Indigenous Music

...Monroe is seventy-two, and that bus is still on the road much of the year...

...Dapogny's intent, on forming the band in 1976, was to be able to play "ragtime, New Orleans jazz, and small-band swing of the 1930s and 1940s...

...He is also a lawyer in Manhattan...

...He was deeply compelling...

...INDIGENOUS MUSIC, Nat Hentoff Jazz That Never Dies When I was growing up, in the 1940s, just about every city and some towns, too, had a local jazz band that passionately adhered to the letter—and hoped to attain the spirit—of classical jazz...

...In and through his body, "Ya've got to have the timing right," says the father of bluegrass, "or the music ain't gonna be no good...

...A word, too, for her attentive accompanist, Lambert Orkis...

...But all of a sudden, George H. Buck's often surprising Jazzology label has come up with Jim Dapogny's Chicago Jazz (J-120), which crackles with enthusiasm, incisive musicianship, biting front-line solos, and the ability to pile climax upon climax—and then add another...

...And "fresh" is the word for these performances...

...The rest of the band, though, consists of full-time musicians who juggle assignments in various groups...

...Not only is the music itself of robust intensity, but the singing has so much presence, so much visceral power and penetrating musical intelligence, that I plan to get everything else I can find by Lucy Shelton...

...M Choice Cuts Having, in my not-wayward-enough youth, heard real gypsies sing and play real gypsy music, I do not gladly approach "versions" of such music by classical composers who probably had gate keepers...

...As in other places, most of the local players had day jobs, but jazz was their true vocation...

...The other pungent players include a computer systems designer, the owner of a hubcap store, a microbiologist, and an English professor who's an expert on Brecht...

...Among the bands' icons were the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven, the Austin High Gang from Chicago, and Bix Beiderbecke...

...Or, for that matter, "gypsy" performances by highly trained singers...

...Pianist Dapogny is an associate professor of music theory at the University of Michigan, but he plays as if that hasn't made him forget too much of what he wants to say about himself...

...As a result, I was not prepared for Gypsy Songs by Dvorak, Wolf, Rossini, Liszt, Verdi, Brahms with soprano Lucy Shelton (Nonesuch 790601 G...

...In Boston, our particular jazz pride was the Vinal Rhythm Kings...

...Also threaded through the work is a darkness, a sinister darkness of mood and premonition...

...It was said of Schubert by one of his contemporaries that he was a mixture of "tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candor, sociability and melancholy...

...has another group that makes the jazz past vividly present...

...He's at 3008 Wadsworth Mill Place, Atlanta, GA 30032-5899...

...Among the guests are Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and a very soulful Way-Ion Jennings...

...In recent years, I'd thought the local classical jazz combos had largely given up because those styles had become so non-trendy...

...I knew of a few in New England and in Texas but did not expect to hear of any new, let alone startlingly joyful, cele-brators of the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s...

...The other word is "hot," as in "hot jazz," a term that's not been used for too long...

...Along with the pleasures, there's plenty punch here, as Louis Armstrong might say, and no little wit...

...Accordingly, among the tunes on this date are "At the Jazz Band Ball," "Copenhagen," and "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate...

...They never made a commercial record, so far as I can remember, but if they had, trombonist Ralph Ferrigno would be in all the jazz encyclopedias...

...Even if you think you don't care a whit for gypsy-style music, you'll find this album astonishing because of Shelton...

...In Schubert's String Quintet (London LDR 71071), written in the last year of his life, all those elements are present, except for the coarseness...

...36 /JUNE 1984...

...The Gully Low boys got together in 1980 under the leadership of David Ost-wald, a man who must lust after challenges, for he plays both the tuba and the bass saxophone...

...The point, says Dapogny, is that, just as in classical music, jazz musicians can play "their own great classics with fresh interpretations...

...But what's the point when recordings of these tunes by the original jazz players are available...

...And a trombone player, Joel Helleny, who might make even Ed Meese want to dance...

...This one is the Gully Low Jazz Band in Dreamland...

...In Bill Monroe's Friends (MCA-5435), Monroe is heard in a series of duets (with accompaniment...

...The playing by everyone in the band reminds me of a woman who wrote to CBS years ago after watching The Sound of Jazz, an hour of straight jazz, no chasers...

...Like the elders of jazz, he puts great stress on playing tunes that are in dance time because through dance time, the musician finds out immediately what the listener is actually feeling...

...The Quintet, a work both exhilarating and disturbing, is performed with sustained inner brilliance and passionate discipline by the Fitzwil-liam String Quartet and cellist Christopher van Kampen...

...How marvelous and rare," she said, "to see people doing the only thing they want to do in this life...

...In quite another idiom, the dark and the light intertwine provocatively in the music of Bill Monroe, who, as it says on the side of his tour bus, is "The Father of Bluegrass Music...

...It's on a different label, GHB (163...

...When such visiting legends as Wild Bill Davison and Sidney Bechet came to town, they would play with the local klezmorim, and once in a while, the visiting stars would steal one of the hot hometowners for a record session or a club gig in New York City...

...You might write for a catalog of all the labels and the surprises lurking within Buck...

...George Buck Jr...