Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC , NatHentoff Count Basie: Putting Wheels on the Beat He comes on stage in a motor scooter because—with his arthritis, diabetes, and two heart attacks—walking is something of a...
...When you can hear this kind of witty, enlivening music nearly every night—and be paid for sitting at the piano and directing it—who would want to retire...
...In the scooter, and then on the piano stool, he looks at the audience with his customary well-satisfied smile...
...Also on Deutsche Grammophon is the first prize winner of the Warsaw 1980 Chopin Competition—Dang Thai Son (Chopin: Andante Spianato Et Grande Polonaise Brillante Op...
...winner of a gold medal in the Warsaw 1980 Chopin Competition, and now more than good enough to appear in Deutsche Grammophon's adventurous Concours series...
...He'll never stop playing...
...In recent weeks, three sets of Basie albums have been released, all incandescently illuminating...
...The songs of Bertolt Brecht, on the other hand, have decidedly political intent—to expose and, if possible, dismember the capitalist state...
...In Basie's own piano playing, the notes became fewer and fewer but each one was exactly meaningful enough to swing a military band...
...Dang Thai Son was born in Hanoi in 1958, received some of his early piano lessons in bunkers, and took later piano instruction in Moscow...
...Among the cheerily bitter titles are: "There's Nothing Quite Like Money," "The Rat Men," "Song of a German Mother" (of a Nazi), and "The German Miserere...
...Before an audience of populist connoisseurs at Opryland, lead singer Bobby Osborne and his banjo virtuoso brother, Sonny, lead their band through such arias on universal themes as "Love Gone Cold...
...I got too lost in sound...
...The set is $22.95 plus $1.75 for shipping and handling from Book-of-the-Month Records, Camp Hill, PA 17012...
...So it is for Ewa Poblocka, born in Gdansk (a city that has figured in recent years in other than musical news...
...It's not because of the public that he's on the job before we are most nights...
...This concert is so musically compelling and culturally illuminating, who is to say that it is not art, and high art at that...
...There are musicians, on the other hand, for whom politics—except the politics of music itself—tend to be secondary...
...Well, if the complexly rich tradition of bluegrass—and its rigorous apprenticeship requirements—are new to you, I'd suggest Bluegrass Spectacular/The Osborne Brothers (RCA AHL1-4324...
...Box 1262, Peter Stuyvesant Station, New York, NY 10009...
...It was recorded less than two weeks after Bill Basie's seventy-seventh birthday...
...Starting with Basie as a sideman in the Bennie Moten band of the early 1930s, the set moves through some of the first sessions the fledgling Basie band cut in New York, and goes as far as Basie dates in the early 1950s...
...Bluegrass, except in times of desperate economic depression, has never had much political content...
...What has this player or that leader contributed to the heritage...
...If Richard Nixon still had access to the White House piano, I expect he'd invite Dang Thai Son down for some four-handed musical reflections...
...Bach, Chopin, Debussy—Deutsche Gram-mophon 2535015...
...A remarkable album of their songs, Change the World: It Needs It (LAB-14), has been newly released by Labor Records (P.O...
...She is a German actress based in Hamburg but, singing in English, is doubly idiomatic...
...And the present Basie swing machine is warmly, resonantly, tastily heard in Warm Breeze (Pablo Today D2312131...
...While Brecht is usually associated in the American mind with composer Kurt Weill in his song forays, he also collaborated with Schoenberg pupil Hanns Eisler, a German Communist deported from the United States after World War II...
...You don't have to be a member of the club to buy the album...
...It's just that there's no other place he wants to be...
...He's like the Greenwich Mean Time of the music...
...It would be like shutting out the lights...
...Obviously, this winner was not Polish...
...That is, if you can survive your youth...
...More than twenty years ago, Basie guitarist Freddie Green, who has been with the Count since 1937, told me, "He loves the band...
...Polygram, as part of its jazz reissue series from the Verve catalogue, has released Count Basie at Newport (UMV 2619)—a 1957 reunion of Lester Young, Jo Jones (Basie's ceaselessly masterful drummer), and singer Jimmy Rushing with Basie and his band...
...The band Basie brought East from Kansas City in 1936 startled the jazzmen in New York because it came on with the collective spontaneity of a small combo...
...As jazz musicians have told me since I was a tad, "Jazz keeps you young...
...As do critics, musicians like to talk about "contributions" as well as kicks...
...He plays Chopin with rhapsodic ardor, grace, discipline, and an exceptional sensitivity to nuances of tone...
...Or, as New Yorker jazz chronicler Whitney Balliett put it more graphically, "Basie put wheels on the beat...
...Over a deft, unobtrusive but felt rhythm section, Sylvia Anders is a consistently compelling, protean, sensuously and satirically powerful interpreter of both the words and the sinuous musical lines...
...But far from being just tracts, these mordant, mercilessly observant numbers—so hard to shake out of the mind—are true lieder of the subways and graffiti-embarrassed urinals...
...Basie had planned it that way...
...It's not that Basie, a disciple and student of Fats Waller, couldn't play fast and all over the keyboard...
...And the sections didn't scream...
...He loves to hear it...
...Because they are so skillfully theatrical, the songs transcend their grim topical origins—especially when sung, as here, with such voracious mockery...
...And it was also just right for the soloists and for the band as a whole...
...Every musician, without any exception I ever heard of, agrees that Bill Basie changed the rhythmic essence of the big jazz band...
...22, etc.—253/359...
...Basie doesn't stay on the road, at his age, to pay the rent...
...Years before, he'd had a long gig at a Kansas City club with nine pieces, and when he expanded, he was determined that the larger orchestra would not sound swollen...
...Ewa PoblockalJ.S...
...And already, though young, Poblocka knows how to enter the mystery within the luminous lyricism of Debussy...
...He preferred not to, because the unerringly astute dramatic placement of his judicious notes made his style the most propulsive in jazz...
...On Book-of-the-Month Club Records, there is the boxed, three-volume Count Basie: The Early Years (91-6545...
...M Choice Cuts Part of the more than lingering obeisance to European cultural standards in this land— at least so far as music is concerned—is the notion that true "artistic" virtuosity is alien, for instance, to the kinds of folks who perform country music in places like Opryland in Nashville...
...While the extraordinarily distinctive array of Basie soloists—Lester Young, Her-schel Evans, Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Jimmy Rushing, Joe Williams—each contributed distinctively to the jazz language, Basie as soloist and leader has been especially invaluable as the keeper of what Freddie Green calls "the rhythm wave"—the jazz pulse, the jazz beat...
...Not in the least intimidated by Bach, she makes his lines sing, as they were intended to...
...For instance, he wanted the bigger brass section "to bite with real guts, but I wanted that bite to be just as tasty and subtle as if it were the three brass I used to use...
...Like Duke Ellington when people used to ask him when he planned to retire...
...And compared to Zukerman and Segovia, who can speak of bluegrass country fiddlers and banjo pickers as other than common players...
...Among the guests are the Lewis Family, who hearken back to hornpipes and tales of Sunday Christians...
...Surely, compared to Domingo and Pavarotti, it is child's play to sing blue-grass...
...An epiphany of how much Basie has meant to musicians as the definer of swing was Stan Getz's reaction years ago after hearing a set by the Basie band...
...I haven't been swinging enough...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC , NatHentoff Count Basie: Putting Wheels on the Beat He comes on stage in a motor scooter because—with his arthritis, diabetes, and two heart attacks—walking is something of a drag...
...It's to hear the band for his own kicks...
...Duke would make one of his rare unpleasant faces and growl, "Retire to what...
...The beat was much more relaxed, more flowing and flexible, than that of any other large band in jazz...
...I told the guys that the minute the brass got out of hand and blared and screeched instead of making every note mean something, there'd be some changes made...
...She plays Chopin the way Jelly Roll Morton used to play ragtime—inside the notes...
...Count Basie, who is seventy-eight, appears to be in his mid-sixties...
...And there's a whole side of rare Basie performances with just a rhythm section...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
