Awhile back, I went
to the Jewish Community Center a few blocks away
to hear an afternoon concert by a chamber jazz
group. The quintet was led by a local jazz celebrity,
a tenor saxophonist who'd been a sideman in several
noted swing-to-bop-era big bands. He'd retired
from all that to run a music store and school,
but kept his hand in by maintaining this rehearsal
group, which played at schools, benefits, and
the occasional paying gig.
With one exception, he
and the other members of this racially mixed band
all looked to be around sixty years old. Healthy,
serene, with good chops, they worked their way
energetically through an hour-long set as the
audience nodded and clapped in appreciation. They
were, I realized, playing what's now called jazz
repertory - their selections were a series of
homages and reinventions of songs whose classic
jazz versions were familiar to their listeners.
That thought brought me
up short. Back when I started listening to jazz,
the music that old jazz musicians played when
they played the music of their youth was Dixieland.
Period. Now, somehow, bop had become the music
of graybeards; it had entered the cultural mainstream
sufficiently that the first notes of the Dizzy
Gillespie-Charlie Parker classic "Groovin'
High" brought smiles of recognition and a
light burst of applause. The housewife next to
me leaned over to explain to her bored, squirming
offspring who Dizzy Gillespie was. Suddenly I
felt very old . . .
No question about it, the
jazz life has changed. And an important part of
that change is how we, the music's audience, now
see and understand that life and those who choose
to live it.
When I was growing up as
a teen-age jazz fan in New York in the late 1950s,
that life was - insofar as I could garner - unrelentingly
hard: fast, dangerous, rootless, marginal. Unless
one found a safe harbor as a studio musician or
sideman in a big band, middle age seemed unpredictable
at best, old age unlikely. (Charlie Parker's trajectory
came to epitomize the legends. When Parker died
in March of 1955, at the age of thirty-five, the
coroner who autopsied him said he'd effectively
achieved middle age: he had the body of a man
twenty years older.)
The whiff of violence still
hung around the edges of the scene. Tales abounded:
of great Dixieland musicians cut down in their
prime by knife or gun (August Wilson's marvelous
play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," brings
those often apocryphal stories alive for our own
time); of the music's relation to the underworld
of crime during the Twenties and Thirties; of
institutionalized racism and its sometimes hideous
consequences; of major and minor players constantly
in jail or rehab centers for drugs, or dead from
them. Not to mention the random idiocy of the
system, epitomized by Thelonious Monk's decade-long
Kafkaesque struggle to obtain from the New York
City Police Department the cabaret license that
would entitle him to perform in nightclubs in
his home town. Or the inexplicable snippings of
the Fates, ploughing under a genius like trumpeter-composer
Clifford Brown in the midst of his first flowering.
I pored over every book
about jazz I could get my hands on then, re-reading
them until I could recite whole passages by heart.
Excepting Louis Armstrong's (and, if she's to
be counted as a jazz figure, Ethel Waters), there
was no autobiography by a jazz musician that did
not proclaim tragic failure in everyday life as
the necessary price for creative triumph. Billie
Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues and Mezz
Mezzrow's Really the Blues typified these
harrowing confessionals, and served to construct
a romantic mythology whose cumulative message
was overwhelmingly clear: Jazz is the art form
of the destroyed and the self-destructive; aside
from its blessed (Louis) and its sanctified (Ethel),
those who made this music were fated to live and
die badly.
Of course, we hadn't yet
really heard from the musicians themselves. Other
than those I've mentioned, and a very few more,
there were no published autobiographies by jazz
players. Even the oral historianship of the form
was still in its infancy, primarily devoted to
the aging practitioners of the music's earliest
phases. The two magazines then covering the music,
Downbeat and Metronome, addressed many aspects
of jazz with varying degrees of knowledgeability,
sympathy and insight, yet somehow still managed
to treat jazz musicians as exotic creatures who
existed only to play. No interview I ever read
in their pages asked the questions that would
have normalized the lives into which they aspired
to inquire:
Where do you live?
What kind of living environment have you made
for yourself? Who are your neighbors, and what
do they think about your line of work? Outside
the sphere of music, what is your involvement
with community? Where do your children go to
school? Does your wife work outside the home?
How do you and your family deal with your work
schedule and the necessity of frequent absence?
What strains does this line of work put on marriage,
parenthood, friendship? How much money do you
make, from what sources, and what's your cash
flow like? Do you have a retirement plan? How
do you keep in physical shape? Where do you
go on vacation? What do you do to relax? What
are your tastes in art, in literature? What
are your politics? What newspaper do you read?
What are your opinions about current world affairs?
In short, there was nothing
to suggest that jazz musicians lived a significant
part of their lives off the stage and outside
the band bus. That image began to change in the
1960s. There were many factors contributing to
the shift; but one of them, surely, was the gradual
discovery by people everywhere that jazz musicians
could be, often were, the folks next door - like
our local saxophonist, or the members of another
Staten Island musical family (father a bass player,
mother a vocalist, son an alto player) I've heard
in concert on the ferry, in local libraries, and
elsewhere. So, even if not yet commonplace, playing
jazz is now a respectable way to earn a living;
the jazz world is no longer a world apart, but
simply a part of a larger world. And jazz musicians
are people of the world and in the world, through
whom the world's music flows.
A character created by
Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks once said, "We
are all singing; I have the mouth." Artists
are the mouths, the hands, the eyes and ears (or,
as Ezra Pound put it, "the antennae")
of the species. The impact of the music called
jazz on artists in all media, on those committed
to the exercise of creative intelligence in all
its manifestations, and on the average citizen,
has yet to be thoroughly annotated, much less
examined in depth. There'll be a lot of jazz happening
here on the Island over the next four or five
months - a concert series at Snug Harbor, Parks
Dept.-sponsored Jazzmobile gigs, and much more.
Get yourself a few slices of the jazz life while
the weather is warm; some people prefer it in
smoky clubs, but I think it tastes best out of
doors. And don't forget to pay close attention
to who's up on stage; could be - like thosein
the crowd - it's people you know. if so, be sure
to say hello, and thanks. Perhaps the time has
come for us to begin to bear witness to what this
music and the everyday people who make it have
meant in all our lives over the course of this
century.