[Dixielandjazz] The Jazz Evangelism of Woody Allen PART 1-A

[Stephen G Barbone]

"Woody is a very musical fellow—really a very knowledgeable musician,"  
says Dick Hyman, Allen's longtime film-score com- poser and arranger.  
"He consciously, deliberately uses jazz, and understands how it works  
with the kinds of scenarios he writes."

It's all a process of familiarity, explains Allen. "Everyone loves the  
music of his childhood, and for some reason, it has a disproportionate  
impact on the person," he says. "When I was growing up and I got up in  
the morning to go to school, I would turn on the radio and it would be  
Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman. This is what you  
heard in your house with popular music back then."

The music he has performed devotedly for the past 37 years actually  
predates those artists by several decades—it's a joyous, disciplined  
strain from the 1910s–'30s called traditional New Orleans jazz,  
"traditional jazz," the truncated "trad jazz," or the somewhat  
contentious "Dixieland jazz." Dramatically different from the brass- 
heavy front-line style of modern New Orleans, it's the earliest form  
of jazz, the fundamental foundation for all splintered subgenres known  
today, from bebop to free to swing. Compared to those mutations,  
traditional jazz is an affable, communal conversation, favoring  
polyphony (different instruments weaving independent lines together)  
and structured for shared expression within an ensemble. Derived from  
regional ragtime and blues (bred specifically in the prostitution  
quarters known as Storyville), it flourished via such eminent players  
as trumpeter Buddy Bolden, clarinetist Sidney Bechet, cornetist King  
Oliver, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton. The first jazz ever recorded  
was in this style: the raucous and comedic "Dixieland Jazz Band 1  
Step," cut by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917.

"Early jazz was very pleasurable and very simple," explains Allen.  
"After a while, that stuff became concert music, and the chord  
progressions got very complicated, and the harmonies got very  
complicated. It became less pleasurable. Not less great—it certainly  
was every bit as great and, in many cases, stupendously great and  
greater. But it required more concentration and more effort from the  
audience."

The word "pleasurable" comes up often in jazz talk with Woody Allen, a  
telling trait given his famously skittish personality. But he's  
increasingly alone in this adulation: Today, few performers specialize  
in traditional jazz, and even fewer listeners seek it out, which makes  
his loyalty all the more notable. He first began performing on  
clarinet in New York with a casual, social ensemble called the New  
Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra at Michael's Pub in 1973 (the  
year he sent a hapless jazz-clarinet player 200 years into the future  
in Sleeper and played horn on the soundtrack), refusing all payment  
for the residency and infamously keeping his weekly Monday-night gig  
in lieu of attending the 1978 Academy Awards to accept his Best  
Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay trophies for Annie Hall.  
(Reportedly, Michael's carted in a television, and he watched the  
ceremony with dispassion between songs.)

In 1996, he formed a more stridently traditional New Orleans ensemble  
(adding the early-'20s innovation of short, fluid solos) with banjo  
player Eddy Davis, with whom he'd first jammed in 1963 while a young  
stand-up comic in Chicago. Together, they created a structured,  
professional band emphasizing 1910s–'20s repertoire and the classic  
lineup of piano, upright bass, banjo, drums, clarinet, trumpet, and  
trombone; the outfit was soon hired at the Carlyle and endures there  
still. (Allen now blithely accepts payment.)

Woody Allen and the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band's subsequent tour  
across Europe was the subject of Barbara Kopple's 1998 documentary  
Wild Man Blues, which captured both the clarinetist's unwavering  
seriousness for the music—"We're going to play hardcore New Orleans  
music, esoteric tunes," he grumbles at one point to his dubious  
entourage—and also his relationship with soon-to-be wife Soon-Yi  
Previn, adopted daughter of his former partner/muse Mia Farrow. (For  
further reference, consult every tabloid from 1992 onward.) The film  
catches several moments of agitated self-flagellation—that first tour  
gave him an Alvy Singer–worthy anxiety attack, say his bandmates—and  
apparently, some things never change.

"If I don't practice for a day for any reason, which is really rare, I  
feel so guilty that it's not worth it to me," Allen says. "If I was  
able to practice a lot more, if I was able to practice five hours a  
day, I would never be great. It's not in me."

And with a small sigh transmitted clearly from the Upper East Side, we  
are reminded that the universe is, indeed, expanding.