John Coltrane – Supremely Loved and Loathed

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

"Tony Whyton has brilliantly revealed how it has become impossible to know

John Coltrane's A Love Supreme outside notions of race, spirituality, history,

authenticity, and nostalgia. For me, it's like hearing the music for the first

time.”

– Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and

American Culture

"Smart and engaging, Whyton's study highlights the multiple and ever-changing interpretations of Coltrane's most famous recording. In the process, Beyond a Love Supreme serves as an important corrective to those efforts—however well-meaning—that might limit how we understand jazz and its people."

- David Ake, Jazz pianist and author of Jazz Cultures and Jazz Matters

In Mahayana Buddhism, which is practiced in many forms mainly in Southeast Asia, China and Japan, a Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who has gained entrance into Nirvana [an equivalent of “heaven”], but holds back [i.e.: stays in the world] to help others accomplish the steps necessary to attain it for themselves.

In doing so, the Bodhisattva makes the world a better place for all concerned by exemplifying the state of enlightenment which results from the devolution of the Self.

Although reasoning by analogy is full of pitfalls, one could say that for many Jazz fans, and especially, many tenor and soprano saxophonists, John Coltrane has been the Jazz equivalent of a Bodhisattva for almost a half century since his death in 1967.

Here, however, I must emphasize the word “many,” because there are those in the Jazz world who view John Coltrane as Mara, the Evil One; a sort of loose Buddhist equivalent of the devil.

Nat Hentoff, the distinguished Jazz author and critic explains it this way in his collection of essays entitled Jazz Is [New York: Limelight Editions, 1991]:

“Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Col­trane, was an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of car­nal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infu­sion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz.

The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since. He considered music to be a healing art, an "uplifting" art.

Yet through most of his most relatively short career (he died at forty), Coltrane divided jazz listeners, creating furiously negative reactions to his work among some. (‘Anti-Jazz’ was one of the epithets frequently cast at him in print.) He was hurt and somewhat bewildered by this reaction, but with monumental stubbornness went on exploring and creat­ing what to many seemed at first to be chaos—self-indulgent, long-winded noise. Some still think that's what it was.

Others believed Coltrane to be a prophet, a musical prophet, heralding an enormous expansion of what it might now be possible to say on an instrument.”

The line of demarcation for mainstream Jazz enthusiasts concerning their acceptance of Coltrane’s work seems to be the changes in his playing that coincided with the recordings he issued on the Impulse! label during the last half-dozen or so years of his career.

Prior to that time, Coltrane’s work on Prestige, Bethlehem and Blue Note, and especially his work as part of the Miles Davis Quintet and Sextet as recorded on Columbia, met with general approval, if not, occasional, outright admiration.

John was a tenor saxophonist who rankled those who preferred the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Don Byas, Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins. They liked their Jazz soloist to have a melodic orientation and not the more harmonic one favored by Coltrane.  And then there was the matter of his sound – harsh, abrasive and grating – to his critics, not to mention the sheer number of notes that John played during his solos which prompted Jazz critic Ira Gitler to describe Coltrane’s style as “sheets of sound.”

In my recollection, one of John’s earliest Impulse! LP’s seemed to really set his critics off – A Love Supreme [CD# 05155-2]. Although Coltrane may have intended the recording to be a liturgical act of expression, his detractors had a field day with it. The recording provoked a storm of controversy that in many ways continues to this day.

At the time of its issuance in 1964, very few gave it the kind of acceptance and understanding contained in the following account from Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.:

“The first records in Coltrane's career as a leader were the work of a man who had submerged himself in heroin and alcohol and who had mortgaged his physical health as a result. If, as super­stition and a measure of biological science suggest, people are transformed every seven years, then Coltrane is something like proof positive. Few spiritual breakthroughs have been so hard won, but he had also reinvented himself technically in that time, creating a body of music in which simplicity of materials gen­erates an almost absurd complexity of harmonic and expressive detail. This is quintessentially true of A Love Supreme. Its foun­dations seem almost childishly slight, and yet what one hears is a majestic outpouring of sound, couched in a language that is often brutally violent, replete with split notes, multiphonics and toneless breath noises.”

When A Love Supreme first appeared, the Jazz press, by and large, excoriated it and consigned its fate to some form of eternal damnation. [Does music have a Dante’s Inferno?]

Few realized at the time, that A Love Supreme, Ascension, First Meditations along with the remainder of Coltrane’s Impulse! output were to become a clarion call for future generations of young tenor saxophonists in much the same way that the work of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young influenced the tenorists of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

To modern-day saxophonists such as the late, Michael Brecker, Bob Berg, Bill Evans, Larry Schneider and myriad others around the world, Coltrane became the musical equivalent of a Bodhisattva. John’s modal, scalar and harmonic patterns, lengthy, liberated and laboriously-drawn improvisations, and mastery of multi-rhythmic song structures were their keys to Jazz “enlightenment.” John “spoke" to them and they became his followers.

It seems that A Love Supreme would never cease to illicit strong feelings – pro and con [mostly con].

Thirty years later, while starring out at the night lights of San Francisco from my balcony, the husband of a work colleague that I was meeting for the first time at our flat for dinner asked me what I thought of Coltrane’s playing on it.

When I mentioned that I hadn’t listen to A Love Supreme recently, but that I was planning on purchasing a CD version of it in order to do so [the world had switched from analog to digital], he rushed off to collect something from his jacket which was hanging in the living room and was back in a flash saying: “Here, please take mine. I can’t stand the thing!”

Since Coltrane’s death in 1967, there have been many books written about him and his music. I’ve read a number of them and have especially enjoyed those by Lewis Porter, Eric Nisenson and Brian Priestly.

Each has offered me different angles of acceptance from which to view Coltrane’s music.

Recently, another such work has allowed me a more specific prism in which to understand the music on A Love Supreme.

Published in paperback on June 18, 2013, by the always-Jazz-friendly Oxford University Press, the book is entitled Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album.

Authored by Tony Whyton, who is a Professor of Jazz and Musical Cultures at the University of Salford and the co-editor of the Jazz Research Journal, this “book takes us through Coltrane's creative process and examines A Love Supreme as a cultural artifact, leading us towards a deeper appreciate of jazz as a whole. As Whyton states, ‘Coltrane's music... continues to have currency today and provides people with a way of understanding the past as well as envisaging the future of jazz.’”

The Oxford University Press media release goes on to say:

“Commonly believed to be one of the greatest albums ever recorded, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme has had a lasting influence on our culture. Recorded in 1964, by the 1970s it had sold nearly a half a million copies, an almost unimaginable number for a jazz musician today. Coltrane's free jazz style has become the industry standard, and popular musicians of all genres, like rock star Bono and guitarist Santana, cite A Love Supreme as being an influence on their work.

In BEYOND A LOVE SUPREME: jazz professor Tony Whyton provides us with a fresh, detailed analysis of this legendary, almost mythic album. Whyton discusses the deeply spiritual aspects of the album, the album's most common interpretations, and compares Coltrane's later work to this masterpiece album. He also explains how A Love Supreme challenged many of the traditional assumptions that still permeate jazz culture, such as the oppositions between improvisation and composition, black music and white music, and live performances and studio recordings.”

And this annotation is from the book’s dust jacket:

“Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, A Love Supreme is widely considered John Coltrane's magnum opus and one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. In Beyond A Love Supreme, Tony Whyton explores both the musical 111    complexities of A Love Supreme and the album's seminal importance in jazz ill   history. Marking Coltrane's transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album also embodies the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life.

The titles of the four part suite—"Acknowledgment," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm"—along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he "recites" instrumentally in "Psalm," reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of major jazz recordings. But Whyton also shows how A Love Supreme challenges many of the traditional, unreflective assumptions that permeate jazz culture — the binary oppositions between improvisation and composition, black music and white music, live performance and studio recording.

He critically examines many of the mythologizing narratives about how the album was conceived and recorded and about what it signifies in terms of the trajectory of Coltrane's personal life. Sifting through the criticism of late Coltrane, Whyton suggests ways of listening to these recordings that go beyond the conventional ideologies of mainstream jazz practice and open the music to a wider range of responses.

Filled with fresh insights into one of the most influential recordings in jazz history, Beyond A Love Supreme is an indispensable resource for jazz scholars, jazz musicians, and fans and aficionados at all levels.”

Totaling a little over 150 pages, Professor’s Whyton’s book is a relatively quick read, but nonetheless, a thought-provoking one.

Not only does it afford a deeper, socio-cultural context in which to view Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, but it also represents another example of how Jazz is becoming more and more, what the late pianist, educator and broadcaster Dr. Billy Taylor and the late, writer and critic Grover Sales once described as “America’s Classical music.”

Put another way, Jazz has evolved to a point where it is researched, studied and reinterpreted almost as often as it is performed.

What better example can there be of this emerging phenomena than Professor’s Whyton reference to Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s 2004 concert of their version of A Love Supreme?

Jazz, the music of spontaneity, forty years after the recording of A Love Supreme, becomes music that is scored [written out], conducted and orchestrated in much the same manner that the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms became canonized in the years following their deaths.

It is so odd to think that a half-century ago, books on the subject of Jazz would barely fill a living room bookcase.

And now it seems there are so many of them that they may very well fill the entire floor of a good-sized research library.

Books like Professor Whyton’s Beyond A Love Supreme will become invaluable to future generations of Jazz fans who were not around to witness and listen to John Coltrane’s music as it was being created.

For those of us who were, Dr. Whyton's work can serve to pull-the-lens back a bit and give us a wider angle from which to appreciate all of John Coltrane’s music.

Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album is available through online sellers and you can purchase it directly from Oxford University Press at www.oup.com./

Jim Hall Live in London 1966- Simon Spillett Notes

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The guitarist is in danger of going down in the Scott Club history as the Quiet American”.

- Max Jones, Melody Maker, June 11th 1966

“There was a time when it would not have seemed unusual to state of an album by a guitarist that its central quality was unalloyed beauty. In these mid-1970s, however, we find meretricious gimmickry, tonal distortion and high-energy assaults on the eardrums an unavoidable part of our milieu. At such a time, a man of Jim Hall's caliber, representing esthetic values that are all but lost, stands out like a gem surrounded by zircons. Egregious displays of technique or technical bravura are antithetical to Hall's nature.”

- Leonard Feather

“Indeed, in what now looks like something of a golden age for jazz guitar, Hall was the figure who best seemed to represent the broad mainstream of his instruments role within the music, neither needlessly agitating for change nor intent on covering ground already well-mapped by others. At the core of his style lay an endless fascination with finding wellsprings of improvisation from the very bedrock of the genre – standard songs, the blues, ballads, chord-changes, melodies, things that swung and which made the kind of instant musical sense than elsewhere was fast being thrown out with the post-bop bathwater.”

- Simon Spillett

What with his quartet and now his big band tearing it up with gigs in many parts of the UK, one wonders where Simon Spillett finds the time to do his research, collect his thoughts and write such comprehensive and instructive insert notes to new CD issues, CD reissues and boxed sets.

Whatever his source of energy, it's always always a delight when Simon “drops by” the editorial offices of JazzProfiles [not an inconsiderable trek for him, by the way] and gives us the day off by allowing us to post one of his splendid essays which are always full of enthusiasm for the music and its makers and chock full of brilliant insights about both.

These notes were intended to accompany Harkit HRCD8059, but alas, issues with the musician’s estate created problems and neither the CD nor the notes were released. But as Simon shared with me in the message that forwarded them: “The words shouldn't go to waste…” [An Mp3 version of the music from Jim Hall Live in London 1966 can be downloaded via Amazon.]

By way of background, Simon Spillett is a first-rate Jazz tenor saxophonist and an authority on the music of many of the great players of the instrument who blossomed during the second half of the 20th century, both in Great Britain and in the USA.

He is the author of The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes which Equinox has recently published in a second edition. You can locate my review of it by going here.

In addition to fronting his own quartet and big band, Simon has won several awards for his music, including the tenor saxophone category of the British Jazz Awards (2011), Jazz Journal magazine, Critic's Choice CD of the Year (2009) and Rising Star in the BBC Jazz Awards (2007).

Simon has previously shared essays on Hank Mobley, Hank with Miles Davis, Booker Erwin, Stan Getz and Al Cohn and Zoot Sims on this page.

Simon has his own website which you can visit via this link.

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

'The audiences at Ronnie's have been so good that I haven't needed more volume.' 

So said Jim Hall in a press interview which dared to raise the contention that the American guitarist's music might be just a shade too subtle for a nightclub crowd. 

'Sometimes I don't think there's anyone out there until they start applauding,' Hall joked in response to all the silence, adding that his low-key approach – centred on 'playing songs, interpreting them' - could be seen as 'a little reactionary in the light of what's going on in American jazz today.' 

Hall had commenced at month long residency at London's Ronnie Scott's on the penultimate night of May 1966, his stint sandwiched in between appearances by blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon and little-girl-lost pianist/vocalist Blossom Dearie. Thus far he was one of a select few guitarists to have broken the club's run of largely tenor saxophone-playing guest stars, joining Wes Montgomery and Belgian René Thomas in a trinity in which he more or less took the middle ground. Indeed, in what now looks like something of a golden age for jazz guitar, Hall was the figure who best seemed to represent the broad mainstream of his instruments role within the music, neither needlessly agitating for change nor intent on covering ground already well-mapped by others. At the core of his style lay an endless fascination with finding wellsprings of improvisation from the very bedrock of the genre – standard songs, the blues, ballads, chord-changes, melodies, things that swung and which made the kind of instant musical sense than elsewhere was fast being thrown out with the post-bop bathwater.

Right from opening night at Ronnie's, he had made this abundantly clear, concentrating on 'superior ballads, hooks on which he can hang his graceful, fluent lines,' as Melody Maker's Bob Houston described them in one review, titled, with yet another nod to Hall's unshowy approach, 'Fluent Jim at a low temperature.'

But there was a problem, at least to the ears of listeners like Houston, who believed the electric guitar 'one of the most anonymous instruments' and one on which a player had to be 'extremely skillful and talented to overcome its tonal limitations.' Hall seemed a little too cool, a musical craftsman whose biggest surprise was, well, a lack of surprise. 

Knowing what we now know of the impending arrival of Jimi Hendrix, set to alight in London that same year, and soon to have a a damascene effect on guitarists of all stripes, Houston's words seem like those of a flat-earth proponent, yet he had a point; at face value there was something altogether safe and buttoned-up to Hall's music; a quiet middle-aged American in a collar and tie soberly cataloguing the Great American Songbook. More Actuary than Reactionary.

Given a little context, it's a lot easier to see why Hall's gentle, modest, attitude found itself the object of such scrutiny. And that same context makes it a whole lot more understandable why one of the most gentlemanly and least outspoken of jazz musicians might consider his art to have more than a whiff of controversy about it. In an era of ever-more outrageous emoting within jazz, Hall wasn't the kind to board a soapbox. In fact, if his choice of low volume really was a reaction to anything it might be construed as a (passive) protest against the attendant noise of recent jazz “progress”, much of which was coming at the expense of the very things he held dear as a musician - melody, harmony and instrumental discipline.

And it wasn't only happening in the land of his birth. By the spring of 1966, the London jazz scene was already seeing the first indications of a change in what now comprised jazz modernity, with even a venue already as “establishment” as Ronnie Scott's forced to embrace the new wave. In April that year the maverick alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman had commenced a residency at the club's Frith Street premises, creating performances so divisive as to make those by the man who had preceded him – Sonny Rollins, so far the most musically capricious of Scott's invited American guests – sound almost derrière guard in comparison. 

Elsewhere in the capital that year there were other seismic stylistic shocks. In fact, on the front cover of the very issue of Melody Maker in which Hall had confessed his 'reactionary' tendencies, the news broke that John Coltrane and arch-radical Albert Ayler were to make London appearances later that year (in the end only Ayler arrived, making a one-off BBC TV recording at the London School of Economics, which, according to those present rendered everything before it artistic scorched earth.)  

Hot on the heels of men like Rollins and Coleman maybe Hall did sound a little blanched. At 35, he would have certainly made a great poster boy for jazz conservatism. Although he had more than proved his mettle in instrumental settings that were anything but conventional (he came to prominence in the mid-1950s edition of drummer Chico Hamilton's chamber jazz quintet, wherein he partnered cellist Fred Katz, and had anchored clarinettist Jimmy Guiffre's pianoless/drummerless trio from 1956 to 1960) even early on in his career Hall sounded pretty much how he looked. Prematurely bald, bespectacled and blandly undemonstrative on-stage, minus his guitar he might have been mistaken for an Eisenhower-era diplomat; his musical lines were similarly neat and tidy, straightening even the most free-wheeling of improvisational concepts into something cogent and palatable.

And it was this knack – that of being able to streamline and amplify (no pun intended) the ideas of other leaders – that led Hall to spend the best part of the first twenty years of his career as a perennial sideman. The list of those who employed his services both on- and off-record during this period is hugely impressive, ranging from Sonny Rollins ('it was sort of like being knighted for me') through Paul Desmond ('for all the years we hung out together we only played in public twice') and Gerry Mulligan to Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Ella Fitzgerald, Ben Webster, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and beyond. 

Accordingly Hall's discography as a musical accomplice during this time contains a high proportion of classic jazz albums: Rollins' The Bridge, Paul Desmond's First Place, Mulligan's Night Lights, a triptych of records with Farmer's quartet, Ella in Berlin and so on. His collaborations with Evans – 1962's elegiac Undercurrent and 1966's Intermodulation, taped a couple of weeks before he opened at Ronnie's – are in another league again, being among the most intimate of all jazz recordings, creating a listening experience more akin to eavesdropping on a private conversation than witnessing a performance intended for the wider world. Reserved and romantic, they're also about as far removed from the folk-image of 1960s jazz as can be imagined

What all these diverse leaders heard in Hall was one and the same: his characteristic ability to telescope the influence of his first idol – Charlie Christian – into all manner of post-bop settings. Added to this was his uncanny accompanist's ear – as suited to Rollins as it was to Fitzgerald. 

There was a downside to all this though: up until the early 1970s, Hall made all but a penny-packet of albums under his own name. The first, 1957's Jazz Guitar (Pacific Jazz) is a keeper, fully delineating the parameters of his style in its initial stages. Hall didn't capitalise on its success though, rarely venturing out as leader in clubland, far preferring to work under the leadership of others

.

Nevertheless, despite this handicap, he was well known to English audiences by the time he made his Scott's début, many of whom first glimpsed his bobbing head in the opening sequence of Bert Stern's classic documentary Jazz On A Summer's Day, released in the UK in 1961.

He'd first played London back in 1959 with Jimmy Guiffre's trio and had returned twice since; again with Guiffre as part of a whirlwind Jazz At The Philharmonic tour in spring 1960 and in summer 1964 with flugelhornist Art Farmer's quartet, flying in to make an appearance on BBC-2's iconic flagship series Jazz 625.

For his 1966 Scott run, Hall was assigned local “accompanists”, standard practice for visiting soloists of the time. Hitherto, this modus operandi had created the occasional difference of opinion between headliner and home team (Stan Tracey and Stan Getz was never the most appropriate of pairings) and had resulted in the odd instance of a rhythm section being relegated to the role of simple musical hod carriers. But in Hall's case he got lucky in securing the services of bassist Jeff Clyne and drummer Allan Ganley, not only two of the best London jazzmen of the era but also the ideal men for the job. 'Their contribution to the proceedings showed them to be no mere accompanists,' wrote Crescendo's Victor Graham in reviewing one of the Ronnie's sets. 'This really was a Jim Hall Trio.'

By the mid-1960s, both Englishmen had distinguished themselves in the highest circles in British jazz in bands led variously by Tubby Hayes, John Dankworth and others. And both had grown into musical personalities in their own right, Clyne moving on from his Hard Bop roots to take in the increasingly exploratory worlds of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Gordon Beck Trio. Ganley, on the other hand, had refined his already adaptable style into one which could fit just as easily behind Blossom Dearie as it could the Indo-Jazz Fusions. 

Hall declared himself well-pleased. 'I'm helped here...by having Jeff Clyne and Allan Ganley, both very sympathetic guys,' he told Max Jones of Melody Maker. 'Each guy has an important role. They're not just keeping rhythm.'

And neither was Hall. 'The full range of his instrument was thoroughly explored, its voicings and sonorities, its facility and expressiveness and all executed with a cleanness and total lack of that extraneous noise which is accepted from even the finest classical guitarists,' reported Victor Graham in the kind of review that makes one wish sounds could leap off the written page.

With this new Harkit release they can. Culled from what appears to be an ever-expanding tranche of tapes recorded at Ronnie Scott's by differing hands during the Sixties, this recording documents Hall's closing night at the club, providing a rare opportunity to hear a piece of history come alive. This session isn't just a rarity for Hall's playing alone -  itself a veritable capstone to all that he had put on offer during his Ronnie's run. Scott Club connoisseurs will note another novelty, that, for once, it's not the clubs namesake that make the customary opening and closing announcements but his partner Pete King, usually a man of few words ('two, in fact,' Scott used to joke).

King's formalities bookend a set of undoubted charm and considerable subtlety – every bit as good as those Melody Maker and Crescendo's reviews would have us believe.

There are gem-like ballads – Here's That Rainy Day, with its glorious moments of reharmonisation and the contemporary vehicle Who Can I Turn To?, thankfully robbed of all its mawkishness: a couple of waltzes – the recherché choice of Irving Berlin's All Alone and Sonny Rollins' driving Valse Hot (which Hall had played with both its composer and Art Farmer) and at least two examples of the trio taking material done to death elsewhere and making it come up as fresh as a daisy; All The Things You Are, the opening choruses of which prove that “free” interactive improvisation need not be all clutter and bluster, and Secret Love, which cooks on low heat for around three and a half minutes before steaming into the most delicious of tempos.

Perhaps best of all there's a tailor-made bossa-nova, O Gato, written for Hall by his wife Jane (who was then balancing the dual-but-not-disconnected roles of New York-based psychoanalyst and songwriter), a theme the guitarist had already taped with Paul Desmond (see the RCA-Victor album Bossa Antigua, 1964).

Visiting Brazil as part of Ella Fitzgerald's touring band in 1960, Hall had been one of the first US jazzmen to pick up on the countries' “new wave” and was featured on two classic bossa albums of the period – Stan Getz' Big Band Bossa Nova and Gerry Mulligan's Night Lights. Hearing him revisit this groove at Ronnie's, with Ganley's insinuating, metronome-consistent beat behind him, is one of the sessions highlights.

Throughout this set Hall displays his every gift, spinning improvisations that alternate single-note runs with densely-packed, chordally-rich passages, accompanying his partners in their own solo spots with pithy interjections (hear the duet he and Ganley get into on The Touch Of Your Lips), all the while directing everything with unfussy ease. There's humour too, especially evident in the deliberate allusions to other themes he weaves into Valse Hot, including Desafinado and 52nd Street Theme. If you know your Sonny Rollins you'll appreciate these all the more: Hall had played in the saxophonist's quartet for around a year in 1962-63 by which time Rollins had proved himself a master at musical quotations. Hall's use of a lick from Lester Young's Every Tub solo is another nice nod, taking one of Rollins' own favourite quotes and sending out into the ether.

Afforded equal time and space by their leader Clyne and Ganley excel too: listen to the sheer solidity and strength of the bassists tone, and for how, both as a soloist and section player he periodically demonstrates a fluency that at times makes it sound as if two guitars are at work rather than one. Ganley is perfect at every turn, with his solo on Secret Love providing the perfect distillation of his approach: a model of rhythmic punctiliousness, refreshingly free from any false “drumnastics”, the whole consistently underpinned with a sense of dynamics rarely heard from British musicians of the era. 

All three of the musicians heard here are now gone. Allan Ganley died suddenly in 2008, followed by the equally unexpected death of Jeff Clyne a year or so later. Jim Hall survived into his 83rd year, passing away in his sleep in 2013. After their initial meeting at Ronnie's in 1966, all three stayed in touch, Ganley recording with the guitarist and Art Farmer in the US in the 1970s (the album Commitment, A&M, 1976), a reunion he sadly later revealed was soured by the uncooperative attitude of a big-time, big-name American bassist. Hall himself always remained open to the new and, after straightening himself out from debilitating personal problems, his performances over the final thirty years of his life grew ever more adventurous, leading to collaborations with a host of notable jazz artists from a younger generation, including Pat Metheny, Joe Lovano and Michel Petrucciani. 

Whatever the setting he steadfastly maintained his “music first” credo, keeping faith with the idea that genuine improvisation needn't come at the expense of artistic taste. 'I like to believe there's a way of reaching people by making them want to listen,” he said during his 1966 season at Ronnie Scott's. “You know, drawing them to you rather than pushing them away.'

Musical pulling power doesn't come more subtle than this.”

Simon Spillett

February 2019

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.”

Eddie Daniels Tribute to Bill Evans - "Quiet Now"