I am currently directing the least-experienced, squarest, high school jazz ensemble I have ever worked with. They’re great kids, but they don’t listen to jazz much, they don’t know much about it, and they don’t really get it when I say their sound is a little “square”.
That said – several of them have tuned in to the “Jazz” series and it has sparked some interesting rehearsal discussions so far. I’m glad there was something on TV that got them thinking about older music and great, influential musicians.
I used the “Marsellis on Music” series in class when I used to teach elementary music and it was lively, informative, and entertaining. The “Jazz” series is already being offered on video educational packages, and I imagine it will be very useful to open up young minds about music they have never even thought about.
Ike, I’ve got to say that I don’t think this series was intended to be that informative to those already educated in jazz. Wynton seems to be putting himself out recently to increase the scope of jazz awareness, and I applaud him for it. FWIW I saw him live in concert years ago when he was about 20 and so completely full of himself that after marvelling at his skill I thought he was personally a complete pain in the ass. The years have matured him and given him something of a musical mission. He’s certainly a lot more personable to his audience now. I still prefer his classical playing to his jazz stylings, but I’m glad he’s out there promoting jazz listening. I’m not sure anyone else is that dedicated to the idea right now. I would rather have my students hear tons of fluff about Armstrong and Ellington than nothing at all.
Jeez, he looks all of 12 now, what was he when you saw him—an embryo?
Best thing about the show is it’s got me doing my own research. I have a lot of the music, but the library got me “In Search of Buddy Bolden” by Donald Marquis and is ordering “Bix: Man & Legend” by Richard Sudhalter.
THE Don Marquis? archy and mehitabel was jazz in words, so it could be…
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My youngest spawn has recently taken up the clarinet. Since hearing Benny Goodman on the radio she has declared that she has no interest in being in the marching band, but wants to be in the jazz band, instead.
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I’m less interested in the upcoming episodes. The music they were playing last night was already getting a little too sweet for my tastes. I prefer the more down-and-dirty, gut-bucket stuff. The only local station that plays jazz during the day is close enough to my office that I can practically pick it up on my fillings, but they play that fifties and sixties RESPECTABLE crap.
Nahhhhh…nobody was declaring it “art” in the 1920s except those Harlem Renaissance types, and, like, anyone was listening to THEM. In he ‘30s Swing was so commercially successful nobody bothered to think about it as art, either. In the mid-‘40s the boppers may have considered themselves artists, but if you read the Beat writers it’s clear that a lot of the listeners still thought of it as plain ol’, good ol’ hot music. So…probably not until the early to mid 1950s?
By the late '50s, Dizzy Gillespie was mocking the eggheads by introducing members of his band as “one of the finest practitioners…of our…American…Art…Form…JAHZZZZZ.”
Making the word “jazz” sound like “hot wet fucking.”
Hey, drop, y’old Moldy Fig, there’s lots of post-1920s jazz I’d call both “down and dirty” and “gut-bucket” ! Here’s three suggestions for starters:
Try some of those organ combos from the late '50s…generally saxophone, electric guitar, Hammond B-3 organ, and drums. Real throbbing, soulful stuff. Any of Jimmy Smith’s records, for example.
Nearly anything with the Adderley boys from the 50s and 60s, Cannonball on alto and Nat on cornet.
Count Basie’s original Decca recordings from 1937. They’ll raise the roof right off of your house.
[sub]I know (some of) that–I’m just trying to start a fight[/sub]
Whiteman and Gershwin were masturbating each other over how they were creating “art” in the 20s.
As for “hot jazz” after the 20s, the local JC station just played an absolutely insipid arrangement of one of my personal favorite post-20s tunes, “Harlem Nocturne.” If they weren’t an order of magnitude better than the “soft jazz” bullshit on the commercial station…
Nope, neither of yer conjectures. It was in relation to a famous photo of some 57 jazz musicians in NY; I believe it was a Life magazine enterprise. The photo is on pg 198-99 of * Stompin The Blues *. Murray’s caption (not Life’s original) is “The first, second, and third line in New York”. It’s broken down via a numerical ghost outline of the photo, using an analogy to the First and Second Line of participants in a New Orleans Jazz parade. The First Line being the musicians playing, and the Second Line being the dancers and people reacting to the music; in the parade and course of the moment, yet not floating the actual notes. Another way to put it would be: reacting to the confluence of temporal events, but not changing it, as a musician can.
So, the photo in Murray’s book breaks the subjects into the First Line; all the Black players, and the Third Line; the players outside Black culture (this included, in this instance: Gene Krupa, Marian McPartland, and Gerry Mulligan.) The Second Line is the group of 11 Black children seated on the curb next to Count Basie.
I was always curious about that, and when I asked Murray, he replied that it was something that he and Duke Ellington had devised. The First Line is the players within the culture, The Second Line, those in the culture coming up, and the Third Line, those outside the culture who can appropriate the style, but can never truly understand where it’s coming from.
I realize that view can open up a whole can of deep-burrowing worms in regards to playing music. Believe me, I’ve spent the past ten years articulating that argument, ad mostly nauseum, in the blues world. It is an intricate and complex dialogue, and my intention isn’t to be inflammatory. But, as I’ve found in asking, the people who’ve created the music have a lot to say in regards to its trajectory through Western consciousness.
Liked the James Europe segment…I always thought of him as the ragtime music director for Vernon and Irene Castle.
(at least that’s how Gunther refers to him before playing The Castle House Rag)
They only mentioned my favs…the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks…for 2 seconds. But I can take it. I’m tough.
Liked the Benny Goodman beginning. Liked the Artie Shaw beginning.
This is Burns. If someone wanted the project to ping pong all over the place they should have given it to James Burke!
Doug—You know of Mr. and Mrs. Castle?! I have a new Dream Man.
I am a huge Castles fan (I have all three books about them and am considering writing one myself) and have the entire Irene Castle collection from J. Peterman.
I’ll meetcha at the Castle House tonight after work, and we can do the Maxixe until dawn . . .
I was kind of hoping that this wouldn’t go there…it’s probably worthy of an entire thread on its own.
Okay, most of the early players and many of the great trend-setters of jazz history were African-American. But were Murray and Ellington really stating that a bunch of six-year-olds sitting on the curb are more important to jazz as a whole than Jack Teagarden or Django Reinhardt or Gerry Mulligan or Eddie Lang or Gene Krupa or Red Norvo or Art Pepper or George Russell or Helen Merrill or Toshiko Akioshi or Stan Getz or Buddy DeFranco or Kai Winding or Lennie Tristano or Chet Baker or Lee Konitz or Bill Evans or Bob Brookmeyer or Barney Kessel or Teddy Charles or Cal Tjader or Jim Hall or Steve Lacy or Pee Wee Russell or Bunny Berigan or Zoot Sims purely by virtue of their BLACK SKIN???
Ummmmmmm…should we boot all the African-American musicians out of all ensembles that play any style of European-American music? After all, if they’re not white, there’s no WAY they could understand the complex underlying emotion of a Brahms string sextet…
Ooooh, I hate this stuff. Back under the rug with it. It’s all music, we ALL share emotions, it’s only skin, and I can’t see any reason a Hottentot couldn’t be the Polka King of Akron, Ohio, if he had a mind to apply for the job.
Hey! Who IS the Polka King of Akron, Ohio, these days?
<off to Dennis Kucinich’s website to find out>
WTF?!?!? He’s taken all the polka stuff off! Hmmm, wrong site. That was his re-election site. How about “Polka, Bowling and Kielbasa?” Yep, if he has to pay for it he’s all business. If the the gummint pays for it he can have some fun. He’s about all I miss about Ohio. Looks like Frankie Yankovic is still Polka King of Cleveland, despite being two years dead. No word about Akron, but I guess it’s not in his district. Somebody has to elect this dude statewide so everybody can enjoy him.
I remember what I wanted to say! Emmanuel Lewis, TV’s Webster, was on Queen Latifah tonight and looks EXACTLY like he was Wynton Marsalis’ “Mini-Me.” Uncanny.
Geez! This is like people criticizing The Ten Commandments for leaving out line and verse. If you want a truly comprehensive documentary, it would be about a hundred years long.
Pops deserves an eight-hour documentary devoted entirely to himself. I think that you are being parsimonious in your praise for the man, Ike. He was preeminent as a trumpeter, a vocalist, and a composer, and he influenced everyone that followed thereafter, not to mention his contemporaries. Minimizing the effect of Armstrong on jazz is the equivalent of minimizing the effect of Clausewitz on modern military history, Picasso on art, or Einstein on physics. He is at the center of it all, on all levels, and to understand Satchmo is to gain a glimpse of understanding of the entire genre. That’s all you can ask for in a short documentary–and yes, it is too short.
Respectfully submitted by the Devil’s Advocate: Charlie Parker is as important in the history of jazz music as is Louis Armstrong. Every movement arising since 1950 has either celebrated or refuted Parker’s influence.
Somebody bright once said “The history of jazz can be summed up in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.”
So far I haven’t seen any references to him. “Meanwhile, out in Kansas City, Mr. and Mrs. Parker were considering a mid-afternoon roll in the hay. It was out of this informal encounter that the blazing comet that was Charlie Parker would enter the planet’s atmosphere.”
On the other hand, we can expect to witness Louis Armstrong’s reaction to, say, Albert Ayler in the segment which covers the 1960s: “Man, that cat sounds like he’s playing that saxophone with his ass.”
(BTW, I said in the OP that I think Satch is the cat’s pajamas. I just want to get ahold of Wynton Marsalis and make him eat a shit sandwich. Any comment on THAT ambition?)
Okay, saw the 4th segment last night (oddly, my Mom in Philadelphia saw the 5th one).
• Stanley Crouch can bite me. “Oh, there WASN’T any REAL singing till Louis Armstrong invented scat,” he intones in his self-important way. He sings in an exaggerated “white-person voice” and then says, “Anyone who could go back to THAT after hearing scat singing is an idiot and should be deported to Pluto.” WELL. If Stanley Crouch enjoys scat singing, that is little short of dandy. I do NOT happen to care for it—and if that means I have to be deported to Pluto, so be it. At least Pluto probably won’t have any pompous assholes likle Stanley Crouch on it.
• Mom says Gene Krupa was gorgeous. “We use to see all the big bands down at Steel Pier,” she says, “and would get right up to the bandstand to watch Gene Krupa.” I told her that if she’d been a little sluttier, I could have been Gene Krupa’s daughter!
• Didn’t you love that dancer from the Savoy? She was adorable.
I saw the ad last night for The Jazz Store, which purports to “carry items to help carry on the jazz lifestyle.” Reefers, coke and heroin, I assume? But I noted that they have old-fashioned turntables. Woo-hoo! I logged onto their catalog and found what I was looking for: a turntable that plays 45s, 33s, CDs and cassettes. Um, excuse me, Jazz Store, sweetheart: what about 78s? I have a large collection of those, including some great jazz records (a 1918 “Livery Stable Blues,” some of Bix Beiderbecke’s work with Paul Whiteman). I just E’d them the suggestion that if they REALLY wanna promote “the jazz lifestyle,” maybe they should offer us something to play the original records on!
I see he devoted his Saturday column to pimping the show. Well, that’s okay, I suppose.
I scanned down, looking for the obligatory Wynton Marsalis mention (Hey! He waited till the FIFTH PARAGRAPH this time!) and found that “Jazz critics don’t like the show…they especially don’t like Wynton Marsalis. I notice they don’t complain about any of the white commentators.”
Well, neat-o! I’m a racist and I didn’t even notice it! Where’s the line for the white hoods?
Okay, Lard-ass, listen and listen good. Considering you’re always yelling about black media-types who yell “racism!” all the time, I wasn’t expecting YOU to yell “racism!” on Wynnie’s behalf. Pretty weak-ass defense.
For the record, I’ve been enjoying Albert Murray’s comments, and Ossie Davis’s, even though I’m not quite sure what HIS connection is with jazz, aside from being black and old. I don’t sit there going “Good point from the White Guy!”
I even like MOST of Crouch’s…incidentally, Eve, though he was typically going overboard with his “Armstrong invented modern singing!” schtick, I didn’t take it so much as a beatifying of the scat sytle as pointing out that Pops was the first to dance all around the beat like he did, to play games with the melody, and to project his voice like a horn. So it’s debatable how much influence Armstrong had on, say, Roger Daltry or Edith Piaf, but he certainly did make an impression on Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.
“Pops was the first to dance all around the beat like he did, to play games with the melody, and to project his voice like a horn.”
—That’s just the kind of show-offy, self-indulgent Shinola I hate about scat singing, which is why I am lined up at the spaceship with the rest of the “idiots” Stan is sending to Pluto. I see he also sent us all books titled “To Serve Man,” so I guess it won’t be TOO bad up there.
Just to make poor ‘ittle Stanny feel better, I really hated that new white talking head they introduced last night—can’t remember his name, but he’s some pencil-necked geek with a 3-days’ growth? Yet another pompous blow-hard talking over music clips I’d like to LISTEN to.
—Eve “Call me a Cab” Calloway (OK, I do like HIS scatting)