Thelonius Monk
John Coltrane
Let me be clear what interests me specifically in jazz. I’ve always loved good music, irrespective of what type of music it was. For example, in the late 1980s when I took my family on a trip up the Nile river on a felucca, an open deck sail boat, we stopped off in a village, in the middle of nowhere, between Aswan and Luxor, and there was a religious festival going on. Men, who had come on horseback and who carried first world war bolt action rifles, were ‘dancing’ to amazing music. They were dressed in long flowing robes, with huge hats and they swirled in school playgrounds and in private spaces in the village, such as the courtyards of private houses. They whirled, around and around, and amazingly, even though their eyes were firmly closed and they were in close proximity, they never actually touched, let alone bumped into each other. I was enthralled – how did they avoid collisions, how did they keep spinning around and around without falling over? To this day, I just don’t know, but it was the music was that really got to me. It transported me into some special place, which I later came to recognize as the absolute present, the pure moment between past and future that is so easy for kids to be in and so hard for adults. There was a dimension to the music that really touched my spirit.
So while I like all kinds of good music, what I’m always seeking is the aspect I’ve just described. It can be as rare as hen’s teeth if you don’t know where to look.
Last night I attended another wonderful program in the National Museum of Harlem, this time on Jazz in the 1960s. The guy who ran the program last night is a sincere, well-informed fellow who clearly really loves his music. His lecture, not a word I like, but can’t think of a better one right now, consisted of a series of video clips that he played from what must be an extraordinary collection.
He told us a lot of things I certainly didn’t know, that Louis Armstrong was the most successful jazz artist of the 1960s, as he had been in the 20s, 30s 40s and 50s. His Hello Dolly, at one point, toppled The Beatles off the number one spot in the Pop Charts. And he showed how Ella copied a lot of what Armstrong did vocally. And that the 60s was unique in that it was a decade in which you could hear music from every preceding era, all the way back to New Orleans jazz.
I certainly wouldn’t criticize the program, for it obviously depended a) on what the presenter had available to him, b) his own personal loves, likes and dislikes and c) it would have been a boring, potentially miserable evening if what he played coincided solely and exactly with my own personal tastes and preferences – had this been so I could have stayed at home and listened to my stuff without driving to Harlem and back. But I found myself fascinated by what he didn’t play, or even refer to.
What I liked. First of all, that it was such a thought provoking program. The insights into Bill Evans, and Monk, and Ella. It was great seeing Monk with his quartet. The frisson of connection when Coltrane appeared and started playing. I loved seeing Bill Evans, I’d seen him live in Ronnie Scott’s little club in Gerard Street in London, I think in the early 60s, I got in, in those days, for half a crown, about a quarter, by showing my musician’s union card.
What I didn’t like. A lot of what he played showed genius playing alongside tradesmen. Maybe this was because so much of the clips were made from TV shows in Europe, and obviously, if you are Sonny Rollins, you couldn’t afford to take a band of equals to Europe and make any money out of it. Having seen some of the greats, they were best in the company of equals, or near equals, musicians capable of challenging, provoking or even stretching them into playing at their most creative. As it was, I accept that I am being unkind in calling the bass player who accompanied Rollins, who’s name I can’t remember, a tradesman. But while he is technically brilliant, he misses on what this music is about at its best, and interestingly, what Rashaan Carter, a young guy who played at the event last week in the Apollo Theater, has in abundance, that spark that ignites something deep within the listener. But many of the accompanists were tradesmen, and my overall point is valid in that what we got to watch was more akin to watching Sugar Ray Robinson in an exhibition bout rather than in a real fight, something approaching the real thing, but inherently different in many important aspects and ultimately, not the real thing. What we saw was some of the greats play well within themselves, against a pleasant, but none too inspiring backdrop.
What else didn’t I like? Well, the main thing I didn’t like is that even great jazz, played and recorded for TV is a shadow of it’s real self. It’s the sound that’s missing, that sibilance of the brass, the thwack of the bass being stuck, that feeling that reverberates right through you and causes the hairs on the back of your neck to rise, as genius expressing a fundamental truth touches something at the very core of your being. All that is missing, and unavoidably so, but people who never experienced the real thing just don’t know and cannot even speculate on what it sounds like.
It may sound churlish to make this point, but what if we had to look at the works of the great painters – in black and white?
What might have been legitimately included? Assuming it exists on DVD. Yusef Lateef’s Eastern Sounds, a seminal album from 1961 that directly led to the fusion of jazz with Middle Eastern and Indian music. But to look at the bigger picture first, the 60s were an age of rebellion, throughout the Western world. Europe, particularly France and Germany, looked as though they might descend, or ascend, depending on your point of view, into outright revolution. Student protest exploded and the streets of Paris were barricaded against the established order. In the USA, the Civil Rights movement was getting into full swing. Black Power was asserting itself. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, two black American athletes made history by staging a silent protest against racial discrimination. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200m, stood with their heads bowed and a black-gloved hand raised as the American National Anthem played during the victory ceremony. The pair both wore black socks and no shoes and Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. They were demonstrating against continuing racial discrimination of black people in the United States. As they left the podium at the end of the ceremony they were booed by many in the crowd and white America was appalled. Such momentous events were reflected in the new jazz of the 60s, and none of this was reflected in last night’s program.
Was there really any reason not to mention Charles Mingus, not to even play a snatch of, say, Fables of Faubus, his musical protest at the ghastly, racist Governor of Alabama, Orville Faubus? Or his Town Hall concert, in New York in 1964 one of the best live recordings in jazz, but of great political as well as musical significance. Or, in keeping with the times, the experimentation of musicians like Archie Shepp, John Tchai and the New York Contemporary Five. Would Miles Davis not merit even a footnote in a program on jazz in the 60s, and was Ellington silent in that period? It wasn’t just the young. Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, notably Coltrane, were exploring the possibilities of a jazz without the usual orthodox restrictions of melody, harmony and rhythm. There was an overtly political element to all this. In the 1940s, the be-boppers, having watched their elder brothers, invent and play Dixieland and Swing at the highest level, only to see their work mimicked, diluted and the white musicians who did so, become rich and famous in the process, tried to create a music that was uniquely theirs. They failed, of course, for music isn’t the prerogative of one group. But there was an attempt at the same in the 1960s, and inevitably and rightly, it failed for the same reasons. And none of this got a look in? Maybe it’s because it isn’t on DVD, it could be as simple as that. But I left the place with the feeling that what had been served up was a watered down, sanitized version of what I remember.
And that leads me back to my main point. A lot of jazz can be as dull, boring and interesting as any other art form. But when jazz takes off, as it did last night, despite all the things going against it, the crappy sound, for example, watching Coltrane and Getz play ballads on the same bandstand, although not actually together, or Monk play Epistrophy, or Bill Evans play My Funny Valentine, almost without straying from the melody, but producing great jazz, at the same time. This leads to the element of the numinous, the spontaneity and creativity, that touching our very core, that connection to something divine, that’s what jazz, at its very best, produces and more than anything, that’s what I really dig.
admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, human brain, ydig Add new tag, discrimination, genius, jazz, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Rashaan Carter, transformation
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