Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff New Horn from New Orleans In jazz, critics never discover startling new musical presences. Neither do record company executives or booking agents or club owners....
...At this point, though, there is no full-scale documentation...
...He digs Louis Armstrong and Rex Stewart as well as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Don Cherry...
...His technique, like Brownie's, is formidable and yet it's not used to dazzle...
...The songs include Woody's "Pretty Boy Floyd," a poignantly graceful performance of the late Harry Chapin's "Circles," and such sum-moners of memories across the generations as "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine...
...Much of the time, she has been heard on record in songs of her native Scotland...
...He has absorbed all his influences, and is creating a distinctive sound and conception that even at this stage would be impressive in a player twice his age...
...I studied classical music," Wynton says, "because so many black musicians were so scared of this big monster on the other side of the mountain called classical music...
...Too safe...
...Two years later, he performed Bach's "Brandenburg" Concerto No...
...Accordingly, Wynton has no hesitancy defining himself as a jazz musician...
...A remarkably protean performer, who also danced and produced, Valaida Snow played decidedly hot trumpet, somewhat in the Armstrong vein, and was a swinging vocalist with impressive proficiency at scat singing (wordless, horn-like vocalizing...
...The most recent revelation is Hot Snow—Valaida Snow Queen of the Trumpet Sings & Swings (RR1305...
...Having proved he can play classical music, he wants to stretch himself as far as he can go, and that he can do only in jazz...
...This has been going on since before Louis Armstrong's time, and it's been happening during the past two years for Wynton Marsalis, a twenty-year-old trumpeter who's come up strong from New Orleans...
...In his own initial album as a leader, Wynton Marsalis (Columbia FC 37574), the kid from New Orleans is by no means just an imitator of Clifford Brown...
...It's interesting, all right, on the classical side of the mountain, but too predictable...
...10011...
...However, one record producer, Ro-setta Reitz, has been filling in some of this lost history in her Women's Heritage Series on the Rosetta Records (115 West 16th Street, New York, N.Y...
...It was an experience that almost killed her, particularly because of the vicious beating she was given when she tried to protect a child who was being savagely smashed...
...In jazz, to be a good performer means to be an individual, which you don't have to be in classical music...
...Unlike many young jazz musicians in recent years, Marsalis has no patience with so-called "fusion"—a commercial mix of jazz and rock aimed at radio station play and the trade magazine charts...
...At seventeen, although Wynton was too young to be accepted by the summer Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, the force of his musicianship persuaded the directors to bend the rules...
...I first heard Marsalis playing with Art Blakey, the bristling drummer who has been nurturing young talent for decades...
...And this twenty-year-old has really explored that tradition...
...The varied rhythms are compelling, if not necessarily converting, and the harmonies are bracing...
...Brownie was also a perpetual student of his horn and of music theory...
...It was funny being up there," he recalls, "because I could always tell how shocked they were that a black kid my age could play their music so well...
...I went into it and found out it wasn't anything but some more music...
...a lyricism that most poets can never even imagine, let alone approximate, and an exuberant mastery of jazz time...
...The hymns, some of them at least a century old, range from Appalachia to Lead-belly's territory...
...This set's title comes from the wise anonymous advice: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares...
...One of the great gaps in jazz history has to do with the women in the music from its beginnings...
...I wanted to find out what it was that scared everybody so bad...
...Wynton went on to Juilliard, where he shocked the faculty again with the range and power of his skills...
...The latter is both a choral group and an array of fiddles, banjos, dulcimers, and other stringed instruments...
...2 with the same orchestra...
...An intriguing departure is Angels Hovering 'Round (Fretless FR 138, a division of Phil Records, The Barn, N. Ferrisburg, Vermont 05473...
...Although Wynton Marsalis has been touched by a number of influences, it was hearing Brownie on recordings that especially astonished and challenged him: "I didn't know someone could play a trumpet like that...
...In this collection of American religious music, Redpath is joined by another singer, Lisa Neustadt, and The Angel Band...
...Individually and in duets, the two complement each other delightfully, combining the antic wit of Arlo with the unflagging enthusiasm of Pete (who bears out the notion that music keeps its practitioners young...
...It was unbelievable...
...This was a woman, obviously, of enormous spirit, and also a musician of significance who, until now, has been almost entirely ignored by jazz historians...
...And the Marsalis sound is clear, vibrant, crisp, and often exultant...
...Marian McPartland has been working on a comprehensive history of female jazz players, and I understand other such works are in progress...
...But as far as both musical idioms are concerned," says this singular young man, "I think—I know—it's harder to be a good jazz musician...
...V Choice Cuts Jean Redpath exemplifies the musical truth that the human voice can be the most beautiful and resourceful of all instruments...
...At the end of that summer, Wynton received an award as the outstanding brass player in the program...
...After you sit up there and play all those scores, you find out that classical musicians are just like all the other musicians— most of them are mediocre and a handful are excellent...
...She booked herself throughout the United States, Europe, and the Far East, and in the early 1940s, while in Denmark, was interned by the Nazis for more than eighteen months...
...Always, the first ones to spread the joyful news are other musicians...
...Back home, where his father, Ellis Mar-salis, is a highly respected music educator, composer, and jazz pianist, Wynton won a city-wide competition when he was fourteen to appear with the New Orleans Philharmonic in the Haydn Trumpet Concerto...
...Nobody in all of jazz had a dissonant word to say about Brownie...
...Pete Seeger, still the Johnny Appleseed of folk music, worked for years with Woody Guthrie, and now he occasionally does concert appearances with Woody's son, Arlo— the most recent of which is Precious Friend (Warner Brothers 2BSK 3644...
...It's there only to propel and illuminate his stories...
...Furthermore—and this is rather new in jazz history—the young hornman is as accomplished a classical trumpeter as he is a jazzman...
...In pre-jazz history, black Southern musicians used to talk about "singing horns," and Marsalis's trumpet does indeed evoke that quality and flexibility...
...the technique itself is never the story...
...Invariably, this dilution of jazz has turned out to be mechanical and meretricious...
...Says Marsalis, "I want to get the public to understand the real significance and beauty of the music, not by watering it down but by getting to such a place in my art that it will be obvious to all who listen that I'm coming from a great tradition...
...The late Clifford Brown, another Blakey alumnus, immediately came to mind...
...Brownie, who was twenty-six when he died in a car crash in 1956, was almost too good to be true: Astonishing technique that he made seem ridiculously easy...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
