[Dixielandjazz] Grover Sales

[Stephen Barbone]

Word is that Grover Sales, Author of "Jazz, America's Classical Music"
has passed away. I have not seen an obit and don't know if Grover Sales
passed away or not, but here is "who he
is/was". I lived near him in Sausalito CA in the late 1960s, before I
moved back East.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Grover Sales: Agent Provocateur  by Robert Tate

"Behind every successful black musician is a smart Jewish businessman."
Jazz historian Grover Sales pauses in front of the class with a slight
smile on his face, awaiting a retort from one of the students. He drops
these bombs here and there throughout his lectures the way a bebop
drummer will throw in random explosions to get things moving on the
bandstand. Tonight, though, no one seems inclined to mix it up with him,
so he goes on.

During a typical evening class, Sales will play a dozen or more
selections from his extensive collection of recorded jazz classics. He
introduces these with comments explaining the importance of each tune,
and suggestions about what to listen for. While the music plays, he
projects slides of the musicians, cutting back and forth to the
appropriate one as each takes his solo. He also mimics playing a piano
or bass, for example, to indicate which instrument the class should be
listening to at a particular moment. The goal is to educate students in
how to listen to and appreciate jazz through a inductive process of
repeated exposure leading to understanding.

This term he is conducting a course on the history of jazz singing at
The Jazzschool in Berkeley, a particularly congenial venue since he can
be his provocative self without literal-minded undergraduate students
taking him to task for it. Most of the students here know Grover and
expect the outrageous from him.

An Infectious Enthusiasm and Love of Jazz His saving grace is his love
of the music. Of course he knows his subject, but unlike most would-be
jazz historians he has lived through a substantial portion of the
history and personally known a great many of the leading figures in
jazz. And his enthusiasm is infectious. You cannot sit in his classroom
for any length of time without feeling the excitement of watching high
art being made on these old recordings. Over time you get the sense of
jazz as a work in progress, an art form that has evolved through the
years and continues to do so right down to the present moment — in
which, as we all know, it lives.

At the end of a recent class, an older gentlemen who had said very
little during the evening announced that he’d like to make a comment. He
remembered hearing many of the bands as a youth and how excited he had
been then. "You brought that all back to me, and I want to thank you for
it," he said.

We will see that Grover disdains that kind of sentimentality, but for
the moment, he's gracious enough about accepting the compliment. And his
classes do tend to have that effect on people.

Grover comes from Louisville, Kentucky. It was on a radio broadcast
there in about 1935, when he was sixteen years old, that he first heard
the Benny Goodman band with Gene Krupa on drums. As he explains, "It was
a religious experience. I’d never heard anything like it. I went to bed
and had a high fever. My mother had to rub my chest with Musterol, and
I’ve never been the same since. It took over my life."

Grover remained an outsider throughout his high school days in
Louisville. "No one would speak to me because of the music I was
listening to. They thought it was really strange, because the hippest
things they were listening to were Hal Kemp, or Russ Morgan, or Skinnay
Ennis, things like that."

Boston, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. In 1938, Sales moved to
Boston, where he ran with a jazz crowd and heard Benny Goodman and other
bands in person. Then one afternoon, listening to the radio, he had a
second religious experience when he heard Duke Ellington’s "Black and
Tan Fantasy."

"I went out of my goddamn mind. I ran to the local record store and
said, 'What have you got by Duke Ellington? I want all of it!'  He says,
'Son, you can’t afford it.' I said, 'How much could I get for fifteen
dollars?' Records were thirty-five cents apiece in those days. So I got
a whole bunch of Ellington records.

"From then on, I got a hold of books and magazines, and started to
listen to the history of this music," recalls Sales these many years
later. "I started to listen to early Louis Armstrong, the Earl Hines,
Coleman Hawkins, and Fletcher Henderson bands, Art Tatum, and all the
rest of them. That's how it got started."

When bebop came along during World War II, Grover was in India in the
army, so he missed the new music. "I was like a lot of my generation who
were in the army and were occupied with other things when the war was
over. I was a late-comer to it. But at least I made the transition,
which is more than I can say for a lot of my generation. I run into that
in the classroom all the time. I run into people my age, like my friend
Herb Caen, who was a great Benny Goodman fan. But Herb Caen's interest
in the musi stopped with Benny Goodman and never got beyond that.
Whenever he wrote anything about so-called modern jazz after that, it
was kind of embarrassing.

"One time he wrote: 'I don’t understand why Erroll Garner keeps winning
jazz polls 'cause he doesn’t play jazz.' The day that came out, the
Modern Jazz Quartet was playing at the Blackhawk. Milt Jackson saw that
item, and he comes up to me and says, 'What kind of piano do he think he play?'"

Catching Up to the Bebop Revolution What with going to college and
trying to earn a living, it wasn’t until 1952 or so that Grover caught
up with the bebop revolution. "The first one that appealed to me in that
group was Monk," says Sales. "That was the first one that really grabbed
me. And from Monk I got into Bird and Dizzy, and then all the others."

Hanging out in the jazz clubs of San Francisco, Grover became acquainted
with jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason. One day Gleason called Grover and
asked him how he'd like to do the publicity for a new jazz festival
Gleason and Jimmy Lyons were starting in Monterey. "I'd like it just
fine," Grover said.

The Monterey Jazz Festival kicked off in 1958, and for seven years
thereafter, Grover handled the publicity for the annual event. At the
same time he was doing publicity work for a number of jazz clubs and
artists, including the Club Hangover, which featured such artists as
Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, and Meade Lux Lewis. He also did a lot of
publicity for the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

In 1969, Grover was living in Marin City next door to an old college
chum, poet Lew Welch. As Grover tells it, "I called him up one
afternoon, and I said, 'Coleman Hawkins died today.' He said, 'Oh,
Jesus!' Then there was a pause, and he said, 'What are you doing in the
next ten minutes?' I said, 'Nothing, why?' He said, 'How’d you like to
teach my class at University [of California] Extension on Coleman
Hawkins tonight? You’ve got five minutes to make up your mind.'

"So I grabbed a dozen Coleman Hawkins records off the shelf and went
next door. He drove me to the Extension at Laguna and Market in San
Francisco, and I taught a class in Coleman Hawkins. Just winged it. He
said, 'You ought to be doing this all the time.' So he got me wired into
teaching jazz studies, and I’m still doing it."

Political Incorrectness as an Art Form Grover has taught at Stanford
University, San Francisco State, the San Francisco Conservatory, and The
Jazzschool in Berkeley. His academic career has not been all smooth
sailing. He was fired from Stanford for what he calls political
incorrectness when a delegation of students from an undergraduate class
complained about him to the administration. "I would tell a joke that I
thought would be innocent and that group would go to the office and say,
'This is a sexist attitude, and it's demeaning, and it's humiliating to
women, it's humiliating to black people, it's humiliating to Jews.'

"When I was at [San Francisco] State — I was at State for 10 years — I
had a lot of trouble. I applied for a professorship, because I was
certainly qualified to do this, and the head of the department actually
sat down and told me, 'We cannot hire anybody for this position unless
they’re members of a minority group.' I said, 'Well, I'm a member of
three minority groups. I'm old, I'm a Jew, and I'm an intellectual'.
That went over big!"

Grover also teaches courses for the Elderhostel program, an
international organization that provides all kinds of courses for senior
citizens. "I teach them courses in things they'd be interested in, like
big-band jazz, which they all grew up dancing to. I show them slides, so
they all get dewy-eyed and teary: 'That’s Gene Krupa! Oh, that's Tommy
Dorsey, sob, sob.' Unlike undergraduates, though, they understand my jokes."

Mastery of Jazz is Rooted in History At root, I think, Grover’s cynicism
stems from his passion for the music. He is adamant that without a
grounding in the history of jazz, players can never become masters of
their art, no matter how technically proficient they may be.

"I was always listening to the Stanford jazz band when they were
rehearsing. They're playing arrangements of Glenn Miller, for God's
sake, among others, and there’s no fire in this. They’re just competent,
is all you can say about them. I've addressed these classes, and I've
found out — well, first of all, Stanford music majors could not take
jazz history and apply it toward their major... Then I'd address the
members of this band collectively, and I'd say, 'How many here have ever
heard of Fletcher Henderson?' Nobody. 'How many people have ever heard
of Don Redmond?' No one. These are  the pioneers of the music they’re
attempting to play!

"They [the students] have absolutely no historical background in the
music they’re attempting rather badly to play... And they write things
on examinations like, 'The black people went into jazz for the art, and
the white people went into jazz for the money.' So there’s a lot of
racism that goes on. Wynton Marsalis is responsible for a lot of this.
Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, they’re responsible for a lot of this.
There was a lot of it in the Ken Burns series. They’re actually trying
to write whites out of jazz as if they never existed."

Jazz History for Jazz Musicians Hoping to improve the situation, Grover
has suggested to Susan Muscarella, director of the Jazzschool where he
currently teaches: "There’s a lot of people studying instruments.
Theyshould know something about the history of this music. Why don’t you
open up my classes on a reduced basis or even a free basis to anybody
who’s here studying a jazz instrument or jazz orchestration or anything
to come in here and find out about how this music started and where it went?"

Grover has written a book called "Jazz: America’s Classical Music."
"It’s used as a basic text in high schools and colleges all over the
country," says Grover. "I wrote it for people like me that can't read
music and don’t know the names of too many chords. It’s a very
simplified, very brief survey of the music."

Grover contributes an occasional column to Gene Lees's very  influential
"Jazzletter," a periodical that accepts no advertising, is not offered
on newsstands, and relies entirely on its subscribers to support
publication. He's also written "The Clay Pot Cookbook" with his wife,
Georgia, and he writes a monthly column on video sleepers, as he calls
them, for the local Tiburon-Belvedere newspaper.

Opinionated as he is, Grover Sales may not be everyone’s ideal jazz
historian. However, his love and knowledge of jazz are deep. If you can
master what he has to offer, you will get beyond the pop-magazine, music
industry, high-gloss version of jazz touted today and find out what the
music really is all about.

Steve's Note: His book is a "MUST READ" if you really want to understand
this music. The man is/was unique, opinionated etc., et6c., etc., but he
told it like he saw/heard it.