[Dixielandjazz] Jazz non reader/composers

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Bechet might well have had the sort of memory reported of Mary Lou Williams, able to reproduce quite a lot without notated notes. Donald Lambert the magnificent stride pianist is also reported a non-reader, possibly in fact dyslexic. He did manage quite a lot of the notes of the opening of the Moonlight Sonata no bother. 
Jay McShann was a superlative pianist wrongly taken by some to be mainly a blues and boogie pianist. I remember him delivering an impassioned version of (ach, I forget the name of the Strayhorn number) and he escaped having to learn to read music until it was forced on him.  He got a very long way with faking, and probably thought it was great fun. 
Errol Garner is of course famous as a non-reader, something even more astonishing if you hear those solo and trio performances privately recorded in 1944. He composed a lot, played amazing stride piano and things resembling Ravel (bit his own). By the time he was into the accepted Garner style and on contract with Columbia they hired Nat Pierce to teach him new repertoire. Garner said that he composed by fingering in the air, and that while circling New York in a fog on an airliner he worked out Misty. Since his hands were going, a stewardess started thinking he was having a fit.  The story was certainly taped by BBC Radio.
Don't underestimate the capacities of memory whether in picking up new material or retaining vast repertoire. I will grant you that Toscanini read music, but when he was getting very old he did cancel the revival of an obscure opera (Meyerbeer or the like) which he hadn't conducted in years, simply because he had forgotten the libretto. The words. If you step outwith a certain range of jazz experience, you'll find all manner of thoroughly documented achievements of listening and mentally recording, and massive memory,  representing abilities  it's not hard to imagine jazzmen possessing.   
Django Reinhardt very possibly composed for someone writing things down. One of the interesting things about the 3CD set of Bechet's Columbia recordings issued by Mosaic is Bob Wilber's note reminiscing about the season of gigs during which Lloyd Phillips (a pianist of vast repertoire) played a game of trying to catch Bechet out with numbers he didn't know. 'Song of Songs' turned out to have been one of Bechet's features touring before 1920. Of course John Chilton did follow up his biography of Bechet by researching Bechet 'compositions'.  A lot of them were tunes Bechet had heard in New Orleans and rather remembered than composed. Maybe Bechet forgot the filing system in his memory, and didn't know the difference. Composing without writing down isn't a difficult musicological  issue. 



       
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