Today's autobiographically-inclined improvisation returns to the question of how we acquire taste in music. Over the years
people who say they don’t care for jazz have questioned my devotion to it. When
people assumed it to be snobbery and intellectual posturing, I would say, “I
like it because it swings and it’s bluesy.” To which one person replied, “But
you like the avant-garde stuff too! Do you really enjoy listening to that?” To
this person I answered, “Not as a steady diet, but yes. I think it is exciting,
and I like hearing something I can’t figure out sometimes.” When I explained
that music does not have to be entertaining to be a valuable experience, he
said, “I don’t understand that. Why should there be an intellectual component
to something as visceral as music?” I replied, “To me, the most visceral thing
in music is improvisation." I prefer the striving for musicality to the “perfection”
of classical music and the “same every time” repeatability of popular music. In
funk and rock, it is usually the experimental and improvisational elements that
most engage me.
One of the things jazz musicians
and jazz evangelists like me preach is that people just aren’t exposed to jazz,
and that they would like it if they were.
I think this is partly true. My parents didn’t have many jazz records,
but I heard a LOT of jazz on television growing up in 1960s America. There were
not many actual shows about jazz or featuring jazz musicians, but jazz
musicians were playing and composing the background music of almost all the
shows about urban life, especially detective shows and espionage shows. Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, Lalo Schifrin,
Henry Mancini, Toots Thielmans, Buddy Collette, they ALL made most of their
living doing music for television. These weren’t just theme songs but full
scores for each episode, usually suspense-oriented variations of a handful of
leitmotifs. There were even theme songs with odd time-signatures---not just
“Mission Impossible” (in 5) but the themes for “Name of the Game” and “Room
222” were both in 7/4.
Another early memory of jazz
consciousness I have is seeing the Modern Jazz Quartet on “Camera Three,” one
of those highbrow programs that came on Sunday morning before church. I loved
that show. I also saw Jim Henson’s play “The Cube” and Ravi Shankar on Camera
Three. Seeing the MJQ on TV was an important moment to me because I remember
that I “got” the way they were playing together. Milt Jackson was playing a beautiful, lyrical
solo on an instrument made of metal that is struck with a mallet. John Lewis
was staying out of the soloist’s way, but pushing the groove along with bluesy
little fills on the piano. The drummer, Connie Kay, was swirling his brush on
the snare drum and keeping the ride pattern crisp and light. The bassist was tall
and lanky (Percy Heath,) and even on our little TV speaker you could hear his
deep note choices. All of this went together and yet each strand of it was
something I could follow separately.
Somehow I understood that improvisation was the only way you could make
this kind of music, and I wanted to be able to improvise someday.
I remember seeing MJQ after that a
couple of times on the Flip Wilson Show.
Flip actually DID have jazz musicians on his show, including Errol
Garner, Louis Bellson and Pearl Bailey, Nancy Wilson, Slim Galliard, Billy
Eckstine, etc. etc. The first lesson in
jazz history I got was also on television, a problematic but at the time
inspiring film called “The Benny Goodman Story” featuring Steve Allen (who of
course could play jazz piano) as the clarinetist and bandleader. The film
avoided the race issue almost completely, even when it came to Teddy Wilson and
Lionel Hampton (as themselves) being “integrated” into the band, even thought
they were conspicuously the only black people at a upper-crust party in one
scene. However the film did skirt the issue of Benny’s Jewishness when he
wanted to marry John Hammond’s sister (played by Donna Reed). I didn’t
understand that as a kid, but only knew that I liked the music they were
playing, especially when it was just the Quartet with Wilson, Krupa and
Hampton!
Another way I was exposed to jazz
was through the horn sections in many of the popular bands of the late 60s: Sly
and James Brown had killer horns, and there were white bands like Chicago and Blood
Sweat and Tears, too, with horns and jazz leanings. At the age of about 14 I started babysitting
for a jazz drummer and science supply salesman named Jim Bagby. Jim was the
first person who played Bill Evans for me, and Coltrane and Roland Kirk and Art
Blakey’s bands and the Max Roach group with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins. I
think the first record he ever played for me though was Kind of Blue. Coltrane
impressed me the most, but it was also the beginning of my lifelong
appreciation of Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans and Miles and Wynton Kelly,
too. Jim gave me a great gift in just letting me check out his records when I
was babysitting, but his enthusiasm and knowledge of the music was inspirational. Jazz has begun and solidified some of my
greatest friendships, and Jim Bagby’s was one of them, and it lasted many
decades, until his death five years ago. I remember early on Henry Robinette
playing records at his house for me, after which I had an appreciation of Sonny
Rollins and McCoy Tyner. The music of my peer group at Desiderata Community
School was eclectic and included jazz fusion and avant-garde jazz as well as
the best of rock and funk.
So, I am not sure that my
appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical
coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement and friendship. In
giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else
made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me
tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as
an undiagnosed bi-polar person. In future blogs I will be touring that landscape
in memory and trying to understand why I took the turns I did, and why I went where
they led.
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