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.

the music goes round and round

These are names we don’t hear much of these days: Red McKenzie (kazoo); Yank Lawson (t); Eddie Miller (cl-ts); Nappy Lamare (g); Bob Haggart (b); Ray Bauduc (d). Bunny Berigan (t) and Eddie Condon (g) drifted in and out of the band known for years as the Mound City Blue Blowers.

I’ve never fully understood how anyone can make a living playing a comb and paper anywhere other than in an underpass adjacent to Charing Cross tube station. And yet Red McKenzie was a successful band leader from about 1924 until at least 1937, and in fact continued playing at his own New York club until his death in February 1948.

The recordings I listened to while cooking a pair of lamb chops were from 1935 and 1936. They are mostly well-known standards such as High Society and Muskrat Ramble. Vocal numbers include She’s a Latin from Manhattan, On Treasure Island and Mama Don’t Allow It. Red was first and foremost a vocalist, although his singers on this album also include Spooky Dickenson and Billy Wilson. They all have that natural resonance in their voices as if they’re singing through a megaphone. The Temperance Seven took them off perfectly.

In the days when radio was called wireless, the Mound City Blue Blowers could be heard quite often in Britain. Today, I can’t remember the last time I heard one of their tracks on the airwaves. But then I play my albums rather than listen to the radio (except R3 JRR when I can) so I’m not a reliable source. The rasping notes of the kazoo swept through my kitchen as a great waft of fresh air on a sultry day.

What these tracks do is swing. That’s swing with a lower-case s, not to be confused with Swing which is an entire genre of jazz. And it reminded me of the essence of jazz, something which many musicologists and commentators apparently ignore – jazz was first and foremost dance music. It was for roughly the first 50 years of its existence a means of getting people dancing. A cynic might say the next 50 years was all downhill as arty jazz musicians started prodding around introspectively in their navels rather than trying to arouse the audience. But that would be to make an unjust sweeping statement, true though it is in part.

Yep. The Mound City Blue Blowers had me stomping my feet and banging saucepan lids in Krupa exuberance. The noise from the kitchen was cacophonous but the music was sublime, just sublime, as Para Handy would have said. And please don’t confuse Para with John, Captain or otherwise.

Let’s start a campaign – bring the kazoo back to jazz.

kirk's works

I try to avoid using the term ‘greatest’ of any individual jazz performer. Occasionally I’ll forget in my enthusiasm for one particular player, but as a rule I prefer to think in terms of many greats rather than the single greatest. Lists appear everywhere claiming to identify the “100 Greatest” this or that, but in reality the heading is merely a felony against the conventions of English grammar.

In jazz, nobody is the greatest.

To illustrate my point, consider what goes into making someone great, and let’s use an alto sax player as an example. Many varied factors combine to allow the player to produce the sound he or she does: the quality of build of the specific instrument and the artificer’s skill; the player’s embouchure and cavity of the mouth; type of reed and mouthpiece; choice of style; originality and creativeness of improvisation; robustness of performance; fingering technique; determination, practice and inspiration. No doubt I’ve omitted a few, but the sound that comes out of the horn is a meld of all these different influences. Rarely do two players sound exactly the same, despite my frequent failure to name a soloist correctly.

Now consider three saxophonists: Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman and Cannonball Adderley. Each is (or was) a distinctive player, immediately identifiable. All were massively successful jazzmen. Each produced a vast personal catalogue of brilliant music enthralling the world for years. All three were technical masters of their instruments. Each played his own idiom of jazz. So how can we select out of this diversity which one could truly be awarded the title of “The Greatest”? We’re comparing brie with claret with whisky.

I have my favourites, of course. But that doesn’t mean they are greats, yet alone be nominees for the accolade of greatest. My preferences are purely subjective, as are yours. The most technically proficient player of all time might well bore me rigid because I don’t enjoy the creativity coming out of the instrument. Often I can’t define what it is that draws me to a particular player. So to attempt to pin the red rosette for best of breed on one specific person is fatuous.

And yet, if I was locked in a dungeon and denied freedom until I nominated a definitive candidate for investiture of the title ‘The Greatest’ I’d probably have to nominate Rahsaan Roland Kirk. His contribution to the history of our music arguably left a tad fainter mark than many others but, when considering the material characteristics of this Hector of jazz, his greatness is possibly just a little more effulgent than that of all others.

For a start he was self-taught but as a teenager he was performing with a band and at the tender age of 25 he stood artistically proud alongside Mingus. He originated his own musical instruments and adapted the keys so he could play three at once. Whistles and sirens became part of his palette. He perfected a system of circular breathing (in the nose and out the mouth) so he had the dubious ability to sustain a note almost indefinitely. I read somewhere that he could even play two melodies at once, but I’ve never heard that in practice. Even after he suffered a stroke and became virtually paralysed in one side, he still continued to perform. He wrote wonderful compositions. His range of styles started at be-bop and never finished, yet incorporated New Orleans, blues, mainstream, modern and funk. When he played the flute, he would sometimes sing along simultaneously, guttering and humming growlingly. He had superb mastery over all his chosen instruments. The creativity and originality of the man seemed to be unbounded.

And he was blind, almost from birth.

Kirk had his critics. Purists would look down their noses at his strange assortment of instruments and dismiss his work as gimmick. As jazz went through anxious and melodramatic metamorphosis in the 60s, leaving many of us perplexed and confused by what we heard, Kirk drove his chariot furiously in the vanguard of the hedonistic charge towards exploration and chaos. Sometimes excruciating, sometimes sublime, Kirk was salient in pushing boundaries of contemporary creation. Genius? I’m not qualified to say, but the man undoubtedly had greatness beyond just great.

Then my bubble burst. Somehow I missed his Blacknuss album of 1972 (six years before he died at the age of 41). I bought it on e-bay recently. I have to admit if I’d heard his version of My Girl before Hog Callin’ Blues I’d probably have turned my back on Kirk and rejected his music as stuff to play in a lift at a seedy hotel. What was his thinking in producing something so lacklustre and mediocre? Even the arrangements make little more than a barely discernible nod towards jazz.

But the great are human too. No doubt Blacknuss was a bid for commercial success. I hope it worked for him at the time. If Einstein or Masefield were to be judged by their weakest efforts, they wouldn’t today carry the respect they do. Kirk deserves the same consideration. Dare I reiterate he was the greatest ever jazzman? Of course not, but Kirk is certainly up there among the best.

i know that you know

Although you’re probably no more interested than I was, I thought I should report that the painfully young candidate won the North Norwich by-election on Thursday. She was the one who kept saying “you know” during the hustings.

She pronounces the words “you know” without any hint of a question mark at the end - you know, when the final word is given an upward lilt, as in “You know?” Rather she uses the phrase as an imperial command, as if to hint that I’m being perverse in affecting not to know, but she knows that I do know. I feel as if I’m being reprimanded, as in “You damned well do know!”

She’s one of Cameron’s bitches. I suspect she’s full of good ideas. Someone ought to tell her that throughout history new ideas have been responsible for all the world’s ills. We humans should take our lead from nature. Animals don’t have new ideas. They simply get on with life, evolving slowly without ambition or schemes other than to live beyond the next crepuscular curtain fall. But I have a feeling that a whole charnel-house of new ideas is about to drop into our lives. Sometimes I’m relieved to be old.

I wanted to ask a question of this newest and youngest MP. Why do programmers at the BBC treat their listeners with such contempt? Yesterday I tuned in at the regular time for Jazz Record Requests, only to hear some distant and tuneless organ grinding away like background tracks to a Gothic Hammer House of Horror film. Apparently, the BBC decided to delay my jazz (yes – MY jazz) in favour of a live (another parenthesis – I’m not sure live is the correct word) recital from the Albert Hall. What is this curious obsession the BBC has with live broadcasts? Why must my music be delayed to make way for something which sounds a damned sight better on record anyway? I had to miss the first ¾ of Geoffrey Smith’s programme because I had other things to do.

Already I can sense somebody saying you can listen to the programme on the internet. But that’s fine if you have a high-powered 48 gigabit fibre-optic super-fast Virgin internet connection less than 100 yards from a telephone exchange. I don’t. I have an old-fashioned dial-up system giving me about 0.25kb a minute. It would take me about 2 weeks to listen to an hour’s worth of jazz albums through my computer.

I wanted to ask the new MP whether she would take my plaint to parliament and raise the issue in the House. But I think she’s probably too busy being clear about things and assuring us she’s entirely transparent. She’s undoubtedly fully occupied formulating youthful new ideas that are brimming to be released into the atmosphere as soon as the holidays are over. God help us all. You know?

monk, bunk and vice versa

For yesterday’s supper I cooked a chicken marinade of garlic, whole-grain mustard and soy sauce, dished up with potatoes and runner beans. As an aperitif, I quaffed lightly of Art Pepper and to accompany the meal I served a classic fine 1947 Monk. I avoid writing the latter’s forename because I don’t know how to spell it. Some experts cite Thelonious and others Thelonius and they’re pretty well evenly split. But then I’m grateful for the fact that the pianist is one of the small band of famous who manage with purely a surname, like Beiderbecke, Roach and Ellington.

Digestion was not aided by a later night cap – a TV programme about the Norwich North by-election taking place this week. What a depressingly young and inexperienced bunch of candidates, most of whom look to my ageing eyes as if they should still be practising their seven times table. They talk in clichés, as if they’re reciting from an issued reader. They were all “clear and transparent” which in reality means they are obfuscating the truth. Each and every one followed the party line while claming to be an independent spirit. We watched them with a creeping feeling of doom, Mrs Dodman and I. One says “you know” all the time as if the short phrase automatically implies axiom. They are all ardent and sincere; each and everyone will put aside ambition to work tirelessly on behalf of the local community. Yet we all know the elected candidate will eventually be just another expendable grinning yapping avaricious head on the Hydra of politics.

Not one mentioned jazz, at least before I dozed off. For twenty-five years I’ve voted independent, putting my cross against any candidate professing to enjoy a good foot-tapping clarinet solo. I figure that anyone appreciating jazz should be given a chance. The rest are too worn out from the exhausting requirement of keeping up party appearances. I know that’s a non-sequitur, but I had a late night.