Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC NatHentoff JAZZIN' THE AIRWAVES While jazz has never been a popular music—not, at least, when it came to the Hit Parade or, as they say now, the charts—it was given a remarkable...
...Well, whatever other critics say, Bing's phrasing and playful intimacy with time made him more of a jazz singer than many of the quasi-hipsters who keep trying to qualify for that honor...
...Aloof, even patrician, in appearance and stance, in her singing she somehow fused delicacy, grace, and irresistible intimations of imminent sensuality...
...Then there were the sick, and the shy (men and women alone...
...In 1979, fifteen years later, The Dillards returned to Salem for two days and nights of celebratory music because the mayor had proclaimed Dillards Day...
...One such band, led by Luke Smathers in and around Asheville, North Carolina (home of Thomas Wolfe and Dick Moores of Gasoline Alley), is still grooving...
...At the time, I heard rumors that some people were taking these broadcasts off the air, and by the 1950s, some airchecks were advertised in the collectors' magazines...
...This set was assembled from Eddie Condon's 1944 Town Hall broadcasts on the Blue Network (remember when the networks were color-coded...
...Joined by family, friends, and former members of the band, they whooped and hollered and swung their way back to their musical beginnings and then part of the way around the corner to the present...
...Why, some of us were digging Fats on our Zeniths...
...Some of it wry, some of it powerfully lonesome, some of it just moving right along...
...Each LP costs $8 if ordered by mail...
...There was also a Southeastern lineage of players and singers who knew the traditional words and licks but had also been much touched by jazz...
...And in those last times, like on this record, what there is to hear—as British musician-critic Benny Green has said—are "not the insufferable croakings of a woman already half-dead, but recitatives whose dramatic intensity becomes unbearable, statements as frank and tragic as anything throughout the whole range of popular art...
...In American and Clean (Flying Fish 253), they use—except for two traditional tunes—current material by songwriters from Texas and Oklahoma...
...You may want to skip a couple of sketches on this particular show, but you're likely to listen often to Connee Boswell and a solid-gold collector's item—a duet with Duke and the man who emancipated the jazz bass, Jimmy Blanton...
...What is Bing Crosby doing in a jazz retrospective...
...Sure, there were cracks and burns and outright holes, but always, the way to listen to Billie was underneath...
...The best of all this sunny carousing was edited into Dillards/ Homecoming and Family Reunion (Flying Fish 215—1304 W. Schubert, Chicago, Illinois 60614...
...If, for some reason, you have been deprived of Lee Wiley all these years, this album will begin an addiction...
...How many of that kind are there in the present quicksand of rock...
...People without money for a cover charge, for instance...
...They helped start what used to be called folk-rock and then country-rock when they moved on to Los Angeles from their home in Salem, Missouri...
...It costs two bucks more if, after all these years, you can't wait and must have it by fast mail...
...On Spokane, among other Bing Crosby sets, there is Kraft Music Hall/May 29, 1941...
...One midnight, in the worst of the Depression, Fats Waller, on the air from the ritzy Palmer House in Chicago, asked, in a veiled editorial, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight...
...Anyway, the Kraft series was one of radio's most urbane—from Crosby's own swift irony to his ecumenical taste in musical guests...
...And Luke Smathers's fiddle is singing-hot...
...These are honest musicians with something of their own to say...
...And of those in rock who are honest, how many are musicians...
...Their jazz needs were greatly nurtured by the radio...
...It bears out my conviction that, with few exceptions, the best jazz is best heard either in a dance hall (if you can still find one) or in a night club where you're not locked into so solemn a listening situation that you can't laugh out loud in pleasure without being glared at as if you were a yahoo...
...By contrast, except for a couple of hours on National Public Radio Saturday nights, it's exceedingly difficult these years to connect with a direct jazz performance anywhere on the dial...
...Those broadcasts, back then, were a boon to all kinds of folks...
...The liner notes play the usual somber changes on how appallingly Billie's voice had deteriorated toward the end (she died in 1959...
...Another group that added various modern flavorings to bluegrass is Country Gazette...
...A catalogue is available...
...I don't mean recordings, but rather as live sounds from nightclubs...
...This is a string band, with vocals, and as is customary in the country swing idiom, the repertory is merrily eclectic—the ancient "Bill in the Lowground," "Indian Love Call," "Meet Me by the Ice House Lizzie," and "Memphis Blues...
...It is a special revelation to hear two movements from Duke's Black, Brown & Beige Suite not in concert but from the more relaxed ambience of the 400 Club in New York...
...Also on Totem, and invaluable, is Volume Two of Lee Wiley "On the Air" (1033...
...The Indian princess"—as Eddie Condon once called the part-Cherokee singer from Oklahoma—was, next to Billie Holiday, the most intriguing of all jazz singers...
...Just as in jazz, you get too far away from the dancers and you go kind of limp...
...It all jumps ease-fully, unpretentiously, and with a hell of a lot of skill...
...There sure is a lot of tangy story-telling still going on out there...
...And the kids who had very big ears even if they couldn't get past the bouncer and buy a drink...
...It started in the early 1970s, and only one of the original founders, Alan Munde, is left...
...There are vivid reminders in this set of the key part dancing played in the evolution and nurturing of bluegrass...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC NatHentoff JAZZIN' THE AIRWAVES While jazz has never been a popular music—not, at least, when it came to the Hit Parade or, as they say now, the charts—it was given a remarkable amount of radio time in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s...
...Jf Choice Cuts Quiet as it's kept, Bob Wills and his disciples from the Southwest were not the only country musicians who liked to swing...
...The Ellington orchestra (1945-1948 edition) is preserved, in all its power and glory, in Duke Ellington "On The Air" (Aircheck 29...
...O. Box 724, Redmond, Washington 98052), has three different labels for listening backwards— Totem, Spokane, Aircheck...
...In recent years, however, there has been a bonanza of these treasures of frozen time...
...There's a Billie Holiday in the catalogue ("On The Air," Totem 1037) which combines a 1944 radio show with performances fourteen years later on a late-night New York jazz television series...
...More jazzin' the airwaves in a later column...
...The current edition strikes me as the most cohesively dramatic and musically resourceful yet...
...Among the instrumental commentators are Pee Wee Russell (in marvelously indigenous form), Jess Stacy, and Bobby Hackett...
...Its second album, In Full Swing, is new on June Appal Recordings JA032 (Box 743, Whitesburg, Kentucky 41858...
...Though some tracks stay in the mind longer than others, there's nothing in the least fake in this set...
...One firm, Nostalgia (P...
...Another, younger band that started with long roots—bluegrass—and expanded its musical vocabulary is The Dillards...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
