Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Elegant Sensuality She was part Cherokee, she ran away from her Oklahoma home when she was fifteen, she recorded with Paul Whiteman and later made small combo sides...
...As Takashi Edgar Ono says in his valuable, comprehensive notes: "She never deliberately tried to overphrase or to sound like a musical instrument...
...She was laid-back, as they say now, but her singing was all the more sensual because of that...
...She was not a jazz singer, although she clearly was a connoisseur of the music...
...That intimacy has always rendered a cabaret—or a jazz club—far more suited to the livelier arts than a concert hall...
...In it Wiley told how it all started, how the small-town Oklahoma girl first heard what some called the devil's music and was transported to a whole new world...
...Lee Wiley was a lady...
...Mabel Mercer Sings Cole Porter (Atlantic 81264-1) exemplifies what George Frazier says about her singing in the album's liner notes: "It is a subtle art, full of light and shadow and what Larry Hart called 'that unfelt clasp of the hand.'" She made cabaret singing high art, but art you could be in the immediate presence of...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Elegant Sensuality She was part Cherokee, she ran away from her Oklahoma home when she was fifteen, she recorded with Paul Whiteman and later made small combo sides with some of the best jazzmen...
...clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, among others...
...And I had a boyfriend who would skip school with me, and we would go over to the local store and play records...
...There was no one like her...
...for prices and shipping costs, write to Tak-ashi Edgar Ono, Tono Records, P.O...
...The songs—recorded in 1931 and 1932 and skillfully resuscitated by mastering engineer Jack Tower—range from the brooding "Too Late" to "We Just Couldn't Say Goodbye...
...The accompanists are acutely attentive, and the songs include "Sugar," "Woman Alone with the Blues," and "Stars Fell on Alabama...
...On three of the tracks in this set, Wiley is backed by what used to be Eddie Condon's A-team: trumpeters Bobby Hackett, Billy Butterfield, Max Kaminsky...
...She herself would still be rather distant and a bit mocking, but the ecstasy might be more memorable because of that...
...Her mother's roots included the Coeur d'Alene tribe...
...The texture of Wiley's voice was sometimes as delicate and fragile as morning mist, but it pulsed so with the life force— and often with her bemused humor—that you knew this was no lady who needed protection...
...But what she did with time, with the inner dynamics of phrasing, and with her clear, deep feeling for the stories she sang made her work unfailingly absorbing...
...Later, she and Bailey became friends...
...The scene that follows was somehow missed by Norman Rockwell: "I used to sit in school and dream, dream about being a singer...
...Yet the way she phrased and the way she lightly but powerfully shaped the beat implied that later, after the club closed, she might be teaching ecstasy to some astoundingly fortunate young man...
...I bought all those Lee Wiley jazz releases, and felt privileged to hand over my money...
...Yet another large achievement by Takashi Edgar Ono is the release, along with the Lee Wiley set, of Mildred Bailey: The Paul Whiteman Years {136002...
...The notes consist of another collector's item—the transcript of a previously unpublished 1971 radio interview...
...But when she performed, she was beyond category and commanded absolute attention...
...Box 419A, Planetarium Station, New York, NY 10024...
...She was not a pop singer either...
...Not that she had airs...
...Now the records that we listened to and liked were called 'race records.' And they were only sold in a certain part of town, the colored part...
...A third singer of elegant sensuality was Mabel Mercer...
...Mabel Mercer had such presence that once, when I did a television show with her, I was more in awe of her than I had been in the company of W. H. Auden, who had been on a couple of weeks before...
...She started digging jazz and blues ("race") records in the early 1920s, but she never sounded black...
...She was Mabel Mercer, cabaret singer...
...Mildred Bailey may have been the first white female singer to understand what black singers and horns were about and to apply that knowledge to her own work without trying to mimic black ways of music...
...One of the year's most delightful surprises is a set of collector's items, The Legendary Lee Wiley (Tono Records, TJ 6004...
...The way she walked and held her head...
...And although she was nonpareil as an illuminator of exceptional (if often forgotten) show tunes, she was not the sort of performer you would see in a Broadway show...
...While Wiley was still in Oklahoma, she would run to the radio whenever she knew Mildred Bailey was due on with the Paul White-man orchestra...
...In the back of class, of course...
...She was regally at home in small, dark rooms in which no one would ever think of asking for a tune that was on the Billboard charts last week...
...These records were [by] Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Clara Smith____My mother didn't like me going down there because, even in those days, they used to have some very bad people down there...
...But that's the way it goes, I guess...
...Nonetheless she was able to project consistent jazz feeling with her innate sense of swing...
...That is, she used her natural, white, rather small voice which was not in itself mesmerizing...
...Like Lee Wiley, by the way, Mildred Bailey was also part Native American...
...Mabel Mercer was right there in front of you— the only way to fully experience her...
...Aristocratic in bearing, she was a kind, private woman...
...When he was still largely an apprentice, Frank Sinatra lingered in the dark of rooms where she sang in order to learn from Mercer...
...As Ono says, although Mildred Bailey went on to make many memorable hot jazz recordings, this album includes some of her most compelling ballad sides...
...trombonist Jack Teagarden...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
