"The slide trombone is a primitive-looking instrument which, next to a trumpet, seems like a cycle to an auto. If your arms are short, don't even attempt to play it, for while you hold it to your lips with your left hand, you must move the slide back and forth in front of you through seven positions with your right, meanwhile manipulating your embouchure within a large mouthpiece in order to achieve the instrument's usual two and a half octave range. It’s no wonder that the trumpet is so vastly preferred as a Jazz instrument., far apart from its carrying power within a higher range, its streamlined size and valves permit easy mobility where acrobatic coordination is required of the trombonist. Thus it's traditional in big bands for the trombone section to be rather simpler than those of the other winds, and indeed, in early jazz, the trombonist's role was to chuff away at rhythmic and harmonic support for the more mobile instruments.
Yet until the advent of jazz, the deep communicative power of the trombone had not been realized: its big sound, rich textures, and classic expressive techniques were the most distinctive of early jazz sonorities. Soloists emerged in the '20s as the big bands grew in versatility and the New Orleans ensemble style began to disappear, and while the liberating influence of trumpeter Louis Armstrong was a major factor in evolving trombone styles (transmitted most influentially by the young New York big band soloist Jimmy Harrison, who died in 1931 the grand manner of early masters such as Kid Ory retained its attraction, too. Surely the Swing Era was the jazz trombone's time of glory, for a diverse group if individualists flourished while, for example, trumpet and tenor sax players seemed to depend on the resources of Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. There were the majestic arrogance of J.C. Higginbotham, the powerful and subtle mastery of Dicky Wells, the suave melodism and blues interpretations of Jack Teagarden, and the elegance of Lawrence Brown to provide standards of excellence; Tricky Sam Nanton, with the Ellington band, was another world of expression entirely; outstanding players such as Trummy Young and the eclectic Vic Dickenson proved important influences themselves.
The end of the trombone's greatest significance was forecast when Lester Young introduced a wholly new sensibility to Jazz, when small combos with their emphasis on treble clef horns gained important as sources of jazz innovation, and finally when the fresh winds of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie renewed the whole atmosphere of the music. Bebop was a music wherein small note values and the clarity of the melodic line, almost the exclusive source of aesthetic values, could not in the least be obscured. The Swing trombone's nobility of sound and dramatic capacities had no place in such a completely lyrical idiom, for if even a trumpeter as accomplished as Gillespie had to sacrifice sonoric richness in order to achieve mobility of execution, how much more did the player of the ungainly slide trombone abandon. A teen-aged Indianapolis J.J. Johnson [born 1924] listened to the graceful, ornate Fred Beckett, with the bands of Harlan Leonard and then Lionel Hampton, "the very first trombonist I ever heard play in a manner other than the usual sliding, slurring gutbucket style. He had tremendous facilities for linear improvisation." Johnson's sense of musical values is important, for he is the leading modern trombonist, almost the exclusive source of '50s and '60s style — yet he maintained that tenor saxist Lester Young and trumpeter Roy Eldridge were more important to his developing art than his trombone peers; later came the impact of Parker and Gillespie on his work.
What Johnson's playing particularly offered — with Parker, Gillespie, and the other major bop figures; with the two-trombone Jay and Kai (Winding) quintets and then his own small touring groups, before he abandoned playing for a Hollywood composing career in the '60s — was fast, highly active lines played with a vibratoless tone so light that it abandoned expressive capability. These qualities made Johnson the dominating figure on his instrument, as two generations of players based their art on his perceptions; without his ideas, the trombone may not have survived in the bop hothouse. "There was a time in my life in the mid-1940s, when my aim was to play as fast as physically possible," he told Ira Gitler in an important interview (Jazz Masters Of The Forties, Macmillan, 1966). "In Philly a ridiculous club owner had a sign outside which read, 'Fastest Trombone Alive.” Inevitably, Jazz and tempos became more civilized . . ." The Johnson style made virtuoso demands on the player's stamina, dexterity, and intellect — thus Johnson was aware of the pitfalls of bop intensity, despite his natural attraction to a Romantic musical outlook."
- John Litweiler insert notes to The Trombone Album [Savoy SV-0276]
From the vantage point of when this article was written in January, 1962, many of the trombonists that Martin Williams writes about were still active in the music.
My one quibble with the piece is that it doesn’t take into consideration some excellent trombonists that were resident on the West Coast during the same period. Players like Frank Rosolino, Carl Fontana and Lou Blackburn probably escaped Martin’s attention due to the fact that his geographical vantage point was the East Coast.
But as it stands, Martin’s essay is a wonderful retrospective of the history of the Jazz trombone and the important Jazz trombone stylists.
One would be hard-pressed to find a better survey, especially one that treats as many of the more obscure early pioneers on the instrument.
“It is usually said that J.J. Johnson was the first trombonist to develop a modern Jazz style on the instrument.
There is more to it than that. It might be more nearly accurate to say that Johnson developed an individual style, which he plays on a trombone. There is not very much about that style that is peculiar to the instrument he uses, not much about it that uses the particular resources of the trombone.
Jimmy Knepper, on the other hand, is the first trombonist in quite a while to find his style specifically in the possibilities of the instrument itself.
To say it another way, and exaggerate it a bit, you could play Johnson style on any horn, but you could play Knepper style only on trombone.
Cannonball Adderley spoke of the distinction and his opinion of it in a review of an LP featuring Knepper a couple of years atzo:
"Knepper is a very good trombonist. But J. J. has spoiled me with regard to a trombone sounding like a trombone. I mean that Knepper, though he's very good, is too tied to the instrument. J. J., on the other hand, is a good soloist who happens to use the trombone. Therefore, if you call Knepper an 'original' trombonist, you may be right. If you mean an 'original' soloist, in the same sense in which I'd use the term for J. J., that's something else.
"Similarly, I think Jimmy Cleveland is an original trombonist but not the original jazz soloist J. J. is. J. J. has a style, and it's the kind of style that allows men on other instruments beside the trombone to emulate it, and they wind up sounding in part like J. J.
"I'd say Knepper is like a modern Jack Teagarden. A man like Curtis Fuller emulates J. J. from a trombone point of view, and a player like Kai Winding was originally a J. J. emulator (not in content but from the viewpoint of the trombone). Knepper's influences, however, sound more traditional — Teagarden, Urbie Green. Even his sound sounds similar to Teagarden's in some spots."
Nowadays, then, jazz trombone has a dual role. It always has had, although the distinction that is now made between an almost abstract style, like Johnson's and a more "trombone-istic" style, like Knepper's, has not always been the distinction that applied.
It is obvious enough and well established enough that jazz first began at least partly as an instrumental imitation of vocal music.
It happens that the characteristics of the trombone are very close to those of the human voice, perhaps closer than those of any other instrument. Therefore, the temptation among early jazz trombonists to imitate human sounds must have been enormous. A surviving practitioner of the early style is, of course, Kid Ory. There are trombonists who probably play the "tailgate" New Orleans ensemble style with more technique than Ory uses (Georg Brunis does), but surely that are few who can play with more expressiveness. And even when Ory is playing the simplest parade smear, he is obviously a man singing on a trombone.
There were some marvelously guttural (and gutter-al) trombone comments recorded in the 1920s by a man named Ike Rodgers.
It has been said that Rodgers could play only two notes but that when he played the blues, they seemed to be the only two notes anybody ought to need. There are examples of Rodgers' work on an available LP, playing with blues pianists Roosevelt Sykes and Henry Brown and commenting on the woes of singers Edith Johnson and Alice Moore (Riverside 150). Rodgers had a trick of his own, of stuffing the end of his horn with window screening. He got a sound that words fail to describe—he still seemed to be talking away on his horn but with a different voice.
Charlie (Big) Green, who graces many an early Fletcher Henderson and Bessie Smith record, carried this vocal tradition further along.
But it reached another kind of development in the work of Duke Ellington's plunger man, Joe (Tricky Sam) Nanton. There are Nanton solos from the late 1930s and early '40s that are so uncannily like projections of the male human voice that they are nearly unbelievable.
Sidewalks of New York was a particularly striking example, because there Nanton was playing a well-known melody, and he seemed almost to be singing it wordlessly. It might be said with only slight exaggeration that Nanton had but one solo, which he put together in various ways. But Ellington used that solo, and the impact of its sound and emotion, so resourcefully and with such variety of settings that to this day there must be a capable Nanton imitator in the Ellington trombone section. He not only must play the old pieces, but he must re-create some of the old effects even on many of the new tunes.
Before Nanton, jazz trombone had already taken another step that gave it its first duality.
There were trombonists in the early 1920s who were playing the horn as a brass instrument, not just using its slide in limited and obvious ways and not using its resources only to re-create human sounds. The first such men to be celebrated in jazz history, were, of course, Jack Teagarden and Jimmy Harrison, and independently they worked out rather similar approaches. (Actually, Miff Mole did the same sort of thing concurrently, if not slightly before them, and Mole was a fine instrumentalist if not quite so good an improviser.)
Coleman Hawkins, who was in the Henderson band with both Big Green and Harrison has put the story this way:
"Jimmy, he was quite a trombone player. . . . I'll never forget it. You know I used to kid Jimmy a lot. I'll never forget the first time we ever heard Jack Teagarden. It was in Roseland. This other band played the first set. I'd heard about this Teagarden ... so I went up to hear him, you know. I went downstairs to get Jimmy and the fellows, to start kidding about it. So I said, 'Umm, man, there's a boy upstairs that's playing an awful lot of trombone.'
'Yeah, who's that, Hawk?'
I said, 'what do they call him . . . Jack Teagarden?'
I said, 'Jimmy, you know him?'
" 'No, I'm not gonna know him. I don't know anything about him. What's he play? Trombone player, ain't he? Plays like the rest of the trombones, don't he? I don't see no trombones. Trombone is a brass instrument. It should have that sound, just like a trumpet. I don't want to hear trombones that sound like trombones. I can't see it.'
"So I said, 'But, Jimmy, he doesn't sound like those trombones. He plays up high, and he sounds a whole lot like trumpets to me.'
"I'll never forget it. Jimmy and Jack got to be the tightest of friends."
So they did, and played together nightly. Sometimes they played all night long in Hawkins' apartment. They did it out of mutual respect, of course, but Hawkins adds slyly that they also did it because each was trying to find out what techniques and ideas the other had that he hadn't learned yet.
It has not been possible during the last few years to hear Harrison on currently available LPs, but Columbia's recent four-record set, The Fletcher Henderson Story (C4L 19; also available as a CD boxed set), presents a great deal of Harrison, and also of Big Green. It is also possible on that set to hear Harrison, J. C. Higginbotham, and Dickie Wells all taking solos on various versions of King Porter Stomp during the evolution of that important Henderson arrangement.
Teagarden remains a superb instrumentalist, and he can be a first-rate improviser. Bill Russo said of him in a recent tribute, "... it was not until a few years ago that I realized that Jack Teagarden is the best jazz trombonist. He has an unequaled mastery of his instrument, which is evident in the simple perfection of his performance, not in sensational displays; the content of his playing illustrates a deep understanding of compositional principles. ..."
A favorite, representative Teagarden solo is the variation he played on Pennies from Heaven during a Town Hall concert with Louis Armstrong (on RCA Victor 1443). It is a free invention within the harmonic framework of the piece that makes little reference to melody itself.
Once Harrison and Teagarden had shown the way, a number of trombonists followed. One of the best was Dickie Wells. Another was J. C. Higginbotham, whose style humorously carried both the vocal tradition and the trombone-instrumental tradition as one. One of Higginbotham's later heirs decidedly is Bill Harris.
Wells has been most highly praised by French critic Andre Hodeir as one of
those who need only "blow into their instruments to achieve something personal and move the listener. Dickie Wells gets this expressive quintessence out of the most thankless instrument of all. When played without majesty, the trombone easily becomes wishy-washy and unbearable. Dickie Wells is majesty personified, in style and particularly in tone."
Wells is also praised for his sense of balance and for the fact that he also knows how to use contrast within a solo. Among the solos Hodeir cites are those on Fletcher Henderson's 1933 version of King Porter Stomp and on Count Basie's Texas Shuffle (Brunswick 54012), Panassie Stomp (Decca 8049), Taxi War Dance (Epic LN 6031-2), and his accompaniments to Jimmy Rushing on Nobody Knows and Harvard Blues (Columbia 901).
And then there is Benny Morton. A compliment once was extended to Morton on the originality and compositional balance of his solos. It was a half-humorous remark: "I don't see why you throw them away by just playing them. You really ought to publish them, they are so lovely and complete." His modest reply was, "Well, I don't have an awful lot of flashy technique so I figured the best thing for me to do was to work on making melodies in my playing."
One of Morton's other contributions was inadvertent and came about because one of his solos happened to get orchestrated.
Even into the late '30s, the written parts and section effects for trombones, although sometimes highly effective, were likely to be rudimentary. In fact, the trombone style that still was used in many swing arrangements can be heard in scores from the mid-1920s by King Oliver's and Jelly Roll Morton's groups.
However, there is included in The Fletcher Henderson Story a remarkable pair of pieces, originally sold back to back on a 78-rpm single, called Hot and Anxious and Comin' and Goin'. Bits of those two orchestrations were lifted by swing arrangers to make "originals" (including In the Mood). The most notable "borrowing" was the Count Basie arrangement Swinging the Blues, which comes directly from these Henderson pieces, and during the course of which Morton's trombone solo on Comin' and Goin' is orchestrated for the entire Basie section.
So far no mention has been made of a singular trombonist in American popular music, Tommy Dorsey. There is hardly a man on the instrument who does not look up to Dorsey as a player, and Dickie Wells recently dedicated a piece to him with a tribute-title: Bones for the King.
On the other hand, it is quite possible to maintain that Dorsey was not a very good jazzman, perhaps not a jazzman at all, although he was in several respects a dedicated musician, and there was never anything phony or patronizing about his use of jazz or of jazz musicians. About Dorsey as a jazzman, one remembers the story of the Metronome all-star date on which both he and Teagarden appeared. Dorsey would not agree to solo with an improviser like Teagarden in the studio, but he did agree to ad lib an accompaniment, using his lovely sound, when Teagarden played The Blues. The result is now available on Camden 426.
Another trombonist who was celebrated in the late '30s and early '40s among musicians was Jack Jenney, who had a lovely tone and ballad style and some fine variations on Stardust. He recorded them with his own band in 1939, and repeated them with Artie Shaw in 1940 (the latter reissued on Victor LPM 1244).
As was indicated, J. J. Johnson gave the trombone an almost abstract style that depended neither on the fact that a trombone can be made quite readily to imitate the human voice nor on the specific resources of the instrument.
As Johnson himself has indicated, he was inspired by one predecessor in this, Fred Beckett.
The more vocal style of trombone continues in J. C. Higginbotham, in the Ellington trombone section, in Al Grey's plunger style, in Bill Harris, and in Bob Brookmeyer, who punctuates his fluent improvising with allusions to the sighs, laughs, grunts, and other yeahl-sayings of the vocal-trombone tradition.
Brookmeyer has spoken with deep respect of Vic Dickenson. To Brookmeyer, Dickenson's horn has gone beyond being an instrument and is an extension of himself, not only of his voice but also of his whole being, so that it is hard to know which is Dickenson and which is trombone. And Dickenson also combines the instrumental tradition and the vocal tradition in a very personal way.
The trombone-instrumental style— or as it may somewhat awkwardly be called, the trombone-istic style—that reappeared in Urbie Green's and Jimmy Knepper's work may find its following again.
This discussion has not been an exhaustive treatment of the history of jazz trombone, or of all its major players in any sense, but it was intended to indicate that there long have been at least two jazz trombone traditions and that now there are three. A young player whose ears are really open to the past has a varied tradition to draw on.”
My thanks to Bob Blumenthal for hipping me to the notes by John Litweiler to Hank Mobley’s 1979 A Slice of the Top Blue Note LP [33582] which was released on CD in 1995 [Connoisseur Series CDP 7243 8 33582 2 9]. They contain information which was not included in the interview with Hank by John Litweiler which was published in the March 29, 1973 issue of Downbeat.
Incidentally, Bob is currently hard at work writing the notes for the booklet that will accompany The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions, 1963-1970 - an 8 CD set - that Mosaic Records will issue later this year.
The Litweiler notes to A Slice of the Top join previous posts about Hank which include the aforementioned March 29, 1973 Downbeat Litweiler interview, Bob Blumenthal’s detailed writings in the booklet that accompanies the Mosaic Records set The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions [MD6-131], the two articles in the defunct British Magazine Jazz Monthly from1961 and 1962 that were written by Michael James who is also Hank’s chronicler in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, the chapter on Hank in Kenny Mathieson’s Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-65, the specific references to Hank’s recordings for the label in Richard Cook’s The Biography of Blue Note Records [Secker and Warburg/London -2001] and the ongoing editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD edited and annotated by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, further commentaries on Hank and his music in the works of Jack Chambers and Gary Giddins, Joe Goldberg’s insert notes to Hank’s Soul StationBlue Note LP, the full length treatment of Hank’s oeuvre in Workout—The Music of Hank Mobleyby Derek Ansell [Northway, 2008], Larry Kart’s insert notes to Hank Mobley’s Poppin’ CD, and Larry’s Hank Mobley - A Posthumous Appreciation, a chapter in his Jazz in Search of Itself [Yale University Press, 2004], Looking East: Hank Mobley in Europe, 1968 - 1970, an essay by Simon Spillett, and Simon’s updatedHank Mobley’s Recordings with Miles Davis.
And in our efforts to collectively publish all-things-Mobley, we have also posted a two part piece about theprogram and thebookletfrom the memoriam to Hank Mobley and his music, on Monday, October 29, 1990, Don Sickler with the assistance of Kimberly Ewing produced "My Groove, Your Move" - The Music of Hank Mobley” which was performed at the Weill Recital Hall located in Carnegie Hall in New York City.
HANK MOBLEY - A SLICE OF THE TOP
“There is a place in modern jazz for a music that is technically enormously sophisticated, yet retains its creator's warmth; that is as intense as the greatest contemporary works, yet presents an open, welcoming surface wherein grace, even gentle humor, appear in the stead of the conventional fierceness; that is permeated with the blues, but without sentimentality or the kind of pandering that the work "funk" has come to represent. Hank Mobley has made that place for himself. As H.L. Mencken wrote of Beethoven, there is no place for cheapness in Mobley's art; there is no evasion of the artist's responsibility for immediate communication (indeed, the absence of the cliche in Mobley's music can only be compared to the rare likes of Bud Powell). But the whole-hearted spirit of melody and swing on these rediscovered sides is the most direct kind of invitation to the listener: "The beat, the beat, they've got to have that beat!" says Mobley, and this set is typical of his work
Hank Mobley grew up in the Newark, New Jersey area, heir to a family of musical tradition: grandmother Emma Mobley was a pioneer Black opera singer, and uncle Dan Mobley, a multi-instrumentalist, "had a jazz band like Count Basie or the Savoy Sultans. My mother wasn't a musician but if you played something that didn't sound right to her, she couldn't pat her foot to it, she'd probably throw her chair at you." Largely self-taught or informally instructed on, first alto, then tenor and baritone saxes, Mobley made his reputation early, and at age 19 began a happy period with pianist Paul Gayten's band, backing singers on the eastern rhythm-and-blues circuit. In 1951, he was just 21 and working in the house band of a Newark club when Max Roach hired him to play tenor.
His subsequent career can be condensed into a remarkable resume: with Roach until 1953, briefly again with Gayten, two weeks with Duke Ellington, a summer with Clifford Brown in Tadd Dameron's band, then a year with Dizzy Gillespie. A co-founder of the Jazz Messengers, he spent crucial years with Art Blakey and Horace Silver, and in the mid-'50s Mobley and John Coltrane were certainly the most active tenor saxophonists on the New York recording scene (the largest block of his five or six dozen records as leader or sideman are from this period). There were two weeks with Thelonious Monk in 1957, return tours with Roach and Blakey, but 2 1/2 years with Miles Davis, beginning in 1961, were a kind of career peak, particularly in the Blue Note albums he directed in those years. He freelanced in the mid-'60s, sometimes co-leading a cooperative group with Lee Morgan, until he left the U.S. in 1968.
History does not record the names of either the first cop to fill his arrest quota by busting defenseless kids on fraudulent charges, or the first lawyer who advised his innocent client to plead guilty in order to insure a light sentence. Too bad — those two began what must be by now a multi-million dollar business, which is, of course, what makes America great. Hank Mobley's first conviction on possession of heroin charges came at least three years before he ever used the stuff, and probation was the result. He traces his "criminal" record to the long-lingering shadow of the deliriously wretched Senator McCarthy; there were two extended savagely corroded spaces in Mobley's life after his second and third narcotics convictions, in the late '50s and again in 1964. He wrote the songs for this LP in prison, with Davis' Birth Of The Cool band in mind, then handed the music and detailed instruction to Duke Pearson in 1966. "I told him I wanted the tuba to come up this way, the other instruments to come up that way"— and Mobley hums the opening of "A Touch Of The Blues." "Duke Pearson's good with the pen. I told him, 'If I do it (write the orchestrations), I might take two weeks, but you can do it in a day.'"
Of Mobley's partners here, the two lower brass players do not solo. James Spaulding's alto solos betray his earlier experiences in a transitional Sun Ra band, incorporating as they do a soul sax style and agitated near-outside playing. The rest of the band appeared exactly three months earlier on Mobley's A Caddy For Daddy session; McCoy Tyner, soon to leave John Coltrane's famous quartet, especially fine in "A Slice Of The Top," adapting Coltrane's style to the piano in "Hank's Other Bag"; Billy Higgins, Blue Note's house drummer, precise and swinging as ever, particularly and increasingly inspired by Mobley and Lee Morgan in "A Touch Of The Blues." As to the trumpeter, long sections of his "A Touch Of The Blues" and "Hank's Other Bag" solos use entirely Mobley phrasing, inspiring the old question of whether Mobley once taught Morgan some techniques of improvisation, "Oh, yes" says Mobley and he reels off a list of a dozen or so jazzmen, primarily from the Newark area, who've profited from his ideas, including such obvious names as Morgan and Wayne Shorter, and some surprises as well—"my little brother."
"I feel like Charlie Parker," he says: indeed, his earlier style was largely founded in an extremely keen understanding of the subtleties of the rhythmic inner content and implications of Parker's phrasing — but even this expansive description limits our view of Mobley's achievement. From the
beginning, his talented uncle emphasized the importance of musical contrast, and so Mobley discovered and internalized all kinds of contrasts in his playing: straight ahead vs. decorative lines, bold melodies vs. understatement, horizontal vs. simple vertical playing, great rhythmic spontaneity. He once described his ideal tenor sax sound: "Not a big sound, not a small sound, but a round sound." Though always agreeable, the character of his sound tended to vary on his earlier recordings; in the '60s, his sound achieved a three-dimensional roundness as his expressive capabilities and his confidence in the tenor's higher and lower ranges expanded.
On this date, his sound is ideal; in "Hank's Other Bag," for example, much of the listener's pleasure lies in savoring the beauty of Mobley's tone. He credits the influence of Davis and Coltrane with the '60s simplification of his style, for he consciously abandoned some degree of high detail in favor of concentrating his rhythmic energies. Indeed, he incorporated some of Coltrane's harmonic adventures into his mature style, as you can hear in the tenor solos on side two—a solo such as "A Touch Of The Blues," which consists largely of simple rhythmic figures, would have been inconceivable a few years earlier, and the threads of rhythmic contrast, shifting accents, and call-and-response with the band that he weaves all combine effectively. A special characteristic of his work in the post-1964 period, too, is the unusual structure of his compositions: the 40-bar "A Touch Of The Blues," the strange oriental vamp which is 16 measures of the 24-bar "Slice Of The Top," the vamp which dominates his minor waltz "Cute 'N' Pretty," "Hank's Other Bag" at least appears to be in the familiar territory of his beast hard bop themes, but again Mobley's writing is deceptive: the melody takes a bright, hip twist, and it's a 28-bar structure. All this may be some distance removed from standard post-bop practice, but Mobley and his players readily master these outlines—all were experienced in modal playing this time, and Mobley's out-stretched changes tend to nonetheless close to me classic blues.
The one standard in this program, "Lull In My Life," is a ballad, for Mobley is one of the special artists whose expository gifts make ballads meaningful without altering their original content. The striking second chorus improvisation is a rhythmic thicket, as Mobley adds double time melodies to Higgins' own double time — a denser work than his "Other Bag" solo, which begins in the best harp bop melodic style and evolved into happy rhythmic playing. Perhaps the most remarkable Mobley solo here is "Cute 'N Pretty," set in relief by the other soloists' involvement with the 6/4 time. Mobley plays with the meter, tossing off phrases in four and eight, contrasting them with each other and with his waltz lines, for among these players he is certainly the most confident and imaginative waltz dancer. The mastery displayed in "Cute" especially, but in the other solos, too, emphasizes again the importance of absolutely pinpoint timing of his phrases: the least lapse of rhythmic acuity, and the fine tension of Mobley's careful line could come to an irrevocable halt. For the control and grace, the lack of belligerence in Mobley's music are deceptive: an urgent internal, very personal intensity is at the heart of his art, an all-compelling involvement in which every nerve and every fiber of the imagination strain to create an ever-changing web of rhythmic dares to his aggressive rhythm section—"The beat, they've got to have that beat!"
Hank Mobley recorded five more albums for Blue Note after this session; the ones immediately preceding and immediately following his 1969-70 European sojourn remain undiscovered in the ongoing search of the Blue Note archives. The 1970s have been far from rewarding for him. He lived in New York for two periods, in Chicago for some months (where he led a remarkable quintet, including drummer Wilbur Campbell and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and composed music for the AACM Big Band that Abrams led). There was a year in East Orange, New Jersey, and in the mid-decade Mobley settled in Philadelphia. Work has been intermittent at best. Two lung operations rendered him musically inactive for long periods; a bureaucratic foul up with his birth certificate prevented a European festival trip; he's had two tenor saxophones stolen, and his remaining tenor leaks ("The doctor told me not to play it, or I might blow one of my lungs out"). As of this writing, he lacks the funds to purchase a new, adequate saxophone.
"It's hard for me to think of what could be and what should have been. I lived with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk; I walked with them up and down the street. I did not know what it meant when I listened to them cry—until it happened to me." In the last year or so Mobley has begun to reappear in Philadelphia area clubs, often sitting in at sessions, sometimes playing alto or baritone. He continues to compose steadily, and, of course, hopes to add to the 80-odd Mobley compositions that have been recorded to date.”
"Once you've heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago it's hard not to appreciate the zaniness, sobriety and universality of their music. Once the music gets to you, you find yourself anxiously awaiting the next installment."
- JAZZ TIMES October, 1980
With the release over the holidays of ECM's 21-CD box set Art Ensemble Of Chicago And Associated Ensembles and the notification of the passing of Joseph Jarman, a prominent member of the AEC, on January 9, 2019, the Art Ensemble of Chicago has been very much on my mind in recent days.
While reflecting on the AEC, I remembered that John B. Litweiler had contributed another of his masterful interviews about the group to Downbeat, so I sought it out so to share it on these pages.
What follows appeared in the magazine’s 1972 Music Annual under the title - The Art Ensemble of Chicago - There Won’t Be Anymore Music.
As you read the piece, please keep in mind that it was written almost a half century ago.
"You know, someday soon there won't be any more music. Oh, there'll still be musicians, but they'll only be playing in their homes, in their living rooms, for their families and other friends. Money! That's what it's all about." —Roscoe Mitchell. Oct. 1, 1971
The Art Ensemble of Chicago began in fall of 1968, when the Roscoe Mitchell Ensemble (Lester Bowie, trumpet; Mitchell, alto sax, woodwinds; Malachi Favors, bass; all, percussion) added altoist-woodwind soloist Joseph Jarman.
Since late 1961, Jarman and Mitchell had performed frequently together in several Chicago groups and had realized that their destinies paralleled. Over the years Jarman had sought a poised, lyrical, dramatic art. Mitchell, no less dramatic, consciously seated a more melodic, expressive and complexly internally structured music with various partners — Favors, Bowie, trombonist Lester Lashley, tenorist Maurice Mclntyre, drummer Philip Wilson — who shared his ideals.
The parallel concepts of drama, the common philosophies of what jazz is and ought to be, and the years of rehearsing and sometimes performing together brought about the union of Jarman and the Mitchell group. Also known as "Joseph Jarman and Company" and "The Lester Bowie Quartet" on occasion, the Art Ensemble of Chicago performed usually in their hometown for small fees at concerts they set up themselves. In June 1969 they and their array of instruments sailed to France (Jarman: "On the S.S. United States — Zoom!"). Bowie and his family found a country estate near Paris, and for nearly two years the Art Ensemble lived there. In that time they recorded 11 LPs, three movie soundtracks, and performed in hundreds of concerts throughout France, Germany, Holland. Italy, Scandinavia.
Along the way Mitchell, Jarman, Bowie and Favors added a young drummer, Don Moye (who came from Detroit). The Art Ensemble of Chicago established its reputation once and for all in Europe, winning a handful of awards from European societies and magazines, and from America's DownBeat. In order to return home in April of 1971, the Art Ensemble had to peddle masters of material they had recorded on their own initiative.
Joseph Jarman: (Born Sept. 14, 1937, in Pine Bluff, Ark) moved to Chicago at an early age. I had always been interested in music, because my uncle was a jazz fan — Illinois Jacquet, Lester Young, Nat Cole, Basie, Ellington. World War II—they came out of the Army and brought all of that music. They were even into Charlie Parker in 1946. I went to DuSable (high school) about 1954 and started to study drums with (Captain) Walter Dyett. And then I didn't study them again. Then I went off into space. I went into the Army, and I had to get out of the line, so I bought a saxophone and got me a saxophone teacher and learned the fundamentals and auditioned for the Army band. I stayed there for about a year and a half. I started to study clarinet because they had too many saxophones.
Then I got out of the Army and wandered around for a couple of years. I went to discover America. I had an alto saxophone, but I wasn't playing it. I went all over the United States and hung out in the Sierra mountains in northern Mexico. I sat in with jazz bands and blues bands as I went around. There's nothing but blues bands in the Southwest — it was Southwestern, Ornette Coleman blues, all rural — backbeat, simple structures. But I was going through a whole lot of changes, so I wasn't really dealing with my music.
I didn't start doing my music until I came back to Chicago and started school. That's where I met Mitchell and Favors and (Anthony) Braxton: Wilson Junior College. I used to be into the Student Peace Union, that kind of thing, during those times. I've always been interested in politics, but now I'm more toward the left in a nationalistic way, black nationalism. But we, the Art Ensemble, we're not about politics.
John Litweiler: (To Roscoe Mitchell.) Were you a good singer at the age of eight?
Roscoe Mitchell: (Born Aug. 3, 1940, Chicago.) Certainly. I used to imitate all the dudes, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Louis Armstrong — I even imitated Mario Lanza.
Jarman: You can hear him singing in A Jackson in Your House (BYG 529. 302, a French LP).
Mitchell: I always wanted to be a musician, and I didn't want to be a singer. It wasn't rare to see jazz records and artists and stuff in the house when I was growing up. I was very young when I first heard Billie Holiday. My mother and uncle were into that kind of bag.
I played baritone sax in the high school dance band, and I didn't really get into the alto until my senior year. Then I played baritone and alto in an Army band. There were a couple of places in Germany where we could play. I played a rock gig during the Fasching season—it's like Halloween, except it goes a week or two. Everybody is drinking and partying in the streets. When I got out of the Army, in July of 1961, me and Joseph and (tenorist Henry) Threadgill and this fellow Richard Smith playing drums, Louis Hall, piano, we had a group for a long time. We were into Art Blakey charts and things like that. Wayne Shorter was my man — Joseph and them used to dig 'Trane, but I used to dig Wayne Shorter.
Litweiler: Joseph Jarman, what were you playing like then?
Jarman: Well, I was just trying to play changes. (Considerable laughter from Mitchell. Jarman and Malachi Favors.)
Mitchell: People didn't really listen to us much. Threadgill stopped playing for a while — oh, he played, but he was just playing in church. He was going through some changes. Favors and I were going to school together. I don't remember playing with another bass player, other than Maurice Chappelle and somebody else.
Favors: When I first heard you, you were sounding like Bird.
Jarman: Favors didn't even speak to us, because he was in the union.
Brother Malachi Favors: (Born Aug. 22, 1937.) Into being in this universe some 43,000 years ago. Moved around and then was ordered to this planet Earth by the higher forces, Allah De Lawd Thank You Jesus Good God a Mighty, through the Precious Channels of Brother Isaac and Sister Maggie Mayfield Favors; of 10.
Landed in Chicago by way of Lexington, Miss., Aug. 22—5:30 a.m. for the purpose of serving my duty as a Music Messenger... ALL PRAISE.
That announcement just sums everything up, and anyone who wants to do an article on me, that's it. I started playing music just after I finished high school. My people were very religious people, and they kept me in church most of the time. They were very strict. (Favors' father is a pastor.) I considered that a form of brainwashing, because they had been taught that certain great black music was evil, wrong. I never had any aspirations of becoming a musician. I remember once at church, I was about 15. I went up and touched a bass, and it was so hard to pull the strings down, I said, "Ohh, I'll never do this."
Music was just something that grabbed me all of a sudden. I started right off in music — I was playing professionally a month after I got my bass. When it grabbed me, I wasn't sincere — it was a thing to be seen; then it was, how much prestige can I get from the music? But then I got hooked, which was the primary object of the forces that grabbed me in the first place. Now I'm not up there playing for the girls.
I initially was inspired by the bebops — Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, all those people. I got to know Wilbur Ware after I got started; he was my main man. He had it, it was just inspirational. The first time I went to his house, he had a drummer down there and he asked me to play with this drummer. This was a very good drummer, and I got up and I just was not into it at all. Those were very depressing days. I guess it's like that with every musician, you know, coming up, he doesn't think he ever will play.
(In 1958, Favors recorded an album with pianist Andrew Hill: they played together about two years. Favors supported himself by playing with popular Chicago pianists and organists over the years; he met Roscoe Mitchell in the autumn of 1961, and AACM [Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians mentor [Mulhal] Richard Abrams shortly thereafter. Throughout the early 1960s, Abrams' big Experimental Band, the source of the AACM by 1965, regularly included Jarman, Mitchell and Favors. By then Mitchell, with Favors and Jarman, had begun work with their own groups, and a "dust-biting" trumpeter, Lester Bowie from St. Louis, had settled on Chicago's North Side.)
Lester Bowie: (Born Oct. 11, 1941, Frederick, Md.) I first heard "Ambassador Satch" (Columbia CL-840, now out of print) I guess I was about 13. I read the story of how Louis Armstrong got with King Oliver, so I used to practice with my horn aiming out the window, hoping that Louis Armstrong would ride by and hear me and hire me to play with him. I turned professional when I was about 15. I had a band; it was a combination of maybe Dixieland and boogie-woogie and rhythm-and-blues types; the instrumentation was trumpet, alto, piano, sousaphone and an occasional drummer. We played a kind of square music there compared to bebop; a lot of real hepcats didn't dig us. I started hanging around this trumpet player named Bobby Danzier, who was big in St. Louis — he and Miles came up together, and he had the same kind of approach. But I still didn't want to be a musician — I'd say, I'm doing this because I'm young; when I'm older I'm going to be a lawyer or something.
I was playing all through school, all through service (with the Air Force Police), with bands, blues bands. The thing that really sent me out there was Kenny Durham and Hank Mobley, the Jazz Messengers record with "Soft Wind," "Prince Albert," "Minor's Holiday." Kenny Dorham sounded so hip, and Bobby Danzier years before had been telling me about having context in your playing, and being soulful. I decided then that when I got out I wouldn't do anything but just play.
[After the service, I] played around in St. Louis for another minute or so, and then went to school. Once I decided to deal music, that's about all I did. I don't think I ever bought a book. (Bowie spent a year at North Texas State, mostly performing throughout Texas with tenorists Fathead Newman, James Clay and roommate Billy Harper.) They play it up because it's the great institute of jazz, or some business. I ended up flunking out. After that, I figured, enough — the only good school for a musician is the road.
(Bowie traveled the Midwest with a blues backup band.) We ended up getting stranded in Denver. We were supposed to work for Solomon Burke — anyway, we worked two weeks at this club, and then the union man came. You know how the unions are, like gangsters. Our cards weren't that straight, so we had to give him some money. Then he said, ‘Be out of town by the time sunrise comes,' so I went to California. Me and altoist Oliver Lake and drummer Philip Wilson (both St. Louis contemporaries of Bowie) hung out for a long time in Los Angeles.
I met Fonty (popular singer Fontella Bass, now Mrs. Bowie) while I was with Oliver Sain, a St. Louis bandleader-producer. I started directing her music, I think it must have been late '65, then we moved to Chicago. (A friend took him to an Abrams rehearsal in June 1966.) I felt right immediately. Kind of like being at home. Richard had me take a solo, and as soon as we finished everybody came over, Roscoe and Joseph gave me their phone numbers right away, and then that same night Roscoe called amd wanted me to do a concert with him. We started rehearsing the next day.
The years 1966 and '67 were crucial to these players. By fall 1966 Bowie's partner, Philip Wilson, had joined the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble and proved to be the catalyst in the development of a highly sophisticated group identity. Mitchell had been experimenting with bells, whistles, harmonicas and gourds as rhythmic and primarily sonoric effects in his music. Wilson's dynamic and rhythmic sensitivity, his graceful skill and volatility, made him the perfect accompanist; during that period he was surely the leading drummer in the New Music. Bowie and Favors were inspired to add "little instruments" to their collections. The astonishing variations of themes, structures, sounds and contexts conceived by Mitchell in this period remain a landmark achievement.
Wilson participated in the Mitchell group’s visuals. For example, one concert opened with a player, accompanied by Favors' banjo, fox-trotting with a huge Raggedy Ann doll, followed by an angry, shotgun-toting Wilson. Another found a Wilson mallet applied to cymbals, snares and Favors' head, until the bassist collapsed in a mock faint.
Two LPs made a year apart without Wilson demonstrate how the Mitchell group's music grew during Wilson's nine-month tenure. The exploratory, intense Sound (Delmark 9408) is a bit cautious with the unconventional instruments, while Lester Bowie—Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa 1) from August 1967 was confident in its highly detailed group improvisation structures and by now beautifully conceived flow of sound. But a month earlier Wilson had abandoned jazz almost completely; since then he has had a successful career in rock 'n' roll.
Bowie: When you take an important part out, the music has to make compensations. It was more of a challenge without him. In the next concert we had a bit where the telephone rang and we answered and said. "Philip's not here." It was a drag to lose him, but things still go on. We added a lot; the instruments started building up. We used to have just a little bit, and now we have a whole housefull.
Mitchell: I felt that the music was in a very sensitive period, and most of the drummers I was digging just weren't melodic enough to be dealing what we were dealing.
(There were no limitations to the group's scope. One performance might present free ensemble improvisation, shifting within subtly structured areas, such as "Number 1"; the next might include a series of songs, usually Mitchell's: vaguely Mingus-like lines, a rock piece, a samba, a bop line, a Favors banjo piece, "Muskrat Ramble.")
Bowie: With Roscoe. there was no limitation about what you could deal from. You wouldn't have to play something melodic all the time, or something fast all the time. It was a combination of any kind of way you could do it. It was the only group I had seen that I could do anything I wanted without feeling self-conscious.
Jarman had acquired a youthful quartet (Christopher Gaddy, piano; Charles Clark, bass; Thurman Barker, drums) which had achieved a range of conscious romanticism quite unique and marvelous in free jazz, based in large degree on Gaddy's original harmonic relationships. Jarman's personal accomplishments were twofold: as composer he scored successfully, brilliantly in an extended-work idiom (most notably in Causes II and Winter Playground 1965 with a large group — among free jazzmen only Ornette Coleman has approached Jarman's success within near-classical forms), and as alto saxophonist he offered an idealized style of astonishing virtuosity, lyric sensitivity and often expressive wit. Like Mitchell, Jarman had acquired "little instruments," though Jarman's presentation was simpler and more formularized. Throughout the years there were flamboyant multi-media Jarman works, with dancers, poets, actors, even films.
In summer 1967 Gaddy was hospitalized for a heart ailment, and a doctor warned him against "music and other strenuous exercise." Gaddy died the following March. The prodigious Charles Clark was a near virtuoso, basically bearing Mingus' principles of creation into free jazz; as Terry Martin wrote: "His solos... can also attain an almost unequalled emotional intensity for this instrument." My own introduction to the variety and wonder of Chicago Civic Symphony immediately recall that awe. He left Jarman in late 1968 to work with Chicago's Civic Symphony. His April 1969 death was a shocking blow. Clark was only 24. The Chicago Civic Symphony immediately inaugurated a Charles Clark Memorial Scholarship for young musicians.
By autumn 1968 the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble was in a state of musical and professional flux. Jarman joined at this time.
Jarman: When Christopher and Charles vanished. I went through a very emotional thing. It really wiped me away, and it was a very heavy emotional thing. I mean, I felt and they felt that many of our tenets were common about what music is; they were the only musicians around. Although Thurman (Barker) was still on the scene, we weren't strong enough to make a thing, because of what we emotionally and psychologically put into the music with Christopher and Charles. So Lester and Malachi and Roscoe saw the state I was in. and they knew I was going to just flip on out, so they hit on me to play a concert. I played it, and it was very good, so then there was another concert and a couple other concerts. Finally we realized that we all had this vital thing in common.
Litweiler: Why did the musicians move to France?
Mitchell: We always felt we wanted to spread the music out. I mean, me myself; I don't want to sit in one place all the time. You can call it a missionary thing, if you want.
Favors: I went because the group went. I really didn't want to go, but I wanted to stay with the Art Ensemble. I was overruled. I felt that it might have been a little more difficult but that we could have made it here. Going to Europe still is not a gas to me.
Bowie: We were always interested in reaching out to more and more people, getting the AACM's name out there. For years before, we had traveled more than anyone else here (in their Chicago years they worked briefly in New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Toronto. St. Louis). The only other place to go was to Europe. We had to live, and we wanted to live by playing music. We weren't working that much around here.
We just left. We worked maybe the second day we were there, at a place called the Lucienaire, a small theater. Immediately we got a lot of attention — like, L'Express, that's like Time magazine, and Paris-Match, all the papers were immediately interested. The next week we did a recording. We used the Lucienaire for a base about three weeks, maybe, and the people would come from all over. Some would say, "Come to here and do a concert," and we'd go there and return to the Lucienaire. We dealt from there.
We did 35 concerts in 1970 for the French Ministry of Culture. Every little town, could be a town of 50,000 people, they've got a big opera house somewhere where they bring in different arts, and they were interested in our music, along with symphony orchestras, ballets, anything. And black music, too. France is just about the most advanced country for the music that I can think of.
Jarman: One of the important things the European experience did was to open my eyes up to a broader world. Being exposed to and in the midst of other cultures and other thoughts and other musics allowed a perspective on myself and my society that I never would have realised before. Meeting, for example, African musicians and their attitudes about music.
Bowie: We played all over Europe. Our situation in Europe was completely unique among groups; the way we carried ourselves, the way we conducted our business. Most cats were in the regular jazz thing: you come, get a hotel room, and blah blah blah. But we had children, a dog; we lived in the country. It was unusual because most of the jazz cats were sitting around Paris, and we had a nice big estate, cherry trees and apple trees, ha... I was leading up to how we traveled: we had equipment; as we traveled, instead of squandering our money, we would collectively get together and buy things that the group needed— instruments and equipment. We had a Volkswagen, and we bought two more trucks over there, and this let us be mobile. No other group over there had any kind of mobility. We could travel anywhere, and this is mostly, I think, the reason we were so successful. We could be hired for Germany; all we had to do was pack and come over, whereas to a lot of groups it would have meant trains and planes. We spent the whole summer of 1970 just traveling. We did radio and TV concerts all over.
Radio and TV over there is all state-owned, so there was always somebody who worked on the station and could get us a job doing a program. In France alone we did about six TV shows and about six or eight radio concerts. Some were live, like from Chateauvallon; it was an arts festival, but the show was just us. They take the music much more seriously than they do over here.
Jarman: Of course, you know how Don Moye got with the group.
Favors: One Saturday night we were doing a gig at the American Center for Students in Arts in Paris. I saw this cat with two conga drums, and I said, "This cat's from Africa" — the African cats were on opposite us, you know. So he came over and just set his drums up. I said, "Somebody bring me a soda" — he said, "Yeah, bring me one, too." Then we heard him play, and we said, "Hey, this cat's bad, ain't he." Then he was playing with Steve Lacy, and I went down and saw him playing trap drums.
Don Moye: (Born May 23, 1946, Rochester, M.Y.) I was going to Wayne State University in Detroit, '66, '65.I was playing with Detroit Free Jazz; we were just young guys. I took some percussion classes, but I wasn't a music major. Those music schools, whew. I used to go over there, and nobody even looked like they were into anything. I couldn't even find anybody to play with, hardly, in that music department. But there were plenty musicians around Detroit.
I used to go over to (trumpeter) Charles Moore's house, he used to show me a whole lot of stuff. Everybody used to go over there to see what was happening. I met Jarman in Detroit, at the Artists' Workshop. I also worked on Guerilla (published by Artist Workshop Affiliates) — I was circulation manager on that. That was a good magazine. (Moye was in the Artists' Workshop the evening of the famous mass arrests.) Everybody who got took in spent their little time in jail. Just a plumb outrageous number. 54 or 60. They just wanted to put John Sinclair out of the picture... I was kind of disillusioned with the Detroit situation, because the whole musical direction was changing. They were going more heavily into the rock thing. By that time Charles Moore and all the cats had disappeared, so there really wasn't anybody on the scene for inspiration.
We (Detroit Free Jazz, a quartet) just went out to Europe — we got it together when we got there. We went to Copenhagen first; we got our first gig in Switzerland. We arrived in May '68, and by June we were playing all over... A gig fell through in Milano, Italy, so we went to Yugoslavia to see what was happening. We were musicians, so they probably figured we were pretty harmless. But we knew they were following us the whole time. At the end, the sequence of events was, I recognized this cat on numerous occasions.
Litweiler: He never spoke to you?
Moye: Naw, there wasn't too much to say. If his job is to follow you. he's going to follow you. They watch Americans. Plus, it was the ninth Annual Communist Convention or something — all these big, wheels in town. There were all these police and soldiers around everywhere. (This was in the winter of 1968-'69.) It was in Tangiers that we got tired of cops, again. Randy Weston got us out of the country. The Moroccan cats, they're mean ones, and if they want to hold you. they'll just hold you. We were all on the boat when they picked one of the cats and said, "No, you can't go." They put him right back on shore. Randy Weston went to these heads of, ah, they were high up in the structure, and had them put him back on the boat. It was weird.
(Before meeting the Art Ensemble in Paris, Moye worked with Steve Lacy in Rome.)
Move: He's one of those prolific cats. When he was in Italy, he was doing a lot of writing — and a lot of starving, I imagine. We didn't work but three concerts in four months, and he was there two years before that ... I was over there two years and 11 months.
Bowie: We had one session where we called in the strings from the Paris Opera. Roscoe had written the string music. They were used to playing the regular whole notes and stuff. They got there and could not play it. We had to cancel that session. Then we got the string players from the Paris Conservatory. Well, they didn't smoke it, but they played it. They were younger; the avant-garde string players, you know. That was really a funny day when those cats couldn't play that music.
(The December 1969 Baden-Baden Free Jazz Meeting found Bowie, Jarman, Mitchell and Chicago drummer Steve McCall joining a selected group of expatriate and European musicians to record new music for television.)
Jarman: Both Mitchell and I took compositions to the Baden-Baden recording. They required the musicians to use some musical skills, you know — like reading notes off the page. And these great European musicians, they say, "Oh, that's difficult," so we couldn't deal our compositions. We tried to rehearse, and they were not capable of reading the music. We just put it in our briefcases until we could get to Chicago and struggle through it with the AACM big band.
There ain't no European jazz musicians, unfortunately. If you check their music and check them, you'll find their roots are right here. You'll find they're copying the best black styles they can. They can get to certain levels of things, as far as mechanics are concerned, but the innate core is beyond them, and they never will be able to grasp it. Unfortunately. They may be able to get the meat, but not the bone the meat is on. Black music just contains properties that their heritage and culture does not have!
Favors: People over there beat us out of all our money; they haven't paid us yet for what we've done. Why do you think we're poor now? If you make movies and records, you should have money. These people haven't even paid us our royalties. We're members of this organization culled SACEM — it handles all the affairs of artists, period. It's supposed to be much better than BMI; in fact, Johnny Griffin swears by it. SACEM tells us, "Well, you'll get your money here." then they say. "Well, the money is here," but we never get it. There's always a later date. It's a worldwide organization; they have a branch here, but this branch tells us that we have to collect from Paris. We had a contract with BYG. they were supposed to buy us a Volkswagen bus. We never got that.
Jarman: Racism in Europe is just as bad as it is here.
Bowie: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. That is the home; the original racists came from Europe. My personal feeling is that the reason more Europeans are open to black music is that they don't have that large black population to contend with. Art is enlightenment for people. In the States, you have millions of blacks, so the Man isn't too interested in promoting black art because he's got that lower-class population that may learn something. In Europe they don't have any fear of anything like that.
Favors: In France they don't have black people to worry about like they do here. Consequently they go all out. They sent me a statement — I'm not even a citizen — asking me if I needed any assistance. That statement would have given me the right to go to a doctor and everything else — that's right! And over here they're just killing people about this little money they're giving them: it's a big thing because you're getting a few pennies from the government, and it's only because you're black. If they didn't have black people, they wouldn't even think about the relief.
Jarman: The music doesn't have any association with the interpretations some writers put on it. What's the spirit of that to you when you see us painting our faces? A lot of people like to suggest this has to do with a militant attitude, when in fact it's a tribal attitude. The mask, in African culture, functions to alleviate human beings so the spiritual aspects of things can come through. When people check this out, they have a real warm feeling. Then this other person comes and tells them. "Well, it's about war paint, it's not a love feeling," and they get these contradictory vibrations.
Litweiler: Do the musicians feel better about playing back home?
Mitchell: We're still not getting our asking price. I mean, we might get one gig, but that means we turned down about six. So on the average, we're really not getting anything. We don't produce concerts ourselves any more, except with the AACM. We want money, and we're willing to negotiate. We want you to print: A fair amount of money for the Art Ensemble, you dig? Stop fooling yourself, get us some money.
Favors: I mean, what did they have coming down to Bloomington, Ind., after us? Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — $3,000, or more than that, you know.
Jarman: We got that award from DownBeat, and somebody told us we'd get a lot of gigs that way. We had to laugh about that.
Bowie: We've just received a grant from the Missouri Arts Council to perform a series of concerts in Missouri, along with other groups from BAG (the St. Louis Black Artists Group). They come five concerts in a series, and we're attempting to be funded for about three more series. Illinois has something like that here, but this is a much bigger place, and you've got much more happening, more graft and things. The Art Ensemble is the outside element of BAG.
BAG was formed by cats who grew up together, Oliver Lake, (drummer) Jerome-Harris Jr., (altoist) Julius Hemphill. We're kind of proud of that, because we've got our own building, all that business, and the bebop cats never achieved that; they have to play in taverns and what have you. BAG's inspiration was the AACM; they've achieved some things that the AACM hasn't achieved merely because it's a smaller place; it's easier to break through.
Jarman: There's a magazine that the AACM is going to publish. This is just my opinion, you know — for what I see as part of my contribution to the Art Ensemble of Chicago is that we are becoming interested in speaking of the depths of the music, the conditions of our lives — I mean, we are hungry, poor, we need money to survive, all this, and people should know that instead of trying to politicize our work, instead of trying to construct moralistic or movement values off of what we're dealing, that it should be looked at from an internal perspective.
Litweiler: Would something like a Ministry of Culture and the French Culture Houses work here?
Mitchell: They have them, but it's not for black people. A lot of rich communities in America have the facilities for people in the community — you see them all the time. The thing about Lincoln Center [in Chicago] was that was in the black community. I remember Lincoln Center from back when I was going to high school.
(Now razed, Lincoln Center was the drafty old settlement house where the AACM gave concerts throughout the 1960s.)
Litweiler: Do you feel that the center, if it were French, would have been government-supported?
Mitchell: Oh, yes. But it wouldn't be like that, it would be a brand-new building. Don't think for a minute that the States are a slouch and don't have anything happening. I think they do a bit more in St. Louis than they do in Chicago. The Missouri Council of the Arts, yeah. The experience I've had with that is that the Council will start off doing like this here [raises his hand|. and then it goes right on downhill. But they do give them something. They paid for this building BAG has for a year or so. A lot of things are more available there that the musicians here have to seek for themselves.
Jarman: The writers had a great deal to do with destroying the reality of the music when they started giving it labels and titles. A lot of musicians think that free jazz means you just ... OK, somebody gave me this instrument, but I'm a free-jazz player, see, so it's true and proper that this is the music [he strums a lute at random |. That kind of view is prevalent, there's lots of people who think that even in 1971.
Exhausted from the wars of getting their music before the public, the Art Ensemble has settled down for the time being. Bowie and his family live in a suburb in St. Louis; the other four live in an 1892 townhouse, one of Chicago's first, with a basement full of trunks and equipment and a whole floor, the kitchen excepted, set up with musical instruments. In back sit two German Ford trucks, both out of commission; parts are unavailable here. In its homeland, the Art Ensemble, since April 1971, has presented concerts in Lenox, Mass.; Bloomington. Ind.; and Chicago. That's all.
As individuals, the five have performed throughout the summer and fall with the BAG band in St. Louis (including a television show) and the AACM big band in Chicago. The situation is sorrowful. Judging from recordings, the early potential of a Jarman-Mitchell-Bowie-Favors union has recurringly been fulfilled. People in Sorrow (Nessa 3), their 1969 French prize-winning work, and Les Stances a Sophie (Nessa 4), a French film soundtrack, are now available in the U.S.; certain specialty stores import the somewhat excellent BYG recordings; one American LP, Phase One, has been issued in France.
It is redundant to point out that these men are among the small handful of seminal musicians to appear in the post-Ornette Coleman era of jazz. Their music, based on full use of as much sonoric variation as possible within essentially melodic and usually complex structures, still seems the way of the future. The Art Ensemble is an entity of five diverse minds directed toward realizing, in instrumental interplay, the only true ensemble music in many years, and perhaps the most challenging ensemble music in all of jazz.
The Art Ensemble needs to perform, on the same basis that other jazz groups perform; its requests are not unreasonable. The fact that they are not able to do so is a crime.”
