The Organ in Jazz - Part 1

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

Other than a comprehensive retrospective in Barry Kernfeld’s The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz which was edited and reprinted in 1995 and Christopher Washburne’s two page reference as part of his essay entitled Miscellaneous Instruments in Jazz which is included in Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz [2000], the following history of Jazz organ by Leonard Feather is the best overview of the organ’s history that I’ve yet to come across although it is limited by the fact that it was published in the October 24, 1963 edition of Down Beat and therefore couldn’t include references to current masters such as Larry Goldings, Barbara Dennerlein and the sublime Joey DeFrancesco.

Like the harmonica and the accordion, there is a great deal of controversy surrounding the appropriateness of the instrument in a Jazz setting: usually Jazz fans either love it or hate it.

I am a big fan of the organ in Jazz, and have been ever since I heard Jimmy Smith’s  Hammond B-3 performances on his Blue Note recordings from the 1950’s and 60’s.

Because of its length, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles is offering this feature in two-parts.

“ON Nov. 17, 1926, at the Victor studios in Camden, N.J., a 22-year-old pianist named Fats Waller changed his name, for a couple of hours, back to Thomas Waller. There was reason for more dignified billing on the record label when St. Louis Blues and Lenox Avenue Blues were released: on this unprecedented occasion Waller had reverted to an instrument he often referred to as his first love, the pipe organ.

This was the beginning of the long, slowly developed first chapter in the history of jazz organ. The second, which was not to begin for a full decade, stemmed from the first use on records of the modern electronic organ. The third chapter was launched in 1950 when two tunes were cut for a single 78-rpm release by Bill Davis, who brought a comparatively modern sound to the electronic organ. The fourth and most productive chapter began, of course, with the arrival in 1956 of Jimmy Smith and the subsequent mass organization of ex-pianists (and of bars and grills) from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me.

To view this sequence of developments in correct perspective, one must admit a priori that the organ at first had no basic relationship to jazz and seemed like a complete outsider, a freak novelty. The fact of its extensive church use had less bearing on the matter than might have been expected, though Waller once tried to imply a link by recording pipe organ solo versions (in a predominantly reverent, only occasionally jazz-tinged manner) of a half-dozen Negro spirituals. (There was occasional use of organs on early Negro religious records, but the organ attributed to Fred Longshaw on some Bessie Smith 1925 sides was merely a harmonium.)

The lack of any strong association between the organ and traditional jazz does not seem as relevant when one takes into account the fact that at one time even the saxophones were regarded as outsiders, maverick horns brought in from the world of brass bands, and that just about every instrument introduced to jazz was a seemingly irrelevant innovation at one stage or another.

The real reasons for the delay in the organ's acceptance were, first, the lack of accessibility of the instrument and the unusual expense involved in buying or renting one (this remained true even after the invention of the electronic version); second, the extraordinary demands placed on the performer.

Although virtually all jazz organists today are former pianists, the piano is a limited proving ground. Switching to organ, of course, involves many new elements: the use of multiple keyboards; of a vast variety of stops, endless combinations of which must be employed; and of the left foot, not merely to pay out the time, but also to play walking single-note lines on pedals that are arranged like the black and white notes on the keyboard, i.e. chromatically.

The use of the foot gives the most trouble. As Dick Hyman says(“I am indebted to Dick Hyman for his assistance in the writing of the technical passages. L.G.F.), "I know of no jazz or pop organist who can do the unbelievable things that Bach organ pieces call for. Playing foot pedals is the beginner's chief problem; continual practice and co-ordination are needed, akin to that between drummer's hand-and-foot relationship."

Obviously there is a great difference in technique involved in playing the various organ models now available to the beginner.

Pipe organs were originally just that, with air resonating in pipes, some open and some stopped, some with reeds, etc., and in the early days using bellows operated by a second person, until electrification arrived. After the early church use, pipe organs were adapted to theaters. They had many percussive instruments actually built in: xylophones, drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, celestes, even pianos, as well as a variety of sound effects.

The electronic organ changed all this. It was claimed that the electric models could synthesize any tone from nine drawbars, individually manipulating and controlling the primary tone (eight feet), and the octave below (16 feet), the octave above (four feet), the octave above that (two feet), harmonics (5 1/3, 2 2/3, and others) that produce various fifth or third overtones. The sum total was a virtually infinite variety of tonal combinations. (The lengths listed in feet refer to the proportionate length of the pipes; these terms are still in use even though the actual pipes are not.)

The tones can be modified also by a built-in vibrato with several degrees of rapidity and waver, and there is now a universally used speaker, the Leslie, that rotates in separate woofer and tweeter units.

One new model of organ is, quite literally, something else. It has two speakers, one for each manual (keyboard), used separately or together, one a Leslie and one not, so that both types of speaker effect can be obtained together or alternately. In addition to a built-in reverberation, this new model has a "glide-pedal" that gives the player the fascinating and unique facilities for actually dipping into a tone or bending a note.

The only jazz musician who has experimented extensively with this model is Hyman, but further work with it may well lead, it seems, to the first major post-Smith step in jazz organ.

The organ touch has to differ from the piano's, because the tone stops instantly on release of the key and furthermore is not affected by the strength with which the key is struck. The loud-soft pedal must be used, a more legato style must be developed, and there is no equivalent of the way a pianist uses the sustaining pedal, though some models can approximate the piano sustaining-pedal effect through optional use of reverberation.

UNFORTUNATELY THE TIME has not yet come when jazz can claim to have developed musicians who started as organists rather than as pianists. When that day arrives, a whole new perspective may open up; meanwhile, the field is crowded with organists many of whom have an adequate but imperfect technique, most of whom studied piano but were self-taught as organists. Certainly Waller could have done much more for the organ had he been given the opportunity to study and play more often. On eight of the dozen tracks in the album Fats Waller in London [Capitol T 10258], Waller played a Compton pipe organ. "I'll never forget sitting down at the console of that magnificent organ in the HMV studio on the outskirts of London," he said later. "It reminded me of that Wurlitzer grand I played at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem when I was a kid 16 years old. I had myself a ball that afternoon, and the records really came easy." In addition to the six spirituals, which he did as organ solos, Fats played organ on two other tracks (Ain't Misbehavin' and Don't Try Your Jive on Me) with a British combo. These tracks are possibly the only examples now extant of an organ teaming successfully with an improvising swing-era combo. (The 1935 I Believe in Miracles, cut with a sextet in this country, may still be obtainable in The Real Fats Waller, Camden 473.)

Waller, though he rarely played organ in public, was no novice, of course; he had an organ in his home and often sat at it for many hours playing spirituals, hymns, and Bach fugues. It is said that he once named the three greatest men in history as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Johann Sebastian Bach, in that order.

Despite the problem of being weighed down by the somewhat bloated, diffuse sound so often produced on pipe organ — the   kind   that   used  to  be  boasted about in movie theater ads as "mighty" — Waller managed to make the monster swing. He had, as they say, the right touch, the light touch.

Nevertheless, when he first tried out the electronic organ a couple of years later at a Chicago session waxed in January, 1940. the less  cumbersome sound and the possibility of swinging  more  naturally were immediately apparent. The electronic organ obviously tended to facilitate an attack and genuine rhythmic pulsation such as could rarely be obtained from the mighty ones.

Waller recorded a number of tunes on the electronic model during the last four years of his life (he died in December, 1943), but almost all the best items have been cut out of the RCA Victor catalog; most, in fact, were never issued on LP at all. An album of electronic organ tracks featuring Waller and his 1940-42 groups (including, of course, Jitterbug Waltz) would be an appropriate release in these organ-oriented days. There were even one or two numbers on which he managed to swing a big band from the organ.

Aside from his own performances, the only organ records of any moment during Waller's lifetime were a solitary 1939 side on pipe organ by Count Basie with his band, Nobody Knows, now unavailable; a remarkable session on which Lester Young played as a side-man with a pseudo-jazz organist, Glenn Hardman; and a series of Decca 78s that were more notable for the piano of Willie (The Lion) Smith than for the pioneering but corny electronic organ work of Milt Herth.

Basie's status as an admirer and informal student of Waller did not lead to any substantial use of the big box. Basie's organ records have been so infrequent that a Joe Williams set is listed in the discography, simply because it is the only available LP on which Basie plays organ (electronic) throughout. His style is so close to Waller's that the source of inspiration is immediately evident.

THOUGH THERE may have been a few obscure, nonrecording exceptions to the rule, the organ in jazz lay virtually dormant for several years after Waller's death. Among the few men to observe this situation, and to do something about it, was William Strethen Davis.

It was while he was working with Louis Jordan's Tympany Five as pianist (1945-8) that Bill Davis felt the urge to fill the gap left by the then complete lack of jazz organists. He woodshedded, spending much of 1949 perfecting a modern technique capable of bringing to the organ some of the then prevailing new ideas in jazz. He experimented with the recorded sound of the electronic instrument in two trial sides with Jordan's group, Tamburitza Boogie and Lemonade Blues, in 1949.

At that time Mercer Ellington was my partner in a company, Mercer records. Ellington's father was so enthusiastic when he first heard Davis that he took him to a recording studio where, with Johnny Collins on guitar and Jo Jones on drums, two tunes were recorded, Make No Mistake and Things Ain't What They Used to Be. Duke himself sat in on piano for Things Ain't. The record was released on a single 78 and later incorporated into a 10-inch LP, New Stars, New Sounds, which has long since been cut out.

The reaction to the initial release was unprecedented. Musicians were gassed by Make No Mistake, which combined all the elements of single-line bop improvisation with full-blooded chord effects and a surging beat. Not only was this the beginning of the modern era in jazz organ, it was also the start of an instrumentation that was to become standard in hundreds of combos: organ, guitar, and drums.

(To give the sides a little added impetus that would stress the startling nature of the sounds, "Wild" was added to Davis' name. Before long Wild Bill Davis had become a major name, too firmly established to change.)

At first there was considerable skepticism when Davis took his organ into night clubs and bars. "What are you trying to do, make a church out of this place?" was the usual question asked.

The impact of Davis enabled many others who for years had been dabbling with the organ to take it up as a full-time profession. Milt Buckner, known for years as pianist with Lionel Hampton, then as pianist and vibraharpist with his own big band in 1949-50. spent a couple more years back with Hampton and then organized his own trio in 1952, playing organ exclusively. The locked-hand or block-chord piano style, which he had played a major role in establishing during the early 1940s, could be transferred very logically to organ.

Bill Doggett, who succeeded Davis as pianist with Louis Jordan, ultimately followed the pattern of his predecessor, switching to organ and forming a trio. He was first heard as organist on some records with Ella Fitzgerald not long after he had taken up the instrument in 1951.

A still later Jordan sideman, Jackie Davis, has been established for several years as one of the more popular organ trio leaders.

Credit should also be given to three musicians who were probably a little ahead of Bill Davis & Co. chronologically, though their particular styles did not have a comparatively massive impact and therefore passed relatively unnoticed. One was Bob Wyatt, who around 1948 was heard at the Royal Roost on Broadway working in a duo with pianist Billy Taylor. Wyatt impressed most listeners as a fine musician but not essentially a jazzman. He has recorded on the Forum label. Another was Doug Duke, best known for his home-built organ-cum-piano. Duke played with Lionel Hampton's band in 1950 and was heard in a few since-deleted Decca sides by Hampton and a quintet and in an LP on Regent records. Charlie Stewart, another organist who was ahead of his time, played at Wells' in New York about 15 years ago.

Although there were, as noted, unmistakable traces of the Gillespie-Parker influence in some of the improvisations of Bill Davis and his followers, the primary value of the new electronic organ sound they developed was in its ability to swing loud and long, with a tendency toward full, heavy-chorded passages and a feeling for strongly syncopated, extended riffing on the blues. Because of this, after the first shock had worn off, the purist jazz fans began to bypass the organists or to dismiss them as rhythm-and-blues performers. (The term rock and roll had not yet come into currency.) Doggett even won a Cash Box award later on as top r&b soloist.”

To be continued in Part 2.

"Introducing Scott LaFaro" by Martin Williams

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

“The Jazz Review was founded by Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams and Hsio Wen Shih in New York in 1958. The Jazz Review was the premier journal of Jazz in the United States. Short-lived as it was [1958-1961], it set an enduring standard for criticism.

Thanks to Nat Hentoff’s generosity, the entire run of The Jazz Review is available online and you can visit it via this link.

The following piece is drawn from the August, 1960 edition.

"It's quite a wonderful thing to work with the Bill Evans trio," said bassist Scott LaFaro. "We are really just beginning to find our way. You won't hear much of that on our first record together, except a little on Blue In Green where no one was playing time as such, Bill was .improvising lines, I was playing musical phrases behind him, and Paul Motian played in free rhythmic drum phrases."

LaFaro is dissatisfied with a great deal of what he hears in jazz, but what he says about it isn't mere carping. He thinks he knows what to do about it, at least in his own playing. "My ideas are so different from what is generally acceptable nowadays that i sometimes wonder if I am a jazz musician. I remember that Bill and I used to reassure each other some nights kiddingly that we really were jazz musicians. I have such respect for so many modern classical composers, and I learn so much from them. Things are so contrived nowadays in jazz, and harmonically it has been so saccharine since Bird."

Charlie Parker was already dead before Scott LaFaro was aware of him, even on records. In fact Scott LaFaro was not really much aware of jazz at all until 1955.

He was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey, but his family moved to Geneva, New York, when he was five. "There was always the countryside. I miss it now. I am not a city man. Maybe that is why Miles Davis touches me so deeply. He grew up near the countryside too, I believe. I hear that in his playing anyway. I've never been through that 'blues' thing either." LaFaro started on clarinet at fourteen and studied music in high school. He took up bass on a kind of dare. "My father played violin with a small 'society' trio in town. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I had finished school, and my father said — half-joking, I think — that if I learned bass, I could play with them. When I did, I knew that I wanted to be a musician. It's strange: playing clarinet and sax didn't do it, but when I started on bass, I knew it was music."

He went to Ithaca Conservatory and then to Syracuse; it was there, through fellow students, that he began to listen to jazz. He got a job in Syracuse at a place called the Embassy Club. "The leader was a drummer who played sort of like Sidney Catlett and Kenny Clarke. He formed my ideas of what jazz was about. He, and the jukebox in the place — it had Miles Davis records. And I first heard Percy Heath and Paul Chambers on that jukebox. They taught me my first jazz bass lessons. There was also a Lee Konitz record with Stan Kenton called Prologue."

In late 1955, LaFaro joined Buddy Morrow's band. "We toured all over the country until I left the band in Los Angeles in September 1956. I didn't hear any jazz or improve at all during that whole time." But a few weeks after he left Morrow, he joined a Chet Baker group that included Bobby Timmons and Lawrence Marable. "I found out so much from Lawrence, a lot of it just from playing with him. I have trouble with getting with people rhythmically and I learned a lot about it from him. I learned more about rhythm when I played with Monk last fall; a great experience. With Monk, rhythmically, it's just there, always."

LaFaro remembers two other important experiences in California. The first was hearing Ray Brown, whose swing and perfection in his style impressed him. The other came when he lived for almost a year in the mountain-top house of Herb Geller and his late wife, Lorraine. "I practiced and listened to records. I had — I still have — a feeling that if I don't practice I will never be able to play. And Herb had all the jazz records; I heard a lot of music, many people for the first time, on his records."

In September 1958 LaFaro played with Sonny Rollins in San Francisco, and later he worked with the same rhythm section behind Harold Land. "I think horn players and pianists have probably influenced me the most, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Sonny perhaps deepest of all. Sonny is technically good, harmonically imaginative, and really creative. He uses all he knows to make finished music when he improvises.

"I found out playing with Bill that I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns, and form. I think a lot more imaginative work could be done within them than most people are doing, but I can't abandon them. That's why 1 don't think I could play with Ornette Coleman. I used to in California; we would go looking all over town for some place to play, I respect the way he overrides forms. It's all right for him, but I don't think I could do it myself. "Bill gives the bass harmonic freedom because of the way he voices, and he is practically the only pianist who does. It's because of his classical studies. Many drummers know too little rhythmically, and many pianists know too little harmonically. In the trio we were each contributing something and really improvising together, each playing melodic and rhythmic phrases. The harmony would be improvised; we would often begin only with something thematic and not a chord sequence.

"I don't like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. (I don't even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.) There are too many things to learn and too many things you can do, to keep doing the same things over and over. My main problem now is to get that instrument under my fingers so I can play more music."

McCoy Tyner - At The Beginning

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

“Sometimes, when John is soloing, I lay out completely.

Something important is involved here, I think. The pianist tends to play chords that the soloist knows are coming up next anyway. Normally, all the pianist does is try to give him a little extra push in the accompaniment and possibly to suggest some new ideas. When the piano isn't there, the soloist can concentrate purely on what he has in mind with fewer limitations or boundaries. Otherwise, what the pianist plays can attract his attention away from his original thought. So it is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically. Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.”

- Pianist McCoy Tyner on playing with John Coltrane

It’s hard to imagine that the following 1963 interview with pianist, composer and bandleader McCoy Tyner took place over a half century ago.

Although it was a huge launching pad for his career his association with iconic saxophonist John Coltrane was only a small part of his time on the Jazz scene. Since John’s death in 1967, McCoy has gone on to lead a number of his own trios, a big band and a Latin Jazz group.

His style is immediately identifiable, something that is very difficult to achieve on piano, and his influence is discernible in the style of many of today’s Jazz keyboardists.

“We talk a lot about freedom in Jazz, but there are underlying disciplines too. When you have the "discipline of religion, as I have, I think you can meet the demands of music and function better. There are still a lot of pressures in musicians' lives, and it is easy to understand why some fall by the wayside. But you have to strengthen yourself to meet those pressures. You can't wait for them all to be removed from your environment.

There are reasons for the pressures and problems. People will usually think of God at a time of tragedy but not when everything is running smoothly. But most musicians believe in God, because most of them are very sensitive individuals. When I first started in music I never realized how sensitive music is, nor how sensitive we are.

My mother played a little piano, and she wanted us to take an interest in music. We had the choice between singing and piano lessons, so my brother and I both took piano. I wasn't too interested at first, but after a while I began to like it and devote most of my time to it. Although I didn't study the classics extensively, I think I had a pretty good foundation.

When I was about 16, I had my own jazz group. I had met another boy who had bought a set of drums, and then we added trombone, trumpet, and alto saxophone. The drummer, Garvin Masseaux, has been playing conga with Olatunji.

I was mainly influenced by records at that time, because there wasn't too much jazz on the radio. Bud Powell and his brother were living just around the corner from me in Philadelphia, but they didn't have a piano in their apartment, and Bud came to my mother's house to play. I wasn't familiar with his work and didn't know who he was. It was hard to understand everything he was doing, but I liked it.

Judging from the records he made with Max Roach and Ray Brown, I think he had reached his prime then, and I learned quite a lot from him and his brother Richard. They were profound musicians, harmonically and in many other ways. Bud had so much taste and creative ability that I couldn't help learning from him.

He had worked opposite Art Tatum and had plenty of other opportunities to hear him, and Bud had been greatly influenced by Tatum. I know he had a lot of admiration for pianists who preceded Art, too, just as I have.

Tatum had really become a virtuoso. His music always sounded so neat and compact. I never thought of it as being arranged, but rather as the result of his tremendous knowledge of the instrument. Anything he could hear he could play.

After I graduated from high school, I worked days and played around home for a time. There were a lot of very good musicians in Philadelphia then and more clubs than there are now. I played with a lot of out-of-town musicians who were brought in as singles, and I worked in Calvin Massey's band around Philadelphia. Calvin had a nice band. He's a trumpet player, and he writes. Charlie Parker recorded his Fiesta.

I was about 17 when I first worked with John Coltrane. He had left Miles Davis for a period, and he was a close friend of Calvin Massey, who introduced me to him. I was working with Calvin at the Red Rooster, and John was going in there for a week. He asked us if we wanted to work with him.

After that, he would contact me whenever he came to Philly with Miles. I think he liked my playing, but we would also have long discussions on music, during which

he would sometimes sit down at the piano and play. He had a lot of ideas, and we were compatible. We saw eye to eye on so many things even at that time, and I could hear the direction he was going. I didn't know what it would be like, or how involved it would be, but I could hear something in his playing that was beautiful, and we enjoyed working together.

Benny Golson came to Philadelphia when I was about 20, and I played a concert with him. He asked me to go to San Francisco with him, where we would pick up a bassist and a drummer.

Then the Jazztet was formed, and that was very good experience for me. The original group consisted of Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Addison Farmer, Dave Bailey, Benny, and myself. It was a very musicianly band, and it had a lot of possibilities, but sometimes I felt there ought to have been more room allowed for improvisation. Eventually there was.

After about six months with the Jazztet, I got another call from John. He was forming his own group. I had a decision to make. I knew there was something with his group that I wanted to do, but yet the fellows in the Jazztet had been so nice to me, and they had helped me quite a bit, musically and otherwise, that I felt I owed something to them. I had to be honest with them and myself, and in the end I decided the best thing to do was to go where I could be really happy, where I could contribute more and really do some good. So I went with John.

I think I made the right move. I wasn't concerned then with whether or not John's group would be successful, for I feel that the majority of good listeners will always support good music.

I know a lot of good groups are formed and disappear, but usually they break up because of personal differences. If the guys conducted themselves right, thought more about producing good music, and generally took care of business, then I believe they would stay together longer. Music has to be the first interest. More dollars will come later.

It's important, too, for a group to be composed of men — real, true men — who will accept their responsibilities. I am proud to be part of an organization where each one is dedicated to the whole. And I really enjoy it.

People sometimes say our music is experimental, but all I can answer is that every time you sit down to play, it should be an experience. There are no barriers in our rhythm section. Everyone plays his personal concept, and nobody tells anyone else what to do. It is surprisingly spontaneous, and there's a lot of give and take, for we all listen carefully to one another. From playing together, you get to know one another so well musically that you can anticipate. We have an over-all different approach, and that is responsible for our original style. As compared with a lot of other groups, we feel differently about music. With us, whatever comes out—that's it, at that moment! We definitely believe in the value of the spontaneous.

So far as we are concerned, too, a lot depends on what John does. A rhythm section is supposed to support and inspire the soloist, and it is a very sensitive thing. How each one of us feels can determine so much, but when I come to solo I may be inspired by what John has played and by the support Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison are giving me. It's all too personal to analyze on paper, anymore than it's possible to say why one person likes chocolate and another likes cookies.

Sometimes, when John is soloing, I lay out completely.

Something important is involved here, I think. The pianist tends to play chords that the soloist knows are coming up next anyway. Normally, all the pianist does is try to give him a little extra push in the accompaniment and possibly to suggest some new ideas. When the piano isn't there, the soloist can concentrate purely on what he has in mind with fewer limitations or boundaries. Otherwise, what the pianist plays can attract his attention away from his original thought. So it is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically. Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.

You can establish your feeling in music so that the public recognizes it, but you can also develop it within a recognizable framework. Sometimes people don't want to hear the development. They only want to hear it as it was in the primary stages. "He isn't playing the way he was," they'll say. "I don't understand what he is doing." But the roots are actually still there, and when the flower blooms the people may not accept it, though it's all part of the same thing. Then their acceptance will depend on their getting more familiarity.

That's why I think there should be more good jazz on the radio — and at times when the music can be exposed to a larger listening audience.

I've often contemplated that word "jazz." I believe early jazz came out of the churches, through the spirituals, which were a form of worship. Then there was the period of the blues, which were played in very different places. Back in those days "jazz" used to mean something else, and that's one of the reasons, I think, why many people still look down on it now. Yet I believe the music itself is one of the most beautiful art forms that exist, but the word used to describe it is just not good enough.

You are exposed to so much music today that you cannot always pinpoint influences. I know that when I used to listen to Max Roach's band I was impressed by the harmonies Richard Powell used to play and by his use of the sustaining pedal on chords. In fact, one of the strong points of his playing was his beautiful harmonic conception. I never copied what he did, but I certainly appreciated it.

I may find myself playing a phrase from another musician, but I never consciously copy, Guys ask me sometimes how I do this or do that, but I don't have any preconceived formula. You can almost subconsciously acquire technical devices, of course, like Richard Powell's way of sustaining chords.

One reason I have so much respect for the older pianists is that in their period there were so many different styles. There were many good musicians among them, and they knew their instrument, and it wasn't so much a matter of copying one another. Many of the younger musicians today involve themselves in a particular style instead of trying to learn the instrument, which I think is very important.

I'm not saying they don't know the instrument, but I think they make an error in trying to duplicate another style rather than try to play the way they feel about things. I've been told that at one time everyone was trying to play like Earl Hines. That could have been good, provided you didn't get hung up and limited to what he was able to do. I think another musician can show you the way, maybe inspire you, but I've never wanted to be an exact copy of anyone else. I'm 24, and I guess I'm still evolving. You can't rush maturity.”

Source:

“Tyner Talk: John Coltrane’s pianist discusses his musical background, beliefs and goals - as told to Stanley Dance.”

Downbeat - October 24, 1963

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Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 3

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

“Among the many important subjects Ken Burns’ Jazz does not explore is this:If jazz bespeaks the black experience, and only blacks can play it, why does it have, and has had since its beginning, such appeal to people of all races and nationalities? What is there in this music that would electrify a white boy in Canada, namely me? I cannot count how many letters I receive in which the writer says something to the effect,  "The first time I heard jazz I was . . . ."

That first exposure usually lingers vividly in memory. Why were six or seven thousand white people in an arena with me when I first saw Ellington? They weren't responding to this music because they were full of rage or regret over slavery and at last had found a voice to express these emotions. Jazz became a world music, and quite quickly. I am friends with two French writers who specialize in jazz, Paul Benkimoun and Alain Gerber. Paul in fact is a physician who is the medical correspondent for Le Monde. Each of them, particularly Alain, has written me letters explaining the passion he had for jazz from the moment of first exposure.

Musicians from behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain will often tell how they were instantly enthralled by the Voice of America jazz broadcasts of the late Willis Conover — someone else, incidentally, who isn't even mentioned in the series, though he did more than any man in the music's history to spread it around the world, and he — and this music — did more to bring down the Iron Curtain than all the politicians and generals and armies put together.

Why has a similar experience of instantly musical love not occurred in people suddenly exposed to Indian ragas, Japanese koto music, or Chinese opera, which remains as opaque to Westerners as the Chinese language itself? What is there in Chinese opera that we just don't get — and in jazz that we do? What gave it this enormous and often instantaneous appeal? This is an awesome question. It isn't even addressed in Jazz, much less answered..

Jazz, in the end, gives me what it gave Jon Faddis: the blues of sadness — sadness for a lost opportunity. This series could have been: the finest instructional and introductory tool the music has ever known, something I could recommend to anyone. It is appallingly distorted, driven by the payback agenda of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.”

• Gene Lees, Jazz author, critic and publisher

As we noted when the first and second series of criticisms [I use the term here to denote an analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work and not its negative connotation] about Ken Burns PBS TV series Jazz posted to the blog, if you want to stir up a controversy among Jazz fans, do a retrospective on the music and you will be certain to hear from someone about who and what you left out of it.

On the other hand, the tendentious, prepossessed and misrepresented supposed documentary on the subject of Jazz produced by Ken Burns deserves to be skewered for both what is was and what it wasn’t.  

If you doubt the “wisdom” in this assertion read the following correspondence by Dick Sudhalter that was addressed to Gene Lees at the Jazzletter. May 2001

By way of background, trumpeter Richard M. Sudhalter had two careers, one as a musician, the other as a journalist. He co-author a biography of Bix Beiderbecke with Philip Evans and the author of Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945. The latter book documents the contributions of white musicians to jazz. He wrote this rejoinder especially for publication in the Jazzletter.

By Richard M. Sudhalter

“While watching one of the early episodes of the Ken Burns Jazz series, I was surprised to find myself thinking not about Louis Armstrong or any other musician present or past, but about Leni Riefenstahl. No, she insisted in talking about Triumph of the Will and Olympische Spiele, her films weren't Nazi agitprop. They were above politics, beyond ideology; done solely in the interest of Kunst, high art.

It was disingenuous balderdash back in Third Reich days, and balderdash it remains today. Similarly, Mr. Burns keeps telling us he's set out to tell the story of jazz as the great American experience; what he's done instead, I fear, is loose a vast political tract, a multimillion-dollar example of special pleading race for a theory of the centrality of race in twentieth century American culture — all in the guise of a series putatively about music.

That saddens me: not so much that he and his collaborators have created this artifact as the prospect of viewers sitting through it without a thought about the audacious, even insulting, deception that's been worked on them.

Jon Faddis got it right in decrying presentation of a body of disputable opinion as fact. To be sure, Albert Murray's theories about the role of the black experience have a certain strength and inner logic, and are worth discussion; but they are far from revealed truth. Other interpretations, no less responsible, will contest and contradict his at every turn.

Viewers of Jazz aren't permitted to hear those interpretations. Burns, and with him Murray, Marsalis, Crouch, Early, and the stunningly underqualified Margo Jefferson, are relentless in peddling their unidimensional cultural view. It's a view that activates, nurtures, and plays on the racial guilt still endemic in large numbers of white Americans. Hardly a moment goes by when some reminder of the past isn't replayed and reiterated on the screen and in the voice-overs, as if making certain no viewer tunes out or is allowed to forget.

With a boyish candor meant to be disarming, Burns has told interviewers that he regards the history of jazz as a metaphor for the story of America's civil rights. It's a clever gambit: no one of good heart and social conscience will dare publicly challenge him, for fear of being branded a racial atavism. It seems to me that Burns has it exactly backwards: rather than mirror the turbulent struggle of black Americans in a predominantly white society, jazz came about, came of age and flourished, in spite of it. The music, in other words, established its own democracy, an extraordinary freemasonry thriving in the face of society's worst depredations. It guaranteed a warm welcome and instant understanding for everyone, regardless of who he was, if he could play. [Emphasis mine].

Even the phrase "our language," title of one of the episodes, sends a message that is at best ambiguous, at worst exclusionist. Does the "our" identify something solely, defensively black? Or does it refer to something understood and embraced by all who were "inside" regardless of race? I'd like to think it was the latter but fear it is the former.

Gradually, carefully, the series compounds and reinforces its message. Having sat through the entire nineteen hours, a neophyte viewer can be forgiven for thinking the entire century of jazz yielded little more than a handful of titanic figures — "geniuses," in the script's inflated language — who excelled against a field of mediocrities, pretenders, and brigands, most of them white. It's also worth noting that each time a white musician receives any credit, it is as a dropout (Beiderbecke), a popularizer (Goodman), or amanuensis to a black creator (Gil Evans to Miles). That a substantial number of white musicians also qualify as genuine innovators and trailblazers (Norvo, Teagarden, Lang, Gifford, for starters) remains unspoken and, ultimately, inadmissible. We're watching a masterful exercise in synecdoche, peddling the part as the whole.

A small personal digression here. Ken Burns interviewed me for some ninety minutes, mostly about Bix, but also about the white New York-based jazzmen of the late 1920s. With care and, I hoped, clarity, I explained how Beiderbecke brought into jazz a new emotional complexity, a layering hitherto absent from the majestic operatic conceptions of Bechet and Armstrong. Where their utterances proceeded along a vaulting emotional arc, his looked inward, using restraint and even indirection in something of the European manner, freely mixing what might otherwise have been considered mutually contradictory elements. The white New Yorkers, I went on to say, were the universally acknowledged modernists of their time, experimenting imaginatively with form, harmony, and melodic organization.

These were innovations of far-reaching import, facilitating myriad developments now accepted as integral to jazz. Above all, they fostered new awareness in other musicians, just as Louis had done with the idea of swing. Jazz before Bix lacked a certain kind of emotional texture; jazz after him was seldom without it. Nor was that all, I said: free use of substitutions, construction of melodies based on chordal extensions, use of shifting tonal centers, experimentation with forms breaking the tyranny of two, four, and eight-bar patterns — all these traced their origins to a readily identifiable circle of early New York-based musicians who happen to have been white.

Obviously, such views comported ill with the overall "message" of Jazz. Therefore all that survived of our ninety -minute conversation was a pair of supremely innocuous sound bites. Instead, we were treated to Margo Jefferson blithely taking the cheapest of all shots at "Paul White-MAN" and expressing the truly lunatic notion that Bix (who by 1930 was distancing himself from the cornet and hot jazz in general in a quest for broader musical horizons) would somehow have been a more fully realized musician if he'd worked in black bands.

I mention this only to illustrate the degree of manipulation and outright distortion that has allowed Burns and his advisers to put across their socio-political message. In a distant sense it echoes the drumfire of social-justice propaganda that informed (or blemished, depending on how it's read) so much of the earliest critical writing about jazz; back in those prewar days the social-justice propaganda of the New Masses regularly trumped any merely musical consideration. It's all there, self-evident, in the writings of Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, and any number of others, including the hallowed John Hammond.

It's been heartening, at least momentarily, to read Internet parodies of the Burns series, and easy to sympathize with protests at the cavalier neglect of jazz developments since the 1960s. I'll happily add my favorites to the roll-call of key musicians scanted and slighted, in particular the cadre of often extraordinary players who surrounded Eddie Condon. To a man, they've been swept from the picture, like Stalinist-era apparatchiks airbrushed out of a Politburo portrait into un-personhood after falling from party favor.

And, too, what of the songs, the great standards that provided the raw materials for dozens of nonpareil flights of jazz fancy? We hear Louis playing Stardust on the soundtrack, for example, but never the name of Hoagy Carmichael. Are we really to understand that Billie Holiday's chief claim to immortality resides in the blatantly political Strange Fruit! Albert Murray's pet conflation notwithstanding, it wasn't all the blues: whether emanating from the Brill Building or from the Broadway stage, the pop songs were essential and indispensable. They're hardly acknowledged.

I can't help wondering what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, men of dignity and no little humility, would have made of so many distortions and fatuous sanctifications made in their names.

I'd like to think that increasing numbers of jazzfolk, players and chroniclers alike, are aware of, and exercised over, the mischief that's been worked here. I'd like to bury the Panglossian notion that all the media hype and saturation publicity will somehow have a beneficial trickle-down effect on those of us who have spent our lives trying to prise a living out of playing jazz. But I know better: the listening and recreational habits of the public aren't about to change. However momentarily consoling to think of an Armstrong or Ellington CD sharing shelf space with Madonna and Metallica in some twenty-something's luxury Manhattan duplex, it's ultimately cold comfort.

It's been a long uphill struggle bringing the rich and varied traditions, and the joys, of a century of hot music to the attention of a generally unheeding public. I regret that the wildly disproportionate success of Burns's Jazz is only going to make the grade that much steeper. Leni Riefenstahl has lived long enough to witness her own disgrace; I doubt we have world enough and time to wait for Burns and his accomplices to suffer a comparable, richly deserved, fate.”

— Richard M. Sudhalter