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Blues & Jazz in America: You Just Fight for Your Life |
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Reviews
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Monday, 06 February 2006 09:54 |
You Just Fight for Your Life
Blues & Jazz in America
By John Sinclair
[The books under review are:]
Garvin Bushell as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988)
Andy Kirk with Amy Lee, Twenty Years on Wheels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989)
Buck Clayton, assisted by Nancy Miller Elliott, Buck Clayton's Jazz World (London: Macmillan, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press Paperback, 1989)
Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Alan Govenar, Meeting the Blues: The Rise of the Texas Sound (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1988)
Michael P. Smith with Alan Govenar, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1990)
Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Frank Buchmann-Moller, You Just Fight for Your Life: The Story of Lester Young (New York/Westport/London: Praeger Publishers, 1990)
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989)
The history of blues and jazz is the hidden story of this nation, the secret chronicle of the once-captive African peoples in America and the high art forms they made out of their experience here prior to and following Emancipation. It's a history peopled with unheralded innovators and giants of 20th-century music, most of them almost totally obscured in the popular codes of information through which the American artistic achievement is routinely summarized and passed on.
Network radio and television, the movie industry, standard reference works on American music, the Billboard charts, the vast pop concert touring industry, even rock radio and MTV--nowhere in these mass media can the history of blues and jazz be traced nor their contemporary manifestations heard.
The official educational system, from elementary school textbooks through high school and college music and history courses (except for the still-rare jazz studies program here and there) is equally void of vital information on blues and jazz and the people who made the music.
Yet the story continues to seep out from under the gigantic rock of official racism and cultural monotheism, told by major innovators (Miles Davis) and important collaborators (Garvin Bushell, Andy Kirk, Buck Clayton) with the assistance of dedicated, often seriously bent blues and jazz scholars whose sole reward is the warm feeling around their hearts when they see their research finally hit the light of day in little ephemeral editions of hard-to-find tomes destined to hit the cut-out bins within short months of publication.
These autobiographies are supplemented by even more scholarly surveys of the lives and times of particular artists (Lester Young) and historical eras (Texas blues, the Jazz Age, the Swing Era, modern-day New Orleans) which greatly expand our knowledge of culturally significant but hitherto relatively obscure eras and areas where the music made its mark on the world at large.
Books like those under review here--all issued during the past two years--take their place on the tiny shelves containing previous such works, many of which have already faded from public sight: autobiographies by W.C. Handy, Perry Bradford, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Danny Barker, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy, Cousin Joe, Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, Dizzy Gillespie, Babs Gonzales, Charles Mingus, Hampton Hawes, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, James Brown; crucial biographies of Buddy Bolden, Joe "King" Oliver, Bessie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Willie Dixon, Riley "B.B." King, Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, "Little" Richard Penniman, Marvin Gaye, Otis Williams (of the Temptations), Smokey Robinson and a few others.
For scholars of the music, each new work issued is an occasion for joy as it offers the possibility of expanding our limited knowledge of the times, personalities, and musical developments of those historic periods when great advances were being made in several disparate areas of African-American music and in the culture which it so precisely reflected. Whole areas of American life previously unilluminated come alive in the words of men and women who were there in the action and are still here to tell the tales which have stuck with them through the many years of their struggle to make their music and secure a living from it.
Two of the most fascinating autobiographies issued of late are the first salvos from the new Michigan American Music Series published by the University of Michigan Press in Ann Arbor under the general editorship of Richard Crawford. Jazz from the Beginning, the story of octogenarian reedman Garvin Bushell (as told to Mark Tucker), and Twenty Years on Wheels by the legendary Kansas City bandleader Andy Kirk (with Amy Lee), uncover two major sidepaths from the main road traveled by jazz from New Orleans to Chicago to New York City.
Garvin Bushell, who grew up in Springfield, Ohio with Dave Wilborn, Todd Rhodes and other members of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, cut his musical teeth in the Black show business and circus bands of the 'teens. He provides from his Midwestern perspective a refreshing account of the development of the music.
Bushell was in the middle of things in New York City from the start, appearing as a member of Lillyn Brown & Her JazzBo Syncopators in 1921 and touring Europe with Sam Wooding's orchestra, one of the first Black musical groups to visit the Continent. He worked with Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Chick Webb in the 30s; broke into the segregated radio and recording studio scene in the 40s; and continued to grow with the times, recording on several occasions with John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy in the 60s.
Andy Kirk, who came of age in Denver, Colorado, at about the same time, provides new information about the legendary Denver bandleader George Morrison and chronicles his own illustrious career as leader of the Twelve Clouds of Joy, one of Kansas City's most popular bands during the 30s. Mary Lou Williams, the young Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Howard McGhee were among the many musicians who passed through the ranks of the Clouds of Joy, and Andy Kirk brings the scene vividly back to life for the modern-day reader.
Another Midwesterner, trumpeter Oliver 'Buck' Clayton of Parsons, Kansas, contributes an excellent account of his life in jazz, published in 1986 and now available in an Oxford University Press paperback. Again we are treated to the viewpoint of a young musician far removed from the jazz mainstream who is drawn irresistibly to the sounds and lifeways of early giants of the music, most notably Louis Armstrong.
Buck headed west and was in on the seminal days of jazz in Los Angeles before settling in Kansas City to work with the original Count Basie Orchestra at the Reno Club and on its first trips to Chicago and the Big Apple. From that point Clayton began to be recognized as one of the leading trumpet stylists of the day. He's still very active in New York City music circles, albeit as a composer and arranger since putting away his trumpet for health reasons.
Kathy Ogren covers another aspect of the music scene of the 20s in her provocative, well-written The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. She examines the social as well as the artistic impact of the new American music--well, make that African-American music and you get the idea. Her scholarship is impressive and to the point, and she marshals her facts with confidence and verve. Highly recommended.
Texas blues scholar Alan Govenar makes two welcome appearances in this set, weighing in with a concise, colorful, well-documented and lavishly illustrated history of Texas blues, R&B and related sounds, going all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and other early blues giants.
The Lone Star State played a decisive though vastly under-recognized role in the development of the blues idiom, and Govenar traces the contributions of Aaron 'T-Bone' Walker, Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown, Sam 'Lightnin' Hopkins, Albert Collins and their contemporaries, as well as movers and shakers like Don Robey (Duke/Peacock Records, Buffalo Booking Agency, Bronze Peacock nightclub) who helped pump out the Texas Sound to the rest of the world. The wealth of period posters, graphics, photos, and other visual ephemera from the Texas blues scene through the years adds a few tons of interest to this splendid historical investigation.
Govenar returns with the great New Orleans photographer/journalist Michael P. Smith in what is essentially a photo study of the modern-day Crescent City music community, augmented by Govenar's riveting interviews with Mardi Gras Indian chiefs, second-liners, jazzmen and blues players.
A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music puts you right out in the middle of the street with the marching bands and their followers, takes you straight on-stage at Tipitina's and Tyler's and the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, and follows the music-makers home to record their private reveries and personal passions. Check out the photos of the late Roy Byrd--Professor Longhair, "The Bach of Rock"--posing with his neighborhood Civil Defense Unit in full uniform!
Now for the real heavyweight entries here: The Swing Era, Gunther Schuller's exhaustive, epochal, perfectly essential study of the music of the 30s, is the companion volume to his irrefutable masterwork of 1968, Early Jazz. Let it suffice to say that, in his preparations for undertaking this massive volume, Schuller personally audited every jazz recording made during the period, transcribed scores of significant solos by the innovators of the era, and brought his impeccable scholarship to bear on every detail of the material at hand. This is the shit, as we say, and serious students of the music owe it to themselves to take advantage of Schuller's monumental work.
Danish jazz musician/librarian/researcher Frank Buchmann-Moller contributes a virtual masterpiece of jazz biography in You Just Fight For Your Life: The Story of Lester Young. The President of the Tenor Saxophone straddles the history of jazz like the Colossus of Rhodes: born in Woodville, Mississippi; brought up in New Orleans as a member of the family band led by his father, Billy Young, where he switched from drums to saxophone so he could get off the bandstand and out the door with the young ladies more rapidly; tempered in Minneapolis and the Upper Midwest before settling in Kansas City as a key member of the Basie band and moving with it onto the world stage; emotionally damaged by his bit in the detention barracks at an army camp in Georgia; and riding to jazz stardom after the war with his pioneering approach to the tenor saxophone, spawning such spectacular musical followers as Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and countless jazz and R&B tenorists. Here's the entire story for the very first time, and we're blessed to have it with us.
Finally, Miles: The Autobiography, the story of Miles Dewey Davis III of Alton, Illinois, the dentist's son who scaled down the social ladder to cast his lot with Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine, Tadd Dameron and other architects of the bebop revolution of the 40s before emerging 10 years later as the premiere figure in the jazz world of the 1950s and 60s.
The auteur of several of the truly indispensable recordings in the history of the music--Kind of Blue, Jazz Track, Round Midnight, Milestones, Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess, Sketches of Spain, Someday My Prince Will Come--the one and only Miles Davis tells his story in his own croaky, wonderfully idiosyncratic voice, perfectly taken down by poet/collaborator Quincy Troupe and packed with the maestro's thorny judgments of his contemporaries and everyone else who piques his interest. This book is a joy to read from beginning to end--get yours today!
--Detroit
November 1990
(c) 1990, 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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