Y'dig?

Quincy Jones

Loren Schoenburg, director of the National Jazz Museum, says if you took the format of a crossword puzzle and entered the names of people who would link to every conceivable American musical form, the first name you would write in would be Louis Armstrong. No one would argue with that. The second, he asserts would have to be Quincy Jones. On hearing this, the writer’s eyebrows rose to where his hairline used to be -  Quincy Jones? Surely not.

Schoenburg played a piece that Quincy Jones had written when he was 19 and playing in the Lionel Hampton orchestra – the biggest of the big name bands of the time, bigger for example, than either Ellington or Basie. He then played a piece from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, an album largely conceived and produced by Quincy Jones, and the best selling pop music album of all time. Schoenburg is a historian, a philosopher, a comedian, an observer of what makes humans tick. He makes killer points, for example, he observes that history is looking backwards at what has happened, whereas life is lived moving forward with no real idea of where it’s headed. He asked us to imagine what it would be like to be 19, having written a piece and had it accepted by the likes of Lionel Hampton, many musicians would have rested on their laurels and built a career out of such a success. But not Quincy Jones. he just kept going, over a fifty year career, never stopped – he produced Lesley Gore, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, and a host of hip hop artists. Who could have looked forward from the persepctive of Seatlle born Quincy Jones and forseen all that?

He produced Count Basie with Frank Sinatra, both at the peak of their careers. Having already become the first black producer for one of the top record labels, Mercury Records, when the English invasion dominated the US Billboard Charts, Jones went to Hollywood and became one of the first black movie studio producers.  In 1967, he produced the music for In the Heat of the Night, a seminal movie which challenged the prevalent stereotypes of race and in the same year he worked on  In Cold Blood – his score used mouth pops and hand clapping and won an Oscar for the best music score.

If you’re not attending Jazz for Curious Listeners, a not to be missed program run by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, or one of its aftermaths, and you like jazz, Americana or even popular culture, you are short changing yourself by not attending.

The writer has been listening to jazz for more than 50 years, but attending the programs in Harlem has added unimagined dimensions to his understanding and enjoyment of the form, and, more importantly, his understanding of 20th century culture in general has been notably enhanced.

And, Quincy Jones, as the second name in the crossword? Unarguably so.

An evening with Shoenburg is rather like listening to jazz at it’s best – spontaneous, unexpected and joyful. On one occasion, he played a Herschel Evans solo and asked the audience to sing it. I for one, freaked, there was no way I could sing it. But he took us through it part by part, and within ten minutes we were all singing along to it, and feeling wonderful. Another time, he got one half of the audience to count, one, two, three, four, etc and other half to go, Baa, ba ba, Baa, ba, ba, and then had us all do it together, the result, the positioning of 4/4 time with 3/4 time, he said, was the essence of swing. This week, he had us all sing some jazz phrases scat-style – starting simple, and getting progressively more complex. The result of each and every one of these exercises is that everyone in the room, was uplifted to a higher place from where they were went they entered the room. The man should be a jazz therapist…. There is something unquestionably numinous about jazz at its best, there is a quality and an experience beyond the commonplace.

dig jazz

Why did jazz appear and develop in America, and not in Africa, Europe or Asia? That’s a big subject and one that has engaged and absorbed better minds than this one. That being so, please allow me a hypothesis. Have you noticed the propensity of the Irish, amongst others, to answer a question with a question? So, allow this Irishman a’ twofer’ as we say in New York. Two for the price of one, a hypothesis before offering an hypothesis on this intriguing topic.

Hypothesis A: That the planet Earth is itself an entity. The countries in which we all live and to which we proudly and perhaps absurdly claim allegiance, are all connected to the same Mother – I’ll call her that because the Earth gives life like nothing else we know of in the entire universe, indeed, to countless millions different forms of life. What other mother can do that? So the Mother Earth is an entity, and the countries and continents form part of a subtle system that mostly we don’t know about.

The Gaia hypothesis was first scientifically formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist James Lovelock. The Gaia Hypothesis suggests that the Earth itself is a living conscious organism. Many, at different times, for example, most of the native American tribes knew this as fact many millenia before Professor Lovelock came along but they did not have the ear of the academic fraternity nor the mass media, and more’s the pity. However, I wish to propose that this being so, the Earth itself has the same subtle system built into it as does each and every human being. There are seven principal energy centers within the subtle energy system of human beings and it is also the case with the Mother Earth. Within that system. America is in the center known as the Visshudhi which is about collectivity and communication. It is also the Virata, if you like, the operating system of the whole structure and hence, anything that happens here, quickly gets known in the rest of the countries of the planet. Let me give one example, and no doubt you can add many more of your own whould you have the inclination. Hip hop began outside an apartment building in Bailey Avenue in the Bronx, not far from where this is being written. It was created by two young men who couldn’t afford to buy musical instruments nor the music lessons even if they could have obtained the instruments. So they did what many of their ancestors did before them, they used what they had to make music, in their case, their voices, a boom box and an enhanced sense of rhythm. In no time, it was a world-wide phenomenon. I saw this at first hand about ten years or so ago, I left New York City and went to London. In the streets one could hear English hip hop everywhere. A week later, I went to Paris to attend a conference at Fontainebleu, and again, in the streets I heard hip hop, but this time French hip hop. Days later, I caught a plane to a provincial city in the middle Volga region of Russia and guess what? In the streets, everywhere I went, I heard Russian hip hop. And all that started from two guys standing outside an apartment building on Bailey Avenue in the Bronx.

Here then is the Shivalan hypothesis. Because America is the Visshudhi, jazz evolved here because for the first time in human history, people from every other spiritual center on the Mother Earth, mixed together as had never happened before in a million years or so of the history of homo sapiens. Louis Armstrong, whose ancestors came from the Swadishthana of the Mother Earth, Africa, worked in New Orleans for a family of Russian Jews, (Russia being part of the Agnya of the Mother Earth, and specifically, the ego of the planet. And, similarly, the Irish, the English, Welsh and Scots (all part of the Anahat or the heart), and every conceivable other nationality and grouping, came together here, as never before, and the result was Jazz.

America was and still is THE ONLIEST – if it happens here, it’ll be everywhere in the shake of a lamb’s tail, or a Charlie Parker horn lick.

I once met an idiot in California who seriously insisted that America’s only contribution to 20th century culture was the Hawaiian Beach Shirt (he happened to own a shop that sold them in their vintage form). Perhaps he just couldn’t see the wood from the palm trees on his shirts?

On the Mother Earth, all the spiritual centers are connected, as they are within us too. There are three main elements of music, rhythm, melody and harmony – and the first of these that we are aware of, as unborn fetuses in our mother’s womb, is rhythm for we feel, then hear her heartbeat, and in time, our own too. Ba boom, ba boom, ba boom. Is it any wonder that rhythm is at the core of all music, and that this aspect of the heart (Anahat) emerges in jazz in the Visshudhi?

There are three channels of energy which run up the spine and into the brain. One chaneel, colored blue, is where we experience feelings and emotions, where our past is encsconced. Blues music, for example, is a music of that channel, but so too is the music of the composer Handel.  It represents the past, and is our feminine side. A second chaneel, colored yellow, controls our thinking and planning, and the military music, marching music, is essentially music of this channel. So too, is the music of Bach, mathematical, masculine brain music, and indeed, this channel is our masculine side and the future. (Some fine fellows take offense if told that part of them is feminine, and I’ve always found it hard to understand why, after all, their mother is 50% of them, not to mention their grandmothers, great grandmothers and so on.)  The third channel is clear colored, or white, and is the channel of our evolution, and of the present. Composers such as Vivaldi, or most notably Mozart, composed music which vibrates this channel. Jazz, as can be readily understood, is one of the few music forms which has music applicable to all three channels.