You just can't keep the music unless you move with it'
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC 'You just can't keep the music unless you move with it' Nat Hentoff I never told him, but Sidney Bechet was responsible for my dropping out of Harvard graduate school. One Sunday...
...And each of those notes, no matter how softly struck, has the propulsive power of the mighty pulse that has so long made the Count the very definition of swinging...
...Johnson...
...The selections are acutely knowledgeable (often including alternative takes), and the engineering is close to witchcraft...
...It's like a royal assemblage—Muddy Waters, Lonnie Brooks, Son Seals, Willie Dixon, Mighty Joe Young, and the dauntless Koko Taylor and Her Blues Machine...
...As he finished each one, Bechet threw the shot glass directly at the erring Mr...
...In Paris, for instance, he played for a long time with a group of young French revivalists who had memorized early recordings, even unto the scratches in the grooves...
...As pianist Dick Wellstoon said of recording with Sidney, he was "like the captain of a beleaguered galley—there was no such thing as a mistake, only mutiny...
...Bechet "plays more music than you can put on paper...
...Those Dixieland musicianers, they tried to do that...
...I looked at the books and wondered what on Earth I was doing among the dead...
...The decision had been coming, but at that moment I knew for sure that I was not going to be a professor of literature...
...Basie, who never plays one note more than he has to...
...But oh, what an improvised I heard Bechet scores of times in all sorts of musical company, and always it was his searing fire that made it all cohere...
...You might also write to Alligator for its catalog...
...But in France, where he spent the last years of his life, he was a star, even a superstar, playing the big music halls and selling an abundance of recordings...
...On My Very Special Guests (Epic), his narratives take on a most intriguing diversity of flavors through the presence of such visiting bards as Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Linda Ron-stadt, Willie Nelson, and, in a ram-bunctiously exhilarating "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," Pop and Mavis Staples...
...Bechet died there in 1959, at the age of sixty-two, and until the end he lustily and rhapsodically exemplified what he once wrote in his characteristically luminous autobiography, Treat It Gentle: "There's this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving...
...One Sunday night, in Widener Library, I was researching a paper on James Fenimore Cooper but kept being distracted by an imperious call...
...The best single collection of Bechet recordings, illustrating how exuberantly he kept moving with the music, is Sidney Bechet, one of the Time-Life Records Giants of Jazz series (STLJ-5009), These editions have already encompassed the work of such nonpareils as Lester Young, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Carter, Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins...
...And the undisputed master of the country ballad is Texas-born George Jones...
...Black intertwining with white, despite the November elections...
...I knew that Bechet, at that moment, was lifting his long, thrusting soprano saxophone to hurl his musicians and the listeners at the Savoy Cafe, a half-hour away, into the ecstatic core of hot jazz...
...But white keening and rueful fantasizing tend to assume other forms (though there surely is a country tradition of black-influenced, white classic blues, from Jimmie Rodgers to Merle Haggard...
...And one night at the Savoy, when his New Orleans elder, Bunk Johnson, had too much bottled spirit to keep his fingers where they ought to have been on the horn, I watched Bechet leave the stand, sit at a table directly under the band, and order a dozen shots of brandy...
...At the pulsing center is Mr...
...A guillotine had more of a natural beat than they did, but Bechet, like a tornado, would envelop them with such giant gusts of spirit that somehow they found themselves flowing along with him...
...You just can't set it down and hold it...
...Bechet was so consumed with the music that he had no patience with careless colleagues...
...Since, for various reasons, musicians hardly ever gather together in these open-ended impromptus in clubs anymore, Granz sets them up in a studio...
...The proud, moon-faced Creole, who astonished established New Orleans "musicianers" (as he called them) when he was still a boy, never was much of a reader...
...So too with the three Bechet volumes in this boxed set—ranging from 1920s dates with Louis Armstrong through many sessions with Bechet as leader...
...Collectors' items Classic black blues are still poundingly alive, and a key label for this genre is the Chicago-based Alligator operation (P.O...
...The accompanying booklet contains a first-class musical biography by Frank Kappler, along with incisive notes on the individual recordings by Richard Sudhalter and one-time Bechet protege Bob Wilber...
...Jones sings out of his own troubled autobiography, giving vivid credibility to his stories of elusive women and too-easy booze...
...The life-tales that nurture the blues aren't only black...
...Alligator is currently distributing a blues cornucopia, Blues Deluxe, a live session on Chicago's Navy Pier recorded by that city's WXRT-FM...
...Somehow I would have to find a vocation where the continually unexpected was the norm...
...From that night on, the music was as Bechet wanted it to be...
...For anyone unfamiliar with the gritty urgencies and sardonic naturalism of big-city black blues, this set is a compelling introduction...
...I have heard new dimensions to sides I grew up with because the Time-Life engineers are so deft at discovering more in the original grooves than anyone suspected at the time...
...And there's also abiding pleasure for long-time familiars of the devils and saints that inhabit the blues...
...While the fine art of country balladry continues to thrive, the jam session, as a way of self-testing jazz expression, is almost extinct...
...Or in any other music I've heard...
...In his own country, Bechet was renowned only among musicians and a small, mesmerized band of aficionados...
...It is in country ballads, however, that personal loss and life's other short-circuits more often take musical shape for down-home white performers and listeners...
...As is traditional in these jousts, it's practically all improvised, with each story-teller having plenty of room to stretch out, ever mindful that the next horn player is thinking of what might top him...
...After all, as Jelly Roll Morton once explained logically, Nat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...
...Just as jazz trumpeters used to revere Louis Armstrong, so just about every country balladeer regards Jones with awe...
...they tried to write the music down and kind of freeze it...
...Except on Norman Granz's Pablo Records...
...Leaving Harvard, never to return, I certified my emancipation by hastening to the Savoy and experiencing head-on what British critic Max Harrison called Bechet's "combination of violence and sensuous beauty"—an overwhelming emotional force, melodically and rhythmically, that has yet to be equaled in jazz...
...For information about this and other Giants of Jazz sets, you can write to Reader Information, Time-Life Records, 541 North Fairbanks Court, Chicago, Illinois 60611...
...Box 60234, Chicago, Illinois 60660...
...Basie Jam #3 is an especially compatible colloquy among such still ardent jazz elders as Count Basie, Benny Carter (alto), Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (tenor), Al Grey (trombone), Clark Terry (trumpet), Joe Pass (guitar), John Heard (bass), and Louis Bellson (drums...
...that's why they lost it...
...Even when they didn't arrange it to death, they didn't have any place to send it...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
