Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Joys of Jazz Iwas eleven when I first heard a jazz recording, and I knew right away this music was for me because it made me laugh. Not that any of the musicians...
...Not all the joys of the music are, of course, that uproarious...
...One of the classic jazz recordings of the past half century was recorded by Doc and pianist Sammy Price for the consistently first-class Canadian label, Sackville (Box 87, Station J, Toronto, Ontario M4J 4X8 Canada...
...Some thirty years ago, Karlheinz Stockhausen proclaimed that Beethoven was dead...
...Consider, for instance, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which David Wyn Jones has called a "continuous, yet cumulative celebration of joy...
...In the latter vein, the most elegant im-proviser in jazz is Benny Carter...
...And Charles Ives is also assuredly contemporary, as can be heard yet again in his Symphony No...
...rather, it just made me feel so good I had to laugh in pleasure...
...It will bring back every time you've fallen in love forever...
...At other times, the elegance is a joy unto itself, as is the case in the jazz-influenced singing of Fred Astaire...
...The music has this enlivening effect...
...Doc is eighty now, and last time I saw him, a couple of months ago, playing at a memorial for trombonist Vic Dickenson, Doc's sound and imagination were as fresh as ever...
...But the whole work is contemporary, as Duke Ellington and Vivaldi are...
...at its best, it's so emotionally direct that it gets you to move...
...Fantasy Records is now reissuing the Contemporary catalog (a label created and lovingly tended for years by the late Lester Koenig...
...Your foot insists on tapping, and your head starts to become part of the beat...
...Carter is active in clubs and at jazz concerts with his customary effortless grace...
...No living trumpeter is quite as effective, however, in making a lovely melodic line even more evocative than Doc Cheatham...
...I remember seeing then Attorney General Griffin Bell on the south lawn of the White House bobbing his head with abandon, but on time, listening to some jazz artists play a Thelonious Monk tune...
...Sometimes it's been linked with sensuousness, as in the alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges...
...If "contemporary" is taken to mean only those who are alive at the same time we are, parochialism also takes on an expanded meaning...
...It comes from hearing instruments that sound so mellow and are played with such rich assurance that the sounds seem to come from fantasy, because no one in real life could create such stunning colors from an instrument...
...Among the composers are Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, J.C...
...S Choice Cuts Much of the music of Haydn and Mozart is like Benny Carter's playing—full of surprises but always under control...
...And Ben Webster was more like Beethoven, At times the expressive urgency was so intense that forms had to be broken through and reshaped for the creator to keep control...
...There is also the pleasure of elegance in jazz...
...The late Red Garland, who was Miles Davis's pianist for quite a while, used to tell how, when he first heard a Charlie Parker recording, he just broke up, laughing, right on the street...
...It is this kind of burnished joy that can be found in a new reissue of a 1957 album, Sarah Vaughn and Billy Eckstine/The Irving Berlin Song-book (EmArcy/Polygram 822 526-1...
...With Benny Carter and Ben Webster, it's like hearing two different approaches to life—a man of light and air and a man of tender hunger who might turn into a volcano before your very ears...
...Not that any of the musicians had made a funny noise on his horn...
...Recorded in the late 1950s, the sessions include another unmistakable giant of the music, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, who was even more sensuous than Johnny Hodges...
...He will be seventy-eight in August, and like Doc Cheatham, has transcended time...
...The set is called Black Beauty (Sackville 3024) and its subtitle is, "A Salute to Black American Songwriters...
...First violinist Christopher Rowland points out in the liner notes that among the quite astonishing passages, there is one that is "utterly contemporary...
...A rather devastating—though joyous—answer to that kind of solipsism is Vladimir Ashkenazy's version of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony (London 411 941-1...
...He means it's contemporary in musical terms...
...A key soloist is trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, who has devoted his life to getting the tastiest possible sounds out of his horn...
...Then there's a jazz pleasure that's like having the very best and most expensive dessert in a restaurant that prides itself on such things...
...The old man was just not relevant any longer...
...4/Three Places in New England/Central Park in the Dark (Deutsche Grammophon 410 933-1) with the Boston Symphony conducted by Seiji Ozawa and Michael Tilson Thomas...
...I saw one long exchange of choruses at a concert in Greenwich Village's Washington Square last summer during which a younger, renowned hornman just couldn't keep up, but Carter sailed right through...
...Another answer to Stockhausen is the old guy's String Quartet in A Minor (London 411 643-1), performed with exceptional ardor and delight in its perilous challenges by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet...
...There isn't a song here—from "Cheek to Cheek" to "Isn't This a Lovely Day"-that you haven't heard scores of times, but the flavor in this set is like premium Scotch as contrasted with a house brand...
...Years ago at a jazz school in the Berk-shires, Charles Mingus, who was defiantly, exhilaratingly, in the vanguard of jazz, heard an ancient pianist who, fifty years before, had found new forms in the quick spaces of ragtime...
...This one horn and one piano player are more deeply affecting, as they roam through the decades, than any orchestra could be...
...Johnson, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Andy Razaf...
...Among the tracks I never want to be without is the Blake-Sissle "Love Will Find a Way...
...I'm delighted that one of the first reissues is Benny Carter, Jazz Giant (Contemporary OJC-167...
...Mingus rushed over to the piano, embraced the old gent and said, "Now I know where I came from...
...Billie Holiday could make you almost cry, but she made you feel awfully good about wanting to cry...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
