May

Smack and the Alto Sax

Heroin, some wag once said, isn’t so much the occupational hazard of jazz musicians, it’s the occupation. It doesn’t trigger the schizophrenic visions induced in acid rockers by LSD, and it doesn’t set off the manic bursts of energy–anathema to the lyrical mood–of cocaine. Instead, it acts as a warm blanket or hot bath on the psyche at the same time that it absorbs large quantities of time, the bane of musicians on the road or during periods of unemployment. (Kids reading at home: Please ask mom or dad’s permission before shooting up.) As a result, it’s the drug of choice for those who’ve grown bored of the low-octane euphorics of marijuana.

I’m sorry–I couldn’t resist.

While smack is an equal opportunity parasite, afflicting practitioners of all instruments in the jazz orchestration, it worked particular damage on alto saxophonists during the twentieth century. Frank Morgan, Art Pepper and Charlie Parker–the greatest of them all–all lost valuable time they could have spent creating to the drug.

Morgan and Pepper made it back from the brink, in Pepper’s case celebrated by the song “Straight Life.” Parker struggled with the drug, growing plump during periods when he kicked the habit by feeding on his favorite food, chicken (yardbird, hence his nickname) then turning wraith-like when he fell off the wagon.

Charlie Parker, during a clean period

Some altos steered clear of the drug entirely; Paul Desmond, whose quicksilver phrasing you hear on Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5,” was satisfied with a dry martini. Johnny Hodges, whose career linked Sidney Bechet and Duke Ellington, seems to have stayed away from the stuff, as did Benny Carter.

Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter.

Parker’s inability to kick the habit was perhaps a reflection of his musical persona; protean, a fire hose of ideas whose solos–even his off-hand riffs–were torrents compared to his peers’ glasses of beer, or in lesser cases, eye droppers. Perhaps he needed the drug to turn off his rational madness from time to time.

Parker died sitting before a television set watching the Dorsey Brothers show, but this is no reflection on their sweet sound. He died of any or all of four causes; pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis and/or a heart attack. His body was so ravaged by the effects of heroin that the coroner estimated his corpse to be that of a man between 50 and 60. He was 34.

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Apr

Billy Strayhorn: A Short, Gay and Lush Life of Beauty

In December of 1938 a short, bespectacled young man of twenty-three persuaded a friend of a friend to arrange for him to meet Duke Ellington, the jazz pianist and composer whose orchestra was in Pittsburgh for a performance. After hearing the young man–Billy Strayhorn–play a few songs on the piano, Ellington offered him an undefined job on indefinite terms. “I don’t have any position for you,” Ellington said. “You’ll do whatever you feel like doing.”

Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington

With no more assurance than that–no written contract or verbal agreement as to pay–Strayhorn moved to New York and joined Ellington as arranger, composer, sometimes pinch-hit pianist and songwriting partner. Their relationship would continue for nearly three decades, an extended improvisation much like those they collaborated on.

Strayhorn was a piano prodigy who worked odd jobs while still in grade school to buy a used upright piano. His first love was classical music, but a combination of circumstances–there were few obvious ports of entry to European art music for a young black man in the thirties–and exposure to jazz pianists such as Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum persuaded him to put his skills to work in that vernacular idiom.

Joe Henderson: Lush Life, the Music of Billy Strayhorn

As far as I can tell, there are no memorials to Strayhorn in Pittsburgh, where he grew up, or in Dayton, Ohio, where he was born, but the case can be made that he is in a class of his own among American composers; his work is classical, and yet people listen to it with enjoyment, not to be improved, instructed or edified as is so often the case with modern classical music. You may know that Strayhorn wrote Ellington’s theme song–Take the A Train–but you have probably heard other songs, such as A Flower is a Lovesome Thing, After All and Lotus Blossom–without knowing they were his.

At his first meeting with Ellington Strayhorn probably played a tune that he then called “Life is Lonely,” but which we now know as “Lush Life.” The song has been interpreted by hundreds of jazz singers (and butchered by more than a few), and it provides some perspective on the man whose characteristic mode was the lament; sad, poignant melodies over rich chord changes interpreted best by those masters of blue moods, Johnny Hodges on alto and Ben Webster on tenor. Strayhorn began composing Lush Life when he was eighteen and finished it when he was twenty-one, and yet it tells a fatalistic, bitter tale of alcohol and fading youth that would seem more appropriate coming from a man four decades older.

Strayhorn was gay, and perhaps he saw that aspect of his being closing off many doors to him, just as his skin color effectively barred him from prizes and fellowships that might have fallen his way if he’d been a white classical composer. Throughout his life he drank too much for his own good, and he may have already realized at a relatively young age that alcohol would be a satisfying but embittering companion as he grew older. He describes the life of a lush with music that is also lush, in the other sense of the word; rich. What he may have seen as he looked ahead was a life that was limited by his race, sexual preference and the bottle, but full of possibilities nonetheless. As Dorothy Parker put it with resignation, you might as well live.

Strayhorn’s lifelong smoking and drinking probably contributed to the esophageal cancer from which he died on May 31, 1967, in the company of his partner, Bill Grove. As he lay dying in the hospital he submitted his final composition–Blood Count–to Ellington, which can be found on Ellington’s memorial album for Strayhorn …And His Mother Called Him Bill. The song is, like Strayhorn’s life, a brief thing that reaches its own melancholy resolution, but leaves you wanting more.

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Apr

Madd About Tadd

Tadley Ewing Peake “Tadd” Dameron once described himself as “the most misplaced musician in the business,” and one needn’t call the missing persons bureau of the jazz precincts to determine that he may have been right.

Tadd Dameron

An unabashed romantic in a guild that, like the butcher’s union, isn’t supposed to sample the marbled inventory that it handles on the job, Dameron tried to marry the sentimental products of Tin Pan Alley with the hard-edged experiments of be-bop. He synthesized the two schools under the higher principle of beauty. “There’s enough ugliness in the world,” he told Metronome magazine in 1947. “I’m interested in beauty.”

Harlan Leonard

Dameron was a passable pianist, but he found his calling first as an arranger, then as a composer who crafted not just melodies and chords but fully-instrumented charts for Harlan Leonard’s Kansas City Orchestra, then Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie. If your only exposure to big band jazz has been to the white “sweet” orchestras that took the music of black arrangers such as Fletcher Henderson and cooled it down and straightened it out, check out Lunceford, whose motto (and hit song) was “Rhythm is Our Business.”

Jimmie Lunceford

You have probably heard Dameron’s music even if you don’t know it; he wrote jazz standards such as “Good Bait,” “Hot House,” “Lady Bird” and “If You Could See Me Now,” a tune inspired by a riff of Gillespie’s that became a hit for Sarah Vaughan.

While Dameron is known for his lush and yet surprising harmonies, he was no mere effete aesthete. He played and arranged for Bull Moose Jackson, the honking R&B tenor, his bop credentials include a nonet with Clifford Brown and he collaborated with John Coltrane on Mating Call in 1958.

Bull Moose Jackson

Dameron’s principal interpreter was Fats Navarro and while the association produced memorable music, it may also have contributed to his downfall. Navarro was an explosive trumpeter who epitomized the “hard” bop style, but he eventually priced himself out of gigs because he needed to support the heroin habit that contributed to his early death at 26. Dameron became a user of the drug, which has filled the long, lonely and boring stretches between gigs for many jazz musicians, and he eventually ended up going to jail for it in 1959.

Fats Navarro

When he was released Dameron was still highly-regarded, and he wrote for Sonny Stitt, Milt Jackson and Benny Goodman, among others, but he would die of cancer within four years at the age of 48.

Much of Dameron’s music is still in print, including his complete Blue Note sessions, and there have been both tribute bands (Dameronia) and recordings of his music by all-star groups (Continuum, “Mad About Tadd”). The quality that will keep his music alive, however, is something that is often overlooked these days by artists who think their first priority should be to shock, offend or irritate: “It has to swing, sure,” Tadd told jazz critic Ira Gitler, “but it has to be beautiful.”

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Mar

In Competitive World of Marching Band One School Takes a Hit

http://www.cronknews.com/2013/03/27/in-competitive-world-of-marching-band-one-school-takes-best-hit/

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Mar

Fran Landesman & the Sad Songs of Spring

When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,” wrote Swinburne, “The mother of months in meadow or plain/Fills the shadows and windy places/With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain”? And who are you or I to gainsay that sentiment, however loaded it may be with hissing sibilants and fricking frickatives?

But those lines, depicted tongue-in-cheek by James Thurber, give no hint of an answer to a more troubling question that arises this time of year: Why are the best of songs about spring–sad?

Swinburne: “Konked,” as Lou Rawls would say, “to the bone.”

It’s that time of year. In spring, we ought to be happy; winter is over, and spring, so long longed for, is here. Perhaps the much-awaited fulfillment of a fervent wish is bound to disappoint.

In spring, as e.e. cummings put it,

when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman whistles far and wee.

A “little lame balloon man”–pretty sad, if you ask me, but you didn’t.

When we sing of spring, we tend–unless we’re idiots humming “Here Comes Peter Cottontail”–to sing sadly.

Fran Landesman

Like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”–lyrics by Fran Landesman, music by Tommy Wolf.

It is the anti-spring song, one for those who once threw their hearts away each spring, but who now say a “spring romance hasn’t got a chance.”

Here is a fine version by Ella Fitzgerald. Landesman has the look of a woman for whom lines of regret such as

Spring this year has got me feeling like a horse that never left the post.
I lie in my room staring up at the ceiling.
Spring can really hang you up the most

were more than an exercise in poesy; someone who was a lot of fun, but who may have waited for some calls that never came as men chose other leggier, prettier girls for–as Cleveland Amory said of a young man from Boston backed by a long-winded reference–breeding purposes. She was called “the Dorothy Parker of jazz,” and many assumed (including me) that she’d been disappointed in love because of her acerbic lyrics.

Ella Fitzgerald

That view, as it turns out, couldn’t have been more wrong. Landesman was happily married for six decades to her husband Jay, publisher of the beat journal Neurotica, and yet he allowed her a wide latitude in romantic affairs. While there’s no registry or clerk’s office in which to record extramarital acts and deeds, it is widely assumed that Landesman was a lover to, among others, both Jack Kerouac, whom she called the handsomest man she ever met, and Lenny Bruce, who proposed to her. “Let’s you and me go on the road,” Bruce wrote to her, “and send Jay a little money every month.”

She described her relationship with her husband in the poem “Semi-Detached”:

We each have a side that’s as free as the air,
And people don’t see the side that we share.
Our set-up is sweet. There isn’t a catch,
The secret is living semi-detached.

“Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” was a play on T.S. Eliot’s line “April is the cruellest month” from The Waste Land, and was apparently part of a high-brow self-deprecating trend among the beatniks to lampoon themselves by re-casting classics such as Shakespeare into hip argot. (Are today’s hipsters in Brooklyn or elsewhere doing anything similar, or even capable of it?) It was first performed, along with “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” in a musical developed from Jay’s unpublished novel about the beat scene in New York, “The Nervous Set.” The show was a huge success in St. Louis, but closed after three weeks when it moved to New York. A half-century later, though, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” is still being performed.

Happy or ecstatic as Landesman may have been with her love life, when she featured it in her work she tended to shine a melancholy light on it; she titled two collections of her poetry Scars and Stripes and How Was It for You? Freed from the convention of monogamy, she may have found pleasure but not necessarily fulfillment.

At the end of her life her sight failed, but she continued to perform her poetry–in a half spoken, half sung fashion all her own–from memory.

The woman who was sometimes called “the godmother of hip” died in July of 2011 at the age of 83, five months after her husband.

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Feb

Poetry and Jazz: Strange Bedmates, Sated at Last

Sherard Vines, a critic whose work has otherwise sunk beneath the waves of literary history, got it right on at least one occasion. “Music,” he said, “has its own way of being efficient, and poetry quite another way.”

Luciana Souza

This formula provides an explanation, in case you were looking for one, for why attempts to combine poetry–as opposed to Tin Pan Alley June-moon lyricizing–with jazz are so universally doomed to fail. Think of all those late night Beat Era sessions at which Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac read his verse–sometimes good in the first case, mostly bad in the second–to some tenor sax player’s rhythmless noodling. If any survive, does anyone listen to them? The question answers itself, res ipsa loquitur as the lawyers say.

Voltaire: “I be down wid dat, dawg.”

This curious inability of the two art forms to conjugate is, I believe, a corollary of an artistic truth first discovered by Voltaire: “That which is too stupid to be said is sung,” he observed. I know this not because I’ve read a lot of Voltaire–I haven’t–but because I heard it on an Animaniacs episode one night. So you can’t accuse me of being too highbrow.

The Animaniacs: My constant companions in the search for deep philosophical truths.

And so poetry, which depends upon compression and form, doesn’t stand–to borrow a great jazz line when sung by Billie Holiday that is merely a cliche when spoken–a ghost of a chance with jazz.

A young Billie Holiday

To every ironclad principle of aesthetic philosophy there is, of course, an exception–in this case provided by Luciana Souza: The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and other songs, an album now a decade old, but still fresh in every respect.

Souza is a forty-something singer, Brazilian by birth, who studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, an incubator for talent brave enough to label themselves as jazz practitioners in a world that has passed jazz by. Elizabeth Bishop is a cross-breed, an innovative formalist whose work always surprises, dead now three decades.

Bishop was born in Worcester, Mass. (I will wait until the raucous applause dies down for the INDUSTRIAL ABRASIVES CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!), but lived in Nova Scotia after her father died and her mother was hospitalized due to mental illness. She attended Vassar where she founded a self-consciously adventuresome literary magazine with upperclass woman Mary McCarthy, who famously said of Stalinist apologist Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The sort of person, as you might imagine, who makes you hesitate before speaking, much less writing, le mot juste and all that jazz.

Mary McCarthy

Able to live on a legacy left by her father, Bishop could afford to travel and in 1951 set off to circumnavigate South America by boat. She arrived in Santos, Brazil in November of that year expecting to stay two weeks, but remained fifteen years, during which time she had a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, a female architect and socialite and a descendant of prominent political family. The two eventually parted, Bishop taking up with another woman before returning to America.

Stevie Smith

Although Bishop was a lesbian she kept her personal life out of her poetry, preferring to be judged solely on the quality of her verse and not on her sexual orientation. At a time when confessional contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were the poetic flavor of the month, she swam against the tides of fashion and, contra Stevie Smith, wasn’t drowning, just waving.

Souza’s interpretation of Bishop’s poems is perhaps weighed down by more emotion than Bishop would have allowed, but then she has transformed them into songs, of which it may be said they are sung, but not thereby rendered stupid.

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Feb

Chick and Ella: Jazz’s Odd Couple

We live in what we congratulate ourselves to be tolerant times, but we have nothing today to compare to William Henry “Chick” Webb, who lived in the first four decades of the twentieth century, which are now recalled as some sort of dark ages compared to the present.

Chick Webb

Webb was hunchbacked, abnormally short–almost a dwarf–with a large head and shoulders, the outward signs of congenital tuberculosis of the spine that had ravaged his body. He was also the hottest jazz drummer of his time, a model for the hyperkinetic white drummers of the next generation such as Buddy Rich and Louis Bellson, who studied him as if they were cramming for a final. His orchestra was less well-known than those of the kings of the swing era, but to a man his competitors dreaded the thought of going head-to-head with him in a Battle of the Bands.

Chick and Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald was eight years younger, at least a head taller and, to be fair, plain, if not homely. She also possessed the purest voice of the swing era; she looked like a square, but she could swing. She wrote the New Testament of scat-singing, a derivation from but elaboration on the Old Testament of Louis Armstrong.

Dig that hat!

Her mother died when she was a teenager, and she lived a catch-as-catch-can life for awhile, working as a lookout at a bordello and as a numbers runner with the Mafia before being sent to reform school. She escaped but was eventually placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronx after living on the streets for awhile.

At the age of 17 she began performing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and in 1934 she won the opportunity to compete in one of its famous “Amateur Nights,” the American Idol of the time. She had intended to dance but, intimidated by a local duo of terpsichorean sisters, she opted to sing in the style of Connee Boswell. She won first prize–$25.

Connee Boswell, casting a “come hither” look

After performing for awhile with Tiny Bradshaw, she was brought to the attention of Webb by Benny Carter. Webb was unimpressed, but was persuaded to let her sing for one night. She was a hit with the audience and was invited to join Webb’s orchestra; he eventually became her legal guardian. Within two years, she was the star of the show, and in 1938 had a huge hit with “A Tisket, A Tasket.” Five years earlier she had been homeless.

Benny Carter

So there they were; a hunchbacked dwarf and a woman who towered over him at the top of the pop charts and producing hot jazz that can be listened to with delight today.

Webb’s health had always been precarious and, like many whose bodies have been shrunken by disease, he was not long for the world. He died in 1939 at the age of 30. His last words were “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”

Ella fronted Webb’s band until 1942 when it broke up. She recorded for Decca for two decades, but her best recordings were made in the autumn of her life; the Verve songbooks, which featured her surrounded by elite jazz musicians singing the works of one composer or composing team per album–Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rogers and Hart.

She made four albums with Louis Armstrong, all of which are candidates for records you’d take with you to a desert island. Her final years were spent recording for Norman Granz’s Pablo label, and on these senior citizen sets her voice has diminished somewhat, but is still as clear as the water at the edge of a creek bank.

She lived four decades longer than Webb, and we are left to wonder what might have been had he aged with her; her middle period would have been more hot than sweet, and the beat behind her might have been more urgent. Her candle might have burned out sooner, so perhaps we should be thankful that instead it faded to a low, blue flame before she died.

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