Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Hottest Horn in Any Town t was two years ago and Wild Bill was seventy-four, standing in the prow of a boat, his trumpet gustier than the winds. This wasn't one...
...He'd keep pouring it in, but there was no change on the outside...
...Talk about roots...
...I had not seen Wild Bill Davison for more than a decade, but I'd kept up with his recordings—most of them made in Europe these years because most American labels no longer have room for classical native jazzmen...
...And kid, eat, make sure you eat between drinks...
...No matter what age you are, see what it takes to get a sound anybody would want to listen to...
...As an educator, Abrams has continually stressed the need of every jazz player to know where he came from, all the way back...
...And booze...
...In "Memories of Theloni-ous Sphere Monk"/Milt Jackson in London (Pablo Live 2308-235), "Bags," as his colleagues call him, has made a perfect set...
...He was working with Sidney Bechet, the typhoon of the soprano saxophone, and they stood there, two forces of jazz nature, driving each other onward and onward...
...M Choice Cuts A singularly valuable American record label is Composers Recordings, Inc...
...170 West 74th Street, New York, NY 10023...
...Abrams, a key force in the development of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music—the schooling place for many currently influential jazz players—is a pianist and composer...
...I suspect the reason it all clicked this time was that Jackson and the quartet had been working in a London club so that they were "together" before they came into the studio...
...Martin-in-the-Fields...
...That is, which of them already knew the wildness inside this cool-eyed, white-haired man with the small horn...
...And on ballads, Wild Bill—who looked as if he'd known every major gangster of the 1920s by his first name—sounded so tender and yet so virile that we figured he must have his pick of the chicks...
...But what about his chops...
...The Concerto for Orchestra is a work of—and about—constant change...
...Whatever the reason, these performances by Jackson, Ray Brown (bass), Monty Alexander (piano), and Mickey Roker (drums) are a model of deep, easeful rhythmic flow, ceaseless melodic imagination, and glowing textural clarity...
...Also quite radiantly cognizant of the living history of her music is German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter...
...Age is hardest on brass players...
...I expect those are gone now too...
...He is also a carrier, as it were, of the whole history of jazz...
...I recommend two recently released Wild Bill sets: But Beautiful (Storyville SLP-4048) and Wild Bill Davison & Ralph Sutton Together Again...
...And the more immersed in it you become, the more you learn new ways to listen...
...Bill had come out of Defiance, Ohio, and worked in the Middle West for a long time before he moved to New York in 1941...
...Obviously, in jazz as in any other music, a flawless album is quite rare...
...He appeared much the same, except for the silver in his hair...
...I was seventeen again, back in the Sunday afternoon darkness of a jazz club and him up there, throwing thunderbolts while swinging as if his beat were a whip, lashing the others to keep up with him...
...But there's an eightieth birthday coming in 1986...
...As the boat sputtered and chugged out into the Hudson, Wild Bill raised the trumpet, casing the crowd out of long habit to see which ones were there on purpose...
...Music of Elliott Carter (CRI SD 469) illustrated both dimensions of this label...
...at Boston jam sessions...
...Then, there was the further challenge of the tribute to the onliest Monk...
...She is indeed an astonishment, and that Berlin Philharmonic is one hell of a band...
...Only once did I see Bill held to a draw in terms of dominating a combo...
...The title is Blues Forever (BSR 0061...
...The singers are Thomas Paul and the ceaselessly astonishing Jan DeGaetani, the most consistently illuminating performer of "advanced" classical music of our time...
...For some time, one of the most venturesome jazz labels in the world has been Black Saint in Italy...
...It not only makes available works that most of us would otherwise never be able to hear, but it also preserves vital music that has been dropped from the catalogues...
...And I still have fifty left...
...There he headed his own combos and hooked up for some years with Eddie Condon, the jazz wit, organizer, and pretty good rhythm guitarist...
...Well, as I've said, I boarded that boat two years ago and wondered what Wild Bill had left to say—what he still had the stamina to say...
...Also on this album is one of the CRTs many premiere recordings, this one of Elliott Carter's Syringa...
...The others might have come along just for the ride, but he'd give them, too, something to remember him by...
...On those recordings, he sounded just as explosively exuberant as he used to on the Sunday afternoons of my growing years when Bill was a frequent guest (Direct from New York...
...The text is John Ashberry's poem, based on the story of Orpheus...
...This wasn't one of those steamboats of early jazz lore, but rather a Circle Line tourist tub that goes around the island of Manhattan...
...Both are dates cut in Denmark, and both are distributed in the United States by the Moss Music Group, 43 West 38th Street, New York, NY 10018, whose jazz catalogue you might want to write for...
...Just as illuminating, in jazz terms, is vi-bist Milt Jackson...
...In this album, Abrams's powerful sense of the music's continuum is a vital element in the elan of the playing...
...Its American distribution has recently been taken over by Polygram Special Imports, and a particularly striking new release on Black Saint—via Polygram—is an orchestra set under the leadership of Muhal Richard Abrams...
...And the titles give some sense of the flavor of the ingredients: "Ancient and Future Reflections," "Du King (Dedicated to Duke Ellington)," and "Blues Forever...
...And he kept the fires up all during the circling of Manhattan, defying the notion that jazz is just for the young...
...As an index of the piece's continually shifting textures, almost every player in the orchestra becomes a soloist at one time or another...
...There is an abundance of subtly evolving textures and dynamics, lyrically intertwining melodic lines, and great affection for this protean language...
...One late night, Wild Bill gave me some advice on that score: "Kid, before you go out on the street, drink a quart of milk...
...It was made," Bill smiled, "of seventy-five bottles of Scotch, all different brands...
...Lines the stomach...
...His sound was so vibrant, so proudly personal, that he could make even the weariest Dixieland flag-wavers come sassily alive...
...It had been taken over that day by the operators of a jazz festival, and this florid-faced septuagenarian, dressed dashingly in a discreet way, was leading one of the combos...
...He calls her "the greatest early musical talent since the young Menuhin," and his newest recording with Anne-Sophie Mutter is the Brahms Violin Concerto (Deutsche Grammophon 2532 032...
...Burning the candle at both ends, after he'd already burned out the middle...
...If you ever want to know why, pick up a trumpet or trombone and blow in it...
...In the notes to the second LP, Digby Fairweather quotes Wild Bill recalling in 1981 a huge cake some of his fans in Switzerland had made for his seventy-fifth birthday that year...
...And on that date, Bill will be in a recording studio, or a club, or even on a boat—playing with, as Louis Armstrong used to say, "plenty punch," and looking for that next piece of fortified cake...
...I would not have been surprised if they had, at last, levitated themselves on the sheer power of their blazing contentiousness...
...It includes Concerto for Orchestra, a reissue of a Columbia LP—with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic—that Columbia has jettisoned...
...So he did...
...Why, Wild Bill, back then, was the very embodiment of the romance of jazz...
...He now looks like a sprightly retired politician of the Prohibition era rather than the Great McGinty himself...
...Storyville SLP 4027...
...The same can be said, by the way, of Alfred Brendel's performances of Mozajt's Piano Concertos K. 450 and K. 467 (Philips 6514148) with Neville Marriner conducting the Academy of St...
...That was one thing my mama had never told me...
...In whatever context he played, Bill was his invincible flaring self—the most vivid voice in the band...
...Only nineteen, she was discovered by Herbert von Karajan six years ago...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
