Playing a Narrow Groove
COOK, BRUCE
On Music PLAYING IN A NARROW GROOVE BY BRUCE COOK Like anyone who pretends to criticism, I have a pet theory. The categories in American music, it seems to me, are breaking down, and by the time...
...Lyons is assisted in his efforts by none other than John Lewis, the director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who serves as Monterey's music adviser...
...One problem may have been the kind of jazz presented...
...Saturday afternoon was given over entirely to Detroit blues, and featured the very dramatic John Lee Hooker, as well as a host of lesser known locals...
...Could it be that the festival format is too highly structured, that it doesn't give the performers enough room to breathe...
...It certainly was a factor at the Monterey Festival, where approximately 7,000 devotees gathered for a weekend of jazz...
...Victoria Spivey, who must be nudging 70, came on Sunday afternoon with some blues from the '20s and captivated an audience that averaged about 50 years her junior...
...Most of the 16,000 spectators seemed to choose precisely the moment the jazz attractions appeared to light up that fourth joint and drop out completely...
...the best of them was a lusty shouter whose last name is Carter but who goes professionally by his first name and middle initial-joe L. The oldest performer on the bill was also one of the most popular...
...At a festival, divisions are firmly laid down: Jazz remains jazz, rock stays rock, and blues continues to be blues...
...A jam by Dizzy, Sonny Stitt, Frank Rosolino, John Lewis, Max Roach, et al., on some of Bird's finest old lines was to have been the climax of the weekend...
...Though I'd like to believe the company knew what it was doing, the three-day pot-party that I witnessed at Otis Spann Memorial Field made me wonder...
...The sense of unity in spontaneity, which is the miracle of jazz, was lost...
...Local residents actively participate in it, and as a result, the affair is one of the smoothest-run jazz gigs this side of Montreux (whose festival is as coordinated as a Swiss watch...
...In the end, one can use such events only to keep up, to get a sample of what is current and choice...
...Yet the effort really failed to come together...
...Rainbow says it made the addition because the blues-freak audience wanted it...
...Only Count Basie and his Orchestra, decidedly derriere-garde, succeeded in generating any sort of positive response...
...But then, the more accessible musicians like Ornette Coleman, Yusef Lateef and Charlie Mingus couldn't reach the kids either...
...For these people, the 1973 Monterey Jazz Festival was a resounding success, presenting all those cool and elegant sounds that are so familiar-dizzy Gillespie, Billy Taylor, Thad Jones, and the Candoli Brothers, not to mention the terribly dignified Modern Jazz Quartet...
...Unfortunately, nobody out there noticed...
...This would explain why one could listen to a great variety of music at the two gatherings, and yet hear so little stylistic melding...
...the Chicagoan Jimmie Rogers...
...The idea, for instance, of five grown-up saxophonists playing his solos note-for-note would probably have seemed to him an awful waste...
...Why anyone would have thought a bunch of blues-rock fans would listen attentively to the avant-garde squawks and trills of a band like Infinite Sound I cannot imagine...
...During the '50s, they retreated to a musical inner sanctum to reflect on their superior culture and evident intelligence...
...Even the pot smoked at Monterey smelled mellower and better aged than what was being passed around in Michigan...
...But I suspect that Bird, a pretty funky guy, would have been embarrassed by it all...
...The familiar Chicago blues sound of bands led by Big Walter Horton, Mighty Joe Young and Luther Allison echoed and reechoed across the dusty grounds...
...He gave them a good, representative set early the first night with lots of punchy brass and a hard-driving beat, and they loved it...
...There were a few gutsy old-time bluesmen to round out the bill: The 81-year-old Mance Lipscomb, still strumming along and still in good voice...
...Wherever Lewis is involved, good taste prevails, and indeed over the years the California programs have been characterized by an unmistakable refinement-albeit of a rather narrow and particular sort...
...the group was totally ignored-not hooted at, not put down, just ignored...
...Last month, however, after attending two musical gatherings a couple of weekends and 2,000 miles apart, I was left with the feeling that history was not proceeding quite according to plan...
...the very able singer and saxist Eddie Vinson...
...it was less a collaboration than a symposium...
...it was just about then that jazz disastrously lost its popular appeal and became an elitist taste...
...This year's festival was supposed to be a tribute to Charlie Parker...
...To hear the very latest or the very best, one must leave the festival circuit and look elsewhere...
...Originally, it was called the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, but jazz was added to its name and program in 1971, when the event was taken over by Rainbow Media, a local music-promoting organization with radical overtones...
...It's my version of the melting pot...
...The festival concentrates on jazz for 40-year-olds, those who arrived at the music when it was quiet, proper and slightly anemic, and who later wrinkled their noses at the cacaphonous rock-'n'-roll of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and Chuck Berry...
...Regrettably, at Monterey the blues program is kept neatly segregated as a separate show on Saturday afternoon, so that the jazz enthusiasts need not bother exposing themselves to it...
...The audience, decidedly older, more settled and more openly middle-class than the Ann Arborites, heard music as staid, settled and backward-looking as themselves...
...NEVERTHELESS, It Was a good show, for if anyone knows how to put on a festival, it is Jimmy Lyons, the jazz disc-jockey-turned-promoter who has kept Monterey going and steadily growing since 1957...
...The categories in American music, it seems to me, are breaking down, and by the time the next generation of performers arrives, the traditional rock/jazz, high-culture/low-culture, black-music/white-music distinctions will finally have gone by the boards...
...The canny old operator from Kansas City, Missouri, who has been leading a band bearing his name for nearly 40 years now, knew exactly what was needed to win over the crowd...
...The group's vice president is John Sinclair, who became a celebrated martyr in New Left circles a few years back after receiving a harsh sentence on a marijuana charge...
...Perhaps, in writing a review, one shouldn't focus so heavily on the age and character of the crowd, yet I think the nature of the people in attendance offers a genuine clue to the style-and often the quality?of a musical event...
...Each performer stood up, addressed the subject at hand, spoke his individual piece, and sat down...
...Of course, Ann Arbor remains essentially a blues festival, and this year it presented everyone from Roosevelt Sykes, the pianist, to guitarist Freddie King, to the Deep South's Joe Willie Wilkins and the King Biscuit Boys...
...and the redoubtable Bo Diddley, who pulled an enormous response from the crowd...
...At both Ann Arbor and Monterey, the music never got off the ground...
...The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival was initiated in 1969 under the auspices of the University of Michigan...
...it surely does to me...
...Lateef, the bare-domed Detroit tenor saxophonist and flutist, has never sounded better, displaying great confidence and verve on the straight jazz, and playing the African numbers he is so fond of with delicate invention...
...Black Snake Blues" brought down the house...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 21
