Serious jazz scholarship (as opposed to reviews) began more than seventy years ago: early books by Robert Goffin, Hughes Panassie, Charles Delanay, Wilder Hobson, Charles Edward Smith and Frederic Ramsey come to mind, as well as essays by Ernst Ansermet, Otis Ferguson, and Roger Pryor Dodge.
In 2010, there is no scarcity of books on jazz, from musicology to polemical ideology. Biographies and autobiographies — from Armstrong to Zwerin with perhaps one hundred subjects between — the autobiographies of Buck Clayton, Sammy Price, Bob Wilber, biographies of Monk, Mingus, Holiday, Fitzgerald, Parker, Paul Desmond, Ellington. Books have been published about musicians who are still relatively obscure: Mark Miller on Herbie Nichols, Anthony Barnett on Henry Crowder.
John Chilton’s studies of Bechet, Hawkins, Eldridge, and Red Allen are models of the form. Ed Berger and his father did right by Benny Carter; Ed devoted a book to George Duvivier and is working on one about Joe Wilder. My shelves are full, and I’m not listing criticism and discography.
Most of what I have noted above (with admiration) is jazz scholarship from the outside — by enthusiastic listeners who have immersed themselves in jazz. I would be the last to disparage that as an art form, as writers who do it include Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Gene Lees, Chris Albertson, Frank Driggs, Nat Hentoff and two dozen others. A few musicians — rare souls — who were also fine writers: Dick Wellstood, Richard M. Sudhalter, Rex Stewart, Dick Katz.
But even given all of this, how often have jazz musicians been asked to tell their stories?
I know that there is a history of popular journalism — early on in urban Black newspapers — of getting quotations from musicians, but I wonder how many utterances that were attributed were actually spoken by the musicians themselves. Later on, one had DOWN BEAT and METRONOME, and smaller magazines — Art Hodes’ THE JAZZ RECORD, here and abroad. Some of this “journalism” perpetuated the stereotype of the musician as an eccentric character who spoke an unintelligible hipster gibberish.
There are, of course, the pioneering recorded interviews of Jelly Roll Morton done in 1938 — mythic in many ways — that might be the first oral history of a jazz musician. Whether you take them as an extended piece of performance art or as first-hand narrative / reportage, they remain invaluable.
Others have attempted to let the players speak — the Oral History Project had musicians interviewing their peers and friends, Stanley Dance’s series of books, the Shapiro / Hentoff HEAR ME TALKIN’ TO YA, Gitler’s SWING TO BOP, the diligent work of Bill Spilka, Hank O’Neal’s book THE GHOSTS OF HARLEM, collections of interviews and profiles by Whitney Balliett, Peter Vacher, Max Jones. Phil Schaap has done extensive, rewarding radio interviews for forty years now. Lester Young spoke to Chris Albertson and Francois Postif. And irreplaceable video-documentaries focus on Ben Webster, Lester, Goodman, Phil Woods. Fifty years ago, Riverside Records recorded Coleman Hawkins and Lil Hardin Armstrong telling their stories.
But all of this is outweighed by the invisibility, the unheard voices of musicians.
Who thought to ask Kaiser Marshall or Walter Johnson anything after they had finished a set with the Fletcher Henderson band? Who interviewed Ivie Anderson? Allen Reuss? Jimmy Rowles? Dave McKenna? Al Cohn? Shad Collins? Barry Galbraith? Shorty Baker? Did anyone ask Denzil Best or Nick Fenton about what it was like to play at Minton’s? Who spoke with Joe Smith or Joe Nanton about their experiences? George Stafford, Tiny Kahn, Nick Fatool, Dave Tough? (I know some of these figures were interviewed or analyzed by my hero Whitney Balliett, but the burden of jazz history of this sort shouldn’t have to rest on one writer’s shoulders.)
Granted, many stellar musicians were once anonymous sidemen and women, and the leaders of bands got all the attention. So there are more interviews of Ellington than of Johnny Hodges, more of Goodman than of Vido Musso, more of Basie than of Jack Washington. But Swing Era fans knew every member of the reed section in their favorite orchestras.
Thus claims of “obscurity” have to be taken less seriously: there was a time when Cootie Williams was nearly as well known as Jackie Robinson would be — you may substitute names you prefer in this equation of “famous jazz musician” and “famous sports figure.”
I can imagine a number of reasons for musicians being ignored.
Some musicians would rather play than talk about their playing; some are even taciturn, although articulate. And sometimes even the most garrulous players are not the best interview subjects. “What was it like to play with Big Boy Smith?” one asks. “Oh, it was a ball! We had a great time!” the musician answers. The interviewer waits for more. “Do you remember any specific incidents?” “Oh, no. It was a lot of fun. We couldn’t wait to get on the bandstand.” And so on. I’ve had this happen to me with the most sophisticated players here and in Europe. They wereen’t reluctant to talk, but they weren’t intuitive novelists themselves.
Although cordial to outsiders, many musicians also don’t see the point of discussing serious matters — like music — with them. Too much explaining. Life is short; the next set is coming soon. This does say something about the unseen wall between themselves and fans — people who don’t know what it is to play, to improvise professionally, come from a different planet. Nice folks, but aliens. Even sweet-natured Bobby Hackett referred to the audience as “the enemy.” “Fans” and “academics” are friendly, “critics” and “writers” might be useful, but none of them really know.
And oftentimes, musicians are ambushed by people who want to talk wishing to talk at inopportune times. A musician asked to comment on the music she’s just played after a forty-five minute set may well be drained by the effort. When they’re not playing, musicians talk of other subjects, including the cost of things, their most recent car repair, health care proposals. Anything is more interesting than responding to “What inspires you when you take a solo?” Some may want to be left in peace, to eat their scrambled eggs while they’re somewhat hot. And who could blame them?
When some venerable musicains are finallyinterviewed when they have become venerable, they have forgotten the details. What they did forty years ago wasn’t musical history, but a way of making a living. And even those who have sharp memories may not want to tell all: candor might mean losing friends or gigs. And some aren’t interested in reliving their pasts: autobiographies and interviews are career-ending landmarks: what musicians do when they can no longer play. Doing beats talking and theorizing.
Others are “saving it for their book” — books that might get poublished posthumously if ever. And when musicians die, sometimes their spouse discards “all that old clutter,” including letters and memorabilia. Sometimes a divorce means that possessions get thrown out, or a son or daughter believes that Papa’s papers are worth millions and refuses to let anyone make money from themsee them.
Having said all that, I want to put it aside.
There were all the reasons that musicians might not want to be asked.
But so many, I have to believe, would have been delighted to tell their stories. Why weren’t they?
Much comes from the earliest perception of jazz as entertainment, hardly serious. It was played at night in places where people talked loudly, smoked, drank, and danced. Real art could be found in museums and in concert halls. Jazz players weren’t ordinary people; they existed outside polite society; some thought them licentious madmen working themselves into ecstasies on the bandstand. Who would be so bold as to ask one of them a question? And what savage reply would result?
The subject of race can’t be pushed aside. If both White and Black listeners thought that jazz was primarily dance music, why study it? Why take its players seriously? And the early preponderance of White jazz scholars and critics — some Europeans and White Americans — can be traced to the idea that jazz was no more than “good-time music,” denying Afro-Americans proper dignity. Would you want your daughter to marry a jazz musician? Would you want your African-American child to concentrate his or her academic efforts on Cab Calloway, on Louis Armstrong? But the initial racial imbalance did shift, and I suspect that Joe Nanton would have been happy to speak with a White college student if the student was both sincere and aware. As would Rod Cless have been.
I think of Emerson in “The American Scholar,” delivered in 1846, urging his audience to study their own culture — only in this way could a nation exist. Many years after Emerson’s death, an American college student couldn’t expect to do advanced study about the authors of his time and place: a college education required German, Chaucer, rather than James T. Farrell and Charlie Chaplin. To say nothing of Sidney Catlett. And so it was for jazz. By the time that academia caught up with it, so many of the progenitors were dead, their stories untold.
The losses are irreparable. To urge readers to interview a jazz musician today won’t replace what has been lost.
What might Frank Teschmacher or Freddie Webster have told us, have someone thought it sufficiently important to ask them?
Those pages remain irrevocably blank.
COPYRIGHT, MICHAEL STEINMAN AND JAZZ LIVES, 2010
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William “Sonny” Greer, who played drums for Duke Ellington for nearly thirty years, never received the acknowledgment he deserves. True, he could be more interested in decorating the ensemble than in simply driving them to the finish line. Musicians who played with Sonny as he got older said that he was sometimes unreliable, that he drank too much. But all those statements matter very little when measured against the musical evidence.
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