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Friday. February 25, 1977
University Daily Kansan
Staff drawing by DAVID MILLER
A heart, besides 2 ears essential to jazz listening
Bv TIM BRADLEY
Reviewer
Writing about music is quite the trick, because music is at once personal and universal, technical and emotional. Experiences of this kind dispassure fans. Who's really to say what's right, what's good?
Jazz, from its inception, has been a music of change and of resistance to change. Every artist has had a style that old fans hate and new fans love. Musicians, critics, and audiences carry on and on about the merits of this versus that music. It was strong, the daddy of them all, hated bop and made no secret of it. Buddy Rich and Stan Kenton each had some ill-considered use of the song music that alienated many country fans from jazz. Duke Ellington used to do two
so many scaled-monkey shrieks; to the electric "sophistikun" fan, anything recorded before 1960 is music for squint-minded antiquarians. Brubeck babies don't like it and play on the board, in and all these fans are running around oblivious to each other, like Pontiac passing in the night.
So-called jazz experts have their images to maintain. Some prove their hipness by demonstrating how far "outside" their musical tolerance can be, especially missing the beauty of some very "inside" music. Others must prove their expertise by knowing dates, labels, who wrote, and what they drove the bass etc., on every jazz side ever recorded. Yet these same experts know not a
And hey, who's to say where jazz came from? Experts are sure it had African rhythmic origins, but there was room in the mix for Creole, Caribbean and South American input, because after all, New Orleans is a city in Chicago, St. Louis and New York.
THE DEAL IS that all the chatter about relative quality of music from certain time periods or certain musicians is just flapdooole and energy on the same bone, and the very music that divides us is the music that unites us.
John Coltrane was a great admirer of Sidney Beetle, even though his musical carnises
Grammy land. the musicians, of all sorts, still need our support, though. And not just for the band or their styles or style, but for jazz itself.
I'M NOT suggesting that we put the clutch in on their discretionary engines. Sure, there are those players who have learned to success formula, neither expounding nor expanding on it. There are times when it seems the only music is the ring of the cash register, out of time, as they did in 1964. Johann Philip Kirpnerger wrote a book called "Methode Sonaten aus'm Ermel zu schudeln", which lazily translated means "Tossing Off Smites." With it, mercenary music mongers can steal from the masters.
Arts & Leisure
Good music must have the
TO BIG BAND BUFFS,
avant-garde music sounds like
arrangements of the same tune;
one for black audiences, one for white.
And Miles Davis hates everybody.
Iazz will survive rock influence
LEROI JONES would have us believe that jazz is an exclusively black territory and others describe it as an essentially American experience.
were galaxies apart. John Williams, the brilliant classical guitarist, admits to owning a Les Paul electric. In the studies, jazzzers are rubbing shoulders with non-jazzers working on TV themes, movie soundtracks and commercials.
By STEVE FRAZIER
Reviewer
For about 25 years after the bop revolution of the '40s, jazz seemed to have its mind made up.
True, new styles - cool, third Stream, hard bop, funk, and avant-garde - sweat in and out as styles had before, but jazz music has been the primary music. During the decades that preceded bop, musicians usually sought to appeal to listeners' feet, but as jazz musicians fled the constraints of swing music, the 80s, jazz music to be music to be enjoyed only by those who would be still and concentrate.
Record companies are springing for reissue series, so we now have a good opportunity to discover again or for the first time the art of the progenitors, the makers of the call jazz. Our music has made it into big clubs, the mass media, concert halls, even into
bean about the emotional content of their specimens.
Rock moved in to meet the demand for popular dance music, and jazz musicians found satisfaction in meeting their personal demands for creative freedom.
A lot of great jazz, though, is coming from Europe, Norway, Sweden, South America, even Japan. The cooperation and partnership between Henderson and Benoog Goodman, Gunther Schuller and Thelonious Monk, and Gil Evans and Miles Davis bespeak
Eventually, jazz found itself ready to enter the 70s. Often brilliant, it was heard in the United States on only a trickle of recordings by a steadily dwindling number of devotees. The result was that their music pronounced dead before, and now many were beginning to take the death knells seriously.
Yet most jazz musicians continued to deliberately avoid any efforts to remake their music into pop music.
THE RECORDED history of jazz from 1945-70 is nothing short of glorious, as shown in the art of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Rollingins, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. But cold vinyl can't tell of the musicians' frustrations; records don't influence their fame, famous and respected artists in Europe and "nigger entertainers" in their own land. Nor does the music explain why many once-sensitive artists had their disrestruction, in alcohol or drugs.
ability to transcend and transport, to involve the listener, who need not worry whether it’s from the Drool School or if it’s hip or who wrote it. Duke Ellington said ‘it don’t mean a thing if it isn’t got that swing’; if it isn’t got that swing’ Louis Armstrong pointed out, “If you have to ask, when I can’t tell you.”
Something was bound to give, and it did: Miles Davis' trumpet shattered the walls of convention with a jazz*rock mixture in 1973. Notices in jazz's haunted music popular culture made her dominant force in jazz in the '70s.
Davis, of course, didn't singlehandedly create jazzrock, but "Bitches Brew" proved that the hybrid style could be both artistically and financially successful. And the students who play musicians who have recorded under Davis is astounding: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Billy Cohamb, Joe Zawalim, Gwendolyn Benson, Ron White, Tara White, William White, Bob Ma朋, Larry Young and Jack delohtone.
AS WITH ANY new style, jazz-rock is played by innovators and imitators. The innovators have shown that rock rhythms can be exciting propellants in their music, and the best jazz-rock can stand on a scale of satisfying and rewarding art.
Unfortunately, the imitators far outnumber the innovators. In the battle for popular appeal, they cater to the lowest common denominator, which is, as the saying goes, both quite low and quite common. To complicate matters, disco invaded pop music, and now the roster of the most successful monotonous rhythm tracks and string machines can only be read as a casualty list.
new jazz style in the '70s. But there has been a furry of activity from all schools of jazz that those who delight in labels must hesitate before calling the '70s the Jazz-Rock Era.
Jazz-rock, for better or worse, has been the most pervasive
EVEN THOSE UPSET with the increase in jazz-rock mercenaries must admit that the new style has drawn many young people and bins for the first time. Understandably unsatisfied with jazz-rock and somewhat acclimated to jazz inflections, they eagerly engage "for only hinted at in most jazz-rock."
THE THOUGHT that Eubie Blake, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Anthony Braxton might all release newly-recorded material in 1977 is perhaps comparable to Johann Strausky's song "Stravinsky" sitting down together to compare notes.
Interest in the various styles of jazz is made easier by the fact that the history of the music is so readily accessible. The entire development of jazz is crammed into three quarters of a century. Each decade has brought a wave of young talent ready to challenge the older ones and a rhythm that really rapid and drastic style changes that make it possible for musicians from every era to be alive and active today.
Another reason for an increased jazz audience is that jazz education has boomed in the United States, especially in high schools. At last count there are more than 100 school jazz bands, each one giving young musicians their first real exposure to jazz.
Besides "live history" from survivors of other eras, extensive reissue projects by the artists introduced a new audience to classic jazz performances, and the same companies unearth
long-lost tapes that shed new light on jazz history.
Europe, which accepted American jazz long ago, has begun to return the favor. Some of the best jazz in the United States can be heard on the ECM and SteepeCase, played by brilliant European musicians such as Jan Garbarek and Niels Hanning Orsted-Pederson.
There's such a long distance between "that's no good" and "I don't care for that." Let us lay down our labels and listen, first with our ears, then with our hearts.
Big bands, declared economic impossibilities after the '40s, refuse to die. Count Basie, Harry James and Mercer Gould, founded tradition Veterans Woody Herman, Stent Kenton and Maynard Ferguson recruit heavily from college jazz programs and find many of their jobs teaching high school music. They are innovative new bands, such as Toshiko Akiyoshi/akisho Tabackin, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and Gil Evens, show that big bands can work around the inherent limitations of large spaces with extended solo space and brilliant arrangements.
NEW AMERICAN record labels devoted to jazz appear regularly. They range from Pablo and Horizon, divisions of RCA and A&M records, to small independent labels like Xanada, Chiaroscuro, Improvising East-East and Famous Door.
EVEN AVANT-GARDE,
although not thriving, appears
to be doing better in the '70s,
but not on the record from
the Arista-Freed label.
Jazz in the '70s, impossible to label under any one name, has given cause for hope and fear.
Because the number of money-minded jazz musicians trying to be pop musicians is so much larger than it has been in the past, they are saddened that their approach might swallow the whole of jazz. But
renewed interest in all types of jazz indicates that the art in jazz will survive along with the musicians.
Study of '40s bebop revolution may aid cultural understanding
By CHICO HERBISON
Guest Writer
"when i get to heaven gonna play on my
burn
harp gonna play all over god's heaven but only with the cats who can make the changes
When the black poet Dollar Brand composed these lines more than a decade ago, he could very well have had the black jazz musicians of the 1940s in mind. The social and economic upheavals which marked the post-World War II years were accompanied by a similar revolution in American jazz. Although, in the early 1950s, swing music was big enough to hold the attention of the American jazz audience, a musical coup d'etat—bebop—was in process.
The racially-turbulent 80s have passed but the crisis has not. And, if there is indeed an historical continuity in Afro-American culture, an examination of the history of the African community provides us with clues to an understanding of the seemingly peaceful 70s.
HARLEM NIGHTCLUBS in the early 1940s were the gathering places for a group of young black jazz musicians who had been members of were also saxophonist Charlie Parker, guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Kenny Clarke, and pianist Thelonius Monk) who began playing jazz with new forms of jazz expression.
experimenters sought to counteract the restrictive nature of large jazz groups.
Although it would be highly inaccurate to conceive of these people as a "circle" of musicians, it would be equally misleading to deny that they were all who occurred among them. All graduates of big bands which prospered during the 1930s, these young
BECAUSE OF the emphasis on ensemble playing in big bands, any other band can be denied. And, due to the primary function of the swing bands—to provide music for dances—even short, though in many instances they are longer. In the position of mere background music
There was, in addition to these aspects of the big band era, a third barrier against which the black bebop musician had been able to overcome theseceptions, jazz historians have been reluctant to deal with the social and racial implications of bebop's "birth." Unfortunately, there is a paucity of references to bebop's roots. keys to the "how" and "why" of bebbop.
THE CLUES WITH which we are provided, however, strongly suggest the racial nature of the reaction against swing music. A small, but growing band was so popular than coincidence that the big band era (with its commercially successful white leaders) led to a period of jazz dominated by black musicians, a period which was, in turn, followed by a preponderance of white musicians in the "colour" school of the 1950s.
Supported by statements of black musicians who were there when “things were cookin’”, the resulting theories have been widely used in style of jazz which the white musicians couldn’t copy (and, therefore, from which whites could not reap any sort of financial rewards”)—in other words, from which whites can win the cats who can make the changes.
musicians of this jazz style. The musical revolution represented by bepop was, at times, an unbelievably fast tempo and rhythmic complexities of bepop prevented many musicians, of all colors, from attempting to play, let alone mastering, the new music.
THEOSE WHO HAVE attempted to attack this view of bebop have yet to recognize the possibilities.
This re-establishment of polyrhythmic devices in jazz and the renewed emphasis on the "blues" (feeling and form) which, among other elements, characterized bebop, suggest the movement of this music away from traditional jazz. Some of the musicians of the black musicians of the 1940s were engaged in a type of cultural renaissance not unlike their counterparts (John Clotrane, Sonny Rolls, Archie Sheph, et al.) in the 1960s. The African-influenced jazz of the last decade was very much a "spiritual" descendant of bebop and their subsequent, Christian, and their follower bands laid the groundwork for the musical aspects of the black revolution.
THE NEED TO examine the social character of the beeb, or any other predominantly black, era of American society, is not easy for racial isolation in jazz. As the black novelist and poet Ishmael Reed has so aptly written, "... the super-race phase of American life—the advocated by African Americans or the whites, men or women, is through."
Jazz, from its very inception, has been a reflection of one of the most sophisticated forms of cultural exchange. Such an exchange cannot occur understanding—racial or otherwise—and heran lies the real revolution.
Herbison is a graduate student in American Studies.
Lawrence, Kansas City music thriving
By BILL UYEKI
Entertainment Editor
It seems local jazz enthusiasts and the local jazz music scene have a reciprocal relationship—one
Recently KJHK-FM, the other campus station, has added jazzer programming five mornings a week. Newer, and only a fraction as powerful as KANU, KJHK nevertheless provides an alternative to the usual blare of local rock stations. Not a bad way to wake up.
There's an abundance of ways to see, hear and enjoy jazz locally, for example:
Radio-In those parts of the country, the jazz programming on KANU-FM has become an institution. There's about 35 hours of jazz weekly; 'Night Is' is a house term with any jazz fan around.
Nightclubs — last night a packed house at Paul Gray's Jazz Place, 926 Massachusetts St., heard some sizzling City City jazz from the Jay McShannon Band,带领 Claude Williams on violin.
The Seventh Spirit, 6½ by E. 7th. S., a private 21 club in the basement and in the balcony of the Opera House at New York City. $200.00.
Trumpeter Tommy Johnson leads the Tommy Johnson Experiment; the Nairobi Trio is a talented, multi-faceted group of ten trained pianist whose fingers brim with musical ideas, leads a trio; and the River City Jazz Band, when it isn't playing under other names as a country band. He's also a musician, incorporating b cool, jazz-rock styles.
blues shows and hampshire picking sessions, Off the Wall Hall, 737 New Hampshire St., schedules some fine jazz acts, such as vibest Gary Burton and Oregon, both featured last year.
Groups - Lawrence jazz groups deserve some mention. All are comprised of competent musicians who need support. None are buying Cadillacs with their earnings.
Each summer the Kansas City, Mo., Parks and Recreation Department seems to do a better job of booking outdoor shows, most of them on Brush Creek in the early spring. The staff included the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Stan
Concerts^2-Friends of Jazz in Kansas City and the Topeka Jazz Workshop, two nonprofit groups, try to schedule about five or six jazz concerts in their cities annually.
Jam sessions—Probably the best bargains for bringing good live jazz in the area are the jazz jam
Kenton Orchestra, the Gary Burton Quartet, Jean Lucy Ponty and Buddy Rich.
Jam sessions were largely responsible for the jazz innovations from the bop revolution. After-hours jam sessions gained major popularity during the heyday of Kansas City jazz in the 20s and '30s, Thomas "Beas" Pendergast lentily allowed clubs to perform at Jam sessions dawn. Later, the scene switched to New York.
Limitless solos and total reliance on sheer musical improvisations were the main characteristics behind jam sessions. The absence of vocal melody, with spontaneity, excitement and energy. Often, as in certain Kansas City jams, the mood among participating musicians was competitive; to see who could play solo the music best was a prerequisite for phrasing.
There's one jam session conducted weekly in Lawrence, at the familiar jazz hotspot, Paul Gray's music studio. Jazz Band leads the club to other musical activities and club grab their instruments to join the band onstage.
The mood is more cooperative than competitive, and though the music only lasts until midnight, most listeners don't seem to mind. The session's popularity is always increasing; the free admission and good music nearly fill the club with listeners every Thursday.
There are more jam sessions in Kansas City than we can fit on this page, but it's worth mentioning a few. It should be noted that all are in Missouri, which simply means listeners must be at least 21 years old and also must be prepared to pay slightly more for drinks than usual.
At the Hotel President, 14th and Baltimore, Roy Searcy leads an exciting jam every Sunday night from 7 to 11. Searcy is a jazzy, blues and boogie-woole style pianist, who's dedicated to keeping the Kansas city sound alive. He performs by himself three nights a week at Papa Nicks, 418 Delaware in the
In the Signboard Bar in Crown Center Hotel, Main and Pershing streets, the John Lyman Quartet jams jams every Monday and Friday afternoons from 4:30 to 7:30. The Ron Roberts Trio joins a jam at Pandora's Box, 214 E.85th, St., from 4 to 7 every Saturday afternoon.
River Quay, but the Hotel President jam session reveals his fine talent for leading a band.
Blues, which donated heavily to the development of jazz, is the music played at the Bagad Lagoon, 3712 Broadway, from 4 to 7 Monday and Saturday afternoons. Colt 45, a tight, house-rocking band, leads the blues jams, which often encompass rock, disco and funk styles.
Most jam sessions involve many "weekend" musicians—players who earn their livings in other fields during the week but let it all loose on weekends. Some are members of a local executive, who played recently at Paul Gray's.
That these musicians don't earn their living with their music doesn't mean they're not competent; it's simply a play of the times. Jazz musicians who make a singing by performing are few these days in Kansas City.
Let's not kid ourselves—the very best moments of Kansas City jazz occurred more than 40 years ago when top artists from the Midwest and Southwest came to play at the downtown clubs and all-night jam festivals. The music is amazing and often exciting how much that era still influences Kansas City jazz in the '70s.