Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones - The JazzProfiles Review

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

Context is everything so, for the record, Paul Devlin, editor, Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (As Told To Albert Murray) [Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2011] is best understood if you read Paul Devlin’s Introduction and then Phil Schaap’s Afterword before delving into Papa Jo Jones’ recollections.

Doing so will help you understand why Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (As Told To Albert Murray) is not an autobiography in the traditional sense of the word.

For example, this opening paragraph from editor’s Devlin's Introduction basically explains why we have the book:

“JO JONES: HIS LIFE AND MUSIC

Jonathan David Samuel Jones—save your breath, "JO"—has more often than not been called the greatest drummer in the history of jazz. Most great jazz drummers have given testimonials to Jones's virtuosity and innovation. This book is his story, derived from interviews with Albert Murray and transcribed, edited, and arranged by me. Jones stood out as larger than life in a world of large personalities. He was a raconteur and tall-tale spinner. His unusual style of narration, combined with his involvement in important moments in musical and cultural history, and along with his observations about other intriguing figures, have resulted in this autobiography. It is not the autobiography but it is an autobiography of Jo Jones.”

And if you then jump to this opening paragraph on page 111 of Phil Schaap’s Afterword, it explains why we almost didn’t have this book:

“Jo Jones wanted his story told in his own words and handled his way. Papa Jo was arrogant enough to think and assert that his memoirs could always be assembled — even after his death and in the absence of any manuscript. "It's in The Archives!" Jo would often exclaim, a parallel to Casey Stengel's frequent summary that "you could look it up." This book has proven Papa Jo right.

That it was in the archives, or his belief that it was, comforted Jo Jones during his later years.”

The key phrase here is that “... Papa Jo jones was arrogant to think that his memoirs could always be assembled ….”

Good luck with that!

When it comes to Jazz, there are very few “archives,” at least not in the formal sense of that word and fewer still that deal with the early years of the music.

Lots of recollections, but very few archives that are “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.”

If it had not been for the fortuitous persistence of Albert Murray, who recorded these interviews with Papa Jo from 1977-1985, and Murray having the presence of mind to give them to the book’s editor Paul Devlin, one of Murray’s trusted and capable “guys,” much about Papa Jo’s career from a primary source perspective might have been lost forever.

Papa Jo’s rise to prominence as a big band drummer occurred from around 1938 to 1948 which coincides with the height and fall of that era.

Along with Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich [and possibly Davy Tough], Papa Jo was widely regarded as one of the best ever at booting a big band along.  

However, by the time of these interview - 1977-1985 - the “best” years of Papa Jo’s career were far behind him. Without intending to be derisive in implying that Papa Jo was a legend in his own mind, the tone and tenor of his interviews with Albert Murray reflect that attitude.

In developing this book from a series of what more properly might be labeled conversations and monologues rather than interviews, Paul Devlin was charged with complying with Murray’s admonition to cleanup the tapes so that they could be read “but not so much that we lose the rawness of Jo’s style.”

But Paul Devlin also had to be mindful of more of Murray’s authoritative counsel and that was “If it is done properly, the ‘as told to’ autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told. To achieve this end, he enlists a competent and empathetic craftsman to make him sound like he thinks his voice should.”

Here, Papa Jo is in luck as Paul Devlin does an excellent job of taking what in many cases are little more than Papa Jo’s ramblings and making them sound coherent and cogent.

It has been said that if you don’t see a contradiction, then it doesn’t exist. Papa Jo was a definite adherent of this precept because the book contains examples of many of his contradictory statements and behaviors.

Papa Jo was a man of many moods and manifestations of impulsive and compulsive behaviors and what this book uncovers and reveals as his greatest contradiction was the man himself.

For many of Papa Jo’s nearest and dearest friends, his consistenatly contradictory, volatile and irrational behavior drove them to distraction.

These ambivalent feeling toward Papa Jo are on display in these excerpts from the concluding portion of Phil Schaap’s Afterword which he labels “The Difficult Sides to Jo:”

“Tenor saxophonist George Holmes “Buddy” Tate [1912-2001], Jo’s colleague in the Count Basie Orchestra, had been amenable to my piggybacking to his gigs since the early 1960s. Often Jo was on these gigs and the three of us — or more — would ride together in Tate's car. Tate was a very congenial, mellow person, but Jo's insistence on being the only teller of their shared stories, the way Jo gave directions, Jo's rules for the gig, and even the general patter of his chatter in the shotgun seat — I admit it was overbearing—came to bother Tate more and more.

One night, at a party for the musicians at my family home, Tate signaled me that he wished to talk privately. I took him to my room. "Do you have your driver's license yet?" asked Buddy. I replied no, but I would be getting it soon. Without waiting for Tate to mention Jo and driving, I added that I would be driving Jo from then on. "Good!" Buddy said, "because I can't stand him anymore."

Later, when Adolphus Anthony "Doc" Cheatham (1905-1997) returned to jazz gigging and soon thereafter took the trumpet chair from Buck Clayton in the Countsmen, Doc would hitch a ride with me and Jo to the gig. Doc Cheatham, who was as mellow as Buddy Tate and, at that time, was in addition quiet and introverted, told me that Jo Jones was the reason he bought a Volkswagen bug, Doc no longer needed my ride, which included Jo's company, and he had no fear that the drummer would ask him for a ride in the small Volkswagen.

I have used the good natures and warm hearts of the highly talented Buddy Tate and Doc Cheatham to bring up the troubling concerns that Jo could be disliked, was definitely feared, and was avoided, sometimes at great cost, by people who actually loved him.

How could this be? Jo Jones was a great man, a musical genius, who did good works for the many he knew and many more for people he never met. As an accompanist, Jo Jones selflessly brought out the best in his fellow musicians. The audience would presume that the soloist and not the drummer was why the music was swinging so wonderfully. The audience would not notice the drummer listening keenly to the soloist that he was driving, nor the percussive responses to the featured player that elevated the soloist's inventions. Jo Jones was thrilled just to have helped the music and didn't mind who got the acclaim. Jo also ran an informal social services program that any musician he came across could partake of. Those activities went beyond musicians and even jazz. Jo Jones was politically and socially involved in the making of many improvements to our society from the Great Depression forward, and he did this all on his own dime. How could he be shunned and even disliked?

I believe Jo Jones's massive righteousness is the root cause to his rubbing so many the wrong way. He was a great believer in the U.S. Constitution, but in his own dispensing of its doctrines, he was quick to take charge of all three of its branches.

Unilaterally, Jones would make the laws, enforce them, and mete out the punishment. One set of codes was for the bandstand — Jo Jones would police the gig to his rules even though he was rarely the leader. Papa Jo was almost always right, but his system was wrong.

There is so much more to this.”

There is indeed and you can learn more about Jo’s self-centered thoughts and actions in each of the following chapters that make up the core content of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (As Told To Albert Murray):

I Have Had a Varied Life   27

Can't Nobody Tell Me One Inch about Show Business   31

The Count Basie Institution   47

They Said the Negro Would Never Be Free   65

My Thirst after Knowledge Will Never Cease   71

People I’ve Rubbed Elbows With    81

I Often Wondered Why I Was Such a Strange Fella   99

The discerning reader can readily identify the egocentric quality in each of these headings. To a certain extent, it is one element that gives the book its charm but they are also an indication of how Papa Jo could be overbearing to the point of being shunned by people who loved him.

If you are looking for a technical explanation of what made Papa Jo Jones such a special drummer, then you can’t do better than the chapter on him in Burt Korall’s definitive Drummin’ Men - The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Swing Years.

But if you are trying to gain an understanding of the human being behind those drums, then Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (As Told To Albert Murray) is the book for you.

With this book, Paul Devlin [and Albert Murray and Phil Schaap] has done a masterful job of ensuring the veracity and validity of Papa Jo’s prophetic statement - “It’s in the archives.”

Order information for both the cloth bound and paperback edition can be found at The University of Minnesota Press.

Albert Murray - "Stomping The Blues" - 40th Anniversary Edition

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

"Murray is possessed of the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling."

—The New Yorker

"Beautifully illustrated with vivid period photos, LP covers, and broadsides of black jazz icons, Stomping the Blues represents the zenith of Murray's writing on the subject."

— Rolling Stone

"One fine lyrical history of the music. Murray demonstrates the central role of blues/jazz in American culture, telling us about the nature of our past, present and future: which of course is exactly what the blues is."

—San Francisco Review of Books

"A flamboyant, insightful examination and evocation of the sources, styles, and mythologies of blues music."

—Newsweek

Jonathan Haidt is a NYU professor of social psychology who specializes in morality and moral emotions.

On November 15th he delivered the 2017 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute under the title -  “The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities and Our Country.”

Professor Haidt began his lecture by observing:

“Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world.

By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people.

This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence.”

In recent years, Jazz, too, has been afflicted by the Cult of the Single Lens which preaches that Jazz was created by Black musicians and appropriated by White musicians. Some go as far as saying that Jazz as a Black Art was stolen by White impersonators.

Those who hold this viewpoint have promulgated a distorted version of the facts that was shaped by ideas that were ideological before they were musical.

But to many scholars, it is beyond dispute that white musicians have been an integral force in jazz from its earliest days. Above all, they maintain that the idea of Jazz as an exclusively black cultural preserve does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Such matters have been loudly argued, even fought over, and doubtless will continue to be hot subjects for some time to come.

More relevant is the question of the music: Does any evidence support the idea of identifiable "black" and "white" styles? Did it ever?

As Richard Sudhalter points out in his seminal Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945:

“In the early years of Jazz’s evolution, particularly in the 1920s and '30s, there were differences. They came about chiefly because musicians of different races were separated in their day-to-day and professional lives. And it was separately that black and white musicians grappled with the same problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, interaction.

Some of his more extreme views may make Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) an unlikely source of valuable insight into such matters. Yet he seems right on target when he remarks, in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

In the context of the early years, the distinction is important. Differences in upbringing, environment, and musical training left white jazzmen (especially those who had little personal contact with black culture and its traditions) more likely to intellectualize, emphasizing matters of harmony and structure.

Performances by black ensembles, above all those of the South and Southwest, possessed, in general, a degree of rhythmic freedom, personal interaction, and often a blues feeling and melodic vocabulary rarely found in music by corresponding white bands. Again, Baraka gets it right:

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

But, along with other scholars who follow this line of reasoning, he fails to account for those many major black Jazzmen who feel, and display, little or no affinity for the blues and its "attitude." The exceptions they present, in their very numbers, are a counterargument, which cannot be explained, as Baraka tries to do, only as a matter of "Negroes trying to pretend that they had issued from [white] culture."

More likely, it seems, is an interpretation suggesting that mastery of what came to be called Jazz was not a matter of racial or genetic affinity (always a dangerous hypothesis) but of choice.”

As has been widely demonstrated in Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, Jazzmen of the pre-World War II decades, black and white, paid careful attention to each other's work, and that the degree to which such mutuality affected individuals varied immensely.

As he states: “Beginning in the 1920’s, individual musicians and ensembles made choices based on what they liked, even admired, incorporating the results in their emergent solo styles. Choice, above all, quickly became the determinant of what and how a man played, how he constructed and developed a solo, addressed the beat. In this context, as noted earlier, certain traits — tendencies and attitudes — can be identified as "white" and "black" contributions to the mix.”

One such “choice” or to revert back to Professor Haidt’s use of the term “lens” is the use of The Blues as a basis for a musician’s approach to Jazz.

[“I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.”]

And since it was first published in 1977, there has been no better description of how Jazzmen who chose The Blues as a lens through which to solve the problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, and interaction needed to play Jazz at the highest levels than Albert Murray’s Stomping The Blues.

If you missed its original publication, the University of Minnesota Press is currently offering a 40th anniversary paperback edition with a new introduction by Murray-scholar, Paul Devlin.

The following from a University of Minnesota media release is very accurate concerning the tone and tenor of Murray’s landmark study of the blues and its relationship to Jazz:

In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that "the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance."

In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.”

To carry Professor Haidt’s lens analogy one step further, a reading of Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues will certainly provide the reader with some clearer views to understand these assertions from Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

It’s one thing to say The Blues, but it’s quite another to understand what is meant by it.

Since it publication 40 years ago, Stomping the Blues has been influential in a number of ways as is detailed in Paul Devlin’s new introduction to the 40th anniversary edition.

Perhaps one of the most helpful insights about what Mr. Murray means by The Blues is contained in the opening paragraph of Mr. Devlin’s Introduction:

"’For Paul, Some fundamentals.’ That is how Albert Murray inscribed my copy of Stomping the Blues. Here is one of his most fundamental points: "You don't stomp the blues like this [pounds fist on table] — you stomp the blues like this [snaps with panache on the afterbeat]." Murray used this example all the time in interviews and on panels in order to illustrate that the blues is "stomped" with elegance, not force; with technique, not power; with joie de vivre, not rage.”

Mr. Devlin’s Introduction also contains many other perceptive and penetrating observations about the book that will help the reader gain a fuller appreciation of its significance. For example, Mr. Murray tells us that:

“Blues music has always been good-time music; its function has been the exorcism of despair."

Mr. Devlin parallel’s this with the work of Andre Malraux when he explains:

“To an extent, this is an application of Andre’ Malraux's argument about the workings of the artistic process: that art, primarily, is a response to art, as explained in his book The Voices of Silence (1953), a monumental, profound, and idiosyncratic analysis of the visual arts that Murray studied for decades, and a work not unlike Stomping the Blues in several ways: poetic, written by a learned critic, yet not shackled by the conventions developed or expected by academic or journalistic critics of the form in question, slow and methodical to start, and difficult to put down once it starts swinging.

Another point Murray considered fundamental was his reorientation of how blues relates to jazz: as a matter of the level of orchestration. Indeed, he argues that the process by which pop tunes and show tunes are recomposed as jazz tunes is "precisely" the process by which the folk blues was extended, elaborated, and refined into jazz. Stomping the Blues is fundamental to his vision of existence and a lens through which to view other aspects of culture. …  It expounds a vision of and for life …  Stomping the Blues endures year after year, enthralling readers new and old while provoking debate.”

In a brief synopsis, Mr. Devlin also details the storied, earlier publication history of Stomping the Blues:

“Stomping the Blues was published by McGraw-Hill in November 1976 and was celebrated with a midday "Kansas City Jam Session" in the publisher's landmark headquarters in midtown Manhattan, featuring jazz giants Mary Lou Williams, Budd Johnson, Buck Clayton, Eddie Durham, Oliver Jackson, Bill Pemberton, and Doc Cheatham. What an auspicious beginning: an artist saluted by artists he salutes. Stomping the Blues went on to win ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for music criticism in 1977. A British edition was published in 1978, and subsequent American editions in 1982, 1989, and 2000. In 2016 it was included in the Library of America's edition of Murray's essays and memoirs ….”

Mr. Devlin offers a broader context as well in which to appreciate the influence and effect of Stomping the Blues as its relates to other of Mr. Murray’s writings, all of which have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, when he notes that:

This edition is a result of a collaboration that began in mid-2009 when I pitched what became Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones as told to Albert Murray, to the University of Minnesota Press [2011]. Since then, working with Murray's literary executor, Lewis P. Jones in, Minnesota has published Murray Talks Music; Albert Murray on Blues and Jazz (2016), a collection of Murray's previously uncollected or unpublished interviews and writings on music (edited by me), and a new edition of Good Morning Blues; The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray (2016), the fourth American edition. Murray Talks Music is a valuable companion to Stomping the Blues. These four books together tell an edifying story about American music and culture in the twentieth century: jazz and the blues as thought and lived; jazz and the blues in theory and practice. Stomping the Blues is the masterpiece that led to the other three….”

In the third and final section of his Introduction, Mr. Devlin offers these comments about the reception and influence of Stomping The Blues:

Stomping the Blues was reviewed extensively. Some of the smartest and most perceptive reviews include those by Gary Giddins in New York, John Edgar Wideman in The American Poetry Review, Robert Fleming in Freedomways, Bob Blumenthal in The Boston Phoenix, Stanley Dance in Jazz Journal, and Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. ...

Many reviewers understood and appreciated what Murray was trying to do. A few years later Nelson George argued in the Village Voice in 1982 that it should be brought back into print and it soon was. George notes, perceptively, ‘the marvel of Stomping is that Murray manages to be both analytically detached and emotionally involved—criticism's most difficult parlay.’

By the early 1980s, and perhaps beginning with the review of the British edition in the Times Literary Supplement in 1978, a certain number of white jazz critics had started misinterpreting and exaggerating the caption on page 197, in which Murray refers to white jazz musicians as being part of the "third line." Third line does not mean third rate, as several critics have claimed or implied: it simply refers to a physical position in the old New Orleans parades, which Murray then used as a metaphor for closeness to idiomatic sources. ….

Stomping the Blues was probably the first work to articulate the connection between jazz, the blues, and locomotive onomatopoeia (or at least the first to do so cogently and comprehensively). Duke Ellington had been orchestrating stylized locomotives since the 1920s and Murray had been talking with Ellington about this since at least 1951 ….

Stomping the Blues had a marked influence on the development of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which Murray cofounded (see Murray Talks Music). The Preface to the Da Capo Press edition in 2000 frames the book in terms of that influence; it is the only previous dition to have an introductory essay. The Preface was written by Rob Gibson, a performing arts executive who was the first director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1991, and in 2000 was its executive producer and director….As of 2000, he writes that Stomping the Blues is a ‘preeminent source’ for people working in the jazz world and that Jazz at Lincoln Center has been able to embody ‘the many ideas that define this treatise.’

Aside from its place in the intellectual foundation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stomping the Blues has become a standard text in history of jazz courses, is a foundational text of the discipline of jazz studies, and has been quoted, cited, and discussed in dozens of books and academic articles….

But the reason to read Stomping the Blues today is not necessarily for its influence on Jazz at Lincoln Center, or on jazz studies as a discipline, or because the blues is central to the life of a random person on the street, or can elucidate a crucial response to modernity, but because following the movement of Murray's thought is a valuable experience in itself.  Yet the content of Stomping the Blues is accurate and can be the cornerstone of

an education in twentieth-century music. …”

Mr. Devlin sums up his Introduction with the following exhortation:

“So, if you're buying this book to replace a tattered copy from a history of jazz course, or if you are completing a Murray collection, or if you are discovering Murray for the first time, may it be your discovery of the year, and may rediscoveries be like new discoveries. Happy stomping.”

Paul Devlin

Long Island, New York

April 2017

I would also urge you to read Stomping the Blues because it will afford you with, from the perspective of Professor Haidt, another “ … tool for understanding the world,” -the Jazz World, that is.