Occasional Jazz Conjectures

Take One: In its early days jazz was an assault on the American dream of a simple morality. Along with alcohol and the movies, jazz boldy suggested (maybe for the first time in this country’s history) that pleasure was a worthwhile quest. With its speed and jarring, otherworldly sense of futurity, jazz represented something fiercely modern: it was uptown and downtown, complex narrative wrapped around the curves of simple beauty, consensual crime’s pulsating soundtrack. Sneeringly described in temperance overtones as “the delirium tremens of syncopation,” jazz was a scapegoat for madness, deviance, graft and nearly every other conceivable left-handed form of human endeavor. Jean Cocteau said it was stimulating “in the same way as machinery. . . or danger.”

This new bathtub-gin-and-rhythm — with its asphalt onomatopoeia and eroticized threat of such sweet thunder — was a shocking tonic to any acceptable parlor Victor Herbertisms or maudlin “After the Ball” fare. But what was perhaps even more threatening than its daring velocity and dissonant wail was jazz’s startling new sense of sensuality, intimacy and risk — and it was this aspect (more than any other) that fueled its incendiary rise into American culture. . .dismantling silence and decency in the face of art “like whips of sex in the Sousa-filled night” (Ed Dorn).

Gary Giddins rhetorically asks from time to time, where’s the next Bird or Coltrane? Where are the new voices that inspire a return of medieval jumping mania and cries of wordly unwholesomeness? Where are the next architects of polyventiality. . .going, like Paul Blackburn suggested, “to the wall/because that’s where the door is/Maybe?”

Innovation frequently occurs, as the Benny Carter song goes, when lights are low. . .so as Valentine’s Day careens, looms, and lingers, consider — Jimmy Blanton, Bill Dixon, Amiri Baraka, Jo Jones, Pepper Adams, J C Heard, Hal Singer, Clarence Williams, Dollar Brand Ibrahim, Yusef Lateef, Mezz Mezzrow, Lee Wiley, Ed Blackwell, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Lester Bowie, Billy Higgins, Fred Hopkins, Ray Brown, Lee Konitz, Pharoah Sanders, Art Tatum, Cozy Cole, Anita O’Day, Jelly Roll Morton. Don Byas, Dizzy, Giorgio Gaslini, Jimmy Heath, Eddie Lang, Charlie Barnet, Warne Marsh, Andy Bey, Zoot Sims, Clifford Brown, Booker Ervin, Ethel Waters, Bunny Berigan, Henry Grimes, Muggsy Spanier, Paul Bley, Andrew Cyrille, Hoagy Carmichael, Eddie Condon, David Amram, Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, Sheila Jordan, Johnny Mercer, Coleman Hawkins, Scott Joplin, Teddy Wilson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Gigi Gryce, George Wettling, Billy Strayhorn — some of the greatest architects of mood, revolution, and desire were conceived under a February winter-moon in back-seats, living rooms, hotels, and even bedrooms, set against an impromptument of rising dew point and a soundtrack of saxophone torches blowing promethean jazz fire.

“. . . I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then asked me would I yes to say yes . . . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” - James Joyce

. . .now’s the time, now’s the time.