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Jazzletter'~ I .%S;.€Fo‘ ' ‘ Life November 1988 V01

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Jazzletter'~ I .%S;.€Fo‘ ' ‘ Life November 1988 V01 Gene L(’<’S PD. Box 240 Jazzletter'~ i .%s;.€fO‘ ' ‘ life November 1988 V01. 7 N0. 1 1 The dates given for Dave on the fatnilyitoinbstone in Letters . lligzist Home Cemetery, 863 Des Plaines, are 1907- Amongthe list of Chiéago musicians and their birth years in the September Jazzletter is Dave Tough (1908). Both Harold S. Kaye, Atlanta, Georgia. Feather’s monumental Encyclopedia of Jazz and Chilton’s Who's Who ofJazz nee tly use the April 26 1903 unm- an and December 6, rig-is, death date. one was born April 26, 1907 and died December 9, 1948. A Lost Innocence I Neither Cook County nor the Illinois Bureau of Vital Statistics has-any record of_Davei'I‘ough’s birth. Fortunately, The development ofphotography in the early nineteenth-cen- I found the church that the Tough family attended in Gak tury angasthen the motion picture, sound recording, and vide- Park, Illinois. They were able to furnish me with a baptis- otape, permitted us to preserve aspects of reali‘ . This mal certificate which “David Jaffray Tough, son of has our perceptions and even ourtideas of Mr. and Mrs. James Tough, was born April 26, 1907, and what art is. We know Nijins1ry’s dancing only-from descrip- baptized June 9, 1907, at‘Harvard Congregational Church, tions of it, and comparatively few people knew» it when he 1045 S; Kenilworth Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois. The Rev. C. was alive. That ofFred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, Arthur Jevne was thepastor.” RudolfNureyev, will be admiredbY.P°9Ple yet unborn. Gene When Dave sailed for Europe in 1927, his passport Kelly will be dancing with Jerry the mouse after we are all read “b. April Z6, 1908,” but the 8 was scratched out and a 7 gone. And Laurence Olivier will be doing thesoliloquies of substituted. A letter from his father, attached to" the passport Hamlet. We have only of the playing of Application, confirmed the April 26, 1907, birthdate. No Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt. -We have playing of doubt this letter wasthe result of the missing birth certificate Glenn Gould, Sergei Rachmaninoff,and GeorgeGershwin. in the Cook County files. - _ Egtcepting. graphic at - statues.and -painting;-and even Davefhimself was ambiguous toward his birthdate._ In decays with -_man"s art prior to tlfm technology an 1938,_interview wth Eduard Miller, Dave . with Ah, one might-saty, but we have the sympho- gave 7 birthdate as April'26_, 1907. In a July '15, 1944, mes of Beethoven. the oper&s~o- -we" not? If at interview with -Miller for Esquir_e'";s' 1945 Jazz Book, Dave this moment (and I~grant thatit is unlikely) no one in the changed the date to April 26, 1908. For an aborted trip to world isperforming or listening totheBeethoven Fifth Sym- South "America with Bud Freeman in February, 1947, Dave’s phony, then that symphony doesn’t Beethoven passport application read “April 26, 1908,” but the entire left us was a us how to make that sym- 1908 is scratched out and 1907 substituted. There was an phony. It is no giesymphonythanan architect's draw- April 1908, hirthdate on the death certificate, theresult mg IS a house. - A 1 . ’ e of inaccurate information given by Dave’s wife, Margaret Majors Tough. ' I Listening to jazz of the 1920s -was always for me more a Dave fell on the comer of Market and Mulberry Streets matter o dutyithan pleasure, one of those labors you under- in Newark, New Jersey, at approximately 5:30 p.m. on Wed- take with gritted teeth to try to understand your own epoch, nesday, December 8, 1948. I-Ie sixteen and a half hours such as readingloan Didion, Gail She’ahy,French essays on later at 10 a.m., Thursday. December 9, in the Newark City the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, and Walter Piston on har- Hospital. The cause of death was given as “fracture of the mony. It was not just that I disliked the hissy surfaces and skull; cerebral hemorrhage and compression; acute alcohol- drain-pipe sound-of When bass lines are inau- ism. Due to probably accidental fall on the street.” dible or indistinct, I. am harmonically disoriented. And I Although the hospital had the name Dave Tough, it couldn’t hear them on the old records. Johnny Mandel says meantnothing to the medical authorities involved. The body that listening to those records was like trying to see some- was shipped off to the Newark City Morgue, where it was thing,through 8 window. ~ discovered accidentally by a woman looking for someone _ As I reportedin the September issue, an Australian col- else. Coincidentally, she knew» Dave’s wife, who was sum. lector and recording engineer named RobertParker has over moned and made the identification, probably on Saturday a period oftime applied modem computer technology to morning, December 11. jazz ofthe 1920s and early ’30s"¥toproduce a num- Dave’s fall took place about a block from the Newark ber of albums in surprisingly — no, amazingly + good Pennsylvania Station. Because Dave had ban a patient at stereo sound. The results .o his efforts were-first heard in a the Lyons Veterans Administration Hospital in Lyons, New series of radio programs, broadcast in_England by the BBC Jersey, it is quite possible that he was attempting to reach but now available on disc on the BBC label in North Amer- transportation back to the hospital. He had already been at ica. recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke,-Duke his wife's homeat 35 Chester Avenue in Newarkearlier that Ellington,Red Nichols,Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Joe day. Dave was periodically given passes by the V.A. hospi- Venuti, and Eddie Lang, as well as celebrated tal in order to his wife. e ‘ A ' but nonetheless interesting figures. ; I r ' i , Copyright 1988 by Gene Lees 2 . .. ‘=1 ' "Isuggestediitthat'earlier1ssue' thattheserecorrlmgs Hill with abig grin, as ifhe were enjoying it. And maybehe J shouldtmuseare-examinationofthernusicofthatperiod. was. Whenrecordcompames'igotwallertoisin and l ‘ AndtllcySetaSl3fltl8fd838lIlS!WhiCh&ll0fllCl'miSStlepr0- drivel, he treated it with the contempt it deservegd, gratflsaregoliingtohavetobejufglged. Formellgstparcthe sardonic performances are keenly funny. But, one feels on soundmsuc progamsrswoe ylackrngw compared listening to the CD devoted to him, it is sad that more ofhis to_whatParkerac 'eved. WiththerushtoCDs,allsortsof studio hours weren’t expended on things such as MinorDrag early jazz is coming back into the marketplace. RCA has and the solo-piano Hanafful ofKeys. He was some fabulous 5 e extensive program of The sound doesn't pianist. - begintocompareto thoseoftheParkerreconsu'uctions. e It is, as I have two or three times quoted Artie Slaw -as . John Norris of Codatells me that when some of the pointing out, impossible for anyone who grew up after Arin- \ RCA people were asked why they hadn’tgone to Parker for strong’s arrival to perceive the impact he had tlieirfen»grneering,theysaidthey didn?twantt0spendthe true, to be sure, of the‘ne'w.music of all »But these moneyor timegPar,ker is wont to lavish on his labors oflove. restorations of Armstrong recordings theyears of What’s mint. 1,116 RCA.reissues are not in stereo, which fact greatest creative power give some hint of it. From the first some people, butdoes to me,.since stereo notes, you feel the crackling authority of a soaring imagina- , clarifies the music, lets me better hear its component puts.‘ tion. “Where did itcotne from?” Shaw§says.' “_G_enius.” 1 _ g Suddeuly,ontheseCDs,Icanhearthem—including - There are two tracks_ine-an album devoted to Jelly Roll t_hebottomlines—andhearitallwell,whetherurbabass,_ Morton by “wixgy and His Orchestra,?’_Blue Blood Wellman Braud’s*String M88 inthe Ellington material, or Blues and I'm _one_ Without You whose personnel is J Rollini’s bass saxophone or Don Mur-ray’s baritone. in the annotation as comprising Wingy Mannoue, r Ihadalways assumedrthebasspartsjust weren'ttherein the Dicky Wells, trombone; Artie Slmw, clarinet; Bud Freeman, e grooves of the original recordings. They may have been tenor saxophone: Frank Virzlortglliifli John Kirby, bass; e but they were there, and they have, through Parker’s scr Marshall, drums. e The tracks were made, to elecuonic alchemy,been brought forward. You can not only these notes, on the same date, July 14, 1930, but that, as we hear thethump, you can hear the pitch of the string bass, as shall see, is unlikely. Shaw that year was 20 years old. played by Brand, Pops Foster, and others. - Blue Blood Blues opens with 3 clarinet solo in the cha-' _ nearly a month, I played the ll BBC-Parker al- lumeau register that leaps tothe top of the instrument. As- ‘bums getting my paspectives rearranged (More suming that Artie had by now forgotten the sessi0n..I oftheseParkertransforinations.tu‘edtreondremarket.)‘ it for him. “Who's the clarinetist?" he said. “Jimmy . lhadfotgottmthattliebmtorteandbass saxophones Thatis where Benny got alot of it, you know,” and = wereasedtophybasseparts. 'lhesoundisodd;thenyouget an accurate simulation of Goodman’s style.- Listening fur- usedto it, anditiscffective, producing akind ofch ther to the clarinetist, he said, “Barney Biwrl?” _ _ t_notionintherhythmsection.- So‘-thesrgnificaneeof ' ' "'I‘henotessay_it’s_you_,”Isaid. __ - " . ' 1 _ Rollinistrikesyotrimmediately. “No. Absolutelynot. Playitagain.”-- ~_ _ g ,"- Much fun.hasbeen'pnlr'ed.atBddieCondonasaguitar- Iran thetrackbackwards to the starto'fthesolo,some- ist. I-Iehasbeenponrayedasahard-drinkingbuffoon,au- thing you can do with CDs. “That's Edmond Hall,”~Artie thorofwittyaphorisms,whowasabletoputtogethergood said. “I'm almost certain of it.” J bandslmtoontributedlittleifanythingtotlienursic. He I played the second tune, I'mAlone without You. “Now neverplayed snlos.andhisrhythm playrngwasquiet. There tint is me,” Artie said. “But the first one is Ed Hall. - You wasevenajolf.ethathedidn’tplayguitaratall,juststroked know, Wingy was a very disorganized man.
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