[Dixielandjazz] retro's the wrong word -- Dixieland and Miles Davis

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Mr. Murphy suggests


"And at risk off splitting the topic, does anyone else other than me find a parallel to Dixieland in the Miles Davis quintet with Wayne Shorter? 
At the time the jazz journals were agog with this'new' notion of 
ensemble improv that really seemed retro to me."

I really wouldn't think in terms of RETRO, since I don't go with a notion of Jazz as on a single forward line. In his wonderful Effing interview with the late Jim Godbolt (in JARS the Ronnie Scott club magazine) Ruby Braff goes on about Miles Davis's enthusiasm for Bix, and in a very good long article now some decades old John  Postgate included Miles Davis in a succession of St. Louis trumpet-playing which goes back to Dewey Jackson (the final blast of whose trumpet was not then available back then) through Joe Thomas and Clark Terry etc., and quite distinct from Bix there is a continuity going back before Armstrong, a more lyrical approach which in the case of Jackson on his earlier recordings, and his contemporary Baby James, relied on the use of both hands, one on the valves and the other manipulating a mute in the bell of the horn.  Nothing like Cootie Williams! 

That technique did not endure into the 1930s, but as I recall the Postgate article laid emphasis on a style fluid rather than using time/ space in the Armstrong manner. 

I do remember that on reissues including Baby James's blues accompaniments Riverside records got his name wrong, and that at a time when the same company was also recording Clark Terry, who remembered these guys not that long after circumstance gave them their brief 1920s careers. Actually I think Marek, with whom I discussed Clark Terry, put me on to the notion that working with Ellington probably woke Clark up to not strictly modern elements of music, and brought out the depth and the wit of the mature Clark Terry, still some years after a relatively late recording debut. 

If anybody wants to go looking there is a question of Wayne Shorter's relationship to Lester Young, and Young's to Trumbauer, and the real question is not RETRO, a term I associate with daft notions of progress and fashionableness, but remembering. 

That is very speculative on my part, as the Miles Davis/ Wayne Shorter ensemble is not one to whose recordings I have ever listened seriously. 

I do remember ten years ago a succession of new recordings by young men and women, trying to bolster a generally thin post-bop idiom with borrowings from Latin America, and Gospel, but dammit not Jazz. 

One very musical CD by a band under the bassist John Patitucci (which came to London when I was passing through at the time, but tickets cost too much more than my international airfare) and pretty well every track had fallen into a jazz-related idiom. The parts were not together enough to be a whole, much of the time. 


Restful, too.

Robert R. Calder