Jazz Compilation 2: Art Blakey!

Mr. Blakey’s ferocious attack on the drum kit makes necessary the above exclamation mark. If you are not familiar with Blakey, I strongly suggest that you remedy this sad state. For the better part of four decades he fronted a group with ever-changing personel known as The Jazz Messengers, which typified what came to be known as ‘hard bop.’ He founded the outfit with pianist Horace Silver in 1955 and retained the name when Silver left.

The Messengers became a kind of finishing school for great musicians, and Blakey’s eye for talent never failed. A very partial list of distinguished alumni: Johnny Griffin, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton, Hank Mobley, and Wynton Marsalis.

I’ve gone through a few Messengers sessions in the last couple of days… one has to be careful, as too much of Blakey’s ballistics in one sitting can, in fact, kill. Here are some nominations:

• In Walked Bud (1957, with Thelonious Monk): I don’t think that any drummer understood Monk’s idiosyncratic sense of rhythm better than Blakey, whose accents and ‘bombs’ under the pianist’s minimalist, angular solo are perfect accompaniment.
• Moanin’ (1958): This Bobby Timmons composition is the Messengers’ most famous number. The call-and-response opening is straight out of the gospel tradition, and Lee Morgan’s trumpet kicks off the soloing with his characteristic bravado.
• Tell It Like It Is (1961): From the album The Freedom Rider, this track is the product of what is, for my money, the hardest swinging of all the Messengers’ lineups, featuring Morgan, Shorter (tenor sax), Timmons (piano), and Jymie Merritt (bass). Blakey doesn’t solo, but he is clearly in charge, as we hear him shouting encouragement from behind his drums. Shorter’s bluesy solo is a highlight here, as he seems to channel late-50s Coltrane.
• Mosaic (1961): Later in the same year, Blakey added the wonderful Curtis Fuller on trombone, and the Messengers became a sextet for the first time. Also new were Cedar Walton (piano) and Freddie Hubbard (trumpet). The result was a richer sound (I would say ‘fuller,’ but that would be an unfortunate choice). Blakey solos like a volcano here, and his propulsive playing dominates throughout. Cedar Walton lends a rhythmic hand in driving the ensemble to a frenzy, culminating in Hubbard’s outbursts in the upper register of his instrument.

More Blakey to come in future posts. Give these tracks a listen, but remember that too much Blakey, like too much good Scotch, might be dangerous.

Jazz Compilation

I’m returning here after months of neglect to write about something very un-Shostakovichian. True, DSCH did write some music for jazz band, but as much as I love the man’s music, he doesn’t swing.

While reorganizing my music collection recently, I realized how long it had been since I had listened to some of it—ten years in some cases. We fall into habits of listening; when I want to hear something, I’ll often automatically turn to favorites… Kind of Blue, Waltz For Debby, Saxophone Colossus, etc. These, of course, will never let you down. But how long had it been since I’d let myself be surprised by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross or Jack Teagarden or Eric Dolphy or Jackie McLean or, or, or…?

I make no particular claims to jazz expertise. I know more than the average person, but that’s not saying much, since you know more than the average person if you know that Miles Davis played the trumpet. But despite my lack of expertise, many friends over the years have asked me to introduce them to jazz—perhaps because I’m an educator (though in a different field), or perhaps because I have a larger-than-average record collection. I’ve always responded to such requests in a piecemeal kind of way: I’ll let them borrow some Miles or some Coltrane or some Bird.

As I went through my collection, however, I decided that it would be great fun (for me, at least) to respond in a more thoughtful, comprehensive way. So I’m putting together my own jazz compilation on the scope of, say, the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, but with my own idiosyncratic focus. My complaint about such collections in the past (and about Ken Burns’s mammoth jazz documentary) is that they tend to focus on historical significance rather than the pleasure of the music. I can understand why they do this, as these collections are often primarily pedagogical, and, of course, pleasure and historical significance often coincide. However, such an approach is often daunting for new listeners who just want to enjoy some music which is new to them. So for the purposes of this compilation, I will let my own taste be the primary guide for selection. And perhaps in time for Christmas I’ll have this ready for interested friends and family.

I’ll be blogging about my nominations for inclusion as I listen, and doubtless I will nominate far more tracks than I will be able to include, at which point I’ll have to do some culling.

I’ll begin with nominations from the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens—as good a place to start as any. There are, of course, no jazz recordings more significant than these, but this is one of those cases in which pleasure and significance coincide—at least on some tracks. And here I’ll indulge in my first moment of blasphemy: some of these recordings (particularly the early ones, before Earl Hines joined Louis) do not hold up well. There are moments when Louis is not singing or playing, and we are forced to listen to Lil Hardin Armstrong’s stilted piano or, even worse, her awful vocals (blessedly rare). That said, many of these performances remain breathtaking. My initial list of nominees from these recordings included about a dozen tracks, which I have (with some accompanying pain) cut down to six:

• Heebie Jeebies (1926): This is the first known recorded example of scat. Louis famously claimed that his music fell off the stand, and he was forced to improvise vocally without words. The story should be true even if it’s not. The tune features the original Hot Five, including Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Lil Armstrong (piano), and Johnny St. Cyr (banjo). The highlight is certainly Louis’s vocal, accompanied by banjo and nothing else, which swings like nobody’s business.
• Struttin’ With Some Barbecue (1927): Same personel here. While Dodds and Ory are adept soloists, Louis’s solo and, especially, his restatement of the theme during the polyphonic conclusion, blow away the rest of the ensemble and demonstrate through contrast the difference between straight syncopation and real swing. One might call it the difference between ragtime and jazz senses of time.
• West End Blues (1928): Louis’s opening fanfare here is one of the most famous moments in jazz. This is a different Hot Five (though I count six), with Fred Robinson (not to be confused with the great Old English scholar from Yale), Jimmy Strong, Earl Hines, Mancy Cara, and Zutty Singleton. By far the most important change here is Hines on piano. His shimmering, delicate solo reveals an artist who can hold his own with Louis, who responds immediately with a heart-rending single note sustained with vibrato. ‘OK,’ Louis seems to be saying, ‘here is someone who can play with me.’
• Weather Bird (1928): This duet with Hines continues the dialogue.
• St. James Infirmary (1928): This remarkably dark old song I include for contrast. My favorite version of this tune, actually, was recorded decades later by Jack Teagarden, about which I’ll write eventually.
• Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1929): Actually not a Hot Five or Seven, but from the same period. Despite the rather square accompaniment, Louis’s vocal and trumpet solo on this Fats Waller tune are pure bliss. Note his quotation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in his solo.

Reference Page

I have added a reference page, where readers may find bibliographical information for published materials I refer to on this blog.

DSCH’s Fifth Symphony: Meaning and Being

“A poem should not mean / But be,” writes Archibald MacLeish in his “Ars Poetica,” though these lines notoriously contradict themselves. The modernist response to music is certainly in this vein, and I am inclined to agree, with certain qualifications. If we read “meaning” as simplistic interpretation, as a kind of musical allegory, then our “interpretation” of music is destined to fall into ludicrous tautology.

Criticism of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has been marked by such simplistic interpretations—from listeners who have heard Soviet orthodoxy and from romantic revisionists who have heard ironic dissidence. These polar readings began to appear almost immediately after the premiere in 1937 and have haunted the symphony ever since. The appearance of the apparently fraudulent Shostakovichian “memoir” Testimony in 1979 (a book supposedly dictated to, but likely mostly written by Solomon Volkov) provided fuel for problematic revision of the problematic orthodoxy. The supposed “Shostakovich” writes:

I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” (183)

It is, of course, just as unclear what “happens” in the Fifth as it is unclear who wrote this passage. In the next Shostakovichian post, I will outline some of this history, and I will try to explain why we can’t escape or ignore it, but also why we should do our best to move beyond it.

Ich am of Irlonde

Time out from DSCH for a Middle English St. Patrick’s Day poem:

Ich am of Irlonde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlonde.
Goode sire, praye ich thee,
For of sainte charitee,
Com and dance with me
In Irlonde.

Politics and Musical Ambiguity

Several readers have commented via e-mail and in conversation on the degree of culpability for those who use the “inner emigration” justification mentioned by Vollmann’s narrator in the previous post. (Yes, this blog does have a few readers, though no one has ventured to post any comments as of yet: come on, people!) This is interesting to consider, no doubt, though surely each case will be different.

What interests me more at the moment, however, is how this kind of political context affects our assessment of art forms we usually consider abstract, like “pure” music. Film and poetry, for example, are different. The political is unavoidable when we assess the work of Leni Riefenstahl (an example a friend pointed out to me today in conversation), because of the naked propaganda of a film like Triumph of the Will; its undoubted brilliance cannot be divorced from what we must consider problematic politics.

But what do we do with, say, Furtwängler, who made some of the most famous recordings of the twentieth century with the Berlin Philharmonic during the war? What do we do with the music of Carl Orff, whose connection to the Nazis is a longstanding subject of controversy? What do we do with Karajan, who actually joined the Nazi party and then had a legendary career, which extended forty years after the war ended?

Do political contexts affect the way we hear these artists?  Should they?  What kind of political work is this music doing?

Of course, the notion that music is free from political and cultural context because musical notes do not signify is mistaken. “Pure” music can signify in any number of ways, and it is as closely connected to cultural context as any art form. Musical quotation, for example, folk and folk-like melodies, certain modalities, and even certain intervals (think of the tritone) all can signify in very specific ways in context.

But it is true that musical signification is usually difficult to pin down, and this ambiguity brings us back to Shostakovich. How does his political ambiguity affect our reading of his musical ambiguity? His is a particularly difficult case because of the widely varying assessments of his politics. Does the Fifth Symphony embrace party orthodoxy, or does it secretly, ironically reject it? Or does it do both and neither? Alex Ross rightly insists in The Rest Is Noise that musical irony is difficult to identify and analyze because it is so difficult to determine specific meaning in a piece of music.

We can, however, learn to be wary of any interpretation that displays too much certitude about what the music is “really saying,” and stay alert to multiple levels of meaning. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony becomes a rich experience when heard in this way. (Ross 245)

In the case of the Fifth Symphony, politically impossible circumstances actually provide the composer a platform for producing great art. But how do we hear it? In future posts I will chart one listener’s idiosyncratic reading of this fraught masterpiece.

And, of course, Shostakovich wrote music for films as well. . . . We have much ground to cover!

From Europe Central

I’ll get back to the Fifth Symphony soon, but I wanted to share a passage from William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, a novel in which Shostakovich plays a major role. Here the party-loyalist narrator ruminates on what he considers the fraud, or at least the convenient excuse, of the inner life of the artist:

As for him [Shostakovich], he had his own world beneath the piano keys. He was engaged in what it’s now fashionable to call inner emigration. At my office we don’t much care for that term, and I’ll tell you why: Hindemith, von Karajan and Furtwängler make music for the Hitlerites, and then, when it’s over, they have the effrontery to plead: Word of honor, I wasn’t really here! I couldn’t possibly have collaborated, since I was living in my head the entire time!—You know what I say to that? I say: Give ‘em eight grams! And if you don’t know what that means, believe me, you’re better off. (108 )

Thoughts?

A first encounter with the Fifth Symphony

I first encountered Shostakovich in high school, believe it or not. My music theory teacher passed out scores of the Fifth Symphony and insisted that we follow along as best we could as she played a recording. I wish I could remember which recording it was.

My response to the D-minor opening—the unmistakable four intervals followed by the descending figure—without knowing anything of the circumstances of its composition, was a feeling of paranoid menace, which began to intensify as the music accelerated, especially with the strange entrance of one-handed piano line. The piano entered here for a few seconds and never reappeared for the remainder of the first movement; it was as if the pianist had been taken out back and shot.

But then after the menace reached a climax of nightmare, something remarkable happened: over a rhythmic background of strings and harp, a flute, a horn, and then a clarinet transformed the paranoid theme into something of heartbreaking beauty. It seemed a miracle to my eighteen-year-old sensibility.

The Fifth Symphony has been an important part of my life ever since, and it served as a gateway to much of the composer’s great music: the string quartets, the violin concertos, the twenty-four preludes and fugues. And, of course, Shostakovich became to me, as to many others, a troubling, irresistable figure: tragic, farcical, ambivalent, enigmatic. His description of the Fifth Symphony is infamously emblematic of his troubled career and his controversial position in the pantheon of great composers. After a politically ominous review of his music in Pravda, he withdrew his monumental Fourth Symphony, for which rehearsals had begun in May of 1936, and wrote this rich masterpiece, he claimed, as “a Soviet Artist’s creative reply to just criticism.”

This web-log will begin as a series of reflections on the life and music of Shostakovich. What does his music tell us about art and society, art and psychology, art and politics? Where I will go from there is anyone’s guess. Suggestions are welcome . . .