Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Parts They Don't Teach Iwas speaking to an auditorium full of apprentice jazz musicians who attend North Texas State University in Denton, forty miles out of...
...To fend off the December panic of Christmas lists, squirrel away especially apt presents in advance...
...The One O'Clock Band at North Texas State is a bracingly crisp, hard-swinging ensemble and the soloists, by and large, are more authoritative than most of those I've heard in other college ensembles ("stage bands" they're called on many campuses...
...These Irish Melodies, first published in 1808, became enormously popular in Britain and the United States because, if the words were new, the soaring tunes were old and rooted in folk history and imagination...
...A delightful case in point is Moore's Irish Melodies (Nonesuch 79059...
...Now don't get me wrong...
...It takes some of the fun out of writing...
...You may think that a long time ago you had become permanently wearied of "The Minstrel Boy," "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms," "The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls," and "Tis The Last Rose of Summer...
...The set is on Deutsche Grammophon (2740 284...
...One of the many reasons the Nonesuch label is so lively is that its releases are so often unexpected...
...The School of Music there includes impressive symphonic and opera divisions, but it is most renowned, overseas as well as in this country, for its jazz program...
...What Duke didn't say, because he had taken a lifetime vow never to say anything unpleasant if he could possibly avoid it, was that most of these technically skilled new guys sounded like a lot of other technically skilled new guys in other bands...
...That's what Monk was telling Gigi...
...He was in a hotel room, writing something for his orchestra, and he told me, "There was a time when I could write for the particularities of each player, sliding past his weaknesses and focusing on his strengths...
...But until a jazz player does have that knowledge, he can be on the fourth level of improvisation and still have nothing to say...
...0 Choice Cuts It is a recommendation I always forget for myself, but I pass it along...
...If I were teaching a jazz history course at North Texas State, I would spend hours playing most of the sides in Count Basie, one of Time-Life Music's Big Band series...
...And the music transcends chronological time, being as continually compelling as, say, the 1940-1942 recordings of the Duke Ellington band...
...Obviously, the way the jazz young are preparing themselves now is the only way for them to go...
...Listening, I remembered a wistful Duke Ellington on the telephone some thirty years ago...
...It is as if Stephen Foster songs were suddenly regenerated, reflow-ered, by, let us say, pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet or Sarah Vaughan...
...And they are sung here with such depth of feeling and grace of phrasing that they make it possible to believe, as Eric Salzman says in the notes, that "when Tom Moore sang and played, women fainted and grown men wept...
...For instance, for someone who can never become weary of Beethoven—I am one of those—there has just been released a boxed, four-LP set of the Five Piano Concertos as performed by Maurizio Pol-lini with the Vienna Philharmonic (Karl Bohm or Eugen Jochum conductors...
...But these young guys coming into the band now—they don't have any weaknesses...
...Some have that kind of knowledge early, some learn it late, some never do...
...There are any number of combos, big bands, lab sessions, and the kind of class work that demands of each student a mastery of at least four levels of improvisation before he or she can graduate...
...Pol-lini has the rare ability to be both precise and passionate, forceful and tender...
...If the faculty is at all competent, young musicians can usually be shaped into a reasonably exciting big band, but no teacher can instruct a young musician in how to say something in his solos that might actually speak to someone else's memories and desires...
...Some of us had come in with patched-up horns, instruments tied together with rubber and such things...
...But you have not heard them sung by Lucy Shelton, Jan De Gaetani, Martin Kelly, and William Sharp...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Parts They Don't Teach Iwas speaking to an auditorium full of apprentice jazz musicians who attend North Texas State University in Denton, forty miles out of Dallas...
...Monk, as usual, made no immediate response, but a half hour later he said to Gigi, "I hope you don't lose it all there...
...This is how Basie trumpeter Buck Clayton described the arrival of the Basie band in New York from Kansas City in 1936: "When we first came, we didn't even sound in tune all the time...
...Indeed, I advised the students at North Texas to get their master's degrees in teaching in case they don't become, stars by the time they're twenty-six...
...And one story I told about Monk had to do with Gigi Gryce, an earnest, vivid reed player who rushed into Monk's apartment one day and shouted the news that he had just gotten GLENN WOLFF a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music...
...They can play anything you write down...
...But the players, the one-of-a-kind players—Lester Young, Buck Clayton, drummer Jo Jones ("the man who played like the wind"), trombonist Dicky Wells-needed no instruction on who they were and what they had to say when they took their solos...
...We had to learn ensemble technique...
...And while the North Texas players were self-assured when they took their solo flights, their confidence seemed to be more technical than autobiographical...
...Between my lectures, I heard a rehearsal of the A-team on campus, the One O'Clock Band...
...But I also told them what Monk said, as a warning not to confuse all the hard-earned techniques with what jazz is all about...
...I was there to tell these youngsters of the titans—what Bird and Mingus and Monk were "really" like...
...We had to learn how to choose good instruments...
...To survive economically, they need all the training they can get, the competition for gigs is that ferocious out there...
...For price information on the two-LP set— or a cassette—write Time-Life Music, 541 N. Fairbank Court, Chicago, IL 60611, or call 800-621-7026...
...All but four of the sides were cut between 1937 and 1940, the Basie band's most floating exultant period...
...They weren't one-of-a-kind players like Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Ben Webster, or Tricky Sam Nanton...
...The Basie set is Time-Life Music STBB 08...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
