Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC , NatHentoff MINGUS: "YOU'D BE PLAYING, AND HE'D YELL, 'GET INTO YOURSELF!'" Sidney Bechet, one of the stormiest of the jazz patriarchs, once tried to explain why he took his...
...The reason for the regeneration of his ideas and emotions may be the presence of Roy Eldridge, the most competitive of all jazz players...
...Also flawless (this is an unusual month) is Helen (Muse Records)—Helen Humes being the Count Basie alumna who, in recent years, has triumphed as a single, with New York's The Cookery as her regular base...
...Great Moments with Charles Mingus (MCA Records), reveals some of Mingus's extraordinary powers of imagination and penetrating truth-telling, with such works as "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and "Theme for Lester Young...
...Mingus sure was protean...
...It was at a jam session...
...Also likely to be a revelation to those of you unfamiliar with Mingus are Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (Atlantic...
...A new two-LP reissue set...
...Way back in the 1940s, he had begun, in these surging works, to create new dimensions of jazz time...
...The singing, the picking, and the blazing fiddling provide a constant whirl of climaxes...
...Mingus had a third way of making himself understood...
...Born in 1922, Mingus died in 1979 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ("Lou Gehrig's disease...
...I played with Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong...
...As long as you can feel the beat," he'd say, "you don't have to keep emphasizing it...
...Although Mingus was accurately considered a frontier-breaker almost from the beginning of his recorded career in the 1940s, he kept stressing where he came from...
...I'd been going on for a long time, and then, it was suddenly me, it wasn't the bass anymore...
...the three-volume Passions of a Man (Atlantic...
...Most people are forced to do things they don't want to most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choice about anything important, including who they are...
...The result is the best record she has ever made, one which, for that matter, is one of the most thoroughly satisfying sets that any jazz singer has ever made...
...One piece excited me so much I screamed...
...All in the same piece...
...He was a boldly lyrical, dramatic, meditative, angry, tender, ironic, deeply quizzical composer who constantly invented new forms as he created one of the largest and most durable bodies of unmistakably original work in jazz history...
...But he also had other ways of telling the truth of his changing selves...
...Mingus was a band leader, and his groups were continual seminars not only in Mingus music but in how his sidemen could plumb themselves...
...Mingus's pieces have provoked similar reactions...
...Further adding to the heat is a strong rhythm section of pianist Oscar Peterson, guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Stan Levey...
...It's not only a question of color anymore," he said...
...Toward the end, when he was still able to talk, we were speaking one afternoon about the racism he had fought all his life...
...People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is that fewer and fewer people are making a real effort any more to find •out exactly who they are and to build on that knowledge...
...Alto saxophonist Stitt, whose playing is sometimes more facile than fresh, has never been as powerfully, challengingly personal as in these performances...
...I go back much farther than that...
...and Mingus Ah Urn (Columbia...
...I go back to the real roots...
...The even more tumultuous Charles Mingus felt the same way: "In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am...
...To begin with, he was a virtuoso bassist who could get that instrument to tell more kinds of stories in more different ways than anyone in jazz before or since...
...Why, you go back to Charlie Parker...
...When I first heard him in person," Mingus recalled, "I almost jumped out of the balcony...
...The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time...
...More than a celebration of the infinite possibilities of the blues, this set,is the very definition of what used to be called jazz hot...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC , NatHentoff MINGUS: "YOU'D BE PLAYING, AND HE'D YELL, 'GET INTO YOURSELF!'" Sidney Bechet, one of the stormiest of the jazz patriarchs, once tried to explain why he took his music so seriously and could not abide associates who did not: "Me, I want to explain myself so bad...
...Furthermore, long before Miles Davis and the current jazz experimenters, Mingus was going outside the chords—using fragments of scales and modes, with shouts and cries as punctuation...
...And so, in Mingus's performances, tempos would accelerate and slow down, according to the feeling he wanted to express...
...Mingus shook his head...
...Not Mingus...
...He wanted his compositions to breathe naturally—unconstricted by a steadily pounding jazz beat...
...Box 39439, Los Angeles, California 90039), you can feel as well as hear the keen improvisatory edge of Lester Flatt & The Nashville Grass, The Bluegrass Cardinals, and Buddy Spicher & The Nashville Stiperpickers as they rise to the pitch of the tournament...
...Since that time, I haven't been conscious of the instrument as an instrument when I play, and so it doesn't get in the way of the music...
...We create our own slavery...
...Ellington was always a particularly influential force...
...Among the many highlights is The Bluegrass Cardinals' tribute to the father of Western swing, Bob Wills (from "San Antonio Rose" to "Stay All Night, Stay a Little Longer...
...What makes his music so exhilarating is the unbendingly free spirit at its core...
...Indeed, before starting out on his own as a leader in the mid-1950s, Mingus had also worked with Lionel Hampton, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington—as well as with Charlie Parker...
...Whatever the personal chemistry is that, so rarely, leads to a perfect jazz album, it was entirely there for this session...
...A young television interviewer once said to him, "You go back a long way, Charles...
...He had no patience with flashy technicians stocked with ready-made ideas...
...An utterly apposite combo—trumpeter Joe Wilder, tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate, pianist Norman Simmons, guitarist Billy Butler, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Butch Miles—is just as crisply ebullient as Helen...
...In this album, however, she soars and plunges and practically levitates on the strength of her feelings...
...That is, groups and soloists who've been on the road a lot get a chance to measure themselves against other performers whom they usually don't get to hear.> So it was at the August 1978 Tennessee Mountain Bluegrass Festival in upper East Tennessee...
...He kept hectoring his sidemen to stretch out...
...I mean it's getting more and more difficult for a man and a woman to just love...
...And often the pulse was only implicit...
...Choice Cuts What makes a music festival really work—when it does— is competitiveness...
...Just as exciting, in its indigenous way, is Sonny Stitt's Only the Blues, a reissue of a classic jam session on Verve (now being released by Polygram...
...I want to have myself understood...
...The music, it's my whole life...
...In The Cookery, however, Helen— possibly at the orders of management— sticks to a rather limited repertory and is seldom as unabashedly exultant and sensuous as she can be...
...When I was about eighteen or nineteen," he once told me, "I was suddenly able to transcend the instrument...
...In this sizzling two-volume set on CMH Records (P.O...
...As one of them says, "Mingus would yell at you in the middle of a solo: 'Stop playing licks and GLENN WOLfF get into yourself!' Christ, he«had more confidence in what we were capable of than we did...
...And the music, it can do that...
...It's getting deeper than that...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
