Indigenous Music

...A powerful breakneck driver, Lee was also an exceptionally tender and graceful explorer of ballads (as in "A Waltz for Fran" in this set...

...Of those country people who have "crossed over" into pop, Merle told me a while ago, "There's no free will to their music...

...They got no soul...

...How many times have I been washed clean by that sound—taken away by the feeling brought on by an old flat-top guitar and a country song...

...Classic bluegrass also neither fades nor dates, and one of the most exhilarating sessions in that idiom in recent years is Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass (Rounder...

...I ain't seen one single place where I ain't been before...

...With the precise, elegant, and effortlessly soaring alto saxophonist are tenor Ben Webster, former Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard, and trumpeter Shorty Sherock...

...and the never-ending road...

...in and out of marriages that couldn't lock in his restlessness...

...Barney Bigard is characteristically cool and liquid while Shorty Sherock's witty, deftly inventive trumpet is somewhat of a surprise because at the time of this recording (1961), he had been immersed in commercial studio work for so long that he was hardly ever mentioned any more as a jazz practitioner...

...The years keep flying by like the high line poles/the wrinkles in my forehead show the miles I've put behind me/they continue to remind me how fast I'm growing old/I guess I'll die with this white line fever in my soul...

...As for Merle himself, it's when he plays guitar and fiddle that you hear the jazz nourishing his Okie roots...

...Haggard, as he says, goes back a long way in jazz, as far back as Louis Armstrong and such distinctive white im-provisers as Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti...

...Lee went on to work with Art Bla-key and head his own combos...

...After a while, he fell down...

...Above all, he had found and steadily developed his own jazz voice before careless love cut him down...

...I'm on the run, the highway is my home...

...They got no heart...

...In 1971, at the age of thirty-four, while working in a New York club, he was shot to death by a woman who loved him to distraction...

...Touring as much and as hard as he does, Haggard does well financially...

...but Take Twelve (Prestige), a reissue of a 196Tsession, should alert newer jazz listeners to Lee's remarkable and passionately disciplined expressive skills...

...In the usual way of measuring time, this set is almost twenty years old...

...He could probably do much better and stay put more often if he'd sweeten up his act—cut down on the jazz, record with strings, try some country-pop tunes...

...The band has a rhythmic thrust that keeps even the ballads taut, and the singing—solo and harmony—has that "high, lonesome" sound that's somehow extraordinarily bracing in its keening...

...They're as hot as they come...

...I've been from coast to coast a hundred times or more...

...From his teens on, he had a seizing authority, a crisp sound, and a swaggering beat...

...Jimmy Rushing knew that feeling too...

...If the Morgan album is full-strength bop, Benny Carter's Opining Blues (Prestige) is classic swing-era jazz...

...Their melodic and rhythmic conceptions fuse so naturally that the performances are uncommonly relaxed and flowing—with the emphasis on warm, intimate "singing" on the horns...

...When he sings, however, the jazz touch is on the players around him—like trumpeter/alto saxophonist Don Markham of Bakersfield, California—but Merle's grainy, conversing-in-a-quiet-bar voice is straight country...

...U Choice Cuts When he was eighteen, Lee Morgan was already in the trumpet section of Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and once in a while took a solo that spun even Dizzy's head around...

...These nights, the country band with the hottest instrumental sounds—without in any way losing its basic country flavor—is Merle Haggard's...

...Now, Morgan is remembered by musicians and a few aficionados...

...Although George Jones is the nonpareil singer of country ballads, Haggard is the pre-eminent complete country singer—the only living performer of the stature of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell...

...With all this easefully swinging luminosity in the front line, the rhythm section is exactly apt—pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist Dave Barbour, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and drummer Mel Lewis...

...The session is what is called in the trade "a blqwing date"—plenty of room for extended solos...

...As in conversation, Merle ends the book by marveling at "the absolute magic of the music...

...He has thoroughly absorbed—and recorded tributes to—the work of Jimmie Rodgers, Williams, Frizzell, and Bob Wills...

...Jimmie Rodgers, the master of white country blues, heard his future as a kid working alongside black laborers singing to ease the hours up and down the tracks of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad...

...and a strong and tender gospel album, dedicated to his mother, Songs for the Mama That Tired (MCA...

...but in essence, it transcends fixed dating, being as continually fresh and wondrous as Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, or Duke...

...When he became a star, they took Charlie away from the piano so he could be a stand-up act...

...But he won't...

...Furthermore, as intensely personal as his music is, Merle is also the reigning expert on the legends of country music...

...And he was far from unique among his peers in his passion for black sounds...

...Rainbow Stew, a live concert at Anaheim Stadium (MCA...

...On the road with the Strangers, Haggard doesn't always play as much jazz as he'd like...

...There's no clash in styles, however, because black and white sounds and phrasing have been intertwining in this land for several centuries now...

...I was born the running kind," Merle sings, "with leaving always on my mind...

...The songs range from early bluegrass classics to a black gospel tune ("Eat at the Welcome Table") and "Leaving Detroit," a variation on a frequent country theme these years—getting off the cold assembly line to go back home where the Southern breezes blow...

...But in a room like the Lone Star in New York, Merle lets himself and the Strangers have a jazz band ball...

...If you have a lot of hard-core country fans in the audience," he says, "you sometimes have to get loud and do the old country club night club act...

...More recently, Charlie Rich, before he was famous and lost his way in a swamp of sugary Nashville strings, knew more about jazz than most jazz critics—and showed it on the piano as he accompanied himself with rolling thunder in cheap joints...

...Current albums by the unbending, pun-gently soulful Haggard include Big City (Epic...

...And the stories told by jazz and country players are essentially the same—"men-women songs," as Jimmy Rushing used to say, and lonesome traveling songs...

...There's also his new book, Sing Me Back Home (My Life) with Peggy Russell (Times Books...

...The fine sizzling fiddlers present are Jerry Lundy and LeRoy Mumma...

...She's now seventy-nine, and Merle says on the album, "with the exception of a few mental scars brought about by her youngest and most wayward son, I believe she's fine...

...And Lee's vigorously emphatic colleagues are tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianist Barry Harris, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Louis Hayes...

...The late Ben Webster, with his huge tone and rhapsodic soul, is a continually intriguing counterpart to the urbane, precisely self-controlled Benny Carter...

...And, like his lead guitarist, Roy Nichols—a stunning, searing soloist—Haggard is an unstinting admirer of Django Reinhardt...

...He writes and sings out of where he's been—in reform schools and then prison when he was young...