Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC, Nat Hentoff A Hidden Jazz Giant It was a summer afternoon, and I was playing the clarinet next to an open window in our first-floor apartment in Boston. I was about thirteen....
...Pausa Records (P.O...
...He was what folks in the South, in the early part of the century, used to call a "songster...
...I could never make a horn speak, sing, whisper, and roar the way he could...
...Box 10069, Glendale, CA 91209) has issued Tribute to Teagarden: Classic Jazz Masters (PR 9026...
...The phrasing, the colors, the memories between the notes—all flow with an irresistible, inexorable momentum...
...I was right on both counts...
...A rock band on the charts makes more in a couple of weeks than Jack did during most of his years...
...The short kid's name was Ruby Braff...
...And it's all jazz—no more singing about ribbon bows and Loch Lomond...
...It's all part of the joy of being able to make his whole life sing whenever he picks up his horn—no matter what's happened since the last time he picked it up...
...Suddenly a hoarse shout from below broke into my Czerny studies...
...Yet, through the years, Ruby has made a number of distinctive albums, and he has attracted an enthusiastic, if rather select, following here and abroad...
...The trombonist and singer did, of course, become much more acclaimed throughout the world than Ruby Braff, but he didn't particularly prosper either...
...Most of the audience, Solti says, utterly rejected the piece and "gave it a cold, slow hand clap...
...A valuable label...
...Concord is at P.O...
...The rest of the repertory ranges from "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street" to "As Long As I Live...
...One measure of the quite magical Braff imagination is the title tune, which he turns into a sensuous reverie that will make you think of "America the Beautiful" in quite a different way from now on...
...tf Choice Cuts Another jazz natural—warm, lyrical, unwilling and unable to change according to fashion—was Jack Teagarden...
...But in her autumnal years, Maxine, who has the jazz time of a young woman, became a singer who does not waste a note, and whose every note is exactly, swingingly right...
...Solti remembers being, as a young man, the page turner for an early performance of the "Sonata," with Bartok and his wife as the pianists...
...It did take Ruby longer than I thought, however, to acquire some renown outside Boston...
...I also knew, as a fervent collector of jazz recordings, that this brash kid was going to be on a lot of them in the years ahead...
...And his sound—full, warm, resonant with romanticism—was "old-timey," even though he was still young...
...In the notes, Dave Dexter says of Teagarden (it can also be said of Ruby Braff) that "he lived only for his music...
...She first gained attention as a cute and mannered quasi-folk singer with John Kirby's air-conditioned combo...
...Box 845, Concord, CA 94522...
...I (London 410 108-1...
...Among Maxine's accompanists are pianist Red Richards, clarinetist Herb Hall, and one of the most enduringly satisfying of all the singing horns in jazz, trumpeter Doc Cheatham...
...On the street, a short, sturdy boy, around twelve, was waiting for an answer...
...The dominant jazz idiom in the 1950s was modern jazz—bop, melodies like roller coasters, harmonies that consumed the melodies, and spiky rhythms...
...Only the students up in the gods stood up and cheered...
...He so loved the melody that, no matter how inventively he varied the theme, he would never bruise the memory of the original...
...I was a player of classical music...
...The first time I heard the Concerto for Orchestra and the string quartets, I thought I detected some intimations of the nether world...
...At the session, he had no paper in front of him...
...Hey, kid, you want to come to a band rehearsal...
...And the Concerto, conducted by Sir Georg Solti (with the London Philharmonic), features Vladimir Ashkenazy...
...Such intimations are also present in a compelling new recording of Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Piano Concerto No...
...For a model of jazz economy, warmth, and subtle suppleness, there is now It Was Great Fun (Audiophile AP-185, 3008 Wadsworth Mill Place, Atlanta, GA 30032-5899...
...He is just as stubborn as he was when he was a kid, refusing to be part of any musical setting he does not respect...
...At the time, he couldn't read music...
...Included are songs long identified with the big, easy-going Texan, such as: "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight," "Stars Fell on Alabama," and "Casanova's Lament...
...As soon as I heard him play one chorus, I knew two things: One, I would never be a jazz musician...
...Ruby sang on and through his instrument...
...On the former, the pianists are Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy with David Corkhill and Andrew Smith, percussionists...
...But Ruby was devoted to the jazz classicists: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young...
...I nodded, very tentatively because although I could read anything written for my instrument, I couldn't improvise...
...In classical music, Bela Bartok, in certain works, created a dimension of raw feeling (however finely crafted) that could be quite menacing as well as bracing...
...Maxine Sullivan, unlike Braff and Tea-garden, didn't start out as a natural...
...But, I figured, they'd have to have some kind of scores at this rehearsal...
...As long as I've known him, and that's more than forty years now, Ruby has never known how not to swing...
...And he is just as deeply exhilarating a storyteller, as on America the Beautiful (The George Wein Collection, Concord GW-3003), where he is joined by Dick Hyman on one of those fabled theater pipe organs that create fantasias without Walt Disney...
...Of course, other, more jagged, even demonic qualities exist in jazz, as in the work of such early blues singers as Robert Johnson or in some of Charles Mingus's performances...
...His problem was that, with his customary mul-ishness, he refused to be in any way trendy...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 12
