Indigenious Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff An Exaggerated Death man I don't know telephoned me recently and, without preliminaries, said, "Jazz is dying, if it's not already dead. Right?" I declined to agree,...
...One of the more unfamiliar names, but not for long, is the startling hot and lyrical violinist John Bank...
...Chico Freeman, a reader of Langs-ton Hughes, has titled his piece in this set "What Ever Happened to the Dream Deferred...
...One thing has not changed...
...The "Sonata 1. X" is Janacek's response to that event...
...The man who called me with the false obituary was right about one thing...
...When John Coltrane hurled his "sheets of sound," and when Ornette Coleman first came on like a Druid singer except he was playing the alto saxophone...
...Jay Hoggard, for instance, a deeply imaginative vibist, spent time in Tanzania studying East African xylophone music...
...Furthermore, as has been evident in such academies of the new jazz as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, this generation is remarkably knowledgeable about most forms and essences of jazz that have come before...
...The set does reveal some generational differences, however...
...This has given them more technical resources, particularly as composers, but, in most cases, has not diminished their fire and spontaneity as soloists...
...When the big bands seemed to be pushing the "pure" small combos aside...
...It has long seemed to me that the most apt interpreter of Janacek's piano music is the Czech-born Ivan Moravec...
...as Quincy Jones once said, "He may just be getting born in Chitlin Switch, Georgia...
...For "pure" music—or at least decidedly nonpolitical tunes and harmonies—there are the wondrously crisp, airy, infectiously springlike performances of Mozart's Symphonies No...
...It was playing before he was born: Tricky Sam Nanton, Juan Tizol, Lawrence Brown...
...33 (Te-lefunken 6.42817) with Nikolaus Harnon-court conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra...
...There are, however, among the new generation of players a generous number of distinctly individual, emotionally penetrating and self-surprising players...
...It's not only that they have a country in common, but Moravec has the size of spirit to thoroughly share, for instance, Janacek's indignation in a piece like "Sonata 1. X. (1905)," which leads off the brilliant Moravec recital of Janacek piano works on Nonesuch 79041...
...The seventeen musicians are heard in various combinations, and contrary to the morticians, there is plenty of melody (even a fair amount of romanticism), much crisp swinging, and no little wit...
...While there are a good many giants still bestriding jazz country (Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Cecil Taylor, among many others), there are no new hugely personal revolutionaries shaping the way almost everybody after them plays on any instrument—as Louis Armstrong did, and Bird (Charlie Parker...
...New or old, all jazz makers exemplify something Paul Desmond once said: "John Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: 'with wanton heed and giddy cunning'— that's how you play jazz...
...In 1905, the Austro-Hungarian empire had refused to allow the establishment of a Czech university in Brno, and after one of the subsequent tumultuous street demonstrations, an unarmed carpenter was killed by the imperial troops...
...I declined to agree, and so he persisted, pointing out there are no longer any giants among the improvisers—no Coleman Hawkins, no Lester Young, no Charlie Parker, no Louis Armstrong...
...And they know other elements of the black tradition...
...Moreover, the intermingling of new flavors and lineages, always part of jazz, goes on...
...31 ("Paris") and No...
...Also present is his countryman, Daniel Ponce, a brisk master of infectious polyrhythms...
...But jazz kept on keeping on because always, in each generation, there are youngsters consumed by the need to become part of that language of so many different dialects, so many intersecting colors and cadences, so many individual and collective histories...
...U Choice Cuts A composer who has been becoming less unknown in this country and whose charm, while considerable, is only a part of his protean temperament is Leos Janacek...
...But another tornado will come...
...When "bop" whizzed in, and the critics banged into each other looking for the misplaced melodies...
...And much of what is being played these nights, he went on, has no story to it...
...It is a "live" recording of a program by the same title from the June 30, 1982, session of the Kool Jazz Festival (formerly the Newport Jazz Festival) in New York...
...The handiest introduction to the generation now breaking through (and a couple of older players who should have been recognized long ago) is The Young Lions (Elektra-Musician, two LPs, 60196-1 R...
...Tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, for example...
...On this date is a young emigre from Cuba, the brilliant alto saxophonist Paquito D'Riv-era, the first Cuban to have become an established jazzman in the States...
...The morticians have always been ready to embalm jazz...
...Some of the new players display a considerable interest in African musical traditions...
...Many of these players are classically as well as jazz trained— unlike most of their elders through the decades...
...And in one performance here, he plays on the evocative African balofon...
...Duke always told a story, and so did Buck Clayton...
...Trombonist Craig Harris, for instance, is only twenty-nine, but when asked to name his primary influences, he cites every member of Duke Ellington's best trombone section...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
