Wedding Venues & Village Halls, the new live jazz venues
Today, far less live jazz is
played than used to be the case, where once there was a great business in jazz
clubs and dance halls, as in the days of King Oliver: in night clubs, for
dances, and on the stage. Indeed, the honky-tonk, or bar room, or night club -
especially the less classy type of joint - once was an essential pillar of the
music, with small bands like a jazz trio
being popular, especially in the United States, where the specialist jazz public is less organised than in Europe. We all know how strong jazz
used to be, and how big a place in the everyday lives of people that used to
play, just from watching period films. A lot of life centred around jazz clubs,
dance halls, pubs were live music was being performed. We can talk to our
grandparents and great grandparents who may have been alive during the war
years, with a dance hall on the Saturday night dance was a regular feature. The
music would have been played would have been jazz. The American big bands
performed on BBC radio, and I can even remember big-band radio programmes on the
radio when I was a child. I couldn't stand it. The discordant harmonies of a
typical big-band jazz piece ending just hurt my ears offended me. It was complex
stuff, and the youngster I just didn't have the experience or understanding to
make sense of it. Having played big-band music in my adult life, I can
appreciate that rather than being a hideous mass it is tremendous complexity,
with harmonies that can collapse and re-form and change with tremendous
rapidity. So where does jazz live today?
Well obviously on the downloads for iPods and the like, occasionally on CDs,
with more and more for private events like weddings, birthday parties and the
kind of events where someone wants something very special and different, perhaps
harking back to a previous time where things were more personal. This is the
kind of business that we cover. Jazz musicians also employed by people who run
holiday complexes, when as a theatre for those staying at the complex, and more
and more crew ships, where they can be up to 6000 guests on board, providing a
large captive audience who are keen to be entertained. The jazz business deals in the
distribution of an available product: musicians. Improved quality and
distribution of recorded music means that in some sense these musicians can be
reproduced at virtually no cost, much in the manner of computer software. This
means that only live performances by musicians are unique, limited in quantity,
thus higher in value, just as the artworks of the famous painter who is now
dead. Somehow, this doesn't seem to sink in to some people who are in a band.
They seem to view a band as a readily available product, sitting in a stack of a
hundred identical bands in the warehouse somewhere, ready for overnight
delivery. They don't seem to be able to get their head around the fact that
there is only one band, and one set of musicians that band available. They find
it hard to get round the concept that if somebody books that band before them,
then they can't have a cloned copy. This causes all sorts of ructions. We live
in an age of mass production. We are used to computer software being
downloadable as often as we like, to as many devices as we like. Nothing like the
conservatoire, or the classical ballet-school, has ever existed in jazz, until
recent years where one or two of the colleges have introduced jazz and pop
courses, and the Guildhall School of music have brought out a series of graded
jazz exams. The associated board of the Royal colleges of music still have not,
to my knowledge, included jazz in their exams. Musicians have got their
elementary education in playing instruments wherever they found it and their
secondary and higher education by playing with other musicians. The production
of a steady supply of first-class and fully mature players therefore depends on
the existence of commercial bands which also happen to be sound 'educational'
institutions. So, although when hiring out
string quartets, if one string quartet has already been booked, the higher is
very likely to be equally happy with another string quartet, because the
musicians of all been through a very similar education and there is a
standardised way of performing classical music, this is not the case with
jazz
bands and small jazz trios, where musicians have come to jazz from very different routes, and
jazz
bands can sound very different. I guess there is a far more standardisation in
the playing of early jazz, and one Trad Jazz band may sound somewhat similar to
another one, but as one moves on through the period jazz there is more and more
variation. Let us consider, on the other
hand, the young European player who came up exclusively through the 'jazz'
movement and the young American player who is arriving today. The young
European, if he entered music after say 1945, very likely played exclusively for
a specialised jazz public and with specialist 'revivalist' or 'traditional'
bands composed of other youngsters like himself, who had learned their music
from records (older players, who were normally forced to go into ordinary
commercial pre-war dance bands, generally received a much better technical
training). He would rarely be forced to play alongside musicians who, though
less learned about King Oliver, were technically far in advance of the amateurs.
He would escape both the grind and the educational value of sight-reading,
rehearsals, and the varied routine of dance-band playing. The young American
player of today suifers in a rather different way from the temporary eclipse of
the large band which, in the later 1920s and 1930s, was the chief musical school
of jazz. There, and there alone, could men learn that extraordinary capacity
which makes a band like Count Basic's produce so dynamic a sound: that which
enables a man not simply to be 'carried' by the rhythm of the rhythm
instruments, but to 'swing' individually and in sections. For (leaving aside
'traditionalist' jazz, which is virtually defunct in its homeland) small-group
work, or jam sessions, are what emerges from jazz education; if they educate the
player at all, it is only at the highest and most sophisticated level. He must
be good already if he is to become better by small-group work. Big bands may
come back, or other forms of training may evolve.
Musicians may lose interest in
it. and flee into carefully rehearsed and arranged jazz (which has its own
merits), as many tend to do. The growing flood of jazz which has actually to be
performed and recorded to meet the existing demand merely intensifies these
problems, particularly on record. Of course, highly processed recording does not
produce bad jazz. If jazz were ever to be standardised into purely composed and
'executed' forms (when it would cease to be jazz as we know it) it might avoid
these difficulties. The repertoire which fills halls may be rather more limited,
the versions which appeal to the public a shade more florid than musicians might
like, but within those limits they play what they consider 'good' music. But the jazz group cannot
afford to become a dealer in standardised commodities, partly because its
commodity (creating music while it plays) dies once it is standardised, partly
because the music itself constantly changes and evolves. The jazz player, if he
has any sense, is reconciled to playing standardised stuff most of the time, for
that is his business as a professional entertainer; and if he is sensible, he
will also enjoy performing as the actor does, though he is less completely
dependent on the audience. It is the gradual conquest of this margin by the jazz
business (i.e. by you and me, the jazz public) which has led him into a quandary
in the past twenty years. JJazz is what its musicians
and singers make it. The player is the centre of its world. We must therefore
try to discover what sort of man, or more rarely woman, the jazz artist is. Let us consider the coloured
musician first. The obvious and dominant fact about the earliest jazz is that it
was a poor man's music, and a music of the 'undeserving' and unrespectable poor
at that. The godly man sang gospel songs, and put away Satan's tunes like the
blues with horror and disgust. That the modern jazz lover has made both
work-songs and spirituals into part of the jazz repertoire is one of the many
ironies of our subject, but one not shared by devout artists like Miss Mahalia
Jackson, who has steadfastly refused, through the years, to sing for anything
but the glory of the Lord, or in company with reprobate music. Naturally the
barriers against jazz were less high among coloured Americans than among whites.
Today, at a time when mixed bands under a coloured leaders are a commonplace in
jazz, there is hardly yet a single coloured conductor of an American symphony
orchestra or leader of a chamber-music ensemble, and few coloured symphonic
players. It is therefore natural that, from the beginning, some middle-class
coloured Americans entered jazz. Indeed, among the musicians for whom a musical
training, or general education, or simply an initial degree of relative
self-confidence are important assets - composers, arrangers, band-leaders -the
middle-class African American played a disproportionately large part almost from
the beginning. Most of the leading jazz composer-arrangers - Handy, Carter,
Morton, Redman, Ellington, Sy Oliver - and many of the leaders of the famous
early large African American bands -
Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, Redman, Lunce-ford, Count Basic - are or were of
middle-class origins. (This is in marked contrast to the leaders of the famous
large white jazz or semi-jazz bands, who are mainly of relatively much lower
social standing, like the Dorsey Brothers, who came from the Pennsylvania mines;
Ben Pollack and Benny Goodman, who came from the Chicago Hull House slum
settlement school; Harry James, who came from circus life; Glenn Miller, Woody
Herman, Ted Lewis, Paul Whiteman. The white equivalents of Ellington or
Henderson had other careers open to them than band-leading. But on the whole the early
jazz was poor men's music, or the music of traditional show folk, whose social
standing was not much above vagabonds'. The instrumental players (other than
guitarists) and pianists were perhaps not of quite such humble social origins as
the blues singers and players, who clearly represent the most pauperised,
oppressed and vagrant segment of the African American people. A foot-loose rural
guitar-picker like Leadbelly, in and out of jail, was despised, if only as a
hayseed, even by the poorest street musicians of New Orleans. Handy was later to make one of
the classics of jazz, the Yellow Dog Blues, out of this memory.) The women
singers, though their musical status was to be much higher than the men's, came
from comparable social depths. Few great artists have come from such appalling
slum poverty as the great Bessie Smith; and the social status (and perhaps the
original profession) of many blues singers is indicated by the nickname of
Bertha 'Chippie' Hill; for a chippy is a prostitute. Except for the peculiar
group of New Orleans Creoles, the instrumental musicians came from equally
modest social backgrounds. At all events, the original jazz players belonged to
the working class which, since African Americans are largely confined to
labouring jobs, meant the unskilled. You see, the average working man is very
musical. Playing music for him is just relaxing. He get as much kick out of
playing as other folks get out of dancing. The artist sprung from the
unskilled poor, and playing for the poor is in a peculiar social position. In
the world from which Creoles and other old city
musicians would have all the townsman's contempt for the country African
American. Old town musicians in New Orleans set the standards, had the
connections which got a man engagements in tour and in other towns, in other
words they have decided - via the discographers and researchers -which New
Orleans musicians live in history and which do not. Chris Kelly is a footnote in
history, rescued thanks to the loyal memory of some minor New Orleans musicians.
Every investigation into the
social origins of the rich, of business and public executives, or men and women
of high intellectual achievements, demonstrates the extraordinary disadvantage
at which the genuinely unskilled and illiterate are. THE MUSICIANS The jazz musician was
therefore potentially a king or duke, but his Versailles was on the Place
Pigalle, his subjects lived in the slums, and his rival potentates or peers were
(coloured) gangsters and crooked politicians, professional gamblers and
fighters, fancy women, and occasionally great preachers, lay or religious. Jazz began to lose its
popularity from about 1927 the African American papers began to hint that jazz
was 'on its way out'. Nothing went right for the great King Oliver after 1928,
and his simple goodness and modest Christian resignation - Oliver was that rare
phenomenon, a pioneer jazz player who was also a copy-book citizen - only make
the story of his last ten years more pathetic. It would be doctrinaire to argue
that the new styles now demanded even by the coloured public were not jazz, even
though they were quite certainly much more influenced by the standards of white
commercial entertainment; and it would be simply untrue to argue that most
musicians minded very much what they played, so long as it swung and gave them
the chance to blow out. Plenty of jazz players continued to feel at ease in
their world, even when resigning themselves to a more modest place within it.
The kings of New Orleans might be cornet players; the queens of Nashville or
Atlanta blues singers; but the kings of the Northern African American ghettoes,
with their more sophisticated tastes, were more likely to be music-hall dancers
like Buck and Bubbles or 'Bojangles' Bill Robinson, boxing champions, or, if
musicians, band-leaders. Fortunately for jazz, in Harlem a superlatively vivid
rhythm was sometimes gimmick enough. Chick Webb, the crippled little drummer,
made his and his band's reputation exclusively through his 'swing'. The musician began to be alone
with his music. It is significant that, whereas the kings of the pioneer
instrumental jazz got their crowns by public acclamation, Coleman Hawkins, whose
supremacy on the tenor sax was virtually unchallenged among musicians from his
first appearance in the early 'twenties for more than a decade, never led a band
until 1939, and was indeed forced to earn his living in England and Holland for
the best part of the 'thirties. The top player was increasingly a musician's
musician, or a star only for the selected and untypical public of 'true' jazz
fans. Jazz lived and flourished best no longer where it was acclaimed, but where
it was tolerated and left alone, as in the speakeasies and night clubs of Kansas
City. A good deal of jazz thus tended to become a musician's music, and the jazz
player to be even more closely confined to a special social and intellectual
world. Such was his situation when white intellectuals in the 'thirties
discovered that jazz was intellectually reputable, and when, thanks largely to
then-systematic championship, it became widely popular among the whites as well
as among its old coloured public. At this point we must consider
a factor in the coloured jazz musician's life which has steadily grown in
conscious importance : race relations. No bar of coloured jazz has ever made
sense to those who do not understand the African American's reaction to
oppression. But, as we have seen, most of the pioneer jazz musicians did not
protest openly against their condition. Handy and Armstrong could write or sing
about 'darkies', 'piccaninnies' and 'coal-black mammies' as if they did not
realise that these are insults and fighting words to the sell-conscious African
American.
much in the nature of things
as that coloured artists playing the South should accept discrimination. A
generation brought up in the Northern ghettoes, a couple of decades playing in
the North and West, and the marvellous political awakening of all the oppressed
and underprivileged in Roosevelt's America, put a new tone into the
jazz-musician's instrument: open resentment. Jazz, as we have seen, had always
attracted a small quota of middle-class and intellectual African American
players, but with one major exception (Duke Ellington) they had played or
arranged the music as it came. But from the late 'thirties
the coloured jazz musician became increasingly ambitious, both to establish his
superiority over the white musician, as it were officially, and to raise the
status of his music by competing with white music on its own ground of elaborate
and sophisticated structure and theoretical, as well as practical expertise.
Jazz did not, indeed, begin to attract young African American intellectuals as
such in any numbers until the new and ambitious versions of the music had
already established themselves. The Modern
Jazz Quartet, for instance, three of
whose members clearly belong to the coloured elite (John Lewis: anthropology and
music at University of New Mexico; Milt Jackson: music at Michigan State; Percy
Heath: fighter pilot and Granoff School of Music, Philadelphia) contains no
player whose career began earlier than the last war years. Nevertheless, the
urge to intellectualise and turn jazz into an avant-garde art-music is clear
from the end of the 'thirties. 'You see we need music, we've
always needed a music - our own. Only our musicians don't play like the whites.
So we created a music for ourselves. When we had it - the old type of jazz - the
whites came, and they liked it and imitated it. Pretty soon it was no longer our
music. No African American can play New Orleans jazz today with a clear
conscience. A few old ones still do, but no coloured man listens to them. They
might just play it for the whites. Even though the experts have proved that
there's no blacker music. 'You see, as soon as we have a music, the white man
comes and imitates it. We've now had jazz for fifty years, and in all those
fifty years there has been not a single white man, Among older middle class
musicians, other than those already mentioned, we may note Benny Carter, 1907,
clarinet, sax and arranger (Wilberforce Univ), Teddy Wilson, 1912, piano
(Tuskegee), Billy Eckstine, 1914, pop singer and band-leader (Howard) and Fats
Waller, 1904, piano and pop singer. It was viewed very much that "only the
coloured men have ideas. But if you see who's got the famous names: they're all
white." In the present state of the
USA it is still inadvisable to draw public attention to the coloured jazz
players who, in and after the 1930s, were associated with the Labour movement
and the Communists, but it's unlikely that the pioneers of the new jazz were
among them, though some may have played, among other symbols of rebellion, with
the orthodox left-wing ones. It could be suggested that left-wing politics got
among the highly specialised and insulated group of coloured musicians,
especially outside New York, mainly through their contact with the strongly
progressive band of jazz enthusiasts and critics. However, it is important to
remember that the new developments of jazz, however abstract and formal at first
sight, expressed a political attitude. The very slogan 'art for art's sake' (or,
as the pioneer revolutionary, John Birks Gillespie said, 'I play for musicians')
must be translated, at least some of the time, into some such terms as: 'Jazz is
an art-music, not just entertainment, and as African Americans we demand
attention for it as such.' Reading and orthodox culture
had never been essential qualifications of the jazz player, but in the new era
it became a distinct asset to be able to say, like Thelonious Sphere Monk, a
particularly characteristic pioneer of the new music, that 'we liked Ravel,
Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofieff, Schoenberg, and maybe we were a little
influenced by them'. The rebellion against the inferiority of the African
American and the traditional forms of jazz expression which were identified with
it ('Uncle Tom Music') is equally evident in the behaviour of the new players.
Groups like the Modern Jazz Quartet, reacting against the old ways by
anti-bohemianism, appear on the stage in faultless morning or evening dress,
bowing stiffly and with expressionless faces to applause. Not to play like a
music-hall act and a clown, not to behave even offstage like the old-style
player who looks for a night club and some whisky and a chick, and a band to sit
in with, as soon as he comes off the job: such is their ambition. An even more
obvious form of revolt against inferiority, which a leading group of the new
players shared with other Northern big-city African Americans, was mass
conversion to the Muslim religion. The attitude of the new
musicians, as well as their music, thus expressed the peculiar ambiguities of
this generation of African American intellectual rebellion. The new musician and
the new music thus expressed the peculiar ambiguities of this generation of
African American rebels. It is coloured, and desperately anxious to compete with
the whites as coloured music: the 'respectable' ambition of the modern jazz
musician is no longer simply to be accepted as a man who plays Bach, or as a
composer of classical music, but as a man who plays a music which is as complex
as Bach but based on a specification African American foundation, e.g. the
blues. At the same time his rebellion - even when he attempts to side-step this
effect by a flight into Mohammedanism or some other non-white culture - takes
him farther away from the specifically African American musical idiom of the old
jazz, and the cultural situation of the old jazzman which, though not
particularly determined by skin colour, was sharply distinct from orthodox and
respectable culture The 'modern' jazzman
represents the same type of minority avant-garde music as his white equivalents
in Paris or New York. Dizzy Gillespie (born 1917) is one of nine children of a
bricklayer from a hole in South Carolina, who came up through the ordinary
jazz-band world. Charlie Parker (1920-55) was a slum-child from Kansas City.
Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Chico Hamilton, the drummers (born 1914,
1919, 1925, 1921 respectively) learned their music as it came. No doubt some of
them had a better education, including musical training, than the men of
Armstrong's generation; but they can in no sense be regarded as people who owe
anything substantial to conservatoires or to the advantages of a African
American middle-class background, or even - since their music repelled most jazz
intellectuals - to outside influences. It was among such players that the
musical and social revolution of the jazz musician began round about 1941-2. The Harlem hipster
'functioned' in some respects like the jazz player. Like bop jazz, only in
verbal terms, jive talk was a set of variations on themes and rhythms unstated,
because assumed. That is perhaps why the only
people who have come close to realising the hipster's ambition in their own
field are the jazz musicians. There is little doubt -though
again it would be invidious to name names, even those which have come before
police courts - that drug addiction was much more widespread among the
'modernists' than among any previous group of jazz players. There was merely the
total inability to get on any terms with the world, and the compulsion to play
what must be played in the face of the world. Since those early days of the jazz
revolution the harshest outlines of revolt have been a little softened, though
no doubt somewhere there are still young players who see themselves -jazzwise -
in the same defiant, and partly self-pitying terms as each new avant-garde of
orthodox artists. The Modern Jazz Quartet is
reviewed by a classical music critic for the Sunday Times. In fact, it has taken
the jazz revolutionaries a great deal less time to win orthodox recognition than
it ever took a Benny Carter or a Dicky Wells to get accepted as a serious artist
outside a tiny circle of unknown enthusiasts. The young jazz musician today is
socially and individually a different person from the Armstrongs and Bessie
Smiths, and even from the Fats Wallers and Lionel Hamptons of the past. The white musician in America
need not be discussed at such length. In a sense, he has practically from the
start been the outside type, playing a music which he knew to be misunderstood
by the public. 'When will we ever be able to earn our living playing hot?' asked
Frank Teschemacher, the famous Chicago clarinetist. Teschemacher and his friends
knew perfectly well from the moment that they began to imitate the coloured
players that this kind of music was not saleable to the white dancing public for
'jazz' in the 1920s. The uncompromising white musician thus faced the problem of
the misunderstood and isolated artist from the beginning; indeed, who knows how
many of them had not chosen to play jazz just because it was their private
paradise, which neither fathers not 'square' friends could share, a protest
against the old generation, against the 150 per cent Americanism of the lush
decade before 1929? Howard Becker the sociologist has described a group of such
young white jazz musicians in the Chicago of the 'cool' era, but the
description, with a few changes, could stand for the 1920s also: they were sons
of good middle-class Americans. They protested, totally and absolutely, against
all aspects of the 'American way of life', by playing their jazz, by frequenting
only musicians and night-club girls, by wolfing existentialist or other
guaranteed anti-bourgeois philosophers. No generation of white jazz players
since the start (with the possible exception of the poor New Orleans whites who
simply played the New Orleans way and thought no more about it) has been without
such a contingent of rebels. Southern or Northern, the genuine professional
musician type seems to have lacked something of the hunted purism of Among the Italians in early
white New Orleans (or 'Dixieland') jazz we note La Rocca and Sbarbaro, Mannone,
Bonano, Rappolo and the Loyacanos, who probably have the historic distinction of
being the first jazz-players in history to come of Albanian stock. In Europe, where no musician
could earn even pocket money, let alone a living, by playing jazz until the rise
of a specific jazz public in the 1930s and 'forties, the ordinary professional
dance band or variety musician formed an even more important component of jazz.
The working-class background was inevitably strong, since the most obvious
school in which the musician learned his trade was one which, both as a
professional military and as an amateur civilian institution, has long been part
of the British working class, especially the skilled part: the brass band. P5]
That is why we frequently find such dance-band musicians as did not turn
professional immediately in characteristic proletarian professions like
printing, factory work, engineering, as toolmakers' apprentices, in cotton
mills, as professional footballers and the like, and why
wefindmanyevenamongthosewho started as clerks-mostly, one would guess, the sons
of working-class fathers - beginning their careers in brass bands. These men
were not necessarily jazz players, though they were the most likely to come into
contact with jazz, through touring players and singers, through the jazz
influence in the pop music they had to play, or because the work of dance
musicians is so boring that they were quite likely to seize upon jazz as a
creative relief from routine. The few early players who came straight to
'rigorous' jazz had naturally to fit into this milieu, since it was the only one
in which they could make a living by playing their music at least sometimes. The
dance-band profession was thus the earliest nursery of European jazz, and
patronised it even while it remained 'commercial'. Henry Hall, of the BBC band,
hired Benny Carter, the American star, to arrange for him. The dance-band
profession, in fact, made possible what jazz there was in Britain -at least
until the middle 'thirties - and provided its first fifth column within
commercial music. Since the end of the
'thirties, the rise of the specialised jazz public has produced a new kind of
white musician: the amateur jazz enthusiast, who has, in the nature of things,
often turned into the professional player. Whatever the character of the
white jazz players, one thing has always - until recently at least - separated
them from the coloured ones: their freedom of movement. Playing music (for
self-educated players, playing their kind of music) or some other form of
entertainment were their only ways of earning a living unless they wanted to be
unskilled labourers, and their only way of making a way in the world. For most
of jazz history the coloured men, who found jazz jobs hard to get, had not the
choice of joining a radio station's staff band or a classical orchestra, of work
as a staff composer or arranger in films or on the air, or simply of settling
down to sell insurance or to journalism or business, like those middle-aged
Chicagoan former jazz players who still meet annually, as 'Sons of Bix', to
commemorate the idol of their youth. The colour bar stopped them. Most of them
could not even retire into ordinary, prosperous pop bands-to bands like
White-man's, Roger Wolfe Kahn's or Ted Lewis's-for the African American
equivalents to the big white pop enterprises were fewer, much less prosperous,
and very much less stable.
More.......