Much jazz writing has proceeded from the Great Man theory of history. If you’re trying to fashion a narrative, it’s a convenient theory. Buddy Bolden begat King Oliver begat Louis Armstrong begat Roy Eldridge begat Dizzy Gillespie; Bix Beiderbecke begat Bobby Hackett begat Chet Baker. And so on. These trains of influence are supportable to a point, and allow for a coherent story to be told about the development of jazz in the US. Coherent but distorted.
Mary Lou Williams identified one reason for the tendency of historians to concentrate on a few famous figures: “In the music business, the going is tough for original talent. Everybody is being exploited through paid-for publicity, and most anybody can become a great name if he can afford enough of it. In the end, the public believes what it reads. So it is often difficult for the real talent to break through.” I don’t suggest that any of the famous names I mentioned above lacked “real talent,” only that, as Williams implies, music in the US is as much a commodity as any other aspect of life, subject to the whims of mass taste and mass marketing. If the record companies thought you were salable, you got recorded. As Gregory McDonald remarked in Fletch’s Moxie, “….In this country, everything is a business. Being creative is a business. Except you don’t have any executive staff, board of directors, business training or experience to fall back on. ”
That the promotion of a few famous Faces of the Franchise leads to a distorted sense of history is what Ralph Ellison meant when he wrote, “Some of the most brilliant of jazzmen made no records; their names appeared in print only in announcements of some local dance or remote ‘battles of music’ against equally uncelebrated bands. Being devoted to an art which traditionally thrives on improvisation, these unrecorded artists very often have their most original ideas enter the public domain almost as rapidly as they are conceived to be quickly absorbed into the thought and technique of their fellows. Thus the riffs which swung the dancers and the band on some transcendent evening, and which inspired others to competitive flights of invention, become all too swiftly a part of the general style, leaving the originator as anonymous as the creators of the architecture called Gothic . . . .”
As the original creators and developers of jazz and their fans pass away – nearly all of them are gone by now – the contributions of those who made no records or appeared on some only listed as sidemen will be permanently forgotten, and so the Great Men will come to seem a set of isolated geniuses rather than particularly vibrant flowers in a fecund jungle of talent and diligent performance.
For example, those explaining the origin of the style generally known today as “bop” often cite a widely repeated account Charlie Parker gave: “I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December, 1939. Now I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.” The Great Man dreamed it up out of his own unaccompanied head.
In Mary Lou Williams account, Thelonius Monk and some of his fellow band members at Minton’s created and/or developed bop to be so complex and innovative that “‘…they can’t steal it because they can’t play it.'” “They” were the (almost always) white band leaders and soloists the music business promoted. Charles Mingus expressed such a view to a British journalist: “White cats take our music and make more money out of it than we ever did or do now! . . . . The commercial people are so busy selling what’s hot commercially they’re choking to death the goose that’s laid all them gold eggs.”
But Dizzy Gillespie pointed out that “No one man or group of men started modern jazz . . . . ” If there’s any room for doubt of the truth of that view, you need go no further than The “Kansas City” Sessions, originally issued by Commodore Records, most recently reissued on CD by GRP Records as Commodore CMD-402, which includes valuable alternate takes and eight additional cuts by a later aggregation, also billed as the Kansas City Six, featuring a couple of additional lead horns and a different bass player. The latter sessions were produced in 1944, the earlier ones in 1938. The 1938 sessions can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vjizJSPT_o, the 1944 cuts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tDQbRUU7D0/.
The earlier “Kansas City Six” was made up of trumpeter Buck Clayton, tenor saxophonist Lester Young (mostly playing clarinet on this date, and absent from five first-recorded tracks ), lead guitarist Eddie Durham, bassist Walter Page, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, and drummer Jo Jones. All were members or alumni of the Count Basie band. The tracks without Lester were produced by John Hammond but sold to Milt Gabler, who added the session with Young to them to make up a 78 rpm album, which he issued on his Commodore label.
On the earlier sessions, nearly every significant element of Bop is already present: frequent use of augmented and extended chords, flatted fifth substitutions, tempi beyond the range of amateur dancers, jagged accents against the beat, abrupt entrances and even more abrupt endings, alternate melodies replacing the standard originals . . . . but however much these session show that Bop was not the invention of isolated geniuses or sudden flashes of inspiration, they’re far more valuable for providing “. . . a musical portrait of a handful of the greatest artists America has produced,” in the words of musician and writer Loren Schoenberg’s liner notes. Some of those artists have entered the pantheon – Lester, Walter Page, Jo Jones. Most of them obtained only modest public recognition in their day and have largely been forgotten by now. Even Lester is scarcely remembered as a clarinetist – these are among the few recordings of his work on that instrument, though they reveal that, in the words of Artie Shaw, ” Lester played better clarinet that a lot of guys who played better clarinet than he did” – reveal, in fact, that Lester was as relaxed, gentle and inventive on that difficult horn as he was on the tenor sax.
Many excellent writers create a narrative voice so distinctive that you can read a sentence or two and know quite certainly who wrote them. Such voices are made individual and unmistakable by any number of qualities – the writer’s diction, sense of rhythm, ear for dialog, ear for internal rhyme, consonance and assonance, but also the writer’s customary range of subject matter, assembly of character types, and apparent purposes. How the writer says what the writer says. I’ve found that nearly all the writers I’ve gotten to know seem to be very much like the people I imagined them to be from their narrative voices. The same is true for many jazz musicians. You get a very strong sense of individual character listening to any jazz performer worthy of the name.
For example, if you listen carefully to Buck Clayton on these recordings, you’ll hear that, like his first inspiration Louis Armstrong, he treats each note he plays as its own entity, worthy of his total attention – attack, sustain, release are all treated with equal respect and care. Clayton absorbed this quality of intense presence from Armstrong as he absorbed so many other of Louis’ virtues and quirks. If you studied a transcribed solo of Clayton’s and one of Armstrong’s, you’d have a hell of time determining which was which, and yet, no one would ever mistake Clayton for Armstrong. You’d know which you were hearing after the first few notes. Listening to Armstrong’s recordings, you hear the joyful self-assertion of a supremely confident young man, simultaneously announcing his entrance into your space and his right to be there and to receive your undivided attention. Clayton’s work, even when soloing before that mighty engine of the full Basie band, creates a very different persona: you hear quiet confidence, restrained and perfectly tailored elegance, a confidence perhaps as complete as Louis’ but far less self-assertive. Clayton seemed most at home when playing with a mute.
Freddie Green makes his presence felt with a rare vocal on “Them There Eyes,” a vocal, so stories go, that he produced by following his then lover Billie Holiday’s mouthing of the lyrics. Green contributed to the Basie band, as he mainly does on these recordings, solely as part of the stellar rhythm section, perfectly filling the great drummer Jo Jones prescription for the creation of Swing: “The easiest way you can recognize whether a man is swinging or not is when the man gives his every note its full beat. Like a full note four beats, and a half note two beats, and a quarter note one beat. And there are four beats to a measure that really are as even as our breathing.” Green soloed even less on guitar than did Fats Waller’s great rhythm guitarist Al Casey, but if he had somehow been spirited up out of the band, you’d immediately feel his absence.
My old friend Dmitri Ashkanov greatly admired Freddie Green, enough that he memorialized that rare vocal recording:
If Freddie Green
Dmitri would have face like happy platter,
and for most his life have given rhythm,
with Jo Jones and Walter Page,
and set great Count free to conduct,
by will through eyes with occasional plink,
play when and what Count wanted.
And once have had great privilege
of sing with Billie Holiday “Them
There Eyes,” while she only mouthèd
words, with love, for that short time,
for me. And Pres stand back slanting
without jealousy, I think, of us or anything.
Green was so vital to the band that Basie had no use for the solo guitar prowess of his trombonist Eddie Durham. Durham had been inventing and fabricating and playing electric guitars since the 1920s, while Charlie Christian was still a growing boy, and his work on that instrument on these recordings reveals an explorer, a chance-taker who takes great delight in the surprising twists and turns he encounters on each pathless path he undertakes to travel. To my ear, Durham is far more satisfying as a soloist than Christian. Durham consistently exploited the harmonic and tonal possibilities of his instrument, far more than Christian did in his thin-toned, relentlessly single-string approach. But Christian was featured with Benny Goodman, the most famous white bandleader of the swing era, and had the additional career advantage of a premature death, so when jazz guitarists are mentioned, his name leads all the rest, still.
The four sides from a 1944 session offer some very different but equally distinctive characters. One of them, Dicky Wells, though he was highly regarded during the 1930s (Andre Hodeir gave him a full chapter in his Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence), has largely been forgotten by now, as his instrument has fallen out of favor in jazz (J. J. Johnson was about the last trombonist to gain any kind of national fame). By 1944, Wells’ fondness for the bottle had begun to become apparent in his playing, but his huge tone and even larger sense of humor had suffered not at all. Listening to him here, I hear that bibulous, forever kidding, favorite uncle, the family black sheep whose visits everyone looks forward to despite the official disapproval in which he’s held. The one who knows how to kid everyone lovingly, who never seems to take himself seriously, though he’s somehow managed to make a boatload of money, which he generously spreads around to his nephews and nieces, usually by pulling it out of their ears.
Bill Coleman, who replaces Clayton on trumpet, perhaps remained under-recognized because he spent a good part of the thirties in Europe, India and Africa, playing with a variety of bands and musicians. You can hear in his playing much of the large tone of Bunny Berigan and the brilliance and architectural sense of Dizzy Gillespie, though Coleman’s rubato gives his solos a more relaxed swing than either ot those two generally produced. I don’t know why he’s not better regarded by critics and listeners – he was certainly valued by other musicians, who chose him for innumerable recording sessions. Chicago pianist Art Hodes might have been describing Coleman when he said of another trumpeter, Lee Collins: “Sure, he’s easy to remember. Like there’s guys you miss . . . . Irreplaceable guys – carried their own weight. And almost all of these greats (with very few exceptions) were very quiet about their greatness. . . . That’s the way I remember Lee Collins. . . . Collins was a lead man; he fussed with the melody, and that gave the players on each side of him room to do their individual jobs without worrying about a trumpet player who was roaming their territory. . . . ” You hear in Coleman that same lack of showboating, of attention-seeking – a lead man doing his job, and doing it superlatively well. All in a day’s work.
Pianist Joe Bushkin was another “musician’s musician” (that is, not even a rumor in his own time among the jazz public but highly valued by such fellow musicians as Tommy Dorsey, Eddie Condon, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. Bing Crosby, a man who demanded and appreciated excellence, called Bushkin out of retirement to tour with him and accompany him on a television Christmas special. He played with the fresh imagination of Teddy Wilson, the succinctness of Basie, but with perhaps the most legato approach of any jazz pianist I can think of, and with a far more complete left hand than either of those two giants. His work here is always striking, whether he’s soloing or comping.
Recording technology had progressed pretty far by the time these sides were made, but no one had figured out how to capture the bass accurately or consistently yet, so Walter Page’s huge contributions can only be sporadically heard. That’s too bad, since other musicians didn’t nickname Page “Big Un” because of his stature or girth but because of the power of his bass sound and his rhythm. You have to tune your ear down to get some idea of how vital that sound was to the entire Basie rhythm section or to these smaller groups. It’s worth the effort.
Describing his art education, art critic and musician Dave Hickey wrote about the many small, obscure art shops he would ferret out in each of the cities his itinerant family landed in: “That was the best thing about little stores. If you were a nobody like me, and didn’t know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell.” Milt Gabler’s Commodore Records surely exemplified those “little stores.” Milt Gabler progressed from reselling remaindered recordings to the jazz lovers and collectors who discovered his original storefront by word of mouth, to producing and selling his own on his Commodore label, to assembling the musicians for the recording sessions he produced. (Later, after leaving the store in the hands of Billy Crystal’s father, he moved into producing a startling variety of music for Decca Records, everyone from Lionel Hampton and Billie Holiday to the Andrews Sisters, Brenda Lee, and Bill Haley. Gabler was clearly a man who loved music and disdained labels.) The amount and quality of music Gabler salvaged and kept alive and brought into recorded being, of which the music on Kansas City Sessions surely represents the keystone, forms a great arch of American music as wondrous as any Colossus. His “little store” served the history of American music far better than all the highfalutin cultural establishments of his day did.
The trove of music – American and otherwise – that the internet makes available to anyone who can get on a computer is surely another wonder. But what’s missing from most of it is what the old physical albums used to provide – proper accreditation, historical context, and analysis to point the listener to particular virtues. Perhaps these supports will join the digitized cornucopia one day. Until then, I’m very grateful that the analog recordings remain available in cd form. Especially this one, which is indeed ” a musical portrait of a handful of the greatest artists America has produced,” but which also preserves a handful of the many lesser known creators and innovators who were the too often silent partners in the jazz enterprise.
