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

[Gary Lawrence Murphy]

yes, a remembering is a better word; at the time I only thought 'retro'
because it seemed to retrieve something of the all at once improv art of
conversation that had been lost in the spotlit heroic-soloist
bebop/post-bop era


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 8:55 AM, ROBERT R. CALDER
<serapion at btinternet.com>wrote:

> 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
>
>
>


-- 
*Teledyn Addendum: teledyn blogspot ca*
*eso: **EighthStreetOrchestra blogspot ca*