Jazz And America

Fifty-six.

Yes, but there was something in that music that spoke to me, and still does. I play Louis Armstrong 10 times a week. When I want to feel better, that’s what I play. I think you do the same thing.

Well, my experience was somewhat similar. I was in New Orleans when I was 15, and I had grown up listening to classical music and then rock, and then rock turned into Fabian and so there wasn’t much to listen to. And I heard a New Orleans jazz band, which got me very excited. Back in New York, I was with my parents visiting some friends, and they had an old Cue magazine in which 15 jazz critics picked the 10 greatest jazz albums of all time, and there was only one album on every single list : The Louis Armstrong Story, Volume Three, with “West End Blues.”

Let’s talk about Louis. When you write about him, and I hope this is true when I write about him, and it’s true when a lot of people, like Dan Morgenstern, write about him, there is a glow in the prose. And it’s there every time he comes into your book.

It’s hard to put into words. There is something elevating about everything he ever did. I’ve never heard anything by him that I didn’t feel somehow lifted up by. There’s something about that incredible sound too. It’s so warm and so magisterial. I don’t mean to sound corny, but there is something terribly loving about him. It just gets you. No matter how silly the song. “Blueberry Hill” knocks me out. Now, I couldn’t care less when anybody else sings that song. He found the essential humanness in everything he did.

Totally welcoming, totally warm, totally inspiring. I don’t know how else to put it.

I listened just last week to a thing he did very shortly before he died, something like “What a Wonderful World,” only a much sappier song. And he’s an old man, and you can hear he’s not feeling well, but it still just lifts you up. And it’s all the more moving, because he’s struggling a little bit to do it. It’s as close to religion as I’m ever going to get.

The trumpet player Max Kaminsky said, “I’m very religious, I worship Louis Armstrong.”

I think so. People got interested in the music, a lot of young people who loved rock and had never really heard jazz at all, film editors and so on, really began to listen. I think it was mostly Armstrong who ushered them in.

I did. And Ken came to see it very quickly, too, as soon as he began to listen. But I mean, it’s always seemed to me that Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who was so very different, are the two titanic figures in the history of the music. There are lots of other wonderful musicians, but those two speak most to me.

No, I don’t think it’s over. One reason we didn’t do more on the current era is that at some point writing about the music becomes more journalism than history. And I don’t know enough. I mean, I’m not as sympathetic to a lot of recent music as I was to earlier stuff. But I think the world is still full of young people trying to play, and I still love to hear them. I just think that when you’re dealing with Armstrong, and Ellington—and Charlie Parker—they are such huge figures that it’s terribly hard to know if anyone in recent years has been anywhere near as important. I don’t feel qualified to make those judgments.

That’s a hard one. I’m very partial to the notion that you can play all kinds of music in new ways. That you can play Jelly Roll Morton in an interesting way, you can play Thelonious Monk in an interesting way. That’s not a lesser thing. It’s making something new out of something old, building on a great tradition. I think Wynton Marsalis does that, and other people do that, but I can’t tell you who’s going to be a monster in the future that people will write books like this one about. I just don’t know.

Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know how to do history unless I’m telling a story. I believe in chronological history. Things develop in order. Jazz history is very often done in a way my father described as “potato-race history.” You know, you put the potato on the spoon and you run up to the finish line, then come back and get another potato. So you do big bands all the way to the end. Then you come back and cover small groups. That isn’t how jazz or anything else actually develops. Things happen all over the place, all at the same time. What I enjoyed was linking up things, so that you know that in a given month various things happened in different parts of the jazz world. For better or worse, that isn’t how jazz history is usually done.

Bebop was invented by swing musicians. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Nothing does.

Well, I think everybody feels a sadness that it lost popularity. I’m not trying to make a moral judgment, Bird and Dizzy are heroic people. They’re trying to create an art form, to be seen as artists, not entertainers. That’s a very admirable goal, and it produced marvelous music. But it was also difficult music. Unless you’re an astonishing virtuoso, it is hard to expect people to sit and listen to somebody play long strings of solos. You have to really be listening.

I know for a fact he loves to see people dancing. It makes you play better, he says. Swing musicians talk about playing at the Savoy and having the audience tell them they weren’t swinging. Dancers would come up and say, you know [snapping fingers], “Pick that up.” It must have been something to experience that amazing give-and-take, that call-and-response excitement. Ellington talks about how wonderful it was to play a ballad and see people falling in love in front of you.

I suppose that’s true. They would have been looking for something more arcane.

Well, it’s an awful corollary to the story. There’s the blatant kind of racism of keeping people out. And there’s a much more subtle kind, which is the idea that somehow jazz music is—at least when played by blacks—somehow an instinctive, raw, natural, primitive thing. That math runs right through the whole history of the music. During the sixties and seventies, for someone like Duke Ellington, who had risen above a lifetime of condescension, to hear someone like LeRoi Jones calling on black musicians to reject everything that ever happened in Europe, including the tempered scale, in favor of what he called “the new, the ‘primitive,’” must have been especially awful.

They would practice until they knew every single note, and then hide all the music, because white audiences didn’t believe black music was “authentic” if musicians knew how to read. How people put up with that and kept on creating is simply—oh, what’s the word I want?—it’s heroic .

Yes, I did. You can’t do American history and not do race. I don’t know a single part of the story it doesn’t come into at some point. But especially, obviously, it comes into this one.

Wynton helped me see that the first generation of young whites to play the music were heroic too. They were a terrifically disparate bunch. Some came from well-to-do suburban families or small towns, others were street hoodlums. What they had in common was that they were irresistibly drawn to jazz, which their friends and families dismissed as “nigger music,” not worth listening to, let alone trying to play. They heard something in that music that spoke directly to them and they determined to try to play it for themselves. They weren’t necessarily better or worse on the subject of race than a lot of other whites, but they heard Louis Armstrong and they knew that sounding like that was something to strive for. Now, none of them ever achieved it, but no black musicians ever achieved it either.

Bix Beiderbecke’s family is the most famous example. His father never reconciled himself to the career his son chose to follow. But, as Wynton pointed out to me, it’s hard not to be sympathetic with the old man: Beiderbecke’s father had been afraid that if Bix became a jazz musician and lived that kind of life, he would become an alcoholic. And, of course, he did.

Absolutely, and I’m sure Ellington’s family was initially appalled by the kind of music he chose to play. They loved him, so everything he did was perfect because he was the apple of their eye, but still he was not playing the kind of accepted middle-class material they would have wanted him to play.

I know he was proud of what he’d done, even when younger musicians who didn’t understand all that he’d gone through criticized him. But that incident seems to me to speak for the whole book, in a sense. He goes to a dance at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas. He had never heard of Louis Armstrong, had never heard jazz, he’s basically there because he hopes he’ll meet girls. And he hears a black person who is a genius.

And he knows it. It’s mysterious. You can’t define it, but he hears it and he knows, even as a teenaged white kid from Texas, that that’s something he’s never heard before, and it stays with him all his life. You know, when he came home after the Brown decision, he played Armstrong records as a celebration. It always circles back to Armstrong.

I do too. Whether he’s playing or singing, he does something you didn’t remember he’d done.

No, he’s the guy with the handkerchief on the old TV shows. I’d be satisfied if it just changed that.

James Reese Europe was an extraordinary person. He was consciously trying to produce a new kind of black music, a kind of ragtime-based precursor of jazz, and in the most articulate and interesting way, while playing for all the rich people in New York. He had New York’s leading dance band before the First World War, and then he took this Army band to Europe and just blew everybody away.

His regiment was the most decorated unit in the American Army during World War I.

They’d been sent to some place in South Carolina for training, and the treatment they received was absolutely horrible. But the fascinating story to me was that they had gone down with a bunch of other New York troops, including white ones, and when the white New Yorkers saw what was happening to their fellow New Yorkers who happened to be black, they were furious and would go beat up the rednecks. I found that to be one of those surprising stories about America that show how complicated we are.

There was great consternation about whether black troops would be allowed in the town. The mayor publicly stated that they should know that even in uniform they were going to be treated the way black South Carolinians were. When they gave a concert in the town square, things were tense. A big, muttering white crowd gathered. But after Jim Europe was finished, all they wanted to know was, When were his men going to play again? And the next day, the same sheepish town fathers came and asked if the band could play at the country club.

There are other parallels. Toward the end of their careers, they’re both addicts of different kinds and they’re both perpetually feeling that somehow they’re not doing what they should be doing. They both think that there’s a secret—if they just knew more about European music, maybe they could produce something better. They’re both listening to the same French impressionist composers too. They both hear something that they’re interested in, and neither gets anywhere near doing what he might have done, because their own appetites devour them.

One of the great things about doing this book—and why it was frightening at the same time—was that it made me listen to people that I hadn’t listened to as carefully as I should have. Lester Young is one, especially in those late years when he has all the lilt of his early stuff plus all the sadness of the human condition. It always swings, and it just kills me.

Oh yeah. And then Ben Webster. I don’t think there’s anybody except Armstrong I like to listen to more than Ben Webster. You know, he was called “the Brute,” a hopeless drunk, mean, sometimes violent, yet he plays so tenderly. That’s one of the great things about jazz, the spectrum of emotion it produces. That a man like Webster could produce those intimate, whispering, tender sounds …

That’s exactly right. These are consummate professionals.

He is a marvelous human being, and in the film he’s terribly moving. I remember, when I was a kid, I would read that there must be something wrong with him, because that was the era when if lots of people liked a musician, that was by definition proof that he wasn’t worth listening to. Brubeck was hugely popular and therefore superficial somehow, and out of touch with his raw feelings. And the other cliché was always that Paul Desmond, his alto saxophone player, was the great musician, and you just had to wade through the Brubeck part. When you really listen to those records, it’s not true at all. Desmond was great, but Brubeck can play . His music’s deeply emotional and swinging and exciting. I heard him in India when I was a teenager. He came and played and tore it up, at Delhi University. I’ve been very lucky. The first three bands I heard in person were Count Basic’s, Duke Ellington’s, and Dave Brubeck’s.

Yeah, they were on tour in ’54, and Time had been preparing two cover stories, one on Ellington and one on Brubeck. And Brubeck, who worshiped Ellington and saw him as a friend, heard a knock on his hotel-room door early one morning, and there was Ellington saying, “Look, Dave, you’re on the cover of Time” Brubeck said it was the worst moment of his life. He wanted to be on the cover of Time , but to be there before Ellington was a terrible thing for him.

For me, it’s fusion. I can’t listen to that. And I can’t listen to—whatever it’s called—“sof” jazz.

Sure, I listened to more, but it’s so diffuse it’s hard to generalize about. I like some late Coltrane, but after that, I find it very hard to stay with it. I think the same thing happened to jazz that happened to painting at about the same time. I graduated from Oberlin College in 1962 with a degree in studio art, and I remember that for most of my fellow students who went on in painting, their goal in life was to do something novel. Each of them thought his or her job was to somehow do something unlike anything anybody else had done. Frankly, none of them produced much. The drive to be new is different from the drive to be genuinely true to your own vision. Since the sixties there has been that pressure on artists in all fields to reinvent the wheel.

No, and I like Omette Coleman. I don’t like all of his music—I don’tunderstand why he ever took up the violin—but you can hear history in his music, you can hear somebody deliberately choosing to do things differently from the way other people have done them. For me, for somebody who likes history, itmusic—Is fascinating to hear somebody reaching back into the past and making something altogether new. That I find thrilling.

It doesn’t have the audience it used to; it is an undervalued art form. It is the most intensely American music, created by the most despised minority, out of all the music they heard here. There is nothing more American.

What was the question?

What did she mean?

I remember—I put it in the book—the year before I got to Oberlin, Ellington went there to play, and they took the grand piano off the stage because the Oberlin Conservatory of Music thought jazz musicians would hurt the instrument. He had to play an upright, which of course he played as though it were the greatest Steinway in the world. There was not a flicker of resentment. He had dealt with this before. It was beneath him.

Same story.

Excellent.

Another generation. Different ways of dealing with the same idiocy.