Film
Seitz, Michael H.
The Most Joyful Trumpet It was a nasty argument. It had started, in the rehearsal hall, with the black drummer and the white baritone saxophonist clashing over which of the two would have one of...
...The first jazz personage to be sent on an overseas tour by the State Department in the 1950s, Dizzy used to come back and tell domestic night club audiences that he had just finished another trip "where I was busy making apologies for the State Department...
...Accordingly, although there are vibrant sections on the second (urban) side, the village sounds are particularly compelling—from the quite musical blasts of an alphorn calling the herd in from pasture to pungent and poignant unaccompanied songs by farm people who are, in every meaningful sense of the word, genuine artists...
...One Night in Washington/Dizzy Gillespie (Elektra Musician Jazz Masters Edition 9 603000-1) is a Gillespie festival, full of spectacular fireworks, lyrical flights, darting humor, and the very soul of jazz...
...While Miles Davis, for instance, is often brooding and elliptical, Gillespie—like Armstrong—is openly joyous and exultant...
...Now, Sabine Meyer appears in Mozart's Clarinet Quintet (Deutsche Gram-mophon 410 670-1) with the Berlin Philharmonic Quintet...
...Off the stand, though Dizzy can be sardonic, his targets are institutions, seldom individuals...
...The guys in the backup combo aren't too bad either...
...Outside, jammed against the fence, were scores of street kids who had been refused entrance...
...Overseas, he was silent on neither American foreign policy nor racism at home...
...He is also in Louis's direct tradition in another sense...
...Everyone began to relax, and an alto saxophonist kicked the rest of the bad feelings out the door by softly playing "I'll Always Be in Love with You" as the drummer and the baritone saxophonist laughed...
...But the fundamental division is between the village and the city...
...As a devoted admirer of Edward R. Murrow's / Can Hear It Now series (the years 1919 to 1949 are now boxed in a three-record set from CBS Records, D3L 366), I thoroughly recommend The Way It Was: The Sixties, a three-LP set produced by Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly, with Cronkite as narrator...
...Always, he is the spontaneous egalitarian—as when he came to play at a lawn party in Ankara during one of his State Department tours...
...It wouldn't do the President any harm to listen to it either...
...There is no one in jazz who is as respected musically and as liked personally as Gillespie...
...But most of us thought it had not been recorded...
...Her musical intelligence, her singing tone, her rhythmic assurance—all create a subtle sense of magic which is, after all, what Mozart is about...
...Though the country is no bigger than Oregon, there are vividly distinctive regional styles, as this set shows...
...He had, just by his look, reminded all of the players that, monumental as their egos were, including his, the music came first...
...And so it came to pass...
...There was room for only one more piece...
...U Choice Cuts Not long ago, Herbert von Karajan appointed Sabine Meyer to a clarinet chair in the Berlin Philharmonic...
...As Ann Briegleb, director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives, says in the notes, "Music is used to lull a baby to sleep, to lighten the burden of everyday work, to provide the social environment for young men and women to meet and match...
...I say this as a former classical clarinetist who has continued to pay particular attention to the instrument...
...That's all he did...
...Consider Reflections of Romania/Village and Urban Folk Traditions (Nonesuch 9 72092), the result of three 1965 journeys into the north of Romania...
...But as the Nonesuch label keeps demonstrating in its admirable Explorer Series, the folk are still at it...
...John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Woodstock Festival, and Rachel Carson are some of the still reverberating presences on hand...
...Ever since Bela Bartok (among other early carriers of recording machines to the countryside) revealed that plain folk were still producing folk music, there have been many such expeditions...
...In the former, the music remains an integral, unselfconscious part of everyday life...
...As the band watched with some embarrassment, the altercation began to focus on race and on whether whites had ever contributed anything original to jazz...
...Suddenly, a classic Dizzy Gillespie big band set has emerged—a 1955 concert in GLENN WOLFF Washington that was much talked about on the jazz scene then...
...His music is celebratory, and on ballads he is unashamed of bare tenderness...
...Von Karajan coolly told the macho musicians that if they did not accept his musical judgment, he would cancel the rest of the season's engagements and recordings except for the basic minimum owed to the orchestra's subscribers...
...Dizzy told the Turkish officials that unless the kids were let in, there would be no music that day: "I came to play for all the people...
...The number of this boxed set is F3M 38858...
...On his horn, he has succeeded Louis Armstrong as the virtuoso trumpeter...
...Then the leader, who had been marking up a score, got up...
...The prospective loss of income, which was sizable, convinced the orchestra members that they could adjust to Sabine Meyer's presence...
...He stood up, looked at the battlers and at the band, and the tension began to leave the room...
...It had started, in the rehearsal hall, with the black drummer and the white baritone saxophonist clashing over which of the two would have one of his compositions played in the forthcoming concert...
...The leader, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, had simply radiated his customary authority and warmth...
...Indeed, there has been doubt in recent years that anything new was left to be put on tape...
...It is the preeminent illumination of this music in this generation...
...She was not musically ready, they said, although there was considerable suspicion that simple sexism was at the dissonant core of their refusal to work with her...
...In view of how little many elementary and secondary students know of even the immediate past, this would be a most useful set to donate to school libraries...
...His choice made worldwide news because she was the first woman to become a permanent member of the orchestra, and many of her male colleagues objected...
...And so he had...
Vol. 48 • February 1984 • No. 2
