Indigenous Music

...On records, I'd wished for a bit more intensity...

...And she took that crowd and turned it every which way she wanted it to go...

...But this singular lady from Georgia, who has only begun to realize her potential, should be able to survive even them...

...They eschew the Greenwich Village club because it's too big and yet often too crowded with a clientele that likes to hoot and holler when the music and beer really get to them...

...Is this the optimum minor-league training for big-city joints like the Lone Star...

...They make the nights go faster...

...But, coming out of Kansas City, it was a relaxed, sinewy, swinging band, with particularly flavorful proficiency in the blues...

...Almost four decades later, Flanagan is one of the masters of jazz improvisation...

...As an inventor of truly original forms, a creator of melodies that few classical composers can begin to match, and as a colorist, Ellington was, as he used to say of others, beyond category...

...But she came back for one more—Ray Charles's "What'd I Say...

...One of the legions of jazz musicians influenced by Charlie Parker (Bird shaped players of all instruments) was pianist Tommy Flanagan...

...This collection of marvels is $38.98 with another $2 for shipping and handling (Smithsonian Recordings, P.O...

...The latter, born in Czechoslovakia, did not come to America until he was in his mid-twenties, but you can never tell that from the jazz authority he reveals here...

...She'd need it at this club...

...But then she let go...

...Proudly...

...And a powerfully pulsing declaration of independence, "I'm a Lady" (not a one-night stand...

...Already here, Parker's distinctive sound, time, and phrasing leap out at you...

...Well, coming out for her first set, Terri, slender, her soft hair cut kind of short, was a mite tentative on the first couple of numbers...

...She's country, all right, but she's heard a lot of black soul sounds and if you listen closely, there's more than a small touch of jazz in her phrasing...

...But more projecting of what she was feeling inside...

...In The Magnificent Tommy Flanagan (Progressive Records, P.O...

...But could this gentle, coolly sensuous lady cut through the rowdy air at the Lone Star...

...It didn't help that there were no horns...

...The kind of growl a jazz trumpeter can make...

...Her obsession is independence...

...On the other hand, I don't like clubs that try to be concert halls, with people shushing at you if you yell out in natural pleasure...

...But that wasn't part of my concern about her...

...A characteristically first-class production—in terms of both sound and annotation—by the Smithsonian Collective of Recordings, the boxed six-record set is called Duke Ellington: An Explosion of Genius/1938-1940...

...I walked over to the Lone Star recently to catch a singer, Terri Gibbs, whom I'd heard only on records...

...Maybe," I was told, "we'll do it somewhere along the line if her career is long enough, which I think it will be...

...His hallmark is clarity—of melodic line, beat, and harmonic design...

...And yet, also evident is the deep blues and swing tradition Out of which Bird naturally evolved...

...These were the first recordings made in the East by "Bird," who was to turn jazz around and upside down...

...Somebody's Knockiri and I'm a Lady, had won her a pride of awards, and even some real money...

...The lively interplay of her musical roots is also clearer and more evocatively resounding in a club...

...Jay McShann's band, recording during part of the same period as that covered in the Smithsonian Ellington set, was much smaller in inventive scale...

...The title is not in the least hyperbolic...

...While the customers eat and chatter, the pianist who happens to sing churns out fifty songs during her three sets a night...

...I mean, all those years, if Terri had suddenly dropped dead at the piano, it would probably have taken a good hour before any of the diners realized something was amiss...

...I haven't told you yet that Terri Gibbs is blind, and has been since birth...

...I had to show people I could do a lot of things they didn't think a blind person could do...

...She refused, for instance, to go to a special school for the blind, choosing the public high school instead...

...Her albums are good, mind you, and I recommend them, but in person, this lady from Georgia is more vivid, more relaxed, and sometimes even quite rambunctious— as when she ends a chorus with a growl...

...Albert Murray, in the notes to this set, puts this music in full context: "I don't think anybody has achieved a higher aesthetic synthesis of the American experience than Duke Ellington expressed in his music...

...Her first two MCA albums...

...There was a "Georgia on My Mind" that made even the usually yelping yahoos at the bar look as if they'd suddenly been struck pensive with acute yearning...

...Not shouting...

...The next day I called someone I know at MCA in Nashville and urgently, pleadingly asked that the company make a "live" Terri Gibbs album in some joint...

...Terri Gibbs seemed to have ended the first set, and the shouts were long and high...

...Box 10230, Des Moines, Iowa 50336...

...What makes Jazz McShann, 1941-43 (MCA Jazz Heritage Series) an album of unusual historical significance is the solo presence on four tracks of a young alto saxophonist named Charlie Parker...

...Mraz sounds as if he grew up in a Harlem home where the phonograph was seldom quiet...

...But I was worried about how she'd do in her first trip to New York, working a twister of a room like the Lone Star, whose motto, emblazoned on the outside of the building is: Too Much Ain't Enough.' On records, her warm, flowing contralto and her knowing way of getting inside a lyric had made me a fan...

...Anybody who achieved a literary equivalent of that would be beyond Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner...

...Box 500, Tifton, Georgia 31794), Flanagan illuminates ballads and swings effortlessly through such transformed standards as "Speak Low...

...These were the years during which Ellington the composer and his glorious instrument, his orchestra, were incandescent...

...I tell you, if you put record company officials into the State and Defense Departments, nobody would notice the difference—the state of incompetency would be just as high...

...Choice Cuis It's early to think about Christmas presents, but in this Reagan economy, you might want to start saving up for a nonpareil present for just about any jazz collector...

...I do wish she'd get a trumpet and a saxophone for the road, though...

...Also, until she began to hit the charts not too long ago, Terri had spent the last five years playing at the Steak and Ale Restaurant in her home town, Augusta, Georgia...

...It's one of those background music gigs...

...Good Lord, a white girl from the Steak and Ale Restaurant in Augusta, Georgia, coming up with the chutzpah to sing that quintessentially black number that Ray Charles has owned for years...

...She didn't imitate Ray, but she was sure swinging, deep and hard, and the blues was no stranger to her...

...He is in the company of drummer Al Foster and bassist George Mraz...

...Indeed, as Terri rocked the room, the climaxes rising one after the other, she let her own soul all the way out...

...Some of the best times I've had in recent years have been in that pounding place— standing, jammed next to visiting Texans and local citizens pretending to be Texans, as Merle Haggard or Delbert McClinton line out gritty country blues...

...Her shoulders moving, she laid down a supple beat—in her singing as well as on piano—that wound up carrying her not-so-hot backup band...

...And when you compare the compositions here—among them, "Blue Light," "The Sergeant Was Shy," "Ko-Ko," "Sepia Panorama," "The Flaming Sword"—with the works of Ives, Sessions, Carter, and other "classical" American composers, Ellington's preeminence is stunningly clear...