[Dixielandjazz] Perfect recording

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

While Bruno Walter never understood jazz, he got one thing right. An absolutely flawless performance, he said, is usually possible only where there is insufficient involvement in the music. 
And then there was Claudio Arrau, who studied rhythmic precision by taking his wife to dance to Chick Webb at the Savoy.  In the series of interviews which serves as his autobiography he remembers the former student who enthused about one of his famous contemporaries, saying that the man had delivered an utterly note-perfect .....    
Which is how the student became former.  Listening isn't passive, and sometimes it's necessary to cease hearing certain things before you can hear the important ones. 
Arrau even reminisced about Busoni and members of an older generation whose audiences didn't mind bum notes, and actually even relished some as incidentals to the performance. 
Uncle Bob Wilber remembers Eddie Condon saying to him when Wilber was rehearsing, "you're playing jazz, make some mistakes!"  It doesn't need to be jazz, it just needs to be not afraid.  Note-perfectness is courtship of the commonplace. 
 
       
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