Jazz from the inside

Liam Hourican

Drums in My Ears Benny Green (DavisPoynter £2.50) This book has a nondescript title and an air ot having been thrown together with no verY urgent critical purpose. It is an undisguised collection. of reviews, and is at times repetitious, at other times maddeningly reserved.

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t the exercise is worthwhile and is conc'tteted wholly without self-indulgence be41ase the author is an austere and brilliant critic of jazz who happens to write like an angel as well. 004 is almost true, as Philip Larkin says in his ero for Sidney Bechet, that in all ears ap,vrthlriate falsehood wakes when certain jazz -racT,I1,ds are heard. Benny Green has a built-in th'enood-detector, and this is not a book for who like their music spiced and garWith tales of the sporting-houses or irtching probes into the extent of heroin r. 'Won in the bebop school. Not that Mr n is anxious to bowdlerise his subject; the one of his main complaints against RI` modern Jazz Quartet is that it tries to do st

art)

that. It is merely that he prefers to apach the music as a serious and all-conng thing, in the way that musicians do. qp,Ine reason for that is not hard to find. 'f)To v fourteenth to my twenty-third

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he tells us, "there were perhaps a hunoedar days when I did not open a saxophone te"8.e and inhale the distinctive musk of its inlort." He pursued his art in venues as unAc71Y as the Wilkinson Sword factory at si,,ft or the Solent holiday camp, and with a Ole-mindedness which the prospect of 41401111g Compton make a century could hie disturb. He is funny and modest about he e,xPeriences and does not tell us how good oecame at the tenor saxophone. Good ti 0"' certainly to acquire a complete inu.er's view of jazz, which gives his criticism

• ;!.are authority.

dewhat he tells us about the state of jazz is nItPiressing enough if, like me, you wish the well without knowing •much about it. trli . ?elieves the 'seventies may be the most Is b1 decade of its history, and the last.This 114 ecause the art may in retrospect prove to gone from its infancy to its dotage in the antite. of its grand masters, Armstrong c•llington. What it needs is new lines of thProvisation, but it is difficult to see where e Can develop. Mr Green tells us that the re,;,.ed saxophonist Sonny Rollins may well esent jazz at the moment of dissolution, !rig art stretchedY , to breaking point by sheer 4eouit ^ b ' the implication of this book is that if lea.,os and Co. are going to hell, they are at Qr:' going by an approved route, and Mr• 4n'en observes them more in sorrow than in dder. For a nice man, he can be very unth„ritable to another set of deviation ists, ue-e'e who think jazz is an uncouth form in 04 of a little classical refinement. Here he is

ave Brubeck: folk

of his pieces, he proudly told us, is a Turkish IN, tune with the traditional blues form supertj"t.i)sed upon it, the whole being in the traditional .14Pean rondo form. As nobody present knew any tion tsh folk tunes, or had any idea what the tradivik,_41 European rondo form consisted of, all were ',fled by Brubeck's subtle flattery.

I) There was a period when for thousands of qe°Ple Brubeck was all they knew of jazz. Mr rilleen pursued him then without mercy, as h: present chronicle shows, and seems to lfrve, won the engagement, to judge from dstil,ueck's almost total retirement, "as sudden

was gratifying."

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hi:u.t it s the warmth of his enthusiasms and alS Intelligent fidelity to the old masters that shake Mr Green so memorable a critic. Here, 1 yrs°16d think, is the last word on Hawkins, 11Og. Henderson, Goodman. The author A-uld not presume to have the last word on ujstrong or Ellington, but he manages to be Aailingiy apt, and his homage to the ageing ,r.131strong, reduced to nine stone weight by a ..Verable laxative obsession and grinding out ‘70nderful World' on the stage of Batley arietY Club, is an act of singular decency. Hourican is Belfast Editor of Radio ' eteris,Eireann.