In case my little blog about hot jazz and eighteenth century classical music seems unusual, here’s “Autumn Leaves,” arranged as a French air for period instrument orchestra:
In the end, they’re all just tunes.
Incidentally, I’ve been enjoying Patrick Cohen-Akenine’s work with his phenomenal orchestra Les Folies Françoises for years, even purchasing full-length works just to hear the ensemble’s gutty, tense and completely transparent strings. For more on Cohen-Akenine’s meticulous attention to those strings and his latest project, check out this article here.
Dance music of the twenties and thirties: dreary, colorless and filled with musicians diligently playing dull written parts, until an improvised break or solo allowed them to display their individuality and inject a brief moment of “jazz” amidst all that “commercial” music.
Except when it wasn’t.
Comparing Frank Trumbauer leading the sax section on C melody saxophone for “Baltimore”
the difference isn’t just about instrument or arrangement. These are two entirely different approaches to timbre, phrasing and section balance: Trumbauer’s dry tone sliding in and out of the theme from between his reed section colleagues, versus Hazlett’s buttery, vibrato-laden and slightly (deliciously) nasal sound providing a lush melody statement on top of the other saxophones.
Both players fashion entirely distinct and deeply personal approaches despite (perhaps even through!) written parts. Neither tune was the cream of the compositional crop, and the chance to shine with multiple improvised choruses on Rhythm changes was a few years and at least one stylistic revolution away. Yet whatever the difference between “jazz” and “commercial” music, there’s clearly a difference between the music on paper and the music at work in these two recordings.
Woody Walder didn’t so much play the clarinet as deploy it. His solos with Bennie Moten’s band are closer to sonic found art sculptures than the poems, speeches and epigrams of his Jazz Age colleagues. Walder pieced together squeals, squeaks, whinnies, whines and cries, sometimes through the insertion of foreign objects into the bell of his instrument, other times with just his mouthpiece. The effect (Walder seemed all about effect) could be humorous or disturbing, at times grating, but was always surprising.
Walder’s particular sound of surprise hasn’t served his legacy well. Most jazz historians locate Walder’s playing somewhere between a tolerable novelty of the times or a now dated commercial evil, perhaps higher than comb playing and barnyard theatrics, but far below the fine art of plunger-muted brass.
Courtesy of chaka85.wordpress.com
It’s a pity Walder missed out on noise music, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s experiments or the deliberately nasal, percussive and off-pitch curveballs of the World Saxophone Quartet. The avant-garde as well as Walder and contemporaries such as Fess Williams (and even King Oliver at his onomatopoeic) all relished vocally inflected, “unmusical,” weird and occasionally cacophonous sounds. Apparently Walder’s mistake was doing it for a willing and wide audience.
It’s best to listen to Walder on his own terms, neither as historical victim or stylistic precursor, but simply as a musician playing on a record. Better yet, forget the man and just listen to the wholly unique, singularly “ugly” sounds twisting pitch and time on “Elephant’s Wobble,” “Thick Lip Stomp” and “Yazoo Blues.” If you’re craving context, listen to how Walder’s solo on “Midnight Mama” at times resembles a hybrid of Rex Stewart’s half-valving and Bubber Miley’s gutbucketing, transplanted to Eric Dolphy’s honking, metallic reed. It’s a hell of an act, or art, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Here’s part three of an insightful documentary on YouTube about Bill Rank and his performances in Holland. Rank is best known as a sideman with Bix Beiderbecke, but “Santopec” comments on a confident, unique trombonist who continued to grow long after Beiderbecke’s Goethe-esque early passing:
The incredible technique is still there after “all those years,” even more well integrated into a highly personal (though clearly indebted to Miff Mole) style based off of wide intervals and suspended harmonies. The difference is a surer, more rounded sound and suppler sense of construction, which allows those leaps and notes to color Rank’s inventions rather than anchor them (as they occasionally do on earlier records). Hearing Rank’s music on its own terms, without any legendary colleagues surrounding it, is the real find.
As for the “modest and captivating” person playing these solos, he confesses to embarrassment at the privileged treatment by his Dutch fans, and he still pronounces the name of an admired colleague with a Midwestern clip (“Adrian Roll-IN-e“). Not much to do with the music, but sometimes the brain and heart behind the notes matter. Who’d have thought?
Saturday night the Boston Landmarks Orchestraopened their summer season at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, featuring special guests the Boston Children’s Chorus and Latin ensemble Alex Y Amigos, with honors for the BCC’s founder, civic leader Dr. Hubie Jones. Geoffrey Wieting provides excellent coverage of the music on The Boston Musical Intelligencer. This blogger (who attended through the generosity of his employer) couldn’t stop talking, and reflecting, about everything the kids brought to that music.
Whatever their nascent spiritual leanings, the young performers looked and sounded uplifted by Aaron Copland’s exhortation to shout during “Zion’s Walls.” Chorus and audience alike were flush with enjoyment at the animal onomatopoeia of “I Bought Me A Cat,” with Copland’s sophisticated harmonies just a means to underline a lot of meows, quacks and giggles. If these compositions were “modernist,” “old” or “esoteric” it was news to this ensemble. They dug into the percussive syllables and jabbering ensemble improvisations of Alberto Grau’s “Pata Pa’ca” with the same excitement.
Seeing a few dozen adolescents singing, swaying and smiling through choral works is a great answer to all the doom and gloom surrounding the fate of classical, jazz and anything else that doesn’t make it to the Billboard Top 100. “Art music” music kept these children riveted, without any drums, auto-tuners or scandalous backstories.
They might not pursue musical careers, they may never perform again, but they’ll always remember how they felt singing to the rafters. It’s not an end in itself but it’s certainly not the end of this music. Just ask the six year old boy dancing in the front row.
Thank You, Boston Children’s Chorus and Dr. Jones (Photo Courtesy of The Boston Globe)
In case any producers were wondering, “The Complete Sudie Reynaud” would fit on one compact disc.
A whole CD devoted to an obscure Jazz Age bassist might require some snappy marketing, and many collectors already own this collection via reissues under Reynaud’s more well-known collaborators. Sudie Reynaud will undoubtedly, and thankfully, remain unknown in every sense of the word.
“Maybe Brass Bass, or Bass Sax, On My Next Album…”
His discography lists him as playing both string bass and tuba, which evidences a basic, and therefore all the more impressive, skill needed to gig in Reynaud’s time. “Bass” meant both “string” and “brass” varieties during this transitional period in jazz and American pop, so “bass player” meant someone who could double both instruments. Steve Brown did so reluctantly, preferring his bull fiddle and the chance to unleash a signature slap technique. Cyrus St. Clair on the other hand preferred to puff rather than pluck: he stuck to brass bass well into the forties, developing jazz tuba into an art decades before Howard Johnson or Bill Lowe. John Kirby split the difference through clean, fast and clever bass lines on both instruments. Chink Martin doubled without drawing too much attention to himself on either instrument, yet his foundation and lift can be heard on dozens of recordings.
Reynaud cut just sixteen sides in his life, recorded sporadically between 1926 and 1933 in Chicago. Like Martin, he serves a functional but spurring role (except for two barely audible sessions on tuba with Fess Williams that can be heard here). On “High Fever” with Doc Cook’s band, Reynaud catches all the ensemble hits and resonates under the band without overwhelming it, even through a stomping final chorus:
While Freddie Keppard‘s ranging cornet dominates this side as well as “Sidewalk Blues,” Reynaud’s part is simple and well-defined: provide ground rhythm and outline the harmonic skeleton (while doing so musically, as Tom Smith’s comment below explains). That role doesn’t allow any insight into Reynaud’s influences, his style, or his personality. All that’s left is pure music, which makes the strutting atmosphere on Jelly Roll Morton‘s tune possible:
If Reynaud were known for nothing other than contributing to “Here Comes The Hot Tamale Man” he’d have an enviable legacy. It remains one of the most rhythmic, confident examples of “hot” artistry from this or any other era, and it’s hard to imagine without those roots and fifth punching away underneath:
Five years later Reynaud was back in the studio under the direction of trumpeter and would-be Louis Armstrong rival Reuben Reeves. The antiphonal lines of reedman Franz Jackson‘s arrangements and the loose, declaratory, Armstrong-inspired language of the soloists illustrate the evolution from hot jazz to nascent big band swing, as do the four steady beats of Reynaud’s string bass, which never steals the show but does make it possible.
He’s felt rather than heard through the swirling darkness of “Zuddan.” He nourishes the stream of solos on “Mazie” and “Screws, Nuts and Bolts” (which includes the simply dirtiest growl imaginable, courtesy of Reeves). Only on “Yellow Five” does Reynaud peek out from the curtain, with thwacking strings and a strong four beat slap towards the end of the side:
There’s no way now to understand him as an artist, no recorded innovations or theatrics to shed some light on him as a human being as well as a sideman (for this listener, his tone isn’t even as distinct as that of Country Washburne, Pete Briggs or John Lindsay). There aren’t any memoirs, interviews or even biographical entries pertaining to Reynaud, either because no researchers have bothered to look or he died without leaving any to find. Whoever Sudie Reynaud was, he did his job. In other words, “Sudie Reynaud,” historical enigma, biographical cipher and musical everyman, is now pure music. There are far worse fates.
Perennially hip, cynically postmodern ears may hear Franz Jackson’s music as outdated. Others will listen and be grateful for an eighty-year career spent playing exactly the notes the clarinetist, saxophonist, vocalist and arranger wanted (which is pretty much the definition of “hip”).
For Jackson artistic liberty was expressed through swing, a clear melody and the blues, not to mention such important musical fundamentals as a distinctly warm tone and a sense of humor. Jackson’s role as one of the last surviving voices of jazz’s pre-swing era only added to his musical toolkit, without miring that voice in nostalgia. For example, “reed popping” was in some ways out of fashion by the late twenties, but Jackson uses it for some percolating counterpoint behind John Thomas’ trombone lead on “Mack the Knife” in 1961. Jackson’s sandy, rhythmically liberated vocal and clarinet (with some delicious chalumeau trills) evidence a player who had been listening and absorbing but also remembering and reshaping ideas for decades:
That sense of knowing exactly what he wants to say (mixed with an underlying sense of joy at being alive to say it), similarly colors Jackson’s playing on the Jimmie Noone warhorse “Sweet Lorraine.” Here it’s clothed in a subtle small group swing arrangement, with Jackson in turn using Coleman Hawkins-esque heft to clothe his own coy approach on tenor sax:
Jackson’s clarinet on “Battle Hymn of the Republic” pays uncanny tribute to George Lewis’ ensemble arpeggios (albeit with surer tone and intonation), while his loping solo grooves and arches even at double the tempo. Here and elsewhere Jackson surrounds himself with other clear, direct communicators:
All of the above videos are posted by Jackson’s daughter, Michelle Jackson Jewell, who also maintains a loving tribute to her father at an informative, comprehensive and tune-filled website. She’s also organizing a campaign to fund the release of Jackson’s 95th birthday celebration, his swinging, star-studded last concert in 2008, which she hopes to issue as a double disc set. You can find out more about her father, this project and how to donate here:
As the clip on that page will show, Jackson could make a chorus of “Happy Birthday” a party unto itself! He once said, “it’s no good tune if it don’t have a story,” and hopefully the right support can keep Jackson’s story going much longer.
Downbeatmagazine has posted Dave Dexter Jr.’s “classic” interview with Billie Holiday from 1939. Among (perhaps apocryphal) anecdotes about Artie Shaw‘s relentlessly serious self-image and some honesty concerning her first recording, Holiday speaks frankly about troubles on the road, looking forward to an “unglamorous and unprofitable” future and her hatred of “straight singing.” Probably worth rereading even if you’ve been there and done that article, and definitely worth getting the electronic word out.
As for that first record she cut, this writer has always enjoyed the singer as well as the sidemen:
yet his favorite Holiday record, based on further subjective, uncritical criterion, remains “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm“:
It turns out Holiday had an enviable future, she just wasn’t around to see it.
Cool jazz is usually assumed to have been a reaction to bebop that first appeared in the late forties, with opponents popping up soon after. It’s no secret that Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer were experimenting with “cooler” sounds in the twenties. Yet the lineage of the cool, as well as its its haters, is just as strong in the music of Ernest Loring “Red” Nichols. Both Red’s jazz and cool jazz share a sense of exploration and reflection, along with critics who were unable to listen past their own fiery, immediate preconceptions.
For Nichols’ kindest adversaries, he was merely a Bix Beiderbecke imitator, while words like “cold” and “mechanical” have logged a lot of mileage courtesy of his other detractors. Such attacks may or may not have to do with the unromantic truth that Nichols was a disciplined, shrewd player and businessman who was able to pay his bills. Geographically, chronologically and musically, he was also his own musician, . During a period when “jazz” meant earthy and “hot,” Nichols had the imagination and gall to work with lighter textures, nuanced arrangements and subdued, cerebral energy. A lucrative studio career has resulted in a nearly insurmountable discography, but Nichols’ take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Washboard Blues” best illustrates his singular cornet and style:
Nichols’ way with a front line speaks volumes from the start. Instead of the three-way polyphony heard in hundreds of combos at the time, cornet and clarinet lay down a bone-dry lead (similar to the brass and reed front lines of most post-war groups). The attention to detail for just two horns is also revealing, first answering Eddie Lang‘s guitar in unison for the introduction, then switching to tight, coy harmony for the melody, with Vic Berton‘s timpani offering its own abstract commentary. When collective improvisation does materialize, it’s with the same balance and intimacy heard earlier. Even the timbres are telling: Nichols’ clean, lithe, slightly clipped cornet, Jimmy Dorsey whistling polished, cutting phrases on clarinet.
The false fingerings and ghosted notes of Nichols’ solo illustrate why “clever” doesn’t have to be an epithet. Dorsey’s arpeggios and phrase entrances come across as more acrobatic but equally measured. Pianist Arthur “The Baron” Schutt shows off his classical studies with busy, two-fisted rubato, while Lang’s strings resemble a steely, pensive harpsichord. The players cherry-pick their notes as though in the midst of some detailed internal calculus, insistently (and for that time, bravely) refusing to throw everything in until they know what’s possible. Many critics hear careful reserve. Other listeners just notice technique, curiosity and patience.
Responding to an earlier post about the loss of Joe Muranyi, a commenter recalled Muranyi trying out his own “metal Conn clarinet, a horn a more self-conscious player would recoil from.” The open-minded Muranyi in turn “played the living heck out of it.” Apparently for some musicians, the instrument is always a catalyst and never a compromise. For Lester Young, a metal clarinet was a choice, maybe even a necessity.
Gunther Schullernotes that when Young put down his tenor, the influential jazz artist and part-time tragic hero “played a cheap metal clarinet that he picked up somewhere on his travels, but whose tone he loved dearly.” Young kept the signature lightness of his sax on the smaller horn, and at fast tempos would use the same triplets and encircling, never inundating lines for the “little stories” he had to tell. At slower tempos and in more reflective settings, he’d come up with a story like the one in “Blues with Helen,” from the 1939 Spirituals to Swingconcert organized by impresario John Hammond [starting at 1:47 in the clip below]:
Hammond introduces Young as “switching over to clarinet,” but there is no sense of “switch” or adaptation here: Young is simply playing clarinet. The tone could be called “thin,” but more like a leaf rather than paper, something likely to tear given the right force but able to support storms and sunlight on its own terms. Sustained notes let the audience absorb that sound while always unfolding a narrative, never halting the action or merely displaying beauty for the sake of itself. If anything is different, it’s that the clarinet’s brighter, at times childlike timbre brings out the fragility of the clarinetist.
Benny Goodman mentions purchasing a Selmer (wood) clarinet for Young while in Europe, an instrument fewer clarinetists might recoil from. While it’s endearing to imagine Young gratefully accepting the gift and sticking to his cheap little instrument, the truth is that it doesn’t matter what kind of clarinet Lester Young played, only that he played clarinet.
The Pop of Yestercentury 