On Music
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Art of the Be-bopper THE CAREER OF Ross Russell is an excellent example of the important services rendered to the arts by men who are not themselves...
...His life was a parody of normal life...
...In rejecting that world he made not a simple break, but a tortuous counter-adjustment...
...He defined himself by a reflex action against the world in which he found himself...
...that the anti-social behavior of jazz musicians is merely an accident of their race or class...
...What began as an innovation in art ended in a defiant new way of life...
...The art of the Bopper was complicated because his existential status was ambiguous...
...The book never puts us inside the world of jazz...
...They became an underground society...
...It was not just a movement in the arts...
...The noble firmness of the blues becomes a chilling cry of anguish...
...The sentiment of the American ballad is abstracted to a cool and despondant shadow of itself...
...it rested upon a revolutionary way of life...
...Be-bop owes its richness, its complexity and its unique emotional sophistication to an origin in a way of life that was revolutionary, uncompromising and self-conscious...
...When Whitney Balliett reviewed Ross' book in the New Yorker, he remarked that the Negro trumpet player who stands at its center and is drawn to a scale of mythic proportions, was a composite picture of Charlie Parker and Lester Young...
...The fictionalized portrait of Parker has all the truth of imaginative vision...
...The initial expression of his enthusiasm was the formation of Dial Records...
...indeed, they seemed to take a grim satisfaction in commercial failure...
...Recently, one of the most knowledgeable jazz critics, Nat Hentoff, has given us a book which bears the suggestive title, The Jazz Life (Dial, 255 pp., $5.00...
...The ecstasy of the frantic jump bands of the early '40s is twisted into a defiant gesture of self-destruction...
...Most of them were junkies and therefore criminals...
...The early Boppers were not interested in pleasing their audience, in winning polls, or in making money...
...It has, to be sure, a purely fictitious story about a young academically trained white musician who has an unquenchable yearning for "dark things...
...Existing in a dark reflex of normal life, the Bopper projected an image that was dark, cold, hard and perverse...
...Yet one of those records, Lover Man, probably did more to establish Parker's reputation than anything else he had done up to that time...
...To Russell's enterprise we owe many of the earliest and finest recordings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Max Roach and several lesser, now forgotten figures of the Bop movement...
...Recent criticism has struggled vainly to dissociate the jazz life from the art of jazz...
...Brought into close relations with Charlie Parker through his work as a recording entrepreneur, Russell soon began to play an important part in Bird's life...
...S. Barnes, 84 pp., $.95...
...When, for example, Russell released the recordings of that last frenetic session before Bird cracked, he was upbraided by Parker who felt that his reputation had been badly damaged...
...The very fact that he saw himself in relation to a tradition was enough to make him unique...
...Their attitude toward other musicians was ruthlessly sarcastic...
...The task of describing this strange and unnatural sense of life cannot be accomplished in any non-fictive mode...
...There remained a much more difficult and possibly more important task: the description of the new jazz life...
...that the fiercely selfdestructive drives of such great jazzmen as Charlie Parker are merely regrettable instances of psychic infirmity associated with · artistic ability...
...But his book, except momentarily and as if by chance, never gives us the sense of what it must be like to live the jazz life...
...Russell's love for his subject is so great that he can admit all the evil, all the coarseness, all the egotistical violence of Parker and yet make us admire the extraordinary strength and truth of his genius...
...With intense self-consciousness, the Boppers adopted curious costumes, a special language, certain signs and mannerisms...
...In the greatest Bop music, the music of Charlie Parker, we have a total parody of conventional jazz...
...His very language, with its eulogistic terms, "crazy," "funky," "terrible," was the language of satire...
...In fact, with the exception of one or two passages, the novel is a carefully considered rendering of Parker, and only he...
...Dividing his material into mechanical categories, Hentoff gives us a chapter on "junk," a chapter on Negro prejudice against whites, reports on the professional histories of certain famous jazz musicians, and the like...
...The Bop musician considered himself distinctly different from his predecessors in American jazz...
...The fault, obviously, does not lie in Hentoff's preparation...
...To read his biography after The Sound is like stepping out of a theater into an empty street...
...The burden of all Bop music is the sense of despair implicit in every moment of joy...
...Having recorded the Boppers and analyzed their music, Russell still had not completed the work he set himself...
...Ross Russell's The Sound (Dutton, 287 pp., $3.95) is not a novel in the proper sense of the term...
...As such it is a profound and courageous piece of work...
...Their deportment was notoriously bad...
...Unwilling to naively express themselves and accept the usual consequences—stereotyping, exploitation and eventual absorption into the Establishment—they waged aggressive war on all who represented the commercial compromise...
...It is, then, to an imaginative apprehension of the jazz life that we must turn if we wish to know this world in its vital integrity...
...And here a distinction must be made between the novel which is inspired by the jazz life and a description of that life which is offered to us as a novel...
...We have had recently from the best of the English jazz critics, Max Harrison, an "official life" of Charlie Parker (A...
...In 1948-49 he contributed a series of brilliantly written articles to The Record Changer which remain to this day the definitive treatment of the Bebop style...
...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Art of the Be-bopper THE CAREER OF Ross Russell is an excellent example of the important services rendered to the arts by men who are not themselves artists...
...These pieces have recently been made available again in Martin William's excellent anthology, The Art of Jazz (Oxford, 248 pp., $5.00...
...Their own sense of values became a total inversion of everything normal, acceptable and traditional...
...Hentoff knows everything about the jazz life: the musicians, their work, their problems, their milieu...
...Not content with getting Be-bop the hearing it deserved from the American public, Russell turned critic and addressed himself to serious students of jazz...
...As a young man, Russell was one of the first to recognize the importance of that extraordinary movement in modern jazz known by the onomatopoetic title of Be-bop...
...it is in his method, which is that of the amateur sociologist cum professional reporter...
...They were acutely conscious of the alternatives of commercial success and artistic integrity, and came down hard on the side of art...
...it was a school of manners...
...But the rather amateurish fable of this man's initiation into the jazz life, his ambivalent reaction to it, and his ultimate inability to "pay the dues" it demands, serves simply as a frame for a slightly disguised but essentially faithful portrait of the man who was the greatest embodiment of the jazz life, Charlie Parker...
...We have been told again and again that dope has nothing to do with music...
...For the first time in the history of jazz, the musician repudiated his role as an entertainer...
...The company was primarily devoted to recording the early Boppers and thus obtaining for them a far wider audience than they could reach in their infrequent public appearances...
...The cautiously correct biography will be of value principally for its list of Bird's recordings...
...Anyone who knows the ugly behavior of highly disturbed men such as Parker will understand what great self-sacrifice and tolerance are demanded of those who try to help...
...What modern criticism has failed to recognize—or, more accurately, what it fitfully recognizes and uneasily rejects—is the essential connection between a kind of being or vision and a style of art...
...For Be-bop was not simply a revolutionary way of making music...
...It all reads like the work of some industrious and sympathetic student of the subject...
...When Parker went to pieces in California, it was Russell who got him into Camarillo State Hospital and found him work after he had been discharged...
Vol. 44 • October 1961 • No. 34
