Benny Goodman - Two Perspectives

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“You know, I don't talk much about my childhood," he said. "Many times I've been asked to talk in depth about it. But I've resisted. I don't know why. I guess there are things that I simply want to block out. Probably because I never found it all that enjoyable. Growing up poor. Living in certain parts of Chicago. I'm not a great one for remembering."

- Benny Goodman in a 1975 interview given to Ira Berkow

This piece evolved after I read the following postscript by Gary Giddins to the republishing of his essay The Mirror of Swing in Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. The compilation was produced in 1996 by Pantheon Books.

“*When I wrote "The Mirror of Swing," a couple of days after Benny Goodman died, I had heard many of the nasty Goodman stories making the rounds, but underestimated the depth of resentment. A few months later, John Lewis, Roberta Swann, and I produced an American Jazz Orchestra tribute to Goodman. More than two-thirds of the AJO had worked with Goodman at one time or another (an extraordinary statistic), and their recollections made the rehearsals memorably hilarious. Yet some stories were related with a naked hatred for what was described as the man's cruelty, cheapness, and vulgarity. Of course, virtually every one of them commenced with a statement of high regard for his musicianship. John Lewis, who does not traffic in gossip, mused one afternoon that throughout jazz history the most innovative and accomplished musicians on every instrument but one were black; his exception was the clarinet and Goodman.

My own limited experiences with Goodman were altogether positive. He graciously met with me in 1975, when I approached him for my own illumination, with no story or publication in mind; and he agreed immediately to lend his name and prestige to the initial board of advisers to the AJO. Still, Goodman was by all accounts a troubled and troubling man, which makes his untouchable status as a celebrity all the more remarkable. Despite the petty jealousies he exhibited and elicited, his private woes remained if not entirely private then confined to the grousing of musicians. I see no reason why they shouldn't be aired now. Yet it would be a shame if the contemporary thirst for pathographies (Joyce Carol Oates's sadly indispensable term) obfuscated Goodman's nearly impeccable public posture and the affection he inspired in the hearts of music lovers for more than half this century.” [Emphasis mine]

Benny Goodman was my introduction to Jazz.  If it weren’t for his music, I might have missed an entry into the joys of Jazz and have been relegated instead to the nascent rock ‘n roll that infected so many of my contemporaries.

And although I’ve had the pleasure of making many, different stylistic journeys through the World of Jazz over the past 60 years, Benny’s music still appeals to me today in a manner that is as thrilling and exciting as the first time I heard it.

In Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, Gary Giddins’ The Mirror of Swing essay [1986] is preceded by one written 50 years earlier by Otis Ferguson entitled The Spirit of Jazz.  At the time, Otis Ferguson was better known as one of America's finest film critics who also wrote about Jazz for The New Republic in the mid-thirties. (He was killed in World War II.) The Spirit of Jazz, with its vivid appreciation of Benny Goodman, appeared in December 1936.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought that it would do its part in helping to ward off any obfuscation of Benny Goodman’s importance to Jazz by representing two perspectives of his significance in the form of excerpts from Ferguson and Giddins essays on these pages.

Otis Ferguson

The Spirit of Jazz.

“Benny Goodman was born in what he now refers back to as the Chicago ghetto twenty-seven years ago, and about twelve years later showed up in knee pants on one of the riverboats, to play in a small jazz band with Bix Beiderbecke, dead now and immortal (Go away, boy, Bix is reported to have said. Don't mess around with the instruments). But Benny Goodman had with him a clarinet of his own, which at that time must have been as long as he was, and he had a superior sense of music; he played with the band, all right. He played around all the time in those first days, studying under good men, mastering his difficult instrument, and going to high school a little, and after that forming a band with a few boys from some sort of conservatory he attended—historic names now, Bud Freeman, Dave Tuft [Tough], Muggsy Spanier. And at the age of sixteen he went to the West Coast to join the Ben Pollack orchestra, which is as historic as the deuce. He stayed with the organization about four years, playing it out every night, working alongside such men as that force on the trombone, Mr. Jack (Big Gate) Teagarden, learning. When he left Pollack, he worked here and there in New York, in pit and stage and radio bands, recording and later getting up a band of his own.

But that is all an interim period for most of us. The general public must have heard his music at one time or another, but there was no ballyhoo to announce where it was coming from. Then, less than two years ago, he started going to town for the general public, and reports came back from the Palomar in Los Angeles that you could not get within fifty yards of the stand, and afterward you could hear over the Congress Hotel's wire in Chicago that this might have been a sedate enough ballroom before, but now Benny was in and blowing the roof off, and they were yelling from the floor.

And this winter he is to be seen in the main room at the Pennsylvania Hotel. The room as you come in is spacious and warm with the air of moderately well-to-do living, people and tables filling the space around the floor and around the raised walk on all four sides, waiters and captains bustling in a quiet efficiency of silver and steam and flourish. But the far side of the room is the main side, where the boys sit high and easy in their chairs and Benny Goodman stands in front, quiet or smiling into the spotlight or tilting his instrument to the rafters as they rise to the takeoff. Sooner or later they will lead into one of those Fletcher Henderson arrangements of an old favorite, and the whole riding motion of the orchestra will be felt even through the thick carpets and the babble of the crowd, and those with two feet under them will move out onto the floor, because the music can be heard best when it is fulfilling its original simple purpose, coming through the ears and the good living wood underneath. As they get along into the later choruses, the boys will let out a little of that flash and rhythmic power which make these separate defined instruments into something indefinable, a thumping big band with the whole room under its thumb ("Got the world in a jug"); the floor will become solid with people, even some of the bare backs and stiff shirts will jolly up noticeably and perhaps do the truck a little (dear, dear).

And then, even with the final blast of the out-chorus still echoing in the hall, everything is suddenly natural and workaday. The men put up their instruments, stretch, look about them, file off at random; Benny stands leafing through his music to give out the numbers for the next set, recognizing as many people as is expedient, later going off to sit at a table somewhere: How's everything? That's fine. Himself, he's on the wagon tonight; he drinks with glum heroism at a glass of plain water. "A Scotch here and a soda there and where the hell are you in the morning? You know?" So now he feels better in the morning. He has a heavy voice coming from well down under the ribs and pleasant with the forthright lively concision of popular speech. Someone comes up, moving with vast importance, and desires that Benny should intervene with the Selmer people. They make clarinets and it seems they've got some conspiracy of imprecise mouthpieces as against the gentleman in question: if she plays good high, then she don't play good low; likewise vice versa. Benny says come around after, he'll see; then presently out of the side of his mouth: Never was one of the things that would play right by itself, you have to nurse it. You know a clarinet? What's he think I can do about a damn clarinet, drive me crazy. Benny Goodman looks sadly at the Scotch on the table and drinks his water.

By now a slight and quiet young man has detached himself from the gossip and joshing of the musicians hanging around in the back, and drifted over to the piano—on which he has only time left to run through two numbers, if that. In a place like this, where there are too many dine-and-dancers too sure that a young man sitting at an upright piano can't be anything to hush your mouth about, Teddy Wilson is as fine an artist at starting late and quitting early as he is at his music, which is the finest. He runs through a few chords. Anyone who wants to hear it a little can move over to the piano. Some do. Just playing to amuse myself is all, Teddy says.

Well, how about the Waller tune "Squeeze Me," Teddy; you used to play that pretty nice. Oh that? he says with his fine smile. I believe I forgot that one by now. He feels through the chords with unerring musical sense and listens for the turn of phrase in some backward corner of his mind—like the mind of any good jazz musician, it is a treasury and stuffed catalogue of all the songs the rest of us have thought lovely and then presently put aside for new toys. He finishes, repeats the last phrase. Hm, I knew I didn't have that one rightly any more, he says, shaking his head. But the song is back for us, the song never died at all. He starts the first chords over, and this time his right hand is released from concentration and free on the keyboard, and to get the pattern in music of those clear single notes without hearing the phrase as it is struck off, you would have to make some such visual image as that of a common tin plate scaled up into the sun, where there would be not only the flash and motion but the startling effect of flight, the rise and banking in curves, the hesitation and slipping off, and the plunge straight down coming suddenly. Wilson in his best mood of creation is something like that.

These nights he shows to better advantage when he comes out with the quartet. There, with something to work for, he really works and is fine in many ways. Remember that he is a Negro in a white man's world, a jazz player in a world where the thirst for music is so artificial it cannot attend with comfort anything not solemnized. And then see the quiet repose and lack of cocksureness, strut, or show, the straightforward and friendly absence of assumption that comes only from a secure awareness of the dignity of a person and of his work. But even if this were the place for over solemn pronouncements, there isn't the time. The stand is filling up again, the boys sucking on reeds, limbering up valves—doing whatever it is that musicians do with a sort of happy-go-lucky boredom. There is no more than time to say, as the first pop tune starts to go up in smoke, that memory may fade and the current musical note perish, but that fifty years around the recorded music of Mr. Teddy Wilson (now craftily surprised that the band came back so soon) should have established him where he belongs — not only great in jazz but among the best lyricists of any time or form.

Swing in, swing out, the band is up again and drawing the people out like the sun in the fable. With Krupa, Reuss (guitar), and the inspired quiet Stacy (piano) laying down a thick rhythmic base, it plays on through whatever songs are the demand of the day, making most of them sound like something. This is an organization in the line of the great jazz bands — Jean Goldkette, Fletcher Henderson, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Ellington, Kirk, et al. — a little lighter than some of these but more beautifully rehearsed and economical, and with cleaner edges. The reed section, scored as such, is more prominent than in older hot bands, giving a fuller lyric quality; but the section (five men, counting Goodman) has a hard skeleton of attack and swing that supports any relative lightness of brass. The band as a whole gets its lift from the rhythm men and the soloists as they take off; it is built from the ground rather than tailored—thanks to the talent, ideas, and leadership of one man.

The recent spreading of interest in good jazz to some extent made Benny Goodman's current music possible, and to some extent was made possible by Benny Goodman's music. He got good men working together, got some ace arrangements of all the good tunes, new and old, and played them wide open though bands weren't supposed to be successful that way. It wasn't so much that he made the people like it as that he gave them a chance to see what it was like when done well (too many hot bands have sounded like a barnyard until they got going around 2:00 A.M.). And one of the important things about his show is that he went right ahead with the same method of getting good music when it came to the old color-line bogey. He would introduce Teddy Wilson as playing with the trio, and the people would bang hands for more (they say on some nights he even had to send the rest of the band home). So hotel managers would get the point almost painlessly: and could no longer say No beforehand, on the ground that people would not stand for it. And when the trio got Lionel Hampton to play the vibraphone, the balance between black and white was even (two of each), and still no kick. Stand for it? — the people stand up from their tables just to hear it better.

They play every night — clarinet, piano, vibraphone, drums — and they make music you would not believe. No arrangements, not a false note, one finishing his solo and dropping into background support, then the other, all adding inspiration until, with some number like "Stomping at the Savoy," they get going too strong to quit—four choruses, someone starts up another, six, eight, and still someone starts—no two notes the same and no one note off the chord, the more they relax in the excitement of it the more a natural genius in preselection becomes evident and the more indeed the melodic line becomes rigorously pure. This is really composition on the spot, with the spirit of jazz strongly over all of them but the iron laws of harmony and rhythm never lost sight of; and it is a collective thing, the most beautiful example of men working together to be seen in public today.

It isn't merely hell-for-leather, either. Gene Krupa, a handsome madman over his drums, makes the rhythmic force and impetus of it visual, for his face and whole body are sensitive to each strong beat of the ensemble; and Hampton does somewhat the same for the line of melody, hanging solicitous over the vibraphone plates and exhorting them (Hmmm, Oh, Oh yah, Oh dear, hmmm). But the depth of tone and feeling is mainly invisible, for they might play their number "Exactly Like You" enough to make people cry and there would be nothing of it seen except perhaps in the lines of feeling on Benny Goodman's face, the affable smile dropped as he follows the Wilson solo flight, eyes half-closed behind his glasses. There was a special feeling among them the first morning they recorded this piece, the ghost of the blues perhaps; and when the clarinet takes up, you will hear the phrases fall as clear as rain, with a sustained glow of personal essence that starts where command of the instrument (the tension of mouth, delicate fingering, etc.) leaves off. Then Hampton sings a chorus, his vibrant hoarse voice and relaxed emphasis so appropriate to the general color; and when they take up again, the instruments blend so perfectly as to be indistinguishable, singing in unison with a sweet breadth of tone that goes beyond the present place and time to some obscure source of feeling and native belief. The term "swing"—no more definable in words than the term "poetry"—is defined at its best in this piece, where the actual beats are lost sight of in the main effect, so that the inexorable and brute lift of the time signature as carried in Krupa's great drum seems fused in the harmony and melodic line of the song. And you may say of the excitement this thing starts in the blood only that these four men are quite simple and wonderful together, that they are truly swinging.

The quartet is a beautiful thing all through, really a labor of creative love, but it cannot last forever, and as the band starts again, you realize that even in jazz there are several kinds of musical appreciation. For if they'll agree to put on the "Bugle Call Rag" before the end of the evening, I'll be willing to say there's nothing finer. There is some hidden lift to this old band standby, with its twenty quaint notes from the "Assembly" call dropping the barrier to a straight-out progression of simple chords—and they are off, riding it with collective assurance and fine spirit, the men in their sections, the sections balancing, the soloists dropping back with care for the total effect. The guests are presently banked in a half-moon around the stand, unable to be still through it or move away either; and as it builds to the final solid chords, Krupa becoming a man of subtle thunder and Benny lacing in phrases, the air is full of brass and of rhythms you can almost lean on. The music seems more than audible, rising and coming forward from the stand in banks of colors and shifting masses—not only the clangor in the ears but a visual picture of the intricate fitted spans, the breathless height and spring of a steel-bridge structure. And if you leave at the end, before the "Good-Bye" signature, you will seem to hear this great rattling march of the hobos through the taxis, lights, and people, ringing under the low sky over Manhattan as if it were a strange high thing after all (which it is) and as if it came from the American ground under these buildings, roads, and motorcars (which it did). And if you leave the band and quartet and piano of the Goodman show and still are no more than slightly amused, you may be sure that in the smug absence of your attention a native true spirit of music has been and gone, leaving a message for your grandchildren to study through their patient glasses.

And exactly fifty years later, the brilliant and omnipresent critic Gary Giddins sums up Goodman on the occasion of his death. From Faces in the Crowd (1992).

© -  Gary Giddons, copyright protected; all rights reserved,
used with the author’s permission.

Gary Giddins

The Mirror of Swing

“While memories are fresh, it won't do to consider Benny Goodman, who died in his sleep on the afternoon of June 13, 1986, at 77, exclusively as a jazz musician. The emotions conjured by his name are unique to those few who transcend the specifics of talent and come to represent an era. If he wasn't the king of a musical idiom called swing, he was surely king of the Swing Era, an agreeable focus for Yankee pride at a time when music counted not only for art, entertainment, and sedative, but as a balm with which to weather terrible storms. Goodman will be remembered for his contributions to jazz, which are manifold, and he occupies an impressive historical niche as the first musician to enjoy hugely successful careers in three discrete fields (jazz, pop, and classical). Yet in his time Goodman was also a blessed and seemingly eternal presence in media culture who, through an unofficial contract between artist and public, reflected the nation's new vision of itself in the arts — earthy, democratic, and homegrown, and at the same time refined, virtuosic, and international.

The enormous sense of loss that attended his death was animated in part by the realization that an age had passed, and not just a musical one. (Other Swing Era titans are still with us, including the great progenitor Benny Carter and the great crooner Frank Sinatra, who inadvertently helped supplant big bands in the public affection.) Goodman came to prominence when America was making major discoveries about the nature of its cultural life, and proved an exemplary figure for national preening. He was in all important respects distinctively American, purveying an undeniably American music with at least the tentative approval of academics and Europhile upper crust, into whose circles he married. His connections put him in Carnegie Hall (a big deal in 1938) five years before Duke Ellington. The public took comfort in him, too. He was white, but not too white, which is to say Jewish, but not too Jewish; and serious, but not too serious, which is to say lighthearted, but sober. At the height of the Depression, he had perfect credentials for entertaining a suffering, guilt-ridden nation. Goodman was one of the 12 siblings born to penniless Russian immigrants in Chicago. He received his first clarinet at 10, in 1919, and had a union card three years later.

Everyone knows this story, or a version of it. As the favorite fable of the 1930s, it was internalized by Depression-bred children who went on to dramatize it for stage, screen, and radio countless times into the late 1950s, and occasionally ever since. It's told of Berlin, Gershwin, and Jolson, and with appropriate variations in ethnicity, of Armstrong, Crosby, Sinatra, Handy, Jim Thorpe, and Presley. Until Vietnam and the civil rights era, it was standard grammar school indoctrination, combining the American dream with melting pot diversity, cheerful tolerance, and a ready willingness to brave new frontiers. If nations were judged by the lies they told about themselves, this one just might guarantee salvation. Small wonder, then, that when an individual appears worthy of the crown, we bow our heads in gratitude. With few exceptions, however, only performing artists and athletes are able to pull this particular sword from the stone.

Few Americans have handled the role of cultural icon as well as Goodman. For more than 50 years, he endured as one of the nation's favorite images of itself. Several weeks before his death, a few musicians were sitting around trading anecdotes about him, causing one to remark, "At any given time somebody somewhere is telling a Benny Goodman story." Those stories are rarely kind, usually having to do with his legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities. But they never dented his media image, nor were they meant to. Americans usually come to resent the entertainers they've deified, yet Goodman remained virtually unblemished. Any real skeletons that may have resided in his closet rattled in peace. It isn't hard to understand why. Everyone could feel good about Goodman. You could send him anywhere, from Albert Hall to Moscow, and rest assured that he would comport himself with quiet dignity and spread Americanism in a manner the world would take to heart. Had he worn striped pants and a top hat, he could not more naturally have embodied everything America wanted to believe about its promise of tolerance and opportunity — those democratic underpinnings insufficiently embraced at home but glamorized for export to the rest of the world. …

Last summer [1985], as an unbilled performer at a tribute to John Hammond, he provided the highlight of the Kool Jazz Festival. It was anything but a middle-aged jazz audience that cheered him on when he came out and played "Lady Be Good" with George Benson, and then — seated, both legs levitating — layered climax after climax on "Indiana." Up to that point, the young white-blues crowd had greeted every jazz performer with impatient demands for the man of the hour, blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. When Goodman finished, that same crowd was on its feet.

When my review of that concert appeared, Goodman's assistant told me the Old Man was pleased and surprised by it, since he'd gotten it into his head that I considered him outmoded. I have no idea why. How could anyone think that? Goodman kept his faith until the end. Ultimately, he mirrored not only a chapter in America's cultural history, but the spirit at the core of a music that can only be enfeebled when nostalgia gets between musician and audience.

In 1975, I visited Goodman at his East Side apartment. He had been practicing Gounod's Petite Symphony when I arrived, and I asked him if he preferred improvising or playing written music. "Gee," he said, "I enjoy both. Listening to music is emotional. Sometimes you like something a lot, and another time you hate it. The whole goddam thing about jazz is emotional. I like to feel the excitement. If it doesn't come out as a wild endeavor — wild with restraint — it doesn't have it." Goodman had it in 1926, and he had it 60 years later.”

Jack Teagarden: The Man with the Blues in His Heart by Otis Ferguson

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The JazzProfiles blog is as much a tribute to Jazz writers as it is an homage to the music and its makers. Jazz authors, editors and critics provide us with insights and information that helps enrich our listening experience.

Although we have previously featured his work on the blog, the name “Otis Ferguson” may still be an unfamiliar one

Malcolm Cowley, his closest friend at The New Republic, the magazine that published much of Otis Ferguson’s writings, had this to say about him:

“Ferguson's name is legendary in the field of jazz. He has been called "the best writer on jazz who ever lived" and "the most brilliant of them all." One of the first critics to write seriously about this native American music, he brought an understanding and appreciation of jazz to an audience far wider than the original small group of aficionados. Professional jazz musicians have been among his most ardent admirers.” [The Otis Ferguson Reader, p. 1].

Malcolm also offered these observations about Otis in his Foreword to The Otis Ferguson Reader:

“I find with regret that the work and even the name of Otis Ferguson are generally unknown to readers under sixty. Older persons are likely to remember the work with pleasure. Much of it dealt with swing bands or unpretentious, well-crafted films and, by extension, with the revival of popular culture during the 1930s, an aspect of the period that is often neglected. Otis—I can't address him coldly as "Ferguson"— approached those subjects freshly, accurately, with lyrical enthusiasm and with contempt for anything faked. Everything he wrote was attentively read in its time, besides leaving echoes in the work of later critics. But the author, who had volunteered as a merchant seaman, was blown up by a German bomb in the Gulf of Salerno, and soon his writing became hard to find except in the back flies of magazines, chiefly The New Republic. Now, after forty years, it is good to learn that the best of the writing, in many fields, is being collected as an Otis Ferguson Reader.”

If you haven’t read Otis Ferguson, you are in for a treat. The following appeared in The New Republic on July 14, 1937.

“Jack Teagarden (otherwise Jackson, Mister Jack, Mister T., Big Gate, etc.) is one of the really high men in the jazz collection, I'll tell you more about it. At the outset it should be said that he has been playing around half his lifetime in a business that sets the most grueling pace of any. On the stand, off the stand, on the train, and up on another stand night after night after night, rehearsals and recording dates, a different hotel and different babes but the same arrangements and iron routine. And the same bottle. Yet a man is supposed to bring it out clean and inspired every time his number is called, and it is a mortal truth that playing it that way in jazz means playing as though you had a fire under you. Teagarden has been on this griddle a long time. Though still a fine musician, he seems tired and cynical, his creation a bit shopworn-which knowing gentlemen have not hesitated to remark or less knowing gentlemen to echo, which in itself is enough to embitter a fellow and make him listless.

Word about him is always going around. He was with Whiteman in the long stretch when they were playing Jumbo and it was getting him down and he was taking more heavily to drink and just about on his deathbed. Then it was over and the word was that Jack was sitting in with the Boys in the Spots and this was a new lease on life. Then he went to Texas and then he and a few others were playing nightly at the Hickory House in a very weary and dispirited jam combination, and it was common knowledge that Jack was taking more heavily to drink and practically on his, etc. Then they were on the road for months, and I saw them in Miami, where they were playing a slew of marches for the greyhound races, and it struck me that Jack did not like marches or greyhounds either, and it didn't help any when he put a dollar on a dog out of sheer boredom and the pooch would stop and go to work on a flea somewhere around the back stretch. Then this spring the Goodman band was playing that New York sweatbox with the odd name of Roseland, crowds bulging the walls out and all, and when the boys finally got away from the stand in the first intermission, the word was that Jack was sitting right on the edge of the platform and his eyes were bugging out, and he was very happy and he had a jug. The new-lease-on-life idea, of course. Now he is down in Texas with Whiteman again and I presume the word is still going around. Well, the point is that a man's bones get weary after a while, and if he doesn't want to go on forever playing it as though it were being torn out of him, and playing for practically marbles, why all right, then. Jack could stop playing as of today and still have more splendor behind him than the latest fourteen-year-old wonder will pick up in the next ten years. Happy is he, in this game, who dies before his time.

Jack Teagarden was born in Texas a little over thirty years ago, with two brothers to follow in the family (Charles plays trumpet beside him in the Whiteman band today). When he was fifteen, he was playing trombone with a brass band, and after that he had jobs with cowboy bands, etc. By the time he was twenty-one, he had come up from Texas and was playing in the Ben Pollack orchestra, which had Benny and Harry Goodman, Jimmy McPartland, etc., and was one of the high-water marks of its time. His face was round, his hair was black and he parted it in the middle and slicked it back. He had a lazy baritone voice that was musical even in speech and Texas all over the place, strong-fibered and rich for singing-though in the early days he made his way wholly on his instrument, which up to his time had been a sort of sliding musical joke.

If there is less doubt today that the trombone is a beautiful horn, full of color and ring and deep power—its high notes played against such exciting resistance, its lows so broad, dark, and hoarse—it is thanks to Jack, along with Jimmy Harrison, Charlie Green, Higginbotham and (with more mechanical verve) Miff Mole, Tommy Dorsey, Bill Rank. I mention these names because no one has quite done for the trombone what Bix Beiderbecke did for the cornet, mastering the instrument completely as a medium for the gusty winds of music that brewed within him. Mole and Rank had that explosive round perfection of each note as hit; Dorsey has a truer singing quality on the "sweet" side than anything recorded; the Negroes (Harrison, etc.) had the raw creative strength. But as an all-around man, Teagarden for me comes nearest to that high spirit in brass. There is the same singing strength and style of his own, the same feeling that this was the instrument with just the timbre and interval to suit him best and he the best suited to it.

He will hit fuzzy ones sometimes, sometimes crowd his horn too much, and often bring back the same variation for a supposedly different theme; but taken at his best, he has that clear construction in melodic lines, that insistent suggestion through complexity of the simple prime beat. And in both tonal and rhythmic attack there is that constant hint of conquest over an imposed resistance which is peculiar to jazz and therefore indefinable in other terms. Something like the difference between driving a spike cleanly into a solid oak block and the hollow victory of sinking it in lath and plaster. Something like what it takes to hold a note and make it build powerfully, or hammer it back in at intervals to dominate a chorus, or come out of a whole burst of notes with three deliberate tones, mounted (as it were) in a sudden ringing silence. Not what it takes, certainly, to play in perfect unison and proper blare a march for Jumbo or the Biscayne Kennel Club—Jack does that, too, as he must to live, but there both instrument and man are merely the highly perfected instrument for somebody else's music —Sousa or whoever. Every man his own composer is the rule in jazz, which is demonstrated once more in the work of Teagarden, building up behind those single-tone vibrato attacks and tortured triplets, running clear in the wide long open beauty of the blues, the lazy rest and slur; every note true to its inner laws of pitch and overtone, true in its relation to the harmonic structure and mood of the piece; the man leaning back against the iron signature or riding it easily, or rampaging on against the van of it like some great brass bull.

Jack has been everywhere, but I suppose the time with Pollack, the first taste of real fame and flush of power were the best for him (his recordings with the Red Nichols outfits are really the best for us). After Pollack he went on the fierce grind of the Mai Hallett organization, along with Gene Krupa and others; and while he has been with Whiteman for years, it is hard to keep track of the men he has played or recorded with meanwhile. He played with the great Louis Armstrong orchestra that recorded "Knockin' a Jug," he is to be heard on some of the works of the Chicago group, he did a lot of jobs with Benny Goodman's recording bands (Someone once remarked that the Goodman family had everything but a trombone. "What do you mean?" one of them said. "We've got Jack"); he was in the movies, has always been featured by Whiteman and Trumbauer, and has made some records under his own name. When Hoagy Carmichael gathered all the stars to put some of his songs on wax, there was Mr. Jackson at the end of "Georgia" playing five or six phrases in as beautiful a mood of invention as you will hear; and when the Venuti-Lang team gathered an "all-star" group to make four sides, there he was again, prominent all the way through, particularly in the best of his recorded "Beale Street Blues";he played one date behind the great Bessie Smith.

And all the time he has been turning out music with a warmth and incessant play of the unexpected that you could never describe, but never confuse with anyone else's. He can take a group of notes in three simple progressions and make them a source of repeated surprise and delight by managing to shift the emphasis, invert the expected order, surge ahead and then hold all and then suddenly bring all out into one of those full measured tones he gets, true in the center and edged with a fine coarse vibrato (the controlled shake of the instrument, the pressure of air to the lips and lips to the mouthpiece—embouchure, if you wish). And, in the measure of his chorus, he always uses the savage velvet of a good trombone, the beat of jazz and lilt of the phrases to arrive at something that is terrific on a leash or sad, or gorgeous, or enchanting with echoes of a better day. His music all through has a true singing quality (though there are many heroes who can be just terrific or technically amazing, those who can throw out a line of notes that will make a kind of song are few and stand at the top) and indeed he can put away his instrument at any time and sing a chorus like an angel. But an angel from Texas, gone a little maverick. They delight to use him for kidding numbers, as witness the classic they did on "The Sheik," but his singing voice goes best with the blues and is a clue to the penetrating, lazy kind of sadness that hangs in his best overtones. I mentioned the "Georgia" number, and there are countless others where nostalgia might be explained by fidelity to content, but when you take the solo (as finely constructed a piece of work, incidentally, as he or anybody else has managed) in a number called "I'm Just Wild about Harry," and hear the phrases drop like an instinctive sorrowing for the sins of the race—then you can tell where he came from and where his heart lies. Running through all his work, singing or playing-“I was born down in Texas, raised in Tennessee” —you can catch the echo of it almost as distinctly as though someone had said it: the heritage, the true lift and music of the blues.

“Said I was born in Texas, raised in Tennessee.” It is an American form, peculiar and beautiful, and its naive turns are never foolish except in the mouths of those who burlesque it without knowing or seeing the enduring strength of its simplicities.

“And there ain't no one woman

Going to make a fat-mouth out of me.”

You have to have it early and have it plenty, it has to come from some reservoir of native experience, combining that expression of the world's sadness with that fine derision for the facts of common life.

(I said a fat-mouth out of me.)

So that old Beale Street jive ("New York might be all right, but Beale Street's paved with gold") seems to lie just behind this man's best work. And I am not joking or filling out an article when I say that Mr. Teagarden's best work is one of those things that has about its edges the strange and awful air of pure creation, something that was brought out because it was born in him like a gift and had to get out. It would be a far far better thing to be Jack Teagarden today, I think sometimes, blowing it out listlessly with Whiteman and perhaps hung over like a chimney full of bricks—and have that much behind you, irrevocable and accomplished—than to be any one of twenty young geniuses breaking out into no matter what art with no matter what talents. For a man lives best by the best that he has done, and so there can hardly be any premature burials of Jack Teagarden, because he has already done pretty fine.”

The New Republic, 14 July 1937

Two Critics: Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“A critic has two functions: (1) to spread knowledge and appreciation of his subject among those who don't know but might learn about it; (2) to encourage those who are doing the work and tell them how it is "coming over," with as little bias and as much understanding as possible. And that is quite a task, requiring a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done; and just as steady a passion for learning how to explain this so that it will somehow mean something to the performer and his audience alike. The best people I have discovered to learn about music from are the musicians, who would not be found dead in the kind of talk generally used to describe their work. The task of describing and estimating their work is not impossible. The main trouble is, it isn't even being attempted.”

- Otis Ferguson

"Most Jazz critics would rather catch another Jazz critic in a minor mistake than bring Bix back from the dead."
- Grover Sales, Jazz author, critic and educator

I knew I had it somewhere; “it” being the best analysis I’d ever read of of what made Whitney Balliett an exceptional writer on the subject of Jazz.

But where?

I seemed to recall, too, that the essay in question reviewed another writer who wrote about Jazz and other topics, the obscure Otis Ferguson.

I had given up looking for it when it literally fell between my feet while I was moving some Jazz books to a new location at the editorial offices of JazzProfiles.

The source for both reviews was a 1983 edition of Gene Lees’ Jazzletter which I had folded and put between the books by Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett.

By the way, both the Ferguson and the Balliet books are available in inexpensive used editions from Amazon.com.

Jazzletter

Gene Lees

March 15, 1983

“In his new book, Jelly Roll Jabbo and Fats (Oxford University Press), Whitney Balliett considers the work of two jazz critics, both French, Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay. In the cause of symmetry, I would like to consider the work of two jazz critics, both American, Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett.

Panassie's Le jazz hot was published in 1934 in France. Its English translation was published in the United States in 1936 — the year Ferguson began writing about jazz for The New Republic. He had been writing about books for that publication for three years, and had reviewed a Gershwin concert for his college paper as far back as 1930. Panassie, however, is considered the pioneer of jazz criticism, the man who, as Balliett puts it, "put jazz on the map in Europe and in its own country."

There are probably two reasons for this. One is that Panassie was the first to get out a book — we are very impressed by books — of jazz criticism in the United States. Ferguson, who became a merchant seaman and was killed off the Salerno shore in a German bombing attack in 1943, never saw a book of his work. Indeed his writings on jazz have not been bound between two covers until the present volume, The Otis Ferguson Reader, published by December Press, 3090 Dato, Highland Park, Illinois, 60035. It contains as well his writing on many other subjects, including the sea. Since the same gang that controls the television, movie and record industries has now devoured book publishing and distribution, it would not have been published at all but for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The great corporations have effectually destroyed free enterprise in the arts.

The second reason Panassie had more impact than Ferguson is that he was a European and Americans were prone to abject genuflection toward the Old World. The cultural establishment still is, which is seen in the fact that only one or two important American symphony orchestras have American conductors. A resentment of the American need for European approval, now echoed in the Canadian need for American validation, is no doubt the inspiration for Eddie Condon's famous wisecrack about Panassie: "I don't see why we need a Frenchman to come over here and tell us how to play American music. I wouldn't think of going to France and telling him how to jump on a grape."

One of the values of Ferguson's work is that he was writing about the music when it was young and thus it is a record of the times. Born in 1907, he was coeval to Louis Armstrong (1900), Duke Ellington (1899), and Bix Beiderbecke (1904), about whom he wrote with insight, admiration, and passion. Ferguson entitled one of his articles about Beiderbecke Young Man with a Horn, a phrase that has retained a curiously haunting quality in jazz ever since. His girlfriend, Dorothy Baker, wrote the novel of that name "inspired by" Beiderbecke's music.

Ferguson was perceptive to the point of prescience. He saw the worth of Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and conveyed his admiration persuasively. He correctly took the measure of Jess Stacy, Teddy Wilson, Ziggy Elman. A portrait of John Hammond is etched in acid. Ferguson is to this day one of the few writers who has ever had the courage to question Hammond's legend, self-written with the assistance of power, family, money, and connections, though the number of musicians who question it is considerable. He writes:

‘Somewhere a long way back, probably — somewhere it wasn't done because he had the inside rail and the silver spoon and the velvet cushion — John Hammond should have been taken in hand and had his ears beaten down a little, and he should have been made to write out five thousand times over, for his eventual good, the sentence: CRITICS OUGHT TO LEARN HOW TO TAKE THEIR TIME.’

Ferguson goes overboard in his praise of Hammond's brother-in-law, Benny Goodman, whose band in the RCA days I found stiff, although it developed fluidity later on when Charlie Christian and Mel Powell were in it. But Goodman did open the door for other and better bands, and Ferguson understood Goodman's impact on the American culture.

Ferguson was not the writer Balliett is, though they take similar follow-your-man-and-listen approaches to character portraiture. The dust jacket of almost every book by Balliett (this is the eleventh) presents Alistair Cooke's statement that he is, "without a rival in sight, the most literate and knowledgeable living writer on jazz." One must of course raise an eyebrow at a man who sets himself up as a judge of literacy and then uses the word "knowledgeable". And Cooke hasn't read every living writer on jazz, assuredly including the Japanese. But Balliett is certainly one of the most graceful essayists in the English language on any subject, even if in this book he does slip into the use of one of those fad words ("arguably" and "thrust" are very popular these days) that sweep through journalism from time to time. In his case, the new word (watch for it; it's cropping up in criticism) is "layered" or "layering". He uses it twice. He also uses "into" at one point. But we must forgive him. These things are insidiously pervasive and insinuate themselves into one's thought; I almost said "hopefully" the other day. For the rest of the course, Balliett's language is fresh, his own, and always arresting in its imagery.

Balliett's pieces are peculiarly devoid of self. He is the invisible interviewer. I used to think he must use tape a lot. I was surprised to find that he simply takes notes, carefully and patiently. How he gets the subjects of his word pictures to be so self-revealing in the presence of a pencil is a bit of a mystery, for he is in person anything but invisible. Tall, almost white-haired, courtly, bespectacled, and notably handsome, he has presence. He would be intimidating were he not an apparently gentle man.

His essays are for the most part almost devoid of overt opinion. They have a cinema verite quality. He describes the music and the musicians so vividly that you can almost hear it and see its makers, even though much of the time you cannot tell what he actually thinks of either. Every once in a while, however, he hauls off and bangs you over the head with a baseball bat of opinion. One of the essays in this book begins, "Michael Moore is the best jazz bassist alive..." Well, okay. Maybe he is and maybe he isn't. He is one hell of a bass player, however, and after reading Balliett’s piece you will know a lot more than you did about both Moore and his playing. In another essay, Balliett says that after Sonny Greer left Duke Ellington, "the band never fully recovered.” A good many musicians would give him an argument on that point.

But that is neither here nor there. What Balliett is, more than a critic, and this makes him invaluable, is an enormously gifted chronicler of jazz, and one who seems to have listened to more music than any five of us put together.

Balliett is at his best describing drummers (he has been one). He says of Greer that he "showered everyone with cymbals." Of Freddie Moore, in a piece called New York Drummers, "You could build a house on his beat." Of Tommy Benford: "There is a metallic cast to him; if he were struck with one of his mallets, he would ring." He says Benford "surrounds his sentences with buffering silences, which give his speech a beneficent, upholstered air." He says that Sidney Bechet "used the chords of a song but also followed the melody, which kept reappearing, like sunlight on a forest floor.".His writing is full of such firefly phrases. But they are never merely cute and he knows enough not to overdo them. Writing that is too thick with imagery takes on an overripe quality, resembling fermenting peaches. His pacing is perfect and his ear unfailing — except for "layering" of course.

Ferguson's ear is not. He affects a hipness, and a common-man coarseness of language. "Terrific" is one of his pet adjectives for the admirable. Ferguson was a graduate — in English and history - of Clark University. He became known at The New Republic for his skepticism toward high art, his advocacy of popular art. His proletarian affectations produce such out-of-tune phrases as "because singing is music and music is such a wonderful thing..." Wow. At times one feels he has read too avidly Hemingway's mannered and all too imitable work. (Incidentally, at one point Ferguson uses the expression "where they're at." I was surprised to learn that this deliberate solecism was in circulation in the jazz world as far back as the mid-1930s.) Nonetheless, Ferguson's observations of the music and its makers and milieu are dead on. For example, he says of jazz critics, "The accepted way of writing about a jazz hero is to put in apocryphal details, such as he thought he heard Buddy Bolden play at the age of two and fell out of his crib at the same time; and the next thing he knew he was seven and one-half years old and really carving all the boys at funeral marches in New Orleans with a cornet he'd made out of the plumbing in a condemned WC in Storyville, after which he quickly went to Chicago to make one of the hottest records in the world, of which I own the only copy personally; and then he went to pieces and made some records even you can buy, only they're no good." In one essay he devastatingly satirizes the kind of language in which jazz was being discussed at Down Beat (or Dead Beat, as Don DeMicheal and I used to call it behind its back). And then elsewhere he commits hippy-dip sins of his own, referring to Jack Teagarden as "Big Gate" and "Mr. T.", and so forth.

But what is chiefly wrong with Ferguson's essays on jazz — and those on books and movies, too, which fill about half this volume — is not his fault. It is the fault of space restrictions in The New Republic. Most of those pieces are short, and though he sometimes treats the same subject in several essays, the effect is a fragmented one. No writer about jazz has ever had the luxury of space, excepting Balliett who, because of the character and editorial attitude of The New Yorker, seems able to explore a subject to whatever length it requires.

For all the skilled complexity (dare I say "layering"?) of Balliett's writing, his approach is essentially simple. He is an unseen emcee, reading an introduction to the act to give you a sense of its value. Then he falls silent and lets the artist speak in lengthy direct quotation, telling you about his work and himself. When you are through, you have grasped the artist's intent, which is crucial to any understanding of art. No one does this better than Balliett and too many writers don't do it at all. After reading Balliett's piece on Ornette Coleman, it is hard to tell whether he likes the music or not, but one certainly understands Coleman better --as one does Jelly Roll Morton, Jabbo Smith, Doc Cheatham, Fats Waller, Dick Wellstood, Vic Dickenson, Dave McKenna, and other subjects of these sixteen essays.

Ferguson annoys you at times by talking down to you. Balliett never talks down. He treats his subjects and the reader with respect and the implicit assumption that anyone who appreciates good music has the wherewithal to appreciate good writing. His tone is Brahminical, elegant, and unselfconsciously poetic. He writes the way Nathan Milstein plays fiddle, the way Benny Carter plays alto. He is the aristocrat unaware of it, who, showing you the beautifully furnished town house of his mind, assumes you are accustomed to drinking from Spode. And when he enters your terrain to interview you, he seems oblivious to the fact that your teacups are chipped. And that is possibly how he gets those interviews.

The good in Otis Ferguson's work far, far outweighs his lapses, and it is clear that the man deserves a monument of some kind, if only in our minds. And he left a sound definition of the function of criticism.

‘A critic has two functions: (1) to spread knowledge and appreciation of his subject among those who don't know but might learn about it; (2) to encourage those who are doing the work and tell them how it is "coming over," with as little bias and as much understanding as possible. And that is quite a task, requiring a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done; and just as steady a passion for learning how to explain this so that it will somehow mean something to the performer and his audience alike. The best people I have discovered to learn about music from are the musicians, who would not be found dead in the kind of talk generally used to describe their work. The task of describing and estimating their work is not impossible. The main trouble is, it isn't even being attempted.’

It is now. Whitney Balliett is the fulfillment of Otis Ferguson's prophecy.”