[Dixielandjazz] The Jazz Evangelism of Woody Allen - Part 1

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is part 1, to be followed by part 1-A. Original message too long  
to be printed.

NOT MEANT to start a discussion about the merits of his playing. Just  
meant to be read by those who are interested in the Trad Jazz scene.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

The Carlyle Hotel on Monday nights is, like all great Manhattan  
institutions, a carefully romantic transaction. For sale is a moment  
in Old New York, a composite of faded glamour too delicate to survive  
and too perfect to have ever really existed. Beneath the soft, earthy  
brushstrokes of an original Marcel Vertes mural, amid the soigné  
murmur of rustling silk and clinking stemware, 90 eager patrons of all  
ages gather in the Café Carlyle supper club to soak up pristine,  
antique luxury.

They've paid $100 or so apiece mostly to see the musician seated in  
the perfect center of the room, at the carpeted meridian of this  
alternate universe—and "see" is truly the impetus here, as the music  
he offers is secondary to the draw of his enormous celebrity, as  
contemporary a fame as the music he loves is traditional. Illuminated  
in dim, flickering light, the man handles his clarinet with ardor,  
scarcely glancing up through his ensemble's two-hour performance; he  
knows the reason we all came, and doesn't need to squint into camera  
flashes for a reminder. But he embraces his part in it all, because he  
believes in the romance, too.

"Jazz has a mythological feeling to it—time has done that," Woody  
Allen tells me beforehand. "And early jazz especially, since it was  
the birth of the art form. I just love it."

He loves jazz, but the sold-out audience loves the proximity to his  
fame even more. He uses this, with some combination of resignation and  
shrewdness, to expose new audiences to his favorite, increasingly  
obscure style of jazz. And in the troubled, rapidly shrinking world of  
that music (especially here in New York), his currency is crucial in  
ways no one predicted, least of all him.

"I'm not just saying this to be amusing: To be even as bad as I am,  
you do have to practice every day," says Allen, with a small, almost  
imperceptible chuckle. "I'm a strict hobby musician. I don't have a  
particularly good ear for music. I'm a very poor musician, like a  
Sunday tennis player."

When it comes to jazz, he has never wanted to be amusing. Allen is  
notorious for approaching the music with complete gravity, both in  
performance and in the few interviews he grants, an indication of his  
larger proclivity for being "off" in real life from his skittish comic  
persona. When he rings the Voice from his Upper East Side apartment  
one warm Tuesday afternoon, he is somber and languid with his answers,  
far removed from the familiar flurry of neuroses he has exhibited for  
decades onscreen. But jazz gets him (relatively) animated, as it has  
been the most enduring passion of his 74 years, and is well documented  
in the filmmaking that made his name.

"I've been a great jazz fan my whole life," he says. "I certainly like  
modern jazz as well, but my favorite kind is New Orleans jazz.  
Something about the primitive quality, the simplicity of it, the  
directness. It is the one style of jazz that stays with me the most."

As a teen growing up in 1950s Brooklyn, Allan Stewart Konigsberg made  
frequent pilgrimages into Manhattan to the Jazz Record Center and the  
performance hall Child's Paramount. At 17, he persuaded Fats Waller's  
clarinetist, Gene Sedric, to give him private lessons for $2 an hour  
(this including the toll for Sedric's arduous subway journey from the  
Bronx to outer Flatbush, according to Eric Lax's 2001 book, Woody  
Allen: A Biography). Allen's first ambition was to be a professional  
musician, though, of course, he ultimately followed the paths of his  
other childhood heroes, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, to the  
tune of approximately one movie annually for the past 40 years.

Through his decades of stylistic departures—from the one-liner  
slapstick Bananas (1971) to the bittersweet romantic fantasy The  
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) to the heterodox tryst Vicky Cristina  
Barcelona (2008)—jazz has been a constant, loving presence. It's part  
of almost all of his soundtracks: James P. Johnson & Cecil Mack's  
"Charleston" was adapted for Zelig (1983), Bix Beiderbecke's "Singin'  
the Blues" was an undercurrent in Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and  
Jelly Roll Morton's "Wolverine Blues" floated through Interiors  
(1978), to name just a few. Often, Allen makes vintage jazz integral  
to the plot: 1987's Radio Daysrecounted golden AM-radio vignettes of  
the 1930s and '40s, while Sean Penn's irascible guitarist Emmet Ray in  
1999's Sweet and Lowdown was second only to "that gypsy in France,"  
the real-life Django Reinhardt. Traditional jazz films, meanwhile,  
have affected his other creative venues: Singer/actor Al Jolson, star  
of 1927's The Jazz Singer, is a character in the short story "Fine  
Times: An Oral Memoir," from Allen's 1972 fiction collection Without  
Feathers.