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 those in 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.
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