Jazz
Rebirth of the blues
JAZZ is back! Half the revolting ads on television show a lone male tenor-player drinking some yob lager or Blend 37 coffee. But it isn't jazz, it's the image: the zoot suit, the crazy whacky guy who won't fit in. You out there, watching, you schmuck.
I have been a jazz bore since I was 18. First it was Bunk Johnson played on 78s and sounding as if they were recorded in an aircraft hangar. I enjoyed trad jazz (yes, it was another jazz revival), but it was not an obsession. Then in 1955 somebody threw me an Extended Play (EP) record of Thelonius Monk piano solos. After the first hearing of 'Well You Needn't' and `Eroner , I had to be scraped off the ceiling. I was seriously in love with the playing and music of Melodious Thunk, as his wife Nellie called him, and I've listened every day ever since. His two wonderful Blue Note recordings will give you some idea of my obsession.
I then discovered Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown! And I tried to play them to my friends, or to anybody who would listen. Nobody would; I could empty a room full of people in three minutes less. I realised that all the musicians I loved were room-emptiers. From then on my obsession had to be a solitary vice.
All these great men had one thing in common: they were all drinking more units than the BMA would consider permissible and had other addictive habits which speeded them up and allowed them to play anybody off the bandstand. And it killed them — that was the price. See What Happened to Kerouac? at the ICA (lots of Monk music).
First, then, a memory lane shot. The Benny Goodman Big Band appeared at the Festival Hall, recreated by: Bob Wilber, clarinet (Give him a big hand, folks!), Charlie Byrd, guitar (Woo!), Al Grey (Take it, •Al!), Art Hodes (Art Hodes on piano!), Spike Robinson (C'mon, Spike!). The place was packed, and we were all of a certain age, and our children had long left home and married. But tonight we were reliving the famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts when jazz became respectable. Toupees were thrown into the air, and we tapped our Dr Scholl's inner soles to `Stompin' at the Savoy', 'Sing, Sing, Sing' and `One O'Clock Jump'. I was only sorry that the great Shorty Rogers couldn't make it, but even so I nearly left the auditorium and enlisted in the US Marines. Coming soon: the Agatha Christie Big Band with Doris Stokes on bass.
I went to the Bass Clef Club (35 Coronet Street, London N1) to see the Paul Bley group. Paul Bley is that not so rare animal, a Canadian jazz pianist. Oscar Peterson's another. I would urge you all to go to the Bass Clef every night. On the set I saw he played as if the piano was a short-wave radio and he was fiddling around trying to find the right station. He had a pipe clamped in his teeth and kept his hat on.
Miles Davis once said that jazz wasn't dead, it just smelt bad. But it's not true. Jazz is alive and bouncing around all over England, and the resuscitation seems to have been done by British musicians. Courtney Pine plays tenor and, along with Andy Shepard, their heroes are my heroes. They want to sound like the awesome John Coltrane. Now the loafer's on the other foot.
So put on your beret and shades, you flipsters and hipsters.. Go blow your wig. But if it does prove to be another hype and the advertisers ruin it by using jazz as a background to some revolting lager, I can always go back to my solitary vice.
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