[Dixielandjazz] two comments -- and swing

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I remember from long ago, because of a special interest, a review of a Martin Luther King memorial concert in DOWN BEAT.The performers were three bluesmen, Big Joe Williams (solo, though somewhat augmented by the unique guitar he built for himself, with nine strings; and the duo of Muddy Waters on guitar and Otis Spann on piano. 
Big Joe, whose playing career went back to the 1920s at least, swung.So said the reviewer. Muddy and Otis drove.  
It was an exceptionally interesting contrast.
The so-called "development" of jazz, and really blues, too, seems to be of a narrowing. I could use the word "progressive", since one of my neighbours was intrigued to have been diagnosed with dementia and told it was "progressive". 

Spann could certainly swing, to judge from some earlier solo and less noisy recordings.He might have been born around the same year in which Big Joe made his recorded debut, but he learned a lot from older men, including his father, an alas entirely legendary because unrecorded pianist called Friday Ford. But I suppose there was some audience pressure much of the time, and there are occasions when drive is more apt than swing, and probably it took over when jazzfolk became more solemn, intense, even driven. Driven to drive.Play that way if it's part of what you want to say.
But if you like playing there's no need to "Get Happy" because presumably playing should and can make you happy.I refer to the English saxophonist/ writer etc. Benny Green's citation of the piano-playing Joe Turner(whom one unfortunate on Amazon thought had recorded little. I commented otherwise!)And Joe was on a TV show with Oscar Peterson (which I have never seen)and he said that when he was a lot younger, people had a lot more fun with music. 

Dammit if Buck Clayton could swing and sound happy enough on a gig I saw on TV, which I have on a hissy audio tape, and in the second half of the concert Humphrey Lyttelton had to take over (Buck was in physical pain with lip trouble, and doubtless his soul hurt too!) what is amiss with a smile? 
I am not talking about for instance a Clark Terry session of supposedly "happy jazz", which was plain banal, oppressively lightweight. 

I remember the boogalooing youngsters of a New Orleans marching band. They swung. And so did the German folks playing the same stuff in the same way when I heard them in the street in Konstanz in Germany (about a block away from where I heard a strolling Italian clarinetist in summer playing Bechet tunes unaccompanied. What ambitions have musicians?

Probably part of the US problem is a tendency to classify music not in musical terms but according to a crude and uninformed approximation to chronology. The same crap as induced some young ignoramus to conclude that since Charlie Parker was a player his father admired, Parker must have been "a Dixieland saxophone player".

But there's no obligation to imitate Parker all the time, Sonny Stitt swung more, and perhaps now rather than the stiltedness of people trying to play jazz long, long ago, without quite the grasp required by an idiom new to them, and maybe most folks, younger musicians might be strung up on noise and strident intensity.  

have fun!

Robert R. Calder





 

  
  
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