Just Jazz

Continuing As Is Always Continuing...
I have to comment more on my comments yesterday on the jazz scene in NYC (that's New York City to those of you who are unfocused perhaps--maybe on Zoloft or Geodon--which is OK; I am but one of the many voices in your head identifying the obvious--and, yes, since the word for madness comes from the fact that we wolves howl at the moon after we're satisfied and not because we're wildly insane and the full moon bores deeply into our confused and undrugged brains and causes us to go YOWLING mad--and there's a difference between "yowling" and "howling"--I don't personally know what a yowl is, but I do know a HOWL is a cry of great satisfaction, or it's a male like myself performing in full-blast vocal virtuosity in an effort to entertain attractively a good looking longhaired female wolf into a position of pleasurable responsiveness--I especially like that long snow-silver type female hair--I once knew a woman filmmaker who had this long silver grey hair down to her magnificent ___ (and I don't mean the kind that has four legs, long ears, and eats grass either) and she had a voodoo-like great name, too, something like Nema or Lunina, something strange and enchanting--rather Andean to me for some high reason--and I spent a whole evening mooning after her with swoonsong and whispered verse only for the evening to end with her walking come hitherly off into a South of Houston Street sunset while I did not follow but instead stayed around a bar and got drunk with a bunch of older musicians, which brings me back to the reason for this post.

Jesus, that Robin has a hell of a big round barn!

Most comments I got were--I politely say this--naive. Most of them were informing me of how many great jazz folks were working NYC every night and day--and then they gave me a list of those I should check out. I published one comment in yesterday's post that has a list of jazz musicians working out of NYC I should be listening to or going to dig.

I say this is naive because it assumes I'm not aware of the NYC jazz scene, you know, not involved in it--and in a way I'm not--but in another way, I am. One of my very best friends, thedailygrowlerhousepianist as a matter of fact, is a full-time working jazz musician--which means, he makes his living playing jazz keyboards. I could go on and on--and I must here stop and reexplain that I'm really not real. I'm a real person playing an anthropomorphic character on a blog--think of me like you would Smokey the Bear or maybe a character more intellectual (what?, you say, more intellectual than Smokey?) cartoon star like Felix the Cat--there ya go--I like that, Felix the Cat's my intellectual equal--though everyone knows a wolf is smarter than a cat, except maybe a Fort Worth Cat--[I interrupt myself to say: How about those coyotes attacking humans in Jersey or is it New York? One actually got a baby's neck in its mouth and was carrying the baby off for a swell dinner and the baby's really really young brother saved it by chasing the coyote and kicking at it until it dropped the prize and slumped off into the underbrush (remember The Dingo Got My Baby?).

[The wolf side of me gets mild satisfaction from such stories; the human side of me actually does kind'a like coyotes and I have since I was a kid. I heard coyotes howl long before I ever heard a wolf howl. A coyote's growl, however, I'm sorry to say, is not as deeply bass and deeply bassly mean and insistent as a wolf's. Pastor Melissa Scott, by the bye, the other eve, thrilled me when she let slip in one of her witty little girl-like poses, "...why!!! you don't wanna be thrown out into the wilderness to be eaten by wolfs, do you?" I love that--"wolfs"--it sounds to me and Henry Miller (I know he's dead--so?) like "woof, woof, woof," which Pastor Melissa is a whole other thing to a man, dog, or wolf. Whew, what a sidetrack--one of my best ever.]

What's Felix the Cat got to do with jazz? Guys that played jazz were once called cats. A guy who called himself Lord Buckley (he's where a comic like Professor Irwin Corey comes from) used to always classify men and women as "cats" or "kitties." Here ya go, he's a sample of Lord Buckley's patter:

Now lookit here all you cats and kitties out there whippin' and wailin' and jumpin' up and down and suckin' up all that juice and pattin' each other on the back and hippin' each other who the greatest cat in the world is. Mr. Malenkoff, Mr. Dalenkoff, Mr. Eisenhower, Mr. Woozinweezin, Mr. Wyzinwoozin. Mr. Woodhill, Mr. Beechhill and Mr. Churchill and all them hills gonna get you straight! And if they can't get you straight, they know a cat that knows a cat that'll straighten you. But I'm gonna put a cat on you was the coolest, grooviest, sweetest, wailingest, strongest, swinginest cat that ever stomped on this jumpin' green sphere. And they call this hyar cat...the Nazz.

There ya go, cats and kitties, a little Buckley...

I guess I meant that what jazz I hear being played today is jazz I've already heard before, and I once insulted a young guy who gave me a tape of his to evaluate by returning it to him with that comment, "I've already heard this before and done better, too, by the way." Damn this dude got insulted but what I meant was, what he'd given me was his own compositions but written as an impersonation of the Miles Davis Sextet of the late fifties--Coltrane or Mobley, Jimmy Cobb or Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers (Mr. P.C.: "Wanna hear the bass the way it really should be, you dig P.C./ Wanna hear it played the way it really should be, you dig, P.C./Talk about rhythm, he's got the rhythm, dig P.C." Name another bass player who's had a classical jazz piece written about him?--I mean with words--music by Coltrane, words by Jon Hendricks) with Bill Evans on piano because Wynton Kelly got there late--he did do "Freddie Freeloader" on that album though. Damn, what a fine piano player Wine-tone Kelly was. All Blues played the way it really should be--raw Miles...and there was a generation of jazz babies who so idolized the playing on that album, the ensemble work--the harmonics--WOW, and the long, long measures of good long, long solos, they thought the only way to sound that good was to copy that sound...I digress, but anyway, that's what I meant in criticizing this young jazz guy--and he was quite a fine drummer, too. He later said he understood what I meant, but I know it hurt him and I know down deep he really didn't understand what I meant.

I once had a Brit bastard at a club here in NYC take my demo tape from me and my bio and face sheet and look at me and say, "I say, bloke, you know what we do with these?" "Listen to 'em, I hope, you bloody Brit asshole" (OK, I really didn't reply like that--I was thinking it though--I was thinking of going for his throat right there, but, the gentleman in me...my self-control got the better of me)." "Here's what we do with 'em, bloke." With that he pitched my tape in the garbage can (offices call them "wastebaskets") under his desk. I went over, pushed his ass out of the way and retrieved it, shot him the bird and left--I never again went in that joint either.

After a Brooklyn gig one night, the club owner said he didn't have any cash left and we'd have to come by the next day and he'd have a check for us. The bandleader said, "Boys, each one of you grab a barstool and aim it at that mirror back there." We did. Five of us raised five barstools over our heads and aimed them right at this slick dude's big fancy bar mirror--"You think you can find us some cash or should the boys take it out on your mirror?" The son of a bitch fished the money right out of his tight pants pocket, handed it over to us, and then told us to never come back in his joint ever again.

But anyway, my jazz comments got some comments...

I heard jazz first right after WWII--sounds like eons ago, doesn't it? Actually, in terms of Bergsonian time, it's no time ago at all. My brother had just gotten back from China and he moved into my room with me, brought his army cot in there, his trunk, his duffield bag, and his Emerson radio, all of that stuff, plus a cool photo of the troop ship he had come home on, the USS General Butler--Smedley Butler, the Marine hero who said as a Marine General all he'd done is fought wars for US corporations and not the people of the US.

I was a wee kid then--but I was bright, always wide awake, hated going to bed, and thought my brother was hot shit, and loved it more because he couldn't sleep at all at night and he would lay there in the dark listening to that little radio up until all hours of the A.M. And one of the things he loved listening to in those late night hours were the remote broadcasts from the New York clubs and especially those coming out of WJZ and the Mutual Broadcasting Co. from the 52nd Street jazz clubs, like the Royal Roost, the Roundtable, or, of course, Birdland--and it was on one of those distant nights that I as a wee lad who was supposed to be sound asleep by that bewitching time of night first heard what proved to be Charles Parker, Jr., and John Birks Gillespie (from Cheraw, South Carolina) with Dodo Marmarosa on piano and Curly Russell on bass, Max on drums--and I heard it and I asked my brother what it was and who was playing it and he said it was what they called not re-bop like was in hey-bop-a-re-bop--that was a Lionel Hampton thing (listen to Lionel's 1944 band do "Hamp's Boogie-Woogie")--no this, he said, was called "be-bop"--because that's the way you scatted it--"bee-od-e-lee-be-bop-a-bop, bop-de-bop, be-od-e-od-e-op-de-be-bop-BOW"--later I heard Max Roach say something different and I had also once heard Dizzy say something different and then Babs Gonzales once said it was even something different--actually nobody knew what the hell be-bop was--it was just a form of speech--all they knew was they couldn't understand it--but I understood it right off the bat, man. Every night after that I made my brother find the jazz groups--and then we listened to be-bop from New York, Earl "Fatha" Hines from San Francisco, Wingy Manone live from New Orleans's Roosevelt Hotel, Duke Ellington's band playing in Fargo, North Dakota (oh yes he did; there's a CD of it), over the Mutual Network hookup, or he'd listen to the Gene Krupa Band playing at the Lincoln Hotel in NYC, or Harry James's band that was still active then; and that's when I started to listening to jazz. I was already steeped in swing, boogie, and the original r & b bands like Lucky Millender's band, the Roy Milton band, Joe Liggin's and the Honeydrippers--and of course Louis Jordan and his jive cats were still jumpin' the blues, along with the vocal stylings of Billy Eckstein, Sarah Vaughan, and this chick Norman Granz was carrying around with the JATP tour, Ella Fitzgerald, the "Tisket a Tasket" girl from the Chick Webb band.

I mean, when you grow up learning jazz from jazz being created right before your ears---jazz today sounds boxed; with all kinds of perservatives added. Oh hell yes, Wynton Marsalis is a great instrumental player--he has a sweet trumpet tone--my problem with him is, he's too sure of himself and as a result, he doesn't really gear me up to a flyin' high or groovin' high kind of swing. Oh Wynton and his family can play hard--Branford ain't bad--the drummer ain't worth a shit--but, hey, Wynton's a family guy so hey, he...OK, I give up--Go, Wynton, Go, Blow, Man, Blow.

I guess I'm jealous. All I mean is Wynton ain't no Louis Armstrong. He ain't no Clifford Brown. He ain't no Kenny Dorham. He ain't no Miles Davis, that's for sure. And no, he ain't even no Little Johnny Coles--oh don't get me started.

I'm glad to know there are still jazz lovers and diggers and cats and kitties out there--

I'm jumpin' off a riff here.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler