The Lowest of the Low

A Josef Škvorecký novella set in wartime Czechoslovakia led me to this droll 1985 BBC documentary about the bass saxophone and its players, who seem a genial lot, comfortable with the humorous effect the instrument tends to have on people but also very much in earnest in their devotion to it. Škvorecký himself appears as one of the interviewees.

One of the masters of the bass saxophone was the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Adrian Rollini (1903-1956), who can be heard below leading a lively combo that includes a young Buddy Rich.

Rollini largely abandoned the instrument in his later career. He opened a hotel in the Florida Keys and died in a hospital in ghastly circumstances, apparently after having run afoul of the mob. Ate van Delden's Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler is the definitive biography.

Uneasy (Vijay Iyer)

Jazz criticism is well outside my area of competence, nor have I made any effort to keep abreast of contemporary developments in the genre, but it would be ungrateful not to make at least a brief note of this record, since I've hardly listened to anything else for the last month or so. Uneasy is a collaboration between the pianist Vijay Iyer, the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and the bassist Linda May Han Oh; it was released on April 9th by ECM. According to a press release,

In the course of this endeavour, the political and social turbulences dominating today’s American landscape are reflected in musical contemplation and tense space. In his liner notes, Vijay elaborates on how today “the word ‘uneasy’ feels like a brutal understatement, too mild for cataclysmic times. But maybe, since the word contains its own opposite, it reminds us that the most soothing, healing music is often born of and situated within profound unrest; and conversely, the most turbulent music may contain stillness, coolness, even wisdom.”

It's a reasonable question how one decides that any instrumental music project, unless it's bluntly programmatic (which Uneasy is not) "reflects" a political and social landscape and conveys those reflections to the listener, and conceivably someone coming to this record without glancing at the liner notes might not detect the presence of any of that at all, but no doubt the reverberations mostly operate on an emotional level, which is appropriate given that music has never been particularly suited to promoting and defending a "thesis." On the other hand, the inventiveness and musical intelligence of the three players here is immediately evident, and the presence of those qualities is itself a welcome response to the state of contemporary culture and public life.

Uneasy hooked me from the first cut ("Children of Flint"), but repeated listens bring out layers and nuances that may be overlooked initially. (And reveal a few likely musical quotes, including to "Salt Peanuts," "I Got Rhythm," and possibly Miles Davis's investigations of Spanish music in the 1950s.) The Geri Allen composition "Drummers Song" put me off at first (at one point the same insistent figure is repeated twenty times or so), but now it may be the one piece that I turn to first. Throughout the album the textures shift and merge, and the music never sounds facile or hackneyed. It doesn't do to be too easy.

Samples from Uneasy can be heard at Iyer's website.

Monk's Mood

What to listen to when you're out driving before dawn, and the streetlights are lit up because it's never really dark anymore, and the traffic lights aren't working right and already the cars are starting to fill the streets and people are on their way to do things that give them no joy but there's another day to get through, and to hell with the ones getting into their limos who will be rolling the dice for all of us today, because it's Monk, dammit, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, 1957, and open your ears and show a little respect for once for the things that really matter.

"What Is Jazz?"

The poem below was printed in a local newspaper in 1966. As the name of the poet would mean nothing to anyone who didn't know her personally I choose to keep it private.

What Is Jazz

jazz is America's song
it's freedom
it's bebop and blues
it's bourbon street and harlem
jazz has a pulse
not a beat
(jazz is a live beast
not a metronome)
it skids and slides
it laughs and sobs
jazz can talk
it talks about yesterday and tomorrow
but mostly about today
about right now
about steamy cellars, hot coffee
and that guy sitting next to you
his troubles
his blues
and that girl he loves
jazz is young
it's always the new thing
it's always out
it wanders
alone
it's tough; it's gutsy
jazz is brave
it does what it feels
not what's right
not what's good
jazz is people who are out
people who walk the streets
it doesn't hide
lice on rats
cold-water flats
jazz gets in
it's real
it's dirty
but jazz never lies to you
it tells you when it hates
it tells you when things are rotten
then it throws back its head
and laughs
it says
man, don't let things get you down
relax baby
enjoy yourself
like this, man
then it bops off
and lets off with a good earthy roar
and ya smile and say
hi bud can I buy you a beer?
what is jazz?
jazz is life, fella
jazz is life.

Hard to Find

"In response to the question 'Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?' he once told a disc jockey, 'Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.'" — Related by Lewis Lapham in "Monk: The High Priest of Jazz"

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on this date one hundred years ago. Below is a recording of one of his best-known compositions, "Blue Monk."

The world is inside of nothing

It's funny how the world is inside of nothing. I mean, you have your heart and your soul inside of you. Babies are inside of their mothers. Fish are out there in the water. But the world is inside nothing. I don't know if I like this or not but you better write it down.

I just watched Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film Round Midnight again for the first time in nearly thirty years. This scene, in which saxophonist Dexter Gordon, playing a fictional jazz legend named Dale Turner, philosophizes while a friend's daughter plays on a French beach, is one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's a bit hokey, of course, but that's show business.

I can readily understand why a black filmmaker like Spike Lee had issues with a film like this, and there's much that could be said regarding its rehearsal of cultural clichés about black men who are in one way or another damaged being sympathetically "minded" by whites, as well as about the portrayal of jazz musicians as oracles rather than as disciplined, skilled professional musicians (see Cortázar's "The Pursuer," which may have been one of the inspirations for this film), but on the other hand this is one of the few fictional feature films from the second half of the twentieth century in which jazz musicians are actually played by jazz musicians rather than by professional actors. In addition to Gordon, who reportedly contributed to the development of the script, the cast includes Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and other luminaries. The music is splendid (and plentiful), Gordon and co-star François Cluzet are splendid, and you have this scene on the beach, all of which ought to count for something.

Naima

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Coltrane. Richard Williams has a brief appreciation at The Blue Moment. Below is a track from Giant Steps (1959).

St. James Infirmary

Any number of sources will inform you that the classic jazz composition "St. James Infirmary" is derived from an Anglo-American traditional ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake," which relates the sad end of a dissolute young man who has fallen victim to syphilis, and whose dying request consists of the instructions for his funeral procession. But are they right?

Those arguing in favor of a connection can point, first of all, to the title institution itself, which is mentioned by name in at least some of the versions of "The Unfortunate Rake," and which may allude (no one seems to be sure) to a long-vanished hospital in London. And then there are lines like the following (from "The Unfortunate Rake"):

Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don't smell me as they bear me along

This is evidently echoed in "St. James Infirmary" (in a version recited in a 1931 trademark infringement case) as follows:

Give me eight black horses to carry me
Eight pretty women to sing me a song
Let them sing me a song to my grave
As the bells toll on and on

Those similarities are real enough, but how much do they really tell us? The problem is that the familiar versions of "St. James Infirmary," which have been recorded countless times beginning in 1927, have nothing evident to do with an unfortunate rake dying of syphilis. In fact it's a little hard to say what the song is about. When I first learned the song, many years ago and who knows where, it began something like this:

I was down in Old Joe's barroom
On the corner by the square
The drinks were served as usual
And the usual crowd was there

The narrator then describes one of the patrons (one version calls him Joe McKennedy), who in turn sings what are no doubt the most familiar lines from the song:

I went down to St. James Infirmary
I saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So sweet... so cold... so fair...

Having described the corpse, most versions continue with something like this (I should note that the lyrics below are, deliberately, a composite, making use of both published texts and ones drawn "from memory," which may or may not match any single existing recording. In any case, the gist is clear):

Let her go, let her go, God bless her
Wherever she may be
She may search this whole wide world over
But she'll never find another man like me

Robert W. Harwood, the author of a fine book on the song which attempts to partially untangle its extremely convoluted history, confesses to finding the "Let her go" stanza "wrong, self-congratulatory, and, in this context, demented," but I think it's darkly hilarious. The speaker — McKennedy, or whoever he is — has been "jilted" by his lover because she has died; the woman will be conducting whatever searching she'll be doing in regions unknown to mortal man. I suspect, in fact, that the stanza has been interpolated into the song from an unrelated source, and originally had nothing to do with death, but if so the borrowing was a stroke of genius.

At this point, the song generally continues with the recitation of dying wishes. But whose — and why? Some observers have attempted to rationalize the lyrics, drawing on the "Unfortunate Rake" tradition, by saying that the woman has died of syphilis and her lover knows that he will soon follow. That's plausible, but it's worth asking whether whoever it was that assembled "St. James Infirmary" in its classic form would have made that connection. If not, can we really say that that is what the song is "about"?

Perhaps the best-known rendition of the song is the one first recorded in 1928 by Louis Armstrong. This version omits the frame verse ("I was down in Old Joe's barroom") and jumps directly to "I went down to St. James Infirmary..." After the "Let her go" stanza, it concludes with the following request:

When I die I want you to dress me in straight lace shoes
Boxback coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch-chain
So the boys'll know that I died standing pat

What if anything remains of "The Unfortunate Rake" in the Armstrong recording? Does it even matter? I would argue that the song as we are most familiar with it is so stylized — so modernized, if you like — that it no longer makes any difference if the narrative is coherent or if it follows its supposed ancestral source, that what we have is a composite made up of bits and pieces of "The Unfortunate Rake" tradition combined with other elements that were originally unconnected to it. What the song "is" now is a melody, a few familiar verses, and a public identity; all the various versions are instantly recognizable as "St. James Infirmary" (even if sometimes they bear other titles) no matter what story-line they seem to convey.

Below is a refreshingly irreverent rendition of "St. James Infirmary" recorded by Alphonso Trent and His Orchestra in 1930.