Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Passionate Gentleman Eighteen years after Edmond Hall's death at the age of sixty-six, hardly anyone under thirty can tell you who he was. He never was known to...
...He died of a heart attack after shoveling snow in front of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home in February 1967...
...But tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, a man with a huge, romantic sound and a compelling beat, is in the front line along with Vic Dickenson and Sidney De Paris...
...In the late 1940s, Edmond worked for more than a year as the leader of a combo at the Savoy, a jazz club in Boston...
...His wife, Winnie, told Manfred Selchow: "Edmond never had been ill as long as I knew him...
...I would suggest you write to Charlie Lourie at that address for price information, including mailing costs, and a list of other Mosaic sets assembled by Lourie and Michael Cuscuna—every one of them an invaluable contribution to jazz history and also a good investment, because each is a limited edition...
...He never coasted, even late at night when there were only eight or ten people in the club...
...Then there are septet and quintet sessions led by Hall, with such pungently distinctive sidemen as trumpeter Sidney De Paris and Vic Dickenson, the wittiest and most original trombonist jazz has yet developed...
...In a recent essay on Hall, Manfred Selchow quotes trombonist Eddie Durham: "Edmond Hall's clarinet sounded like a human voice...
...He could talk on his instrument...
...He ranged over the human condition with ceaseless energy and a tone-often tart but never abrasive—that could cut right through a hundred trombones...
...Also included are rare solo performances by another almost forgotten nonpareil, pianist-composer James P. Johnson...
...Off the stand, Edmond Hall was one of the most self-effacing people I've ever known...
...He never was known to the public at large, except peripherally during his time with the Louis Armstrong All Stars from 1955 to 1958...
...He was proud of his father, a clarinet player in the Onward Brass Band in Reserve, Louisiana, he was proud of the black heritage that had produced his father, and he was proud of what he himself had added to that heritage...
...I practically lived at the Savoy, and also announced a radio remote from there...
...Different kinds of joy were selling...
...But in his last years, when jobs became rarer, he became seriously doubtful about himself and his artistry...
...You kncftv, Edmond died of a broken heart...
...So how could white people treat him as though he were less than human...
...The only subject that made him reveal hurt and anger, though softly, was Jim Crow...
...Courtly, gentle, he was utterly incapable of promoting himself...
...Edmond never found an answer to that question...
...Edmond made a good many recordings through the years, but the very best—and I think he would agree—were sessions he cut for Blue Note as both leader and sideman...
...What Louis Armstrong was for the trumpet, Ed was on the clarinet...
...There came a time wh?n gigs were few for musicians of Edmond Hall's way of music...
...There are four LPs in this set, beginning with one of the first "jazz chamber music" sessions—a 1941 date with Hall, guitarist Charlie Christian, bassist Israel Crosby, and Meade Lux Lewis on celeste...
...So I heard Edmond just about every night, certainly including my nights off, for all the time he was there...
...Rehearing these sides, with which I grew up, I am puzzled that there are people who deprive themselves of the exhilaration of jazz...
...And so, in his last years, this man of quintessential dignity waited by the phone, which didn't ring all that often...
...Through his clarinet, Edmond spoke of jubilation, the deepest blues, fragile echoes of desire and loss, memories of innocence and experience, the infinite pleasures of being with musicians as sure and quick as he was...
...There are four sides, with James P. Johnson as leader, on which Edmond does not appear...
...From set to set and number to number, the intensity remained hot and bright, and I never knew what was coming next...
...The rest of us, smiling and tapping to the beat, never doubted that it would always be that way...
...Finally, Edmond returns as a sideman in a Sidney De Paris group, and those tracks too sound as buoyant and vivid as when they were first issued...
...A small cadre of hard-core jazz partisans here and abroad was very much aware of Edmond Hall, but for a long time now there have been no reissues of his recordings and only flickering mention of him in most of the international jazz press...
...I remember Winnie sitting, many nights, at the Savoy in Boston, listening to Edmond and, I think, knowing more than he did that it wouldn't necessarily always be that way...
...We would always be young, swept away every night by Edmond Hall...
...The drummer on most of the dates is Big Sid Catlett, a large man of delicately precise skills who was the favorite drummer of many jazz musicians because when he was in charge of the time, all you had to do for yourself was float...
...I was sixteen when they first came out, and I played those original seventy-eight rpms over and over, for those were the loveliest ethereal blues sounds I had ever heard...
...Whenever he began to play, this quiet man turned into one of the most passionate, driving clarinet soloists in the history of jazz...
...All of them are now in one boxed set, along with other classic jazz performances, in The Complete Edmond Hall/ James P. Johnson/Sidney De Pahs/Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions, Mosaic Records MRG-109, 197 Strawberry Hill Avenue, Stamford, CT 06902...
...But then, there are those who vote Republican...
...Since these are complete sets, there are some alternate and previously unissued takes as well as knowledgeable biographical essays and, of course, total discograph-ical information...
...The two most seizingly original clarinetists in jazz have been Pee Wee Russell and Edmond Hall...
Vol. 50 • January 1986 • No. 1
