[Dixielandjazz] The Jazz Evangelism of Woody Allen - PART 3

[Stephen G Barbone]

There's a moment in Sweet and Lowdown when Sean Penn's virulent Emmet  
Ray says, "My feelings come out in my music."

This is not autobiographical, says Allen.

"I wish I could say that," he insists. "The problem is, not enough  
feeling comes out of my music. I mean, I play my heart out and I close  
my eyes and hunch my shoulders and do all the external motions that  
great players do to pump the feeling through their horn, but I can't  
get a lot of feeling through it. That's been one of the sad things in  
my life, that I hear a real great clarinet player and they'll just  
play two or three notes, and those notes are so beautiful and full of  
feeling. And I'm killing myself and trying so hard to squeeze that  
note out and get the feeling into it, but it's just not there. It has  
to be somewhere in your chromosomes or something."

As for the Carlyle: "The brunt of the audience doesn't know anything  
about jazz. They say, 'I've liked his pictures, and I'd like to see  
him,' or 'I've hated his pictures, and I'd like to see him.' "

But, hey, the heart wants what it wants. And here lies the unique  
privilege of Woody Allen: He introduces unlikely and disparate new  
audiences to his particular, esoteric brand of jazz, and into the jazz  
community at large. He's an accomplished musician but not a peerless  
one, though that hardly matters: Fame is today's currency, and he has  
it to burn. Allen is not jazz's savior—to say so would certainly  
mortify many people, most of all him—but his jazz-scene compatriots  
appreciate his unprecedented ability to interest people who never even  
knew they could be interested in it. To them, Allen is demonstrating  
the best chance jazz has for renewal—and survival.

"He's doing this the right way, which is major outcropping," says  
Schaap. "He's going in the right direction, in that he is not overly  
concerned with training someone to play clarinet like him. He's  
interested in having an opportunity to hear New Orleans polyphony."

"Woody Allen is a great artist, a profound artist," says Wilner. "He's  
a force on the music scene. He doesn't get the recognition that he  
deserves because of his fame as a filmmaker, an actor, and a comedian.  
He's propagated the music further worldwide than anyone else could  
have done."

"Well, he's a better actor than a musician," cracks Gordon, who once  
booked him as a young stand-up at the Village Vanguard. "But listen,  
he's trying and he loves it, and it's all to the good. I think it's  
adorable."

Of course, given the steep Carlyle cover, Allen is not accessible to  
everyone. To a less expensive, less mainstream degree, other  
traditionalists are boosting the NYC jazz community: David Ostwald's  
Louis Armstrong Centennial Band plays swing-based trad on Wednesday  
nights at Birdland, while Vince Giordano's Nighthawks offer early New  
Orleans jazz Monday and Tuesday nights at Sofia's at the Edison Hotel,  
both with door prices that are a fraction of Allen's. West Village  
clubs the Ear Inn and Arthur's Tavern also host trad-jazz jams with  
generally younger musicians.

So, has Allen inspired these up-and-comers? As usual, it depends on  
whom you ask. "I've strictly been influenced by the clarinet players  
that I mentioned to you—Johnny Dodds, George Lewis, Sidney Bechet,"  
Allen says. (In fact, his two adopted children with Previn are named  
Bechet and Manzie, the latter after drummer Manzie Johnson.) "But I  
don't think I've, God forbid, ever influenced anybody. It's more like  
I'm an eclectic copycat. I probably influence them to practice harder  
or to give up their instruments."

This, according to someone once praised after a 1973 gig by premier  
Crescent City trombonist Jim Robinson (who, unaware of his screen  
fame, called Woody "Willard," according to Lax's biography). But so  
goes Woody Allen's great contradiction: His movies are intellectual  
and labyrinthine, yet his clarinet playing strives for a simplicity he  
still feels is unattainable. He exalts jazz for having "no cerebral  
element to it" in Wild Man Blues, yet for precisely that reason, he  
undercuts his own technical prowess.

"I think the first time people see him, they go to see a celebrity,"  
says Marion P. Felder, 25, a Juilliard graduate and drummer for David  
Ostwald's Louis Armstrong Centennial Band and the Count Basie  
Orchestra. "But hearing him play myself, and going back for second and  
third times, you're going because you actually want to hear him play.  
Musically, he draws you in. It just seems so authentic, like he's  
giving you a piece of himself. It's like he's giving you something he  
really loves. You can tell he really loves the music, and he plays it  
to the best of his ability."

After his latest Carlyle run ends, Allen will resume his day job and  
begin shooting a new movie, Midnight in Paris, overseas; his films  
cost less to produce in Europe, and jazz is still quite popular there,  
so it's an ideal summer-break combination. And as for his hometown  
jazz scene? He's watching and waiting like the rest, but the decline,  
ironically, doesn't seem to make him as nervous. "Things go up and  
down in New York. . . . I visited my former neighborhood in Brooklyn  
the other day, and it's quite terrible now," he says. "I don't think  
anything here moves in one direction and stays in that direction. I  
think it's very fluid."

Woody Allen has imparted so much wisdom about life and love in his  
movies that maybe we can trust him about this, too. Maybe we can  
believe that even beyond his wide ripple effect of celebrity, his love  
for traditional jazz, mirrored in the millions of people who love it  
now or have the potential to start, is enough to keep this American  
art form alive. His vision of jazz can't die, right? Talking to him,  
it just seems impossible. Jazz is as tough and romantic as the city he  
loves.

sanderson at villagevoice.com