oh play that thing

Somehow I’d managed to convince myself that the capacity to learn to play a musical instrument was directly proportional to the amount of time spent listening to it in the hands of experts. Forty plus years of absorption should surely at least give me a good head start. I was about to become a musical opsimath.

By steady attrition, I eventually selected the alto saxophone as my intended instrument. The tenor is a lot heavier to lug around and I’d read somewhere that the soprano’s fingering is more difficult to conquer, so the alto seemed a promising compromise.

For the first few weeks I appeared to be progressing well. I wanted to play “Ornithology” but my music teacher insisted I practise scales. Within a couple of months, I’d more or less mastered the key of C and could play the first few bars of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” Then a musician friend lent me a microphone and suggested I record myself as an aid to improving technique.

That was a mistake. The lowing and mooing from the tape deck was nothing like the mellifluous sounds I heard in my head. So I started to work on improving my tone. I changed reeds, bought metal mouthpieces, cleaned the horn from time to time, puckered my lips a little more than was natural and thought Paul Desmond. Still I sounded like a lovelorn stag arriving too late for the rut.

But I persevered. I acquired a couple more scales, played along with Dexter Gordon on my favourite version of “Lullaby of Birdland” and generally drove my neighbours to the verge of suicide. At the time we lived on a farm and the neighbours were a barn full of cows – that’s a measure of how bad I was.

After about 18 months, a new music teacher expressed concern that I couldn’t play “God Save the Queen” by ear, I was incapable of improvising on “Three Blind Mice” and his neighbours were now beginning to complain about the noise on Saturday mornings. To add to my distress, a fellow pupil, a young girl who had been learning for about six months, was actually playing in an amateur swing band and was already romping through “Seventy-six Trombones” at a fair lick.

The final nail in my musical coffin was when I flicked open a biography of Ronnie Scott and read that Pete King was playing professionally in clubs within two years of picking up a saxophone for the first time. After two years, I managed a faltering “Auld Lang Syne” at a friend’s Old Year’s Night trosh and still sounded worse than the ships in the Wash at midnight. What should have been inspiration proved to be a deterrent. I admitted defeat. I sold the saxophone on e-bay.

I’ve now bought a penny whistle; I’m rubbish on that too. I’m going to try the kazoo next. It worked for Red McKenzie. What I don’t understand is this: how can anyone love jazz the way I do and be such a total failure at trying to play the stuff?

if silence is golden, you ain't worth a dime, 'cos your mind is on vacation but your mouth is working overtime

A few years ago I went with a couple of musicians to a big-band jazz concert in a public hall near King’s Lynn. During proceedings, one of my companions asked a particularly vocal lady to keep her voice down. She objected and a brawl almost ensued. We were asked to leave to forestall trouble, a little unfairly I thought. I missed more than half the programme of a superb swing band, but all my teeth were intact.

Live jazz in pubs and clubs can be a tricky issue. The good manager will be aware of the need to maintain a fine balance between the wishes of those there to listen to music and have a drink at the same time and those there to drink with a background of music. Sometimes the two groups can’t be reconciled easily, especially in pubs; they are there for different reasons and often mingle uncomfortably.

A pub near Norwich ran Friday lunchtime jazz sessions, presenting such local luminaries as Stella Goodey, James Goodwin and Derek Cubbitt. The music was played against an unremitting soundscape of chinking plates, scraping chairs on a tiled floor, repeated creaking of a servery door and buzz of conversation.

Yet neither musicians nor audience complained about background noise. They knew they were in an environment where about half the audience were there to hear them, the other half out for a pleasurable time. Nobody competed for ears. Somehow everyone found what they were looking for. And the same applied in most pubs dishing up successful live jazz.

I was reminded of this when I listened recently to a CD – Charles Mingus on Charles Mingus. In the introduction to the singular “Folk Forms No. 1” he appeals for quiet. “Restrain your applause… in fact don’t even take any drinks… or no cash registers ringing etc.” This was Mingus pretending to be recording in the electrifying atmosphere of a club, when in reality he was in the studios. He wanted the musicians to play as if they had the stimulus of an audience.

Some of the best jazz recordings are live in front of a vociferous audience – tracks by Wynton Marsalis, Chris Barber and Roland Kirk to name just five (Marsalis and Kirk should be there twice). I actually relish LP tracks reverberating with the rattle of ice in a glass, the murmur of voices at the bar and the thunder of rapturous applause. (That’s a Jungian slip – who talks about LPs these days?) Let’s never forget that our music was conceived and nurtured in drinking houses and dance halls and came of age in clubs and bars. Some will argue with justification that jazz started to decline the day it moved into the concert hall. In my view, jazz, and perhaps music generally, should be heard only with somebody shouting “Nigel” in the background. (Mercy, Mercy, Mercy – Cannonball Adderley – at least it sounds like Nigel to me).

In my modest opinion, if Mingus had really wanted his musicians to relax as if they were in a club atmosphere, he should have invited an audience to dance, holler and start fights. Or maybe supply his men with viper, but that’s another story. We need a campaign – more live music in front of audiences prepared to demonstrate their enjoyment of what they’re hearing.

why don't you do right?

A few weeks ago, The Times ran the obituary of Lawrence Lucie, the jazz guitarist. As would be expected from such an august publication, it was a considered, well-formulated piece of prose, setting out the history of this Methuselah of the rhythm section. Obituary authors are never identified; they prefer anonymity, presumably to avoid the risk of taking away the final limelight from the recently departed.

Yet I can’t help wondering who wrote it. A very interesting phrase was used in the body of the text. It reads: “The records by Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen, with the saxophonist Sidney Bechet, became classics of traditional jazz.”

The word ‘traditional’ in that sentence puzzles me. What does it mean set into the context of the period when the recordings were made, the early 1940s. I thought traditional jazz was a uniquely British 50s invention, intended to separate modernists (We love Charlie Parker) from mouldy figs (Go home dirty bopper). I’ve never before heard the word ‘traditional’ used with quite the meaning conveyed in this article. Surely the New Orleans Jazzmen played jazz? We have no need to qualify it with the word ‘traditional.’ The style of jazz played by Morton was the original jazz and, many would say, the only true form of jazz.

Modern jazz (as in be-bop and its multiplicity of spawn, good and bad) took the genre of music in a new direction. It remained jazz primarily because the main exponents of the new craft started life playing the old jazz. They carried the word through to the new music. That’s a little like David Beckham inventing an entirely new team game using a shuttlecock and insisting on calling it ‘smooth football.’

I have no real gripe against most forms of jazz being called jazz. But my concern is that some of the stuff being rammed into our ears today is presented with the title ‘jazz’ when in reality the sounds are as closely related to the original thing as fine French brie is to cat food.

Play what music you like; I will applaud you. Create any sound taking your fancy; I will give it a fair audience. Record it and perform it; I will pay to listen. Publish the sheet music and take the royalties; I will make my contribution unflinchingly. Promote your music any way you think appropriate; I will support you.

But please – PLEASE – do not call it jazz purely because you believe you can benefit from the reflected glory of true jazz. The word jazz needs protecting from the unscrupulous and the opportunist. What we need is a conservation order slapped on the word ‘jazz’ so only the real thing can be so described. It worked for sherry and cheddar cheese.

We need a campaign.

if I Hadi talking picture

One of the great unsung heroes of the alto and tenor saxophones was a man named Curtis Porter. He’s probably better known as Shafi Hadi, no doubt having changed his name on religious grounds during the late 1950s.But even as Shafi Hadi, few will have encountered him because he appears to have enjoyed no more than the metaphorical 15 minutes of fame. By then, he’d dropped into semi-obscurity.

I first heard him in about 1962 or 1963 when Mingus and his Tijuana Moods album erupted into my hitherto cloistered British-trad-jazz-revival consciousness. Suddenly I was listening to a sax player capable, in my opinion, of trouncing the great Bird himself.

His tone was cut of the best diamond, sharp yet plaintiff, stuffed full of 100 carat emotion and bluesy fire. Solos were considered and intelligent, delivered with exacting precision. Phrasing and intonation were often laconic; he eschewed the fusillades of notes. For him, his jazz was not about increasing the numbers of notes per second by running frenetically up and down the chords, but was more to do with turning short sentences and phrases into pithy sayings of expressive substance. Pauses were as significant as the notes themselves; somehow he stitched silence with sound to produce solos of the utmost beauty.

Little is know about him. He started playing in various R&B bands (before R&B become a corrupted concept) and I know for a while he was associated with Hank Mobley. His first recording venture with Mingus was “The Clown” in early 1957 (about 6 months after becoming a jazz player at the age of 26) and he was involved with the great bassist on at least seven albums until middle 1959.

During 1958 he collaborated with John Cassavetes on the sound track for the producer’s film “Shadows” in which Mingus was also involved. Cassavetes acted out the roles as Hadi improvised accompanying music. Cassavetes wrote: “It was terrific. He played the story of his life to music.” The actor also records that Hadi was married, was large in stature as well as creativity, and stood physically tall. Nat Hentoff in the liner notes for “The Clown” writes that Hadi had said after the recording: “I think more jazz groups should tell stories like Mingus does, instead of just playing notes and techniques.”

And then Shafi Hadi apparently disappeared from the centre of the jazz scene. Nobody seems to know where he went, or what he did, although rumours abounded. He’d become a painter; he’d been in prison; he’d died from a drugs overdose in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. None of this is substantiated. He comes across as a shadowy figure. Writers of liner notes give sketchy details of the man, but rarely show any sign of knowing him well or even considering him important. And yet he’d demonstrated the capacity to be a monumental instrumentalist.

My favourite Hadi solos are on “Los Mariachis” from Mingus’ Tia Juana Moods Album. Listen to it, and if anyone knows more about this enigmatic and quiet genius, I’d love to hear.

clap hands, here comes charlie

Surely everybody knows that another musician has becoming legend: Les Paul. His death last week has prompted an entire litany of reviews, memorials and obituaries. He had a long and proud innings, being 94 when he died, so his fans (both professional and lay) have a lot of great stuff to remember him by. I never knew him, so I’d be disingenuous to say I’m sad. But I recognise the lacuna his passing leaves.

If I understand what I read correctly, Les Paul was instrumental in moving the guitar from the back row to the front of the band. One obituary suggested he’d invented the electric guitar, but in fact he’d created the solid electric guitar. Pre-Paul, the electric guitar was acoustic with an amplifier attached beneath the bridge. What he did was convert a plank of wood into musical notes and inspired countless youths to participate in turning the guitar into what is now probably the world’s most popular instrument. Yep – it’s all his fault.

A few years before Les, a great jazz musician took an electric guitar and sat in the front row with it, playing as if it was a melody instrument alongside the saxophone or trumpet. Others had experimented before him, but I think I’m right in saying that in the middle 1930s Charlie Christian was the first jazz guitarist to use his instrument other than for strumming or performing quick breaks in rare solos. He took the jazz world by the throat and moved even hardened professional cynics and virtuosi like Benny Goodman to suddenly sit up and take the jazz guitar seriously as a lead instrument.

Some of Christian’s best work was with the Goodman and Lionel Hampton bands. He drove many of the numbers as part of the rhythm section and then stepped forward to solo with as much creativity and flair as Goodman’s clarinet or Hampton’s vibraphone. Listen to “Seven Come Eleven” and “Honeysuckle Rose” (both 22 November 1939) and “Haven’t Named It Yet” or “”One Sweet Letter From You” from a month or two earlier.

My personal favourite, though, is his “Swing to Bop” (also known as Charlie’s Choice), an improvisation on Basie’s “Topsy,” recorded at Minton’s in May 1941. With the house trumpeter, Joe Guy, who for years I believed was Roy Eldridge performing under a pseudonym, Kenny Clarke (d) and not Thelonious Monk on piano as the album claimed but probably Kenny Kersey, this impromptu quintet jammed to provide a carriage for what is in my opinion the best guitar solo ever recorded. It swings with breath-taking confidence and Christian’s phrasing and flow of ideas stoked the energy until the number pulses and builds to a febrile crescendo of foot-tapping and be-bopping proportions. This is unalloyed swinging jazz with exposed-nerves excitement.

Why do I bring this up now? Both men were born in the same nascent era of jazz – Paul in 1915 and Christian a year later. Les Paul had a long and distinguished musical innings. Charlie Christian had a very short life – he died in 1942 of TB aged about 25 after a recording career of little more than about three years. Yet in their spheres, both had enormous influence. Les Paul’s legacy will be cause for celebration for many years to come; Charlie Christian’s is still recognised throughout the jazz fraternity.

I can’t resist asking myself what would have been if Charlie Christian hadn’t died so young. Kenny Clarke, the infamous be-bop drummer, said Christian would have been a real modern if he’d lived. He said those words long before the word ‘modern’ began to lose some its clarity. I suspect part of his meaning is lost in the passage of time.

But I wonder how many of today’s guitarists understand the debt they owe to Charlie Christian. Everyone seems to forget that Rock & Roll (the progenitor of today’s popular music) was a scion of jazz.

mercy, mercy, mercy

This posting is not strictly about jazz. It’s a cry of despair. Music is becoming far too intrusive into my life and I don’t know what to do about it.

Everywhere I go, I’m bombarded by music. I love my jazz (and often listen to other genres of music) but I would like to be able to listen to it when I want, not when some faceless cynical misanthrope in a seriously misguided marketing department feels I should.

For example, we lunched with friends at the Unthank Arms in Norwich. It’s an excellent pub serving good food. I was slightly disappointed with the range of real ales (meaning they didn’t have Abbot) but the Wherry was in good shape. In spite of the average age of the clientele being somewhere between middle-age and the catafalque, we were assaulted by pumping heavy metal rock, inappropriate for a pub at 10pm on a Friday night, never-mind 1.45 on a Thursday afternoon. Of course, the girls behind the bar were very pretty, but were only recently through puberty; obviously they chose the only music they know. Where’s the landlord’s guiding hand? My impression of the pub was severely tarnished. I’ll not return.

After lunch, we moved on to Dunelm, a vast household and fabrics warehouse on the inner ring road. Mrs Dodman wanted fabric for the cushions she’s making for our new house (subject to contract). As we waited to be served, we found ourselves standing beneath a loudspeaker set into the ceiling. It blasted a scattergun of Radio Dunelm at us so we could scarcely hear what the very helpful shop assistant was telling us. Background music I can just about tolerate, but this was virtually inside me. Why so damnably loud? Hasn’t somebody told management that the military use such techniques as a form of torture to weaken the resolve of the Taliban? And it works.

The problem is becoming endemic; it’s a plague. Few shops and pubs are without blaring perambulatory accompaniment, especially larger chain stores. It’s a greater threat to my health than swine flue, blue-tongue disease and e-coli all rolled into one. If I find a blissfully quiet shop, a car will pull up outside with its 5000 amp multi-woofer pounding until my eardrums are aching in sympathy with the welding holding the car together. What is wrong with a little silence occasionally? Will we all suddenly die of boredom if the music stops for just one minute?

Let’s start a campaign to abolish piped music once and for all. As part of the lobby, everybody over the age of sixty could drive around with car windows open playing Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” at full volume. That’ll get the bastards running for cover. And let’s see if we can force a change in attitude before the shops all start playing those excruciating Christmas tracks.

portrait

On the wall of my study (which, incidentally, the estate agent insists on dubbing bedroom 3) is a poster-sized reproduction of Art Kane’s famous 1958 photograph of 57 jazz musicians assembled in Harlem for an Esquire Magazine photo-shoot.

Many of the greats of the day turned up. The perimeters of the image are defined by Benny Golson (top left – ts), Johnny Griffin (top right – ts), Dizzy Gillespie (bottom right – t) and Gigi Gryce (bottom left – as). The odd shaped trapezium thus formed circumscribes such illustrious names as Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Max Kaminsky, Jimmy Rushing, Art Farmer and Lester Young. Count Basie is also in the photograph, but he chose to sit on the kerb at the edge of the group, alongside twelve local youngsters who were determined to get in on the act.

Imagine - fifty-seven of the top jazz musicians in the world standing together on a set of grubby steps outside a bland Harlem tenement building straight out of the Godfather. I know if we could give them all instruments and ask them to play Perdido the sound would probably be excruciating, but how many permutations of small groups could we have jamming together in sublime symphony? The mind boggles.

Now take it one step further. How many didn’t make the photo-shoot for one reason or another? Henry ‘Red’ Allen, for example; Eddie Condon; Edmond Hall; Lionel Hampton; Dexter Gordon; Barney Kessel; Bud Powell…. the list is not endless but it’s significantly longer than my blog capabilities. I can’t attempt to calculate how many jazz greats could have been involved, given the time or the opportunity. So what’s the number of permutations of potential small groups now?

New York in 1958 must have been the Mount Olympus of jazz. From here, these musicians wrought their instruments for domination of the universe of music. It all seems so long ago – so historical. And yet about half the youngsters sitting proudly in front of their living idols were probably born in the same year as I was.

Art Kane was in exactly the right place at the right time to take a precise snapshot of the state of jazz in the USA at a critical juncture. Thereafter, change accelerated and the idiom moved in new directions – for better or for worse. In some ways, the photograph must have been a valedictory, an end of term group photograph. What’s the chance of a 2009 version? If one was produced today, how many of us would be able to put names to more than a few faces, let alone know their oeuvres?

The best thing is the poster covers a mark on the wall. Such versatility; Art Kane was obviously a genius.