[Dixielandjazz] Hobsbawm as Jazz Writer (London Review of Books)

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

blasts etc. from the past  are being posted by the London Review of 
Books. Viz.:


Vol. 32 No. 10 · 27 May 2010Diary
My Days as a Jazz CriticEric Hobsbawm
  2074 words

  I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in 
Anger,
  which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take
notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young
Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the
Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and
possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman.
  He arranged a meeting with the editor, Kingsley Martin, then at the
peak of his glory, who said ‘Why not?’, explained that he conceived his
typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties, and passed me on
to the commander of the (cultural) back half of the mag, the formidable
Janet Adam Smith. Her interests ranged from mountaineering to poetry,
but did not include jazz. As ‘Francis Newton’ (named after a Communist
jazz trumpeter who played on Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’), I wrote 
a
  column every month or so for the New Statesman for about ten years.
  It was a good time to be writing about jazz. Not only did my column
allow me an occasional respite from the personal and political
convulsions of 1956, that year of Communist crisis, but it was the first
  time since 1935 that American jazz musicians could be heard live in
Britain. Until then the typical British jazz fan, well informed by 
Melody Maker
  and tiny argumentative journals, had lived essentially on a diet of 78
rpm records, passionately analysed by young men in upstairs rooms or in
the ‘rhythm clubs’ of the 1930s. A surprising number of these records
had been made in the US for the British
market, but hard-core aficionados, especially the small but missionary
group of blues enthusiasts, also established their own networks for
importing American discs. I had been on the fringes of this community of
  experts since the early 1930s, thanks to my cousin Denis Preston, who
eventually became a pioneering figure on the recording scene; but, until
  the example of Kingsley Amis gave me courage, I had been too awed to
join in their debates. Young and on the whole provincial, suburban and
musically untaught, they were loving and propagandist critics rather
than practitioners. By the time Francis Newton was born, these
aficionados had created a uniquely original youthful British pop scene
in ‘trad jazz’, which reproduced versions of New Orleans jazz and
country blues, by then far better known in this country than in the US.
  In one of my earliest columns I observed the sudden profitability of
trad jazz ‘and even that last refuge of bankruptcy, blues-singing’, as
illustrated by profitable but unimpressive imitations of Bessie Smith’s
‘Reckless Blues’ and a chart-topping version of Huddie Ledbetter’s
jailhouse ‘Rock Island Line’, sung by a surprised and blameless British
guitarist, Lonnie Donegan. What did it mean? I asked. We now know that
it meant the rise of the British rock scene, the Beatles and the Rolling
  Stones, about to transform the American pop industry in the early
1960s. It never captured my generation, nor that of most jazz musicians,
  least of all the highly professional record studio session players who
had to turn its illiterate amateur products into music. But what
did being Francis Newton mean to me? The attraction was not so much the
opportunity to review jazz performances and the records now flooding in,
  or even to fit this extraordinary music into 20th-century
  society. It was the chance to understand the musicians and their 
world:
  in short, ‘the jazz scene’. I lived on the edge of the West End, and
teaching at Birkbeck left most of the day free, so it was possible to
combine my profession with the nocturnal and late-rising habits of the
scene. My main base was the Downbeat Club on Old Compton Street, a few
minutes’ walk from home, a joint which, like so many of London’s modern
musicians and their hangers-on, I used as an off-duty reporting point.
Though people might play there and it sometimes booked a pianist, the
Downbeat was a social club, unlike Ronnie Scott’s new enterprise, then
starting up in a not yet orientalised Lisle Street, where one went not
to drink and gossip but to listen. There were also some after-hours
joints in Soho where one could do both. Clubs are what I remember more
vividly than the concerts in which visiting musicians earned their keep,
  though it was only in the US that I was to
discover the glory of a jazz scene based primarily on clubs. I must have
  been one of the last to hear the great Ellington band, visibly at ease
in its natural environment, play a genuine club date, ‘melting’, as I
reported, ‘a hard assembly of middle-aged San Francisco lawyers,
doctors, journalists and fixers like traditional brides’. I suppose this
  and meeting the tragic pianist Bud Powell in his Paris hotel room,
catatonic except when at the keyboard, are the most vivid memories of my
  jazz years. It soon became obvious that there was a notable gap
both in taste and context between those of us – most jazz writers, but
also successful players – who developed an enthusiasm for the music in
the 1930s and 1940s, and the small corps of serious professional British
  musicians who played and formed the only real public for ‘modern’ jazz
before Miles Davis began to make his impact. Writing about jazz in the
1950s meant, basically, trying to understand or at least come to terms
with bebop (even the passionate jazz-conservative Philip Larkin
eventually felt he had to make a gesture in this direction), but I don’t
  know how far I succeeded, except for an admiration for Thelonious Monk
and an immediate passion for the supremely talented and intelligent
Dizzy Gillespie, the most dazzling trumpeter in the world, who lacked no
  gift except the willingness to reveal his soul, as Parker had done. My
admiration for Miles Davis was based on his records, not on any live
performance I heard. I enjoyed the company of the players, and
they accepted me as an oddity on the scene (no milieu is more tolerant
than that of jazz musicians), sometimes as the sort of walking reference
  book who could answer (non-musical) queries. I remember one from a
tenor player’s girlfriend, about whether it was right to believe in God.
  But could any non-musician understand what creative musicians are
really about, however much he socialised with them? After all, as one of
  them told me (I think it was the tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt), 
‘words
  are not my instrument.’ For a white non-musician to get close to black
artists was even harder. Until the great exodus of American players in
the 1960s, when the US jazz scene collapsed,
few of them lived in Europe. True, there didn’t seem to be any
difference between white and black in the Downbeat Club, and the young
Cleo Laine was perfectly at ease describing herself as ‘a Cockney
spade’, but visiting African-American players were aware of race even in
  tolerant Europe, and so, almost certainly, were British West Indians
like the gifted and adventurous alto player Joe Harriott, who was an
important component of the modern scene. Still, on the road, which was
their permanent way of life, the Americans were used to being asked
questions by white admirers, and experienced performers who relied
entirely on the white circuit, notably blues singers, had a genuinely
informative narrative ready. As the only academic writing on
jazz, and under culturally high-class auspices, Francis Newton naturally
  found himself acting as tourist guide to swinging Soho for foreign
intellectuals. He also found himself drawn into the avant-garde cultural
  bohème in Britain, which overlapped with the non-bop jazz scene; 
George
  Melly and ‘Trog’ (Wally Fawkes, the clarinettist of the Humphrey
Lyttelton school) were already producing their satirical and socially
perceptive comic strip Flook in, of all places, the Daily Mail.
  I still have the membership card for Muriel’s Colony Club in Dean
Street, which someone – most likely Colin MacInnes – pressed on me, but
alcoholic camp was not my scene, nor jazz theirs, even though at one
time they had decent background music played by an agreeable West Indian
  pianist. I was commissioned almost immediately to write a book. More 
to
  the point, being Francis Newton reinforced my contacts with those on
whom the musicians depended, the agents, bookers and the rest of the pop
  music business world of which jazz formed a small corner. Their 
private
  opinions of ‘the talent’ diverged widely from their public ones.
  I also found myself a member of the global network of intellectual 
jazz
  lovers. Since outside Britain these still saw themselves as something
of an underground, if no longer persecuted, musical faith, they – and
especially the writers – formed a surprisingly effective international
of mutual trust and help. In the US this did
not go as far as in Japan, where, as I was to discover in those tiny
bars, the most formal academics – and who can be more formal than a
Japanese university dean? – talked with an inconceivable degree of
emotional frankness, simply because a guest they had never met before
was a fellow jazz lover. I soon discovered that jazz solidarity, which
went with the championing of Kafka as a first stage of the Prague
Spring, was equally intense in Czechoslovakia. As the Miles Davis and
Modern Jazz Quartet scores for Nouvelle Vague movies showed in the
1950s, French intellectuals were expected to be unusually hip about
modern jazz but, as usual, took little note of non-French jazz writers.
  Stateside, jazz solidarity was of more practical help. Local jazz
writers did everything they could to help an unknown from London, from
booking a hotel in Greenwich Village to passing him from one critic to
the next for guidance to the scene in some unfamiliar city. It helped
that so many promoters of jazz and blues came out of the left-wing
milieu of the 1930s and 1940s, notably the greatest of all jazz talent
scouts, the crew-cut John Hammond Jr, whose judgments were largely to
guide my own. It was only on my first trip to the US,
  where all surviving schools and artists could be heard at the same
time, that I came to realise how lucky Francis Newton had been: this was
  a golden age for jazz, largely because even the ultra-boppers of the
1940s had rejoined and renewed the music’s mainstream. It was only on my
  second trip in 1963 that I realised how quickly the tsunami of rock
music had swept it away. Birdland had put up the shutters. For the best
part of the next 20 years, jazz hardly existed for the young, except in
the university milieu as a part of adult high culture – like classical
music, only smaller. What public did remain for live performance was
antagonised by the emergence of a new, musically radical ‘free form’
jazz. Paradoxically, this isolated what was politically the most radical
  and racially militant movement in jazz from its natural
African-American constituency. By this time my life was changing.
  My wife, Marlene, claims that I proposed at a Bob Dylan concert.
Marriage and babies inevitably put an end to Francis Newton’s
freewheeling nocturnal lifestyle, though not to reviewing concerts and
records. It wasn’t as much fun, except for the stunning and disturbing
first visit to Britain of Ray Charles, whom I had first heard as one of 
a
  handful of whites in a corner of a vast rock-and-roll dance in 
Oakland,
  California, when he was still known only to the black public. They did
not dance much while he sang. By now not quite a major pop star but
already a hipster saint, fourth in line to Lester Young, Billie Holiday
and Charlie Parker, and certainly already a monstre sacré,
  he worked the audience in the Finsbury Park Astoria with his
‘sanctified’ bluesy voice in a style combining showbiz effects and
soul-baring emotion. I still shiver at the memory of hearing that
hunched, thin, unhappy blind man milk the audience with ‘once I was
blind, but now I see.’ Let that, as well as my spectacular failure to
recognise the potential of the Beatles (I never had any time for the
Stones), stand as the last memory of Francis Newton’s years covering the
  scene for the readers of the New Statesman.

Letters      Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010

I  was glad to see Eric Hobsbawm give the late folk/blues great Huddie
Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, credit as the inspiration for
Lonnie Donegan’s recording of ‘Rock Island Line’ (LRB, 27 May).
  Newly released from Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he first
learned the song from Kelly Pace, a convict at the Cummins Prison Farm
in Gould, Arkansas, whom he encountered in 1934 while working as a
driver for the musicologist John Lomax, then travelling through the
South collecting songs for the Library of Congress. Lomax recorded Pace
leading a group of seven men, one of them doing an imitation whistle.
When they heard their song played back later, they threw down their hats
  and beamed with pride. Lead Belly liked the song as well, and before 
he
  quit work that day he had learned it.Years later he would add
his own introduction, which Donegan copied: ‘I got cows, I got sheep, I
got goats, I got horses.’ During the Second World War Lead Belly
sometimes switched to the more topical, ‘I got guns, I got tanks, I got
bombs, I got Jeeps.’ The Beatles acknowledged the Donegan recording as
one of their main influences. George Harrison told his publisher, Brian
Roylance, that since Donegan’s repertoire consisted mostly of Lead Belly
  songs, there would have been no British rock scene had it not been for
Lead Belly. ‘No Lead Belly, no Beatles,’ said George Harrison.

John Reynolds

				New York
			

Vol. 32 No. 12 · 24 June 2010
So that’s who Francis Newton, the author of The Jazz Scene (1959), is:
the famous Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (LRB, 27 May).
  Two things he gets wrong in his Diary: the original Ronnie Scott club
was in a basement not in Lisle Street but in Gerrard Street. I heard Ben
  Webster there in, I think, 1959. Second, I, too, was a habitué of the
Downbeat, dropping in generally at lunchtime but on the occasional
evening when I didn’t have a gig, or wasn’t in the Establishment Club
enjoying the Dudley Moore Trio. It was in the Downbeat that I persuaded
the drummer Allan Ganley – to his immense amusement – to dep for me in a
  gig for the Billy Cotton Band Show in  1963.
There was certainly music in the Downbeat in the evenings – was it
  Brian Lemon at the piano? I also heard Annie Ross sing there.

Brian Innes
				Montgaillard, France
			
For
  those who are old enough to remember but whose memory is failing, 
Brian
  Innes was the leader of the Temperance Seven from 1955 to 1965.

Editor, ‘London Review of Books'