Jazzletter 93023 February 15, 1983 Vol
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P.O. Box 240 Ojai, Calif. Jazzletter 93023 February 15, 1983 Vol. 2 No. 7 L6II€I'S The Musician as Writer t I was taken with your recognition of Beiderbecke's enormously When Roberta Mandel, the singer and pianist, subscribed to the underrated influence. Shortly before my retirement from the Jazzletter, she said she thought I deserved a medal for optimism. faculty at Carleton College, I taught a course entitled Lord and “I didn't know musicians read anything but notes," she said, Duke and another entitled Bix and Bird. Together the two were thereby in spite of the fact that she is witty and articulate herself designed to examine the contributions to jazz history made - indicating her submission to the image-of the jazz musician as respectively by New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Kansas inarticulate boob (not that we haven't all known a few who filled $31. In both cases I emphasized comparison as well as contrast. the bill). So many writers have written that “jazz musicians are not llington might dismiss Morton, but Duke had more In' normally an articulate group," or some variation thereon, that, I common with Jelly than with anyone else — including stature. think, the musicians themselves came to believe it. No one who And when I projected my sequel, composer John Eaton ever hung around Jim and Andy's could accept that image of the immediately responded by citing several basic ways in which jazz musician. My God, the talk there was incessant. You could Parker provided a parallel to Beiderbecke. drown in exchanges that went on from eleven a.m. until closing. John S. Lucas, Winona, Minnesota But Ihad no ideajust how articulate jazz musicians really are. Don’! give me any great credit for insight. One of the people Until now, that is. I have been inundated, to my great pleasure, who missed the boat on Bix was me. John S. Lucas is a poet anda not only with long and highly literate Iettersbut even with entire retired English professor. Under the byline Jax. he was, during his books, some of which, including one by Ernie Furtado, I still have graduate student days, a reviewerfor Down Beat. not had time to read. Bobby Scott has just written six pieces for harp, a quintet for flute and harp -— and a novel, whose first Roses in the Morning moved me to tears. Mercer's lyrics have chapters are excellent. And I have become aware that some of our always been great favorites of mine, and I loved his vocal way with people have pushed this duality to the point of pursuing parallel a song, especially in the early Capitol days. Even as a kid I sensed careers as writers and musicians. Owen Cordle, for example, is a his artistry in the bird songs like Skylark. saxophonist and writer, music critic of the Raleigh, N.C;, News Recently I heard an Ellington version of, of all things, Margie. and Observer, and a contributor to Down Beat and Jazz Times. from I934. It was Rex Stewart's first appearance with the band Ben Sidran is a pianist, songwriter, singer, and journalist. Like and I was struck by the obvious influence of Bix, bearing out your Artie Shaw, Paul Desmond originally intended to write. He used conviction of his being such an important factor in the to hang out not so much at J. & A.'s as Elaine's, a habitat of development of the art. writers. Paul said a lot of them were very capable musicians. Janet Kelsey, Honolulu Hugo Friedhofer almost became an artist and he certainly ‘er Kelsey is a retired English teacher. could have been a writer. When I was a student at the Ontario College of Art, preparing to be a painter, I was interested in how I enjoyed the piece on Johnny Mercer. I met him only once, but many of my fellows wrote poetry or played piano. There was a when I did, he did me a favor I didn't deserve. I was a kid reporter, piano in one of the school's hallways, and it was always being very green, and I had buggered up an assignment and Mercer played, and well. Larry Rivers is an ex-musician. Actor Michael bailed me out by giving me an excuse. Moriarity is a fine jazz pianist. Novelist Anthony Burgess is a Why is it that so many lyricists, often better musicians and substantial composer. Dudley Moore's degree is in music. Pianist tunesmiths than the guys they write lyrics for, are so timid about Chuck Folds used to be an editor at American Heritage. letting their own tune-writing get heard? Mercer was one such. So The fact is that an interest in one only ofthe arts is exceptional, is Sheldon Harnick, who will only write lyrics for the Broadway not the rule. “Don't let anybody put you in a box!" Bobby Scott stage (Fiddler, etc.) but who is a superbly trained musician. My said, with passion. To love one of the arts usually is to love them friend Frank Roberts staged a comic opera of Harnick's in D.C. all. And since a substantial part of what we call talent is an some years ago, a one-act spoof of French Impressionist operatic insatiable compulsion about finding out how things are done, style with the lyrics coming out of a Berlitz manual and the music a anybody with enough smarts to find out how music is made is flawless send-up of the Debussy of Pelleas et Melisande. usually able to figure out how a painting ora book is put together. George Warren, Monterey, California Marion Evans even figured out the stock market. Barry Little, the Former guitarist George Warren, who used to have a studio in Toronto neurologist, pianist, and composer, is a good painter as Los Angeles with Laurindo Almeida, is now a novelist. And this well. brings us to a most interesting subject... Which brings us to the subject of doctors as musicians. Terry Rogers, the Seattle pulmonary specialist, plays saxophone in a ...the pimps, procurers, and purveyors of group made up entirely of doctors. Doctors tell me that doctors popular culture who own stage, screen. and tend to be shallow people of narrow focus, but not the ones I radio... know, because they are all musicians, or at least music freaks. —Nicholas von Hoffman Oh! I just remembered. Shirley Bassey had to play a gig in Australia — Sidney, I think. Her conductor was rehearsing the orchestra during the afternoon. The lead alto player was terrible. and theoretical excellence and compositional skills. For him, on The conductor, disturbed, called the contractor aside to find out the testimony of friends and acquaintances, most of them long where this guy had come from. The contractor said, “He is one of gone now, Bix had kind of grown outside his infatuation with hot the top cardiologists in Australia." “Well tell him to bring his tools jazz by I925. He came more and more to consider it a tonight," the conductor said, “because when Shirley hears him manifestation of adolescence. In his view, the people who clung to she's going to have a heart attack," it were either musically stunted or, as in the case of Louis Doug Hamilton, the Toronto composer and trombonist, and Armstrong, native geniuses. ‘ an excellent one, is a physician. Doug, incidentally, became one of Bix saw himself — wanted to see himself ~ as a “legitimate" or the newest subscribers on the same day as Dizzy Gillespie, our “respectable" musician, a composer, someone who could create hero. He has a superb album, called The Brass Connection, on the something musically enduring and, in his view, worthwhile. His Dark Orchid label. It includes, aptly enough, Dizzy's Tanga. solos on the records? He liked some of them, didn't like others. Incidentally, the Toronto musicians sometimes kid Doug about Some — particularly the early Wolverines efforts — embarrassed his speciality. He's a proctologist. And of course we all know him. It was a very revealing moment, that meeting with Sylvester about Denny Zeitlin, the composer and pianist who treats your Ahola which we describe in the book. Hooley remembered with other end. He's a psychiatrist. - lasting astonishment Bix's demeanor: looking at the floor and I have been discussing with some of the subscribers the mumbling, “Hell, I'm just a musical degenerate. He meant it. possibility of closing the Jazzletter down at the end of its second To him, the writing of Ferde Grofe and Gershwin and Bargy and year. in July. If it does in fact cease to exist it will be due not to any the rest was class. It was accomplishment, Kultur, if you will. Not lack of literacy among musicians but to the Xerox machine. It is for nothing did he all but forsake the cornet in the last year of read by a large number of people who are not subscribers. life. He just didn't give a damn about it anymore. He wanted“ Without advertising to sustain it, it can only die as a result. It is compose, to excel as a “real" — his quotation marks more than costing more than it takes in, and indeed it hasjust been bailed out mine —- musician. by a couple of our sawbones friends, Drs. Hank Maller of Los But that was half a century ago. N0 dropping out to take a few Angeles and Terry Rogers of Seattle, who have made donations. courses at Berklee or Juilliard or Manhattan.