JAZZ IN SEARCH OF ITSELF LARRY KART Jazz in Search of Itself Yale University Press NEW HAVEN AND LONDON FOR JACOB Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright ᮊ 2004 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Minion type by Binghamton Valley Composition. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kart, Larry, 1942– Jazz in search of itself / Larry Kart. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-300-10420-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3506.K37 2004 781.65'09—dc22 2004041413 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 The following pieces were first published in the Chicago Tribune and appear here by permission: Johnny Griffin; Ira Sullivan; Louis Armstrong; Black Beauty, White Heat; Earl Hines; Count Basie; Duke Ellington; Arthur Rollini; Arnett Cobb; Artie Shaw; Louis Bellson; Ruby Braff; Dizzy Gillespie; Thelonious Monk; Herbie Nichols; Oscar Peterson; Stan Getz; Woody Herman and Stan Getz; Al Cohn; Art Pepper; Sonny Stitt; Jackie McLean; Clifford Brown and Max Roach; Philly Joe Jones; Horace Silver; Bill Evans; Keith Jarrett; Gary Burton; Pat Metheny; McCoy Tyner; Wayne Shorter; Ornette Coleman; Cecil Taylor; Roscoe Mitchell; Evan Parker; Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra; Milestones; Miles Returns; Lee Konitz; Marsalis at Twenty-One; The Death of Jazz?; “The Death of Jazz?” Revisited; The Marsalis Brothers Further On; The Sound-Alikes; Gershwin Musicals; Hoagy Carmichael; Smithsonian Pop; Billie Holiday; Sarah Vaughan; Cabaret Music; Chris Connor; Tony Bennett; The Jazzman as Rebel; Anita O’Day; Jazz Goes to College. The following pieces were first published in Down Beat magazine and appear here by permission: Notes and Memories of the New Music; Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell; Frank Zappa; Miles in the Sky; In a Silent Way; The Lost Quintet; Jazz in the Global Village; Raiders of the Lost Art. An excerpt from The Oxford Companion to Jazz appears here by permission of Oxford University Press. Jazz and Jack Kerouac first appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. CONTENTS Preface xi Introduction: Enactment in Sound 1 PART ONE Notes and Memories of the New Music, 1969 PART TWO A Way of Living Johnny Griffin 28 Ira Sullivan 33 Wilbur Campbell 37 PART THREE The Generators Louis Armstrong 46 Black Beauty, White Heat 49 Earl Hines 51 Count Basie 54 Duke Ellington 57 Arthur Rollini 62 Arnett Cobb 64 Artie Shaw 65 Louis Bellson 67 Ruby Braff 68 vi CONTENTS PART FOUR Moderns and After Dizzy Gillespie 73 Thelonious Monk 78 Monk in Motion 81 Herbie Nichols 85 Oscar Peterson 88 Stan Getz 90 Woody Herman and Stan Getz 95 Al Cohn 99 Art Pepper 105 Sonny Stitt 111 Jackie McLean 112 Sonny Rollins 116 Hank Mobley 119 Tina Brooks 126 Clifford Brown and Max Roach 130 Philly Joe Jones 133 Horace Silver 134 Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell 135 Bill Evans 138 Keith Jarrett 149 Gary Burton 150 Pat Metheny 155 Frank Zappa 161 McCoy Tyner 167 Wayne Shorter 170 Ornette Coleman 176 Cecil Taylor 185 Roscoe Mitchell 188 Evan Parker 194 The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra 196 PART FIVE Miles Davis Milestones 201 Miles in the Sky 206 CONTENTS vii In a Silent Way 208 The Lost Quintet 209 Miles Returns 212 Filles de Kilimanjaro 214 PART SIX Tristano-ites Lee Konitz 220 Tristano, Konitz, Marsh 225 PART SEVEN The Neo-Con Game Jazz in the Global Village 240 Raiders of the Lost Art 248 Marsalis at Twenty-One 251 The Death of Jazz? 255 “The Death of Jazz?” Revisited 261 The Marsalis Brothers Further On 265 The Sound-Alikes 270 PART EIGHT Singers and Songmakers Gershwin Musicals 278 Hoagy Carmichael 283 Smithsonian Pop 287 Billie Holiday 291 Sarah Vaughan 295 Cabaret Music 301 Chris Connor 306 Tony Bennett 307 Standards and “Standards” 313 PART NINE Alone Together The Jazzman as Rebel 320 Anita O’Day 326 Jazz and Jack Kerouac 330 Jazz Goes to College 336 PREFACE In every case the pieces collected here came to be written be- cause other people asked for them. But that is no excuse. Long before I put myself in a position to be asked to write regularly about jazz—first, in 1968–69, for a magazine (Down Beat) and then, from 1977 to 1988, for a newspaper (the Chicago Trib- une)—I wanted to be put there, in part because of a notion I’d begun to have about the role that someone who writes about jazz necessarily occupies. Unlike the two other chief new arts—photography and mo- tion pictures—that arose or coalesced at some point during the nineteenth century, jazz does not have a primarily technological basis, though it would come to benefit greatly from technolog- ical means of dissemination (the phonograph record and radio). Instead, jazz’s primary “material” is the quintessentially histor- ical set of human circumstances under which it arose—the col- lision/interpenetration of particular peoples under particular conditions in a new and expanding nation that had a form of government based on particular principles. And perhaps it is that inaugural immersion in the flux of history that has made jazz’s further artistic development so immediate, visible, and in- tense—as though this art were compelled to give us a running account of its need to be made and the needs its making served. Of course, the same could be said of any other burst of novel artistic activity—say, painting and sculpture in fifteenth-century ix x PREFACE Florence. And the wonder is that in relation to jazz we are in effect a bunch of fifteenth-century Florentines. Unavoidably im- plicated in what the artists make, we can, if we are alert and self-aware, quiz ourselves as to what necessities their various makings might fulfill, in us and in themselves. It was that real- ization, that sense of at once grasping and being in the grip of this music’s perpetual intimate narrative, that made me eager to talk about it. I have called this collection Jazz in Search of Itself for two reasons. First, the frequent unity in jazz of performer and com- poser, and the typical jazz circumstance of composition/perfor- mance in the moment, seems to me to place the ongoing ex- pression of individual instrumental and vocal personality at or near the heart of the music. Second, there is the matter of the music’s own “self” or “selves,” the shapes its collective expres- sion has taken and will go on to take. In the first decade of jazz’s second century, it would seem that “search” and “self” are terms that fit. My thanks to colleagues, friends, and mentors Bob Chatain, Harriet Choice, the late Ross Feld, Bill Kirchner, John Litweiler, Terry Martin, Doug Mitchell, Dan Morgenstern, Chuck Nessa, and the late Martin Williams, and, of course, to the musicmak- ers. INTRODUCTION: ENACTMENT IN SOUND It seems clear that when Ernest Ansermet wrote “I couldn’t say if these artists make it a duty to be sincere” in his famous 1919 article about Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orches- tra and its “extraordinary clarinet virtuoso,” Sidney Bechet, he meant that sincerity of some special sort was among the virtues he found there. This was shrewd, even prescient, as was the comparison Ansermet drew between those musicians, especially Bechet, and the “men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries” who cleared the way for Haydn and Mozart by making “expressive works [out] of dance airs.” That the creation of “dance airs” was the literal role, socially and economically, of much jazz upthrough the end of the Swing Era almost goes without saying. And yet this was not the only role the music had to play, as Ansermet’s emphasis on sincerity and expressiveness may suggest. Draw a line as early as the mid- 1920s, and in the large body of remarkable music that already exists a strikingly individual personality is at work in almost every case—Bechet, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Arm- strong, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds, Frank Teschemacher, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Earl Hines, et al. It could be argued that many of these musi- cians (certainly Armstrong and Smith) were inherently self- dramatizing, larger-than-life entertainers working in and for a marketplace that urged them to aggressively develop their skills 1 2 INTRODUCTION: ENACTMENT IN SOUND along individual lines. But the weight of biographical and re- corded evidence suggests that the dramatized selves these artists projected to the public were very much in tune with the selves they actually possessed, while other jazz artists who were not of a bold, demonstrative stripe (Beiderbecke, for one) also placed a definite personal stamp on their work and were, like their less reticent counterparts, valued for doing so. Valued by whom and in what ways, to what ends and to what effect? Valued by their colleagues, first and foremost. Al- lowing for considerable differences in role and temperament among the mid-1920s stalwarts mentioned above, there is a strong sense of a common project being worked upon, of tech- nical and expressive resources being vigorously explored and shared.