do you know what it means to miss new orleans?

Suppertime is never really good for philosophical debate. This could be because antacids and digestive juices react chemically with abstractions. Or maybe it’s the fact that our suppers tend to be excuses for quaffing copious volumes of red wine, port and single malt. Either way, as evenings process into late nights, supper conversation tends to become a little more intense, pensive and irrational in nature.

Here is the question from a recent bibulous encounter over plates of stilton, brie “Rustica” and Jacob’s cream crackers: if jazz were a language, which would it be?

One diner thought Spanish, reasoning that Spain’s fiery national traits were a strong parallel for the evolution of our favourite music. It’s a large country of diverse landscapes and enough land to allow very different forms of culture to co-exist happily, without unduly restricting parochial and regional aspirations. It can be at once introspective, romantic and exciting – this is all reflected in the language. My Spanish vocabulary is limited to calling “Hola!” across a road so I nodded sagely without attempting to contradict. Somebody did start to relate the Basque separatist cause to the history of Jazz, but by then the stopper was out of the whisky. “Mingus is to jazz what the Basques are to Spain,” explained my friend, as if I had a chance of understanding what he meant. Was Mingus a Basque separatist? “It’s an analogy,” he despaired as I poured myself a large tumbler of malt.

The Maestro thought that he could detect a clear Teutonic influence. “We like to pretend jazz is one original phrase after another, but in reality proponents tend to adhere to quite strictly established formats. Pass the whisky.” I obeyed. “The Germans are like that,” he continued. “Hitler tried to ban jazz, but that’s only because he didn’t understand the music.”

“It’s Italian,” proclaimed a visiting marine biologist. “Totally mad, chaotic and undisciplined,” he argued, but then the man is a self-confessed devotee of Ornette Coleman.

“Probably Latin,” I ventured.” Laughter rippled around the table. “A dead language,” said the cello player. But Latin is not a dead language; it’s an immutable language. That’s the great strength of Latin. No interfering scholar attempts to tinker with it and send it careering towards that oblivion where pedants while away idle hours writing letters to ‘The Times’ about the inexorable dilution of the English language, totally ignoring 2000 years of linguistic history. “You know where you stand with Latin,” I explained. “It’s cast iron.” The port came round again, closely followed by whisky “You see, there’s only one true jazz – New Orleans. All the others are scions, off-shoots, hybrids, but they are never true original jazz. New Orleans is THE jazz – it can’t move or change. Time and idioms marched on, leaving New Orleans unchanged. Like Latin.”

“It’s all double-Dutch to me,” chipped-in Mrs Pooter Dodman. “The X-Factor is just about to start. Shall we go through to the lounge?”

The Maestro and I stayed at the table, gently swirling whisky. “Bad year for mushrooms,” he slurred.
“Is that an analogy?” I asked.
He peered at me through the bottom of his glass.
“No. It’s a Bunnahabhain,” he said.

yesterdays

A couple of days ago I made a prize acquisition. A charity shop in Sleaford had for sale an old Panasonic record player. A label on the dusty black casing read simply “PATS tested. Pooter. £5.00.” The machine even had my name on it. How could I resist? I bought it and carried it home.

The record player dates from the days when the original Dansette and Bush portables were in decline and manufacture was switching to places like Japan to produce a new breed of sleek, smoky-dark, Perspex-rendered modernistic products. It predates Euronics (whatever they are) and I suspect the anatomy of my new acquisition has more mechanical parts than a 1950s Meccano kit. It was produced when the word “digital” meant you used fingers to press buttons.

Mrs Pooter was not too impressed. I’m from the era of 78rpm and she’s more of your 45rpm age. “What do you want with that old thing?” she queried. The answer was obvious to me. So I can play my old albums on it, of course. “You’ve only got one,” she grumbled and left the study to stir the contents of the Remoska. She’s right of course. I do have only one album – but what an album! It’s Charlie Christian live at Minton’s in May 1941. I bought it on E-bay some years ago and have been waiting for this opportunity to play it on a genuine old-style record player. I also have a single – Hard Work by John Handy, but I question whether this latter disc can be regarded as jazz. It’s more R&B-cum-funk.

Despite uxorial reservations, the search is on. I want to buy old jazz LPs and EPs. Modern CDs are too clinically pristine for me, even the re-mastered ones. Reproduction is perfect to the extent that even Kid Ory sounds as if he recorded the track yesterday. All those atmospheric clicks and crackles have been digitised out. My tasty pig’s ear has been turned into synthetic yet expensive silk

Those for whom youth is still an anchor to their perceptions will probably not understand what I mean. But I was brought up on the then radically different and glorious Radio Luxembourg (hissing and fading) and warped shellac 78rpm disks that wobbled on the turn table and scratched irremediably the first time they were played. My original Bud Freemans never sounded as if he was standing next me in a synthesised and antiseptic recording studio; they sounded as if the band had performed on toy instruments in a noisy tin-lined club on the floor below. I’m conditioned to expect jazz to be enjoyed with socks in the ears and rusty nails being used as a stylus. Wonderful stuff.

Now, my new-old Panasonic turntable allows me to relive my youth. Charlie crackles and clicks, and clatters and claws, as only true and genuine jazz can and should. This is jazz with a capital C. I’m in my element again. I have jazz with the C-Factor. And I love it.

Dinah

Driving home the other day, I listened to an old cassette. It’s a little stretched now so takes time to reel in the slack enough to operate at the correct speed, and the crackles are becoming more noticeable, but I tolerate its shortcomings because the tape contains a prime example of what I believe to be perfect jazz.

The track is by the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and is titled “Dinah.” I actually have two versions of the number, both recorded on the same day, 21 December 1939 in New York. The line up is Hampton (vib), Benny Carter (tp), Edmond Hall (cl), Coleman Hawkins (ts), Joe Sullivan (p), Freddie Green (g), Artie Bernstein (b) and Zutty Singleton (d). The lesser version is superb and was originally issued on the Victor Label 26557/Master BS 046024-1. Take 2, however, is perfection personified.

This, of course, does provoke the debate “What is perfect jazz?” That I can’t answer. The subject is too subjective and probably anyway demands the expertise of a musicologist to expound meaningfully. But I can explain why Take 2 of “Dinah” is perfect to my inexpert ear.

After an initial couple of bars from Hampton’s vibraphone, it explodes with three simple notes from the trumpet. The tone and exhilaration of that triplet bursts into the senses like rifle fire and brings goose pimples to the flesh of my arm. Benny Carter is better know for his saxophone work, but his opening solo on “Dinah” proves he was of equal measure on both instruments. This is the most awakening and scintillating opening chord of any jazz track I know, including Armstrong’s “West End Blues.”

The improvisation is a perfect example of how to take a well-known theme and weave something wonderfully creative and new without completely losing all traces of the original melody. Carter starts the track spinning, Coleman Hawkins on tenor picks up the thread beautifully and Hampton himself maintains the flow. The entire 2 minutes 36 seconds is tightly-packed and perfectly co-ordinated with each and every instrumentalist fully understanding (and demonstrating) what jazz generally, and this number in particular, is all about.

The number swings. I use that term a lot. I don’t mean to imply that good jazz MUST necessarily swing, but this one has the added bonus of not just swing, but drive as well. It scoots along rhythmically at a pace to outrun a cheetah yet never flags, never tires. Muscle is provided by the steady pound of drum, guitar and bass, in their background way exhorting the melody instruments to excel. And their efforts are rewarded by success. Foot-tapping is not mandatory; it’s ineluctable.

The ebullience is heightened when the band begins to riff behind the vibraphone solo. The repeated refrain never dominates but simply underscores the efforts of the band’s leader, lending perfect support to the outflow of originality as his solo progresses. A good riff is a thing of great artistic beauty. This is the Mona Lisa of all riffs. The excitement mounts as all musicians bend into the recording with every kinetic ounce of their gargantuan skill

These are masters of their instruments. Each and every one can probably hear the sounds in their heads a fraction of a second before they replicate the note with absolute perfection. All instinctively know what the others have in their minds, some innate sense allowing them to anticipate where the rest of the band members are headed. The result is perfect harmony and co-ordination. I freely admit I am in a layman’s awe of the art of the jazz instrumentalist.

Because the track is less than 3 minutes long, it doesn’t have time to start to jade like so many post-LP jazz numbers. It says what it has to say, no more or less, in a forthright and succinct way and, having said it, comes to a striding and confident end, leaving the listener slightly breathless, exhilarated and wishing for more of the same.

Listen to “Dinah.” It’s one of my nominations for the honorific of “perfect jazz.”

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.