Art
Jam #1, MGreene
November 24, 2002, Interesting discussion between an older musician and a couple of musicians from the Detroit, Michigan, area--it had to do with influences, the old musician talking about purity, nurturing a seedling garden of musics that came about in the US of A full force right after World War II. Kids in the late forties and early fifties were of a special generation. That generation had no designation, like the Lost Generation, the Beatniks, or Generation X; in fact, a good designation for that generation would be the Forgotten Generation, or for an even crueler appellation, how about the Never-Heard-of Generation. The old musician's generation, a generation that turned its back on Swing, Jump, Boogie, a generation like the Beats there when Be-bop up and changed the mainstream of jazz, which is all Swing was, a white interpretation of black jazz out of New Orleans, Harlem, Chicago's Mafia jazz clubs, and the Middle American big band jazz coming out of the Midwest, especially Kansas City, truly out of which came Charles Parker, Junior, and in New York advanced by a bunch of super musicians coming out of the Deep South, like Dizzy and John Coltrane, though their southern-style of music learning had been heartily refined after these geniuses settled in the confines of the New York City scene during and after WWII. Miles was from the Midwest. What a gathering. And it happened at the same time the old musician was learning music, taking piano lessons and being classically trained in the rudiments of ancient music. Listening to the early bop was quite a revealing experience. Some of the Swing charts had been hairy, sure, but the bop charts were head arrangements, spontaneous blowing, taking off on a riff and improvising through measure after measure of crescendo and diminuendo--oh, the freedom of it--blow, man, blow, that was the order of the day in jazz. Just blow. Yeah, you knew all the notes, the chords, the forms, shit, those were engrained in your head--everybody had music lessons in those days--if you were into music. Most homes had pianos. Guitars were not yet the most dominant omnipresent instruments they are today. Bands had guitars but they were chordal strummers. Even the earliest be-bop guitarists started off the chordal strum, evolving single-note lines as they had to revamp to catch up with the horns and pianos, fuck the bass and the drums, though they were fighting for attention, too, to fit into be-bop, like Max Roach, a very young man, figured it out; then Blakey, Philly Joe, dudes like that. Jo Jones with Basie had the right idea, but he was a foundation on which Roach and the other boppers built a whole new music of the drums. The old musician could go on for decades describing growing up musically at such a time. Such an all-American time, too. Music right out of the American soil and soul. Black origins, yes, but whites gloriously favoring it, even though they made a minstrelsy mess out of it when they made a mockery out of the music while at the same time being madly in love with it [Bing Crosby, for example; minstrelsy in order to make a living, but enchanted by the black aspect of the music at the same time]. It's like when one day you would as a white man have to take sides, say in another Civil War--either stay with the blacks and face anihilation, or get behind the whites you basically despise and save your ass. Artists can't save their asses no matter the color of their skin. Art exits the human soul as art, no matter the race of the artist. Art is universal. Life is universal. It was only natural that this pure American music as art would become universal. It was hard for the old musician to admit such a point. He was progressive, so he had to admit it, but...it was hard. He was a purist when it came to American music. That was his bias, his ethnocentric bias. He was extremely jealous of the way others learned his precious music after the music did become universal.
One of the guys from Michigan said, "Hey, I understand what you are saying, old dude, and I must admit I never considered the subject from your point of view. I assumed all guys my age learned jazz and blues and such the same way I did." The other Michigan guy agreed. "What he means is, at least I speak for myself being from the same hometown, you dig, I came to jazz through bands like the MC5, or the Detroit Wheels. I heard the Beatles before I really knew jazz. I accepted the Beatles." The old dude growls. "God, the Beatles...shit, they ruined jazz especially. They did respect our black rhythm and blues and rock. Their first album was a rip off of all American black tunes, like 'Slow Down,' a tune by Texan Larry Williams that really flip-flopped-and-flew, man, whereas the Beatles did it like a kids tune. They turned our classical music into children's tunes, like Barney...I mean, you ever watch Barney, man, play the piano?--hell, yeah, Barney plays hinkity, rinky-dink, sloppy jazz piano, man--a child's respect for jazz. Am I making sense? The Beatles, hell, as Ray Charles said, 'I had to do their tunes because of their popularity, but I never did dig their music.' Their music changed the modal aspects of rhythm and blues and rock. Took it out of the traditional homemade mode or whatever blues idiom you were coming to the music from...and you had to know the blues in order to properly construct say a be-bop tune. A old original type blues guy, John Lee Hooker was one of the best at it; he could hold a measure open for what seemed like minutes, getting the full flavor out of a line, out of a musical point, their guitars as much a part of their voice as anything, their pianos jumping and dancing with the vocals--12/4 times, 32/4 slow draggy hully-gullies and things. Fuck the Beatles. I never listened to 'em, never studied them, though I admit, I did do their stuff when I was a piano bar pianist, or playing once in a bowling alley restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had to play what bowlers wanted to hear."
One of the young guys said, "Come on, Mr. History, the Beatles wrote some good tunes." The old musician pondered. "Wanna know the truth, and this applies to classical music as well as pop, everything that is British is stolen--when they were an empire, they stole all of the musics from their colonies, or they Anglocized them like they did American music in the sixties. Boring fucking modes. Boring fucking music, like Sir Eddie Elgar. Benjamin Britten stoled everything American. Hell, at one time, St. Martin of the Fields was doing more American stuff than American orchestras, certainly the boring New York Philharmonic, which since Lenny Bernstein was their most famous conductor, they haven't hired an American-born conductor, preferring instead the rigorous Nazi conduction of guys like this last Viennese dude, Kurt Von something or the other. I remember when Pierre Boulez, who thought he was so fucking modern, came here--he was a total flop. And this is the guy who found errors in Stravinsky's scores."
A NEW LOOK AT WHITES PLAYING BLACK MUSIC
Tonight, October 8, 2002, I watched a very powerful and well-done program on PBS, I believed it was called "A History of Jim Crow"-- but, whatever it was called, it provoked me, especially during one of its segments on the use of music during times of slavery, to rethink my own view of whether or not I have the right (of soul--or well-being) to adopt black music as my own--I can't justify, after thinking through what provoked me in the television program, certainly the singing of any of the so much earlier forms of black music--that music conceived out of a need for a relief from being a slave. I am beginning to proceed too fast, I need to slow down and ponder my new position as a white musician on how I can play and sing that black music that evolved from the state of slavery. This provocation I suffered was sparked into flame by what happened to blacks after the Civil War, when blacks were establishing their rights as American citizens in southern communities like Atlanta, New Orleans, and in particular Wilmington, North Carolina, with blacks in these cities making glorious progress in politics, economics, and in establishing a presence amongst the Cloud 9 circles of wealth and power in those communities. Some cities, like New Orleans, had begun to truly integrate, with black city councilmen ruling over whites, black doctors treating whites, black lawyers representing whites, even marriage between blacks and whites in the upper classes. But as Du Bois said, no matter how educated, how brilliant, how wealthy, or how politically powerful, the white man all along was conniving to put the blacks back into slavery. The white solution all started on the railroad--that which later was inspirational in the music called the blues, on into the branches of the blues tree that began sprouting a thick foliage, like boogie-woogie (eight to the bar), swing (white and black forms), and later bebop, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, rock and roll, heavy metal, punk rock.... It started on the trains, especially those in the south, when the railroads ruled blacks had to sit separate from the whites--in what became known as "Jim Crow" sections. Then came Plessy vs Ferguson. Ferguson, a man who could easily pass for white he was so light skinned, decided to purposely sit in the white section of the Jim Crow train. Then he announced to the white folks that unless he told them he was a black man, he could go right on fooling them and that made the Jim Crow rule stupid and unconstitutional. This led to this intelligent black man taking his case against Plessy all the way to the Supreme Court, all, of course, old white guys, a couple even having been in the Confederate Army. It was this Court's decision, that Jim Crow was fine as along as the facilities were "separate but equal"--damn, that's where it came from. I heard it all my life growing up in rather tolerant West Texas--like, "What are they complaining about, they have the same of everything the white man has, what do they want? Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile" to which I would suggest who doesn't take a mile if you offer them an inch on the white side of the fence? That's natural if, say, like the blacks, you've never had a chance to even know what an "inch" was--suddenly offer them an inch; how the hell should they know how much an inch is--I mile could be an inch as far as they're concerned. Whites have always panted after black music. Even back in New Orleans when the music that would eventually sweep the world as jazz was given existence, white people either being super attracted to it, or they saw a horrible devilish lure in it and proclaimed it "the music of the Devil." Whites came to black music in droves during the period after WWII when black music became readily available to white kids, when white kids started listening to the blues on the radio, to boogie, to bebop, on the radio, the airwaves that reached all across American through the high-powered 50,000 watt (the highest watts the FCC would allow) stations, like WGN in Chicago, or WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee, or even the even more powerful border stations like XELO (equis eh-lay-O), or XERF, using the high powered 100,000 watt stations (legal in Mexico) to blast their music and culture, southern white mainly with some blues thrown in. Nights when I was a curious teenager, I would stay up until 3 a.m. tuning (as we called it) around the dial and hearing jazz coming from the Hi Hat in San Francisco, from Daddy O Daley in Chicago, from Bill Martin down in New Orleans, from Wes Bowen in Salt Lake City, and from old reliable Symphony Sid doing live remotes from Birdland and the Royal Roost on the major networks--in the late night and early morning hours, running fifteen minutes up to a half hour each, starting around 11:30 and running 'til 1 or 1:30 in the ho-hum.
Jim Crow on the trains and the Supreme Court ruling against Ferguson gave the whites what they had been waiting for. Open season on black emancipation. Open season on blacks, as Du Bois said, no matter their state in life. Jim Crow gave the white man the excuse to revert to a plantation system again, and whites in Atlanta, New Orleans, and even Wilmington, North Carolina, began to run the blacks not only out of their political and economic positions, but all the way out of town, destroying their property, burning them out, wrecking their establishments, and sending them into the swamps and thickets, men, women, children, with whatever clothes they happened to be wearing when the whites came. Those that stayed got beatings constantly. If they took their beatings, they would be left half dead, but at least half alive, too. If blacks protested their beatings, or fought back against their beatings, then they were killed. And this was all done in the name of the Democratic Party, too. Most of the reconstruction era blacks were Republicans. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Now isn't this an ironic twist. When I was a real young kid, I remember the day President Roosevelt died. I recall very clearly the first car I saw with its headlights on. It was coming across South Seventh and up my street, Vine, going north, and I asked my mother why the headlights were on and she said, President Roosevelt died. And the blacks grieved and cried openly in public for Roosevelt, and yet, he was a racist pig and a Democrat, kowtowing to the southerners--well, hell, I mean the Little White House was in Georgia. Come on. Just ironic. And irony is what I learned in high school English Composition class. Hemingway and Faulkner, my favorite writers, used irony as a plot twister.
Watched Austin City Limits last night. Two white bands, both claiming to be pursuing a "new blues." Ok, I am for that, but what I heard wasn't new at all, unless the Almon Brothers are still new. Unless every trick band like Buffalo Springfield and the Electric Flag are still new. And then there was an older slide guitar player (using a man-made piece of plastic it looked like for a slide--I have a beautiful video of Manse Lipscomb playing the slide with a pocket knife) and hell there he was mocking I think Howlin' Wolf, but changing out of his normal white southern voice into a Negro dialect. That's the only thing I can call it. I know my own white friends who play the blues will bemoan and curse my way of thinking, but like I said above, since watching the History of Jim Crow on television, I just can't justify any longer trying to play black music as if I am black and understand it from that point of view. I understand it from a passionate love point of view, but I now feel that when playing blues or jazz or any music that comes from the black experience--say Hip-Hop, Techno Pop, whatever blacks have come up with--I can love it and understand it musically, but I must play my own form of it, just as I cannot justify my trying to learn to play Latin musics their way--you know, perfectly hooked on their methods and acting as if they are purists in worship of it as they mutilate it with their white inabilities. Inabilities because the musician who is born into Latin musics will always grasp it from the soul whereas another person from another culture would never be able to do that. That is why I am now leaning toward listening to white artists separately from black artists--I come out listening to a guy like Dave Van Kliet, or whatever his name is, you know, Captain Beefheart. Or the poetry of Charles Bukowski set to music, which I am now endeavoring to undertake at a ferocious pace. Yes, I may use a hip-hop beat in my music, but I use it to fit my music and I am not mimicking any particular black version of whatever it is I am borrowing. I am being contrary, I know, but I just have to be this way, especially now that I see everything I was taught and everything I read, everything I worshipped, everything that motivated me was white. I have never been taught the black experience, for instance, growing up like I did in the south, in a former Confederate state--the state of Texas, now so integrated...though racism still persists among the whites and just as the freed blacks who were integrating in North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana after the Civil War were stopped dead in their tracks by the Jim Crow decisions of the all-white Supreme Court, today's black successes could find themselves in the same boat even today in this so-highly civilized world, still authoritatively controlled by the white race. I heard a very intelligent Jewish person recently condemning blacks for becoming Moslems by saying they were standing behind the very people (the Arabs) who conquered Africa and put blacks into slavery in the first place, and that they really should be behind the Jews and Israel because the Jews had suffered much worse than any black had ever suffered. I cringed. How could a stable, successful, cognizant Jewish person make a statement like that? Couldn't an Arab say the same thing, that they had suffered more than the Jews and the blacks. Racism is like a dog chasing its tail. So ridiculous. So stupid. But, unfortunately, so Real.
Later this afternoon I listened to a live set from the Metropolitan Opera House in the forties, with Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Zutty Singleton, and Jack Teagarden, singing "Basin Street Blues," one of his signature tunes along with "Old Rockin' Chair's Got Me" and "I Hear You Knockin' but You Can't Come In." Jack was a strange phenomenon of a man, a white man, yes, from Vernon, Texas (just north of where the Greenes come from), but in looks, manners, and voice he often was considered black by white audiences [See photo below left]. Even after seeing Jack in person you weren't sure. Jack was the most natural white cat I have ever met, and I met him during an engagement he had at the Swiss Chalet in Dallas with Don Jacoby, a trumpet player who, I believe, went to North Texas University just before I got there--when it was North Texas State College, the first college, by the way, in the Southern Collegiate Group of Colleges to integrate, in 1956, eight years before the Civil Rights Bill. I was always proud of North Texas's cool attitude during those divisive times, but North Texas was a cool school, devoted to jazz, good writers, great classical singers, Jimmy Reed, and a socialist leaning in its Liberal Arts instruction (I majored in Sociology/Economics under teachers from the University of Chicago and Harvard (when Harvard had a course called the Sociology of Altruism))--these were the days of whites adopting black walks, clothes, speech, actions--with terms like "hip," "hep," "lollygagging" (one of my favorites), "finger popping," "man," "cat," "cat-man," "gate," "give me five" (which was coined by Louie originally as "give me some skin, pops [what Louie called all white men, even Leonard Bernstein]," accomplished by sliding your hand down the outstretched hand of the cat asking for the skin--that was later boiled down into simply "give me [or "slip me"] five, Jack [for "Jackson"]"). So Teagarden came to Dallas in 1963 and I went up and met him and he was coldly different from me, man. He was tightly bound, slumped snuggly into that trombone stance, a really tall, big man with a sharp Native American chisled face and a deep tannish skin, topped by coal black hair that he slicked down with petroleum jelly. Even I used Royal Crown [the other popular one down south was Dixie Peach]pomade on my hair, to keep my wild cornsilk hair in a steady, cool curl. These were the days of ducktails for whites--either you had ducktails or you had a crewcut--the hair identified you as hip or square. Of course, the squares wore the crewcuts.
Art
Jam #1, MGreene
Later, after my wife, Mary, and I moved to New Orleans, we were hanging out on Bourbon Street one night at Your Father's Moustache, listening to Turk Murphy of all people, from San Francisco, a weird combination player of tailgate, dixieland, and jazz mixed into a loud blatting type trombone tone--sort of like the trombonist Bill Harris with the Woody Herman Band sounded--a white trombone sound, later it would be modernized by Willie Dennis and smoothed out by Urbie Green. It probably came from Jack Teagarden...also J.C. Higgenbotham played that way. We were seated at a side table up near the bandstand. In the subtle table light, from a small lamp with an amber shade, I noticed a nondescript brass plate screwed to the wall. It read, "It was on this spot when this was called the Dreamland Ballroom that Jack Teagarden died while performing with his band"--the date of the event was given, I don't remember it exactly, but it was I believe in 1964. That was eerie. And that was my last experience with Jack Teagarden.
Storyville,
early 1900s
It is the excitement of the totality of jazz that gave it credence at one time in the history of the USA. It began as raw entertainment. It began in bands, school bands, funeral bands, jug bands, marching bands, army bands, vaudeville bands, porch bands, street-corner bands, church bands, and it continued that way until it split off into units -- solos, duos, trios, etc. Jelly Roll, the pianists' pianist, in order to gain a reputation to where he could start his own bands, first made his way as a canman in the Storeyville whorehouses, where he noticed his solo piano playing had to conform to the rhythms of sex, which in a way are the rhythms of the heart, the true rhythm of individual life. He noticed his playing made the girls' eyes shine brighter; made their hips wobble in the right way needed to hook a john. And he noticed that some johns just sat and listened to him play. Buddy Bolden (photo above left), who, by the way, was crazy as a bedbug, became the first recognized jazz band leader. Louis said Buddy played so boldly and wild you couldn't argue with him, but could only follow him. Those who followed became known as sidemen. Louis at first was just a sideman to King Oliver, who was a natural-born leader, a big, evil-looking hulk of a man who took no shit from nobody. Louis appealed to him just as he saw Louis appealed to an audience. From out of that New Orleans fin de sicle turmoil came the disciplined music that later would be called Jass, a term
artjam#2,
mgreene
probably first used by the white band called the Original Dixieland Jass Band led by another crazy, Nick LaRocca [photo above of Nick's bust being kissed by his wife](interesting to note that on one Google image file that has a great photo of Nick, when you click on it you get one of those error messages and a porn site shows up instead of Nick, but then, ain't that what jass is all about?), a truly wacko trumpet player who would later argue until his dying day that jazz was the invention of white people and that the blacks picked it up from them. Poor Nick. He had a terrible life of drink and insanity, so jealous that a common, ordinary Negro boy from the orphaned backstreets of New Orleans could play jazz with such original verve and vim and do so entertainingly, so much more than Nick ever accomplished. When King Oliver went to Chicago, jazz went with him, up the Mississippi, taking along with it all the music grown between the mouth of the Mississippi, known as the True Delta, and that Delta beginning up river around Greenville, Mississippi, where W. C. Handy said he first heard what was to become known as "the blues" played by a Tutweiler, Mississippi, street musician who was entertaining at the railroad station in l903, "Going where the Southern cross the Dog." Of course, we know the blues developed much earlier than that, but in that area, yes, in the fields. The Field Hollers. Those were the blues coming straight from human bodies as they toiled against all odds in the hotter than hell fields of the Cotton Belt. Reflections of these blues can be heard so clearly in the music of Hudie Ledbetter, Robert Johnson, and the young Muddy Waters, who grew up on the same plantations as Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson (Muddy's father Ollie played the guitar). Everything by then was flowing upriver to escape the intolerable white against black frictions in the South. The cold-cold South to those suffering under those others so annealed into immovable cruel stances against fellow human beings, stances forged in the fires of slavery. The Blues became the source of a secret language, a great flowing of catchy songs whose words were the first ebonics, neologisms defined through the grapevine that was just out of the reach of the white man's comprehension.
When Lil Hardin Armstrong [photo above, circa 30s] said she saw Jelly Roll in Chicago, she said she watched him to see what made him so special. She said that he played with everything he had and that you could see him playing out his chest, down his arms, and out his big fingers. She said she knew the key to his success, any musician's success, and that was he played hard, damn hard. But Jelly Roll got there before Louis hit. And Hoagy Carmichael tells about the first time he saw Louis Armstrong. At the College Inn, wasn't that the Mafia joint Kid Ory and Louis worked in? Hoagy was there with Frankie Trombauer and Eddie Condon. Hoagy said he did some muggles (pot) and was in the ozone when Louis started playing. He said he thought he had died and gone to heaven--he noticed no one else in the band, in the joint, but Louis, dipping into each lush note as it jabbed and punched its way to progressively planes for the trumpet, for jazz, for the entertainment aspects of jazz--it came from the whorehouses to the Mafia joints in sinful Chicago--Billy Sunday said Chicago was the evilest city in the Devil's United States--and as the song said, Billy couldn't shut it down--it took the Feds to do that, though they took their merry times for a while; after all, the FBI was run by a guy who liked to dress up in women's clothes and who lived with a guy named Chester most of his life. The music made 'em dance, jitterbug, Charleston, Slew Foot, the Drag--and dancin' made 'em thirsty and hungry for food and sex--and the music brought in the white folks. They had discovered a new form of black entertainment--and damn they liked it, some of them liked it so much, like
Mezz Mezzrow [photo above], they wanted desperately to be black, to pass as black. Mezz, a braggadocious half-ass clarinet player was accepted because, as he admitted, he had the best mezz in town--and he did the best mezzroll to boot. Mezz, though, talks in his phony book pretty coolly about workin' the Chicago scene, the recording gigs, the chances to come to New York, the inner fights among the Chicago white boys and the eventual break up of that aspect of Chicago Dixieland meets New Orleans Jass, which by now was Jazz--rhyming with pizzazz. To jazz good was to fuck good, once down the middle and then from side to side, just like a jockey, as the old blues song advised--"My daddy was a jockey...and he taught me how to ride." And ridin' was what you had to do to keep steady while fucking your baby--and it gave us a blues beat, which, in turn, gave us a whole bunch of early jazz rhythms and blues. The whites were calling themselves "cottonpickers," little smart-ass Chitown whiteys who had maybe picked cotton out of their ears, but certainly never out in a bald, hot, black-dirt field at high noon with the bolls cutting into your hands all day, sun-up, sundown--Work until the mule hollers, as the boys from the Delta began singing in Chicago. The blues came right on up after jazz. Some of it stayed in Memphis--some good cats came out of Memphis--But BB's best album in the fifties was that Live in Chicago album on Kent. Whoo-boy. And did the ladies love these cats.
ATTEMPTING TO EXPLAIN JAZZ:
By the time jazz got to New York City, and, yes, I know, it came from more places than Chicago--what I am going to say is, that Jazz was defined and refined on its journey through the New Orleans environment, up the Mississippi, but also spreading out radially from New Orleans, since the Original Dixieland Jass Band, remember old crazy Nick LaRocca, did their first recording--considered the "first" jazz recording --"Clarinet Marmalade" maybe? [It is easy to enlighten me--email me at mgreene@nac.net]--in New York City. Of course, you already know all of this--because white guys like Phil Schaap have to know every little historical detail of things like jazz recordings--and, have you noticed, just because you have access to tons of old masters and shit--or even if you simply have an enormous record collection, like Ralph Gleason used to boast of, it makes you a "jazz expert"? But there was jazz in Texas; in Kansas City, for sure; in Los Angeles; and Mary Osburne, the fantastic guitar player, said she heard jazz (Charlie Christian, her idol) in Fargo, North Dakota, or some god-awful extremity of the country like that (I am sure it's North Dakota--but I should ask Phil Shaap to be more sure--notice how as time passes guys like Phil make history more and more sure than it ever was before. Another thing you should always notice about Phil Shaap is that when he interviews older musicians, none of them are really interested in their old recordings--most musicians don't even listen to their records--yeah, while you are recording them, sure you listen over and over--but once you nail it, it's for others--you don't need it anymore) in those days when the "good old good ones" were being written and performed. [As a footnote, there is a famous performance by the Duke Ellington Orchestra recorded in Fargo, North Dakota.]
When jazz got to New York City, in came King Louis, the Duke, the Count, even the Jay McShann Band and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, to join the astute jazz folks already here, like James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Chick Webb, and from out of the Bronx, a young white musician who called himself Artie Shaw. The music they were playing was being picked up by the Tin Pan Alley element--George Gershwin, Cole Porter--and the black composers like Clarence Williams, Fletcher Henderson, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller--even Maurice Ravel on a trip to New York City went to Harlem and heard the sounds and when he got back to France, shazam, the blues started appearing in his work, especially his Trio for Piano, Violin, and Clarinet. As a result, jazz became a rage in Europe, from Paris, to Berlin, to Copenhagen, to London. Jazz meant pizzazz, the cat's meow, the hippest way ever to party and revere life, even though it started as a part of the nightlife, the right life. When jazz tried to escape the nightlife image, that's when it got into trouble (more about this at a later splurge of energy).
DUKE SAID IT WAS "JUNGLE MUSIC":
Duke based his statement on what he had his drummer, at that time, Sonny Greer [whose drumset looked like a gamelang orchestra invaded by a marching band's battery. I mean, Sonny had gongs, chimes, coconut hulls, brass bells, whistles, cymbals, wooden blocks, a glockenspiel, a marimba, vibes], doing, the rhythms he was creating with his percussion battery. Listen to the Kentucky Club recordings, then the Cotton Club band, and the band used in the early movie shorts Duke did, after his Jungle Band was famous thanks to the radio. And then there was Louie. Duke had to have gone ga-ga over Louie, with Louie's fine chops, and his range--Duke loved a lot of range on the trumpet--Bubber Miley played a long thin trumpet that looked almost like those used at the racetracks to this day, except his had a valve setup and played diatonically and syllabically instead of monotonal notes made by bending through the mouthpiece, like a bugle boy, except the bugle was shorter, looking more like Don Cherry's later times pocket trumpet. To Duke it was jungle music because later in his "Madame Zzaj" suite he gave the whole creative father image to the drum--the drum back in native Africa, of course, the drum used to call all across the jungles--jungle drums--I can heard them now--they are cross- cultural. I remember when I was a lad of no more than 3, attending a Native American dance in Ponca City, Oklahoma, home of the Ponca tribe. The most memorable and awesome sound I have kept from that clearly mentally visible day in my life is the sound the drums made, that incessant measured beat, big thug drum (like a kettle) underpinning the polyrhythmic toms and tambourines and ankle bells. That incessant rhythm is a heartbeat rhythm, the perfect rhythm, that based on the beating of the human heart. I used to hear that in jazz. Especially Duke's Jungle Music. It wasn't so evident in Fletcher Henderson's bands. Fletcher promoted swing and variety show antics in his arrangements, tricky, complicated, give and takes, diminuendos and crescendos, with arpeggios bubbling all over the arrangement pages. If the father is the drum, then jazz itself must be the woman, the mother of the music inspired by the father drums. Or, if we remember Duke saying, "Music is my mistress," we know who Madame Zzaj really is, the music fathered by the drums. By the way, Duke always conducted his bands from the piano. His piano was the baton. Every one of his riffs led to a cue for the orchestra, for a horn solo, for a modulation, for a rhythm like that of a bus suddenly becoming the rhythm of a transcontinental train. Gershwin wrote music on trains. So did Ellington.
What you should listen to:
1) Jelly Roll Morton, the solo sides.
2) Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens/stuff w/Fatha (who changed piano playing with what he called the "trumpet" style).
3) The White Chicagoans-- Krupa, Freeman, Goodman, screwbally old Mezz Mezzrow (read his fictional book about his fictional life), and especially the composing of Hoagy Carmichael -- Bix, too, because he was there when Louis bloomed.
4) All the early blues dudes: Robert Johnson, Cow Cow Davenport, Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Little Brother Montgomery, Manse Lipscomb, and the Texians who led up to Lightnin' Hopkins and those special Texas-bred bluesmen. Texas would later give us some very unique jazz interpreters.
5)Now's the time to start digging all that jazz building up in the Chicago area. We are talking late twenties and into the thirties. Also, get ready to come to New York City, so listen to Fletcher Henderson, Clarence Williams, Spencer Williams, and, of course, the Duke's Jungle Bands that played at the Kentucky Club and the Cotton Club. There is a great video of Duke playing at the Cotton Club--tres chic, with Bubber, Sonny, and that weird-looking Elmer Snowden.
6)I am adding the solo work of Fats Waller, especially that from the late twenties and early thirties, then listen to the band numbers that feature Gene Sedric, John Hamilton, Slick Jones, Cedric Wallace, Al Casey--that was a solid little band. Compare it to the white swing bands of the time, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, etc., and tell me if you don't think Fats's band doesn't swing off a different mode than the best white bands. Fats literally jumps into his tunes and their swing is all dependent upon his piano. Nice control.
7)The 29 recordings made by bluesman legend Robert Johnson in 1936-1937. Bob Guida, the gentleman blues scholar from Queens, New York, once owned many of these original recordings, which I have had to pleasure of hearing as though you were in the recording studio with Robert. Amazing records.
Some say this guy can blow
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