a decade been quietly bringing into print, in humble LP form, thousands of invaluable jazz recordings long absent from American catalogs...
...JUAN-LORENZO HINOJOSA T HE CATHOLIC charismatic movement: source of perplexity, joy, consternation, and zeal...
...There is probably no better point of entry into the question than the recent book by Ralph Martin titled The Crisis of Truth (Servant Publications, $10.95,250 pp...
...The part that they do preserve is vast...
...here he usually fronts an undistinguished orchestra...
...The liner notes would have proclaimed that they sure don't make music like this anymore, and as for information about the recordings themselves, well, just give a listen, old timer...
...In this book, Martin raises the right questions but, unfortunately, falls quite short of the mark with his answers...
...Not since the reissue programs of the early 1940s, when "hot" records unavailable for years found their way into the hands of a new generation of jazz fans, have the masterworks of early jazz been so numerous and so readily accessible...
...I offer no "program," no "library" of jazz as advertised by various book clubs and subscription services...
...From Spirituals to Swing (Vanguard VSD-47/48...
...Teagarden takes the vocal on the latter and on several other tunes, singing with the same feeling for the blues that permeates his trombone playing, which can be heard to advantage on over half the cuts on the album...
...You can buy good reissues that way, but it's more fun -- and cheaper -- to acquire them piecemeal...
...The contemporary zeitgeist is one without windows...
...two records...
...Yet the quality and scope of current reissues on LP should leave no jazz fan complaining...
...You'll sing any further praises yourself...
...The two takes of "Stardust" presented here are masterpieces of spontaneous lyricism...
...one record...
...two records...
...Basically, Martin sees the church in the grips of a tremendous crisis of truth: Where has our certainty gone...
...The original monophonic sound has been retained...
...Gems include "Handful of Keys," "E Fiat Blues," and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now...
...Here, I want to reflect on the movement today, and to take stock, for many of the questions facing the church are configured within the ranks of the Catholic charismatics...
...I say quietly because virtually none of these releases is given even minimal promotion...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
