[Dixielandjazz] Bach

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Counterpoint is the thing. 


The journalist Alistair Cooke wrote about the evening he went into an after-hours (bMr. Armstrout not a dive) establishment in Chicago in the mid-1930s and was sitting quietly when somebody started playing Bach's first prelude on the piano. And then the succeeding fugue, and then the second and so on...  and after a night at the Grand Terrace it was Earl Hines -- presumably winding down but doing his digital dexterity no damage. 


At a gig in Edinburgh long ago, a friend of mine had been finding less appeal than he had hoped for from a gig by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, maybe they's been having an off-night. I can't remember who else was on the gig, other than Peter Ind on bass (at least one of their performances was recorded on the tour) but anyway Messrs. Marsh and Konitz got to the stage alone, and delivered from memory a two part invention which had been rather preoccupying my friend around that time, and it was rather a highlight of the evening thus far. It might have been for some listmates if they'd been dragged along to Konitz and Marsh ????


But why wouldn't white Chicagoans share the enthusiasm for Bach which Coleman Hawkins had, staring from Holland over the German border, around the time Cooke was hearing Hines, but with the wrong colour of skin to allow a comfortable pilgrimage to Leipzig?   Remember Jimmy McPartland recalling the night in the 1920s when he went to meet up with Louis, and how when Mr. Armstrong introduced "my friend Mau-Rice Ravel" he was bowled over -- his hitherto distant HERO.  


It's unlikely there's no Bach in the roots of "Dixieland" 

I suddenly thought of Kenny Ball, and of the noise liable to have been made if instead of "Midnight in Moscow" Pye Records had put out, during the Hit Parade period of KB, say "Lopin' in Leipzig" ---  Bachophiliacs averse to post-Parker jazz ought to be reassured that the Sonny Rollins "St. Thomas" refers to a Caribbean isle and not an aisled church in Saxony Bach was Cantor of 


Robert R. Calder