Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Satchmo Played It All He's been dead for almost twelve years, and except for the jazz sect, he's been largely forgotten. Since jazz is not taught in the schools,...
...A phenomenon on the order of Melville and Twain and Charles Ives...
...Book-of-the-Month Records is at Camp Hill, PA 17012...
...Buoying in quite another way is Rossini's Sins of My Old Age (Nonesuch D-79027...
...What Louis used to say of King Oliver also distilled his own musical nature: "My, what a punch that man had...
...The singing, by J.D...
...Though largely forgotten, Armstrong's music has lost none of its exultation, lyricism, and fierce pride...
...At the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival, during a celebration of Armstrong's seventieth birthday, Dizzy Gillespie said, "If it hadn't been for him, there wouldn't have been none of us...
...a large white handkerchief (he worked so hard, he sweated a lot...
...And could he shout a tune...
...You don't have to be a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club to buy the album...
...Louis Armstrong for my livelihood...
...and "(If I'd Known Last Night Was the Last Night) I Would Have Loved You All Night Long...
...The set's tunes range from "Big Butter and Egg Man" to "Love Walked In...
...A musical event, therefore^ is the four-volume Louis Armstrong/Rare and Unreleased Performances (Book-of-the-Month Records 21-6547...
...Eight singers and two pianists, they can sound like a cast of hundreds and like a twilit tryst of two...
...An enormous grin...
...His repertory became predictable, but always there were dazzling explosive passages, and sometimes he still got inside simple melodies with a grace and tenderness that made musicians, and a few of us in the laity, cry...
...But, to both the arbiters of high culture and the populace at large, the young Louis was a black horn player who just made it all up...
...Fortunately, someone took it all down on acetate discs which, at last, have been transferred to LP in Cavalcade of American Music (Ariel Cam 11...
...The quotes were picked up by newspapers all over the country, and Joe Glaser, Armstrong's powerful and profane manager, denied for Louis that he had said any such thing...
...The album is sold in record stores only, but if you have difficulty finding it, you might write Fonodisc International, Inc., for information on what stores in your area carry it (535 East 86th Street, New York, NY 10028...
...On the other hand, there were the musicians who knew and revered him as their source...
...Armstrong rejected the denial and reaffirmed his bitter anger...
...It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time...
...A dividend: With Harold Arlen at the piano, Judy Garland sings "Over the Rainbow...
...The performers—brilliant collectively and in solo—are the Los Angeles Vocal Arts Ensemble...
...You know, you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played...
...To the folks in the box seats, he just wasn't a serious musician...
...The package costs $26.95 plus $1.75 for shipping and handling...
...As the notes say, in most Nashville recordings it's hard to tell the difference any more between pop and country...
...Another tradition of musical narrative in this singing land is, of course, the country lineage...
...As a listener addicted to rampant lyricism—in country music, jazz, wherever—I have long been an admirer of Felix Mendelssohn...
...Armstrong had to make a living, of course, and did eventually grin big enough and record a sufficient number of pop hits to attract audiences in Las Vegas and for the Ed Sullivan show...
...It sounded like he was making love to me...
...In 1855, after decades of illness and writer's block, Rossini came musically alive again after a move to Paris...
...Also recommended from the lively, protean Rounder catalogue is Here Today (Rounder 0169...
...Crowe and Keith Whitley, conjures up the very faces and figures of these true-life mortals who, like you or me, have been unlucky or wilfully wasteful in matters of love...
...But there's no way of mistaking the 100-proof country blend in the singing and playing of these boys from Kentucky...
...Hell, they said, he didn't sign manifestoes or speak out against racism...
...a voice that seemed made up equally of gravel and maple syrup, and a trumpet that knew how to play only big, round, clear notes...
...Handy, Walter Donaldson, Sigmund Romberg, Arthur Freed, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, and Irving Berlin...
...U Choice Cuts One night in 1940, at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, thirty-two of the nation's most renowned composers and lyricists ran a musical marathon of standards, singing and performing their own songs...
...That's how I wanted to sing...
...Armstrong could also reach right into your soul...
...Or, as Miles Davis puts it, "Louis has been through all kinds of styles...
...Both are blurred together these nights in a characterless musical margarine...
...Five players from various points of the American compass with richly diverse experience in bluegrass have assembled as Here Today...
...Since jazz is not taught in the schools, kids are not likely to have heard of him at all...
...D. Crowe and the New South (Rounder 0153...
...Among the American legends become aurally vivid are: George M. Cohan, W.C...
...Well, actually he shared his thoughts with interviewers who asked him about Jim Crow...
...A most amiable vaudevillian, that Louis Armstrong...
...Older folks remember him as an entertainer—in movies with Bing Crosby and on the Ed Sullivan Show...
...The songs range from the celebratory Earl Scruggs piece "Foggy Mountain Chimes" to the chilling "Lonesome River" and an anthem of the aftermath of divorce, "The Children Are Crying...
...the grim travails of the poor, from flower girls to homeless wanderers, and a sparkling New Year's toast...
...So, to jazz musicians and jazz buffs, Armstrong was one of those exceedingly rare American originals who have been the inventors of our own culture...
...Recorded between 1924 and 1961, the forty-eight performances include some that have long been unavailable in the United States and several that have never been commercially available anywhere in the world...
...And when Governor Or-ville Faubus of the sovereign state of Arkansas vowed to prevent the integration of schools there, Armstrong said to a wire-service reporter: "The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell...
...As for President Homespun Ike, "He has no guts," Armstrong said...
...But this is yet another minority enthusiasm of mine, since Mendelssohn is so lightly regarded that most of his work is no longer performed...
...It wasn't only his startling technique (he was the first virtuoso jazz soloist) or the bold, singing tone...
...Among the songs of his reawakening are "Sins of My Old Age," which address various forms and illusions of love...
...There were some, looking at the grin and the handkerchief, who mumbled that Armstrong had become an Uncle Tom or something pretty close to it...
...And in 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr...
...and others on the march to Selma were savagely beaten by troopers and police, Satchmo said, "They'd beat Jesus if he was black and marched...
...However, if you do not allow your source of pleasure to be directed by established tastemakers, I strongly recommend a ceaselessly pleasurable performance by the Melos Quartet of Mendelssohn's The String Quartets (Deutsche Grammophon 2740 267...
...And the songs have the shape and feel of true-life stories—"Where Are the Girls I Use to Cheat With...
...Nor was it just the deep, enveloping swing and the continually surprising turns of his imagination...
...Billie Holiday found her youthful vocation listening to his trumpet on recordings: "He didn't say words, but somehow it just moved me so...
...Satchmo was the man who opened up the limitless potential of the jazz solo, the man who anticipated so many astonishing ways of jazz musical speech...
...The most satisfying proof in months of the continual regeneration of country story-telling is Somewhere Between/J...
...Their singing and playing are as clear as country water...
...I want to thank Mr...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Satchmo Played It All He's been dead for almost twelve years, and except for the jazz sect, he's been largely forgotten...
...For unabashed melodic imaginativeness—it's part of Mendelssohn's passion for clarity of line as well as feeling— this set is just right for clearing the mind after another day of untuneful contemporary disorder...
...To the other, more numerous followers, he was just black, and they preferred Al Jolson, thank you...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
