INDIGENOUS MUSIC

...Pee Wee sjared at the pages in consternation, and mumbled: "This can't be me because I can't play this...

...Born in 1906 in a suburb of St...

...Pee Wee died in 1969, two years after the death of his wife—a loss from which he never tried to recover...

...For price and shipping details, write Reader Information, Time/Life Records, 541 North Fairbanks Court, Chicago, Illinois 60611...

...By sixteen, the clarinetist, already a pro, hit the road for good...

...From a 1927 date as a sideman with Red Nichols through various Eddie Condon sessions and his last recordings under his own leadership, the perennially surprising scope of Pee Wee is fully realized in performances that cannot possibly date because they're so wholly sui generis...

...Louis, Pee Wee grew up in Muskogee, Oklahoma—the town commemorated by Merle Haggard in a way that indicates it was best Pee Wee left early...

...and by and large, their most powerful recordings are "live" sessions during which the almost palpable interaction between them and their listeners makes for much more authentic excitement than a sterile studio can generate...

...To my reluctant surprise, the use of a synthesizer by these folk players alongside the fiddle and the pipes actually works...

...Still, were I a record producer, I'd record everybody worth preserving in a live setting...

...A certain group of guys—I don't care where they come from—that have a heart feeling and a rhythm in their systems you couldn't take away from them even if they were in a symphony organization . . . these are men whose way of playing you couldn't alter no matter where you put them or what you tried to teach them...

...Well," said Pee Wee, "even if it is me, I wouldn't play it again the same way...

...In real life, most musicians coast at those times when invention flags...

...Anyway, this Jim Hall trio set characteristically abounds in light (Hall is the most luminous of improvising melodists), space (he lets the notes breathe), and dance-like rhythms (the Hall beat is as graceful and flowing as it is firm...

...It was a self-definition...

...Classical players too...

...If you have too many instruments that have to be plugged in, an electrical failure can put you out of business...

...V Choice Cuts Certain performers understandably record most effectively in a studio because they require a lot of electronic gussying up before their essentially fake personalities can seem real...

...If I could, which I can't...

...You take each solo," he once told New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett, "like it was the last one you were going to play in your life...

...But he kept playing, and he kept taking those risks...

...The student swore to its accuracy...

...Listening to the conversation, the magisterial Coleman Hawkins, who had recorded with Pee Wee long before, said: "For thirty years I've been listening to him play those funny notes...

...Almost from the start, his imagination and technique had ranged far beyond any simple labels...

...Jim Hall, the preeminent jazz guitarist in all the world (unless a new, as yet unrecorded Django Reinhardt is lurking somewhere), is heard, after too long a wait between records, in Circles (Concord...

...This chronic passion for risk-taking did not seem to fit the off-stand Pee Wee—an acutely shy, mumblingly ironic, self-deprecating man whose only non-musical pleasures were booze, painting (which he took on with vivid, abstract delight toward the end of his life), and his wife ("my hobby is being with a gal named Mary...

...Or since...

...He's always been way out, but they didn't have a name for it then...

...Pee Wee's resultant musical career is splendidly documented in the three-volume set under his name in Time/Life Records' Giants of Jazz Series...

...So too, in its way, the Battlefield band is both venturesome and steeped in tradition...

...One of the tracks is from a 1961 session I put together to show that Pee Wee had been most unjustly and narrowly categorized as a Dixieland musician through much of his life...

...Merle Haggard compellingly proves the point in Rainbow Stew (MCA), recorded in Anaheim Stadium...

...An apprentice clarinetist, I was listening, astounded, to Pee Wee at a Boston club when, at the end of a set, a New England Conservatory of Music student brought him a present: a sheaf of music manuscript pages containing the student's painstaking transcriptions of all of Pee Wee's solos from the previous night...

...At the end of that 1961 date, the side-men were talking about how one of Pee Wee's choruses had sounded like something Thelonious Monk might have written, and others of his solos had been "really way out...

...Most of the stories are of his own semi-autobiographical invention, but there is also a rollickingly infectious version of Jim-mie Rodgers's "Blue Yodel 9." Yet, because Haggard can instantaneously feel the audience's shared memories of these songs, his performances take on extra grit and zest...

...As an old friend of Pee Wee put it, "He epitomized the jazz musician...

...I once likened some of those sounds to famished gulls, creaking doors, and lost children, but at other times—especially on the blues—he could be so softly intimate as to make you remember every one of your lost loves, including those well lost...

...I don't think I ever was a boy," he once said, recalling his parents' indifference to whether he stayed or left...

...In a way," he said, "it comes down to this...

...Although it's a studio date, Hall, a musician of fierce concentration, creates his own selfenveloping ambience wherever he is...

...When he played, however, the most familiar standards were subtly, lyrically, sometimes agonizedly transformed into new shapes—each time—with sound-colors that had never been heard on a jazz clarinet before...

...The program consists mostly of vintage tales of drinking, splintered love affairs, and his own chronic sense of himself as a lonesome fugitive...

...So, in his case, as with the late Bill Evans, it doesn't matter much whether he's being recorded inside or out...

...But I hope they stop there...

...Included is an astutely illustrated booklet (including some of Pee Wee's paintings) and exceptionally illuminating notes by John McDonough...

...Their tradition is that of Scottish song and dance, and their new album, Home Is Where the Van Is (Flying Fish), is a reminder of how little Scottish music is released here—compared to that of the Irish, for example...

...The more you try," he used to say, "the luckier you get...

...They looked like a fiendishly avant-garde score...

...The playing is bracingly stimulating (particularly the lovely soaring of the Northumbrian pipes) and the singing manages to be both virile and gentle...

...Jim Hall, though a modernist, is thoroughly rooted in the whole history of the jazz language...

...An exception was Pee Wee Russell, the most persistently daring clarinetist in jazz history...

...He even looked like one...

...At least these Scotsmen's voices could still captivate you in the dark, and there ought to be a lesson there...

...I once asked Pee Wee to define jazz...

...They coast by playing their own familiar licks to get them through the night...

...Now, if his record company will finally record him in a more intimate setting, like a club, the result could be the most exultant Hag session yet...

...One way I can indicate the astonishing complexity of his solos—though none were "difficult" to follow because his emotional force made it all cohere—is to recall an incident of my boyhood...

...But there are others who project from their own inner electricity...

...He used to think they were wrong, but they weren't...