Allen Lowe: That Devilin' Tune

Allen Lowe: That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950 (paperback, 1999, Music and Arts Program of America)

A saxophonist of some note, Lowe now has two books of American music history tied to extensive CD sets, or vice versa. His first effort was American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record 1893-1956 (1997, Cadence Jazz Books), which turned into a slightly more limited (cutoff date 1946) 9-CD box set, which interleaves jazz, country, folk, blues, and pop in no special order, the juxtapositions the raw stuff of history. In a gross case of Second System Complex he soon followed that up with a 36-CD history of jazz, again somewhat broadly considered. The book itself came out in 1999, but the CDs (4 boxes of 9 each, each box with a quarter of the book text reset in tiny type) didn't appear until 2007.

Not an easy book to find. I got my copy from Cadence/NMDS. Had to make my own scan of the cover.

(p. 11):

When it comes to the study of jazz and some of the things that have been said about the music, it's tempting, but not really fair, to say that everyone is wrong. Sometimes they're wrong by omission and sometimes by commission, by not only what they say and what they claim, but by what they leave out, what they don't know about or what they think they do know. So when Wynton Marsalis declares, about jazz, in an issue of the magazine of Jazz Times, that "the music was always based around melody. Solos didn't come into fashion until Louis Armstrong," one has to wonder where he got his information. The exact origins of jazz are obscure and the original sounds of jazz or jazz-like playing are unknown. Certainly early jazz was about much more than melody, it was about rhythm and sonority, texture, and invention; and the truth is, many of the earliest jazz performances contain solos. And we can guess about other aspects of the music's origins, but we have to understand and acknowledge that we are guessing, even if we do so with knowledge and research.

(p. 12):

American popular music is a complex and wonderfully multi-faceted organism. The range of vernacular music which has emerged in the United States is astonishing in its natural and unselfconscious multicultural diversity, in the way it has subsisted on both a folk and commercial realm. Though, once again, the jazz world is fond of saying that its music is America's sole original artistic contribution, they leave out, at their own historic peril, country and hillbilly music, ragtime and show music, minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley, not to mention gospel, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. This kind of snobbery is endemic to jazz, indicative of attitudes that, ironically, mirror the kind of snobbery and isolation that jazz itself faced in its formative years.

Should have added hip-hop to that list, too, though maybe he intended r&r to cover it, since it cover a lot.

(p. 22):

Grossly underestimated (actually, generally unmentioned) in most jazz histories is the tradition of the African American string band. This tradition, though myopically ignored by early record producers, may be, in its merger with the wind ensemble,t he truest key to the development of jazz as both a specific discipline and as an art form. The image of the brass and marching band may have more of a visceral and romantic appeal, but the tempering effect on early dance music of the combination of brass and string sonorities is probably closer, in its aesthetic lineage, to jazz's actual birth.

This yin-yang combination of string and brass is evident all over the African Diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas, where American companies recorded black performers well before 1920. Early combos made up of black musicians in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, Trinidad, and Brazil and recorded in the first part of the 20th century offer fascinating glimpses of the African method in both collision with and in isolation from Euro forces, in the throes of publicly issued declarations of cultural independence. These groups may lack the particular and peculiar influence of ragtime (and, thus, a specifically jazz-like lineage), but they do not show that the musical idea of tempered steel and brass was far from new.

(p. 33):

One early type of song included in the general ragtime category was the cakewalk. The cakewalk had legitimate slave/plantation origins, as an early form of black dance that parodied the ruling class. It was a lowbrow corruption of highbrow ambition, a cynical take on the false Southern aristocracy's idea of cultivated posturing in pseudo-European dances. These stiff-backed steps were grist for the mill of slave satire, though, in creating a caricature of the master's pretensions, slaves turned white laughter upon both whites and upon themselves. On the one hand the cakewalk was a sharp depiction of white vanity, of the absurdity of people trying to develop cultivated sensibilities in the midst of something as depraved as slavery; on the other hand whites, who loved watching blacks assume high-falutin' poses while wearing raggedy-fancy clothes, saw in these slave shows not themselves but something which would become a minstrel prototype: the hopelessly and hilariously deluded Negro with designs upon a class status he could never, by his very nature, achieve. Late in the 19th century the cakewalk became another Tin Pan Alley spinoff of ragtime, a form of instrumental ragtime song. No longer a plantation phenomenon, it was now just another commercial hook, one held in some contempt by today's more formalist critics of ragtime. It may, however, have greater significance, as not only an early type of American popular song but as a route to the development of jazz.

(p. 111):

Though the phrase would not be applied to a jazz movement for over twenty years, the first real birth of the cool took place in the 1920s, among a very select group of white musicians. It may be an exaggeration to call this a movement; the titular leader of these sometimes only loosely connected musicians was cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who was unsuited by habit and temperament to actually lead. But lead he did, however inadvertently, becoming a spiritual medium through which a number of very young white men found artistic deliverance.

(p. 131):

White country musicians like John Dilleshaw or the groups of H. M. Barnes shared with blacks a great wealth of musical tradition. Though not always apparent on recordings, the truth of this common musical heritage has emerged through the years, leaked by personal testimony and non-commercial field recordings and shown by the work of black hillbillies. The racial twain certainly did meet, if not always for public consumption, and not all historians, white or black, are comfortable with the evidence. Left to their own devices white and black instrumentalists could sound eerily alike, non-ideological participants in the first, if unofficial, New South movement.

(p. 143):

For inspiration [Benny] Goodman may have looked, if he looked at all, to Coleman Hawkins, whose vertical harmonic dodges were mapped in increasingly coherent and horizontal ways, and in more and less abstract ways, a song's harmony. But that influence, if it really ever existed with Goodman, was probably only peripheral. In truth he was one of the freest and most advanced improvisers of the 1920s, whose innovative ideas involved the development of an increasingly broken-field style of running chord changes and an elongation and smoothing out of the natural properties of the jazz melodic line. Like their contemporaries in various European modernist movements and like advocates of free verse (think of William Carlos Williams and "the variable foot") all of these musicians sought (if more intuitively, with less need of manifestoes, and less intellectual rationalization) techniques to fight their way out of the narrow boxes of hitherto acceptable form.

(p. 149):

The jazz soloist of the new age was a grappler, a wrestler with those elements -- melody, harmony, and rhythm -- that defined his musical universe. Jazz, always an intensely inter-active music, became even more so as the normally subordinate roles of bassist, drummer, and accompanying pianist or guitarist began to change, to become, increasingly, harmonically and rhythmically pro-active. [Louis] Armstrong was never really part of these changes. He reigned as Babe Ruth in an age of Ty Cobb, circling the bases with a smile and a gracious nod as others sweated and slid their way around them. Things might have been different had he not achieved the kind of fame which made his accompanists afterthoughts in the minds of both his manager and his public. It's difficult, however, to imagine how a talent of his kind -- magnetic, electrically charged, infinitely expansive -- could ever have been contained in the confines of work-a-day group jazz. Instead he became a model for a new jazz star system, for the incoming of that developing pre-war generation, like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey.

(pp. 165-166):

The five or so years previous to [Benny] Goodman's success seem, in hindsight, like the years of a ripening big band conspiracy, as though the building of the jazz-band edifice and the establishment of its stylistic hegemony in the public psyche were part of a plan which, with Benny's 1935 broadcasts, came suddenly and overwhelmingly to fruition. Listen to Ben Pollack (Two Tickets To Georgia) in 1933, to Bennie Moten's 1930s band, some of Red Nichols' 1931 ensembles, Arthur Schutt's arrangements for Goodman's "Bill Dodge" sessions from 1934, Fletcher Henderson's 1930-31 band, [Jack] Teagarden's 1933 Plantation Moods, or Sy Oliver's [Jimmie] Lunceford pieces, and you have the swing era in much more than just embryo. Listen to bands after 1935 and you experience an odd consistency, a series of jazz likenesses which have to do not only with commercial copycatting but with jazz reaching, and starting to tentatively cross, a new musical bridge. It was now officially out of the margins of popular entertainment. The new move to the commercial center stimulated not only a rush of artistic advance but a trend toward artistic stasis, thereby planting with repetition and formulaic redundancy, the seeds of the next (bebop) revolution.

(pp. 175-176):

We sometimes forget that music of nearly any form responds, at its root, to factors that are beyond the reach of history, that are much more than just reflections of such things as class and race and economics, or shifting demographics and migratory habits. Musical form and content change because they have to, because the process of making music of any kind is so all consuming of both the musician and the music. A style alters or modifies itself when its characteristic gestures become cliché, when it begins to repeat itself, to show signs that it has worn out its aesthetic welcome; such is the one of the most basic of human artistic impulses, to challenge prior assumptions of form and idea. Just as the Delta blues changed at the hands of Robert Johnson, who knew instinctively that the original form begged for change and redirection and that it had gone, stylistically, almost as far as it could go, so did jazz react to the need for the expansion of formats and styles that had nearly exhausted themselves: Louis Armstrong found a way out of the narrow confines of New Orleans polyphony; Coleman Hawkins, with Armstrong's help, freed the saxophone from its slap-happy, circus past; Lester Young, facing a generation of Hawkins disciples, showed that there were aesthetic alternatives for the playing of the saxophone; Bix Beiderbecke, admiring early white trumpeters who had reached something of a stylistic dead end, showed everyone that there was another way to hear the music, that one had neither to remain entrapped in a neo-Dixieland desert or simply emulate Louis Armstrong. Large aspects of white jazz in the 1920s were the product of an aesthetic counterculture, and there are many more examples, black and white. Each illustrates, as critic Richard Gilman has said, that the act of artistic creation, at its best, constitutes a counter-history, the generation of a psychological and aesthetic alternative to the prevailing artistic and social order.

(p. 194):

As we've pointed out, change was in the air in those years [early 1940s], in the atmosphere of recording studios and some of the after-hours Harlem clubs like Minton's or Monroe's Uptown House. Musicians were feeling their way toward new means of expression, into a harmonic system that incorporated seemingly odd and difficult intervals as well as clashing dissonances, that integrated these changing tonal elements into more irregular patterns of rhythm and that placed accents in less predictable places, on less predictable beats. [Thelonious] Monk was very much in the center of all this. If he didn't have the same kind of fleet, right-hand-emphasizing solo style that some of the new generation had, he had the requisite harmonic acumen, the ability to substitute chords of sometimes remote relationship to the original harmony, and a rhythmic mastery that allowed him to accent in all of what seemed like the wrong places while maintaining complete equilibrium. If this threw some late night jammers for a loop, if it confused them and forced them from the stage, well, then, that was just to bad -- no, actually, that was the point and purpose, to separate the new from the old, or at least, the older.

(p. 195):

All that, however, puts the cart somewhat before the horse. 1940s modernism came from many directions and led not just to bebop but to a whole post-War smorgasbord of musical styles. Another new sound was emerging from the big band and blues echoes of the Swing Era, and though it appealed, at first, largely to African American audiences, the long-term commercial implications for both black and white musicians and audiences were great. Louis Jordan, preceded and strongly influenced by groups like the Harlem Hamfats, was one of the first to appreciate its possibilities, as it appropriated basic swing and shuffle rhythms in the service of relatively simple chord progression -- sometimes the blues, sometimes the old standby I Got Rhythm, sometimes even the old ragtime changes -- and lyrics that found hooks in often humorous and leering ways. When Louis Jordan sang, as he made love to a [woman] in secret, "there ain't nobody here but us chickens," and Wynonie Harris, with Lucky Millinder's band, wondered "who put the whiskey in the well?," it became clear that something different was coming into popular focus, and with it a new music of novelty and irresistible swing.

(p. 212):

Bebop was not an avant garde movement in the same deep cultural sense as the European rebellions of the 1910s and 1920s, but this may have been so because it lacked an effective propagandist, a social theorist to place it in an appropriately revolutionary context. That would come much later, in the revisionist historical battles waged by some jazz critics in the post-1960s era. But it was an avant garde movement in the sense that it now placed jazz in the theoretical running; it made allowances, for the first time in any systematic way in jazz, for new kinds of dissonance based on either intervals or stacked intervals, for methods that seemed, musically, non-representational by virtue of their sometimes surprising and sometimes even shocking juxtapositions of harmony, scale, and rhythm. Bebop was, in other words, a challenge to the established musical order, and [through] it, like nearly all modernist movements, eventually settled into routine predictability, for a time it had the same powerful impetus as the earlier European avant garde, becoming, by virtue of its challenge to basic notions of tonal and rhythmic consonance, a truly revolutionary phenomenon.

Charlie Parker was its leader and most potent symbol. Though Dizzy Gillespie, possibly because of both his longevity and relative accessibility, has suffered some historical neglect, the truth is that, brilliant as he was, he didn't inspire the same kind of reverence and awe in fellow musicians as did Parker. Dizzy was the trumpeter of the era, however, and a sign of his greatness is the dearth of other trumpet players who have worked directly in the Gillespie style, who are able to come anywhere near not only his amazing facility in the upper register but his complete mastery of the instrument. He inspired many others, but inspiration was not enough to permit any kind of real or accurate imitation.

On the other hand, imitation of Parker was rife and slovenly, in his social habits as well as his saxophone style.

(p. 250):

As much as some people struggled, the musical Luddites, against the radical changes (both technical and commercial) in jazz, the music continued to advance with the momentum of artistic inevitability -- and jazz, despite some protestations, was now a full-fledged art music, albeit one with a typically ambiguous relationship to the pressures of marketing and sales. The descriptive cliché of jazz's origins -- that it represented a collision of European and African aesthetics and techniques -- was finally an apt one, as new musicians stealthily adapted more formal aspects of their musical training to jazz's sometimes ephemeral and spontaneous purposes. Still, this idea of a Euro-African fusion made more sense when applied to places other than America, like, for instance, Argentina, in which the traditional tango was undergoing the kind of radical transformation that swing had undergone in the middle 1940s. Bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla, who would, in later years, rise to a level of international fame and find himself admired by more than one jazz musician, was already, by the late 1940s, composing in a way that, intentionally or not, paralleled jazz's orchestral expansion and integration of planned and spontaneous moments. His was a very different kind of annexation of Latino rhythms to jazz ends, too subtle in its implications to have, like Chano Pozo, a broad and multicultural effect, but too musically significant and far ranging to ignore.

(p. 257):

Before he died (in 1955) Charlie Parker left some tantalizing hints of not just what the future would bring, but what the future was. In many respects the future was everywhere in jazz of the late 1940s, in things like the pulsing, lined-out improvisations of Lennie Tristano and in the curt harmonic frisking of standard chord progressions by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh; it was there in the densely layered compositions of George Russell and Charles Mingus, the "tone paintings" of Dodo Marmarosa, the uncannily sensitive stage-whispers (both individual and collaborative) of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, in Johnny Carisi's carefully organized use of dissonance, even in Bud Powell's harrowingly personal reassessments of triadic harmony. There was even evidence of the future in Stan Kenton's increasingly self-righteous, self-conscious and somewhat desperate midwifing of it, in his attempts to compress in time events that, like nature, would just have to take their course.

But Charlie Parker, who had warned his disciples to keep open minds about the musical world around them, was already there, in some of his more eccentrically designed harmonic and rhythmic excursions, in his exploration of more distantly and ingeniously related harmonic cycles. He was there in solos like one on My Old Flame which he recorded live in a club in 1948, in which he appears ready and willing to break sonic barriers, to be chomping at a musical bit that, had he lived longer, he would likely have broken. His ability to serve, even as he conspired in his own self destruction, as such a broad source of inspiration (all of the above-named futurists idolized him) and enough to insure his statues [stature?] as a musical prophet and predict his eventual martyrdom, and he was one musical Messiah who not only walked, musically speaking, on water for his disciples, but who warned them, with great prescience, not to close their eyes to the increasingly complicated musical world in which they lived.

(p. 259):

Though I might argue that one treatment for what ails those of us who observe, fight about, and write about jazz might be detailed study of its complicated history, I don't really believe this will help. Everyone has their own uses for history, and mine, if more inclusive than the average, are no more objective nor less combative. My hope in writing all this is (that is, these last three hundred or so pages) is only that the occasional name will catch the occasional eye of the occasional reader, and deliver one more musician, dead or alive, from the humiliations of obscurity.

posted 2008-07-13

Jazz Consumer Guide (15)

That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History [1895-1950] (WHRA) Miles Davis reduced jazz history to four words: Louis Armstrong Charlie Parker. Ken Burns's 10-hour Jazz didn't go much further than to add Miles Davis. Martin Williams' canon-establishing five-CD Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz was more judicious, but he disposed of the origins problem by contrasting two takes of "Maple Leaf Rag" -- one by Scott Joplin, the other by Jelly Roll Morton. Compiler Allen Lowe takes the contrary approach, picking records for the questions they raise. He's repackaged his book into four boxes totalling 36 CDs, 854 songs. Researchers will want the first box, which doesn't get to Armstrong until the last cut. Fans might start with the third, which announces "swing is here" and never lets up. A

posted 2008-02-12

Recycled Goods: December 2007 (#50)

A man who could get to the point, Miles Davis once managed to reduce all of jazz history to four words: "Louis Armstrong Charlie Parker." This is actually just a more extreme form of what happens routinely in the writing of history, where myriad events are selected for one reason or another, shorn of much complexity, the individuals polished up into archetypes. When Martin Williams assembled The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz he effectively established a canon, telling everyone who came after what was essential, and by omission what was peripheral. Williams largely agreed with Davis, according Armstrong and Parker eight cuts each (out of 95 total), but expanded his pantheon to include Duke Ellington (8), Jelly Roll Morton (5), and Thelonious Monk (5). (Others with multiple cuts: Bessie Smith, Frankie Trumbauer [Bix Beiderbecke], Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, and Ornette Coleman.)

Allen Lowe, who's written two books on early 20th century American pop and jazz and compiled record sets to illustrate them, dislikes the Great Man focus. He prefers the mess that actually happened, juxtaposing things that we only later sorted out into nice neat boxes like country, blues, ragtime, hot jazz, swing, and bebop, and especially things and people that don't fit into any of the above. Lowe's second book/archive set, That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950, is as messy as his subject. The book, published in 2001 by Music and Arts Programs of America, runs 312 pages -- dense and frenetic as its main purpose is to annotate a play list of 854 songs, divided into 36 CDs, sold in four slim boxes of 9, each with a small print chunk of the book.

Lowe's been down this road before. His previous book, American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record 1893-1956 (1997, Cadence Jazz Books) turned into the 9-CD American Pop: An Audio History: From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record, 1893-1946 ([1998], West Hill Audio Archives). Freely juxtaposing genres, its 238 songs rarely stray far from recognized signposts, providing a one-stop history lesson that is, well, almost canonical. On the other hand, That Devilin' Tune has a dose of Second System Complex: having succeeded once, Lowe aims far higher this time, with four times as many discs/songs covering a slightly narrower focus, he takes the opportunity not to gather more well known songs but to delve into the idiosyncratic obscurities. This doesn't work nearly as satisfactorily as a survey, but does provide plenty of grist for research and argument. The major figures are present, of course, but rarely with their signature work: Ellington gets 15 cuts, Armstrong 10, Morton 10, Parker 9, Goodman 8, Trumbauer and/or Beiderbecke 8, Basie 7, Hawkins 6. But I only see 4 dupes from Williams' canon: Armstrong's "Hotter Than That" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues"; Morton's "Grandpa's Spells"; Parker's "Koko" (a different version). I don't know whether Lowe tried to avoid citing tracks that any but the most fanatical collectors might have, but he generally comes up with interesting choices. For the major figures, these samples are actually quite select -- Ellington has over 30 CDs in Classics' Chronological series. Even Bert Williams, a minstrel star from the 1910s with 3 cuts here, recorded 3 CDs worth of material (now on Archeophone).

That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History: Volume 1 (1895-1927 [2007], WHRA, 9CD): Whereas Williams disposes of where jazz came from by juxtaposing two versions of "Maple Leaf Rag," one by composer Scott Joplin and the other by Jelly Roll Morton, Lowe digs deep into many roots besides ragtime -- minstrels, songsters, march bands, James Reese Europe's orchestra. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1917) doesn't appear until the 3rd disc. Ethel Waters and Mamie Smith (1921) make the 4th, and Jelly Roll Morton (1923) the 5th, but the series doesn't start to sound predominantly jazzy until the 6th or 7th disc. While he sprinkles in early bits of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Bennie Moten, he holds Louis Armstrong back until the last cut -- maybe to play down the notion that Armstrong invented jazz, or just because he couldn't find anything to follow "Hotter Than That" with. A-

That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History: Volume 2 (1927-34 [2007], WHRA, 9CD): Bix Beiderbecke leads off with 3 of the first 9 tracks, contrasting with 2 cuts by obscure trumpeter Louis Dumaine. The book takes on the always annoying question of race in jazz, plugging numerous whites -- including an argument that Beiderbecke was the first cool jazz proponent -- without ceding any arguments to Richard Sudhalter's white jazz brief, Lost Chords. The records wend their way through numerous intimations of swing to come, punctuated by occasional blues and country tunes that are hardly less jazzy. A-

That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History: Volume 3 (1934-45 [2007], WHRA, 9CD): Swing is here, announced by Jimmie Lunceford, Red Norvo, Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Ray Noble on the first disc. Second disc tees off with Bob Wills, a westerner who swings too, and moves on to Count Basie. The most consistently satisfying of the boxes, at least until 1940 (disc 7) when Lowe starts looking for premonitions of bebop -- Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie show up on disc 8, but disc 9 (1944-45) is a broad smorgasbord of retro dixieland (Kid Ory, Bunk Johnson), elegant Ellington, singers like Billie Holiday and Nat Cole, saxophonists like Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas. A

That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History: Volume 4 (1945-51 [2007], WHRA, 9CD): Bebop takes over, but of course it isn't that clean a cut. Disc 4, for instance, starts with Bing Crosby and Al Jolson singing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" -- the fourth take, following Collins and Harlan (1911), Louis Armstrong (1937), and Bunk Johnson (1945). Then, after Sidney Bechet, comes Chano Pozo's "Ritmo Afro Cubano." That disc wanders especially wide: Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald, Lenny Tristano, Mutt Carey, Astor Piazzolla, Hank Penny, Nelly Lutcher, Buddy Rich, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker. But before long bebop has driven most of the other contenders from the depopulated clubs -- exceptions are the occasional throwback like Kid Thomas, and an especially ugly bit of projectile vomit from Stan Kenton. I suppose there's a lesson there: I would have picked something listenable, but if you have to acknowledge Kenton, why whitewash him? A-

posted 2007-12-01