Columbia
Missourian, September 17, 1995
The
great bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker liked to go into his favorite
tavern and play country music on the jukebox. Astounded by his taste
for what they considered a clearly inferior musical form, Parker’s
fellow jazz musicians asked him, “How can you stand that stuff?”
“The
stories, man,” Parker replied. “Listen to the stories!”
Nat
Hentoff has been listening to the stories for more than a half
century from his boyhood in Boston to his long tenure as jazz critic
for the Village Voice. His musical interests, though, extend
beyond even the elastic term “jazz”; this book collects many of
his writings over the past decade on folk and country music as well
as jazz.
But,
as Hentoff argues, such categories are arbitrary. The music
transcends artificial boundaries, with the great performers drawing
inspiration from a wide range of sources. Thus jazz pianist Fats
Waller used to warm up for his performances by playing Debussy.
Similarly, Parker not only enjoyed country, but also was a
knowledgeable fan of classical music. As he once said about listening
to Bartok’s “Second Piano Concerto,” “I heard things in it I
never heard before. You never know what’s going to happen when you
listen to music. All kinds of things can suddenly open up.”
Similarly, country singer Merle Haggard not only is a walking
encyclopedia of almost every style of country music, but also claims
as an influence the jazz of such performers as Belgian guitarist
Django Reinhardt.
This
multiculturalism often transcends racial lines, pointing up that much
of the best American culture is a mulatto hybrid. The King of Texas
Swing, Bob Wills, was heavily influenced by the songs of black
sharecroppers he heard as a youth in west Texas, and as a boy he once
traveled 50 miles by horseback to see a performance by the great
blues singer Bessie Smith. When Hentoff once commented to country
banjo player Earl Scruggs that he heard a strong Irish influence in
Scruggs’s playing, the musician responded, “A lot more than
Irish. There’s black in there, too. No musician with ears can leave
out the black.” As Dizzy Gillespie once said, “All of music is
out there in the first place, all of it. From the beginning of time
the music was there. All you have to do is try to get a little piece
of it. I don’t care how great you are, you only get a little piece
of it.”
Most
of the articles are short (two-three pages); Hentoff has developed a
knack for brief, memorable descriptions of a performer’s abilities.
About vocalist Carmen McRae, he comments, “You could hear the
commas in the lyrics,” while for trumpeter Buck Clayton, “In his
solos even the silences pulsated.” Other descriptions are less
kind: Dave Brubeck “played the piano as if he were clearing a
lifelong trail through a forest of giant sequoias,” while vocalist
Mary McHugh “sang with all the passion and dynamics of Justice
William Rehnquist.” Occasionally the opinions border on the
heretical, as when Hentoff defends Bing Crosby as one of the most
underrated jazz singers.
While
Hentoff celebrates the music’s heritage, he expresses concern for
its future. Ironically, much of the crisis in jazz has been brought
about by its success in infiltrating academia, with the establishment
of jazz programs at several major universities. This higher musical
education has imbued a generation of performers with phenomenal
technique and an encyclopedic knowledge of the form, but also often
makes listening to the music as exciting as reading a phone book.
Hentoff complains that an album by saxophonist Anthony Braxton, one
of the young lions of jazz, has liner notes, written by Braxton, that
are mainly mathematical equations. Often lost, Hentoff says, are the
indefinable ability to swing as well as the development of a personal
style. As multi-instrumentalist Benny Carter comments, “The kids
are fantastically endowed with technique. They do more today than I
would have thought possible fifty and sixty years ago. But they
sacrifice a lot of emotional content for technique. And skilled as
they are, I can’t tell one from another.”
Hentoff
also worries that children are not being introduced to the rich
musical legacy Americans have created. How many black students, he
wonders, “have the slightest idea that [Duke] Ellington was the
most abundantly original composer in the history of the country? And
a composer who in his work . . . wrote of the black experience in
America, from its beginnings, with extraordinary depth, wit,
tenderness, and strength. How many schoolkids of any color anywhere
in the United States know anything about Ellington? Or Lester Young?
Or Charles Mingus? Or Bessie Smith? Or Jo Jones? They have been
deprived of the richest, most distinctive strain of their own
cultural heritage. And most of them stay culturally deprived for the
rest of their lives.”
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