By Max Babi
This is my personal journal of an exciting journey: from a point where I didn't have the foggiest notion about jazz to a point where it seems like jazz is internalized in my system... I hope to account for a lot of exciting discoveries I made from my schooldays onwards, a lot of conditioning which subtly changed my persona altogether and a whole lot of awareness coupled with a scholarly habit of casting a critical eye on anything and everything connected with making of music... I also hope to pay tributes to a bunch of truly gifted geniuses hailing from widely differing backgrounds, practising different genres but all with the common thread of brilliance coursing through their stylistic expression of innermost turmoil and joyous founts of emotional riches. In the bargain I hope to understand myself better, why I have leaned towards a particular type of jazz and jazzmen, and why has a certain type left me cold. I hope this journal will help likeminded souls, much younger but burning with the same intensity to understand what is jazz and thus assimilate in a fuller manner.
Jazz--isn't that a slippery customer! You listen to jazz for years, or even decades and let it dissolve into your bloodstream, let it envelope you like a benign miasma and let it become your other self : but, when a greenhorn pops the inevitable question, "what exactly is jazz," you can barely do better than scratch your head or go Umm and Er... before rigging up a plausible reply. How very demeaning, how devastating but how true, for a jazz-hooked person.
Jazz has had innumerable definitions right from the downright frivolous to loftily intellectual gobbledygook, from stiffly terse to gleefully verbose. But the closest, and the briefest in all its pristine glory is what Satchmo [Louis Armstrong] had to say about Jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know..." Nobody ever gave a better definition of this fuzzy concept called Jazz. All-encompassing and organic--for it has been as accommodating as the English language and as organic too, since it is growing on a daily basis, merrily getting infused with new idioms, styles and giving birth new genres which were unimaginable only a few decades ago... such a fascinating process. No other form of music I know, has allowed the free entry to such a wealth of instruments from other cultures too--which is a fascinating process by itself too. The improvisational blues-tinged genius of Rahsaan Roland Kirk , holds a major stake in this enterprise. He is reputed to have invented more than six instruments of his own--some of them weird cross-breeds like a trumpet with a sax mouthpiece, for instance. But whatever he played, his playing came straight from the heart.
On a personal level, if I had to describe jazz to a music lover who hasn't been exposed too liberally to this wonderfully creative art, I would compare it to a fascinating and famous city. Everyone discovers the same landmarks, the same fun places and the same watering holes in different ways. It's like you choose to stay in a different quarter, look at the place in your own way, and come away with a different impression of the same places visited by others. Impressions of the same city coming from different people can be startlingly different, even contradictory or disconcerting. But then personal likes and dislikes ever so strongly with each person.
I grew up listening to the radio, and those days in '60s the Voice Of America Jazz Hour, presented in a priestly somber manner by the unforgettable Willis Conover. That was the highway to discovery for me. I did listen to great jazz on the BBC and many Asian radio stations later on, but it was the VOA-JH which provided me the primary education and distinctly formed my personal taste in jazz, as it were. Duke Ellington's version of Billy Strayhorn's immortal classic "Take The A Train" was his signature tune, and perhaps due to the fact that millions of non-English-speaking listeners sat glued to the radio for one full hour listening to Conover, he used to talk at an agonizingly slow speed, annunciating the names and facts very clearly indeed. Precisely chosen nuggets of information, those used to be. These were the "online courses" in Jazz to my mindÃÂÃÂÃÂ÷ each program was a masterpiece of holistic presentation, just the right mix of information with the brightest selections of jazz from a galaxy of stars from the world of jazz.
Naturally I grew up slightly more inclined to the swing era big bands, bebop, cool jazz, even hard bop and later on fusion... whilst riding the glorious Blues train in parallel. Woody Herman and his various Thundering Herds, occupied a special place in my heart with their smooth variations on classics right from Woodchoppers' Ball to the soothingly melodic "Cherokee." He had a powerful corner each in the trumpet section, sax section and the other woodwinds. But it was the sax section which held a unique glamour all its own. Known as the Four Brothers, who later on became real big names when they struck out on their own, they were a true delight to listen to. Zoot Sims and Al Cohn were the slightly more prominent in these four sax specialists. They always played together but really fought like wild cats with their horns, weaving brightly-hued tapestries of sounds which provided a virtually kaleidoscopic glimpse into their incredible inner worlds of creativity and freedom of expression. Perfect example of good jazz.
Glenn Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra was another magical outfit : as irresistible as Harry Potter's world to today's child. There was a seductive smoothness about their presentations which bowled me over and kept me company whilst mugging over stuff for school exams every night. Weekends were a punishment because Conover took a break and I couldn't wait till Monday night for his sorcerer-like return. My little world defragmented itself into a heavenly abode immediatelyÃÂÃÂÃÂ÷on hearing the first dramatic note of Ellington's piano on "Take The A Train"...
Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman came on to the jazz scene with their somber and intellectually tough approach--perhaps the same was happening to John Coltrane around the same time. There was a tendency for these intellectual performers to break the basic rules like playing to the predefined beat and making their horns talk instead of sing. Sometimes it got sickeningly atonal and even amusical to my ears attuned to melodic expression right from the beginning. I am sure I didn't like the proliferation of these new music forms at all. However I must say that Eric Dolphy did a great thing by introducing the magical bass clarinet into mainstream jazz, whilst it had been relegated to classical performances so far. It has a bewitching sound--and the fact that it is constructed like a thin-bodied small sax, gives it an exotic look. A pity the instrument didn't catch the fancy of listeners. Lovely deep and breathy sound.
I have a niggling doubt that it was Dolphy's wild experimentation which became a stumbling block for this powerful contender. This was perhaps the beginning of the most fearful phase of "avant garde" or the overly experimental jazz which to my young mind, left the listener far behind whilst the musician probably had a lot of fun with himself. Ostensibly due to this inaccessibility and atonal aspects of the style, I avoided it painstakingly.
Cannonball Adderley and Coleman Hawkins on the other hand, had expanded the range of the saxophone into some other directions, where pure jazz idiom flourished, oblivious to all the modern idioms, outside influences and inside madness tearing it apart. Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk also did the same, following faithfully the logically uplifting improvisational movements whilst carving out their own special niches. Dizzy Gillespie with the trademark "bent" cornet, also did similar things and Don Cherry openly flirted with the Indian music influence, the use of microtones : thus reducing the basic stiffness of performance and making melody the king, not the rhythm which used to be dictating terms earlier. Harmony was almost gone, when these small combos flourished, and brought Jazz closer and closer to the Hindustani [North Indian classical] music. Sonny Rollins was infusing blues heavily into his own style of jazz, and without ever having seen him perform live [until Jazz Yatra happened at Bombay in 1978] I could rather miraculously imagine him jumping around while playing. One can very rarely recognize a saxophonist by his sound, but in case of Rollins, his unmistakable grainy and rasping sound has always been a trademark.
The most notable twist in the story came in from the shy performer who always played his trumpet bent over like a hunchback, with his drug-ruined eyes covered with a blindman's dark glasses--Miles Davis. He turned out to be a potent powerhouse of innovation. His place in the Jazz firmament is that of a prophet, no less. His open dalliance with Rock, so far a virtual enemy of Jazz, turned up some gems in history of Jazz. His wonderful album Bitches Brew speaks volumes for this new movement, and it seems to be featuring a glaxy of jazz superstars who either formed their own seminal Jazz-Rock groups or shone like lone stars in the firmament of jazz for decades to comeÃÂÃÂÃÂ÷ a galaxy of superstars indeed. John Mahavishnu McLaughlin with his 18-stringed guitar brought a fresh new style of performance that came in straight from his heart and India. New directions were thrown open. Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Chick Correa, Herbie Hencock, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett, Stanley Clarke, a whole galaxy of superstars in Jazz were born in the Miles Davis stable. An invisible but throbbingly discernible thread seems to be running through the innovative styles of all these masters who were given a first taste of stardom by Miles Davis the stylish genius.
Sidney Bechet was a magician from the old times whom I discovered by serendipity and stuck onto through thick and thin with my tastes changing over the slow-flow of decades. His clean and slightly rasping sound, his unique but helpless vibrato, his masterful improvisations, all this combined to make him one of the greatest clarinetists ever. However I did not know for a long time [my only source of music being the radio] that he was equally talented with soprano sax and the alto sax. I do feel at times that perhaps he played the soprano the best. His tunes "Petite Fleur" and "Summertime" were very popular with the song-requesting public of yesteryears, on the radio.
Curiously somehow, I didn't connect the Blues and Jazz as sister-phenomena or parent-offspring pair at all. To my mind, both styles were separate and the bluesy jazz being belted out by John Coltrane, John Handy, Miles Davis, and all the other geniuses who were groomed by him [Davis], gave me the impression that jazz was going through another bout of fusion--pretty good, but surely transient in nature. The bluesy improvisations by big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, or even Stan Kenton [the latter influenced me deeply for some reason: most probably due to his profoundly complex compositions with equally intriguing improvisations] appeared like smooth performances by ageing female gymnasts : too good to last too long. And that's how it changed too--big bands playing the blues were more of an aberration during the time cool jazz or hard bop had been making inroads with an uncontrolled and even uncontrollable impetus and a snowballing momentum.
Since the VOA-JH and Conover had an encyclopaedic attitude towards jazz, and almost an evangelistic tendency to drive home the message. Well, it did not really matter to me what the audiences in USA were listening to or buying records of. There were no hit-parades nor bestseller charts. Thus the five-days a week program was more like a library opening up its myriad departments to me to show off its treasures. What treasures I found there, too! From the European and Asian sources I had collected a lot of useful knowledge about Dixieland, Boogie Woogie, and other pre World War II era types of Jazz, wherein my heroes were Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, even hugely talented drummer Buddy Rich with his own big band aspirations. Harry James, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington also--who seemed to be going off in different directions to me, from the familiar but somewhat rigid patterns of Dixieland type music with its marching band type approach to jazz. You know, limited improvisation within the tight limits of the melody and an infectious beat sternly bringing the musicians back on course, almost with an animal circus ring master's whiplash, one could imagine.
But the nightly one hour of uninterrupted Jazz from Conover's endless repertoire would bring me back to the modern classics and the Jazz standards which soon became as familiar as the street lamps outside on a much trodden roadÃÂÃÂÃÂ÷ tunes like "Misty," or "Satin Doll" or "St. Louis Blues" or "Summertime," "I've Grown Accustomerd To Her Face," "I Am Beginning To See The Light," "Caravan." This was a new phenomenon to my mind--listening to a standard being played or sung very differently by another jazzman.
Nowhere was this difference more glaringly apparent than in vocal renditions of the age-old masterpieces. It's a matter of personal choice, but sometimes I wondered why I chose a non-jazz performer's rendition of a standard better than an accomplished jazz singer's. An illustrative example could be the standard "Let's Do It" performed every so differently by Eartha Kitt and Ella Fitzgerald. In my Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manner I had been developing a vast repertoire of favourite popular singers, those who were never featured on a jazz program. Eartha Kitt was one such performer--but she beats Ella Fitzgerald hollow when she sings this mildly erotic song and turns the simple but mischievously playful lyrics into a spate of virtual carpet-bombing by her caressing voice, her gurglingly intimate thick whisperish manner of lashing the listener softly and sensuously with words and soundÃÂÃÂÃÂ÷ Eartha Kitt sounds like the fount of mystical eroticisim. Ella Fitzgerald sounds too bland and devoid of spiciness almost like Oriental food as compared to this nerve-tingling, blood-pounding heart-thumping performance by Eartha Kitt.
Comparisons were inevitable with the instrumental classics too. "Caravan," that heavenly melody has been performed in twenty five different ways by both jazz and pop musicians. I mean nothing could be further apart than the catchy foot-tapping sort of jamming on guitars by Chet Atkins and Les Paul when juxtaposed with the highly melodious performance on muted trumpets and trombones and a full strings section by Xavier Cugat, for example. Latin jazz was yet another bright chapter in this holy journey, I recall.
Xavier Cugat, Perez Prado, and Tito Puente are some names that come to my mind when the wildly popular Cha Cha Cha movement flashes through the memories like a bolt of lightening. Again, the Latin music seems un-conncected with Jazz--but, later on I did come to realize that the backbone of this music was improvisation, where Jazz came in. Without spontaneous improvisation, even the most danceable Latin performance be it Mambo, Samba or Tango, would fall flat on its face--and that's where the soul of jazz seems to have entered the Latin music realm and liberated it as it were, from the perceived boundaries of melodic expression. Unlimited freedom within a tightly defined melodic expression is what Jazz is all about, isn't it.
Latin Jazz melted away into the background for a while during the early '60s, only to return with a louder bang. Bossa Nova happened. It threw open the doors to totally unimagined chambers in the castle of Jazz. It came in as a breath of fresh air just when things were jelling into tighter shapes by way of cool jazz and the softly spreading understated improvisation of Miles Davis clones who sometimes seemed to be playing for themselves, not giving two hoots for the audiences or the spectators. Performing arts would have got stunted into a weird artistic license, had that fashion continued. Sensitive listeners could make out what was happening on the stage simply by concentrating on the quality of the sound only--no TV nor internet webcasting was needed then.
Bossa Nova, meaning the new trend, came to the fore through an unlikely trio: stranger bedfellows one could not imagine. Laurindo Almeida on guitar, Stan Getz on his mellow tenor saxophone and Antonio Carlos Jobim with his soft-as-fluffy-clouds vocals. Later on Esther Jobim also joined in to make that a magical quartet. Their soft voices, intimately whispered deliveries, relaxed but precisely consistent pace and the overall intimacy of togetherness culled from a rare understanding of each other's style of playing / singing lifted them to a plateau which commanded a world view, as it were. Bossa Nova spread like wild fire universally. JoÃÂÃÂÃÂão Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto also became very famous.
Modern Jazz Quartet, or MJQ as it was lovingly called, took to Bossa Nova in a big way and went on releasing album after album for years. To my adolescent hormonal chaos, their cool style wasn't too attractive, but the Bossa Nova angle raised them to an exalted pedestal through universal popularity and in no time I too found them appealing in a strange way. I loved listening to the soothing strains of their piano and vibraphone for years. Milt Jackson on vibes and John Lewis on piano used to be the chief architects of these serene improvisations--even when Bossa Nova died out. Theirs was the distinctive sound that gave MJQ its brand image. Connie Kay's masterful support on drums and the sustained acoustic bass drone from Percy Heath. MJQ seemed to be going on and on, when groups were forming and disbanding all around.
Meanwhile the wealth of Blues came to me in bits and pieces like sudden showers in winter. B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker--these were the immediately noticeable, immensely likeable performers. The India-America link was pretty thin those days, and things American were neither sold in the market nor easily brought back by the Indians working in US. However, some diehards did that. A particular good help was Rajan, an accomplished architect--who has designed the beautiful and fascinating Planetarium at the wonderful city of Baroda in Western parts of India. He had a goodish collection of the blues and I got to listen to them, make copies and enjoy the wonderful music for years.
