Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff SONGS OF SOLIDARITY On Labor Day, for the first time in many years, organized workers in New York Citv— 100,000 of them—put on a pa. rade. Among the sights that gave...
...As the first independent union of Eastern Europe, we deeply feel a sense of community [with you...
...Stop turning dignity and culture into a huge liquor store...
...The only things missing were songs...
...At last, the recording of that evening has been released: The Only Recorded Performance of Paul Desmond with the Modern Jazz Quartet (Finesse/distributed by Columbia Records...
...You need the pulse of music against such heavy odds...
...And once, in another time, the five of them appeared together in concert—on Christmas Day in 1971, in New York...
...While the words are often sardonic and sometimes fierce in their anger, the performances are subtly shaded and, therefore, all the more effective...
...at the Shipyard we've raised/ a flag with a red ribbon:/ for bread and for freedom/ and for a new Poland—/ Janek Wisniewski had fallen...
...A witty, subtle man, he seasoned his romanticism with wry musical-literary allusions and curves of phrasing that could somehow be simultaneously airy and poignant...
...And he's just as passionate, foot-pounding, and moodily lyrical as he's always been...
...But growing up in the 1930s, I learned a whole repertory of pungent labor tunes on picket lines, at meetings, and on parade, and I wait now for new ones...
...Choice Cuts He never changes, this white pianist, born in Russia, taken as a babe to Chicago, and then possessed by the blues...
...Originally produced in Sweden by Jorgen Widsell and Lars Holm-berg in cooperation with Solidarity, the recordings were made in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Warsaw...
...And he's done other things, including co-editing a magazine, The Jazz Record, which printed my very first piece...
...Another song contrasts the way the workers live with the lives of the powerful...
...Another epiphany was a woman in her late sixties from my shop (District 65-UAW, publishing division) who was so exhilarated that she marched with three different unions, and still didn't get her fill...
...Hodes describes his own playing when he describes the kind of music he listens to: "It's got to hit me—otherwise, what am I listening to, am I listening with my head or to musicT Another musician who never changed was the late Paul Desmond, an introspective, softly lyrical alto saxophonist with a tone as pure, in its way, as the sound of the early Joan Baez...
...Oh, there were plenty of bands—from Irish pipers to polyrhythmic Puerto Rican percussionists—and some chants and shouts...
...Do not miss it...
...Also as usual...
...In the news reports about Solidarity I have seen scant mention of that union's songs...
...Some are new, others are based on old Polish folksongs and dances, and there's even one that's sung to a Bob Dylan melody...
...First of all, these are real songs—not conjugated slogans...
...Box 194, Plainview, New York 11803...
...updatings of historic tales of Polish resistance...
...And blues...
...Stop apologizing all the time,/ and telling us that you've gone astray./ Look at our mothers and our wives,/ drab and shabby like our lives...
...Postulate 221 Songs from the New Polish Labor Movement...
...There is, for example, A Song About Janek from Gdynia who was one of hundreds of workers killed by the militia in the Gdansk shipyard uprising of 1970...
...The best set of Hodes on record in many years is Someone to Watch Over Mel Live at Hanratty's (Muse) in which he ranges from his own vintage Selection from the Gutter through standards and pieces by Jelly Roll Morton and Lil Armstrong...
...The most arresting way to tell a story of great danger is through understatement...
...For more rarities, including radio broadcasts, write Jazz Archives for a catalog...
...There are also parodies of official Party slogans...
...On his Folkways label, Asch has released Solidarity...
...An extraordinary collection of previously unreleased airchecks, Charlie Christian Live...
...On three of the tracks, Count Basie joins with the rhythm section to create a pulsing momentum that is among the most exciting experiences in all of recorded jazz history...
...poems, and a recurrent, acute sense that all Poland is listening as Solidarity gathers strength and that, indeed, the world is listening...
...This is not only the best Charlie Christian on record, but Benny Goodman, who tended toward self-conscious perfectionism in a studio, has never played with a hotter sound and swing...
...Art Hodes can play other kinds of jazz too, but the blues runs through all his music...
...Asch has filled this information gap...
...Well, as usual...
...Though initially addressed to malign Teutonic forces, the song makes its present point without any necessary change in lyrics: "No German shall spit in our faces,/ Or Germanize our children,/ Our arms are shaped in our hearts,/ The Spirit shall command us...
...His guitar too was a lyrical instrument, and he played it with a fire, with a crackling imaginativeness, and a huge, deep beat that split the history of jazz guitar in two, pre- and post-Christian...
...Among the sights that gave me a natural high that lasted for days was the large ILGWU contingent—row after row of blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, and, surviving in solidarity, elderly Jews...
...After a at the Shipyard we Ve a flag with a red ribbon • · · brief documentary recording of the shots and the screaming on that day, the singer notes with deadly understatement: "It is the Party that guns the workers down...
...They'll come, and Ronald Reagan will be their abundant source...
...But musically, Desmond was most attuned to the kind of intensely gentle players who made up the Modern Jazz Quartet (John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Connie Kay...
...with the Benny Goodman Sextet, has been released on Jazz Archives Recordings (P.O...
...She had been waiting for a long time for labor to strike up the band again...
...Those songs do exist...
...On October 2, when Lech Walesa won re-election as chairman of Solidarity in the first national elections anywhere in postwar Eastern Europe that had not been organized by the government, the ballot boxes were first opened and turned upside down so all could see they had not been stuffed...
...Desmond became renowned through his years with Dave Brubeck, whose lumberjack's approach to the piano was, to say the least, incompatible with Desmond's silvery, quizzical solos...
...Some of the New York marchers and watchers were talking about another labor movement, Solidarity, the organizing drive that has not only opened some free space in Poland but has also had the chutzpah to exhort workers in other Soviet-bloc nations to do the same thing...
...I knew they had to exist...
...A Solidarity song heard at the time of the strike was written in 1908 and has traditionally been sung in periods of national crisis...
...Then there was Charlie Christian...
...Plenty of blues...
...But it's as a player that Hodes, now seventy-six and looking a good deal younger, has survived...
...Asch has included a booklet with the original texts and translations, along with some historical notes...
...The performers chose to appear anonymously...
...Stop telling us that we are stupid,/ ungovernable, and without experience...
...Postulate 22, the album's subtitle, is a poem that was added to a list of twenty-one demands made to the Government by the striking workers...
...but.they got along and, in the process, got rather rich...
...I expect there already is a song about that remarkable moment in Polish time...
Vol. 45 • December 1981 • No. 12
