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Winter’s
icy fingers claw at my
windows and for good
reason: it’s warm
inside with a dozen
candles around the room
adding their amber glow
to the soft light and
moody music that
accompanies. I’m
cooking dinner and
I’ve just dropped
the needle on Side 1 of
an original pressing of
a Blue Note classic,
saxophonist Julian
“Cannonball”
Adderley’s Somethin’ Else.
I love the suave
elegance of Miles
Davis’ muted
trumpet* and the
swishing brushes Art
Blakey applies to his
snare drum: delicious
textures!
Then I realize that
there are deep
assumptions
underpinning my
appreciation, some
profound things I know
when I listen to Jazz.
The man on the drums
beautifully articulated
one of them:
“Jazz washes away
the dust of everyday
life.”
Ain’t that the truth.
I also know that the
men making this music
are modern, urban,
American, and highly sophisticated.
Relative to much of
Western music, Jazz is
quite recent. Its birth
dates back to the late
1800s in New Orleans.
Overlapping with
Prohibition and
intertwined with The
Roaring Twenties, The
Jazz Age began in 1920.
Another aspect of the
modernity of Jazz is
the way people hear it.
Jazz debuted around the
same time as the
phonograph.
“Livery Stable
Blues,” released
in 1917 by a New
Orleans outfit of white
musicians called The
Original Dixieland Jass
Band, sold over a
million copies. If you
couldn’t afford a
record player, you
could hear their song
on the radio, another
new technology.
Bound up with its
modernity,
there’s nothing
bucolic or pastoral
about Jazz. Listening
to “Take
Five” as Paul
Desmond weaves his
iconic sax melody over
the rest of Dave
Brubeck’s quartet
in quintuple time
doesn’t evoke
visions of haystacks
and trickling streams.
Desmond once said that
he wanted his sax to
sound “like a dry
martini.” They
don’t drink
martinis on the prairie.
Jazz is a music of cool
clubs and cozy venues
in bustling cities,
especially its three
urban cradles: New
Orleans, Chicago, and
New York, but also
Kansas City,
Philadelphia, and Los
Angeles. Jazz is
soundtrack to
well-dressed couples
stepping out beneath
brightly lit marquees
with rivers of
headlights and
taillights flowing
past, as well as Harlem
streets radiating heat
with chalked hopscotch
grids and near-naked
kids frolicking in the
geyser of a fire
hydrant. The
trumpet’s melodic
refrain in Herbie
Hancock’s
“Watermelon
Man” is an
instrumental styling of
the vendor who used to
bring his horse-drawn
cart through
Chicago’s
cobblestone alleys
calling out
“heyyyyy
water-melon-man!”
Now I’m cueing up “Tanya,” a whole side of Dexter Gordon’s One
Flight Up, another
Blue Note masterpiece.
On double bass is the
great Niels-Henning
Ørsted Pedersen. As
you can guess from his
name, Pedersen hailed
from Denmark, but while
he spoke with a Danish
accent he played with
an American one.
Guitarist Django
Reinhardt, with his
Manouche Romani
ancestry, and
Paris-born violinist
Stéphane Grappelli
brought their curious
European backgrounds to
bear on the music to
pioneer a genre that
has come to be known as
Gypsy Jazz, but even
with their delightful
inflections, it’s
still recognizably
“Ain’t
Misbehavin’,”
“Body and
Soul,” and
“Solitude.”
Jazz is an American
idiom. Almost all of
its practitioners have
been
American—certainly
all its titans are:
Louis Armstrong, Art
Blakey, Dave Brubeck,
Miles Davis, Duke
Ellington, Ella
Fitzgerald, Dizzy
Gillespie, Benny
Goodman, Billie
Holiday, Charles
Mingus, Thelonious
Monk, Charlie Parker,
Sonny Rollins, Horace
Silver, Frank Sinatra.
And yet, Jazz
transcends passports
and birth certificates.
No matter their
origins, Jazz musicians
converse in the same
language; as Wynton
Marsalis so memorably
described it, a group
of artists “can
negotiate their agendas
with each other and
that negotiation is the art.”
It’s a dialogue,
a highly sophisticated
conversation. Jazz is a
music of abstraction
with improvisation an
essential component. It
demands players with
fluid minds and
democratic
sensibilities: everyone
gets to have their say
but it’s up to
the player or singer how to say it.
I hear the wind gusting
in the bare branches of
the massive oak behind
my digs. It makes me
yearn for warmer
climes, or at least a
warmer state of mind. I
have just the thing, a
trip to “St.
Thomas” and a
little calypso courtesy
Sonny Rollins off of Saxophone Colossus on that happy black and yellow Prestige label….
And I know that I love Jazz.
* * * * *
Footnote for the fans:
Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else,
released on Blue Note
in August 1958, is very much the sister ship to his friend and collaborator’s Kind of Blue,
released a year later
on August 17, 1959.
Check it out!
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